So far, discussion of the responsibility of far right paranoids' fueling the kind of rampage that left three cops dead in the Mark Poplawski case has been abstract. Now we find out that Poplawski actually posted Glenn Beck's insane FEMA concentration camp segment to a neo-Nazi website.
Showing posts with label Violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Violence. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Right Wing Murder Instigation, Continued
Via Andrew Sullivan:
Friday, October 17, 2008
Republicans Inciting Thuggery in Anticipation of Crushing Defeat
It is starting to look like a Democratic tsunami on November 4th. Certain folks are getting desperate to avoid that. The ugly atmosphere at McCain (and especially Palin) rallies is spilling out into actual violence.
[Update]
I like Josh Marshall's take:
An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group's Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month.
Attorneys for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now were notifying the FBI and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group.
Republicans, including presidential candidate John McCain, have verbally attacked the group repeatedly in recent days, alleging a widespread vote-fraud scheme, although they've provided little proof. It was disclosed Thursday that the FBI is examining whether thousands of fraudulent voter-registration applications submitted by some ACORN workers were part of a systematic effort or isolated incidents.
[Update]
I like Josh Marshall's take:
Vandalized ACORN offices in Boston and Seattle and threats of death or violence in Providence and Cleveland follow in the wake of McCain's bogus "vote fraud" scam.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman Assassinated
According to CNN:
The chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party died Wednesday, hours after a shooting at the party's headquarters, police said.
Chairman Bill Gwatney died at 3:59 Wednesday afternoon after a gunman entered his Little Rock office and shot him several times in the upper body, Little Rock Police Lt. Terry Hastings said.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way
The right wing’s whole narrative that “the treasonous liberals want to pull out of Iraq just when we’re on the verge of final victory!!!!11!1!" strikes me as just crass, disingenuous posturing: doing pre-spin on the inevitable withdrawal that must, given the math and the deteriorating state of our military, take place.
So, let’s get real. Using the right’s own (in my view, hubris-addled) metrics, let’s define “achieving victory in Iraq” as:
* Violence reduced to, at a minimum, Pre-March-2003 levels;
* A stable, secular, united central government in Baghdad;
* Infrastructure and services (power, water, food distribution, sewage treatment, etc.) exceeding standards that obtained in pre-war Iraq.
…thus providing the example of prosperous freedom that would be (highly debatably…) attractive to Arab populations living under dictatorships in the region.
How could the United States (and, given the level of support the United States could realistically expect from the rest of the world, it would be virtually the United States alone doing this) get there from here? What would it really, actually take to completely pacify Iraq? (Note that I’m just going to discard any considerations of the morality of the enterprise here, and argue from a position of cold, amoral pragmatism.)
Step one is troops. Lots and lots and LOTS of troops. Bush’s “surge” is comically inadequate to the task. You’d have to absolutely flood the non-Kurdish parts of Iraq with American troops, who could clear of insurgents, and then seal off to weapons smuggling, the whole of Iraq, village by village, city by city, region by region. You’d also have to effectively seal off, or at least monitor in fine-grained, very intrusive detail, the borders of the country, especially the ones with Syria and Iran - to the point that a ball-point pen couldn’t enter the country without American say-so.
This means anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of combat troops…in each large city in Iraq. Baghdad alone would probably need something in the neighborhood of 200,000 troops, just for the city itself. Plus, every road into Baghdad (and every other city in Iraq) would need to be under 24-hour patrols and surveillance, to prevent insurgents and weapons from moving from place to place. Not to mention saturating every border crossing of any size with American troops, and regular, pervasive patrols of every mile of the border.
The entire population would need to be disarmed: the military would need to just say something like, “you have six weeks to turn in any weaponry. Any Iraqi civilian found to be in possession of a weapon after that time will be presumed to be an insurgent, and will be subject to imprisonment.”
In other words, the American Military would need to effectively run Iraq in the short- to mid-term. The total American forces in the country at any moment would probably total somewhere between one and two million troops.
Step two: Once the violence was quelled (and, with sufficient troops, there is virtually no doubt it would be): “turn the lights back on.”
Prime targets of insurgents are electrical lines, to keep the population uncomfortable and inconvenienced, and thus resentful. So, rebuilding existing generating capacity, building new capacity as needed, and then putting power stations, and every mile of power line, under 24-hour guard, is essential to undermining support for the insurgents.
Next, restore basic services: Water, sewage, garbage collection.
Garbage collection especially would improve quality of life life measurably for the population, in a highly visible way, and would almost certainly be rewarded with lots of goodwill. Garbage collectors are prime targets of insurgents, because garbage piles by the side of the road make good hiding places for IEDs.
Step 3: Send the vast, vast majority of the American contractors in Iraq home, and hire Iraqi companies for all future rebuilding projects, and pay them in dollars. Iraqi unemployment is pervasive, and unemployed men (especially former Iraqi Army soldiers) are ripe for recruiting by insurgents. Employing them would dry up this particular resource for insurgents, and also give Iraqis a sense of ownership of the projects they would be building. Even people not involved directly in building schools, post offices, etc., would see them being built, and have a clear sense that everyday life is getting incrementally better.
All this would, of course, be hideously expensive - hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. There would probably also be another sharp spike in American casualties, but the insurgency would probably hugely diminish in the face of pervasive American troops, so the spike would be significant but temporary.
Of course, some of those casualties would be draftees, because summoning the level of troops required for all this would require a draft (and a big one) without question: a level of mobilization not seen since World War II. I expect the war fetishists at Little Green Footballs would get awfully quiet if they were faced with the prospect of having to actually, you know, risk their own worthless necks fighting in the war they masturbate to.
