Forgotten Knowledge: Tokyo Firebombing, 100,000 In One Night

Firebombing of Tokyo, March 9, 1945

Firebombing of Tokyo, March 9, 1945

Seventy years ago, one-half of Tokyo (the size of New York City) was laid waste by a low level night time attack of 334 American B-29 Superfortresses.  Stripped of their guns and loaded with incendiary bombs the attack lasted over three hours.  The temperatures rose to one thousand degrees.  Over 100,000 died in wooden shanty-towns.  It was the first of a series of bombing raids that destroyed 64 Japanese cities, before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

And this was in “the Good War.”

For more, see Eyewitness to History, the Asia Pacific Journal, Japan Air Raids, BBC, and more images (warning, some very graphic.)

Now that  62% of those polled (Quinnipiac) are calling for U.S. troops back in Iraq and Syria, is the time to publicly remember war and all its demons.

Malaki Steps Down

A step back from the edge but the cliff is still crumbling and the wind blowing hard.  What next?

Nouri al-Maliki has stepped down as Iraq’s prime minister and given his backing to Haider al-Abadi as his successor, Iraqi state TV reported.  Al Jazeera

From Iraq: Backing Away from A Civil War Within A Civil War

Iran endorsed Iraq’s new prime minister-designate on Tuesday, dealing a devastating blow to Nouri al-Maliki as even the incumbent’s most loyal militia turned its back on him.

After eight years in office, Maliki has refused to step aside as Iraq’s prime minister, vowing to fight the nomination Monday of Haider al-Abadi to form a new government. But he was left with nowhere to turn for support Tuesday as he lost the backing of Tehran, which wields significant influence over Iraqi politics. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a militia that has supported Maliki in the past, also said it supported the decision of Iraq’s Shiite politicians to nominate Abadi.

Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, congratulated Abadi, Iraq’s religious leaders and political parties on the appointment, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.

 

WaPo

Enemies of Enemies — To Become Friends?

“Military aircraft that conducted air strikes against ISIS military targets in western Iraq are believed to have been from Syria’s air force, a U.S. official told ABC News.

“There have [also] been reports of Iranian troops intervening on behalf of the beleaguered Iraqi government.

ABC

The New Pottery Barn Rule: You Break it, You Move On

Contrary to Colin Powell’s much quoted warning “You Break it, You Own It,” the policy and military elites of the United States who broke Iraq have just moved on in their always comfortable lives.  This week is the 11th anniversary of the Bush-Cheney invasion.  Last year, 2013, some 8,000 Iraqi’s died in the continuing sectarian violence triggered by that invasion.

Here are some reminders.

Greg Mitchell at The Nation:

As we approach the eleventh anniversary of the US attack on Iraq this week, we may face a bit more media coverage of that tragic conflict than usual. How much of it will focus on the media misconduct that helped make the war possible (and then continue for so long)? It’s certainly not something the media like to dwell on.

For now, let’s relive just some of the good, the bad and the ugly in war coverage from the run-up to the invasion through the five years of controversy that followed. In updating the first e-book version of my book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq, which features a preface by Bruce Springsteen, I was surprised to come across once-prominent quotes and incidents that had faded a bit, even for me. Here is a list of fifteen episodes, in roughly chronological order.

1) In late March 2003, the day before the US invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”

2) After the fall of Baghdad in April, Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, said, “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.”

3) The same day, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neocons now.”

4) Thomas Friedman, who had called this a “legitimate war of choice,” now wrote at The New York Times, “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war…. Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons.”

read all

Katrina vanden Heuvel at the Nation looks back at the warnings and predictions of some who opposed the invasion:

This Monday marks the eleventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq—a solemn punctuation mark to the steadily increasing violence that has gripped that country over the past two years. Sectarian violence claimed more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013 alone, and this year’s toll has already surpassed 2,000. Iraq today is a broken and failing state: the war that many would prefer to believe ended in 2011 continues unabated, with Iraqis continuing to suffer, as much as ever, the fallout from this country’s callous lies and avoidable mistakes. Despite Colin Powell’s sanctimonious “Pottery Barn rule,” John Feffer wrote on his Foreign Policy in Focus blog at TheNation.com last month, the United States has made no effort to “own up to our responsibility for breaking the country.”

read all

Rachel Maddow put together a substantial investigation about the pre-planning to take over Iraq’s oil fields, much before the 9/11 attacks.  This is the first part of it, which you can find at MSNBC

Iraq War Dead Rising

Iraq multigraph.php

Iraq Body count reports that in DECEMBER TOTAL: 983 civilians were killed.

9,475 KILLED THIS YEAR

the highest since 2008, according to IBC

To underline the rising swirl, “Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda threatened on Thursday to seize control of Falluja and Ramadi, two of the most important cities in Iraq, setting fire to police stations, freeing prisoners from jail and occupying mosques, as the government rushed troop reinforcements to the areas.

The violence in Ramadi and Falluja had implications beyond Anbar’s borders, as the Sunni militants fought beneath the same banner as the most hard-line jihadists in Syria — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

That fighting, and a deadly bombing in Beirut on Thursday, provided the latest evidence that the Syrian civil war was breeding bloodshed and sectarian violence around the region, destabilizing Lebanon and Iraq while fueling a resurgence of radical Islamist fighters.”

NY Times

China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom

Astounding headline and story.  

 Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.

China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.

“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the mark

… “We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration who worked on Iraq oil policy. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.”

Did Gifted Generals Win the War?

Andrew Bacevich, former colonel in the US Army, and now professor of International Relations at Boston University reviews two books about the war in Iraq, and especially two of its generals: David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal.  The books do not tell all they might.  Even though Bacevich praises the research of Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor in The Endgame, he faults them for not walking their analysis out to where it leads.

“The Endgame” seeks to “provide the most comprehensive account to date” of the events it describes. It achieves that. Even so, where it matters mostthe ­authors come up short.

Future historians may well classify the surge as a myth concocted to perpetuate a fraud. The myth centers on the claim that a strategy devised in Washington and implemented by a brilliant general saved the day. The fraud is that a 20-year military effort to determine the fate of Iraq yielded something approximating a positive outcome. Although “The Endgame”provides an abundance of evidence to demolish the myth, Gordon and Trainor shy away from doing so. With the American public and political elites inclined simply to forget the Iraq war, “The Endgame”provides a rationale for doing just that.

A useful antidote to those trotting out figureheads to claim that the ship is heading in the right direction.

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John McCain: Wrong on the Facts, Wrong on the Morality and Wrong In the Heart of His Countrymen

From Jim Wallis who watched McCain in his justification throes….

 

Let me state some clear convictions from many of us in the faith community. The war in Vietnam was morally wrong. The war in Iraq was morally wrong. And John McCain has been morally wrong on both of them. Christian judgments of war should always run a narrow spectrum — from the peacemaking ethic of Jesus, which rejects war to the just war theology of Augustine and Aquinas. But even in the just war tradition, conflicts have to pass a number of moral tests and be the option of “last resort.” The burden of proof is always on those who support war to justify the taking of life.

Both Vietnam and Iraq failed those tests and were unnecessary wars of choice. Those wars were unnecessary, the terrible deaths from those wars were unnecessary, the enormous casualties were unnecessary, the painful family losses were unnecessary and all the horrible costs were unnecessary.

And yesterday, we saw a politician who has based his entire political career on war furiously trying to force a potential Secretary of Defense to say that he has been right all along.

But McCain hasn’t been right in his endless promotion of war as the primary solution to our national conflicts. He has been consistently wrong and America has paid a very high price because of the ideological zealots of war that McCain represents.

Iraq Vet Offers to Family He Destroyed — His Anguish

In a powerful article called Atonement in The New Yorker by the unparalleled Dexter Filkins we get a story that should be part of every recruiting package to anyone who thinks joining the armed forces is a good thing to do.

It tells of Lu Lobello, a hell-raising kid who joined the U.S. Marines and found himself in a fire-fight in Baghdad that nothing. nothing, nothing, had prepared him — or any of his squad– for.  Trained only for “when in doubt, light ’em up,” he was part of a massacre of an Armenian Christian family who were themselves trying to get out of harms way.  His memories of the afternoon have destroyed the rest of his life:  dishonorable discharge, heavy drinking,  continual insomnia.  Finally, in desperation, he decided to track down the young woman in the car they had shot at. And he found her — living in the United States, her shattered shoulder healed.  Filkins, who had written about the family after the incident, helped arrange a meeting between Lobello and Nora Kachadoorian.  And, out of uniform, away free fire zones and in the deepest wonder of human beings, he found forgiveness.

This is a story you will long remember.  It should be widely known, and read for all its lessons:

  • once in a war, you don’t get to chose what happens
  • what happens in 10 minutes may affect the rest of your life
  • bullets don’t know good guys from bad
  • no matter what you’ve prepared for, you haven’t prepared for this
  • no matter what your superiors tell you, they haven’t planned for this
  • some people, some times, find empathy beyond the imaginable

Some excerpts… but read it all..  New Yorker Oct 29 & Nov 5  [Sorry, no complete link.  You have to log in, or buy the issue, or go the library or a friend with a subscription, and of which will reward you] Read more of this post