The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Saturday, February 26, 2011

War News for Saturday, February 26, 2011

The DoD is reporting a new death unreported by the military. Staff Sgt. Jerome Firtamag died Wednesday, February 24th somewhere in the United States after contracting a non-combat related illness in Kandahar, Afghanistan on Wednesday, December 1st.


Warning Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan

Pakistan Demands Data on C.I.A. Contractors


Reported security incidents

Baiji
#1: Gunmen attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery on Saturday, killing a guard and detonating bombs that sparked a fire and forced the facility to shut down, officials said. The assailants, carrying pistols fitted with silencers, broke into the Beiji refinery around 3:30 a.m., attacked the guards and planted bombs near some production units for benzene and kerosene, said the spokesman for Salahuddin province, Mohammed al-Asi. One guard was killed and another wounded, al-Asi said. By midmorning, firefighters were still trying to extinguish the blaze, said Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad.



Afghanistan: "The Forgotten War"
#1: A suicide bomber has blown himself up at a sports field in northwestern Afghanistan, killing at least four people. Governor of Faryab province, Abdul Haq Shafiq, says the bomber attacked Saturday while people were playing buzkashi, a traditional Afghan sport in which players on horseback wrangle for a headless goat carcass. He says four were killed and 19 people were wounded. Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for the Afghan Minister of Interior, says the bomber attacked in Shirin Tagab district.

#2: Nine civilians, including women and children, were killed by a roadside bomb Saturday in eastern Afghanistan, a police official said. The explosion occurred in Lakhan, a remote village in Khost province, provincial deputy police chief Yaqub Khan said. 'Three men, two women and four children were martyred in the blast,' he said. 'An investigation is under way.'

#3: In Kabul, police said three rockets were fired Saturday morning in a public area in the capital but caused no damage.

Militants have fired two rockets into Bagram Air Field in Kabul, the main US base in war-ravaged Afghanistan amid a surge in violence against the US-led forces in the country. The rocket attack on the US base -- located 11 kilometers southeast of Charikar in Afghanistan's Parwan province -- took place late Friday, a Press TV correspondent reported. Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, has claimed responsibility for the attack. Earlier, two rockets targeted central parts of Afghanistan's capital Kabul in an attack that left no casualties and caused damages to only a few buildings, officials say.


DoD: Staff Sgt. Jerome Firtamag

3 comments:

Dancewater said...

Iraqis revolt against their ‘liberation’ by the U.S.



Azzaman, February 25, 2011



Iraqis are supposed to have been ‘liberated’ by their U.S. occupiers. They are supposed to be enjoying the fruits of their occupation by the world’s most powerful nation. They are supposed to have democracy, unlike other Arab countries whose nations are rising against their dictators.



The U.S., childishly, thought it could bring democracy to Iraq by toppling its dictator who was as worse as the current Libyan despot who has been strafing his own people with helicopter gunships.



How naïve the U.S. was. It thought it could bring its own lackeys and install them as satraps to rule the country democratically.



When the U.S. itself failed in its democratic test by invading a country on false accounts, its lackeys felt why bother.



When the U.S., like the current murderer in Libya, hired tens of thousands of mercenaries, euphemistically called security guards, to fight its own battle and kill Iraqis with impunity, its lackeys felt why bother.



And today, the lackeys it brought with its invasion, who are ruling the country, including its semi-independent Kurdish north, find that their own people are rising against them the way the people of Libya and other Arab countries are revolting against their dictators.



There has been no democratic transformation in Iraq. There has a change to the worse.



In northern Iraq, Kurdish tribal chiefs have the government, the money and their unruly militias in their hands. Tens of thousands of Kurds have risen, demanding democracy, transparency, accountability and a change of system. Many of the demonstrators have already been killed.



In the rest of the country, hundreds of thousands went to the streets on Friday demanding democracy, transparency, accountability and a change of system. Provincial headquarters were torched and several people killed.



Iraqis, who think of themselves as the real revolutionaries of the Arab world, are embarrassed and ashamed. They wanted to have the change on their own, the way the Egyptians toppled Mubarak’s presidency.



The U.S. did no good for Iraqis. It has humiliated them in the eyes of the Arab nations. They were the ones to have risen first and toppled their dictator by their own hands.



How glad we the Iraqis would have been if we today, like other Arabs, rose against our dictator and had him toppled.



We need to remove this stigma of shame by overthrowing the lackeys the U.S. brought with it and installed over us, whether in the Kurdish north or the Arab center and south.

Dancewater said...

Tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets yesterday in nationwide protests that left at least 19 dead and dozens wounded, but the US military consciously and conspicuously remained on the sideline. This encounter, American officials said, posed a key test for Iraqi troops and riot police following the transfer of lead security responsibilities from the US military to the Iraqi government on Sept. 1.

Two protesters were shot dead by Iraqi security forces in the northern city of Mosul, and one was killed in Ramadi. A crowd of more than 1,000 demonstrators in Baghdad, some tossing bricks and rocks, clashed with troops and riot police on a key bridge leading to government offices in the protected international Green Zone.

But according to US Embassy officials, the Iraqi Army and police appear to have passed this test following years of high-priority training by US military advisers to help them function as a standalone, sovereign force.

“What we have seen . . . is that Iraq’s security forces generally have not used force against peaceful protesters,’’ Aaron Snipe, deputy spokesman for the US Embassy, said last evening. “There have been reports of violence in separate incidents. But Iraqi security forces appear to have followed Prime Minister Maliki’s directive by ensuring that citizens who choose to protest peacefully would be allowed to do so.’’


YEAH THERE IS ONLY 19 DEAD!!!!!!



our media is full of total idiots.

Dancewater said...

more democracy for Iraq:

After Iraq's Day of Rage, a Crackdown on Intellectuals

Iraqi security forces detained about 300 people, including prominent journalists, artists and lawyers who took part in nationwide demonstrations Friday, in what some of them described as an operation to intimidate Baghdad intellectuals who hold sway over popular opinion.

On Saturday, four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest of thousands at Baghdad's Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.

"It was like they were dealing with a bunch of al-Qaeda operatives, not a group of journalists," said Hussan al-Ssairi, a journalist and poet, who described seeing hundreds of protesters in black hoods at the detention facility. "Yesterday was like a test, like a picture of the new democracy in Iraq."

************

and they failed the test.....