Juan Cole on "appeasement" and Christian terrorists

Reading Juan Cole's blog with coffee of a morning is a daunting experience. Relentless and indefatigable only begin to get at it. He covers a huge range of topics with characteristically pithy and often withering wit, he does it every day, AND he has a job.

The quality of his writing is consistently and ridiculously excellent, considering he's a one-man news bureau. The guy sets the bar for bloggers way high.

Today he seems especially energized, and covers about nine different topics. Most recently, as of 9 am, he has a great contextualizing take on that staple of the neocon lexicon, "appeasement":

The Crock of Appeasement

The warmongers, imperialists, and just plain greedy who wish to use up US troops to gain their ill-gotten goods love to use the word "appeasement." Anyone who stands against their expansionist ambitions will be tagged with this term. In the lexicology of the Rabid Right, it evokes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's attempt to negotiate with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It is certainly the case that Hitler was a genocidal maniac and not the sort of man with whom one could usefully negotiate. But not all negotiation is equally fruitless. Before that incident, by the way, "appeasement" had a positive connotation, of "seeking peace."

The rightwing use of the term appeasement, however, turns it on its head. Taken seriously, the doctrine of "no appeasement" on the right would mean we are stuck in perpectual war, always doomed to be on the offensive, always dedicated to gobbling up more of other people's territory and wealth even at the expense of living in constant dread of being blown up and being forced to give up the civil liberties which had made American civilization great.

It would never be possible to negotiate a truce with any enemy. That would be appeasement. It would never be possible to compromise. That would be appeasement. It would never be prudent to withdraw troops from a failed war. That would be appeasement. In other words, the rightwing doctrine of "no appeasement, ever" actually turns you into Hitler rather than into Churchill.

Read the whole post....

And his commentary on the Eric Rudolph sentencing was absolutely spot-on. His is the best response I've seen to that appalling and frankly racist Thomas Friedman column in which he basically makes all Muslims responsible for suicide bombers. Here's Juan on the "Christian Terrorist":

Other things you won't see in the American press about this story (satire alert):

Thomas Friedman will not write an op-ed for the New York Times about what is wrong with white southern Christian males that they keep producing these terrorists. He will also not ask why Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are not denouncing Eric Rudolph every day at the top of their lungs.

No reporter will interview frightened Iraqis about their fears at hearing that there are 138,000 armed Christians in their country belonging to the same faith as the bomber, Rudolph, some of them from his stomping grounds of Florida and North Carolina.

Daniel Pipes will not write a column for the New York Post suggesting that white southern Christians be put in internment camps until it can be determined why they keep producing terrorists and antisemites.

George W. Bush will not issue a statement that "Christianity is a religion of peace and we will not allow the Eric Rudolphs to hijack it for their murderous purposes."

Frank Gaffney will not write a column for the Washington Post castigating the Republican Party for appeasement in surrendering to the terrorist threats of radical Christians, by now opposing reproductive rights.

Max Boot will not point out that if the United States could only keep the Philippines in the early twentieth century by killing 400,000 Filipinos, than that was what needed to be done, and if the US can only beat back radical Christians by killing 400,000 of them, then that may just be necessary.

Pat Buchanan will not write a column blasting King George III for having promoted the illegal immigration into the American south of criminal elements, whose maladjusted descendants are still making trouble.

Read the whole post...

This Happens Every Day (Why?)

Photo by Karim SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

Crisis Pictures, which had gone away for a while, is back and posting new content. For me no site has brought home the horror and cost of the Iraq war like this site. Warning: the pictures are often graphic.

As regards the Iraqi casualties of our war, and our criminal neglect of same, Judith Coburn, who has covered war in Vietnam, Central America and the Middle East, writes in tomdispatch.com:

How many Iraqis have died in our war in their country? Is there a better symbol of how the war for Iraq has already been lost than our ignorance about the cost of the war to Iraqis?

"Cost of the war": a cliché to normalize the carnage, like the anaesthetizing term "collateral damage" and that new semantic horror, "torture lite." And yet the "cost of the war" report, by now a hackneyed convention of American journalism, includes only American casualties -- no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American mainstream media's own professed commitment to "objectivity." Three years of "anniversary" articles in the American media adding up the so-called "cost of the war" in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed, American dollars spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention of the Iraqi dead as part of that "cost."

Some key points:

• Human Rights Watch reports that while coalition forces killed more Iraqi civilians than the insurgents did in the early months of the war, now insurgents are killing many more civilians than coalition forces. The Education for Peace in Iraq project, a non profit group of antiwar Gulf War veterans, Iraqis, and others, reports that insurgents are now killing 15 times the number of civilians killed by coalition forces and that the number of civilians killed by insurgents has doubled since the first six months of 2004. Just last week, the New York Times front-paged rare Iraqi Interior Ministry figures showing insurgents are now killing an average of 800 Iraqi policemen and civilians a month.
• Ironically, IBC [Iraq Body Count], once heralded as a brilliantly conceived breakthrough in monitoring war casualties -- impossible without the Internet -- is now an object of some dismay among anti-war activists because its methodology inevitably leads to a casualty undercount.
• [S]tories highlighting the magnitude of Iraqi suffering have been rare indeed. A study by George Washington University researchers found that American television coverage of the invasion of Iraq itself was remarkably sanitized. Only 13.5% of the 1,710 TV news stories they reviewed from the start of the war to the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 included shots of wounded or dead Americans or Iraqis. Only 4% showed any dead.
• The October, 2003 [Human Rights Watch] report Hearts and Minds charged that American soldiers often used "indiscriminate force," especially at checkpoints after insurgent bombings, and also in raids on civilian houses, causing many civilian casualties. Few of these injuries to civilians are investigated by the military, HRW found.
• Besides cluster munitions, a new and improved version of napalm, the Vietnam War's other most grisly weapon, and its chemical cousin white phosphorous, have been used by American forces in Iraq, a fact known to few Americans because our media has barely reported on the subject. The Pentagon has admitted that it used napalm near the Kuwaiti border during the invasion, though the use seems to have been more widespread than the Pentagon said. For instance, the Bush Administration reportedly lied to its British allies about its use. (In Europe, the evident use of napalm by the U.S. in its assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah last November sparked headlines and furious opposition in the British Parliament.)

Read the whole article....

Armageddon outta here!

While we're on that topic, John Prados, writing in the Bulletin, weighs in on the report of the WMD Commission.

Despite flaws, the report is essential reading for anyone seriously interested not only in the Iraq intelligence issue but also in broader questions of proliferation. In nearly 600 pages of history and prescription, the commission report delves into five major cases (Iraq, Libya, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea) and provides nine chapters of analysis, with suggestions on intelligence organization and proliferation management. About 100 additional pages--the chapters "Iran and North Korea: Monitoring Development in Nuclear Capabilities" and "Covert Action"--are classified and therefore unavailable to the public.

The good news: "The final report is surprisingly good, given the commission's starting point" (many of the appointees were intelligence neophytes—hmm).

The bad news, well....

