October 2007
Monthly Archive
October 18, 2007
The Bush/Cheney regime’s cowboy statesmanship has yielded another predictable consequence – global arms races. Bush’s bully boy diplomacy, his blind arrogance and his utter failure in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East has simultaneously goaded and emboldened key rivals such as China and Russia.
Bush and his stable sweeper, Rumsfeld, set events in play when they had America unilaterally scrap its nuclear weapons treaties and announce the development of a new generation of nuclear battlefield (or tactical) weapons. That bit of jumped up bravado along with the Texas Turd’s insistence on basing anti-ballistic missile interceptors on Russia’s doorstep triggered the inevitable response from Russia’s Vlad Putin.
Putin appeared on a call-in show today where he assured Russians that their military is also proceeding with its own new generation,nuclear arsenal and matching, improved capacity missile systems. Russia, recovering from its post-communism economic doldrums and awash in petro-rubles can afford to do just that.
What a difference two decades can make. Then it was the USSR that was in serious financial distress and America ascendant. Now it’s America that’s in hock to its eyeballs and Russia ascendant.
A prudent president would have positioned the United States much differently. Bush has proven to be foolish to the point of stupidity; picking unnecessary fights, draining his treasury, leaving his military strained to the breaking point and his nation’s financial strength sapped. With the looming environmental and resource challenges, Bush has left the United States about as vulnerable as its enemies and rivals could hope for. Even with a clear headed and courageous leader, it could take America decades to undo the Bush legacy.
The Frat Boy has put himself well in the running for the worst president in his nation’s history.
In the meantime the new cold war is “on” and we’d better start thinking about what we can do about that.
October 18, 2007
Is it still Mr. Dion or just Mr. Disappointment?
Our Liberal leader did not distinguish himself yesterday in his cold-porridge response to the Harper throne speech. The opposition will bring amendments which, if they’re rejected, will send it scurrying to abstain from actually taking a position on policies it has long condemned.
Mr. D’s Liberal party is in a tactical retreat, or so we’re told. The only thing clear is its intent to head for the hills at the first sign of anything it doesn’t like. Even if it is a wise option for the caucus – it’s a message to every uncommitted Canadian voter that the Libs are in disarray and routed.
Running is one thing, running away is another. There has to be a game plan, something understandable, compelling and convincing, that you’re running to or else you’re just running away.
The Official Opposition doesn’t run from the government it is supposed to oppose. It stands and makes its opposition known and felt. It presents the electorate with a clear alternative, another option they can support.
Tabling amendments doesn’t cut it. That’s whining, not opposing. To announce, in advance, that you’ll be putting forward these amendments and then folding your hand if they’re not accepted, gives feckless a near-religious quality.
If Dion wants our support, he needs to earn it. He must come out with a clear, forceful and cogent policy – one that reflects his vision and that carves out real territory for the Libs and forces the NDP and CPC to their natural warrens.
October 17, 2007
This is the day that Stephane Dion either shows he’s got the guts to lead or simply confirms that he is what he’s appeared to be ever since he got the leadership – hapless and ineffectual.
Dion should have been able to come out swinging against the throne speech when it mattered – yesterday. That’s when Harpo’s agenda was scoring air time. Today, when Dion finally unveils his response, it’s old news – stale. All he’s done is, yet again, undercut himself.
What in Harper’s fearmongering crime bill proposal or his rejection of Kyoto or his Afghanisnam 2011 nonsense was so surprising that Dion couldn’t have slammed them yesterday when it mattered?
For my money, Dion had better pull something powerful out of his hat today or accept that he’s unable or unwilling to actually lead a national party and hand the job to someone who wants it enough to do it.
This is D-Day, Dion Day.
October 13, 2007
If this one takes flight, you had better duck next time you see a pig.
A group of Vancouver prostitutes wants to establish a brothel in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. From Alternet.Org:
…local sex workers have banded together to establish Canada’s first cooperative brothel in an attempt to offer women a safe place to work.
The group, formed by a sex workers’ alliance based here, called the British Columbia Coalition of Experiential Women, will incorporate next month and is already setting the groundwork to open the co-op brothel.
Members have begun scouting for a location and are enlisting the backing of local businesses, police and labor organizations.
Faced with the task of cleaning up the city to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver authorities said they are open to the idea.
“We would be willing to explore anything that … would be helping the situation of sex trade workers, and make it safer for them and make it better for the community,” said Vancouver police spokesperson Howard Chow. He noted one requirement: “It has to be something that is lawful.”
>Prostitution itself is legal in Canada. However, since most activities associated with it are not — such as soliciting sexual services in a public place, operating a bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution — the group is planning to appeal to the federal government for an exemption.
Now, let’s see… “Dear Prime Minister Harper. You don’t know us but we’re really not much different from you and many of your cabinet ministers. We’re all in the business of screwing the Canadian people. Now here’s a business idea…”
October 11, 2007
View from the Lake over at Progressive Bloggers linked to an article from the National Disgrace about the War of 1812. NatPo’s fluff piece treated that war pretty much as Canadians themselves do, essentially irrelevant. They even quoted some lady from the Sackets Harbor state park as saying America won the war because, had they lost, they’d be using loonies and toonies now.
