Saturday, March 27, 2004
Complicity
As usual, Charley Reese explains, in very simple terms, the madness that is the Israel - Palestine conflict:
The murder of Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheik Yassin, makes perfect sense as long as you understand Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's strategy.
That strategy is to make peace impossible.
For three years, Sharon has done everything to prevent peace. He himself provoked the new uprising, re-invaded the occupied territories, destroyed the Palestinian Authority, forced Yasser Arafat into house arrest and launched an unprecedented, brutal campaign of assassinations, curfews, fences, destruction of property and random killing of Palestinians. The Israelis have killed about 2,700 Palestinians in the past three years, in contrast to about 700 Israelis killed in the same period.
At the same time, Sharon has refused all offers to negotiate, and whenever the Palestinians arranged a cease-fire on their side, Sharon broke it with a provocative raid or assassination. No other rogue state or rogue leader would have been allowed to get away with such behavior, but Israel has the U.S. government in its pocket. That's the answer to the question posed by the French ambassador to Great Britain as to why the world allows "this (expletive deleted) little country to cause the world so much trouble."
Sharon doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement would involve returning nearly all of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. Israel's goal has always been Palestine without Palestinians. He is greatly afraid that the world will lose patience and impose a settlement on Israel. Hence, his strategy is to make peace impossible so that he can impose unilaterally his own settlement – a settlement, of course, that will condemn the Palestinians to unlivable conditions. Moreover, Reese contends, the US better wake up to the fact that its knee-jerk suppot for Israel is one of the prime reasons a good portion of the Arab world "hates America":
The Arab world sees us – correctly – as an accessory before and after the fact to all the crimes Israel commits against the Palestinians and other Arabs in the area. We cannot load Israel down with modern weapons, with gifts of more than $90 billion of American tax dollars, with absolute protection from all attempts to hold it accountable under international law, and then pretend we are innocent. We are guilty by proxy of murder, land theft, destruction of property and all the other human misery that Israel has caused in the region.
So, if you're one of those rah-rah Israel First supporters, don't complain when the terrorists come looking for you. You've allowed your politicians to enlist you in somebody else's war, and in war there are always casualties on both sides.
America has become a nation of pathological irresponsibility. Nobody wants to take responsibility for his or her own actions, which is the basic cause of the litigation flood. Least of all do American politicians wish to do so. They would rather heap on the manure that the terrorism directed at us has nothing whatsoever to do with the policies they have followed for the past 30 years or more. In truth, it has everything to do with those policies.
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High-end consumers are spending big
It sure is nice being rich in Bush's America.
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Friday, March 26, 2004
The Clarke circus
Richard Clarke's hit a nerve, cause the Bushies are hitting back hard, throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the former "terrorism czar" in order to impugn his credibility. This political circus is pretty amusing to witness, since I really don't think Clarke has added much to our understanding of how this administration has functioned during its time in office.
Of course, considering his position of authority, I suppose you can say Clarke adds credibility to the charges that the Bushies have never handled the threat of terrorism properly, or that Iraq was a distraction and part of an ideological crusade that has nothing to do with terrorism, and which actually puts the United States at greater risk of terrorist reprisal by inflaming sentiment around the world and creating a groundswell of support for Islamist causes. But these allegedly controversial charges have been uncontroversial for quite some time, I think.
Condi Rice's performance throughout this charade has been pretty funny, too, as she incessantly lobs comments that dispute Clarke's testimony and book, all the while trying to avoid being held accountable -- under oath, that is -- for anything she's said or done.
Lastly, Josh Marshall has been keeping on top of the efforts to smear Clarke. It's dirty work, but someone has to do it. Thus far, media figures on the right have sunk so low as to suggest Clarke might be a racist, and Bill Frist, the Senate Majority leader, is floating charges that Clarke maybe -- just maybe -- perjured himself.
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Ha, ha
The Dear Leader thinks the WMD issue is something to joke about, apparently.
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Not going anywhere
The US has found a loophole that will enable it to continue to control Iraq militarily, even once political sovereignty is transferred on June 30.
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Army survey reports low morale
The US Army has finally released its report on the mental health issues soldiers are grappling with in Iraq. Amongst a variety of details, the Army has found a suicide rate of 17.3 per 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, which tops the Vietnam war rate of 15.6 and the first Gulf war rate of 3.6. Additionally,
The report also detailed low morale among Army soldiers, with 72 percent of those questioned characterizing morale as either low or very low in their unit and 52 percent saying their personal morale was either low or very low.
