Unless of course, what america says it wants for Iraq is contrary to what it does in Iraq – which is arguably the case.
That would be the understatement of the millenium. LOL.

Posted by: Bea | Jun 8 2007 19:07 utc | 4

america will do as it has always done to nationalist leaders anywhere who they believe are a menace
first they will destabilise & demonise. then they will isolate. after the isolation has succeeded. they assasinate
whether its allende, trujillo, lumumba , ben barka , nguyen van truy – on & on – endless dark lists of assasinated leaders – whose death was ordered direct from washington
in nearly every instance we have documentary records that tell us this – so vain are they in their murderous impulses – that they advertised the murder of che for example – whose death can be connected directly to that brother of pol pot – & mass murdererer, henry kissinger
they are proud of the way their institutions of fear have worked & aspects – like the old school of americas were the training ground for & in that fear
& those days have not ended. on the contrary i’d suggest this extrajudicial murder has been a consistent policy of the empire since the election of bush running in parallel with their sinister policies of ghost prisoners, extraordinary rendition & the active repression of civil liberties
sadr has at least understood that you cannot play this game with the monster unless you are armed to the teeth & are prepared to match menace for menace. sadr is as interested in parliamentary politics as the cheney bush junta – that is to say, murder suits them very well indeed & some hack here or there in this or that taliking shop is of absolutely no interest, no interest at all

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 8 2007 23:43 utc | 6

Bill Lind’s take on the war and Muqtada:

The likelihood, unfortunately, is that no one can restore a state in Iraq. If anyone can, it is probably Muqtada al-Sadr. According to the May 26 Birmingham (Alabama) News (I spent the Memorial Day weekend in the Confederacy; whatever its failings, it never learned to cook as badly as Yankees can),
The influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr publicly emerged Friday for the first time in months, calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq and vowing to defend Sunnis and Christians. His appearance, and remarks, seemed part of an ongoing tactical shift by al-Sadr to recast himself as a nationalist who can unify and lead a post-occupation Iraq.
This is less of a shift than it might seem. Al-Sadr has maintained communications, and perhaps more, with some Sunni resistance groups all along. I suspect he has had his eye on the brass ring, namely all of Iraq, from the beginning. He knows what the idiots in Washington seem not to know, namely that only a leader who has opposed the occupation and America can hope to have sufficient legitimacy to restore an Iraqi state.
What all this means, in concrete terms, is that America should facilitate al-Sadr’s rise to national power. That does not mean embracing him; to do so would be to destroy his legitimacy. Nor is he fool enough to accept any such embrace. Rather, it means staying out of his way, avoiding fights with his Mahdi Army, selectively picking off challengers to him within his own movement (which in fact we may be doing, wittingly or not), and letting our hopeless, worthless puppet government in Baghdad’s Green Zone fall into history’s wastebasket when the time is right.
None of this will ensure al-Sadr can restore a state in Iraq. Again, the odds are that no one can. But he seems to be the last, best hope.
The White House, of course, will accept none of this. Bush’s maximalism is part and parcel of his defining break with reality. But our commanders on scene, Admiral Fallon and General Petraeus, may see it. If they do, they have a moral responsibility to act on it, the White House be damned. At this point in a lost game, we must take whatever route might, just might, lead to restoring an Iraqi state. The alternative, a stateless Iraq, will represent such a vast victory for Islamic Fourth Generation forces that any real Iraqi government, however unfriendly to the United States, is infinitely preferable.
If the folly of maximalist objectives instead remains our guide, we will know soon enough. The U.S. will go to war with the Mahdi Army, do a Fallujah on Sadr City (for which the U.S. military has already drawn up plans) and try to capture or kill al-Sadr himself. At that point the war in Iraq will effectively have no strategic objective at all, beyond being a gift beyond price to old Osama.

My sense RE Sadr exactly.

Posted by: anna missed | Jun 9 2007 5:49 utc | 8

The US wants to lock the country up – control its resources – defang it re. Israel – render it pliant, submissive, an outpost of the US with black-clad slave ladies starving to feed their children and experiencing shock and awe on their tv screens at the porno lite.
Particularly, some puppet Gvmt. must be made to work, must be ..
Iraqis should get used to being non-people deprived of all but the food basket.
Saddam was good, but not good enough, he had to go.
Any religious leader who could hold the country together would be welcomed (Allah ordains), religious fundamentalism is great, the best prop. ever invented. The military contractors, the Apocalypse nutters, love it to death. Crazy poor deluded Muslims who don’t brush their teeth or care for their ‘wimmen’ and don’t understand that Chevron has the ultimate experts, a chance for the Iraqis to rebuild with oil revenues!

Posted by: Noirette | Jun 9 2007 13:23 utc | 10

The former commander of Abu Ghraib now commands the training command where all of the interrogators learn their dark craft. This is at Fort Huachuca, about 60 miles south of Tucson.
Many of us here in Tucson join two brave priests who are on trial here for trying to deliver a letter to the commanding officer asking her to not teach torture techniques. The priests will probably go to prison, as may some of us local protesters.

Posted by: Jake | Jun 9 2007 17:28 utc | 12

@fauxreal, #11
After listening this morning to an NPR report on Splat Pack films like Hostel II and Saw, and reading the excerpt from the Village Voice piece on Abu Ghraib, it strikes me that part of our cultural psychosis has to do with the fact that we deal daily with images and sounds of all-too-imaginable horrors, but not with the most visceral connection: the smells.
How might we respond to “gore-nographic” films or news footage of war zones if they came to us in full spectrum Odorama?

