The Common Ills: Hejira

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Hejira

Friday on The Diane Rehm Show, Nadia Bilbassy (Al Arabiya) stated:

When Prime Minister Maliki took over, the army makeup of Shiite was 60 percent. By the time he left, it was almost 90 percent. He did a purge against all the top leader commanders of the Iraqi army. And by the way, most of the people who fights with ISIS or Daesh are the former Ba'athist military who worked under Saddam Hussein. They're the one who had the experience. They're the one who has the military brilliant mind of planning where to go and how to do attacks, et cetera, not just by ISIS, by the way. So the problem now is how to get these people onboard. When they demanded their rights in their riots in April, it was peaceful, by the way. He went -- Maliki went after them. He jailed their political leaders. He put them in imprisonment. He also exiled them. So the whole idea of how do you trust this government.

A little bit of reality can peek through from time to time, apparently.

As the Twitter brigade works to misconstrue what's going on in Iraq today, few bother to note the reality of what happened in Iraq from 2010 to 2014 under thug Nouri al-Maliki.

Instead, they bore us with their Tweets on, for example, Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney is an old man -- a very old man -- in poor health.

He most likely will not be among the living for long.

He will also never be President of the United States.

He achieved his greatest power from 2001 through 2009.

He has none today.

He's just an old, corrupt, probably dying man.

So why give him your power?

Why obsessively Tweet about someone who means so very little and who is many, many years removed from power?

I have no idea but obsessing over Dick Cheney is like making jokes about New Jersey -- there's no real level of skill or bravery involved.

Much more pertinent to today? Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan (Washington Post) report, "As President Obama was weighing how to halt Islamic State advances in Iraq, some of the strongest resistance to boosting U.S. involvement came from a surprising place: a war-weary military that has grown increasingly skeptical that force can prevail in a conflict fueled by political and religious grievances."

So in this case, it was the military brass that was urging restraint?

Interesting.

Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 279 violent deaths across Iraq.

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4496.

Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Barack Post-TPA Vote" and Kat's "Kat's Korner: Steve Grand's Perfect Summer Soundtrack" went up earlier today. The following community sites -- plus Jane Fonda -- updated: