This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • Anti-war drivel

    This was on Lew Rockwell, someone posted it on Facebook and despite the warning, I didn’t take antacids before reading it. But, it’s written by some doofus named Laurence M. Vance and titled “Marines, Why Do You Do This to Your Families?“. judging by the title, you’d think Mr. Vance is asking the Marines to stop abusing their families in some manner, but no, he’s asking them why they would go to war. After plowing through the series of specials on PBS about the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment and their tour of Afghanistan in the Sangin district of Helmand province. Apparently, they had a tough time of it and lost 25 Marines killing 470 Taliban (you know those guys who aren’t our enemies). So the abuse that the Marines of 3-5 are inflicting on their family is the fact tha they’re conducting our nations’ wars;

    If you just wanted to feel the trill of leading men in battle, then shame on you. If you just couldn’t find a job so you enlisted in the Marines, then shame on you. If you just wanted to experience the mental and physical challenge, then shame on you. If you just enlisted because your father was a Marine, then shame on you. If you just wanted to go to war, then shame on you. If you just thought you were defending our freedoms, then shame on you. If you just wanted to die a hero, then shame on you. If you just felt you had to complete the mission, then shame on you. If you just enlisted because you thought your government needed you, then shame on you. If you thought there was just no better job than being a Marine, then shame on you.

    I have no doubt that the Marines of the Darkhorse Battalion fought valiantly. I am not questioning their manhood, courage, or determination. But I also have no doubt that each of the deaths of those twenty-five Marines from the Darkhorse Battalion was preventable, unnecessary, and senseless.

    Lance Cpl. Josue Barron, who lost an eye, a leg, and some of his close friends, at the end of a discussion about whether everything that happened in Afghanistan was “worth it,” said: “It was worth it. If I say it wasn’t worth it, what about my friends that died? I’m disrespecting them, like they died for nothing.”

    Sorry, Josue, as much as you may not want to face it, and no matter how many times you tell yourself that it was “worth it,” your friends died in vain just like those unfortunate U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq. Likewise, the only thing that the Marines in Afghanistan died for was a lie.

    Shame on you for putting the Marines above your families. Shame on you for making a god out of the Marines.

    It must be nice to know that there are Marines out there who put their lives on the line everyday so people like you, Miss Vance (I have no problem questioning his manhood), can retch this kind of bile onto the intertubes. If there weren’t men like the 3-5 Marines, Miss Vance might have to defend himself on the street outside his warm and comfortable home, or by his roaring fire hearth and that would cut into his writing schedule, not to mention his ability to breathe.

    Of course, no Lew Rockwell piece is complete without a salute to chief crank emeritus of the anti-war movement;

    I plead with you to heed the words of U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler (1881-1940), a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner who came to the conclusion that:

    War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

    Do you mean the Smedley Butler who was suspected of conspiring in a plot to overthrow the US government and install a Nazi sympathizer as our president? THAT Smedley Butler? But then, the linguine-spined anti-war movement has always been more comfortable with Nazis and Socialists than a democratic government protected by the US Marines.

  • Another Book I Won’t Read

    Hollywood seems to lack for new ideas; how many movies are re-makes, sequels, or prequels? Our news media (as Jonn notes) certainly lacks perspective and originality as well.

    Us geezer types are often accused of lusting after “The Good Old Days” while the REAL hypocrites like the antiwar crowd, and OWS, are trying to recapture their own imagined “Good Old Days”.

    Rarely is this hypocrisy quite so blatant as in this book (no direct link from me!)

    A review: In “The Operators,” Michael Hastings, the man whose Rolling Stone interview doomed the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, offers up dispatches from Afghanistan.

    During the Vietnam War, the generation of David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan transformed America’s mainstream media into a hotbed of antiwar and antimilitary muckraking. By the time a major war effort returned, in 2003, that generation had grown too old to visit the trenches, allowing the emergence of Generation X reporters like Dexter Filkins and George Packer, who did not share their predecessors’ contempt for the military. Most Americans welcomed the change.

    Not so Michael Hastings, as we learn in “The Operators,” his account of events in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2011. Mr. Hastings asserts that this generational change drove him to write “The Runaway General,” the Rolling Stone article of June 2010 that doomed the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. With characteristic acerbity, Mr. Hastings laments that his press colleagues have abandoned the spirit of Vietnam, when “war had been exposed as the Giant Lying Machine, in Halberstam’s words.” Instead, he says, they write glowing profiles of generals and other officials in the hope of gaining greater access to sources.

  • Preempting the truth with worried mockery

    A certain self-consciousness reveals itself in this recent Ted Rall cartoon. The immediate set up for the image is three veterans sitting around a military or patriotic (likely referred to in his circles as jingoistic) bar. The scene evokes the stock conceptualization of a VFW or American Legion Post. The middle patron is missing his arm. All are wearing belligerent, seemingly ignorant t-shirts. The man on the left makes mention of the betrayal of the political class in the war, an allusion to the common theme in the German Army after the Treaty of Versailles. The second compares his treatment to that of the maligned generation of Vietnam vets. The last declares his intention to run for Congress. Perhaps, for the left, the most frightening inclination of all.

