Obama

Ahhhh, finally a Democrat who will not shirk from fighting with the republicans on national security issues!  Not only that, but in Barack, we have someone who can simply and eloquently state the truth... and with that a devastating and damning argument...

Barack Obama continues hitting back hard today at the false McCain/GOP assaults on him for allegedly seeing terrorism as only a law-enforcement problem...

"I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let's talk about 9/11.

"The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors -- the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we'd be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

"Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership -- the people who murdered 3000 Americans -- have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."

You have got to read this front page story in the NY Times today.  This just borders on farce, if it wasn't the Bush administration, I wouldn't believe that it was true... but sadly, it is only too true.  I can tell you, the Joseph Heller's of the future will have no shortage of material to write the 21st century Catch-22...

22-year old war profiteer

How does a 22 year-old get a $300 million defense contract to supply arms to the Afghan army? First, make sure you're not zinged with a felony when police find your fake ID. Then hire a licensed masseur to be your VP. Find some shady arms dealers, make the lowest bid and voila -- you're in business with the Bush administration.

As the Times found out, AEY fulfilled that contract by dealing with a variety of shady arms dealers (one Czech, one Swiss) to get their hands on ammo stockpiles in the old Eastern bloc. And as far as ensuring the quality of the munitions? Here's how it went in Albania:

Albania offered to sell tens of millions of cartridges manufactured as long ago as 1950. For tests, a 25-year-old AEY representative was given 1,000 cartridges to fire, according to Ylli Pinari, the director of the arms export agency at the time of the sale.

No ballistic performance was recorded, he said. The rounds were fired by hand.

Not surprisingly, the Afghan army has been unhappy with the product. AEY shipped the decades-old ammo in cardboard boxes -- apparently to save money on shipping charges. And the Times reports that the boxes arrived in Afghanistan spilling out of the boxes, "revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966." It's illegal to deal in Chinese arms.

[T]he company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

It just keeps getting better though... the story goes into the dude's the 22 year-old CEO's personal life, and it is just insane.  He was under 21 when he started defense contracting, and was going out with a fake ID, and was caught.  He only avoided a felony charge for fraud by doing a diversion program.  It should be noted that the felony conviction would have made him ineligible to contract with the Defense department.  He was also involved in numerous domestic disputes with various girlfriends which got the police called on him, including stalking, and physical violence.  Wow, an incompetent asshole, sounds like a good fit for the Bushies!

The Congressional Research Service has just released some extraordinary new figures showing that the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has jumped to an astounding $12 billion per month.

Twelve billion dollars per month. For anyone counting, that's $10 billion every month for Iraq and $2 billion for Afghanistan. In 2005, the bill for Iraq was $8 billion a month. CRS attributes the additional monthly $2 billion to the surge -- an operation that the Pentagon estimated in January would only cost an additional $5.6 billion through September.

Now we can juxtapose that little bit of information with this article that I saw this morning...

The fight over a popular health insurance program for children is intensifying, with President Bush now leading efforts to block a major expansion of the program, which is a top priority for Congressional Democrats.

Democrats have proposed a major expansion of the program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, to cover more youngsters with a substantial increase in federal spending.  This would increase spending by $50 billion over the next five years — the amount decried by Mr. Bush as “a massive expansion."

So let's see... we can get health insurance for tens of millions of kids for ten billion a year, or we can spend that on a month in Iraq.  Of course Bush won't sign the bill for the health insurance because it is "too expensive."  What a joke.  That's ok, Bush is putting the cost of this disastrous war on all of our credit cards.  My grandkids will still be paying back the interest for the cost of this war to the Bank of China...

Worst
President
Ever

Heh, this could come straight out of the Onion.  I mean, the jokes just write themselves...

Canada troops battle 10-foot Afghan marijuana plants

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.

General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.

"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.

"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hiller said dryly.

One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

Well, here we have a major crackpot saying that we should pull out of Iraq now.... oh wait, no, he's the head of the British Army...

"I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war-fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning.

...."The hope that we might have been able to get out of Iraq in 12, 18, 24 months after the initial start in 2003 has proved fallacious. Now hostile elements have got a hold it has made our life much more difficult in Baghdad and in Basra."

....Sir Richard adds, strongly, that we should "get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems". "We are in a Muslim country and Muslims' views of foreigners in their country are quite clear. As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited into a country, but we weren't invited, certainly by those in Iraq at the time. Let's face it, the military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in."

So we have the head of the army of the only country to realistically support this disaster in Iraq - now publicly saying that it is time to go.  He's saying it right around the time that Tony Blair (the great disappointment) is going to go away, and a new Labor Prime Minister will step in.  I wonder what the new PM will do.  How much you want to bet that the UK will "re-deploy" its troops to Afghanistan sometime next year?

