The Mound of Sound

Retired Justice John Gomery showed up before a Commons committee today to whine that Harpo has completely ignored his report on restoring government accountability issued in the wake of his enquiry into the sponsorship scandal.

At the time, when Gomery was doing everything possible to help Harpo into power, our Furious Leader rubbed his back, patted his judicial bum and assured Gomery that he, Harpo, would clean house once he got the reins of power.

SURPRISE! Just kidding. C’mon you really didn’t believe that nonsense, did you? Did you? Accountability? Ha, in a pig’s eye!

From the Toronto Star:

“I am disappointed. I find it hard to swallow,” he told the Commons government operations committee, which is reviewing the Conservative’s handling of his report.

“I gave them two years, I thought it would give them the time to do something.”

Well, best you learn how to swallow harder, Johnny. You were had. The Canadian people were had.

Gomery told his undoubtedly rapt audience that the growing, centralized power in Harpo’s PMO is a “danger to Canadian democracy” and paves the way to political interference in public administration.

But what’s wrong with Rule by Political Commissars? You know, those faceless insiders who keep the gags firmly on outfits like the Department of National Defence and Environment Canada, Harpo’s aides who keep the curtains so tightly drawn lest the Canadian people get a glimpse of what the inside really looks like.

Gee, John, does this mean no more congratulatory photo ops with Stephen Harper? I’ll bet you feel like a real tool now, don’t ya? That’s because you were a tool and a very handy one at the time.

Harpo EnviroMin John Baird is a huckster, a dabbler in the Dark Arts, a master of sleight-of-hand. Well, maybe not exactly a master because he and SHarper have tried to con us twice and it hasn’t worked but you have to give him full points for trying.

That’s why Bairdo is now talking tough on the Athabasca Tar Sands, or at least future projects which, he promises, will have to achieve unattainable targets using nonexistant technologies that we’ve been told for a decade are just around the corner. Our Furious Leader’s 800-pound gorilla (and he really does look like one) beats his chest, bares his fangs in anguished roars and flings dung about his cage proclaiming loudly that they’ll do better next time or, if not, then the time after that, or the one after that, or sooner or later or eventually, maybe.

It’s all show. Really, it’s all for worrywart voters. “Look mom”, he proclaims, reaching deep into his diapers, “look what I’ve made for you!” Sorry for all the scatalogical references but it’s a preposterously scatalogical plan.

It’s designed to showcase initiatives; bright, shiny, sparkling distractions; not to achieve a meaningful reduction in our nation’s GHG emissions. If he wanted to do what really matters, Baird would be showcasing something other than fanciful ideas – he’d be defining limits, hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

Why are the Tories so afraid of greenhouse gas emission caps? It’s obvious when you think about it. It’s because it would mean carbon rationing, allocation of a national, total maximum permissible carbon emission quota, and how else can you carve up something you’ve rationed except on a per capita basis? Why should a guy from Ontario be limited to X-tonnes of GHG emissions when a guy from Alberta gets 4X? If we’re all going to have to sacrifice, shouldn’t we all bear the same sacrifice? Of course we should, it’s the quintessential Canadian way, rien?

You see, once you set hard caps, emissions = money and potentially big money. Alberta doesn’t want to share its good fortune, it’s petro-wealth, but it sure wants you to share it’s petro-dirt. Whatever limits are set, it wants your province not it’s own to bear the disproportionate burden, to carry the environmental cost of its wildly lucrative Tar Sands.

Worse yet, is what the idea of carbon rationing on an equitable, per capita rationale would or could lead to. Why, if we entertained such revolutionary thinking at home, how would we begin to refute the Chinese and the Indian claims for similar, per capita quotas? What might begin in Athabasca could wind up undoing the entire New World Order.

That’s why Bairdo is cavorting about promising to “do better” because what’s he really trying to do is to keep the same shell game going for just as long as he and our Furious Leader can get away with it.

I hope I’ve given you something to think about, a fresh way of looking at exactly what lies behind the Tories environmental scheming. Harpo, Bairdo and the rest of them are cheap shills for Big Oil and the sooner we see that plain reality, the sooner we’ll find a way of dealing with this problem.

I was lucky enough to catch part of an interview with Gwynne Dyer aired on BC’s Knowledge Network last night. The interview had been taped sometime last fall.

Dyer had some interesting observations on Afghanistan. He noted that the Afghans had “seen off” four, foreign incursions over the past 150-years – three British invasions and one Soviet – and said we’re number five even if we think we’re “special.”

As for democracy and a viable state, Dyer said that Afghanistan has never really functioned as a state, merely an assembly of suspicious, rival ethnic groups that, between wars, sometimes manage to strike ceasefire deals that last for up to two to three decades. Then they go back at it until they get exhausted and decide what comes next. That’s where they were when we stepped in.

Right now we’ve got the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara and Turkmen lined up on our side against the largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, on the other. Warlords are in power in Kabul because it’s a tribal society, a genuine herd of cats.