    It’s the laughable paradigm in which Rall and his left-wing ilk regard us, as easily manipulated and reactionary fools, sacrificed on the alter of forces beyond our reckoning. This sort of pretentious elitism is witnessed time and again by those most divorced from the union of civic duty and personal sacrifice in the pursuit of the actual common good.

    This silly dialogue reveals something else: fear of exposure.

    Illustrating the cause for people like Rall’s concern is Fred and Kim Kagan’s excellent piece on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. It was precise in identifying the cause of the breakdown of peace and security for the people in Iraq since the end of the successful Bush/McCain “surge”. I’ll quote briefly:

    With administration officials celebrating the “successful” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, thanking antiwar groups for making that withdrawal possible, and proffering outrageous claims about Iraq’s “stability,” “sovereignty,” and the “demilitarization” of American foreign policy even as Iraq collapses, it is hard to stay focused on America’s interests and security requirements. Especially in an election year, the temptation will only grow to argue about who lost Iraq, whether it was doomed from the outset, whether the current disaster “proves” either that the success of the surge was inherently ephemeral or that the withdrawal of U.S. troops caused the collapse.
    —
    The withdrawal of all American military forces has greatly reduced America’s leverage in Iraq. U.S. military forces were a buffer to prevent political and ethno-sectarian friction from becoming violent by guaranteeing Maliki against a Sunni coup d’état and guaranteeing the Sunnis against a Shiite campaign of militarized repression. The withdrawal of that buffer precipitated this crisis and removed much of our leverage.
    —
    Like it or not, the timing of the moves against Hashimi et al. upon Maliki’s return from Washington has created a perception in Iraq that these actions were authorized by Washington.

    After hundreds of billions of dollars and almost 4,500 American service member’s lives the Obama Administration scuttled the negotiations required to keep American forces in Iraq. After eight years of blood, sweat and treasure the end was decided by Democratic political pollsters in campaign season.

    Explosions are ripping through Baghdad at a rate and ferocity not seen since 2007. The Shiite Prime Minister is purging his government of the Sunni members needed to retain a pluralistic state, literally the day after American withdrawal. The Kurds edge closer to open secession and the Iranian Quds Force establish safe houses across the country.

    Peter Wehner in Commentary quite succinctly said:

    What is happening in Iraq is sickening, in part because the gains came at such a high cost and in part because what is happening there was so avoidable. Obama was handed a war that was largely won. What America had given to Iraq is what the Arab scholar Fouad Ajami called “the foreigner’s gift.” But Iraq being Iraq, maintaining an American troop presence there, separate from engaging in combat operations, was necessary if Iraq was ever to become whole again. President Obama has undone much of what had been achieved there, almost in the blink of an eye. And when the history of his administration is written, it increasingly looks as if he will be fairly judged to have been the man who lost Iraq.

    In an administration full of failures, this one may well rank among the highest. The human cost to Iraq and the strategic damage to America may be unimaginable. And so unnecessary.

    And so, full circle, we come back to the paranoid fear of intellectual midgets like Rall. Knowing the devastating judgment an unbiased history will lay upon the Obama Administration for so callous an abandonment of the Iraqis at at the cost of so many American’s lives he attempts to preempt this searing truth with petty mockery and stumbling historical analogy. Keep your heads on the swivel and call out this caustic and hateful manipulation when you see it.

  • Matthis still in your schools teaching your kids

    In this video, Matthis talks to about 180 school children (their count) in a New York City public school representing World Can’t Wait, the anti-war group which began by just opposing President George W Bush and founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and Anarchists. Their program is called We Are Not Your Soldiers and their purpose is to “educate” kids on how to resist military recruiting;

    Here’s a video of a Philadelphia School system teacher praising herself for having these radical communists talk to her students about the importance of resisting recruiters. Like Recruiters just load up students on the bus and drive them off to basic training without their permission.

    Thanks to one of my ninjas for the link.

  • IVAW faults their ignorance for their problems

    Huffington Post writes that IVAW is struggling for veterans by participating in the Occupy movement.

    [Dottie Guy,] The former military policewoman is just one of about 2,000 disgruntled veterans who say they’ve risked their lives and well-being only to come home to a country that profits from their sacrifices.

    Yeah, I’m sure there are 2000 active veteran members of the IVAW. Despte the flight from the organization over the last two years. But Guy blames her own ignorance for her financial straits;

    When she came home from Iraq in 2003 with an injured ankle and severe anxiety, Guy was not aware of the military health services that were available to her. She relied on her job’s health insurance to cover her surgery.

    Yeah, who knew that a veteran could go to the Department of Veteran Affairs for help? That’s news to me.

    But now that she knows she can go to the VA, she doesn’t like it;

    “The VA services are abysmal,” Guy said. “But yet the corporations who are making all this money from these wars are living high off the hog.”

    Yeah, you should have seen the VA before the year 2000, Dottie.

    Another veteran, Scott Kimball, says that he didn’t want to go to the VA;

    When Kimball returned from Iraq and was battling PTSD, he couldn’t bear confronting it.

