Please keep these excellent posts coming.

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

Good post. I am looking into these issues on my blog.

Found your blog on yahoo – thanks for the article but i still don’t get it.

• Writing NO ORDERS, supplying NO TROOPS to guard Al-Qaqaa’s 280 metric tons of high-explosives — even though they were warned in person by the head of the IAEA — was not a move that would ensure stability.

• Disbanding the security services that the Pentagon was depending on to fill out their tiny numbers was another fatal blow to stability.

Underdeployment, nonguarding of munitions, canning the entire security force and the gov’t in one day — these are not actions by an invading power seeking stability.

You’re either a liar or a fool if you think otherwise.

That’s not necessarily true of Harmon. She mainly represents the aerospace wing of the MIC, as I posted above.

“the RoC went through fire as well during the Chinese civil war.”

No, nothing like it. The Japanese genocide in coastal China they went through, along with the rest of the Chinese. Their flight to Taiwan was at the cost of the PEOPLE ALREADY LIVING THERE, not so much for poor, poor Jiang and his fellow elites.

“My only point here is that the Kurdish entity is going to end up in a sort of legal limbo, comparable to that of Taiwan, at least for a while.”

That does not follow. Iraqi Kurdistan will only be in limbo if Iraq the state collapses. Is that what you’re referring to?

“It is the election, not the civil war, which is threatening their plans”

“It is the civil war, and the collapse of their mission in Iraq, that caused them to lose the elections in 2006″

No, that’s not correct. They’ve been stealing our elections since 1999. Their machine broke, after massive activist intervention in the vote-fraud. And Republicans gave up on Bush in droves, because of Katrina, the failure to find WMD, and the failure to capture or kill Bin Laden.

In 2006 at the elections, the issue of a ‘civil war’ was still greatly disputed in the press and in the public.

“Had the Iraq War established the stable, America-allied government they wanted,”

They NEVER WANTED STABILITY!!! If you are so ignorant as to be able to ignore a planned genocide, then that’s more than an IQ test, it’s a test of your morality, and you are getting a FAILING GRADE.

Right you are – I should have referenced an “armistice” or “cease fire,” not a “surrender.” Now, on the question of whether the No Fly/No Drive zones amounted to legal means to enforce the conditions of the armistice, let’s just say we’re in a grey area. I realize the UN never explicitly authorized them, but on the other hand, authrozing a force to go to war includes authorization to negotiate the conditions of the enemy’s cessation of hostilities upon their defeat.

Paul in LA,

I was being sardonic. Oh, that goodness. I thought you’d gone around the bend!

Not similar cases at all. (in reference to the Kurds vs Taiwan). Well, obviously, in many ways they are, although the RoC went through fire as well during the Chinese civil war. My only point here is that the Kurdish entity is going to end up in a sort of legal limbo, comparable to that of Taiwan, at least for a while.

It is the election, not the civil war, which is threatening their plans in former Iraq, Iran, New Orleans, and the formerly more-free United States.

It is the civil war, and the collapse of their mission in Iraq, that caused them to lose the elections in 2006, and the rest of their political fortunes. Had the Iraq War established the stable, America-allied government they wanted, the Busy administration would be on top of the political world. These people actually believed in the idea of a western-oriented Iraq setting off democratic revolutions throughout the Middle East, and banked their future on it. I find your conspratorial view unconvincing.

Odds are this will not be pretty, but we will not pull out no matter who is in charge here in the USA.

Harman is essentially saying she wants to hold the victim down for a rapist, but doesn’t think it’s necessary to slap her around as much as the other gang members do.

You are misinterpreting what SA is offering. They are NOT offering to buy Kirkuk. They are offering to pay I. Kurdistan to give up its claim to including Kirkuk in I. Kurdistan. Kirkuk is an integrated city of all three factions. If it became part of I. Kurdistan, that relationship might/would change that status. Because of Sunni income from oil in Kirkuk, SA is offering to pay the Kurds not to threaten that income.

That said, the German source of that Rawstory article gave a misleading title: “Saudi Arabia offers Kurds 2 billion dollars to give up Kirkuk”

In any case, SA was NOT trying to get the Kurds to give up their community share of Kirkuk, but rather the demand for Kirkuk to become officially I. Kurdish.

“…the United States Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ( 000 U.S. 05-184 ) that Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention applied to the War on Terrorism” –wikipedia

To wit, in this conflict, US forces have commonly failed to uphold their Common Article 3 duties:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

[There hasn't been any cruel treatment, has there?]

(b) Taking of hostages;

[Several reports of US soldiers taking hostages to force confessions during interrogations have surfaced.]

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

[Shooting whole famililes to death is a bit more than humiliation.]

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

The repeated pogroms on Al-Fallujah is certainly ‘the carrying out of executions without previous judgment.’ The four Blackwater employees were killed not by Falluja en masse, but by Blackwater via (a probably intentional) negligence, and a handful of Fallujan street persons.

2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.

US forces commonly fail to care for their victims. Indeed, CENTCOM has stated that it has no duty to count or track the dead and wounded civilians. Why should they? Genocide isn’t a Geneva Convention behavior. Deploying mercs in a legal occupation is a warcrime. Deploying mercs in a genocide is just good common sense.

I was being sardonic.

“As far as the status of the Kurdish state, that’s probably going to end up as muddled as Taiwan.”

Not similar cases at all. The Kurds have been through fire. Read Galbraith, and see it from their standpoint. When I read the book last year, it changed much of my view. Previously I was very angry about the coming partition — now I see it as a net gain for the Kurds, who after all are surely better off now than they were in the 1980s, when GHW Bush was helping Hussein slaughter them.