Combat stress was caused by seeing dead bodies, personally coming under attack or knowing someone who was killed or seriously wounded, the report said. Other factors included soldiers' uncertainty over when they would go home.
The report found that soldiers who showed signs of depression, anxiety or traumatic stress were more likely to say it was too difficult to get help from the Army.
About 57 percent of personnel in combat stress-control units and 67 percent in mental health offices attached to Army divisions in Iraq cited insufficient supplies of key medications, including antidepressants and sleep medications. I also ran across, via the MojoBlog, an article by a former Army commander who served in Iraq. Initially published in January, it illustrates rather vividly the chaos soldiers have been experiencing:
An explosion rocks the vehicle in front of you, throwing soldiers onto the street. You see the vehicle rise up onto two wheels before settling and rolling to a stop. AK-47 fire and RPGs are heard almost simultaneously. Your soldiers stagger about trying to shake off the effects of the concussion. Some fire wildly in different directions because the cracking of the AK-47s are echoing off the buildings, so you cannot pinpoint the direction of fire. The battle drill says to clear the kill zone, but you have competing priorities. First, you have casualties that need to be secured, assessed and stabilized. Second, if you run, you won’t kill the enemy or deter them. You must fight back and hopefully kill them. Do you stay in the kill zone and fight?
This happened to my soldiers and me. Sadly, this has happened to my company and me on several occasions in various forms. On this day, I lost a platoon sergeant and it was a devastating experience to many soldiers. He is alive but when I got to that truck he was a pile of blood and matter. His leg was completely blown off with shrapnel wounds all over him. He stayed there as we secured everything, trying to still lead his soldiers. We fought back that day, killing one suspected enemy and detaining two more. This reaction occurred due to rehearsals, AARs, aggressive leadership at every level, and discipline.
...American soldiers are facing men with a cell phone is one hand, a RPG in the other, and ill-conceived hatred in their heart. This enemy is asymmetric in the most unpredictable way. US forces will face this threat for months in Iraq, if not years... No wonder stress levels are so high.
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Boy bomber becomes propaganda
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Thursday, March 25, 2004
Launching broadsides from the shadows
Meet Condoleeza Rice, paragon of truth, nobility, and courage, "shooting spit balls" from the "peanut gallery."
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Flawed poll
The highly touted poll from Oxford Research International that paints popular sentiment in Iraq in generally rosy terms is riddled with problems, says Brendan O'Neill.
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‘Your Government Failed You’
As the firestorm over Richard Clarke evolves with attacks and counterattacks not likely to cease any time soon, his testimony before the 9/11 commission has revealed that the assaults of that day might have been preventable.
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Girding the globe
"One year after U.S. tanks rolled through Iraq and more than two years after the United States bombed the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan," writes James Sterngold of the SF Chronicle, the Bush administration "has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.
"The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls 'lily pads.' They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries -- the traditional Cold War role of such installations -- but as jumping-off points for future 'preventive wars' and military missions."
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Black deaths in Iraq higher than in Vietnam
The percentage of black fatalities in the military is higher in Iraq than it was even during the Vietnam war, according to Sherrel Wheeler Stewart of BlackAmericaWeb.com.
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Engineering consent
The Sydney Morning Herald's Antony Loewenstein examines the NY Times' role in promoting the war on Iraq.
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Keeping tabs on a dissident
The LA Times has discovered that the FBI spied on John Kerry during his protest campaign against the Vietnam war in the 1970s.
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Medicare in worse trouble than thought
If the current trend of rising medical costs and diminished treasury receipts continues, this year's annual report from the Medicare board of trustees warns that the federal health insurance program for the elderly will go bankrupt by 2019.
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Peaking oil?
When will the oil spigot start drying up? asks Verne Kopytoff in the SF Chronicle.
"Mounting evidence suggests that an important turning point may be close," he writes. "According to several studies, oil production is expected to begin a permanent decline within a few years, prompting social and economic upheaval across the globe.
"Or maybe not. A rival school of thought says that oil's imminent demise is exaggerated and that crude will be plentiful into the near future."
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Cornered?
