August 2007
Monthly Archive
August 3, 2007
Stephen Harper is reportedly about to shuffle the lackeys who carry his water. In other governments they’d be known as cabinet ministers. This, however, is the Emerald City and Harpo is the Wizard hisself.
The fiercely top-down, uber control freak is supposedly going to shuffle a bunch of people whose names and identities are all but unknown.
Now, in fairness, Harpo may not be good at delegating authority, but at least taking on a cabinet portfolio in his government isn’t a speaking role.
August 3, 2007
Whether it’s a Repuglican or a Demutante, American politicians unanimously fret over the lack of progress on Iraq’s oil law.
When they speak of the legislation it’s to present it as the magic key to ethnic harmony in a unified Iraq – divvying up the spoils, as it were, equitably among all three ethnic groups.
What they almost never mention is what Washington is really after in this legislation – the transfer of control of Iraq’s oil wealth to America’s Big Oil industry. From The Guardian:
…the administration – particularly the vice-president, Dick Cheney – and the oil lobby are enraged that the oil law is stalled. The main reason is not that the Iraqi government and parliament are a lazy bunch of Islamist incompetents or narrow-minded sectarians, as is often implied. MPs are studying the law more carefully, and have begun to see it as a major threat to Iraq’s national interest regardless of people’s religion or sect.
This is the second bit of good news from Iraq. Civil society, trade unions, professional oil experts and the media are stirring on the oil issue and putting their points across to parliament in the way democracy is meant to work. The oil unions have held strikes even at the risk of having leaders and members arrested.
The pervasive outside image of Iraq as a country in free-fall where violence on a mass scale is an ever-present threat is not wrong. But it can mask the fact that “normal life” and indeed “normal politics” are still possible. The real reason why the Bush administration wanted the oil law rushed through was that it feared public discussion, and was worried that the more people understood what the law entails, the greater the chances of its defeat. Key parties in the Iraqi parliament oppose it, including the main Sunni party – which this week withdrew from government – as well as the Shia Sadrists and Fadhila.
Washington has promoted the law as a “reconciliation” issue, claiming its early passage would show that Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian communities could share revenues on a fair basis. But this is a trick. Only one of the law’s 43 articles mentions revenue-sharing, and then just to say that a separate “federal revenue law” will decide its distribution. The first draft of this other law only appeared in June, and it is clearly unreasonable to expect the Iraqi parliament to pass it in less than two months.
The law that Washington and the US oil lobby really want would set the arrangements for foreign companies to operate in Iraq’s oil sector. Independent analysts say the terms being proposed are far more favourable for foreign oil companies than those of any other oil-producing state in the region, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Platform, an oil industry watchdog, warns that the Iraq oil and gas law could “sign away Iraq’s future”. Greg Muttitt, its co-director, says: “The law is permissive. All of Iraq’s unexploited and as yet unknown reserves, which could amount to between 100bn and 200bn barrels, would go to foreign companies.”
There is the true face of America in Iraq. Not content with having reduced the country to violence and ruin with their illegal war of aggression, they want to rob it of its wealth on their way out the door. Sleazy? You bet. Is it any wonder that Harper is enthralled with this gang of thugs?
August 3, 2007
The people of Baghdad are suddenly free. They’re free from washing, free from cooking, why they’re even free from drinking. The Bush/Petraeus surge has worked so brilliantly that the Iraqis don’t even have to flush their toilets – if they have toilets. There’s no water in Baghdad. Hasn’t been anything in the pipes for a while now.
The city’s pathetic electricity grid can’t produce enough power to operate the city’s water purification and pumping stations.
That’s not to say the locals couldn’t use a bit of water right now. It’s summer over there and it gets wicked hot. From TorStar:
Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
Jamil Hussein, 52, a retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house has been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. He says the water that does flow smells bad and is unclean.
Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.
“We’ll have to continue drinking it, because we don’t have money to buy bottled water,” he said.
Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity “it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. And even then the water won’t be clean for a time. We just don’t have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing.”
Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, said that water treatment plants were working “as far as we know.”
I believe “as far as we know” is the lexicon currently used by the occupation for “don’t know, don’t care.”
