Treading water

I'm still phoning things in until I can get steady access to the internet and stay abreast of media. In the meantime, here's some reading.

* To nobody's surprise, I hope, Bush decided to use last year's speech template on Iraq by iterating nothing new or worthy in a sermon at Fort Bragg on Tuesday.

* Anthony Cordesman, no wild-eyed analyst, decries the fact that Bush only offered up "spin, risk avoidance, and promises without cost" in his speech. "Normal perhaps by today's political standards," Cordesman concedes, "but scarcely the kind of realism and leadership that will inspire the continuing American support that U.S. forces, Iraq, and our allies will need during the difficult and uncertain years to come."

* Despite Dubya's pleadings, Americans would best be advised to heed the words of Robert Parry, who counsels, the "hard truth is that the American people have only two choices on what to do next: they can continue to send their young soldiers into the Iraqi death trap for at least the next several years and hope for the best, or they can build a movement for impeaching George W. Bush and other administration officials – and then try to make the best of a bad situation in Iraq."

* Patrick Cockburn looks at turning the corner in Iraq, one year on.

* ~1,700 dead in Iraq, illustrated.

* "Getting out of Iraq, it seems, is a lot harder than going in," observes Robert Dreyfuss. Nevertheless, he offers a two-part prescription.

* Billmon notes well some of the contradictions about "Negotiating With Terrorists."

* Dahr Jamail reports on the conclusion of the World Tribunal on Iraq hearings in Istanbul last week. Check out some of the testimonies and the jury's concluding statement.

* Woops. Iraq's now the perfect training ground for terrorists. That wasn't supposed to happen, was it?

* "While U.S. casualties steadily mount in Iraq," the AP reports, "another toll is rising rapidly on the home front: The Army's divorce rate has soared in the past three years, most notably for officers, as longer and more frequent war zone deployments place extra strain on couples."

* Kilgore would be proud. Still.

* In Salon, Gary Kamiya pens a memo to Fox News watchers: There's a war going on, ya know!

* Some Iraqi "terrorists" cheered Bush to victory in November 2004, according to the AP.

* Michael Smith lays out the story behind the story of the Downing Street memos for the LA Times and his own paper, the London Times.

* Hey, hey! Here's a relatively good article on the DSMs from the Washington Post. And, whattayaknow, it made page one! See also, as another reminder: "Why the DSM is important."

* Michael Klare reviews some of Matthew Simmons' findings in his new book, Twilight in the Desert. If Simmons is correct about the coming exhaustion of Saudi oil fields, Klare posits, "we can kiss the era of abundant petroleum goodbye forever." Earlier, I posted a review of the book by Kevin Drum, which nicely and simply summarized the "peak oil" issue.

* For the first time since January, the US army says it reached its recruiting goals for June. Looking through rose-colored glasses, that is. Plus: Matt Taibbi weighs in with his usual biting remarks on the recruiting shortfall.

* Expressing alarm at the loss of a humanitarian impulse in world affairs, even one that has a tendency to go off the rails, Tony Judt laments in the NYRB, "the US isn't credible today: its reputation and standing are at their lowest point in history and will not soon recover. And there is no substitute on the horizon: the Europeans will not rise to the challenge." He concludes, "President Bush sees 'freedom' on the march. I wish I shared his optimism. I see a bad moon rising."

* Views of the US around the globe continue on their downward path, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes poll. Recall the 2003 and 2004 surveys.

* I'm not quite sure what part of the Hippocratic Oath states that a doctor should help facilitate torture, but -- surprise, surprise -- that's been going on at Gitmo.

* Outlining an action plan to reel in the US' torture policies, Elizabeth Holtzman concludes in The Nation, "there is no sure way to compel the government to investigate itself or to hold high-level government officials accountable under applicable criminal statutes. But if the public does not seek to have it happen, it will not happen. Those in the public who care deeply about the rule of law and government accountability must keep this issue alive. Failure to investigate wrongdoing in high places and tolerating misconduct or criminality can have only the most corroding impact on our democracy and the rule of law that sustains us."

* On the heels of the downing of a Chinook helicopter in the Hindu Kush, Carlotta Gall of the NY Times reports that violence in Afghanistan has "increased sharply in recent months, with a resurgent Taliban movement mounting daily attacks in southern Afghanistan, gangs kidnapping foreigners here in the capital and radical Islamists orchestrating violent demonstrations against the government and foreign-financed organizations."

* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the Iranian presidential election this week. He's also been fingered as one of the ringleaders behind the 1979 seizure of hostages at the US embassy in Tehran. This has to make the warmongers even happier, since it'll make it easier to drum up fervor against the Iranians, if need be.

* "A Jew doesn't expel a Jew," says Cpl. Avi Bieber of the Israeli army. Maybe it's a bit unfair to say this, but I'll bet he doesn't have similar compunctions about expelling Arabs. See also: "Israeli Soldiers 'Getting Away With Murder'" and "Jewish settlers spark Gaza violence."

* "One month into President Robert Mugabe's brutal campaign of demolition and displacement [Operation Murambatsvina]," reports The Independent, "which has cost at least 400,000 people their homes and livelihoods, the scale of the humanitarian disaster is emerging. The victims of this forced expulsion - which has been compared to the devastating policies of Pol Pot in Cambodia - are arriving in the already famine-stricken countryside, where, jobless and homeless, they are waiting to die. Unofficial estimates obtained by The Independent suggest the death rate is already outstripping the birth rate nationwide by 4,000 a week."

* Sudan "is being consumed by a civil war that has already claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands," writes Thilo Thielke for Der Spiegel. "But despite the obvious crisis, the international community continues to drag its feet and refuses to intervene."

* Tom Engelhardt does yeoman's work updating that great conservative canard of "moral relativism" for today's political climate.

* Writing for In These Times, David Moberg explains what's missing from recent exposes of class inequality in America.

* The US is still ringin' the bell of freedom by incarcerating the most people on Earth, in comparison with other nations.

* Good news: Canada and Spain have legalized gay marriage.

* Why can't liberals get it right on eminent domain? wonders Sam Smith.

* Alan Dershowitz is still disgracing himself by his actions against Norman Finkelstein.

* Professor Kim has the goods on the Mexican stamp controversy.

* Time, Inc. is reportedly set to release reporter Mathew Cooper's notes on the Valerie Plame incident, which might reveal the identity of the leaker.

A Revision

From the past week

I've been in and out of town recently, and that's likely to continue for a bit. Blogging's going to run hot and cold for a while.

* "The real scandal of the Downing Street Memos," writes Thom Hartmann, "with the greatest potential to leave the Bush presidency in permanent disgrace, is their implication that lies may have been put forward to help Bush, Republicans, and Blair politically. If Bush lied to gain and keep political power, precedent suggests he and his collaborators in the administration may even be vulnerable to impeachment." See also: Mark Danner and Tom Engelhardt on "Why the Memo Matters."

