Some stuff

* According to the NY Times, the Pentagon has concluded that "many bombings against Americans and their allies in Iraq, and the more sophisticated of the guerrilla attacks in Falluja, are organized and often carried out by members of Saddam Hussein's secret service, who planned for the insurgency even before the fall of Baghdad."

* After finally realizing that there were no good options left, the US military has announced it is stopping its seige of Fallujah and has struck a tentative deal to allow an Iraqi force to begin patrolling the city. It's yet to be seen if this tactic will bring an end to the cycle of violence that has killed hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of US soldiers since April 5.

* "One year after President George W Bush declared an end to 'major hostilities' in Iraq, public opinion there and in the United States is beginning to converge, as people in both countries increasingly agree that the US invasion and occupation might not have been such a good idea after all," Jim Lobe reports. "That is one conclusion of two major public opinion polls released Thursday, one by the New York Times and CBS News, which found that a record 58 percent of US respondents now believe the invasion was not worth the cost in lives and resources, and another by CNN, USA Today, and Gallup that found 57 percent of Iraqis believe U.S.-led coalition forces should leave their country 'in the next few months.'"

* Juan Cole and Tom Regan break down the Iraq poll further.

* The CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes II has published images of the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US soldiers. You can view the images and some corresponding video via UnFair Witness.

* "Where is the U.S. peace movement, now that we really need it?" asks Ira Chernus. "The war in Iraq is handing the movement a golden opportunity on a silver platter. But the movement seems to be MIA. Too busy to organize the massive protests that should be happening today. Too busy trying to elect a presidential candidate who sounds a bit ashamed of his antiwar past."

* The US State Department's annual report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," has found that the number of worldwide terrorist attacks has dropped to its lowest level since 1969.

* The CIA is predicting the breakup of Russia in an update of its report, "Global Trends 2015."

Tag teamin'

James Ridgeway offers some questions he'd liked to see Bush and Cheney asked during their joint testimony before the 9/11 commission tomorrow.

(via dialogic)

Remember Falluja

Writing in Ha'aretz, Orit Shohat compares US war crimes in Falluja with Israel's actions in the occupied territories. It's not a pretty picture, in either case.

Will the media slumber on?

In the LA Times, Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch prods the media to start paying attention to genocide in Africa as it's happening, not ten years after the fact:

The international media don't send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries.

We've just finished a spate of front-page stories, television docu-histories and somber panel discussions on "Why the Media Missed the Story" in Rwanda, pegged to the 10th anniversary of one of the most shocking tragedies of last century, or any century. More than 500,000 people were killed in a small African country in only 100 days, and the world turned away.

But even as the ink was drying on the latest round of mea culpas, another colossal disaster in Africa was already going uncovered.

Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring Chad. They report that militias working with the Sudanese government have been attacking villages, ransacking and torching homes, killing and raping civilians. These armed forces are supposedly cracking down on rebel groups based in the Darfur region, but in fact they are targeting the population.

The rainy season comes to western Sudan in May. If farmers don't get back to their villages by then, the crops will not get planted this year — and that could mean mass starvation as well. But no one will go back as long as the janjaweed (literally, "armed horsemen") militias remain in the area.

So where are the journalists?

The woeful reporting of just about anything going on in Africa is one of the most shocking deficiencies within the media. My own ignorance of events there is something that deeply perturbs me and -- while this sounds somewhat arrogant -- I try to pay close attention to what's going on in the media. I can only imagine the ignorance of those countless numbers of people who either don't have the time to engage news reports or don't think it's worth their time.

Friday's Nightline

If you haven't already heard, ABC's Nightline is going to devote its entire Friday show to reading the names of those members of the US military who have been killed in Iraq.

Pro-Choice = Pro-Terrorist

It seems Karen Hughes is trying to outdo Rod Paige's infamous remarks:

One of President Bush's campaign advisors on Sunday implied that women and men who participated in the March for Women's Lives, as well as all those who support reproductive rights, hold the same values as terrorists. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Bush advisor Karen Hughes said, “President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions...really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.” Hughes continued, saying, “Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.”

It's simply amazing what these jokers can get away with.

Anti-semitism down; criticism of Israel up

Following the release of the revised EUMC survey, this news lends added doubts to the alleged virulence of the "new anti-Semitism":

While anti-Semitism has decreased in most of Europe over the past two years, Europeans harbour increasingly hostile views towards Israel, according to a survey released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League, the US civil rights organisation.

The survey, coinciding with a fall in reported anti-Semitic incidents in several countries last year, suggests governments are succeeding in preventing violence in the Middle East spilling over into Europe through the continent's large Muslim communities.

The poll's findings could also undermine the argument, supported by some civil rights movements including the ADL itself and think-tanks in Israel and the US, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe holds its second conference on anti-Semitism in Berlin tomorrow.

Speaking in Berlin yesterday, Abraham Foxman, ADL director, said the decline in anti-Semitic attitudes since a first survey in 2002 showed European governments, particularly France, were having some success in defeating anti-Jewish sentiments.

"The good news is that regardless of the methodology we use, there is a decrease in anti-Semitic attitudes in eight out of the 10 countries surveyed," Mr Foxman said. "The bad news is it seems to be open season on Israel and the level of criticism is almost beyond reason."

Here's a thought: if Israel stopped trampling on human rights and incessantly using the excuse of terrorism to justify massive amounts of collective punishment, then perhaps the "unreasonable" criticism Mr. Foxman laments would abate.

Passing the buck

Bloody Aprils

Here's a fair rendering of recent events in Iraq, I think, in my own adjusted-for-effect prose:

The US army insists that its devastating invasion of Fallujah earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Iraqi insurgents, particularly the authors of a vicious attack on American contractors. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always – although its daily behavior in occupied Iraq contradicts this claim – it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.

But Al Jazeera has unearthed a different story. It has found that, while the US operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the resistance – in the short term, at least – more than half of the Iraqi dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal American operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which the CPA is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.

The assault on Fallujah by the US forces began early on 5 April. One week earlier, four US contractors escorting a food convoy into the city were killed and mutilated by a mob of angry residents. This horrific slaughter reverberated in media around the world, making it the most vivid image of the violence facing the occupational authorities in Iraq, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the bloody insurgency countered by US forces since the fall of Baghdad.

Ok, now compare and contrast with what appeared in the Independent on April 25, 2002:

The Israeli army insists that its devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always – although its daily behavior in the occupied territories contradicts this claim – it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.

But The lndependent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant organizations – in the short term, at least – nearly half of the Palestinian dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.

The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel's armed forces began early on 3 April. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long conflict between the two peoples.

Some will think this is an unfair comparison, or a stretch that isn't completely tenable. Obviously, I don't think that's the case. The US announced it would be "exporting Jenin to Iraq," in Nigel Parry's foreboding words, and it looks to be doing precisely that.

A quick take on things

I'm pressed for time and frankly not really into blogging right now for a variety of reasons, but here's some stuff I thought was worth checking out from the past few days.

* Tom Engelhardt has a nice round-up of articles on the situation in and around Iraq. It's clear that things hang in the balance right now, and the forthcoming moves by US forces towards Najaf and/or Fallujah this week will make the situation for the occupational authorities worse.

* A PIPA survey has found that a majority of Americans still believe in Dubya's Iraq lies. Juan Cole and Josh Marshall offer some further analysis of the poll.

* Bob Woodward: shrewd operator or pointless pontificator?

* If you haven't already, check out Russ Kick's scoop of pictures of returning coffins from Iraq over at the Memory Hole. Amazing what an FOIA request can do, eh? Coincidentally, those photos appeared on the heels of a series of similar images published by the Seattle Times. The woman who took the photos which were published by the Times was subsequently fired from her job with a US contractor.

* Gabriel Ash tackles the new question being thrown at critics of the Iraq war -- "So what do you propose?"

* The argument that a US withdrawal from Iraq would result in a "political vacuum" is part of the same imperial mindset that "saw the enormous expanse of the American West as 'empty territory' waiting for us to occupy it, when hundreds of thousands of Indians lived there already," declares Howard Zinn in the Progressive.

* There's a good interview with Noam Chomsky in the same issue of the Progressive, as well.

* Peter Galbraith outlines a plan to get the US out of Iraq in the NYRB.

* An article from Newsweek prompts Josh Marshall to gape in awe at just how far Paul Wolfowitz and the boys were willing to go in search of the "Holy Grail of the neocon knighthood, the fabled Iraq-al Qaida link."

* A Christian Aid survey of poor Shia neighborhoods in Iraq has found that the quality of life for residents has gotten worse since the fall of Hussein's regime.

* Witness the mendacity of two "operation kickbacks" -- one in Iraq and one at the United Nations.

* The featured article in this week's NY Times Magazine details how Bush's re-election efforts look "less like a political campaign than what is known in business as a multilevel marketing scheme," an initiative that equates democratic participation with reality TV in the mind of Bush's campaign manager.

* Tweedledum Bush or Tweedledee Kerry? Not quite. Bush and Kerry sing the same tune on Israel and Iraq now, but there are many important differences between Kerry's DLC-sponsored platform and the Bush-Cheney "criminal enterprise," according to the Black Commentator.

* Sibel Edmonds, the FBI's 9/11 whistleblower, is being gagged by the Justice Department. In related news, the NY Times reports that the 9/11 commission is expected to sharply criticize NORAD's failure to defend the skies on that fateful day in its final report.

* Fred Halliday puts terrorism in historical perspective in an extended essay over at OpenDemocracy.

* Randy Shaw and Mickey Z. address some of the issues surrounding the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman last week in Afghanistan.

* Here's a concise introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict by Norman Finkelstein which I ran across via the Estimated Prophet.

* Geraldine Sealey explains how Fox News beat CNN in Salon.

* Is the anti-globalization movement -- ahem, Global Justice Movement -- dead? Nope. As Madeleine Bunting claims, it's just fighting other battles right now, retooling, and getting ready for future ones.

* Speaking of which, there was a protest against the IMF this past weekend in DC. There also was a massive, inspring march for women's rights on the Mall. DC Indymedia had both events covered.

Curious backdrop

Paul Street connects the dots between 9/11, Richard Clarke, and the Rwandan massacre of ten years ago in a discussion of "narcissistic compassion."

(via wood s lot)

Informative stuff

Some recent articles worth checking out from ZNet:

* Ed Herman revisits Dasht-E Leili and Jamie Doran's documentary, "Massacre at Mazar."

* Manning Marable outlines the death of affirmative action in a two-part feature: part I and part II.

* David Bacon examines the privatization of Iraq in the context of human rights.

* Anjum Niaz probes the Oil-for-Food scandal at the UN.

Voting fiasco, redux?

According to the Independent, a new report by the US Commission on Civil Rights concludes that the "United States may be on the way to another Florida-style presidential election fiasco this year because legislation passed to fix the system has either failed to address the problems or has broken down because of missed deadlines and unmet funding targets."

Vanunu freed

Our self-centered national debate

"Given that the last remaining justification for the Iraq war is the replacement of a tyrant with a democratic government," Chris Toensig writes in the LA Times, "the stubborn solipsism of the American debate on Iraq is more than a little odd. But the ultimate measure of how self-centered our national conversation about Iraq has become can be found in what is not measured. No attempt is being made by the U.S. military to count civilian deaths in besieged Fallujah – nor were such records kept during the major combat operations last year. And no one is monitoring maternal and child mortality rates since Hussein's defeat. Such statistics were carefully kept by the old regime as well as the United Nations and independent researchers during the economic sanctions of 1991-2003. Alaa Yusuf, a doctor whose hospital I visited, was both philosophical and bitter. 'Maybe the statistics were part of the old regime's propaganda,' he said. 'Maybe the new propaganda requires no statistics.'"

It ain't because we're "free"...

After a recent tour of the Middle East, Walter Russell Mead addresses the somewhat infamous question of "Why They Hate Us" in an opinion piece for the NY Times.

Mead and I have this knack of being on the same page, it seems.

More troops

As Senator Chuck Hagel hints of a forthcoming military draft, the NY Times reports that the Pentagon had drawn up a contingency plan "to send fresh troops quickly to Iraq in case it decides it must keep 135,000 or more American soldiers deployed beyond July."

Iraq screw ups

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations yesterday, Juan Cole explained what mistakes the US has made in Iraq and what it needs to do to go about correcting them.

The spectre of civil war

Jason Vest writes of a leaked memo from the CPA in Iraq warning that the handling of the occupation over the past year has "created an environment rife with corruption and sectarianism likely to result in civil war."

Meanwhile, Robert Fisk suggests in an interview on Australian television that the notion Iraq will descend into civil war "is being pushed...by the Americans and the British in order to frighten the Iraqis into obedience."

Scary George

"It's hard to know what is more disturbing," writes David Corn in response to the Woodward allegations. "That George W. Bush misled the public by stating in the months before the Iraq war that he was seriously pursuing a diplomatic resolution when he was not. That he didn't bother to ask aides to present the case against going to war. That he may have violated the U.S. Constitution by spending hundreds of millions of dollars secretly to prepare for the invasion of Iraq without notifying Congress. That he was misinformed by the CIA director about one of the most critical issues of the day and demanded no accountability. Or that he doesn't care if he got it wrong on the weapons of mass destruction."

Woodward's claims

As promised, Bob Woodward popped up on CBS' 60 Minutes with some damning revelations about the Bush administration from his new book Plan of Attack. If you missed his interview, you can read the transcript or watch it here.

Woodward's most significant claims, some of which I mentioned previously, were: a) Bush ordered Rumsfeld to draw up an Iraq war plan in November 2001; b) the plan drew on funds allocated for Afghanistan, without Congressional knowledge; c) the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US knew of the war plan in January 2003, even before Colin Powell; d) the Saudis made a deal to help lower gas prices in the US before the 2004 election to help Bush win; and e) Bush is a religious fanatic who feels a mandate from God to "liberate" the world.

The administration is already on the counterattack, trying to discredit Woodward's points and spin them into innocuous political factoids. Most of what Woodward has to say does not come as a surprise, but the Saudi oil deal is a major revelation that hasn't even been hinted at elsewhere. If it wasn't previously, the close relationship between the Bush family and the Saudis should now become a major political issue.

The one thing that did not come out in the interview, but which is mentioned in Plan of Attack, is Powell's charge that Cheney set up a "separate government" to handle the Iraq war planning and intelligence manipulation. Justin Raimondo, as he typically does, examines this news in the context of the neocon-Israeli connection.

A people's war

Writing in the Guardian, Martin Jacques observes that it should now be "clear to everyone - apart from Donald Rumsfeld and his cronies - that, far from being a rump of Saddamist malcontents, the [Iraqi] resistance enjoys broad based support among the Sunnis and increasingly the Shias too. The old truths are alive and well. People do not want to be ruled by an alien power from thousands of miles away whose interests are self-serving. The resistance in Iraq bears all the hallmarks of a people's war for self-determination."

Nonetheless, the question that remains, according to James Petras, is "Will our intellectuals take note?"

Defeat...or worse?

"Because of Bush's strategic commitment to global hegemony and his messianic ideological persuasions," Robert Freeman writes in an explication of the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, "the U.S. cannot get out of Iraq; but because of the realities of colonialism, guerilla war, phony democracy, and the foundation of lies to justify it all, it will not be able to win either. Does this sound familiar?"

"The damage to U.S. prestige in the world for its illegal invasion of Iraq is already done," Freeman continues. "The danger now is that in his desperation to 'avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat,' the repudiation of his entire presidency, and a generation-long disdain for U.S. military power, Bush will resort to apocalyptic barbarism. This is exactly what Nixon did trying to salvage 'peace with honor' in Vietnam. It is this temptation that only the American public can force Bush to resist."

Bringing in the mercenaries

"Far more than in any other conflict in United States history, the Pentagon is relying on private security companies to perform crucial jobs once entrusted to the military," the NY Times reports. "With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias -- by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000."

From Israel to Iraq (and Syria?)

The assassination of the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantissi only reinforces what I said following Yassin's assassination last month. Bold moves by Israel, yes. Also disastrous ones. Just wait.

For Americans, it surely cannot be good to have much of the Arab world convinced Bush greenlighted the "targeted killing." It also doesn't help that Rantissi's murder is resonating across Iraq, particularly with Fallujah in chaos, the occupation in "crisis," Najaf surrounded, and Bremer itching to put down the uprising.

And to make things even more fun, Israel is threatening to take its fight to Syria. If it does, will the US follow?

Killing peace

"By overturning the decades-old official U.S. position that the dispute over borders and refugees had to be resolved by direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians," Michelle Golberg writes in Salon, "Bush in effect conceded huge areas to the Israelis in advance of those negotiations. It's true that in any peace deal, some large Israeli settlements were likely to be folded into Israel proper -- with the Palestinians being given compensatory land -- and true as well that no wholesale right of return was likely to be acceptable to the Jewish state. But by prejudging these issues, Bush fundamentally shifted the entire dynamic of the [peace] process -- and," Goldberg concludes, probably "killed it altogether."

9/11 warnings were "dire and persistent"

A lengthy front-page article from Sunday's NY Times outlines some of the 9/11 commission's findings thus far, most notably that "clear, urgent and persistent" threats of an attack by Al Qaeda -- some dating back several years, others arising in the months leading up to 9/11 -- "had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government."

Trying to "kill his way out of it"

Again, I defer to Charley Reese to explain what's going on in the world:

President George W. Bush continues to mislead the American people as to the cause of terrorism directed against the United States.

This week he guaranteed that more Americans will die from terrorist attacks due to his stabbing the Palestinians in the back. He has from the beginning acted as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were the ventriloquist.

He proved it again by buying into Sharon's scheme to steal great globs of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and by arrogantly denying the right of Palestinian refugees to return home or be compensated. Israel has no legal right to the land occupied by settlements; the whole world recognizes this and has for decades. The United States used to recognize it until Bush decided to kiss the most ample part of Sharon's anatomy.

How dare George Bush tell Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed in 1947–48 and again in 1967, that they have no rights? What unmitigated gall and arrogance he shows, what contempt for the Palestinians and indeed for the whole Muslim world. When did God give George Bush the power to abolish the human rights of other people?

It's no wonder he has to lie through his teeth to try to explain terrorism. We are not victims of terrorism because terrorists hate us or democracy or freedom. We are victims of terrorism because George Bush's policies inflict grievous harm on Palestinians, on Afghans and on Iraqis.

Robert Fisk strikes a similar, ominous note.

Woodward's Plan of Attack

Continuing where Bush At War left off, Bob Woodward is set to release a new book which probes George Bush's handling of the Iraq mess. The major revelation thus far is that Bush charged Rumsfeld with drawing up a war plan as early as November 2001, something done outside the purview of Congress and even some members of Bush's cabinet. The plan also drew on funds that were actually allocated for operations in Afghanistan.

An extended article about Woodward's findings from the Washington Post outlines some of the faultlines in the administration, most of which have been reported (or at least hinted at) elsewhere: Powell hates Cheney; a possessed Cheney and his minions (Wolfowitz, Feith, and Libby) led the march to war; Condi Rice was in the dark for quite a while.

Interestingly, the Post article even reveals Powell felt Cheney and his boys "had established what amounted to a separate government" with Doug Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which eventually mutated into the Office of Special Plans. Powell went as far as to call Feith's setup a "Gestapo" office.

Nonetheless, the Good General decided to throw his hat into the ring by lobbying for the war before the UN in February 2003, armed with "slam dunk" evidence against Hussein's regime provided by Tenet's CIA. And, well, we all know how that turned out.

The book, titled Plan of Attack, is set for release next week. Woodward will do the customary appearance on CBS' 60 Minutes this Sunday, and will likely unveil further details, most of which do not portray the administration in glowing terms and confirm for the umpeenth time that Iraq was in the crosshairs all along.

The funny thing about Woodward is that while he's an establishment journalist who has been given unprecedented access to the Bush administration because he can be frequently relied upon to fawn in the face of power, it looks like there might be enough material in this new book alone to start impeachment proceedings. Of course, that won't happen, but I suppose we can dream.

Stretched thin

James Fallows details the "hollow army" in this month's Atlantic Monthly:

The United States spends more on armed forces than do all other countries combined; the resulting arsenal is more than a match for any opposing power and for nearly any conceivable coalition of foes. No one disputes that American military supremacy is an international reality. But our military has become vulnerable in a way that is obvious to everyone associated with it yet rarely acknowledged by politicians and probably not appreciated by much of the public. The military's people, its equipment, its supplies and spare parts, its logistics systems, and all its other assets are under pressure they cannot sustain. Everything has been operating on an emergency basis for more than two years, with no end to the emergency in sight. The situation was serious before the invasion of Iraq; now it is acute.

This overstretch really kicked into gear under Clinton's watch, but the Bush adventures following 9/11 have exacerbated the problem to the point of crisis. The ominous part of this is that nobody in the American political establishment has anything remotely productive to say about it since they've internalized the necessity of a hegemonic role for the US.

Who needs neocons to ridicule when mainstream Democrats -- including their presumptive Presidential candidate -- have already decided that reducing the Pentagon's budget and pulling back from abroad aren't even issues worth considering?

The Palestinization of Iraq

Before the Iraq war, Juan Cole writes, "Bush connected nonexistent dots between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Now he and his neoconservative brain trust are mapping the Iraq conflict onto the Likud Party agenda in Palestine. This time, however, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- and one that will have devastating repercussions for U.S. interests in both Iraq and the entire Arab world."

The other viceroy

Meet the real ruler of Aghanistan. No, not you Mr. Karzai. Try Zalmay M. Khalilzad -- US ambassador, neocon shellman, oil kingpin.

Capitulation

As John Kerry moves further and further right, Alex Cockburn is once again aghast that "the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflict debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left -- a necessarily catch-all word -- is almost without precedent. By accepting the premises and practices of party unity the left has negated the reasons for its own existence."

Who's tragedy?

Matt Taibbi is perturbed by the bankruptcy of the debate over whether Iraq is "another Vietnam":

Thirty years after the fact, America still insists on looking at Vietnam as "our national tragedy," the tragedy apparently being 58,000 dead, a regrettable loss of public confidence in the institution of the presidency, a brief period of political turmoil on American campuses, an enduring hesitancy to use military force. Just look at our movies about Vietnam: the tragedy is always the poor Vietnam vet who comes home and suffers through a long period of monosyllabic turmoil and intermittent employment, doomed to live out his days limping around his hometown in boots and a shabby field jacket, wondering where his life went so wrong.

Right. That's the tragedy. Not the indiscriminate murder of one-sixth of Laos. Not the saturation bombing of wide swaths of rural Indochina. Not the turning of ancient cultures into moonscapes. Not the napalming of children or the dropping of mines and CBUs into civilian villages for scare value.

This process is starting all over again. With 58,000 looming in the background, we are starting a new count, which is up to about 640 as of this writing. Do we even count the number of Iraqi dead? Maybe in the daily battle reports, but you have to really look for a running total. I've seen numbers ranging from 10,000 to 15,000, but it's never anything like the concrete numbers we grimly and tearfully assign to coalition deaths. As in the past, we're content to let that other figure drift off into an estimate.

When this whole mess is over, I'm sure we can expect more of the same. With half of Mesopotamia turned to glass, we will build a sunken wall to our boys and give an Oscar to the first director with enough balls to do Saving Private Lynch. We have no shame in this country.

Bill Greider has some interesting stuff to say about the "Iraq as Vietnam" meme, too.

The claims of a "new anti-Semitism" take a blow

"Pro-Israel groups in the US and Europe have campaigned to suggest the European Union is aflame with a 'new anti-Semitism,' and to thereby stifle criticism of Israel," Ali Abunimah notes. "But recently they've suffered several setbacks."

Hydrocarbon exhaustion

The end of the oil age is coming, says Jason Mark in a review of a trio of books on the changes that will accompany a steady depletion of carbon reserves.

Everything's ok. Really.

Catch up

Here's a condensation of some of the things I've recently found interesting or relevant.

* So the hawks got their way in Fallujah. In a stunning display of arrogance and incompetence, the occupational authority in Iraq has ignited a resistance amongst a broad swath of Shiites and even united Shiites and Sunnis. That's what will happen with a brutal occupation. The logic, as Thomas Wheeler notes, is obvious: "when you push people around and brutalize them, some of these people will push back."

* An ever growing number of US military deaths; the killing of hundreds of Iraqis, some buried in mass graves; civilians beaten to death; snipers firing at ambulances; the taking of hostages; the use of heavy-handed, Israeli-like tactics; the shelling of Mosques -- these are just the most egregious examples of the horrors of the past two weeks. Perhaps most significantly, these recent developments have likely signalled the death of any positive conclusion to an extended American occupation. The plain truth is that foreign occupiers are not wanted.

* The response to these events by the US has been two-pronged. On one hand, US officials admit, almost painfully, that, yes, things aren't quite going as planned; on the other, the CPA denigrates any media outlet that dares to publicize the brutality of events in country and Arab media outlets, particularly Al Jazeera, are excoriated for parroting baseless propaganda.

* On the home front, it's quite obvious, according to Danny Schechter, that the American people are "not being told what's really going on," as first hand accounts from people like Rahul Majahan, Jo Wilding, Naomi Klein, Andrea Schmidt, and Dahr Jamail fly in the face of the dominant image being portrayed in mainstream US outlets. Likewise, Baghdad Burning suggests that the "western news networks are far too tame. They show the Hollywood version of war -- strong troops in uniform, hostile Iraqis being captured and made to face 'justice' and the White House turkey posing with the Thanksgiving turkey...which is just fine. But what about the destruction that comes with war and occupation? What about the death? I don't mean just the images of dead Iraqis scattered all over, but dead Americans too. People should have to see those images. Why is it not ok to show dead Iraqis and American troops in Iraq, but it's fine to show the catastrophe of September 11 over and over again?"

* What to expect in the near to distant future in Iraq? As Pepe Escobar says, the "only card left" for the Americans is the use of overwhelming military force to "pacify" the country. Sounds like 'Nam, eh? Of course, action like this will likely provoke further revulsion, stronger unity amongst the disparate elements in Iraq, and the adoption of more desperate tactics by the resistance. Luckily, Rami G. Khouri has a solution to this seemingly intractable situation: "The United States should learn the lessons of the past year in Iraq, bask in the glory of its liberating Iraqis from a killer regime, take a bow before the world for its noble deed, and go home with dignity, leaving behind a credible international and Iraqi mechanism by which Iraqis can ensure their security and define their own future condition." Drawing a page from America past, Khouri concludes, "Things turned out OK in Concorde and Lexington when the British troops left, and things will turn out OK in restive Iraqi towns when the 'natives' can control their own lives as well."

* Tony Karon identifies what's missing from the 9/11 Commission: an investigation into the US' late Cold War policy of outsourcing terrorism, particularly in Afghanistan.

* The controversial August 6th PDB has finally been declassified. Larry Johnson decodes it and the Washington Post reports that by the time Bush received that particular PDB "the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." But, as the Post reports in another article, a glance at Bush during his August 2001 vacation did not betray any sense of concern. The administration, via testimony before the commission and in recent press conferences, has more or less admitted that it didn't do anything extraordinary in response to mounting threats, stressing that the FBI and CIA were doing plenty from their point of view.

* The Bush administration has hedged a good portion of its defense of not having made substantial moves in the months leading up to the attacks on 9/11 on the fact that CIA Director George Tenet was briefing the President each day, something that Bush's predecessors had not even done. In testimony before the 9/11 commission, however, Tenet revealed that he didn't speak with Bush during his August 2001 vacation. As Fred Kaplan of Slate puts it, "at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed."

* In its bid to beat back charges that it failed to act, the Bush administration declassified parts of a plan to attack Afghanistan that were drawn up prior to 9/11. In so doing, it has admitted that the war on Afghanistan was not merely a response to 9/11. Benedict Spinoza explains what this probably means. And, no, it doesn't mean that the administration awoke to the threat of Al Qaeda just prior to 9/11.

* Oh, and have you gotten the 9/11 script? The right-wing pundits seem to all be on cue.

* Following some of the revelations from the 9/11 investigation and in an effort to score political points against Republicans, Mickey Z. observes that "some on the Left are actually attacking Bush from the right. This beautiful mindset makes it possible for purported progressives to hate Bush for going overboard after 9/11 and hate him for not going overboard before 9/11."

* What is all the fuss about the Sharon and Bush press conference? asks Ali Abunimah. The provisions from "Sharon's coup" come as no surprise, since they mirror almost precisely what Barak's government was dangling before Arafat during the Oslo period. Nonetheless, Bush's assurances represent a further blow to any just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict by annointing Sharon's master plan and deferring a Palestinian state until the situation swings irrevocably in Israel's favor. It also will allow Sharon to "halt the Palestinian dream of returning to the 1967 borders and flooding Israel with refugees," as he promised to do in a statement just prior to his departure for Washington, at a large settlement east of Jerusalem.

* Considering domestic politics in the US, Sharon's endorsement confirms Bush's total capitulation to neoconservatives and also promises to win over some Jewish voters with the 2004 election on the horizon.

* An interesting question: Why does Kerry sound like Bush on Iraq? And on Israel, too?

* Paul Farmer revisits Aristide's ouster from Haiti in the London Review of Books. While many questions remain unanswered, there's little doubt that the US played a crucial role in displacing the former Haitian President from power, and that most of Aristide's claims are true.

* "In a democratic society," Robert Jensen observes in an excerpt from his new book Citizens of the Empire, "the question should not be whether one supports the troops. The relevant question is whether one supports the policy. The demand that war opponents must 'support the troops' is nothing more than a way of demanding that we drop our opposition to the policy."

* Picking up where Richard Hofstadter left off, Werther examines the rise of "pseudoconservative dogma" in the US -- "a grab-bag of popular delusions which seem almost anarchic in their contradictoriness. Anti-state rhetoric sits adjacent to authoritarian ukase, free market dogma jostles with corporate state plutocracy, and so on: religious devotion with militarist fervor, rugged individualism with leader worship, 'family values' with plutocratic decadence, America first with global messianism."

* Stan Goff has some provocative remarks concerning the situation of the world right now: "The ultimate liberal hypocrisy is the one that shuns the soldier as if the soldier lives in a parallel system, not recognizing that militarism doesn't float over history any more than the make and model of your automobile. If you turn on your lights with a wall switch and drink clean water from your tap, if you walk in the park, if you wear a stitch of manufactured clothing, if you've shopped on a vacation overseas, if you so much as breathe in the United States of America, you are as much a part of the body of actually-existing imperialism as any nervous, trigger-happy Marine killing a family at a Baghdad roadblock."

* If progressives want to gain a substantial footing in American politics, says Laurie Spivak, they better "start fighting fire with fire and thinking strategically like conservatives in terms of marketing" their ideas to a broader public.

FYI

I'm on hiatus until next week.

Despicable

Words fail me.

Update: There's an investigation underway into the photo in the link above. Body & Soul has more on this.

Noble no more

The Guardian has some new information to report from the forthcoming Vanity Fair article I mentioned previously.

According to Ewen MacAskill, the 25,000-word investigative piece set to appear in next month's edition of the magazine reveals that France tried to broker a deal with the US over the Iraq war some two months before the invasion:

At a lunch in the White House on January 13 last year, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, an adviser to the president, Jacques Chirac, and Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador in Washington, put the deal to Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser.

In an effort to avoid a bitter US-French row, the French officials suggested that if the US was intent on war, it should not seek the second resolution, according to highly placed US sources cited by Vanity Fair.

Instead, the two said that the first resolution on Iraq, 1441, passed the previous year, provided enough legal cover for war and that France would keep quiet if the US went to war on that basis.

The deal would suit the French by maintaining its "good cop" status in the Arab world and safeguarding Franco-US relations.

So much for "noble France" standing up to the US war machine.

The deal was allegedly quashed by Tony Blair, who felt that domestic pressure in Britain required that the coalition pursue a second UN resolution against Iraq, which France ultimately killed with a veto.

Ill from DU

An investigation by the NY Daily News has found that four National Guard members from New York have come down with illnesses likely caused by exposure to depleted uranium during their service in Iraq this past year.

The epicenter

Writing in the CS Monitor, Mark LeVine observes that, in order to grasp the gravity of the occupation of Iraq, one must understand it "in the context of globalization."

Empowering the corporations

In a column for US News & World Report, Lou Dobbs of CNN continues to lambaste the "Washington consensus":

Globalization is a fact, while free trade remains an economic ideal. Proponents of free trade have for the past three decades envisioned a borderless society, with trade being the great equalizer as well as the catalyst for unbounded global prosperity. The fact is, U.S. trade policies have failed to live up to utopian promises.

In recent years, U.S. free-trade policies have not only been costly to the United States but costly rather than beneficial to many of our trading partners. Wages in Mexico fell by 21 percent in the six years following the North American Free Trade Agreement. And in the two years since the United States paved the way for China's entry into the World Trade Organization, our trade deficit with China has increased by nearly 50 percent. The total U.S. trade deficit has reached nearly a half-trillion dollars.

And what is the response to this point of corporate America and the Bush administration? Effectively, just wait and everything will be just fine. But waiting to pursue responsible, balanced trade policies will cost America dearly. The U.S. multinationals, of course, want to be able to outsource jobs to cheap overseas labor markets with little apparent concern for hard-working Americans who lose their jobs. And our government absolves itself of the duty to pursue rational trade policies by saying any change in policy would interfere with free trade. That's a convenient rationalization of a do-nothing approach on the part of government and a disregard for the national interest on the part of multinationals.

Dobbs' turn-about on the issue of "free trade" has been rather remarkable to witness.

This kind of talk was considered heresy just two years ago. Amongst the majority of the business community and the media establishment, unfortunately, it still is.

Eyes on Iraq, from day one

The critics who charge that the Bush administration was preoccupied with Iraq and paid little attention to the threat of a terrorist attack from Al Qaeda prior to 9/11 are right, says Jason Leopold, who confirms with a little research that the administration was obsessed with Iraq and missile defense in the months leading up to the attack.

The other war

Seymour Hersh strikes again in the New Yorker.

His subject matter this time around is how the Bush administration screwed up the situation in Afghanistan, and what needs to be done about it.

Good news on the economy, for a change

The US economy gained 308,000 jobs in March, much to Bush's delight. The unemployment rate stayed pretty much level, moving up to 5.7% from its February rate of 5.6%.

Uprising

Things go from bad to worse in Iraq. Over the weekend, a Shia uprising in three cities -- Baghdad, Najaf, and Amarah -- has left at least 34 people killed, including nine coalition soldiers, along with 210 Iraqis and 24 soldiers wounded.

The revolt was initally sparked by the closure of the Shi'ite paper Al Hawza, and is being lead by Moktada al-Sadr, a 31 year-old radical cleric.

Juan Cole has a variety of posts on these events, so check in with him for a close reading of the situation.

Clarke 'corroborated'

According to the Washington Post, the "broad outline" of Richard Clarke's criticisms of the Bush administration "has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush's admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book Bush at War that he 'didn't feel that sense of urgency' about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.

"In addition, a review of dozens of declassified citations from Clarke's 2002 testimony [before a joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures] provides no evidence of contradiction, and White House officials familiar with the testimony agree that any differences are matters of emphasis, not fact. Indeed, the declassified 838-page report of the 2002 congressional inquiry includes many passages that appear to bolster the arguments Clarke has made."

Impeach 'em

John Bonifaz wants to see Bush impeached. Waiting for Dubya to be voted out of office is just not an option for him:

Some will argue that we are too close to an election to make the call for impeachment. But we cannot afford to provide immunity for presidential high crimes so long as they are committed (or fully revealed) close to an election cycle. We must hold the president accountable for high crimes at any point in his or her term.

Moreover, we would be foolish to assume that the 2004 election will be a fair one. Millions of Americans still believe George W. Bush stole the 2000 election, thanks to the Supreme Court's controversial and partisan 5-4 decision which threw out 175,000 Florida votes that had never been counted. None of the documented crimes of 2000—including the deliberate disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters through a fraudulent purge of "felons" by Katherine Harris—have been prosecuted. Worse yet, many of the infamous punch card machines have been replaced with even more controversial electronic voting machines that make a recount impossible.

No president in our history has presented a greater threat to our Constitution and our democracy than George W. Bush. If we fail to place the proper charges of high crimes on this president, we invite him to engage in further lawlessness, further illegal war-making, further lies and further unnecessary bloodshed—now, or even more so in a second term. If we fail to protect the Constitution today, we invite its shredding tomorrow by an administration with even less regard for the Constitution than the present one.

Sage advice, me thinks.

Be sure to check out Impeach Central, a clearinghouse for impeachment-related material run by Bonifaz and his colleagues.

Bush and Blair made secret pact for Iraq war right after 9/11

The Guardian reports that, according to an article to be published in the May edition of Vanity Fair, "President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001."

This revelation comes from Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was also present at the dinner on September 20.

Plame investigation expanded

The NY Times provides an update on the Plame leak investigation, which has gone off in an interesting new direction:

Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials say.

In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and for the first time raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.

The expansion of the inquiry's scope comes at a time when prosecutors, after a hiatus of about a month, appear to be preparing to seek additional testimony before a federal grand jury, lawyers with clients in the case said. It is not clear whether the renewed grand jury activity represents a concluding session or a prelude to an indictment.

Frog marching, of some sorts, looks quite possible at this point.

The past two weeks have not been going well for the Bush administration, to say the least. Rove & Co. must be sweating bullets.

Reputation ruined

The Black Commentator details the political demise of Condoleeza Rice.

EUMC releases revised report on anti-Semitism

Ha'aretz reports that the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) has released a revised version of its controversial report on anti-Semitism:

The new report, made public yesterday in Strasbourg in the presence of European Parliament President Pat Cox and EUMC director Beate Winker, contrasted with controversial findings of last year's EUMC-sponsored study, which the body shelved, citing incomplete data and controversial methodology, after it was leaked to the press in December 2003.

Last year's report predominantly blamed young Arabs and Muslims for rising anti-Semitism. This year the report said: "Although it is not easy to generalize, the largest group of perpetrators ... appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans." The report, including data on anti-Semitism and hostility to Jews in Europe since 2002, concludes, "There were many incidents of Jews being assaulted and insulted, attacks against synagogues, cemeteries and other Jewish property, and arson at a Jewish school."

Jewish leaders in the U.S. and Europe blasted the report, accusing the authors of purposely avoiding identifying who was responsible for anti-Semitic incidents in Europe. Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said that the report's authors were afraid to present the causes of the latest wave of anti-Semitism.

The 344-page report maintains that France had the most significant rise in instances of anti-Semitism, with 313 incidents, a six-fold increase since 2002. In Belgium the number of incidents doubled, while in Germany, the number of anti-Semitic incidents dropped, though increased in severity.

Certain supporters of Israel, especially on the American Right, have been making a lot of noise about the growth of a "new anti-semitism" amongst Muslim populations and the international Left, particularly in Europe. The initial suppression of the EUMC report was pointed to as a prime example of how Europe was unwilling to own up to this nefarious development.

Considering this charge, it's ironic -- and much more consistent with European history -- that this updated version of the EUMC report emphasizes that those "young, disaffected white Europeans" most prone to anti-Semitism tend to be, as Ha'aretz puts it, "influenced by extreme right-wing political ideas."

About the plans to use planes...

From the Independent:

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.

She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".

She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."

Salon ran a story on Edmonds' charges by Eric Boehlert last week which covered many of the same details in this Independent piece.

Priorities

This story from Wednesday's NY Times hasn't been getting much play in the media:

The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday.

The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.

So let me see if I can get this straight. The Bush administration boosts "defense" spending dramatically, by billions of dollars, but won't provide the funds for an initiative that's likely much more effective than any bombs, tanks, or missiles have been towards reducing the threat of terrorism, all in the name of saving a paltry $12 million. This is a highly symbolic move.

Terrorism on the back burner

The Washington Post reports:

On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.

The speech provides telling insight into the administration's thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.

The speech was postponed in the chaos of the day, part of which Rice spent in a bunker. It mentioned terrorism, but did so in the context used in other Bush administration speeches in early 2001: as one of the dangers from rogue nations, such as Iraq, that might use weapons of terror, rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.

The text also implicitly challenged the Clinton administration's policy, saying it did not do enough about the real threat -- long-range missiles.

So much for the Bushies having their eye on the ball. The administration was tripping over terrorist warnings throughout the Summer of 2001, and yet Condi Rice was hard at work drawing up justifications for SDI.

This is just plain embarrassing.

Iraq war evacs hit 18k

Mark Benjamin of UPI reports that there have been more than 18,000 evacuations of military personnel out of Iraq since the beginning of the war.

Moreover, this figure, calculated through March 13, "is nearly two-thirds higher than the 11,200 evacuations through Feb. 5 cited just last month."

Butchered

Most media reports characterized the four Americans lynched yesterday in Fallujah as "civilian workers," "contractors," or "security guards," but they are most accurately called mercenaries. They were working for Blackwater USA, after all.

The pictures and video of the scene immediately bring to mind Mogadishu and, as Billmon points out, a more distant historical reference.

Rough 'em up, elsewhere

Kareem Fahim of the Village Voice reports that, while the 9/11 probe is dominating the headlines, a Canadian investigation soon to get underway into the deportation of Maher Arar may reveal some sordid details about the United States' affinity for outsourcing torture.

Undefended skies

According to Ted Rall, "The really big unanswered question of September 11, 2001 is this: Once it became obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked -- at one point that Tuesday morning, [Richard] Clarke says the FAA thought it had as many as 'eleven aircraft off course or out of communications' -- why didn't our government intercept them?"

See no evil

"President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction," Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports, "according to classified documents made available for the first time."

Keeping track?

The CSM asks, "Who counts the civilian casualties?"

Air America

Air America Radio has commenced broadcasting. You can listen in via its website.