September 2007
Monthly Archive
September 16, 2007
Brian Mulroney is obsessed with Meech Lake, his middle of the night gambit to put his stamp indelibly on the future of Canada. The Meech Lake Accords were, in my opinion, the stuff of a consumate snake oil salesman like this jackass. It was autocratic in the extreme, an effort by a bunch of guys hatched in the middle of the night to transform our nation without public consent. Mulroney bought everyone at the table, none more so than the premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa.
Like all charlatans, Mulroney’s pitch was founded on pure bullshit. He held Meech Lake to be the resolution of Quebec’s discontent – permanently. Quebec would get the “distinct society” clause and go away happy so that we could all live in peace and constitutional contentment thereafter.
There was one key party speaking the truth throughout this sordid business – Bourassa himself. Those who bothered to listen to the Quebec premier could quickly tell that Meech Lake was the powder in the keg of a future of constitutional chaos. Mulroney assured English Canada that “distinct society” was mainly a sop to Quebec nationalism, nothing of any great consequence. Bourassa, a Quebec federalist, maintained it was a genuine and powerful constitutional transformation that would elevate his province into a state of near equality with the “rest of Canada.”
Bourassa’s position was born out by Quebec’s position on the “notwithstanding clause.” Mulroney, caught flat-footed, opined that Quebec would abandon its claims to the notwithstanding clause in exchange for Meech’s distinct society clause. Bourassa said “no”, Quebec would take the distinct society clause and retain the notwithstanding clause, using the two in conjunction to achieve de facto sovereignty association. Distinct society would be Quebec’s sword and the notwithstanding clause would be its shield.
Despite this controversy, Mulroney continued to claim that the Meech Lake Accord would end Quebec’s constitutional wrangling. This too was flatly denied by Bourassa who made it plain that Meech would merely be the beginning of Quebec’s demands.
So, what did this astonishing prime minister do when confronted with these discrepancies? Did he go back to the table to sort them out before pushing the accord through? Hardly. Mulroney said he’d let the courts decide these questions later – much later, when it was far too late to undo the damage he’d inflicted.
It’s not surprising that Mulroney blames Trudeau for his failures. He was a chump then and he’s a chump now.
September 13, 2007
Inter Press Service news agency quotes Pentagon sources as saying that US General David Petraeus’s direct superior, Admiral William Fallon, called Petraeus an “ass kissing little chickenshit” when the two first met in Baghdad last March.
Fallon, chief of the US military’s Central Command is said to have made the remark, “…after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.”
The enmity between the two commanders became public knowledge when the Washington Post reported Sep. 9 on intense conflict within the administration over Iraq. The story quoted a senior official as saying that referring to “bad relations” between them is “the understatement of the century”.
Fallon’s derision toward Petraeus reflected both the CENTCOM commander’s personal distaste for Petraeus’s style of operating and their fundamental policy differences over Iraq, according to the sources.
The policy context of Fallon’s extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus’s agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration’s effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress.
In a highly unusual political role for an officer who had not yet taken command of a war, Petraeus was installed in the office of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, in early February just before the Senate debated Bush’s troop increase. According to a report in The Washington Post Feb. 7, senators were then approached on the floor and invited to go McConnell’s office to hear Petraeus make the case for the surge policy.
Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus’s role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia – the area for which Fallon’s CENTCOM is responsible.
The CENTCOM commander believed the United States should be withdrawing troops from Iraq urgently, largely because he saw greater dangers elsewhere in the region. “He is very focused on Pakistan,” said a source familiar with Fallon’s thinking, “and trying to maintain a difficult status quo with Iran.
September 13, 2007
Rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts, floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics, crop failures and famines. That’s the best scenario. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, without comprehensive and effective international action to arrest climate change, the effects on the world could be worse, much worse, on an order akin to a nuclear war.
In its annual survey of the impact of world events on global security, the IISS said that, “…while everyone had now started to recognise the threat posed by climate change, no one was taking effective leadership to tackle it and no one could tell precisely when and where it would hit hardest.”
The report claims that as many as 65 countries will probably lose over 15 percent of their agricultural output by 2100 at a time when the world’s population was expected to head from six billion now to nine billion people.
From Reuters: “The report, an annual survey of the impact of world events on global security, said conflicts and state collapses due to climate change would reduce the world’s ability to tackle the causes and to reduce the effects of global warming.
