October 2007
Monthly Archive
October 6, 2007
I’ve been meaning to write a post about Gwynne Dyer’s new book, The Mess They Made, but I think it’s too full of gems to pass it off with a review. If you’re at all concerned about the Middle East, radical Islam, the United States, or Canada living in the shadow of America, you really should read this book. To try to get you hooked, I’ll be doing a few posts based on excerpts from the book.
In this part I’ll deal with one of Dyer’s conclusions as to why the US won’t leave Iraq:
…the U.S. authorities in Iraq expend a great deal of energy in ensuring that an official request for the withdrawal of foreign troops does not see the light of day. The only logical explanation is that, while the Bush administration would love to bring most of the troops home and ease the political pressure there, it still has not accepted the necessity of bringing them all home. It still imagines, in some incoherent way, that it can manipulate events in Iraq so that the insurgency dies down, the economy stabilizes, and a grateful Iraqi government welcomes the permanent stationing of twenty or thirty thousand American troops on its territory. The fourteen “enduring bases,” with which the White House planned to replace the bases in Saudi Arabia that have become a political liability for the Saudi government, are still under construction, and as far as the White House and the Pentagon are concerned the game is still afoot. Chickens do tend to run around for a bit even after their heads are chopped off.
…in order to avoid demands for withdrawal the Iraqi government must be kept weak. Prime Minister al-Maliki has publicly said that he cannot move even a company of soldiers without U.S. permission. It is the CIA that pays the entire budget of the main Iraqi intelligence service, not the Iraqi government, so guess who it works for. …al-Maliki’s government, unable to raise anything like the amount of revenue it needs from the devastated Iraqi economy, is on a very short financial leash held by the Americans.
October 6, 2007
Marion Jones, the darling of America’s 2000 Sydney Olympics, has taken a tumble. Jones won five medals, including three gold, and has been denying allegations of doping ever since.
She’s not denying it now. Jones has pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to federal investigators and has confessed in a White Plains, New York courtroom to having taken steroids before the 2000 summer games.
Jones’s admission brings an ignominious end to the storied career of a woman once regarded as the greatest female athlete of all time.
In 2004, infamous Balco founder, Victor Conte told ESPN that he’d supplied Jones with several illegal drugs:
On April 21, 2001, in an Embassy Suites hotel room in Covina, California, he [Conte] said, he was sitting about “a foot away” as Jones used a $US1000 NovoPen injector – a device that “looked like a Sharpie [a large felt tip pen]” and that can be used to inject human growth hormone. After pulling the spandex of her bicycle shorts above her right thigh, he said, Jones “dialled up a dose of 4 units of growth hormone and injected it into her quadriceps.” Jones’s former husband, CJ Hunter, “was hugely responsible for making sure she did what she was supposed to”, he said, adding that after they split up: “I had to reprimand her for getting careless.”
She left a growth-hormone cartridge injector “on a refrigerator in a hotel room in Edmonton . . . and had to go back and get it,” Conte said. “[She] left it again at a hotel in Eugene, Oregon, a few days later. After the first time she forgot it, she said she’d put it in a sneaker and lean the sneaker against the refrigerator so she wouldn’t forget it. Then she forgot the shoe. That injector had a thousand dollars worth of growth hormone in it! “I couldn’t afford the risk,” Conte said. At the same time, he said, he was having “financial problems” with Tim Montgomery, so he ended his relationship with them, and “soon I was working with their rivals”.
Montgomery and Jones are now partners and parents of a year-old son. The magazine story confirms previously published accounts of what was called “Project World Record” on Montgomery’s behalf, Conte acting as Montgomery’s “pharmacology and nutrition” guru. Montgomery set the 100-metre world record, 9.78 seconds, in 2002.
Jones’ confession will only add to the controversy surrounding the death of her predecessor, Florence Griffith-Jones. “Flo-Jo” scored three gold medals at the Seoul Olympics only to die suddenly from a heart attack at age 38.
October 6, 2007
Maybe not exactly an “underdog” but certainly controversial and it was a landslide, even in a nation that knows a thing or two about landslides, the real ones.
