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sanchez just doesn't get it .....
Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is 'a Nightmare' …..
In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration's handling of the war "incompetent" and said the result was "a nightmare with no end in sight."
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan" and denounced the current addition of American forces as a "desperate" move that would not achieve long-term stability.
"After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism," General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.
- By Gus Leonisky at 14 Oct 2007 - 1:22pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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The end would mean the end of plunder...
Written by Chris Floyd
Saturday, 13 October 2007
There are actually some quarters where Pentagon honcho Robert Gates is considered a moderate of some kind, one of the few sensible, responsible figures in the Bush Administration able to restrain – or at least moderate – the raging-bull belligerence of Dick Cheney and his crew. This has always been a curious reputation for a man who has spent most of his career hip-deep in militarist skullduggery, as Robert Parry, among others, has amply demonstrated. (Here and here, for example.) But in such desperate and degraded times as these, it's only natural to clutch at the slightest straw of hope that someone, somewhere, will stand between us and the worst excesses of our masters, as we noted here earlier.
(In fact, I'm so old that I can remember all the way back to the year 2000, when Cheney himself was regarded by the peddlers of conventional wisdom as a sensible, responsible figure, a "safe pair of hands" who would restrain the coltish antics of Young Bush and mitigate the extremist zeal of the GOP "base." That really panned out well, didn't it?)
Brain mash...
From The Guardian
The mTBI injury can occur when a soldier gets a blow on the head or is in close proximity to an explosion. The increased use of improvised explosive devices (IEDS) - roadside bombs - in Iraq and Afghanistan means more troops are at risk than in previous conflicts, and experts say that even the most advanced helmets cannot protect the brain from the shock waves.
A US neurologist and former doctor at the US department of veterans affairs, P Steven Macedo, said: "The enemy combatants are not trying to put missiles or bullets into our troops - they are trying to blow up their vehicles with IEDs. But the vehicles and the men wear heavy armour so what goes through them in many cases is the blast wave and we are beginning to see the impact this is having on the neurological make-up of our troops. This is the first war since the first world war where the major cause of injuries is blasts."
Advances in brain scanning have revealed that soldiers can sustain bruising and blood clots on the brain, even if there is no visible injury. If the condition is not diagnosed it can lead to long-term problems - from depression and anxiety to violence and relationship break-up.