Once some semblance of stability was achieved, some sort of conference amongst the various factions in Iraq could probably hammer out an agreement that would be acceptable to all parties, or at least one that everyone would be equally dissatisfied with.
This whole project would all take a level of consensus in the United States that clearly does not obtain. A large majority of Americans oppose the occupation as it is currently being conducted. If large numbers of their children were being drafted for, and their taxes raised to pay for, an even bigger occupation, Washington D.C. would undoubtedly be overrun with citizens chasing their congressmen and senators around with torches and pitchforks.
And, it may not even work: what happens if Americans start withdrawing troops, and violence increases? What then?
So, let’s get real. Using the right’s own (in my view, hubris-addled) metrics, let’s define “achieving victory in Iraq” as:
* Violence reduced to, at a minimum, Pre-March-2003 levels;
* A stable, secular, united central government in Baghdad;
* Infrastructure and services (power, water, food distribution, sewage treatment, etc.) exceeding standards that obtained in pre-war Iraq.
…thus providing the example of prosperous freedom that would be (highly debatably…) attractive to Arab populations living under dictatorships in the region.
How could the United States (and, given the level of support the United States could realistically expect from the rest of the world, it would be virtually the United States alone doing this) get there from here? What would it really, actually take to completely pacify Iraq? (Note that I’m just going to discard any considerations of the morality of the enterprise here, and argue from a position of cold, amoral pragmatism.)
Step one is troops. Lots and lots and LOTS of troops. Bush’s “surge” is comically inadequate to the task. You’d have to absolutely flood the non-Kurdish parts of Iraq with American troops, who could clear of insurgents, and then seal off to weapons smuggling, the whole of Iraq, village by village, city by city, region by region. You’d also have to effectively seal off, or at least monitor in fine-grained, very intrusive detail, the borders of the country, especially the ones with Syria and Iran - to the point that a ball-point pen couldn’t enter the country without American say-so.
This means anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of combat troops…in each large city in Iraq. Baghdad alone would probably need something in the neighborhood of 200,000 troops, just for the city itself. Plus, every road into Baghdad (and every other city in Iraq) would need to be under 24-hour patrols and surveillance, to prevent insurgents and weapons from moving from place to place. Not to mention saturating every border crossing of any size with American troops, and regular, pervasive patrols of every mile of the border.
The entire population would need to be disarmed: the military would need to just say something like, “you have six weeks to turn in any weaponry. Any Iraqi civilian found to be in possession of a weapon after that time will be presumed to be an insurgent, and will be subject to imprisonment.”
In other words, the American Military would need to effectively run Iraq in the short- to mid-term. The total American forces in the country at any moment would probably total somewhere between one and two million troops.
Step two: Once the violence was quelled (and, with sufficient troops, there is virtually no doubt it would be): “turn the lights back on.”
Prime targets of insurgents are electrical lines, to keep the population uncomfortable and inconvenienced, and thus resentful. So, rebuilding existing generating capacity, building new capacity as needed, and then putting power stations, and every mile of power line, under 24-hour guard, is essential to undermining support for the insurgents.
Next, restore basic services: Water, sewage, garbage collection.
Garbage collection especially would improve quality of life life measurably for the population, in a highly visible way, and would almost certainly be rewarded with lots of goodwill. Garbage collectors are prime targets of insurgents, because garbage piles by the side of the road make good hiding places for IEDs.
Step 3: Send the vast, vast majority of the American contractors in Iraq home, and hire Iraqi companies for all future rebuilding projects, and pay them in dollars. Iraqi unemployment is pervasive, and unemployed men (especially former Iraqi Army soldiers) are ripe for recruiting by insurgents. Employing them would dry up this particular resource for insurgents, and also give Iraqis a sense of ownership of the projects they would be building. Even people not involved directly in building schools, post offices, etc., would see them being built, and have a clear sense that everyday life is getting incrementally better.
All this would, of course, be hideously expensive - hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, every year. There would probably also be another sharp spike in American casualties, but the insurgency would probably hugely diminish in the face of pervasive American troops, so the spike would be significant but temporary.
Of course, some of those casualties would be draftees, because summoning the level of troops required for all this would require a draft (and a big one) without question: a level of mobilization not seen since World War II. I expect the war fetishists at Little Green Footballs would get awfully quiet if they were faced with the prospect of having to actually, you know, risk their own worthless necks fighting in the war they masturbate to.
Once some semblance of stability was achieved, some sort of conference amongst the various factions in Iraq could probably hammer out an agreement that would be acceptable to all parties, or at least one that everyone would be equally dissatisfied with.
This whole project would all take a level of consensus in the United States that clearly does not obtain. A large majority of Americans oppose the occupation as it is currently being conducted. If large numbers of their children were being drafted for, and their taxes raised to pay for, an even bigger occupation, Washington D.C. would undoubtedly be overrun with citizens chasing their congressmen and senators around with torches and pitchforks.
And, it may not even work: what happens if Americans start withdrawing troops, and violence increases? What then?
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Ash Wednesday is Tomorrow
"My name is Safa Younis. I'm 12 years old."
The interviewer asks, "What did the American soldiers do when they broke into the house?"
"They knocked at the door," Younis says. "My father went to open it, they shot him dead from behind the door, and then they shot him again after they opened the door."
She describes hearing the Marines go through the rest of the house, shooting and setting off a grenade before getting to the bedroom where she was with her mother and siblings.
"Then comes one American soldier and shot [at] us all," she says. "I pretended to be dead ... and he did not know about me."
May God bless Safa Younis and the surviving members of her family; May God be merciful to the Marines who killed her father, and to the commanders and president who put them in that situation; and most of all, may God be merciful to me for my silence.
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