Pervez Musharrraf, or “Mushie” to his friends, has won Pakistan’s presidential election, scoring 252 of the 257 votes cast in that country’s parliament. Three ballots were tossed out as invalid and two votes went to his main rival, retired judge Wajihuddin Ahmad. There were 691-eligible votes but the opposition pretty much gave this election a pass, either abstaining (the safe option) or boycotting the election in protest of Mushie’s refusal to give up his command of the country’s armed forces.
Even before the voting, the ruling party’s privatization minister, Wasi Zafar, announced the result to an Associated Press reporter: ”He will be elected with a vast majority. God willing we will enter full democracy.” Good call Wasi but somehow I don’t think God had anything to do with it.
October 5, 2007
The past few decades have witnessed the growth of a political disease that, like all untreated contagions, led to an epidemic in the United States over the past six years. It’s a malignancy often called the “far right.”
It’s debilitating to those who succumb to it. It disrupts their sensory systems and causes cognitive dysfunction. They see only in black and white and hear only that which pleases them. They quickly become incapable of discerning nuance of any form, of grasping facts and other realities and, in advanced states, become myopic to the point of blindness – seeing nothing more than a burning light that they unquestioningly follow.
The far right malignancy has savaged the United States, sapped its strength, and left it incapable of standing upright. Unable to recognize its true foes it has to be content to swing blindly, treating everyone as a threat.
There are those in our own country who show the incipient signs of infection. One of them currently resides at our expense at 24 Sussex Drive. Fortunately for us, his disease has been slow to spread to our fellow countrymen thereby keeping his own affliction in check, at least for the moment.
There is reason for hope. Today I found it in the musings of right-wing columnist David Brooks. After years of cheerleading, then justifying, then excusing the diseased excesses of his own party – yes, that would be the Bush Republicans – Brooks has seen the light, thrown in the towel, opted for the cure. He has retreated to take refuge in the wisdom of Edmund Burke:
“Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.
Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.
Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”
The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.
Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.
Over the past four decades, free market conservatives within the Republican Party have put freedom at the center of their political philosophy. But the dispositional conservative puts legitimate authority at the center. So while recent conservative ideology sees government as a threat to freedom, the temperamental conservative believes government is like fire — useful when used legitimately, but dangerous when not.
Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has championed a series of reforms designed to devolve power to the individual, through tax cuts, private pensions and medical accounts. The temperamental conservative does not see a nation composed of individuals who should be given maximum liberty to make choices. Instead, the individual is a part of a social organism and thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that precede choice.
Therefore, the temperamental conservative values social cohesion alongside individual freedom and worries that too much individualism, too much segmentation, too much tension between races and groups will tear the underlying unity on which all else depends. Without unity, the police are regarded as alien powers, the country will fracture under the strain of war and the economy will be undermined by lack of social trust.”
My God, Brooks speaking like a true Liberal. Maybe, just maybe, he could bring a bit of that vaccine to that clown in that lovely house on the Rideau.
October 4, 2007
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Canadian police can be sued for damages caused by negligent investigation. The majority decision was written by Chief Justice McLachlan:
,,,police are not immune from liability under the Canadian law of negligence, that the police owe a duty of care in negligence to suspects being investigated, and that their conduct during the course of an investigation should be measured against the standard of how a reasonable officer in like circumstances would have acted. The tort of negligent investigation exists in Canada, and the trial court and Court of Appeal were correct to consider the appellant’s action on this basis. The law of negligence does not demand a perfect investigation. It requires only that police conducting an investigation act reasonably. When police fail to meet the standard of reasonableness, they may be accountable through negligence law for harm resulting to a suspect.
…It has not been established that recognizing a duty of care in tort would have a chilling effect on policing, by causing police officers to take an unduly defensive approach to investigation of criminal activity. In theory, it is conceivable that police might become more careful in conducting investigations if a duty of care in tort is recognized. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The police officer must strike a reasonable balance between cautiousness and prudence on the one hand, and efficiency on the other. Files must be closed, life must move on, but care must also be taken…
The case involved a native man arrested by Hamilton-Wentworth police for a robbery he didn’t commit. As a result, the man spent 20-months in prison until he was acquitted on a retrial. His claim for damages was dismissed as was the police department’s appeal against a ruling that police investigators could be liable for negligent investigations.
