Tag Iraq War
No Living Memory
The media have reported the death of Australian WWI vet Claude Choules, the last living combatant to fight in that conflict. Only two days ago, this excellent article by Evan Fleischer was posted at The Awl, talking about Choules and the overlapping of generations between the major wars of American history. Whether Fleischer knew something we all didn’t or not, the article is presciently well-timed, but it’s also a really good piece full of interesting tidbits about veterans of a number of wars. Only Florence Green, who served as an RAF canteen girl during the war, is left alive.
A guest post at TomDispatch.com by Adam Hochschild considers some of the parallels between the politics of the First World War and the politics of the Iraq-Afghanistan War. Hochschild is the author of a new history of the war, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918″. Here’s a pullquote from the TomDispatch post:
Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.
The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day — and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.
In the wake of the death of Bin Laden, the question “Was it worth it?” looms large over military action that promises to linger almost indefinitely among the poppy fields of Afghanistan, much as it lingers still over the poppies of Flanders.
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More Assorted Infographics
My September 11 post this year consisted of a pie chart of the total number of victims of the Global War On Terror from 9/11/01 to the current date. Here’s a bar graph that displays the same data which should help make the point even better:
Newsweek tries to put the plight of those Chilean miners into perspective with this amazing infographic from last week’s issue:
There are four access holes from the surface to the miners, each exactly the size of that circle (which I have attempted to show here exactly as it is on their website), and EVERYTHING they receive from the outside world until the rescue shaft is completed must fit that diameter.
This one might be a little hard to discern at first:
That is a density map of the Boston metropolitan area indicating racial makeup. Red represents white people, blue represents black people, orange represents Hispanics, and green represents Asians. As you can see, honkies got the bruthas surrounded. It’s not new knowledge that Boston remains a deeply-divided city racially, but it’s still a little startling to see it displayed so markedly. Compare Boston to the maps for New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and you’ll see that the difference isn’t in the segregation but in the overall diversity of a metro area. These maps were created by a fellow named Eric Fisher, who created similar maps (all based on 2000 Census data) for 40 major American metro areas (which I found via this Fast Company post)
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Remember Them
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Another Iraq War Infographic
When you add in Afghanistan, that 2009 total is at least 339. In June of this year alone, 32 active-duty American troops in Iraq committed suicide. According to this story, there are five times as many failed suicide attempts as successful ones. The rate of suicide in the military is double the civilian rate.
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Your Daily Infographics
First a small bit of context for the first one: I was simply gobsmacked by this Huffington Post story (pointed out by Jack Cluth) that twigged out something that went unreported in the “20% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim” story from last week: 52% of Republicans believe that Osama “probably or definitely” wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the United States. I will let you ponder the rank stupidity of that while you look at this Venn diagram (via Scott Underwood)
Graphic #2 is, as I say, only marginally related, as it is more specifically about the Iraq War, but considering the lame bit of political theater from Obama last night, it’s worth recalling:
Make of these data points what you will, my friends.
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War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is
Of all the meaningless gestures from the Obama Administration regarding our illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none is more meaningless than the declaration that “the last combat troops have left Iraq”.
Fifty thousand troops remain in Iraq and the number of mercenaries used in lieu of U.S. military personnel will nearly triple from 2,700 to 7,000. An American military presence in Iraq is unlikely to disappear for decades to come. Just ask the Germans, who still have 68,000 American soldiers in their country even though their war ended 65 years ago. Or the Japanese, who have 47,000 U.S. troops. Or the Koreans, with 37,000. “They need us to maintain order”, “they need us to defend them”, “the strategic value of forward placement is critical to our national security”, “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and so on. The lies evolve as the situation changes, but there is always some rationalization for permanent occupation.
John McCain had the temerity to say this on Twitter: “I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.”
Somebody should kick John McCain in the teeth. While it’s not the first time the United States trumped up some bullshit reason to invade another country, the outright lies from Bush and his allies used to gin up a case for a completely unnecessary war are nothing short of war crimes themselves. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tony Blair, every last one of them should be hauled in front of the same sort of kangaroo court that Saddam Hussein was tried in, summarily found guilty, and hanged for their crimes against humanity. Crowing triumph after seven years of unadulterated misuse of power should be seen as the craven act of a coward and a bully, and the bootlicker McCain deserves to have some sense smacked into him.
