Shane Ratliff died on Monday. I met him in Ruby, South Carolina during the filming of Robert Greenwald’s film Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers. Shane was one of the many people we interviewed for a documentary about how the likes of Hilliburton/KBR, CACI,Blackwater, and other corporations stuck their snouts into the deep trough of the wasted and unaccounted-for-cash that now defines how the
Iraq war quickly morphed from “mission accomplished” to fiasco, imperial hubris, and descent into chaos.
But Shane was a favorite of ours, a man with a off-beat sense of humor and a wry southern and, indeed, South Carolinian way of getting at the grit of reality. He was a truck driver by inclination and trade, with the hard rules of the road as his moral compass. On his many trips across the United States he thought he had seen everything. But he had not yet experienced the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Halliburton/KBR in the land of greed, grab, and grin that was Iraq as the CEOs that hired him descended upon this great opportunity to serve their country… from a golf course in the tony suburbs of Houston.
The US media have reported on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities. But 130,000 troops remain in Iraq and many argue that the occupation will continue only under a different guise. Have things really changed? Or has the occupation simply been rebranded?
Today, all U.S. troops must be withdrawn from Iraqi cities, including U.S. bases in Baghdad, according to the Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the U.S. and Iraq. The Iraqi government will also take legal responsibility for the actions of U.S. troops and have legal jurisdiction over American soldiers who commit crimes off-base and off-duty, and the SOFA will grant permission to U.S. troops for military operations, as well as ban the U.S. from staging attacks on other countries from Iraq.
While it may seem like a step forward toward ending the six-year occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon is doing what it can to dodge or play down these SOFA stipulations. In recent weeks, it has been re-classifying bases and troops, hiring “corporate security” mercenaries, and preventing Iraq from having jurisdiction over those actions. It’ll get away with it too, as Congress never ratified the SOFA, and because many are justifying further occupation under the banner of keeping Iraq secure.
How did Senators John McCain and and Joe Lieberman spend the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war? Did they apologize for cheerleading the Bush administration’s pernicious lies that led our country into and have kept us mired in Iraq? Did they show remorse for a war that took the lives of over 4,000 US soldiers and up to 1 million Iraqi civilians, while costing us $3 trillion when all is said and done? No, instead these Senators brought us the sequel to their twisted buddy comedy, escalating the war in Afghanistan.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed yesterday, McCain and Lieberman urged the Obama administration to go all in after completing its policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The “minimalist” or “reductionist” path would be, in their view, “dangerously and fundamentally wrong, and the president should unambiguously reject it.” As with the Iraq war, McCain and Lieberman believe it’s in our national interest to win in Afghanistan at all cost, which they even define as establishing “a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary.”
How do McCain and his ideological Benedict Arnold of a sidekick propose achieving such a lofty goal? Well, that part they don’t get into. No need to be bogged down with the specifics; suffice it to say our country needs a broad counterinsurgency and we need it now! The maximalist approach, which is ironic, considering McCain and Lieberman criticize and fear-monger about those who use “loose rhetoric about a minimal commitment in Afghanistan.” The thing is though, and I never ever thought I’d write these words, McCain and Lieberman are absolutely right.
Barack Obama has stepped out farther on Iraq than I thought he would. During the campaign, he pledged a date to get all combat troops out of Iraq, but as many progressives pointed out, the definition of “combat troops” can be a bit fuzzy. There was definitely wiggle room in that talking point. But as President, Obama has not only moved to keep his campaign promise, but gone a step farther – he’s set a date for all U.S. troops to leave the country we invaded six years ago.
Though us progressives will have to hold him to that promise, I must say, I’m pleasantly surprised. There was no need for Obama to go out on that limb, but he did, and that gives me hope in his commitment to peace.
The Iraq war, started six years ago, has an end date. The war in Afghanistan, however, does not.
Obama will announce the new strategy he’s formulated for Afghanistan in a few weeks. I may again be pleasantly surprised. Either way, I’ll be holding up his strategy to the rubric laid out by Alex Thurston a few weeks ago. And I will continue to oppose any new strategies that don’t meet this standard.
