On Not Taking The Neocon Bait

The Dish

IRAQ-UNREST-MOSUL

David Harsanyi sees few good options for salvaging the outcomes of the Iraq War:

Some will, no doubt, argue that doing nothing (and we might very well be doing something soon) means that more than 4,400 U.S. troops and over $700 billion had been wasted in a war that ended but was not won. Perhaps. But a more important matter is this: would the death of another 4,000, or 400, or four, bring about a preferable outcome or a set of conditions that allow the United States to convincingly declare victory? If a decade of nation building brought us this, what could we possible gain by seriously reengaging? Clearly, to make it work the American people would need to be prepared to make a generational commitment – and polls don’t tell us that we’re in the mood for an open-ended conflict in the Middle East.

These are horrible choices, indeed…

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Japan kills 30 whales in first hunt since international court halted its Antarctic whaling – “survey” indicates no one feels more patriotic or manly!

Japan has caught 30 whales off its northern coast in its first hunt since an international court ordered the halt of its annual expedition in the Antarctic, officials said Friday.

The Fisheries Agency said a coastal whaling fleet killed 30 minke whales during the April-June season as part of Japan’s northwestern Pacific research hunt. Another group of whalers is still at work in a more distant area of the Pacific.

via Japan kills 30 whales in first hunt since international court halted its Antarctic whaling.

President & First Lady Make Historic Trip to Standing Rock Sioux Reservatio Today

Presidential visits to Indian reservations are extremely rare. President Bill Clinton was the last sitting U.S. president to visit an Indian reservation when he did so in 1999 to the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Prior to President Clinton’s visit, President Franklin Roosevelt visited the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina in 1936.

via President & First Lady Make Historic Trip to Standing Rock Sioux Reservatio Today.

High Tunnel Hoop House Construction Guide – free download

This publication is the product of 17 years of experience in hoop house (high tunnel) design, construction and utilization. As an educator and consultant, I have been asked numerous times by work associates and growers to produce a ‘how to’ resource on hoop house construction.

via High Tunnel Hoop House Construction Guide.

I remember Mosul, but Iraq 3.0 is what happens when you exit a war early | Colby Buzzell | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Sometime in the 2020s, San Francisco

One day my son is going to ask me at the dinner table: Daddy, why did we lose the Iraq war?

I won’t ask him if his teacher put him up to it, because 10 years from now, it will probably be common knowledge that, yes, we did lose the Iraq war. Everybody – teachers and historians, liberals and conservatives – will agree.

I have years to prepare an answer for my son. Right now, this is what I think: We were winning when I was there. We were winning when we were there.

That’s about all I can say. We lost.

Of course, I could also say the same same thing my father thought about his alma mater: A lot of good Americans died in the war.

Period. End of discussion.

What else can you say?

via I remember Mosul, but Iraq 3.0 is what happens when you exit a war early | Colby Buzzell | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

28 injured, 8 detained in fierce clashes at Al-Aqsa | Maan News Agency

Twenty-eight Palestinians were injured and eight detained during clashes that broke out after Israeli forces stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City after Friday prayers.

Israeli forces stormed the holy compound, which is the third-holiest site in Islam, after worshipers began marching in support of more than 125 Palestinian administrative detainees who have been on hunger strike for more than 50 days.

The march left through the Moroccan and Chain Gates, at which point groups of special forces began firing stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets toward worshipers.

Special forces also began beating worshipers with batons, including ambulance crews and journalists on the scene, while another Israeli unit besieged the worshipers in the Al-Aqsa Qibli Mosque and closed the doors and launched stun grenades and pepper gas into it.

A fourth unit besieged worshipers inside the Marwani Mosque, and fired stun grenades and gas at worshipers, who were mostly elderly, according to the Al-Aqsa mosque director.

After the end of clashes, police set up a checkpoint at the doors of the Al-Aqsa mosque and began checking identity cards. They detained eight Palestinians during the checks, according to police.

via 28 injured, 8 detained in fierce clashes at Al-Aqsa | Maan News Agency.

If this were US, British, or German police doing this to worshipers – what would we say?

