The Awesomeness that is Obama's Iraq Plan!

In Other News

 
When Settlers Attack (in Israel)

Nir Rosen reports from Majd al Anjar, where the rage of young men mixes with the sectarian fervour spilling over Iraq’s borders.

Chomsky on Iraq

 

 

Required Reading: Arthur Silber

Over One Million Murdered -- and Nothing Has Been Learned

More Iraq Links

From Chris Floyd:

• As Iraqis See It
• CSI Iraq
  

Read the Report

Hillary Clinton: Bad for Iraqis, Iranians, Americans and Democrats

This drove me to write this post.

Hillary voted for the Iraq invasion, each subsequent funding request, and the belligerent Senate resolution on Iran.

It should be extremely clear to anyone. Do not vote for Hillary.

Her Iraq related votes:

• (-) Voted to Agree To: H.J.Res. 114; Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002
• (-) Voted to Reject: Durbin Amdt. No. 4865; To amend the authorization for the use of the Armed Forces to cover an imminent threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction rather than the continuing threat posed by Iraq.
• (-) Voted to Reject: Levin Amdt. No. 4862; To authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces, pursuant to a new resolution of the United Nations Security Council, to destroy, remove, or render harmless Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons-usable material, long-range ballistic missiles, and related facilities, and for other purposes.
• (-) Voted to Reject: Byrd Amdt. No. 4868; To provide statutory construction that constitutional authorities remain unaffected and that no additional grant of authority is made to the President not directly related to the existing threat posed by Iraq.
• (+) Voted to Agree To: Byrd Amdt. No. 4869, As Amended; To provide a termination date for the authorization of the use of the Armed Forces of the United States, together with procedures for the extension of such date unless Congress disapproves the extension.
• (-) Voted to Agree To: S. 1689 As Amended; Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan Security and Reconstruction Act, 2004
• (-) Voted to Agree To: Biden Amdt. No. 1190 As Modified; To express the sense of the Congress that the United States remain engaged in Iraq in order to ensure a peaceful, stable, unified Iraq with a representative government.
• (-) Voted to Pass: S.762, As Amended; Supplemental Appropriations Act to Support Department of Defense Operations in Iraq for Fiscal Year 2003
• (-) Voted to Agree To: Warner Amdt. No. 3260, as Modified; To authorize appropriations for a contingent emergency reserve fund for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• (-) Voted to Reject: Kerry Amdt. No. 4442; To require the redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq in order to further a political solution in Iraq, encourage the people of Iraq to provide for their own security, and achieve victory in the war on terror.
• (-) Voted to Agree To: Motion to Table McConnell Amdt. 4269; To require the withdrawal of the United States Armed Forces from Iraq and urge the convening of an Iraq summit.
• (+) Voted to Agree To: Feingold Amdt. No. 3164; To safely redeploy United States troops from Iraq.
• (+) Voted to Agree To: Levin Amdt. No. 2898; To provide for a reduction and transition of United States forces in Iraq.
• (+) Voted to Agree To: Feingold Amdt. No. 2924; To safely redeploy United States troops from Iraq.
• (+) Voted to Agree To: S. J. Res. 9; United States Policy in Iraq Resolution of 2007

Her Iran related vote and statements:

• Voted to Agree To: Kyl Amdt. No. 3017 as Modified; To express the sense of the Senate regarding Iran.
• Statement of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Support of Stop Iran Now Rally
• Clinton: No Military Action on Iran Without Congressional Authority

Other voices:

Arthur Silber
Chris Floyd

Congrats to Iceland!

A link roundup for today

More links:

• What World War III May Look Like
• No More Dirty Tricks Campaign
• A 9/11 every day for 5 or 10 years?
• I called. Have you?
  

Links to be aware of ....

-- Video regarding Blackwater; private security corporation, recently in the news.

-- Annotated version of Bush's Sept. 13th speech

-- Naomi Klein: Why failure is the new face of success

-- Towards Iran: Rice swipes at IAEA, urges bold action on Iran

-- TomDispatch: American Exceptionalism Meets Team Jesus, Tom Engelhardt interviews James Carroll

Letter on David Reinhard's: There are defeatists, and then there is Brian Baird

"There are defeatists, and then there is Brian Baird" was a commentary by David Reinhard about pretty much anyone who feels the Iraq Invasion has and can only fail and Representative Baird's recent trip to Iraq in which he finds both hope and a reason to stay forever.