Posted by: catlady | Jun 9 2007 20:25 utc | 14

Please note that today’s report by McClatchy on the Mahdi Army does not anymore contain the phrase “anti-American” (and that is not accidental):
Mahdi Army makes a final push to control southwest Baghdad

In the past 10 days, the fiery Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia has resurfaced in force, making a push to roust Sunnis from Baghdad and to isolate Sunni enclaves in the west of the capital from their brethren in the south.
…
The new escalation coincides with the withdrawal of Kurdish soldiers, who were stationed in the Amil and Bayaa area as part of the Baghdad Security Plan. The Kurdish pullback began Wednesday as their scheduled three-month deployment ended, according to Iraqi and U.S. military officials.
…
“The Mahdi Army has taken on the role of the government inside Bayaa, it is the provider of services and of security,” he said. “The Mahdi Army did a lot of things that have a sad side to them, like displacing the Sunnis in the area; they did it out of necessity to secure the area.”
…

Posted by: b | Jun 10 2007 8:56 utc | 16

The neocons are not just ideologues in a Straussian perspective. They are also outside of the reality-based world in their belief in the god-like power of a social darwinian capitalism.
Yes. Their ideological roots are very confused, and Strauss (whom I have read with half an eye) seems just a sort of excuse, like what college students are supposed to turn up when they are to trace origins, continuity, etc.
Their grounding is more in the left than in the right, wasn’t it so that many changed allegiance to support Reagan? Went from Democrat to neo-Rep? In short, taking up what could be called the neo-fascist elements of both ‘wings’ and switching as needed, which, btw, worked?
The ideological underpinnings seem to be vague slogans and ‘wink wink’ principles, more appeals to an ingroup than any consistent stance or political attitude, a desire to grab power and form ‘reality’ itself. The pubic discourse is social darwinist in a way: but even that seems a sop to traditional conservative thinking, as they are champions of Big. Gov. Repressive Laws. Big Corps. Private contractors, etc. (fascist alliance..)
And they have their partners in the neo-libs, who are just as bad. Or worse.
Freedom is just another word…

Posted by: Noirette | Jun 10 2007 16:06 utc | 18

and for the sake of information- I also found and watched a rebuttal to the film about Chavez from the opposition.
What’s interesting to me is that, yes, the filmmakers did manipulate via editorial decisions and the use of montage and parallel editing. however, the basic issue in the conflict is not different.
as the opposition noted (opposition led by the oligarch’s, but sure, there are others who are not the richest of the rich who surely have opposed Chavez too..) anyway, they said Chavez was elected by an absolute majority. Chavez also, remember, returned the electronic voting machines from the U.S. that would have counted the election otherwise…not a minor issue in my mind…
and the military here, as a whole, tho not necessarily in the actions of certain individuals, as seen in both films, was trying very hard to follow constitutional guidelines, even when the situation was chaotic.
So if the oligarchs had such a majority on their side, etc. why couldn’t they follow the constitutional guidelines and present their case before the Venezuelan citizens in a vote? In both films, tho this is obscured in the second one, the issue was nationalization of the oil industry. at the end of the second film, when they show Chavez discussing this, and assign blame to him, it is because he said he provoked the event, yes, because of his actions as prez — and Chavez did not run as any friend to the oil industrial elites, so it is no surprise that their greatest natural resource would be a major part of his work to redistribute wealth that has accumulated with a power elite that, as all of them do, circle jerk to maintain that power among themselves.
also, the outcome of the attempted overthrow of Chavez says more good about him than them, tho even then they try to use that as a way to say the film distorts and therefore nothing in it has any value?
noirette- the “democratic” neocons sprang from the loins of Scoop Jackson, who was also derisively called the Senator for Boeing — military contractors — Jackson thought Eisenhower was not hawkish enough on defense spending.
actually, I think the neocons have strong beliefs that underpin their actions. I’ve been looking back at some things I’d seen earlier and I’m sort of trying to see where certain assumptions and reactions have combined. — I’m trying to synthesize for myself information others have accumulated as a sort of vision of how we got here now that does not rely on the catch phrases that lose meaning as they become deformed by struggles of various groups to define them. maybe I’ll have something useful to contribute here by the process.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 10 2007 18:08 utc | 20

For long days and months and years, a solitary hope of any possible good emerging from the unending, malignant, death dealing, ill-fated US occupation of Iraq has been that the occupation itself might provide Iraqis with a common enemy to unite against. Not by strategy or design of the neo-colonialists. Yet, could it become so? A small, self-defeating contribution to the disingenuous, avowed goal (“a free, self-governing Iraq”) of the imperial invasion, marked by most bitter ironies.
Could Sadr, his armies, and his allies, as Lind suggests, be the force for a returning order and more national unity than any other coalition has achieved since 2003? If so, chances may be poor, as r’giap notes, that Sadr would live through it. Yet, as b observes, Sadr does not taunt the US with direct confrontation, but preaches against all foreign interference in Iraq.
For me, the conviction is growing that the top US military leaders want to remove many US forces in months, not years, because they are so weakened by this war, far beyond all public acknowledgement of actual troop deficiencies and material costs.

But our commanders on scene, Admiral Fallon and General Petraeus, may see it. If they do, they have a moral responsibility to act on it, the White House be damned.

Do others see signs, as Lind hints, that decisions of war and retreat may no longer be entirely under the command of the WH?

Posted by: small coke | Jun 11 2007 7:25 utc | 22