The Taliban Are Winning

Further proof that the Manley Panel report is a load of political hogwash came today in the release of several reports showing that we're not winning in Afghanistan but the Taliban is.

The Atlantic Council of the United States, in a report prepared by former Afghanistan NATO commander, retured US general James L. Jones, warns that NATO is, at best, in a "stategic stalemate" as the Taliban expands its influence in the countryside and the Karzai government fails to carry out vital reforms and reconstruction. From the Washington Post:

"Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," said the report by the Atlantic Council of the United States. "Afghanistan remains a failing state. It could become a failed state," warned the report, which called for "urgent action" to overhaul NATO strategy in coming weeks before an anticipated new offensive by Taliban insurgents in the spring.

A second report, by the Afghan Study Group, co-chaired by General Jones and US diplomat Thomas R. Pickering stressed the urgent need for the appointment of a UN High Commissioner to coordinate the international effort, a move that Karzai sabotaged last weekend.

Progress in Afghanistan "is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country," said the report by the Afghanistan Study Group.

Wow, we're not winning? The Taliban's winning? Odd that our military wunderkind, Rick Hillier, hasn't been sounding the alarm here at home, isn't it?

Of course we're not winning, something the Karzai government all but guarantees. Lest everybody realize how useless he is, Karzai blocks the appointment of Paddy Ashdown as UN super envoy, torpedoing it at the very last moment and setting the whole effort right back on its heels. You'll know Karzai is serious about salvaging Afghanistan the day he arrests his first drug lord. That's right, he hasn't arrested one of them in the past six years and it's so easy. All he would have to do is start with his own brother Ahmed who's reported to be in thick with the opium trade.

If there's to be any hope of saving Afghanistan we have to get rid of Karzai and the warlords and drug lords and common criminals who have insinuated themselves into positions of power in his government. We have to stop pretending that this guy is our guy. He's not.

Forget the helicopters, forget the extra troops, forget Manley and Harper. That's all meaningless nonsense until we can establish some sort of decent, functioning governance for Afghanistan. Maybe this is one of those Diem moments. Then again, how well did that turn out?

The Terminator is Not mitt Romney

Arnold Schwarzenegger has thrown his endorsement to John McCain. With the Guiliani endorsement locked up the backing of the California governor ramps up McCain's momentum.

If the last Republican debate before Super Tuesday, the tension between McCain and Romney was palpable. Huckabee and Paul took part but seemed merely a way for the two real contenders to take a break.

Despite his shameless touting to the evangelical right at the outset of his campaign, McCain is clearly the moderate amongst the Republican crowd. He says he'll keep the Iraq war going until America wins. How he hopes to achieve that in a nation whose people want this war ended will be interesting to watch if he succeeds the man he blames for screwing it up, George w. Bush.

Harper Screws the Messenger

It's up to the Canadian Forces to decide what they will and won't tell us about their actions in Afghanistan. That came from Blockhead himself, our Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, as he lovingly greased himself up to slip to safety from the detainee controversy. From the Globe & Mail:

"The military is free to release information about Afghan detainees if it chooses, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday, as he was criticized for excessive secrecy on how Canadian troops handle their prisoners.

"These are operational matters of the Canadian military. If the Canadian military chooses to reveal that information, that's their decision. But the government certainly isn't going to release it on their behalf," Mr. Harper said in the House of Commons."

There you have it, hands off from the Cons. Canadian Forces will say what they like, when they like and to whom they like, so don't blame the Harpies if they're not up front, blame the military. Wait a second, that doesn't sound quite right, does it?

It's not, that is unless Lardo has repealed the gag order he slapped on the Canadian Forces that came to light just two weeks before Christmas. That's when word got out that the Forces had been told that requests for information and interviews had to be pre-cleared with their political commisars, senior officials from the prime minister's office.

"The Privy Council directive applies to all matters of "national importance" but is primarily focused on shaping information relating to the war in Afghanistan."

Oh my goodness, Harper appears to be - lying. Worse, he seems to be hanging the Armed Forces out to dry to give himself political cover. Not Harper, he wouldn't do that, would he?

(the original story was posted on 10 December, 2007)

Edwards, Giuliani Out?

The New York Times and Associated Press are reporting that third-place Democratic hopeful John Edwards is going to bow out of his party's presidential nominaton race. Edwards is not expected to endorse either Obama or Clinton - at least not today. It seems he's waiting to see whether either of them will adopt his anti-poverty platform.

This means that both the Repugs and the Dems go into Super Tuesday with two-horse races. With Giuliani gone, it's down to McCain/Romney on the right and Obama/Clinton on the left (which is still, to us Canadians, right). Huckabee, of course, remains in the Republican race but that's now seen as a device to deny evangelical voters to Romney. There's a lot of speculation he'll be rewarded, if McCain wins the nomination, by being added as McCain's running mate.

It will be fascinating to see how the Edwards departure plays out. I expect Hillary is working on her Edwardian makeover even as you read this.

Harper A Bag of Overheated Hot Air - NATO

Our Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, has been made to look like a manipulative idiot by NATO. Actually, it wasn't NATO that made Harper look like a manipulative idiot. He sort of did that on his own. Yet a spokesman for the alliance did put Lardo in his place. From CanWest:

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper is engaging in unnecessary, irrelevant and “overheated” speculation when he suggests a Canadian troop pullout from Afghanistan could jeopardize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a NATO official said here Tuesday.

Canadians have every right to debate the future of Canada’s “key” military role in Afghanistan that has led to a disproportionately high number of Canadian casualties, James Appathurai told reporters.

But he challenged Harper’s grim speculation about the future of NATO, an alliance founded by the U.S., western Europe and Canada in 1949 as a bulwark against the possible military threat from the old Soviet Union.

“I think that making links between this (Canada’s possible withdrawal) and NATO’s credibility are frankly . . . unnecessary,” he said.

“We understand the Canadian position that a thousand more troops are needed in Kandahar. But let’s not link what is a successful mission with 37 countries (or) NATO’s 60-year credibility to this. That simply is not really relevant.”

"This kind of overheated speculation (about NATO being in jeopardy) really needs to be cooled a little bit.”

Harper Vows to "Stay the Course" - Whatever That Is

We're a pretty cheap date. Throw another 1,000 soldiers our way and a few trinkets and we'll stay in Afghanistan. Our Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, has bought the Manley report - lock, stock and pickle. Now if we don't get our way, he says, we'll be gone early next year - gone as in "bye, bye."

Naturally Harper didn't let fast changing conditions on the ground in Kabul enter into his deliberations. Not a peep about how Kabul is undermining NATO or Hamid Karzai's weekend gamesmanship to defy the UN, NATO and the US. Of course it's easy to ignore all those realities - that put our soldiers' lives in danger - when you're busy playing political football.

If you want to weigh Harpo's bold decision against reality, take a look at the item "Karzai's Kabul Uprising" posted here earlier today.

The End of the World As We've Known It

These are fascinating times and we just may be witnessing a geopolitical power shift of seismic proportions; the decline of the West and the ascendancy of the East. The vehicle for this could be the looming recession.

There's an excellent analysis of how empires rise and fall in a book I reviewed earlier, "American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century." It's author, a prominent Republican named Kevin Phillips, examined the consistent patterns found in the rise and fall of previous dominant states including the Dutch, the Spanish and the British empires and applied those patterns to his own country to conclude that America was approaching the end of its glory days.

One of Phillips' key observations was how mighty nations fell into decline when they abandoned their own manufacturing base in favour of offshore production, thus using their wealth to grow another nation's economy. Sound familiar? Accompanying this phenomenon, Phillips identified the shift from a production-based economy into a financialized economy (see "The Bubble Up Economy - Part Deux" posted here yesterday).

This transition is also discussed by Fareed Zakaria in his latest article in Newsweek entitled "The World Bails Us Out" in which he observes, "The United States is in the beginning of a period of relative decline. This is not defeatism, it's math."

"As the American economy slows down, there are no indications that other countries are tumbling. In particular, the fastest-growing big economies in the world - China, India, Brazil—appear set to continue with their robust growth. While a sharp American downturn will surely slow them down somewhat, those emerging markets will all continue to expand—to buy, sell and trade—and this will help the United States.

The quarterly results of many large American multinationals (other than banks) show how. Their profits are growing extremely slowly in the United States—at best a few percent—but are surging by 15 or 20 percent abroad. Adding all these companies together, we can see why America's trade deficit—which ballooned for decades—has begun shrinking dramatically, by $100 billion over the past year. This trend will accelerate as the U.S. dollar's decline continues to make American exports more affordable across the world.

The past few years have been very good to the world's energy-rich lands—Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Norway. Add to the list China and Singapore; they may not be big oil exporters, but they still have huge surpluses. These vast savings have to go somewhere, and sovereign wealth funds—the investment arms of these nations—have provided infusions of cash to otherwise desperate American financial firms. Imagine what the U.S. economy would look like without these investments. Many of its most illustrious banks and financial companies would have gone bankrupt, triggering cascades of gloom and doom across America.

These trends represent a large, ongoing shift in the global economic order. Power is moving away from the traditional centers of the global economy—the Western nations—to the emerging markets. To put it more bluntly: the United States is in the beginning of a period of relative decline. It may not be steep or dramatic, but the fact that it's happening is clear. Even if one assumes a slowdown, the other big economies will still grow at two and three times the pace of the West.

All this means that the political and economic clout of the West—and centrally of the United States—is waning. You can see this reality in the discussions at Davos, where Indian businessmen, Russian officials, Saudi investment advisers and Chinese academics are moving to center stage.

On the American campaign trail, the candidates talk about a world utterly unrelated to the one that is actually being created on the ground. The Republicans promise to wage war against Islamic extremists and modernize the Middle East. The Democrats deplore the ills of globalization and free trade, and urge tougher measures against China. Meanwhile Middle Eastern fund managers and Asian consumers are quietly keeping the U.S. economy afloat.

Karzai's Kabul Uprising

Hamid Karzai is on the warpath, in revolt, and his antics could have major repercussions for the US, NATO and us too. Over the weekend Karzai shook up his Western benefactors by torpedoing the appointment of Lord Paddy Ashdown who was slotted to become the UN's super envoy to Afghanistan. It's a tale of grand intrigue that our media totally missed. Fortunately the story is brilliantly laid out in Asia Times:

Kabul knew for months about the impending appointment of Ashdown as a key step in a new NATO strategy spearheaded by the US and Britain, aimed at stabilizing the Afghan situation. Karzai knew detailed planning had gone into the move involving NATO, the EU and the United Nations Security Council. But Karzai waited patiently until the eleventh hour before shooting it down publicly on Saturday in a interview with the BBC while attending the World Economic Forum meet in the Swiss resort town of Davos. The move was pre-planned and carried out in a typical Afghan way with maximum effect.

Karzai insists there has been a serious misunderstanding of motives because Kabul had never taken a "decision" on Ashdown's appointment. He is perfectly right in saying so. But in actuality, Karzai has put on display his proud Afghan temper. He has taken umbrage that Washington and London took the decision on Ashdown's appointment in consultation with Brussels and thereupon got UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon to execute it, all the time taking Kabul's agreement for granted.