• The report studiously avoids whether the Bush administration misused its intelligence and reaches the misleading conclusion that no politicization of the intelligence process ever occurred. (Interestingly, the commission's Libya investigation--no doubt conceived by the Bush White House as a helpful counterweight to Iraq, since it presents a success--actually shows that on an issue with less political salience, intelligence performance was better, even though the same limitations of evidence applied.)
  
  
• the Al Qaeda chapter, which consists entirely of a series of snapshots of what intelligence thought before the October 2001 Afghan campaign compared with what was found there afterward. In doing so, the commission overstates what was found, evaluating the Al Qaeda effort as having "fast-growing unconventional weapons capabilities and aggressive intentions." The report acknowledges no such weapons--chemical, biological, or nuclear--or capabilities were found, and coalition forces encountered nothing more than scattered bits of lab equipment and some technical papers on computer hard drives. Clearly, Osama bin Laden was interested in such weapons, but there is little evidence of a coherent program, much less an aggressive one. Despite this, the commission tars U.S. intelligence with underestimating Al Qaeda's weapons capability--a judgment that smacks of post hoc justification for the war on terrorism.
  
  
• the WMD Commission raises chilling possibilities for even greater secrecy. The authors advocate more use of secret wiretaps and "pen registers" (devices that record incoming and outgoing phone numbers). Alleging a "well-documented" plethora of damage to U.S. intelligence collection supposedly caused by media disclosures, the commissioners support coordinated leak investigations and focusing the DNI's [director of national intelligence] inspector general on such investigations; paying more attention to making open information secret (while simultaneously proposing greater use of "open source" information for intelligence purposes); and starting a latter-day "Loose Lips Sink Ships" campaign. The commission discussed but could not close ranks on creating a "qualified privilege for reporters," which could have restricted journalists' ability to protect their sources. Reporters, not leakers, could become targets of investigation, as is already happening in the Valerie Plame affair.

US Still Pursuing Nuclear Options

Well, I tried for a few hours to keep away from the subject of war, but then I came across this.

From Agence France Press, reprinted in Common Dreams.

But even as it moves to retire much of its Cold War arsenal, [the Bush administration] has pressed a reluctant Congress for funds for nuclear bunker-buster studies, refurbished nuclear testing facilities, and a facility to build the plutonium triggers for new weapons.

The US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, is reported to be developing "global strike" options, including a nuclear option, against potential adversaries with nuclear weapons such as Iran and North Korea.

More than 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nuclear weapons "are alive and well," said Robert S. Norris, an expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an arms control and environmental advocacy group.

Norris points to the administration's Nuclear Posture Review of 2001 as "the revealing document" that shows its intention to use nuclear weapons to counter a new cast of potential adversaries armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Read the whole article...

Am I alone in thinking that we have a lot more to fear from 10,000 intercontinental state-of-the-art nukes than a handful of say, 1966 short-range vintage Chinese warheads in the hands of "rogue" states? Bush, Cheney--yeah, I trust those guys with the fate of the planet!

One big bad idea and one big fat lie

I'm trying to keep this blog from turning into something that only talks about war and politics.

Map from NASS

It's meant to be about other things as well. (The map above, by the way, tracks change in number of farms from 1997 to 2002 and gives a new meaning to "red" and "blue" states). The dumb life of roots for example:

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride or excess of power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

That's the Wendell Berry poem that has given this blog its incredibly affected name, in case you hadn't noticed.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of that, here is a Salon interview with George Pyle, the author of Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Agriculture. Pyle isn't saying anything Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry haven't said before, but every new mainstread voice who takes up this cause is welcome, and besides his seems an articulate and aptly pissed off take on the subject:

... In Pyle's view, our farming culture is based on one big bad idea and one big fat lie.

"The bad idea," he writes, "is the increasing concentration -- economic, political, and genetic -- of the ways in which our food is produced." The lie behind it is that "the world is either short of food or risks being short of food in the near future." With the help of an editorial writers' fellowship, and later as the director of the Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Pyle took time away from his daily deadlines to research a book on the American farm economy.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell" is dedicated to the memory of his father, who was raised on a Kansas farm, but Pyle is no sentimentalist when it comes to the fate of family farms. What the agricultural economy needs, he argues, is a truly free market -- not one kept afloat by federal subsidies and unaccounted environmental damage. The root cause of hunger, he claims, is usually a lack of money. Yet the fear of not having enough food has driven the rise of chemical fertilizers, massive machinery, genetically modified seed, and whatever else will help squeeze greater yields out of every acre.

Meanwhile, the true costs of the industrial system -- eroded soil and depleted aquifers, polluted water and air, desperate and indebted farmers, rundown main streets, unhealthy diets, and a food supply at risk –- are not factored into the price of food.

Even as we push to grow more, the government subsidizes farmers for growing less. The subsidies continually fail to keep up with gains in production, leading to a surplus of food that costs less than it should. This gets shipped abroad and cripples the efforts of third-world countries to develop their own agricultural base. And so the system fails even on its promise to feed the world.

Read the whole interview...

Forget "Rove-gate" and get ready for "Cheney-gate"

It gets curiouser and curiouser.

While Alexander Cockburn cautions that "on the Left, just as in the Plame affair, we should be leery of words like traitor and 'national security.' They cut both ways," Justin Raimondo says:

Forging "evidence" that helped get us into a war – what are the penalties for that?

The fast developing scandal seemingly centered around Rove and a few journalists has only begun to unfold. By the time it is over, we'll have the War Party – or, at the very least, a few high profile representatives – in the dock, and then the fun will really begin. So forget "Rove-gate" and get ready for "Cheney-gate." I'll gladly forgo the pleasure of seeing the president's chief political advisor frog-marched out of the White House for the prospect of seeing our vice president, along with his top staffers, led out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in handcuffs.

Read the whole article...

Larisa Alexandrovna has more on Project Missing Dick.

"Digitized extras in a Hollywood epic"

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair:

But of the liberated, occupied, afflicted, battered-to-despair Iraqi people, Americans see and hear and, worst of all, care almost nothing. The Iraqis might as well be digitized extras in a Hollywood epic, scurrying in the wide-screen background and being massacred en masse as some tanned specimen of all-American man-steak is heroically positioned in the foreground, giving orders to the lesser-paid stars in his squad as if he had just teleported in from the Battle of Thermopylae. Apart from an occasional dispatch (such as a CNN report on May 13), the ongoing agony of the Iraqi people is the huge, tragic unmentionable in the televised war coverage. Sydney Schanberg again: "Can you recall the last time your hometown newspaper ran a picture spread of these human beings lying crumpled at the scene of the slaughter?" It doesn't seem to dawn on our pundits and leaders that when two dozen Iraqi police recruits are murdered by a car bomb it sends a shock wave through entire communities, leaving untold grieving widows, parents, siblings, children, friends, and co-workers behind to nurse their pain and rage. Imagine the impact it would have if 50 police or army recruits were wiped out over the course of a week in this country. Now imagine 50 dying every single week with no relief in sight and tell me the U.S. wouldn't be suffering a national nervous breakdown. But the Iraqi dead are discounted as the Price of Democracy. If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice harbored any semblance of shame beneath their aluminum-foil Vulcan armor, they would fall to their knees to express sorrow and beg forgiveness from the Iraqi people, even though Cheney might need help rising to his feet again. But of course they never will. They will continue to brazen it out, abetted by a milquetoast Mr. Media.

