A report out of Baghdad cites three US soldiers dead, between attacks in
Baghdad and Kufa.
BAGHDAD: Three U.S. soldiers were killed and two injured in fresh skirmishes in Kufa and Baghdad. 12 members of the Mehdi Militia were also killed in the US retaliatory action.
Killing of Japanese soldiers was feared in an attack on a Japan military convoy in Samawa.
The US military has also claimed killing of 51 resistance fighters.
Joe Galloway, who has turned against the war now having once, on the authority of those in Washington, believed it necessary, files his Memorial Day thoughts.
Some snips from his report below, a revisiting of Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, long version at the link, and a report on an IGC assassination. Many reports I am finding obscure the direct reality of this assassination, occurring on Monday in Baghdad.
Member of Iraq Governing Council killed as announcement on new president delayed
31-05-2004, 10:16
A member of the Iraqi Governing Council and Secretary General of the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) was killed on Monday in an attack in Baghdad.
Al-Arabiya TV reported that the Sunni politician Mohsen Abdel Hamid had been killed.
Mohsen Abdel Hamid's party played a key role in negotiating an end to the recent violence in Fallujah, acting as a broker between US forces and the residents of the city. [snip]
From Joe Galloway:
[L]ast week we saw Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pinned to the wall before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He became the first of the neo-conservative architects of pre-emptive war to admit, hesitantly, to failures - failure to plan adequately for post-war Iraq; failure to send enough troops to secure the peace; failure to define any exit strategy.
Those ultimately responsible for those failures include Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and their bosses, Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush.
None of them has attended the funeral of a single soldier killed in pursuit of their policies in Iraq. Not one. They do not allow the cameras to record the solemn and dignified return home of those who have fallen.[snip]
Most people likely know Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler's famous exposition of war based on his experiences and culled from his lectures in the 30s.
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.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. [snip]
Who Makes The Profits?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits -- ah! that is another matter -- twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent -- the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.[snip]
Who Pays the Bills?
[B]oys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone. [snip]
How To Smash This Racket!
WELL, it's a racket, all right.
A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. [snip]
To Hell with War!
[T]he professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments. [snip]
Somewhere smack in the middle of Butler's long anger is this reflection and it really is grinding as I listen to Bush at a Memorial Day event, with taps played, and clips of Condie Rice at a commencement address go by...
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system -- the medal business -- the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
[snip]