Karzai anticipated that Ashdown, true to his reputation in the Balkans, would function like a colonial viceroy. Karzai knows that the Western agencies and organizations operating in Afghanistan lack coordination. But a "unified command" under Ashdown would create a counterpoint in Kabul to Karzai's own authority. Karzai didn't want that to happen.

The bottom line concerns Karzai's political future. He sizes up that Ashdown is part of a political package leading toward a post-Karzai era. There has been persistent chatter in recent weeks that Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to the UN - an ethnic Afghan - is in the mix for a run as president of Afghanistan. According to Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, Karzai took the rumor seriously and point-blank asked Khalilzad about it when the two met in London in October, but Khalilzad "didn't give a Shermanesque response".

The UN's capacity to spearhead the political process in Afghanistan now stands seriously impaired. This deprives Washington of a neutral international bridge - but under its control - leading toward the Taliban camp, which is a pre-requisite for commencement of any meaningful intra-Afghan dialogue. Meanwhile, the war hangs perilously on the edge of an abyss.

Almost everyone is talking to the Taliban one way or another. Confusion is near-total. All this is happening at an awkward time when NATO lacks a counterinsurgency strategy. In particular, Britain, which lately assumed a lead role within NATO, has been embarrassed. Karzai singled out British operations in Afghanistan for criticism in an interview with the Times newspaper of London on the eve of his meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Davos on Friday. Karzai alleged that Afghan people "suffered" from the coming of the British. He had little praise for the 7,800 British troops deployed in Afghanistan. He said, "Both the American and British forces guaranteed to me they knew what they were doing and I made the mistake of listening to them. And, when they came in, the Taliban came."

As The Times commented, "British forces believe that, in many respects, their Afghan allies pose more of a challenge to their mission than the Taliban ... It is the Afghan government that is now proving more of an obstacle to stability in an area where a mixture of official corruption, ineptitude and paranoia are stymying British efforts."

...it remains to be seen how long Washington can keep Karzai away from the reach of the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Russia and China-dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organization. From the Ashdown saga, Karzai must have realized his capacity to shake up US strategy in the region. In an interview with CNN in Davos on Thursday, Karzai said, "We have opened our doors to them [Iran]. They have been helping us in Afghanistan." Karzai then insisted that the Bush administration has "wisely understood that Iran is Afghanistan's neighbor".

Musharraf will know that his own defiance of Washington's recent attempts to dictate the nature of the political set-up in Islamabad now enters a conclusive phase. He will know that with such a first-rate mess-up in the war in Afghanistan, Washington is hardly in a position to be intrusive, let alone dictate terms of engagement to him. In a curious way, Karzai has considerably smoothened for him the passage from now until the elections in Pakistan on February 8. In all probability, Pakistan, which has excellent intelligence outfits in Kabul, knew in advance that Karzai was about to give shock-and-awe treatment to Washington. Clearly, Musharraf has begun finger-pointing at anyone who will even remotely suggest the need of deploying US troops on Pakistani soil.


Timely backing from China has also strengthened Musharraf's hands. In an extraordinary commentary titled "No more turmoil in Pakistan is permissible", China's People's Daily has come out with a whole-hearted endorsement of Musharraf's leadership. It said, "President Pervez Musharraf has resorted to a host of viable measures ... Pakistani government has been making unremitting efforts in defense of the supreme national interests ... Some opposition forces at home and a few powers overseas impose pressures or punitive measures against Pakistan in the name of 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'opposition to terrorism'.

Musharraf must be greatly relieved that Beijing has finally broken its silence and come down unequivocally in support of him at a crucial juncture in his desperate resistance of the US game plan to remove him from power and to disgrace the military by deploying American troops on Pakistani soil.

Increasingly, Karzai and Musharraf find themselves in a somewhat similar predicament. They cannot do without American support, but they do not accept US pressure tactics. They know US regional policies are part of their problem within their own countries and, therefore, they need to differentiate themselves for their political survival. Paradoxically, their attempt is to perpetuate the US's dependence on them while they work at consolidating a political base of their own, which is independent of US control. In Karzai's case, the 3-4 million votes that Musharraf can mobilize from the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan will always remain a decisive factor in his re-election as president. Besides, there are regional powers - China and Iran in particular - which are keenly watching the geopolitics surrounding Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Iranian thinking is that there is a concerted US-Israeli plot to destabilize Musharraf's regime with the twin objective of the US establishing a base in Pakistan for its military intelligence operations directed against Russia and China and at the same time for neutralizing Pakistan's nuclear capability.

...Both China and Iran are keen on the stability of the Karzai government. Both would like Karzai to continue to explore the parameters of a neutral, independent foreign policy free of US manipulation. Both visualize that Afghanistan can serve as a vital land bridge between them, playing a strategic role in the rapid expansion of Sino-Iranian relations.

Wheels spinning within wheels and we're stuck debating another thousand soldiers for Kandahar so that we can prop up a guy who is working hard at cross purposes and whose country appears headed in a direction of its own. Astonishing, unbelievable. Are we really so naive, so myopic, maybe even so stupid?

Private Health Insurance Has Its Limits

It seems some Americans are learning that their gold-plated, private healthcare insurance policies may not be all they bargained for. According to the Washington Post, if you get really ill, you could be in a lot of trouble - financial trouble.

"A small but growing number of American families beset by major medical problems are learning the hard way that simply having health insurance is sometimes not enough.

Those who need organ transplants or who have hemophilia, Gaucher disease or other costly chronic illnesses can easily rack up medical bills that blow through the lifetime benefits cap of $1 million or more that is a standard part of many insurance policies.

That has left some very sick people facing health-care tabs of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, prompting their families to seek help from the government, or to scramble to change jobs or even divorce for no other reason than to qualify for new health insurance. And it has led some advocates for the chronically ill to plan a new lobbying effort in hopes of persuading Congress to require that insurers increase lifetime caps to as high as $10 million.

Statistics on how many people exceed the lifetime caps are hard to come by, but advocates note that the amount of many caps hasn't changed in decades, or at least has not kept up with health-care inflation and the sky-high cost of lifesaving new therapies, making it more likely that people will reach the limit."

Vancouver's Number One

According to a survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit, Vancouver is the world's best place to live. From BBC News:

The EIU ranked 127 cities in terms of personal risk, infrastructure and the availability of goods and services.
All the cities that fell into the top "liveability" bracket were based in Canada, Australia and Western Europe.

The Economist's Top Ten:

TOP TEN
Vancouver
Melbourne
Vienna
Geneva
Perth
Adelaide
Sydney
Zurich
Toronto
Calgary

Playing Dodgeball in Paradise

The world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters are gathering in Honolulu this week to discuss, talk, chat, while away some time and, of course, work on those tans. From ENN:

"The two-day gathering, which starts on Wednesday in Honolulu, is meant to spur U.N. negotiations for an international climate agreement by 2009, so a pact will be ready when the current carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

The Bush administration rejects the Kyoto plan, saying it unfairly exempts developing countries from cutting back on emissions, and could cost U.S. jobs. Instead, Washington favors voluntary measures and "aspirational goals" to limit climate change, aided by easier transfer of environmental technology."

In attendance will be representatives from the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and the United Kingdom.

There hasn't been much publicity about this conference and there's a reason for that. Consider how James Connaughton, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, described the objectives.

"I think these will be iterative discussions, which the initial goal will be to lay out a variety of options without holding any country to a particular proposal," Connaughton told reporters at a briefing on Friday. "... We're trying to do this in a collaborative way, rather than in the more classic 'You bring your number, I bring my number, and we start kicking them around."'

Is This Where Pandemic is Born?

The UN Humanitarian Affairs Office is reporting a disturbing outbreak of bird flu in Bangladesh. What's disturbing is that it's happening in Bangladesh:

"Bird flu or avian influenza is spreading across Bangladesh. In the last four days, over 1,000 crows have dropped dead in Barisal, Patuakhali and Dinajpur districts, with laboratory tests confirming they were infected with the H5N1 virus.

Initial reports suggest the crows had eaten bird flu-affected dead chickens thrown away by farmers.

Despite government efforts to burn or buy the dead birds, in many places the carcasses of dead chickens and crows can be seen rotting in the open."

What makes the Bangladeshi outbreak so troubling is the nature of poultry raising in that country. 70 per cent are "backyard chickens." This means the poultry supply isn't concentrated in farms that can be checked and, where necessary, culled. It also makes detection of the spread of the disease vastly more difficult.

"Habibur Rahman of Mymensing Agricultural University, a leading bird flu expert, and A.S.M. Alamgir, a virologist at the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research, now describe the situation as “alarming”.

"Not only crows, about 1,000 ducks died of bird flu in Naogaon District yesterday. Ducks usually carry the H5N1 virus, but do not die. When ducks die, it indicates that the virus is very highly pathogenic. Even the possibility of mutation of the virus can’t be ruled out."

One Bad Apple

This is no slur on Canadian soldiers. They're a good bunch and a lot better than the calibre of some we took in the 60s. But, just the same.

The National Spot has a story that indicates the Department of National Defence needs to keep a sharper eye on just who is signing up.

Private Stephen Cox had been at the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu for all of 10 days when the complaints began.

In handwritten statements to a Military Police corporal, a dozen platoon members said Pte. Cox had claimed to be the Son of Man and the Second Coming of Christ.

He said God had chosen him to cleanse the world of evil and that he was going to kill the Jews, Catholics, blacks, aboriginals, gays and lesbians, they wrote.

"I heard Private Cox talk of mass genocide of all humans who do not share his beliefs," one complaint read. Said another, "It was revealed to him that he was the second Christ and it was his duty to join the Canadian Army and get into JTF-2 [the special forces] so that he would be in place for the apocalypse in 2012."

It turns out that Private Cox was known to police as a pot trafficker and that he once boasted about killing a B.C. couple but he says he revealed all to recruiters in Vancouver. They don't quite see it that way.

The good part of this story is that Cox' fellow recruits did the right thing in promptly informing their superiors about him. It wasn't just one or two but a dozen of his platoon mates acted and that's very good to know. Still, Peter MacKay and Rick Hillier need to make sure people like Cox don't get through the front door.

Stelmach Tucks Tail Between Legs and Splits

Special Ed has announced he'll jump on the short bus and split for Edmonton this afternoon while the gettin's good.

The Alberta premier has decided to head for the foothills before his fellow premiers begin their summit on climate change tomorrow. Stelmach, whose otherwise modest little province churns out a third of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, has apparently been stampeded out of Vancouver by the representatives of every other province in the country.

Instead of explaining and defending his feeble greenhouse gas plan, Ed seems to have figured that what's good enough for Dick Cheney is good enough for him and for Alberta and for Canada.

Argentina's Children of the Dead

Across Argentina, young men and women are discovering the truth, that their real parents were slaughtered and they were then handed out to the butchers' friends. From The Guardian:

"Horacio Pietragalla felt "like a cat raised in a family of dogs" and was puzzled that, at the age of 14, he was already taller than his father. It was only later that he discovered he was the child of a leftwing activist murdered by the Argentine military during the "dirty war". The executioners gave Horacio away to a general's maid more than a quarter of a century ago.

Now Pietragalla and dozens of other young Argentines are discovering who their real parents were and meeting their grandparents for the first time. Some are bringing legal actions against their parents' kidnappers, while others are going through the painful process of realising the people they thought were their parents had lied to them.

