The Mound of Sound

Let’s see – Spring, 2008. That’s just a year and a half from right now. By then, we’re told, the Afghan Army will be ready to start taking control of the country’s security. This from Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO Secretary General. Of course, Jaap has left himself a world of wiggle room. He qualified his prediction by saying the Afghan Army will “be gradually taking control.”

That could mean anything from safeguarding the presidential latrine to securing some of the tame provinces in the north. Just don’t expect them to be taking over in Helmand or Kandahar provinces by then. No, we’ll probably still be there for that job.

It looks as though President Bush and de Hoop Scheffer were successful in strongarming some concessions from France, Germany, Italy and Spain, albeit begrudgingly. They’ve sort of said their troops might be authorized to take part in combat in the south in certain circumstances.

France said it will decide on combat deployment on a case by case basis. Spain and Italy said their contingent might be made available to fight “in extreme circumstances.” Ditto for Germany.

Now you would have thought the NATO leaders would feel secure in Riga, Latvia but guess again. According to the Times of London, the summit is defended by 7,000 Latvian troops and 2,000 NATO soldiers backed by helicopters and two warships in Riga’s harbour.

The NATO Secretary General’s remarks about handover are a sop to those who need to tell their constituents that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Actually wishy-washy seems an apt description of the summit so far.

It would be interesting to know how much damage we need to inflict on the Taliban and rebellious peasants before Afghanistan will be safe to hand over to any Afghan Army. At the end of the day, can we kill enough of them to make a difference?

The Australian reports sources at the NATO summit in Riga as saying they want a high-powered “international fixer” to sort out the mess in Afghanistan.

While NATO concentrates on holding the Taliban at bay, they want backup in the form of a heavyweight political initiative to push through democratic reforms and an anti-drug policy.

“Our problem is that we’re getting on with the security and reconstruction, but there’s no one person appointed who can make sure the Afghan Government gets on with issues such as disarming the warlords,” the senior source in Riga said.

The guy can’t help himself. Everytime he hears Shia he sees Iran and then he sees red. That’s preventing George Bush from finding any useful solution to his problems in Iraq.

The White House seems to be courting the Sunni world to somehow take over and sort things out in Iraq. That overlooks two huge problems – a Shia majority that will no longer tolerate Sunni interference and their Shia benefactor, Iran. Even the Kurds in northern Iraq are unlikely to welcome an Arab Sunni intrusion.

President Bush is never going to get the answers he wants to hear on Iraq. They simply don’t exist. Getting Saudi Arabia and Jordan involved is all well and good but there’s little they can do to quell the civil war without the agreement and support of Iran and Syria. So long as Washington has Tehran in its sights, getting the essential Iranian co-operation is unlikely, if not out of the question.

Now there’s a proposal for quasi-partition in the form of a 3-state federalism for Iraq. That would leave the oil-rich Shia south and the oil-rich Kurdish north and the resource barren Sunni middle. It would also entail sorting out who will control several key cities, including Kirkuk, and an awful lot of ethnic adjustments. The Shia would probably go for it and the Kurds already have that degree of autonomy and more. Neither group, however, is in the mood to share their resource wealth with the minority associated with their decades-long repression.

Much as he doesn’t want to, much as he would been seen as humbled, George is going to have to negotiate an Iraqi peace package with Iran and with Syria and he’s going to have to come bearing gifts. Right now he’s throwing a diplomatic tantrum, giving both the cold shoulder. Let’s hope he gets over that and pretty quickly.

The past year has seen the Western media begin to stand up and say what’s long needed saying about our far right leaders. They all seem to be afflicted with the same disorder – a profound detachment from reality.

The Aussie newspaper, The Australian, is no bastion of leftie sentiment so I found columnist Philip Adams’ screed against John Howard pretty bold.

“One can only wonder what form of the ailment our poor Prime Minister has developed. Or is it something else? Not dementia, but a different dimension. Is he living in one of those parallel universes? Are we glimpsing him through wormholes? Whereas every sane person in the US – including members of the administrations damaged or destroyed by the war – acknowledge that the Vietnam conflict was both a folly and a calamity, Howard still says it was the right thing. And he said it in Vietnam, as a guest of the Government, sitting beside the well-known draft dodger George W. Bush. That millions died as a consequence of Western stupidity doesn’t seem to concern him. If not barking madness, Howard’s utterances were very bad manners.
Howard and his friend were there to discuss even greater fiasco, another US-Australia joint misadventure. The US has now been bogged down in Iraq for longer than they were in World War II. The casualties and costs soar, yet in George and John’s parallel universe, things are going well.

