Iraq/Afghanistan
revere | October 8, 2007The US invasion of Iraq has not managed to spread Democracy in the region but it is successfully spreading Cholera:
The number of cholera cases in Iran is on the rise after the outbreak of an epidemic in neighbouring Iraq, an Iranian health official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"The last count shows 43 people have contracted cholera in Kordestan province," Mohsen Zahrai, who is in charge of water and food-borne diseases, told ISNA news agency.
He said those affected had been commuting across the border with Iraq and warned Iranian citizens to postpone pilgrimages to Iraq until the…
revere | October 2, 2007Is Nigeria a member of the Coalition of the Willing? It appears to be, on the basis of this evidence. For background, let's go back to a BBC story on April 30, 2003:
Foreign currency worth nearly $200m has been found in a Baghdad neighbourhood, the US military say.
Troops found $100m and 90m euros in 31 containers, US Central Command said.
The money has been flown out of the country to a "secure location" for counting purposes and will eventually be returned to Iraq to help rebuild the country, the US said.
Last week, US troops found more than $650m in the same area of Baghdad.
The latest…
revere | September 28, 2007General Petraeus, speaking for President Bush, has told us things are going well in Iraq. He backed it up with charts, numbers and "twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence." (YouTube version here). One of the charts he didn't show, however, was this chart (via atrios) from the Department of Defense. I wonder why:
revere | September 23, 2007Before the invasion there was cholera in Iraq but at a fairly low level: 30 cases a year reported or about one in a million population. Cholera is entirely preventable with clean water and easily treatable with oral rehydration therapy. But it can also kill a person in less than a day. The bug's toxin opens the floodgates in the intestines and the victim becomes rapidly and often fatally dehydrated. People alive and apparently well in the morning can be dead by nightfall. It is a frightening disease. There are now a reported 30,000 cases of diarrhea and 1500 confirmed diagnoses of cholera in…
revere | September 17, 2007War's travel companion, Disease, is stalking Baghdad. This disease, cholera, is totally preventable and easily treatable under ordinary circumstances. Of course these aren't ordinary circumstances. Thanks to the invasion and the subsequent US occupation and the resistance to it there has been a total breakdown in civil order. The result is the kind of epidemic disease one associates with Victorian London or mid-19th century America, not a 21st century (once) developed country:
A cholera epidemic in northern Iraq has infected approximately 7,000 people and could reach Baghdad within weeks as…
revere | September 16, 2007I'm tired of hearing people with usually progressive views (like Mark Shields or John Kerry) complain the latest MoveOn ad in the New York Times asking if General Petraeus has Betrayed Us is counter-productive, "alienating those who would otherwise agree with us." It's the same bogus argument we hear about forthright atheists saying what needs to be said. I doubt anyone who genuinely questions this war will be led to support it because Move On ran an ad in the NYT some are uncomfortable with. Of course the Right Wing Noise Machine is in full throttle:
A political group supporting President…
revere | September 14, 2007I just watched Dear Leader tell his fellow citizens why we will have to wait until the next President before there is any hope for extricating the country from the quicksand of the Iraq Debacle. It was not a surprise, but no less dismaying for being expected. But I've been dismayed before. Vietnam.
In 1969 our leaders were the same kind of lying bastards who did whatever they wanted. That year Pete Seeger appeared on the David Steinberg TV show and sang this song. The country was divided on the war, much more divided than today, something he acknowledges when he says no one need sing with…
revere | August 9, 2007For all you Second Amendment-is-the-most-precious-freedom-we-have folks out there, take heart. We are spreading freedom in Iraq:
The US military cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to the Iraqi security forces, an official US report says.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the Pentagon cannot track about 30% of the weapons distributed in Iraq over the past three years.
The Pentagon did not dispute the figures, but said it was reviewing arms deliveries procedures. (BBC)
Yes,that's right. 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols, along with 135,000 pieces of…
revere | July 30, 2007I don't know what to say about this, except it appears at this point to implicate theuse of slave labor in the construction of the US Embassy in Baghdad, aided, abetted and with the knowledge of the US State Department (hat tip Boingboing) . You decide:
The US State Department is denying the claims of occupational health and safety violations while at the same time saying they can't control how foreign laborers are treated:
"At this time our reach does not extend to third-country hiring practices," said William Moser, the deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions. (Washington Post via…
revere | July 24, 2007Here is Max Blumenthal's Unofficial Tour of the College Republican Convention. It's both funny and appalling. Take your pick. Or just laugh through your tears.
On the other hand, if you are offended and under the age of 42, you can sign up and take your anger out on the Iraqis:
revere | July 8, 2007Some federal money ($430 million) for pandemic preparedness is now being released to help states and communities "to respond to bioterror attacks, infectious disease, and natural disasters that may cause mass casualties." The bulk of federal pan flu money has been for procurement of vaccines and antivirals. Over the years money$2 billion has been released to increase acute care capacity. There isn't a lot of evidence we are in much better shape for all that. So do we think this new bolus of dough will help?
