If only Saddam Hussein had been smart enough to solicit a legal opinion from his government lawyers that gassing people was within the law, he could have been playing golf in Myrtle Beach right now.

In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: “I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don’t want to get on a list.” In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head — probably a Republican — confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the new ID requirement for all government employees, that exposes all his most personal information to the State — but he is scared not to sign it: “If I don’t, I lose my job, my house. It’s like the German National ID card,” he said quietly. This morning in Denver I talked for almost an hour to a brave, much-decorated high-level military man who is not only on the watch list for his criticism of the administration — his family is now on the list. His elderly mother is on the list. His teenage son is on the list. He has flown many dangerous combat missions over the course of his military career, but his voice cracks when he talks about the possibility that he is exposing his children to harassment.

It’s been on my mind more and more lately. What is it that we, as regular Americans, can do about it? I know I want to do something, but I’m not sure what.

You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”

The simple extension of making abortion illegal is that those who get them should be punished. Apparently this corollary has never been considered, by at least those protesters on the video, and I’m sure, many other anti-abortion advocates. The questioner does an excellent job.

It seems difficult for these men and women to fully appreciate the situation they’re in during deployment. Only when they return home, can they truly appreciate what it is that went on.

“I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi,” said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado. Specialist Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, in Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad, for a year beginning in February 2004. “You know, so what?… The soldiers honestly thought we were trying to help the people and they were mad because it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying to help you, here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and my family, and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these missions. Well, we’re trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill us.”

He said it was only “when they get home, in dealing with veteran issues and meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then.”

The little interaction that the troops had with Iraqis while deployed fostered a sense of resentment towards the very people they were there to protect.

They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.

This resentment sometimes took its toll on the most innocent

“And we were approaching this one house,” he said. “In this farming area, they’re, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we’re approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, ’cause it’s doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn’t—mother fucker—he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog—I’m a huge animal lover; I love animals—and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he’s running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I’m at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I’m, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog’s yelping. It’s crying out without a jaw. And I’m looking at the family, and they’re just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can’t be fixed….

“And—I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but—and I had tears then, too—and I’m looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that’s what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I’m so sorry that asshole did that.

Raids were and still are commonplace in Iraq. However, most of the time, they’re the result of bad intelligence, or worse, one civilian attempting to cause trouble for his neighbor. The result is thousands of families being tormented in their own homes for no good reason.

“You want to catch them off guard,” Sergeant Bruhns ex plained. “You want to catch them in their sleep.” About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

“You run in. And if there’s lights, you turn them on—if the lights are working. If not, you’ve got flashlights… You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that’s outside.

“You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there’s no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

“You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all–anything–anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?’

“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “So what you’ll do is you’ll take his sofa cushions and you’ll dump them. If he has a couch, you’ll turn the couch upside down. You’ll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you’ll throw everything on the floor, and you’ll take his drawers and you’ll dump them…. You’ll open up his closet and you’ll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

“And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

…

For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. “I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that’s just not what I joined the Army to do,” he said.

In part because the Army is in no way a trained police force, and also because of the deep fear of insurgent attacks, arrests were often made for the flimsiest of reasons.

Even with such slim pretexts for arrest, some soldiers said, any Iraqis arrested during a raid were treated with extreme suspicion. Several reported seeing military-age men detained without evidence or abused during questioning. Eight veterans said the men would typically be bound with plastic handcuffs, their heads covered with sandbags. While the Army officially banned the practice of hooding prisoners after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, five soldiers indicated that it continued.

“You weren’t allowed to, but it was still done,” said Sergeant Cannon. “I remember in Mosul [in January 2005], we had guys in a raid and they threw them in the back of a Bradley,” shackled and hooded. “These guys were really throwing up,” he continued. “They were so sick and nervous. And sometimes, they were peeing on themselves. Can you imagine if people could just come into your house and take you in front of your family screaming? And if you actually were innocent but had no way to prove that? It would be a scary, scary thing.” Specialist Reppenhagen said he had only a vague idea about what constituted contraband during a raid. “Sometimes we didn’t even have a translator, so we find some poster with Muqtada al-Sadr, Sistani or something, we don’t know what it says on it. We just apprehend them, document that thing as evidence and send it on down the road and let other people deal with it.”

Lack of knowledge of Iraq, its culture and language only added to the soldiers’ growing frustration

American troops in Iraq lacked the training and support to communicate with or even understand Iraqi civilians, according to nineteen interviewees. Few spoke or read Arabic. They were offered little or no cultural or historical education about the country they controlled. Translators were either in short supply or unqualified. Any stereotypes about Islam and Arabs that soldiers and marines arrived with tended to solidify rapidly in the close confines of the military and the risky streets of Iraqi cities into a crude racism.

…

In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, “a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.”

The massive number of convoys in Iraq, generally used to escort civilians such as the contractors KBR, seemed to create more chaos than they prevented. Fear of insurgent IEDs led the soldiers to learn the practice of never slowing down or stopping, for anything.

According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys—guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk—when these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.

Checkpoints were another area for random chaos and violence. Checkpoints had no standard procedures about them and were often poorly marked. This lead to great confusion between troops and civilians.

Sergeant Flatt recounted one incident in Mosul in January 2005 when an elderly couple zipped past a checkpoint. “The car was approaching what was in my opinion a very poorly marked checkpoint, or not even a checkpoint at all, and probably didn’t even see the soldiers,” he said. “The guys got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they shot up the car. And they literally sat in the car for the next three days while we drove by them day after day.”

…

A few veterans said checkpoint shootings resulted from basic miscommunication, incorrectly interpreted signals or cultural ignorance.

