AP
9 minutes ago
Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip on Saturday to end a five-month Israeli military offensive and the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants into the Jewish state, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Saturday.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas confirmed the cease-fire, saying it would take effect at 6 a.m. Sunday.
Abbas telephoned Olmert late Saturday to tell him he had arrived at an agreement with all Palestinian factions to stop firing rockets into Israel from the coastal strip, Olmert spokeswoman Miri Eisin said.
She said Abbas asked that Israel reciprocate by stopping all military operations in Gaza and withdrawing its forces, and Olmert agreed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061125/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Bubble Trouble
Friday, November 24. 2006
Real Estate Investment Trusts
By Ralph Nader
The torrid pace of risks and valuations reached a new level in the business known as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). Required by federal law to pass on most of their earnings to their shareholders, REIT shares have been going up and up for eight straight years, with this year clocking an unexpected 30% rise all by itself for commercial real estate
Judging by the absence of warnings from financial writers and columnists about soaring REIT stocks and the recent record prices paid by debt-loaded private-equity firms to buy publicly held REITs listed on the stock exchanges, the tempo is still bullish—full speed ahead!
That’s when you know that trouble with this bubble lies on the horizon. When it’s all bulls and no bears.
Twenty years ago, Felix Rohatyn, leading partner of Lazard Frères & Company, a major investment bank, told me he worries a lot about speculative excess on Wall Street. “The thing that strikes me in a lot of this is how little real professionals,” he said, “understand risk…. The leveraged buyout is a risk evaluation. People take a pedestrian company with 20 percent debt and 80 percent equity and they turn it into 80 percent debt and 20 percent equity, all of a sudden you have a terrific business. It doesn’t make any sense.”
It may not have made sense then, but for the first acquirers it usually made them a lot of dollars. Mr. Rohatyn saw “a massive and deeply institutionalized gap between those who risk and those who pay.”
I wonder what he thinks about gaps, risks and valuations now as he looks out of his Manhattan suite at New York’s real estate spiral. He could envision the following prudent behavior. That these commercial apartment and office buildings would be valued at about ten times their net annual earnings. Or he could observe what is really going on when these structures—individually or in clusters—change hands.
In recent days, private-equity companies are reported to be interested in buying public REITs that are trading between 30 and 55 times earnings. When the Blackstone Group paid about a ten percent premium to acquire Equity Office REIT—already selling at its high for the year—Equity Office’s largest shareholder, Cohen & Steers, thought the sales price at $48 was too low. C & S’s Jim Corl explained his appraisal by declaring the cost of buying all the properties in Equity Office’s portfolio would have been in the $60 range.
One New York City-based REIT saw its stock double in the past twelve months to $138 a share from a then record high. It is presently selling at 55 times earnings and yielding 1.7 percent. Like many other REITs, this one experienced a sharp share increase the day of the Blackstone acquisition news announcement that was seen by Wall Street as possibly signaling a takeover binge by these cash-loaded private-equity firms.
Now, to repeat, apartment and other commercial buildings are bought to make profit. Why would a buyer pay, not ten times the net annual income, but 30, 40, 50 or more times? The answers to that question would probe deeply into the ways complicated financial deals hand off that risk to other investors, tier the risk through instruments such as “toggle” bonds, and take advantage of accommodating tax breaks and low interest rates in a period of bulging capital surpluses looking for appreciating investments.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer S. Forsyth was intrigued enough to interview Sam Zell, called the legendary Chicago-based real estate mogul who sold Equity Office to the Blackstone Group. Zell quickly told her that “this is the greatest period of monetization in the history of the world. That huge amount of liquidity that’s floating around is not something that would be absorbed in weeks. I think it will take more like six years.”
Ms. Forsyth asked why are so many REITs being taken private? Ever the booster, Mr. Zell replied that private investors are willing to work at higher risk-levels than the public markets which have fiduciary obligations to their shareholders and therefore have adopted “a philosophy of very conservative leverage.” Most public REITs pay between 3 and 7 percent dividends. These private investors are really seeking quick capital gains for the risk—a more risky adventure.
Now comes the key question. She asked, “You’ve said that the public markets undervalued your company. Why?”
Mr. Zell’s response: “Basically over the last few years, the analytical community was continually behind in their evaluations of office assets.” Whew!
The absence of any concern about excessive risk, any reference to the slowdown in the economy, any mention that the amount of space companies leased during the third quarter was significantly lower than the first half of 2006, any reference to continuing construction of new buildings, or most remarkable, the huge debt loads that are being incurred.
Mr. Zell has been around since the Sixties and has seen busts followed by booms in real estate. Yet he seems to see nothing scary on the horizon.
Tiers of debt always are scary, especially when Uncle Sam does not actively bail out real estate and its financiers. Millions of younger, middle-age and older adults find it scary because they are being driven out of cities due to unaffordable rents and condo prices. So too do small businesses find it scary having to close their stores when their leases expire because they can’t come close to paying the new rents.
Maybe the major question of them all is: Who is real estate for first? Real people or speculating financiers. Real people or corporations playing with bricks-and-mortars as if they were just a numbers game in a fast turnover bazaar.
Speak out, Mr. Rohatyn.
http://www.nader.org/template.php?/archives/1123-Real-Estate-Investment-Trusts.html#extended
Real Estate Investment Trusts
By Ralph Nader
The torrid pace of risks and valuations reached a new level in the business known as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). Required by federal law to pass on most of their earnings to their shareholders, REIT shares have been going up and up for eight straight years, with this year clocking an unexpected 30% rise all by itself for commercial real estate
Judging by the absence of warnings from financial writers and columnists about soaring REIT stocks and the recent record prices paid by debt-loaded private-equity firms to buy publicly held REITs listed on the stock exchanges, the tempo is still bullish—full speed ahead!
That’s when you know that trouble with this bubble lies on the horizon. When it’s all bulls and no bears.
Twenty years ago, Felix Rohatyn, leading partner of Lazard Frères & Company, a major investment bank, told me he worries a lot about speculative excess on Wall Street. “The thing that strikes me in a lot of this is how little real professionals,” he said, “understand risk…. The leveraged buyout is a risk evaluation. People take a pedestrian company with 20 percent debt and 80 percent equity and they turn it into 80 percent debt and 20 percent equity, all of a sudden you have a terrific business. It doesn’t make any sense.”
It may not have made sense then, but for the first acquirers it usually made them a lot of dollars. Mr. Rohatyn saw “a massive and deeply institutionalized gap between those who risk and those who pay.”
I wonder what he thinks about gaps, risks and valuations now as he looks out of his Manhattan suite at New York’s real estate spiral. He could envision the following prudent behavior. That these commercial apartment and office buildings would be valued at about ten times their net annual earnings. Or he could observe what is really going on when these structures—individually or in clusters—change hands.
In recent days, private-equity companies are reported to be interested in buying public REITs that are trading between 30 and 55 times earnings. When the Blackstone Group paid about a ten percent premium to acquire Equity Office REIT—already selling at its high for the year—Equity Office’s largest shareholder, Cohen & Steers, thought the sales price at $48 was too low. C & S’s Jim Corl explained his appraisal by declaring the cost of buying all the properties in Equity Office’s portfolio would have been in the $60 range.
One New York City-based REIT saw its stock double in the past twelve months to $138 a share from a then record high. It is presently selling at 55 times earnings and yielding 1.7 percent. Like many other REITs, this one experienced a sharp share increase the day of the Blackstone acquisition news announcement that was seen by Wall Street as possibly signaling a takeover binge by these cash-loaded private-equity firms.
Now, to repeat, apartment and other commercial buildings are bought to make profit. Why would a buyer pay, not ten times the net annual income, but 30, 40, 50 or more times? The answers to that question would probe deeply into the ways complicated financial deals hand off that risk to other investors, tier the risk through instruments such as “toggle” bonds, and take advantage of accommodating tax breaks and low interest rates in a period of bulging capital surpluses looking for appreciating investments.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer S. Forsyth was intrigued enough to interview Sam Zell, called the legendary Chicago-based real estate mogul who sold Equity Office to the Blackstone Group. Zell quickly told her that “this is the greatest period of monetization in the history of the world. That huge amount of liquidity that’s floating around is not something that would be absorbed in weeks. I think it will take more like six years.”
Ms. Forsyth asked why are so many REITs being taken private? Ever the booster, Mr. Zell replied that private investors are willing to work at higher risk-levels than the public markets which have fiduciary obligations to their shareholders and therefore have adopted “a philosophy of very conservative leverage.” Most public REITs pay between 3 and 7 percent dividends. These private investors are really seeking quick capital gains for the risk—a more risky adventure.
Now comes the key question. She asked, “You’ve said that the public markets undervalued your company. Why?”
Mr. Zell’s response: “Basically over the last few years, the analytical community was continually behind in their evaluations of office assets.” Whew!
The absence of any concern about excessive risk, any reference to the slowdown in the economy, any mention that the amount of space companies leased during the third quarter was significantly lower than the first half of 2006, any reference to continuing construction of new buildings, or most remarkable, the huge debt loads that are being incurred.
Mr. Zell has been around since the Sixties and has seen busts followed by booms in real estate. Yet he seems to see nothing scary on the horizon.
Tiers of debt always are scary, especially when Uncle Sam does not actively bail out real estate and its financiers. Millions of younger, middle-age and older adults find it scary because they are being driven out of cities due to unaffordable rents and condo prices. So too do small businesses find it scary having to close their stores when their leases expire because they can’t come close to paying the new rents.
Maybe the major question of them all is: Who is real estate for first? Real people or speculating financiers. Real people or corporations playing with bricks-and-mortars as if they were just a numbers game in a fast turnover bazaar.
Speak out, Mr. Rohatyn.
http://www.nader.org/template.php?/archives/1123-Real-Estate-Investment-Trusts.html#extended
Factors in Our Colossal Mess
November 25,2006
By Gabriel Kolko
Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare.
These are dismal days for those who attempt to run the affairs of the world. But how should we understand it?
It would be a basic error to look at our present situation as if it were rationally comprehensible. The limits of rational explanations are that they assume rational men and women make decisions and that they will respect the limits of their power and behave realistically. This has rarely been true anywhere historically over the past century, and politics and illusions based on ideology or wishful thinking have often been decisive. This is especially the case with the present bunch in Washington.
We are right to fear anything, particularly a war with Iran that would immediately reel out of control and have catastrophic consequences not only to the region but globally. We are also correct to see limits to the power of irrational people, for the United States is strategically weak. It loses the big wars, as in Korea, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq-even though its tactical victories often prove to be very successful-but also ultimately destabilizing and ephemeral. Had the U.S. not overthrown the Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1954 it is very likely the mullahs would never have come to power and we would not now be considering a dangerous war there.
Although the whole is far more important than the parts, the details of each part deserve attention. Many of these aspects are known, even predictable, there are -- to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld -- the "known unknowns and the unknown unknowns" -- the "x-factor" that intercedes to surprise everyone. All of these problems are interrelated, interacting and potentially aggravate or inhibit each other, perhaps decisively, making our world both very difficult to understand -- or to run. Putting them together is a formidable challenge to thinking people outside systems of power. It has always been this way; fascism was in large part the result of economic crisis, and World War Two was the outcome. How factors combine is a great mystery and cannot be predicted -- not by U S or by those ambitious souls who have the great task of making sure there is no chaos. We wish to comprehend it but it is not decisive if we don't; for those who have responsibility to manage it, this myopia will produce the end of their world-and their privileges.
What is important to watch?
We can rule out the Left, that artifact of past history. Socialism ceased being a real option long ago, perhaps as early as 1914. Since I have just published an entire book, After Socialism, and detailed its innumerable myopias and faults, I need not say more than that it is no longer is a threat to anybody. The fakirs who lead the parties who still use "socialism" as a justification for their existence have only abolished defeats at the hands of the people from the price capitalism pays for its growing follies. That confidence- freedom from challenge by the unruly masses-- is very important but it is less and less sufficient to solve the countless remaining dilemmas. The system has become increasingly vulnerable, social stability notwithstanding, since about 1990 and the formal demise of "communism".
Assume Anarchy
The failure of socialist theory is much more than matched by the failure of capitalism because the latter has the entire responsibility for keeping the status quo functioning-and it has no intellectual basis for doing so. The crisis that exists is that capitalism has reached a most dangerous stage in destructiveness -- and no opposition to it exists. This malaise involves foreign affairs and domestic affairs -- vast greed at home and adventure overseas. If the foreign policy aspects are largely American-originated, the rest of the world tolerates or sometimes collaborates with it. Its downfall is inevitable, perhaps imminent. The chaos that exists will exist in a void. No powerful force exists to challenge, much less replace it, and therefore it will continue to exist -- but at immense and growing human cost. Alternative visions are, for the moment at least, mostly cranky.
Ingenious and precarious schemes in the world economy today have great legitimacy and flourish in the sense that the postulates of classical economics postulated are fast becoming irrelevant. It is the era of the fast talker and buccaneer-snake-oil salesmen in suits. Nothing old-fashioned has credibility. Joseph Schumpeter and other economists worried about pirates, but they are more important today than ever before-including than during the late 19th century when they were immortalized in Charles Francis Adams Jr's Chapters of Erie. The leitmotif is "innovation," and many respectables are extremely worried. I argued here in Counterpunch recently (June 15 and July 26) that gloom prevails among experts responsible for overseeing national and global financial affairs, especially the Bank for International Settlements, but I grossly underestimated the extent of anxieties among those who know the most about these matters. More importantly, over the past months officials at much higher levels have also become much more articulate and concerned about the dominant trends in global finance and the fact that risks are quickly growing and are now enormous. Generally, people who think of themselves as leftists know precious little of those questions, questions that are vital to the very health of the status quo. But those most au courant with global financial trends have been sounding the alarm louder and louder.
The problem is that capitalism has become more aberrant, improvisatory, and self-destructive than ever. We are in the age of the predator and gamblers, people who want to get very rich very quickly and are wholly oblivious to the larger consequences. Power exists but the theory to describe the economy which was inherited from the 19th century bears no relationship whatsoever to the way it operates in practice, a fact more and more recognized by those who favor a system of privilege and inequality. Even some senior IMF executives now acknowledge that the theory that powerful organization cherish is based on outmoded 19th century illusions. "Reconstructing economic theory virtually from scratch" and purging economics of "neoclassical idiocies," or that its "demonstrably false conceptual core is sustained by inertia alone," is now the subject of very acute articles in none other than the Financial Times, the most influential and widely-read daily in the capitalist world.
As an economic system capitalism is going crazy. In late November there were $75 billion in global mergers and acquisitions in a 24-hour period-a record. Global capitalism is awash with liquidity -- virtually free money -- and anyone who borrows can become very rich, assuming they win. The beauty of the hedge fund is that individual risks become far smaller and one can join with others to bet big -- and much more precariously. Henced, spectacular chances are now being taken: on the value of the U.S. dollar, the price of oil, real estate -- and countless others gambles. In the case of Amaranth Advisors, this outfit lost about $6.5 billion at the end of September on an erroneous weather prediction and went under. At least 2,600 hedge funds were founded from the beginning of 2005 to October 2006, but 1,100 went out of business. The new financial instruments -- derivatives, hedge funds, incomprehensible financial inventions of every sort-are growing at a phenomenal rate, but their common characteristic, as one Financial Times writer, John Plender, summed it up on November 20. , is that "everyone [has] become less risk adverse." Therein lies the danger.
Hedge funds will bet on anything, natural disasters and, soon, longevity of pension fund members being only the latest examples of their addiction to taking chances. London is fast replacing New York as the center of this activity, and the capital market in general, because the regulatory regime of the government the British Labour Party established is much more favorable to this sort of activity than that Bush's Republican minions allow -- though this may change because Wall Street does not like losing business.
On September 12, 2006, the International Monetary Fund released its report on "Global Financial Stability," and it was unprecedented in its concern that "new and complex financial instruments, such as structured credit products," might wreak untold havoc. "Liberalization," which the "Washington consensus" and IMF had preached and helped realize, now threatens the US dollar and much else. "The rapid growth of hedge funds and credit derivative mechanisms in recent years adds to uncertainty," and might aggravate the "market turbulence and systemic impact" of once-benign events. Hedge funds, it warned, have already "suffered noticeable losses."
At the end of October, again the Financial Times, Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, deplored these new financial products, which have been increasing and growing into the trillions. He wrote that he could not comprehend them; that there is scant oversight over them; that many are pure hype; that nothing prevents them from creating immense domino effects on the entire financial system were they to collapse, thereby also dragging the well-regulated parts of the system down. Then, at the beginning of November the quasi-official UK Financial Services Authority issued a report that detailed the existing risks to the entire world financial structure. Despite its tone, it is dynamite.
The FSA report documents the many risks to the private equity sector: excessive leverage, unclear ownership of risk, market abuses and insider trading. There are conflicts of interest of every sort; the system is opaque; hedge funds made inherent dangers even riskier. "Given current leverage levels and recent developments in the economic/credit cycle, the default of a large private equity backed company or a cluster of smaller private equity backed companies seems inevitable."
Given this growing consensus of risks, on November 13 Sir John Gieve, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, concluded, in the Financial Times, that each national state regulating full-blown financial crises was no longer feasible: the financial system is international in scope today and no national mechanism can handle it. There have been at least 13 borderline or full-blown financial crises since the late 1970s and some of the methods for dealing with them would be "less easy to deploy" under present conditions-which is a polite way of saying they were irrelevant. His conclusion: Regulators "should practise coping with global crisis," "work together" on practical examples to develop machinery, especially to avoid the "moral hazards" of bailing out firms in trouble, including "closing down a large firm in an orderly way."
The chances of developing a common trans-national approach or rules are close to zero, if only because nations of the world are rivals in the bid to attract financial companies and regulation, or lack of it, is a major factor on where to headquarter. When the next financial crisis occurs, and the likelihood of that happening has grown by leaps and bounds, it is more likely than ever to drag the entire global economy with it. At least the "experts" think so. They did not before now.
So economics may foul up politics. Perhaps not, but it could become a very important factor in the overall situation.