* If you missed the Conyers hearing on the DSMs, you can watch it here. The gathering on Capitol Hill triggered some unbelievably snide remarks from Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, too.

* Partly in response to the Post's reaction to the DSM, David Swanson asks, "Remember When Bush's Lies Weren't 'Old News'?"

* After reading a recent Lexington Herald-Leader profile of Gold Star Families for Peace's Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in the Iraq war, Ned Stafford wonders, "Would these honest, hard-hitting words appear in one of the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post or USA Today?"

* "The gap between tactical victories on the one hand, and few tangible improvements in the overall Iraqi security situation on the other, is creating a widening disagreement over whether the US is winning or losing the war in Iraq," reports the CS Monitor's Dan Murphy, bringing back memories of Vietnam.

* Confirming yet again that Iraq has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, the NY Times' Douglas Jehl reports, "A new, classified assessment by the CIA says that Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it provides a new laboratory for militants to hone their skills in urban combat."

* House Republicans Walter Jones (NC) and Ron Paul (TX) have teamed up with Democrats Dennis Kucinich (OH) and Neil Abercrombie (HI) on legislation that would require the US to begin withdrawals from Iraq by October 2006. Jones' involvement in this is somewhat remarkable. Justin Raimondo profiles the Congressman best known for leading the "Freedom Fries" brigade and Tom Engelhardt has more on the withdrawal meme that is popping its head up in political discussions, ever so slowly.

* Is the US military covering up the deaths of thousands of troops who served in Iraq? Michael Ewens takes a look.

* The London Times' Michael Smith has led the way with coverage of the Downing Street Memo. He sat down for a revealing online chat on the Washington Post's website last week. Worth reading.

* Smith has again been leaked notes about the prewar bombing of Iraq, which the British legal office acknowledged was "illegal."

* Pointing to the recent Jeremy Scahill piece on the prewar bombing, Paul Rogat Loeb notes that while the Downing Street Memo has started to receive mainstream attention, "we've heard almost nothing about the degree to which this administration began actively fighting the Iraq war well in advance of the March 2003 official attack -- before both the October 2002 US Congressional authorization and the November United Nations resolution requiring that Saddam Hussein open the country up to inspectors."

* Just as the Iraq war did not initiate in March 2003, Scott Ritter argues, "history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran."

* Jim Lobe describes the preemptive strike on the Iranian elections; Norman Solomon opines that even while "some Americans are exposing the deception for the latest war," the warmongers are laying the "groundwork for the next one" in Iran; and Roger Howard has a novel idea: "leave Iranian politics to the Iranians."

* The son of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, whose assassination touched off the wave of protests in Beirut a few months ago, has emerged victorious in Lebanon's contentious elections.

* The US has started rapping Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov on the knuckles for obstructing the probe into the killings in Andizhan on May 13. It's unclear whether or not this was because or in spite of the recent restrictions Uzbekistan placed on US access to its K-2 military base.

* Bolivia's new president has sworn in a new cabinet and is promising to prep the country for future elections in a move to satiate some of the demands of the protesters. In a related piece for The Nation, Christian Parenti tells the back story about the uprisings in the South American country.

* A new Christian Aid survey suggests that "Africa is a massive $272 billion worse off as a result of ‘free’ trade policies forced on the continent as a condition for receiving aid and debt relief" over the past 20 years.

* Recalling some of the issues raised in his July 2004 NYRB essay, Anthony Lewis observes in the NY Times, "We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy." Plus: American Leftist asks, Is another shoe about to drop?

* Dave Neiwert notes more eliminationist rhetoric emanating from the right-wing echo chambers over undue references (in their minds) to any misdeeds by the good ol' US of A.

* Matthew Clark: "If we know where bin Laden is, why don't we get him?"

* "A Senate panel is probing allegations that FBI agents in Saudi Arabia sat on leads in the Sept. 11 investigation and then destroyed piles of secret documents related to the case," reports the NY Daily News. Sibel Edmonds also rewinds the clock to other "missed opportunities."

* The House of Representatives trimmed back some of the PATRIOT Act provisions relating to library and bookstore snooping, according to the Washington Post.

* CNet News reports, "The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities."

* While the Bush administration goes out of its way to scuttle plans to address global warming, Henry Porter writes in the Guardian, "The great lie in the climate debate is that there is still a debate worth having. Opponents of change insist that the human factors in global warming are not proven and that we must wait until we have hard evidence before taking drastic action, which is as about as silly as saying there are two equally valid views on the issue of whether paedophilia damages children."

* The Free Press group is excerpting the introduction to its new book, Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Check it out.

* Rehashing some of Robert Higgs' calculations, Jurgen Brauer and Nicholas Anglewicz contend, "Many Americans believe that 19 cents on defense for every 81 cents on non-defense is a reasonable way to spend a tax dollar. But by another calculation, the tax dollar splits 68 cents for defense and 32 cents on everything else."

* "The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself," observes the CS Monitor's Peter Grier. "Is that a liberal's talking point? Sure. But it's also a line from the recent public testimony of a champion of the free market: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan."

* "Barely five years into the 21st century, with a globalized neo-liberal trade regime firmly in place in a world where market economy has become the norm, trade protectionism appears to be fast re-emerging and developing into a new global trade war of complex dimensions," warns Henry C K Liu. "The rich nations need to recognize that their efforts to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of already unfair trade will only plunge the world into deep depression. History has shown that while the poor suffer more in economic depressions, the rich, even as they are financially cushioned by their wealth, are hurt by political repercussions in the form of either war or revolution, or both."

* Doug Ireland has penned a nice tribute to the recently-deceased left journalist James Weinstein.

New Memos Detail Early Plans for Invading Iraq

It's about friggin' time an article like this one from today's LA Times appeared in the US press. It ties together DSM I, DSM II, and the six new memos recently leaked in a fair and succinct manner.

The Times doesn't blurt "Bush lied!" in the headline, but that's not what war critics have been asking for. If you listened to people like Dana Milbank and Michael Kinsley, though, you'd get a different impression.

See also: Paul Woodward's take on "How to read the memoranda from Downing Street" and Raw Story's Path of War Timeline. The latter dovetails nicely with Benedict@Large's old Cakegate timeline, which dates back to Summer 2003 and suggests that, yes, it's long been possible to piece together the story of the Bush/Blair determination to topple Hussein, no matter what.

Franklin indicted

Justin Raimondo digs into the AIPAC investigation and Larry Franklin's indictment.

"In ripping up and exposing Israel's Washington spy nest, federal prosecutors will be disturbing all kinds of unpleasant nocturnal creatures," he concludes. "If you pick up a big rock, you never know what's going to scuttle out – and this trial, scheduled to start Sept. 6, is sure to give us a few surprises. One thing that won't surprise me, however, is a widening investigation – and more indictments."

Suffice it to say, Raimondo lives for stuff like this.

Ignoring the DRC

Andrew Stroehlein asks in the CS Monitor, "Why aren't the media covering the Congo?"

