June 2007
Monthly Archive
June 21, 2007
I woke up this morning and tried to catalogue the reasons to despise US Veep Dick Cheney. I went through the usual list – Iraq, fear mongering, Halliburton, lying, Afghanistan, secrecy, Halliburton, corporate democracy, the Taliban, suppression of civil rights, KBR, Saddam and al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Bechtel, Saddam and WMDs, Iran, Halliburton, death and suffering and misery on a massive scale – you know, the same old same old – but then I noticed something was missing, overlooked.
Oh yeah, it was the black thing. As a Congressman in 1980’s, Cheney voted against resolutions demanding the release from prison of Nelson Mandela. Cheney smeared Mandela as a “terrorist.” There it is. Add that to his opposition to Martin Luther King day and you have all the fixins’ of a genuinely evil bastard.
Actually I’m still not sure I got it all. How about it? Anything to add?
June 21, 2007
After 9/11 almost gave George w. Bush an excuse to conquer Iraq and after he got caught lying through his Texas teeth about Saddam’s WMDs and links to al-Qaeda, Shrub fell back on his messianic delusion about bringing democracy to the Middle East. Elections would wash away all his sins. Democracy was just the ticket. So elections it would be.
Afghanistan had elections. Iraq had elections. So did Lebanon and Palestine. And just how did that turn out for the Champion of Democracy? Afghanistan elected a parliament with a solid representation of warlords, drug lords and common criminals. Not so good. Iraqis elected religious fundamentalists, the perfect formula for sectarian squabbling and sectarian violence. Even worse. In Lebanon, Hezbollah made out like bandits at the polls. Not what George was hoping for. And the Palestinians handed their votes to Hamas. Hmmm. That’s four for four for the Frat Boy in the Oval Office, a sweep, all of them failures from Washington’s point of view.
But just what made the Palestinian people shift their support from Fatah to Hamas anyway? UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi explains why in an opinion piece in the LA Times:
“…for one thing, the old government had been democratically elected; now it has been dismissed out of hand by presidential fiat. There’s also the fact that the new prime minister appointed by Abbas — Salam Fayyad — has the support of the West, but his election list won only 2% of the votes in the same election that swept Hamas to victory. Fayyad and Abbas have the support of Israel, but it is no secret that they lack the backing of their own people.
“There is a reason the people threw out Abbas’ Fatah party in last year’s election. Palestinians see the leading Fatah politicians as unimaginative, self-serving and corrupt, satisfied with the emoluments of power.
“Worse yet, Palestinians came to realize that the so-called peace process championed by Abbas (and by Yasser Arafat before him) had led to the permanent institutionalization — rather than the termination — of Israel’s 4-decade-old military occupation of their land. Why should they feel otherwise? There are today twice as many settlers in the occupied territories as there were when Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat first shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. Israel has divided the West Bank into besieged cantons, worked diligently to increase the number of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem (while stripping Palestinian Jerusalemites of their residency rights in the city) and turned Gaza into a virtual prison.
“People voted for Hamas last year not because they approved of the party’s sloganeering, not because they wanted to live in an Islamic state, not because they support attacks on Israeli civilians, but because Hamas was untainted by Fatah’s complacency and corruption, untainted by its willingness to continue pandering to Israel. Fatah leaders were viewed as mere policemen of the perpetual occupation, and the Palestinian Authority had willingly taken on the role of administering the population on behalf of the Israelis. Hamas offered an alternative.
“Has Hamas done unspeakable things? Yes, but so has Fatah, and so too has Israel (on a much larger scale). There are no saints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Palestinians, frankly, see a lot of hypocrisy in the West’s anti-Hamas stance. Since last year’s election, for example, the West has denied aid to the Hamas government, arguing, among other things, that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. But that’s absurd; after all, Israel does not recognize Palestine either. Hamas is accused of not abiding by previous agreements. But Israel’s suspension of tax revenue transfers to the Palestinian Authority, and its refusal to implement a Gaza-West Bank road link agreement brokered by the U.S. in November 2005, are practical, rather than merely rhetorical, violations of previous agreements, causing infinitely more damage to ordinary people. Hamas is accused of mixing religion and politics, but no one has explained why its version of that mixture is any worse than Israel’s — or why a Jewish state is acceptable but a Muslim one is not.
