SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY FINALLY EMERGED IN THE PUBLIC EYE TODAY LOOKING FETCHING IN A PAIR OF TINA FEY GLASSES.
HE DECLARED THAT SUPPORT FOR BARACK'S ILLEGAL WAR IS GROWING.
ALSO GROWING IS THE CANCER ON THE PRESIDENCY.
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
At the Washington Post today, conservative Michelle Bernard tries (and fails) to make a coherent case for war on Syria. Her prop of choice? Iraqi women. Bernard's part of the cheap trash who ignore Iraqi women. The women of Iraq suffer and they suffer without any help from world government's so Bernard's lies aren't needed. She insists that women are suffering in Syria. It's similar to the propaganda Women's Media Center -- in the roll out for war that Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and Jane Fonda all hope you never call them on -- was featuring a few months back. That shouldn't surprise you.
When The Brides of War enlist to become love slaves of Barack, they run to Lauren Wolfe for information. The hustler also works for The Atlantic. She specializes in "OHMYGOD!WOMENAREBEINGKILLEDSOMEWHEREANDIMUSTANDWILLSTOPIT!"
'journalism.'
Here's some information for all the tricked out sex slaves in the nunnery of St. Barack: War kills.
War kills indiscriminately. There is no 'precision' in war. It is bloody, it is messy and it is deadly.
Do women suffer during war?
Yes, children they do. In The War Against Women, the late Marilyn French established this with a historical overview of war and how it functions alongside the patriarchy, how the domination sought in war is also sought in society.
I realize this is new ground for Michelle Bernard. And probably for the idiot Lauren Wolfe.
Bernard wants you to know that, in 2003, shortly after the start of the Iraq War, she actually managed to chat with a few Iraqi women in DC who had been brought in, by the Bully Boy Bush administration, to speak to Congress. Guess what they told Bernard? They wished the war had started sooner! Isn't it shocking? Iraqi women, as the war had just started, would be flown to the US to lobby Congress and they supported the war! Well case closed, yet again!
But before Bernard does her victory lap, let's all grasp that the women were propaganda tools of the White House -- which is why they were able to travel to the US to begin with.
And let's further grasp what Michelle Bernard doesn't grasp or won't tell you.
The year is 2013. Michelle insists that Iraqi women told her they were better off due to war ("What took you so long!" she quotes one Iraqi saying) so the US should attack Syria.
What's she leaving out?
How about today?
How about the effects of ten years of war on Iraq and, yes, on Iraqi women? Let's start with Wednesday's snapshot:
And in southern Baghdad, NINA reports:
Police source told NINA that an improvised explosive device, emplaced near women beauty salon in Shurta neighborhood, went off wounding the salon's owner and three other civilians, happened to be nearby, as well as causing damages to the salon.
That attack is very important. al Qaeda may or may not be responsible for that attack but for years they have launched attacks in that area. The attack, if carried out by al Qaeda, may have been an attack on business or anything. But the best guess is it being an attack on women who refuse to live in Iraq as though Iraq is Afghanistan.
That attack was and remains important but no western news outlet treated it as such. No one filed a report on it. As always when women are the intended targets, the press looked the other way. In fact, the only time the western press tends to note women dying is when they can (accurately or inaccurately) label them a prostitute. Zainab Salbi founded Women for Women International. Last March, she wrote a column for CNN on the status of women in Iraq:
On the political front, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has not appointed a single woman to a senior cabinet position, despite the fact women are guaranteed 25% of the seats in parliament by the constitution. The Ministry of Women's Affairs, a poorly-funded and mostly ceremonial department, is the lone ministry headed up by a woman.
Constitutionally, women were able to secure the ability to pass their citizenship on to their children by non-Iraqi husbands, making Iraq one of a handful Arab countries with such a provision for their female citizens.
But on the other hand, women are no longer guaranteed equal treatment under one law in terms of marriage, divorce, inheritance and custody. That law, the Family Statutes Law, has been replaced one giving religious and tribal leaders the power to regulate family affairs in the areas they rule in accordance with their interpretation of religious laws.
This not only is making women more vulnerable, it is giving women from various sects (Sunni or Shia) or religion (Muslim or Christian) different legal treatments on the same issues.
