War reporting and discussion

It has been asked a number of times why Angry Bear has not posted on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for awhile now. William Pitt asks the same question for himself:

William Pitt writes an op-ed about where the criticism in the press and blogs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone in the last couple years:

A good friend noted recently how little we hear of Iraq and Afghanistan in the news anymore, and further noted the deafening silence regarding those ongoing wars from what he described as “dishwater left-leaning political activists” whose disengagement from the issue, according to him, makes them full of something I can’t repeat in print. That bogus disengagement, he asserts, stems from the fact that Obama is in office now, so everything must be OK. It isn’t, of course, but it is hard to miss the fact that we haven’t heard much about the wars, or the protesters, since a couple of Januarys ago.

[snip]

Once again, all that was from one single day (Rdan…a long list of bombings and deaths by place). So, yeah, it’s not over over there. Not by a long chalk, and despite the whistling silence, it’s not over over here, either. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan affect every living American well beyond the impact of the flesh-and-blood conflicts we occasionally see on TV. The issue of who is still getting rich off those wars, how our society has been wired to blindly support a permanent state of war, and why we hear so little about these all-consuming matters, remain deeply pressing and of deadly importance.

Jamail is not the only reporter focusing on this. This Thursday, a teach-in will be taking place on Capitol Hill to focus specifically on Iraq, Afghanistan and the issues that surround them. The moderator will be Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and the panelists will include Chris Hedges, author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”; Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” and former Army colonel and current political activist Ann Wright.

There is a lot of conversation on other hearings and news, but as

“Jarhead” succinctly puts it, “We are still in the desert.”