Pseudospeciation, the ability of humans and some other primates to classify certain members of their own species as ‘other,’ can neutralize the threshold of inhibition so they can kill conspecifics. —from War Psychiatry

The above comes from an army textbook on combat trauma. To such lovely military terms such as collateral damage and friendly fire we now add “pseudospeciation” and “conspecifics”: the practice of turning people into something less than human so we can kill them without hesitation or remorse.

There have always been two distinct stages to military training. First, the basic tasks and regimens that go into doing one’s duty — how to march and how to shoot and chain of command and so forth. Like any job, serving in the military involves a set of skills that must be mastered by every new recruit.

This first level of training is all that’s necessary to produce a first-grade military … in peace time. But if we want them to be effective during war, then they need the second level of training — they must be conditioned (some say brainwashed) to view everyone on the other side, civilians and combatants, as less than human.

Once we’ve transformed that family of five into a cadre of ragheads, hadjis, spics, gooks, japs, niggers, or injuns, then it doesn’t matter how we treat them. They’re conspecifics — less than humans — and we do the world a favor by eliminating all such vermin.

Too harsh? How about this little morale building ditty from the Vietnam era that is still used today to train those troops we so love to support:

Shell the town and kill the people.
Drop the napalm in the square.
Do it on a Sunday morning
While they’re on their way to prayer.

Aim your missiles at the schoolhouse.
See the teacher ring the bell.
See the children’s smiling faces
As their schoolhouse burns to hell

Throw some candy to the children.
Wait till they all gather round.
Then you take your M-16 now
And mow the little fuckers down.

This is your country on war-think. Many of our beloved troops, having mowed the little fuckers down, will be returning to a local community near you. Let’s hope you and your children don’t look too conspecific.

Mr. Bush likes to say that his wars are bigger than politics and that major decisions belong to the generals, rather than Washington legislators. Repeatedly we’ve been told that this general or that would deliver the truth about Iraq and competently (as only a general can do) map out the next step in Bush’s military adventures.

That Bush has simply ignored or fired several generals who were not appropriately competent has gone mostly unremarked upon by the war-think media. They even continue to trumpet the coming report of the latest expert — General Petraeus — even as Bush has made clear that the General won’t actually be delivering the report and that the report won’t actually be his. Sigh.

If only he would listen to real experts:

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: Had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Short version: everything we’ve been told about the US standing down as the Iraqi army stands up is total bushit. And tying our withdrawal to such bushit is insane.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in flux.

Why do these surrender monkey troops hate the troops so much?

Yearly drug mortalities: Tobacco, 340-400,000; Alcohol, 125,000; Caffeine, 1000 to 10,000; Legal drug overdoses, 14-27,000; Illicit drug overdoses, 3800 to 5200; Aspirin, 180 to 1000 Marijuana, 0. —US Surgeon General

Just writing the title for this article feels a bit criminal. The War on Drugs has gotten us to the point where saying anything positive about marijuana makes you an immoral, youth-corrupting, teasonous jerk. Yet, the first casualty in the drug war was the truth. In our national frenzy to eradicate certain (but not all) types of drug use, we have become mired in a swamp of lies that do more damage to our nation than any drug ever could.

One does not have to be a past, present or would-be marijuana user to care deeply about this issue. The criminalization of marijuana has negative consequences that affect us all. Even such arch-conservatives as William Buckley, George Shultz and Milton Friedman have called for the legalization of marijuana. Their bottom line: fighting a war against marijuana constitutes a monumental waste of resources.

Marijuana is a common plant that has grown wild around the world for thousands of years. From 1000 B.C. until the late 1800s, it was the planet’s most widely-cultivated crop. Its psycho-active properties have long been important to many cultures for medicinal, spiritual and recreational purposes. There are hundreds of productive uses for which marijuana provides an ideal source material. Yet since 1937, the US has made the cultivation, possession and use of marijuana a venal and stringently punished crime. This is great foolishness with dire consequences. It is time for a change.

Today, Americans are disillusioned with the war in Iraq, and many around the world predict that an exhausted America will turn inward again. Some see a nation in permanent decline and an end to American hegemony. At Davos, some Europeans apparently envisioned a post-American world.

Forget about it. Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world. —David Brooks

The hardest part about listening to the Democrats who would be President is that, while they are all in a hurry to proclaim the Iraq war a mess — Bush’s mess — with the exception of fringe candidates Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich, no one questions America’s role as the world’s biggest military machine and sole super-bully. According to the Clinton-Obama Dems, America should go on intervening here and there, doing whatever necessary to maintain the American way of life. We just need to do a better, more progressive-minded job of dominating others.

As Glenn Greenwald writes:

The Number One Rule of the bi-partisan Foreign Policy Community is that America has the right to invade and attack other countries at will because American power is inherently good and our role in the world is to rule it though the use of superior military force. Paying homage to that imperialistic orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining Good Standing and Seriousness Credentials within the Foreign Policy Community.