Power in Washington
President Bush made the election a referendum on the war and was badly repudiated; his party suffered a disaster. Disorientation, depression, and defeat have left the president and his neoconservatives adrift. They have power, two more years of it, and we are at the mercy of people who are irresponsible and dangerous. Their rhetoric proved a recipe for disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq -- a surrealistic nightmare. The American public is largely antiwar (55 percent of those who voted disapproved of the war, most of them strongly); they voted against the war and only tangentially for Democrats, most of who vaguely implied they would do something about the Iraq war but immediately after the election shamelessly reaffirmed their support for its essence. But people, and voters in particular, are such a nuisance everywhere. More quickly than in the past, they respond to reality, which means that traditional politicians must betray them very speedily. They create certain decisive parameters that ambitious politicians flout at greater risk than ever because the people have shown themselves ready to vote the rascals-whether Democrats in 1952 and 1968 or Republicans last November -- out of office. The American public is more antiwar than ever, and no one can predict what the future holds, including some Republicans outflanking the Democrats from a sort of antiwar left so that they can remain, or gain, office. That the people are subsequently cynically ignored-as they have been immediately after the last American election--is a fact also, but their role can neither be overestimated nor gainsaid. Experience shows that politicians, whatever they call themselves or in any nation we can think of, can never be trusted. Ever. But the facts on the ground -- reality -- are today very bad for those who advocate wars.
Israel: the Dream Comes Apart
Hawks in Israel, ascendant since the founding of the Jewish state, are still debating their thirty-three day war in Lebanon and the decisive limits to their once awesome, ultra-sophisticated modern military power exposed by their Lebanon adventure. The Israeli press is full of accounts of ministers' sexual offenses and corruption. Ehud Olmert's government is badly divided, backbiting, and may fall soon. The army is openly split and Olmert would like to dump its chief of staff, Dan Halutz, and the minister of defense. The Zionist project is in an unprecedented state of disrepair, with profound demoralization taking hold. Olmert himself is a complete mediocrity, a minor Likud politician who parlayed himself into the number two spot and was lucky. His comment when he visited the U.S. in the middle of November that America's Iraq war had brought stability to the region either infuriated or embarrassed everyone. He is basically a shrewd politician but very stupid man.
The most devastating analyses of Israel's war in Lebanon have appeared in Israel itself, and "the fact the Israeli army is at a low point," according to a writer in Haaretz, has goaded rather than deterred Iran. "Almost every weapon lost its significance and effectiveness as soon as it was used," Ofer Shelah wrote in the Jaffee Center's Strategic Assessment. The Israeli military relied on massive, overwhelming firepower delivered by the most modern means possible and it failed to stop incoming rockets and enemy mobility, much less win the war. Hizbollah not only showed Syria how to defeat the Israeli army but made Iran much more confident they can carry on what it is doing. The entire government and army leadership was incompetent.
From its very inception there was a warrior ethic in the Zionist ideology, one it shared with diverse reactionaries in Europe. Both its left-wing as well as the Right have nourished it, and Joseph Trumpeldor, the hero of this militant mentality, was one of the founders of Zionist socialism-a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair, the far left of this tendency. But the cult of heroism in Israel has made way for military technocrats who read digital print-outs (as described in Defense Tech, Nov. 20, 2006.) Morale in Israel, and especially the once elitist military, has plummeted. The arms industry there is very large, and like its American equivalents need subsidies -- computer-based war is very expensive and greatly helps employment. But Lebanon only showed Israel what the Americans learned elsewhere -- it loses.
There are many dangers, from fascistic politicians like Avigdor Lieberman becoming even more powerful, to yet greater emigration abroad of those Jews with high skills. The latter is happening. Israel's ability to flout European opinion with impunity or to have Washington embark on military adventures from which Israel gains is increasingly limited. France has warned Israel that should it initiate a war with Iran it would create "a total disaster" for the entire world". Oil prices would rise, the entire Arab world would unite behind the Iranians, and Israel would be targeted but so would other nations. Even more important, Israeli strategists admit that Iranian nuclear weapons would only create a stable deterrent relationship between the two nations, and are not an "existential threat."
Repentance or Rapture?
Above all, in Iraq the American government is facing the failure of its entire Middle East project, an illusion in which the Israelis have a profound interest. Bush and gang are in a state of denial, but the U.S. is going the way of its defeat in Korea and Vietnam, and its military is increasingly overstretched and demoralized. It has based its foreign policies on fantasies and non-existent dangers, neo-con dreams and desires, only partially to meet equally illusory Israeli objectives to transform the entire Middle East so that it accepts Israel in whatever form the fickle Israeli electorate presents it. American foreign policy has been fraught with dangers since 1945, and I have documented them extensively, but this is the worst set of incompetents ever to hold power in Washington. It "shocked and awed," to use the departed Secretary of Defense's phrase, itself. Things are going disastrously for conservative warriors.
But it is very difficult to anticipate what this administration will come up with, though disasters over the past six years have made a number of alternatives far less probable. In a way, that is a good thing, although the cost in lives lost and wealth squandered has been immense. The Baker/Hamilton bipartisan commission is deeply split and if -- with emphasis on "if" -- if it happens to come up with a clear alternative the president is free to ignore it. The Pentagon has formulated alternatives, summed up as "go big," "go long"-both of which would require 5 to 10 years to "Iraqize" the war-- or "go home", but it is divided also. One thing certain, however, is that it has neither manpower, materiel, nor political freedom to make the same mistakes as in Vietnam-as the first two alternatives would have it do. There are no options in Iraq because the U S has traumatized the entire nation and created immense problems for which it has no solutions. No one can predict what it will do in Iraq because the administration wishes to preserve the illusion of success and is genuinely confused how to proceed. It has produced chaos. Iraq is very likely to remain a tragedy, one wracked by violence, for years to come. The Bush administration has created a massive disaster involving the lives of many millions of people.
A great deal depends on the President, whose policy has utterly failed in Iraq, is failing in Lebanon, and one of his options is escalation -- war with Iran. Israel might attack Iran in order to drag America in, but by itself it can only be a catalyst. Olmert and Bush approach these issues in a remarkably similar fashion. Either way, Bush has not ruled out war with Iran despite warnings from many military men that such a conflict would have vast repercussions, probably last years, and the U.S. would likely lose the war, even if it used nuclear weapons, after creating an Armageddon.
A number of the neocon theoreticians have repented the Iraq adventure, and even criticized some the basic premises that motivated it, but it would be an error to assume that this administration has some contact with reality and can be educated-by the electorate or by alienated neocon intellectuals. There are still plenty of people in Washington who advocate going for broke, who still retain fantastic illusions. There remains the imponderable factor of rapture -- fantasy and illusions mixed with desires. Is victory around the corner if we escalate with more troops? Will the Iraqi troops the Americans train attain victory over enemies that eluded U.S. forces? Many much wiser presidents have pursued such chimeras. Why not Bush too? Facts on the ground, which are much greater in constricting American power than they were six years ago, are a critical factor. They may not be sufficient to prevent irrational behavior. We simply cannot know.
All of these factors, and perhaps others not mentioned here, will affect each other. The whole is very often no stronger than all the parts. All surprises that thwart the Bush administration's freedom to act are now to be welcomed, and while the world's financial system is the leading candidate for upsetting the U.S.'s calculations, it is scarcely the only one. The facts on the ground, realities rather than decisions, are usually crucial, and here the U S is losing in its megalomaniac ambition to shape the world. It has been this way for many nations led by men far superior in intellect to George Bush.
Wishes are not reality and the U S has an endemic ability to hold onto its wishes and fantasies as long as possible. Desire often leads to its acting despite itself. But its resources are far more constrained now than they were six years ago, much less for the United States during the Vietnam War-which it lost. The American public is already deeply alienated, the world financial system is teetering, the U S' military resources are virtually exhausted.
We shall see.
By Gabriel Kolko
Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare.
These are dismal days for those who attempt to run the affairs of the world. But how should we understand it?
It would be a basic error to look at our present situation as if it were rationally comprehensible. The limits of rational explanations are that they assume rational men and women make decisions and that they will respect the limits of their power and behave realistically. This has rarely been true anywhere historically over the past century, and politics and illusions based on ideology or wishful thinking have often been decisive. This is especially the case with the present bunch in Washington.
We are right to fear anything, particularly a war with Iran that would immediately reel out of control and have catastrophic consequences not only to the region but globally. We are also correct to see limits to the power of irrational people, for the United States is strategically weak. It loses the big wars, as in Korea, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq-even though its tactical victories often prove to be very successful-but also ultimately destabilizing and ephemeral. Had the U.S. not overthrown the Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1954 it is very likely the mullahs would never have come to power and we would not now be considering a dangerous war there.
Although the whole is far more important than the parts, the details of each part deserve attention. Many of these aspects are known, even predictable, there are -- to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld -- the "known unknowns and the unknown unknowns" -- the "x-factor" that intercedes to surprise everyone. All of these problems are interrelated, interacting and potentially aggravate or inhibit each other, perhaps decisively, making our world both very difficult to understand -- or to run. Putting them together is a formidable challenge to thinking people outside systems of power. It has always been this way; fascism was in large part the result of economic crisis, and World War Two was the outcome. How factors combine is a great mystery and cannot be predicted -- not by U S or by those ambitious souls who have the great task of making sure there is no chaos. We wish to comprehend it but it is not decisive if we don't; for those who have responsibility to manage it, this myopia will produce the end of their world-and their privileges.
What is important to watch?
We can rule out the Left, that artifact of past history. Socialism ceased being a real option long ago, perhaps as early as 1914. Since I have just published an entire book, After Socialism, and detailed its innumerable myopias and faults, I need not say more than that it is no longer is a threat to anybody. The fakirs who lead the parties who still use "socialism" as a justification for their existence have only abolished defeats at the hands of the people from the price capitalism pays for its growing follies. That confidence- freedom from challenge by the unruly masses-- is very important but it is less and less sufficient to solve the countless remaining dilemmas. The system has become increasingly vulnerable, social stability notwithstanding, since about 1990 and the formal demise of "communism".
Assume Anarchy
The failure of socialist theory is much more than matched by the failure of capitalism because the latter has the entire responsibility for keeping the status quo functioning-and it has no intellectual basis for doing so. The crisis that exists is that capitalism has reached a most dangerous stage in destructiveness -- and no opposition to it exists. This malaise involves foreign affairs and domestic affairs -- vast greed at home and adventure overseas. If the foreign policy aspects are largely American-originated, the rest of the world tolerates or sometimes collaborates with it. Its downfall is inevitable, perhaps imminent. The chaos that exists will exist in a void. No powerful force exists to challenge, much less replace it, and therefore it will continue to exist -- but at immense and growing human cost. Alternative visions are, for the moment at least, mostly cranky.
Ingenious and precarious schemes in the world economy today have great legitimacy and flourish in the sense that the postulates of classical economics postulated are fast becoming irrelevant. It is the era of the fast talker and buccaneer-snake-oil salesmen in suits. Nothing old-fashioned has credibility. Joseph Schumpeter and other economists worried about pirates, but they are more important today than ever before-including than during the late 19th century when they were immortalized in Charles Francis Adams Jr's Chapters of Erie. The leitmotif is "innovation," and many respectables are extremely worried. I argued here in Counterpunch recently (June 15 and July 26) that gloom prevails among experts responsible for overseeing national and global financial affairs, especially the Bank for International Settlements, but I grossly underestimated the extent of anxieties among those who know the most about these matters. More importantly, over the past months officials at much higher levels have also become much more articulate and concerned about the dominant trends in global finance and the fact that risks are quickly growing and are now enormous. Generally, people who think of themselves as leftists know precious little of those questions, questions that are vital to the very health of the status quo. But those most au courant with global financial trends have been sounding the alarm louder and louder.
The problem is that capitalism has become more aberrant, improvisatory, and self-destructive than ever. We are in the age of the predator and gamblers, people who want to get very rich very quickly and are wholly oblivious to the larger consequences. Power exists but the theory to describe the economy which was inherited from the 19th century bears no relationship whatsoever to the way it operates in practice, a fact more and more recognized by those who favor a system of privilege and inequality. Even some senior IMF executives now acknowledge that the theory that powerful organization cherish is based on outmoded 19th century illusions. "Reconstructing economic theory virtually from scratch" and purging economics of "neoclassical idiocies," or that its "demonstrably false conceptual core is sustained by inertia alone," is now the subject of very acute articles in none other than the Financial Times, the most influential and widely-read daily in the capitalist world.
As an economic system capitalism is going crazy. In late November there were $75 billion in global mergers and acquisitions in a 24-hour period-a record. Global capitalism is awash with liquidity -- virtually free money -- and anyone who borrows can become very rich, assuming they win. The beauty of the hedge fund is that individual risks become far smaller and one can join with others to bet big -- and much more precariously. Henced, spectacular chances are now being taken: on the value of the U.S. dollar, the price of oil, real estate -- and countless others gambles. In the case of Amaranth Advisors, this outfit lost about $6.5 billion at the end of September on an erroneous weather prediction and went under. At least 2,600 hedge funds were founded from the beginning of 2005 to October 2006, but 1,100 went out of business. The new financial instruments -- derivatives, hedge funds, incomprehensible financial inventions of every sort-are growing at a phenomenal rate, but their common characteristic, as one Financial Times writer, John Plender, summed it up on November 20. , is that "everyone [has] become less risk adverse." Therein lies the danger.
Hedge funds will bet on anything, natural disasters and, soon, longevity of pension fund members being only the latest examples of their addiction to taking chances. London is fast replacing New York as the center of this activity, and the capital market in general, because the regulatory regime of the government the British Labour Party established is much more favorable to this sort of activity than that Bush's Republican minions allow -- though this may change because Wall Street does not like losing business.
On September 12, 2006, the International Monetary Fund released its report on "Global Financial Stability," and it was unprecedented in its concern that "new and complex financial instruments, such as structured credit products," might wreak untold havoc. "Liberalization," which the "Washington consensus" and IMF had preached and helped realize, now threatens the US dollar and much else. "The rapid growth of hedge funds and credit derivative mechanisms in recent years adds to uncertainty," and might aggravate the "market turbulence and systemic impact" of once-benign events. Hedge funds, it warned, have already "suffered noticeable losses."
At the end of October, again the Financial Times, Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, deplored these new financial products, which have been increasing and growing into the trillions. He wrote that he could not comprehend them; that there is scant oversight over them; that many are pure hype; that nothing prevents them from creating immense domino effects on the entire financial system were they to collapse, thereby also dragging the well-regulated parts of the system down. Then, at the beginning of November the quasi-official UK Financial Services Authority issued a report that detailed the existing risks to the entire world financial structure. Despite its tone, it is dynamite.
The FSA report documents the many risks to the private equity sector: excessive leverage, unclear ownership of risk, market abuses and insider trading. There are conflicts of interest of every sort; the system is opaque; hedge funds made inherent dangers even riskier. "Given current leverage levels and recent developments in the economic/credit cycle, the default of a large private equity backed company or a cluster of smaller private equity backed companies seems inevitable."
Given this growing consensus of risks, on November 13 Sir John Gieve, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, concluded, in the Financial Times, that each national state regulating full-blown financial crises was no longer feasible: the financial system is international in scope today and no national mechanism can handle it. There have been at least 13 borderline or full-blown financial crises since the late 1970s and some of the methods for dealing with them would be "less easy to deploy" under present conditions-which is a polite way of saying they were irrelevant. His conclusion: Regulators "should practise coping with global crisis," "work together" on practical examples to develop machinery, especially to avoid the "moral hazards" of bailing out firms in trouble, including "closing down a large firm in an orderly way."
The chances of developing a common trans-national approach or rules are close to zero, if only because nations of the world are rivals in the bid to attract financial companies and regulation, or lack of it, is a major factor on where to headquarter. When the next financial crisis occurs, and the likelihood of that happening has grown by leaps and bounds, it is more likely than ever to drag the entire global economy with it. At least the "experts" think so. They did not before now.
So economics may foul up politics. Perhaps not, but it could become a very important factor in the overall situation.
Power in Washington
President Bush made the election a referendum on the war and was badly repudiated; his party suffered a disaster. Disorientation, depression, and defeat have left the president and his neoconservatives adrift. They have power, two more years of it, and we are at the mercy of people who are irresponsible and dangerous. Their rhetoric proved a recipe for disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq -- a surrealistic nightmare. The American public is largely antiwar (55 percent of those who voted disapproved of the war, most of them strongly); they voted against the war and only tangentially for Democrats, most of who vaguely implied they would do something about the Iraq war but immediately after the election shamelessly reaffirmed their support for its essence. But people, and voters in particular, are such a nuisance everywhere. More quickly than in the past, they respond to reality, which means that traditional politicians must betray them very speedily. They create certain decisive parameters that ambitious politicians flout at greater risk than ever because the people have shown themselves ready to vote the rascals-whether Democrats in 1952 and 1968 or Republicans last November -- out of office. The American public is more antiwar than ever, and no one can predict what the future holds, including some Republicans outflanking the Democrats from a sort of antiwar left so that they can remain, or gain, office. That the people are subsequently cynically ignored-as they have been immediately after the last American election--is a fact also, but their role can neither be overestimated nor gainsaid. Experience shows that politicians, whatever they call themselves or in any nation we can think of, can never be trusted. Ever. But the facts on the ground -- reality -- are today very bad for those who advocate wars.
Israel: the Dream Comes Apart
Hawks in Israel, ascendant since the founding of the Jewish state, are still debating their thirty-three day war in Lebanon and the decisive limits to their once awesome, ultra-sophisticated modern military power exposed by their Lebanon adventure. The Israeli press is full of accounts of ministers' sexual offenses and corruption. Ehud Olmert's government is badly divided, backbiting, and may fall soon. The army is openly split and Olmert would like to dump its chief of staff, Dan Halutz, and the minister of defense. The Zionist project is in an unprecedented state of disrepair, with profound demoralization taking hold. Olmert himself is a complete mediocrity, a minor Likud politician who parlayed himself into the number two spot and was lucky. His comment when he visited the U.S. in the middle of November that America's Iraq war had brought stability to the region either infuriated or embarrassed everyone. He is basically a shrewd politician but very stupid man.
