Failing Canada's Seniors

Flashback to the early 70's. I was a young, Ottawa reporter searching for a story. A block down the road from my highrise, two nursing home patients died in the span of a week. They had committed suicide by crossing the road to the local convenience store, buying a lethal quantity of aspirin and downing the lot in their rooms.

The idea of two oldsters from the same joint offing themselves in such short order sounded like just the sort of story I could use. So, off I went in pursuit of glory and gain.

Somehow I wound up talking to the psychiatrist responsible for the denizens of this nursing home and several others. He was plainly distressed and lamented how he alone was responsible for the impossible task of tending to the emotional troubles of seniors in several nursing homes.

I learned from this fellow a lot about the emotional turmoil that attends removing an intellectually intact individual from their home and relocating them, against their will, into a nursing home where their very psyche is under stress from the get go. These two gents just couldn't accept the end of their independence, their dignity and so decided ending it was the best way out.

What began as a bit of sensationalism developed into something much greater as I began to explore Ontario's extended care nursing home legislation. I came to feel that, once you fell into that category, you were dead meat.

It dawned on me that those consigned to these institutions were, in essence, incarcerated. They were inmates. That drew me to consider how we expected other inmates to be treated.

My research led me to the Geneva Conventions. While nearly four decades later I can no longer recall specifics, I did find that were we to provide enemy prisoners of war with such limited resources as we afforded our own elderly, we would be in violation of the treaties - war criminals.

That, in turn, led me to what is now known as Corrections Canada, the Canadian Penitentiary Service. I wasn't surprised to discover that the minimums under the Ontario nursing home legislation fell far short of the minimums prescribed for Canadian criminals.

I concluded my series with a short radio piece explaining how the impecunious senior, facing incarceration in a state nursing home, would be so much better off by simply murdering someone to get a life sentence under vastly better conditions in a Canadian pen.

And now, three and a half decades later, are Canada's seniors any better off? From what I've seen, it's difficult to imagine they are. Without caring and watchful relatives, seniors are compelled to surrender much of their identity, freedoms and basic rights, even their personal safety. But, then again, who cares?

What Happened to "Fight"?

During the ascendancy of Rick Hillier our Department of National Defence put out some very polished and dramatic TV spots that appeared to pitch the new, red-meat armed forces under the buzzword "fight". If you missed the ads you simply weren't watching anything remotely Canadian on your television.

These ads seem to have vanished. No more clarion calls to Canadian youth to set free the testosterone, put on the camo paint, pick up the assault rifle and have at it.

So, what happened to "Fight With The Canadian Armed Forces"?

I have no idea. Do you?

The Face of Success

With the Iraqi parliament on holidays for the month, none of its benchmark legislation passed, and the September deadline for assessment of the "surge" by US lawmakers, the neo-cons are coming out in full force, churning out glowing op-ed pieces for any newspaper that'll print them.

The surge is working, they proclaim. We're winning this one. Just another year, wait, make that two, maybe three. Victory is just around the corner.

So what is this success supposed to look like? Well, don't look at the dysfunctional Baghdad government, that's no success. Forget about the roughly four million displaced Iraqis either. Don't dwell on the soon-to-be breakaway Kurdish state in the north. Forget about the fuel shortages in this nation awash in oil or the lack of electricity of other essential utilities. And then there's the third of Iraq's population that Oxfam now deems in urgent need of emergency aid. That, then is the face of success in Iraq.

Oxfam reports that, with unemployment hovering at 50%, 43% of Iraqis live in "absolute poverty." Here are a few other clear signs of success:

70% of Iraqis lack adequate water supplies

80% lack effective sanitation

92% of Iraqi children show learning problems related to the pervasive sense of fear

800,000 Iraqi kids have dropped out of school

40% of Iraq's doctors, teachers, water engineers and other professionals have fled the country.

So, when you start reading all the "think tank" articles about how Iraq is turning the corner, remember these numbers. They won't be getting any better between now and September.

Putin for President! - In 2012

There's speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin may seek re-election. Not this year. That's when his second term expires and Russia has a 2-term limit - sort of.

It seems the Russian constitution limits the presidency to two consecutive terms. That would let Prince Vlad sit the next one out and then come back again in 2012.

"As long as the president has decided not to run for a third term, our party will be ready to nominate Vladimir Putin for president in 2012," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Sergei Mironov, leader of the loyal Fair Russia party, as saying during a visit to Russia's Bakhkortostan region at the southern Urals.

Putin, criticised by the West and disparate opposition groups at home of backtracking on democracy, has said he will present a candidate of his choice to succeed him in an election.

Despite the fact that he cannot run for a third term, around two thirds of Russians would have voted for Putin if an election was held last Sunday, according to the latest survey by pollster VTsIOM.

On Being a Leftie

I'm a genuine Leftie. I'm a sinistral - a left-hander. Now, according to stuff I've found on the BBC website, it turns out there are a lot of plusses (and a few minuses) to being left-handed.

BBC reports that an Oxford team has found a gene that increases the likelihood of being left-handed. It turns out the same gene also increases the likelihood of developing psychotic illness such as schizophrenia.

But - on the plus side. It turns out the 10% of us who aren't right have a lot of real advantages. For example, we think more quickly. That's right, unlike you dullards, scientists have found that signals move decidedly faster between the hemispheres of our brains.

Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.

The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.

Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily.

Chartered psychologist, Dr Steve Williams said left-handed people tended to be better at using both sides of the brain.

"This seems to go with evidence that left-handers use both sides of the brain for language - that they are more bicerebral. They get faster at it because they're having to use both sides of the brain more."

"In football, being able to shoot with either foot is a huge asset (each foot like each hand is under opposite-side control) and I've heard that left-handers tend to have better backhands in tennis," he added.

But wait, there's more. We're better in fights:

The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases.

But University of Montpellier experts, writing in Proceedings B, say it could be because they do well in combat.

A study of eight aboriginal societies found homicide rates increased significantly with the incidence of left-handedness. Oops!

Not only that, but being left-handed makes me - sort of - Churchillian! Yes, Winston was one of us. Then again, so was Hitler. Yeah, but so is Clapton!

A Timebomb Under Gonzales?

This is good. The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee has given the White House 18-hours to come clean over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The ultimatum is in the form of a demand by Arlen Specter that the White House issue a letter by noon tomorrow addressing the question of Gonzales' "veracity."

"Given the difficulty of discussing classified matters in public, I think it is preferable to have a letter addressing that question [of Gonzales' veracity] from the administration ... by noon tomorrow, which will be made available to the news media," Specter wrote in the statement. "The administration has committed to producing such a letter."

Some observers believe Specter will take off the gloves tomorrow, possibly joining the Democrats in a bid to unseat Gonzales.

O'Connor To Walk the Plank?

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor has been a complete dud. He contradicts himself, he contradicts his military staff, he often seems confused or ill-informed. He's a dud and for Stephen Harper, Gord is becoming a real liability.

“It strikes me as unusual to have the minister and the chief of the defence staff saying different things,” said Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and a close Harper friend. “All I can say is that it looks odd. It makes you wonder what's going on.”

O'Connor isn't getting any help from his Chief of Defence Staff, Hillier. A number of times O'Connor has stated some policy or view only to have it undermined and contradicted by Hillier.

Strongman Rule

It's something we associate with tin pot dictators not parliamentary democracy. Yet Canada is living with our very own version of Strongman Rule in Stephen Harper.

Harper doesn't just lead the Conservative government, he is the government or thinks he is. When there's an announcement to be made, Stevie is the one before the cameras. He micromanages his government which means when something falls off Harper's radar screen it all but disappears.

Tomorrow the Tories will gather in Charlottetown for a 3-day policy session. Stuck in the mud, the party needs to come out with some fresh ideas to increase its popular support. MPs and Senators may toss ideas around but most expect will be more of Harpo's "top down" control-freak management.

This may be a critical year for Stephen Harper, a year that will determine whether he has taken his party as far as he can. Unless he pulls off some sort of breakthrough Harpo may find out what lies in store for autocrats who let down their own side.

Felderhof Acquitted

Former Bre-X geologist John Felderhof has been acquitted of all 8-charges of insider trading.

Felderhof was accused by the Ontario Securities Commission of selling $84 million worth of Bre-X stock between April and October 1996, while having information that was not disclosed to investors.

Despite the acquittals by the Ontario Superior Court, Felderhof remains beset by civil litigation.

The Best Way to Fight Islamist Terrorism - Stop Fighting

Before you dismiss this idea out of hand, just look how well all our high-tech Western military muscle has done in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We're actually creating our own enemies and we're doing it faster than we're killing off the existing foe. Do the math.

Wired editor, Nicholas Thompson, believes we have the means to defeat Islamist extremism in the proven wisdom of one George Keenan who gave birth to the strategy known as "containment":

In the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan, who was then the State Department’s policy planning chief, gave American strategy a name, but not much else. He argued that we didn’t have to actively defeat the Soviet Union, only outlast it. Communism held inside itself “the seeds of its own decay.” The United States should refrain from provoking Moscow, whether through confrontation or histrionics. Patience would lead to success.

Kennan explained that he didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.

The Soviets are making “first and foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and soundness of political life in the victim countries.”

Kennan’s insight was that a long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing. Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.

Kennan’s insistence on a political strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the reverse.

“Let us find health and vigor and hope, and the diseased portion of the earth will fall behind of its own doing. For that we need no aggressive strategic plans, no provocation of military hostilities, no showdowns.”

Brazil Meets Reality - At Last

For years Brazil has viewed global warming and greenhouse gas emissions as a Northern hemisphere problem, something to be resolved by the Western world. That's now changing as Brazil comes to realize that it can no longer defy gravity.

Most scientists see Brazil as the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. Those emissions come not from vast seas of fossil-fuel burning cars or from heavy industry or coal-fired power plants. They come from deforestation - the clearing and burning of the Amazon rainforest.

As recently as last June, Brazil joined with India and China to tell the developed world to mind its own business on GHG reductions. It was a stupid, juvenile response and one that was quickly overrun by events even the West cannot control. From the New York Times:

A number of recent events have led political leaders and ordinary Brazilians to conclude that they are not immune to climate change. First and foremost was a disastrous 2005 drought in the Amazon that killed crops, kindled forest fires, dried up transportation routes, caused disease and wreaked economic havoc.

Brazil sees itself as an emerging agricultural and industrial power, and global warming could have a disastrous impact on those aspirations. Scientists note that Brazil’s southern breadbasket flourishes largely because of rainfall patterns in the Amazon that are likely to be altered if droughts recur or climate change accelerates.

“Once they really register that the Amazon rain machine is very important to the south of Brazil, they are going to be much more interested in avoiding deforestation,” said Thomas Lovejoy, president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. “You don’t have to be interested in biodiversity to want rain to keep that amazing agricultural system going.”

Brazil also envisions constructing a large network of dams throughout the Amazon over the next several decades to supply electricity to its industrial heartland in São Paulo, 2,000 miles south of here. But those plans depend on water flows in the region’s vast rivers not drying up.

In addition, in 2004 a hurricane formed in the South Atlantic for the first time since weather records began being kept. The storm came ashore in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, which was not prepared for it, and destroyed houses and forced thousands to flee.
“There was no previous registry of this happening, not even in the literature of colonial times,” said Carlos Nobre, Brazil’s most prominent climate scientist, who works at the National Institute for Space Research.

The latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in April, has added to concerns here. “By mid-century, increases in temperature and associated decreases in soil water are projected to lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savanna in eastern Amazonia,” it predicted, while also warning that “crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases” in tropical areas, “which would increase risk of hunger.”

Among climatologists who study the Amazon, the buzz words these days are “tipping point” — the moment at which damage to the environment is so severe and widespread that it pushes the ecosystem into an irreversible cycle of self-destruction.

Whether it's China or India or Brazil, climate change is as real as gravity. Put another way, you don't have to "get" global warming, it'll come to you.

Making Japan Own Its History

Most of us see Japan as we came to know it during the last quarter of the past century. We see it that way because we like it that way. We don't see Japan as it was from the 1920's until the end of WWII. We don't like to look at the ugly face of Japan - its brutal, barbaric, martial face.

Half a century later Japan is evolving to take its proper place in the community of nations. There's nothing wrong with that, in itself. What is troubling is the lengths to which Japan's ruling right-wingers have been going to erase the country's hideous past.

The Japanese government has plunged into a furious campaign of denial. They deny that Japanese kidnapped many thousands of Asian women, a lot of them Korean, and forced them into sexual slavery for their troops abroad. Even more atrocious has been their utter denial of what is known as the "Rape of Nanking" where invading Japanese troops indulged themselves in an orgy of rape and mass murder which was well documented by Westerners living in the city back then.

The US Congress has passed a resolution calling on Japan to apologize for its wartime sexual slavery of Asian women. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has rejected the resolution, calling it "regrettable." From the New York Times:

Some of the aging former sex slaves, known euphemistically in Japan as comfort women, and their advocates welcomed the resolution. But they reacted angrily at Mr. Abe’s response. “Abe denies that they were the ones who violated the women,” said Jan Ruff O’Herne, 84, a Dutch woman who was forced into sex slavery in Indonesia.

“I didn’t expect anything better from him than that,” she said, speaking by phone from her home in Adelaide, Australia. “But this resolution puts enormous pressure on the Japanese government. I’m still hoping that something will happen because the women are getting old, and we deserve a proper apology.”

Japan absolutely must own its own history. We have to see to that.

Which One Walks Like a Chimp?

All right. You tell me.

Why Iraq is So Much Worse Than Vietnam

Those who say Iraq can't be compared to Vietnam are right. As John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, writes in the Guardian, Vietnam pales in comparison to the mess George w. Bush has crafted in Iraq:

America was able to walk away from Vietnam because that country was peripheral in the world economy and the knock-on effects of US withdrawal were comparatively slight; Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor in global oil supplies, and if the US pulls out its ability to protect its allies in the region will be called into question. Another crucial difference is that Vietnam had an effective government in the north that could take over when the US exited. No such entity exists in Iraq. The feared domino effect in south-east Asia did not occur, but Iraq could be the scene of a domino effect in reverse in which the country's warring neighbours fall into the void left by the Americans' departure. By any standard, defeat in Iraq would be a more devastating blow to US power than Vietnam.

The most important - as well as most often neglected - feature of the conflict shaping up around Iraq is that the US no longer has the ability to mould events. Whatever it does, there will be decades of bloodshed in the region. Another large blunder - such as bombing Iran, as Dick Cheney seems to want, or launching military operations against Pakistan, as some in Washington appear to propose - would make matters even worse.

The chaos that has engulfed Iraq is only the start of a longer and larger upheaval, but it would be useful if we learned a few lessons from it. There is a stupefying cliche which says regime change went wrong because there was not enough thought about what to do after the invasion. The truth is that if there had been sufficient forethought the invasion would not have been launched. After the overthrow of Saddam - a secular despot in a European tradition that includes Lenin and Stalin - there was never any prospect of imposing a western type of government. Grotesque errors were made such as the disbanding of the Iraqi army, but they only accelerated a process of fragmentation that would have happened anyway. Forcible democratisation undid not only the regime but also the state.

Liberal interventionists who supported regime change as part of a global crusade for human rights overlooked the fact that the result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing. Equally they failed to perceive the rapidly dwindling leverage on events of the western powers that led the crusade. If anyone stands to gain long term it is Russia and China, which have stood patiently aside and now watch the upheaval with quiet satisfaction. Neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. The result of these delusions is what we see today: a world of rising authoritarian regimes and collapsed states no one knows how to govern.

What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.

Air India Villains

If media reports can be believed (and who would doubt them?) the key plotters behind the Air India bombings have been unmasked.

According to the taped confession of Babbar Khalsa International leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was later believed executed while in police custody, Lakhbir Singh Brar “Rode”, nephew of the late Bhindranwale and head of the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, was the mastermind of the bombing. Rode, who is now said to be holed up in Lahore, has never figured in the investigations of either the CBI or the Canadian authorities.

The confession is said to implicate two others, Inderjit Singh Reyat and Manjit Singh as participants in the bombings.

Harmail Singh Chandi, a former Punjab police officer, says he was present when Parmar admitted his involvement in the June 1995 bombing during an intensive interrogation over five days in October 1992.

He provided detailed information to Indian magazine Tehelka Magazine, which quotes Chandi saying Parmar implicated Inderjit Singh Reyat, a long-identified suspect named Lal Singh and Lakhbir Singh Brar, a founder of the International Sikh Youth Federation who once lived in Vancouver.

Chandi said he kept a tape-recording of the confession even though senior officers told him to destroy it prior to ordering Parmar’s in-custody execution

Warfare Masks Suffering Elsewhere

We've become preoccupied with waging war. Whether it's "the mission" in Afghanistan or Bush's war of whim in Iraq or the looming next war in Iran, warfare is grabbing far too much of our attention.

Even in Afghanistan we were too busy pretending to be defeating the Taliban to put much effort into relieving the famine there last year. Who is dropping everything to send badly needed help to Iraq's millions of dispossessed? What about the refugees of Darfur? Then there's the million Bangladeshi's displaced by the current flooding. The biggest of all, however, is the Congo.

According to the Congolese humanitarian affairs minister, Jean Claude Muyambu, a staggering six million of his countrymen have been driven from their homes where, despite truces, fighting continues. That's six million atop the four million dead from fighting during the 1998-2003 war that drew in six African countries.

Simpleton or Chronic Liar?

Hurricanes Tied to Global Warming

Katrina

A new study directly links increases in the frequency and severity of hurricanes to global warming. From BBC:

This new study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London, looks at the frequency of these storms from 1900 to the present and it says about twice as many form each year now compared to 100 years ago.

