Opposition to Iraqi constitution weakening

Knight Ridder's Nancy A. Youssef reports that the Iraqi constitution will likely pass the referendum on October 15:

The two strongest opponents of Iraq's proposed new constitution said this week that they wouldn't campaign against it aggressively, making it likely that voters will approve the constitution in an Oct. 15 referendum.

Passage would be a victory for the Bush administration's Iraq policy, but it's unclear whether the document will produce a stable Iraqi government with broad public support or further alienate the country's Sunni Muslim Arab minority.

So many Sunnis will vote "no," but it looks they won't have the numbers to jettison the entire draft.

Looking forward, American and Iraqi governmental officials are hopeful that the approval of the constitution will validate, to some degree, Iraq's coming elections in December and encourage members of the insurgency to abandon their oppositional pose by engaging the formal political process.

Of course, as the recent ICG report attests, pushing the constitution through could just as easily accelerate the country's civil war by further entrenching Sunnis against the government.

Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Photos

The second round of Abu Ghraib photos have been cleared for release. This should make for an interesting few days and weeks once they hit the airwaves.

Mysteries of New Orleans

Worth reading: Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot's 25 Questions about the Murder of New Orleans.

Hacking the wall

Polar ice shrinking fast

From ABC News:

This season has ushered in the warmest Arctic summer in 400 years. A NASA report to be released this week finds the polar ice pack has shrunk by nearly 30 percent since 1978, and new satellite photos show the melting is speeding up.

Scientists say the Arctic may be caught in a vicious cycle of global warming. As ice melts, there's less white matter to reflect the sun's heat back into space. The dark ocean absorbs more of the sun's heat and that, in turn, melts more of the ice pack.

There's additional material later on in this article about the disturbing effects being seen in Alaska from climate change, including the melting of permafrost. So it's worth reading on.

You might recall that a recent report in the New Scientist noted with some alarm the same trend in Siberia.

Update: Here's a related story from the BBC.

Guard Was Deluged Too

Today the NY Times investigates why the National Guard seems to have dropped the ball with its response to Katrina. One major reason: Iraq.

In interviews, Guard commanders and state and local officials in Louisiana said the Guard performed well under the circumstances. But they say it was crippled in the early days by a severe shortage of troops that they blame in part on the deployment to Iraq of 3,200 Louisiana guardsmen. While the Pentagon disputes that Iraq was a factor, those on the ground say the war has clearly strained a force intended to be the nation's bulwark against natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

Reinforcements from other states' National Guard units, slowed by the logistics and red tape involved in summoning troops from civilian jobs and moving them thousands of miles, did not arrive in large numbers until the fourth day after the hurricane passed. The coordinating task was so daunting that Louisiana officials turned to the Pentagon to help organize the appeal for help.

With all of the focus on FEMA's screwups, this aspect of why the federal government's response to Katrina was so poor seems to have gotten lost in the haze. Indeed, with all of the focus on hurricanes in the US media, Iraq itself has disappeared almost entirely off the national radar.

Not an aberration

Now that Lynndie England has been sentenced for her role in Abu Ghraib, Jennifer K. Harbury provides the missing context to the popular understanding of the US' involvement in torture - historically and more recently.

The coup that wasn't

In an excerpt from his new book, Scott Ritter revisits the infamous tale of when the US tried to use the UNSCOM inspection teams in Iraq for spying and to precipitate an eventual coup.

Withdrawal up for debate

You might have noticed the nascent debate over the prudence of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq on some high-profile blogs of late (see, for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Jim Lobe summarizes the main arguments, in case you haven't been paying attention.

Rampant rumors

Many of the worst tales from New Orleans in the early days of Katrina's aftermath -- the rapes, murders, wanton violence, et al. -- have turned out to be urban legends. The LA Times and Times-Picayune investigate how and why these rumors took flight.

Worse with God

This is interesting:

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

...The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

You don't necessarily have to view this report through the religion lens to find a sad resonance in the last sentence above.