During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received a great deal of criticism for using the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig”, but the news spin on this troop reduction is exactly that. Meanwhile, Obama himself deserves a pretty good smack for continuing and expanding the war in Afghanistan, now nearly ten years old and with even less legitimacy than the invasion of Iraq.
There will, of course, never be any proper accounting for all of this. The trillions of dollars squandered, the lives lost or ruined, the incalculable damage done to not just the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but also the people of this country. But neither should there ever be a banner raised in triumph, a head held high in honor, or a page written in history that portrays these last seven years and however many more to come as anything less than a disgrace and a shame.
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Factoids Of The Day
We watch a LOT of “Hannah Montana” around here. The current season is the final one for the show, and one thing that’s quite noticeable in the most recent episodes is how much all of the kids on the show have matured over the last year. Except for Jason Earles, the actor who plays Miley’s brother Jackson. And do you know why???? Because he’s 32 FREAKIN’ YEARS OLD, that’s why!! Or maybe not; Wikipedia says he might be only 24.
I was practically dumbstruck the other day when an old high school friend trotted out the “soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for your freedom” line on Facebook. Is it possible than even now, eight years into a pair of wars that show no sign of stopping ever, that there are still people who believe that there’s any other reason besides oil for our military presence in Central Asia?
Pretty much everybody knows that the United States is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the world, right? But did you know that the Department of Defense accounts for so much of that consumption that if it were an independent nation it would be #4 on that list all by itself? (in per capita consumption) Or, if you just use the absolute figures, the DoD would be #38 on the list, just behind the Philippines.
We’ve had a bit of a fly problem in our house recently. Due to the town’s trash collector coming by our house several hours earlier than usual a few weeks ago, I missed getting our garbage to the curb, and in the week that all of that rotting food had to sit in the mudroom waiting for its next turn to join the local landfill, some flies got in and got seriously busy with each other. At first it only seemed like a couple of flies here and there, but apparently there is no such thing as “a couple of flies”. Something had to be done, but we didn’t want to be spraying pesticides in the kitchen, which is where most of them had taken up residence, so Bridget bought some of those adhesive fly strips at the dollar store. In the space of a couple of days, the carnage was intense. You would think we were doing genetics experiments for the number of flies we found wriggling fruitlessly (HA!) on those sticky strips of doom. BWA-HAA-HAAAAAAA!
Ahem…sorry about the cackling. My point in telling you this story is to lead up to this link: the BBC reports that a new paper from a team of evolutionary biologists in Canada has concluded that most insects (and probably a fair percentage of other species) developed a “Stink of Death” mechanism so that the oleic acid given off by the decaying bodies of dead bugs would act as a repulsor mechanism to tell other bugs to stay away from a potential danger.
So, while the fly strips were successful in and of themselves in ridding our kitchen of the fly menace, leaving the strips hanging, covered with decaying fly corpses, is also probably convincing other flies to get the fuck out of Dodge. They’ll stay up for a couple more weeks, by which time the cold weather will have finished off whatever stragglers have escaped my lethal clutches! BWA-HAA-HAAAAAA!
The fourth annual “Most Corrupt Members Of Congress” report is now available for your perusal. This year, the report only lists 15 members of Congress, down from 24(!) last year. CREW, the organization behind the non-partisan effort, says the list is smaller because many of last year’s “honorees” were not re-elected in 2008, and some likely “honorees” have not been charged, censured, or indicted…yet. The list is pretty evenly divided between Democrats (8) and Republicans (7), though it is heavy with members of the House (12) compared to only three senators (McConnell, Ensign, and Burris). There are some pretty familiar names, too: Maxine Waters, John Murtha, Jerry Lewis (no, the other one), and Charlie Rangel. All people who pop up again and again as crooks. And, no, that moron Joe Wilson (the “YOU LIE!” guy) is not on the list — it’s not a crime to be stupid, especially if you’re a member of Congress.
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Another Anniversary
Yesterday marked the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.
4,259 U.S. service members dead
31,089 U.S. service members wounded*
1,320,110 Iraqi deaths attributable to the invasion**
Cost of the war to American taxpayers as of 11/08: $656.1 billion
Number of Weapons of Mass Destruction found: 0
* unofficial estimates of wounded run as high as 100,000; the discrepancy is due to a change in the way the U.S. DoD’s methodology of determining what counts as “wounded”. Further, it is estimated that thousands of troops have suffered permanent brain damage but are not counted in official casualty figures.
** all estimates of Iraqi casualty counts are speculative and subject to interpretation. This estimate is the high end.