An estimated 30,000 people were killed by the junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 before it finally collapsed in the wake of the defeat in the Falklands war. Most of the victims were young and some were pregnant when arrested. Around 500 babies are believed to have been born in the army's prisons. After their parents were tortured and killed, the children were handed over to military families.

Others who believe they may be children of the disappeared are now waiting to have their DNA tested, Estela Bravo said yesterday from New York. She added that one of the remarkable aspects of the operation to find them was that many had the same quirks as the parents they never knew. "Juan Cabandié likes to go off to the mountains, look up to the sky and find himself, and his aunt has told him that his mother did exactly the same," she said.

After the fall of the junta, a number of those in the military fled, many to the US and Miami in particular.

Start Spreading the News

Rudy Giuliani gets his pompous ass booted straight back to the Big Apple tomorrow. In the first Republican primary he's actually contested the only thing he has to look forward to are the flames.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy has worked hard in Florida, campaigning for weeks while his rivals squandered their efforts in smaller states. So, how has that paid off? Just fine, actually. Right now Giuliani holds on to a solid fourth place - the ejection seat is armed.

These little town blues

Are melting away

I'll make a brand new start of it

In old New York

If I can make it there

I'll make it anywhere

It's up to you, New York, New York.

Bye Rudy, the world will just have to make do without you.

Levelling the Democratic Playing Field

In the blue corner, the Clintons. In the red corner, the Kennedys.

Let's face it, if Bill Clinton had been run over by a bus a year ago, Hillary Clinton would not be where she is today in the Democratic Party's presidential race. She's always had a powerhouse in her corner, the Big Draw, Bill. Oh sure, sometimes he's put his foot in his mouth but that's not always been accidental. Backfires happen, even when they're scripted. Nonetheless it's been a campaign waged by the Two-headed Clinton.

That makes it even more surprising that the challenger, underdog Barack Obama, has done as well as he has so far with his win in Iowa and his conquest of South Carolina. He's had to run uphill while his opponent, the heir presumptive, has enjoyed the high ground advantage.

That playing field is going to be a little more even today thanks to the levelling effect of America's greatest Democratic family, the Kennedys. Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late JFK, wrote an astonishingly emotive endorsement of Obama in the New York Times on the weekend in which she described the man as cut from the same cloth as her father. Today, the brother of that same president, Senator Ted Kennedy, will also lend his name to the Obama campaign.

I've always felt it was somewhat unseemly that the Democratic field should have to run against the Billary tag team. Maybe, just maybe, Caroline and Ted, the Kennedys, can unhorse part of the Clinton behemoth.

Without the intervention of the old man, GHWBush, and the Lee Atwater dirty tricks played by Shrub's Quasimodo, Rove, America might well have wound up in 2000 with Al Gore or John McCain as chief executive instead of having to splash around in the shallow end of the Bush gene pool for eight years. Imagine.

For All of We Dog Lovers

The hound pictured above is my Mikey. If you're a dog lover, I thought you might like the following "compare & contrast" of dogs'n cats.

How To Give A Cat A Pill

1. Pick up cat and cradle it in the crook of your left arm as if holding a baby. Position right fore-finger and thumb on either side of cat's mouth and gently apply pressure to cheeks while holding pill In right hand. As cat opens mouth, pop pill into mouth. Allow cat to close mouth and swallow.

2. Retrieve pill from floor and cat from behind sofa. Cradle cat in left arm and repeat process.

3. Retrieve cat from bedroom, and throw soggy pill away.

4. Take new pill from foil wrap, cradle cat in left arm, holding rear paws tightly with left hand. Force jaws open and push pill to back of mouth with right forefinger. Hold mouth shut for a count of ten.

5. Retrieve pill from goldfish bowl and cat from top of wardrobe. Call spouse from garden.

6. Kneel on floor with cat wedged firmly between knees, hold front and rear paws. Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold head firmly with one hand while forcing wooden ruler into mouth. Drop pill down ruler and rub cat's throat vigorously.

7. Retrieve cat from curtain rail, get another pill from foil wrap. Make note to buy new ruler and repair curtains. Carefully sweep shattered figurines and vases from hearth and set to one side for gluing later.

8. Wrap cat in large towel and get spouse to lie on cat with head just visible from below armpit. Put pill in end of drinking straw, force mouth open with pencil and blow down drinking straw.

9. Check label to make sure pill not harmful to humans, Drink 1 beer to take taste away. Apply Band-Aid to spouse's forearm and remove blood from carpet with cold water and soap.

10. Retrieve cat from neighbor's shed. Get another pill.Open another beer. Place cat in cupboard, and close door on to neck, to leave head showing. Force mouth open with dessert spoon. Flick pill down throat with elastic band.

11. Fetch screwdriver from garage and put cupboard door back on hinges. Drink beer. Fetch bottle of scotch. Pour shot, drink. Apply cold compress to cheek and check records for date of last tetanus shot. Apply whiskey compress to cheek to disinfect. Toss back another shot. Throw tee shirt away and fetch new one from bedroom.

12. Call fire department to retrieve the damn cat from tree across the road. Apologize to neighbor who crashed into fence while swerving to avoid cat. Take last pill from foil wrap.

13. Tie the little bastard's front paws to rear paws with garden twine and bind tightly to leg of dining table, find heavy-duty pruning gloves from shed. Push pill into mouth followed by large piece of filet steak. Be rough about it. Hold head vertically and pour 2 pints of water down throat to wash pill down.

14. Consume remainder of scotch. Get spouse to drive you to the Emergency room. Sit quietly while doctor stitches fingers and forearm and removes pill remnants from right eye. Call furniture shop on way home to order new table.

15. Arrange for SPCA to collect mutant cat from hell and call local pet shop to see if they have any hamsters.


How To Give A Dog A Pill

1. Wrap it in bacon.

2. Toss it in the air.

If We Could Only Put Children First

Imagine what our leaders would be like if they could somehow measure the impact of their decisions on the children who'll be affected as though those children were their own.

Would we be firing cluster bombs into populated areas and then leaving them there to kill the unwary if we knew our kids would be walking through there? Of course we wouldn't. So then, why is it okay when we do it if the foreseeable victims are someone else's kids?

This isn't an attack on Israel but it is about an attack on Israel. The UN Humanitarian Affairs Office has released a report on the psychological toll inflicted on Israeli kids in the town of Sderot from incessant rocket attacks from Gaza. While you read this, eliminate all thoughts of Palestinians or Israelis or their historical grievances. Just think kids.

"At least 75 percent of children aged 4-18 in the southern Israeli town of Sderot suffer from post-traumatic stress, including sleeping disorders and severe anxiety, new findings published in January say.

The report by Natal, the Israel Trauma Centre for Victims of Terror and War, comes after the town first came under Palestinian militant rocket fire from the Gaza Strip in 2001. In the last two years the number of projectiles has risen significantly, and in recent months rocket fire has become an almost daily event.

The Natal report, based on a representative survey, indicates that some 28 percent of adults suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It suggests that the biggest impact was on the young, who suffer nightmares, loss of appetite and problems at school.

Some 120 children are currently undergoing long-term mental health therapy. This is not surprising, say experts, given that many times the rocket fire is timed for the early morning when children head to school.

During a visit by IRIN to the town on a school day, over 10 rockets landed in or near the city between 7am and 8.30am. Every time rockets triggered the warning siren - the now infamous `Tseva Adom' or `Red Colour' system - children ran for cover.

The system is only partially effective. One resident said the siren gives people between zero and 15 seconds to find cover - "and most of the time it's closer to zero".

Dalia Yossef, the manager of a local branch of a national organisation for trauma intervention, Hosen, said the challenge in treating the children was that the rockets continued to fall. "It's ongoing, there is no 'post'. How do you treat post-trauma in this situation?" she asked."

I suspect that, as long as each group targets, deliberately or inadvertently, the other side's children this is simply never going to end. By the way, the picture above is of Israeli kids - writing messages on shells about to be lobbed into Lebanon. I chose this picture to show just how sick both sides can be. That's nothing short of obscene.

The Grades are Posted

Canada and Afghanistan are both in the Top 10 nations in terms of corruption. Afghanistan sits comfortably within the 10-most corrupt nations while Canada stands among the 10-least corrupt nations. Here are the standings:

Somalia 1.4 Denmark 9.4

Myanmar 1.4 Finland 9.4

Iraq 1.5 New Zealand 9.4

Haiti 1.6 Singapore 9.3

Uzbekistan 1.7 Sweden 9.3

Tonga 1.7 Iceland 9.2

Sudan 1.8 Netherlands 9.0

Chad 1.8 Switzerland 9.0

Afghanistan 1.8 Canada 8.7

Laos 1.9 Norway 8.7

* The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)

As you might guess, the higher the score (out of 10.0), the less corrupt the country and the lower the more corrupt.

The Skeletons In Billary's Closet

In today's New York Times, Frank Rich explains why Hillary Clinton may be the Republicans best hope of keeping the White House.

"Asked by Tim Russert whether the Clinton presidential library and foundation would disclose the identities of its donors during the campaign, Mrs. Clinton said it wasn’t up to her. “What’s your recommendation?” Mr. Russert countered. Mrs. Clinton replied: “Well, I don’t talk about my private conversations with my husband, but I’m sure he’d be happy to consider that.”
Not so happy, as it turns out. The names still have not been made public.

"Just before the holidays, investigative reporters at both The Washington Post and The New York times tried to find out why, with no help from the Clintons. The Post uncovered a plethora of foreign contributors, led by Saudi Arabia. The Times found an overlap between library benefactors and Hillary Clinton campaign donors, some of whom might have an agenda with a new Clinton administration."

Great, just what America needs, another White House beholden to the House of Saud.

"The Republicans are not going to have any compunctions about asking anybody anything,” Mrs. Clinton lectured Mr. Obama. Maybe so, but Republicans are smart enough not to start asking until after she has secured the nomination.

"Not all Republicans are smart enough, however, to recognize the value of John McCain should Mrs. Clinton emerge as the nominee. He’s a bazooka aimed at most every rationale she’s offered for her candidacy.

"In a McCain vs. Billary race, the Democrats will sacrifice the most highly desired commodity by the entire electorate, change; the party will be mired in déjà 1990s all over again. Mrs. Clinton’s spiel about being “tested” by her “35 years of experience” won’t fly either. The moment she attempts it, Mr. McCain will run an ad about how he was being tested when those 35 years began, in 1973. It was that spring when he emerged from five-plus years of incarceration at the Hanoi Hilton while Billary was still bivouacked at Yale Law School. And can Mrs. Clinton presume to sell herself as best equipped to be commander in chief “on Day One” when opposing an actual commander and war hero? I don’t think so.

"Foreign policy issue No. 1, withdrawal from Iraq, should be a slam-dunk for any Democrat. But Mrs. Clinton’s case is undermined by her record. She voted for the war, just as Mr. McCain did, in 2002 and was still defending it in February 2005, when she announced from the Green Zone that much of Iraq was “functioning quite well. ” Only in November 2005 did she express the serious misgivings long pervasive in her own party. When Mr. McCain accuses her of now advocating “surrender” out of political expediency, her flip-flopping will back him up.