“State failures would increase the gap between rich and poor and heighten racial and ethnic tensions which in turn would produce fertile breeding grounds for more conflict.”
“Fundamental environmental issues of food, water and energy security ultimately lie behind many present security concerns, and climate change will magnify all three,” it added.
The IISS report is helpful in lending context to the laughable climate change proposals we get from the likes of Harper, Bush and Howard. The Institute of Strategic Studies is anything but some radical, left-wing propaganda mill. Even the right-wing petro-puppets will have a hard time disputing the report’s credibility. Its message is plain: we’re already going to pay a very big price for allowing the environment to degrade as much as it has already and the longer we wait to actually take effective action the more we’re going to pay in decades to come.
September 13, 2007
George w. Bush has described the American people as “addicted to oil.” While that’s true, oil may not be their most troublesome addiction.
Americans have also become addicted to cheap money. By “cheap” I mean money that can be had at unsustainably and ridiculously low interest rates. The past ten or so years have demonstrated that, when money becomes cheap enough, people will go after it like hogs at the trough.
In the United States low interest, together with mortgage deductability and booming house prices, created the “perfect storm” but, instead of winds and high seas, it came in the form of a sea of debt that eventually washed over the gunwales as it was bound to do. Everyone turned a blind eye to the leaks in the hull, even as the debt filled the bilges.
There was no secret to any of this. For years, economists have noted that America’s buoyant economy was driven by its real estate market. Real estate, not manufacturing or resources, was America’s economic engine. No one wanted to talk about what was bound to happen when that real estate market became saturated and shifted from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. There was hardly a mention of the mountain of debt upon which this housing market stood. You had to listen closely to hear the faint voices warning that homeowner equity levels were falling to all-time lows while homeowner debt levels were soaring to record highs. This was all happening right out in the open and no one did anything to stop it.
George w. Bush did nothing to stop it. He was, and remains, at least as irresponsible as anyone else. He cut taxes for the rich, cuts that were made good by – you guessed it – federal debt borrowing. He launched America into a war without end, a war that is being financed entirely with borrowed money.
Think about that. War without end paid for with borrowed money. It’s nothing short of mind-boggling. This is lunacy writ large and it’s a congenital Republican disease. If you doubt that, look at the books as they stood when Ronald Reagan became president and when he left office. When RR took office, America was the world’s largest creditor nation. When he left, it had become the world’s largest debtor.
Addicts are often driven to make unwise choices – committing crimes to finance their habits, neglecting their diet and health, sharing needles… the list goes on. That’s why addictions tend to end poorly. It’s the same for America’s addiction to cheap money
Republicans and Democrats alike are ready to march through the streets demanding the Federal Reserve Bank cut interest rates. They want interest rates cut to forestall the worst of the fallout from the subprime mortgage catastrophe. High interest rates are going to mean more mortgage defaults. More defaults are going to mean more forced sales in a collapsing housing market which will mean tumbling property values triggering even more defaults along the way. No one knows where that will end and those in power are very afraid, especially with the 2008 elections looming.
Cutting interest rates is a viable option unless you’re dependent on foreign lenders. When you slash your interest rates your bonds become a lot less attractive to those whose largess keeps you afloat. A lack of confidence in America’s ability to bear the economic pain of setting right its own fiscal foolishness cannot help but undermine the US dollar. This prospect is one reason key lenders such as China are looking to move their foreign reserve holdings into Euros instead of dollars. The risk is that, at some point, the Americans may be forced to borrow in Euros or other foreign currencies instead of greenbacks. Borrowing in a currency stronger and more stable than your own can carry very dire, long-term consequences for the heavily indebted.
Could we be witnessing the beginning of the end of America’s global paramountcy? Yes, quite possibly. It won’t happen overnight but will likely take a decade or more and, even then, America’s decline, while significant, won’t be catastrophic. It will more closely resemble the end of the British Empire than the collapse of Rome. Just as North America ascended as Europe declined, now Asia will rise while our fortunes ebb. It’s their turn to undergo the transformation from backward, agrarian states to industrial and economic powerhouse.
It’s not that this reality wasn’t foreseen by Washington. Bush and the neo-cons apprehended the threat to American economic and military paramountcy so vividly that they were driven to craft the Bush Doctrine. This Orwellian dictate provides that America will be entitled to use military force to prevent any other nation or bloc of nations (think EU) from achieving economic or military parity with the United States – in perpetuity.