The authors say that man-made climate change, which has increased the temperature of the sea surface, is the major factor behind the increase in numbers.

"Over the period we've had natural variability in the frequency of storms, which has contributed less than 50% of the actual increase in our view," said Dr Greg Holland from the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who authored the report.

"Approximately 60%, and possibly even 70% of what we are seeing in the last decade can be attributed directly to greenhouse warming," he said.

NATO Comes to Its Senses

There's been an epiphany at NATO. The alliance has realized that chasing Taliban insurgents through civilian villages with 2,000 pound aerial bombs was a really dumb idea. So in future NATO warplanes will be using smaller bombs. Just how much smaller remains to be seen. But the encouraging news is a change in attitude about letting the Taliban draw NATO in to slaughtering civilians:

Alliance commanders have also recently delayed attacks on Taliban forces in some situations where civilians were at risk.

"We realise that if we cannot neutralise our enemy today without harming civilians, our enemy will give us the opportunity tomorrow," [Nato secretary-general de hoop Scheffer] told the Financial Times. "If that means going after a Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then."

Great thinking, long overdue - if it actually turns out to be true.

How the Right Sees Afghanistan - Poorly

Some bloggers suggest that the National Post is on the verge of bankruptcy, a flagship furiously sucking equity out of its CanWest parent. I hope they're right. The paper is nothing so much as a far-right, politically bent propaganda rag. It would be a small loss to Canada if it went under.

Columnist Don Martin is an example of why we don't need NatPo. He's been on assignment in Afghanistan where the heat must've given him brainwaves such as calling for Canadian forces to issue body counts to pump up support at home. Martin even wanted us to count the "pink mist" that resulted from NATO's aerial bombardments, not particularly worried that mist could be the mortal remains of some kid we exterminated.

Martin leaves Afghanistan today and, predictably, is doing it with a column that comes with everything but pom-poms. He also shows that he just doesn't get it.

Hundreds of Soviet tanks, troop carriers, trucks and artillery guns, perfectly preserved by Kandahar's desert-dry environment right down to goggles and binoculars, lie abandoned in a gated compound within sight of Canadian base headquarters.

For nine bloody years in the 1980s, the Soviet Union tried to prop up a Communist government in Kabul and annihilate the mujahedeen insurgency. Finally, the fading superpower ditched its military hardware here in the rush to flee a fight it couldn't win.

There's a reason the arsenal sits in a gated compound under the watchful eyes of Canadian forces and it isn't because the stuff was abandoned by the Soviets when they left. It's because all this weaponry was put to use by one of the many sides to the civil war that wracked Afghanistan for many years after the Soviets left. This stuff wasn't abandoned, it was surrendered and impounded.

Then Martin comes up with this gem: Right off the bat, let me argue that Canada cannot impose a political timetable on successfully ending this military mission. Earth to Martin, no one is suggesting that Canada can "impose" any manner of timetable on "successfully ending this military mission" whatever that may mean - and it does mean very different things to different people. Does this guy just pull this stuff out of his backside?

This one is precious: Soldiers who believed they had a Churchillian prime minister now know he's just another political weather vane, twisting in response to the winds of public opinion. What soldier in his right mind would have thought Harper "Churchillian"? It would take an incredible ignorance of Winston Churchill to ever draw that comparison, not a problem for Don Martin.

The war against the poppy is lost.

Even with eradication activity picking up under British supervision, the opium-producing plant is setting record high harvests. Detection is not a problem -- soldiers often remark how beautiful the poppy fields look when they're in full red bloom. But British military officials tell me it's a struggle to convince farmers to switch their illegal crop for less lucrative melons, grapes or even marijuana.

Fair enough, Don, but what does that mean to "the mission", to NATO and to the Kabul government? Do the math.

The combined air and ground firepower of the joint forces here is a sight to behold. How so much destructive technology can be neutralized by a few thousand religious extremists armed with ancient rocket launchers, last-generation rifles and old anti-tank mines boggles the mind.

I can't imagine what it would take to boggle a mind like Martin's but his schoolboy fascination with firepower means he has no idea that massive firepower can contribute to losing a guerrilla war. Seven weeks in Afghanistan and he still hasn't grasped that this is classic, asymmetrical warfare and that is precisely how so much destructive technology can be neutralized by a few thousand religious extremists armed with ancient rocket launchers.

Martin goes on to rave about how Kandahar city is bustling with construction and commerce, just as Kabul did previously. What hasn't dawned on him is just what is driving all that activity. It's drug money. Kandahar's very prosperity speaks of our failure to establish an alternative to the narco-economy of the countryside. Kabul too flourished - until the Americans laid into the poppy fields in that region. When the opium money dried up, so did Kabul.

Martin concludes by noting that the job (whatever that is) won't be finished by 2009 which, he says, makes it imperative that Canadian forces stay here until the job is done, even if the surrender monkeys in Ottawa think it's politically convenient to leave.

It's sad, really, that despite almost two months in Afghanistan, Martin has grasped so little of its history and its reality. Of course, if you go there to be a cheerleader, deep thoughts need not be a priority.

Martin is just plain wrong on so many levels. He completely ignores the corruption-riddled Kabul government that, of itself, virtually guarantees that "the mission" cannot succeed. He doesn't get that. He ignores the narcotics driven prosperity that leaves the welfare of the country in the hands of insurgents and criminals, some of them politicians. An economy based on lawlessness cannot give rise to a civil society, end of story. He doesn't realize that we don't control our own war in Afghanistan. We're a part, an important part, but still a part of a far larger campaign and, even if we notionally succeed in Kandahar (which we're not), our contribution can be rendered insignificant if the rest of the place is a failure.

It's unfortunate that the National Post thought so little of this story that it sent a guy of Martin's calibre to analyze it. Really unfortunate.

Ex- Says Felderhof is Innocent

David Walsh is dead. So, apparently, is Michael de Guzman. That leaves only one principal of mining fraud Bre-X to take the heat - geologist John Felderhof.

The company imploded a full decade ago wiping out $3-billion of investor equity. Some got rich, most lost their shirts. When the dust settled the company was worthless, no vaste horde of Indonesian gold.

Today's Report on Business has a detailed account, from the former Mrs. Felderhof, about the Bre-X aftermath and her ex-husband's plight. Ingrid Felderhof doesn't have a lot good to say of her former spouse but she insists he was as much a victim of the fraud as anyone else.

Forgive the Hummer? Hardly!

Is the massive Hummer really more eco-friendly that the hybrid Prius?

According to CNW Marketing Research of Oregon, it is. A controversial study by CNW holds that hybrids, at least the technology being fielded today, are more energy intensive throughout their lifetimes than Detroit's most massive gas-guzzlers. From the Globe & Mail:

CNW identified 4,000 "data points" for each car, ranging from the energy consumed in research and development to energy consumed in junkyard disposal. It calculated the electrical energy needed to produce each pound of parts. It calculated greenhouse gas emissions. It calculated mileage, too - adjusting for the differences between rush-hour Tokyo and rural America.

To keep it relatively free of technical jargon, the company expresses energy requirement as the dollar cost of energy for every mile across a vehicle's anticipated years of use - "U.S. dollars per lifetime mile." Thus it reports the lifetime energy requirement of a Hummer as $1.90 a mile; the lifetime energy requirement of a Prius as $2.86 a mile.

It reports by model name and by category. For 22 models of economy cars, the average lifetime energy cost is $0.85. For six models of pickup trucks, it's $2.58. For 14 models of smaller-sized sports utility vehicles, it's $2.07; for nine models of larger-sized SUVs, it's $3.98. For 10 models of gas-electric hybrids, it's $3.65.

Toyota, however, still has some of the greenest vehicles on earth. The Scion has the lowest energy cost of all at 48 cents a mile. The Corolla, at 72 cents, and the Echo (Yaris), at 77 cents, are also in the best-on-earth class. Low-energy competitors include Dodge's Neon (64 cents) and Saturn's Ion (67 cents). Cars with the highest energy requirement include the Rolls Royce ($10.97) and the equally elegant German-made Maybach ($15.83).

I'm not convinced. Hybrid technology is still in its infancy. New technologies tend to be flawed and need years of refinement. What is also not apparent is how much of the energy consumption attributed to these various machines is "fossil fuel" energy, the dirtiest kind? If you want to compare apples to apples, it's the Yaris at 77 cents to four bucks for a full-size SUV. That, in my view, is where the focus needs to be.

The Cheney Malignancy

A lot of what has gone wrong with the Bush presidency lies with they way it has been warped by his veep, Dick Cheney. Carter-administration veep, Walter Mondale, says Cheney's manipulations have been "alarming". From the Washington Post:

...it wasn't until Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency that the vice presidency took on a substantive role. Carter saw the office as an underused asset and set out to make the most of it. He gave me an office in the West Wing, unimpeded access to him and to the flow of information, and specific assignments at home and abroad. He asked me, as the only other nationally elected official, to be his adviser and partner on a range of issues.

Our relationship depended on trust, mutual respect and an acknowledgement that there was only one agenda to be served -- the president's.

Subsequent administrations followed this pattern. George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle and Al Gore built their vice presidencies after this model, allowing for their different interests, experiences and capabilities as well as the needs of the presidents they served.

This all changed in 2001, and especially after Sept. 11, when Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the vice president. His was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the president.

Through his vast government experience, through the friends he had been able to place in key positions and through his considerable political skills, he has been increasingly able to determine the answers to questions put to the president -- because he has been able to determine the questions.

Whatever authority a vice president has is derived from the president under whom he serves. There are no powers inherent in the office; they must be delegated by the president. Somehow, not only has Cheney been given vast authority by President Bush -- including, apparently, the entire intelligence portfolio -- but he also pursues his own agenda. The real question is why the president allows this to happen.

Three decades ago we lived through another painful example of a White House exceeding its authority, lying to the American people, breaking the law and shrouding everything it did in secrecy. Watergate wrenched the country, and our constitutional system, like nothing before. We spent years trying to identify and absorb the lessons of this great excess. But here we are again.

Is America Becoming a Spent Force?

In global terms, the United States has always been a mix of reality and perception. What other nation could fuel its economy for decades on debt and deficits underwritten by foreign investors? What other nation would dare field something as globally obnoxious as the "Bush Doctrine"?

America's success has always been built on the goodwill of others and their faith and reliance on Washington. To keep that going America has had to preserve its credibility. But, thanks to George w. Bush and his influential Dick, America's credibility has taken a pummeling as the balance shifts away from perception and steadily toward reality.

The upcoming Middle East voyage of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates is expected to show just how frail has become America's coercive grip. The duo will attempt to to persuade Iraq’s neighbors to do more to help stabilize the country, to counter Iran’s growing ambitions and to try to get real movement on peace between Israel and the Palestinians. According to the McClatchey Newspapers service, they face an uphill battle:

America's credibility in the region has plummeted. The U.S. has failed to stabilize Iraq, destroy al Qaida, pacify Lebanon, isolate Syria or bolster moderate Palestinians. Instead, its policies have fueled Sunni Muslim extremism and emboldened Shiite Iran, which America's moderate Arab allies consider the two greatest threats to their rule.

So far, its support for Israel's ill-fated war in Lebanon and its efforts to undermine popular radical groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon have borne little fruit. Along with its support for autocrats such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, such actions have undercut American claims that it's championing Muslim democracy.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the Bush administration’s time in office. Leaders of friendly Arab states have lost confidence in President Bush’s ability to deliver on his promises and are wary of sticking their necks out too far to cooperate, according to diplomats and some U.S. officials.

“Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to Hamas, which now controls Gaza. But Rice has repeatedly ruled out dealing with the group, which is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
"The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas."

Can America recover its former prestige and clout abroad? That will be a question answered by the next administration and how quickly and successfully it can extract the United States from Iraq. With another year and a half left of the hopelessly inept Bush/Cheney administration, time is not on America's side. If Bush's successor keeps trying to force feed America's ideology to the world, the American century may be over.

The New World Order

There are two types of places in the world - those that get too much and those that don't.

Too much, this summer at least, means floods or droughts. Britain along with Texas, large parts of China and South Asia have been inundated by floodwaters. Southeast and Southwest United States, Australia, Africa and Southeast Europe have all been hit by heatwaves and drought.

In Bangladesh the flooding has turned bad enough that the country is now cut in two. Half of Bangladesh is now submerged. Flooding has also hit Pakistan, India and Nepal. Throughout the subcontinent millions are reported taking to the high ground whether that be on rooftops or in refugee camps where they await government relief.

Is this the New World Order? Climate change scientists have long predicted that global warming will bring extreme conditions - droughts and floods - as temperatures rise and alter precipitation levels and distribution worldwide. Gee, that seems to fit the bill!

The Battle of the Arctic

It's going to take more than a handful of light icebreakers to fight, much less win this one.

British and American submarines have now taken up permanent station under the Arctic ocean in preparation to confront their old adversary, the Russian navy. Russia, for its part, is building one new submarine and has ordered three more, as it brings its badly neglected navy back online.

Everyone's eyes are on what is believed to be the vast, untapped oil wealth beneath the Arctic waters. With the ascendancy of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) an enormous demand for oil is developing. These same Arctic waters, soon to be ice-free for much of the year, are also believed to have rich fish populations and enormous, sub-surface mineral wealth.

Russia is now using a mini-sub to try to establish that the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of the Siberian continental shelf and, therefore, Russian territory. This would allow Russia to claim an area of the Arctic equal in size to Western Europe.

Both Canada and Denmark claim the Lomonosov Ridge is attached to their own undersea shelves and therefore belongs to them. Claiming it and enforcing those claims are two distinct matters and neither of these minor countries would be wise to count on much support from Britain or the US. (If you don't think we're a "minor" country in this thing, think again).

Many scientists believe the Arctic ecology too fragile to sustain economic exploitation. They're probably right but there's far too much potential wealth involved to stop what has already well begun.

The Petraeus Factor

Frank Rich, writing in today's New York Times, details the surprising rise to political power of General David Petraeus, America's last hope in Iraq. Rich claims Bush has all but ceded the Iraq problem to his top general:

And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list of those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our uniformed officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a de facto military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the commander in Iraq. We must "wait to see what David has to say" Mr. Bush says.

Actually, we don’t have to wait. We already know what David will say. He gave it away to the Times of London last month when he said that September “is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy.” In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read it) — full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy.

Rich goes on to dismantle the Petraeus image as just that - image:

It has been three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline “Can This Man Save Iraq?” The magazine noted that the general’s pacification of Mosul was “a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way.” Four months later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagon's own report.

By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could stand down. “Training is on track and increasing in capacity,” he wrote in the Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure.

The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no “surge” would have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this late date, as we did only when General Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating independently is in fact falling — now standing at a mere six, down from 10 in March.

In Rich's analysis, Petraeus' main role has now become anchoring an increasingly delusional president - a political, not a military role.

Bye bye - Abe

Japan's days of far right government may be drawing to a close. Prime minister Shinzo Abe's conservative LDP suffered a sharp defeat in the country's upper house elections, losing its majority to the moderate Democrats.

The LDP still holds a large majority in the lower house which Abe says he'll use to stay on as prime minister, a move his own party may resist.

With the upper house in the hands of the populist opposition, it could lead to a legislative deadlock that would trigger dissolution in the lower house and early elections the LDP does not want to face. Japanese voters have turned against the right due to a series of scandals and blunders.

Taliban Add Anti-Aircraft Missiles to the Mix

The Taliban are said to have deployed heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles in Afghanistan. The Telegraph reports that an American C-130 Hercules transport was brought under attack on July 22.

It closed in on the large C-130 aircraft, pursuing it as the pilots launched a series of violent evasive manoeuvres and jettisoned flares to confuse the heat sensors in the nose of the missile. Crew members said that they saw what they believe was a missile passing very close to the aircraft. The C-130 was not damaged in the attack.

NATO will neither admit nor deny the attack but a surface-to-air missile alert has been issued to all Western aircraft flying in the southwest region of Afghanistan.

The recent attack was probably with an SA7 shoulder-launched missile, an elderly model of Soviet or Chinese origin. Though relatively primitive they are still a potent weapon, particularly against low-flying helicopters, such as the workhorse Chinook transporters used by British forces in the southern Helmand province.

In April members of the Special Boat Service operating in Nimroz province intercepted several truck loads of weapons coming across the Iranian border, including a working SA7 missile. It was one of a number of recent weapon caches that Western officials claim have been seized on the border with Iran, fuelling allegations by Britain and America that Iran, or elements within the Iranian government, have begun supplying arms to the Taliban.

Hundreds of SA7 missiles disappeared into the black market in Iraq in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, where they have since been used to shoot down dozens of helicopters and aircraft, reportedly including a British C-130 in 2005.

Maliki Wants Petraeus Relieved

He's the US Army's counterinsurgency guru, General David Petraeus. He's the guy George w. Bush is counting on to make the "surge" work, to save Bush from the ignomy of defeat. But the very leader Petraeus is supposed to help, Iraqi president Nouri al Maliki, wants the general to go.

The Telegraph reports that Maliki has begged Bush to recall Petraeus:

One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general's signature strategy to be scrapped. "He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias," said the official. "Bush told Maliki to calm down."

At another meeting with Gen Petraeus, Mr Maliki said: "I can't deal with you any more. I will ask for someone else to replace you."

Gen Petraeus admitted that the relationship was stormy, saying: "We have not pulled punches with each other."

President Bush's support for Mr Maliki is deeply controversial within the US government because of the Iraqi's ties to Shia militias responsible for some of the worst sectarian violence.