Conversely, one who denies that premise reveals oneself to be deeply unserious and unworthy of meaningful discourse. While differences on the “when” and “how” are permitted, there is virtually no debate within the foreign policy establishment about whether the U.S. has the right to continue to intervene and attack and invade and occupy other countries in the absence of those countries attacking us.

Most important, the notion of essentially good and necessary American war-mongering must remain “a bi-partisan view so that, in turn, the question of America’s role in the world is never subject to any real debate.”

So we all keep thinking of war as inevitable, just, and, when waged competently, good.

There’s new polling that shows that two-thirds of Iraqis, including majorities of every ethnic and religious group in Iraq, strongly oppose “plans to open the country’s oil fields to foreign companies.” The nerve!

Since getting control of Iraqi oil has been the real point of the whole invasion and aftermath, how annoying that the damn Iraqis are using their US-blessed democracy to frustrate the process. No wonder the Iraqi lawmakers would rather go on vacation than work on such legislation. Forget about getting re-elected: life expectancy for Iraqi politicians who go against the will of the people is not great.

Which throws America back into its original “how to get our oil out of their soil” dilemma. It would have been so nice if the Iraqi government just deeded it over to us.

Let’s drop a few thousand more bombs, flatten another city or two, and see if we can get those polling numbers moving in the right direction. Democracy, American-style…………

Why, an old joke goes, are you hitting yourself with the hammer? Because, ha ha, it feels so good when I stop.

This has become the only consolation to the continuing disaster of Mr. Bush, his idiot war, and his anti-democratic misleadership. He will eventually be gone, along with his war-mad band of rapture-nuts and chickenhawks, and no matter what the prevailing conditions, everything will feel so much better.

There will, however, be no cessation of the pain and suffering until they’re gone. The Democrats have proven pathetic, actually granting more powers to Bush and his dim-witted and pathologically dishonest Attorney General. “Hey master Bush, can we help you swing that hammer?”

The Republicans have all accepted their marching orders and are spreading the no-think mantra about how well the war is going now. Victory’s in sight, they say, just around corner number 3,649. Hammer, hammer, hammer….

Anyone who tries to point out the inanity of it all is accused of terrorist-love.

And we still refuse to listen to those who got it right from the very beginning:

Iraq has oil — lots of it. It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water. And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states.

The Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive. But Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to create a viable enclave. A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries. The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be crushed.

The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world. Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep the conflict going by arming Sunni militias. This anarchy could end with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered carcass of Iraq. No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going to die. And it is our fault.

Hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer……………

The great unwhite-male hopes of the Democratic party — Clinton and Obama — are now in a campaign fussdoodle over who would nuke Pakistan first. While not actually saying we should do it (Obama started out saying we never should, but quickly backpedaled), both are making muscular statements about the need to “keep all options on the table” — a phrase that in the Bush years has been used to warn the rest of the world that a rapture-lunatic had his finger on the button, so watch out.

The Democrats, being more reasonable, peace-loving folk, stress that its not meant as a threat. But it’s important that an American President not have his/her options limited by such niceties as international treaties, common sense, basic human decency, or the will of the American people. So, they say, since it is possible that Pakistan might someday engage in some anti-american activity, we need to keep our nuclear options fired up and ready to go.

Juan Cole points out the obvious:

Is Senator Clinton saying she would entertain the option of nuking Pakistan or Afghanistan? Wouldn’t that kill a lot of innocents and spread radioactive materials around on the grass that cows eat, putting it into milk and thence into local children, increasing their chances of contracting cancer….

Pakistan, by the way, is a) an ally, b) a nuclear power in its own right, c) a major Muslim country of 160 million, the population of which will soon equal that of the United States, and d) an opinion leader among other Muslim states. Most Pakistanis are not fundamentalists but rather Sufis, traditionalists, mild reformists or secularists. Or at least that is the case now. If US presidential candidates push them to the wall, they can after all decide to turn radical.

(The certifiable Tom Tancredo is talking about holding Islamic holy sites Mecca and Medina hostage to nuclear blackmail. Can’t one of Tancredo’s family members have him committed, sign the papers and get rich off his estate while he is in a padded room for a few years?)

As for the mostly sane Democrats, could we please stop talking about whether we are going to nuke our allies? I mean, I know that Obama and Clinton are afraid that their Republican rivals will talk tougher than they and will depict them as soft on terrorism. But I can’t imagine that the electorate wants to hear that nukes are on the table with regard to the tribes of northern Pakistan!

Of course, the neocons and rapture-nuts are thrilled with such talk, but the rest of us recognize it for what it is: reckless and irresponsible bluster that can only lead to tragic consequences. Obama needs to stick with his original instincts. Clinton needs to stop projecting her inner muscle man. We all need a President who removes illegal, immoral, and irrefutably stupid options from the table.