"Rush Limbaugh and Tom Delay hate Mr. McCain as much as they hate the Clintons. And they hate him for the same reasons Mr. McCain wins over independents and occasional Democrats: his sporadic (and often mild) departures from conservative orthodoxy on immigration and campaign finance reform, torture, tax cuts, climate change and the godliness of Pat Robertson. Since Mr. McCain doesn’t kick reporters like dogs, as the Clintons do, he will no doubt continue to enjoy an advantage, however unfair, with the press pack on the Straight Talk Express.

"If Mr. Obama doesn’t fight, no one else will. Few national Democratic leaders have the courage to stand up to the Clintons. Even in defeat, Mr. Obama may at least help wake up a party slipping into denial. "

Democrats also need to get some updated polls. With fully half of potential voters saying they would never vote for Hillary, no matter what, her husband and her popularity within the party are irrelevant. If she's that divisive to the electorate, she's toxic to the Democrats.

The Bubble Up Economy - Part Deux

A fascinating article in the February edition of Harper's in which veteran venture capitalist Eric Janszen predicts the next bubble for America's economy, arguing that, in the U.S., "...The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle." Here are a few excerpts:

"A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare - one every hundred years or so..."

"...Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being.

"...That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function."

"A few weeks after D-Day, the allies met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to determine the future of the international monetary system. ...The United States, now the dominant economic and military power, successfully pushed to peg the currencies of member nations to the dollar and to make dollars redeemable in American gold.

"Americans could now spend as wisely or foolishly as our government policy decreed and, regardless of the needs of other nations holding dollars as reserves, print as any dollars as desired. But by the second quarter of 1971, the U.S. balance of merchandise trade had run up a deficit of $3.8 billion, ...until that time the United States had run only surpluses. Members of the Bretton Woods system, most famously French President General Charles de Gaulle, worried that the United States intended to repay the money borrowed to cover its trade gap with depreciated dollars. Opposed to the exercise of such "exorbitant privilege," de Gaulle demanded payment in gold. With the balance of payments so greatly out of balance, newly elected President Richard Nixon faced a run on the U.S. gold supply, and his solution was novel: unilaterally end the U.S. legal obligation to redeem dollars with gold; in other words, default."

"...After 1975, the United States would never again post an annual merchandise trade surplus. Such high-value, finished-goods-producing industries as steel and automobiles were no longer dominant. The new economy belonged to finance, insurance and real estate - FIRE.

FIRE is a credit-financed, asset-price-inflation machine organized around one tenet; that the value of one's assets, which used to fluctuate in response to the business cycle and the financial markets, now goes in only one direction, up, with no more than occasional short-term reversals. With FIRE leading the way, the United States, free of the international gold standard's limitations, how had great flexibility to finance its deficits with its own currency. This was "exorbitant privilege" on steroids.

"...As FIRE rose in power, so did a new generation of politicians, bankers, economists, and journalists willing to invent creative justifications for the system, as well as for the projects - ranging from the housing bubble to the Iraq war - that it financed. The high-water mark of such truckling might be the publication of the Cato Institute report "America's Record Trade Deficit: A Symbol of Strength." Freedom had become slavery, persistent deficits had become economic power."

"...Deregulation had built the church, and seed money was needed to grow the flock. The mechanics of financing vary with each bubble, but what matters is that the system be able to support astronomical flows of funds and generate trillions of dollars' worth of new securities.

"...The media stood by cheeering, carrying breathless profiles of wunderkinder in their early twenties who had just made their first hundred million dollars; business publications grew thick with advertisements. The media barely questioned the fine points of the new theology.

"...In a bubble, fictitious value goes away when market participants lose faith in he religion - when their false beliefs are destroyed as quickly as they had been formed. Since the early 1980s, the free-market orthodoxy of the Chicago School has driven policy on the upward slope of an economic boom, but we're all Keynesians on the way down; rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, tax cuts by Congress, deficit spending, and dollar depreciation are deployed in heroic proportions.

"The Internet boom had been a matter of abstract electrons and monetized eyeballs. ...At the bubble's peak, $12-trillion in fictitious value had been created, a sum greater even than the national debt."

"...Historically, the price of American homes has risen at a rate similar to the annual rate of inflation. ...discounting the housing boom after WWII, that rate has been about 3.3 per cent. Why, then, did housing prices suddenly begin to hyperinflate? Changes in the reserve requirements of U.S. banks, and the creation in 1994 of "sweep" accounts, which link commercial checking and investment accounts, allowed banks greater liquidity - which meant they could offer more credit. this was the formative stage of the bubble. Then, from 2001 to 2002, in the wake of the dot-com crash, the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was reduced from 6 percent to 1.24 percent, leading to similar cuts in the London Interbank Offered Rate that banks use to set some adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) rates. These drastically lowered ARM rates meant that in the United states the monthly cost of a mortgage on a $500,000 home fell to roughly the monthly cost of a mortgage on a $250,000 home purchased two years earlier. Demand skyrocketed, though home builders would need years to gear up their production.

"...All that was needed for hypergrowth was a supply of new capital. ...for the housing bubble, starting around 2003, it came from securitized debt.

"...The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a "subprime mortgage crisis," but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.

"...The housing bubble has left us in dire shape, worse than after the technology-stock bubble, when the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was 6 percent, the dollar was at a multi-decade peak, the federal government was running a surplus, and tax rates were relatively high, making reflation - interest rate cuts, dollar depreciation, increased government spending, and tax cuts - relatively painless. Now the Funds Rate is only 4.5 per cent, the dollar is at multi-decades lows, the federal budget is in deficit, and tax cuts are still in effect. The chronic trade deficit, the sudden depreciation of our currency, and the lack of foreign buyers willing to purchase its debt will require the United States government to print new money simply to fund its own operations and pay its 22 million employees.

"Our economy is in serious trouble. Both the production-consumption sector and the FIRE sector know that a debt-deflation Armageddon is nigh, and both are praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression."

"..There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes.

".,..Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure - transportation and communications systems, water and power.

"...The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises need to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy7, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology - and the infrastructure to support it - is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence."

Buried Alive

Poor George w. Bush. Even really bad presidents don't get kicked into the gutter until they're out of office. Not so for Shrub. According to Paul Harris writing in The Observer, American pundits are already pronouncing judgment on the frat boy's dismal legacy:

"...George W Bush - whose successor won't take office until January 2009 - is ...suffering the indignity of having his historical legacy unfavourably examined while still having almost a year left of his second term. A slew of books and a planned major film are all starting to judge Bush's place in history even as he keeps the seat warm in the Oval Office."

"And so far, the verdict does not look good.

"The title of Jacob Weisberg's recent book says it all. The editor of online magazine Slate called his tome The Bush Tragedy. It is an exhaustive look at the Bush years that paints a portrait of disaster. A publicity blurb for the book, ignoring the fact that Bush has 11 months left in power, talks of the president's 'historic downfall'.

"To cap it all, film director Oliver Stone has announced plans to rush out a biopic on Bush in time for the November election. Though Bush may take some solace in being played by acclaimed actor Josh Brolin."

"...Experts say the rush to judge Bush's legacy in print and celluloid is a sign of the modern media times and also of Bush's powerlessness. Having lost control of Congress, he is effectively unable to drive any policy forward. Thus his legacy is already in place. 'Bush fatigue has set in. Part of that is him. Part of that is the nature of the modern presidency,' said Carl Cannon."

If Oliver Stone wants to save a few bucks, he should consider using the set of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" as a substitute for the Oval Office.

What Lurks Across the Border Inside Pakistan

Canadian journalists have generally done an abysmal job of covering the conflict in Afghanistan and events in neighbouring countries. The embedded scribes seem to be the worst. They either turn into a weird sort of Florence Nightingale with a keyboard or they're reduce to parroting the litany of absurd claims that regularly issue forth from Canadian commanders.

Absurd? I wish I could recall how many times I've read some Colonel boast that we have the insurgents trapped here or there, leaving them to choose between surrender and death, only to have them vanish, in good order with their weapons, to come back and fight another day at a time and place of their choosing. According to the boss, the Big Cod, Hillier, there were only a "few dozen" insurgents in Kandahar when we went there. Well those few dozen must have an unlimited supply of lives given the casualties we claim to have inflicted on them.

It's not surprising then that we are left to wallow in near total ignorance of what is actually going on across the border in Pakistan's tribal lands. Military and political leaders freely state that this is the key to winning in Afghanistan. Every now and then one of them loudly proclaims the need to go in there and winkle out the terrorists. We regularly blame Islamabad for not doing enough. So just what is going on in the Pakistani border territories?

In the January 28th edition of The New Yorker, journalist Steve Coll has an excellent article on Benazir Bhutto which provides a fascinating window into the state of the "Tribal Lands." Here are a few excerpts:

"...During 2004 and 2005, as the Taliban and Al Qaeda increased in strength in Pakistan, they carried out attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The bush Administration urged President Musharraf to dispatch the Pakistani Army into South Waziristan to disrupt them, and Musharraf agreed to do so. The Army had never before entered the Tribal Areas to subdue them by force' after British troops were defeated there, during the late imperial period, colonial and Pakistani governments had favored a system premised upon local autonomy. The invasion began poorly and has been deteriorating ever since; the Army has taken significant casualties, and, while its forces have killed or captured some Taliban leaders, they have also set off popular resentment."

"...By late 2006, after sporadic battles that received little international attention, the Army had been, in essence, "militarily defeated" by the Taliban and Al qadea, as a US Defence Department official put it."

"...Tariq Waseem Ghazi, a retired three-star general who served as Pakistan's Defense secretary between 2005 and 2007, told me that, among Pakistan's top commanders, 'everybody felt there was a need for a political accommodation' in the Tribal Areas. 'I think it was unreasonable at any time that we should go into the Tribal Areas with the same kind of motivation and fervor with which the coalition went into Afghanistan or into Iraq' he said. '...I kept telling them, Shock and Awe is fine for you if you fly in from the U.S. or Canada, but shock and awe is no good for us when we have to live with the Tribal Areas as a part and parcel of Pakistan.'"

"...Pakistan could have several motives in undertaking a covert program to aid or protect the Taliban: appeasing Pakistan's radicalized Pashtun population; pressuring Afghanistan's government into political concessions favorable to Pakistan; or preserving a historically friendly militia as a hedge against an eventual American withdrawal from Afghanistan."

"...Shuja Nawaz, the military historian, said he doesn't think that among the senior generals and intelligence officers 'there's any consensus that the Taliban are the enemy.; He explained, 'so long as the Taliban don't attack the Army, it sees them as perfectly fine. And, potentially, if they take over Afghanistan, it sees them as a group that would have at least some sympathies with Pakistan and vice versa."

The good/bad news is that the Taliban and al Qaeda appear to be turning their attention, this year at least, away from Afghanistan and onto Islamabad instead. There is always some hope that this may shatter their support within the ranks of the Pakistani Army and its intelligence service. That, however, remains to be seen. Pakistan seems to be descending into a state of political, religious and military turmoil. Rather than pressuring Musharraf we may be better off doing everything we can to support him.