Keep your eyes out for the disingenuous claim from both the republicans and from conservative pundits that the Democrats should put forth some "serious" ideas on Iraq, or should just shut up and support Bush's failed policies.  Kevin Drum succinctly puts this red herring to bed...

Look: A "debate" is fine, but only if there's something to debate. Should we privatize Social Security? Let's debate. Should we debate about how to fix Iraq? We could, but only if there were some plausible solutions to argue about. Unfortunately, there aren't. We don't have enough troops in Iraq to keep order and the troops we do have aren't trained properly anyway. Nobody appears to have any serious desire to change that. Politically, the sectarian split in Iraq is embedded deeply in their history and culture and is mostly beyond our ability to affect, especially after three years of mismanagement. Globally, we have virtually no influence left with either local power brokers like Iran or with our European allies.

Various luminaries in the liberal foreign policy community have been proposing Iraq policies right and left for over three years now. First, that perhaps we should have kept our focus on Afghanistan and stayed out of Iraq altogether. Then, once we were there, liberal thinkers suggested more troops, dialogue with Iran, a multilateral council to accelerate regional investment in Iraq's progress, a variety of counterinsurgency strategies, a variety of partition plans, more serious engagement in Israeli-Palestinian talks (Tony Blair practically begged for this), and on and on. Every single one of these suggestions was ignored.

Would they have made any difference? Who knows. But to blame Democrats now for not being aggressive enough in trying to trisect this angle is like blaming Gerald Ford for losing Vietnam. George Bush fought this war precisely the way he wanted, with precisely the troops he wanted, and with every single penny he asked for. He has kept Don Rumsfeld in charge despite abundant evidence that he doesn't know how to win a war like this. He has mocked liberals and the media at every turn when they suggested we might need a different approach. The result has been a disaster with no evident solution left.

It's one thing to ask for "debate," but it's quite another to ask for a pony that doesn't exist anymore and to blame Democrats when they're unable to produce yet another one after three years of trying. That makes no sense.

With everthing coming off the rails in Iraq, people tend to forget about that other war that we've got going on, you know the one in Afghanistan... the one which we supposedly won...  yeah, that one.

Well, there was a very long story in the NY Times the other day which basically exposed the lie to the Bushie propaganda that things are going great in Afghanistan.  Most of the country is controlled by warlords, and they are financing their local militias by selling opium and heroin.  Swell...  A whole country overrun by warlords?  Sounds familiar... kind of like Iraq?

Let's not forget the whole reason why we invaded Afghanistan in the first place - Osama.  Still have not caught him, in case you're wondering.  He was in Afghanistan, being hosted by the Taliban, who, if you're keeping count, are still alive and well in the border region of Pakistan.

Now that you mention it, we've got Pakistan... weren't they supposed to be our "ally" in this whole "war on terror" thing?  Not that we care that they have sold nuclear secrets to all comers who have a big bankroll, are engaged in a nuclear buildup with India, and support terrorists in Kashmir.  Now we have this...

Pakistan has signed a "peace deal" with al Qaeda (with the Bush administration's encouragement?), and tell ABC's Brian Ross that if Osama bin Laden "is being like a peaceful citizen" in Pakistan, the al Qaeda leader "would not be taken into custody?" (Ten minutes later, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States disavowed that statement.)

As Robert Young Pelton describes in his new book, "Licensed to Kill," a top-secret U.S. military task force holds down makeshift firebases along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Manned by Afghans but backed up by U.S. special ops fighters and private military contractors, they carry on the hunt for "high-value targets" like Osama bin Laden, even as the military denies doing so.

The bases are routinely attacked at night, Pelton says, and sometimes one is even overrun before the Americans can take it back with air support hours later. He talked to a task force sergeant, who described the incursions:

"We got hit pretty bad two weeks ago," he tells me, adjusting his dirty Jack Daniel's cap. "Six guys in our unit got Purple Hearts. They [the ambushers] were waiting for us--knew exactly where we were. . . . The Pakistanis watched the whole thing and did nothing."

He points to a spot a little over a mile away. "They fire rockets right from that hill on the Pak side. We meet with the Pak officials every month on the border. . . . They smile. We smile. They bullshit us and we bullshit them. Then they watch us get attacked without lifting a finger. This place is fucked." I ask him if the men who attacked him were Taliban, Pakistanis, or Arabs. He looks up at me, squints in the sun, and spits again for effect, admitting, "I have no fucking idea who we are fighting."

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