The most devastating analyses of Israel's war in Lebanon have appeared in Israel itself, and "the fact the Israeli army is at a low point," according to a writer in Haaretz, has goaded rather than deterred Iran. "Almost every weapon lost its significance and effectiveness as soon as it was used," Ofer Shelah wrote in the Jaffee Center's Strategic Assessment. The Israeli military relied on massive, overwhelming firepower delivered by the most modern means possible and it failed to stop incoming rockets and enemy mobility, much less win the war. Hizbollah not only showed Syria how to defeat the Israeli army but made Iran much more confident they can carry on what it is doing. The entire government and army leadership was incompetent.
From its very inception there was a warrior ethic in the Zionist ideology, one it shared with diverse reactionaries in Europe. Both its left-wing as well as the Right have nourished it, and Joseph Trumpeldor, the hero of this militant mentality, was one of the founders of Zionist socialism-a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair, the far left of this tendency. But the cult of heroism in Israel has made way for military technocrats who read digital print-outs (as described in Defense Tech, Nov. 20, 2006.) Morale in Israel, and especially the once elitist military, has plummeted. The arms industry there is very large, and like its American equivalents need subsidies -- computer-based war is very expensive and greatly helps employment. But Lebanon only showed Israel what the Americans learned elsewhere -- it loses.
There are many dangers, from fascistic politicians like Avigdor Lieberman becoming even more powerful, to yet greater emigration abroad of those Jews with high skills. The latter is happening. Israel's ability to flout European opinion with impunity or to have Washington embark on military adventures from which Israel gains is increasingly limited. France has warned Israel that should it initiate a war with Iran it would create "a total disaster" for the entire world". Oil prices would rise, the entire Arab world would unite behind the Iranians, and Israel would be targeted but so would other nations. Even more important, Israeli strategists admit that Iranian nuclear weapons would only create a stable deterrent relationship between the two nations, and are not an "existential threat."
Repentance or Rapture?
Above all, in Iraq the American government is facing the failure of its entire Middle East project, an illusion in which the Israelis have a profound interest. Bush and gang are in a state of denial, but the U.S. is going the way of its defeat in Korea and Vietnam, and its military is increasingly overstretched and demoralized. It has based its foreign policies on fantasies and non-existent dangers, neo-con dreams and desires, only partially to meet equally illusory Israeli objectives to transform the entire Middle East so that it accepts Israel in whatever form the fickle Israeli electorate presents it. American foreign policy has been fraught with dangers since 1945, and I have documented them extensively, but this is the worst set of incompetents ever to hold power in Washington. It "shocked and awed," to use the departed Secretary of Defense's phrase, itself. Things are going disastrously for conservative warriors.
But it is very difficult to anticipate what this administration will come up with, though disasters over the past six years have made a number of alternatives far less probable. In a way, that is a good thing, although the cost in lives lost and wealth squandered has been immense. The Baker/Hamilton bipartisan commission is deeply split and if -- with emphasis on "if" -- if it happens to come up with a clear alternative the president is free to ignore it. The Pentagon has formulated alternatives, summed up as "go big," "go long"-both of which would require 5 to 10 years to "Iraqize" the war-- or "go home", but it is divided also. One thing certain, however, is that it has neither manpower, materiel, nor political freedom to make the same mistakes as in Vietnam-as the first two alternatives would have it do. There are no options in Iraq because the U S has traumatized the entire nation and created immense problems for which it has no solutions. No one can predict what it will do in Iraq because the administration wishes to preserve the illusion of success and is genuinely confused how to proceed. It has produced chaos. Iraq is very likely to remain a tragedy, one wracked by violence, for years to come. The Bush administration has created a massive disaster involving the lives of many millions of people.
A great deal depends on the President, whose policy has utterly failed in Iraq, is failing in Lebanon, and one of his options is escalation -- war with Iran. Israel might attack Iran in order to drag America in, but by itself it can only be a catalyst. Olmert and Bush approach these issues in a remarkably similar fashion. Either way, Bush has not ruled out war with Iran despite warnings from many military men that such a conflict would have vast repercussions, probably last years, and the U.S. would likely lose the war, even if it used nuclear weapons, after creating an Armageddon.
A number of the neocon theoreticians have repented the Iraq adventure, and even criticized some the basic premises that motivated it, but it would be an error to assume that this administration has some contact with reality and can be educated-by the electorate or by alienated neocon intellectuals. There are still plenty of people in Washington who advocate going for broke, who still retain fantastic illusions. There remains the imponderable factor of rapture -- fantasy and illusions mixed with desires. Is victory around the corner if we escalate with more troops? Will the Iraqi troops the Americans train attain victory over enemies that eluded U.S. forces? Many much wiser presidents have pursued such chimeras. Why not Bush too? Facts on the ground, which are much greater in constricting American power than they were six years ago, are a critical factor. They may not be sufficient to prevent irrational behavior. We simply cannot know.
All of these factors, and perhaps others not mentioned here, will affect each other. The whole is very often no stronger than all the parts. All surprises that thwart the Bush administration's freedom to act are now to be welcomed, and while the world's financial system is the leading candidate for upsetting the U.S.'s calculations, it is scarcely the only one. The facts on the ground, realities rather than decisions, are usually crucial, and here the U S is losing in its megalomaniac ambition to shape the world. It has been this way for many nations led by men far superior in intellect to George Bush.
Wishes are not reality and the U S has an endemic ability to hold onto its wishes and fantasies as long as possible. Desire often leads to its acting despite itself. But its resources are far more constrained now than they were six years ago, much less for the United States during the Vietnam War-which it lost. The American public is already deeply alienated, the world financial system is teetering, the U S' military resources are virtually exhausted.
We shall see.
The Economist Democracy Index: US ranks 17th
Mercosur
Thursday, 23 November
Uruguay, only “full democracy” in Latinamerica
Almost half the countries in the world can be classified as democratic but only 28 “full democracies”, which are mostly developed nations with the exception of Uruguay and Costa Rica from Latinamerica according to the latest report from The Economist.
In “The World in 2007”, the British weekly magazine analyzed the level of democracy in 167 countries with the five categories; electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties, maximum of 10 points per each category.
The Economist, based on its analysis, classified the countries into four stages of democracy; full democracy, 28 countries; flawed democracy, 54; hybrid democracy, 30; and authoritarian regime, 55.
Although the recent wave of worldwide democratization, only 13% of the world population is considered to be living in ‘full democracy,’ whereas 40% of them are still under authoritarian regime.
Sweden is the most democratic country, according to the research, with 9.88 average score. Ireland, 9.71 points, the Netherlands, 9.66, and Norway, 9.55 follow the Scandinavian kingdom. The US is ranked 17th while Japan is 20th and the United Kingdom 23rd.
Average democratic index in each continent is; 8.64 in North America, 8.60 in Western Europe, 6.37 in Latin America, 5.76 in Eastern Europe, and Middle East and North Africa (3.53) and Sub-Saharan Africa (4.24) at the bottom.
North Korea received average score of 1.03 out of 10 and the 167th out of 167 in the ranking. Not surprisingly, NK received no point at all in civil liberties category.
South Korea did a fare job; it is ranked as the 31st democratic country among 167 with a ‘flawed democracy.’
Spain is ranked 16, behind Malta and ahead of United States; Portugal is in position 19, Japan and Belgium rank 20 and France 24, followed by Costa Rica, Mauritius Island, Slovenia and Uruguay sharing position 27.
The report points out that United States has suffered “a serious erosion of civil liberties” in the context of the war on terrorism and something similar has happened in the UK with a significant declination in political participation.
Among the top ten of the group of “flawed democracies” figures Italy, followed by India, Botswana, South Africa and Chile.
Other Latinamerican and Caribbean countries in the group include Brazil, 32; Panama, 44; Jamaica, 45; Trinidad Tobago, 48; Mexico, 53; Argentina, 54; Colombia, 67; Paraguay, 71; Guyana, 73; Peru, 75 and Bolivia, 81.
The “flawed” group also mentions new EU members or candidates such as Slovakia; Poland; Bulgaria; Romania and others such as Israel, 47; Philippines and Indonesia.
Turkey, 88; Nicaragua, 89; Ecuador, 92; Venezuela, 93; Russia, 102; Haiti, 109, and Iraq, figure in the “hybrid” group.
Finally the authoritarian regimes has as full members, Cuba, 124; Pakistan, 113; Jordan, 113; Morocco and Egypt, 115; Iran, 139; Saudi Arabia, 159 and China 138.
http://www.falkland-malvinas.com/Detalle.asp?NUM=9282
Thursday, 23 November
Uruguay, only “full democracy” in Latinamerica
Almost half the countries in the world can be classified as democratic but only 28 “full democracies”, which are mostly developed nations with the exception of Uruguay and Costa Rica from Latinamerica according to the latest report from The Economist.
In “The World in 2007”, the British weekly magazine analyzed the level of democracy in 167 countries with the five categories; electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties, maximum of 10 points per each category.
The Economist, based on its analysis, classified the countries into four stages of democracy; full democracy, 28 countries; flawed democracy, 54; hybrid democracy, 30; and authoritarian regime, 55.
Although the recent wave of worldwide democratization, only 13% of the world population is considered to be living in ‘full democracy,’ whereas 40% of them are still under authoritarian regime.
Sweden is the most democratic country, according to the research, with 9.88 average score. Ireland, 9.71 points, the Netherlands, 9.66, and Norway, 9.55 follow the Scandinavian kingdom. The US is ranked 17th while Japan is 20th and the United Kingdom 23rd.
Average democratic index in each continent is; 8.64 in North America, 8.60 in Western Europe, 6.37 in Latin America, 5.76 in Eastern Europe, and Middle East and North Africa (3.53) and Sub-Saharan Africa (4.24) at the bottom.
North Korea received average score of 1.03 out of 10 and the 167th out of 167 in the ranking. Not surprisingly, NK received no point at all in civil liberties category.
South Korea did a fare job; it is ranked as the 31st democratic country among 167 with a ‘flawed democracy.’
Spain is ranked 16, behind Malta and ahead of United States; Portugal is in position 19, Japan and Belgium rank 20 and France 24, followed by Costa Rica, Mauritius Island, Slovenia and Uruguay sharing position 27.
The report points out that United States has suffered “a serious erosion of civil liberties” in the context of the war on terrorism and something similar has happened in the UK with a significant declination in political participation.
Among the top ten of the group of “flawed democracies” figures Italy, followed by India, Botswana, South Africa and Chile.
Other Latinamerican and Caribbean countries in the group include Brazil, 32; Panama, 44; Jamaica, 45; Trinidad Tobago, 48; Mexico, 53; Argentina, 54; Colombia, 67; Paraguay, 71; Guyana, 73; Peru, 75 and Bolivia, 81.
The “flawed” group also mentions new EU members or candidates such as Slovakia; Poland; Bulgaria; Romania and others such as Israel, 47; Philippines and Indonesia.
Turkey, 88; Nicaragua, 89; Ecuador, 92; Venezuela, 93; Russia, 102; Haiti, 109, and Iraq, figure in the “hybrid” group.
Finally the authoritarian regimes has as full members, Cuba, 124; Pakistan, 113; Jordan, 113; Morocco and Egypt, 115; Iran, 139; Saudi Arabia, 159 and China 138.
http://www.falkland-malvinas.com/Detalle.asp?NUM=9282
Historic and religious factors, and US backing, shaping Ethiopia’s aggression in Somalia
November 2006 / Somalia
Although little noticed elsewhere in the Ummah, a popular Islamic movement has taken power in Somalia and is under attack from neighbouring Ethiopia, backed by the US. MAHMOUD AHMED SHAIKH reports.
The current conflicts in the Horn of Africa have not merely turned up on the contemporary world stage out of nowhere. Muslims and Christians in Ethiopia and neighbouring regions were engaged in confrontation (armed and otherwise) with each other long before the arrival of the Western colonial powers and the establishment of British, Italian and French protectorates and colonies. Muslims in the subsequent Italian Somali, British Somaliland and the French Somali colony (Djibouti) were, naturally, also involved in the religious friction in Christian Ethiopia. Semitic immigration from Arabia at about the time of Christ had also strongly affected the local culture, and Coptic Christianity was introduced in the fourth century. Two centuries later the growing empire reached its height under the Azum rulers but was checked by Islamic expansion from the East. The independent kingdom of Abyssinia came into being in the eleventh century; modern Ethiopia dates from 1855, when the state finally brought under its control the various tribes in the territory now known as Ethiopia.
As a result Christian Ethiopians pride themselves on never having been colonised. It was in 1896 that Italy tried to invade their country, only to be repulsed. But Italy returned in 1936 and was able this time to conquer Abyssinia and occupy it until its liberation and the return of the Emperor, Haile Selassie, in 1941. This pride of never having been colonised, while admirable in itself, is compromised by the parallel pride felt by many Ethiopians that their country was a colonial power, and was treated as such by the European colonisers in the Horn of Africa. That successive Ethiopian governments have treated the Somali areas and other regions that they conquered in the past as colonies, and their inhabitants as subjects, is not in doubt.
Yet Ethiopia does not allow those colonies the right to self-determination and independence and goes to war with any country that dares to help their struggle for independence. It went to war with Somalia over the Ogaden in 1977 and with Eritrea over their disputed border. Ethiopia was federated with Eritrea in 1952 and annexed the area in 1962. And when the federation came to an end and the issue of shared borders came to a head, Ethiopia rejected the ruling of an independent international commission and chose to go to war with Eritrea.
That Ethiopia is still “at war” with Somalia, though the latter is broken up into its two constituent parts (Somalia, the former Italian colony, and Somaliland, the former British Somaliland), is very clear. Somaliland declared its independence in 1991, after the overthrow of Siyad Barre. Ethiopia was ecstatic over the break-up and resolved to oppose any restoration of a united Somali state – preferring to see Somaliland remain a separate entity, though without diplomatic recognition, and Somalia a failed state mired in internal conflict. Addis Ababa feels that if this state of affairs continues the Ogaden region will be safe in its own hands and the Somali resistance, not getting any external assistance, will have no option but to give up its struggle for independence.
Ethiopia knows that Somalia is riven by tensions between clans, without hope of re-emerging as an independent functioning state if these divisions are not mended. It also knows that the only way to heal these divisions, which have traditionally caused great problems for Somalis, is to invoke their shared Islamic identity. Hence its full support for the transitional government led by Abdullahi Yusuf, a warlord who has participated in the clan warfare waged in Somalia for the past 15 years and helped to made it a failed state. Yusuf was also a strong ally of Ethiopia, and continues to be so. Moreover, Ethiopia is waging a full-scale war against the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Apart from its historical hatred of Islamic leaders and organisations, Addis Ababa realises that the ICU is more likely to unite Somalis than are clan-based groups and programmes.
In fact, the ICU has managed to take control of most areas of Somalia since taking control of the capital in June and forcing the interim government to take refuge in the remote town of Baidoa. The fact that the ICU has no large army or substantial budget, yet has achieved so much despite the backing of the interim government by Ethiopia, the US and the UN, shows that the Somali people are fully behind the Islamic movement. Most Somalis are no doubt angered by the undisguised religious prejudice against a movement backed by most of the inhabitants of a Muslim country. Their conviction is confirmed by the obvious Christian-based alliance between the US government and Addis Ababa. The wider international war against Islam waged by the US government has also given credence to that conviction.
Both Ethiopia and the US initially underplayed their military presence or cooperation in Somalia in support of the interim government. But they are now increasingly being forced to admit their backing for the interim government, which has no army of its own and cannot engage in battle, having also lost the support of its clan militias. This clearly means that foreign troops have to be present in Somalia to do its fighting for it. Ethiopian troops have frequently crossed into the country in past months to bolster it, and even US troops have crossed the border on one occasion from neighbouring Djibouti, where the US has a naval base. Ethiopia insists that the “military personnel it has in Somalia are there to advise the government, not fight the ICU.”
The US admitted its military cooperation with Ethiopia inside Somalia on October 11, when it dispatched to Addis Ababa a military delegation led by the deputy assistant secretary of defence. The talks centred on the military cooperation between the US and Addis Ababa and their alliance against ‘terrorism’ in the region. An Ethiopian source who had taken part in the talks was quoted in reports on October 12 as saying that the situation in Somalia was discussed and that prime minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia had confirmed to the US delegation that his country had nothing to do with the crisis in Somalia. The head of the US delegation said after the meeting that the military cooperation between the two countries was very strong. She added that the Ethiopian army was cooperating closely with US troops in Djibouti.
But despite their somewhat indirect acknowledgement of their military involvement in Somalia, the Americans continue to proclaim that they will use military might to end terrorist organisations in the region – including the ICU. To justify their claim that the ICU is a terrorist organisation, which is set to invade Ethiopia on a “jihadist programme”, they accuse several countries, as diverse as Pakistan, Eritrea and Indonesia, of giving the ICU both military and financial aid.
A senior US official, for instance, accused Eritrea on October 19 of opening a “second front” in its struggle with Ethiopia by supplying arms to the ICU. Jendayi Frazer, the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, said: “I think Ethiopia is quite clearly attacking Ethiopia on another front. We have pretty clear evidence that that is a fact and they are shipping arms into Somalia.” Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war from 1998 to 2000 and continue to be locked in a boundary dispute, which Frazer called the “first front”.
Meles Zenawi, on the other hand, accused gunmen from Pakistan, Indonesia and the Arab world of backing the ICU to the extent that they are now able to march to the common border in a clear move to invade his country. He told his parliament on October 19 that the “jihadists were massing their forces near our borders,” and vowed to fight them if they chose to invade. “If this activity continues, and is found to threaten our national security, then our forces will have the right and obligation to defend the country,” he said. “However, that does not mean that we will declare war.”
