The Mound of Sound

Or let’s hope it’ll be just in time. Word that the Afghan mission is in for some badly needed reinforcements – at least one more NATO brigade and more US forces as well.

The NATO brigade is to be made up of troops mainly from the various nations already active in Afghanistan. The Americans are (wisely) extending the tour of their mountain brigade by another four months and possibly sending fresh troops in also.

It’s not clear whether the NATO reinforcement troops will be combat-ready and whether their committment will be subject to any of the caveats that have kept some, such as the Germans, from being deployed into the south where the fighting is most intense.

Let’s hope the extra troops are enough to bolster NATO forces to meet the anticipated Taliban spring offensive. The trouble is that it’s all guesswork as to what is coming. Will it be the Taliban and al-Qaeda or will they, too, show up with reinforcements. There have been rumours that the Taliban have been joined by the northern warlords, various drug lords, mujahadeen and disaffected nationalists, temporarily operating together under an agreement to set aside their differences until the Westerners are driven out and Karzai toppled. That is definitely a worst-case scenario but no one knows what’s coming or, if they do, they’re not speaking openly about it.

Imagine it’s 1957 and you’re suddenly presented with clear proof of where the world would be in half a century.

Let’s say, for example, that we all realized that the Cold War would consume massive wealth and resources to end in the fall of communism. Would both sides agree that they could use their treasure more wisely for the actual benefit of their people?

What if our environmental decline was mapped out fifty years in advance? Would we have started looking for better, safer alternatives in time to avoid at least the worst of the problems that face us today?

The truth is that a lot of what is coming down the pike can be accurately predicted but it is our human condition not to respond until we must, perhaps not even until it’s too late.

What strategies is Canada now mapping out to leave us ideally positioned for the world of 2057? You and I both know the answer. We’re doing nothing or next to nothing.

If the world in 2050 is going to be markedly different than the world we’ve known for centuries, shouldn’t we at least be discussing what lies ahead and our options for coping with it?

A couple of things we’ll probably have to deal with are securing and distributing our freshwater resources. Some areas, particularly southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, may fall into protracted drought while B.C. receives heavy rainfall. Wouldn’t it make sense to see if and how that surplus water could be used in places that may need it most?

We also need to consider growth. The areas expected to be hardest hit by global warming are the regions that are already the hottest on the planet. It won’t take much change to render a lot of the earth’s surface uninhabitable. That will leave the occupants two choices – migrate to more temperate areas or die. What do you think they’ll choose? The Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence have already studied this and they came to the same conclusion.

It would be wonderful if we could just make room for all the newcomers but we can’t. We may, however, be compelled to accept a lot more than we want or are prepared to assimilate.

We have enough experience with immigration to be able to identify the opportunities and problems this will present. Surely the time to work on these questions is now, not when we are beset by migrants.

Should we give priority to Americans? How do we retain control of our own country? How do we safeguard our resources for our needs and benefit?

This whole exercise is very time-consuming. We need time to formulate the questions we need to address. We need time to come up with reliable scenarios that are essential for planning. We need time to debate and discuss our options and make choices. We need time to put our choices, our policies into effect before we wind up playing catch-up.

What we have at the moment is a government that claims it is minty green, almost overnight, and will do everything except anything that might impact on the economy. That timid approach consigns us to window dressing solutions. It does not welcome questions and debates and making choices. It actually seeks to forestall those things.

We may have a chance right now to take steps that will pay huge benefits in the future. One thing that is apparent, the longer we loiter with our heads in the sand claiming to be green, the fewer options we’ll have when we’re forced to make decisions.

Anti-Americanism is sweeping the globe. According to the controversial right-winger, Dinesh D’Souza writing in the Christian Science Monitor, it’s because the US offers so many things to condemn, there’s something for everyone.

“Anti-Americanism comes in different varieties. The European kind emphasizes the “evils” of “red” America: a shoot-first, ask-questions-later cowboy in the White House, and Bible- toting fundamentalists walking around the corridors of power.

“The Muslim variety is very different. Many Muslims point to the “horrors” of “blue” America: homosexual marriage, family breakdown, and a popular culture that is trivial, materialistic, vulgar, and, in many cases, morally repulsive.

“This latter view is dangerously – and justifiably – common in many traditional cultures across the globe. Because it feeds their perception that American values are inimical to their way of life, this attitude can blossom into the kind of anti- American pathology that partly fueled the 9/11 attacks. Any serious effort to shore up American’s security must include steps to edify American culture.

“The most powerful of all the American offenses recited in the lands of Islam, argues preeminent Middle East expert Bernard Lewis, “is the “degeneracy and debauchery of the American way of life.”

“A major reason why some Muslims focus their anger on the United States is because it is American culture – not Swedish culture or French culture – that is finding its way into every nook and cranny of Islamic society.