“As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky,” said Sergeant Jefferies, who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a day. “That means stop to most Americans, and that’s a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please freeze, but an open hand means stop. That’s a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they’re saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they’re saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you’re shooting pregnant women.”

The full article contains many more stories like these.

I can only imagine what it must feel like to be an Iraqi living amongst such violence and chaos. How would I feel towards those who violently broke into my home and the homes of my neighbors night after night, causing fear and grief. Or of soldiers who killed my dog for no reason, or who randomly shot at my friends while driving down the road. What kind of hatred would I feel towards these people? Would I take any opportunity to cause them pain in return? Perhaps.

(via Truthdig [http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/
20070712_iraq_vets_break_silence_on_devastating_realities_of_war/])

A single, and yes, horrible, murder of 32 people is a tragedy, but what about what is going on around the rest of the world, especially Iraq where our nation is the direct cause of so much suffering? And on a scale much larger than that of Virginia Tech. Former CIA agent Larry Johnson helps place the events of Virginia Tech into perspective.

What are we to make of the bizarre contrast between our national grief over the terrible slaughter of students and faculty at Virginia Tech and our muted reaction to the continuing bloodbath in and around Baghdad? One mass killing in the 209 years since Virginia Tech was founded is not exactly a trend. It is a terrible thing but not likely to be repeated anytime soon.

We cannot say the same about events in Baghdad and Iraq. Just today four separate car bombs in and around Baghdad teft at least 160 Iraqis–mostly Shia–dead. Yesterday, Tuesday, at least 85 bodies turned up and there were more bombings. Monday was not much better–thirty corpses and at least twenty killed in bombings. Sixty nine plus on Sunday. And the beat goes on.

Think about those numbers in relationship to the anger expressed by the public and press because Virginia Tech University officials failed to prevent Monday’s massacre. What would we be saying if another shooter showed up at Virginia Tech on Tuesday and killed 20 more students and another shooter bagged an additional 40 on Wednesday? The President of the University would be lynched, the students would arm themselves, and the police would lose any pretense of control. Why do we think Iraqi Shias and Sunnis should react differently then we would?

How can we be so upset about Virginia Tech, and be calling for increased security measures for a one-in-a-million event, when events just like it happen in Iraq on a daily basis? I think of the grief I feel when I hear a man talk about the loss of his daughter in Virginia, and then I think of all of the stories I don’t hear about from Iraqi parents, and it breaks my heart.

Should we ignore what happens in Iraq because it’s half-a-world away? Or maybe because they’re Muslims? Out of sight, out of mind is not an excuse. I suppose we can put some blame on the media for not giving Iraq the same coverage they are to Virginia, but we can use our own imaginations as well. Next time you hear about a bombing in Iraq that took the lives of 30 people, think about the national grief of America regarding Virginia, and apply it to the daily horrors visited upon the people of Iraq.

In the total scheme of things the horror unfolding in Iraq will affect our nation’s security more than a month of Virginia Tech massacres. Yet our attention is riveted on Blacksburg not Baghdad. There are some silver linings. At least the media is covering genuine grief and anguish as opposed to the nonsense of a Don Imus or Anna Nicole Smith. And maybe, just maybe, as we contemplate what it means to mourn the single day massacre of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech we will develop an empathy for Iraqis who, today, are mourning the equivalent of five Virgina Techs.

But the Iraqis won’t sleep tonight with the hope that today’s heartache was an aberration. Nope. They wake up each and every day confronting a new horror just as bad as Monday in Blacksburg, Virginia. When government institutions and officials prove incompetent or incapable of protecting citizens it is no shocker that people take matters into their own hands. Welcome to the Hobbesian world of modern Iraq.

Apparently, McCain wanted to prove it, so he decided to take a stroll. However, in order to do so,

He was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.

Not exactly your typical walk to the market.

This really demonstrates the dishonest side of McCain which has shown up more and more during this presidential campaign. Most notably in his appearance with Jerry Fallwell at Liberty University, and now this. John McCain is just one more sleazy politician willing to do whatever it takes to get elected. He’s certainly not going to get my vote.

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.

In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.

When I think about it, this is the problem with global warming that tends to evoke the strongest emotions out of me. It would be one thing if those who caused the greatest amount of planetary warming were the ones who had to carry the burden of its effects, but the world isn’t fair like that. Western nations like the U.S. have the resources available to them to help battle the effects of global warming. Poorer countries do not.

Scientists say it has become increasingly clear that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. That will nourish crops in warming regions like Canada and Siberia while parching countries — like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa — which are already prone to drought.

While rich countries are hardly immune from drought and flooding, their wealth will largely insulate them from harm, at least for the next generation or two, many experts say.

Cities in Texas, California and Australia are already building or planning desalination plants, for example. And federal studies have shown that desalination can work far from the sea, purifying water from brackish aquifers deep in the ground in places like New Mexico.

That’s not to say that industrialized countries won’t be affected as well. There’s a common idea in America, that whatever comes, some great technological innovation will come along and save the day. It can perhaps be considered a noble view of the country, but it is not often that something with such long term causes and affects comes along.

Many other experts insist this is not an either-or situation. They say that cutting the vulnerability of poor regions needs much more attention, but add that unless emissions are curbed, there will be centuries of warming and rising seas that will threaten ecosystems, water supplies, and resources from the poles to the equator, harming rich and poor.

Global warming is the rare situation that requires far-sighted efforts to confront the problem. By the time obvious, disastrous consequences are occurring, it will be far too late to solve this problem. Unfortunately, it will be those in the poorest countries who will be the first victims, and they are the ones who can do the least to prevent it.