But the members of the parliament he was addressing know that it is in fact their country that invaded Somalia in the first place and has well-armed troops there to protect the interim government, headed by Abdullahi Yusuf, whom they know to be an Ethiopian agent. Foreign journalists and analysts say that there are Ethiopian troops there that number between 6,000 and 8,000. The activities of those troops hit the headlines on October 22, when they attacked the ICU in the town of Bur Hakaba, near Baidoa, where the weak and nominal interim government is based.
Apart from the alleged need to ‘defend’ his country and fight ‘terrorism’ in the region, prime minister Zenawi has good reason to continue his aggressive confrontation with Somalia. He has to deflect attention from the poverty, mismanagement and oppressive rule his regime is responsible for. In fact, there is a high degree of instability in Ethiopia as many people, unhappy with the regime’s failures, protest widely and loudly, and the regime responds by killing, injuring and arresting. In March 2002, for example, violence erupted in the Tepi region between rival ethnic groups and the security forces, after widespread public protests against the results of local elections held in December 2001. Officially 128 people were killed by the security forces, but opposition forces sources put the number dead at about 1,000. Larger numbers were killed in subsequent events, to the extent that the EU threatened to suspend the economic aid Ethiopia receives from it.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Ethiopian regime is corrupt and oppressive. But despite this the US government, which claims to be working for the entrenchment of democratic rule in the African continent, is a strong ally of Addis Ababa and of Zenawi. This is not at all surprising, as Washington also treats some Arab dictators as allies, despite its claim that it wants to introduce democratic rule into the Middle East. The world’s “single superpower” finds such allies and its faked “war against international terrorism” as a useful tool for imposing its will worldwide. Somalis (and other Muslims) will remain vulnerable to manipulation until they stop letting the wool be pulled over their eyes, and work out viable strategies to deal with these demonic agendas.
http://www.muslimedia.com/somalia-ethioagress.htm
Although little noticed elsewhere in the Ummah, a popular Islamic movement has taken power in Somalia and is under attack from neighbouring Ethiopia, backed by the US. MAHMOUD AHMED SHAIKH reports.
The current conflicts in the Horn of Africa have not merely turned up on the contemporary world stage out of nowhere. Muslims and Christians in Ethiopia and neighbouring regions were engaged in confrontation (armed and otherwise) with each other long before the arrival of the Western colonial powers and the establishment of British, Italian and French protectorates and colonies. Muslims in the subsequent Italian Somali, British Somaliland and the French Somali colony (Djibouti) were, naturally, also involved in the religious friction in Christian Ethiopia. Semitic immigration from Arabia at about the time of Christ had also strongly affected the local culture, and Coptic Christianity was introduced in the fourth century. Two centuries later the growing empire reached its height under the Azum rulers but was checked by Islamic expansion from the East. The independent kingdom of Abyssinia came into being in the eleventh century; modern Ethiopia dates from 1855, when the state finally brought under its control the various tribes in the territory now known as Ethiopia.
As a result Christian Ethiopians pride themselves on never having been colonised. It was in 1896 that Italy tried to invade their country, only to be repulsed. But Italy returned in 1936 and was able this time to conquer Abyssinia and occupy it until its liberation and the return of the Emperor, Haile Selassie, in 1941. This pride of never having been colonised, while admirable in itself, is compromised by the parallel pride felt by many Ethiopians that their country was a colonial power, and was treated as such by the European colonisers in the Horn of Africa. That successive Ethiopian governments have treated the Somali areas and other regions that they conquered in the past as colonies, and their inhabitants as subjects, is not in doubt.
Yet Ethiopia does not allow those colonies the right to self-determination and independence and goes to war with any country that dares to help their struggle for independence. It went to war with Somalia over the Ogaden in 1977 and with Eritrea over their disputed border. Ethiopia was federated with Eritrea in 1952 and annexed the area in 1962. And when the federation came to an end and the issue of shared borders came to a head, Ethiopia rejected the ruling of an independent international commission and chose to go to war with Eritrea.
That Ethiopia is still “at war” with Somalia, though the latter is broken up into its two constituent parts (Somalia, the former Italian colony, and Somaliland, the former British Somaliland), is very clear. Somaliland declared its independence in 1991, after the overthrow of Siyad Barre. Ethiopia was ecstatic over the break-up and resolved to oppose any restoration of a united Somali state – preferring to see Somaliland remain a separate entity, though without diplomatic recognition, and Somalia a failed state mired in internal conflict. Addis Ababa feels that if this state of affairs continues the Ogaden region will be safe in its own hands and the Somali resistance, not getting any external assistance, will have no option but to give up its struggle for independence.
Ethiopia knows that Somalia is riven by tensions between clans, without hope of re-emerging as an independent functioning state if these divisions are not mended. It also knows that the only way to heal these divisions, which have traditionally caused great problems for Somalis, is to invoke their shared Islamic identity. Hence its full support for the transitional government led by Abdullahi Yusuf, a warlord who has participated in the clan warfare waged in Somalia for the past 15 years and helped to made it a failed state. Yusuf was also a strong ally of Ethiopia, and continues to be so. Moreover, Ethiopia is waging a full-scale war against the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Apart from its historical hatred of Islamic leaders and organisations, Addis Ababa realises that the ICU is more likely to unite Somalis than are clan-based groups and programmes.
In fact, the ICU has managed to take control of most areas of Somalia since taking control of the capital in June and forcing the interim government to take refuge in the remote town of Baidoa. The fact that the ICU has no large army or substantial budget, yet has achieved so much despite the backing of the interim government by Ethiopia, the US and the UN, shows that the Somali people are fully behind the Islamic movement. Most Somalis are no doubt angered by the undisguised religious prejudice against a movement backed by most of the inhabitants of a Muslim country. Their conviction is confirmed by the obvious Christian-based alliance between the US government and Addis Ababa. The wider international war against Islam waged by the US government has also given credence to that conviction.
Both Ethiopia and the US initially underplayed their military presence or cooperation in Somalia in support of the interim government. But they are now increasingly being forced to admit their backing for the interim government, which has no army of its own and cannot engage in battle, having also lost the support of its clan militias. This clearly means that foreign troops have to be present in Somalia to do its fighting for it. Ethiopian troops have frequently crossed into the country in past months to bolster it, and even US troops have crossed the border on one occasion from neighbouring Djibouti, where the US has a naval base. Ethiopia insists that the “military personnel it has in Somalia are there to advise the government, not fight the ICU.”
The US admitted its military cooperation with Ethiopia inside Somalia on October 11, when it dispatched to Addis Ababa a military delegation led by the deputy assistant secretary of defence. The talks centred on the military cooperation between the US and Addis Ababa and their alliance against ‘terrorism’ in the region. An Ethiopian source who had taken part in the talks was quoted in reports on October 12 as saying that the situation in Somalia was discussed and that prime minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia had confirmed to the US delegation that his country had nothing to do with the crisis in Somalia. The head of the US delegation said after the meeting that the military cooperation between the two countries was very strong. She added that the Ethiopian army was cooperating closely with US troops in Djibouti.
But despite their somewhat indirect acknowledgement of their military involvement in Somalia, the Americans continue to proclaim that they will use military might to end terrorist organisations in the region – including the ICU. To justify their claim that the ICU is a terrorist organisation, which is set to invade Ethiopia on a “jihadist programme”, they accuse several countries, as diverse as Pakistan, Eritrea and Indonesia, of giving the ICU both military and financial aid.
A senior US official, for instance, accused Eritrea on October 19 of opening a “second front” in its struggle with Ethiopia by supplying arms to the ICU. Jendayi Frazer, the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, said: “I think Ethiopia is quite clearly attacking Ethiopia on another front. We have pretty clear evidence that that is a fact and they are shipping arms into Somalia.” Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war from 1998 to 2000 and continue to be locked in a boundary dispute, which Frazer called the “first front”.
Meles Zenawi, on the other hand, accused gunmen from Pakistan, Indonesia and the Arab world of backing the ICU to the extent that they are now able to march to the common border in a clear move to invade his country. He told his parliament on October 19 that the “jihadists were massing their forces near our borders,” and vowed to fight them if they chose to invade. “If this activity continues, and is found to threaten our national security, then our forces will have the right and obligation to defend the country,” he said. “However, that does not mean that we will declare war.”
But the members of the parliament he was addressing know that it is in fact their country that invaded Somalia in the first place and has well-armed troops there to protect the interim government, headed by Abdullahi Yusuf, whom they know to be an Ethiopian agent. Foreign journalists and analysts say that there are Ethiopian troops there that number between 6,000 and 8,000. The activities of those troops hit the headlines on October 22, when they attacked the ICU in the town of Bur Hakaba, near Baidoa, where the weak and nominal interim government is based.
Apart from the alleged need to ‘defend’ his country and fight ‘terrorism’ in the region, prime minister Zenawi has good reason to continue his aggressive confrontation with Somalia. He has to deflect attention from the poverty, mismanagement and oppressive rule his regime is responsible for. In fact, there is a high degree of instability in Ethiopia as many people, unhappy with the regime’s failures, protest widely and loudly, and the regime responds by killing, injuring and arresting. In March 2002, for example, violence erupted in the Tepi region between rival ethnic groups and the security forces, after widespread public protests against the results of local elections held in December 2001. Officially 128 people were killed by the security forces, but opposition forces sources put the number dead at about 1,000. Larger numbers were killed in subsequent events, to the extent that the EU threatened to suspend the economic aid Ethiopia receives from it.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Ethiopian regime is corrupt and oppressive. But despite this the US government, which claims to be working for the entrenchment of democratic rule in the African continent, is a strong ally of Addis Ababa and of Zenawi. This is not at all surprising, as Washington also treats some Arab dictators as allies, despite its claim that it wants to introduce democratic rule into the Middle East. The world’s “single superpower” finds such allies and its faked “war against international terrorism” as a useful tool for imposing its will worldwide. Somalis (and other Muslims) will remain vulnerable to manipulation until they stop letting the wool be pulled over their eyes, and work out viable strategies to deal with these demonic agendas.
http://www.muslimedia.com/somalia-ethioagress.htm
The US Empire –Beginning of the End Game
November 24, 2006
By K Gajendra Singh
A 15th century Ottoman Sultan Murat II arranged for Mehmet II , not the favourite son , to be trained in the art of governing at the capital city Edirne ,under an able Grand Vizier. Mehmet II had been a wild and disobedient brat, so Murat II advised his teacher use of the rod , which was done to good effect. A Sunni, Sultan Mehmet II fell under the unwholesome influence of a Shia cleric, fought with the Grand Vizier and the military Janissaries rebelled. Before Mehmet II could create further mess, Murat II returned from Manisa, where he had retired for spiritual pursuits and took back the reins of the empire.
US President George W. Bush, has made such an unholy mess of US polity and its foreign policy that Papa George W. H Bush, a former President , had to create a bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, not only to salvage , whatever remains of his son's Presidency, but to arrest the fast decline of the hyper power, still with enormous powers of destruction. Bush courtiers, led by the Neo-cons with their racist Staussian policies, till 2003 were claiming Washington to be the new Rome, but alas without redeeming graces of an empire, are now ratting on the Bush Regime.
With the Ottoman star on the rise , after the course correction , Mehmet II went on to conquer Constantinople in 1453 , became Fethi (the Victorious ) and extinguished the millennia old Byzantine empire. This laid the foundations for the Ottoman expansion westwards who twice knocked at the Gates of Vienna, a memory which still rankles ,which Europe now uses to keep Turkey outside the Europe Union . The ebb and flow of domination between the East and the West is as old as history, beginning with the Greek –Persian rivalry. US led Christian West, now dominates and exploits Muslim Middle East, Asia and Africa and is ranged against Orthodox Slavs. Iranians remain a hard nut to crack.
Bush has only succeeded in putting the US empire's decline into fast forward mode. Nothing is likely to reverse the course , much to the relief of most of the world , victim of its unilateralist policies. In 6 years USA ,from being a fairly popular country , with its many good points in spite of flaws , has become one of the most unpopular .The US regime has become the most hated , with Bush being rated a greater danger to the world peace than even North Korean dictator Kim Il Jong, even among neighbours and allies like UK.
On Papa Bush's course correction, let me quote from Tom Engelhardt ;
"Sooner or later, failure has a way of stripping most of us of our dreams and pretensions.
'So let's start with a tiny history of failure. George W. Bush's life trajectory of failing upward has had a rhythm to it -- and a rubric, "crony capitalism." Daddy's friends and contacts helped him into and -- after he failed -- out of the oil business, into and out of the baseball business, into and now, it seems, out of the failed game of global politics. His is, as the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish and John Aloysius Farrell put it back in 2002, "the story of a man who struck out numerous times before being bailed out by big hitters who often were family members, friends, or supporters of his father."
'It's appropriate, then, that the man who bailed him out in Florida when he essentially lost the presidency in 2000, Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III, would reappear six years later, in the wake of another failed election, to bail him out again now that he's screwed up the oil heartlands of the planet.
"Daddy -- we're talking here about former President George H.W. Bush -- has three adopted boys: His former National Security Advisor (and alter ego) Brent Scowcroft, who went into opposition to the younger Bush's Iraq policy even before the invasion of 2003 and now lurks quietly in the wings; his former CIA Director Robert Gates; and Baker."
When driven by the Neo-Cons and other war lords , the Bush Administration was beating the war drums against Iraq , in my Asia Times article of 24 August, 2002 , "Bush Family's Phony wars" I had warned that the invasion of Iraq would open a Pandora's box in the region. As history showed it is easy to start a war but difficult to predict its ultimate outcome . ( Extracts below from the article are italicized )
"For the Bush family, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is the tempting Apple in the Middle Eastern Garden of Eden. The results of succumbing to the temptation to take a bite could be as disastrous as they were for Adam and Eve. "
Bush is now received formally only because he is the US President .People from Britain to India demonstrate against his visit .A few days ago in Indonesia , there were vociferous protests against his visit , with his handlers risking a bare 6 hours stay in the country. In the most populous Muslim nation, US popularity has come down from 70% in 2001 to 30 % now ,as it has all around the globe even among allied nations. At the Asian Pacific summit in Vietnam, leaders rebuffed Bush's line on north Korea , which has become a nuclear power with missiles, because of flawed US policy and its preoccupation with the Iraqi quagmire.
In the 7 November mid-term US elections ,in which his Republican party lost control of both the Senate and the House and many Governor mansions, when many party candidates declined to even have Bush for canvassing , he has become a dead 'lame duck' . Pre-election polls showed electorate opposed to Iraq war and Bush's performance by 2 to 1.You can not fool all the people all the time , not even the Americans , where 5 big corporations controlling 90% of US media have kept US public misinformed. But nearly three thousand GI body bags from Iraq war and twenty thousand maimed and injured GIs can no longer be kept hidden.
Americans proudly call their state 'US Incorporated', which it has truly become, a mighty but a dangerous company ; manufacturing , selling arms and using them recklessly all around the world ( while experimenting with chemicals and depleted Uranium munitions ) The Mongols , Turks and other wild tribes used arms for expanding empires but in US Inc , arms manufacture and its use has become an end itself , to hell with the US public interest. From hundreds of billions of US taxpayers money spent so far since the illegal invasion of Iraq , the US arms manufacturers remain the main beneficiaries . They are Lockheed Martin , Boeing ,Northrop Grumman ,Raytheon , General Dynamics , Honeywell Halliburton, BAE Systems and thousands of smaller defense companies and subcontractors .
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President in his Farewell Address on Jan. 17, 1961 said ,"[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." --
But now this monster has imposed itself on USA and is expanding , going for more lethal and profitable means of destruction even against international treaties and conventions .The end of the Cold War did not reduce this monster's appetite .US now spends over $ 400 billion on defence ie for attacking other nations , almost equal to what the rest of the world does .Russia spends a mere fraction of it. Members of US Congress are too deeply involved through lobbies and influence peddling and keep this monster alive and kicking. Tame generals after retirement can look forward to cushy jobs in the defence industry. Currently this monster is fed by an almost equal US trade deficit.
The other players in the ruling US oligarchy are energy interests whose members and nominees are the major decision makers in the US Administration .President Bush , Vice-President Dick Cheney , Secretary of State Condi Rice , US Ambassador in Baghdad , you name it .While Americans with gas guzzlers , who contribute half carbon dioxide to climate warming , have paid dearly at the gas station , by manipulation and insider trading US and UK oil multinationals have reaped massive profits .But to US chagrin ,higher oil prices has enriched energy rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela and stand up to USA. While US hold over oil reserves is becoming shaky in the Middle East , emerging economic powers China and India are tying up energy resources around the world .
"In 1991 George Bush Sr sought the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He failed and left the region in a mess. Now his son, President George W Bush, having inherited Dick Cheney and other chieftains from his father's presidency, is pursuing the family vendetta. Ordinary Iraqis continue to pay the price of this vendetta, with more than half a million children reported to have died from lack of medicines and malnutrition since the 1990 embargo. Iraq's US-friendly neighbors like Jordan and Turkey are suffering too. –
" It is difficult to know what to believe of the leaks regarding the US's current options to oust Saddam, ranging from assassination, fomenting a coup or internal rebellion, air strikes against Baghdad and other Iraqi command centers, to a vast amphibious invasion with massive air support, involving up to 250,000 soldiers. The latest plan, involving around 60,000 troops backed by heavy air power, will begin with a swift attack on Saddam's elite Republican Guards around Baghdad, in the hope that the regular Iraqi army would then abandon Saddam. Such balderdash. The result of any such actions could be as catastrophic as Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden."
The current plans being discussed either by the Administration or by the incoming Democrats party , equally complicit in the illegal invasion of Iraq ( as were the Labour and Conservative parties in UK ) are as fanciful as the plans leaked out before the invasion or those actually implemented .
" Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of a few sane voices in the administration, remains opposed to a military strike just as he was in 1991, as it has no clear strategic objectives. Recent media leaks from the Pentagon and the State Department suggested that "many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq". Soon another leak countered that some in the Establishment favored an "inside-out" plan to "take Baghdad and one or two key command centers and weapons depots first, in hopes of cutting off the country's leadership and causing a quick collapse of the government". Such a plan was once dismissed by General Anthony Zinni, the US Middle East envoy, as a recipe for a "Bay of Goats" disaster, like the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba."