The reports that a major Al Qaeda figure -- presumably Ayman al-Zawahiri -- was cornered in Pakistan last week seem to have deflated. "It now appears," according to Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times Online, "that world public opinion fell victim to a Musharraf-inspired web of disinformation."
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Sham of a democracy
This is a pretty telling report from the Associated Press about how Iraq's fledgling government is expected to mature over the next year or so.
Virtually every step of the way will be dominated by the American presence -- "nonpartisan Iraqi technocrats" will be groomed by US troops and advisers, Iraqi leaders will take their cues directly from the massive US Embassy being built in Baghdad, and the general budget will be lorded over by US officials like Paul Bremer.
"Democracy" will indeed flourish, but it will be the kind of democracy that is ultimately deferential to American interests.
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On Clarke
Rand Beers, John Brady Kiesling, John Brown, Greg Thielmann, Joseph Wilson, Karen Kwiatkowski, Paul O'Neill -- the list of former government workers who have indicted the Bush administration upon leaving their posts is lengthy. And now add perhaps the most damaging name: Richard Clarke.
Clarke is filling in the details, but the general thrust of his claims has long been known: Bush paid little attention to terrorism prior to 9/11, despite being warned periodically that a major attack was afoot; 9/11 was used as a pretext to invade Iraq; and, lastly, the war in Iraq has diverted resources, squandered political goodwill, and raised the ire of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Anyone who doesn't already see this administration as being inept, corrupt, and criminal is either hopelessly clueless or wholly indoctrinated.
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Yassin's assassination
Israel's "targeted killing" of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin promises to be a significant turning point in the trajectory of the Israel-Palestine conflict. While Israel claims the move was meant to strike a blow against terror and presumably safeguard its citizens, the assassination is better seen as a remarkably aggressive and reckless move that will only inflame tensions and lead to more attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. Many have noted Hamas' statement that this provocation promises to "open the gates of hell" -- which seems like a very real possibility.
Most significantly, as Rashid Khalidi has observed, Yassin's killing "may well be the last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution." It will also throw a groundwell of support behind Hamas and significantly undercut the Palestinian Authority, particularly in the Gaza Strip.
But if history is any guide, this may be precisely the point. Israel rather notoriously mid-wifed Hamas during the 1970s in order to undercut the PLO, and therefore reduce the possibility of any sustained negotiations that could resolve the conflict. The same rationale is likely at work here, with Sharon hoping to provoke further violence which might then justify harsher measures by the Israelis -- like expulsion -- under the rubric of defending Israelis from further violence.
Israel has signaled a desire to resolve this conflict only with the application of military force. The response from the Palestinians will mirror this militarism. The coming months promise to be very grim, even moreso than usual.
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M20
I wound up making my way up to NYC for the antiwar protest on Saturday. It was a great day -- gorgeous weather, people out in droves, and cops as tempered as I've ever seen at a protest.
There were much fewer people than at last year's protest, although the overall environment was much more relaxed. Gone were the cattle pens, thankfully. A circular march down Madison Ave. and up 6th Ave. was even allowed, too. Estimates of the crowd ranged from around 30,000 (city) to 100,000 (march organizers); take the average and you probably have an accurate figure.
Here's a roundup and corresponding pictures from other protests from around the world.
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Saturday, March 20, 2004
One year later...
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Friday, March 19, 2004
Lazy blogging
* US oil prices have hit a 13 year high.
* Are the Balkans set to explode again?
* "A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond," the Washington Post reminds us. Things haven't quite worked out as the Bush administration said they would.
* Thus far, 660 Iraqis have been killed in suicide bombings since the beginning of the war.
* Norman Solomon asks, "Can the United States credibly wage a 'war on terrorism' by engaging in warfare that terrorizes civilians?"
* Pakistani troops are allegedly "closing in" on Bin Laden's right hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The "spring offensive" might be paying off.
* The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a group which claims to be linked with Al Qaeda, wants Bush to beat Kerry in the 2004 elections.
* "Scientists have produced the first comprehensive evidence that the diversity of butterflies, birds and plants is in decline in the UK," the Guardian reports. "They say their research supports the argument that mass extinction threatens life on Earth."
* The LA Times reports, "The numbers of Hispanics and Asians in the United States will triple over the next half-century as an aging white population slips from its traditional majority perch, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections being released today."
* Par for the course: Bush Medicare Lies and Propaganda.
* Jerry M. Landay outlines the players behind the Bush attack machine.
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