TWO CHEERS FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA'S IRAQ TROOP WITHDRAWAL

In making the historic announcement that all US troops would leave Iraq by year end, President Obama conveniently failed to mention two important points:

First, our withdrawal is over the objection of the Pentagon which has lobbied for and worked hard to keep indefinitely tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for training, support and counterterrorism past December 31.

Second, we are leaving because President Obama's negotiators failed to get the Iraq government to grant immunity to any US soldier for crimes committed against Iraqis after December 31, 2011. Iraq has experienced senseless and unpunished violence against its citizenry for eight and a half years and they are justifiably fed up. Without a grant of immunity, President Obama has also had enough of our murderous and bankrupting war and occupation of Iraq, while American itself is crumbling both physically and spiritually.

Now, if we can finally launch the investigation into Bush administration war crimes, which led to this sad chapter in American history, we would really have something to celebrate.

IS THERE A PILL FOR THIS MALADY?

An American, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated by a fellow American, and some Americans cheered.
An American, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated by a fellow American, and some Americans cheered.
An American, Martin Luther King, was assassinated by a fellow American, and some Americans cheered.
An American, Anwar al-Awlaki was assassinated by fellow Americans, and many Americans cheered.
The important difference among these four assassinations by fellow Americans was that only the last one was carried out by government employees acting in accordance with immoral, un-American, but official government policy.

I don't feel a bit safer because al-Awlaki is dead. But I do feel a bit sick.

WAR DAZE

On Mar. 18, President Obama told the U.S. Congress that U.S. involvement in the Libyan would be a matter of "days not weeks." October 18 marks seven months, or more appropriately, 213 days and counting. Technically, the President wasn't lying or mis-informing the American people. He was simply measuring the Libyan campaign in days not weeks...or months or years. But the import of his March 18 statement to our citizenry was that this military intervention would last a week or two at most.

Shame on him and his co-war mongers in NATO, who have an killed an untold number of innocent civilians who might otherwise be alive but for our needless and murderous intervention. These are
the very people Obama claimed his intervention was protecting. Its real purpose is to grab of chunk of the vast Libyan oil reserves by supporting and supplying the designated winners of the Libyan civil war.

Apparently, the designated losers forgot to get the US/NATO game plan. It happens every time.

HELLO KETTLE, POT CALLING

The US charge that Iran orchestrated what appears to be a "Keystone Kops" type terrorist attack against the Saudi ambassador, and the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington should be viewed with extreme skepticism by anyone familiar with decade long US lying to provoke military ventures in the Middle East. The plot described in court was simple minded, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed. It involved an Iranian immigrant used car salesman, Mansour Arbabsiar, with a family connection to the Iranianh Quds Force, hiring members of the DEA infiltrated Mexican gang Los Zetas to do the deeds. The fact that such a cockamamie scheme goes completely against the highly sophisticated Iranian intelligence community does not disprove Iranian government involvement; but it sure should make us wary of the shrill cries of proof positive emanating from Washington. The pro Iran war extremists in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US are once again beating the drums for a third major war in the Middle East in spite of the two colossal loses we've racked up there already.

With our record of creating millions of dead, injured and homeless through our lying about the need to instigate and maintain endless wars, this congers up the old adage of the pot calling the kettle black.