Recently , the Pentagon suggested three options for Iraq : send in more troops, shrink the force but stay, or pull out. These have been described as Go Big, Go Long and Go Home. But one solution gaining favour among military commanders is summed up as "Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long". No Go home for the time being.
"A US attack could dangerously destabilize the region, harm the global economy, and infuriate Arab and Muslim masses. Former British chief of staff Field Marshal Lord Bramall, warned in a letter to the Times that an invasion would pour "petrol rather than water" on the flames and provide al-Qaeda with more recruits. He quoted a predecessor who during the 1956 Suez crisis said: "Of course we can get to Cairo, but what I want to know is what the bloody hell we do when we get there?"
But Bush Administration driven by Neo-Cons , Iraqi quislings like Ahmed Chalabi and Iyyad Alawi thought that after the "Shock and Awe" , the Iraqi natives will welcome US troops with flowers and obey commands in spite of the history of successful Iraqi resistance against British occupation in 1920 and 30s. So much for planning.
Powell was cajoled into lying about WMDs in the Security Council before the invasion , smirching his own standing and seriously denting US credibility in the world. After he was eased out, his chief aide publicly denounced the cabal of Cheney , Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and other neo-cons for having high jacked US policy making . Even when it was proved by US teams that there were no WMDs or plans for nuclear bombs or connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda , Cheney and others continued to disseminate lies .A retired US Ambassador , who exposed the US lie on Iraq getting Uranium from Niger, was harassed , cover of his wife Valery Plame , a CIA operative exposed , a crime under US laws.
"Bay of Goats"
US and UK troops now face a Dunkirk in Iraq , with US convoys being stopped near the Kuwait border and mercenaries escorting them being abducted .The time for escape is running out from the blow back of the 'Desert Storm". Billions of dollars have been outsourced to mercenaries outfits and others with little audit or control over the loot. Even the British , who occupy regions inhabited by Shias , who were happy with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime but oppose foreign occupation , are quitting Basra and are camping in the safety of the Desert , protected by jets and helicopter gun ships .
" However, there is room for hope that worse may not come to worst: a saving grace of the US constitutional system of checks and balances is that Bush may be the most powerful man in the world, but he can't ignore Congress. And, however much George Bush Sr might hate Saddam, he would not want his son's presidency to end in disgrace."
It is quite clear that such hopes based on "US constitutional system of checks and balances ' did not materialize .The system has degenerated and collapsed and needs drastic overhaul . It is morphing into a dictatorship , with Patriot laws , racial profiling , unauthorized telephone tapping and spying in universities .The retraction of liberties in UK is equally bad , with big brother watching every move on video cameras and hundreds of British born and bred Muslims ready to volunteer even as suicide bombers.
A people elect the government they deserve as they did in USA in 2000 and 2004 .Only in USA a Presidency can be won by legal jiggery pokey , when lawyers , even when elevated to the august Supreme Court still remain loyal party lawyers and did not allow votes for Al Gore, Bush's rival to be counted . This has for ever tarnished the standing and credibility of US legal system and its democratic pretensions. It is not the only fundamental flaw from which the US democracy suffers . How can there be democracy , when 5 Corporate entities control media ,where billions of dollars are required to be collected against IOY's to fight elections . There are lobbies galore , more than 50 for each Congressman , which spend US$ 2.4 Billion (Billion ) a year in wining, dining and corrupting the lawmakers .The many Congress scandals are only a tip of the iceberg of corruption.
Most of the Congressmen are millionaires and each term enriches them further .No wonder the poor in US remain neglected , their number increasing and income disparities widening . There are 37 million poor , one in every four blacks . The top 1 percent of the population now owns 33.4 percent of US wealth while the bottom 50 percent has 2.5 percent. The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP
Unless these and other flaws are corrected , US will remain an incorporated company and not a true democracy. It has morphed into a vehicle for the corporate interests , of the corporate interests and by the corporate interests .Period .Capitalism may be driven by greed , but in USA , greed has become end all and be all , the new faith and cult .Rampant consumerism has become its daily ritual , planet earth warming may be damned .Greedy scientists can be hired to say whatever you want , that tobacco smoking was not linked to cancer .
"Bush left reality behind. Now we are all trapped'
US analyst William Pfaff recently wrote ,"For Americans, Iraq has ceased to be a video game running along the edge of public consciousness. The midterm congressional elections demonstrate that the US public wants to get out of Iraq almost as much as the British, as does the attention suddenly given to the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was actually set up months ago.
"But how is exit to be accomplished? Clearly the White House does not know, nor does the US army. The Baker-Hamilton Commission is unlikely to know, as its members were chosen because they represent the higher reaches of the conventional wisdom.
"In America, it's as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it's time to shut down the player.
"This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.
"We are the leading nation, the most moral, born with the redemptive mission to create what the Puritan preacher Jonathan Winthrop called the 'City on the Hill', the democracy 'of the people and by the people' that originated the modern world with our repudiation of monarchy and inherited privilege, establishing the greatest of republics, saving the Four Freedoms for the world by winning (alone!) both First and Second World Wars, then the Cold War, and now confronting the ultimate test of the 'long war' against Evil itself, incarnate as Terror.
"Today this is the language of government, journalism, politics and foreign policy in the US, spoken in the policy discussions at Washington think-tanks and on the editorial pages of newspapers.
"Is this Orwellian? Or is it just demagogy, politicians' lies, White House spin, journalistic laziness, formulations conceived to sell books? Or could it be cynical manipulation by apprentice dictators, energy industry and weapons-maker magnates, closet fascists? It is not Orwellian in that the neocon ideologues, George Bush and Tony Blair, certainly believe all this. They are not being manipulated.
"It is not Orwellian because the creators of this cartoon-like conceptual world have themselves become actors in the virtual universe their ideas and actions have made. They have left reality behind - or they simply ignore it, as they did in invading Iraq."
Let me quote from another of my 4 year old piece "The decline of the American Century ' of 11 September, 2002 Asia Times online;
"If the American public were told that an attack on Iraq would not be like the 1990-91 computer game [ which the US media obediently disseminated ] and might cause many thousands of casualties (given the low US threshold last tested in Mogadishu), that Arabs might destroy oilfields which bring prosperity to oil companies and cheap gas to their cars, and that US nationals might even be attacked in Muslim countries, Bush's popularity would plummet immediately.
"What is needed is not regime change or so-called "US-ushered democracy" in Iraq (as in Afghanistan), in a region of Hama Rule "rule or die". Saudi Arabia is ruled by an incongruous alliance of luxury-loving princes and Wahhabis, who enforce medieval punishments at home and promote fanaticism abroad, yet Washington does not demand regime change there. Another repressive US-supported regime in Egypt continues to provide recruits for al-Qaeda. Opening a Pandora's box in the Middle East would release bottled-up historical forces with unpredictable results, like Ayatollah Khomeini after the ouster of the Shah of Iran.
.
"The United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, controls 30 percent of world resources. And US corporate interests, forming perhaps 1 percent of this population, control these massive resources. They want to control the world without accountability, not even to the American people.
"Perhaps it is in the United States itself where its ill-informed and misinformed people need not just a regime change but a system change. Where energy and military-industry corporate interests have hijacked power from the people to pursue their narrow objectives. Where corporate chiefs enjoy coercive powers even the Communist Party chiefs in the former Soviet Union would have envied. Where blacks, Hispanics and the poor cannot freely choose a president (as in Florida, where only by not counting their votes did George Bush become the president).
The United States needs a regime and a system under which people can question, without being labeled unpatriotic or enemies, failures of a system that could not and cannot protect them."
What now;
The 10 key members of the Baker-Hamilton Commission are not military strategists or geopolitical thinkers who might offer a solution to Iraq , They are basically old establishment hands extending back to the Reagan era. Jim Baker , with help from his buddy Eduard Shevardnadze and a trusting and naïve Mikhail Gorbachev , frightened by Ronald Regan's threat of Star wars , and later a drugged Yeltsin, Soviet Union was dismantled , with West entering Russian strategic space .In Iraq and the region, those on the other side are apart from Iran, Syria , a resurgent and wiser Russia under Vladimir Putin and rising giant China , which holds US trillion dollars .
The situation is complex with great possibilities of the conflict spreading beyond Iraq . Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a key figure in the region recently told "Der Spiegel," "When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too." He concluded, "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one would be able to get a grip on the consequences."
Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said, "We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups." He concluded grimly, "The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body."
Many in US have suggested partitioning Iraq .Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador, sees the consequences: "To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale."
Even the cold warrior Henry Kissinger, whom many would like to try for war crimes and who reportedly egged on Bush to stay the course till 'victory ' was achieved ,now admits a military victory in Iraq was no longer possible. He told the BBC that the dramatic collapse of Iraq would have "disastrous consequences."
Kissinger called for an international conference including Iraq's neighbors, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and India and Pakistan to find out a solution.
Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations told SPIEGEL that the Middle East could become dangerous for years to come. He added that "the old Middle East -- an era which I believe has only recently ended -- was one in which the United States enjoyed tremendous dominance and freedom of maneuver. Oil was available at fairly low prices, the region was largely at peace. I believe largely because of the American decision to go to war in Iraq and how it has been carried out, --It's one of history's ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in Geneva on 21 November that "The United States in a way is trapped in Iraq .It cannot stay and it cannot leave. There are those who maintain that its presence is a problem and there are those who say that if it leaves precipitously, the situation will get worse." He added that the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq "should not lead to a further deterioration of the situation." The goal should be to leave when Iraqi authorities can ensure a "reasonable, secure environment.
Annan, who retires at the end of the year said the war in Iraq, and the failure of the U.N. Security Council to prevent the invasion by U.S.-led forces, was the biggest regret he had from his 10-year tenure. "I firmly believe that the war could have been avoided," "The inspectors should have had a bit more time." US media dogs were launched at him when he described US invasion of Iraq against the UN Charter and hence illegal.
Annan welcomed moves to involve Syria and Iran in trying to foster stability in Iraq because it would help bring peace to the region.
New Moves;
News stories are appearing about the US contacts with the Iraqi Resistance , including Baker telling a Saddam Hussein lawyer that Tariq Aziz, former deputy prime minister, would be released from detention by the end of this year, hoping that he will negotiate with the US on behalf of the Baath Party leadership. Condi Rice has appealed to the Gulf Cooperation Council to serve as intermediaries between the US and armed Sunni resistance groups [ except Al Qaeda]
National Security adviser Stephen Hadley carried a six-point message for Iraqi officials on his recent trip to Baghdad: to include Iraqi resistance and opposition leaders in any initiative towards national reconciliation; general amnesty for the armed resistance fighters, dissolve the Iraqi commission charged with banning the Baath party; cancel any federalism proposal to divide Iraq into three regions, and combine central authority for the central government with greater self-rule for local governors , distribute oil revenues in a fair manner to all Iraqis, including the Sunnis whose regions lack the resources.
Prime Minister Al-Maliki was not agreeable since his Shiite followers believe that their historic moment has arrived after one thousand years of Sunni domination. Leaks of talks with the Resistance have been common since even 2003, There is no reason to disbelieve that these US measure are nothing more than the historic tactics of divide-and-rule.
Hard facts on the ground;
It is quite clear that the accusations like WMDs, Iraq's nuclear program and Iraq's linkages with Al Qaeda were just excuses as the then US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrogantly boasted after the occupation .It was to control the region , rich in oil and after vanquishing Iran , even control the Caspian Sea basin energy resources too .Azerbaijan and Georgia are already in the US pocket .Wolfowitz, now President of the World Bank , also told the US Congress that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for its reconstruction and enrich US multinationals .Yes , crony capitalism and rampant loot of Iraq revenues have enriched US companies like Haliburton , Bechtel and Republican party members apart from the corrupt ruling quisling government in Iraq .
Except the oil ministry everything in Iraq , even the human heritage Museums were allowed to be looted, ( but because of the Resistance the oil production has been less than during Saddam days ) but under Pentagon supervision , US has gone ahead and built many military bases , about which very little information comes out. Nor is the US media curious to write about it. The US has 55 bases of different sizes in Iraq ; five or six of these are massive including Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, the huge base first named Camp Victory adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, and al-Asad Air Base in western Anbar province, are enormous - big enough to be reasonable-sized US towns with multiple bus routes, neighborhoods, a range of fast-food restaurants, multiple shops, pools, mini-golf courses and the like. Ready for long stay!
Several billion dollars have already been sunk into them. Balad, for instance, already handled the levels of daily air traffic one would normally see at Chicago's ultra-busy O'Hare and being enlarged .The four mega-bases would serve as permanent US jumping-off spots in what Bush administration edcall "the arc of instability" .In all the work is still in progress.
A United Press International reported: "Following hints US troops may remain in Iraq for years, the United States is reportedly building a massive military base at Arbil , in Kurdish northern Iraq." Iraqi Kurdistan , which has functioned as a US protectorate since 1991 Gulf war has always been a logical fallback position for US forces "withdrawing" from a failed Iraq. Turkey had accused Israel of training Kurds there for subversive activities against neighbours .
And the new US embassy building now going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone and , almost the size of Vatican City, with "100% independence from city utilities", not to speak of a "swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building" and its own anti-missile system. One wonders how long US could use it .Recently a car bomb was attempted inside the secure Green Zone fortress .
You bet USA will easily be parted from these strategic assets .
Barring some exceptions, the Western discourse inflicted on the world with control of media and communications , specially from USA is racist and colonist.
A human tragedy of biblical proportions;
The prestigious British medical journal Lancet based on John Hopkins Medical school study estimated the death of Iraqi following the US invasion and occupation at over 655,000 ( equal to the American civil war ). Similar methodology is used to compute deaths in other wars and famines around the world. When asked at a media conference if, given the Lancet study, Bush stood by the number he had previously cited of 30,000 Iraqi deaths,( in December , 2005 ) .Bush responded, "You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life - 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just - it's not credible." Western leaders and media have either ignored these colossal crimes or followed Bush line.
From Colin Powell to US Generals like Tommy Franks all have reiterated ;" We do not do body counts." But whenever a Western hostage is taken or a western soldier killed , you have the whole family , relations and friends and neighbours being interviewed on Western channels. As if non westerners were an inferior human breed.
According to the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) more than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing bleak future with UNHCR funds having been reduced. 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, while 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.
The discourse on West spreading democracy is just a different version of Christian West's ' self evident' manifest destiny to civilize the natives of the world .Look at the temerity in describing the illegal invasion of Iraq ; Operation Iraqi freedom. And the charade of bringing democracy in the Middle East , when the Western record has been suppression of nationalist and democratic aspirations and forces all around the world . Now that Iraqis whether Sunnis or Shias remain fiercely opposed to the occupation, Neo-cons mutter 'Iraqis don't deserve freedom and democracy." They are an inferior breed.
Western leaders have prostituted words like liberty, freedom and democracy. Nobody likes to be colonised or enslaved ; the Turks, the Algerians, the Vietnamese ,the Afghans , and the Iraqis who fought against the British occupation even in 1920 and 30s. Still the arrogant West wants to colonise, exploit and impose its values on other nations. Chapters and verses have been written in Western media that the Iraqi occupation and colonization would have succeeded with more troops . It would have only meant even more horrendous bloodletting then taking place now , over 100 Iraqis being killed every day . The Vietnamese sacrificed 2 million people and the Algerians one million for their liberty.
Bush and Blair have only endangered the security of many European nations. UK has become the most exposed although some terror alerts were exaggerated for political reasons ie to impose curbs on freedom .Unless US policies are changed ,sooner than later USA will face resistance from its marginalised black community specially black Muslims. How the blacks and Hispanics have remained marginalized became clear at how the Katrina disaster was mishandled.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. Copy right with the author. E-mail Gajendrak@hotmail.com.
By K Gajendra Singh
A 15th century Ottoman Sultan Murat II arranged for Mehmet II , not the favourite son , to be trained in the art of governing at the capital city Edirne ,under an able Grand Vizier. Mehmet II had been a wild and disobedient brat, so Murat II advised his teacher use of the rod , which was done to good effect. A Sunni, Sultan Mehmet II fell under the unwholesome influence of a Shia cleric, fought with the Grand Vizier and the military Janissaries rebelled. Before Mehmet II could create further mess, Murat II returned from Manisa, where he had retired for spiritual pursuits and took back the reins of the empire.
US President George W. Bush, has made such an unholy mess of US polity and its foreign policy that Papa George W. H Bush, a former President , had to create a bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, not only to salvage , whatever remains of his son's Presidency, but to arrest the fast decline of the hyper power, still with enormous powers of destruction. Bush courtiers, led by the Neo-cons with their racist Staussian policies, till 2003 were claiming Washington to be the new Rome, but alas without redeeming graces of an empire, are now ratting on the Bush Regime.
With the Ottoman star on the rise , after the course correction , Mehmet II went on to conquer Constantinople in 1453 , became Fethi (the Victorious ) and extinguished the millennia old Byzantine empire. This laid the foundations for the Ottoman expansion westwards who twice knocked at the Gates of Vienna, a memory which still rankles ,which Europe now uses to keep Turkey outside the Europe Union . The ebb and flow of domination between the East and the West is as old as history, beginning with the Greek –Persian rivalry. US led Christian West, now dominates and exploits Muslim Middle East, Asia and Africa and is ranged against Orthodox Slavs. Iranians remain a hard nut to crack.
Bush has only succeeded in putting the US empire's decline into fast forward mode. Nothing is likely to reverse the course , much to the relief of most of the world , victim of its unilateralist policies. In 6 years USA ,from being a fairly popular country , with its many good points in spite of flaws , has become one of the most unpopular .The US regime has become the most hated , with Bush being rated a greater danger to the world peace than even North Korean dictator Kim Il Jong, even among neighbours and allies like UK.
On Papa Bush's course correction, let me quote from Tom Engelhardt ;
"Sooner or later, failure has a way of stripping most of us of our dreams and pretensions.
