Exercises

Something rang false about Operation Swarmer from the start, some tickling in the back of my mind from my days in the Air Force. Today, as reports of no resistance and forty insurgents captured, many of which had been released, only served to strengthen my unease, my rottenness in Denmark feeling about what looked to be too easy. I read quotes about how it represents a change, marks an evolution. It's a very big exercise to capture thirty insurgents....

It's an exercise. That was the thought that was tickling me all day. It's a demonstration - I used to watch them all the time. Gather a bunch of guys up, drop them out of an airplane, add a little smoke and a lot of noise and you get a military demonstration, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, signifying nothing. We have proven that Iraqi dress-up soldiers can fly in U. S. helicopters and can hold a weapon. The pictures I've seen of Iraqi troops show one thing: They aren't sharp. Their movements are slow, sloppy, imprecise. These aren't soldiers, they're men dressed up as soldiers carrying weapons.

Want to bet the insurgents they rounded up were dressed in olive drab clothing and wore cheap Casio watches? That was your ticket to Guantanamo if you were found with that contraband in Afghanistan. Those "battlefield fighters" and those "insurgents" have one thing in common, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were picked up for the wrong reason.

The highly publicized weapons cachets yesterday? There were six and by one of our generals' own admission, they weren't huge. A couple of AK-47's maybe.

This appeal to the NASCAR and Nintendo crowd comes at a time when our rhetoric against Iran starts to sound more and more like our rhetoric against Iraq. Whether Bush is readying another invasion to make us look even more like our enemies in the second world war and the cold war, I don't know. It sounds like it, although I rather doubt even his Republican syncophants in Congress would approve a war declaration or even a resolution of support under the current situation. Every poll has a lower number. Bush's Presidency has failed and he knows it. His only chance of rescue is another attack or another war and he knows that.

We've lost the moral high ground. We keep men whose only crime was owning a plastic digital watch for years without access to counsel, the right to confront their accusers or even having their families notified that they're alive. We deny our own citizens the right to trial, resorting to legal maneuvering to keep them jailed for just a few days longer. We invade countries for no reason other than the belief that they may some day do us harm and maintain that it's our good and proper right to do so again in the future. We rob from our poor to enrich our rich. Our Congress is for sale to the highest bidder. We openly approve of rape of the environment and sale of our public lands to pay for obligations while our leaders have frittered our riches away. We are unable to police ourselves in Congress yet one in ten of us are either in prison or on parole. Under Republican Rule, we are no longer the shining beacon of freedom and liberty, rather we've become our enemies.