Dip of the week! Hates Prairie Chickens and loves campaign payoffs! To reverse the Department of the Interior’s listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to prevent further consideration of listing of such species as a threatened species or endangered species under that Act pending implementation of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-Wide Conservation Plan and other conservation measures, and for other purposes. (H.R. 4866) – GovTrack.us

H.R. 4866: To reverse the Department of the Interior’s listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the …

… Endangered Species Act of 1973, to prevent further consideration of listing of such species as a threatened species or endangered species under that Act pending implementation of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-Wide Conservation Plan and other conservation measures, and for other purposes.

via To reverse the Department of the Interior’s listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to prevent further consideration of listing of such species as a threatened species or endangered species under that Act pending implementation of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-Wide Conservation Plan and other conservation measures, and for other purposes. (H.R. 4866) – GovTrack.us.

Oops, Sorry For “Accidentally” Destroying Your Mar Mkhayel Home

Oops! We knocked down another house accidentally for the 500th time – let’s go for 1,000! Not.

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

While everyone jumped from one pub to the next in Mar Mkhayel yesterday to catch the first game of the FIFA World Cup, there was a woman there standing in disbelief in the midst of her living room, looking over the streets filled with traffic. She was not looking out of a window.

The Facebook group advocating to Save Beirut’s Heritage (link) is trying to propagate the story of a woman who could have died because of the greed of contractors in Beirut who know there’s no law to hunt them, no regulations to constrict them and no one to tell them they did nothing wrong.

Right next to that woman’s house is a 1920s building which as of yesterday does not exist anymore. In the process of demolishing that building, her own apartment’s walls were destroyed in the process. If that woman had been there while those skilled…

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The gun lobby’s new tactic: redefining ‘school shootings’ so they don’t count | News | theguardian.com

In short – as far as I can follow the logic – the message to parents concerned that there are loaded weapons going off on school property, and that their sons and daughters are at risk of being hit by bullets from those weapons, is this: it doesn’t really count unless the shooter is a pupil, not involved in a gang, who made a pre-meditated plan to massacre a large number of students.

And not in the parking lot.

(If you think this kind of absurdity is confined to the fringe, see this only slightly less mendacious CNN piece, which brings the figure down from 74 to 15 by excluding, among others, shootings motivated by “personal arguments, accidents [or] alleged gang activities and drug deals”. Johnson says the cable channel stole his work.)

What’s especially dispiriting about this flat denial of reality is how little prospect it offers for rational discussion or compromise. Even if you’re a supporter of gun control, you can still hold a reasoned discussion with somebody who believes that the benefits of widespread firearms ownership outweigh the harms. You can discuss international comparisons; and how no comparable country experiences anything like this level of gun violence; the other person can seek to establish why those comparisons aren’t relevant; or that, yes, violent deaths are actually in decline in the US, and so on. But when the pro-gun side of the argument consists of simply insisting that the gun violence that people are so distraught about isn’t real gun violence? Then there’s no clear way forward at all.

And let’s not forget the bigger point here. A pro-gun journalist applies the most stringent imaginable criteria to the term ‘school shooting’; he rejects every instance he possibly can, for reasons many might regard as spurious, and then triumphantly declares that there have only been … seven bona fide school shootings in America since December 2012!

Only seven school shootings since December 2012.

I hope I never to get to the point at which the word “only” in that sentence makes even the slightest bit of sense.

via The gun lobby’s new tactic: redefining ‘school shootings’ so they don’t count | News | theguardian.com.

Turkey ignored direct warnings of ISIS attack on Mosul – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

As Turkish leaders scramble to find a way out of the crisis, details of the security lapses that led to the storming of the consulate are beginning to emerge. Unless the hostages are released unharmed, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan could face a political crisis of a scale that might yet torpedo his candidacy for the August presidential race.

What we know

On June 6, the governor of Mosul, Atheel al-Nujaifi, put in an emergency call to Kareem Sinjari, the interior minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq saying that ISIS was about to take over the city. Sinjari swiftly spread the word, a full five days before the attack occurred. It is unthinkable that the Turks were not aware of the danger. Yet they apparently did not feel threatened enough to evacuate the consulate. Indeed, as recently as June 10, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared that there was no threat to Turkey’s Consul General Ozturk Yilmaz and his staff. Davutoglu has since changed his tune, now saying that the security environment to travel by land to Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital, had rendered evacuation impossible. Never mind that it’s just a 40-minute drive from Mosul. In the worst-case scenario, Turkey could have used helicopters to evacuate the personnel. Turkey has around 2.000 troops stationed on the Iraqi side of the Turkish-Iraqi border, nominally there to chase Kurdistan Workers Party fighters if need be, and they have helicopters.

via Turkey ignored direct warnings of ISIS attack on Mosul – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.