'So let's start with a tiny history of failure. George W. Bush's life trajectory of failing upward has had a rhythm to it -- and a rubric, "crony capitalism." Daddy's friends and contacts helped him into and -- after he failed -- out of the oil business, into and out of the baseball business, into and now, it seems, out of the failed game of global politics. His is, as the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish and John Aloysius Farrell put it back in 2002, "the story of a man who struck out numerous times before being bailed out by big hitters who often were family members, friends, or supporters of his father."
'It's appropriate, then, that the man who bailed him out in Florida when he essentially lost the presidency in 2000, Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III, would reappear six years later, in the wake of another failed election, to bail him out again now that he's screwed up the oil heartlands of the planet.
"Daddy -- we're talking here about former President George H.W. Bush -- has three adopted boys: His former National Security Advisor (and alter ego) Brent Scowcroft, who went into opposition to the younger Bush's Iraq policy even before the invasion of 2003 and now lurks quietly in the wings; his former CIA Director Robert Gates; and Baker."
When driven by the Neo-Cons and other war lords , the Bush Administration was beating the war drums against Iraq , in my Asia Times article of 24 August, 2002 , "Bush Family's Phony wars" I had warned that the invasion of Iraq would open a Pandora's box in the region. As history showed it is easy to start a war but difficult to predict its ultimate outcome . ( Extracts below from the article are italicized )
"For the Bush family, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is the tempting Apple in the Middle Eastern Garden of Eden. The results of succumbing to the temptation to take a bite could be as disastrous as they were for Adam and Eve. "
Bush is now received formally only because he is the US President .People from Britain to India demonstrate against his visit .A few days ago in Indonesia , there were vociferous protests against his visit , with his handlers risking a bare 6 hours stay in the country. In the most populous Muslim nation, US popularity has come down from 70% in 2001 to 30 % now ,as it has all around the globe even among allied nations. At the Asian Pacific summit in Vietnam, leaders rebuffed Bush's line on north Korea , which has become a nuclear power with missiles, because of flawed US policy and its preoccupation with the Iraqi quagmire.
In the 7 November mid-term US elections ,in which his Republican party lost control of both the Senate and the House and many Governor mansions, when many party candidates declined to even have Bush for canvassing , he has become a dead 'lame duck' . Pre-election polls showed electorate opposed to Iraq war and Bush's performance by 2 to 1.You can not fool all the people all the time , not even the Americans , where 5 big corporations controlling 90% of US media have kept US public misinformed. But nearly three thousand GI body bags from Iraq war and twenty thousand maimed and injured GIs can no longer be kept hidden.
Americans proudly call their state 'US Incorporated', which it has truly become, a mighty but a dangerous company ; manufacturing , selling arms and using them recklessly all around the world ( while experimenting with chemicals and depleted Uranium munitions ) The Mongols , Turks and other wild tribes used arms for expanding empires but in US Inc , arms manufacture and its use has become an end itself , to hell with the US public interest. From hundreds of billions of US taxpayers money spent so far since the illegal invasion of Iraq , the US arms manufacturers remain the main beneficiaries . They are Lockheed Martin , Boeing ,Northrop Grumman ,Raytheon , General Dynamics , Honeywell Halliburton, BAE Systems and thousands of smaller defense companies and subcontractors .
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President in his Farewell Address on Jan. 17, 1961 said ,"[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." --
But now this monster has imposed itself on USA and is expanding , going for more lethal and profitable means of destruction even against international treaties and conventions .The end of the Cold War did not reduce this monster's appetite .US now spends over $ 400 billion on defence ie for attacking other nations , almost equal to what the rest of the world does .Russia spends a mere fraction of it. Members of US Congress are too deeply involved through lobbies and influence peddling and keep this monster alive and kicking. Tame generals after retirement can look forward to cushy jobs in the defence industry. Currently this monster is fed by an almost equal US trade deficit.
The other players in the ruling US oligarchy are energy interests whose members and nominees are the major decision makers in the US Administration .President Bush , Vice-President Dick Cheney , Secretary of State Condi Rice , US Ambassador in Baghdad , you name it .While Americans with gas guzzlers , who contribute half carbon dioxide to climate warming , have paid dearly at the gas station , by manipulation and insider trading US and UK oil multinationals have reaped massive profits .But to US chagrin ,higher oil prices has enriched energy rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela and stand up to USA. While US hold over oil reserves is becoming shaky in the Middle East , emerging economic powers China and India are tying up energy resources around the world .
"In 1991 George Bush Sr sought the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He failed and left the region in a mess. Now his son, President George W Bush, having inherited Dick Cheney and other chieftains from his father's presidency, is pursuing the family vendetta. Ordinary Iraqis continue to pay the price of this vendetta, with more than half a million children reported to have died from lack of medicines and malnutrition since the 1990 embargo. Iraq's US-friendly neighbors like Jordan and Turkey are suffering too. –
" It is difficult to know what to believe of the leaks regarding the US's current options to oust Saddam, ranging from assassination, fomenting a coup or internal rebellion, air strikes against Baghdad and other Iraqi command centers, to a vast amphibious invasion with massive air support, involving up to 250,000 soldiers. The latest plan, involving around 60,000 troops backed by heavy air power, will begin with a swift attack on Saddam's elite Republican Guards around Baghdad, in the hope that the regular Iraqi army would then abandon Saddam. Such balderdash. The result of any such actions could be as catastrophic as Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden."
The current plans being discussed either by the Administration or by the incoming Democrats party , equally complicit in the illegal invasion of Iraq ( as were the Labour and Conservative parties in UK ) are as fanciful as the plans leaked out before the invasion or those actually implemented .
" Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of a few sane voices in the administration, remains opposed to a military strike just as he was in 1991, as it has no clear strategic objectives. Recent media leaks from the Pentagon and the State Department suggested that "many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq". Soon another leak countered that some in the Establishment favored an "inside-out" plan to "take Baghdad and one or two key command centers and weapons depots first, in hopes of cutting off the country's leadership and causing a quick collapse of the government". Such a plan was once dismissed by General Anthony Zinni, the US Middle East envoy, as a recipe for a "Bay of Goats" disaster, like the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba."
Recently , the Pentagon suggested three options for Iraq : send in more troops, shrink the force but stay, or pull out. These have been described as Go Big, Go Long and Go Home. But one solution gaining favour among military commanders is summed up as "Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long". No Go home for the time being.
"A US attack could dangerously destabilize the region, harm the global economy, and infuriate Arab and Muslim masses. Former British chief of staff Field Marshal Lord Bramall, warned in a letter to the Times that an invasion would pour "petrol rather than water" on the flames and provide al-Qaeda with more recruits. He quoted a predecessor who during the 1956 Suez crisis said: "Of course we can get to Cairo, but what I want to know is what the bloody hell we do when we get there?"
But Bush Administration driven by Neo-Cons , Iraqi quislings like Ahmed Chalabi and Iyyad Alawi thought that after the "Shock and Awe" , the Iraqi natives will welcome US troops with flowers and obey commands in spite of the history of successful Iraqi resistance against British occupation in 1920 and 30s. So much for planning.
Powell was cajoled into lying about WMDs in the Security Council before the invasion , smirching his own standing and seriously denting US credibility in the world. After he was eased out, his chief aide publicly denounced the cabal of Cheney , Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and other neo-cons for having high jacked US policy making . Even when it was proved by US teams that there were no WMDs or plans for nuclear bombs or connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda , Cheney and others continued to disseminate lies .A retired US Ambassador , who exposed the US lie on Iraq getting Uranium from Niger, was harassed , cover of his wife Valery Plame , a CIA operative exposed , a crime under US laws.
"Bay of Goats"
US and UK troops now face a Dunkirk in Iraq , with US convoys being stopped near the Kuwait border and mercenaries escorting them being abducted .The time for escape is running out from the blow back of the 'Desert Storm". Billions of dollars have been outsourced to mercenaries outfits and others with little audit or control over the loot. Even the British , who occupy regions inhabited by Shias , who were happy with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime but oppose foreign occupation , are quitting Basra and are camping in the safety of the Desert , protected by jets and helicopter gun ships .
" However, there is room for hope that worse may not come to worst: a saving grace of the US constitutional system of checks and balances is that Bush may be the most powerful man in the world, but he can't ignore Congress. And, however much George Bush Sr might hate Saddam, he would not want his son's presidency to end in disgrace."
It is quite clear that such hopes based on "US constitutional system of checks and balances ' did not materialize .The system has degenerated and collapsed and needs drastic overhaul . It is morphing into a dictatorship , with Patriot laws , racial profiling , unauthorized telephone tapping and spying in universities .The retraction of liberties in UK is equally bad , with big brother watching every move on video cameras and hundreds of British born and bred Muslims ready to volunteer even as suicide bombers.
A people elect the government they deserve as they did in USA in 2000 and 2004 .Only in USA a Presidency can be won by legal jiggery pokey , when lawyers , even when elevated to the august Supreme Court still remain loyal party lawyers and did not allow votes for Al Gore, Bush's rival to be counted . This has for ever tarnished the standing and credibility of US legal system and its democratic pretensions. It is not the only fundamental flaw from which the US democracy suffers . How can there be democracy , when 5 Corporate entities control media ,where billions of dollars are required to be collected against IOY's to fight elections . There are lobbies galore , more than 50 for each Congressman , which spend US$ 2.4 Billion (Billion ) a year in wining, dining and corrupting the lawmakers .The many Congress scandals are only a tip of the iceberg of corruption.
Most of the Congressmen are millionaires and each term enriches them further .No wonder the poor in US remain neglected , their number increasing and income disparities widening . There are 37 million poor , one in every four blacks . The top 1 percent of the population now owns 33.4 percent of US wealth while the bottom 50 percent has 2.5 percent. The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP
Unless these and other flaws are corrected , US will remain an incorporated company and not a true democracy. It has morphed into a vehicle for the corporate interests , of the corporate interests and by the corporate interests .Period .Capitalism may be driven by greed , but in USA , greed has become end all and be all , the new faith and cult .Rampant consumerism has become its daily ritual , planet earth warming may be damned .Greedy scientists can be hired to say whatever you want , that tobacco smoking was not linked to cancer .
"Bush left reality behind. Now we are all trapped'
US analyst William Pfaff recently wrote ,"For Americans, Iraq has ceased to be a video game running along the edge of public consciousness. The midterm congressional elections demonstrate that the US public wants to get out of Iraq almost as much as the British, as does the attention suddenly given to the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was actually set up months ago.
"But how is exit to be accomplished? Clearly the White House does not know, nor does the US army. The Baker-Hamilton Commission is unlikely to know, as its members were chosen because they represent the higher reaches of the conventional wisdom.
"In America, it's as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it's time to shut down the player.
"This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.
"We are the leading nation, the most moral, born with the redemptive mission to create what the Puritan preacher Jonathan Winthrop called the 'City on the Hill', the democracy 'of the people and by the people' that originated the modern world with our repudiation of monarchy and inherited privilege, establishing the greatest of republics, saving the Four Freedoms for the world by winning (alone!) both First and Second World Wars, then the Cold War, and now confronting the ultimate test of the 'long war' against Evil itself, incarnate as Terror.
"Today this is the language of government, journalism, politics and foreign policy in the US, spoken in the policy discussions at Washington think-tanks and on the editorial pages of newspapers.
"Is this Orwellian? Or is it just demagogy, politicians' lies, White House spin, journalistic laziness, formulations conceived to sell books? Or could it be cynical manipulation by apprentice dictators, energy industry and weapons-maker magnates, closet fascists? It is not Orwellian in that the neocon ideologues, George Bush and Tony Blair, certainly believe all this. They are not being manipulated.
"It is not Orwellian because the creators of this cartoon-like conceptual world have themselves become actors in the virtual universe their ideas and actions have made. They have left reality behind - or they simply ignore it, as they did in invading Iraq."
Let me quote from another of my 4 year old piece "The decline of the American Century ' of 11 September, 2002 Asia Times online;
"If the American public were told that an attack on Iraq would not be like the 1990-91 computer game [ which the US media obediently disseminated ] and might cause many thousands of casualties (given the low US threshold last tested in Mogadishu), that Arabs might destroy oilfields which bring prosperity to oil companies and cheap gas to their cars, and that US nationals might even be attacked in Muslim countries, Bush's popularity would plummet immediately.
"What is needed is not regime change or so-called "US-ushered democracy" in Iraq (as in Afghanistan), in a region of Hama Rule "rule or die". Saudi Arabia is ruled by an incongruous alliance of luxury-loving princes and Wahhabis, who enforce medieval punishments at home and promote fanaticism abroad, yet Washington does not demand regime change there. Another repressive US-supported regime in Egypt continues to provide recruits for al-Qaeda. Opening a Pandora's box in the Middle East would release bottled-up historical forces with unpredictable results, like Ayatollah Khomeini after the ouster of the Shah of Iran.
.
"The United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, controls 30 percent of world resources. And US corporate interests, forming perhaps 1 percent of this population, control these massive resources. They want to control the world without accountability, not even to the American people.
"Perhaps it is in the United States itself where its ill-informed and misinformed people need not just a regime change but a system change. Where energy and military-industry corporate interests have hijacked power from the people to pursue their narrow objectives. Where corporate chiefs enjoy coercive powers even the Communist Party chiefs in the former Soviet Union would have envied. Where blacks, Hispanics and the poor cannot freely choose a president (as in Florida, where only by not counting their votes did George Bush become the president).
The United States needs a regime and a system under which people can question, without being labeled unpatriotic or enemies, failures of a system that could not and cannot protect them."
What now;
The 10 key members of the Baker-Hamilton Commission are not military strategists or geopolitical thinkers who might offer a solution to Iraq , They are basically old establishment hands extending back to the Reagan era. Jim Baker , with help from his buddy Eduard Shevardnadze and a trusting and naïve Mikhail Gorbachev , frightened by Ronald Regan's threat of Star wars , and later a drugged Yeltsin, Soviet Union was dismantled , with West entering Russian strategic space .In Iraq and the region, those on the other side are apart from Iran, Syria , a resurgent and wiser Russia under Vladimir Putin and rising giant China , which holds US trillion dollars .
The situation is complex with great possibilities of the conflict spreading beyond Iraq . Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a key figure in the region recently told "Der Spiegel," "When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too." He concluded, "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one would be able to get a grip on the consequences."
Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said, "We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups." He concluded grimly, "The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body."
Many in US have suggested partitioning Iraq .Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador, sees the consequences: "To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale."
Even the cold warrior Henry Kissinger, whom many would like to try for war crimes and who reportedly egged on Bush to stay the course till 'victory ' was achieved ,now admits a military victory in Iraq was no longer possible. He told the BBC that the dramatic collapse of Iraq would have "disastrous consequences."
Kissinger called for an international conference including Iraq's neighbors, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and India and Pakistan to find out a solution.
Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations told SPIEGEL that the Middle East could become dangerous for years to come. He added that "the old Middle East -- an era which I believe has only recently ended -- was one in which the United States enjoyed tremendous dominance and freedom of maneuver. Oil was available at fairly low prices, the region was largely at peace. I believe largely because of the American decision to go to war in Iraq and how it has been carried out, --It's one of history's ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in Geneva on 21 November that "The United States in a way is trapped in Iraq .It cannot stay and it cannot leave. There are those who maintain that its presence is a problem and there are those who say that if it leaves precipitously, the situation will get worse." He added that the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq "should not lead to a further deterioration of the situation." The goal should be to leave when Iraqi authorities can ensure a "reasonable, secure environment.
Annan, who retires at the end of the year said the war in Iraq, and the failure of the U.N. Security Council to prevent the invasion by U.S.-led forces, was the biggest regret he had from his 10-year tenure. "I firmly believe that the war could have been avoided," "The inspectors should have had a bit more time." US media dogs were launched at him when he described US invasion of Iraq against the UN Charter and hence illegal.
Annan welcomed moves to involve Syria and Iran in trying to foster stability in Iraq because it would help bring peace to the region.
New Moves;
News stories are appearing about the US contacts with the Iraqi Resistance , including Baker telling a Saddam Hussein lawyer that Tariq Aziz, former deputy prime minister, would be released from detention by the end of this year, hoping that he will negotiate with the US on behalf of the Baath Party leadership. Condi Rice has appealed to the Gulf Cooperation Council to serve as intermediaries between the US and armed Sunni resistance groups [ except Al Qaeda]
National Security adviser Stephen Hadley carried a six-point message for Iraqi officials on his recent trip to Baghdad: to include Iraqi resistance and opposition leaders in any initiative towards national reconciliation; general amnesty for the armed resistance fighters, dissolve the Iraqi commission charged with banning the Baath party; cancel any federalism proposal to divide Iraq into three regions, and combine central authority for the central government with greater self-rule for local governors , distribute oil revenues in a fair manner to all Iraqis, including the Sunnis whose regions lack the resources.
Prime Minister Al-Maliki was not agreeable since his Shiite followers believe that their historic moment has arrived after one thousand years of Sunni domination. Leaks of talks with the Resistance have been common since even 2003, There is no reason to disbelieve that these US measure are nothing more than the historic tactics of divide-and-rule.
Hard facts on the ground;
It is quite clear that the accusations like WMDs, Iraq's nuclear program and Iraq's linkages with Al Qaeda were just excuses as the then US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrogantly boasted after the occupation .It was to control the region , rich in oil and after vanquishing Iran , even control the Caspian Sea basin energy resources too .Azerbaijan and Georgia are already in the US pocket .Wolfowitz, now President of the World Bank , also told the US Congress that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for its reconstruction and enrich US multinationals .Yes , crony capitalism and rampant loot of Iraq revenues have enriched US companies like Haliburton , Bechtel and Republican party members apart from the corrupt ruling quisling government in Iraq .
Except the oil ministry everything in Iraq , even the human heritage Museums were allowed to be looted, ( but because of the Resistance the oil production has been less than during Saddam days ) but under Pentagon supervision , US has gone ahead and built many military bases , about which very little information comes out. Nor is the US media curious to write about it. The US has 55 bases of different sizes in Iraq ; five or six of these are massive including Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, the huge base first named Camp Victory adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, and al-Asad Air Base in western Anbar province, are enormous - big enough to be reasonable-sized US towns with multiple bus routes, neighborhoods, a range of fast-food restaurants, multiple shops, pools, mini-golf courses and the like. Ready for long stay!
