“one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in American history”

Quit saying that, call it what it is. It is the biggest foreign policy blunder in American History.

As pitiful and sickening as their new-found retrotactive defiant sagacity is, equally as reprhensible is that these ‘oiks’ (look it up)are still allowed not a scrounged soapbox, but a a glittering podium from which they are allowed to re-write their own histories without any meaniingful challenge, not only to their pasts but to the words they now add to their old recipe to make it seem new and invogorating and relevant to the current taste.

Those supplicants in the press that were convinced then when these parasites were bursting with the bloody rewards of tolerance, now regard the survivors of their infestation with the sympathy reserved for any endangered species, absent the recognit that they were and still are parasites and not benign symbiotic agent essential to the maintenance of life.

Oops, a bit OTT there, sorry! But goddamit if the press can persuade these bastards to crawl out from under once again the press should be there witha goddam shoe, reday to pound them to goo. Instead they maintain the morbid fascination of a child viewing a repulsive yet compelling creature before being distracted again by the promise of more food at the table or a trip to the cinema–the importance of their discovery of a weird and isdious creature lost once again as easily as it was found.

When are these people going to be held accountable? WHEN?!!

How do you write “Iraq” in Mandarin Chinese?
___________

Dunno, but I suspect the ideograph will also double to mean “the end of the US” too.

The build up to the war deceitful; the occupation was bungled before, during, and after Bremer; and the national treasury has been plundered, while Iraqi’s have borne incredible suffering. Many Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries are reduced to begging, prostitution, and crime.

But Iraq got a flat tax, so it’s all good.

30,000 dead & wounded young Americans break my heart.

But Bremer really, really pisses me off.

And we wonder why they’re not wild about us being in our country? I’m not blaming our troops — when you are fighting an unidentifiable “enemy”, you pretty much shoot at anything that looks remotely suspicious. I’m blaming our leaders for putting us in a situation (fed by the rah-rah-war-on-terror crowd back home) where so many people who mean no harm are dying.

You should listen to the Winter Soldier testimony at Democracy Now – it’s quite frightening. It’s really not the soldiers’ fault – they were following orders, some more reluctantly than others. In case after case, these soldiers keep saying that they were given orders from above to shoot any Iraqi for any reason, and plant evidence if the victims turned out to be innocent.

That’s it.

Also, the big, private schools here in Texas have shifted language priorities from Latin to Mandarin.

Got to prepare to become the low-payed slaves to the Chinese sooner or later.

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And we wonder why they’re not wild about us being in our country? I’m not blaming our troops — when you are fighting an unidentifiable “enemy”, you pretty much shoot at anything that looks remotely suspicious. I’m blaming our leaders for putting us in a situation (fed by the rah-rah-war-on-terror crowd back home) where so many people who mean no harm are dying.

Hmm – the new template must not support Unicode. But the Charset is UTF-8, so it should.

Let me try: 伊拉克

???

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197

“….But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the IMF has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer’s reforms as “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.” …

JASON WASHBURN: My name is Jason Washburn. I was a corporal in the United States Marine Corps, in which I served four years. I did three tours in Iraq. My first two tours were with the 1st Battalion, 4th Marines Charlie Company. And my third tour was with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines Weapons Company. I was in the initial invasion, and eventually, after the invasion was done, we settled down in Al Hillah. This was in ‘’03. From ’04 to ’05, I was in Najaf, and from ’05 to ’06, I was in Haditha.

During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot. It seemed like every time we turned around we had different rules of engagement. And they told us the reasons they were changing them was because it depended on the climate of the area at the time, what the threat level was deemed to be. And the higher the threat level was, the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond.

And, for example, during the invasion, we were told to use target identification before engaging with anyone. But if the town or the city that we were approaching was a known threat, if the unit that went through the area before we did took a high number of casualties, we were basically—we were allowed to shoot whatever we wanted. It was deemed to be a free-fire zone. So we would roll through the town, and anything that we saw, everything that was saw, we engaged it and opened fire on everything. And there was really—I mean, there was really no rule governing the amount of force we were allowed to use on targets during the invasion.

I remember one woman was walking by, and she was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading towards us. So we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher. And when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was only full of groceries. And, I mean, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to pieces for it.

More Winter Soldier testimony:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/18/winter_soldier_contd_us_vets_active

I wonder how this debacle will be portrayed in the history books of 2050?

Good question. How do you write “Iraq” in Mandarin Chinese?