Check out this gallery of photos from Iraq submitted to Operation Truth by soldiers. Some of the images are very disturbing, but they reflect reality as it is, so it's important that they're available to us.

If you get a chance also check out Op Truth's blog. Sgt. Zach has had a couple of entries recently and a number of other current and former soldiers discuss current events and US strategy on the blog. If you can, support Operation Truth and their advocacy on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Fifteen soldiers have died this week in Iraq and two have died in Afghanistan, the land of our forgotten war.

Meanwhile, Bush, with his "Rose Garden optimism," is insisting the war in Iraq is nearly over while not giving any timetable for troop withdrawal, and is insisting the ubiquitous insurgency is waning, the on-going violence a sign of its weakness.

It's so completely absurd.

Ignoring reality is not going to make this war end any quicker. If anything it will sink us deeper into the quagmire. We've got to see it for what it is. How do we "support our troops" by completely ignoring reality and pretending things are different than they really are? It does make it easier to send them off with inadequate equipment and treat them like crap when they get home. They can try to spin that into "support," but in the fact-based real world it's egregious neglect at best.

S is back in Kabul after being in Jalalabad for a couple of weeks. He wasn't able to call me or email me there. Though the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan is where the "hunt is on" for bin Laden, the base and facilities are extremely rustic. He and his kandak of Afghan soldiers ran support missions for everyone from the marines to the FBI, who were finally gathering evidence at an Al Qaeda camp we'd bombed four years ago (yeah, a little late). I'll post a few pictures later today. According to S, the area around Jalalabad is dominated by Afghan "hillbillies", people who are by and large distrustful of government, many of whom are involved in the drug trade. I hope he'll write his stories down some day. If he does, I'll share them here. I'm happy he's back in Kabul and still safe. It's such a relief.

I've been trying to catch up on my reading, including magazines. Yesterday I finally read the May issue of Harper's and came upon this: an article by war correspondent Chris Hedges about a convention of fundamentalist broadcasters in Orange County. It's a frightening look at a subculture dominated by hate and vindictiveness that preaches the "gospel" of a militant Jesus. They are vehemently anti-gay. You can read the entire piece here. Meanwhile, here's an excerpt from Hedges' piece that scared me the most:

[...]

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian "dominion" over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America's Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and "Christian values" form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and "homeland" security. Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay "tithes" to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of "moral crimes," including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.

[...]

I leave the convention early Tuesday morning on a shuttle van to LAX. I am wondering whether I shouldn't stay in California a few more days, in order to attend a funeral. Chris Marquis, a close friend and colleague of mine at the New York Times, died while I was out here from complications brought on by AIDS. I learned of his death on the first day of the convention, and even a few days of the Dominionists' bigotry against homosexuals has been more than I could stomach.

I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini's "Corporatism," which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right's persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.

We've already come to the point where politicians are forced to tell us their religious beliefs (there is no longer private faith), and every single one I've heard has professed a love of God. There is an intricate connection between this Christian fundamentalism and the wars we are waging. Like the Islamic fundamentalists who insist their suicide bombers are religious martyrs, in the Christian right's logic soldiers are expendable and are dying for a just and worthy cause (their deaths are a "small price to pay for freedom" to many Americans, and a righteous part of the spread of Christianity to others). They do not question Bush because he is seen as a sort of massiah, spreading the word of their Jesus across the globe. Theirs is an apocalyptic vision of the future, one that completely ignores reality for the promise of a world made new by the blood of Jesus.

This is the ideological battle of our time. How do we fight it?