Iraq
tqa | September 17, 2007
Once again, John "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" McCain went and said something stupid at a campaign stop. And, once again, he got caught on video doing it. This time, he went just slightly overboard in his criticism of the now-infamous MoveOn.org "General Betray-us" ad. Holding a blown-up, laminated copy of the ad, McCain said:
"It's disgraceful, it's got to be retracted and condemned by the Democrats and MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country, my friends."
(And if you don't believe Time Magazine, CBS has the video footage.)
Unlike the "Bomb Iran" incident, this wasn't…
neurophilosophy | September 14, 2007A new survey, released today by the ORB polling agency, suggests that around 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. That's more than 4% of the country's population.
tqa | September 12, 2007
Staff Sergeant Yance T. Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora died on Monday in a vehicle crash in Baghdad on Monday, along with six other American soldiers and two "detainees." During their time in Iraq, both Gray and Mora displayed more than just the courage needed to face the enemy. They also displayed the courage needed to stand up, to face the country, and to say that the strategy in Iraq isn't working, and never will. They had the courage to say this, knowing that their opinion would not be well received by many of their superiors. And, ultimately, they had the courage and civic responsibility…
tqa | September 12, 2007
The New York Times/CBS News poll that was released on Monday got a fair bit of media attention. Most of the attention focused on the revelation that Americans, by an overwhelming margin, trust the military leadership to resolve the war in Iraq (68%), rather than Congress (21%) or the White House (5%). The remainder of the attention went to the poll's finding that most Americans don't think the surge has made a heck of a lot of progress.
There's one question buried way in the middle of the poll - 15 pages into the pdf - that I think deserves a lot more attention. Respondents were asked the…
neurophilosophy | September 12, 2007On March 4th 1991, four days after the end of the Persian Gulf War, ground troops from the U.S. 37th Engineering Battalion destroyed large caches of weapons found at the Khamisiyah Ammunitions Storage Facility, a site approximately 25 square kilometres in size, located some 350km south east of Baghdad.
The U.S. Department of Defense initially denied that its troops may have been exposed to nerve agents during the demolitions at Khamisiyah, but following an inspection of the site by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1997, it emerged that the munitions destroyed on that day…
mikethemadbiologist | September 12, 2007Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers describes what he calls counter-intuitive polling on Iraq. Basically, people are less likely to say that want to leave Iraq the worse they think the situation is. But this isn't surprising or counter-intuitive at all: it's called guilt.
At the start of the Iraq War, roughly thirty percent of Americans opposed the war. Now, depending on the poll, roughly sixty percent think it's a bad idea. That means that half of those who currently oppose the war were former supporters.
This leads to a lot of guilt. It also means that many who now oppose this war still '…
mikethemadbiologist | September 10, 2007This quote from Fred Kaplan's Slate article has left me gobsmacked:
At the same time, nearly all politicians, including most Democrats, have come out against a total withdrawal and have recognized that we will have some military presence in Iraq for a long time to come.
Hold that thought, because I want to remind you of some polling data I discussed a couple of weeks ago:
From Strategic Vision, a Republican polling firm:
4. Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only)
Yes 51%
No 39%
Undecided 10%
Not beginning a withdrawal…
mikethemadbiologist | September 9, 2007Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero is confused by Michael Gordon's claim that the surge has lowered the violence in Iraq:
What I'd like to know, instead, is whether the conclusions he draws in the paragraph quoted are reasonable ones based upon the evidence he presents. Likewise, I'm aware of the "correlation does not necessarily equal causation" fallacy which Gordon flirts with. In this case, tho, I think it is very reasonable to assume that additional military power might "cause" decreased numbers of attacks. I just don't see them; the improvements, except as noted above, seem to be mostly…
mikethemadbiologist | September 7, 2007...he is us. Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers relates the results of some polling. Democratic voters were asked the following question:
Now I'm going to read you a list of people, organizations. For each person or organization, please tell me which of the following four choices comes closest to what you think their view is on what the U.S. should do in Iraq?
The respondents had four choices:
1. Make no cutbacks in U.S. troops in Iraq.
2. Leave a substantial number of troops in Iraq, but have them concentrate on training Iraqis and targeting Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq.
3. Start withdrawing…
mikethemadbiologist | September 6, 2007General Petraeus is bringing new meaning to the phrase 'head count':
Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."
Which led to this assessment:
"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome."
