Aguanegro wonders…

…about the wisdom of boycotting the ‘08 Beijing Olympics because of the PRC’s crackdown in Tibet while the United States is in the midst of two military occupations. (Oh wait, Iraq and Afghanistan are totally different from Tibet? Bullshit.) Tell Richard Gere to clean his own house before he tries to fix up someone else’s.

Oh wait, maybe the Iranians aren’t the ones trying to start World War 3.

Alas, the Times does good work. Apparently, Iran isn’t pursuing nuclear weapons to destroy us, Israel and our freedom. Apparently there are times you can believe some of the things about Iran, like “civilian nuclear program” and “Iran Generally Truthful About Nukes“. I know, I’m way too cynical. But seriously, nobody could have seen this one coming. Quote of the new millennium, right here:

“In interviews on Monday, some administration officials expressed skepticism about the conclusions reached in the new report, saying they [political appointees] doubted that American intelligence agencies had a firm grasp of the Iranian government’s intentions.” Naturally, italics mine.

Get ready for a regional war?

It looks like Bush administration diplomacy fails again. The New York Times recently published a report stating that Turkish aircraft (whether it was helicopters or planes has been disputed) attacked the “abandoned” village of Zakhu, which is in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks are saying planes carried out the attack while the Iraqi government claims it was helicopters. A spokesman for the Kurdish regional government denied it was an attack, but said that Turkish planes “dropped flares” in the mountains near Zakhu.

An anonymous PKK member did corroborate that an attack was carried out. Since the PKK are the ones actually hulled up in the mountains I’m more likely to believe them than the Kurdish regional government, which has to take a more conciliatory diplomatic line (although the lines where the PKK ends and the Kurdish government begins is quite blurry).

Spinning The Surge

As The Surge ™ in Iraq winds down, it’ll be interesting to see who takes a story like this and tries to claim it’s evidence of a partial withdrawal. If you add 30k troops to 140k and then remove that same 30k, you haven’t withdrawn at all. You’re just back where you started a year ago with a couple of hundred dead soldiers and a many thousands of dead civilians.

A nice tidbit of information about that jerk Joe Lieberman.

From the NYTimes blog called The Caucus, we have a post called “Lieberman Calls Liberal Democratic Base ‘Paranoid’”. An interesting quote:

“In the speech, Senator Lieberman referred to his primary loss, and denounced the anti-war base of the Democratic party that worked hard to defeat him last year. Despite the fact that he overcame that opposition and won re-election, leading Democrats and many of the presidential candidates, consider the 2006 election results — which gave Democrats majorities in the House and Senate — a mandate against the Iraq war.”

I just wanted to clarify something. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut. He ran as an independent in the general. A small percentage of Democrats supported for him, but most of Lieberman’s voters were Republican.

If you want an idea of how out of sync Lieberman is with his constituency and the “Democratic party” with which he still caucuses, here it is: In the 2006 general elections Joe Lieberman lost to Ned Lamont on his home turf in New Haven, CT. He couldn’t even win in his own 25th ward, the most local locality (a couple of miles by a couple of miles) in politics, the equivalent of losing in your backyard or having your family vote against you. There should be no mistake about it, “Bush’s favorite Democrat” was in fact elected by Republicans.

There’s an old saying that “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t after you.” It’s interesting that Lieberman chose to call the liberal Democrats “paranoid”, since 1) He seems to be the one that thinks the entire world is out to get him, and 2) Somebody was actually out to get him, it’s just that it wasn’t Ahmedinejad, Iran, Hizbollah, or the “totalitarian forces of radical Islam,” it was the Democratic Party trying toss him out of office.

Anthropologists strike back against the military’s “Human Terrain System”.

The American Anthropological Association has issued a statement about the U.S. military’s coldly-titled “Human Terrain System” (HTS) project in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program teams military units with anthropologists in order to “better understand” Iraqis and Afghanis, and to become more “culturally sensative.” A while back I wrote about why the American Anthropological Association should sanction, ban, or expel members who take part in HTS. The moral implications of twisting science to assist in a military venture are fairly obvious. Thankfully the AAA resolution addresses the issue, even if in a roundabout way (see excerpts from the resolution after the jump).

A change in format.

Well, this blog began as a place for me and a friend to argue about the election and politics in general. Things change. You might already be aware that I’m the only person who has posted so far. It now looks like my good friend from Leb’ will not be able to blog on ToVote at all because of a legal and contractual obligation (also, working 70-80 hours a week). All the best to him, since he’s doing both what he wants to be doing and what he’s good at, and somehow manages to get paid for it. I might try to draft another contributer(s), but for the time being, I’ll be playing this piece solo. I hope this isn’t too much of a disappointment for the millions of readers ToVote has already attracted, but that’s life. Keep it real, and please check back again soon. I have a bunch to post that’ll go up later tonight or early tomorrow.

A look at foreign fighters in the media

I just peeped this video about foreign jihadists fighting for the Taliban from the New York Times website. It’s a pretty rare that we get to see the face behind a Taliban bombmaker or suicide bomber (although the suspects in the interview desperately maintain that they were merely tourists, there are no guilty men in prison, after all). But I have to wonder out loud whether we’ll ever see an interview as straightforward as this one with Arab suspected of suicide or other terror attacks. The imprisoned Siberian looks distinctly more European or western (like us) than the image we’re usually given of the average “jihadi”. Even though the guy’s probably guilty as sin, David Rohde still gives him a relatively fair shake in the interview. Can we expect this more personal, fair, and human look at “the terrorists” even if the face is Afghani Taliban fighter, or an Arab IED maker from Iraq?

Another reason why the U.S. shouldn’t attack Iran

Ouch.

for(John Edwards==Hillary Clinton) {printf(“Either way, the same bad candidate!\n”);}

John Edwards has pretty much become a caricature. Try as he might he just can’t seem to keep his voice below a prolonged yell, generally informing us all about what we already know, that there’s an enormous gap between poor and rich in America(rich like all the money he made as a lawyer).

Even worse is that while Edwards badmouths Hillary Clinton for her healthcare plan, campaign contributions, Iraq War vote, and future Iraq plan, his healthcare plan, his Iraq War vote, and his plan for the future of Iraq are…the same as Hillary Clinton’s. And he’s taken money from state lobbyist and “industry groups.” And when he points fingers at Hillary and claims she’s running for the status quo, Edwards just wants us all to forget that he ran as John Kerry‘s running-mate in 2004. You won’t find much more of a bland, status quo, establishment politician out there than John Kerry. But don’t worry, Edwards has changed. He’s changed his entire political outlook, on wealth, on war, on health care, all in the span of three years! I wonder what prompted his conversion?