Read the whole article...

Meanwhile, the opposition party has a bright idea...

More troops!

I gotta admit. I bet the Republicans weren't expecting that.

"So much progress to report"

Photo by Dahar Jamail

As real Knight-Ridder journalists respond in anger to an editorial writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press who said they were accentuating the negative in Iraq "when there's so much progress to report," Dahr Jamail talks to Amy Goodman about all that progress. Here, he discusses how the U.S. military treats hospitals as enemy encampments:

[O]ne of the major examples of that is the U.S. military operations, both sieges of Fallujah, that is, where -- particularly the November siege, the first thing that the U.S. military did was go into Fallujah General Hospital and occupy it, place snipers on the roof and detain doctors, prevent them from carrying out their medical care, as well as the deliberate targeting of ambulances. And since that siege, in ongoing operations like in Al Qaim and in Hadithah, we have seen a almost exact repeat of that, where hospitals are sealed off, medical workers are prevented from working or being targeted themselves, and this has become clear that not only in Al Qaim and Hadithah, but it’s ongoing right now in Buhrez, which is right near Baquba; as we speak, this is ongoing, and any time there is a major operation now by the U.S. military in Iraq, this is the type of tactic that they're using.

Jamail has prepared an extensive report "Iraqi hospitals ailing under occupation", which he presented at the World Tribunal on Iraq, Istanbul 23-27 June. It is available, in both PDF and HTML versions, at his website.

It's all unravelling too fast



Who can concentrate on all these revelations? In today's Washington Post, more rope with which to hang Rummy:

Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women's underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.

Military investigators who briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday on the three-month probe, called the tactics "creative" and "aggressive" but said they did not cross the line into torture.

The report's findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers. The report shows that they were used on Qahtani several months before the United States invaded Iraq.

The investigation also supports the idea that soldiers believed that placing hoods on detainees, forcing them to appear nude in front of women and sexually humiliating them were approved interrogation techniques for use on detainees.

Read the whole story....

It's Norm!

I must say I had been worried. The orchestrated broadcasting of the "Karl Rove is actually a national hero" lunacy was so furious, so jaw-droppingly disingenous and so ... repetitious (all over TV, the Internet, the newspapers—everyone was saying the exact same thing) , it made me wonder if I was missing something.

But no—as impressive a display of official mendacity as the Talking Points blitz was, it was really just bluster. Rove's in deep do-do, and the White House is trying to attack its way out.

And they're going to the bullpen. Now pitching... NORM!

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Republican officials hinted Wednesday that Sen. Norm Coleman could play a leading role in responding to Democrats' attacks against White House aide Karl Rove.

The Minnesota Republican downplayed a report in the Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, that he has been designated by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to be one of Rove's "principal defenders in Congress."

Read the whole article...

One only hopes he's as scintillating in defense of Rove as he was when he went up against George Galloway [video].

Numbers game



This story was posted on the World Peace Herald site.

Iraqi civilian casualties

An Iraqi humanitarian organization is reporting that 128,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began in March 2003.

Mafkarat al-Islam reported that chairman of the 'Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad, Dr. Hatim al-'Alwani, said that the toll includes everyone who has been killed since that time, adding that 55 percent of those killed have been women and children aged 12 and under.

'Iraqiyun obtained data from relatives and families of the deceased, as well as from Iraqi hospitals in all the country's provinces. The 128,000 figure only includes those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths and does not include those were abducted, assassinated or simply disappeared.

The number includes those who died during the U.S. assaults on al-Fallujah and al-Qa'im. 'Iraqiyun's figures conflict with the Iraqi Body Count public database compiled by Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. According to the Graduate Institute of International Studies' database, 39,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since March 2003. No official estimates of Iraqi casualties from the war have been issued by the Pentagon, which insists that it does not do "body counts." The Washington Post on July 12 reported that U.S. military deaths in Iraq now total 1,755.

The numbers reported by 'Iraqiyun support the study published in the Lancet in October, which said the risk of death by violence for civilians in occupied Iraq [was] 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.

The Lancet story should have been one of the biggest news stories of the year, but when it was covered at all in the mainstream press it was dismissed as "controversial" and "politicized". Yet according to an excellent overview of the issues raised by the study at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the methodology was disciplined (heroically so) and what should have been a headline-dominating finding—that there have been 100,000 violent deaths since the invasion (excluding Fallujah)—is not at all controversial.

Revisiting the Chronicle article, which was published in February, a few things stand out:

• The Lancet study methodology was of the highest standard. "Public-health professionals have uniformly praised the paper for its correct methods and notable results.... Bradley A. Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says 'Les [Les F. Roberts, a research associate at Hopkins and the lead author of the Lancet paper], has used, and consistently uses, the best possible methodology....'
  
  
• Indeed, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact -- and have acted on those results."
  
  
• According to the Chronicle, "The number of deaths in Fallujah was so much higher than in other locations that the researchers excluded the data from their overall estimate as a statistical outlier"
  

• According to one researcher, "If anything, the deaths may have been higher [than the study's estimate] because what they are unable to do is survey families where everyone has died."
  
  
• Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, who was quoted as saying, "These numbers seem to be inflated" when asked about the Lancet study, later said his quote was "really unfortunate."
  

  He says he told the reporter, "I haven't read it. I haven't seen it. I don't know anything about it, so I shouldn't comment on it." But, Mr. Garlasco continues, "Like any good journalist, he got me to."
  

  Mr. Garlasco ... is mystified that the Defense Department has not expressed interest in such studies. "Civilian casualties can be a bellwether for the actual conduct of the war," says Mr. Garlasco, who was an intelligence officer at the Pentagon until 2003. "They're using all these precision weapons, so one would expect that if you're striving to minimize casualties, you'd have very low casualties. In Iraq we've seen the exact opposite, so one has to wonder why."
  
  

All Rummy, all the time


Which is more remarkable—that Karl Rove has kept his job until now or that Donald Rumsfeld has? He's all over the papers these days. Has he done enough damage yet? Apparently not. Here he is trying to stir up interest in yet another war.

For a little perspective on the Iran and terrorism idea, William O. Beeman, Professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University, traces this history of Iran's "Support for Terrorism":

The United States government first began to identify Iran as a supporter of terrorist activities in 1984 under the Reagan administration. The accusations have grown more strident from year to year. On an annual basis the State Department has repeated accusations that Iran has supported virtually every terrorist attack in the world.

This is an astonishing exaggeration. In fact, Iran cannot be linked to any direct attack on the United States since the 444 day hostage crisis, which ended in 1981. The assertions of Iran's continued support for terrorism are prime examples of truth by repetition, used commonly by many conservative commentators, and myriads of U.S. legislators and officials-including U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her recent European tour....