Unmaking Iraq

A new ICG report suggests that last January's election in Iraq solidified and legitimized politics along ethnic lines, pushing the country further down the path to civil war:

Iraq's rushed constitutional process has deepened ethnic and sectarian rifts and is likely to worsen the insurgency and hasten the country's violent break-up, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said on Monday.

"The constitution is likely to fuel rather than dampen insurgency," said Robert Malley, head of the think-tank's Middle East and North Africa program, introducing an ICG report.

"A compact based on compromise and broad consent could have been a first step in a healing process. Instead it is proving yet another step in a process of depressing decline."

Iraqis are to vote on October 15 in a constitutional referendum on what the ICG calls a weak document that lacks consensus.

... "The United States has repeatedly stated that it has a strategic interest in Iraq's territorial integrity, but today the situation appears to be heading toward de facto partition and full-scale civil war," the report says.

Many analysts have already noted this trend, but it would be nice to see some serious discussion of it in the American media.

Britain to pull troops from Iraq?

Withdrawal or not? Tis the question.

Another ghost city

In case there was any doubt, it looks like Tal Afar has been sufficiently "Fallujahcized."

Connections before experience

Time asks, "How Many More Mike Browns Are Out There?"

DC demos

The NewStandard has a pretty good report on Saturday's antiwar demo in DC. William Rivers Pitt has been blogging from DC, too.

Year Zero in N.O.

Diane Farsetta has a interesting report on how rightwing think tanks, working in concert with GOP congressional members, are salivating over the "possibilities" presented by a complete overhaul of New Orleans.

For a foil, check out this interview with Mike Davis, the excellent urban historian. He provides a way of thinking through the Katrina mess that works as a sort of antidote to the pablum coming out of the Heritage, AEI, etc.

The fruits of "Murderous Maniacs"

More torture goodies ahoy:

As a military jury in Texas considers the fate of Lynndie England, the low-ranking reservist pictured in the notorious photos of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army's most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.

According to their testimony, featured in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), beatings and other forms of torture were often either ordered or approved by superior officers and took place on virtually a daily basis. The soldiers, all of whom had also been deployed to Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, testified that the same techniques were used in both countries.

I'm sure glad we got to the bottom of this stuff when Abu Ghraib popped up. Less freedom-lovin' countries would have, like, you know, covered things up and pushed blame downward.

Not us, though. We're throwing the book at those who were responsible. People like PFC Lynndie England, the Mengele-like mastermind from backwater West Virginia.

The 'myth' of Iraq's foreign fighters

One of the major studies on the nature of the insurgency in Iraq, which was foreshadowed a few months ago in the Boston Globe, has been published finally.

As noted then, the report, released yesterday by CSIS, blows the lid off the "foreign fighter" in Iraq bogeyman, claiming that the insurgency consists of only about 4-10% non-Iraqis. Moreover, it asserts that the "vast majority of Saudi militants [ed. - the focus of the study] who have entered Iraq were not terrorist sympathisers before the war; and were radicalized almost exclusively by the coalition invasion."

The exile

Edward Said passed away three years ago today. Here's a very good retrospective on his life.

Rita

The Houston Chronicle's special coverage of Hurricane Rita is worth keeping an eye on, particularly the paper's blog.

As always, Google News is a useful resource. So is the NHC and -- on energy issues -- the Oil Drum.

Plight of the poor

No way out, again?!! Oh, just give it time. They'll find a way to get the poor people out...eventually.

U.S. failure No. 1

Dave Zweiful channels Paul Krugman: in a sane world, Katrina would trigger political momentum for universal health care.

After all, if you really want to address poverty in the US, this is the obvious first step.

Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding in NO

Here's an interesting bit from the Washington Post about what really caused the flooding of New Orleans. It doesn't appear to have been the high storm surge:

Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry.

The Army Corps of Engineers has said that Katrina was just too massive for a system that was not intended to protect the city from a storm greater than a Category 3 hurricane, and that the floodwall failures near Lake Pontchartrain were caused by extraordinary surges that overtopped the walls.