October 2, 2007
There was a telling little article from David Common on CBC’s web site today. Apparently Canada’s Defence Department would rather not bother you with any information about casualties suffered by our forces in Afghanistan:
…a great many Canadian soldiers are being injured in Afghanistan. And we’re not hearing about it.
The question now is, why? Two years ago, at the outset of this more dangerous mission in southern Afghanistan, any and every injury was made public to journalists embedded with Canadian soldiers in Kandahar, and with Canadians at large.
A new policy has clearly emerged. Deaths are still reported but injuries are not, unless one of two scenarios exists. The first is if the injury is so severe, it may very well result in death. The second is if journalists already know about it. If a journalist happens to be in a convoy that is hit and sees the injury, they’ll obviously know about it.
Injuries are increasingly frequent these days. As many as four roadside bomb strikes happen each week. Soldiers are being injured in the process, some of them seriously. Some of them will lose limbs. Others will have their lives irreparably damaged. We won’t know. Whether we should know is another question.
The point is this: soldiers have died in this place, but many more have been injured. The United States, which is engaged in its own largely unpopular war in Iraq, still releases injury statistics. Canada does not.
Making Canadian casualties disappear from public view is unacceptable.
October 1, 2007
While NATO forces are swatting at the Taliban for Hamid Karzai some of his country’s other dark forces are looming.
The way this miserable war has been pitched to us here, we have the Taliban on one side and we’re with the good guys on the other side. Black and white, white and black. Easy as pie. Sure.
As Rosie Dimanno writes in today’s Toronto Star, Afghanistan’s other murderous loonies now seem on the verge of making their own power grabs:
The most ravaged district of Kabul is a ghostly testament to the folly of war, waged without pity.
There is nothing left intact, just the detritus of siege: Jagged bits of masonry, husks of buildings, crumbling walls pockmarked with artillery fire.
The Soviets didn’t do this. The Taliban didn’t do this.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar did this.
Hekmatyar has more blood on his hands, arguably, than even the Taliban, with which he has variously fought against and yoked himself to, depending on strategic ambitions. And he’s always been a most ambitious man.
…this is the man – an unyielding terrorist by any definition of the word, the embodiment of treachery – that Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he would welcome in peace talks. Hekmatyar says sure, let’s parley – once foreign troops are removed and the new Afghan constitution is dissolved.
Nuts to that, Karzai counters, knowing full well that Hekmatyar covets the presidency and an ultrafundamentalist Afghanistan no different than what the ousted Taliban had imposed. Leery of what comes after NATO forces depart, however, Karzai is welcoming all fugitives into the negotiating tent as pre-emptive gambit.
A worst-case scenario: Rumours that Hekmatyar might join forces with another unhappy warlord, Rashid Dostum. The ethnic Uzbek thug is a founding member of the United National Front, an anti-government alliance established this year that has pulled together senior veterans from the fight against the Soviets.
Though detesting each other, they’ve been fleeting allies before, Hekmatyar and Dostum, during the change-lobsters-and-dance chaos of the civil war era.
Last year, coalition forces found a cache of arms belonging to Dostum’s forces. There is an escalating worry that Dostum, perhaps in co-ordination with Hekmatyar, would unleash heavy artillery on ill-prepared NATO troops in the northern part of Afghanistan, soldier contributions from countries that have kept them out of combat zones.
All these factional groups just won’t let Afghanistan be, the fanatically anti-West Hekmatyar most especially. Yet there are elements within NATO, even in the U.S. State Department, urging accommodation with Hekmatyar, such is the yearning for a political resolution to end the insurgency.
In Afghanistan, though, internecine politics always devolves to war. And if new Afghanistan is destined to become once more old Afghanistan, Canadian troops have been wasting their time, their sweat, their blood.
Just what did we expect to come out of this idiotic notion that we could establish orderly, Western secular democracy in this nest of vipers?
October 1, 2007
The US military has officially opened its latest franchise, Africa Command. As you might expect, AfriKom has just one base right now, in Stuttgart, Germany. Plans are underway, however, to find real African nations willing to host American military bases, 24 being the target.