“There is a cultural blowback against America that is coming from all the traditional cultures of Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Asia. This resistance is summed up in a slogan used by Singapore’s former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew: “Modernization without Westernization.” What this means is that traditional cultures want prosperity and technology, but they don’t want the values of American culture.”

“Even the term “Great Satan,” so commonly used to denounce America in the Muslim world, is better understood when we recall that in the traditional understanding, shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Satan is not a conqueror; he is a tempter. In one of its best-known verses, the Koran describes Satan as “the insidious tempter who whispers into the hearts of men.”

Dinesh may have identified a genuine problem that needs to be addressed, but how? He wants a culture war at home and, by his implication, a war on liberalism. Dinesh, naturally, equates liberalism with depravity. He also urges the US to do more to show the world the “other America” that they don’t see, the conservative and religious America.

Of course Dinesh doesn’t want to consider just how much good old, religious conservatism the US has been showing the Middle East in recent years. Does this guy think liberals caused the quagmire in Iraq? Does he think the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and Islamism globally is being fueled by rap music or American military and political interventions in the Middle East?

The Islamists believe there is a crusade now underway driven by Christian fundamentalists who wish to subjugate the Muslim world. Sadly, that doesn’t fit into Dinesh’s equation, his view of the root of all of America’s troubles. Dinesh is another radical flogging another book, a phenomenon that has led to a bizarre game of one-upsmanship. His tome is dedicated to the proposition that liberalism caused the attacks of 9/11. Idiot.

A refreshing, alternate viewpoint comes from Henryk Broder writing in Spiegel who warns that adjusting our cultures so as to not affend the Muslim world is rank capituation:

“Those who react to kidnappings and beheadings, to massacres of people of other faiths, and to eruptions of collective hysteria with a call for “cultural dialogue” don’t deserve any better.

“‘The West should desist from engaging in all provocations that produce feelings of debasement and humiliation,’ says psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter. ‘We should show greater respect for the cultural identity of Muslim countries. … For Muslims, it is important to be recognized and respected as equals.’ In Richter’s view, what the Muslims need is “a partnership of equals.”

“But Richter neglects to describe what this partnership might look like. Does achieving such equality mean that we should set up separate sections for women on buses, as is the custom in Saudi Arabia? Should the marrying age for girls be reduced to 12, as is the case in Iran? And should death by stoning be our punishment for adultery, as Shariah law demands? What else could the West do to show its respect for the cultural identity of Islamic countries? Would it be sufficient to allow Horst-Eberhard Richter to decide whether, for example, a wet T-shirt contest in a German city rises to a level of criminal provocation that could cause the Muslim faithful in Hyderabad to feel debased and humiliated?

“Should devout Jews be entitled to demand that non-Jews give up pork? And should they have the power to impose sanctions if their demands are not met? Can a Hindu in India run amok because the Dutch do not view cows as sacred beings? Those who believe Muslims have the right to be outraged by the Danes failing to abide by an Islamic prohibition — especially when it’s not even clear that such a prohibition even exists — must answer such questions clearly in the affirmative. Even illiterates must then be allowed to ransack bookstores; in a world in which anyone is entitled to feel offended and humiliated, anyone can also choose which provocations he is unwilling to accept.”

Foreign Affairs minister Peter MacKay wants our NATO allies to send help to guard Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

Even if he gets a few thousand extra hands, they probably won’t arrive in time to make any difference to the insurgent’s spring offensive. In any event, NATO forces in Afghanistan are too few to tackle the Herculean job of guarding the border with Pakistan.

The rugged border region is all but impossible to control. The Soviets tried it when they had a force of more than 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. Infiltrators had to dodge infrequent air strikes and other minor irritants but the border remained open for business.

The only nation with enough troops to make a serious effort at this is Pakistan and they’re not about to go beyond some fencing and minefields.

MacKay’s instincts are good, he sees the real problem, but his chances of coming up with an effective response are almost nil.

It’s poppy eradication time again in Afghanistan, the time right after Afghan winter when Kabul, the UN, Washington and NATO toss around ideas for wiping out Afghan poppy fields.

There’s no question that getting rid of poppies and the opium produced from them is a good thing – if you’re not going to buy the stuff to answer the demand for legitimate, opiate medicines. If we don’t buy it, our addicts will buy it on our streets.

US Drug Czar, John Walters, thought he had a deal with president Karzai to permit spraying. Kabul now says no. The Afghan goverment wants the West to provide tractors so it can simply plough the poppy fields under. Nobody’s quite sure what to do or even what will be done.