But with the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

If this analysis holds up, it points the finger of culpability for the floods directly at the underfunding of levee work. As the Post points out at the end of the piece:

John M. Barry -- who criticized the Corps in "Rising Tide," a history of the Mississippi River flood of 1927 -- said that if Katrina did not exceed the design capacity of the New Orleans levees, the federal government may bear ultimate responsibility for this disaster.

"If this is true, then the loss of life and the devastation in much of New Orleans is no more a natural disaster than a surgeon killing a patient by failing to suture an artery would be a natural death," Barry said. "And that surgeon would be culpable."

Out Now

Michael Schwartz lays out "Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense" in a TomDispatch piece.

"American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous possibilities for future violence," he concludes. "The either/or of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is likely to get -- for the U.S. and for the Iraqis."

Wasted opportunity

Unfortunately, due mostly to the Bush administration's lack of enthusiasm and the inertia of the Katrina fallout story, the UN's recent summit on the Millenium Development Goals passed by with hardly any fanfare here in the United States.

You can revisit what transpired -- more accurately, what didn't transpire -- via TerraViva's special website devoted to the meeting.

Miscellany

* In separate pieces, Patrick Cockburn reports on the suspected theft of over $1 billion from Iraq's defense ministry and "Baghdad's worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam...when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon - claiming 152 lives and wounding 542."

* While a US-insurgent stalemate is reported in Iraq's Anbar province, the "Fallujah model" again made its way to another Iraqi city recently. This time in Tal Afar.

* Two important books on Iraq have come out recently. Read interesting reviews of these testimonials from Anthony Shadid and George Packer.

* Last Chance for Iraq? Peter Galbraith offers yet another prescription -- a modified break-up -- for the war torn country in the NYRB.

* Goody. Now you can pay for the Iraq mess with money directly from your pocket! Here.

* Michael Klare examines the Americans' losing battle for oil in Iraq.

* Colin Powell is still trying to cover his ass for the Iraq debacle. Unsuccessfully, that is.

* Happy Anniversary, PNAC.

* Jim Lobe and John Basil Utley report on the happenings at a major New America Foundation conference where academics and policy makers galore probed the many shortcomings of the Bush-led "war on terror."

* Mark Danner looks at the GWOT, four years on.

* Lost at Tora Bora. Mary Anne Weaver recounts Osama's infamous escape in the NYT Magazine. She sets the stage thusly: "as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign."

* IPS' William Fisher reports on the ongoing hunger strike at Gitmo.

* Scott Ritter says the EU's stalled negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program is yet another signpost on the march to eventual US military action.

* The Washington Post recently outlined some changes in US nuclear posture. Jim Lobe adds some missing context.

* We Deliver! According to the AP, "The United States is the largest supplier of weapons to developing nations, delivering more than $9.6 billion in arms to countries including those in the Near East and Asia in 2004, and boosting worldwide sales to those countries to the highest amount since 2000, a congressional study says."

* Is Gaza now free? Hardly. As Charley Reese says, withdrawal is not nearly enough.

* Der Spiegel says Germany lost its recent national election.

* The UN's annual Human Development Report "normally concerns itself with the Third World," according to Paul Vallely of the Independent, "but the 2005 edition scrutinizes inequalities in health provision inside the US as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty. It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as Malaysia. America's black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday."

* "Although we haven’t heard President Bush say it much lately," Gene Gerard writes, "he came into office as a self-professed 'compassionate conservative.'" But as an annual Census Bureau study suggests, "the country hasn’t seen much of that compassion in the last five years. Many Americans are working harder, earning less, and without the benefit of health insurance. It’s easy to understand why the report was released a day after the largest natural disaster in a century, when much of the country was distracted."

* Deja vu all over again? Like Katrina, Hurricane Rita is taking aim at the Gulf of Mexico's energy infrastructure. It is also strengthening rapidly as it moves westward.

* Is Katrina a Harbinger of Still More Powerful Hurricanes? Following an MIT study, Science Magazine publishes the second major scientific article in the last two months to suggest global warming is making hurricanes more intense.