“A genuine peace based on the two-state solution would require an end to the Israeli occupation and the creation of a territorially contiguous, truly independent Palestinian state.But that is not happening. Fatah seems to have given up, its leaders preferring to rest comfortably with the power they already have. Ironically, it is Hamas that is taking the stands that would be prerequisites for a true two-state peace plan: refusing to go along with the permanent breakup of Palestine and not accepting the sacrifice of control over borders, airspace, water, taxes and even the population registry to Israel.
“Embracing the “moderation” of Abbas allows the Palestinian Authority to resume servicing the occupation on Israel’s behalf, for now. In the long run, though, the two-state solution is finished because Fatah is either unable or unwilling to stop the ongoing dismemberment of the territory once intended for a Palestinian state.
“The only realistic choice remaining will be the one between a single democratic, secular state offering equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians — or permanent apartheid.”
June 21, 2007
US Embassy, BaghdadUS Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has lowered the boom on her department’s diplomats who haven’t been too keen on applying for openings at the embassy in Baghdad. At the moment the vacancy rate is just 1% but a lot of the people holding down those jobs are coming up for rotation and there’s been a real drop in interest from the replacement pool.
Yesterday Rice sent a cable to all US embassies and missions which read, in part: “We must ensure that these top priority requirements are met before any other staffing decisions are made. To that end, we have decided to take the unprecedented step of creating a special country-specific assignment cycle for Iraq, commencing with the release of this message.”
In US diplomatic-speak that means Rice could hold up appointments to other posts and force, or “direct,” some diplomats to accept positions at what is the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
A senior State Department official allowed that Iraq is an extremely dangerous hardship post with near daily insurgent mortar attacks on the fortified Green Zone where the embassy is located but accused the American Foreign Service Association (the diplomats’ union) and some in the State Department of attempting to hamper policy by advising Baghdad candidates not to go and warning of potential career damage.
The US embassy in Baghdad occupies about the same amount of land as the Vatican and comprises 27-buildings, making it by far the biggest US embassy in the world.
June 21, 2007
There’s another dimension to the Hamas/Fatah civil war. Al Qaeda may be poised to pick up the pieces. As Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in The Guardian, Washington and London may have done it again:
“Since declaring jihad in 1998, al-Qaida has aspired to acquire the legitimacy of representing the Palestinian cause, well aware of its rich symbolism within the Arab and Islamic collective conscience
“When Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri issued their “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” statement on February 28 1998, responses to their declaration varied from apathy to amusement. They were an obscure group lost in the faraway emirate of the Taliban, a pathetic remnant of the fight against the USSR during the cold war. Their role looked historically defunct and their discourse archaic.
“Things could not be more different now. Al-Qaida has become an intensely complex global network, with a decentralised, flexible structure that enables it to spread in all directions, across the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Europe. Whether pursuing active cells or searching for sleeping ones, the security world is haunted by al-Qaida’s ghost.
“The organisation’s penetration of Palestinian politics is the climax of a long, still unfolding process. Rapidly expanding from one location to another, al-Qaida currently boasts branches throughout the Arab region. …Nationalist demands and aspirations of liberation of Palestine, independence from foreign dominance, and sovereignty over resources, began to be spoken with an Islamic voice, in a region where the national and the Islamic have always been intimately intertwined.
“With the severe restrictions imposed on them by their western-backed governments and the evaporation of American promises of reform and democratisation, this “democratic Islam” currently finds itself in the grip of a crisis. The greatest beneficiary is al-Qaida. In the Middle East, its battles are fought on two fronts: against “traitor” regimes and their western backers on the one hand, and against popular Islamist oppositions deemed “deviant from the true path of jihad” on the other. In a speech recently broadcast on the al-Jazeera satellite channel, al-Zawahiri scolded Hamas for straying from the path of resistance by participating in the political process.
“Events on the ground give further credibility to al-Zawahiri’s words. Arabs have watched with horror as Palestinians have been severely punished for their electoral choices, isolated, starved, and propelled towards the bottomless pit of internecine feuding. The message from Washington and London seemed to be: don’t bother with the ballot box – only through bombings and violence is change possible. Between occupation and obstruction of peaceful change, the US is creating the ideal environment for al-Qaida to flourish, the product of a sick geopolitics and a deformed view of the region and its needs.”