Bush's Neighbourhood Improvement Project

If there's one thing the Middle East/South Asia region could really use right now, it would have to be more weapons. Let's face it, no Carnage Festival worth the name can go on and on and on without an abundant supply of stuff to kill other people with. And when it comes to the Muslim world, George w. Bush's attitude is full-bore, party time.

This week, Washington made a lot of noise about how the Saudis are becoming a pain in the backside that we sometimes call Iraq. The Saudis, it seems, are busy funneling aid and other goodies to Iraq's Sunni insurgency which, just coincidentally, likes to spend much of its time attacking American soldiers. So, what to do?

How about offering an arms sale package to the Saudis and their neighbours worth, oh say, $20-billion? Well that naturally didn't sit too well with Israel so Washington went ahead and upped their weaponry welfare package to $30-billion over the next 10-years. There's a tidy $50-billion of new killing stuff, all of it heading to what has to be by far the most unstable little corner of the world. Oh, and don't forget, the new nuclear package America has negotiated with India. That should spur those Pakistanis to get busy, don't you think?

The Americans say they're worried about giving the impression they're fueling an arms race in the Middle East. Not so, they say. They're only bolstering friendly nations to meet Iran's growing military capability. Hey... what the hell... that is an arms race!

A Tax On Everybody? Oh No!

America's top cross-dressing, Republican presidential candidate has lambasted Democratic nomination hopefuls, Barack Obama and John Edwards, Edwards for proposing tax increases on the wealthy and Obama for saying he would meet with leaders of nations such as Cuba, Iran and Libya without preconditions.

As for Edwards, Rudolph Guiliani, presumably dressing straight if only for the sake of gravitas, said the former senator's platform that would raise the top tax rates on long-term capital gains "This is a tax on everybody.'' That, of course, flies in the face of the Bush Doctrine which says really rich people ought to be spared the indignity of taxation whenever possible.

In response to Obama, whom Guiliani privately finds strangely attractive, the failed former New York mayor said, "Fidel Castro is a dictator and he is a murderer. He should not be visiting with U.S. presidents.''

My E-Mail to the Prime Minister of Canada's New Government

The whole Mulroney/Schreiber controversy just won't die. Wouldn't it be great if our current Conservative prime minister took a few, simple steps to put the whole thing to bed? I think so. That's why I sent the following e-mail to Mr. Harper:

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

The Airbus affair simply won't go away. In persuading the Chretien government to settle by paying Mr. Mulroney $2-million of taxpayer funds, Mr. Mulroney gave sworn evidence that he had never had any business dealings with Mr. Schreiber.

After CBC's Fifth Estate obtained Mr. Schreiber's Swiss bank accounts showing a trail of funds from Airbus to Schreiber and, hence, on to Mr. Mulroney, your Conservative predecessor changed his account and said he had received that money as a retrainer for providing legal services to Mr. Schreiber. It appears that, at the same time as the payments were exposed, Mr. Mulroney also made a voluntary disclosure to Revenue Canada of certain unreported income.

The documents alone raise a strong suspicion that your Conservative predecessor misled federal government lawyers in compelling a settlement of his defamation claim. Particularly as Mr. Mulroney was a Conservative prime minister and is linked to Canada's New Government, you should be intent on obtaining clarification that exonerates Mr. Mulroney.

Sir, if these monies were indeed given to Mr. Mulroney as a legal retainer could you ask his firm to produce copies of its trust ledger confirming receipt and deposit of these funds? I'm sure Mr. Schreiber would agree to relinquish his privilege on this matter. Could you also have Mr. Mulroney's then firm furnish a copy of their accounts to Mr. Schreiber pursuant to which these monies would have been withdrawn from the firm's trust account?

Mr. Harper, lawyers are under strict obligations as to handling retainers that leave a clear paper trail. You may be aware that, until recently, Mr. Schreiber publicly stated that your Conservative predecessor rendered no legal services to him in consideration for these payments. Mr. Schreiber also described the original source of these payments, the Airbus monies, as "schmiergelder" or grease money, a bribery fund in connection with the Air Canada purchase of Airbus jetliners.

This whole business has a terrible smell, Mr. Prime Minister, and I know that Canada's New Government has no time for political chicanery. Would you therefore please get to the bottom of this?

Regards


Note - I will of course promptly post the unedited response I receive from the Prime Minister. Once Mr. Schreiber is sent back to Germany this will all probably die on the vine. If you want these loose threads tied up, the dangling questions answered, write Mr. Harper. Or, if you like, you can copy the message above, add your name to it and e-mail it to "pm@pm.gc.ca" Then we could all share our responses.

There is every reason to believe that Mr. Schreiber is a dodgy sort of wheeler-dealer. He is a wanted man in Germany. Yet his allegations have been troubling, a blight on Mr. Mulroney's good name. Surely this controversy can all be cleared up by the production of just a handful of documents that will corroborate Mr. Mulroney and vindicate him of any suggestions that he received tainted money from Mr. Schreiber. Then we could all just forget about this unhappiness.

A Mulroney/Schreiber Sidebar

This story illustrates why so many of us are angered at the current state of media concentration in Canada.

When CBC's Fifth Estate aired its account of this story it was mentioned that, while the Globe & Mail broke the story, the National Post had it first but spiked it - deliberately chose not to publish it.

A few weeks after the Fifth Estate broadcast I visited my elderly Dad in Leamington, Ontario. The paper they get is the Windsor Star, another CanWest Global newspaper. When I mentioned the Schreiber/Mulroney story to my Dad, he'd never heard of it. He decided to find out why not and so called the Star editor. Here is the explanation he was given.

Yes the editor of the Windsor Star was aware of the story. No the Windsor Star hadn't carried the story. The Windsor Star published what came to it via the CanWest tunnel - Asper approved - and there was nothing in that newsfeed about Mulroney/Schreiber at all and so nothing was printed in their paper.

More Dead Afghan Civilians

NATO reports 50 Taliban killed along with 28 civilians. More dead civilians. Who cares? Harper? No. O'Connor? No. Hillier? No.

Nobody cares, at least not enough to do what they know has to be done to protect innocent Afghan lives. End of story.

Wait, I've got an idea. How 'bout we change "dead civilian" to "Civilian Inadvertently Liberated from Taliban Oppression"? There, that sounds much better, doesn't it?

Congress Succeeds Where Putin Failed

The US Congress is expected to refuse funding needed by George w. Bush to establish an interceptor missile battery in Poland. From The Guardian:

The House appropriations committee cut $139m (£69.5m) from the $310m the Bush administration wants for preparatory work on the missile project in Europe. It approved funds for a radar system in the Czech Republic but cut the $139m Mr Bush requested to establish a missile interception system in Poland, the most controversial part of the defence system.

John Murtha, chairman of the committee, said the Bush administration has "got to convince us this is worthwhile".

As well as reducing the budget, Congress is shifting priorities from futuristic programmes to more immediate concerns, such as improved healthcare for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, pay rises for soldiers and marines, and much-needed weaponry for Iraq, such as the heavily-armoured Stryker vehicles.

The committee's pared-down budget will go to the full House for a vote next week but is almost certain to be passed.
The House and Senate have questioned whether establishing the system in eastern Europe is sensible given the extent of the opposition it has aroused in Russia. They also question its technical feasibility and the failure of other Nato countries to commit fully to it.

Are we beginning to watch the unravelling of the Imperial Presidency? If Congress chokes the beast into unconsciousness over the missile defence scheme, what's next? Has the day of the rightwing nutbar finally come to an end?

US Ordered To Pay $107 Million for Murder Frame-Ups

Four decades ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation set up four innocent men in a 1965 gangland murder. From the Boston Globe:

In a decision that was as dramatic as it was stern, US District Judge Nancy Gertner said from the bench that the FBI had deliberately withheld evidence that Peter J. Limone, Joseph Salvati, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo were innocent, and that the bureau helped cover up the injustice for decades as the men grew old behind bars and Tameleo and Greco died.

"FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules, and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause," said Gertner, berating the FBI for giving commendations and bonuses to the agents who helped send the men to prison for the killing in Chelsea of Edward "Teddy" Deegan, a small-time hoodlum.

Japan's Brief Fling with Neo-Cons Ends This Weekend

The party of Shinzo Abe are called Liberal Democrats, which is sort of like branding Stephen Harper as "Mr. Accountability." They're actually a bunch of right wing hard-liners intent on restoring Japan's imperial grandeur by erasing all traces of the country's hideous past.

This Sunday Abe may take a kamikaze flight of his own. The Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner, the New Komeito, need at least 64 of the 242 seats up for grabs to maintain a majority in the upper house.

But polls indicated that the governing coalition will win far fewer than the 64 seats and that the opposition Democratic Party is likely to gain a majority.

No word yet on whether Abe will cleave to his traditionalist zeal and go out the sepuku route.

Iran Isn't America's Only Pain in Iraq

It's probably a statement of how America's current weakness in Iraq is viewed across the Middle East. The Saudis are getting downright uppity with Washington.

The New York Times reports that the Bush/Cheney administration/regime/junta is becoming vexed at the Saudi's efforts to meddle in Iraq.

Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.

One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”

Officials in Washington have long resisted blaming Saudi Arabia for the chaos and sectarian strife in Iraq, choosing instead to pin blame on Iran and Syria. Even now, military officials rarely talk publicly about the role of Saudi fighters among the insurgents in Iraq.

The Bush administration’s frustration with the Saudi government has increased in recent months because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government and to pursue a different course in Iraq from what the administration has charted. Saudi Arabia has also stymied a number of other American foreign policy initiatives, including a hoped-for Saudi embrace of Israel.

American officials in Iraq also say that the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers.

The administration “thinks the Saudis are no longer behaving the role of the good vassal,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The Saudis, in turn, “see weakness, they see a void, and they’re going to fill the void and call their own shots.”

He Was as Drunk as... As an Astronaut

Say what? On at least two occassions NASA astronauts had to be warned their drunkeness constituted a safety risk to flights.

According to Aviation Week, a 12-page NASA paper soon to be released details two incidents when investigators investigators reported “ ‘heavy use of alcohol’ by astronauts” within 12 hours of flying.

No Whore Like an Old Whore

Oh he was so pure. He was just the man to cleanse Canada's parliament of the loose ways of the Liberals. Stevie was going to wash the place down with his very own Holy Water.

Remember when Harpo promised that his government - that would be Canada's New Government by the way - would end the practice of partisan appointments to federal boards and commissions? Guess what?

It's Harpo's turn at the trough now and he's going just as fast as he can to show us that he's a complete fraud, an outright liar. Huh?

Just as Adbusters outed Harpo on the environment, Democracy Watch has now outed him on his accountability promises. From the Toronto Star:

Since the beginning of the year, the Tories have made about 800 appointments, many of them with close ties to the party, and there is still no sign of an independent public appointments commission, said Duff Conacher, co-ordinator of Democracy Watch, a group advocating government accountability and corporate responsibility.
"To lie to the voters, to mislead the voters during the last election on this issue of government accountability shows a very high level of hypocrisy and dishonesty," Conacher said.

It has been seven months since the Tories' much-vaunted Accountability Act was passed, with the appointments commission its centrepiece.

But critics suggest the commission will never happen because the Conservatives' chances of being re-elected seem to be fading.

The Accountability Act, drafted by the Tories in response to the Liberal sponsorship scandal, passed the Commons and Senate and received royal assent last December, but a separate cabinet order is required for many provisions to come into force. The wording is such that there is nothing forcing cabinet to establish the appointments commission.

Let's face it folks, Stephen Harper is an outright liar. What was it his mentor, the honourable Mulroney used to say? "No whore like an old whore," yeah that's it. Now, what about that global warming thing?

Schreiber Gets the Best of Mulroney

Brian Mulroney has been ordered to pay his fellow shyster, er- entrepreneur, Karlheinz Schreiber, $470,000. The judgment of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice effectively orders Mulroney to make restitution of three cash payments the former Tory PM received from his then stalwart buddy, a key figure in the Airbus Scandal.

The payments came in the form of three envelopes, each neatly stuffed with $100,000 in cash. Mulroney would meet Schreiber in a coffee shop and an envelope would be passed across the table. Three meetings, $300,000.

CBC got its hands on Schreiber's Swiss bank records. They showed the cash came from money Schreiber was paid by Airbus for the sale of jetliners to Air Canada, money Schreiber called "schmiergelder" or "grease money."

By Schreiber's account it was dirty money, paid mobster-style, to a genuinely dodgy character.

Mulroney sued the Chretien government over the Airbus scandal and, under oath, claimed he'd never had any dealings with Schreiber. That claim was instrumental in the Canadian government's decision to fold and pay Mulroney $2-million.

Only later, when the evidence of the payments came out, did Mulroney start scrambling. He then said the money was a "retainer" to represent Schreiber to establish an arms factory and a pasta business.

At first Schreiber denied this but, as his battle to avoid extradition to Germany collapsed, he seems to have figured he might as well get his money back using Mulroney's own bizarre story to secure a judgment.

Now Mulroney is asking the court to set aside the judgment. He's challenging its jurisdiction to make the order - a tactic that won't require him to get into the facts of what actually happened. That motion is being argued today.

Personally I'd like to see Mulroney wind up with this case re-opened so he could argue the facts on their merits. Maybe Harpo could postpone Schreiber's extradition so this saga could all play out in court. I'm sure Harper's newfound buddy, Mulroney, would be ever so grateful for a chance to clear his wonderful name.

Adbusters Outs Harper

The online version of Adbusters has stripped Stephen Harper of what it calls his "green veneer":

After failing to get any support for his ironically-titled Clean Air Act, Harper’s government announced a new climate change policy last April called “Turning the Corner” that was supposed to strike a balance between environmental and industry concerns. But the new strategy was a gift to corporations and gave them so many loopholes and exemptions from target caps that it will actually lead to a rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Through “intensity-based targets,” corporations can increase their pollution as they increase their production. It will also give new companies three years to start meeting targets – widely seen as a free pass for the oil and gas companies operating in Alberta’s toxic tar sands, which are desperately trying to ramp up production to meet the United States’ insatiable need for oil. Under the new plan, companies can also meet 70 percent of their targets simply by paying into a fund, and those that don’t meet their targets can just buy their way out with carbon credits.

Harper’s attempt to portray himself as environmentally conscious is all the more insulting considering his track record. Since he was elected in 2006, Harper has cut 20 different federal programs meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, made secret deals with George Bush and American oil executives to bolster production of the Albertan tar sands (which already consume 600 million cubic feet of natural gas a day), and introduced the incredulous Clean Air Act, which doesn’t set hard caps on emissions until 2050.

Like many aspects of his appearance, Harper is trying to mask his persona as a right-wing radical and re-brand himself as a middle-of-the-road moderate in order to appeal to Canadian voters. While he has managed to calm some people’s fears by diluting his stance on the Iraq War and gay marriage, Harper’s environmental transformation is a façade. But Canada and the rest of the world have little time left to play with his disguises. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning that billions of people around the world are going to face food and water shortages caused by flooding within 13 years, Harper’s “greening” is nothing more than a whitewash.

Obama Calls HIllary "Bush/Cheney Lite"

Ouch! That's gotta hurt. Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has fired a broadside at Hillary Clinton:

“I’m not afraid of losing the PR war to dictators...I’m not going to hide behind a bunch of rhetoric. I don’t want a continuation with Bush-Cheney. I don’t want Bush-Cheney light. I want a fundamental change.”

Obama was referring to Hillary Clinton's statement that, like Bush/Cheney, she too would not talk to leaders from countries like Iran unless they first met certain conditions.

IDEX - Recharging the Middle East's Bloodlust

A lot of money is due to change hands this weekend in Dubai. It's the annual, International Defence Exhibition or IDEX, and it's just the place to stock up on goodies for your particular insurgency of choice.

Everything can be had from sniper rifles to state-of-the-art surveillance gear to the latest attack jets and there'll be plenty of buyers for just about all of it.

Saudi Arabia and Jordan are widely believed to be arming Iraq's Sunni insurgency this way and, while America is fond of complaining of Iranian ordinance finding its way into Shia hands, when was the last time you heard Bush/Cheney denounce their Saudi buddies for helping their Iraqis kill Americans?

IDEX - bringing together all the mayhem and suffering fit to buy and all of the oil money keen to buy it.

The Death of Easy Money?

The United States is the ultimate consumer society. Consumer spending has driven that country's economy as it has no other and the fuel for it has been easy money, that is to say very low interest rates. As described in the Washington Post, the peril of an economy built on prolonged, low interest is what happens when that inevitably ends.

Easy credit has been the economy's lifeblood in recent years. It gave people who previously couldn't afford homes a crack at the American dream. It fueled multibillion-dollar takeovers of some of corporate America's biggest names. It buoyed the stock market and propped up the prices of many other assets.

But now, the investors who a few months ago were willing to lend money to Wall Street at low interest rates, on loose terms, are balking as they worry about having to pay the price for lax lending standards.

The trouble started in one of the shakiest sectors of finance, home mortgages for people with bad credit, but it is spreading. As easy credit dries up, some huge corporate deals are being delayed and could unravel.
The question now is how far will the pain spread, and how many people will get hurt as it does.

"When people get scared, they tighten up all over," said A. Gary Shilling, president of the investment firm that bears his name. He said he expects housing prices to fall significantly further. "This kills consumer spending," he said of the credit crunch. "We think we'll be in a recession as a result by the end of the year. And that will spread globally because U.S. consumers still are the buyers of first and last resort for the excess goods and services produced around the world."

At the moment opinion is sharply divided on how the US will ride out the storm. Some are hopeful it will turn out to be a passing squall that leads to sunny skies again this fall. Others believe a recession looms.

The Best News In A Long Time

"I'm a big believer in polluter pays.

There will be an investigation into how this happened

... and how we can stop this from happening in the future."

Write that down somewhere you'll be able to find it because I think we'll need it before long.

The policy comes directly from the rabid mouth of Canada's EnvroMin John Baird. Bairdo (as in "Baird" + "Weirdo") was responding to the ruptured oil pipeline in Burnaby, B.C. earlier this week that resulted in the escape of thousands of litres of crude oil.

I, too, agree with the "polluter pays" principle. It's fair and it's just and, when done right, it can be really effective.

In Canada there hasn't been enough of this sort of thing. Take, for example, Big Oil. They've been running an enormous tab for a long time and maybe the moment has finally arrived for them to be presented with their bill.

Just a few days ago Big Oil was talking about the great benefits to be had from carbon capture and sequestration, something they followed with the suggestion that our government fund the programme. Hey Baird, why don't you take your "polluter pays" principle on the road. First stop - the Tar Sands.

The Gone Old Days

I'm reluctant to let this out but - oh well, the climate of our planet is changing and, in terms of our relativey frail life forms, the changes are powerful.

If it isn't the heat that gets you, it may be the rain. Just about every place on the planet is getting hotter. In colder areas that can be a mixed blessing. In normally hot regions, it's an outright curse.

Even once-mild Europe isn't spared. Heat waves have claimed thousands of lives in places like Paris and, further south, the Meditteranean shores are becoming seasonally unbearable. The eastern Med, in particular, is scorched and parched.

The same goes for the southeastern and southwestern regions of the US where what's expected to be a long-term drought has set in. The populations that have migrated to Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and the like are now having second thoughts - and not because they want to.

The rainfall these places need hasn't disappeared, it's merely moved on and concentrated in places as diverse as China, Texas and Britain. The populations of those areas aren't short of rain, they're floating in it. The curious thing is that all that rain often means no drinking water. Go figure. (if you don't understand, it's because floodwaters inundate municipal water and sewer systems, leaving drinking water contaminated and unfit).

Those who prefer it cold are going to be drawn closer to earth's poles. Some who need it cold - polar bears and the Inuit, for example, are going to have to find ways to adapt. The Inuit have been advised to get rid of their snowmobiles and go back to dog teams because dogs can recognize thin ice and, if your sled does go in, can sometimes pull you right back out. Now there's a comforting thought.

The Good Old Days are now the Gone Old Days. That's more than a bitter lament. It means that, in addition to rallying to the fight against global warming, we need to direct resources and efforts to finding the very best ways and means of adapting to what's already arrived and what will be coming in the near future.

In Canada we need to grasp how blessed we are compared to most of the planet, including our immediate neighbour. We need to appreciate these natural advantages and decide what we need to do to preserve, even defend them. Let's not delude ourselves: this is going to take time, effort, resources and an awful lot of goodwill and co-operation if we're to do this right. We can't obsess about getting back the Good Old Days. They are now, by any measure, the Gone Old Days.

World Economy Booming - for Some

Russia, India and China. Their rapid economic growth is expected to drive the world economy to a 5.2% growth this year, despite a lagging United States.

China's economy is expected to grow slightly faster than 11% while the US will be closer to 2%, provided it can contain the damage from its bursting housing bubble. Germany and Japan come in at 2.6% growth, slightly less than Britain.

The forecasts, produced by the International Monetary Fund, come with an inflation warning. The IMF says sustained, strong growth will be reflected in rising costs of energy, commodities and labour.

The IMF forecasts point to a major shifting in global economic power from West to East. It now appears to have reached a point where even a US recession will be a mainly local problem instead of a global catastrophe.

Al-Qaeda's Ace in the Hole - Bush

If you were in a war and you knew that, with a very small force you could tie down the lion's share of your enemy's force in one area, where would you deploy your main force? Well you would probably take the opportunity to use your greatest force where it could exploit your enemy's vulnerability. For al Qaeda today, that vulnerability is in south Asia - Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular.

For every soldier George Bush has tied down in Afghanistan he has three in Iraq, supposedly battling al-Qaeda. Three to one, that must say something.Unfotunately what it says is not encouraging.

When Bush talks of al-Qaeda it is inevitably to tie the terrorist group to his misadventure in Iraq. Drawing down US troops in Iraq would hand a victory to al-Qaeda, he claims, knowing that, with the help of his mouthpieces - the Ann Coulter/Fox News/Rush Limbaugh types - he can still persuade his base that he knows what he's doing.

Now George Bush is either lying or he's incredibly stupid - stupid the point of gross incompetence. Even as he was uttering this nonsense, his top anti-terrorism experts were appearing before Congress, in the process exposing Bush's self-serving, soldier-killing, homeland endangering deceit. From the Boston Globe:

In rare testimony before two House committees, Edward Gistaro, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, said that Al Qaeda terrorists operating in South Asia are better equipped to attack the United States than the network's followers in Iraq are.

Asked which arm of Al Qaeda concerned him the most, Gistaro told a joint session of the House armed services and intelligence panels that it was South Asia.

"The primary concern is in Al Qaeda in South Asia organizing its own plots against the United States," he said. Al Qaeda planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from its bases in Afghanistan.

"We see increased efforts on the part of Al Qaeda to try and find, train, and deploy people who could get into this country," he testified.

Meanwhile, a top US general in Afghanistan told Pentagon reporters in a video teleconference that the number of Al Qaeda foot soldiers traveling to South Asia has increased up to 60 percent over the past year.

"It's increased probably 50 to 60 percent over what it was last year . . . and they come from multiple areas in the Middle East," said Army Major General David Rodriguez, commander of the 82d Airborne Division.

Iraq is bleeding America's military and sapping popular support in the US. Iraq is preventing the United States from turning to face its enemy.

Ever since Bush/Cheney invaded Afghanistan they have been playing directly into the hands of al-Qaeda. When they had nearly choked the very life out of this once ragtag criminal gang, they released their grip and let it recover. Then they invaded Iraq out of sheer whim, handing bin Laden a huge victory and permitting al-Qaeda to grow in numbers and expand in range from Europe to East Africa to West Asia. Unbelievable. Now that the size and capability of al-Qaeda has grown markedly, Bush refuses to meet its thrust. Unbelievable.

I'm beginning to wonder whether Bush's top officials even tell him the truth any longer or, through the filter of Dick Cheney's organization, tell their president only what he wants to hear or what Cheney wants him to hear?

Bush is now deep in his bunker where he can no longer see the light of day. He reminds me of another delusional leader on the losing end of an invasion of whim who ordered non-existant divisions to hold off a resurgent enemy.

Dutch Courage

It's almost as agonizing to watch as the same debate going on at home. The Netherlands is now in the process of deciding what to do with their forces in Afghanistan when their mandate lapses next August.

The Dutch have contributed 1,000 soldiers plus helicopters and jet fighters. Holland initially went into the ISAF effort for two years with the expectation that other NATO members would take over when that commitment ended.

Now, like Canada, the Dutch have noticed there are no other NATO states lining up to take over.

The Dutch commitment was two years and out. Canada, after a farcical "debate", decided two years and then we'll see. That was back when Stephen Harper was obsessed with his manhood.

What the Dutch and we need to understand is that THIS IS AMERICA'S WAR. It's not a war for the survival of our very civilization. It was a war initiated by the United States in response to a criminal act that hit the skids when the United States decided they'd rather play with their tanks in another country, Iraq.

If NATO can't come up with other nations to shoulder their share of this mission, then it is the United States that should take over. It's Washington that has chosen to tie down 180,000 soldiers in Iraq, not NATO. It was Washington that convinced us to step in and mind the store while they stepped out to have a smoke in Iraq. It was Washington that was supposed to have the Iraq business wrapped up four years ago. It is Washington, not Brussels, that has created this godawful mess. Let's put the responsibility back where it truly belongs.

From the start of this NATO "mission" I was troubled that our alliance might easily be transformed into America's Foreign Legion. We're at that decision point right now. The alliance itself can't survive that. Let's focus on preserving the NATO alliance even if it means saying "No" to Washington.

America's Deserter in Chief

The New York Times today laments that George w. Bush has no exit strategy for his failed war in Iraq.

What is President Bush’s plan for a timely and responsible exit? That is the essential precondition for salvaging broader American interests in the Middle East and for waging a more effective fight against Al Qaeda in its base areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And it is exactly the question that Mr. Bush, his top generals and his diplomats so stubbornly and damagingly refuse to answer.

The plan [to keep American troops fighting until at least 2009] ignores the fact that the volunteer Army cannot sustain a prolonged escalation without grievous losses in quality, readiness and morale. Even more unrealistically, the plan assumes that with two more years of an American blank check, Iraqi politicians will somehow decide to take responsibility for their political future — something they’ve refused to do for the last four years.

The sad reality is that it takes real courage to lose a war, to admit failure, to muster up the resolve to accept the best of a host of bad options to relieve the suffering of one's nation. Bush knows that no good choices remain, there never really have been any, so he'll shelter in his cowardice and take no choice. This is America's "War President".

Bush is a coward and it is his cowardice that is driving his grandiose "war on terror." Like all cowards, he'll freely lie and deny and make no end of empty promises and grand assurances. The worst part has to be that, when you watch him blather on, you can see that he knows the truth but can't and won't bring himself to speak truth.

George Bush has abandoned his post, deserted the field. He's the Frat Boy again but, then again, he never was more than that. He's now America's "Deserter in Chief." It's time for Congress to show the courage their president cannot. End the war and impeach the bastard.

How Iraq Ends

There have been plenty of scenarios of where Iraq will be five years from now. The fantasists, the Bush/Cheney camp and their deluded followers, predict it will be a vibrant, healthy, very pro-Washington nation - sort of like pre-Kuwait invasion Iraq sans Saddam. The pessimists believe it will be little more than a state of anarchy, a hotbed of sectarian violence and a breeding ground for global Islamist terrorism. Others, perhaps the realists, believe Iraq won't be.

No more Iraq? What then?

Just how does Iraq end? The first thing to understand is that the seeds of Iraq's dissolution were planted in the wake of Desert Storm. Now, despite claims to the contrary, the new Iraq is burdened with a constitution that has been booby-trapped to permit but one outcome. It is a result that's been waiting to happen since Bush I pushed Saddam out of Iraq. Read on and I think you won't have much trouble understanding what's to come.

The most likely answer is three states. Kurdistan in the north. A Sunni Arab state in the middle and a Shia Arab state in the south. North and south get fabulous oil wealth. The Sunni middle gets the shaft.

An outsider who is probably as knowledgeable as anyone is Peter Galbraith, son of Canadian-born economist John Kenneth, and a foreign policy wonk who has been intimately involved with the northern Kurdish state for years. Peter G. sees the writing on the wall. He ought to, some of it is in his very own hand. At the end of the day, he says it will be constitutional democracy that eliminates any prospect of a unified Iraq:

Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable, while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.

Iraq's mainstream Shi'ite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shi'ites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they would lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.

The US benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, Hakim's Shi'ite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad, and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad governorate, with one-quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers.

New local elections are not required until 2009, and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening Muqtada, who is hostile to the United States and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve US interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.

Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish-Shi'ite deal: the Kurds supported the establishment of a Shi'ite-led government in exchange for Shi'ite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions, such as the one the SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.

Since there is no common ground among the Shi'ites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shi'ites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted, but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.

When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then-US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the US insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.

With input from the UN (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.

Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in Parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish non-governmental organizations, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a "No" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as "satisfactory", an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.

For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shi'ites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shi'ite state. By their boycotts and votes, the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shi'ite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.

America's war in Iraq is lost. Of course, neither President Bush nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning - a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes - but by the consequences of defeat. As Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."

Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting that the "surge" is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people.

...there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shi'ite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shi'ites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, are far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.

Iraq after a US defeat will look very much like Iraq today - a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.

My earlier posts go into some detail about Peter Galbraith and his involvement in Iraq, particularly Kurdistan. Galbraith, in fact, has been instrumental in steering the political reality that virtually dooms Iraq - the Kurdish constitution. The background is in the posts listed below.

Previous posts on this subject:

The Other Civil War - October 28

Are The Kurds Ready to Bolt - October 7

Definitely Not Oprah's Book Club - 3rd Ed., September 17

A Damned Liar

America's top lawyer, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, is an out and out liar.

He's such a baldfaced liar that US Senators from both parties aren't reluctant to call him one.

Gonzales' latest lie is that he and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card weren't really planning on taking advantage of former AG John Ashcroft when they rushed to his hospital room late at night while Ashcroft was recovering from surgery.

This mediocre little thug instead told a senate hearing that he and Card merely wanted to tell Ashcroft of the Congressional leadership's desire that Bush's intelligence-gathering programme not expire the next day.

Gonzales wasn't able to answer why, if the visit was all so innocent, FBI Director Robert Mueller thought it necessary to send agents to Ashcroft's room to prevent Card and Gonzales from keeping Ashcroft's deputy out.

Ranking Republican senator Arlen Specter minced no words about Gonzales' credibility:

Mr. Specter signaled that he did not accept Mr. Gonzales’s explanation about the hospital incident. “What credibility is left for you?” the senator asked at one point.

Mr. Specter has accused Mr. Gonzales before of dodging questions, and he did so again today. At one point, the senator said, “I see it’s hopeless.” At another point, he said acidly, “Let’s see if somewhere, somehow we can find a question that you’ll answer.”

Israel to Probe Lebanon War Crimes

The Winograd commission enquiring into the Israeli government and Defense Forces' actions in last summer's Second Lebanon War, as it's called, has also agreed to examine claims that the IDF committed war crimes during the fighting.

In response to claims by the left-wing Meretz party that war crimes had been committed by Israeli forces, Winograd said the panel's final report will examine the war's events from the perspective of international law.

The examination hinges on the IDF use of cluster-bomb munitions fired by rockets into residential areas. The UN reports that leftover, unexploded bomblets have killed 30-Lebanese civilians and wounded 180 since the hostilities ended last summer. The UN estimates Israel fired about 3-million bomblets into Lebanon.

Most of Israel's cluster weapons were provided by the United States. Following the war the US State Department investigated and concluded that Israel violated a committment to the US not to fire cluster bomb weapons into population centres.

Last year the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the large number of unexploded cluster bomblets littering Lebanon resulted from the IDF's decision to buy cheaper and unsafe American cluster weapons:

The cluster bombs constitute the number one humanitarian problem facing Lebanon after the war because many of the bomblets remain unexploded and as duds, they have turned into make-shift mines, converting towns, villages and fields into undeclared minefields. Since the cease-fire went into effect on August 14, at least 14 civilians, including many children, have been killed by the unexploded bomblets.

The United Nations demining unit estimates the ratio of duds in the cluster bomblets fired by Israel could be as high as 30-40 percent. This translates into hundreds of thousands of unexploded bomblets throughout southern Lebanon, endangering the lives of residents and preventing farmers from working their land.

Taliban Begin to Encircle Kabul

Remember all the stories about how we had beaten back the Taliban, knocked them off balance and disrupted their planned spring offensive? Maybe we didn't achieve quite as much as claimed.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the recent Taliban kidnapping of 23-Korean aid workers is just the latest evidence of the spreading insurgency.

It suggests that the Taliban have consolidated enough power in border provinces to strike farther north, with an eye toward ringing Kabul from the south. Few analysts say that Kabul itself is in danger of direct attack, and none say it is in any danger of falling. But the situation echoes what happened to the Soviets two decades ago, when they maintained control of the cities and little else.

"Ghazni is important as the gateway to Kabul, and control of that road is very important, both symbolically and practically," says Joanna Nathan, a Kabul-based security analyst for the International Crisis Group.

The increasing instability on Kabul's southern doorstep is a concern for President Hamid Karzai's government and its allies. The insurgency has always been centered in the south, where the Taliban was born from ultraconservative Pashtun tribes. But it is creeping northward and farther from Pakistan.

"It is getting farther away from the border," says Ms. Nathan. "What was cross-border is becoming local."

In recent months, suicide bombings in the far north – in Badakhshan and Kunduz – also suggest an attempt to widen the theater of combat, at least superficially. The attempt is more deeply rooted in Ghazni, where the Taliban can attempt to marshal support from a disaffected local populace made up largely of conservative farmers. Local Taliban have been reinforced by Taliban from the deeper south, says Lee.

This does not necessarily suggest growing sympathy for militant Islam. Rather it indicates that some Afghans have lost their patience with the government and are turning against it. The effect has been to constrict the flow of trade on roads south of Kabul, cutting it off from a major trading partner, Pakistan.

Bush's Telltale Embassy

When it's completed it'll house a staff of 1,000 or more. That's a huge staff for an embassy but the US embassy in Baghdad is huge, Washington's largest embassy anywhere. It comprises 27-buildings and occupies an area larger than the Vatican.

But aren't the Americans planning to leave Iraq? So what gives with the mega-embassy?

"It really is sort of betwixt and between," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations who advises the Defense Department. "It's bigger than it should be if you really expect Iraq to stabilize. It's not as big as it needs to be to be the nerve center of an ongoing war effort."

As the LA Times reports, the very size of the embassy complex has given rise to Iraqi suspicions:

"It's all for them, all of Iraq's resources, water, electricity, security," said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlighted site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. "It's as if it's their country, and we are guests staying here."

"They're not leaving Iraq for a long time," said Hashim Hamad Ali, another guard, who called the compound "a symbol of oppression and injustice."

The embassy buildings are being heavily reinforced and surrounded by massive perimeter security. Even that won't prevent them from becoming a prime target for insurgent mortar and rocket attacks. As a result, Washington is facing enormous reluctance among foreign service workers when it comes to postings to Baghdad.

To be fair and balanced, the embassy complex is within easy range of Shia miltias and Sunni insurgents alike.

