Five and counting....

General Wesley Clark is, like his erstwhile mentor Colin Powell, an unprincipled ass-licking careerist who sold his soul to the devil a long time ago. However, now that he’s given up his political ambitions he’s coming clean on some of scandals he was privy to. One of them is the Neocon War Schedule. In this clip he details what occurred just before the Iraq adventure.

Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: “Are we still going to attack Iraq?”

He said: “Sir, it’s worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”

Clark also points out that about ten years previously, in 1991, Paul Wolfowitz told him pretty much the same thing. Now there’s nothing dramatically new here – the Project for the New American Century has pretty much laid it all out at that time. Isn’t it scary though that an unelected self-selected group with dubious loyalties can decide on the wars the country takes on, with the elected ‘representatives’ reduced to a bystander’s role?

Isn't it scarier still that this plot scarcely gets a mention in the MSM or in what passes for political discourse in the USA?

So which will occur first: Syria and/or Iran attacked, or the USA becomes bankrupted from these adventures?

Iraq War 7th Anniversary

Hundreds of thousands dead, $800 billion wasted. Seven years on the instigators go scot-free.

Please view this short anniversary video: http://rethinkafghanistan.com/?utm_source=rtairaq

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Russia and Georgia: A reality check

The arrogance and tendentiousness of the American MSM continues to take the breath away. The Washington Post, once a great newspaper, and supposedly ‘liberal’, exemplifies this with an insane editorial entitled “The U.S. and its allies must unite against Moscow's war on Georgia”. It contains the usual Bush blather about defending democracy, freedom, blah, blah, blah.

Just consider a few facts:

The Georgians started this conflict. In South Ossetia they attacked Russian peacekeepers (I use that term in its loosest sense) who were there as part of a peace deal signed by Georgia and Russia. Several Russians were killed.

For almost two hundred years Georgia has been part of Greater Russia. Maybe they were entitled to independence, maybe not, but if so, why can't South Ossetia and Abkhazia then be independent of Georgia? Their people are not Georgian and don't want to be part of it.

Back in the late eighties Ronald Reagan promised Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union peacefully granted non-Russian ‘countries’ independence, the US and NATO would reciprocate by not expanding into those countries. These promises were broken with a callousness and cynicism that would have done Hitler proud. Now they want Georgia to become a member of NATO. In case you forget, NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Georgia is closer to the South Pacific than the North Atlantic. For fuck sake!

Then Bush wags his finger and with a straight face warns against using ‘armed force’ to ‘bully’ a small nation. All he was short of saying was that ‘we could have bullied Iraq and Afghanistan too, but we took the peaceful route’.
And of course if you ever see America doing something stupid in this general region, you can be sure the Israelis are in there somewhere, pouring petrol on the flames. And sure enough, the Israelis are up to their necks in Georgia. They have been selling them massive amounts of armaments and ‘private’ military training and intelligence services. A number of the Georgian cabinet hold Israeli citizenship. A nice little war would boost Israeli coffers (replacement armaments), test the weapons and intelligence in actual war circumstances and hopefully drag America into another conflict in the region. All of this is still on the cards.

The only bright side is that the US is bogged down in the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos, the economy is going down the tubes, and China and the ‘sovereign funds’ (i.e. Arabs) can pull the financial plug at any time. Thankfully Europe, conscious of its dependence on Russian energy, looks like staying out. Surely, in such circumstance even a buffoon like Bush and the neocon nutcases that surround him wouldn’t do anything so stupid as get directly involved? Let’s just hope so.

But going back to the Washington Post and the American MSM generally. How in God’s name do they continue to purvey such garbage? Have they learned nothing from all the disasters of the last forty years – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan? How do the American sheeple continue to believe it? Have they been totally lobotomised?

I truly fear for that once great country. How the Chinese and the Arabs must be laughing.

But I'm laughing too, because the Internet and blogs are rapidly putting these useless bastards out of business.

4,000 dead

This week, the Iraq war claimed its 4,000th American killed in action, but that sad and tragic milestone came as the war seems to have slipped off the evening news, off the front pages and from the minds of the American people.

Iraq: 5 Year Anniversary

Something good from Iraq at last

Though twisted and bitter by nature, your Savant does have one weak spot. Dogs. So it was with some emotion I read this story from Associated Press.

"It began with a simple act of kindness to save an abused, injured dog from becoming one more victim in the Iraq war. But what followed for Marine Maj. Brian Dennis and the mutt was a tale of friendship and loyalty that spanned miles and overcame long odds — one set to take a turn Friday with the anticipated arrival here of the Marine's best friend.

"This dog who had been through a lifetime of fighting, war, abuse ... is going to live the good life," Dennis told his family in an e-mail from Iraq."