Read the whole article

Rummy brings his Midas touch to CAFTA

Not content to rest on his laurels in Iraq, Rummy takes to the op-ed pages and turns his unfailingly wrong-headed condescension to the idea that "The coming vote on CAFTA is a national security vote."

Yale undergrad Sarah Stillman remains unconvinced. Writing in Huffington Post, she says:

Members of Congress, beware: a vote against CAFTA is a vote for Osama. Or so Donald Rumsfeld might have you believe, if you read his recent op-ed in the Miami Herald in which he ominously warns, “The coming vote on CAFTA is a national security vote. Let there be no doubt.”

But how is it that CAFTA--a free trade agreement negotiated in secrecy and tailored primarily to the needs of multinational manufacturers, agribusiness, and pharmaceutical companies--will help combat “the violent extremism that is threatening civilized societies”?

Since I’m having a hard time following Rummy’s line of reasoning here (it’s been known to happen on occasion), maybe I should ask the widow of a man named Jose Sanchez Gomez--an indigenous representative of the Campesino Unity Committee who was shot and killed by Guatemalan army forces while attending one of the many peaceful protests against CAFTA in the highlands of Huehuetenango last March.

Or perhaps I should ask Marta Maria Caballero, a young woman who faces another version of “violent extremism” from her managers every morning when she arrives to work at a Nicaraguan auto parts factory. In the wake of her recent efforts to organize an independent trade union after enduring years of unsafe working conditions and sexual harassment, Caballero must now confront an escalated barrage of vicious threats and intimidation.

But I somehow doubt either of these women will agree with Rumsfeld's declaration that Central America is currently reveling in a so-called “magic moment” of freedom and human rights. The only hocus pocus they're likely to confirm flies straight from Rummy's pen-cum-magic-wand, which he's long utilized to transform chaotic realities into convenient opportunities for promoting U.S. military and corporate interests abroad.

Read the whole post

Oh my God! Terrorists!


Don't want to be a wet blanket but terrorism might actually rank rather far down the list of your worries. Read the little perspective-piece below (be careful on those ladders!), don't forget about global warming and always keep the Doomsday Clock in mind (it's still seven minutes to midnight):

More than 31,000 nuclear weapons are still maintained by the eight known nuclear powers, a decrease of only 3,000 since 1998. Ninety-five percent of these weapons are in the United States and Russia, and more than 16,000 are operationally deployed. Even if the United States and Russia complete their recently announced arms reductions over the next 10 years, they will continue to target thousands of nuclear weapons against each other.

From Think Again: Homeland Security by Benjamin Friedman in Foreign Policy.:

For the vast majority of Americans, the chances of dying in a terrorist attack are close to zero. There’s a higher probability that you’ll die by falling off a ladder than getting mixed up in some terrorist plot. So why is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security constantly telling every American to be afraid? That’s a strategy that creates widespread fear without making America any safer. U.S. homeland security efforts should focus less on what is possible and more on what is probable.

.... The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are minuscule. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the odds are about 1 in 88,000. The odds of dying from falling off a ladder are 1 in 10,010. Even in 2001, automobile crashes killed 15 times more Americans than terrorism....

Read the entire article

Going Green

NPR had a great report this morning on a sea change in European agricultural subsidies. EU countries are shifting away from the absurd American model that creates surpluses, lines the pockets of big agribusiness interests, and generally mucks up the ecosystem—and towards paying farmers for "doing things that create a healthier, cleaner or just prettier landscape."

Actually, the whole series, "Going Green in Agriculture," is well worth a look-see, and the producer, Daniel Charles, has a great site, In Search of Green Agriculture.

Here is a nicely representative quote:

"If farmers are required to limit their plantings of Bt corn or cotton for the good of the ecosystem, why not go further? Why not compel (or induce through cash incentives) farmers to do other things that would produce substantial environmental benefits, such as allow some of their land to revert to grasslands and woods? ...... If genetic engineering is fascinating, or even ominous, then plowing, sowing, reaping, or breeding cannot be mundane."

Those sentences were born of frustration with debates over the environmental risks of genetically engineered crops. To me, those arguments seemed disconnected from agricultural reality. People were spending lots of time and energy analyzing subtle environmental consequences of planting genetically engineered soybeans or corn, compared to conventional soybeans or corn. Yet few seemed interested in the enormous environmental consequences of a much more fundamental choice - whether to plant soybeans and corn at all. Landscapes covered with such crops, and that includes 150 million acres of the United States, are essentially ecological sacrifice zones.

In fact, there seemed to be a curious lack of interest, among environmentalists, in most of the decisions that farmers make: Whether they plow land or not; how much land they keep in pasture or grassland; how much fertilizer they use. Yet those decisions make a huge difference.... Farmland is the environment. It is - or was, within recent memory - the primary area of wildlife habitat. Consider this: crops and cattle grazing areas cover more than half of land area of the United States, outside of Alaska.

Hearing Voices

Cartoon by Steve Bell (archive)

A major difference between last week's London bombings and the 9/11 attacks is that the shouters who drowned out any kind of analytic response are not nearly as successful as they were in 2001.

When Susan Sontag called the 9/11 bombings "an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions," she was vilified. Bill Maher lost his job. Others were intimidated into silence. In late 2001, to even bring up "specific American alliances and actions" was outside the realm of accepted discourse.

Of course, Sontag was right then, and now, while there is no shortage of idiots braying about "giving in to terrorism" and "appeasement", expressing sentiments like Sontag's is "allowed" again. Without being "pro-terrorist", one can actually posit cause and effect relationships. It's not much, but it's progress of a sort.

From the Guardian, Gary Younge has a piece called Blair's blowback, in which he dares to make an obvious link between Fallujah to London that would not have seen the light of day in 2001. For those seeking documentary evidence about Fallujah, please see here (for an unsettling video travelogue) and here, for "Fallujah in Pictures."

We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, employing violence as their sole instrument of persuasion, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately. They left us feeling unified in our pain and resolute in our convictions, effectively creating a community where one previously did not exist. With the killers probably still at large there is no civil liberty so vital that some would not surrender it in pursuit of them and no punishment too harsh that some might not sanction if we found them.

The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London. The two should not be equated - with over 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged or flattened, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they can and should be compared. We do not have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage or resilience. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imagination could not stretch to empathise with the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have something closer to home to identify with. "Collateral damage" always has a human face: its relatives grieve; its communities have memory and demand action.

These basic humanistic precepts are the principle casualties of fundamentalism, whether it is wedded to Muhammad or the market. They were clearly absent from the minds of those who bombed London last week. They are no less absent from the minds of those who have pursued the war on terror for the past four years.