Time to Fight Back

To the nutjobs, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is dedicated to spreading fear and panic on the strength of unsubstantiated claims that man is changing the world's climate.

To the nutjobs.

Floods in China, Texas and Britain - vanishing polar ice - receding glaciers - drought and desertification - what once were considered rare anomalies are today commonplace. Did you ever notice how the IPCC reports are regularly overtaken by events almost as soon as they're released? Why do you think that is?

Here's the answer. The IPCC doesn't overstate in its forecasts and predictions. It understates. The IPCC reports are consensus based and they reflect the powerful lobbying efforts of countries such as the United States, China and India demanding that they be understated. That's why they've consistently underestimated the severity and timing of climate change events that have followed.

Now we have a Canadian study that proves what has been predicted all along - that global warming and greenhouse gas emissions are altering global rainfall distribution patterns. The lucky ones - us - are going to receive more rainfall overall, even at the price of massive flood events. The unlucky ones - them - are already seeing their homelands turn uninhabitable by drought, groundwater exhaustion and desertification. This is another reality the IPCC did not overstate.

The impacts of global warming are coming on faster and stronger than what we'd been warned to expect. There's no short-term answer for this problem. The answers are painfully long-term, multi-generational. The longer we put off accepting our responsibility for what we've created, the worse it's going to be for those who will inherit this world from us.

The time for putting up with the nutjobs is over.

It's time to fight back. Sure other nations are dragging their heels but that's no excuse not to accept our responsibility.

So, What's Holding You Back?

A plaintive op-ed piece in today's Globe & Mail about carbon capture and sequestration. The item, written by oil patch spokesman Steve Kaufman, lauds the idea of industrial emitters employing proven technology to capture carbon emissions before they escape the factories and refineries that produce them and then bury the captured carbon underground.

By leveraging the expertise that already exists here to develop the technologies, infrastructure and regulatory models necessary for the creation of a large-scale carbon capture and storage network, Canada would become a global leader in addressing climate change.

The basic technology for carbon capture and storage is already proven and safe. The practice of injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields for enhanced oil recovery has been going on for more than three decades in the United States. Deep geological carbon capture and storage projects currently operating in Norway, Algeria and Saskatchewan are each eliminating about one million tonnes of emissions annually.

Good idea, Steve, so what's holding your people up? You have to go well down into the article to find it - government subsidies.

Long-term carbon dioxide storage and monitoring will require the kind of visionary government policies and funding mechanisms required for other historic Canadian infrastructure projects such as the Canadian Pacific Railway and the trans-Canada pipeline system. In terms of its potential for transforming industrial activity, creating a national carbon capture and storage infrastructure could be no less significant.

Maybe Steve's right. Maybe government should pick up the tab for a national, carbon capture and sequestration programme. And, here's my "maybe". Maybe the government should impose a carbon tax to cover the costs of this programme. I think it's called "make the polluter pay", a principle that's been widely accepted already and should be applicable to GHG emitters. No handouts on this one. There's no way I'm willing to subsidize the Tar Sands polluters while they wallow in today's gas price windfalls.

President Cheney

Steve Bell, The Guardian

Americans Rebounding in Support for Iraq Invasion

Yeehaw, just when you thought it was safe to go in the water again. A New York Times/CBS News poll has found a sharp increase in the number of Americans who now say that taking military action against Iraq was the right thing to do.

A bare majority of Americans (51%) still say the invasion wasn't justified but those on the other side have increased from a low of 35% two months ago to 42% today. Two-thirds of the respondents, however, believe the war is going badly.

It's suspected that Bush's utterly groundless yet upbeat assessment of the progress on benchmarks and the prospects of his army's "surge" have worked his old magic with many Americans so desperate to believe. Oh dear.

Economics on Crack - Our Addiction to Growth

Jean Chretien was addicted to it. He wanted to "grow" Canada's population through immigration to create new taxpayers to provide for the aging citizenry. Stephen Harper wants to grow Canada's fossil fuel industry until we become an "energy superpower."

Growth - it's the crack cocaine of economics. It's intoxicating and highly addictive but, like crack, it cannot end well. Why not? Because growth in all its manifestations is about consumption. It entails consumption of resources of all descriptions in a manner devised to then increase consumption. It's akin to keeping your foot pressed hard on the gas pedal as you accelerate toward a wall.

In some respects our civilization has already hit that wall, even if it's not apparent quite yet. Take groundwater, for example. In Asia and other parts of the world, including the US, agriculture has been built on exploitation of groundwater. Year after year we've pumped water to the surface faster than these aquifers can recharge. We want to drain the swimming pool and yet still dive into it. Do you think that's very bright?

Then there's the global warming wall. Again it's tied directly to growth and consumption. The recalcitrant, like our own Stephen Harper, want to make a token gesture in the form of activity-based greenhouse gas reductions, called "intensity" targets. An intensity based system, for example, calls for a 10% reduction in GHG emissions per barrel of oil. That reduction, however, is rendered meaningless by a 200% increase - or growth - in production. Now you have a problem that is 180% of what it was before you imposed reductions. It only works if you don't accept that we're already putting out more than our maximum limit of GHG emissions.

But wait, there's other progress to be had. Take ethanol, for example. It's renewable and somewhat cleaner than fossil fuels so let's go that way. Unfortunately we prefer to produce ethanol from corn. Why? Because those who grow corn and those beholden to them want it to be made from corn. But what does it take to grow corn? Farmland, fertilizers, pesticides, and lots and lots of water and fossil fuels. Water? You got it. So we're taking two already over exploited resources - fossil fuel and ground water - throwing in a bunch of chemical fertilizers and pesticides - and taking a renewable resource out of the global food supply. That sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

For decades man has been creating a deficit balance in the world's resource inventory - renewable and non. Whether you like to hear this or not, we're going to have to find different ways of doing things and that's going to take a tide change in our values. We're going to have to see constant, accelerating growth not as an answer but for what it is - a very serious and immediate threat to our wellbeing. In other words, we're going to have to learn to live within our means environmentally just as we expect ourselves to live within our means fiscally.

This isn't just something we ought to do or something we need to do. It's something we're going to have to do and if you don't believe it, you're defying gravity. The era of trying to grow our way out of our problems is over.

Limitless Clean Energy

The venerable Brit scientist and creator of the Gaia theory James Lovelock is a strong proponent of nuclear energy. He sees reactor power as the sole viable alternative to fossil fuel energy in existence today. Lovelock, however, also sees the best long-term hope for mankind in a developing form of nuclear energy, fusion reaction.

"Along with many other scientists throughout the world, I knew that nuclear fusion energy, the nuclear combustion of hydrogen, was the ultimate clean ad everlasting energy source, mainly because we knew that this was what empowered the sun and other stars. Most of us still thought that we were a long way from realizing fusion in practice. It just seemed impossible that the conditions inside the core of the sun, with temperatures over 100 million degrees, could be arranged here on Earth on a practical scale as part of a power station.

But in February 2005 the director of the Culham Science Centre, Professor Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, invited Sandy and me to visit and view their Tokomak reactor, and to learn about their recent experiences using it and the prospects for fusion energy. We were amazed and delighted to discover that their fusion reactor had proved itself by sustaining for two seconds a nuclear flame that burnt deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, and generated sixteen megawatts of energy.

As a scientist I was intrigued by the thought that there in front of me was a large toroidal flask within which temperatures far above those of the hottest part of the sun's core had been sustained for a couple of seconds. The temperature of the burning mix of hydrogen isotopes was 150 million degrees.

The deuterium fuel used for fusion energy is unlimited in availability. It constitutes 0.016 per cent of water and is easy to extract [while the fusion reaction itself produces tritium].

The nuclear waste of a fusion reactor is the harmless non-radioactive gas helium, and there are no long-term radioactive wastes. The metal parts of the reactor become mildly radioactive as a consequence of the neutron flux, but this is a minor disposal problem.

Noting that France is about to build the next large thermonuclear reactor which will be producing power for that country's grid, Lovelock lamented the failure to back Kyoto: If Kyoto had been influenced more by the pragmatism of scientists and engineers and less by romantic idealism, we might soon have harvested fusion energy. As it is, even given good will, it may take twenty more years before it begins to heat our electric kettles or run our word processors.

Which brings us to Vancouver and General Fusion Inc. which has already lab tested its own hot-fusion device and is now raising capital to produce a prototype fusion reactor. General Fusion is developing a patent-pending technology, MTF fusion, which it hopes to turn into a prototype reactor by 2010. Let's hope it succeeds but, even then, it would probably take at least another decade before fusion power became a significant contributor to our power grid.

Coming Soon to Montebello - The Three Stooges

No Sally, the Three Wise Men only show up at Christmas!

Living in America's Shadow

You can scream, you can shout, you can howl at the moon - but you cannot escape the fact that, in the era of the Cheney monarchy, Canada is firmly under Washington's spell. The American foreign policy of "you're either with us or you're against us" has demanded a yielding of some sovereignty. Today, America's enemies become our enemies, even if we don't declare them that in so many words. In everything from fisheries to softwood lumber we bend to America's often capricious will. That's why Canadians - you and me - have an immediate and vested interest in the goings on in Washington that we've never had to shoulder before.

Churning through these thoughts I was reminded of an article I'd read in the June issue of Harper's that explored what America faces in undoing the damage of the Bush/Cheney regime. One aspect examined was the need to undo the climate of fear and cowardice inculcated in the American people and their government:

We abhor cowardice and revere courage in part for the good courage does the rest of our character. In Ancient Greece it was one of the four cardinal virtues, along with temperance, prudence and justice, none of which can be found in either the Bush Administration or the majority of the Congress. ...one can say with some certainty that a fearful person is unlikely to be temperate, prudent or just. It is reasonable to think that as courage improves the moral character of a person or a government, fear worsens it.

Cutting taxes for the rich and adding billions to the national debt is not prudent. Leaving millions of people, many of them children, in dire poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world is not just. Silencing the press is not temperate, nor is secret surveillance of the citizenry. Failing to put an end to an unjust war because one is afraid, like the Democrats, of repercussions at the polls is anything but courageous.

...The word "virtue" in either the Greek or Christian sense, does not apply to the Bush administration or to many of its cohorts in Congress. some of our representatives now lie, others accept bribes, at least one abused children, many participate in fixing elections, and then there is the war. The result has been an American decline so precipitous it may not be reversed for generations, if ever.

...We have become brave in answering pollsters and timid in pursuing action. ...It is a comfort of sorts to think that the disposition to evil is limited to the Bush Administration and its followers in the legislature, but there is an itch in that idea. Bush and his minions were reelected in 2004. Could there have been any cause for that but fear? And would this country have turned against him if the prediction of his court of fools had been correct and the invasion and occupation had been "a piece of cake"?

The final question is compelling. We take comfort in polls revealing that a majority of Americans now consider the conquest of Iraq to have been unjustified but how much of that enlightenment arises from the fact that Iraq has turned into a disaster? I suspect our comfort is an illusion.

A year ago I wrote of the final line of the American national anthem, the part where it describes the United States as the "land of the free and the home of the brave". It struck me at the time that neither can exist without the other - no bravery without freedom and certainly no freedom without bravery. And yet we see in this incomparably wealthy and powerful nation, a climate of fear and even a willing surrender of freedoms.

America's Iraqi Helpers Want Out

George w. Bush and his ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Cocker, try to put a very positive spin on the mess they've created in that country. Cocker's real assessment was apparent in a cable he sent to the Bush administration, a copy of which fell into the hands of the Washington Post.

The cable calls for all Iraqis currently working for the US to be given refugee status. Cocker warns that without the promise of safe haven in America, the Iraqi employees will quit.

It seems the Iraqis in the employ of the American occupation are under no illusions about how well it's all going.

Democratic Candidates Face YouTubers Tonight

CNN will tonight host a Democratic all-candidates debate in which the questions will be coming from YouTube users. YouTube received 2,300 video questions from the American public from which CNN will chose around 30.

A lot of bloggers are disappointed that CNN gets to filter the questions, seeing it as a form of censorship. Then again, CNN is airing the debate and the procedure is somewhat novel.

The candidates have been given a "heads up" on at least one question they'll face. From The Guardian:

Among them is a 30-second clip from a cancer survivor who removes her wig and says her chances of survival are not as good as they would have been if she had had health insurance.

"What would you, as president, do to make low-cost or free preventative medicine available for everyone in this country?" she asks.

I'm not sure this is as big a deal as CNN would suggest. After all, candidates often subject themselves to open-line radio where the questions from callers are a lot more spontaneous than the YouTube project.

The Case for Regulation

When it comes to issues like free trade, globalization and de-regulation, a lot of time, money and effort has gone into ensuring we're thoroughly indoctrinated in our views. Tariffs? They're bad, aren't they? Isn't that why we joined the World Trade Organization? Free Trade, Globalization? A rising tide floats all boats, eh? De-regulation? Open marketplace, competition - right?

These pitches all rely on the same thing - assumptions. We assume that tariffs are always bad, that they lead to bottlenecks in the trade of goods that injures both sides of the deal. In the course of assuming that we assume away the social, political and economic utility of tariffs. I know, we haven't actually done away with tariffs but we're certainly marching down that road.

De-regulation was the cause celebre of the Mulroney/Thatcher/Reagan cabal. In Canada, the Mulroney Tories de-regulated the airline industry and our two, flag carriers which then competed themselves into oblivion until there was but one and even it had to struggle its way through bankruptcy proceedings. Canadian Pacific swallowed up Pacific Western Airlines and the once-magnificent Wardair; changed its name to Canadian Airlines International; began hemorrhaging money as it gradually collapsed under its own weight; tried to rescue itself by grabbing Air Canada - and then died to be swallowed up by the same Air Canada it had targeted. And just how well did that de-regulated coup d'etat work out for Air Canada? We all know the answer to that, especially anyone who flew Air Canada during those miserable days.

Sometimes the absence of regulation in an industry is simply unhealthy. Sometimes the central government has a role to play in regulating industries that goes beyond health and environmental issues. In today's New York Times, columnist and economist Paul Krugman examines how de-regulation caused America to lose its lead in high-speed internet connectivity:

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

As a result, we’re lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn’t even in the top 10.

What happened to America’s Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot — or was persuaded by special interests to ignore — the reality that sometimes you can’t have effective market competition without effective regulation.

...when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there’s little competition in U.S. broadband — if you’re lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there’s nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that’s much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

It’s too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it’s interesting to learn that health care isn’t the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren’t prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.

Taking the Fight into Pakistan

The idea has been bandied about before - go after the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in their lairs inside Pakistan. It's an option George w. Bush himself brought up this week. It's a decision that also could have enormous ramifications, the sort that the frat boy Bush has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to grasp until it's too late.

Richard Nixon did it. He sent his military forces swarming into Cambodia to attack the safe havens of the North Vietnamese army infiltrators. He kicked proper hell out of the place, killed an awful lot of civilians, and maybe bought himself a year's grace before the inevitable.

The idea is the same but the turf is not and neither are the people our side would have to deal with, the Pashtun. It's sort of like putting a bare foot into a bag full of scorpions. You're going to get stung, it'll hurt like hell and it might even kill you. Chances are good, when it's over, you'll realize you made a huge mistake.

The Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis has travelled through these lands and he knows better:

I spent a remarkable time in this wild medieval region during the 1980s and '90s, travelling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and their chiefs, called "maliks."

These tribal belts are always called "lawless." Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn't like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, "save your last bullet for yourself."

...there is law: The traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behaviour and personal honour. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, War at the Top of the World.

The 40 million Pashtun -- called "Pathan' by the British -- are the world's largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan's Pashtun number 28 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation's largest ethnic group.

The tribal agency's Pashtun reluctantly joined Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops entering there.

But under intense U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan's constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region's tribes, killing 3,000 of them.

In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen.

As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war.

The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region.

Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf's government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honour far more than money, and cannot be bought.

Any U.S. attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake.

Margolis (quite correctly in my opinion) argues that carrying the fighting into Pakistan will only widen the war and transform it into a battle against western occupation. Think Iraq. Secondly, he points out that Musharraf's fate lies in the hands of his army's officers who may topple the general in response to US or NATO attacks. His third point is that this tactic could reignite the movement for a unified Pashtun homeland, Pashtunistan, that could fatally undermine the modern Pakistan state which, in case you need reminding, has a troublesome nuclear arsenal. Lastly he notes the US military has a mixed record from taking on what were, at best, weak and small opponents - such as Iraq. Pakistan, with its half-million soldier military, could well be much more than the US and NATO could handle.

Those Bush administration and Harper government officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.

Angus Reid - Harper Down to 29%

So, Stephen Harper's approval rating has fallen to 29% in the latest Angust Reid poll. Yippee! Well, not quite. Our own Stephane Dion's numbers aren't even half Harpo's. The Liberal leader tallies a whopping 14% approval. 21% of respondents say their opinion of Dion has worsened over the past four weeks.

Stephane, the holiday is over. The only reason Harper is even floating at 29% is because there's no Liberal leader taking the fight to him.

Dion, it's time to decide. Either lead or leave.

The Revenge of Gaia

Gaia is an evolutionary system in which any species,

including humans, that persists with changes to

the environment that lessen the survival of its

progeny is doomed to extinction.

We have in a sense stumbled into a war with

Gaia, a war that we have no hope of winning.

All that we can do is make peace while we are

still strong and not a broken rabble.

Chances are that, when it comes to global warming, you're more familiar with names like George Monbiot than that of James Lovelock.

Lovelock is a classic British boffin. He's a brilliant old man with a refreshingly young mind that seamlessly blends abject pessimism with inspirational optimism through the application of a lifetime of science and rigorous logic.