Several billion dollars have already been sunk into them. Balad, for instance, already handled the levels of daily air traffic one would normally see at Chicago's ultra-busy O'Hare and being enlarged .The four mega-bases would serve as permanent US jumping-off spots in what Bush administration edcall "the arc of instability" .In all the work is still in progress.
A United Press International reported: "Following hints US troops may remain in Iraq for years, the United States is reportedly building a massive military base at Arbil , in Kurdish northern Iraq." Iraqi Kurdistan , which has functioned as a US protectorate since 1991 Gulf war has always been a logical fallback position for US forces "withdrawing" from a failed Iraq. Turkey had accused Israel of training Kurds there for subversive activities against neighbours .
And the new US embassy building now going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone and , almost the size of Vatican City, with "100% independence from city utilities", not to speak of a "swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building" and its own anti-missile system. One wonders how long US could use it .Recently a car bomb was attempted inside the secure Green Zone fortress .
You bet USA will easily be parted from these strategic assets .
Barring some exceptions, the Western discourse inflicted on the world with control of media and communications , specially from USA is racist and colonist.
A human tragedy of biblical proportions;
The prestigious British medical journal Lancet based on John Hopkins Medical school study estimated the death of Iraqi following the US invasion and occupation at over 655,000 ( equal to the American civil war ). Similar methodology is used to compute deaths in other wars and famines around the world. When asked at a media conference if, given the Lancet study, Bush stood by the number he had previously cited of 30,000 Iraqi deaths,( in December , 2005 ) .Bush responded, "You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life - 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just - it's not credible." Western leaders and media have either ignored these colossal crimes or followed Bush line.
From Colin Powell to US Generals like Tommy Franks all have reiterated ;" We do not do body counts." But whenever a Western hostage is taken or a western soldier killed , you have the whole family , relations and friends and neighbours being interviewed on Western channels. As if non westerners were an inferior human breed.
According to the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) more than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing bleak future with UNHCR funds having been reduced. 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, while 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.
The discourse on West spreading democracy is just a different version of Christian West's ' self evident' manifest destiny to civilize the natives of the world .Look at the temerity in describing the illegal invasion of Iraq ; Operation Iraqi freedom. And the charade of bringing democracy in the Middle East , when the Western record has been suppression of nationalist and democratic aspirations and forces all around the world . Now that Iraqis whether Sunnis or Shias remain fiercely opposed to the occupation, Neo-cons mutter 'Iraqis don't deserve freedom and democracy." They are an inferior breed.
Western leaders have prostituted words like liberty, freedom and democracy. Nobody likes to be colonised or enslaved ; the Turks, the Algerians, the Vietnamese ,the Afghans , and the Iraqis who fought against the British occupation even in 1920 and 30s. Still the arrogant West wants to colonise, exploit and impose its values on other nations. Chapters and verses have been written in Western media that the Iraqi occupation and colonization would have succeeded with more troops . It would have only meant even more horrendous bloodletting then taking place now , over 100 Iraqis being killed every day . The Vietnamese sacrificed 2 million people and the Algerians one million for their liberty.
Bush and Blair have only endangered the security of many European nations. UK has become the most exposed although some terror alerts were exaggerated for political reasons ie to impose curbs on freedom .Unless US policies are changed ,sooner than later USA will face resistance from its marginalised black community specially black Muslims. How the blacks and Hispanics have remained marginalized became clear at how the Katrina disaster was mishandled.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. Copy right with the author. E-mail Gajendrak@hotmail.com.
Robert Fisk: A French colonial legacy of despair
Robert Fisk
They wanted Lebanon's 'independence' - but they wanted it in France's favour
Published: 25 November 2006
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2013319.ece
They wanted Lebanon's 'independence' - but they wanted it in France's favour
Published: 25 November 2006
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2013319.ece
New US Defense Secretary Advocated Air Strikes on Nicaragua
Gates Advocated Air Strikes on Nicaragua
By GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — In 1984, Robert Gates, then the No. 2 CIA official, advocated U.S. airstrikes against Nicaragua's pro-Cuban government to reverse what he described as an ineffective U.S. strategy to deal with communist advances in Central America, previously classified documents say.
Gates, President Bush's nominee to be defense secretary, said the United States could no longer justify what he described as "halfhearted" attempts to contain Nicaragua's Sandinista government, according to documents released Friday by the National Security Archive, a private research group.
In a memo to CIA Director William Casey dated Dec. 14, 1984, Gates said his proposed airstrikes would be designed "to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua's military buildup" and be focused on tanks and helicopters.
He also recommended that the United States prevent delivery to the Sandinistas of such weapons in the future. The administration, he said, should make clear that a U.S. invasion of the country was not contemplated.
The target of Gates' anxieties was Nicaragua's leftist president, Daniel Ortega.
Ironically, Gates' nomination to succeed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was announced just days after Ortega capped off a surprise political comeback by winning election as Nicaraguan president after three previous bids were rejected by the voters.
Ortega has recast himself as a moderate, assuring Nicaraguans that his Marxist-Leninist days are over.
Gates saw a calamitous situation in Central America in December 1984. Congress had ordered a halt to U.S. support for the Contra rebels, leaving Ortega free, as Gates saw it, to establish Nicaragua as a "permanent and well-armed" ally of the Soviet Union and Cuba.
He said the United States should acknowledge that the existence of a Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua closely allied to Moscow and Havana "is unacceptable to the United States and that the United States will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out."
In addition to airstrikes, he recommended withdrawal of U.S. recognition of the Nicaraguan government and recognition of a Nicaraguan government in exile that would be entitled to U.S. military support.
Economic sanctions should be considered, "perhaps even including a quarantine," Gates wrote.
His proposals were never adopted, but the administration attempted to circumvent the Contra aid ban by secretly funneling money to the rebels that had been obtained through arms sales to Iran. Democrats say they will question Gates during his Senate confirmation about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal, which erupted two years after he sent his memo to Casey.
Gates' grim prediction in the memo of disaster in Central America did not come to pass. Congress renewed aid to the Contras in 1986. In February 1990, Nicaraguans dealt a blow to the Soviet Union and Cuba by voting Ortega out of office. And within two years, the Soviet Union had disappeared.
___
November 24, 2006 - 2:54 p.m. MST
Copyright 2006, The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP Online news report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/Other_US_Govermnent/Gates_Nicaragua.html
By GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — In 1984, Robert Gates, then the No. 2 CIA official, advocated U.S. airstrikes against Nicaragua's pro-Cuban government to reverse what he described as an ineffective U.S. strategy to deal with communist advances in Central America, previously classified documents say.
Gates, President Bush's nominee to be defense secretary, said the United States could no longer justify what he described as "halfhearted" attempts to contain Nicaragua's Sandinista government, according to documents released Friday by the National Security Archive, a private research group.
In a memo to CIA Director William Casey dated Dec. 14, 1984, Gates said his proposed airstrikes would be designed "to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua's military buildup" and be focused on tanks and helicopters.
He also recommended that the United States prevent delivery to the Sandinistas of such weapons in the future. The administration, he said, should make clear that a U.S. invasion of the country was not contemplated.
The target of Gates' anxieties was Nicaragua's leftist president, Daniel Ortega.
Ironically, Gates' nomination to succeed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was announced just days after Ortega capped off a surprise political comeback by winning election as Nicaraguan president after three previous bids were rejected by the voters.
Ortega has recast himself as a moderate, assuring Nicaraguans that his Marxist-Leninist days are over.
Gates saw a calamitous situation in Central America in December 1984. Congress had ordered a halt to U.S. support for the Contra rebels, leaving Ortega free, as Gates saw it, to establish Nicaragua as a "permanent and well-armed" ally of the Soviet Union and Cuba.
He said the United States should acknowledge that the existence of a Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua closely allied to Moscow and Havana "is unacceptable to the United States and that the United States will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out."
In addition to airstrikes, he recommended withdrawal of U.S. recognition of the Nicaraguan government and recognition of a Nicaraguan government in exile that would be entitled to U.S. military support.
Economic sanctions should be considered, "perhaps even including a quarantine," Gates wrote.
His proposals were never adopted, but the administration attempted to circumvent the Contra aid ban by secretly funneling money to the rebels that had been obtained through arms sales to Iran. Democrats say they will question Gates during his Senate confirmation about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal, which erupted two years after he sent his memo to Casey.
Gates' grim prediction in the memo of disaster in Central America did not come to pass. Congress renewed aid to the Contras in 1986. In February 1990, Nicaraguans dealt a blow to the Soviet Union and Cuba by voting Ortega out of office. And within two years, the Soviet Union had disappeared.
___
November 24, 2006 - 2:54 p.m. MST
Copyright 2006, The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP Online news report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/Other_US_Govermnent/Gates_Nicaragua.html
Stuck at a Red Light
November 24, 2006
By Layla Anwar
Today I was stuck in a traffic jam that seemed to last an eternity. The lights kept changing colors from Red to Green, Green to Red and I was still stuck, immobilized , unable to move forward .
My radio was blasting a song by Elham Al Madfai* , a song entitled Khuttar (meaning Visitor in Arabic). And whilst I was patiently waiting for the red light to switch off and the green light to switch on, my mind wandered...
I saw the Red Zone and the Green Zone in Baghdad.
The red zone was very red. As red as the sun that sets on the Tigris. Red as blood, red as fire.
The green zone was a green as the palm trees that embrace the river, as green as spring.
The red zone is filled with limbs , scorching heat, immolated bodies with Iraqi kerosene (oil).
The green zone has healthy men and women walking about, playing bowling and billiard.
The red zone is screaming with burns,pain and anguish
The green zone is playing disco music and drinking beer and whiskey.
The red zone is bursting into flames , its markets reduced to ashes, its women pulling out their hair.
The green zone is where secret love affairs flourish, where three meals a day are served and where electricity is available.
The red zone has demolished houses , mosques and targeted churches.
The green zone with its palaces is bathing in blessings handed out by the American parish priest.
The red zone is burning in flames.
The green zone is barricaded behind high fences , striking more business deals.
Red Zone , Green Zone, Red light , Green Light , the traffic seems endless.
I have to move now , someone is honking .
* Elham Al Madfai is an Iraqi singer.
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2006/11/stuck-at-red-light.html
By Layla Anwar
Today I was stuck in a traffic jam that seemed to last an eternity. The lights kept changing colors from Red to Green, Green to Red and I was still stuck, immobilized , unable to move forward .
My radio was blasting a song by Elham Al Madfai* , a song entitled Khuttar (meaning Visitor in Arabic). And whilst I was patiently waiting for the red light to switch off and the green light to switch on, my mind wandered...
I saw the Red Zone and the Green Zone in Baghdad.
The red zone was very red. As red as the sun that sets on the Tigris. Red as blood, red as fire.
The green zone was a green as the palm trees that embrace the river, as green as spring.
The red zone is filled with limbs , scorching heat, immolated bodies with Iraqi kerosene (oil).
The green zone has healthy men and women walking about, playing bowling and billiard.
The red zone is screaming with burns,pain and anguish
The green zone is playing disco music and drinking beer and whiskey.
The red zone is bursting into flames , its markets reduced to ashes, its women pulling out their hair.
The green zone is where secret love affairs flourish, where three meals a day are served and where electricity is available.
The red zone has demolished houses , mosques and targeted churches.
The green zone with its palaces is bathing in blessings handed out by the American parish priest.
The red zone is burning in flames.
The green zone is barricaded behind high fences , striking more business deals.
Red Zone , Green Zone, Red light , Green Light , the traffic seems endless.
I have to move now , someone is honking .
* Elham Al Madfai is an Iraqi singer.
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2006/11/stuck-at-red-light.html
Live blogging from Baghdad: Can it get worse?
November 24, 2006
The nation seemed adrift. It was as if the main players in Iraq were asleep, unable to stop the mounting bloodshed around them and oblivious to the consequences. Iraqi politicians enmeshed themselves in vitriolic debates, while Washington waited for the results of various study groups to decide on a solution in Iraq.
Meanwhile, every day, corpses bearing signs of torture were dumped in the city; nightly mortar attacks rocked Sunni and Shia districts; Al-Qaeda militants expelled Shia civilians from Sunni neighborhoods; kidnappers abducted government employees.
An Iraqi friend started voicing his anxiety to me that something truly awful could happen now. He was terrified the moment would come without warning. This week, some militants in his western Baghdad neighborhood had been heavily mortaring a Shia district, called Hay Amal. He was sure if the mortaring kept up, the Mahdi Army would storm his street. He knew it would take
just one spark to unleash the chaos.
Last night, I spoke with my friend after the Sadr City bombings; he could hear mortars burst and gunfire barrages in the distance. The power had gone out in his house and he listened to the explosions in the dark. He wondered if the government or anyone could stop an armed group from breaking down his door and taking revenge. The government had slapped a curfew down on the city, but he thought that wouldn’t stop Shia militias, with ties to the security forces, from roaming Baghdad.
We spoke again this morning. This time, his little son was crying. He went outside and sat in his car while we spoke. The child loved the car and it usually quieted him. The street was empty. My friend said he hadn’t slept much because of all the explosions last night. He prayed things would stay calm.
Ned Parker is the Baghdad Correspondent for The Times and has been based in the country since March 2003. He has also filed extensively from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Ali Hamdani and James Hider will also be adding to this weblog.
Posted by The Times Baghdad bureau on November 24, 2006 at 10:57 AM |
http://timesonline.typepad.com/inside_iraq_weblog/
The nation seemed adrift. It was as if the main players in Iraq were asleep, unable to stop the mounting bloodshed around them and oblivious to the consequences. Iraqi politicians enmeshed themselves in vitriolic debates, while Washington waited for the results of various study groups to decide on a solution in Iraq.
Meanwhile, every day, corpses bearing signs of torture were dumped in the city; nightly mortar attacks rocked Sunni and Shia districts; Al-Qaeda militants expelled Shia civilians from Sunni neighborhoods; kidnappers abducted government employees.
An Iraqi friend started voicing his anxiety to me that something truly awful could happen now. He was terrified the moment would come without warning. This week, some militants in his western Baghdad neighborhood had been heavily mortaring a Shia district, called Hay Amal. He was sure if the mortaring kept up, the Mahdi Army would storm his street. He knew it would take
just one spark to unleash the chaos.
Last night, I spoke with my friend after the Sadr City bombings; he could hear mortars burst and gunfire barrages in the distance. The power had gone out in his house and he listened to the explosions in the dark. He wondered if the government or anyone could stop an armed group from breaking down his door and taking revenge. The government had slapped a curfew down on the city, but he thought that wouldn’t stop Shia militias, with ties to the security forces, from roaming Baghdad.
We spoke again this morning. This time, his little son was crying. He went outside and sat in his car while we spoke. The child loved the car and it usually quieted him. The street was empty. My friend said he hadn’t slept much because of all the explosions last night. He prayed things would stay calm.
Ned Parker is the Baghdad Correspondent for The Times and has been based in the country since March 2003. He has also filed extensively from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Ali Hamdani and James Hider will also be adding to this weblog.
Posted by The Times Baghdad bureau on November 24, 2006 at 10:57 AM |
http://timesonline.typepad.com/inside_iraq_weblog/
'In Saddam's time I never saw a friend killed in front of my eyes.'
The Times November 25, 2006
The people of Baghdad , whether Sunni or Shia, live in fear o f ambush and torture.
I never saw neighbours driven out of their homes just for their sect. And I never saw entire families being slaughtered and killed'
Martin Fletcher, Ali Hamdani, Ned Parker
Against a backdrop of spiralling violence in Baghdad, The Times persuaded six ordinary Iraqis to visit its bureau to describe their lives. Sunni or Shia, they all had a strikingly similar tale to tell
Inside Iraq: Read Ned Parker blogging live from Baghdad
Saad Hassam
Street cleaner
Shia
Single
Age 23
Saad was a conscript in Saddam’s army when US tanks rolled into Baghdad in April 2003. He deserted, went home and celebrated with his family. “We were dancing. I felt like I was reborn,” he said. He dreamt of getting a job at the airport that might let him travel.
Today the eyes of this thin young man brim with tears as he recounts what actually happened.
The Americans launched an effort to clear up the rubbish around the capital. Saad risked the charge of collaboration by taking a job as a street cleaner in the Rashid district of west Baghdad for a meagre $5 a day.
That was dangerous enough, but the work became even more perilous when insurgents began seeding roads with improvised explosive devices disguised as rubbish. Street cleaners were blown up, or denounced as informers when they betrayed the location of such devices. “You can’t just turn a blind eye. If you leave them there they might kill innocent passers-by,” Saad said through an interpreter.
One morning in 2005, two cars drew up beside Saad and his four fellow sweepers and opened fire. Two of his colleagues were killed. Saad wept. “It was a bitter feeling. It was such a minor and simple job, yet you were not safe doing it,” he said.
Saad quit. Four months later his older brother and a neighbour were killed in a random attack by Sunni gunmen as they chatted with friends outside the family home in the Hey Amal district of Baghdad. A few days later gunmen opened fire on the funeral.
For a long time Saad did not go out, but eventually he and two younger brothers had to return to work as street cleaners to support their parents and three other siblings. “My friends told me I couldn’t keep going on like that and that I had to go out and start working again.” Saad has since found eight improvised bombs. He knows five street cleaners who have been killed, and hears of many more.
Two months ago Saad was caught in a car bomb as he was buying cooking gas at a petrol station near his home. He now has a festering wound on his right hand, and although a neighbour drives him to hospital, it lacks the right medicine. He cannot afford proper medical treatment and cannot work.
He has told his younger brothers to go and work in a safer area of Baghdad and, even though the pay is derisory, he will return to his old job if his hand heals — because there is no other work and the family has no other income. “Sometimes my brothers and I look at each other when we get home and laugh at what we have earned,” he said.