August 2, 2007
Gary Kamiya has written an interesting piece for Salon.com entitled, War, chaos and Bush’s faith. The following is excerpted from that piece:
America is not the first country to be led like a half-hypnotized lamb to the slaughter by a delusional leader. The ultimate responsibility rests with Bush. Which raises a final question: Where did Bush’s fatal hubris come from? Why did he think he could challenge God?
The question of how a president’s faith affects his decisions is, of course, a matter of conjecture. But there is ample evidence that Bush’s delusions about Iraq are inseparable from his religious faith. Of course, there are millions of deeply religious people whose faith has not led them to abandon reason. But Bush’s faith appears to have only deepened his native arrogance: He sees it as a form of humility, a poor sinner’s acceptance of God’s will. Bush believes that God is on the side of this war, and that everything will therefore come out all right in the end. He does not care about the real world — because for him it isn’t the true reality. The war in Iraq, that horror in which real human beings are dying, is merely a stage before good finally triumphs over evil. And if that victory does not take place in our lifetime, it doesn’t matter: All that matters is that he fought the good fight. This is why he did not concern himself, and still doesn’t, with details such as whether this war is winnable in any non-biblical time frame.
So there are two related lessons America should take away from the Iraq disaster. First, don’t treat war lightly. It is an insanely powerful and unpredictable agent, one that can destroy everything it touches. Second, beware of leaders whose devotion has not brought them real humility — and beware of their wars. They will see war as a toy, which they control, or which is controlled by their God. But nobody controls war. Not even God.
August 2, 2007
Peter MacKay, standing in as foreign affairs minister while Harpo is busy with other things, blithely dismisses Russia’s claims to the Arctic polar region:
“This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, We’re claiming this territory.’
“There is no threat to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic … we’re not at all concerned about this mission — basically it’s just a show by Russia,” he told CTV.
A “show by Russia”? That show seems to be about establishing a contiguous link between the Siberian shelf and the undersea surface of the area Russia is now claiming. This show is about creating a claim under international law to an area we claim as our own, sovereign territory.
Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in global politics and international law at the University of British Columbia, says Canada needs to identify possible underwater extensions to its own landmass before a 2013 deadline under the UN accord.
“Getting the work done on time will likely involve chartering a heavy icebreaker from Russia or Finland,” Mr. Byers told CanWest News Service earlier this week. “So be it. The stakes involved more than justify the cost.”
MacKay needs to get off his backside and tell us exactly what Canada is going to do – and when – to establish and defend our claim to this very territory. This is no time for whistling past the graveyard. The Russians aren’t treating this as a joke.
August 2, 2007
From the day he became Prime Minister, Stephen Harper has been bitchslapping the Canadian media. He’s shown them no respect, sharply limiting their access to him and other members of his caucus. He’s still doing it because our national journalists have shown themselves too cowardly to stand up to him. They let Stephen Harper control the news. Astonishing.
They got another dose of Harpo’s medicine in Charlottetown yesterday where the Tory caucus is holding its annual retreat. At the direction of the PMO, the press were booted out of the hotel where the caucus is meeting. Each and everyone of these bold, courageous scribes was put out on the street, just like the trash. From the G&M:
One RCMP officer told a reporter that “there is a time and a place for the media.” Another said they were acting on the orders of the PMO.
National caucus chairman Rahim Jaffer defended the action, saying that spouses and children accompanying many of the 125 MPs and 24 senators may be intimidated by the reporters and cameras.
So if you’re looking for that special gift for a member of the parliamentary press gallery – why not a lovely set of knee pads?
August 2, 2007
Two years ago British police executed Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year old Brazilian electrician. He was killed in a subway car by counterterrorism police days after London’s subway bombings.
De Menezes was shot, in the head, seven times. They blew his head off.
At the time the London cops explained said the man’s bulky clothing and panicked manner led officials to believe he was a suicide bomber.
It was subsequently revealed that de Menezes wasn’t wearing bulky clothing nor had he run or resisted arrest. The whole story that he’d basically brought this on himself was simply untrue, a ruse made up to take heat off the cops.
An inquiry into the shooting ruled out any prosecution of the officers involved. The commander of the unit has since been promoted.