We have no plans to get rid of warlord rule and, unless and until we do just that, the nation will remain a patchwork of tribalism. In other words, we can win but only if we fight – and defeat – every ethnic group in the country. And what do you think are the odds of that?

The only way “the mission” to Afghanistan makes the slightest sense is from a position of wilful blindness and profound ignorance. You have to really, really, really dumb yourself down so that you can ignore all the obvious contradictions and manifest obstacles for which we’re not even venturing solutions. We’re talking John Manley dumb here.

I’ve spent hour upon hour searching out information on Afghanistan’s warlords, a subject that goes unnoticed and unmentioned by Canadian reporters even thought it is the pivotal reality to Afghanistan’s future. People, both present and past, like Dostum, Dadullah, Massoud, Gul Agha, Fahim, Haq, Mazari, Shirzai and Hekmatyar – not to mention, of course, Karzai. Even the president is a warlord. They all are. And, as pointed out by Chatham House in its latest review of Afghanistan’s pitfalls, there exists a powerful “nexus” – yes, an actual, living, breathing connection – between these guys and the insurgency and the country’s record-breaking opium trade. They’re against the Taliban insurgency because (a) we’re doing the fighting and (b) they choose to be for now.

Ah, but what about the Afghan National Army? Okay, what about it? In a nation whose very foundations are based on ethnic rivalry and feudal tribalism, how long do you think the Afghan National Army will last after the warlords each call their own factions home? These soldiers don’t have a bond with a country that doesn’t exist. Their bond is with their respective tribes and those tribes are directly ruled, not by Kabul, but by their warlords. Every private and corporal’s families are subject to the whims of their tribe’s warlord.

We have an Alice in Wonderland mentality about this war and that explains why, six years down the road, we’re still hanging about swatting at flies. C’mon – we’re talking about the power and glory of the Western world here on one side and a gang of medieval peasants on the other – and we’re not winning! And our leaders – military and political – ran out of ideas years ago. They’re on “stay the course” cruise control now. The best idea they can come up with is an extra thousand soldiers for Kandahar.

At least we’ve finally shed our sophomoric notions of bringing democracy and human rights to Afghanistan. Psst – here’s a secret – we were never serious about that anyway.

The key to getting out of this cesspit is to find a way to drive a wedge between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. We’ve made that task vastly more difficult, Herculean even, by our foolishness of the past six years, but if we don’t find a way to make it happen our sole remaining choice will be to leave, defeated. We need to look at the Taliban, cleansed of al-Qaeda affiliation, as barely distinguishable from all the other fundamentalist nutjobs we allow to rule outside the Pashtun territories.

The Taliban need to be re-integrated into Afghan affairs but we can’t do that. These deals are negotiated and brokered among warlords, not with outsiders, particularly not infidel outsiders. The role we need to play is to figure out what it will take for the Taliban to cut al-Qaeda loose and then make that happen. Here’s a hint – bombs aren’t going to do it. It’s going to take honey, lots of it.

Afghan elections are coming up and there’s word that Washington is going to try to shift their boy, Khalizad, into Karzai’s chair. Let’s all hope – pray if you can – that doesn’t happen.

Image credit: http://www.warlordsofafghanistan.com/ . Where you can buy a lovely set of coasters bearing the images of each of these charming fellows. If you’re looking for truly informative sources on Afghanistan, let me know and I’ll post them.

Plans announced by Brit prime minister Gordon Browne last October called for his country’s military contingent to be reduced by half right about now. Hasn’t happened and it seems the force of 4,100 will be staying for some months to come.

The Americans are holding a presidential election “some months to come.” It could just be coincidence but accounts of American military deaths in Iraq seem to have picked up.

There’s no way to tell, just yet, whether we’re seeing the beginning of the pre-November election uprising by Iraq’s Sunni and Shia militias but what’s happening seems consistent with that.

Nothing to do but wait and watch.

I used to like John McCain, especially back in 2000 when he showed such courage and decency in his campaign against George w. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination.

I liked the John McCain who stood up and denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerism.”

I liked the John McCain who took on Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush for their absolute bungling of the Iraq war.

I liked the John McCain who, in 2001, stood his ground and opposed the Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the rich, proclaiming, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.”

If I’d had the chance I could have voted for that John McCain but this is 2008 and that John McCain is dead. He’s been replaced by the new John McCain, stripped clean of all those principles, all that courage and that good conscience so that he can weasel through that small hole that leads to a Republican White House.

The new John McCain is a willing, even happy shill for the extreme, religious right; for America’s “most fortunate”; for those who want the Iraq war to go on forever and ever amen. He appears as convocation speaker at Bob Jones university, embraces nutjob Pastor John Hagee, pledges to make permanent the tax cuts for the rich that once so offended his good conscience, and says he’ll continue an unwinnable war until victory is his.

It’s becoming impossible to tell where George w. Bush leaves off and John McCain picks up.