Gee, do ya think?
So let's think about this 'metric'…
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2007
Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq is a 28-minute film from the Archaeology Channel which documents the plundering of Iraqi archaeological sites and looting and destruction of priceless artifacts.
This destruction of Iraq's heritage has been going on since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, and continues to this day. The looting of artifacts from the Iraq museum in Baghdad, which took place soon after the U.S. began its military action, was widely publicized, but the mass media now makes no mention of the subject.
In the last few years, many objects looted from various…
mikethemadbiologist | August 27, 2007Glenn Greenwald catches Washington Post political 'reporter' Anne Kornblut impugning the patriotism of millions of Democrats:
The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut, analyzing the differences between Republicans and Democrats on Iraq, explained on Tuesday night's Hardball:
ANNE KORNBLUT, "THE WASHINGTON POST": It remains, especially in Democratic crowds, the number-one issue. There is no applause line that gets a bigger response when you're out with Senator Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, than when they say the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start ending this war in…
mikethemadbiologist | August 27, 2007Yes, I'm kidding. But there's a new poll which should make every Republican political operative and politician terrified. From Strategic Vision, a Republican polling firm:
4. Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only)
Yes 51%
No 39%
Undecided 10%
Not beginning a withdrawal in six months if Iraq becomes more stable, a brigade of magical unicorns shows up, and so forth. Iowa Republicans want us out in six months. Gone. Outta (t)here. I'm not sure that we can even do that logistically, without spiking most of our heavy…
mikethemadbiologist | August 26, 2007Brought to you by Glenn Greenwald:
That is why war opponents on the "left" -- including bloggers -- were and still are deemed Unserious even though they proved to be correct. Their opposition was not based (at least principally) on the belief that we were using the wrong "force deployment packages," that the timing was wrong, that we should have waited a little longer (that type of "opposition" was the only permitted type). Rather, it was largely based on the notion that the war itself was illegitimate because Iraq had not attacked us and could not threaten our national security, and that…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2007Yes, I've cribbed the title from Chris Hedges' superb, must-read book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. But Josh Marshall stumbles across a great insight about the Iraq War and Occupation, but doesn't quite carry through all the way. So the Mad Biologist will. Marshall writes about President Bush (italics mine):
And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.
By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 22, 2007You might have heard of Family Security Matters, a rightwing faith-tank that has been embarrassed by one of their members, Philip Atkinson. He embarased them so thoroughly that FSM has purged all reference to him from its website (more about that, later). So what was the offending passage, given that FSM's stable of commentators is, well, rather unstable? Here's Atkinson, in a column titled "Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy":
When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization,…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2007From the back cover of The Wimp Factor is this illustration that explains so much about the rise of the modern conservative movement:
From hatred of gays to blowing the crap out of the wrong country to prove that we're not weak, it is remarkable how much of this stems from male insecurity. Couldn't these wimps have bought a red sports car or had an affair instead?
mikethemadbiologist | August 8, 2007I don't mean to make this into an anti-Ignatieff blog, but there are two more great posts about his idiocy: one by ScienceBlogling and "embarrased" Canadian James Hrynyshyn, the other by David Rees.
ScienceBlogling James writes:
There real reason why so many academics, from the hard sciences and the social field, opposed the war is it was a stupid idea, one that could only serve to strengthen the enemies of democracy and reason. It's the same thing when it comes to scientific issues like climate change, or evolution or stem cells, or abstinence-only sex education. The Bush administration isn'…
neurophilosophy | August 7, 2007Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is said to be one of the signature injuries of the conflict in Iraq, and accounts for a larger proportion of troop casualties than it has in previous wars fought by the United States. According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, the U. S. military formally diagnosed 2,121 cases of TBI between October 2001 and January 2007.
The incidence of TBI among troops may actually be much higher than these official statistics suggest, largely because of the increasing use of the signature weapon of the Iraq war: the improvised explosive device (IED).…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2007Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought that Ignatieff's self-analysis was idiotic. Brad DeLong writes that Ignatieff wasn't acting like an academic (italics mine):
I think Ignatieff has it wrong when he contrasts realistic politicans with academic visionaries. The academics I know and respect labor under three ethical prime directives:
Learn as much as possible about the issue.
Fairly present all points of view that have significant support.
Always remember that the world is a complex and surprising place, and that our theories, models, and data are limited: the map is not the…