The good news is that it isn't more procurement money for vaccine and antivirals. It's…
revere | June 27, 2007I hope the Democrats are successful in stopping the Iraq atrocity. Out of Iraq. Now. But I must once again disagree -- strongly disagree -- with the notion that Iraq has distracted us from the "real" war against terrorism, the one in Afghanistan. This is a talking point of virtually all the Democratic presidential hopefuls and a distressingly large proportion of the progressive blogosphere. I must say again: Afghanistan was wrong, too.
That was the title of a post I put up in December 2005 at a time when Iraq looked less like the colossal screw up many of us knew it was. It was also a time…
revere | March 19, 2007Anniversaries may be artificial milestones marking a distance on a road from the past, but they also remind us of where we are now: enmired in the fifth year of a hideous and vicious war, a war whose disastrous consequences were foreseen by many but disregarded by a compliant press and credulous public. No one -- no politician or citizen -- should be able to say they were deceived. They allowed themselves to be deceived. Almost a quarter of the US Senate voted against the use of force resolution, without benefit of hindsight. Many of you understood, too. We started it, anyway. We should end…
revere | March 12, 2007If anything should signal the dire shape of the US food safety problem it's FDA's announcement last week that it is extending the warning over Salmonella contaminated Peter Pan peanut butter to products bought as far back as October 2004. FDA warnings about Peter Pan peanut butter have been steadily pushed back from May 2006 to December 2005 and now to October 2004.
ConAgra makes Peter Pan peanut butter products at a single plant in Sylveter, Georgia. It is also marketed by Wal-Mart as Great Value Peanut Butter with lot number 2111. The product recall for the Peter Pan and Wal-Mart Great…
revere | March 5, 2007The mainstream media (MSM) have covered the disgraceful treatment of US Iraq War veterans by the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center quite well and it has resulted in the firing of the medical center's commmander and the forced resignation of the Secretary of the Army, its civilian head. But before either of them sent down the tubes, the first to go was one William Winkenwerder, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs (ASD/HA), last heard of in this space as the Pentagon's Chief Medical Bully. Good riddance.
Why was Winkenwerder the first to go? Here are his official responsibilities…
revere | January 31, 2007Lecturers, even at a university like Harvard, are pretty far down the food chain. Even if, like Linda Bilmes an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School, you were once an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration and co-authored a paper recently with a Nobel Laureate economist. Lecturers are the kind of vulnerable faculty a call to their Dean might harm. At least the Pentagon seemed to think so, because after chewing her out over the phone they called her Dean to complain about a "pretty dry" paper she gave at the Allied Social Sciences Association meeting in Chicago. Maybe…
revere | January 2, 20072006, like other years, was a year of revenge killings. Iraq is the poster child for the cycle of violence and counter-violence that seems to have no end but exhaustion of the combatants. But it isn't the only one. The death sentences in the notorious case of the Tripoli 6 and the execution of Saddam Hussein are two more.
We have dealt here depressingly often with the Tripoli 6 case, the health workers from Bulgaria and Palestine convicted in a Libyan court of intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV. The exclusion of vital scientific evidence that the virus was almost certainly a…
revere | December 8, 2006We've talked a lot about the terrible effects of the war in Iraq on this site. In this country the emphasis, quite naturally, is on the American victims, so we have tended to discuss the Iraqi victims. But a victim is a victim and war has too many of them. Our fellow ScienceBlogger Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority know this only too well. His wife Nicole is serving in Iraq now. Many of you know Mike as the blogger here who put up the detailed guide to how we can be heard on behalf of The Tripoli 6. Now Mike is asking for our help for another worthy cause, the families of service…
revere | November 23, 2006It seems like only yesterday that Dear Leader was making a surprise visit to the troops in Iraq for his annual Thanksgiving photo-op. Here's the report on CNN from 2003. You will see that things weren't going so great even then:
His visit marked the first time a U.S. president had traveled to Iraq, and concern for Bush's safety kept the trip cloaked in secrecy. Even some members of the Secret Service were kept in the dark about it.
The whirlwind trip came amid persistent insurgent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq -- and less than a week after a cargo plane was struck by a missile and forced to…
revere | July 26, 2006It's nice we have straightened out Afghanistan. No more nasty Taliban.
The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which is the formal name for the religious police who enforced strict, conservative Islamic law during the 1990's, is being reinstated by President Karzai's government, according to Afghan officials.
Although crackdowns on forms of expression deemed un Islamic have generally come from the courts, and although conservative Islamists are currently the main block in Parliament, this initiative came from the President's recently approved Cabinet. (Pak…