Don’t be misled by all that pomp and circumstance and ivy…like all centers of plutocratic power Harvard is often an accomplice in imperial projects…if not the actual incubator.

BY TOM HAYDEN
DATELINE: THE NATION 9.14.07

Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge? Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: Published on Sunday, August 19, 2007 by the International Herald Tribune

“Pacifying” Iraq has proved not just elusive but a costly nightmare with no end in sight. The truth on the ground that most American media continue to fudge about.

VIEWED FROM IRAQ at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is surreal.

Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. Read the rest of this entry »

The debate about whether Americans should stay or leave Iraq after four years of brutal occupation is surreal because it continues to be underwritten by enormous lies. Plain and simple, the US elites invaded Iraq to rob that nation at gunpoint of its major resource, oil, and all the current foot-dragging is simply to accommodate stateside politics to the ensuing debacle, while clinging to some “solution” that might provide a fig leaf for an indefinite US military presence in that region. The essay we reproduce below is an excellent dissection of the principal lies feeding the confusion, as usual with ample complicity on the part of the corporate media, which through shoddy work, or cynical collaboration, effectively prolongs the agony of Iraq. The evidence that the mass media are not doing their job is everywhere. Just consider for a moment the following astonishing facts—astonishing in their sheer obscenity when put in the context of so much want and misery in the world, and that most Americans never heard of them— collected by Doug Henwood for one of his remarkable essays, and published back in 2003:

“LIGHTNESS”

In the early days of the war, when things weren’t going so well for the “coalition,” it was said that the force was too light. But after the sandstorm cleared and the snipers were mowed down, that alleged lightness became a widely praised virtue. But that force was light only by American standards: 300,000 troops; an endless rain of Tomahawks, JDAMs, and MOABs; thousands of vehicles, from Humvees to Abrams tanks; hundreds of aircraft, from Apaches to B-1s; several flotillas of naval support - and enormous quantities of expensive petroleum products. It takes five gallons of fuel just to start an Abrams tank, and after that it gets a mile per gallon. And filling one up is no bargain. Though the military buys fuel at a wholesale price of 84¢ a gallon, after all the expenses of getting it to the front lines are added in, the final cost is about $150 a gallon. That’s a steal compared to Afghanistan, where fuel is helicoptered in, pushing the cost to $600/gallon. Rummy’s “lightness” is of the sort that only a $10 trillion economy can afford.

Wrap your mind around those little facts before you read the rest of the indictment.—Eds.
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BY JOHN TIRMAN, AlterNet
Posted on November 28, 2006, Printed on September 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/44771/ Read the rest of this entry »

CYRANO TOPICAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT: Auveline Robinson

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the perfect foil for a global system of fearmongering with the plutocracy as the only winner. (Wanted poster distributed by U.S. Army.)

BY ANDREW TIGHMAN Dateline: Sep 6, 2007

Fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq is the last big argument for keeping U.S.
troops in the country. But the military’s estimation of the threat is
alarmingly wrong. Meanwhile, as this report shows, the Bush administration continues to cynically play this hand, as it has turned the word “al-Qaeda” into a priceless propaganda asset.

Read the rest of this entry »