"There is nothing they're doing right."

Sinan Antoon (professor) and Ali Fadhil (journalist) agree the US needs to leave Iraq.

Two Iraqi-Americans speak to Charlie Rose about the US war in Iraq. Glenn Greenwald urges us all to watch the entire interview.

One more of the twenty civil wars being fought in Iraq

Obviously we need to stay in Iraq to prevent/help the sectarian vs. nationalist bloc from/to realizing we're stealing their oil/ unite in an United Iraqi democracy....

While the majority of Iraqis know that the current Sunni-Shiites tension did not exist before 2003, no one can deny that after five years of U.S. occupation, sectarian tension is now a reality. Sectarianism is another disaster that was brought to Iraq by the war and occupation of Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion did not only destroy the Baath political regime, it also annihilated the entire public sector including education, health care, food rations, social security, and the armed forces. The Iraqi public sector was a great example of how millions of Iraqis: Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Christians, religious and secular, all worked together in running the country. The myth that the former Iraqi government was a "Sunni-led dictatorship" was created by the U.S. government. Even the Iraqi political regime was not "Sunni-led," let alone the rest of the public sector. A good way to debunk this fairy tale is through a close look at the famous deck of cards of the 55 most wanted Iraqi leaders. The cards had the pictures of Saddam, his two sons, and the rest of the political leadership which most Iraqis would recognize as the heads of the political regime. What is noteworthy is that 36 of the 55 were Shiites. In fact, the two vice presidents were a Christian and a Shiites Kurd.

Sometimes I feel like Iraqis and Americans are analyzing two different wars happening in two different countries. In one narrative, there is a civil war based on ancient sectarian hatred where a U.S. withdrawal will cause the sky to fall. In the other, there is a country struggling under occupation to get its independence back where the occupation is not welcomed and it is causing political, not sectarian, splits and violence.

According to the Iraqi mainstream narrative, the foreign occupation is the major reason and cause for violence and destruction. Foreign intervention is not only destroying Iraq's infrastructure, but it is also splitting Iraq's formerly integrated society. In addition, Iraqis are fighting among each other over fundamental questions about the future of their country, but the central conflict is not between Sunnis and Shiites, it is between Iraqi separatists and nationalists. Unlike other countries in the region such as Lebanon, the Iraqi sectarian tension is still reversible, because it just started five years ago. More importantly, it isn't main driver fueling the Iraqi-Iraqi conflict. This "hidden" conflict is between separatists and nationalists.

The day after and the day after that

It's not just the anniversary of the war in Iraq but everyday that we will look for news of our soldiers and the fighting. It may have 'slipped' ever so conveniently off the front pages of our mainstream news, but we will never forgive nor ever forget.

Excellent coverage the war and history of Iraq:

By Blue Girl of Blue Girl, Red State

Pygalgia

DistributorCap

And on the Winter Soldier event:

Iraq Veterans Against the War

Bill W. of Crooks and Liars:

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan was a 4-day event from March 13-16 in DC that brought together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although the news media has unsurprisingly ignored the event much as they did its predecessor in 1971, this time we have digital media and the intertubes to document it and bring it to a wider audience.

Bill W. has a transcript from a soldier Will Prysner:

Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger or lob a mortar round. They do not have to fight the war. They merely have to sell the war. They need a public who is willing to send their soldiers into harm’s way and they need soldiers who are willing to kill or be killed without question. They can spend millions on a single bomb, but that bomb only becomes a weapon when the ranks in the military are willing to follow orders to use it. They can send every last soldier anywhere on earth, but there will only be a war if soldiers are willing to fight, and the ruling class: the billionaires who profit from human suffering care only about expanding their wealth, controlling the world economy, understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation is in our interests. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the working class to die to control the market of another country. And convincing us to kill and die is based on their ability to make us think that we are somehow superior. Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, have nothing to gain from this occupation.

The vast majority of people living in the US have nothing to gain from this occupation. In fact, not only do we have nothing to gain, but we suffer more because of it. We lose limbs, endure trauma, and give our lives. Our families have to watch flag draped coffins lowered into the earth. Millions in this country without healthcare, jobs, or access to education must watch this government squander over $450 million a day on this occupation. Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country to make the rich richer, and without racism soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.

Hipparchia of Over the Cliff, Onto the Rocks and her other blog: War Without Comment. Watch the videos about soldiers in Vietnam speaking then and now. A devastatingly true comment made (3:23 1st video) made by an ex-soldier:

"I've been all over the world and the most politically ignorant people of any country I've ever been to is the U.S.A."

Time to find out what is going on. Ignorance will be no excuse for the horrors done in our name.

An historical file?

Or just fucking hysterical? Via Ripley at Zen Cabin, the Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON—Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

The assessment on post-Hussein Iraq included judgments that while Iraq was unlikely to split apart, there was a significant chance that domestic groups would fight each other and that ex-regime military elements could merge with terrorist groups to battle any new government.

The second NIC assessment discussed “political Islam being boosted and the war being exploited by terrorists and extremists elsewhere in the region,” one former senior analyst said. It also suggested that fear of U.S. military dominance and occupation of a Middle East country—one sacred to Islam—would attract foreign Islamic fighters to the area.

The former senior [intelligence] official said that after the NIC papers were distributed to senior government officials, he was told by one CIA briefer that a senior Defense Department official had said they were “too negative” and that the papers “did not see the possibilities” the removal of Hussein would present.

They knew. They lied. People died. Impeach, convict, jail.

Senator Webb

Stating the obvious:

Sen. Webb (D-VA) on the president's veto: "We won this war four years ago. The question is when we end the occupation."

Thank you, Senator.

Georgie, Dearest

I'm sure we will be seeing a host of these types of books for decades. Here's one of the first: "The Occupation of Iraq," by Ali A. Allawi, published by Yale University Press:

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.

What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

- The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

- Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party - from government, school faculties and elsewhere - left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

- An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.

- The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.

- Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.

- The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.