Tony Blair is not responsible for the more than 50 dead and 700 injured on Thursday. In all likelihood, "jihadists" are. But he is partly responsible for the 100,000 people who have been killed in Iraq. And even at this early stage there is a far clearer logic linking these two events than there ever was tying Saddam Hussein to either 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

It is no mystery why those who have backed the war in Iraq would refute this connection. With each and every setback, from the lack of UN endorsement right through to the continuing strength of the insurgency, they go ever deeper into denial. Their sophistry has now mutated into a form of political autism - their ability to engage with the world around them has been severely impaired by their adherence to a flawed and fatal project. To say that terrorists would have targeted us even if we hadn't gone into Iraq is a bit like a smoker justifying their habit by saying, "I could get run over crossing the street tomorrow." True, but the certain health risks of cigarettes are more akin to playing chicken on a four-lane highway. They have the effect of bringing that fatal, fateful day much closer than it might otherwise be.

Crisis pictures...



... is back online, as of Saturday, July 10.

Cindy Sheehan gets to sees the president, up close and personal



This was from Democracy Now about a week ago, Wednesday, June 29th, 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest on the line with us in Washington is Cindy Sheehan. She is the mother of Casey, who died in Iraq last year.... Cindy I did want to ask you right before the Fort Bragg address of President Bush, he met with family members who lost loved ones in Iraq. Have you been able to meet with Bush administration officials?

CINDY SHEEHAN: Actually, I met with the President in June of 2004, a couple of months after my son was killed. We were summoned up to Fort Irwin, Washington state, to have a sit down with the president. So my entire family went. And I was on CNN last night with Larry King talking about this, and there was another mother who had met with him, and she said that she supports the war and the President, and she said he was so warm and everything and gentle and kind, and when my family and I met with him, I met a man who had no compassion in him. He had no heart. Like Karen said, he cares nothing about us. We tried to show him pictures of Casey. He wouldn't look at them. He wouldn't even acknowledge Casey's name. He called me “Mom” through the entire visit. He acted like we were at a tea party, like it was something fun, that we should just be so pleased that we got to meet with the President who killed our son.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you say to him?

CINDY SHEEHAN: The first thing, he came up to me, and he goes, “Mom, I can't imagine your loss. I can't imagine losing a loved one, you know, whether it be a mother, a father, a sister or brother.” And I stopped him, and I said, “You have two children. Try to imagine them being killed in a war. How would that make you feel?” And he got a little bit of -- just a little bit of human flicker in his eye, like he might be connected for a minute, because this is a man that's disconnected from humanity. And he had just got a little flicker in his eye, and I said, “Trust me, you don't want to go there.” And you know what he told me? He goes, “You're right, I don't.” And so I said, “Well, thank you for putting me there.”

And then he moved on to the next person, and then a little while later we were talking, and he went up to my oldest daughter, and he said, “I wish I could bring back your loved one to replace the hole in your heart.” And she goes, “Yeah, so do we.” And he gave her the dirtiest look and turned his back on her and ignored her for the rest of the meeting. And then a little later on in the meeting, I said, “Why were we invited here? We didn't vote for you in 2000, and we're certainly not going to vote for you in 2004.” And he said, “It's not about politics,” which is just bologna, because he went through the campaign trail, and last night he said he meets with families, and we say that we’re praying for him and stuff like that.

You know, that’s not -- that wasn't our experience. And everybody else I’ve talked to who have met with him have about the same experiences I do. He comes in, says I want to extend the gratitude of the nation and express my condolences, but he says it, and his eyes don't convey that, his heart doesn't convey that. We felt – we left our meeting with him feeling worse than when we walked in, feeling more determined to stop the madness in Iraq than before.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Cindy Sheehan, lost her son Casey in Iraq, did meet with President Bush.

Training wheels

From "Making the world unsafe for democracy," at tomdispatch.com

It may be that nations deserve the leaders they get and perhaps it's no mistake that George Bush ended up as our leader -- twice no less -- in a period that otherwise seemed to cry out for having your basic set of grown-ups in power, or that his Secretary of Defense likes to play stand-up comic at his news conferences, or that his first Attorney General just loved to sing songs of his own creation to his staff, or that none of them can get it through their heads that it's not just the terrorists who, in our world, have been taking "the lives of the innocent."

I keep thinking: Who let these children out in the world on their own? Obviously the American people, in some state of global denial, did. It's strange, but I can't get out of my mind an image that Bush administration officials, from the President on down, were using regularly back in 2003-2004. They often quite publicly compared the Iraqis to a child taking his first wobbly bike ride (assumedly on a democratic path) under the administration's tutelage. There was Washington, the kindly adult, stooped over, helping balance that ungainly kid, or trying to decide whether this was the moment to take off those training wheels and let the child take an initial spin on his own, chancing of course a spill.

In May of 2004, for instance, the President, according to a CBS News report, "sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan..., saying Iraqis are ready to ‘take the training wheels off' by assuming some political power." Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke similarly in March of that year: "Getting Iraq straightened out, he said, was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: ‘They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.'" And from Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, others chimed in similarly.

Of course, all of this was a lie of an image and not just because it was classically patronizing and colonial. After all, if you wanted to extend the image, you would have to say that the American parent helping that sweet child learn how to bike was also plundering the child's future college fund, looting his future patrimony, and turning his life into a swirl of deadly chaos. Take off those wheels and let him wobble around that first corner and he was likely to be knocked off his bike by an RPG round and find himself in a hospital without supplies run by doctors who were either being assassinated or fleeing the country.

Perhaps this image, now retired by the administration, came back to me as the President spoke because, only the day before, on a wet and slippery Scottish road, riding his own special sports bike, George had crashed into a policeman guarding him, scraping his hands and arms, and sending that policeman briefly to the hospital.

Of Japanese beetles, wanky journalists and students

To hell with politics and war.

Right now I'm obsessing over Japanese beetles. The bastards are a plague on my sweet corn and Kentucky Wonders. My sympathies go out to those who grow things for a living today.

Instead, I'm trying to think happy thoughts.

The Go-Betweens have a new album. They're now in their fourth decade of bohemian reverie. Their new album is quite good.

Bonus putdown, this from the Guardian review:

Whenever a band reforms, they are understandably subject to mistrustful inquiries about motives and consequences. Except, for some reason, the Go-Betweens, who reconvened in 2000 after 12 years apart without causing a solitary suspicious eyebrow to be raised. One ex-Go-Between who did not participate in the reunion, drummer Lindy Morrison, would claim this was because no one cared in the first place, except "a fistful of wanky journalists and some students."

I've always been a (slightly) bigger fan of Forster than McClennan, though they are, as everyone acknowledges, a paradigm of complementarity (don't know if that is even a word). Here are the lyrics to Darlinghurst Nights, which is a brilliantly cracked tribute to the joys and self-deceptions of boho life:

DARLINGHURST NIGHTS

I opened a notebook, it read “The Darlinghurst Years”
I snapped it shut but out jumped some tears
I didn’t have to read it, it all came back
Dragging my fingers through my hair
Hidding behind her back

Gut rot cappuccino, gut rot spaghetti
Gut rot rock’n’roll through the eyes of Frank Brunetti
And always the traffic, always the lights
Joe played the cello through those
Darlinghurst Nights

One more coffee and I must go
Back to my room more chapters to go
We’ll meet up in an alley with more places I know

I’m going to change my appearance everyday
I’m going to write a movie and then I’m going to star
in a play
I’m going to go to Caracas because you know I’m
just going to have to get away

Marjorie and Kim, Andy and Clint, Debbie, Bertie, people came and went
And then there was Suzie who we never ever saw again

And always the traffic always the lights
Climbing that hill star studded nights
Joe played the cello

Alright.