One war, started six years ago, has an end date. I intend to see our second war gets the same.
Think about it for a second. What do you actually hear and see right now? This page. The walls and furnishings of the room in which you sit. Perhaps some music or some background noise. Yet you know as sure as you were born that out of sight there are other rooms mere steps away–perhaps the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and a hall. What makes you so sure that they exist? Nothing but your memory…Then there are the companions who enrich your life–family, workmates, neighbors, friends a husband or a wife, and even people you are fond of to whom you haven’t spoken in a year or two–few of whom, if any, are currently in the room with you. You also know we sit on a planet called the earth, circling an incandescent ball of sun, buried in one of many galaxies. At this instant, reading by yourself, where do the realities of galaxies and friends reside? Only in the chambers of your mind. Almost every reality you “know” at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory.
–Howard Bloom, “Reality is a Shared Hallucination,” You Are Still Being Lied To.
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces.
In recent days, the architects of that invasion worked to solidify a noxious lie as the historical narrative of the events before and after March 19, 2003. Our new president, thanks be to God, declared his intention to remove our forces from Iraq. But as we move toward the exit, we also move toward the pen and paper to write the final account of what transpired. Six years after the invasion, it is incumbent upon us to remember, to face the truth of the Iraq war and what it says about us, without shrinking, because what chose to remember determines our reality. Those who decided that their ends were more important than the lives lost in the pursuit of those ends, having failed to succeed in the moment, want to make real their lies and their phantoms and their fantasies in the only place where reality lives once the moment passes–in our memory.
For those already outraged at the AIG bonus scandal, here is a fact that should add more fuel to the fire: The Obama administration has paid the mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater nearly $70 million to operate in Iraq and, according to the Washington Times, may keep the company on the payroll months past the official expiration of its Iraq contract in May. I reviewed Blackwater’s recent transactions with the Obama State Department and discovered a $45 million payment to Blackwater on February 4, 2009 for “protective services-Iraq.” It is described as a “funding action only.” Here is the interesting part: The estimated “Ultimate Completion Date” is 5/07/2011.
The Washington Times (as described below) reported on a $22 million payment to Blackwater on February 2. Combined with the $45 million payment I discovered, that’s nearly $67 million in 72 hours. Not bad for a company supposedly going down in flames.
With the US economy in shambles and millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet and keep their homes, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton need to explain to US taxpayers how they justify these mega-payments to a scandal-plagued mercenary company. (At the very least, someone should ask Robert Gibbs about it).
Via Ken Silverstein at Harpers, “an amazing and disturbing YouTube video that shows an American military officer trash-talking to a group of Iraqi police. It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the U.S. mission there, to put it mildly.”
I have watched with mild amusement this week the self-immolation of the Republican Party as it bows before the altar of Rush Limbaugh, begging for mercy, pleading for forgiveness, breathlessly seeking guidance and wisdom from The Oracle.
President Obama and the Democratic Party have wasted no time in pointing out to the American people this marriage from hell, tying Rush like a rock around the collective Republican neck and hoping for its quick descent to the netherworld of irrelevance.
But some commentators (Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, Chuck Todd of NBC News, etc.) have likened this to “what Republicans tried to do to the Democrats with Michael Moore.” Perhaps. But there is one central difference: What I have believed in, and what I have stood for in these past eight years — an end to the war, establishing universal health care, closing Guantanamo and banning torture, making the rich pay more tax and aggressively going after the corporate chiefs on Wall Street — these are all things which the MAJORITY of Americans believe in, too. That’s why in November the majority voted for the guy I voted for. The majority of Americans rejected the ideology of Rush and embraced the same issues I have raised consistently in my movies and books.
After years of frustrating ambiguity, President Obama has clearly committed to a complete withdrawal of all US troops in less than three years.
Speaking to the Marines in North Carolina, Obama finally clarified that the proposed “residual force” of 50,000 or more will be a “transitional” one, departing one year after combat operations end on August 31, 2010. That position is consistent with the terms negotiated by the Iraqi government in the final days of the Bush Administration, in what the Iraqi side notably called the “withdrawal agreement.”
, and Kristele Younes, an Advocate at 
