[T]here are many who would say I am a hero for doing what others would not while putting myself at extreme risk … I understand the sentiment, and I trust that there are those who truly believe that all service members are heroes, simply for signing up. But I can’t help think that for some, “hero” is a throw-away word, designed to demonstrate a “support the troops” position or guarantee applause at an event.

… I don’t feel comfortable being called a hero. In fact, my brow furrows and my mind sharpens when I hear it. Words matter, and “hero” is so loaded and used so frequently that it stands to lose its meaning altogether. Maybe this is just New York cynicism, but I know I’m not the only veteran who feels skeptical when he or she is placed in the hero bin along with every other service member from the past 10 years. I admire the fact that men and women with whom I served chose a dangerous profession for their country – often making the decision after 9/11. But, these are soldiers. Soldiers are human beings. There are good ones and bad ones. A few do amazing, heroic things. The rest do their jobs – incredible, unique jobs – but jobs, nonetheless. Some perform happily, others grudgingly. And I argue that most feel embarrassed when lauded as heroes.

Although the wary pundits who criticized the early chemical weapons stories were wrong about this particular case, they were right about the overarching truth of the situation: the invasion and occupation of Iraq was an horrific war crime in itself, regardless of what weapons or tactics were or were not used. Even without the chemical weapons, the death squads, the tortures of Abu Ghraib, the rapes and rampages, the deliberate empowerment of violent extremists, the endless barrage of lies, and the world-historical levels of corruption and war-profiteering that characterized the reality of the war, this act of aggression would still be a work of the most vile, most putrid, most irredeemable evil. … The destruction of Fallujah was like a black hole, where all the evil of the war was sucked in and concentrated with unbreakable force. So I think it’s worth reiterating, once more, the actual context of this atrocity that is now reverberating through the twisted, tormented bodies of children born long after the guns have fallen silent.

In seeking to replicate a policy which its own UN administrator at the time characterised as “effectively genocidal”, those implementing and advocating for intensified and far-ranging sanctions against Iran are waging an indiscriminate war against the Iranian people, despite the broad consensus and observable historical track record that sanctions only serve to immiserate innocent civilians while consolidating the hold on society of the governing regime. If, as many US officials have publically said, the goal of sanctions are to forcibly coerce Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government, the decimation of the Iranian middle class through the collapse of the economy will have only the opposite effect. The people of Iran will suffer potentially catastrophic harm as Iraqis did a decade earlier, while their state grows increasingly repressive and empowered relative to a poor and destitute population - a natural outcome within a command economy such as Iran’s. It is incumbent upon all those concerned that the grotesque crimes of the past not be repeated, and that the blanket, indiscriminate economic war against the Iranian people not continue in the name of political expediency. The blunt instrument of untargeted sanctions against a country are not an alternative to war but a form of war in and of themselves, even more pernicious in that the victims are always necessarily the weakest and most vulnerable of society.

The then-leaders of the United States [Bush] and Great Britain [Blair] fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart,” he wrote. “They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand - with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.

President Obama fulfilled the U.S. commitment to withdraw from Iraq that the Maliki government wrung out of the Bush administration, and he stopped the CIA from kidnapping people and bundling them off to Guantanamo. But even after his much-vaunted “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, there will still be twice as many U.S. troops there as when he took office. And he halted the parade of men in orange jump suits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine in Cuba, not by restoring the rule of law, but by ordering the extra-judicial execution of terrorism suspects — a national policy of cold-blooded murder. Not a week goes by without news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, but the U.S. also conducts assassinations by helicopter-borne special forces like the ones who killed Osama Bin Laden. The former head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Admiral Eric Olson, told an Aspen Institute conference that SOCOM conducts a dozen such operations every night in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The total number of night raids in Afghanistan escalated from twenty per month in early 2009 to over a thousand per month two years later, and senior officers admit that at least half of them target the wrong person or house. Sixty thousand U.S. special operations forces now conduct assassinations, night-raids, training missions, joint operations and exercises in 120 countries around the world, twice as many as when Obama came to power, with deployments in about 70 countries at any given time.

That must have been easy to say, especially if he were already in the air, the country for which nearly 4,500 Americans and an untold number of Iraqis have died, becoming smaller and smaller beneath him. I am guessing the word “opportunity” here is fungible. What we do know is this: in the last month, some 409 Iraqis were killed during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The deaths occurred during several waves of coordinated attacks, most recently on August 16, when an estimated 70 were killed and more than 200 wounded in more than a dozen towns and cities and Baghdad neighborhoods.

Here, as a start, is a little scorecard of what’s gone on in Iraq since Big Oil arrived two and a half years ago: corruption’s skyrocketed; two Western oil companies are being investigated for either giving or receiving bribes; the Iraqi government is paying oil companies a per-barrel fee according to wildly unrealistic production targets they’ve set, whether or not they deliver that number of barrels; contractors are heavily over-charging for drilling wells, which the companies don’t mind since the Iraqi government picks up the tab. Meanwhile, to protect the oil giants from dissent and protest, trade union offices have been raided, computers seized and equipment smashed, leaders arrested and prosecuted. And that’s just in the oil-rich southern part of the country.