Yes, If You Were Asking, That's A War Crime

Duncan Hunter figures he killed hundreds of civilians in Fallujah.

All the Political Acumen Of The Guy At The End Of The Bar

“Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly,” Trump responded. —Howard Stern Confirms Trump Said He Was For Iraq War In 2002

When Trump spoke those words, the hardline warhawk criticism of the first President Bush was, and had been for a decade, that he didn't "finish the job" in Iraq during Desert Storm. The warhawks went on about this endlessly. They've long comprised a considerable contingent of the two major American politicial parties, and make up a good portion of "independents" as well. They forever see a good excuse for war somewhere. Desert Storm, swift and decisive as it was, did not sate their wetted appetite for military conflict. They groused formally at the Project for a New American Century, where the blueprint for "finishing the job" was sketched out.

Trump's "I guess so," signals a wistful acquiescence to what, failing to be done before by the first Bush, must be corrected now by his son.

September in Civilization

Saudi Arabia agrees to host training of moderate Syrian rebels

Something about the idea of moderate Syrian rebels cries out for a Monte Pythoning, I suppose. A training room somewhere outside Riyadh run according to the tenets of moderate rebellion.

What civilization hath wrought, given six thousand years and home field advantage: the Saudi royals underwrite a proposed replacement for the current Syrian government composed of "moderate" rebels, while the utterly compromised Iraqi govenment lies in tatters, suffering reconstitution just the other day by the newly installed Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, whose administration currently faces the loss of considerable amounts of territory once presumed to be Iraq but held, forcibly for now, by an entity called ISIS as part of its newly proclaimed caliphate, which entity is now targeted for bombing by the USA. Politically the situation could not be more fluid, if by fluid the full flavor of catastrophe might be conveyed.

A Churl Replies

Condoleeza Rice is a non-metaphorical warmonger. She hawked the own-goal invasion of Iraq concocted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. She was part of the full-court PR for US invasion, the tragic world-historical blunder that unleashed the current generations-worth of warfare in the Middle East. She is odious in that respect.

Why should any university grant the platform of a commencement address, its one last gesture of guidance to its assembled graduating class, whatever that might be worth, to a person who, when it came to the crucial self-defining passage of her life, did the wrong thing, the utterly, reprehensibly wrong thing?

War and Justice Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Mayonnaise

War invites chaos. Sometimes the dead in war are soldiers, who may or may not have had a fighting chance. Often enough the dead are dead for arbitrary reasons having nothing to do with their fitness for or their deployment in battle. They are those, never adequately accounted for, who unfortunately chance to die in war. War's murderousness transcends its warriors, enlists mistakes and overzealousness and the unthinking catholicity of ferocity for which the male human is so justly renowned, in its service, to convincingly destroy.

Bradley Manning released a helicopter gunship video documenting the slaughter of a bunch of people on the ground in Iraq, one such incident encouraged by war there. The victims were harmless people in retrospect, a couple of them worked for the Reuters news agency. Chaos is no respecter of war's aims, a clean kill, a chestful of medals, a quick successful campaign. Chaos undercuts all rationales when it comes, and it always comes when called in war.

Bradley Manning also released to the world a cache of diplomatic cables sent between its overseas posts and the State Department, situation reports and chitchat from stations in Tripoli and Baghdad and La Paz and all the where else on the globe the United States has itself positioned these days. It is claimed that the revelations contained in the cables from North Africa helped fuel the destabilizations of the Arab Spring.

Bradley Manning was apprehended and has been subjected to a measure of torture, well within the range of cruel and unusual, during his months of confinement awaiting trial. The judge in his case, Colonel Denise Lind, recognizing this slight, recently authorized a reduction of three and three quarters months in the length of any sentence imposed on Manning, ruling that there was no intent to punish behind the military's admittedly cruel and unusual behavior.

A

Argument: On History On

James Bridle has printed a collection of every edit made to the Wikipedia article "The Iraq War" from December 2004 to November 2009, amounting to 7,000 printed pages in twelve volumes on the arguable subject. No argument regarding the Iraq War, however blunted by the forces of fact and reason, however sharpened to its best possible point by the intercessionary fashioning of some later better way of saying it, is likely to have been skipped over lightly in this enormously lengthy public handling and mishandling of the article "Iraq War" on Wikipedia. So if at some later time some historian is at all interested in becoming immersed in what people were capable of saying about the Iraq War while it was going on in an effort to make some final sense of the matter which has eluded people up till now, here is a primary document without peer: