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kpete's JournalHow America Made ISIS Their Videos and Ours, Their “Caliphate” and Ours -By Tom Engelhardt
How America Made ISIS
Their Videos and Ours, Their “Caliphate” and Ours
By Tom Engelhardt
What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly good. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.
In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It’s a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda rejected it, so brutal that it’s brought back crucifixion, beheading, waterboarding, and amputation, so fanatical that it’s ready to persecute any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it’s made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you’ve got a label that’s really, really bad like genocide or ethnic cleansing, you can probably apply it to ISIS's actions.
It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East. Today, it rules over at least four million people, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their revenues as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons). Despite opposition, it still seems to be expanding and claims it has established a caliphate.
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Talk about a feel-good feel-bad situation for the leadership of a superpower that’s seen better days! Such threatening evil calls for only one thing, of course: for the United States to step in. It calls for the Obama administration to dispatch the bombers and drones in a slowly expanding air war in Iraq and, sooner or later, possibly Syria. It falls on Washington’s shoulders to organize a new “coalition of the willing” from among various backers and opponents of the Assad regime in Syria, from among those who have armed and funded the extremist rebels in that country, from the ethnic/religious factions in the former Iraq, and from various NATO countries. It calls for Washington to transform Iraq’s leadership (a process no longer termed “regime change”) and elevate a new man capable of reuniting the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, now at each other’s throats, into one nation capable of turning back the extremist tide. If not American “boots on the ground,” it calls for proxy ones of various sorts that the U.S. military will naturally have a hand in training, arming, funding, and advising. Facing such evil, what other options could there be?
If all of this sounds strangely familiar, it should. Minus a couple of invasions, the steps being considered or already in effect to deal with “the threat of ISIS” are a reasonable summary of the last 13 years of what was once called the Global War on Terror and now has no name at all. New as ISIS may be, a little history is in order, since that group is, at least in part, America’s legacy in the Middle East.
MUCH MORE:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175888/
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“When you chop wood, chips fly”
After discussing Israel's attempts to minimize civilian casualties, and the pilot's anger at those who claim Israeli pilots disregarded civilian lives, the following moment takes place. The dialogue below occurs just after the pilot expresses that he is at peace with the efforts he saw military personnel take to limit civilian casualties:
Nonetheless, I say, many children and women were killed.
“When you chop wood, chips fly,” A. says.
"Do you know who said that before you?" I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Stalin."
He is shocked. “Delete that, delete that I said that,” the pilot asks.
I didn’t delete it. These pilots are wonderful people, but there is a limit to what I can do for the sake of their image.
It is a remarkable moment, the simultaneous acceptance of 'collateral damage' amongst Palestinians, and the horror that the metaphor used to represent such acceptance is one made famous by Stalin.
That horror is both a mirror into which most Israelis prefer not to gaze and a window most Israelis want blocked by opaque curtains, something which could equally be said regarding the United States and its drone campaign.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4565631,00.html
http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.htmlhttp://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/01/1326261/--Delete-I-said-that-the-Israeli-pilot-asked
Repukes/MSM to America: We have to panic, and we have to panic now.
There’s a new message coalescing around events in the Middle East, coming from Republicans, the media, and even a few Democrats: It’s time to panic. Forget about understanding the complexities of an intricate situation, forget about unintended consequences, forget about the disasters of the past that grew from exactly this mind-set. We have to panic, and we have to panic now.
The centerpiece of every Sunday show yesterday was a sentence that President Obama spoke in a press conference on Thursday. He answered a question about “going into Syria” by saying that we shouldn’t “put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.” Naturally, Republicans leaped to argue that Obama wasn’t actually talking about military action in Syria, but about dealing with the Islamic State (or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) more generally, and who knows what else. Many in the media took the same line. The first rule of a “gaffe” is that it should be taken out of context, and then the discussion should quickly be shifted away from whatever it was actually about to how, thus decontextualized, it might be perceived.
So on “Meet the Press,” Andrea Mitchell ignored the fact that the question Obama was answering was about U.S. military action in Syria, and asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein, “is the president wrong to signal indecision by saying that we still don’t have a strategy against ISIS?” When that didn’t elicit a sufficiently strong condemnation from Feinstein, Mitchell pressed on: “Doesn’t that project weakness from the White House?” Obviously, there’s nothing worse than “signaling indecision” or “projecting weakness.” Not even, say, invading a country without having a plan for what to do after the bombs stop falling.
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And let’s be clear about this, too: the position of the people who pretend to be horrified at Obama’s “gaffe” about not having a strategy for invading Syria is that we don’t need a strategy. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — a man who wants to be commander in chief — said, “we ought to bomb them back to the stone age.” Having a carefully constructed plan that takes into account not just what you want to blow up but what the consequences of American action will be in the coming months and years? That’s for wimps. We should just invade, yesterday if possible, and worry about all the messy stuff later. After all, it worked in Iraq in 2003, right?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/09/01/on-the-islamic-state-the-voices-counseling-panic-grow-louder/
Ferguson police are using body cameras
Source: St Louis Post Dispatch
FERGUSON • Police officers here began wearing body cameras on Saturday as marchers took to the streets in the most recent protest of a shooting three weeks earlier by a city officer that left an unarmed teenager dead.
Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said his department was given about 50 body cameras by two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, about a week ago. The companies donated the body cameras after the fatal shooting on Aug. 9 of Michael Brown Jr. by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson.
Company representatives were at the police department on Saturday training officers to use the devices, which attach to uniforms and record video and audio. Some members of the police department have been specially trained on the devices’ use.
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The cameras are being assigned to squads, and each officer will get one to use, he said.
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/ferguson-police-are-using-body-cameras/article_88e0067c-d3e6-5599-a581-a58d0022f1f8.html
Texas Gov. Rick Perry Tweets Ugly Image, Deletes It, Then Says it Was "Unauthorized"
Screenshot of the now deleted Tweet from Gov. Rick Perry.
6:40 PM - 31 Aug
But, uh, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg had nothing to do with his indictment…
Read more at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43796_Texas_Gov._Rick_Perry_Tweets_Ugly_Image_Deletes_It_Then_Says_It_Was_Unauthorized#wWgf4HK9wzmJzhy1.99MORE:
2014http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43796_Texas_Gov._Rick_Perry_Tweets_Ugly_Image_Deletes_It_Then_Says_It_Was_Unauthorized
Jon Stewart to Reporter: “Look, there’s a lot of reasons why I hate myself—being Jewish isn’t one"
Jon Stewart on whether he's a "self-hating Jew" ...
“Look, there’s a lot of reasons why I hate myself — being Jewish isn’t one of them,” Stewart told the reporter. “So when someone starts throwing that around, or throwing around you’re pro-terrorist, it’s more just disappointing than anything else. I’ve made a living for 16 years criticizing certain policies that I think are not good for America. That doesn’t make me anti-American. And if I do the same with Israel, that doesn’t make me anti-Israel. You cannot outsmart dogma, no matter what you do. If there is something constructive in what they’re saying, hopefully I’m still open enough … to take it in and let it further inform my position. But I’m pretty impermeable to yelling. As soon as they go to, ‘Your real name is Leibowitz!’ that’s when I change the channel.”
— Josh Marshall
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.613275
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