First of all, the War of 1812 remains of enormous importance to Canada. Second, America lost that war – and lost badly. Third, if you’re Canadian you ought to be grateful, every day, to Brock and Tecumseh and the 49th Regiment of Foot, the Voltigeurs, the 41st, King’s 8th and Canada’s militias including the Canadian Volunteers.
The War of 1812 was America’s first foreign war. Like so many since, it was an American war of conquest. The United States initiated the war. Its Congress declared war on us. Canadians were expressly warned to submit or be enslaved. The Americans waged war on us knowing they had enormous superiorities in population and soldiers.
The goal of that war was to drive the British out of Upper and Lower Canada that they might be conquered and annexed to the United States. It is by the goal on which the war was launched that questions of winners and losers are determined.
The United States had the British, Canadian Militias and Indians outnumbered by roughly 10 to 1, about the same ratio as their population advantage.
Population, in a land still being settled, has a huge effect. For example, there were enough American settlers along the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario to justify development of roadways. We had even more territory but only a fraction of the settler population so we had no effective land routes, forcing us to use the lakes and leaving our forces vulnerable to superior American naval power. That was just one example of the advantages enjoyed by the Americans.
Our goal in that war was survival – defeating the enemy in the field and driving his regiments from our soil. If we failed, we were conquered. There was no middle outcome for us. Our enemies’ advantages assured that.
Yet it was two centuries ago so how could it remain relevant? To the Americans it was a sorry defeat, their first of many, so it isn’t particularly relevant. To us, the underdogs, however, it was an enormous victory that carries with it so much that we take for granted today.
It’s not about Americans not having to use loonies or toonies, that’s just plain silliness. To us, however, it was thousands of Canadian youth not having to be sacrificed in places like Vietnam or Iraq or any of America’s other pathetic lunacies. Had we lost that first and most critical war, had we not overcome our numerical and tactical inferiorities, we would have been American today and for that alone each of us should sincerely thank our own particular God that we prevailed.
Commiottees are being formed in Ontario and New York and elsewhere to turn the bicentennial of the War of 1812 into some perverse Disney-style event. The theme will all be “water under the bridge.” Hardly. But for the War of 1812, George w. Bush would be your president today. Think about that.
October 8, 2007
One of the problems besetting the NATO mission, or ISAF, in Afghanistan is that there are just too many armies and not enough soldiers.
The forces committed to that wretched place are a piecemeal bunch, each subject to “caveats” or conditions under which they may and may not be used. For example, one country may specify that its soldiers can only fire their guns on the first and third Tuesday of the month and only when fired upon first from really, really close range. These caveats hobble the force commander who must employ his forces subject to each nation’s terms and conditions. Too many armies.
Not enough soldiers. NATO’s overall force levels are a fraction of those deployed on other, far less challenging missions such as Bosnia but, instead of finding effective ways to greatly increase the force size, NATO is struggling to keep it from shrinking too much in the coming two years.
In a remarkably uncritical piece in today’s TorStar the paper’s Ottawa bureau chief Bruce Campion-Smith did a bang-up bit of boosterism for “the mission”:
“Afghans know the battle is not won yet and so are reticent about offering their wholehearted support to a foreign force that might not be here in two years.” Afghans actually know the battle isn’t won yet? Really? What else do they know? Maybe they know just how well foreign armies do in their country. Maybe they know how this will end, even if we don’t want to admit it – yet.
“The presence of Canada is needed till Afghanistan is able to defend itself. That day is not going to be in 2009,” Karzai told Canadian journalists at a recent news conference clearly staged to deliver a message back home. “Look around and see that the enemy is not yet finished, not yet defeated.” Look at that, Karzai knows it too. He also knows he has about a snowball’s chance on a mid-summer day in Kabul that the enemy (you choose which one) will be defeated. If he actually believed the Taliban would likely be defeated, do you think he would be pleading with them to cut him a deal every other week?
“This is a country that won’t be rushed.” Rushed into what? With its half-dozen normally suspicious and hostile ethnic groups, it’s hardly a country at all. When its people do get together, it’s usually to drive out the latest bunch of infidels who show up thinking they’ll remake the place. To the extent Afghanistan is a country, it’s been described as a collection of bits that its neighbouring countries didn’t want.
Whether you support the Conservatives, Liberals or the NDP on Afghanistan, we’d all do much better if we based our arguments on the realities of that country, of NATO and ISAF, instead of the silly scenarios our leaders adopt to further their own political fortunes.
October 8, 2007
Military historian Gwynne Dyer is adept at the art of understatement. If anything this style makes his analysis and arguments more compelling. In his latest book, The Mess They Made, he asks what should the West do about the Middle East and comes up with the answer, nothing:
The Middle East as we have known it for the past ninety years is coming to an end, because the Americans Will soon be leaving. President Bush is so determined to resist that conclusion that the legions will not finally depart until he has left office, but it is coming as surely as the sun sets in the west. And although Bush will leave defeated and disgraced, he has set events and emotions in train that will transform the region – if not quite in the way he intended.