With an estimated 1,000 people dying there every day as a result of hunger and disease caused by war, it is an appropriate question. But the extent of this coverage of noncoverage is reaching the absurd: print, radio, TV, Internet - they all want to know why they themselves are not writing articles and broadcasting programs about the Congo.

And it is not just me noticing this. In March, Reuters even held a seminar on "forgotten crises," at which the Congo topped the list, and on BBC World Service the other day, I heard a newscaster ask: "Shouldn't this be getting more attention?"

Indeed. What the world media are missing is one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II: 3.8 million people have died in the Congo since 1998, dwarfing not only the biggest of natural catastrophes, such as December's South Asia tsunami, but also other manmade horrors, such as Darfur.

Congo's situation is complicated - any war on such a scale would be - but the outlines of the current stage of the conflict are straightforward enough for any journalist to summarize.

Stroehlein doesn't leave you hanging, and goes on to outline the complicated situation in the rest of the piece.

His point, obviously, is valid, particularly in the US where the media remains transfixed by Jacko-mania, pretty white women disappearing, and the like. It's a disgraceful situation, to say the least.

Iraq's future

Responding to some of Juan Cole's recent remarks about the dim prospects in Iraq, in which he regrettably concludes that the resistance is likely to grow stronger and the US presence is not likely to recede, Dave Wearing writes,

If the conflict in Iraq is not for the most part a civil war, a nihilistic Al Qaeda killing spree or a power-grab by Ba'athists, but instead a conflict between US troops and an array of resisting forces rooted in the population, then the removal of one side from the battlefield would surely go some significant way to ending the bloodshed. If, as Cole argues, the resistance relies on a deep reservoir of popular support, and that support is fed by animosity to the US forces, does it not follow that the removal of the US would help to drain that reservoir?

A Muslim peacekeeping force under the command of the UN (something which has already been proposed) comprising Sunni and Shia troops and answering to the General Assembly, not the Security Council, could maximise the beneficial effect a US withdrawal would have for internal security. Such a force would be far more acceptable to the population, leaving any remaining belligerent forces isolated and easier to deal with. Its clear that many Iraqis are attacking Americans, not because Muslim Arabs are pathologically violent, but because they are enraged at being occupied by the country that backed Saddam, killed half a million of their children with sanctions and is now in the process of wrecking their homeland. After a US withdrawal, Iraq would still have a serious security problem, but one that would have been downgraded from a full scale guerrilla war to a terrorist threat from an isolated minority. UN troops would therefore not be entering a "meat grinder."

Iraqis could then spend some of their efforts looking to the future. After fresh elections, this time held under UN observation, a new government could move to create the prosperity within which a stable democratic society can thrive. To do this it would need the profits of oil sales to improve infrastructure and living standards. National debt would therefore have to be cancelled and US imposed privatisation schemes abandoned. In addition, natural justice demands that substantial reparations be paid by the nations that backed Saddam and that devastated the country with sanctions and bombing. Bringing these elements together would mean that Iraq could face the future with a degree of confidence.

Is this scenario realistic? Will powerful elites and nation states allow such a solution to be taken forward? In light of the catastrophe that is the US occupation its not hard to foresee in the short term the withdrawal of what elite support remains for the adventure. A solution similar to that described above may come to be seen as the only realistic one for arresting Iraq's descent into hell, something the global economy can ill afford. But western populations should not sit around hoping that elites will do the right thing, or that whatever suits elite interests might one day happily coincide with what is the right thing to do. To effect these solutions the measure taken to bring down Apartheid, free India, win the vote, end segregation, secure labour rights and score countless other victories should be repeated on an enormous scale, forcing governments to act. The US is already all but defeated in Iraq. With assistance from western populations that defeat could be turned into a victory for the Iraq people, and for the world as a whole. If that victory is to be won, then it is for us to take the action required in order to achieve it.

I agree completely. It's one thing to lament what's going on in Iraq, but quite another to throw one's hands up and say that there's not much we can do about it.

Tough. It's going to take a lot of effort to forge a solution out of the rubble that exists now, but that's where efforts need to be addressed. The status quo in Iraq needs to change, and the first thing that has to happen is that the political process needs to be wrenched from out of the hands of the US and its lackeys. Once this is done, a whole slew of new options might present themselves.

I may be sounding a bit like Presidential candidate John Kerry here, but I truly think that if the Americans were to renounce their imperial designs and indicate a willingness to withdraw within a few months, the rest of the world would be able to hammer together some kind of solution, at least one that is better than the chaos and violence currently on display. Right now, the onus is on Americans to get their government to pull out, as quickly as possible.

Behind the Senate's lynching apology

If you thought America had come to grips with one of the darkest parts of its history, you'd be, well, wrong. At least, judging by the reaction of several US Senators...

More, here.

Saving journalism

Russ Baker tries to perform some CPR on investigative reporting. Let's hope he's successful.

A community-benefiting ownership strategy

Gar Alperovitz fleshes out his vision of a progressive "ownership society" in The Nation.

Bolivia calm, for now

Jim Schultz notes the three Bolivias that have emerged over the past few weeks of protests, as the CS Monitor looks at the daunting hurdles that lie ahead as new President Eduardo Rodríguez tries to heal the huge divisions in the country.

For a wider sense of context, Forrest Hylton adds, "since Latin America currently displays stronger tendencies toward radical social change than any other region of the world, outcomes in Bolivia will give us a better sense of what gains are possible for popular insurgencies in an age of permanent planetary warfare. Struggles in Bolivia thus reverberate beyond national and regional arenas; their significance is global."

G8 Debt relief

The US and Britain have agreed on a deal for African debt relief ahead of the upcoming meetings of the G8 nations. Writing for allafrica.com, Reed Kramer outlines the proposal:

The agreement on 100% debt relief for developing countries announced by finance ministers from the eight largest industrial nations on Saturday initially benefits 14 nations in Africa. Another nine African countries could qualify for full debt cancellation in the next 12 to 18 months, and the ministers pledged "to provide a fair and sustainable solution to Nigeria's debt problems in 2005" through the informal grouping of creditor nations known as the Paris Club.

The nations first in line for debt forgiveness are 18 (including four in Latin America) that have reached the "completion point" in the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative launched by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1996. The 14 in Africa include Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Nine others that are considered close to completion are Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Sao Tome and Sierra Leone.

Britain put the price tag for writing off the debts of the 18 eligible countries at $40 billion, plus an additional $11 billion for the soon-to-be eligible nine. Aid groups and debt relief proponents say 62 countries need total debt forgiveness if they are to meet the Millennium Development Goals that were adopted by the United Nations in 2000 and include cutting poverty and disease in half by 2015. The ministers said that the World Bank and African Development Bank would be compensated 'dollar for dollar' for the debt cancellation, while the cost of debt relief for the International Monetary Fund "should be met by the use of existing IMF resources" or, by "extra resources" where necessary.

This sounds good on the surface, but apparently the deal comes with significant strings, including conditionals that may be more lucrative for the finance ministers of the west than the debt they've written off, as Sanjay Suri and George Monbiot point out.