As for fanciful notions of going into the Tribal Lands and North West Frontier to clean out the Taliban and al-Qaeda, we'd better be prepared to go in with a much bigger force than we have in Afghanistan today and we'd better be ready, before we set foot in there, to accept very heavy losses for a very doubtful outcome.

Caroline Kennedy Endorses Obama

Fresh on the heels of his massive win in South Carolina, Barack Obama can add Caroline Kennedy's endorsement.

Writing in the New York Times Kennedy said Obama has the measure of her own father, John F. Kennedy:

"All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.
I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans."

I'm not sure this isn't a bigger win for Obama than South Carolina itself.

Obama Hammers Clinton 54-27

MSNBC reports that Barak Obama has trounced Hillary Clinton in South Carolina by a punishing 54-27% margin.

Remarks made by both Clintons in recent weeks seem to have alienated black voters who turned out in big numbers to vote 80% for Obama.

After sniffling her way to a win in New Hampshire, the South Carolina vote puts Hillary very much back in the ranks of just another contender, not the annointed one.

Driving a Stake Through Giuliani's Heart

Florida's highly popular governor, Charlie Crist, has endorsed John McCain in advance of Tuesday's primary in that state.

Crist's move is a blow to rival Mitt Romney and quite possibly a death knell for former frontrunner Count Rudy Giuliani who has been campaigning in Florida for weeks and is relying on that state to legitimize his nomination run.

Some pundits are now speculating that a crushing defeat in Florida could spell the end of Giuliani's "9/11" gravy train. As the New York Times put it, "Goodbye Rudy Tuesday."

There's now speculation that, if he wins the nomination, McCain may chose Crist as his running mate. From Associated Press:

Crist has been seen as a moderate Republican. He has championed efforts to curb climate change, and was praised by former President Clinton for his efforts to restore voting rights of felons who have completed their sentences.

He also pushed for a law that requires a paper trail in state elections, a measure that bans the electronic voting machines his predecessor, Gov. Jeb Bush, sought after the 2000 presidential election. That election ended in a hotly contested recount, which President Bush won by 527 votes.

An "Overwhelming" Victory for Obama

Based on exit polls, the Washington Post is predicting an overwhelming victory for Barak Obama in the South Carolina primaries.

Apparently the white vote was pretty much split with Clinton and Edwards in a near tie and Obama a close third. The black vote, however, is believed to have gone to Obama four to one.

More than half of the Democratic electorate was black, a slight increase over 2004 when 47 percent of primary voters were African-American. A desire for change was once again the key voting attribute of Democratic primary voters - as it had been in votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. And, as in Nevada, which held its caucuses last Saturday, the economy was the overriding concern of the voters.

During today's voting in South Carolina, there were indications of a heavy turnout -- especially in black precincts where Obama, the first African-American with a serious chance of winning the nomination, expects to win easily. Several black precincts near Columbia, the state capital, reported hitting 25 percent of all registered voters by midday, according to state party officials.

Time To Topple Karzai?

Hamid Karzai is turning into a royal pain in the ass and a useless one at that. Maybe it's come to the point where either NATO goes or he does.

Karzai has just blocked the appointment of UN super envoy, Paddy Ashdown. Lord Ashdown had made clear he wanted far-reaching powers to serve as overall co-ordinator for international aid and political efforts in Afghanistan. Now his candidacy is up in Afghan smoke.

From the Times Online:

"The latest snub came as British officials were already fuming over Mr Karzai’s criticism of the role of British troops in Afghanistan. In an outburst to journalists on Thursday, the Afghan leader claimed that British forces had failed in their mission in Helmand province.

“Without British troops in Helmand province there would be no control over the influence of the Taleban in the south, and no control over the Taleban’s exploitation of the poppy,” said one senior army officer who has served in Helmand.

The Afghan leader claimed that Helmand had been under Kabul’s control before the British troops arrived on the scene, and that the province was now overrun with Taleban.

The new tension has been caused by differences between the Kabul Government and the British troops on the ground over Mr Karzai’s choice of local officials to run the Helmand administration and the security forces.

President Karzai expressed particular frustration at the way he claimed the British had forced him to get rid of Sher Muhammad Akhunzada, his chosen and trusted governor in Helmand.
His deployment is yet another signal of Mr Karzai’s lack of faith in British policy in southern Afghanistan and his belief that warlords can succeed where governance fails."

In 2006, the Brits forced the ouster of Sher Muhammad Akhunzada and his replacement by Mohammed Daud. The Brits felt Akhunzada was a corrupt warlord with ties to the opium industry and considered Daud, by conrast, honest and reliable. Maybe Daud was but that didn't stop Karzai from sacking him in December, 2006. And Karzai has blamed the Brits ever since.

From The Telgraph:

"There was one part of the country where we suffered after the arrival of the British forces," Mr Karzai told journalists on the margins of the Davos Economic Forum.

"Before that, we were fully in charge of Helmand. When our governor was there, we were fully in charge. They came and said 'your governor is no good'. I said 'allright, do we have a replacement for this governor, do you have enough forces?'

"Both the American and the British forces guaranteed to me they knew what they were doing and I made the mistake of listening to them. And when they came in, the Taliban came."
Mr Karzai added: "The mistake was that we removed a local arrangement without having a replacement. We removed the police force. That was not good. The security forces were not in sufficient numbers or information about the province. That is why the Taliban came back in."

Karzai is up for re-election next year and this may be time a real leader for Afghanistan came forward. Karzai has just been too ineffective and his government too susceptible to warlords and drug lords to have done any good. According to a new book just released, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop by Antonio Giustozzi, reviewed in Asia Times, Karzai has contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban:

"Giustozzi partially attributes the re-entry of the Taliban to the feebleness of President Hamid Karzai's administration, which is geared to accommodating tribal strongmen and warlords rather than to building a professional bureaucracy. Corruption, infighting and arrogance among provincial authorities delegitimize the government and open space for the Taliban to re-emerge. For instance, the abuses of Helmand's governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, turned an uncommitted population into Taliban sympathizers by 2006. Harsh methods of the government's intelligence service drive many into the lap of the insurgency. The general weakness of the provincial administration alienates tribal elders who otherwise resent the Taliban's impudence. "

Trying to salvage Afghanistan from its insurgency is hard enough without being undermined by a hapless, corrupt central government. Next year's Afghan elections may be our best, last chance to sort out the Kabul conundrum.

The Economist's Take on Harper - "The Automaton"

What's wrong with the Conservative party, what's holding them back? It's not the opposition but it may well be Stephen Harper. According to The Economist, Steve just isn't connecting with the Canadian people:

"Mr Harper has been unable to do much more than survive. Respected for his competence, he has all the charisma of an automaton. “I thought that people needed time to get used to Mr Harper,” says Roger Gibbins of the Canada West Foundation, an Alberta-based think-tank. “But it's turned out that to know Harper is not to love him.” That is especially true for women. Opinion polls show little change in allegiance since the last election—except for a brief moment of Conservative advance last autumn..."

I don't know about "respected for his competence," a claim that seems to be unravelling the longer Harpo remains in office but really "Automaton?" You gotta admit, I think that nails it right on the head.

Down In The Dumps

When I was born, the gobal population was about 2.4-billion, all in.

Today we've grown to over six billion and that's expected to peak to over nine billion by 2050. Yet of today's six billion, two out of five, 41% don't have access to a latrine. That's 2.6 billion people living their daily lives without sanitation, more than the entire population of the planet when I was born. In Toronto, that would mean upwards of 800,000 people going on the street or in alleys or subway stations or behind your house or beside your car. Try to imagine what that would be like.

Of course we don't have to imagine that, we don't have to think about it at all. This is Canada and pretty much everybody has a pot to... well you know.

It's estimated that 1.5-million children die every year from lack of sanitation and associated hygiene threats. That's a lot of kids, isn't it?

Why am I bringing this up? Just to point out that, while problems like global warming and nuclear proliferation deserve our urgent attention, we can't turn our backs on a host of additional problems just like this one.

Oh, by the way, this is the International Year of Sanitation. There'll even be a World Toilet Summit held in Macao this November to find ways of meeting the goal of reducing by half the percentage of people without access to sanitation by 2015.

Slap Him In Irons If That's What It Takes

Brian Mulroney's lawyer is hinting the boss may not make another appearance before the Commons ethics committee "unless he gets assurances from the committee that it won't stray from its mandate" or at least what Mulroney contends is its mandate.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that there are plenty of areas Mulroney doesn't want the committee exploring, plenty of questions he'd rather not have to answer.

If he doesn't come back, subpoena him. If he doesn't answer the subpoena, proceed against him for contempt and have him brought forward in cuffs if he makes that necessary. Get Mulroney in the witness chair and, this time, get him under oath.

Maybe that'll mean he'll claim the protection against self-incrimination of the Canada Evidence Act, but so be it. At least let him wear that for the rest of his life if he so chooses. This is a guy who claims he's done nothing wrong, he has nothing to hide. Odd how he's done such a fine job of hiding so far.

Brian Mulroney's Cash Fetish

Whenever Brian Mulroney falls into controversy it always seems to involve cash. Long before he started pocketing envelopes of the stuff from Karlheinz Schreiber, Mulroney was awash in good, old fashion, paper currency - bundles of it.

The Commons ethics committee is planning on calling two men who can shed some light on this. One is Mulroney's former Chief of Staff, Norman Spector, and the other is the Mulroney's private chef, Francois Martin. From the Toronto Star:

"Spector, chief of staff to Mulroney in the early 1990s, wrote about the payments in a forward to Toronto lawyer and author William Kaplan's book about Mulroney's relationship with Schreiber.

He describes Mulroney's networking with wealthy and powerful people. He writes also of Mila Mulroney's "expensive lifestyle."

"Mulroney was not a rich man. Party funds were being drawn, and one of our staff was assigned to pore through personal expenses to determine if some might be reimbursed. Every month I cashed a cheque at a local bank and remitted the funds to Mila," Spector wrote.

The committee also expects to hear from François Martin, Mulroney's former chef, who has told of transporting thick envelopes of cash for the family.

In Stevie Cameron's 1994 On the Take, Martin tells of visiting Mulroney aide Fred Doucet in the Prime Minister's Office to pick up thick envelopes of cash and deliver them to Mila Mulroney.

"Cash came in like it was falling from the sky," he said in the book."

Author Stevie Cameron quotes Martin as telling her Mulroney kept a large safe in the basement of 24 Sussex Drive to hold the cash. She also claims that when Mulroney bought his $1.7-million retirement home in Montreal, he and Mila had it extensively renovated. The renos, she claims, cost close to $1-million and much of the cost was paid - in cash.

The Will to Leave - And Live

The Canadian Armed Forces have taken on a Herculean chore in Afghanistan. Maybe that's because we - and the handful of participating NATO nations - are stuck in peacekeeping mode.

I have nothing against peacekeeping. I believe that's what Canadian forces do best, where they make the greatest contribution. That said, Afghanistan isn't about peacekeeping. It's counterinsurgency warfare. Yet we're still approaching it as though it was something else and that's why, six years down the road, we still sit around with our thumbs up our backsides sending our soldiers out trolling for IEDs.