“And the “deliberate civil war” thing – do you think Bush and Cheney screwed up the Katrina response on purpose, too?”

Isn’t that obvious?

Bush to Pelosi, oval office, after Pelosi has asked what can be done to fix the disastrous Bushco response: “What didn’t go right?”

Bush and his pal Haley Barbour in MS are RACISTS and classists (*Barbour himself is something like a Grand Wizard). They get a kick out of dispossessing those beneath them.

“This adminstration fixed their political fortunes to the success of the Iraq project,”

“What hasn’t gone right?”

“and the civil war has destroyed not on their hopes for Iraq, but their presidency, their party, and the future of neoconservative ideology.”

That’s because you buy that tripe. The civil war which they fomented is going well — THEY DIDN’T EXPECT TO LOSE THE 2006 ELECTION. It is the election, not the civil war, which is threatening their plans in former Iraq, Iran, New Orleans, and the formerly more-free United States.

“One segment of the Sunni insurgency, led by religious fanatics, deliberately provoked a civil war by attacking the Shiites,”

How do you know that? What do you think the 30,000+ mercenary squads are busy doing? Sitting in rockers and knitting? When the UN office in Basra was bombed, the U.S. did very suspicious things. For instance, CENTCOM annnounced it had captured NINETEEN bombers at the border, and they confessed to being Al Qaeda.

Two weeks later, media light off, and CENTCOM reveals that they never had anyone in custody for the bombing, except an Iraqi teenager they admitted wasn’t involved.

Who bombed that building? Why would Iraqis bomb the UN?

FOR SURE, Iraqis, muslims, did not burn the Koran-Torah Repository to the ground. That singular act of genocide has the rightwing Christofascist handwriting all over it.

Try Googling the name Stryber and the word Iraq. You’ll find out that a British merc outfit hired deathsquad mercenaries from S. Africa. Do you think racist white supremacists like Stryber care(d) about burning down or bombing mosques?

• Bushco and CENTCOM failed to guard Al-Qaqaa, Hussein’s main ammo dump, previously under lockdown from the UN.

That is either an act of criminal negligence OR treason (and both). When you want to start a civil war, fire the security forces (create massive unemployment)(send the soldiers home with their AKs), fire the gov’t (ruthlessly unemploying thousands of upper middle-class Sunnis) by a one-day, no process deBaathification, and then go around raping the country and allowing rape of the country, until the people have lost all sense of community and shared needs. Shut off the water supply and the power, and blow up all the sewage plants so the children can die from dysentery along with their grandparents, and turn the power on and off, so that no one can keep milk or meat to feed their families.

Then drop hundreds of TONS of half-strength uranium into a country with killer sandstorms and hardpan soil, and induce generations of childhood leukemia and cancer cases, because children’s bodies preferentially take up uranium over calcium, taking the radioactive toxin into their bones, probably for the rest of their short lives. That method of killing violates the Hague Conventions, and in fact is a standalone defining case of genocide:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Preventing births, forceable transfer — both are examples of what so-called ‘depleted uranium’ will do to those innocents, for a thousand years or more.”

THIS IS GENOCIDE, BY CIVIL WAR, AFTER VIOLENT INVASION. It is in every way a major warcrime, and under our existing year 1999 laws, is a capital offense under the 1997 War Crimes Act.

Such acts are NOT mistakes, not goofs, not botching, not failures of intelligence. They are evil, itself.

“Maybe I’ll check out that Galbraith book. Any relation to John Kenneth, or is that a coincidence?”

His son.

Harman noted she “does not want us to leave Iraq.” Rather, she explained, “I’m someone who supports an ongoing mission in Iraq. But I don’t think a combat mission is the right mission.”

For the United States of America, Iraq can only ever be a ‘combat mission’. George Bush and 20 years of sanctions have seen to that Senator. Why don’t you spend a few months working from the Green Zone. Modern communications are incredible…

Not to nitpick, but…

Iraq never surrendered. Saddam’s regime agreed to a cease-fire, after a peace conference.

The conditions for the cease-fire did not include an Iraqi agreement to no-fly zones.

We set up the No Fly/No Drive zones under that authority.

These no-fly zones were unilaterally imposed by the US and the UK. They really didn’t have the authority to establish them. The UN certainly never had a vote, and the UN resolution that the US and the UK argued gave them the legal basis for establishing them, doesn’t mention the no-fly zones either.

You keep implying they did. (US troops taking up positions in Kurdistan prior to the war).

No, I don’t. I’m talking about the security guarantee and the air support.

Paul in LA, the Turks look towards the Kurds lovingly? Did history end, too? That’s pretty, er, optimistic.

As far as the status of the Kurdish state, that’s probably going to end up as muddled as Taiwan. The Turks, Kurds, Iranians, and what’s left of the rest are Iraq are all going to want to hear different things – OR WAR! Real federalism with the rest of Iraq probably isn’t on the table for years, maybe a lot of them, if ever. Is that where you think our diplomatic efforts should go, towards a federalist Iraqi state?

And the “deliberate civil war” thing – do you think Bush and Cheney screwed up the Katrina response on purpose, too? This adminstration fixed their political fortunes to the success of the Iraq project, and the civil war has destroyed not on their hopes for Iraq, but their presidency, their party, and the future of neoconservative ideology. One segment of the Sunni insurgency, led by religious fanatics, deliberately provoked a civil war by attacking the Shiites, in order to make Bush’s effort to install a goverment fail. Bush couldn’t stop it, the Shiites took the bait, and the civil war broke out. I don’t think what we’ve seen in Iraq was how they intended it to play out.

Maybe I’ll check out that Galbraith book. Any relation to John Kenneth, or is that a coincidence?