    “I was scared to go to the VA,” Kimball said. “I didn’t want to be a messed up veteran.”

    Yet somehow, it’s the DVA fault he didn’t get treatment.

    I’m glad that the IVAW has finally discovered that there are actually veterans who need healthcare, but their message needs to be a little less erratic and more focused so we don’t appear to be a bunch of whiney brats.

    Thanks to Daniel for the link.

  • Who could have predicted this?

    Well, besides anyone who didn’t want the United States to lose the war in Iraq because of purely partisan reasons;

    The story is at Stars & Stripes;

    Two bombs and a rocket attack struck the Iraqi capital on Monday, just weeks before the final pullout of American forces from the country.

    The explosions brought to 100 the number of people killed in the capital so far in November, up from 62 in October.

    So maybe a timetable withdrawal wasn’t such a good idea…but we’ve been telling the Leftists that for eight years, haven’t we?

  • This is not news. (Updated)

    Ok, for the past few years there have been people calling for President Bush to be tried for war crimes. I ignore most of these links because it is the same thing over and over again. But this one is different because there seems to be a court in Malaysia. I have never even heard of this group before.

    A tribunal in Malaysia, spearheaded by that nation’s former Prime Minister, yesterday found George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of “crimes against peace” and other war crimes for their 2003 aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts used to justify the attack. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal — which featured an American law professor as one of its chief prosecutors — has no formal enforcement power, but was modeled after a 1967 tribunal in Sweden and Denmark that found the U.S. guilty of a war of aggression in Vietnam, and, even more so, after the U.S.-led Nuremberg Tribunal held after World War II. Just as the U.S. steadfastly ignored the 1967 tribunal on Vietnam, Bush and Blair both ignored the summons sent to them and thus were tried in absentee.

    But it seems that this is going around the internet as if this were real news. The court is not legit and now power to do anything so what they say does not really mean anything. But despite that people seem to believe otherwise in the comments on youtube.

    Oh and they are going to ask the International Criminal Court co-sign the verdict.

    The tribunal ruled that Bush and Blair’s name should be entered in a register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as such under the Rome Statute, and will also petition the International Criminal Court to proceed with binding charges. Such efforts are likely to be futile, but one Malaysian lawyer explained the motives of the tribunal to The Associated Press: “For these people who have been immune from prosecution, we want to put them on trial in this forum to prove that they committed war crimes.” In other words, because their own nations refuse to hold them accountable and can use their power to prevent international bodies from doing so, the tribunal wanted at least formal legal recognition of these war crimes to be recorded and the evidence of their guilt assembled. That’s the same reason a separate panel of this tribunal will hold hearings later this year on charges of torture against Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others.

    Your not a formal organization to begin with much less anything that you come up with. This is a joke and a bad one at that. But expect to see this on your Facebook feed soon if not already.

    UPDATE:     Seems that people are claiming that Former President Bush has canceled his trip to Switzerland because he is afraid that he will be arrested for war crimes. This bad joke is getting worse.

  • Matthis inciting OWS

    Our favorite disgraced IVAW member is trying to incite OWS protesters with his arrogant use of his false military experience again, writing n the Huffington Post;

    These operations do not strike me as random. What the police are engaging in looks like a military crowd control tactic called ‘snatch and grab,’ something I practiced in training on various occasions in the military.

    Yeah, all of you military journalists who did riot control training, raise your hands. Yeah, none.

    But, that’s OK, he’s faking his own importance in the OWS protests, too;

    “Dude, they’re scoping you out,” said a fellow protester, and pointed to a police group in the rear of the police line. A few white shirts… and a few others. One had a camera pointed right at me. I felt pointedly threatened, like they’d recognized me and I’d been marked. When the ‘snatch and grabs’ began at Zuccotti, I knew I couldn’t stick around.

    Yeah, nothing worse than an arrogant chickenshit. I’m sure matthis is just that important that the police want to single him out of a crowd of smelly hippies because he’s such an effective leader…he’s so effective that when they take his picture, he scurries away like a frightened chipmunk and writes a missive to warn everone else.

    If this is the first you’re reading about Matthis, he joined the Army voluntarily to avoid a charge for selling drugs near a school playground, served a tour in Japan, then Germany where he took a TDY trip to Afghanistan for six days and calls himself an Afghanistan veteran. Then he skipped out on his recall to active duty from the IRR and calls himself a “war resister” – he never opposed the war against terror until it was his turn to go. He left the IVAW because they wouldn’t completely sign on to his flag-burning antics while wearing their T-shirt.

    He regularly takes his lies to classrooms and tells high school students what the Army will do to them when he has no idea what military life is really like. He tells about atrocities they commit, although his experiences with war are limited to “no shit” bar room stories.

    He was a military journalist who never took part in riot-control training. the Army doesn’t waste their time training people who’ll never need that training.

    Mattis is a chump who still thinks that basic training was hard because that’s the hardest he had it in his five years of military service. Matthis regularly encourages people to take chances that he would never involve himself in, that’s why he’s telling OWS protesters to stick with the fight while he himself hides out in his girlfriend’s apartment.

    Thanks to a nameless ninja for the link.