The Go-Betweens. God bless 'em.

"Up pops the devil, right in front of me"

More on mad mullahs and Iran demonization:

I've been a little obsessed about this (see here and here), but there are interesting pieces by Gary Leupp and BagNewsNotes on the "Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage-takers" story that came up last week, and just as suddenly disappeared. The accusation was of course page one news, but you have to look a little harder to find out that he wasn't the guy. In "Anatomy of a Neocon Smear" William O. Beeman rounds up the usual suspects and says Ahmadinejad "might be a bridge-builder to the world—if the world would meet him halfway"—which is probably the worst possible news for the neocons imaginable.

So, on to Plan B for the innuendo squad, and the suddenly hot accusation, after 15 or 16 years (!), that Ahmadinejad participated in, or was complicit, in a murder. Austria's justice minister denies he's probing Ahmadinejad for the murder of a Kurdish official in 1989. Who knows? I have no idea whether the accusation is true or not, but it's an interesting time for it to come up, no?

Meanwhile, Iran and Iraq make a deal on military cooperation.

Numbers and "What Is Happening to America?"

I am perhaps more ignorant than I should be, but at times numbers jump out at me. I didn't know that! I had no idea! How can this be? How could I not know?

Tony Judt's The New World Order, an essay/review of several recent books (including Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, which I am reading at the moment—a lengthy excerpt is available at tomdispatch.com) manages to produce several of these overwhelming numbers.

• There are 70,000 detainees currently "held outside the US, and may be kept incarcerated and incommunicado for as long as the Global War on Terror is fought—which could be decades."
  
  
• At the US's own interrogation centers and prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, at least twenty-seven "suspects" have been killed in custody. This number does not include extrajudicial, extraterritorial "targeted assassinations": a practice inaugurated by Benito Mussolini with the murder of the Rosselli brothers in Normandy in 1937, pursued with vigor by Israel, and now adopted by the Bush administration.
  
  
• The US Department of Defense currently maintains 725 official US military bases outside the country and 969 at home (not to mention numerous secret bases) and spends more on "defense" than all the rest of the world put together.
  
  
• The United States consumes 25 percent of all the oil produced in the world every year but has proven reserves of its own amounting to less than 2 percent of the global total.

I wonder how widespread the knowledge of these numbers is, and what would happen if more people did know.

Judt properly draws some unsettling conclusions from these books, all of which touch on the (until quite recently) fashionable idea of a new American Empire:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially—brutally, contemptuously, illegally—abroad while preserving republican values at home. For it is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country's political class have failed. Congress appears helpless to impede the concentration of power in the executive branch; indeed, with few exceptions it has contributed actively and even enthusiastically to the process.

The judiciary is little better. The "loyal opposition" is altogether too loyal. Indeed there seems little to be hoped from the Democratic Party. Terrified to be accused of transgressing the consensus on "order" and "security," its leaders now strive to emulate and even outdo Republicans in their aggressive stances. Senator Hillary Clinton, the party's likely candidate for the 2008 presidential elections, was last seen ostentatiously prostrating herself before the assembled ranks of the America-Israel Political Action Committee.

At the outer edges of the US imperium, in Bratislava or Tiflis, the dream of republican America still lives on, like the fading light from a distant, dying star. But even there the shadows of doubt are growing. Amnesty International cites several cases of detainees who "just could not believe Americans could act this way." Those are exactly the words said to me by an Albanian friend in Macedonia— and Macedonian Albanians have good reason to count themselves among this country's best friends and unconditional admirers. In Madrid a very senior and rather conservative Spanish diplomat recently put it thus:

We grew up under Franco with a dream of America. That dream encouraged us to imagine and later to build a different, better Spain. All dreams must fade—but not all dreams must become nightmares. We Spanish know a little about political nightmares. What is happening to America? How do you explain Guantánamo?

The American people have a touching faith in the invulnerability of their republic. It would not occur to most of them even to contemplate the possibility that their country might fall into the hands of a meretricious oligarchy; that, as Andrew Bacevich puts it, their political "system is fundamentally corrupt and functions in ways inconsistent with the spirit of genuine democracy." But the twentieth century has taught most other peoples in the world to be less cocksure. And when foreigners look across the oceans at the US today, what they see is far from reassuring.

For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national "values"; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not "democracy."

London, July 7, 2005

Winners: fear, Fox News, George W. Bush, racial profiling, conspiracy theorists, think-tank kooks, unaffiliated kooks, arms peddlers, terrorism "experts," terrorists

Losers: rational thought, civil liberties, due process, just about everyone else on the planet, the planet itself

Meanwhile,

So Mr. Bremer, where did all that money go?

Sa'ad Eddin, Al-Ahram, 7/6/03

The story of the mind-boggling disappearance of $9 billion-plus has been around for a while, but new details keep emerging:

The CPA maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces. The US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.
...
The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security".
...
An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that when he came to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1m) was his retirement package.

When the Iraqi Governing Council asked Bremer why a contract to repair the Samarah cement factory was costing $60m rather than the agreed $20m, the American representative reportedly told them that they should be grateful the coalition had saved them from Saddam.
...
Further evidence of lack of transparency comes from a series of audits and reports carried out by the CPA's own inspector general's office (CPAIG). Set up in January 2004, it reports to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafe tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their CPA compatriots.

All the president's men

Writing in the Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal offers a good overview of conservatives and the Supreme Court, and says the most extreme among them think their goal, which is nothing less than to to overturn FDR's legacy, is just within their grasp.

Excerpts:

President Nixon attempted to pack the court with two southern segregationists who were rejected by the Senate. His choice for chief justice, Warren Burger, as conservative as he was, disappointed him and he took to calling him "a dumb Swede". At last, he selected William Rehnquist, the farthest-right candidate he could find, a judge who had personally intimidated blacks and Hispanics from voting at polling places and written a memo in favour of segregation. Before his confirmation hearing Nixon instructed him to "be as mean and rough as they said you were....."

Conservative frustration at their inability to remake the country through Republican domination of the supreme court has risen exponentially during O'Connor's ascendance. The Federalist Society, a tightly knit group of conservative lawyers created during the Reagan period, now operates as a controlling network throughout the Bush administration. There is simply not a single presidential appointee in a position of legal responsibility who is not a card-carrying member. Among them, the regnant doctrine is called the "constitution in exile" - a belief that the true constitution has been suppressed since Roosevelt and can be restored by the uniform appointment of "originalists" to the court.....

Indeed, the notion of torture is alive in the executive branch. Bush's lawyers, in the office of legal counsel of the justice department, have concluded that the president "enjoys complete discretion" and any limitation on his power to torture is unconstitutional. Thomas's logic is the same as the logic of the OLC in granting the right of the president to torture as part of his inherent authority as commander in chief. In his dissent in Hamdi v Rumsfeld, Thomas argued thatdetainees have no right to due process of law, assigning "unique" powers to the executive in national security, and none to Congress, contrary to the constitution. The extremity of advocating legalisms for the suspension of rights and torture is not unrelated to a broader extremism.

