Tag: Iraq

ABC News is reporting that the new commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway, says that the strain on resources caused by the war in Iraq is jeopardizing the Marines’ worldwide mission.

“There is stress on the individual Marine, and there is stress on the institution,” Conway told reporters today.

Conway expressed concern that the Marines could be hampered from successfully deploying if a significant new crisis were to erupt.

In the Bush era, when the military censors a documentary about the crisis faced by veterans returning from war, it’s treated as a gossip item in the New York Daily News:

Cher had 5,000 DVDs of “The Ground Truth: After the Killings” made, but unless American soldiers are on her mailing list, they’re not getting to see it.

Army, Navy and Marine Corps base officers have refused to show the documentary, about difficulties Iraq War vets have after they return home, according to director Patricia Foulkrod.

“It’s hard for them to reconnect to their families,” Foulkrod told us. “They’ve been in a very dramatic situation. The adjustment is so difficult. They come back and are offered only minimum wage. We spent so much money on the war, the government didn’t really set aside the proper money to take care of these guys when they get back.”

During one phone pitch to a Colorado base, a commanding officer told a Focus Features distribution exec that the content of the film was “inappropriate” and would be “detrimental” to the servicemen and their families.

Actresses Olivia Wilde (“The O.C.”) and Susan Sarandon are also trying to get the word out. “I understand why the Armed Forces would be afraid to show this film because it shows the huge gap in recognizing and providing help for returning soldiers’ psychological and physical needs,” Sarandon told us.

An Army spokeswoman replied: “First of all, I actually only know one place they went to, and that was West Point. … This is more of an activist piece than a documentary,” she said. “If you look at ‘The Ground Truth,’ it has a definite point of view. We don’t say, ‘Don’t go see it,’ but we don’t see why we should promote it.

“We don’t get too many requests on documentaries,” she said. “It’s usually more things with entertainment value, people saying we’d like to do something nice for the troops – like the movie ‘Sahara.'”

Thanks, Rush & Malloy — doing your bit for the military-industrial complex!

Cold comfort: The list of Pres. Bush’s former supporters grows longer every day. Now even Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman — a loud and agressive cheerleader for the war — has changed his tune:

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.”

…”There are a lot of lives that are lost,” Adelman said in an interview last week. “A country’s at stake. A region’s at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn’t have to be managed this bad. It’s just awful.”

Next up, every Democrats’ favorite 2008 GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich:

“People expect a level of performance they are not getting,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech.

The conservatives are collapsing under the weight of their immense self-deceptions. We should be swimming in schadenfreude, if only the trap they’ve gotten us into weren’t so damn serious.

Borowitz nails it again.

Elsewhere, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group issued recommendations for winning the war in Iraq, including putting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the insurgents.

And the band played on:

Baghdad’s morgues are full. With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.

Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.

The city’s network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says…

Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.

“We can’t remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again,” al-Obaidi said. “We simply don’t have the staff.”

Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.

“Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They’re all looking for their dead sons and I don’t know how the computer or we will bear up,” he said.

While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.

The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. The Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 — close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000 to 50,000.

In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.

In the Oval Office yesterday, Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s exit statement to the American people summed up why the Iraq war has become a debacle:

The great respect that I have for your leadership, Mr. President, in this little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century — it is not well-known, it was not well-understood, it is complex for people to comprehend. And I know, with certainty, that over time the contributions you’ve made will be recorded by history.

Sorry, sir, but some of us mere citizens understood from the outset that invading Iraq would open a Pandora’s Box of nasties — the ratcheting up of terrorist activities worldwide, the creation of a 51st American state in the Third World, as well as the insertion of American secular democracy into the one-thousand-year-old-conflict between Islam and Christendom, a long and unwinnable war that has only brought death and destruction to both sides.

With not a smidgeon of military expertise — but perhaps with an insight into world history not shared or that was simply ignored by our betters in Wasington — we saw that once these nasties had been released, there would be no way to put them back in the box.

Why did Rumsfeld, Cheney, Pres. Bush and the others do it? As the president finally admitted during a campaign stop last week, it was always about the oil, stupid. These high rollers took all our chips, placed them on top of the Iraqi oil fields and rolled the dice. It was anything but a sure bet, as we have seen.

Rummy is right about one thing: Pres. Bush’s “contributions… will be recorded by history.” He will be remembered as the Worst President Ever, in large part because he took the United States into a needless and disastrous war under false pretenses.

Impeachment is too good for him.

Just in on CNN: Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has resigned today and Pres. Bush will announce the resignation at a news conference at 11AM PST. John King says the resignation is under pressure from GOP leaders in Congress.

Bob Gates, former CIA Director, is likely to be named as his replacement.

I wonder how Borowitz knew this?

Today, to no one’s surprise, an Iraqi court found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death.

This verdict cost the United States the lives of 3,000 of its military men and women and $340 billion, to date — not to mention the lives of 600,000 Iraqi children, women and men who have died as a result of our invasion and occupation.

Back in 2002, all of the reasons President Bush and his administration gave us for changing the regime in Iraq have proven to be false. There were no WMDs (and they knew it), and there was never a chance a democracy would flourish there.

Their real motive, of course, was to secure access to the oil fields for western corporations. The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein is just a very expensive sideshow.