Barry McCaffrey on Drugs The Butcher of Rumaila Says "Stay the Course" Candide’s Notebooks, April 3, 2007
Rumaila High
Barry McCaffrey, possibly a war criminal during the first Gulf War and Bill Clinton's drug Czar, writes in the LATimes that there is no choice in Iraq but to stay and kill more Iraqis: “More than 100,000 armed militia members and insurgents confront central authorities. A handful of foreign fighters (about 500) and a couple of thousand Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq extremists provoke sectarian violence through murderous attacks on the innocent civilian Shiite population and their mosques. This provokes a response of brutality and ethnic cleansing against the vulnerable Sunni civilian population.” Despite all that, Also, “As many as 3,000 Iraqis are being killed or kidnapped a month, and American forces have suffered more than 27,000 killed and wounded. But “we have little choice as Americans except to give our new military commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and our new ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, the political and military support they need during the next 12 months. Failure in Iraq at this point could generate a regional war among Iraq's neighbors that would imperil U.S. interests for a decade or more.” I emphasized the as Americans: what does it mean exactly, as Americans? A minor, telling detail in a degradingly argued whole that's blind to the obvious even as it states it: American interests have been ruined for decades in the region, and a regional war is only another way of redefining the war already handicapping the United States in Iraq. See the full column...
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