Long before word of global warming filtered down to any of us, Lovelock originated the "Gaia Hypothesis." Put simply, and probably somewhat inaccurately, it pictures the earth as a living thing. It's not that Lovelock has fanciful notions that rocks and water and air are animate. What he does contend is that the earth acts as though it were animate, a living thing. It self-regulates its biosphere and, when it gets sick, it gets a fever.

The Gaia Theory took a long time to gain the acceptance of the scientific community. At first about a third of it was accepted, the rest considered too futuristic and unproven. Year by year the balance of it was borne out by events. It's still a theory but one that now has the backing of consensus.

The theory isn't just about global warming (or "global heating" in Lovelock's words) but about the overall impact of humanity on the biosphere and what we must do about it.

"The Revenge of Gaia" is a genuinely worthwhile read. Check it out.

France's Anti-Intellectual Government

Nicolas Sarkozy doesn't mince words: “I am not a theoretician. I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”

Sarkozy's message extends to his cabinet. The nation of Descartes and Jean Paul Sartre thinks way too much. His Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, recently advised the French to abandon their "old national habit." From the New York Times:

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases."

I'm just trying to remember. Haven't we all had to deal with another anti-intellectual government over the past seven years? Apeople who stopped thinking and questioning and focused on "doing" especially doing what they were told. That leader - something to do with cowboys and polyps, eh? How well has that country fared since it went anti-intellectual?

Too Hot for Sun Worshipers

China is deluged by rainstorms and floods. So are parts of Britain. What could be worse? Maybe it would be to be in sunny Greece, Italy or Southern France. Europe's Mediterranean nations are facing the unthinkable - weather so hot it kills their tourism industry.

In Greece, temperatures have reached 43 C. in the shade, the hottest weather in over a century.

'The Mediterranean climate of this country no longer exists. It is changing, perhaps even faster than we expected,' said Michalis Petrakis, director of Greece's Institute of Environmental Research at the National Observatory in Athens.

It's the same story throughout most of the eastern Med. Forest fires are spreading throughout the region, wildlife is simply dying off.

CNN Licks Its Wounds and Blitzer

CNN.com has fielded a bizarre defence of reporter Wolf Blitzer. It comes on the heels of the thrashing Blitzer took at the hands of Michael Moore a few days ago. Moore had been invited on to talk about his latest documentary "Sicko." Blitzer preceded the Moore interview with a piece by CNN's medical reporter, Sanjay Gupta, that challenged Moore's credibility. When Moore got his turn, he shredded Blitzer who stood before the camera almost mute and looking stunned.

We all have our own opinions but I've always thought Blitzer to be a journalistic lightweight, constantly testing the winds of opinion and sniping from the sidelines. Given the rousing defence of their reporter, CNN must think a lot of others share my opinion:

Wolf Blitzer's in the news again. CNN's colorful, attack-dog journalist was involved in another on-air confrontation, this time with "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore.

"Attack dog journalist"? Oh, spare me.

Liberals have learned what conservatives have long known -- that there are benefits to being seen as "standing up" to the "hostile" press. Former President Clinton's testy exchange with Chris Wallace on Fox News Channel last September was particularly instructive. Fans of Democratic presidential candidates are delighted about their refusal to appear in a debate sponsored by Fox.

"I'm much more sensitive to it because I suspect that politicians and people who have political agendas are going to use these forums increasingly not just to answer questions on substantive issues, but to try to score some points and rally their bases," Blitzer said.

[Blitzer] sees himself as a surrogate for the public, with a responsibility to ask newsmakers about things that their critics are saying about them. If a question is ducked, he'll ask again. If it's ducked again, he'll point that out and move on.

What a self-serving load of crap! Thanks CNN.

Brainpower Optional for Tax Collectors

Spiegel Online reports that French authorities have confirmed what a lot of people have long believed, you don't actually need a brain to work in a tax office.

The proof lies in the case of a French civil servant. When he went to doctors complaining of a mild numbness in his left leg, they x-rayed his skull. Inside, where the brain ought to have been, they found a huge, fluid-filled cavity.

Tests showed that the man's IQ is 75 -- the average is 100 -- but he was not considered physically or mentally disabled. Dr. Lionel Fuillet said that his condition had not impared his development or his socialization. He is married with two children and works in the tax office.

Britain Now Defenceless?

A secret memorandum leaked to Britain's Daily Telegraph indicates that the demands of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have so sapped British military strength as to undermine the ability of the military to defend Britain itself.

Gen Sir Richard Dannatt has told senior commanders that reinforcements for emergencies or for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan are "now almost non-existent".

In the memorandum to fellow defence leaders, the Chief of the General Staff (CGS) confessed that "we now have almost no capability to react to the unexpected". The "undermanned" Army now has all its units committed to either training for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, on leave or on operations.

"General Dannatt's appraisal means that we are unable to intervene if there is an emergency in Britain or elsewhere, that's self-evident," a senior officer said.

"But this is a direct result of the decision to go into Afghanistan on the assumption that Iraq would diminish simultaneously. We are now reaping the reward of that assumption."

Disgraced Marine Walks Free

Former US Marine corporal Trent Thomas has been handed a bad conduct discharge and sent on his way after being convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder in the execution of an unarmed Iraqi last year.

Thomas and his squad dragged the man from his home, marched him 1,000 yards and shot him 11-times. The squad members have claimed they acted out of frustration with the Iraqi legal system.

The former marine displayed no remorse for the killing, saying, "I believe we did what we needed to do to save Marines' lives."

Israel's Witch Hunt (We're Talking "Salem" Here)

Well at least they don't burn'em at the stake. From McClatchey:

Sana Kuma stands charged in Israel with the crime of "practicing magic", an offence that could net her up to five years in jail. Just what did she do to get on the wrong side of the Israeli criminal justice system? She's been reading customer's coffee grounds to divine their futures. To some that would be just harmless fortune-telling. In Israel that's a serious crime.

“Life is enemies and friends,” Kuma said recently after doing a coffee-ground reading for a former Miss Israel. “I have to accept the good and the bad.”

Kuma’s transgression is something known to its practitioners as tasseography. Put more simply, it is the ancient art of overturning a coffee cup — usually a demitasse used for Turkish coffee — and looking for answers in the patterns left behind by the grounds.

Fisk on Lawrence and Modern Fools (Canadian too)

Robert Fisk has written an important piece in today's Independent in which he points out that T.E. Lawrence had it right about Iraq (and Afghanistan)when he wrote:

'Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active and 98 per cent passively sympathetic'

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour..."

How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, the Turks "would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available."

Now who does that remind you of? The "fortified post every four square miles" is the ghostly future echo of George W Bush's absurd "surge". The Americans need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill will of the Iraqi people, and they have only 150,000 available. Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of "war lite" is responsible for that. Yet still these rascals get away with it.

Hands up those readers who know that Canada's Defence Minister, Gordon O'Connor, actually sent a letter to Rumsfeld two days before his departure in disgrace from the Pentagon, praising this disreputable man's "leadership". Yes, O'Connor wanted "to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your many achievements (sic) as Secretary of Defence, and to recognise the significant contribution you have made in the fight against terrorism". The world, gushed the ridiculous O'Connor, had benefited from Rumsfeld's "leadership in addressing the complex issues in play".

O'Connor tried to shrug off this grovelling note, acquired through the Canadian Access to Information Act, by claiming he merely wanted to thank Rumsfeld for the use of US medical facilities in Germany to ferry wounded Canadian soldiers home from Afghanistan. But he made no mention of this in his preposterous letter. O'Connor, it seems, is just another of the world's illusionists who believe they can ignore the facts - and laud fools - by stating the opposite of the truth. Bush, of course, is among the worst of these meretricious creatures. So is the late Tony Blair.

Oh, how we miss Lawrence. "The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern (guerrilla) commander," he wrote 78 years ago, accurately predicting al-Qa'ida's modern-day use of the internet. For insurgents, "battles were a mistake ... Napoleon had spoken in angry reaction against the excessive finesse of the 18th century, when men almost forgot that war gave licence to murder".

"Rebellion must have an unassailable base ...

In the minds of men converted to its creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.

"It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic ... Granted mobility, security ... time, and doctrine ... victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

I remember how Daniel Pipes - one of the great illusionists of modern American journalism - announced in the summer of 2003 that what the Iraqis needed was (no smirking here, please), a "democratically minded strongman".

But wait, Pipes is at it again. The director of the "Middle East Forum" has been writing in Canada's National Post about "Palestine". His piece is filled with the usual bile. Palestinian anarchy had "spewed forth" warlords. Arafat was an "evil" figure. Israeli withdrawal from Gaza had deprived Palestinians of the one "stabilising element" in the region. Phew! "Palestinianism" (whatever that is) is "superficial". Palestinian "victimisation" is a "supreme myth of modern politics". Gaza is now an "[Islamist] beachhead at the heart of the Middle East from which to infiltrate Egypt, Israel and the West Bank".

So we are going to have yet another war in the Middle East, this time against Hamas - democratically elected, of course, but only as a result of what Pipes calls "the Bush administration's heedless rush to Palestinian elections"? It's good to see that the late Tony Blair is already being dubbed a "savant". But shouldn't Pipes, too, read Lawrence? For insurgency is a more powerful "vapour" than that which comes from the mouths of illusionists.

NatPo Calls for Taliban Body Count

The National Post's Don Martin chides our military for not producing "body counts" of the Taliban we kill. Martin apparently believes that the Canadian people need to know that we're killing far more than we're losing from our own side.

Canadians have just two confirmed and photographed Taliban kills to their credit in the past month, a sobering contrast to nine fallen soldiers at the hands of insurgents during the same time frame.

Just this week, 17 Afghan police officers were killed in various hot spots throughout the country, compared with only four dead Taliban.

There have got to be more enemy casualties, of course. Informed observers note Taliban fighters turned into a pink mist by aircraft bombing runs are not counted, although a bombed corpse is just as legitimately dead as a bullet-ridden one, in my view.

Martin thinks all Canadians need is a good, hefty Taliban body count and we'll all rally to the mission. I don't know what world Martin inhabits but it isn't mine and I doubt that it's yours either.

That "pink mist" he refers to is, unfortunately, all too common. The problem is that the mist could be the last traces of women or children taken out by airstrikes on villages. The last thing our military wants to do is to have to justify itself whenever it reduces a human being to a mass of protoplasm.

One of our common complaints about the Taliban is that they stubbornly refuse to stand up in some vacant field to let us kill them. In the time-honoured tradition of insurgents, they do use innocent civilians as there armour. Killing them often means killing civilians in the process.

Sorry, Don, but the fastest way to bleed the already dwindling support for "the mission" is to let Canadians see just how blunt and ugly and sometimes even indiscriminate counter-insurgency warfare can be.

Arabs Don't Trust Blair

Poor Tony Blair. He got out of office but only just before the mob showed up with tar and feathers. Then his real boss, George w. hisself, comes up with the brainwave to have Blair appointed "special envoy" to represent the UN, the US, the EU and Russia, in trying to sort out Middle Eastern problems, particularly the Palestinian dilemma.

The only bunch who don't seem to be buying the Blair thing are the Arabs themselves. From The Guardian:

Israel is delighted he is getting involved but Arab reactions range from sceptical to openly hostile. "George Bush wanted to reward Blair for his hostility to the Arabs," said Galal Nassar in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly. "In backing Bush's nominee the Quartet has endorsed a disastrous choice." Columnist Rami Khouri wrote in Beirut's Daily Star: "If there is an award for the combined negative credibility of an institution plus an individual, the Quartet and Blair should be its first recipients. Appointing Tony Blair as special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace is something like appointing the Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome."

The Right Thing to Do

Denmark is preparing to withdraw its troops from Iraq where they've been serving under British command in Basra.

In preparation for their departure, the Danes have secretly extracted 200-Iraqis who had been working for them, mainly as translators. All will be offered asylum in Denmark.

"It's the right thing to do," said Captain Joergen Christian Nyholm, who served in Iraq. "My personal opinion is that they are at a pretty high risk."

Another Body Blow for Musharraf

Pakistan's Supreme Court has reinstated Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, ruling that the judge's dismissal by president Pervez Musharraf was "illegal."

Mushie purportedly sacked Judge Chaudhry for alleged corruption but it is widely believed the dictator was seeking to eliminate a judicial threat to the legitimacy of his rule that could upset Musharraf's plans to seek parliamentary appointment to a second, five-year term. That ploy is expected to be challenged before the courts.

This is not a happy time for Mushie. His takedown of the Red Mosque extremists has bought him new enemies but few new friends. The breakdown of his truce with Islamist forces in Waziristan has left him scrambling for a new deal even as the accomodation is being condemned by Musharraf's Western benefactors. Then yesterday the White House announced it was prepared to carry its war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda onto Pakistani territory.

Mushie has long been just one step ahead of his assassins and now he has even more people apt to be gunning for him as he becomes weaker and weaker.

Krugman Outs Petraeus

One unfortunate side effect of the Bush Global War Without End on Terror has been the politicization of our generals.

It used to be considered a core tenet of democracy that the armed forces were effectively subordinate to their civilian masters and never, ever were to take part in the political arena. That's a principle our own General Hillier hasn't always honoured but, then, neither have his American counterparts either.

The bright shining star of today's Iraq war is General David Petraeus, America's counter-insurgency guru and now commander of US forces in Iraq. Petraeus is squarely behind the eight-ball right now with a disenchanted American people and an angry Congress demanding that he produce clear and convincing results of progress by September, the military's own deadline for reporting on the "surge".

Now that same military, quite predictably, is trying to wiggle out from under that committment, saying they'll need "more time" to assess whether the strategy is actually working. Watch for the Pentagon to turn intensely political on this as its demands are rejected.

As for Petraeus, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warns that Petraeus has shown himself ready, willing and able to play politics:

I don’t know why the op-ed article that General Petraeus published in The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 2004, hasn’t gotten more attention. After all, it puts to rest any notion that the general stands above politics: I don’t think it’s standard practice for serving military officers to publish opinion pieces that are strikingly helpful to an incumbent, six weeks before a national election.

In the article, General Petraeus told us that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously.” And those security forces were doing just fine: their leaders “are displaying courage and resilience” and “momentum has gathered in recent months.”

In other words, General Petraeus, without saying anything falsifiable, conveyed the totally misleading impression, highly convenient for his political masters, that victory was just around the corner. And the best guess has to be that he’ll do the same thing three years later.

Hillary Clinton is also getting a load of politics from the Pentagon. She had requested, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, that the Defense Department develop a detailed proposal for withdrawing troops from Iraq. That request sparked a letter from a Pentagon undersecretary saying that, even discussing withdrawal, aids the insurgents:

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”

A Clinton aide fired back with this missive:

“Redeploying out of Iraq with the same combination of arrogance and incompetence with which the Bush Administration deployed our young men and women into Iraq is completely unacceptable, and our troops deserve far better. The redeployment of our forces out of Iraq is long overdue. The Administration must immediately provide a redeployment plan that keeps our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq - not a political plan to attack those who question them after years of miscalculations and misjudgments. This response is at once outrageous and dangerous.”

It's becoming obvious that the military - whether in the US, Britain or Canada - have to be put back in their place. Once they can speak back to political power, they become political power and that is unacceptable.

The Greatest Man-Made Disaster

That would be Iraq or, to be more precise, the Iraq that George w. Bush has created.

Timothy Garton-Ash, writing in today's LA Times, says Iraq is over and yet hasn't even begun.

The Oxford prof and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University says it's impossible to tell just how bad this is going to get but Iraq and its ramifications will get worse:

Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call "soft partition" — the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 million to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions, under close U.S. military supervision — would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that Americans are prepared to allow their troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job — two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.

In an article for the Web magazine Open Democracy, Middle East specialist Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged "Al Qaeda Central" in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.

Osama bin Laden's plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The U.S. government's own latest National Intelligence Estimate, released this week, suggests that Al Qaeda in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.

The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of its military was "no more Vietnams," it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary.

Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be some totemic photographic image of national humiliation as the U.S. struggles to extract its troops.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done terrible damage to the U.S. reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the West.

In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic.

Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.

Memo to Steve - It's About Futility, Not Morality

Our prime ministerial brain trust claims Canadians' rejection of the mission to Afghanistan isn't based on moral objections but on the casualties our forces have sustained.

If it ain't "A" then it's gotta be "B", eh? Maybe it's not really "B" either but "B" along with "C", "D", "E" and "F".

I don't believe that it is the casualties issue that is driving this as much as the combination of so many other factors. It's the haplessness of the Karzai government; the indifference of other NATO members; the ineptitude of George Bush and his stupid war in Iraq that keeps his military off the job in Afghanistan; the inability of our side to sort out Afghanistan's narco-economy; the corruption in the Afghan government, police and security services; the resurgence of al-Qaeda throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa; the resurgence of the Taliban and the wishes of Karzai and his parliament to negotiate with our supposed mortal enemy; our complete vulnerability to insurgents and terrorists operating with relative freedom across the border in Pakistan; the amount of time, effort and lives expended with no demonstrable result save for the resurgence of our opponents; the deaths of civilians caused by our addiction to artillery and airstrikes and - most of all - the total inability of our leaders - political and military - to present an understandable and convincing plan to win this thing.

No, Stevie, Canadians aren't deciding this on an "A" or "B" call. You and your buddy, Rick Hillier, have given us any number of reasons to say "no" to the mission.

Zolf Offers Harper a Refreshing Kool-Aid

Larry Zolf, writing in the National Post, pleads with Stephen Harper to restore Conrad Black's Canadian citizenship:

Prime Minister, you and you alone can give Conrad Black his Canadian citizenship back. David Radler, who ratted on Black, will serve time in a comfortable Canadian jail. Black faces 20 years for taking his own file boxes from the Toronto offices of Hollinger Inc., and faces the possibility of spending that time in a tough Chicago prison. That is a ludicrous situation.

