Insurgents at the Gate

i like the way its written

Its about time the western bootlickers volunteered to go to Iraq & Afghanistan. They were never needed so desperately.

Some super Power! Lahaul vila Quvvat.

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Iraq

The Times May 29, 2006

3,000 UK troops are Awol since war began
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor

NEARLY 3,000 British soldiers have gone absent without leave every year since the start of the Iraq war, with more than 1,000 of them still missing, according to Ministry of Defence figures.

The numbers evading capture by the Royal Military Police have risen sharply since the invasion of Iraq, giving rise to allegations that an increasing number of soldiers might be trying to avoid further tours to the conflict zone.


Recently Ben Griffin, an SAS soldier, resigned from the elite regiment, saying that he was not prepared to serve again in Iraq because of the way that American troops treated the Iraqis.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2201471,00.html

John H. Summers: C. Wright Mills`s The Power Elite
Source: NYT Book Review (5-14-06)

[John H. Summers teaches intellectual history at Harvard. He is currently writing a biography of C. Wright Mills.]

``The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern.``

The opening sentence of ``The Power Elite,`` by C. Wright Mills, seems unremarkable, even bland. But when the book was first published 50 years ago last month, it exploded into a culture riddled with existential anxiety and political fear. Mills — a broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia — argued that the ``sociological key`` to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization of society. At the pinnacle of the government, the military and the corporations, a small group of men made the decisions that reverberated ``into each and every cranny`` of American life. ``Insofar as national events are decided,`` Mills wrote, ``the power elite are those who decide them.``

His argument met with criticism from all sides. ``I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet`s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,`` Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The New York Post. Adolf Berle, writing in the Book Review, said that while the book contained ``an uncomfortable degree of truth,`` Mills presented ``an angry cartoon, not a serious picture.`` Liberals could not believe a book about power in America said so little about the Supreme Court, while conservatives attacked it as leftist psychopathology (``sociological mumbo jumbo,`` Time said). The Soviets translated it in 1959, but decided it was pro-American. ``Although Mills expresses a skeptical and critical attitude toward bourgeois liberalism and its society of power,`` said the introduction to the Russian translation, ``his hopes and sympathies undoubtedly remain on its side.``

Even so, ``The Power Elite`` found an eclectic audience at home and abroad. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara debated the book in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir published excerpts in their radical journal, Les Temps Modernes. In the United States, Mills received hundreds of letters from Protestant clergymen, professors and students, pacificists and soldiers. This note came from an Army private stationed in San Francisco: ``I genuinely appreciate reading in print ideas I have thought about some time ago. At that time, they seemed to me so different that I didn`t tell anyone.`` In the aftermath of the global riots of 1968, the C.I.A. identified Mills as one of the most influential New Left intellectuals in the world, though he had been dead for six years.

The historical value of ``The Power Elite`` seems assured. It was the first book to offer a serious model of power that accounted for the secretive agencies of national security. Mills saw the postideological ``postmodern epoch`` (as he would later call it) at its inception, and his book remains a founding text in the continuing demand for democratically responsible political leadership — a demand echoed and amplified across the decades in books like Christopher Lasch`s ``Revolt of the Elites`` (1995), Kevin Phillips`s ``Wealth and Democracy`` (2002), Chalmers Johnson`s ``Sorrows of Empire`` (2004) and Thomas Frank`s ``What`s the Matter With Kansas?`` (2004)....


Posted on Tuesday, May 16, 2006

in retrospect, we should all thank dubya for boldly going in to iraq and removing saddam. can you imagince if he was molly-coddled on his terms and if he were to be still around how arrogant he would be with oil price at $72/barrel and deamnd from cheen and hindus rising? the whole middle-east would be in flames without the ledership shown by the US..iran and iraq fighting again, iraq invading kuwait and al-qaida controlling soodies. iraq as bad as it is, is a far more controlled explosion, and surely could have been done in a better fashion...

Re: # 29
hamidm -- here is the partial answer to your solution question:

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he felt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son`s death.

Asked what would give him satisfaction, Berg, an anti-war activist and candidate for U.S. Congress, said, ``The end of the war and getting rid of George Bush.``


``The end of the war and getting rid of George Bush.``

Re: # 28

nasah,

....... i happen to agree with the next president of the united states, john mccain, who wants to send in another 15-30000 troops to win the war ..... what is your solution ?

