Friday, October 28, 2011

Leslie Gelb wants you!

Look who crawled out the trash today. Former New York Times scum and War Hawk Leslie H. Gelb. Gelb wants everyone to rally around his call as he insists, at The Daily Beast, "We Need Liberals Now!" And does Mars Need Moms too? Exactly why the hell should anyone heed a call from Gelb?

As if begging for boos and hisses that will certainly follow, and as Freuden as any any common thief, Gelb returns to the scene of his crime, drawing attention to himself:

Republicans and neoconservatives are attacking Obama for withdrawing all American troops from Iraq in two months and accusing him of giving the store to Iran. Forgotten is the carnal fact that the Baghdad government said “Get out!” and that Iraqi and President George W. Bush’s officials signed an agreement three years ago mandating full withdrawal. The Republicans and neoconservatives didn’t say a word of criticism about that deal. They just pile on Obama with the media’s help. And it’s perfectly clear that Bush destroyed the U.S. position in the Gulf when he destroyed the Iraq government and Army, leaving no counterweight to Iran. At least the center left is asking what needs to be done next to bolster U.S. interests.

Oh, is someone wrong on the Iraq War? Really, that's something Gelb should know a great deal about. He of course provided blanket support in real time when the Iraq War was being sold. Philip Weiss (MondoWeiss) noted Gelb's confession a few years back:

My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common -- often wrong -- wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.


And let's be clear that this wasn't a support for the illegal war that quickly vanished despite Gelb's use, in 2009, of the term "initial." Gelb didn't turn against the Iraq War until over 60% of Americans did. As late as fall 2007, he was still whoring for the Iraq War -- in the book review pages of the New York Times. What trash. And in that whoring, he generally attacked liberals in the way he now wants to attack the right.

Gelb is not about peace or building anything, he's a trickster, he's a liar and he's looking for minions. He was an ass who was made fun of in the Carter administration (Hamilton used to say Leslie Gelb was born with a stick up his ass) and he's not improved with age.

Yesterday's snapshot noted: "Reuters notes 2 Baghdad bombings have claimed 18 lives and at least thirty-eight are injured." This morning, AP reports that the death toll has risen to 32 and in yet another indictment of the US press, only the wire services have treated the bombings as major news. Even those papers with Baghdad desks haven't seen this story as something to explore.

In Iraq, the LGBT community has often been targeted. That's been most common in the Baghdad area; however, not exclusive to just Baghdad. Now Michael Luongo (Chelsea Now) reports on a new wave in the Kurdistan Regional Government:

As America prepares to leave Iraq, after an occupation dating back to 2003, a new wave of gay suppression might be under way. According to Ali Hili, chair of Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group aiding queer Iraqis, police recently raided a gay party in Kalar, a small town in Kurdistan, in the north of Iraq, arresting 25 men.
According to a news release from the group, “The men were attending a party at a private house on 15th of September when the police raided the address. After fierce protests against the raid by human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, all but three men have since been released from the city’s Garmyan Prison. Several of those detained claim to have been subject to violent beatings while being held in solitary confinement. The authorities in Kalar refuse to disclose the whereabouts of those still in detention, the conditions in which they are held, or the charges they face.”
Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region of Iraq only loosely under central government control since 1991, has not seen the intense violence of Baghdad and the southern portion of the country, where an estimated 700 or more gay men have been killed by religious insurgents, militias, and other forces.


We'll close with this Glen Ford's "The Butchering of Gaddafi Is America's Crime" (Black Agenda Report):

Last week the whole world saw, and every decent soul recoiled, at the true face of NATO’s answer to the Arab Spring. An elderly, helpless prisoner struggled to maintain his dignity in a screaming swirl of savages, one of whom thrusts a knife up his rectum. These are Europe and America’s jihadis in the flesh. In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa – a horror and revelation indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness by the brutes’ own cell phones.
Nearly eight months of incessant bombing by the air forces of nations that account for 70 percent of the world’s weapons spending, all culminating in the gang-bang slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and his military chief of staff, outside Sirte. The NATO-armed bands then displayed the battered corpses for days in Misurata – the city that had earlier made good on its vow to “purge Black skin” through the massacre and dispersal of 30,000 darker residents of nearby Tawurgha – before disposing of the bodies in an unknown location.
The saner sections of America’s psychological operations machinery – including their collaborators in the corporate media – were doubtless as horrified as anyone at the Libyan jihadis’ insistence on revealing so graphically to the entire planet the barbaric character of the “revolution.” The months of gushing, ad nauseam press reports of near-universal jubilation in Tripoli and elsewhere at rebel “victories” – always under cover of NATO bombs – now made great sense. Who but those in search of instant martyrdom would voice displeasure at the NATO-jihadi triumph, with murderous fiends such as this roaming the streets?


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