We're told the biggest task is to train an Afghan army of somewhere between 40,000 to 70,000 soldiers to ensure the security of the country and the central government in Kabul. What have we accomplished? 15, maybe 20,000 tops and a lot of them either deserting or about to every day. Six years for this?

In six years we ought to have been able to recruit, equip and train an army of 100,000 from Quaker colonies alone! But the Afghan people aren't pacifists, they're steeped in martial history although it's generally been on a tribal level but still. So what gives? Damn little, and that's the problem.

The answer lies in Canada's mission to Kandahar but you can find the same message in the Dutch, the German and the French contingents also. We're over there on peacekeeping mode.

In warfighting mode, the relative positions of civilian and military leaders shift somewhat. The civilian leadership remains in overall command and tells the military what it wants. The military then tells the civilian leadership what it needs to do the job. The civilian leadership then comes up with what the military needs or at least it does its best to fit the bill. Then the military goes out and achieves what it's been told to accomplish or dies trying.

The military measures its needs according to the job it's been given. If it has to fight an army of 20,000, it needs enough force to do that job. If it has to fight an army of 100,000, it needs considerably more. What the military needs is defined by the challenge. If the government wants to run convoys it needs to churn out corvettes and frigates. If it wants to fight an air war it needs bombers and fighters.

We're at war in Afghanistan but we're not acting like it. At the risk of droning on about this again, when we picked up the Kandahar mission, General Rick Hillier prescribed a force of about 2,500 soldiers for the job. That would give him 1,500 inside the wire to do all the support jobs necessary to let him maintain a combat force of 1,000 soldiers outside the wire. Why only 1,000? Well, at the outset, Hillier told the fawning flock of reporters that we were only facing a "few dozen ...scumbags." Even though Kandahar at 52,000 sq. kms. is a good amount of territory, 1,000 soldiers ought to have been enough to handle a few dozen bad guys.

But that few dozen quickly turned into a few hundred and now into the thousands with several thousand more waiting their turn just across the line in Pakistan and what are we deploying to meet that threat? Why a force of 2,500; 1,500 inside the wire and 1,000 troops outside, just like we had at the outset.

We were supposed to have the bad guys handily outnumbered but we don't anymore. Their numbers have grown, by an order of magnitude, while ours remain static or, perhaps, stagnant. We remain, even at this late date, with a force measured to conventional warfighting, not counterinsurgency.

Guerrilla war isn't fought with tanks and artillery and air strikes. Heavy firepower ought to play a relatively minor role. Counterinsurgency is a war of soldiers, lots of soldiers. It requires the government side to occupy ground, denying that territory and the civilians and villages within it to the enemy. You keep them out by being there yourself.

The Romans mastered counterinsurgency warfare and just about every power since then has had a go at it. Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Afghanistan are all examples where the guerrillas won. There are others. Let's see - where did they lose? I'll have to get back to you on that. Sure there was Malaya but there the Brits weren't dealing with a nationalist force but an insurgency spawned by an ethnic minority (Chinese) that the Malays wouldn't support.

Notice I said "nationalist"? That's because guerrilla movements are nationalist. They come from within and seek to implant their vision on their country. It's their country. It's where they and their families and their tribes live. They don't want to destroy the country, they want to reshape it. That's why their war is a political war. Only by achieving their political goals - foremost among them the collapse of popular support for the central government - do they win.

You don't get very far trying to force a guerrilla opponent to fight a military war. By the simple fact that they don't have tanks or artillery or helicopter gunships or mobility or high tech communications, there's no way they can win a military war. But they don't have to win a military war, they don't have to fight a military war. Our senior officers just make themselves look idiotic when they mock the Taliban for not coming out to "fight like men." That's the mentality of leadership that's committed to fighting the wrong war, the military war.

The low manpower/high firepower military war plays into the hands of the insurgents. We've become addicted to massively superior firepower as a "force multiplier" a way to avoid having to actually multiply the force itself. It's just super, as long as you can get your enemy to mass into a convenient formation in a suitable battlefield. That's military war. Those same, massive firepower weapons lose political wars. Because you rely on weaponry you don't have soldiers on the ground in the villages to keep the insurgents out. Then, when the guerrillas provoke you into firing on them, your powerful weaponry almost inevitably wipes out civilians in the mix.

Now, you may kill ten guerrillas and only two civilians but in the village down the road the locals are going to get told you killed twelve civilians and they're going to believe it. There, you just took another loss in the political war. They're going to believe it because they know these insurgents freely come into their villages also and that means they could be the next in line for your "death from above." They lay the blame for the dead civilians at your feet because they know that when their turn comes it'll be a Western bomb that kills their family. And all that heavy firepower they associate with that guy Karzai in Kabul. Eventually they may see the guerrillas as their only hope of getting to live in peace again.

So, what's the answer? Surely it must begin in taking the decision to either leave or wage a counterinsurgency war. We either fight the insurgents in their political war or we leave. How do we fight a counterinsurgency war? You do what it takes and that means your political leaders decide to provide their military leaders with what they need for this type of warfare - massive numbers of soldiers.

Those leaders, Harper included, need to take a couple of hours to read America's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, FM 3-24. If you want to read it and know more about the problem than your own prime minister and his defence minister and, perhaps, even our top general, follow this link:

www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf

The lead author of fm3-24 was America's guerrilla warfare wunderkind, David Petraeus. It came about because the American military realized after 9/11 that it knew almost nothing about counterinsurgency warfare. They also realized there was a treasure trove of invaluable information at their fingertips from all those guerrilla wars over the last two millenia and they began by absorbing and digesting that wisdom.

So, what's the miracle truism of fm3-24? Rule Numero Uno is that counterinsurgency warfare is the most labour-intensive warfare we can undertake. You need people on the ground occupying territory. You need them living in and securing the villages and the fields and the installations. You need them scouring the territory ambushing and hunting down the insurgents. You need scads of soldiers so that you maintain the initiative, not the guerrillas. You win by keeping them on the defensive, unable to access their essential civilian support system. If you don't, you lose. Which leads to Rule Numeros Dos - Go Big or Go Home.

Harper, loudmouthed braggart that he is, proclaims the government is going to do "what's right" in Afghanistan, not what it learns from polls. Fair enough. Want to know "what's right?" Go to fm 3-24 and other recent strategic studies. What's right is a combat force that falls between one rifle for every twenty five to fifty civilians in the territory to be protected. What's right means a force of 15-25,000 soldiers in Kandahar, combat soldiers. That's "what's right", and that's what Harper has absolutely no intention of doing.

What's right is not leaving our understrength force over there to run through territory it doesn't control, trolling for IEDs. What's right is having the courage, the decency to honour the sacrifice of these soldiers by admitting we're not going to bear the burden of fielding the force they need to win. What's right is to muster up the integrity to admit it's time to leave.

Mulroney Waterboy Runs to the Rescue

Phil Mathias, former "investigative" reporter for the National Spot, has come out swinging (or at least fanning the air) in defence of the guy he never wanted to investigate, Brian Mulroney.

A whole little PR sturm und drang has been unleashed just in time for the resumption of the Commons ethics committee investigation into the dealings between Brian Mulroney and his long time buddy, Karlheinz Schreiber.

One of Muldoon's lawyers has sent a whining gripe note to committee chairman, Paul Szabo, complaining that the grand old bullshitter himself hasn't been treated with kid gloves by the committee members. Lawyer Guy Pratte had a right proper hissie, claiming the committee had treated Mulroney unfairly and with disrespect. Oh dear me!

The whole thing seems to have erupted just as there's talk the committee may subpoena Mulroney's tax records to see if they will shed any light on the cash-stuffed envelopes that Schreiber passed to our former Conservative prime minister.

Then Phil Mathias waded in with an opinion piece condemning all and sundry for subjecting Mulroney to a witch hunt.

"... the campaign against Mr. Mulroney is what academics call a "mobbing," a process that is most visible on politically correct university campuses. An unpopular member of faculty is targeted by an accusation and then subjected to an inquisition, which eventually leads to his expulsion in disgrace. Very often, the accusation is trivial or false, and the disciplinary process is abused. This is what has happened to Mr. Mulroney."

"The grudge most Canadians hold against Mr. Mulroney is that he introduced the hated Goods and Services Tax in 1989, a measure that was nevertheless applauded by economists, and later by Liberals. His image suffered a serious blow in 1995, when publisher Seal Books (subsequently absorbed by Random House Canada) decided the best way to excite interest in a book by Stevie Cameron was to feature Mr. Mulroney on the cover dressed opulently in a tuxedo next to the words On the Take, even though the book contained no hard evidence that he has ever taken a bribe."

"...During his libel action against the government, Mr. Mulroney was asked by government lawyers if he had ever had any dealings with Mr. Schreiber. In his answer, Mr. Mulroney failed to mention a $225,000-$300,000 deal he had made with Mr. Schreiber for work that he would do after he left office. (Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Schreiber disagree on the amount paid.) Mr. Mulroney's political savvy probably told him that if he revealed the Schreiber deal, the roof would cave in on him, as it has since done. Mr. Mulroney is now condemned for not revealing this arrangement, even though it had nothing to do with the issue in the libel case."

Hey Phil, if the question wasn't relevant Mulroney, a lawyer accompanied by senior counsel, could have objected to answering it. He didn't. Instead he went off on a detailed description of meeting Schreiber a few times for a cup of coffee. Sorry, Phil, but the guy's under oath and he's giving a deliberately misleading (ie "false") answer. He was "savvy" enough to know that if he told the truth, "the roof would cave in on him?" I think that's called perjury, Phil. He chose to answer the question, he was under oath, what you now think of the question itself is irrelevant, Phil.

"The ethics committee now wants to examine Mr. Mulroney's tax records relating to the $225,000-$300,000 payment, even though Mr. Mulroney received most of the money while he was a private citizen for work that he would do as a private citizen. The Canada Revenue Agency has apparently accepted Mr. Mulroney's submissions, so why are the tax records of this private citizen a matter of Parliamentary ethics? When a mobbing is in progress, such questions are put aside."

You see, Phil, there you go again. He received "most" of the money while he was a private citizen. That's like saying we don't need to worry about the fact that this transaction was put into effect while BM was a key figure in the government of the day, the former prime minister. Sorry, you've got a few spots on your logic Phil and I think they're grease.


"...By the time the ethics committee and the commission of inquiry have finished with Mr. Mulroney, their inquiries will have added another year or two to the 15 years that this witch hunt has already been going on. And whatever their ultimate findings, the mere process of investigation may destroy the last shreds of Mr. Mulroney's reputation and make the disgrace of this former Canadian prime minister complete."

Phil, Phil, Phil - If Mulroney's reputation is destroyed and his disgrace complete, that's his doing and no one else's. If only we could get into GCI and Frank Moores and where that $20-million of Airbus money went and whether any of it found its way into Brian's pockets but that's a long shot and Mulroney knows it. CGI is long gone and, fortunately for Mulroney, so is Moores. That's one thing the Commons committee has clarified. That money - that illicit money - didn't go to Schreiber but to Frank Moores, the same guy Mulroney appointed to the board of Air Canada just in time for the Airbus deal.