The spirit animating the Bush administration and the conservatives on the court is the illusion of omnipotence. It is the opposite of that of Justice John Paul Stevens (a Republican appointed by President Ford, who has recently expressed his pride in doing so). In his dissent last year in Rumsfeld v Padilla, Stevens argued that an American citizen could not be detained without due process. "Even more important than the method of selecting the people's rulers and their successors," he wrote, "is the character of the constraints imposed on the executive by the rule of law."

Great moments in disinformation, vol. 1

This year's model: The Zarqawi Myth

Amjad Rasmi, Arab News, 8/3/04

In which Dahr Jamail goes in search of the world's Number Two (with a bullet!) terrorist, and finds more questions than answers....

A remarkable proportion of the violence taking place in Iraq is regularly credited to the Jordanian Ahmad al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his organization Al Qaeda in Iraq. Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off, no ambush occurs that isn't claimed in his name or attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him, lifting his reputed feats of terrorism to epic, even mythic, proportions (much aided by various mainstream media outlets). Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based upon administration lies and manipulations, I had begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed.

Read on...

As usual, Conyers takes action while his peers in Congress do nothing

Raw Story reports that the Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) has drafted a letter to the White House asking that Karl Rove explain his role in the outing of a CIA agent or resign his office.

Regardless of whether these actions violate the law . . . they seem to reveal a course of conduct designed to threaten and intimidate those who provide information critical of your administration, such as Ambassador Wilson. We hope you agree with us that such behavior should never be tolerated by any administration.

It will be interesting to see how many of his colleagues sign on to his letter. "This being a recess week, it will be somewhat difficult to obtain co-signatories," the Congressman writes on his blog.

Conyers appears to be the only member of House or Senate to understand that his is an opposition party, and he has consistently been the most vocal opposition voice. On June 30, he and 52 other members of Congress filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents relevant to the DSM.

Don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it

In A Fiction as Powerful as WMD, Sami Ramadani puts the lie to "stay the course" rhetoric in Iraq, and asserts that the bloody sectarianism that has riven Iraq since the invasion was a result of deliberate American policies:

The occupation's sectarian discourse has acquired a hold as powerful as the WMD fiction that prepared the public for war. Iraqis are portrayed as a people who can't wait to kill each other once left to their own devices. In fact, the occupation is the main architect of institutionalised sectarian and ethnic divisions; its removal would act as a catalyst for Iraqis to resolve some of their differences politically.

Cindy Sheehan recalls her 82 seconds of fame on Larry King.

In spite of appearing with two members of the "opposition" party (Kerry and Bayh), it fell to Sheehan, president of Gold Star Families and mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, to offer a token (82-second) "peace" response to the president's speech on June 28th:

The thing that struck me when I was watching that vacuous man giving his hollow speech was the fact that he could have always replaced the word "terrorists" with the phrase: "my moronic and callous foreign policies." For example, when he said that terrorists spread death and destruction on the streets of Baghdad and kill innocent people, he could have just as easily said: "My moronic and callous foreign policies spread death and destruction on the streets of Baghdad and kill innocent people." When he said that we need to stop terrorists from toppling governments in the region, he could have just as easily said: "We need to stop my moronic and callous foreign policies from toppling governments in the region." People have characterized the speech-lite in many ways, but if I had to pick a few words to describe it, I would say: "Hypocritical, manipulative, condescending, meaningless drivel."

After my brief advocacy for peace, my position was refuted by another Mom whose son was killed in Iraq in 2003 who said she "totally disagrees" with me and "feels sorry" for me. Well, you know what? I ache for her blindness and for the millions of sheeple who have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the bunch of hypocritical, bad shepherds who are running a disastrous herd over the world. I have distressing news for the Soccer Safety Moms and the NASCAR Dads who are such ardent supporters of this administration and war: Your grandchildren and children who will be entering Kindergarten this fall will be fighting George's endless war if he gets his way and is allowed to continue spreading the cancer of imperialism in the Middle-East. Donny Rumsfeld said we could be in Iraq for another dozen years. Does anybody think with all the billions of dollars that are being poured into constructing super-sized bases in Iraq that the war machine plans on relinquishing the cash-cow that is that poor, unfortunate land anytime soon? Think about it when you tuck your child into bed tonight.

As I sat in the Green Room of CNN, I was saddened and troubled by George's call for us Americans to fly the flag proudly on the 4^th to honor our troops. For one thing, the American flag is not a magical token that can bring armor to the troops who are still dying without the protection. The flag is not a faith healer that can restore limbs and eyesight to the ones who have been maimed forever. The flag is not a genie in a bottle that can blink her eyes and bring our children home from this horrible blunder that they are suffering for and being slaughtered for. But, as for me, I will never be able to celebrate another patriotic holiday without mourning what this nation has stolen from my family. I will never be able to look at an American flag without thinking of the uniform my son wore proudly that displayed that same symbol and the evil ones who desecrated and defiled the stars and stripes by lying us into the invasion of Iraq. No, Casey's sacrifice was not "worth it" and George needs to do more than wave his flag and manipulate our sense of patriotism. He needs to march his girls to a recruitment center and send them to Iraq to fight the terrorists that his moronic and callous foreign policies have recruited or he needs to wake up and smell the apple pie and bring our other sons and daughters home, now!

Let's make poverty—er—history repeats itself

With Bush telling Tony Blair to expect no favors (he wants "to move beyond the Kyoto debate") and Bob Geldof fearful that all his efforts will end in a "grotesque failure", some wider perspective on the G8 from George Monbiot of the Guardian:

The G8 leaders have seized this opportunity with both hands. Multinational corporations, they argue, are not the cause of Africa's problems but the solution. From now on they will be responsible for the relief of poverty.

They have already been given control of the primary instrument of US policy towards Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy and raw self-interest. To become eligible for help, African countries must bring about "a market-based economy that protects private property rights", "the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment" and a conducive environment for US "foreign policy interests". In return they will be allowed "preferential treatment" for some of their products in US markets.

Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is investment. But investment by many of our multinationals has not enriched its people but impoverished them. The history of corporate involvement in Africa is one of forced labour, evictions, murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and collusion with dictators. Nothing in either the Investment Climate Facility or the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes mandatory constraints on corporations. While their power and profits in Africa will be enhanced with the help of our foreign-aid budgets, they will be bound only by voluntary commitments: of the kind that have been in place since 1973 and have proved useless.

Just as Gordon Brown's "moral crusade" encourages us to forget the armed crusade he financed, the state-sponsored rebranding of the companies working in Africa prompts us to forget what Shell has been doing in Nigeria, what Barclays and Anglo American and De Beers have done in South Africa, and what British American Tobacco has done just about everywhere. From now on, the G8 would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa's best friends. In the name of making poverty history, the G8 has given a new, multi-headed East India Company a mandate to govern the continent.Without a critique of power, our campaign, so marvellously and so disastrously inclusive, will merely enhance this effort. Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives. Where, on the Live 8 stages and in Edinburgh, was the campaign against the G8's control of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN? Where was the demand for binding global laws for multinational companies?