Saad’s dreams were dashed a long time ago. “We always say, ‘Inshallah, there will be a solution’, but realistically we can’t see any hope.” Would he like Saddam back? “Yes,” he says. “For many reasons. During Saddam's time I never saw a friend killed in front of my eyes, I never saw neighbours driven out of their homes just for their sect, and I never saw entire families being slaughtered and killed.”
Hamid Abed Muhammad
Baker
Shia
Married with three children
Age 38
At 8.30 one morning, gunmen burst into a baker’s shop owned by a friend of Hamid and opened fire, killing six customers and employees. They also killed Hamid’s friend and put his body in the oven.
Six weeks ago Hamid watched an Opel saloon pull up outside a bakery opposite his own in the al-Bayia district of south central Baghdad. Four gunmen opened fire, killing one employee and two customers.
Hamid knows of at least seven bakers from his area who have been killed by Sunni “Mujahidin”. The reason is simple: Iraq's bakers tend to be Shia, and so are trusted to supply Iraq’s predominantly Shia security forces and government offices.
Hamid, a large, gentle man, has received oblique threats himself. He has given up two contracts to provide bread to the National Guard, and stopped baking at the Rashid Hotel inside the green zone.
It is business he can ill afford to lose. He reckons a quarter of his neighbourhood has left the city. At least 12 regular customers have been killed. The restaurants he used to supply have mostly closed. He used to sell 10,000 breads a day, but now sells fewer than 1,000. He no longer dares to open early or stay open late.
Three of Hamid’s five employees have quit because of the danger. He would like to pack up as well, but has to support his parents, his wife and three young children. His brothers and sisters have fled to Syria, but he cannot afford to join them.
Hamid will not let his oldest daughter, aged 5, attend kindergarten after another child was kidnapped. He rejoiced at Saddam's fall, but now yearns for the security of that pre-war era. Iraqi society is wrecked, he says. “There is no solution. My children have no future. How can you build a better future for them when you’re struggling to survive each day?”
Anas Dawood
Office administrator
Sunni
Married
Age 28
Anas has seen more of the world than most Iraqis. As a diplomat’s daughter with a degree in business administration, she has lived in China and Morocco. She is bright and vivacious, and her face briefly lights up as she remembers the pre-war days when she and her friends took holidays, partied into the small hours and went to restaurants.
No longer. Over the past two years her life has contracted to the point where she and her husband, Muhammad, are virtual prisoners in their home in the hardline Sunni district of Amiriyah, west Baghdad.
First she had to quit her job at a trading company in central Baghdad because the proliferation of roadblocks, bombs, robberies and kidnappings made the journey to work too dangerous. Then religious Mujahidin began imposing Taleban-like rule on Amiriyah itself.
Anas stopped wearing jeans after hearing of women being killed or beaten for wearing Western clothes. Then she had to give up driving. Soon she could no longer go shopping or to the hairdresser. She stopped wearing make-up in public. She had to start wearing a veil and then an abbayah when she went out. Eventually she felt unable to leave the house at all.
Four months ago Muhammad quit his job as an engineer after the Shia-dominated police raided his Sunni-owned company and abducted three colleagues. Moreover he was risking his life just leaving Amariyah as the last Shias, including close neighbours, had been driven out or killed. That meant anyone entering or leaving the district had to be Sunni and therefore a target for the police or militias.
Today the couple live off their savings. Muhammad goes out to buy food, and they occasionally visit Anas’s parents a few streets away, but otherwise they hardly leave their house. They speak to friends only by telephone. Their visit to The Times bureau — on their second wedding anniversary — was the first time in a year they had risked staying out after dark. The Dawoods do not know who is imposing this reign of terror, but feel its malign presence all around. They hear constant reports of reprisals against those who do not fall in line. “We feel hopeless,” said Anas. “We feel life will become more and more suffocating. We don't know what to do. We feel desperate to leave this country.”
Would she bring a child into such a world? “Not if you were realistic and reasonable,” she replied. “But it’s part of our nature to want to have a baby.”
Qahtan Aouda
Barber
Sunni
Single
Age 27
Only in Iraq could a barber lose his life for trimming a beard, and Qahtan lives with that fear each day.
A year ago he was cutting hair at his open-fronted shop in the Hey Amal district of west Baghdad when an SUV carrying four strangers drew up outside. One got out, called for Qahtan and asked him to shave his beard. Qahtan, who had heard of Baghdad barbers being killed by al-Qaeda extremists for agreeing to such requests, sensed a trap. He said he never cut beards. The man left, advising Qahtan to be careful.
Qahtan immediately closed up and moved to new premises a few streets away. Within two months he had moved again, convinced he was being watched. His present shop is in a side street, but that did not prevent it being wrecked recently by a bomb.
He now keeps an AK47 to protect himself. He has put a sign in his window saying he does not cut beards, though he still cuts those of trusted customers. He refuses to discuss politics or the security situation with any customer he does not know. Instead of staying open long into the night he closes well before dark. He says at least seven of his customers have been killed, two of them butchered by the Shia Madhi militia last week.
Qahtan would like to leave Iraq but his family needs the $60 or $70 he brings home each week. He would like to change jobs, and has a degree, but cannot find a position without a political patron. “I feel helpless. I can't make any long term plans,” he says. “I just try to survive each day, but staying at my shop will get me killed. I’m sure of that."
Muhammad Shati
Telecoms engineer
Shia
Engaged to be married
Age 37
Muhammad Shati has waited four years to marry his fiancée, Lamyia, but tragedies keep intervening.
They both work for the state telecommunications company, and he had just persuaded her to marry him when the US invaded in March 2003. Months later, when a semblance of calm had returned, they set another date. Then Lamyia’s brother was killed during an American assault near the southern town of al-Nasariyah.
As Iraq descended into lawlessness two of Muhammad’s cousins, both farmers, were shot dead during a land dispute in the town of al-Kut, but worse was to follow. On September 6 this year Muhammad’s older brother, Mahmoud, 50, disappeared in a Sunni district of Baghdad while driving home from work. Two days later the family found his body at the mortuary. He had been shot through the head and abdomen. His arms and chest were burnt and bruised. His corpse had been fished from the Tigris river.
Muhammad is now struggling to support his brother’s wife and five children, aged between 5 and 20. Some time ago he switched to an administrative job because going out on repair jobs was too dangerous. But that pays only $180 a month, so he is desperately searching for something more lucrative. There is no way he can afford to marry.
Saddam at least offered security, he says. “If you kept away from his regime you felt safe.” Today he is close to despair. “It’s grim, it’s bleak, but we have to survive this. We have learnt in Iraq to deal with reality and forget about hopes and imagination.”
Will he ever get married? “Inshallah,” he replies. “Love keeps Lamyia patient. But with the way things are going now, marriage is becoming ever harder to envisage. When I see a wedding car in Baghdad I gaze at them and wonder can it be true that someone is still getting married in the middle of all this?”
Omar al-Azani
IT manager
Sunni
Single
Age 33
Omar, who once played basketball for Iraq, comes from Gazaliyah, a mixed area of west Baghdad racked by bombings, shootings and kidnappings. His brother fled to the Gulf in March. In July Mahdi militiamen seized his two aunts and a 28-year-old nephew. Omar later found their bodies in a grave in Karbala; his nephew's mouth had been slit right up to his ears. A month after that his parents fled to Syria.
For the past few months Omar was living in a hotel in the relatively safe Karradah district where he was installing an internet system. He did not dare go out. He sold his car. For $35 he had acquired a fake identity card because Omar was a Sunni name.
He is now in Sulaimaniyah, in the safer Kurdish north, waiting for his brother to secure him a visa for the Gulf. “It’s very difficult. I will leave my friends, my family, my memories. I don't know if I'll ever come back,” he said. “Maybe I'll find a new life somewhere else in a country where I can walk down the street and eat in restaurants like a normal human being.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-2470188,00.html
The people of Baghdad , whether Sunni or Shia, live in fear o f ambush and torture.
I never saw neighbours driven out of their homes just for their sect. And I never saw entire families being slaughtered and killed'
Martin Fletcher, Ali Hamdani, Ned Parker
Against a backdrop of spiralling violence in Baghdad, The Times persuaded six ordinary Iraqis to visit its bureau to describe their lives. Sunni or Shia, they all had a strikingly similar tale to tell
Inside Iraq: Read Ned Parker blogging live from Baghdad
Saad Hassam
Street cleaner
Shia
Single
Age 23
Saad was a conscript in Saddam’s army when US tanks rolled into Baghdad in April 2003. He deserted, went home and celebrated with his family. “We were dancing. I felt like I was reborn,” he said. He dreamt of getting a job at the airport that might let him travel.
Today the eyes of this thin young man brim with tears as he recounts what actually happened.
The Americans launched an effort to clear up the rubbish around the capital. Saad risked the charge of collaboration by taking a job as a street cleaner in the Rashid district of west Baghdad for a meagre $5 a day.
That was dangerous enough, but the work became even more perilous when insurgents began seeding roads with improvised explosive devices disguised as rubbish. Street cleaners were blown up, or denounced as informers when they betrayed the location of such devices. “You can’t just turn a blind eye. If you leave them there they might kill innocent passers-by,” Saad said through an interpreter.
One morning in 2005, two cars drew up beside Saad and his four fellow sweepers and opened fire. Two of his colleagues were killed. Saad wept. “It was a bitter feeling. It was such a minor and simple job, yet you were not safe doing it,” he said.
Saad quit. Four months later his older brother and a neighbour were killed in a random attack by Sunni gunmen as they chatted with friends outside the family home in the Hey Amal district of Baghdad. A few days later gunmen opened fire on the funeral.
For a long time Saad did not go out, but eventually he and two younger brothers had to return to work as street cleaners to support their parents and three other siblings. “My friends told me I couldn’t keep going on like that and that I had to go out and start working again.” Saad has since found eight improvised bombs. He knows five street cleaners who have been killed, and hears of many more.
Two months ago Saad was caught in a car bomb as he was buying cooking gas at a petrol station near his home. He now has a festering wound on his right hand, and although a neighbour drives him to hospital, it lacks the right medicine. He cannot afford proper medical treatment and cannot work.
He has told his younger brothers to go and work in a safer area of Baghdad and, even though the pay is derisory, he will return to his old job if his hand heals — because there is no other work and the family has no other income. “Sometimes my brothers and I look at each other when we get home and laugh at what we have earned,” he said.
Saad’s dreams were dashed a long time ago. “We always say, ‘Inshallah, there will be a solution’, but realistically we can’t see any hope.” Would he like Saddam back? “Yes,” he says. “For many reasons. During Saddam's time I never saw a friend killed in front of my eyes, I never saw neighbours driven out of their homes just for their sect, and I never saw entire families being slaughtered and killed.”
Hamid Abed Muhammad
Baker
Shia
Married with three children
Age 38
At 8.30 one morning, gunmen burst into a baker’s shop owned by a friend of Hamid and opened fire, killing six customers and employees. They also killed Hamid’s friend and put his body in the oven.
Six weeks ago Hamid watched an Opel saloon pull up outside a bakery opposite his own in the al-Bayia district of south central Baghdad. Four gunmen opened fire, killing one employee and two customers.
Hamid knows of at least seven bakers from his area who have been killed by Sunni “Mujahidin”. The reason is simple: Iraq's bakers tend to be Shia, and so are trusted to supply Iraq’s predominantly Shia security forces and government offices.
Hamid, a large, gentle man, has received oblique threats himself. He has given up two contracts to provide bread to the National Guard, and stopped baking at the Rashid Hotel inside the green zone.
It is business he can ill afford to lose. He reckons a quarter of his neighbourhood has left the city. At least 12 regular customers have been killed. The restaurants he used to supply have mostly closed. He used to sell 10,000 breads a day, but now sells fewer than 1,000. He no longer dares to open early or stay open late.
Three of Hamid’s five employees have quit because of the danger. He would like to pack up as well, but has to support his parents, his wife and three young children. His brothers and sisters have fled to Syria, but he cannot afford to join them.
Hamid will not let his oldest daughter, aged 5, attend kindergarten after another child was kidnapped. He rejoiced at Saddam's fall, but now yearns for the security of that pre-war era. Iraqi society is wrecked, he says. “There is no solution. My children have no future. How can you build a better future for them when you’re struggling to survive each day?”
Anas Dawood
Office administrator
Sunni
Married
Age 28
Anas has seen more of the world than most Iraqis. As a diplomat’s daughter with a degree in business administration, she has lived in China and Morocco. She is bright and vivacious, and her face briefly lights up as she remembers the pre-war days when she and her friends took holidays, partied into the small hours and went to restaurants.
No longer. Over the past two years her life has contracted to the point where she and her husband, Muhammad, are virtual prisoners in their home in the hardline Sunni district of Amiriyah, west Baghdad.
First she had to quit her job at a trading company in central Baghdad because the proliferation of roadblocks, bombs, robberies and kidnappings made the journey to work too dangerous. Then religious Mujahidin began imposing Taleban-like rule on Amiriyah itself.
Anas stopped wearing jeans after hearing of women being killed or beaten for wearing Western clothes. Then she had to give up driving. Soon she could no longer go shopping or to the hairdresser. She stopped wearing make-up in public. She had to start wearing a veil and then an abbayah when she went out. Eventually she felt unable to leave the house at all.
Four months ago Muhammad quit his job as an engineer after the Shia-dominated police raided his Sunni-owned company and abducted three colleagues. Moreover he was risking his life just leaving Amariyah as the last Shias, including close neighbours, had been driven out or killed. That meant anyone entering or leaving the district had to be Sunni and therefore a target for the police or militias.
Today the couple live off their savings. Muhammad goes out to buy food, and they occasionally visit Anas’s parents a few streets away, but otherwise they hardly leave their house. They speak to friends only by telephone. Their visit to The Times bureau — on their second wedding anniversary — was the first time in a year they had risked staying out after dark. The Dawoods do not know who is imposing this reign of terror, but feel its malign presence all around. They hear constant reports of reprisals against those who do not fall in line. “We feel hopeless,” said Anas. “We feel life will become more and more suffocating. We don't know what to do. We feel desperate to leave this country.”
Would she bring a child into such a world? “Not if you were realistic and reasonable,” she replied. “But it’s part of our nature to want to have a baby.”
Qahtan Aouda
Barber
Sunni
Single
Age 27
Only in Iraq could a barber lose his life for trimming a beard, and Qahtan lives with that fear each day.
A year ago he was cutting hair at his open-fronted shop in the Hey Amal district of west Baghdad when an SUV carrying four strangers drew up outside. One got out, called for Qahtan and asked him to shave his beard. Qahtan, who had heard of Baghdad barbers being killed by al-Qaeda extremists for agreeing to such requests, sensed a trap. He said he never cut beards. The man left, advising Qahtan to be careful.
Qahtan immediately closed up and moved to new premises a few streets away. Within two months he had moved again, convinced he was being watched. His present shop is in a side street, but that did not prevent it being wrecked recently by a bomb.
He now keeps an AK47 to protect himself. He has put a sign in his window saying he does not cut beards, though he still cuts those of trusted customers. He refuses to discuss politics or the security situation with any customer he does not know. Instead of staying open long into the night he closes well before dark. He says at least seven of his customers have been killed, two of them butchered by the Shia Madhi militia last week.
Qahtan would like to leave Iraq but his family needs the $60 or $70 he brings home each week. He would like to change jobs, and has a degree, but cannot find a position without a political patron. “I feel helpless. I can't make any long term plans,” he says. “I just try to survive each day, but staying at my shop will get me killed. I’m sure of that."
Muhammad Shati
Telecoms engineer
Shia
Engaged to be married
Age 37
Muhammad Shati has waited four years to marry his fiancée, Lamyia, but tragedies keep intervening.
They both work for the state telecommunications company, and he had just persuaded her to marry him when the US invaded in March 2003. Months later, when a semblance of calm had returned, they set another date. Then Lamyia’s brother was killed during an American assault near the southern town of al-Nasariyah.
As Iraq descended into lawlessness two of Muhammad’s cousins, both farmers, were shot dead during a land dispute in the town of al-Kut, but worse was to follow. On September 6 this year Muhammad’s older brother, Mahmoud, 50, disappeared in a Sunni district of Baghdad while driving home from work. Two days later the family found his body at the mortuary. He had been shot through the head and abdomen. His arms and chest were burnt and bruised. His corpse had been fished from the Tigris river.
Muhammad is now struggling to support his brother’s wife and five children, aged between 5 and 20. Some time ago he switched to an administrative job because going out on repair jobs was too dangerous. But that pays only $180 a month, so he is desperately searching for something more lucrative. There is no way he can afford to marry.
Saddam at least offered security, he says. “If you kept away from his regime you felt safe.” Today he is close to despair. “It’s grim, it’s bleak, but we have to survive this. We have learnt in Iraq to deal with reality and forget about hopes and imagination.”
Will he ever get married? “Inshallah,” he replies. “Love keeps Lamyia patient. But with the way things are going now, marriage is becoming ever harder to envisage. When I see a wedding car in Baghdad I gaze at them and wonder can it be true that someone is still getting married in the middle of all this?”
Omar al-Azani
IT manager
Sunni
Single
Age 33
Omar, who once played basketball for Iraq, comes from Gazaliyah, a mixed area of west Baghdad racked by bombings, shootings and kidnappings. His brother fled to the Gulf in March. In July Mahdi militiamen seized his two aunts and a 28-year-old nephew. Omar later found their bodies in a grave in Karbala; his nephew's mouth had been slit right up to his ears. A month after that his parents fled to Syria.
For the past few months Omar was living in a hotel in the relatively safe Karradah district where he was installing an internet system. He did not dare go out. He sold his car. For $35 he had acquired a fake identity card because Omar was a Sunni name.
He is now in Sulaimaniyah, in the safer Kurdish north, waiting for his brother to secure him a visa for the Gulf. “It’s very difficult. I will leave my friends, my family, my memories. I don't know if I'll ever come back,” he said. “Maybe I'll find a new life somewhere else in a country where I can walk down the street and eat in restaurants like a normal human being.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-2470188,00.html
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