Speaking of Zombies

• Mercury Rising excerpts a Democracy Now! interview with Raed Jarrar discussing current events in Iraq:

  There has been a lot of focus on ISIS because it makes a good media story. It’s this crazy group. Everyone is an expert now on ISIS and where it came from. And it tells a compelling story for a U.S. intervention: There is an extremist terrorist group that is threatening a legitimate central government that is our friend. That is the narrative now. I think that is important to unpack and deconstruct, because, on the one hand, ISIS is one of many players in this uprising. It’s really naive to believe that one crazy terrorist group can take 50 percent of Iraq’s territory in a week. There are many other players, including—I think the most important players are tribal leaders in all of these provinces, and their armed militias, and former Iraqi officials from the Saddam Hussein government, led by the former vice president, Izzat al-Douri, who runs a group called al-Naqshbandi, a group. There are other smaller players like the Iraqi Islamic Army, the Mujahideen Army, the 1920 Brigades. There are, I would say, at least 12 other players. So it’s more indigenous. The vast majority, I would say, maybe almost everyone who’s fighting, is an Iraqi, unlike what the image that is being drawn by the Iraqi authorities.

• Sing it, Southern Beale:

  We should never, ever have gone into Iraq. Never. End, full stop. What’s happening now in Iraq is exactly what we peaceniks said would happen waaaay back in 2002 when this was being “debated” the first time. Sectarian violence, civil war, Sunni vs Shia, etc. etc. etc. All of that stuff. We were told we were unpatriotic. We were told to support the troops. We were told to shut up and clap louder and put a yellow ribbon on our cars and stick a cork in it and stop talking about how much the war would cost because “deficits don’t matter.” We were right then, and we’re right now.
  
  And to the mainstream news media, who banged the war drums so loudly 12 years ago: stop trotting out everyone who was completely wrong last time to offer “expertise” this time. There are no do-overs in warmongering.
  
  I find it completely unacceptable that we live in a country where Americans will take to the streets to prevent their fellow citizens from having health insurance, but they refuse to acknowledge that this country sent its soldiers to die for oil company profits. Wake the fuck up, people.

• ETA:  James Fallows, The Atlantic:

  Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life—writers, politicians, academics—who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense. None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to. [Added emphasis mine.]