At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs.

President in a (très patriotique) tutu!

Photo by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

I can imagine his religious base is gonna be very disappointed when he finally makes his big announcement.

Now if Karl wasn't so damned distracted with the grand jury and all, he would've never let this photo happen.

Mad Mullah demonization watch

Iran's Nuclear Lies, a long Newsweek piece, natters on for 1800 words or so with very little of substance to say, and is yet another instance of Team B thinking—i.e. if we can't find any evidence of an enemy's weaponry it must be really super-sophisticated (see Soviet Arms "buildup", Iraq weapons inspections). As regards the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, Christopher Dickey fails even once to mention the most obvious—in fact, only—solution, a nuclear-free Middle East.

For some reason, such talk has become taboo, even though as recently as March, the Washington Post looked into it. In Push for Nuclear-Free Middle East Resurfaces, Walter Pincus explores the idea:

While U.S. policy has been to support the concept of a nuclear-free Middle East, administration officials almost never acknowledge publicly that Israel's possession of such weapons may be a factor in the actions of other regional powers, such as Iran, Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. The CIA regularly omits mention of Israel's nuclear weapons in its six-month reports to Congress on weapons of mass destruction.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a report Thursday, called for the United States and other nuclear powers "to intensify efforts to create of a zone free of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the Middle East." Citing the conflicts and rivalries that abound in the region, the report says, "This knot of real and exaggerated security threats and status seeking is pulled tighter still by Israel's undeclared possession of nuclear weapons, and by its continuing conflict with the Palestinians and with neighboring Arab states that do not recognize its existence."

George Perkovich, one of the study's authors, said one starting point for the region could be to have Israel halt its production of fissile materials, the same thing that is being asked of Iran. "Our aim should be to create a security environment, and you can't do that if you don't recognize publicly that Israel has nuclear weapons," he said.

But that was before the May NPT Review Conference, where, according to Embassy magazine, "Proposals for a nuclear weapon free zone in the Middle East were met with disinterest or opposition by mid-level American diplomats, and high-level U.S. diplomats, like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose not to attend the conference."

And in a broader context, as regards the efficacy of this ongoing campaign of demonization of Iran, William O. Beeman, Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University and author of The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, takes into account specific Iranian cultural attitudes and sees America's approach as being uniquely unconstructive:

It is a general principle of communication dynamics in Iran that only parties who are in an active pre-existing relationship have the ability to make demands on each other. To enter a relationship, there needs to be a clear understanding about roles -- how the parties are to be mutually supportive. In interpersonal interaction, an individual who tries to make demands on another from a "superior" position without having this understanding is practicing "power mongering" (ghodrat-talabi). This is one of the most despised actions in all of Iranian conduct, and is resisted with every fiber of one's being. Even if a party is forced into acquiescence, there are consequences down the road, since the party forced to their knees, so to speak, will harbor eternal resentment, and will look for a way to strike back at some time in the future.

The United States and Iran currently have no active relationship. Therefore American demands on Iran will be met with greater and greater resistance the more they are promulgated, either directly through shouting and invective, or through trying to use the European negotiating team to do Washington's work. The Europeans, who do have a functioning relationship with Iran, have a chance to succeed in their negotiations, if only they are not perceived as American tools. The only way for the United States to press its interests successfully with Iran is to bite the bullet and get back into direct communication with the Islamic Republic. As distasteful as this might be to some parties in the current administration -- and indeed to many in Iran -- it can be done with sufficient political will.

It's hard to imagine with the disaster in Iraq, but there appears to be no one, Republican or Democrat, willing to challenge the notion that "regime change" is a viable option in Iran, or the presumption that the United States has the right to decide who should govern that country.

Holiday weekends...

... much harder than workdays. Garden progressing, in spite of our being cursed by the rain gods over the weekend. Storms to the left, storms to the right, nary a drop for me.

Pole beans—are they worth it?

After several hours of erecting a rickety structure to support my "kentucky wonders" (THAT remains to be seen), I feel no sentiment more strongly than: next year it's bush beans all the way.

This pastoral idyll just buying time before I begin my week's quota of ranting on Karl Rove, the Supreme Court, and the ongoing Iran demonization campaign.

Crisis pictures needs your support

One of the most important sites on the entire web, crisis pictures is having difficulties meeting financial obligations. Please support them.

Mmmmm. Yuengling!!

A nice patriotic holiday sentiment from Jerry & Joe Long, from The Huffington Post.

If we had one wish for the 4th of July, it would be that out on The Mall in Washington DC, the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson would slowly creak to life. Creak to life, almost imperceptibly at first, the way statues do in those Ray Harryhausen movies.

Then, with leisured dignity, the statues of Lincoln and Jefferson would walk down from their memorials...and (assuming of course, that the statue of Jefferson could be pulled off the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune and, for readers of C.A. Tripp, Lincoln pulled off Jefferson) go on a rampage of retribution and vengeance.

They would run amok on K Street; grinding the bones of tobacco, insurance, pharmaceutical, chemical and all other lobbyists in the city into a gelatinous mass of sludge.

They would take turns kicking the headquarters of the NRA, the AARP, AIPAC, and every special interest group to rubble.

They would find Billy Tauzin cowering under his desk at PhRMA, and eat him. Along with every other congressman turned corporate shill.

They would break the tip off the Washington Monument, and use it like trash collectors to spear every corrupt politician, duplicitous think-tanker, lap dog journalist, vile consultant and point missing pollster in the Beltway.

Just for the hell of it, they would each take an arm of Doug Feith and pull.

And then, the man who defined our Republic and the man who saved it would return to their poses atop a pedestal and a curule chair.

Having given us one last chance to do what’s best for all the people, not just the ones with money.

Or...if we can't have that, a couple of buffalo burgers grilled to juicy perfection and washed down with a frosty Yuengling Lager...Happy 4th!

Surprising support for impeachment shown in Zogby poll, more idiots on parade on Times op-ed page

"In a sign of the continuing partisan division of the nation, more than two-in-five (42%) voters say that, if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment. While half (50%) of respondents do not hold this view, supporters of impeachment outweigh opponents in some parts of the country."

So we've come to situation where virtually no one in the so-called opposition party or major media is even making concrete demands about setting a troop pullout timetable, while more than two in five ordinary Americans say the President should be held accountable for his mendacity, should it be proven (any more than it already has....), through impeachment.

And the New York Times continues to cough up its prized editorial page real estate to the idiots who got us into this mess. It doesn't mention on his little author citation at the bottom of the article, but lest we forget: Kenneth Pollack was, is, and will ever be remembered as the author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.

As one of the leading voices supporting what is looking more and more like the worst single decision ever made by an American president (remember, it took four presidents to make the Vietnam mess), Kenneth Pollack SHOULD be the last person on earth anyone should listen to in regard to Iraq.