Despite all the babble, what never seems to cross their lips is how to put an alternative economy in place to allow the locals to support their families without growing poppies. Why is that not the first priority? It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

The alternative economy idea doesn’t work because it cannot be a first priority. Before you can even hope to establish an alternative economy, you have to give the farmers genuine security – from the Taliban, from the drug lords, even from the police and their own government. That’s the first objective, the alternative economy is second, getting rid of the poppies is third.

Campaigning against the poppies as we have done is an admission of failure in the first two objectives, the prerequisites. We can’t give them security so we can’t create an alternative economy so we’ll complete the vise we’ve left them in by trying to wipe out their livelihood.

The drug czars of the US and UN have repeatedly shown that they couldn’t care less about the repercussions of eradicating Afghan’s poppy fields. They consider the consequences to be someone else’s problems.

Hey, if you haven’t got time to waste making a guy feel like he’s drowning, why not make him feel like he’s on fire? Ah, the modern age.

The US military has unveiled its “heat gun” the latest, non-lethal weapon it has developed for “crowd control.” The weapon fires a beam of radiation that terrifies those it hits by making them feel they’re about to burst into flames. Pretty neat, huh?

“There should be no collateral damage to this,” said Senior Airman Adam Navin, 22, of Green Bay, Wis., who has served several tours in Iraq. That was the same view taken when the US military exposed hundreds of its own soldiers to early nuclear weapons tests. Hmm, how did that turn out, by the way? Oh, that’s right, a lot of them died of cancers. Ooops!

I expect there are a number of practical problems to the use of this system in the field for crowd control but I can think of one application where it would be just dandy – interrogation. It’ll sure save on the water bill.

The US Ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, has called Stockwell Day “a little presumptuous” for seeking to have Maher Arar removed from America’s no-fly list’ “It’s a little presumptuous for him [Day] to say who the United States can and cannot allow into our country.”

Odd that it’s not presumptuous for the United States to tell Canada who we should or should not allow into Canada nor, apparently, is it presumptuous for the US to seize Canadian citizens and send them abroad to be tortured.

Now the ambassador explained that his country has its own reasons for continuing to see Arar as some sort of danger but, whatever those concerns may be, they’re not prepared to share them with us, their partner in Washington’s Global War Without End on Terror. I’m sorry but, if Maher Arar is some sort of villain, America had damned well better start coming clean with us about it.

If, however, this is all about spite because Arar is suing the US because the little ninny can’t even take a year of torture like a man, well then, that’s another matter entirely.

He bombed. By all accounts, George Bush’s State of the Union Address last night was a dud. Usually a president can expect a bump in support after these things but Bush got no bump after his Iraq initiative speech a couple of weeks back and, by all accounts, he didn’t seem to move anyone with his speech last night either.

Bush needed to win support last night – from his own, congressional Republicans. Many of them will be reading the winds of public opinion to decide whether to remain neutral or to join other Repubs in a revolt against the White House. The signs aren’t good for George Bush.

The Democrats today begin the long-overdue investigations into the Iraq war. They’ll have what George Bush can no longer command, a receptive audience from the American people. There are a lot of questions that the executive, sheltered by a Republican congress, was able to dodge. That cover is now gone and, with his support in tatters, this president is more vulnerable than at any time over the past five years.

Arrogance and naivete. In a president they make a lethal cocktail of bad judgment. George Bush didn’t understand that, while you can deceive your people into a war, once you’ve launched that war you have to deliver the promised results. You have to win because you simply can’t lie your way back out again.

What makes Bush’s failure so remarkable is that the bar was set so low. In reality, he didn’t have to uncover WMDs or show that Iraq was capable of attacking the US or even that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda. The American people would have tolerated all of those inconvenient realities – if Bush had won his war as he’d promised.

The American people showed themselves willing to accept an “end justifies the means” war so long as the US won it fairly quickly. After all, isn’t their country the world’s only superpower? Who can stand up to that? Some nation that’s been hobbled by a decade of sanctions? Never.

Everything else was window dressing. All George Bush had to do was to conquer Iraq but that he couldn’t achieve. He didn’t defeat the Iraqi military in the field – they vanished to return as an insurgency. He didn’t achieve a surrender of the Hussein government – they too evaporated. Even without a defeat or a surrender it might have been enough if he’d been able to secure the occupied country but he didn’t take nearly enough troops for that. He never intended to be in that position.

Bush has served up a fiasco that carries with it a national humiliation. For that he won’t be forgiven.

Now the Frat Boy has to await his fate as a hostile congress pokes and prods and deconstructs his actions and decisions, one by one. The most secretive presidency in living history will now be dragged out into the light for public scrutiny and that is what George Bush must fear most. George Bush has been thrown to the wolves.

It’s all about reverse polling, planting seeds of doubt, smear jobs. It’s becoming a defining part of American society.

Remember John McCain and the whispering campaign claiming that he had an illegitimate, black baby in his past? You can’t forget John Kerry and the Swift Boat brigade.