“But the real world – particularly the American electorate – disagrees. The fiasco began in shared dementia about weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad links to 9/11, a fantasy about blossoming democracy. Reagan’s blurring of realities was never so destructive. The Iraq war will have consequences immeasurably more damaging to its region and the world than three Vietnams. Even Tony Blair knows that. But not the US President and certainly not the Australian Prime Minister.

“In Howard’s dimension or dementia, the strangest things happen. Refugees try to drown their babies and asylum-seekers are terrorists. Again and again, one tries to connect the PM’s beliefs or actions with any objective reality.

“Consider other madnesses appearing from the wormholes or as symptoms of dementia. While the war on terror has been stoking up terrorism, the infinitely more terrifying prospect of climate change was ignored. Worse still, both Howard and Bush ridiculed it. While choosing or pretending to believe the tawdriest intelligence on Iraq from debased agencies, they chose to neglect the collective intelligence of the entire scientific community.

“Yes, the Hawke government deserves a decade’s blame, but in Howard’s decade the facts were incontrovertible. Now we’ve a dangerously belated and deranged response. Nuclear power might, just might be a factor in 20 years. That’s a grand total of four decades of denial and delay. This is not policy. It is further procrastination. Even more shamefully, like Tampa, it’s wedge politics.

“No matter how sorry the state of affairs, Howard is never sorry. Not about the stolen generation, not about the Vietnam War. Not about WMDs and the other excuses for Iraq. Not about his secret collusions with Bush that had Australia committed to invasion months before we were told – and not about the squalid backroom dealings of the AWB with Baghdad of which, of course, he claims to have known nothing. Howardism means never having to say you’re sorry.

“In Howard, Australia has had its most reckless leader. In Howardism we’ve had an insane approach to local politics and international affairs that has shamed the nation and continues to put it in harm’s way. The electorate increasingly understands this yet shrugs it off. That’s Howardism too.”

Is it any wonder that Stephen Harper has embraced John Howard so warmly?

The hunt is on to find out who slipped polonium-210 to Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko. Fingers have been pointed at Russia as the source of this isotope but the Russians are flatly denying it.

Maybe we should be blaming the internet. Polonium-210, said to be 100 billion times deadlier than cyanide can be bought freely on the internet. United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies in New Mexico offers a small amount of the isotope in a small, disc shaped container for – get this – $69.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Nuclear Scientific’s website warns the company:

“… will occasionally terminate and refund orders if we feel you are juvenile posing as an adult, inexperienced with the materials ordered, or using our products to make any sort of explosive device.” How thoughtful.

Canada decided to apologize and generously compensate the children of Chinese immigrants from many decades past who were forced to pay a head tax to get in. Now it’s Britain’s turn.

Tony Blair is about to apologize to the victims of Britain’s once-flourishing slave trade. Well, actually it’s more of a lament than an apology because we know how expensive apologies can become.

In his typical “oh gosh” manner, Blair deftly skirts the sticky part of this business: “It’s hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time.” I guess it was legal because the government of the day made it so in the Slave Trade Act, and that’s good enough for Tony.

It’s estimated that somewhere between 10 and 28-million Africans were sent to the Americas and sold into slavery over nearly four centuries. Britain alone managed to transport upwards of 300,000 Africans a year in its fetid, disease-ridden slave ships.

Stephen Harper had better make a much stronger argument to his fellow NATO leaders in Riga than he did in this morning’s Globe & Mail. If not, we’re screwed. Harper, together with the Dutch P.M., wrote an op-ed piece extolling all their successes in Afghanistan to date and their claims were overwhelmingly unimpressive.

Glossing over any suggestion of setbacks and outright failures, Harper used the classic Orwellian language of his mentor in Washington, the standard “war is peace” thing. How are we doing in Kandahar, Steve? “There is still hard work to be done there with boots on the ground.” Is that Harperese for the bad guys are taking control of more of the province because we don’t have remotely enough troops there and our policies are driving the locals into the arms of the insurgents? “Still hard work to be done.” Yeah, right Steve. Lots of it and more every day.