Here was my letter:

In David Reinhard's latest absurdity ('There are defeatists, and then there is Brian Baird', Aug. 23), he convinces no one of the notion that he is either sorry for nor will refrain from "partisan name-calling". It is certainly not "defeatist" to recognize reality, as evidenced in the latest National Intelligence Estimate which notes that the "steep escalation of rates of violence has been checked for now" leaving Iraq with a best a flat rate of violence in which easily over 1500 Iraqi civilians are killed each month -- hooray! Since it is certain that US troops will kill more civilians, children among them, a "truth-telling simple descriptor" of David Reinhard and other 'succeedists' such as Baird would be: 'Child-killers'.

I Support the Troops too!

A. Whitney Brown shows some love!

What is his point?

I was thinking more about David Kane's paper on Roberts' Iraq mortality study published in the Lancet and wondering what is his point?

Well, here it is:

When including Falluja, it is impossible to have a precise estimate of post-invasion mortality. [p 3]

Yet excluding Falluja is not “conservative.” In fact, including this cluster — i.e., using all the available data — generates a result with such a wide confidence interval that the reported increase in Iraqi mortality becomes statistically insignificant. [p 5]

From the calculations above, it is impossible to be 95% confident that there was an increase in mortality. The lower bound of the confidence interval for the relative risk can not be 1.6, as reported in L1. It must be much lower. [last paragraph]

The goal it seems is to show that the study is wrong. And what is the motivation to show that it is wrong? Yummy soup indeed!

Sampling Soup: Iraq and the Lancet Study

In regard to this debate of the study by Roberts el al. in 2004, I will weigh in with a modification of an analogy I ran into somewhere. By the way, I have ZERO expertise in statistics soooo ... fortunately this is my blog and I can play one if I wanna! grin!

Somewhere at some point someone (hahaha!) suggested that sampling and polling and the like are similar to a cook taking a spoonful of their well-stirred soup to determine how it tastes. Assuming cooks do this and it works it seems just as amazing as deriving large conclusions from "such a small sample".

Well, to continue with and extend this metaphor to the study and Iraq. Imagine Iraq as a large pot of soup at a rolling boil. Now, you decide to take a couple of samples from various locations within the pot; not necessarily just with a spoon from the top but say you drop in your thimble-on-a-string and pull it up and taste it.

Now say that you get five samples this way. One tastes almost passable, three taste really bad and the fifth one tastes truly beyond horrible. What is the "taste mean"? Taste standard deviation? What do you think the soup tastes like "overall"? What about the "truly beyond horrible" sample? Is it an outlier? Do we throw it out? Do we have a large confidence interval? If so and we add in the outlier, does that increase our confidence interval? So much so, that maybe large portions of the soup actually taste quite yummy!?!

Anyway, probably does not make any sense or have any relation to reality, but it was fun coming up with anyway!!

Letter on David Reinhard's: A surge of information to counter the defeatocrats, Thur 26th 2007

"A surge of information to counter the defeatocrats" was a commentary by David Reinhard about Bush's latest attempt to justify the Iraq fiasco.

Here was my letter:

What was thuglican David Reinhard's point in his July 26th opinion "A surge of information to counter the defeatocrats"? Is it that Bush is taking propagandistic advice from Osama bin Laden in framing the war in Iraq as the "third world war"? Or is it to prove correct the assertion of critics when he informs us that "in 2004 [Zarqawi] pledged allegiance to bin Laden" finally giving al-Qaida any real sort of "presence" or "prestige" in Iraq and thereby putting the lie to al-Qaida as a justification for the invasion? Really, what is the point to David Reinhard?

Letter on Debra Saunders': It is simply too soon to discuss surge failure, Mon July 16th 2007

"It is simply too soon to discuss surge failure" was a pundit commentary on the Iraq surge by Debra Saunders. I can not find it on the Oregonian's website, but I believe it was this one.

Here was my letter:

Presumably the Editors wished to provide some "balance" to the Iraq surge by offering Saunders' opinion ("too soon to discuss surge failure'), which 36% of Americans at most would agree with (Pew Research Center's survey of March 26, 2007). Saunders', like all those on her side of this issue (see Reinhard on Sunday), only offer as "evidence" of the surge's effectiveness the military's own statements and pronouncements. Such propagandistic stenography is repellent to the bulk of humanity that understood by the Enlightenment; Saunders ought to be ashamed.