And while the G8 nations pat themselves on the back, the biggest problem for Africa stares us in the face, says Naomi Klein: it is the neoliberal creed that mandates that the riches of the continent remain, overwhelmingly, out of the control of Africans.

In other words, the scale of this debt relief is a step in the right direction, but we're still a far way off from what needs to be done.

Iraq bleak

Jim Lobe notes that news from Iraq is incessantly dim, even as seen through the Pentagon's own filtering service.

Where's Arthur Chrenkoff when you need him? Ah, there he is. Thank heavens.

The movement cultivates its young

Ah, the next generation. The NY Times looks at the young, plucky conservatives who are paid interns at the Heritage Foundation this summer.

Just think, maybe they'll get the chance to lord over a multi-billion dollar budget when the US invades Iran, like their earlier allies did in Iraq.

Talk about resume building!

Killin' insurgents (or not)

While several US military leaders admit that the Iraqi insurgency won't be defeated with force, Mark Benjamin nevertheless observes that the body count seems to be back in fashion.

Along these lines, the US military recently announced it attacked and killed about 40 insurgents last week in the western portion of the Anbar province in Iraq. Problem is, the residents of the area dispute the claim.

Notice a pattern yet? This happens almost everytime the US announces a significant "kill."

Bad polls for Bush

Bush's job approval ratings have dipped down to a new low, and a different poll indicates that nearly 60% of Americans think a withdrawal from Iraq should begin.

Zimbabwe driving out the "rubbish"

The NY Times describes "Operation Murambatsvina" in Zimbabwe, which is not getting nearly enough attention in the west:

HARARE, Zimbabwe, June 10 - The government abruptly began demolishing shanties and roadside markets here three weeks ago, evicting thousands of people and bulldozing homes or burning them to the ground, in what officials call a cleanup of illegal slums and black-market vendors.

But as the campaign, directed at as many as 1.5 million members of Zimbabwe's vast underclass, spreads beyond Harare, it is quickly evolving into a sweeping recasting of society, a forced uprooting of the very poorest city dwellers, who have become President Robert G. Mugabe's most hardened opponents.

By scattering them to rural areas, Mr. Mugabe, re-elected to another five-year term in 2002, seems intent on dispersing the biggest threat to his 25-year autocratic rule as poverty and unemployment approach record levels and mass hunger and the potential for unrest loom.

The United Nations estimates that the campaign, Operation Murambatsvina, using a Shona word meaning "drive out the rubbish," has so far left 200,000 people homeless and 30,000 vendors jobless. Human rights and civic leaders say the numbers could be several times that, a view that seemed plausible during a four-day visit to Harare and Bulawayo, the nation's second-largest city, and points between.

No matter the precise numbers, the campaign is clearly one of the most aggressive steps yet taken against the Zimbabwe population by a government that has in recent years met rising international condemnation for stifling its opponents.

Related stories on this from IPS, Al Jazeera, and the Glasgow Sunday Herald.

Base logic in Uzbekistan

Surprise, surprise: the US advocated laying off the Uzbek government following its massacre of hundreds of protesters last month because of fears the US military would lose access to its base in the south of the country.

You'll recall that HRW's recent report on the massacre urged the US to shut its air base in protest. Obviously, that's not gonna happen.

Peak oil in the mainstream

The BBC's Adam Porter notes the mainstreaming of "peak oil" as a topic for reasonable discussion.

Kevin Drum's recent review essay in the Washington Monthly is a good primer on the peak oil issue, too.

War: Realities and Myths

This piece by Chris Hedges is stunning.

It seems to be heavily adapted from his December 2004 NYRB essay, which I considered to be one of the best short pieces I'd read all year.

Please spread widely.

Draft ahoy?

Joe Biden has put the draft back on the table.

"It is going to become a subject, if, in fact, there's a 40 per cent shortfall in recruitment," the Senator from Delaware told NBC's Meet the Press.

In another worrying sign, applications are down at the US military academies.

Need more leakers

Ray McGovern analyzes the "Downing Street II" document and makes a renewed appeal for other "patriotic truth tellers" to come "out of the woodwork" by leaking internal American documents about prewar machinations.

As important as the recent revelations from the London Times are, he stresses that not much is going to happen on the domestic front unless Americans come forth with their own evidence or memos indicting the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, Think Progress rewinds the clock to last year's ignored release of other Briefing Papers that showed "the British felt the pre-war evidence for attacking Iraq was weak and that the U.S. lacked a plan to address the post-war situation."

Another 2002 British memo on Iraq

Another 2002 memo written for Blair's inner circle has been leaked to the press detailing deliberations about the coming war with Iraq.

The London Times leads with this description of it, emphasizing that the Brits were trying to figure out a way to make the already-decided war legal when it clearly was not:

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

...The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

Interestingly, the Washington Post is also running a piece on this very same memo that looks nothing like the Times' story. The Post's Walter Pincus, in contrast, decides to play up the parts about the Brits being alarmed that the US was not planning for the aftermath of the war:

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

It's amazing that this is what Pincus felt was worth highlighting. As he notes in the piece, everyone already knows that the Bushies rushed into war with no plan after trashing the State Dept's "Future of Iraq" project. Leading with that bit about the memo adds nothing of value to public discourse about the war.

Although Pincus goes on to flesh out the story a bit and link it to some of the issues raised by the DSM in the last 'graphs, he doesn't do justice to the meat of this story. To make things worse, his report is starting to pop up in wire stories and they're only mentioning the 'lack of a plan' part of the memo.

Read the Times and Post stories in their entirety, but make sure you read the memo. There's plenty more in there that's not covered in either piece. My favorite excerpt, for example, is this:

Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.

In other words, warm up the propaganda machine!

This is all pretty damning, on multiple levels. For Bush and Blair, obviously. For the Post, you betcha. You'd think that after dropping the ball completely on the Downing Street Memo, American media organs would try to rectify things in this case. Doesn't look that way, though.

Hopefully the American media can finally get on the ball and start demanding answers. To help out, perhaps somebody with a conscience in or around the administration will start leaking American memos.

Please?

Hope in the dark

The perpetuation of Arab disunity

The Asia Times Online's Pepe Escobar discusses reports and conjecture that Iraq is on the path to breakup, noting that the most commonly cited plan is "an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq - an essential part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East."

Funny, that.

New president in Bolivia

Here's a good Democracy Now! segment on the situation in Bolivia, where the head of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodriguez, was sworn in as the new President last night. There was widespread concern, which I shared, that the military was going to crack down on the protests, possibly making way for a coup.

Although the country has pulled back from an outbreak of mass violence, the situation is far from settled. The main demands of the protesters -- the nationalization of the energy industry and a rewrite of the constitution -- are yet to be addressed, and it is unclear what direction Rodriguez and the national Congress will take in the coming days. Keep an eye on things.

Iraq's broken army

This article from the Washington Post is important because it throws more doubt on the running line from the US that Iraq's security forces are growing in size and skill with each passing day.