How ’bout this one? “We will continue to vigorously support Afghan efforts to strengthen the rule of law, tackle corruption, and take action against illegal narcotics.” So, we’re already vigorously supporting the effort to strengthen the rule of law. I guess we’re doing that by leaving those kids in prison down the road in Kandahar for refusing their fathers’ attempts to sell them, right? And how we must be vigorously supporting the efforts to tackle corruption. How’s that going, Steve? Are we rounding up the corrupt cops who are driving the peasants over to our enemy? I mean these cops are helping the guys shooting at us.

Then there’s the vigorous effort against illegal narcotics. I assume these would be the same narcotics, raw opium, by which the Afghan farmers put food in the mouths of their kids, right Steve? So what are we doing to give them another way of sustenance, of survival, before we wipe out their crops? Doesn’t just destroying their poppy crops simply drive them into the all too welcoming arms of the Taliban?

So Steve’s got three points: security, corruption and drugs and the record belies his claims of progress. In fairness he hasn’t rolled out the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Much as I’m sure he’d like to, that wouldn’t help his effort in Riga to get other nations to jump into this mess.

Maybe the Globe piece is just for the benefit of people at home. Maybe he’s keeping his A game for the leaders in Riga. He’d better hope he’s got a much more convincing pitch to deliver in Latvia because those leaders know better than to buy this nonsense.

As the name of this site suggests, I don’t like extremism – political, religious, social or economic. Extremist philosophy is, by its very nature, the view of cranks, the shrill voice of a malignant minority. In politics, extremists don’t try to embrace the moderate majority or even move them toward their radicalism. What they do has been repeatedly shown by the Bush regime, now being aped by the Harper regime. They try to intimidate moderates, instil fear in them, appeal to every base instinct they can provoke in the majority. They work outside the moderate majority, work around them, because that is the only way they can prevail. Their tactic is to use deceit to sow confusion and fear. They don’t persuade, they manipulate and they’re masters at it.

Bush and Rove believed they could transform Republican rule into a right-wing dynasty that would carry on far past the political horizon. Stephen Harper, to begrudgingly give him his due, is far shrewder. He knows he isn’t going to shift the political centre in Canada. He knows his radical view has a limited shelf life. He knows he’d better loot the till before the boss returns.

Harper is a man of seemingly limitless contradictions and hypocrisy. He speaks of principle, he’s been doing that since he came to Ottawa. He seems to have a set of principles to suit any circumstance, every occasion. In opposition, Harper had one set of principles. He often displayed missionary zeal in denouncing supposedly arrogant overreaching by the Martin, minority government. When Harper managed to fool a bare minimum of Canadians needed to win the keys to 24 Sussex Drive, all those old principles were tossed into a cardboard box and stowed in the closet to make way for a new set of principles that reflected an arrogance the Libs never even dreamed of.

I don’t like Stephen Harper. I really doubt whether he’s emotionally balanced. I fear for the damage he may leave Canada in his wake. Let’s hope he’s gone soon, very soon.

Canada’s first nations haven’t had much luck with the Conservative Reform Alliance Party of Stephen Harper. Harp doesn’t seem to care very much for the natives or their issues.

First he kicked over the Kelowna accord, an agreement reached by the last Liberal government after a year and a half of negotiations with the provinces, territories and five aboriginal groups. The money to finance the deal was even set aside in the budget.

“Not signed” screamed the Tories on assuming power. No deal, it was just nonsense, and so on. Kelowna was dead and will stay that way unless we get rid of the Harpies.

Not content with reneging on the Liberal promises, Harper is taking action at the United Nations also where Harper Canada is joining the usual suspects – the US, Australia, New Zealand and Russia in trying to undermine the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The declaration, which the Liberal government helped push through the UN, is, according to the Toronto Star: “…aimed at setting minimum standards for the dignity, survival and well-being of the world’s indigenous people, who are the poorest and least advantaged in their countries.”

The non-binding declaration was the product of negotiations that took 20-years but Harper complains that it’s “unclear” and should be renegotiated. Now there’s a statesman for you.