A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Bradley Manning/Wikileaks supporter David House on #OccupyWallStreet

Posted: 17 Oct 2011

The eloquence of arguing for a different world (still continuing in Sydney, by the way) is a movement fueled by anger, technology and passion:

Assange speaks at the #OccupyLondonStockExchange protest

Posted: 16 Oct 2011

Iraq remains the catastrophe that nobody wants to acknowledge

Posted: 16 Oct 2011

Juan Cole on the spluttering end to the (kind of/sort of) formal US involvement (though private contractors are only increasing):

The US keeps fretting over Iranian influence in Iraq, but that is silly. If you didn’t want Iranian Shiite influence in Iraq you shouldn’t have overthrown the Sunni Saddam Hussein and seated the Shiite fundamentalists as a controlling interest in Parliament. Now that Washington has put the Iraqi Shiites in power, it should expect at least moments of great cooperation with Tehran.

And so that is the way the war ends. No great demonstrations in the US against it in its twilight. It is ending almost by default, because the Iraqi parliament can seldom get real legislation done, the US is forced to adhere to the 2008 SOFA. In the background, the bombs are still going off and the country is riven by ethnic disputes. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed.

The US will receive no benefit from its illegal war of aggression, no permanent bases, no bulwark against Iran, no new Arab friend to Israel, no $14 a barrel petroleum– all thing things Washington had dreamed of. Dreams that turned out to be flimsy and unsubstantial and tragic.