A low and vile element has crept into American politics that works to confuse voters and play on their worst instincts, an element that is robbing America of its integrity.

Who can forget the Kim Campbell campaign in which the Tories ran an ad mocking Jean Chretien’s face? I clearly recall people in my neighbourhood going out and tearing PC campaign signs from their front lawns. There was a torrent of outrage that swept across party lines. It was an affirmation that our integrity would stand above partisan politics and that we would punish those who dared to do these things.

Now this same ugliness is surfacing again in the United States in a campaign to smear Barak Obama. The con job tries to spread the word that Obama is from a radical Muslim family and was educated in a fundamentalist madrassa or Islamist school. It’s false but that doesn’t matter to a society that has grown indifferent, perhaps even tolerant about these things. The vision is of a closet, radical Muslim with a name one letter off that of America’s arch-enemy, taking hold of the White House and subverting the United States to the will of Allah.

Why do people resort to these smear jobs? Because they work. They work well enough to let a completely unqualified Frat Boy with an unaccomplished and chequered background to squeak into the White House to wreak havoc on his nation.

When will this end? Not until the American people repudiate these tactics and punish the perpetrators at the ballot box.

We should all keep an eye on this because there are some in this country who want to take us down this same path. There are those who watch carefully what works in the states, who even consult practitioners of these dark arts, and who would not hesitate to take our integrity from us.

Imagine, Bill Clinton back in the White House. Hillary sitting behind the Commander in Chief’s desk in the same oval room where her husband had certain dalliances back in the 90’s.

Walking the halls and coming upon a portrait of a former president who is still revered today as something akin to a rock star. Knowing that whenever you speak, a lot of people will be judging your words by what that other president might have said.

Realizing that you’re presiding over a nation in troubled economic straits while everyone remembers how good everything seemed when that other president ran the economy.

Will Hillary Clinton be measured by the America she inherits or by the other Clinton who ran the place up to end of the millenium?

Bill exuded a serene confidence, he put people at ease. Hillary doesn’t have that gift. She comes across as cold and ambitious, the sort who lets no one get in her way. Bill was blessed by the gift of extemporaneous speech. He could speak, convincingly, at length, without notes and he did it in a way that reached people. Hillary hasn’t shown that same spontaneity.

Bill was also incredibly lucky. During his administration America experienced the “Dot Com” boom. Of course it was aberrent, an empty bubble, but it was a blessing for the presidency. Notional wealth was being created on an astonishing scale. With that, a tsunami of tax revenues flooded the treasury. Americans felt prosperous and the government was awash in sufficient revenue that it was able to balance the budget. Sure it was an illusion but it had concerete benefits for Bill Clinton.

America was respected globally. Bill Clinton made friends and allies easily. Around the world he was liked, even admired, and that spilled over into a fondness for America and its people.

All that has changed, for the worse. Bush has squandered America’s goodwill. It is now widely seen as a pariah, a rogue state. George Bush has stupidly revealed how fragile America’s military might can be. Nasty little states are flaunting their nasty little ways, confident that America is so tied down in Iraq that its options against them are limited.

At home, George Bush has created an American oligarchy where the divide between the rich few and the poor or marginal working class is wider than ever, where social mobility has been strangled, where the wealthy make their fortunes offshore while their working class countrymen work harder for less reward, if they’re lucky, or search for jobs if they’re not.

He has transformed the United States into a fiscally weak state that has accrued massive debts, that runs enormous deficits and that even funds its foreign wars on foreign loans. George Bush has “defunded” the American government, crippling its strength for years, if not decades, to come and mortgaging the future of its working class by borrowing to fund its excesses. George Bush has waged and perhaps even won America’s first class war.

Should she become president, Hillary Clinton will face a towering wall of challenges that Bill never had to confront. Lucky as his administration was, the next one will be just the opposite. The Frat Boy who now occupies the White House is like the deadbeat tenant who can’t make the rent and steals away into the night leaving behind a filthy and damaged apartment and a landlord with no money.

The next president is going to have to make some tough and potentially unpopular decisions. He or she will have to call upon the American people to make the sacrifices that George Bush was too gutless to ask of them in order to fund his war of whim. The next president is going to have to behave like a grown up – and that, too, will come as a shock to the American people. If it is Hillary, her government will bear no resemblance to Bill’s and there are bound to be people who will be angry about that.

As president, Hillary Clinton will have to redefine Bill or exile him to pursue “good works” far from Washington. The problem isn’t her and it really isn’t him either. It’s the American people and the expectations that having Bill there might heap onto Hillary’s shoulders. Such a presidency may be the one to draw a clear line between president and presidential spouse, a line that was increasingly blurred by the likes of Nancy Reagan and – why Hillary herself.