August 2, 2007
Milk prices in Germany are about to jump – by 50%. The culprit? The Chinese. The Chinese have discovered a thirst for milk and they don’t have the dairy industry to meet their own demand. So, according to the Guardian, they’re raiding German supplies:
The Chinese have been dubbed “milk snatchers” by German consumers for buying so much milk that prices of dairy products in Germany are expected to soar by 50%.
A third of all the milk produced worldwide is now being transported to China, much of it from the EU and a significant amount from Germany, which produces 27bn litres a year.
Now outraged consumer groups and politicians have called for the government to raise unemployment benefit to cover the rise.
Yesterday supermarkets across the country reported that shoppers were panic buying dairy products in an attempt to beat the price increase.
The only effective way to increase global milk yields without breaking the milk quotas, according to experts, is to encourage the breeding of cows outside the EU. German dairy farmers have duly been selling their best high-performance milk cows to Chinese farmers, who are receiving government subsidies if they switch to dairy farming.
August 2, 2007
It’s a reality that the White House can’t bring itself to accept. Iraq is just far too broken to be fixed.
The government, particularly the security services – the folks with the guns, is in the iron fist of the majority Shiites and they have no intention of letting go. Between the Shia and the Kurds, the fix is in. One more set of elections and their people will veto the very deal America is trying to impose on them. That’ll mean no constitution for Iraq as a unitary state but, then again, the Kurdish constitution which is incorporated into the Iraqi constitution means there really is nothing unitary about that government.
Can Iraq survive as a federal state? Probably not. The two sides with decades-old grievances against the former Sunni ruling class aren’t interested in any deal that raises the resource-poor Sunni triangle up to their level of potential wealth. That would mean a gratuitous transfer of economic and political power to the same group that suppressed them, at times barbarously.
Once you look at Iraq as a cluster of 3-states just waiting to happen, the American/Brit military forces take on a much different complexion. At that point the Western forces exist to try to impose a political reality that two of the three Iraqi groups want to escape. The infidels become an impediment to the legitimate aspirations of both Shia and Kurd. They revert to their original status as occupiers.
In an earlier time the United States might have put in place a strongman to impose order and a government to Washington’s liking. In fact that’s what the White House wanted for Iraq until Sistani forced Washington’s hand to call an election in which the neo-con’s handpicked, pro-Western, secular slate was stunningly defeated. That was the writing on the wall for Iraqi unity.
With the departure of the central government’s main Sunni bloc, Iraq’s political viability is at an end. The Sunnis can see what’s coming and can only hope that their walkout, on the eve of the September assessment of the surge, will cause the White House to pressure Maliki to yield to their demands.
Why did Iraq’s parliament go on holiday with nothing achieved on their legislative “to do” list?
Did they leave not realizing that they hadn’t met even one of the benchmarks they were to have achieved by September? Is this a parliamentary temper tantrum?
Were they like a bunch of irresponsible college students skipping class in order to hit the beach?
Were they playing hookey or have they actually dropped out?
Is this an “I don’t have to and you can’t make me. You’re not the boss of me” moment?
Isn’t it curious that you don’t hear these obvious questions bandied about much in the Western media? You don’t hear Washington pols raising them either.
Think about it. The notionally sovereign government of Iraq having the nerve to stage a soft mutiny against Washington even as the Baghdad parliament begins to collapse.
We may be seeing the endgame in Iraq orchestrated not from half a world away but by the Iraqis themselves. Maybe they know what we haven’t been willing to recognize – that the Iraqi state is now so broken, it can’t be fixed.
August 2, 2007
If anyone needed any proof that the US effort in Iraq is still as muddled and inept as it was from the moment the first American tank rolled across the border, all they needed to do was listen to Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates’ remarks in Abu Dhabi yesterday.
“We probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation which, let’s face it, is not just some sort of secondary kind of thing.
“The kinds of legislation they’re talking about establish the framework of Iraq for the future, so it’s almost like our constitutional convention.”
Probably underestimated the depth of mistrust? Just what planet have these people been on for the past four years? This isn’t a mistake, some sort of oversight – it’s full-bore incompetence. It’s also a shocking admission of hubris – Washington continuing to believe that it will shape the future of the Iraqi peoples. This is the thinking of idiots and morons.
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