Afghanistan policy after the McChrystal scandal—The New Yorker:
The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between civilians and their government, but the Afghan state is a shell hollowed out by corruption, and at its center is the erratic figure of President Karzai.
From the Boston Globe:
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
Howard was a real nice guy. Back when I was in book publishing we knew we could ask him for a nice back-cover quote and he’d always say yes. He was just that kind of person, supportive of the whole movement, the real deal.
He also had some of the best eyebrows on the Left!
Seattle Times reporter Mark Rahner takes a satirical look at how Bill “Bix” Bichsel, 81, broke into Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor. (via The Seattle Times: Video)
Wow, what a story.
Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.
Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.
Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.
“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.
Over on QuakerRanter:
“We’ll end the war just as soon as…” is the rhetorical parent of empire-crushing quagmires. The conditional changes as needed, because it needs to stay fresh to stay plausible. One president will claim that the right enemy leader needs to be killed, another that more troops need to be temporarily added.
I just got an email from Alyse Emdur, an artist in the Los Angeles area who’s started this project. I don’t know her but she wants to get the word out and I’ve never heard of anything quite like it. Here’s the description:
While teaching, I witnessed the presence of army recruiters in our educational environment. I am initiating a nation wide participatory project, Photograph a Recruiter and am inviting high school students to contribute. The project invites high school students to photograph the military recruiters in their schools! Through the act of looking back at recruiters, students are encouraged to engage in critical discussion about war and recruitment.
The ongoing growing collection of photographs, taken by high school students, will be uploaded on the website www.photographarecruiter.com. Select images will also be printed for exhibit in a traveling Photograph A Recruiter art show. For more information, or to submit image(s), write to, photographarecruiter@gmail.com
Yes, it’s coated in a kind of diplomatic double-speak, but listen to it:
“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” General McChrystal writes.
This is an eight year war and the US’s top general is saying he doesn’t think the other side can be defeated without an emergency influx of more troops.
A Washington state Quaker filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the U.S. government is discriminating against him because it will not recognize his status as a conscientious objector on military draft forms.
Click for video:
Reflections from someone who traveled to Iran last December: “When I was there, I felt the energy of young people that wanted and needed change. Nearly two out of every three people is under thirty. Many of them highly educated, including many women. A hope for change is what brought millions of women and men to the ballot boxes. A hope for change brings these same people to the streets now. Demanding their rights and demanding their votes to be heard.”
Quote: Eleven years ago, six white kids, fresh out of college, took a vow: They would shack up; they would share. They would live either in monogamous married couples or be celibate. They would work only part-time, valuing one another and their community over wealth. They would stand against injustice where they saw it, and bring about justice where they could.Via Jayahome
Quote: The same skepticism that conservatives like to train on bleeding-heart idealists might also help create a more critical and careful examination of wealth, power, the possibility of structural injustice, and the possibility that some enemies might even become friends—and at less expense than it would take to kill them. Both progressives and conservatives, unfortunately, get too caught up in their own identities, rather than using their philosophies as analytical disciplines and sources of inspiration. Checking to see if someone puts out the right cultural signals, shares the same visceral dislikes of certain politicians (“who makes you hear the dog whistle?”), and laughs at the usual stereotypical jokes about nutcases—all that builds false community, not true national security.
Military planners are talking about a 50 year war in the “Arc of Instability” that stretches across the Middle East. What would a 50 year peace plan look like?
Quote: In this perspective, Iraq is only an immediate front, with Afghanistan and Pakistan the expanding fronts, in a single larger war from the Middle East to South Asia. Instead of thinking of Iraq like Vietnam, a war that was definitively ended, it is better to think of Iraq as a setback, or better a stalemate, on a larger battlefield where victory or defeat are painfully hard to define over a timespan of five decades.
Martin’s commentary: With President Change just redistributing the wars, it certainly seems like there’s long-war thinking going on behind U.S. military involvement.
Hayden says the useful comparison might not be Vietnam but the Indian Wars: long, drawn out skirmishes across a wide field with irregular fighters and shifting alligiences. Good as far as it goes, but those wars ended with colonization, with more non-natives living in the West than Native Americans.
Perhaps more meanacing is the idea of the classic British counter-insurgency wars that attempt to break the spirit of the occupied country through long drawn out conflict. This war depends on being fought outside of camera range—a U.S. officer is quoted saying: “you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian aid projects.” Hayden says Abu Grahib-style prison is being expanded in Afghanistan and Pakistan is just as much of a powderkeg ready to explode.
Via JohanPDX
An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the Holocaust Museum, one of the capital’s most-visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
From the Description:
This blog is a community and a resource for news, analysis and discussion on the many ways that ordinary people around the globe are using nonviolence every day, often under the most difficult circumstances. We welcome activists, students, scholars and critics, as well as those just discovering nonviolence, to read and take part.
The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
Martin’s Commentary: Ummm…. whoops?