June 21, 2007
The Bush maladministration is floating the idea of Tony Blair as a Special Envoy to the Middle East representing the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. Blair’s job would be to sort out the Palestinian fiasco and help Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas create a viable Palestinian state.
Why Blair? Well, he’ll soon be out of work. He’s immensely distrusted and unpopular at home which gives him a great deal in common with George w. Bush. He knows so much about the Middle East that he was invaluable in helping George w. set the whole place on fire. He’s a war criminal. Arabs don’t trust him, excluding of course those who might get billion pound bribes. He fervently believes George w.’s messianic fantasies. At times delusional himself, he’s also got a well demonstrated and finely honed talent for lying through his teeth. His evangelical devotion to democracy won’t get in the way of dismissing the democratically-elected Hamas party from this missionary project to redeem the pagan Palestinians. All things considered, Blair would make an excellent Paul Bremer style proconsul for the hapless Palestinian people who, after all, can’t even be trusted to vote properly.
Sounds like Blair would fit Washington’s bill perfectly.
June 20, 2007
Pentagon planners expect George w. Bush to demand an extension of the Baghdad “surge” and they know that will mean yet another tour extension for the already stressed out volunteer military. According to a report in The Guardian, the Pentagon is about to demand more
“…the Pentagon’s mental health taskforce reported that US troops were undertaking higher levels of sustained combat duty than during Vietnam and the second world war; and the strain was telling.
“The taskforce found that 38% of soldiers, 31% of marines, 49% of national guard members and 43% of marine reservists exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety or other psychological problems within three months of returning from active duty.
“Symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injury – the two so-called “signature injuries” associated with service in Iraq and Afghanistan – included nightmares, insomnia, anger and alcohol and substance abuse, it said.
“It also questioned the practice of returning soldiers to front-line duty while they were taking medication, such as lithium and Prozac.
“The US currently has about 155,000 troops in Iraq. Most typically spend 15 months in combat zones with a guaranteed 12 months at home – a breach of the Pentagon’s own rules that say equal time should be spent on and off duty.”
This is the work of a president who is more concerned with not getting tagged with defeat than with genuinely supporting his troops. While casualty levels have not reached anything close to the losses taken in WWII and Vietnam, extending the combat tours of soldiers already so damaged shows anything but support.
June 20, 2007
That’s the question being asked by McClatchey News Service. Reporter Dion Nissinbaum questions why Fatah seemingly yielded Gaza with hardly a fight.
“…there was no last stand. Instead, Fatah leaders fled the Gaza Strip by boat and on foot, leaving lower-level fighters feeling betrayed.
“In five days of fighting, Fatah never put up a real fight. The question is why not.
“In interviews with McClatchy Newspapers during and after the fighting, Fatah foot soldiers said they felt abandoned as they realized that there’d be no counterattack, not even a last-ditch defense.
“Some of them thought incompetent political leaders had done them in. But this land has long been fertile soil for conspiracy theories, and others wondered whether Abbas had deliberately ceded the Gaza Strip to Hamas in an attempt to isolate the radical Islamic group and consolidate his power in the much larger West Bank.
“‘There was total frustration and disappointment,’ said one Abbas security officer who was among the last to abandon the presidential compound on Thursday night, June 14, and asked to be identified only as A.R. because of fear of retaliation. ‘We felt like there was a conspiracy to hand over Gaza to Hamas.’
“Whether it was conspiracy or collapse, Fatah’s downfall in Gaza has created an unexpected opportunity for Israel, the United States and others to re-establish full relations with Abbas and the pro-Western emergency cabinet he’s installed to replace the elected, Hamas-dominated Palestinian government.”
June 20, 2007
It was perhaps the most barbaric military atrocity of the last century, the “rape of Nanking.” That is until yesterday when a group of legislators from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party got together to call the whole thing a fabrication. They claim Beijing is using the incident as a “political advertisement.”
300,000 Chinese died in this incident. Officers used some to demonstrate their beheading skills with their Katana swords. Enlisted men used others for bayonet practice. Women were raped and then killed, sometimes in unbelievably perverse ways. Children weren’t spared the butchery either.
