Saturday roundup

At the Global Affairs blog, Philip Cunningham, who teaches at Dosisha University in Japan considers the ways in which W.’s Iraq debacle has weakened the ability of the US to play a positive role in the Burma / Myanmar crisis.

Susie Madrak links to a real soldier who upbraids the chickenhawk Rush Limbaugh for calling veterans opposed to the Iraq War “phony soldiers”. (No doubt he thinks the badly wounded among them are “phony handicaps” too; about 30,000 US troops have been killed or wounded bad enough to go to hospital, with perhaps 10,000 so very badly injured.)

At Tomdispatch: Guantanamo Forever, and “It’s the Oil, Stupid.”

At the Napoleon’s Egypt blog, a frank admission by an officer, Dezirad, that war in the Middle East is hell: “Since we have been in Egypt we have done nothing but suffer. The immense fatigues which we experienced in the Desert, the prodigious heat of the sun, which sets the very ground on fire, the absolute want of food, and the necessity of continual marching, have carried off a vast number of volunteers, who dropt down dead at our feet from mere exhaustion.”

Dropped dead while marching in the desert? We know what Rush would think of them!