For a supposed "investigative reporter", Mathias has gone well out of his way for years to avoid investigating this one. Mathias broke the story of the RCMP letter of request, the publication of which created the basis for Mulroney's defamation suit. It was during a Fifth Estate interview with Mathias in his office at the Spot that a CBC cameraman filmed a letter on his desk that turned out to be the English translation of the "smoking gun" letter. From the Fifth Estate web site:

"Mathias' former colleague at the National Post, Andrew Coyne, says the leaking of the letter was the act which actually constituted the libel.

"What made it a libel was that it was printed in the Financial Post and everyone could read it there," Andrew Coyne told the fifth estate. "Obviously Mr. Mulroney would be very concerned about his reputation ... but for the police to be passing back and forth allegations to each other on its own it seems to me is not terribly blameworthy."

Schreiber has long been suspected as source of the Letter of Request that wound up with Mathias. Those suspicions grew when it was revealed by CBC reporter Neil MacDonald that the document in Mathias' possession was the same translation of the letter Mulroney's lawyers had filed in court the day they launched their lawsuit.

Mathias had obtained a translation of the justice department letter prepared for Mulroney by Schreiber's lawyers in Switzerland.

"So how could a private document prepared for Mulroney by his own lawyers find its way into the hands of the reporter who broke the story?"

Caught with the translation - not the actual RCMP letter but the translation prepared by Schreiber's Swiss lawyers - investigative reporter Mathias refused to explain the obvious - how this wound up in his hands, the very reporter who "broke" the story? Was this whole thing - the letter, its publication in the Spot contrived? If so, there was no libel of Brian Mulroney, at least none for which the federal government could be help responsible. We deserve our two million back plus a whole pile of cash-stuffed envelopes in accrued interest.

I hope the committee issues one more subpoena - to Phil Mathias. He has a lot of questions to answer.

Australia Warns Visiting Canada Dangerous?

Australia's "Smart Traveler" web site now lists Canada as a destination where visitors should "exercise caution."

We're listed as somewhat dangerous due to the risk of terrorism, snow and ice storms, avalanches in BC and forest fires that can supposedly erupt any time.

This assessment is coming from a country that is awash in lethal threats. Australia hosts 17 of the world's deadliest snakes including the Inland Taipan; a gaggle of nasty bugs including the Funelweb Spider, the Box Jellyfish and Blue-Ringed Octopus, 165-species of sharks, saltwater and freshwater crocodiles, droughts, floods and wildfires.

I wonder if the Aussies are warning potential visitors to steer clear of their own country? It would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it?

And We're Trigger Happy?

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates hit a raw nerve recently when he criticized NATO nations as being ill-suited to the counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan. He said we were just way too reliant on airpower and heavy weaponry which led to unnecessary civilian casualties.

There's some truth in what he says. We have been more than a little too free with airstrikes but, as the American forces - in Afghanistan and Iraq - continunally show us, when it comes to being trigger happy, they're still Number One.

Just yesterday, American forces operating in a town south of Kabul managed to mistakenly kill 9 Afghan policeman plus one civilian. The US forces were searching homes on the outskirts of town and used explosives to blast open a gate. The Afghan police, hearing the explosion, thought it must be the work of the Taliban and rushed to the scene.

As the police approached, the Americans thought they were Taliban and gunned them down. They even used air power to attack a police vehicle.

The American commander says as far as he's concerned the victims were insurgents and claimed to have no information on whether they were Afghan police. The incident occured at around 3 a.m.

The New York Times Slams Giuliani

Poor Count Rudy, he can't even get a break in his hometown.

America's newspaper of record, The New York Times, has endorsed John McCain as the best Republican candidate for president. As for Rudy, the paper said it all in this:

"The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power."

Not content with kicking Rudy to the curb, the paper went on:

"Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign."

We can hope that the Times review turns into Giuliani's political epitaph when Repugs cast their votes in the Florida primary. America and the world will be better off without him.

Political Numbers and Political Lies

This is one of those posts where the urge to resort to vulgarity overwhelms the suppression mechanisms so, if you're feeling of refined sensibilities, move along.

I have had it up to the tits with Manley's political numbers. Yet that's the key to seeing through all the feigned sincerity of the Manley Panel's report.

2,000 - that's the figure Manley puts forward. If someone - NATO, the United States, the martians - can come up with another 1,000 fighting soldiers, we ought to stay. That's as far as these hucksters will go, just far enough for Harper to stage manage another scam debate like he did last time.

2,000. Two thousand. A brigade roughly. Why 2,000? Why not 1,800 or 18,000? Read the report. There's no reason given for the magic number. That's because there's no reason for the magic number, other than magic. It's just a shill's device for stifling essential, meaningful debate. It's a political number, one we're expected to imbue with the quality of sufficiency because it's enshrined in ink on paper.

We're supposed to stay in Kandahar to 2011 and beyond so long as someone (presumably the Pentagon) comes up with the next 1,000 soldiers. And then what?

Are we going to win with 2,000 combat soldiers? Win what? Then again, what does "winning" look like to the Manley Panel? NOwhere in the sonorous yet empty report does "the Panel" venture a description of what we're trying to win and just how we get there. Those are petty details beyond the scope of their higher, political vision.

Now, whether you be left, centre or right-wing, here's a question. Do you believe we ought to ask Canadian soldiers to sacrifice their lives unless we ("we" - the people, the nation, our government) are actually in this to win?

You see, if you begin with that simple question, you arrive at a proposition that defines each and every remaining question in judging "the mission." It is, in fact, the essential starting point. Without it, everything else is political numbers, political babble.

If you answer "yes" to that question (and you're a total aberrant if you don't), then you must next ask, what is the definition of "win." What result will we be content with? You have to draw the line somewhere. We're talking here guerrilla warfare bordering on civil war. That's inherently messy and confusing. There won't be any surrender documents signed at ceremonies on the decks of battleships this time.

The Manley Gang assume some bizarre consensus on the notion of winning. That's why you'll find no lengthy description and evaluation of options.

Listen to me. If you can't define "winning", you can't wage much less win a war. Alexander the Great, Wellington, Rommel and Patton would think we were fools for even trying. Yet that's what Manley/Harper would have us do.

Winning is somewhat more than the flip side of losing but working out how not to lose is a good first step in figuring out how to win. We've used the awful spectre of losing to justify continuing this war for better than six years now. The common line is that, if we lose, the Taliban returns triumphant. Says who?

Show me something, anything to make the case that the Taliban could return to power but for the military exertions of the US and NATO? We've been told that, every day for the past six plus years, and it's become an article of faith, but protracted, screwed-up military adventures are almost always sustained by faith in delusions.

So, where's the beef? The Other Side (the non-Pashtun tribes that make up almost 60% of the Afghan population plus the pro-government Pashtuns, collectively) has had six years of breathing space from the days when they were in a deadlocked war of attrition. Why, without us, would they not be able to do just as well as the ISAF infidel at swatting away the Islamists? Why? C'mon, let's hear something reality-based. We just find it convenient to assume these dodgy South Asian types would all roll over and revert to the Bad Old Days. But for that assumption, that ludicrous home truth, "the mission" would be a f#&@ing joke. Can't be having that, can we?

It's not like these backward peoples need us to teach them how to fight. Ask the generals of the old Soviet army, hell ask Rudyard Kipling. They know how to fight and they need neither our training nor encouragement to do it.

What if we just let them settle Afghanistan's hash (pun not intended)? I raise it simply because it's an obvious question that you should but won't find raised in the Manley Brigade report.

I could go on and on and on but I've found that I've already gone well past the useful limit of this blog medium so I'll leave the rest of this rant for another time.

The Bubble-Up Economy - Part One

Forget "trickle down/supply side" economics. That's so 80's, a means to get government off the backs of the most advantaged so they can really go to town. Sure it creates enormous debt and undermines social programmes but the rich don't give a dump about their Medicare benefits or Social Security cheques, do they, and you can always pawn the debt off on the working classes by deftly tweaking the tax code to shift the burden off the rich, the investment class, the rentiers, by cutting tax from investment income and shifting that burden over onto wages, earned income. But you can only take that so far, or can you?

Here's an idea! What about getting the taxpayers, i.e. the working folk, to bail out the investor classes? Take subprime mortgages. The investor class made a killing selling and shuffling bad paper. If it wasn't legal (more or less) it'd be criminal. But all good things must end and, right now, those investors are scared to death of massive defaults on those dodgy mortgages they spent the Bush years flogging to everyone who could sign their name. So, what do you do?

How 'bout the Fed maybe coming up with a $20-billion relief package? Better yet, why doesn't the White House and Congress come up with a $150-billion "stimulus" bill, sending tax rebates to the workers? Put a few hundred bucks in their pockets and hope that lets some of them pay their mortgages. The best part? It's all done with borrowed money. We'll pay the workers with money we borrowed on their behalf that they or their kids will wind up having to repay, with interest! We'll just tell'em we're giving them the money. They'll never know the difference.

See, the idea isn't "trickle down" any more. It's bubble-up. The investor class has long since invested their tax cuts into Asia but the working guy, he has to spend that money, and so it bubbles up right back to the tax-haven accounts of the most deserving or, as I like to call'em, the "Haves and the Have-Mores." Abe was wrong. You can fool all of the people all of the time.

Gagging the Debate on Arctic Drilling

Political pressure from Sweden and the United States has gagged scientific warnings on the perils of oil drilling in the Arctic ocean.

A group of scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Arctic Research division, led by director John Calder, together with 150 scientists with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) spent four years compiling a report entitled "Arctic Oil & Gas" in which they laid out the environmental risks unique to the region. From Spiegel Online:

Among other things, Calder's report warns against the dangers posed by faulty pipes and tanker accidents. "Oil spills are especially dangerous in the Arctic, because its cold and heavily season-dependent ecosystems take a long time to recover. Besides, it is very difficult to remove the damage from oil spills in remote and cold regions, especially in parts of the ocean where there is ice." Calder also criticizes the destruction of landscapes that comes with building pipelines and describes the way Arctic villages would change once the oil money upends all traditional social structures.

But despite these commendable warnings, there is a significant problem behind the work of Calder and other scientists: it has been devalued by political wrangling. Until recently, the summary ended with more than 60 recommendations the scientists had compiled for politicians. Those recommendations have since disappeared.

The modifications are the result of quarrels within the Arctic Council, which commissioned the AMAP study. Unanimity is required between the permanent members of the Council, which include the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Canada, the United States and Russia -- but Sweden and the US were opposed to the document. Sources at the Tromsø meeting said the Americans didn't even want the term "climate change" to be used in the final report.

John Calder remains perplexed. His report, originally intended as a milestone in the development of the Arctic oil and gas industry, could end up being largely ignored because its most important section, the recommendations for action, is missing.

"Risks cannot be completely ruled out," the authors write in the penultimate chapter of the AMAP report. It is statements like these that have prompted the environmental organization World Wildlife Fund, which presented its own report in Tromsø on the risks of oil accidents in Arctic environs, to call for an end to exploration for new oil and gas reserves in the Arctic.

"The Arctic has an almost unparalleled level of ecological sensitivity and one of the lowest levels of capacity in terms of cleaning up after an accident," said James Leaton of WWF's chapter in the United Kingdom.