“Japan’s occupation of Nanjing was nothing more nor less than an ordinary battlefield,” the group said at a news conference where it presented documents it said supported its views.
Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group, said members could not let “lies and deceit be spread around the world” on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the city’s fall.
So, who do you believe, the self-serving Chinese or the much-maligned Japanese? The nice thing is you don’t have to believe either side to know the Japanese are lying through their teeth.
The Japanese atrocity in Nanking happened in December, 1937, four years before Japan went to war against the Western nations. Because of that there were plenty of Westerners in Nanking when the Imperial troops arrived. A number of these Westerners recorded what they witnessed. Many took photographs, including a number of pictures taken by a UPI photographer. The photographs record acts by Japanese soldiers that can only be called barbaric and disgusting.
To the anger of Japanese commanders, the Westerners refused to leave and even created a safety zone which saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Among those who protected the innocents was a German, John Rabe, a Nazi.
The Japanese legislators who are pushing this are as vile and loathsome as any Holocaust denier and their government’s credibility hangs on whether they are ousted from their party. If Stephen Harper wants to lecture another country, this one’s easy meat.
June 20, 2007
It was a roadside bomb, naturally. Our soldiers were in an unarmoured, all-terrain vehicle, “travelling a short distance” to resupply a checkpoint.
Apparently, one or more Taliban insurgents managed to slip through our lines and back out undetected to plant the device.
Who knows what he was thinking but Brig. Gen. Tim Grant is quoted as calling the attack “an unfortunate accident.” Memo to Tim: there wasn’t a damned thing accidental about this.
After that Grant broke into the standard refrain of pious grieving and unbridled praise for three soldiers who had to lose their lives to an insurgent booby-trap planted by a bunch of murderous thugs in our own back yard.
NATO, meanwhile, has dismissed the recent outbreak of suicide and roadside bomb attacks as “militarily insignificant.” Now, if only the Taliban were fighting a military war, instead of a political war, that assurance might mean something. The Taliban isn’t seeking to be “militarily significant” in these tactics. Why do these people not seem to understand that?
“We find ourselves in the midst of the so-called fighting season, when what we had predicted is taking place: an increase in suicide bombings and more desperate attempts by the enemies of peace and stability to present the illusion that they are stronger than they are,” said Lt. Col. Maria Carl, spokeswoman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. Actually the insurgent goal is to create the appearance that we’re much weaker and far more vulnerable than we claim to be and, according to a number of recent accounts, it’s working.
June 20, 2007
The New Yorker magazine has given us a reminder that the public knows only a fraction of what happened at Abu Ghraib prison and who was involved in the sytemic torture of prisoners captured by American troops.
By now the picture of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrodes fastened to his body has become iconic of the depravity of the jailers but there’s more, much more and those responsible have been shielded by the Bush administration.
The two-star Army General who led the first military investigation into human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq claims that when his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told Congress that he’d only just seen the prison pictures, he was wilfully misleading them. According to Major General Antonio Taguba, the pictures and his report had already been in the Pentagon for several weeks by the time Rumsfeld testified. In other words, either Rumsfeld did see the pictures or he deliberately chose not to see them to cover his ass. I guess that’s what is called the “ostrich defence.”
Okay, let’s see. Rumsfeld, the ultimate micromanager, commissioned the report and then didn’t look at it or the pictures until it all broke loose in the media? Right.
Major General Antonio Taguba also claimed in an interview with The New Yorker magazine published yesterday that President George Bush also “had to be aware” of the atrocities despite saying at the time of the scandal that he had been out of the loop until he saw images in the US media.
Taguba passed his own judgment on the former defense secretary, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from CRS – Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself.”
And what pictures they were. Taguba says the images kept from the public and not even mentioned in the trials included such interrogation techniques as an American soldier sodomizing a female Iraqi detainee and images of sexual humiliation between a father and son.
Taguba complains that he was instructed only to investigate the military police at the prison and go no further. “Somebody was giving them guidance but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.” He adds: “Even today … those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”
And how was Taguba rewarded for his investigation? You guessed it, forced retirement.
Taguba’s candid revelations tell us a lot about the Bush regime, our Stephen Harper’s American Idols. And, from the top down, those “civilian and military leaders responsible” still control our lead partner in the Bush “war on terror.”
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