Mr. Prime Minister, why not imitate Mr. Bush's treatment of Scooter Libby and show Black some mercy, too?

The Conservative party owes Conrad Black a great deal. He created the National Post, a newspaper that championed the Canadian Alliance and you too, Mr. Prime Minister.

I defended Black on the CBC Web site. I found the whole Black trial American vigilantism at its worst.

But that's beside the point, Mr. Prime Minister. Giving Black his Canadian citizenship back would be the right and decent thing for you as a prime minister to do. It would also piss off the Canadian Liberal establishment and the Canadian Liberal media, and wouldn't that be fun for you?

In a way, Zolf's right. The Harpies do owe Convict Black a debt of gratitude and a man of such stalwart principles as Stephen Harper claimed to be back when might even do what Zolf suggests. But Harpo has already shown that he's not going to let his vaunted principles get in the way of his quest for the chalice of power.

Sorry, Larry, but with Harper languishing in the polls and beset by all manner of looming troubles at home the last thing he needs is to invite public outrage by cutting a cushy deal for Lord Black. Even you, Larry, know that much.

Canada's Ongoing Political Deadlock

It looks like it's going to take one really big issue to cause Canadians to make a decisive choice on just who they want to lead this country.

A Globe & Mail/CTV poll finds the Libs and Tories tied at 31% in popular support. The NDP have 17% and the Greens 10%.

This is bad news all around but especially for Stephen Harper who is shedding his skins faster than a snake with leprosy. Did anyone notice how Harpo was praising Canada's "progressive" traditions, even our universal health care, while prancing through South America? I don't think even Stephen Harper likes Stephen Harper any more. All those things this guy once stood for he's now wiping his feet on. I'm sure that, deep down inside his guts are churning, but Harpo knows that he's not going to let his principles stand in the way of a shot at real power.

More bad news for the Harpies is their boss's utter failure to achieve a breakthrough in Quebec where the Tories are a distant third to the Bloc Quebecois and the Liberals.

The good news has to fall to the Liberals. Even with a leader as lackluster as Stephane Dion, our "Invisible Man", the party can still hold its own against the Tories - for what that's worth.

Judicial Bias Revealed

Any litigation lawyer knows that some cases will turn not so much on the facts or even the law as on the personality of the judge hearing the case.

Some judges are just bloody awful, others are great, most are somewhere in between. Some are bold, some are timid; some right, some left. Even articled students hanging around the court house quickly learn which is which.

Now a study of the Ontario Court of Appeal has further shattered the notion of judicial impartiality. From the Toronto Star:

The study found that judges differed in opinion on Charter challenges, depending on whether Liberals or Conservatives appointed them. The study also traced divergent opinions to a judge's gender in family law cases.

Both of these factors had a greater impact when the appeals panel – which is almost always composed of three judges – was homogenous: when judges were either all Conservative or all Liberal, for example, or when all were men.

For example, when a convicted defendant makes an appeal after an unsuccessful Charter challenge to render evidence inadmissible, most panels upheld the conviction. But an all-Conservative panel affirmed the conviction 65 per cent of the time and all-Liberal groups upheld it at a rate of 87 per cent.

In that case, and despite impressions that Liberals would "be softer on crime," [Osgoode Hall Law Prof and co-author James] Stribopoulos said, "You would want three Conservative judges. Which is kind of crazy."

A judge's gender became most pertinent in family law disputes. When men appeal a ruling, all-male panels were statistically slightly kinder to female litigants. Litigants who were successfully acquitted on a Charter challenge were more likely to get that acquittal affirmed by a panel with at least one female judge – at 82 per cent – than they were with an all-male panel, at 70 per cent.

The solution is simple: promote more diversity among judges, Stribopoulos said. "That's why it's important that the whole of the judiciary looks like the society it judges. And right now, it doesn't."

Kiddie Porn Linked to Molestation?

It's a controversial study and it may not be adequately scientific but a report soon to be released claims that 85% of those who watch kiddie porn also molest children.

The study, carried out by psychologists at the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, found 85% of inmates convicted of possession of child pornography admitted "they had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors, from inappropriate touching to rape."

There are conflicting opinion over just what to make of the study and its findings but, if nothing else, it is sure to lead to further research that will meet even stringent scientific criteria.

The issue is how the criminal justice system should deal with kiddie porn downloaders and the spread of this form of pornography on the internet. Some are suggesting that those caught be treated more akin to actual molestors than harmless perverts.

Tories Drag Feet on Veterans' Benefits

The Harper government never passes up an opportunity to boast how it supports the troops but, when it comes to veterans, that seems to be mainly hot air.

NDP defence critic Peter Stoffer says the Tories have failed to act on his motion passed last fall to improve veterans' benefits:

The motion directed the government to make five reforms: eliminate the “gold-digger” clause to allow spouses access to survivor benefits if they marry a Forces retiree after age 60; extend Veterans Independence Program home-care services to all widows and widowers of veterans; stop the reduction of long-term disability benefits faced by veterans released from the military for medical reasons; increase the survivor pension amount for veterans’ spouses to 66 per cent from 50 per cent; and end the clawback of service pensions for veterans who receive the Canada Pension.

Mr. Stoffer said the improvements would help about 400,000 veterans and spouses and would cost Ottawa between $800 million and $1.2 billion a year.

He pointed out that Stephen Harper’s government had a total surplus of about $23 billion in its first two budgets.

All for One...

The Guardian reports that Iraq's seven major Sunni insurgent groups have agreed to form a political alliance.

The insurgent leaders described, ...a joint political programme, including a commitment to free Iraq from all foreign troops, rejection of any cooperation with parties involved in the political institutions set up under the occupation, and a declaration that all decisions and agreements made by the US occupation and Iraqi government are null and void.

The aim of the alliance - which includes a range of Islamist and nationalist-leaning groups and is currently called the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance - is to link up with other anti-occupation groups in Iraq to negotiate with the Americans in anticipation of an early US withdrawal. The programme envisages a temporary technocratic government to run the country during a transition period until free elections can be held.

The alliance says it is independent of either al-Qaeda or Baathist resistance forces.

How Stupid Is the Leader of the Free World?

We're coming up to the sixth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, 2001. Six years of near-constant war. There was the war in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. There was the war to hunt down and exterminate al-Qaeda. The war to topple Saddam and bring democracy to Iraq. The war against the "dead enders", Saddam loyalists. The war against al-Qaeda in Iraq. The war against the Sunni insurgency. The war against the Shiite militias. The global war without end on terror.

Over the past six years the United States and NATO have dutifully followed America's "war president", the undisputed Leader of the Free World. So, how has that gone anyway?

The Taliban were sent packing, but they're back. Al-Qaeda and archvillain Osama bin Laden headed for the hills. Now they're resurgent. Afghanistan's notional democracy is wobbly, riddled with corruption and ineffective. The only thing booming in that country is it's record-setting opium production. Neighbouring Pakistan is destabilized and a breeding ground for Islamist radicals. The cops and security services prey on the Afghan people and drive them into the arms of the Taliban.

In Iraq, Saddam is dead and has been replaced by a fundamentalist Shia-dominated "democracy" of sorts. The country is falling apart. The Sunni insurgency and Shia militias are alive and well and killing their fellow Iraqis with a vengeance. Al-Qaeda has become established in Iraq and uses the place as a training ground for Islamist terrorism. The country can't provide gas to its fuel pumps even though it's awash in crude oil. Water and electricity are sporadic, even in Baghdad. The ultra-secure Green Zone now gets mortared almost daily. Civil wars, there are several, abound and now threaten the Kurdish north.

The Leader of the Free World cannot accept his failure in Iraq nor can he conceive of how to win even one of the several wars underway there. He has his army so depleted, exhausted and utterly tied down in Iraq that he's incapable of fielding a decent size force in Afghanistan.

Canadians need to see this debacle for what it truly is. We're part of the chorus line in Afghanistan in a miserable production that has no leading cast to be found. We can sit around and sing and dance but the plotline is going nowhere.

It would be great if America's Congress showed the courage, honesty and vision so lacking in their executive but that's not about to happen.

The rest of NATO knows the score. That's why they're not stepping up to take our place in Kandahar. They know we can't save America from its own government and, without that, we can't save Afghanistan either. Washington is leaving Ottawa with no option but to call down the curtain and go home.

Cold War Nostalgia

Call it a "blast from the past." Yesterday the Royal Air Force scrambled a pair of Tornado fighters to intercept a Russian Bear bomber as it approached Scotland.

This sort of thing was almost routine back in the Cold War days but it's been a rarity ever since.

Gulf of Mexico to Set New Record

This year's "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico is supposed to be a record-breaking 8,500 square miles off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana. Within that area (about the size of New Jersey), there won't be enough oxygen in the water to support life.

Spring runoffs from major US rivers pump massive amounts of farm chemicals and other contaminants into the Gulf waters. These give rise to huge algae blooms. As the algae die they sink to the bottom and undergo decomposition that strips oxygen from the water. Marine life that can't get away simply dies.

Scientists suspect this year's runoff was heavier than normal due to more intensive agriculture to produce biofuels. Great, just bloody lovely!

The Environmental Biker

Meet the KillaCycle, the fastest electric motorcycle on the planet. 0-60 mph (that's miles) in 1.4 seconds, 8.7 seconds in the 1/4 mile. It uses powerful lithium ion batteries, each the size of a roll of lifesavers, 880 in total. It doesn't go all that far on a charge but it sure doesn't take long to get there either.

U.S. Health Care Predator - Big Pharma

The legal and illegal drug industries have one thing in common - big profits. In America, if Big Pharma and its sidekick, federal politicians, have their way that gravy train is just going to keep on rolling.

The Christian Science Monitor has published a scathing review of the Bush regime's Medicare plan, supposed to help elderly Americans afford their prescriptions but actually helping out America's pharmaceutical companies even more:

The White House and Congress claimed the private structure of the program would lead to lower drug prices. In fact, since the program began last year, the opposite has happened, thanks to the lobbying wizards of K Street. A fragmented band of more than 1,400 Part D insurance plans has had little negotiating power with the drug companies. Nor do those plans have much reason to bargain: Part D subsidizes patients on extended and expensive medication regimes at 80 percent.

Most remarkably the bill that Congress pushed through in 2003 didn't let the government negotiate drug prices. Why? Because the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) got no authority to define the "formulary" list of drugs for which Medicare will pay. Absent a credible threat to drop from that list any overpriced drugs that have branded alternatives – which the vast majority has – the government lost its negotiating stick.

Surprise! No price competition. So drug companies were able to raise rates for brand-name medications (that have comparable alternatives, but for which there are no generics) at twice the rate of inflation in the first six months of the program. And together, the five largest drug firms enjoyed a 45 percent increase in profits over the prior year.

This year, prices under Medicare private insurance plans for 10 of the most prescribed brand-name drugs (that have comparable alternatives) shot up an average of 6.8 percent in just four months.

When the bill was being debated, taxpayers were told the program would cost $400 billion. Today, realistic estimates put the figure at more than $1 trillion. The big drug companies, of course, love this. All those multiyear investments in lobbying have paid off – allowing them to use your tax dollars to boost their earnings.

So, let's see what we've got here. A programme that's touted as helping needy Americans that actually helps out American corporations already awash in cash. Gee that sounds like Bush/Cheney, doesn't it?

Dominoes in Kabul

A British government report warns that failing to bolster the increasingly irrelevant government of Hamid Karzai could lead to an Islamist tide that could sweep into Pakistan and, some claim, eventually lead into a widespread Shia/Sunni regional war. From The Observer:

A report by the British Parliament yesterday said the British-led NATO force in Afghanistan, which includes about 2,500 Canadians, doesn't have enough troops to carry out its mission and the Taliban show worrying signs of strength.

The report, by the British House of Commons defence committee, highlighted a series of concerns, from a lack of training for Afghan police and armed forces to an unclear policy on eradicating the country's vast opium poppy fields.

But the chief preoccupation was a lack of support from other NATO countries to provide more troops to the 36,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, and evidence that violence, including Iraq-style suicide bombings, was growing as Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked insurgents expand their sphere of influence.

Peter Inge, the U.K.'s former chief of the defence staff, highlighted the generals' fears in public recently when he warned of a "strategic failure" in Afghanistan. It is understood that Inge was speaking with the direct authority of the general staff when he made an intervention in a debate in the House of Lords, the parliament's second chamber.

"The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognize," Inge said. "We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for NATO ... We need to recognize that the situation – in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan – is much, much more serious than people want to recognize."
Inge endorsed a speech by Paddy Ashdown, , who painted a bleak picture during the debate. Ashdown said Afghanistan presented a graver threat than Iraq.

"The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq," he said. "If we fail in Afghanistan, then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied.

"I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East."

Curiously the report seems to omit any mention of the 160,000 American troops now losing their war in Iraq who could, presumably, do a lot more good were they shifted to Afghanistan, the war they were supposed to win in the wake of 9/11. Oh dear.

Reinstate Capital Punishment While We Still Can

The way Canada's crime rate is falling, Harpo had better get on with bringing back capital punishment while he can still find someone to hang.

A Stats Can report found crime in 2006 at its lowest level in 25-years. No wonder Vic Toews was on such a law and order rampage!

Minor violent crime (petty assaults, etc.) was stable but - oh my gosh - the national homicide rate fell 10%.

China's Filthy Miracle

The miracle is China's skyrocketing industrial economy. The filth is what that miracle has already cost the country and its people.

China built up its economic momentum without really thinking much about the consequences of rampant, unregulated industrialization. Now it is beset by those consequences and facing an environmental nightmare on a scale unprecedented in man's history. From The Guardian:

"...up to 300 million people are drinking contaminated water every day, and 190 million are suffering from water related illnesses each year. If air pollution is not controlled there will be 600,000 premature deaths in urban areas and 20m cases of respiratory illness a year within 15 years.

China's water quality gives the researchers greatest concern. One third of the length of all China's rivers are now "highly polluted" as are 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters. Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year.

Although China is the world's fourth largest economy, growing 10% a year and closing rapidly on the US, Japan and Germany, its environmental standards are often closer to those in some of the poorest countries in the world, says the report. More than 17,000 towns have no sewage works at all and the human waste from nearly one billion people is barely collected or treated. Nearly 70% of the rural population has no access to safe sanitation.

Although China has tried to improve its air quality, it has not invested enough to keep up with the flood of people to its cities, many of which have some of the worst pollution in the world. The burning of more than 2bn tonnes of the dirtiest coal a year is costing the economy the equivalent of 3-7% of GDP (£8-15bn a year), according to the report. While no specific figure is given for the overall cost of China's pollution, in 2004 it was thought to be in the region of £32bn.

"A healthy economy needs a healthy environment," said Mario Amano, deputy secretary-general of the OECD - the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - in Beijing yesterday.

The report estimates that 27% of the landmass of the country is now becoming desertified. Much of the country already suffers from water shortages, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences expects water demand to increase by nearly 50% in the next 40 years. Industry's share of this is expected to grow from 16% to 41%.

Bush Prepares to Attack Iran

President George w. Bush is the guy who gave us the "road map" for peace in the Middle East, the way forward to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conundrum. It's an on-again, off-again ploy he likes to drag out just before he attacks some nation in the region.

Remember Iraq? Part and parcel of that grand adventure was Bush's promise to deliver the Palestinians from their plight. Good optics with the Arab world, right? Then, when the Iraq business fell into the toilet, so did Bush's interest in the Palestine promise.

So now Bush is making the same noises again. Must restart the Palestinian peace process. Let's get it going, this fall at the latest.

Curiously, today's Guardian quotes an administration official as stating that Dick Cheney has won Shrub's support for military action against Iran next year. Bush/Cheney apparently don't trust their successor, Democrat or Republican, to deal with Iran.

What Latin America Needs Right Now - Another Bush Toadie

Canada's furious leader, Stephano Harper, is in Bogata today to begin a five-day photo op to Latin America. It's expected Harpo will pull out some sort of "free trade" gimmick from his bag of tricks to justify his airfare and hotel bill.

Now that Canada is a world leader, the Latin Americans are expected to make polite noises, accept a few trinkets and give Steve a friendly waive bye-bye.

The Harpie managed to put his civil rights torch discretely in his pants in order to focus on trade saying that it's "ridiculous" to rein in economic co-operation until conditions are ideal. Gee, that sounds like the same spin he used with China, right? No, forget it.

Harpo's concerns with civil rights seem inversely proportional to the ideological compatibility with the nation in question. Just another Bush toadie.

Are Dems Ready to Shift America's Political Centre?

Ronald Reagan shifted his nation's political centre securely to the right. In the process, US moderates transformed themselves into what would be recognized as conservative in other Western countries. "Left" and "Liberal" were smeared with negative connotations that were reinforced by a powerful fringe media to become popularly accepted reality.

Has that nonsense finally run its course? The New York Times reports that a lot of Democrats are now weighing the possibility due to an emerging populism among the American people:

Clearly influenced by some of their most successful candidates in last year’s Congressional elections, Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities. They deplore what they call a growing gap between the middle class, which is struggling to adjust to a changing job market, and the affluent elites who have prospered in the new economy.

So far, Republicans have, by and large, stuck by their free-market philosophy. They point to a rebounding stock market, declining deficits and steady if unspectacular economic expansion as evidence that conservative policies of tax cutting, less regulation and more trade are working.
But Democrats say they are responding to economic trends that the statistics in the headlines do not capture, including middle-class insecurity about jobs, the affordability of health insurance and the costs of education. The times have changed, these Democrats argue, and six years of Republican tax and economic policies have heightened the inequities.