The only thing really apparent about AfriKom is Washington’s desire to blanket the region with its military forces. Curiously, they’re not saying what they’ve got in mind. They have said that all those soldiers won’t be there to secure American access to resources or to hunt terrorists. Maybe they’ll just sit around to make sure no African leader gets too uppity with Washington. I mean they’ve got to be there for some purpose, don’t they?
Liberia is reported to be willing to accommodate some American military presence but other African states seem reluctant, even wary. Nigeria is trying to keep AfriKom’s headquarters out of the Gulf of Guinea region.
South Africa’s Defense Jinister Mosiuoa Lekota is a bit more blung, “Africa has to avoid the presence of foreign forces on her soil.” Yeah, well, good luck with that Mosiuoa. Whether you like it or not, there’ll be plenty of foreign forces on your doorstep soon, very soon.
October 1, 2007
You can only spin this one so far and then reality comes crashing down. Here’s the way the National Post gilds the lily:
Canadian air drops ‘save lives’, avoid risky Afghan roads
The spin follows:
Canada has begun making dramatic air drops from CC-130 Hercules aircraft to troops in hostile territory to spare the lives of convoy crews that would otherwise face a long and perilous land journey to carry out the same mission.
In order to keep the enemy guessing, the flight profiles and drop points always vary, as do the timings for such runs, which can also be conducted at night. Although Canada made a few such air drops to troops here last year, doing so regularly only became possible last month when several Canadian Hercules were based at Kandahar for the first time. Before that they were located at an airfield several hours away in the Middle East.
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s an admission that we can’t even maintain enough security between our garrison and outposts to permit overland resupply. How in hell are we supposed to make the Afghan villagers believe they’re secure from the Taliban when we need air drops to supply our own soldiers in the field?
If you don’t keep your logistics routes open, you’re cut off. You’re yielding control over the territory between your garrison and your outposts to the enemy. What are we going to do if they start picking off the vulnerable, lumbering Hercules prop-transports?
This may mean one thing to an armed forces press officer and a willing dupe from CanWest and quite another to the insurgents on the ground where the convoys no longer run. The Taliban know quite well what it means. It’s a game they’ve been playing against armies from the west for centuries.
We’re not at the point of Khe Sanh or Dien Bien Phu, at least not yet. But we have surrendered control of our communications lines with our forces in the field. This may not be a defeat, yet, but it is a tactical reversal and there’s no pretending otherwise. Remember, we were supposed to be securing Kandahar province. That’s why we’re there, eh?
October 1, 2007
Sure it sounds trivial. Charisma, originally a theological term denoting a “spiritual gift or grace giving a person a gift of prophesying or healing”, now commonly meaning a magnetic and compelling personality.
History records some genuinely charismatic leaders – Roosevelt and Churchill, surely; John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Pierre Trudeau’s charisma was palpable, even to his opponents. Then again I suppose you could say that most Germans found Hitler charismatic just as Italians were drawn to Mussolini.
Where are the charismatics today? They seem to be in short supply. There’s certainly none in that cold, wooden plank we have for a prime minister, Stephen Harper. You pretty much have to come from the ranks of those who like their undies starched to find anything magnetic in Harpo. Stephane Dion? Well at least he’s not cold but he’s anything but magnetic either. Jack Layton? No, guys who look like siding salesmen aren’t charismatic. Too sleazy.
Obama is heralded as charismatic and he probably is somewhat but not nearly enough to topple the completely anti-charismatic Hillary Clinton. Rudy Guiliani? He tries hard to connect but, let’s face it, he’s a cross-dressing, serial divorcee. Fred Thompson? Sort of but much too wrinkled and, again, he’s not really connecting.
Americans think Ronald Reagan was charismatic but that’s largely a delusion based on their refusal to accept what a murderous, lying thug he really was. They also found their current fuhrer charismatic as hell until he sent their desperate hopes and dreams swirling into the toilet of Iraq.
We all need a good shot of charisma every now and then and we’re in a real “now” moment. We need an orator, a real firebrand, someone who can stand up on a stage and make us say “yeah, yeah”. Haven’t we had enough Harpers and Hillaries and even Dions? I’ve had my fill. We’re at a crossroads, a confluence of serious problems that challenge our very civilization. It’s time for a genuine leader, one with the spiritual gift of charisma. Someone we can really follow.
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