Military people have sharply increased donations to Democrats since the Iraq invasion.

This is an interesting factoid.

A new study finds that contributions to Democrats from members of the U.S. military have shot up dramatically since the start of the Iraq war in 20003.

The study, by Capital Eye, which is a newsletter for the Center for Responsive Politics, finds that this year, 40% of military money has gone to the Democratic Party or Dem Presidential candidates, compared to only 23% in 2002, before the war started.
From TPM Election Central.

Think maybe more of the military people feel that the Democrats are supporting them?

The officer corps shifted sharply towards the Republicans after the end of the Vietman war. I wonder if any of the officers are shifting to the Democrats now?

The American military is used up - burned out

Occasionally the U.S. media says that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are worn out, or burned out, or hollowed out like after Vietnam. It's true, but none of our American media dares describe what that really means. Fortunately the British Guardian is not so squeamish and not in cover-up mode. Here is a truly graphic article from The Guardian:

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis
Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday August 12, 2007

Observer
Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.

The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.'

The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.'

A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.'

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'

It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition. There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to stay alert and wired.

But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details of these soldiers' frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the girlfriends that they don't see, or about the children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.

'I counted it the other day,' says a major whose partner is also a soldier. 'We have been married for five years. We added up the days. Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven months. Seven months ... We are in a bad place. I don't know whether this marriage can survive it.'

The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is 'about broken'. Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen.

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).

But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.

'They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,' said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the International Herald Tribune in April.

'Modern war is exhausting,' says Major Stacie Caswell, an occupational therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the military hospital in Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline problems: often they have seen friends killed and injured, or are having problems stemming from issues at home - responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of their cases. One of the most common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders.

'This is a different kind of war,' says Caswell. 'In World War II it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all around. And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to do...'

'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene. They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.'

'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is no decompression.'

These are men and women are fighting a war that should never have been started, for reasons that change weekly or sink to vague statements of "We are fighting Terrorists!"

All of this is in behalf of an idiot child who was afraid to go to Vietnam himself and didn't even bother to finish his agreed to tour in the Air National Guard. The idiot child is buttressed by a paranoid old man who, when asked why he kept getting deferrals on going into the service during the Vietnam era says "I had other priorities." It's an ego trip for the top members of the Bush administration, one that has gone very badly from shortly after the beginning and for which one of the Architects, Donald Rumsfeld, has already taken a well-deserved fall.

The U.S. needs to get our military out of Iraq and quit squandering lives and money on an unnecessary and very nasty war.

Also, Bush and Cheney need to be removed from office, and tried as war criminals, if only for the torture programs they have instituted.

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Let's be fair and give the other side their say.

Go over to Atrios and watch the interview with Bill Krystol, a principle architect of the invasion of Iraq, who has recently returned from an eight-day visit to Iraq where he learned that the 'surge' is working well, and needs to be supported and continued.

Warning - Krystol is not on his best game, since Jon Stewart (at Comedy Central) is asking real journalistic questions, and Krystol is quite unused to such probing.

Bill does get his message across, however. "All is going well now - just give it more time." Jon merely establishes that Bill went over to Iraq with that message in mind, uses his trip to support what he has been saying all along and has no real basis for what he is saying except that he wants it to be true.

Go watch the interview and see if you don't agree with me.

Rumsfeld, Neocons laugh off death of Pat Tillman

M.J. Rosenberg points out the right-wing Neocon attitude towards the death of Pat Tillman:

I always thought that, for all their loathsomeness, the right cares about our men and women in uniform. Yes, I know that they are all too willing to sacrifice them on the battlefield. But that is war and these people believe that all wars are worth dying in.

But now I see that they even have utter contempt for the individual soldier who dies on a foreign battlefield. Donald Rumsfeld and his GOP allies chuckled their way through yesterday's hearing on the death (friendly fire, murder, whatever) of the most famous soldier serving in the 9/11 wars, Pat Tillman. This is the same soldier whose death they used to drum up support for the war, who they made a poster boy for it.

But then he was killed (somehow) and it came out that he opposed the Iraq war, was not a Christian, and, worst of all, came from a family of troublemakers who demanded to know what happened to their boy.

