I know Benazir Bhutto's assassination has been covered here extensively, but I would like to add my two cents. A frequent cry from conservatives is "Where are the moderate Muslim voices? Why aren't they denouncing the jihadists?" Well the fact is, they do denounce the jihadists and one of the most powerful moderate Muslim voices in the world was silenced today.
I want to give Hillary backers the chance to make their case. I've seen a lot of horse race stuff, campaign tactics stuff, but very little about what Hillary has actually accomplished in her career. Now I could go sifting through the muck out on the tubes, but with some passionate Clintonistas around here, I'm sure I can get what I'm looking for.
I've thought about this before, but for some reason it has resurfaced in my mind recently. For all the contemptible ways this Administration has behaved over the years, the diversity of the Cabinet is enviable.
So I spent a year in Iraq, during which I read, posted, or diaried on DailyKos several times a week, if not several times a day, depending on my work schedule. I took a month off when I got home and that included political discourse. I will post a diary this week about my experience (with pictures), but since May is over now I've been drawn back into the fray. This isn't a policy driven diary, I just want to make a few seemingly obvious points about military service that are not discussed on a regular basis.
As one comes to expect in the army, the day I anticipated was not the day I experienced yesterday. To begin with, I showed up for duty an hour late because, unbeknownst to me, we had "sprung forward" over the course of the night. And I was greeted not with the mundane tidying and prep work I was expecting, in anticipation of our imminent departure, but an overflowing septic system that had shit water flowing onto the concrete.
The morning spent toiling in human waste got me thinking about how my little ordeal could shed some light on the larger situation.
Most army folks don't have to cook their own meals. There's army cooks or a mess hall to take care of that wherever you go. But now I'm living away from the base and the enormous chow hall, with no cooks. The brigade, in its infinite wisdom, does send out enough food every month to feed three times as many people as we have here, so its not like we go hungry. In fact, our problem is not having enough freezer space to keep everything. With each shipment, we end up throwing away pounds of edible food and sauces due to the lack of space. And of course we usually grab the easiest things for lunch and dinner, like chicken patties and premade burgers or (in my case) ramen and tuna, instead of taking the time to make one of the dozens of boxes full of actual meals that collect dust in the store room. So last night I did my part and made spaghetti and meatballs for the whole crew.
Captain Brian Freeman was not your stereotypical military hero. He didn't sigle handedly destroy a rifle platoon while saving three comrades' lives and losing his left leg and right arm. He will not recieve the medal of honor. All he got was kidnapped and executed. But that is not where his heroism lies. His actions, which were tragically cut short in Karbala, will continue to have an impact long after his death.
The KDP, the biggest Iraqi Kurdish political party, just had its Mosul headquarters bombed today. At least four killed and 26 wounded. Notice the casualty figure in the report mentions only civilians. It doesn't make reference to military or police killed or wounded. I don't know where this building is located, but it seems likely to me that there would be security forces around, if only the peshmerga (Kurdish militia).
While there have been many obvious problems with the Iraq campaign thus far, as any observer of this site has known for quite some time, is the effort doomed to failure? Is there nothing the government and people of the United States can do to achieve a stable Iraq before we leave? And if this conflict is too far down the road of disaster, how can we learn from this and better prepare for the next counterinsurgency our country will face? With the appointment of General David Petraeus as overall commander of our Iraq forces, I believe the army has taken a step in the right direction.
I don't know who started the urban legend, but I see almost it everytime I or another service member posts here. Someone will say "I thought Daily Kos was censored on military computers." Well, seeing as how I'm at my work station on a FOB in Iraq right now typing this diary, I'm here to tell you this is not true.
I was fourteen when the Republicans took the house. I knew about politics and had a very basic grasp of how it worked, but I was not all that concerned that the "other" party had taken power. I saw it as a natural part of the democratic system.
Reading this story on MSNBC was refreshing. It highlighted a lot of the things I see and feel in my area of operations, one that is similarly away from the big city. Please read:
Perhaps this story got some attention as it is from the AP, but I didn't see anything about it. Stars and Stripes, having no local news to report aside from a two page sweep of the country (my hometown made it last week for a prostituion sting!), carries more international and national news than my hometown paper, so maybe this wasn't widely read in the States.
As a civil affairs soldier I interact with the local leaders in the Iraqi towns and villages in my area of operations (AO). While we have identified many leaders of various kinds, the dual parallel lines of authority, tribal and governmental, are sometimes confusing. We don't always know the tribal leaders or the extend of rivalry between different tribes. We also have difficulty getting local leaders to cooperate on many projects and initiatives because they defer so much to central authorities. While central control of the government and the decentralized control of the tribe seem contratictory (and they are sometimes), they each have their own spheres and the challenge is to ascertain where those spheres beging and end.
Violence and pain are two things our party has a hard time dealing with on the national level. There are plenty of Democrat Attorneys General, sheriffs, and police chiefs at the local, county, and state level out there who use and authorize violence and pain to coerce people into doing what we as a society deem necessary. But when it comes to national politics, Democrats can't do the heavy lifting to reconcile our aversion to violence and the necessity of using violence as a part of our foreign policy.
