Clipmarks | kelvin273's 'war' clips

Afghanistan going down the toilet

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:40:59 GMT

clipped by: kelvin273
clipper's remarks: So basically postwar Afghanistan is looking a lot like postwar Iraq now. The Iraqi invasion (and the timing) just look better all the time. :-/

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A resurgent Taliban is back in charge over parts of Afghanistan, the nation's chief intelligence official said Wednesday in an assessment that differed from the one made last month by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Despite his less-optimistic assessment on that score, McConnell said the Taliban has suffered "significant degradation" in its leadership and is unable to successfully face off against U.S. and NATO forces.

He attributed an uptick in violence to the Taliban resorting to the terrorist tactics used by al Qaeda in Iraq -- suicide attacks and roadside bombings.

McConnell also said the Taliban chooses other means to engage.

"They'll fill in an area when we withdraw, or they will influence a village or region if our presence is not there," he said.

Tags: afghanistan, war.war on terror

Are they underestimating Harry Reid?

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:02:09 GMT

clipped by: kelvin273
clipper's remarks: I wonder if Harry Reid is smarter than we've been giving him credit for. Conventional wisdom in Democratic circles holds that he's a wimp who folds every time Republicans even threaten a filibuster. But I wonder if it's possible that playing the helpless minority, especially on Iraq, might pay more political dividends than direct confrontation by sending the message that voters *must* give the Dems 60 votes in the Senate and the presidency if they want the war to end. I still think they should be more confrontational on domestic issues like the AMT, but this is food for thought.

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says President Bush is driving allies "over the cliff."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House of Representatives approved another $70 billion in war spending on Wednesday, capping a year of frustration for Democrats who took control of Congress on pledges to end the war in Iraq.

Rep. David Obey, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said Democrats "have tried every way known to man to bring this war to a conclusion."

"I think it is clear that if the nation wants a change in direction with respect to this war, it has only two options," said Obey, D-Wisconsin. "One is to elect more progressive voices in the United States Senate, and second is to elect a president who has a different set of priorities domestically and a different vision for America's involvement in the Middle East -- and especially in Iraq."

Tags: congress, politics, iraq war

Kamikaze Revisionism in Japan

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 06:12:29 GMT

clipped by: kelvin273
clipper's remarks: So now the question is if this is just going to be annoying (like Southern civil war revisionism) or a sign of resurgent Japanese militarism. Not that that would be entirely a bad thing. A militarized Japan might help keep China from making too much trouble.

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Women look at photos of Japanese kamikaze pilots at the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots.

Long a synonym for the waste of war, the suicidal fliers are now being glorified in a film written by Tokyo's governor, Shintaro Ishihara, a well-known nationalist and co-author of the 1989 book "The Japan that Can Say No." And a museum about the kamikazes in the southern town of Chiran, near the airstrip where Uchida and others took off, gets more than 500,000 visitors a year.

"The worries, sufferings, and misgivings of these young people ... are something we cannot find in today's society," Ishihara said when his movie, "I Go to Die For You," opened this spring.

No one is publicly calling for young Japanese to kill themselves for the nation these days. But the renewed hero-worship of the kamikazes coincides with a general trend in Japanese society toward seeing the country's war effort as noble, and mourning the fading of the ethic of self-sacrifice amid today's wealth.

Tags: japan, kamikaze, world war ii, history

Iraq has been in a Civil War for two years

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 03:36:06 GMT

clipped by: kelvin273

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

News Analysis

A Matter of Definition: What Makes a Civil War, and Who Declares It So?

By EDWARD WONG

Published: November 26, 2006

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — Is Iraq in a civil war?

Though the Bush administration continues to insist that it is not, a growing number of American and Iraqi scholars, leaders and policy analysts say the fighting in Iraq meets the standard definition of civil war.

The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second says that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.

American professors who specialize in the study of civil wars say that most of their number are in agreement that Iraq’s conflict is a civil war.

“I think that at this time, and for some time now, the level of violence in Iraq meets the definition of civil war that any reasonable person would have,” said James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford.

While the term is broad enough to include many kinds of conflicts, one of the sides in a civil war is almost always a sovereign government. So some scholars now say civil war began when the Americans transferred sovereignty to an appointed Iraqi government in June 2004. That officially transformed the anti-American war into one of insurgent groups seeking to regain power for disenfranchised Sunni Arabs against an Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and increasingly dominated by Shiites.

Others say the civil war began this year, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off a chain of revenge killings that left hundreds dead over five days and has yet to end. Mr. Allawi proclaimed a month after that bombing that Iraq was mired in a civil war. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is,” he said.

Tags: war, iraq