The Bush Doctrine won’t work, of course. America’s prospective rivals won’t have it and it’s even more doubtful that the American people would be willing to support that type of thing. It is, however, illustrative of the position in which the United States now finds itself and what the coming decades hold for it and other key nations.
When it comes to Asia at least, American fears of economic eclipse may be exaggerated. I suspect that climate change in that corner of the planet all but guarantees that China’s and India’s economic rise will be relatively brief. In Asia, as elsewhere, groundwater resources are approaching depletion. Aquifers are being pumped to exhaustion. The magnificent glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide a substantial amount of India’s and China’s river waters, are rapidly receding. Even the Ganges is forecast to become a seasonal river, in effect a great culvert to carry the monsoon runoff to the sea. Both China and India are about to be confronted by a number of social, economic and environmental challenges that will be extremely difficult to surmount.
Then there’s the math, it always comes down to the math. The US, with 5% of the world’s population, uses 25% of the world’s energy to drive its economy. To achieve that same standard, both China and India would need 100% of the world’s energy. The planet simply does not have nearly enough resources to enable these countries to achieve anything resembling Western standards of living.
However they will demand more, a greater share of the already finite resource pie, and that’s going to have to come from other nations’ current share. In the realm of natural resources it will remain a seller’s market. Things will be tougher for those on the buyer’s side of the market and, when you’re facing a looming bidding war, being heavily indebted is not an enviable position.
September 12, 2007
Hey, we won! The Taliban have announced they’re ready to negotiate with the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai.
I know, I know – it smells a lot like a piece of crap but if you throw enough varnish on it and polish it up nice it’s not so bad.
What stands in the way of a deal? That would be us or, to be precise, Washington. You see, the Afghan conquest was pitched to us as something it never was. Our side went in to help the Good Guys send the Bad Guys packing. The trouble is, there was never all that much difference between GG and BG, even though we needed to believe there was to keep this farce going for six years.
From the outset we treated the Taliban as evil incarnate and our side, the GGs, as something much better. Why? Good question. Both sides were full of nasty, murderous thugs but, when it came to our side, we had this guy Karzai – a nice guy, enlightened, pro-West, English-speaking, the whole package.
Beginning the new government with Karzai was a good move. His own dad was killed by the Taliban. Who could be more reliable than that? However there was a fatal flaw in our plan, one that remains fatal to our delusional image of a new Afghanistan. This flaw was the guys who would become Karzai’s key lieutenants, those with whom he would have to share power, the warlords of the Northern Alliance.
We didn’t like these guys. The Americans put their names on a list of villains Karzai was absolutely never, ever, ever to appoint to key government positions. Karzai appointed them anyway. Why? Because we gave him no other choice. We abandoned Hamid Karzai and Afghanistan’s future to these warlords and that sealed his and his country’s fate. Why did we abandon Karzai? For the same reason that the White House abandoned the fight against the Taliban when they had them on the ropes – Iraq.
Without warlord support, Karzai was little more than the mayor of Kabul. The US and NATO needed to bolster Karzai, to establish him as a legitimate, national leader. We didn’t. Why? Because that would have meant toppling the warlords, our former allies, and bringing their provinces under federal control. We didn’t want another war, especially not with these thugs, so Karzai had to buy their support by handing them the reins of power.
If you don’t think these guys are murderous thugs and criminals, consider this: their most significant legislative achievement has been to grant themselves total amnesty for their monstrous crimes in the past and virtual immunity for their crimes to come. In the West, we chose to put lipstick on this pig and trumpet it as “democracy”.
Six years on and we’re still fighting the resilient and now resurgent Taliban. Once we had them on the ropes then we gave them breathing room and they used it to come back, retake territory and destabilize Kabul. Karzai is no fool. He looks around him and sees his government and his security services infiltrated with corruption; his “national” army a loose and temporary amalgamation of warlord militias; Bush on the ropes at home; Blair gone; NATO fast losing interest; his countryside increasingly falling under the control of insurgents, drug lords and his own warlords; his nation’s economy now dependent on narcotics; long-promised civil reconstruction floundering; and Pakistan, whose assistance Afghanistan desperately needs, hostile and in disarray. Now, pretend you’re Hamid Karzai sitting in your office in Kabul and then do the math.
What to do? How about we start by giving up the fantasies that have brought us to where we are today? Truth Number One: we’re not in this to win, we never were. The US and NATO combined still have a paltry fraction of the force needed in Afghanistan to provide essential security for the central government. Take the city of Toronto, fire 80% of the police officers and what do you think would happen? Not good but, then again, it’s only Toronto.
Truth Number Two: The Taliban are neither as evil nor as threatening as we’ve made them out to be. The Taliban didn’t support al-Qaeda, it was the other way around. Six years after they were driven out of Kabul no one has come up with any direct link between the Taliban and 9/11 other than that they permitting al-Qaeda to run some camps up in the hills. There’s not been a shred of evidence – nothing, nada, zilch – that the Taliban had the faintest idea that America was going to be attacked by bin Laden’s gang. We’ve had their books for six years. Plenty of them have defected to our side. Still nothing linking the Taliban to international terrorism. Quite remarkable that, eh?
Truth Number Three: The Afghans are not ready for Western democracy. In the days since their last king they’ve reverted to theocratic medieval feudalism. We can’t drag them out of that. They will have to find their own way out. That’s a trial and error process that they’re going to have to endure – just as we did.
That’s not to say they can’t start with some of the trappings of democracy. Even the Taliban are willing to concede the right to free elections within the framework of an Islamic state.
Truth Number Four: We, the West, need to engage the Taliban. Karzai isn’t strong enough to do this on his own, especially given his vulnerability to the warlords within his camp. We didn’t stand up for Karzai before, we can’t afford to fail him again. This time all interests, warlords included, have to be represented at the bargaining table.
Look, we know there’s no military solution to Afghanistan’s problems. When we’re pressed on the point we admit that. Despite that begrudging acknowledgement, we’re still going around as though we can defeat the Taliban with our air power, artillery and tanks. The solution to this country’s problems has to be political and that inevitably means some sort of accommodation and reconciliation.
This isn’t about defeatism. If we wanted the big win we would have – at the very least – deployed the resources needed to win long before now. We’ve been playing this on a shoestring all along so don’t give me any crap now about “cut and run” or “staying the course” or giving in to the terrorists.
At this point almost any accommodation that can bring real peace to this troubled country is a victory, a genuine achievement. Time we realized that.
September 10, 2007
What’s most telling about US General Petraeus’ report on Iraq is the pinhole narrowness of its focus. It’s cherry picking taken to an extreme with virtually all the negatives swept aside.
It’s not that Petraeus doesn’t know better, he does. He was one of the principal authors of FM 3-24, the US military’s new counterinsurgency field manual. FM 3-24 embodies the lessons of guerrilla warfare literally from the time of Caesar right up to the present. One of Petraeus’ own core findings is that you can’t wage a counterinsurgency on the cheap. It takes troops, masses of them, simply not to lose. By his own formulae, the US would need well more than 300,000 soldiers in Iraq – almost double the number deployed.
With 300,000 plus soldiers the US might be able to provide enough security to enable a viable Iraqi government to take hold. But there is no viable Iraqi government, only the faltering administration of Nouri al Maliki. Neither Sunni nor Shia have genuine support for Maliki. As for the Kurds, they’re just biding their time until the central government either capitulates to their demands (does “sovereignty association” sound familiar?) or they pull out completely.
Even if Petraeus had enough troops – and he doesn’t – there’s nothing to secure. Petraeus knows it and so does Washington. Which may explain the Bush regime’s desperation to keep this flat tire rolling.
Washington needs to find someone fit to rule Iraq. “Fit to rule” means specific things: 1) able to keep the country more or less together; 2) able to deliver the oil law that will hand control of Iraq’s only resource of consequence to American companies; 3) able to keep Iraq safely out of the control or undue influence of Iran. What about democracy? You can forget about that, ain’t going to happen. Real democracy translates into far too much political power for pro-Iranian/anti-Americans such as Sadr.
Bush/Petraeus have gone into the business of buying time to let the US try to find someone fit to rule and that’s increasingly looking like someone who closely resembles the last guy, Saddam Hussein. America is realizing what the Brits learned almost a century ago; when it comes to effectively ruling Iraq what’s needed is a strongman, a Sunni strongman. Saddam’s Sunni predecessors didn’t come to power accidentally. They were the West’s “go to” guys from the outset.