A choice excerpt:

Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis' courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military's goal of operating independently by the fall.

"I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period," said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern's company, who sold his share in a database firm to join the military full time after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."

"We don't want to take responsibility; we don't want it," said Amar Mana, 27, an Iraqi private whose forehead was grazed by a bullet during an insurgent attack in November. "Here, no way. The way the situation is, we wouldn't be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years."

Despite this, American commanders still say they're "on target" with training:

Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division, which oversees an area of north-central Iraq that includes Baiji and is the size of West Virginia, called the Iraqi forces "improved and improving." He acknowledged that the Iraqis suffered from a lack of equipment and manpower but predicted that, at least in his area of operation, the U.S. military would meet its goal of having battalion-level units operating independently by the fall.

"I can tell you, making assessments, I think we're on target," he said in an interview.

It's interesting to see Taluto's name here, since he also dropped some interesting comments to the Gulf News recently.

In an interview with the Dubai paper, he admitted a number of "good, honest" Iraqis are part of the insurgency, inspired by their hatred of the occupation. Taluto added that "99.9 per cent" of those captured fighting the Americans were Iraqi, dispelling the claim that foreign fighters make up the bulk of the resistance.

I'd make a bet the Pentagon's going to come down pretty hard on him soon.

Wrongs in Ohio

Pointing to John Conyers' extensive investigation into the 2004 election anomalies, Gore Vidal still smells "Something Rotten in Ohio."

Fighting for Democracy

The chant of "This is what democracy looks like!" is somewhat of a cliché here in the US, but if ever it was true, it is so today in Bolivia. The masses, an overwhelming number of them poor and indigenous peoples, have taken to the streets demanding that the wealth of their country is not siphoned off to outside parties or local elites and instead used to address their needs. In response, it looks like the military is going to be unleashed on them soon. It goes without saying that this is quite an ominous development, considering the depth of the popular movement that has risen up in the last month or so.

George Bush has allegedly pinned his presidency to the theme of spreading and protecting democracy abroad, to the extent that doing so is now framed as a security matter for the US. If anything underlines the fraudulence of Bush's claims, it is the lack of attention and support the protesters in cities like La Paz and Cochabamba now receive.

"Democracy," in Bush speak, is really a narrow definition that is all about political rights, not economic or social ones. What needs to be pointed out is that true democracy -- meaning a system in which people have relatively equal opportunities to effect their own destiny and that of the collective entity that best represents them -- is impossible in vastly unequal societies. Bolivians are attempting to rectify this in their country today, and their efforts are being met mostly with silence (if not outright scorn) because they do not align politically with the Bush administration and also threaten the reign of private capital in their country.

Many people on the left, like Naomi Klein, have lamented how Bush has hijacked the language of democracy. If there is to be any attempt to wrest it back, we need to stand up to his narrow formulation and reassert the centrality of equality -- across the board -- in our narratives. We can begin doing so by supporting those people down in Bolivia with all of our best efforts.

So contact your Congressional representatives, write your local media, and spread the word. In short, do something to show that the sort of democracy you support is flowering today in a relatively tiny, land-locked country in South America and that any attempt to squash it should be met with the greatest reproach.

Bolivia developments

"It is zero hour in Bolivia," says Al Giordano, and events are moving quickly.

Keep track of the situation as it develops via the links I mentioned a few days ago.

Ethiopia unrest

Another American ally in the "war on terror" has taken to mowing down protesters, this time in Ethiopia.

More on this, here.

The US media and the French referendum

Patrick Martin pierces the shameful rhetoric coming from American commentators on the French public's vote-down of the EU Constitution.

It's amazing to see the group think on an issue like this. Why people should be condemned for refusing to join the "race to the bottom" that is the neoliberal project is beyond me.

Heal wounds, don't open them

Congress is gunning for the UN again, says Jim Lobe.

People outside the US might see this as yet another sign that it's worth giving up on the Americans. Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith observe,

As the rest of the world faces an aggressive, unilateralist superpower with apparent contempt for international law and the 'decent opinion of mankind,' two responses come naturally. One is appeasement: trying to moderate U.S. aggressiveness through concession. The other is anti-Americanism: bashing the United States as uniquely the source of the world’s evil. Is there a better alternative?

Brecher and Smith think so and go on to recommend a few actions people outside the US might wish to take in order to effect positive change in the US government's behavior. Their conclusion:

The goal of such action should not be to express hatred for Americans (something the Bush administration can easily utilize for its own purposes) but to convey disapproval of the actions of the U.S. government. The purpose is not to harm the American people, but rather to help them overcome an incipient autocratic regime and hold their government accountable to the rule of law.

Hear, hear. We need some help, not rhetoric that plays more into the hands of the aggressive nationalists over here.

Maritime terror

Many analysts think the next great act of global terrorism is not likely to happen by land or air, but rather by sea. For whatever reason, this sort of potentiality is muted in European and American discussions of transnational threats, but it gets a significant amount of attention from Asian analysts.

B Raman outlines some of the more worrying scenarios for the Asia Times Online.

Army falling short on recruits

Anyone worried about the possibility of a future draft should take pause at these figures.

Change in the Mid East

Robin Wright of the Washington Post reports that even establishment organs and figures are noticing that Bush is not following through on his promises to promote "democracy" in the Arab world, a move that was telegraphed a few months ago.

More reading along these lines, here.

Turning Point On the War?

In E&P, Greg Mitchell observes that while newspaper editorialists are "still refusing to use the 'W' word in offering advice to Dubya -- that is, 'withdrawal' -- some at least are finally using the 'L' word, for lies."

He adds:

Memorial Day seemed to bring out the anger in some editorial writers, who at that time are normally afraid to say anything about a current conflict that might seem to slight the brave sacrifices of men and women, past and present. Maybe it was the steadily growing Iraqi and American death count, or the increasing examples of White House "disassembling" (to quote the president this week), or the horror stories emerging from Gitmo.

Or perhaps it's a hidden trend that might have even more impact than the rest: the writing on the wall spelled out by plunging military recruitment rates. That only adds to the sense that, overall, the Iraq adventure has made America far less safe in this world.

For whatever reason, it's possible that more than a few editorial pages may finally be on the verge of saying "enough is enough." Perhaps they might even catch up with their readers, as the latest Gallup polls find that 57% feel the war is "not worth it," and nearly as many want us to start pulling out troops, not sending more of them.

Good news. Hopefully the "W" word won't be too far behind.

More DSM fallout

Eric Boehlert wonders: "Why did it take more than a month for the US press to report on the serious revelations in the Downing Street memo?"

And David Michael Green cuts to the chase:

Finally, it appears that we have in the Downing Street Memo a weapon, and with it the proper context, to end our long national nightmare.

Impeachment. Now.

No disagreement here.

Spending priorities

The NY Times editorializes on the "Crumbs for Africa" promised by George Bush following a bit of pressure from Tony Blair to buck up on aid to crisis-ridden areas of the continent.