Economically, women have gone from being visibly active in the Iraqi work force in the 1980s -- particularly in the farming, marketing and professional services sectors -- to being nearly non-existent in 2013.
The women who could afford it withdrew from the public space due the violence dominating the streets. 10 years ago Iraq produced much of its own food and had a productive industrial sector -- but now Iraq imports practically all of its food, and farmers and factory workers simply found themselves out of a job as industry ground to a halt. And while both women and men suffered as a result, the impact on women was greater due to their limited mobility in the face of poor security.
Violence against women -- and the lack of legal protection for women -- is also on the rise. Women's rights groups blame the increase in violence on the social and economic pressure that families face, the lack of public and political will to stop it, and the increase religious conservatism that often justifies the violence.
MADRE's Yifat Susskind and Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq's Yanar Mohammed wrote a column on the status of women in Iraq this year as well:
If you talk to women in war zones anywhere, they’ll tell you that domestic violence increases in war-time. But in Iraq, violence against women has also been systematic. And unknown to most Americans, it has been orchestrated by some of the very forces that the US boosted to power.
Like religious fundamentalists everywhere, these sectarian militias and clerics have a social vision for their country that depends on subjugating women. But because the US wagered that they could deliver stability, these men were cultivated as allies in Iraq. As we now know, they never even got the stability they traded women’s rights for.
The dynamic was clearly at work in the drafting of Iraq’s constitution, heavily brokered by the US. To pass it, the US needed support from Islamist parties. They got it by trading away women’s rights. In fact, the current constitution is a huge step backwards for Iraqi women. It replaces one of the Middle East’s most expansive laws on the status of women, dating from 1959, with separate and unequal laws on the basis of sex. They subjected Iraqi women to a newly introduced Sharia law promoted in an article in the new constitution.
So the ridiculous Michelle doesn't just remain a groupie in the Cult of St. Barack, she's also a dumb liar who thinks she can trick America into supporting war on Syria by insisting war was what Iraqi women wanted and it made their lives better. And Women's Media Center -- Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and Jane Fonda -- need to be called out for entering into the dangerous relationship with Lauren Wolfe. You'd think Gloria would especially avoid that relationship which makes it appear that Women's Media Center is nothing but a government propaganda outlet -- she will never escape working for the CIA in college or the rumors that she continued working for them after college. I do not believe she worked for them after college. She would deny the "working for" in college but she received rewards and she did their work, including reporting back afterwards -- a detail that she bragged about repeatedly in the 60s -- check the articles from that era -- but rewrote history a decade later when the Red Stockings went public with Gloria's CIA work. For those unfamiliar with the charges, post-college, a sort of diagram is drawn of Gloria with various CIA and CIA-linked figures. The Red Stockings felt that feminism was being watered down in the seventies and felt Gloria had a great deal to do with it. They began digging around and found Gloria's college CIA link. They raised the issue publicly and it was in all of the feminist press of the era except Ms. magazine (which Gloria controlled -- though one of the charges was that Ms. was a CIA front). Gloria ignored the charges and people began lying for Gloria. When she finally answered the charges, after Betty Friedan had helped publicize them, she suddenly never knew it was a CIA front funding her travel until after the fact. And the media was kind to Gloria and ran with that crap without questioning it. The same MSM printed articles in the 60s where Gloria bragged about her work for the CIA in that era, portraying herself as some sort of Agent 99.
It's very telling that Gloria, Jane and Robin would fund a Syrian project (Wolfe's) to begin with. Feminists should be focused on Iraq where women's rights and status suffered a tremendous blow. You want to speak out against war, how about you chronicle the effects war has had on the lives of Iraqi women. Instead, they've funded alarmist propaganda which, no surprise, is now being used to argue war.
Gloria, Jane and Robin are you really that stupid? (Answer: Yes, they apparently are.)
Gloria, Jane and Robin are silent on Syria. They won't decry an attack on it and they have funded a propaganda mill whose intent is to force action. What's going on here?
Three elderly women have made it their goal to cure male impotency.
At the heart of the arguments for an attack on Syria is the male impotency. Scott Lemieux (American Prospect) notes today, "At bottom, as James Fallows notes, the case for action against Syria is based on the same logical error as too many foreign-policy disasters past: we have to "do something," and military action is ... something." That feeling of powerlessness, that heaven forbid, even men might have to feel. Instead of telling the Peter Pans of the world to go with it, explore it, grasp it and become better humans as a result, the elderly Wendys of Jane, Robin and Gloria intend to hover the beds in the nursery at night ensuring ejaculation, no limp noodles on their watch.