While on patrol in the Anbar province, Dennis spotted what appeared to be a gray and white, male German shepherd-border collie mix. He named the dog Nubs after learning someone cut the ears off believing it would make the dog more aggressive and alert.

What savage bastards!

Within weeks, Nubs was greeting Dennis during routine patrol stops along border communities. The Marines fed him bits of their food and by November, the Marine and his unit were keeping an eye out for the dog, which routinely chased their Humvees when they departed.

Life on the run, however, was taking a toll on the dog. He had lost a tooth and been bitten in the neck. In late December, Dennis found Nubs near death in freezing temperatures. The dog had been stabbed with a screwdriver.

Dennis rubbed antibiotic creme on the wound and slept with Nubs to keep him warm. "I really expected when I woke up for watch he would be dead. Somehow he made it through the night."

Dennis thought he had seen the last of the dog days later when his squad headed back to its command post some 65 miles away. He couldn't take the dog with him and watched as it tried to follow the Humvees away from the border.

Two days later, while Dennis and a comrade were working on a Humvee, he looked up and saw the dog staring at him.

"Somehow that crazy damned dog tracked us," he wrote.

But the reunion was short lived. Military policy prohibits having pets in war zones, and Dennis was given four days to get the dog off the base or kill him.

The decision was easy: Nubs was going to San Diego!

If that doesn't make you feel good, check for a pulse.

Well done, Major.

And isn't Nubs lovely?

Bush's imaginary friend

Who said....?

"And when the forbidden months have ended, slaughter the unbelievers everywhere they are found; besiege them. capture them, torture them, prepare every stratagem of warfare upon them; levy the tax upon their convsersion."

A: The "Prophet" of the Religion of Peace, in the Koran

Patriotic duty

Who said...?

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"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."

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A: Theodore Roosevelt

Iraq protest

Who said...?

"Everyone wants to save the planet. Nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes"?

A: PJ O'Rourke

Sopranos Finale

Who Said....?

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"Faith is believing in something you know to be untrue?"

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A: Woody Allen

Carter on Blair

Former US President Jimmy Carter has criticised Tony Blair for his "blind" support of the war in Iraq. He told the BBC that Mr Blair's backing for US President George W Bush had been "apparently subservient". Doesn't miss much, does our Jim.

He added that the UK's "almost undeviating" support for "the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq had been a major tragedy for the world". Blair made a last visit to Iraq, presumably to get a first hand view of his handiwork. During the visit the rebels tried to mortar bomb him. Sadly they missed.

All cultures equal?

Watching CNN a few evenings ago your Savant had the stomach-churning experience of seeing a 17 year-old girl being kicked, beaten and stoned to death. CNN points out how the case portrays the tragedy and brutality of honor killings in the Muslim world. Honor killings take place when family members kill relatives, almost always female, because they feel the relatives' actions have shamed the family.

In this case it was Dua Khalil, killed for being seen with a Sunni Muslim man. She had not married him or converted, but her attackers believed she had, a top official in Nineveh province said. She is of the Yazidi faith, who observe an ancient Middle Eastern religion, and look down on mixing with people of another faith.

In the great tradition of religious interplay, the killing is said to have spurred the killings of about two dozen Yazidi men by Sunni Muslims in the Mosul area two weeks later. Attackers affiliated with al Qaeda pulled 24 Yazidi men out of a bus and slaughtered them, a provincial official said. Lovely. Interestingly, the video clearly identifies a number of policement looking benignly on. It’s their culture, see?

Bush supports the troops

Baghdad night on the town

The judicial murder of Saddam was bad, but it could have been worse. The Iraqis can be quite firm in their dealings with unpopular rulers. The last Crown Prince, Abd al-Ilah (picture left), was one such unpopular guy - and with good reason. When Gen. Kassem launched his coup in the late fifties, the Iraqis first machine-gunned the royal family, then hitched the still alive Crown Prince to the back of a truck and dragged him through the streets of Baghdad in joyful procession. The people in the crowd screamed in delight and dashed up every so often to cut off pieces of the body for souvenirs (as one does). First his sexual organs, then both his arms and legs.

The coup leaders laid the corpses out in the center of the city and everybody joyously stamped on them and ran automobiles back and forth over them for hours. Then the Crown Prince, sans arms and legs was hung from a balcony and the crowd went wild and stabbed it with pointed sticks, and people climbed up and whittled off slivers to celebrate. One of the best nights out in Baghdad history. One of his fingers was sent to Egypt’s President Nasser as a gesture of solidarity, who, horrified, had it buried in sacred ground.

Good God! Hopefully Inda wont do that to Bertie if he wins next May.