Noting that Bush relented by pledging "$674 million in emergency aid that Congress had already approved for needy countries," the editors of the Times went on to add a bit of background:

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

What is 0.7 percent of the American economy? About $80 billion. That is about the amount the Senate just approved for additional military spending, mostly in Iraq. It's not remotely close to the $140 billion corporate tax cut last year.

Or, to contextualize this figure in a different way, Cursor points out that $674 million buys only about three days in Iraq. To go even further, we might wish to take this news into account:

Global military spending in 2004 broke the $1 trillion barrier for the first time since the Cold War, boosted by the U.S. war against terror and the growing defense budgets of India and China, a European think tank said Tuesday.

Led by the United States, which accounted for almost half of all military expenditure, the world spent $1.035 trillion on defense, equal to 2.6 percent of global gross domestic product, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said.

I dunno about you, but I'd prefer to see my country spend money helping people fight off infectious diseases, combat malnutrition, and the like, rather than ensuring that Boeing and Raytheon are well fed.

Editing away global warming

From today's NY Times:

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Meanwhile, the Independent reports,

An unprecedented joint statement issued by the leading scientific academies of the world has called on the G8 governments to take urgent action to avert a global catastrophe caused by climate change.

The national academies of science for all the G8 countries, along with those of Brazil, India and China, have warned that governments must no longer procrastinate on what is widely seen as the greatest danger facing humanity.

...Over dinner at the White House last night, Mr Blair appeared to make little progress on one of his main priorities for Britain's year chairing the G8 - a new international effort to combat climate change. The Prime Minister is trying to draw the US, China and India into the discussion, but there is little sign that the Bush administration will accept the growing scientific evidence about the problem.

Somehow I doubt Tony's going to have much success. Like elsewhere, the facts can always be "fixed" or, as the Times story attests, edited around the policy.

DSM lives, barely

Even though the US press is doing an admirable job ignoring its implications, the Washington Post's Jefferson Morley notes that "The Downing Street Memo Story Won't Die" -- "thanks to the attention it gets on the Internet."

CNNI

CNN's started running a feed of CNN International, according to the CJR. I haven't had a chance to catch it, but my past viewing experiences abroad confirm the quality of the broadcasts.

Seriously, any regular American TV news consumer who encounters this programming will probably think it's being beamed in from Mars. The difference in quality is shocking. Hopefully more of this to come...

HRW on Uzbek massacre

According to the Independent, Human Rights Watch has published a report on the events in Uzbekistan last month, where police and military forces gunned down hundreds of protesters in the eastern city of Andijan.

The New-York based human rights organisation said its investigation into the events of 13 May left it in no doubt that the Uzbek government had systematically slaughtered hundreds of its own citizens in a "massacre" and then tried to cover up the atrocities. The evidence it had uncovered was so compelling and the Uzbek government's duplicity, guilt and intransigence so obvious, it added, that Washington was morally obliged to shut its air base in the south of the country.

"Camp Stronghold Freedom", or K2, an air base near the southern town of Khanabad, was originally set up to supply the US invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan, and continues to play a role in Washington's "war against terror". Human Rights Watch said Washington was in negotiations that would allow it to keep a base there permanently. It called upon the US to insist upon an independent international investigation, something the government of Islam Karimov has repeatedly rejected, and to sever military and financial ties in the event of continued refusal.

"Yes, we would be giving up an asset in Uzbekistan," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in Moscow. "But if we don't act when the government slaughters hundreds of its own civilians, when are we going to act?"

"We" act when its congruent with our existing interests. In this case, it is not, so that's why you don't hear much protest out of Washington.

The US does not want to upset the status quo in Central Asia, especially when it comes to military bases, so authoritarian governments mowing down civilians is of little concern when viewed in the context of the strategic realities the Beltway types have constructed for themselves. That's the way power politics work, unfortunately. If people wish to change this, it's only going to come about by external pressure on the political process.

Accepting the consequences

Writing in the LA Times, Naomi Klein warns of the coming release of new images from Abu Ghraib, and uses a reference to the classic film, The Battle of Algiers, to illustrate a larger point about the Iraq occupation:

The photographs will elicit what has become a predictable response: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will claim to be shocked and will assure us that action is already being taken to prevent such abuses from happening again. But imagine, for a moment, if events followed a different script. Imagine if Rumsfeld responded like Col. Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo's famed 1965 film about the National Liberation Front's attempt to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. In one of the film's key scenes, Mathieu finds himself in a situation familiar to top officials in the Bush administration: He is being grilled by a room filled with journalists about allegations that French paratroopers are torturing Algerian prisoners.

Based on real-life French commander Gen. Jacques Massus, Mathieu neither denies the abuse nor claims that those responsible will be punished. Instead, he flips the tables on the scandalized reporters, most of whom work for newspapers that overwhelmingly support France's continued occupation of Algeria. Torture "isn't the problem," he says calmly. "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay…. It's my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."

His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don't have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires.

Now, as then, there are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.

Most Iraqis do not consent to the open-ended military occupation they have been living under for more than two years. On Jan. 30, a clear majority voted for political parties promising to demand a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. Washington may have succeeded in persuading Iraq's political class to abandon that demand, but the fact remains that U.S. troops are on Iraqi soil in open defiance of the express wishes of the population.

That's certainly an inconvenient fact and those who still hang on to the notion that the US is in Iraq to spread democracy should have to answer for it. How can you be fighting for democracy when your continued presence is in stark opposition to the will of the people?

Bolivia

I hate to keep directing people to ZNet, but once again it's one of the few outlets where you can find any consistent coverage about what's going on in the world.

This time I'm talking about Bolivia, which is in the midst of a major social upheaval, led by protests calling for the nationalization of the country's energy industry. There is also stark opposition to a variety of neoliberal reforms instituted in the country since the early '90s.

For more mainstream coverage, the NY Times has a paltry article today on the "crisis," while the BBC rings in with a good backgrounder and Q&A.

Lastly, here's a useful Google News link. The Narcosphere and Jim Schultz's "Blog from Bolivia" are informative resources, too.

Watergate's relative insignificance

Paul Street raises a point about the revived Watergate interest that I wanted to make, but forgot to mention.

Referring to a central claim Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky made in Manufacturing Consent, Street writes that Watergate

was a relatively small sin compared to other crimes more professionally committed by the Nixon administration. Those other transgressions included the “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which killed possibly 200,000 people and terribly damaged a poor peasant nation, and the undertaking of a massive F.B.I. operation to undermine basic democratic freedoms at home.

The Nixon administration was involved in the flat out Nazi-style assassination of a leading Black Panther (Fred Hampton), the sparking of racial disturbances to discredit the black power movement; numerous murderous attacks on the American Indian Movement, and numerous acts of infiltration, burglary, and illegal espionage against radical organizations like the Weather Underground and the Socialist Workers Party.

So, Street asks, "Why all the attention to the Watergate break-in compared to that 'other' stuff?"