* "A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover," reports the Independent. "Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years."

* Project Censored has released its list of the top 25 underreported stories of 2005. Camille T. Taiara has a more detailed run down of the top ten.

* Here's an excerpt from James Howard Kunstler's new book on peak oil and related topics, The Long Emergency.

* In a creative essay excerpted from his new book, The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen uses his own life experience to make concrete the realities of white privilege.

* Here's a very well-deserved smackdown of Victor Davis Hanson, the NRO crowd's favorite historian and "classicist."

Katrina, a few weeks on

From my vantage point, the broadcast media did a very good job covering Katrina early on, but in the last two weeks has unfortunately returned to its old, familiar habits of providing mindless dreck. Now we're treated to human interest stories almost exclusively (stay away from CNN!) and very little quality reporting from the ground in Louisiana, Mississippi, or the hundreds of shelters housing refugees. The federal government, led by Bush, is promising to fix the situation and throw money at the problem, but I can gather very little specifics about what's actually going on or what's the plan. Perhaps it's still early...

The government's failure to react to the storm sufficiently has been so egregious that the Bushies have not been able to get away with their usual deflection of criticism. It's uncontroversial that dire warnings were ignored; now we know that the levees broke as early as Monday, August 29, and the feds didn't start getting their act together until Wednesday or even Thursday.

The FEMA debacle and assorted "breakdowns" have been covered exhaustively, perhaps to the extent that they've drowned out adequate exposure of other responsible parties. For instance, there's very little coverage in the national media about state and local failures, outside of Rove and Co.'s attempts to blame the mess (unsuccessfully, it seems) on Democrats.

In the print media, there's been a great deal of solid, contextual reporting going on. I'm referencing some of it in this post, largely for future reference. Here, for one, is a pretty damning analysis of Bush's "isolated" governing style, as exposed by Katrina. Patrick Cockburn also penned a very cogent piece linking the administration's handling of Iraq and Katrina.

For added background, here's a concise article on how FEMA's failures contributed to the catastrophe in New Orleans. It's the follow-up to a prescient investigative piece from September 2004. More detailed articles on this topic come from Peter Dreier and Walter Brasch.

Michael Brown's become the pathetic symbol of the disaster, another clueless public official put in charge of a degraded organization due to the administration's ideology and affection for cronyism. Ironically, the relentless criticism of Brown has allowed other officials to dodge the blame for their involvement in the mess, notably Michael Chertoff.

Other things worth paying attention to:

* IPS asks, Did FEMA "buy" votes for Bush in Florida? Democracy Now! and Jason Leopold have also addressed the issue of whether FEMA's overcompensation of Floridians for Hurricane Frances in September 2004 was politically motivated.

* The largely uninterrogated role of privatization in the calamity.

* Karl Rove's in charge of the Katrina recovery. As Dan Froomkin notes, "Rove's leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush's image."

* Gretna's great shame.

* The reappearance of the "Other America." The media has not done a good job navigating the troubled waters of race and class, alternatively promoting the "colorblind" trope and, as Paul Street puts it, "reactionary, privilege-friendly narratives [that] close the American mind to the many ways in which Katrina might educate the populace about class, race, Martin King's 'triple evils,' and the perverted priorities of empire and inequality."

* Gentrification and, yes, the threat of ethnic cleansing to come.

Weathering the storms

Back soon

I'll have new posts up in a few days, by midweek at the latest.

After Katrina

Little time and a poor internet connection means blogging will continue to be sluggish here until after Labor Day. Obviously, the hurricane fallout will dominate news until then, and probably well after.

I recommend checking out Cursor's collection of links from the last few days. Actually, I dare you to thumb through them without getting really angry.

Also see these two pieces by Jim Lobe, along with the continued coverage from the Times-Picayune and Sun Herald.

If you are interested in making a donation and haven't yet, here are some more ideas. ACORN's not mentioned, but they could use a helping hand, too.