And now Pat Tillman is, in the words of an army chaplain, "worm dirt." And his death, which may have been a murder, is one big joke to these guys. Rumsfeld, leaving the Committee room, dodged Tillman's family, not offering a word of sympathy. They have none. Read the rightwing blogs on the Tillman case. The once fair-haired boy is now a joke, his death just one of those things, his family a bunch of liberals who should shut just shut the f--- up.

Even the Republican criminals currently in charge of this country don't have to also be loathsome gutter-slime, but Rumsfeld and crew work at it.

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See also:

• Evidence suggests Pat Tillman was murdered
  July 26, 2007
  
• What is the Bush Admin hiding in the Pat Tillman case?
  July 15, 2007

What is the Bush Admin hiding in the Pat Tillman case?

The basic story of Pat Tillman is clear, and since he was a professional football player who dropped his football career to join the Army along with his brother after 9/11, he got a lot of press.

After completing Ranger indoctrination Tillman was sent with the second battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment in Fort Lewis, Washington into Iraq in the initial invasion, then sent from Iraq to Afghanistan where he was killed on April 22, 2004 while on patrol. The initial report from the Army Special forces Command said that he was killed by enemy fire in an exchange of fire with the enemy resulting from an ambush. Gen. John Abizaid, the Commander of the troops in Iraq and Iran at that time, awarded Tillman the Silver Star, a Purple Heart and a posthumous promotion from specialist to corporal based on a detailed account of the heroic story of his actions - in a battle that never took place and which was known by the Army Commanders to have not taken place.

The Army Commanders immediately knew that Tillman's death was actually a friendly fire incident. So they put his unit under a communications blackout to prevent any communications with reporters and burned Tillman's body armor and uniform. The initial investigation conducted by Army captain Richard Scott concluded that Tillman's death was the result of a lack of discipline that should have brought serious punishment. The investigations by higher ranking officers that have since followed have reached much less harsh conclusions, so the individuals who actually killed Pat Tillman have gotten mild punishment if any at all, and the higher ranking officers have not taken any responsibility for what was a failure of leadership, more clearly in the aftermath of Tillman's death, but from what I have heard, also during the shooting itself.

As a retired Army officer myself, it looks like the living survivors get a lot more mercy than they deserve, the dead remain very dead and so get no mercy at all, and the commanders who failed to properly control the situation or investigate, judge and honestly report the aftermath continue on in their careers with no real accountability. This looks like a prime example of careerism in the military. Pat Tillman, his family, the Army and the American people all deserve much better.

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Mark Kleiman properly points out how the Democrats should be dealing with this. Congressional Hearings to determine exactly what happened and why, both on a road outside of the village of Sperah, Afghanistan and later during the investigations and cover-ups.

EmptyWheel at The Next Hurrah adds her always considerable political wisdom to Mark Kleiman's proposals.

Maliki says U.S. troops not needed in Iraq

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki states that the U.S. troops are no longer needed in Iraq. Iraqi forces can provide the security Iraq needs. This is his response to the interim report on Iraq just given by the Bush administration.

Of the 16 Washington-established benchmarks in that report, the Bush administration stated that Iraq was failing 8 items entirely and "making progress" on 8 others. Maliki's point appears to be that those benchmarks are a fiction created in Washington, D.C. and have no relevance in Iraq. Considering the clear nearly total ignorance of the Iraqi nation that the Bush administration displays, this is not a bit surprising.

Polls have shown that the majority of the public in both the United States and the public in Iraq want the American troops out of Iraq quickly. The stumbling block is the ignorant stubbornness of Cheney and Bush and the presumed desire of the government of Iraq to keep the Americans there. Now Maliki puts the government of Iraq on the side of those saying get the American troops out.

The only stumbling block now to getting American troops out of Iraq now is to convince Bush that there is nothing further that they can do there. Unfortunately, in bush's simplistic "It's either Black or White." mind, we "lose the War in Iraq" when we decide to leave, and "We have not lost Iraq as long as we are still there."

So what Bush has done is set the decision about what we are going to do with our troops in Iraq as a referendum on "What we have already done with our troops in Iraq." So it doesn't matter that the American military is losing about 100 soldiers to death per month, another 800 to a 1000 to severe, crippling and permanent wounds, and some 40% of all combat soldiers are coming home with severe mental illnesses. They will stay there an fight (according to Bush) until somehow the purposeless invasion of Iraq can be justified.

That is an extremely high price to pay to justify an invasion that every expert outside the Bush administration and the Republican Party recognizes cannot be achieved. The only people now who refuse to recognize that the invasion of Iraq is a totally failed enterprise are those whose jobs depend on not recognizing that fact even as their noses are rubbed in it. Now Prime Minister Maliki has just rubbed their noses in it - Big Time.

There is no further rational reason for American troops to fight and die in Iraq, not when the only goal for their fighting is to return stability to that nation and their very presence is the major destabilizing factor.

A good poker player will tell you not to throw good money into a pot that is already lost.

An effective businessperson will tell you that when a project has failed, you do not use "sunk costs" to justify not canceling it.

A good General will adamantly state that you do not reinforce a failed position.

Yet Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party are saying that we can't leave the failed enterprise in Iraq because of the blood and treasure we have already spend there, and leaving acknowledges failure. Somehow if we don't admit failure, we haven't failed.

The facts show how false, how very hollow that argument is. There is no significant measurement by which the American unilateral invasion of Iraq can be considered to be anything but an utter failure. For the Bush administration to continue to send American troops into the meat grinder does not change the fact that the Iraq expedition is a total failure. Delaying the date of withdrawal does not and will not change that failure into anything else, and history will recognize that Iraq was not and is not America's War. It is a war fought by Bush and Cheney for the benefit of the Republican Party and its hold on power in the U.S. government, nothing else. Just as no serious historian today accepts the position of the Nixon Presidential Library that Watergate was a Coup against Nixon, no legitimate serious historian is going to later define the Bush administration and its highlight event, the unnecessary and distracting war in Iraq as anything but the single most massive failure of American foreign policy to occur since American became a nation.

Maliki has offered an escape hatch. He says that the Americans have don't their job and are no longer needed. It is time we took him up on it and get out, and if Bush and Cheney have their egos too thoroughly involved to accept that their militaristic fantasies cannot be achieved, then we need to remove them and replace them with leaders who serve the American nation, not their own over-stuffed and corrupt egos.

Someone needs to look to America's needs for the future and quit wasting troops, time and money trying to justify a failed past. If Bush and Cheney have to go to get someone to do what America needs done, then so be it.

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From Atrios:

• Video on Impeachment from Bill Moyers show
• Transcript of the video.
• Useful addresses (Politicians)
• FAIRs Media contact list.
  

Where there's a will....

Juan Cole, writing this morning, pointed me to the statement by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British diplomat. Sir Jeremy has a number of comments he wanted to make about how the invasion and occupation of Iraq was mishandled. But the Blair government will not let him publish his book.

Fortunately, he has found a way to make an end run. He provided a new forward to the reissue of "Tigris Gunboats: The Forgotten War in Iraq 1914-1917", a memoir by Wilfred Nunnskip. Here are the main comments:

The Telegraph It is a history of the 1914-17 expedition to capture Baghdad by a British expeditionary force for which Nunn led the naval contingent.

Sir Jeremy writes that it was an appallingly bloody campaign, fought against the Ottoman Turkish army in which Britain suffered 40,000 men killed, wounded or captured in a few months.

Eventually Baghdad was taken, but the capture proved nothing but a heartache for the invaders.

"The victory of March 1917 left the British owning the territory of Iraq after the war," writes Sir Jeremy. But it brought them "many years of trial and distress in trying, first through colonial occupation and then through intrusive diplomacy, to stabilise a nation that has rarely in its history remained both united and peaceful.

"Is it too churlish to ask whether the leaders of a more modern administration might have profited from studying this experience?

"It now transpires that many individual American officers did try to learn from Iraq's earlier history.

"But other considerations closer to home were weighing on the top-level decision-makers; there was little delegation of real authority to those in the theatre who could see what the local conditions required; the different parts of the military and civilian systems were out of tune with each other; and the limitations of the use of force were poorly understood.

"That meant that a sense of common purpose was missing after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, which was not the case nine decades earlier."

Sir Jeremy adds: "Neither the British Government in 1917 nor the Coalition in 2003 really understood what they were taking on when they assumed control of Baghdad."

So we are suffering from politicians who don't read or understand history.

The only people who would be surprised by that are going to be those politicians themselves, and that's assuming that somehow they can be made aware of their failure. Not very likely.