By Chomsky and Herman’s analysis in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), "powerful groups" like the Democratic Party "are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by [American corporate] media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or distant victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted or absent altogether" (p. 300).

For Chomsky and Herman, the disparity between the media’s obsession with Watergate and its relative disinterest in, say, the carpet bombing of Cambodia or the destruction of domestic opposition groups was a textbook study in the corporate media’s servility to state power. Truly "heroic" revelations and media coverage would have attended to the infinitely greater crimes committed against Cambodia, AIM, Chile, and the Black Panthers.

Street then proceeds to cite a recent Greg Palast piece lamenting that in today's media, a similar-styled Watergate investigation is nary impossible and "unnamed sources are OK if they defend Bush, unacceptable if they expose the Administration’s mendacity or evil."

True enough, but Street adds that we need to "go deeper than Palast to the Chomsky and Herman level."

It’s not just that Watergate is more than three decades old and that dominant media no longer practices the sort of tough investigative journalism that helped produce the Watergate story. The problem is also that Watergate wasn’t even close to the worst thing done by the Nixon administration and that the servile press is still patted on the back for "unseating a government" with revelations about a clumsy break-in that was conducted with unclear motive and apparent direct presidential non-involvement (Nixon’s illegalities had to do with his efforts to cover up the subsequent investigation) against the other leading US business party. That administration should have been unseated as a result of revelations about much worse criminal activity directed at less powerful others at home and abroad.

Anyone with a head on their shoulders should be able to draw analogies to today. Various sideshows of malfeasance are still given center stage in the media circus, while the most egregious abuses of the current administration -- done usually with the opposition's tacit approval -- are shushed away as either partisan bickering or unsubstantiated charges. All along, the media shows an unwillingess to probe past the initial denials from centers of power in Washington or, as in most cases, just tell the brutal truth.

The Mobility Myth

Three cheers for Bob Herbert who notes in his NY Times column the ominous and glaring revelations about class disparities that have appeared in the media recently.

People with liberal and leftist sympathies have championed Paul Krugman for flying the flag of sanity at the Grey Lady. Unfortunately, Herbert's contributions as a Times columnist are often overlooked. He deserves equal plaudits for bringing attention to many of the more important developments that run by his desk, like in this case.

(via professor kim)

Protect the Children

Jacob G. Hornberger takes solace in the recent NY Times article about the growing reticence among parents to send their kids off to die for the empire.

He writes, "Parents are wise to protect their children from the U.S. military and its wrongful invasion and occupation of Iraq, not only in the hope of protecting the lives and limbs of their children from being wasted in a wrongful and destructive cause but also in the hope of ensuring that their children are not put in the horrible moral dilemma of either killing innocent people or being killed."

It's really as simple as that.

Pentagon in blinders

This article from the Chicago Tribune suggests that the Pentagon has yet to internalize the lessons of "Fourth Generation Warfare," and

rather than adopting a new strategy, the generals and civilian leaders in the Defense Department have continued to support conventional, high-intensity conflict and the expensive weapons that go with it. That is happening, critics say, despite lethal insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They don't understand this kind of warfare," said Greg Wilcox, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and critic of Pentagon policies. "They want to return to war as they envision it. That's not going to happen."

The Tribune piece is full of quotes expressing astonishment that the Pentagon cannot learn from this situation, but the simple truth is that a defense establishment whose primary purpose is to maintain American hegemony will never be able to roll back this sort of threat environment.

Indeed, the growing comparative advantage of the US military only makes it more likely that adversaries will shrink from the open battlefield and instead choose the sort of drawn out insurgency that we see now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until the DoD drops its dreams of "full spectrum dominance," this problem will not go away. It will only get worse.

More facts on the ground

Try to act surprised: Israel's still building settlements in the West Bank, despite the recommendations of the Sasson report.

Another piece in the puzzle

Robert Parry, on point as usual:

The clues are falling into place, pointing to the incontrovertible judgment that George W. Bush willfully misled the United States into invading Iraq, in part, by eliminating the possibility of the peaceful solution that he pretended to want.

Many of the clues have been apparent for three years – and some were reported in outlets such as our own Consortiumnews.com in real time – but only recently have new revelations clarified this obvious reality for the slow-witted mainstream U.S. news media.

The latest piece of the puzzle was reported by Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press in an article on June 4 describing how Bush’s Undersecretary of State John Bolton orchestrated the ouster of global arms control official Jose Bustani in early 2002 because Bustani’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] was making progress toward getting arms inspectors back into Iraq.

If Bustani had succeeded in gaining Iraq’s compliance with international inspection demands, Bush would have been denied his chief rationale for war, even before U.S. military divisions were deployed to the Persian Gulf. Bustani had made himself an obstacle to war, so he had to go.

After fleshing out the story and tying it to previous reporting on Bustani's ousting, Parry concludes:

Observing the behavior of the national news media over the past three years has been like watching incompetent players in the mystery game “Clue” as they visit all the rooms and ask about all the suspects and weapons, but still insist on guessing at combinations that are transparently incorrect.

Indeed, the major U.S. news outlets appeared to have been so cowed by the Bush White House that they only grudgingly reported on the Downing Street Memo last month – and then only after the leaked document had become a cause celebre in Great Britain and on the Internet.

So far, there’s also been next to no bounce on the AP’s reporting about the real motive behind Bustani’s ouster in April 2002. That story would seem to be the final clue – if one were needed – to prove that Bush has consistently lied about how and why the United States went to war in Iraq.

At this point, a trickier question might be why the mainstream U.S. news media has performed so badly for so long.

Amen to that.

Haiti in chaos

How's that other recent example of Bushist-inspired regime change going down in Haiti? The NY Times takes a peek:

By the accounts of diplomats and political observers, human rights activists and business people, this remains a country poised for implosion, with almost all its institutions ravaged from the inside out by corruption. Ruthless mobs have risen in their place, led by drug traffickers, former military officers, corrupt police officers and street thugs. They have set off a devastating wave of murders, carjackings, armed robberies and rapes.

Kidnappings are the latest scourge.

Like most crimes, kidnappings tend to go unreported. But authorities in the interim government and foreign diplomats estimate that 6 to 12 kidnappings occur in this city [Port-au-Prince] every day. Among them are high-profile cases, like the recent abductions of an Indian businessman and of a Russian contractor to the United Nations. Some authorities said they had received reports of vegetable vendors being kidnapped for $30.

An overwhelming majority of the cases seem aimed at the middle and working classes. Afraid to go to the police, most families negotiate with kidnappers on their own. Mrs. Beaulieu's family negotiated for hours by cellphone with a kidnapper who called himself "commandant."

And:

A report released last week by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group laid the blame for most of Haiti's violence on "spoilers," including drug traffickers, who are well-connected to the political system but have no real allegiances. In a news conference on Friday, Prime Minister Gérard Latortue said many of the leaders of the gangs inciting violence were Haitians who had spent time in American prisons.