It is not unusual for candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination to move left in the primary season; Mr. Clinton himself touched on some of these populist themes in his 1992 campaign. But all the major Democratic candidates for president are promising to use government to ease the insecurity of the middle class, on issues like education and health care.

Sixteen months before the election, with their domestic platforms being formed, these candidates are proposing, for example, to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the most affluent Americans and, in some cases, redirect that money to expanded health care. On the campaign trail and in Congress, Democrats are also talking about expanding assistance for college and help for workers who lose their jobs to cheaper labor abroad.

Democrats have also been pushing for legislation that would allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare with the pharmaceutical industry, a favorite target of the economic populists.

Perhaps the silver lining of the Bush/Cheney neo-con excesses will be a renewed America substantially to the left of today's abberation, a government genuinely "for the people."

Impeach

Now That's Progress

I'll have the special, hold the shrapnel.

Maybe George w. Bush is right, maybe there is progress in Baghdad. Why, within the ultra-secure Green Zone, for example, there's a new dress code.

The US State Department has directed its employees to wear this season's fashion statement, the PPE or Personal Protection Equipment look.

A McClatchey Newspapers reporter managed to get his hand on the latest directive from the US Embassy:

"As a result of the recent increase of indirect fire attacks on the International Zone, outdoor movement is restricted to a minimum," it states. "Remain within a hardened structure to the maximum extent possible and strictly avoid congregating outdoors. Personal protective equipment (PPE) is mandatory until further notice.

"Public places that are not in a hardened structure - such as the Blue Star Restaurant - should be frequented only in conjunction with the use of your PPE."

The Brutal Face of the War on Terror

Fighting insurgents is enormously challenging and frustrating for conventional soldiers. Imagine enduring booby-traps, ambushes and firefights, losing friends, and later walking down streets knowing that some of the faces who watch you are likely those who try to kill you and will try again tomorrow.

A trial underway now in Camp Pendleton, California shows how this formula for disaster can go terribly wrong, especially if those soldiers are being shoved from higher-up. Several marines are being court-martialed for the execution of an unarmed Iraqi in 2006. The squad had gone out at night to locate a suspected Iraqi insurgent. When they got to the man's home he was gone so they grabbed another man from the home, took him outside, killed him and planted an AK-47 near the body to reinforce their claim the victim had been killed in a shootout.

A marine corporal testifying at the court-martial gave chilling evidence that his fellow soldiers were being pressured from the top:

Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo testified Saturday at the murder trial of Cpl. Trent D. Thomas.
"We were told to crank up the violence level,'' said Lopezromo, testifying for the defense.

When a juror asked for further explanation, Lopezromo said: "We beat people, sir.''

Lopezromo, who was not part of the squad on its late-night mission, said he saw nothing wrong with what Thomas did.

"I don't see it as an execution, sir,'' he told the judge. ``I see it as killing the enemy.''

He said Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.

Deconstructing Detente

Russian president Vlad Putin is scrapping the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty. the pact had been intended to reduce East-West tensions by restricting where each could deploy its forces. The idea was to prevent one side becoming alarmed by the other lining up army divisions along their common border, poised to strike.

Putin, of course, is miffed at Bush's insistence on positioning parts of his anti-ballistic radar and interceptor system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Bush claims the system is intended to deal with a missile attack from a rogue state such as Iran. Putin sees it, instead, as an attempt to contain Russian military power and influence, especially after Bush rejected Putin's offer to use a radar site in Azerbaijan better suited for monitoring the skies over Iran.

The Russian move has NATO and the US furious which is a tad strange given that Washington and several NATO states never ratified the treaty in the first place. Yet the Euros probably won't do very much more than whine given their dependence on Russia for natural gas supply.

Only Real Church to Pay 2/3rd Billion for Priests Diddling Kids

If as Pope Rat.. oh you know... is right, and the Roman Catholic Church is the only real Christain (that's 'Christian' in ped-language) church, then his Los Angeles Diocese much be the churchiest of them all. On this Sabbath, the very day before jury selection, RCC-LA has announced a $660-million settlement. From The New York Times:

The Los Angeles cases have been particularly complex because they involve so many victims, multiple insurance companies, many Catholic religious orders whose own priests and brothers stand accused, and a prominent archbishop, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who has cast himself as an ally of victims but has been accused by them of intransigence.
Many dioceses in California have been hit by large numbers of lawsuits because the state passed a law in 2002 that opened a one-year window for cases to be filed without regard to the statute of limitations.

A settlement would require the archdiocese to make public its confidential files that could shed light on which church officials knew of the abuse accusations, and when they knew, Mr. Boucher said. Many of the accused priests had multiple victims because they were moved by their superiors from one parish to another when accusations arose.

No word yet from the Big Hat, the Rat Zinger, about this little peccadillo. Hey, your Popeness, how bout chanting "We're Number One, We're Number One" oh, say, 660-million times!

And How About Lady Black?

Conrad the con Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, has met his Waterloo. Like Napoleon, he cast himself as invincible and unquestionably right. It's taken a Chicago jury to prove him wrong.

But what now for Lady Black or, as we knew her, Barbara Amiel. A former journalist and socialite who transitioned effortlessly from far left to far right as her matrimonial fortunes prospered, she is blamed by some for contributing to her husband's downfall. Even Black's former English flagship newspaper, The Telegraph, couldn't resist publishing a few words about the self-described "North London Jewish girl."

Derided as the ultimate hard-nosed gold-digger, Lady Black has yet to give her critics what they desperately want by leaving her husband as his fortunes take a dramatic dive.

Questions of sincerity aside, Lady Black, 66, has played a convincing role of the loyal wife.

That said, there was good reason for a little humility and understanding on her part. Not only was she a director of Hollinger International, but her flaunting of their extravagant lifestyle arguably first prompted shareholders to question the accounts.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom about Conrad Black’s financial difficulties is that the trouble only started when he met Amiel.

Having lived a privileged but relatively unostentatious existence, he suddenly became involved with a woman whose extravagance - as she famously admitted herself - "knew no bounds".

It is often said that Amiel’s taste for the high life - multiple homes and matching staffs, private jets and lavish entertaining - pushed her husband into a high-spending league which he could only finance with considerable effort.

"My husband is very rich, but I am not... I have been a bitch all my life and did not need the authority of money to be one," she once wrote.

"I am a North London Jew who has read a bit of history. This means I know this: in a century that has seen the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, British and Soviet empires. Reversal of fortune is the rich bitch’s reality.

"One might as well keep working and have the family’s Vuitton suitcases packed."

And Amiel, the virulently right-wing journalist, did indeed keep working even as her husband stood trial. In a column earlier this month in Macleans, a Canadian magazine, she sketched a picture of her life far removed from the "rich bitch" of yore.

The Blind Leading The Weak

George w. Bush seems to have dodged a bullet, forcing weak-kneed Republican congressmen to back down over their demands that he wind up the failed Iraq War.

All Bush had to do was what he's done so many times since 2001 - invent facts, conjure up favourable assessments and tell his Republican stooges, well, to go back and act like utter stooges.

Bush claimed that Iraq has made significant progress on 8 of the 18 benchmarks which are the essence of his "surge" in Baghdad. That the question of just how much progress was left up to Bush himself to define, says it all. Significant progress because George w. Bush needs to find significant progress to quell the sycophants and get his way. To reinforce this he threw in a dose of scare tactics about al-Qaeda and Iraq. Then there was the patriotism arm twister about supporting the troops. Bang, bang, bang and the Republican underlings ran to hide from the evil Count.

It is remarkable how a people will continue to tolerate a failed leader who has demonstrated his gross incompetence and dishonesty at every turn of his grandiose "war on terror." If the Brits had had a George Bush instead of a Winston Churchill, they'd be eating schnitzel and speaking German today.

A Fair and Balanced Verdict

Conrad Black has been convicted on the strongest charges against him but acquitted by the jury on the majority of the charges, including racketeering.

It is obvious that the jury considered the evidence carefully and was able to distinguish appropriate payments and expenses from the truly egregious taking of corporate funds. Black was, for example, acquitted of charges relating to the "non compete" payments on the CanWest sale. There the purchaser wanted the promise of Black not to just come back and set up a new paper in competition with National Post. The jury did, however, convict Black of fraud in the taking of funds as "non compete" payments when other purchasers never asked for such terms.

Black was also convicted of obstruction for removing 13-boxes of documents from his Toronto offices. That charge carries a possible 20-year term, making it the most serious conviction Black faces.

Overall my impression is that Black received both justice and fairness.

Black Guilty!

Conrad Black has been convicted of fraud. The Chicago jury found Black guilty of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. Black is now facing a possible 35-year prison sentence.

Harper's Obscure Foreign Policy

Stephen Harper gets a once-over in the latest edition of The Economist. The article examines Harper's supposed foreign policy:

CANADIANS knew little about Stephen Harper's foreign policy when his Conservative government took office last year, for the simple reason that he had not articulated one. They still don't know much. Since the election, foreign policy has been dominated by just one issue, that of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Now perhaps they are about to be enlightened.

Some Canadians see Mr Harper's trip [upcoming trip to Colombia] as part of his general desire to be in step with George Bush. The prime minister has made smooth relations with the United States a priority. Afghanistan has become the top recipient of Canadian aid. Mr Harper's government has given outspoken support to Israel; its relations with China have been strained. Nevertheless, this week Mr Harper announced plans to purchase up to eight patrol ships for light ice-breaking duties to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic seaways, which is contested by the United States.

In fact, in much of this there is more continuity than change. Relations with Latin America have been getting closer since the signing of the North American Free-Trade Agreement with Mexico in 1992. It was the Liberal government which deployed combat troops to Afghanistan; while it talked of a balanced policy in the Middle East it tended to take Israel's side when it counted. And few Canadian prime ministers have allowed all-important relations with their American neighbour to deteriorate.

Perhaps the main innovation is plain speaking and the dropping of any pretence of an over-arching vision. Mr Harper's foreign-policy adviser, Roy Rempel, has argued that the myth of Canadians as the world's peacekeepers and do-gooders should yield to blunt considerations of national interest. Another interpretation is that Mr Harper has decided not to have a foreign policy, merely reacting to crises and opportunities as they arise.

This, says Adam Chapnick, of the Canadian Forces College, is in keeping with an old Conservative tradition dating back to Canada's first prime minister, Sir John Macdonald. When trade relations with the United States were debated in the House of Commons, he apparently brought two speeches with him—one in support and one opposed—and then used the one that contradicted the Liberal stand.

There it is, obvious at last. You can't flip-flop on foreign policy unless you first have a foreign policy. Point to Harpo,.

On Harper and Afghanistan

Former Mulroney hack, Norman Spector, is anything but non-partisan. Despite that he is capable at times of some genuine wisdom. I enjoyed his take on Harper's Afghanistan dilemma in today's Globe and Mail:

...with casualties mounting, the Afghan mission is badly tangled in domestic politics, and Mr. Harper's government, too, is bleeding. Still, both the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals have hinted at some willingness to carry on in some fashion, and therein lies an opportunity.
Mr. Harper should begin by giving Canadians the unvarnished truth about the mission's prospects.

But his fundamental challenge was best expressed by British Labour MP Aneurin Bevan in a magisterial parliamentary speech at the height of the 1956 Suez crisis: "When a nation makes war upon another nation, it should be quite clear why it does so. It should not keep changing the reasons as time goes on."

Under Jean Chrétien, it was never made clear why Canadian troops were in Afghanistan - unless it was to make up for their not being in Iraq. Under Paul Martin, the parliamentary debate on the dangerous Kandahar deployment was a one-night affair that went virtually unreported. And Mr. Harper has been shifting his rationale for the mission, while comporting himself more like a backroom boy engaged in spin wars than a wartime prime minister.

No Red Serge for Bill Elliot

Whatever reservations you may have about the RCMP's first civilian commissioner, Bill Elliot has started off making a bright move - he won't wear the uniform.

I think if Elliot had decided to dress up like a real honest-to-God mountie, it would have sent discontent racing through the force. You have to make it through Depot to be entitled to wear the hat, the boots and the red serge.

Much as it may be hoped that the force will benefit from having an outsider at the top, I would think at some point that leadership ought to revert to a veteran of the force, not a bureaucrat.

Where Is Stephane Dion?

If you look at the latest polls, he's nowhere.

An Environics poll shows Dion, at 16%, trailing both Harper, at 38%, and Layton (at 20%) when Canadians were asked to name which they would prefer as prime minister.

The only good news in the poll was that Canadians are still not willing to give Harper the majority he needs to pull off his agenda.

Dion told us he wanted to lead the Liberal Party. It's time he showed some sign of that. Harper and Layton have taken advantage of every opportunity to get before the cameras. Crass as that may be, in politics, out of sight is very much out of mind.

People here in the West are not responsive to Stephane Dion. His message isn't getting out. Harper ought to be an easy target but Dion isn't firing any shots. That's not leadership.

Hillier's "Mission Accomplished" Moment

General Rick Hillier has told the Toronto Star that Canada's soldiers in Afghanistan will be handing over their combat role in Kandahar to the Afghan army as early as next spring. The mission will then focus on training and supporting the Afghan soldiers to prepare them for taking on the Taliban.

With the Taliban resurgent in Kandahar province and our tactics utterly incapable of providing essential security to Afghan villagers supposedly under our protection, it makes sense to try something else.

Bear in mind that Canadian soldiers haven't sustained a lot of casualties in actual combat. We tend to get whacked by IEDs and suicide bombers while patrolling and simply driving down the wrong road once too often.

Still, giving up a relatively unsuccessful combat role is a good prelude for either bailing out of Afghanistan altogether or moving along to some more peaceful locale.

Will the Afghan army hold up without us? Not if history is any guide. Military power in Afghanistan seems to be best fielded in ethnic militias but you can't get to that point without in-fighting. Remember the "northern alliance"?

At least shifting to the training mode distances us from the smear of "cut and run". Like the Americans in Vietnam, we never lost - we just didn't win.

Six Wasted Years of War on Terror

Sometimes it's helpful to go back and recall what it's all about. Okay, it's 11 September, 2001. Four teams of al-Qaeda terrorists, mainly Saudis, all in the US legally and trained at US flight schools, hijack four airliners. Two bring down the World Trade Centre towers, one flies into the Pentagon. The fourth crashes into a field.

There it is - al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden even came right out and took responsibility for the attacks. He brazenly attacked the world's most powerful nation, the planet's sole superpower. Obviously he was going to pay, or was he?

At first it was likely that al-Qaeda would be crushed. The US jumped into Afghanistan's exhausted civil war, boosted the Northern Alliance, and rolled up the Taliban government sending the Talibs and al-Qaeda fleeing into the mountains.

The US sent powerful teams of special forces to hunt down al-Qaeda, particularly bin Laden and his top aides. They even had them cornered in Tora Bora but then paid locals to finish them off and somehow they slipped away. Then Bush, in a fit of War on Terror A.D.D., forgot about Afghanistan and chose to attack Iraq instead. The special forces tracking down bin Laden were pulled out to prepare for Iraq.

The rest is history, just not good history. The fight against al-Qaeda has now turned global ranging from Indonesia to South Asia to the Middle East to West Africa to Europe, even North America. The evil has metastasized. The infidels in Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn hordes of recruits to the ranks of al-Qaeda and similar groups. All the while Bush's army is tied down in Iraq and deployed to the point of exhaustion.

NATO has become drawn into the whirlpool of Bush/Cheney megalomania. We're now stuck in Afghanistan almost as securely as the Americans in Iraq. Despite the assurances of our military genius, Rick Hillier, we can't maintain another operation elsewhere should the need arise (and it has, again and again).

Now the latest US intelligence assessment is that al-Qaeda has used the respite and all Washington's considerable help to recover to pre-9/11 levels. They've restored their organization, its leadership, numbers and communications and once again they're flush with cash. al-Qaeda is ready to rock'n roll.

Just what have we accomplished over the past six years? Not very much. The guy driving this bus, George w. hisself, keeps running us into a ditch and we keep getting back on that bus each time he does it. Are we so afraid of this guy that we can't tell him, as far as we're concerned, he's fired?

It's time to get off the bus because the only place it's going is straight into the nearest ditch. If this joker wants to keep spinning his wheels in Iraq that should be his business, not ours.

282-Million Signs of Iraq Progress

I think this is actually a record. Bank guards at a private bank in Baghdad yesterday decided to take their jobs and shove it. Before leaving, however, they helped themselves to $282-million and they took it in US dollars, not Iraqi dinar either.

This being Iraq, there are a lot of unanswered questions and even more suspicions. Why did the bank have that much American cash on hand? How did the two or three errant guards get away with it undetected? According to The New York Times:

Several officials speculated that the robbers had connections to the militias, because it would be difficult for them to move without being searched through many checkpoints in Baghdad.

Militias? Involved in bank robbery? Really? Go figure.

Weasel Words.. The Usual

Did you hear the good news? The Iraqi government has shown what the White House describes as "satisfactory performance" on no fewer than 8 of the 18 benchmarks benchmarks for progress on political and security fronts in Iraq.

Does that mean that the Maliki gang has actually met any of these benchmarks? Why, not exactly. It must means that the chronic liars and dissemblers in the executive branch have chosen to bolster their own interests by resort to the grand weasel word, "satisfactory." Dick Cheney and George w. Bush would call crap on a stick a tasty treat if it would serve their interests.

While the White House report noted progress in the military realm, with an overall decrease in the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence and in casualties from car and truck bomb blasts, some of the benchmarks have not been met in that section, such as improvements in the ability and political neutrality of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government.

The administration’s decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.</