But Iraq is a real, fire-breathing dragon. After four years of occupation, with the UN and the international community looking on, with the Muslim world watching even more closely, how do you now abandon the democracy option? You simply abandon the place itself. First you load the dice. Take the Shia leadership down – in Iran and Iraq – and rejuvenate the Sunni leadership. Along the way you have to cut some deal with the Kurds. Once those elements are in place, you pull your forces back into garrison and let the mayhem run its course with a little covert aid here and there as required to ensure a Sunni win.
This all sounds fantastic until you rummage through the alternatives. You’re not going to get secular rule from the Shia, ain’t gonna happen. Another Shiite theocracy would threaten the entire Middle East oil region (even Saudi Arabia’s best oil fields are in areas dominated by their Shia minority).
Bush/Cheney believe in the inevitability of an Iranian nuclear weapon and, therefore, the need for pre-emptive attack and they’re looking to gut the whole of Iran’s military establishment and infrastructure, not merely its nuclear installations. They can’t prevent Iran from coming back in the long run but they can severely cripple it in time for a Sunni takeover of Iraq.
Taking out Iran would sharply curtail Tehran’s ability to influence an Iraqi civil war while elevating Washington’s influence on the outcome. It might not guarantee a favourable result but it would clearly be America’s best chance of getting someone in place who is “fit to rule” by their criteria.
Flanked by Afghanistan to the east and a pro-Washington, even if undemocratic Iraq to the west and an increasingly hostile Saudi Arabia across the Gulf to the south, Iran is largely neutralized, contained. And it’s the battle with Iran that America needs to win right now.
September 3, 2007
It’s high time our media accepted some responsibility for the nonsense they all too often relay from our politicians.
Hey, Press Gallery – the pols already have their own spin machines. You’re supposed to be working for US, not THEM. It’s your job to be a bit adversarial when these guys start overloading your carts with fresh, steamy bullshit. They’re not just lying to you, they’re lying to us and, by repeating this nonsense, you’re willingly lying to us too.
Whatever happened to critical thinking, old fashioned analysis? Take a look at what’s being said, compare that to the facts and if they don’t match up, say so.
I have yet to hear a Canadian or American reporter come out and say that a nation that goes into a counterinsurgency war without nearly enough troops has already lost. Here’s something else I haven’t heard from these people – if you go to war with incompetent political leadership you’re bound to lose.
How ’bout this for critical thinking. You can’t win a war by deploying only a third of the troops you need to win. Oh sure, you can fight it for a long time – just as long as you’re willing to continue the farce, to feed the mayhem machine – but you can’t win and here’s the kicker, when you’re not the home team and you’re woefully understrength, you will eventually leave in failure.
It doesn’t take a latter day Clausewitz to understand this stuff. The histories of these nasty little wars have been written for centuries and you can pretty much take your pick because the basic principles have been repeated with great consistency, over and over again. Go back as far as Julius Caesar or as recently as T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), Giap, even the current Iraq commander Petraeus (FM 3-24). Take your pick, it’s all there.
Read this stuff and you’ll discover something: that our Born Again miscreants – Bush, Blair and Harper – and their minions and generals – haven’t. They still believe they can defy gravity and levitate their way out of this, even after years of repeatedly falling on their asses with a thud. This is what you call incompetent leadership, the type that wages wars of failure.
Terrorism is a threat of generational duration but it’s not existential in dimension. It is, as Robert Taber wrote, the “war of the flea.” If you’re getting flea bites on your ankles you don’t take a chain saw to your legs. If you do, sooner or later you’ll run out of legs. Then where will you be? No, you take a calm, measured approach. Maybe the whole place will need to be fumigated but just maybe a little flea powder and vacuuming will solve the problem.
Tanks and artillery are lousy for fighting insurgents (who are not necessarily terrorists). That’s because they can only fight the insurgents when the insurgents chose to let them and, all too often, wind up inadvertently butchering the local population which then swells the ranks of the insurgents. After a while you get a blinding headache and you still haven’t put a dent in the wall.
We need journalists who have at least read the core literature on guerrilla warfare so that they have some basic ability to make sense of events on the ground. Instead our top newspapers give us wilfully blind cheerleaders like Blatchford and Martin who do no good service to the military, their country or their readers.
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