There is not a need to do anything. Syria has a civil war. Now Spain had a civil war (1936 to 1939) and the US government stayed out of it. Many of those Americans back then who had a side in that war traveled to Spain and fought. That's certainly an option for Nicholas Kristof and the other saggy penises. 600,000 deaths is considered a conservative estimate of the death toll. You can also review these stats offered by PBS for the American civil war.
On this week's Moyers & Company (link is video and text, airs on many PBS stations across the country), Phil Donahue is the guest host and he speaks with Andrew Bacevich about an attack on Syria. Excerpt.
What would a 23-year graduate of West Point offer us now regarding the dilemma in which Obama finds himself, regarding Syria?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I mean, if I could have five minutes of the president's time, I'd say, "Mr. President, the issue really is not Syria. I mean, you're being told that it's Syria. You're being told you have to do something about Syria, that you have to make a decision about Syria. That somehow your credibility is on the line."
But I'd say, "Mr. President, that's not true. The issue really here is whether or not an effort over the course of several decades, dating back to the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, an effort that extends over several decades to employ American power, military power, overt, covert military power exercise through proxies, an effort to use military power to somehow stabilize or fix or liberate or transform the greater Middle East hasn't worked.
“And if you think back to 1980, and just sort of tick off the number of military enterprises that we have been engaged in that part of the world, large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and on and on, and ask yourself, 'What have we got done? What have we achieved? Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more Democratic? Are we enhancing America's standing in the eyes of the people of the Islamic world?'
"The answers are, 'No, no, and no.' So why, Mr. President, do you think that initiating yet another war, 'cause if we bomb Syria, it's a war, why do you think that initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise is going to produce a different outcome? Wouldn't it be perhaps wise to ask ourselves if this militarized approach to the region maybe is a fool’s errand.
"Maybe it's fundamentally misguided. Maybe the questions are not tactical and operational, but strategic and political." You know, I have to say, I'm just struck by the fact that Secretary of State Kerry has become the leading proponent for war. It's our secretary of state's job apparently--
PHIL DONAHUE: He threw his medal-- he threw his medals back.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, that's why it's doubly ironic. 'Cause the Secretary of State is the war promoter. And that our secretary of state happens to be a guy who came into politics basically advertising himself as the guy who because of his--
PHIL DONAHUE: Understands war?
ANDREW BACEVICH: --Vietnam experiences, understands war, understands the lessons of Vietnam, and is therefore going to prevent us from doing dumb things. On the contrary, he's the lead cheerleader to go through another dumb thing.
PHIL DONAHUE: President Obama would say to you, "These are children being grossly and painfully killed."
ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah.
PHIL DONAHUE: "How can you watch these videos with the foam coming out of the nostrils. And we've got to do something."
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, the attack is a heinous act. Now does the fact that they were killed with chemicals make it more heinous than if they were killed with conventional ammunitions? I'm not persuaded.
I mean, I think the issue, one of the issues here, to the extent that moral considerations drive US policy, and I would say as a practical matter they don't, but let's pretend that they do to the extent that moral considerations drive US policy, there's a couple of questions to ask. One would be, "Why here and not someplace else?"
I mean, just weeks earlier, the Egyptian Army killed many hundreds of innocent Egyptians. And we sort of shook our finger at Egypt a little bit, but didn't do anything. So why act in Syria? Why not act in Egypt? I think that that needs to be sort of, that needs to be clarified.
And the other question will be, "Well, if our concerns are humanitarian, why is waging war the best means to advance a humanitarian agenda?" If indeed US policy is informed by concern for the people of Syria, let's just pretend that's the case even though I don't think it is. If it's informed by concern for the people of Syria, why is peppering Damascus with cruise missiles the best way to demonstrate that concern?
I mean, a little bit of creative statesmanship it seems to me might say that there are other things we could do that would actually benefit the people of Syria, who are suffering greatly, who are fleeing their country in the hundreds of thousands. Who are living in wretched refugee camps. Why don't we do something about that? Why wouldn't that be a better thing to do from a moral perspective than bombing Damascus?
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Prashant Rao