..... look, i see is iraq as a great opportunity to break the logjam in the the muslim world and, more importantly, in the muslim mind ........ together with the the shining example of israel, a democratic iraq can will serve as a becon of light for people who have been wandering in darkness for the last thousand years ............ i think it is downright mean and petty to deny those people a shot at liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness and imported beer ...........

hamidm, tahmed -- I agree with you guys that this dog was so rabid and so out of control that it had become an embarrassment to even those bloody Islamists themselves --

so they had to call the Haditha`s puppycatchers to put this deadly DOG to sleep....and it`s definitely a temp gas relief.....before another ONE, another ONE and another ONE replaces him....

nasah #13 you can call americans what you like - the fact is that zarqawi is now roasting in hell as america scores once again on behalf of the civilized world. Of course, zarqawi and his kind of two-paisa thugs amount to nothing compared to the thugs the US has put away in the past - like the Nazis and the Japanese (who would be ruling over you today while you were declared an ``inferior race`` if american hadnt put them in their place in WWII).

Re: # 15
that was quite immature of you to post that buddy. if thats how u judge hindus, us muslims are worth nothing based on our current records

#15 by hasanmahmood

For all the lovely Hindus
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/5058840.stm

Yaar what do you want to prove? Child marriages are as bad as honor killings, Karo Kari or the Vani system in Pakistan. At least such practices are abhorred by the majority of Indians unlike honor killings which are given a silent wink by Pakis and where even a top Paki industrialist was accused of getting his daughter Saima Sarwar killed smack inside Asma Jahangir`s office.

And just to spite you, here`s something for all the lovely Pakis:


Traded like animals - the blood feuds settled with `gift` of a wife

Excerpts:

``Seventeen years ago her father had struck a devilish deal to stay out of jail. Now his daughter was paying its price. A rival family was demanding that Tasleem marry one of their sons. Her hand in marriage had been promised back in 1989, they insisted, as part of an agreement to end a blood feud between the two clans.``

``She is a victim of vani, an ugly tradition where young Pakistani women are traded between families in resolution of a dispute. Although outlawed two years ago, vani is still prevalent in conservative pockets across Pakistan.``

Ref#22

[......when measured against the 150 years standards of Indian and Pakistani colonial laissez affair bondage ]

You get your dates wrong brother. Indian bondage is much longer. Since the cruel, muslim barbarian started attacking Indians it starts since then.

Ref#22
[Invaders and invaded cannot be morally equivalent]

Correct

[Iraqis should LOVE the Americans ]

May be no.

But Zarqawi is not Iraqi.

Islamic terrorism is not Iraqi.

Al Qaida is not Iraqi.

Dear Nasah

Please don`t forget this distinction.

Invaders and invaded cannot be morally equivalent.....Occupiers and occupied can`t be equal on the Scales of Justice....

.....to resist the occupation is the most morally and ethically correct act of the occupied -- if that was NOT SO Europe would still be under the Nazi boots in 2006....

-- the means to resist depend upon the invaders means to inflict pain on the occupied citizenry -- the ignorant arrogant Bushy criminals thought Iraq being a backward brown third world country -- invading it will be a cake walk -- Iraqis being the vile Arabs will bow before the force used in Fallujah -- and torture in Abu Gharib -- lie down on the streets of Baghdad -- and form a welcome mat for the conquering white army --

and why the Iraqis did NOT -- against all that fireworks of `awe & thunder` -- against that murderous military splendor -- is the most disappointing puzzling thing for my naive American countrymen......

but interestingly this is the view of my Pakistani and Indian moralists as well....well the problem is that Baghdad is not the moral equivalent of Islamabad or Delhi.....either..

unlike the stoic power-respecting rational invader-tolerant `xenophile` Indians and Pakistanis -- Iraqis are impatient intolerant `xenophobic` people -- especially when they visit in armored vehicles....

for some crazy reasons not clear to `understanding` Indians and Pakistanis analysts -- the Iraqis HATE foreign invaders -- and HATE is inherently not a good thing in subcontinental terms --

the Iraqis should LOVE the Americans for Fallujah (sounds like yummy Falludas) and Abu Gharib....

the difficulty is that the small small-minded Iraqis are not as big and big-hearted as the Indians and Pakistanis.....

......when measured against the 150 years standards of Indian and Pakistani colonial laissez affair bondage -- the Iraqis definitely have an anaphylactically hypersensitive sense of national dignity and an abnormally touchy sense of national self respect.....

and that is how the Iraqis think that Haditha is not their doing but the Americans undoing.....
-- and in this regards -- the ungrateful Iraqis are being not necessarily unreasonable with the reasonable gracious Americans.....

I agree that All Iraqis need to become born again Christians -- that is if someone slaps you on one cheek that they should offer the slapper the other cheek for to be slapped again -- but the irony is the that it is the Born-Again Christian who is slapping them on their all four cheeks.....and poor Iraqis don`t know what to become -- except slap back that born-again un-Christian with all their fours......