"The United States is exporting its crime problems to Haiti," Mr. Latortue said. "Many of the criminals in Haiti learned to be criminals in the United States, and when they are deported here, they bring those skills with them."

Danielle Magloire, a spokeswoman for Haiti's temporary governing group, the so-called Council of the Wise, agreed. "There's no real ideological fighting in Haiti," she said in an interview. "The criminals here are not political activists. They are mercenaries."

Still, other observers said, the violence in Haiti has its roots in politics. Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the United Nations last month that former members of the military, including many led by those who helped oust Mr. Aristide, were responsible for rampant abuses in the provinces, including illegal detentions and extortion.

I'm not sure which is worse: the initial coup that sent the country spiraling further down the rabbit hole, or the lack of attention this issue gets in the media. To its credit, ZNet is one of the few outlets that pays attention to what's going on there. Also check in periodically with HaitiAction.net and the IJDH.

Tighten the belt

According to the LA Times, those ungrateful Iraqis aren't reacting well to neoliberal austerity measures.

Iraqis, who are already dealing with food shortages, daily power blackouts and a deadly insurgency, on Sunday received another dose of bad news: Their newly elected leaders may slash budgets and government jobs.

Many fear that the move could cause impoverished Iraqis to sympathize with rebel forces. The new Iraqi government said it recently had deployed 40,000 troops in the capital to capture militants, who have killed more than 800 people in the last month in suicide bombings and other attacks.

...As many as half of Iraq's 6.5 million-strong workforce is employed by the state, thanks in part to ousted President Saddam Hussein, who increased the public payroll to mask unemployment and shore up a faltering economy.

Kubba did not say how many jobs could be eliminated, but he warned that budget cuts "will be a bit painful."

...Humam Shamaa, an economist with the Iraqi Institute for Future Studies, a think tank, said that each Iraqi without a paycheck is a potential recruit for well-funded militant groups.

Salaries account for only 20% of public expenses, Shamaa said. Iraqi ministry employees earn about $130 a month on average. He warned that with increasing food prices, 30% unemployment and 9 million Iraqis living below the poverty line, any budget cuts could push more Iraqis toward violence.

"We have to find jobs for people, not throw them out of work," he said. "I think that reducing the public sector will only encourage the insurgency."

Hi, Naomi. Where you been?

Class in America

Jennifer Ladd and Felice Yeskel review the recent articles on class in America that have appeared in the NY Times and WSJ.

They write:

These feature stories are not news to many close observers of U.S. culture and economics. In the last three decades, we've become a vastly more unequal society. The rungs of the ladder of opportunity are weakening, threatening our national self-image as a meritocratic opportunity society. Three years ago, British commentator Will Hutton observed that "U.S. society is polarizing and its social arteries are hardening. The sumptuousness and bleakness of the respective lifestyle of the rich and poor represent a scale of difference in opportunity and wealth that is also medieval -- and a standing offence to the American expectation that everyone has the opportunity for life, liberty, and happiness." But these current articles sound a cultural and economic policy alarm bell. One important finding is that inequality matters.

Many progressives have argued that these inequality trends are bad for the economy, our democracy and culture. But many conservatives and some liberals, while expressing discomfort with the accelerating income and wealth gap of the last three decades, believe that inequality is the price we pay to maintain a dynamic, growing, and opportunity-creating society. As long as there is mobility, they argue, we should tolerate high levels of inequality. Indeed, the culture has celebrated the rising number of millionaires and billionaires as a harbinger of broader prosperity.

But if mobility is indeed stalling out -- and one's opportunity is tied increasingly to inherited privilege or born disadvantage, then the defense of inequality vanishes. Too much inequality can lead to worsened opportunity.

It is unlikely that either newspaper series will expose the ways in which wealthy families and corporate CEOs use their money and power to rewrite the rules of the game, contributing to the erosion of opportunity. Efforts to abolish the inheritance tax and shift the tax burden off of investors and onto wage-earners directly undermine mobility. Tax cuts lead to budget cuts, leading many states to cut education spending and financial aid for higher education. At a time when advancing up the economic ladder is increasingly tied to attending a four-year college program, the opportunity is more out of reach for poor and working class young adults. Meanwhile, elected officials are reluctant to pass legislation or make the educational investments that contribute to a level playing field. So as we hard-wire inequality into the rules of the economy, addressing our collective confusion about class becomes all the more important.

One of the dramatic findings in the first Times article is the glaring disparity between the public perception of mobility in American and the reality. Americans overwhelmingly believe that we live in a mobile society. Half of those polled believe they have a chance to become financially wealthy. But the data now shows that the U.S. has less mobility than the countries of Europe, which we always thought of as having rigid class and caste systems.

Ladd and Yeskel continue, adding a wrinkle to the discussion:

Those who are raised poor and working class are different because people are more likely to die from the manifestations of class oppression: poor health care and food, stress, overwork, etc. Our classist system provides real material rewards and benefits for owning class and upper middle class people at the expense of poor and working class people. But even owning class people frequently suffer alienation and isolation that deprives them of meaningful connections with all of humanity. The premise of a meritocratic society is that people earn and get what they deserve, based on their effort, drive and intelligence. But if a society advertises itself as a meritocracy, but in practice allocates success based on hereditary advantage, how are those who are not winners supposed to respond? Such a bind leads many poor and working people to internalize their shame and blame, instead of demanding that the society live up to its promise of opportunity.

This internalized oppression plays itself out in violence, put-downs, and ways we might hold our children back from their potential. This dynamic limits each of our potential, our sense of self worth and our ability to bring forward our gifts to the world.

This angle is one that's only recently starting to get attention from social scientists. The fact is that inequality doesn't just mandate that certain people live more luxurious lives than others. The findings seem to suggest a direct correlation between a society's collective health and its degree of equality.

(via Democratic Left Infoasis)

American tunnel vision

From the Independent:

Senior Democrats are calling for the closure of America's detention centre in Guantanamo, Cuba, saying it has become a "propaganda and recruitment tool" for terrorists in the wake of continued allegations of prisoner abuse.

A leading senator, Joseph Biden of Delaware, suggested the time had come to consider a gradual closure of the facility, arguing its worsening reputation around the world was helping to recruit people bent on hurting the US.

"This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world. And it is unnecessary to be in that position."

It's really sad, but by no means surprising, that a leader of the "opposition" party takes this tack on Gitmo. Biden's primary response is to lament, above all, the PR problem created by all of the abuse and torture that the US has handed out over the past few years.

Ironically, this is one of the very reasons why America is so despised in the world. Even when there's copious evidence of wrongdoing - heinous, shameful wrongdoing in this case - American politicians and citizens continue to wonder why foreign audiences take our actions at face value, rather than through the unquestioned lens of benevolence that most people here view them. When confronted with our own transgressions, the first impulse is not to reflect inward, but to unleash accusatory questions about why people outside the US don't embrace our innate goodness.

Maybe if we, as a country, started to own up to our disgraceful actions and stopped thumping our chest every 30 seconds, there might be less animosity directed here. Just a thought...