…The destruction of the Iraqi state and the subsequent defeat of U.S. military power there have finally destabilized the Middle East, a notional region that came into being after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918. …It was initially controlled by the British and French empires, who drew most of the borders, but a surge of revolutions in the 1940s and 1950s brought independence to the Arab countries. By then, however, both oil and Israel had made the region of great interest to the United States, which took over as the dominant power from the 1960s onwards. And under that American dispensation, there have been no further changes of regime for forty years, apart from the revolution in Iran in 1978 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; the undemocratic regimes that were in power in 1967 are all still in power, within the borders that the European empires drew in 1918.
It is that Middle East that is now coming to an end. It is ending because defeat and humiliation in Iraq mean that soon there will no longer be the will in the United States to go on with the task of maintaining the status quo, and because the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq are going to overwhelm the status quo. Everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even the 1918 borders themselves might change. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, almost anything you care to imagine.
So what should the rest of the world do about this? Nothing. Just stand back and let it happen. Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions) and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas. For the first time in a century, the region is a going to choose its future for itself – and it may, of course, make a dreadful mess of it. Even then outsiders should not intervene, because foreign intervention generally makes things worse – but also because its none of their business.
For several generations the West has insisted that the Middle East is its business, because that is where half the world’s oil comes from. Radical change cannot be allowed there because it might interrupt the flow of oil, and so the region has remained politically and socially frozen for generations. But today every major oil-producing country in the Middle East depends on the cash flow from oil exports to feed its growing population, so they are all compelled to sell pretty much every barrel they can pump – and to sell it into a single global market that sets the price for buyer and seller alike.
…the oil will go on flowing no matter who’s in charge, so it’s all the same to the customers. If the new regime is better than the old, good, if not, too bad. But it’s their business, not ours.
October 8, 2007
The Canadian Armed Forces new policy of suppressing bad news out of Afghanistan seems to have reached even the inner sanctum of Stevie Harper’s cabinet. That was pretty clear today when our supposed foreign affairs minister, Maxime Bernier, told reporters in Kandahar that attacks against Canadian soldiers there had decreased over the past year.
“The territory is more secure now today, here in Kandahar than it was a year ago,” Mr. Bernier said. “Look just a year ago what happened, there were many attacks, and the attacks have diminished.”
A United Nations report, one that Bernier apparently couldn’t read, states that insurgents attacks have increased 25% over the past year, noting that may be a conservative assessment. Obviously it’s not conservative enough for Bernier. The UN report is backed up by like assessments from other respected agencies.
Could it be that Bernier has caught Bush/Cheney disease – the virus that makes you spout whatever crap comes off the top of your head without regard for reality?
According to the Globe & Mail, our befuddled foreign affairs min pointed out other fantasy improvements:
“He also claimed that it’s getting easier for aid workers to travel the province.
“We have improvement because our civilians, our humanitarian workers are able to go out there and do their work,” Mr. Bernier said.
“In fact, the growing risk of kidnapping among aid workers has prompted the UN to develop a new map assessing the likelihood of capture by insurgents in districts across the country. Almost the entire province of Kandahar is shown as “high abduction risk.”
“In a survey this year, Afghan government employees said they have limited ability to visit the majority of Kandahar’s districts without armed escort; across the south, local officials said their access was decreasing because of the rising insecurity.
“Another measure of aid workers’ ability to work is the UN’s internal security map.
“This summer the map showed about one-third Afghanistan in the highest-risk category for travel, representing a deterioration from the summer of 2006, when only 15 per cent of the country earned the same rating.”
And we’re paying this clown for what exactly? He must’ve been too busy raiding the mini-bar on the flight over to Kandahar to bother getting even a basic briefing from his staff. Maybe Bernier should start looking for a job he can handle – something with a handle.
October 7, 2007
George w. Bush isn’t going to fare well in the history books. That’s obvious based on what we already know of this astonishingly flawed man and the realization that many more “insights” are to follow once he leaves office and his administration’s stalinesque cloak of secrecy is gone.
One part of Bush’s legacy that’s already apparent is George the Inquisitor, the grand torturer of the White House. Today’s lead editorial in the New York Times laments the stain that this man has left on their nation:
Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.
The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.
After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods — simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation — had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.
The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined “torture” to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people.
Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?
Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values.
George w. Bush has damaged America and will leave his nation weakened and crippled in ways and to degrees that won’t be fully appreciated for many years to come. Mission Accomplished, George.
October 6, 2007
No matter how you cut it, $76-million a year is serious money. That’s the annual revenue of Oral Roberts University and it’s now in jeopardy over claims made in a lawsuit about Lindsay Roberts, wife of Richard Roberts, son of Oral Roberts.
The lawsuit has been filed by three former ORU professors who said they were sacked for bringing up some inconvenient truths about alleged shenanigans at the university in a report they delivered to the university’s board of regents.
The professors allege that university president Richard Roberts “asked a professor in 2005 to use his students and university resources to aid a county commissioner’s bid for Tulsa mayor. Such involvement would violate state and federal law because of the university’s nonprofit status.”
But the juicy bits concern Lindsay Roberts (pictured above) and allegations that she has a curious interest in “underage males.” She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”
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