Dying to Support Afghan Freedom to Die

Is this what Canadian soldiers are dying to save? The Guardian reports that an Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death for insulting Allah:

"An Afghan journalist sentenced to death for distributing an article "violating Islam" is actually being punished for his brother's writing detailing abuses by northern warlords, a media group claimed today.
Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, 23, was sentenced to death yesterday by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

It was said he distributed a report he printed off the internet to fellow journalism students at Balkh University.

The judges said the article humiliated Islam, and members of a clerics' council had pushed for Kambakhsh to be punished."

But Jean MacKenzie, country director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which helps train Afghan journalists, said Kambakhsh is being punished for stories written for IWPR by his brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi.

"We feel very strongly that this is a complete fabrication on the part of the authorities up in Mazar, designed to put pressure on Parwez's brother Yaqub, who has done some of the hardest-hitting pieces outlining abuses by some very powerful commanders in Balkh and the other northern provinces," MacKenzie said.

"So we feel that what is happening with Parwez is not a very veiled threat against Yaqub Ibrahimi," MacKenzie said.

Ibrahimi wrote stories for IWPR late last year quoting villagers accusing Afghan member of parliament Piram Qul of being behind murders and kidnappings.

Qul - a former commander in the militant and political group Jamiat-e-Islami and a current parliamentarian from Takhar province - denied the allegations.

Yeah, this sounds like a government worth saving, eh? We're paying an open ended blood price for these goons. It's about time our government took Karzai by the lapels and told him to damn well clean up that nest of vipers he calls a parliament.

Lying The World to War

Some Bush sympathizers still maintain that Shrub, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and others were merely "mistaken" about the claims they made about Saddam Hussein and Iraq leading up to the invasion and afterward. Honest mistake = no war crime (supposedly). Others believe these con artists embarked on a deliberate scheme of deception and outright lies. Well, the verdit's in and guess what? They lied - and they lied and lied and lied.

Now their lies have been logged, sorted, digested, analyzed and compiled into a neat, searchable database you can find at: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

IRAQ: The War Card presents 935 Weapons of Mass Deception spewed out for public consumption by the Bush regime in the two years following September 11, 2001. These are lies about the security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

"On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials [Cheney, Rusmfeld, Rice], along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews."

The War Card site features a free, 380,000-word searchable database. The following chart demonstrates how their campaign of lies peaked in the weeks prior to the invasion:

Take a look at the site. The conclusion is inescapable. There was nothing mistaken about the claims spun by the Bush gang to goad their congress and people into unprovoked, pre-emptive war on Iraq. Like other thug regimes before them, they just flat out lied to their own people and the world - and they did it with straight faces.

The Descent Into MADness

A cabal of retired top generals argue that the West must expressly reserve the right to pre-emptive nuclear attack to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. From The Guardian:

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

This takes the doctrine of pre-emptive war well past its bounds. The doctrine permitted one nation to attack another about to launch an attack of its own. In other words, the nation about to be attacked was allowed to strike first.

What these generals are advocating has nothing to do with being attacked. The mere acquisition or attempt to acquire WMDs would be enough to justify nuclear pre-emption. What's wrong with that? Plenty.

For starters, whose intelligence do we use in deciding who is and isn't acquiring nuclear weapons? The Americans have the largest intelligence machine - a combined budget of $50-billion annually. It failed to detect the Pakistani or Indian nuclear weapons programmes. It completely botched Iraq but that wasn't discovered in time to block the American invasion. It botched Iran until redeeming itself at the last minute. It botched Korea. No, we can't trust the demonstrably incompetent US intelligence services or the ginned-up nonsense spewed from the White House. The same has to go for the sycophantic Pentagon. And the Brits haven't been significantly better. For that matter, NATO has been a bust too.

Which politicians do we rely on in reaching these fundamental decisions? George Bush? Rudy Giuliani? No, I don't think so. The American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation?

The simple fact is there's no nation, no service and no leader in the West deserving to be entrusted with the decision for a nuclear first strike. That's reason enough to scrub it right there. But there are other reasons, lots of them.

What of Israel? If the West was to attack a small country under this doctrine, would it not justify the same treatment of Israel and its nuclear arsenal? If the US was to say that Israel is exempt due to American protection, what would prevent other nuclear states from extending the very same protection to smaller nations of their choosing?

Then there's the civilian question. Nations covertly seeking to develop WMDs will undoubtedly locate their installations in heavily populated areas. How many nations are prepared to countenance a pre-emptive nuclear attack on a civilian population? For the West it would tear alliances to shreds. For the rest of the world it would evolve alliances very hostile to the West.

This lunatic talk of nuclear pre-emption comes at a time of rising global, superpower instability. I know, I know we're now in a unipolar world with but one superpower. That doesn't mean there aren't several newcomers moving up and there's an arms race underway in almost every one of them.

Russia, China and India are all going full out to rearm their nations. Russia is developing a new generation of missiles and warheads designed to defeat America's anti-ballistic missile defence systems. China is developing a blue water navy complete with missile subs and plans on extending its force into space. Even India is re-arming, greatly expanding its own naval and air forces.

The West's economic and political hegemony faces new challenges from these emerging powers. How will they respond to a West that declares it has the right to a nuclear first-strike independent of the Security Council? I think it would give some of them even more reason to distrust the West at a time when we need their support and cooperation more than ever. The last thing we need to do is to lower the nuclear threshhold.

This policy will drive smaller nations to seek the protection of larger states. They know from recent example how the West can make "mistakes" even mistakes of convenience. I would think we would find a lot of smaller states searching for a benevolent big brother, one not of our choosing. Smaller states with the resources upon which the West is so dependent.

No, this policy is lunacy writ large and it could have repercussions, short and long-term that could make us rue the day we contemplated it. It's time to put these old warhorses back in the stable and tell them to stay there.

Do we really want the world to return to a state of teetering on the brink of Mutually Assured Destruction?

The Manley Report - A Few Salient Points

It took a while but I got through the Manley report on Afghanistan. At first I was somewhat impressed. With a few glaring exceptions the Panel seems to have managed a fair grasp of the facts. Much of the stuff was obvious but it was assuring to see them acknowledge it.

It's when the report got into the political questions that their views became hard to accept, at times hard even to believe. This is ultimately a political discussion and the report leaves a bottomless pit of wiggle room, more than enough to allow it to be exploited by all sides of the issue. The closer you get to the end of it the more it appears a colossal waste of time.

A Few Salient Points:

"Without systematic performance standards, accounts of security successes or failures are mainly anecdotal ...the Afghan and ISAF governments need first to craft a much more coherent and unified security strategy, and then impose practical, verifiable criteria for gauging and analyzing the course of that strategy."

"...the Panel observed harmful shortcomings in the NATO/ISAF counterinsurgency campaign. The most damaging shortfalls included an insufficiency of forces in the field, especially in high-risk zones in the South; a top-heavy command structure at ISAF headquarters in Kabul; an absence of a comprehensive strategy directing all ISAF forces in collaboration with the Afghan government; limitations placed by some NATO governments on their units, which effectively keep those units out of the conflict... ...These and other deficiencies reflect serious failures of strategic direction, and persistent fragmentation in the efforts of ISAF and NATO governments and between them and the Afghan government."

Okay, John, there are these several critical, potentially even fatal flaws in the way business is being handled in Afghanistan. Why then don't you tell us what they mean for the Canadian mission and what we're to do if they're not set right? You've pointed out the obvious but dodged any mention of what Canada should do in response. That's a huge failure.

The report envisions Canada aiding the Kabul government in formulating a basis for negotiations between the central authority and the "good" Taliban wishing to renounce violence. The Panel still wants Taliban leaders responsible for former atrocities prosecuted. Here they overlook the fact that some of the "Northern Alliance" warlords were hardly better and yet used their control of the parliament to pass an amnesty for themselves. I think one-sided justice is going to create a non-starter for negotiations with the Taliban.

The Manley Panel report also skips over the reaction that any power-sharing deal with the Taliban is likely to trigger in the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara warlords in the north who've been spending the last couple of years rearming and reconstituting their militias in anticipation of just such an eventuality.

The Panel seems to gloss over the fractures that underlie the Kabul government. It is a coalition of the willing - for now. The lack of trust and unity contribute, perhaps more than anything else, to Karzai's inability to purge his government of corruption and move on the opium bosses. Enormous pressures have been brought on Karzai by the Americans and ISAF but he's been unable or unwilling to crack down.

In the event of an ethnic or tribal breakdown in the central government what would befall the Afghan National Army? Would it remain loyal to the remnants of a Kabul government or break up into its constituent tribal elements and head for home? In that event do we sit on the sidelines of a renewed civil war or do we just take on a brand new bunch of enemiese to combat?

Leaving aside all the unasked questions, the manner in which the Manley Panel construed Canada's mission was, in my view, biased, distorted, perhaps even dishonest.

...the Panel could find no operational logic for choosing February, 2009 as the end date for Canada's military operation in Kandahar - and nothing to establish February, 2009 as the date by which the mission would be completed.

Here the Manley bunch is being wilfully disingenuous. February, 2009 was chosen not on the basis of operational logic or on any fanciful notions that the mission would be completed by then. To suggest that is pure sophistry and undermines any trust that should be placed in Manley's vision.

Parliament merely decided (following a farcical debate in which essential questions were never asked, much less answered) to carry ISAF's load in Kandahar until that date. ISAF and NATO were never released from the obligation to find replacements for us after that although Manley suggests that the extension was some form of de facto undertaking to stay for however long it takes to "win" in Afghanistan.

Manley is implying a much greater commitment than was ever undertaken. Staying to the end was never discussed in the debates leading up to the 2009 extension. It was certainly never explained to the Canadian people. He's pulling that straight out of his ass and he knows it. He also knows that, without this sort of chicanery, his arguments for remaining are seriously undermined. It is entirely reasonable in a conflict such as this to expect to be relieved after a period of service especially given that NATO is an alliance with a strength over over a million soldiers.

Manley's recommendation that Canada's military mission to Kandahar be "conditionally extended" beyond 2009 leaves the future of our effort to be determined, not by Canadians, but by Brussels. The Panel even presume to put a tidy price on it - another 1,000-strong battle group furnished by other NATO members. They've done all the math having no idea what may be coming from Pakistan or the Taliban or the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara warlords or the drug barons. It sounds positively sophomoric. 1,000 won't do the job that we're facing today. What assurances can Manley's Panel give that the price he demands for indefinite Canadian commitment will have any relevance in a year from now much less two or three? The answer is none whatsoever.

"If no undertakings on the battle group are received from ISAF partner countries by February, 2009, or if the necessary equipment is not procured, the Government should give appropriate notice to the Afghan and allied governments of its intention to transfer responsibility for security in Kandahar."

Gee, that's cute. What sort of notice does Manley have in mind and to whom does he suggest we "transfer responsibility for security in Kandahar?" What a load of nonsense.

In my initial assessment of this report based on news accounts I gave it a D+/C-. Having read it myself, I'd drop that to a very solid F.

Torture, No - Terror, Absolutely

The men shown here are hunting for unexploded cluster bomblets from Israeli weapons fired into southern Lebanon. The UN reports they're still finding an average of ten new sites every month. Israel, which left the Lebanese countryside littered with these weapons, won't tell the UN where they are. From the UN Human Affairs Office news service, IRIN:

"Deminers clearing Israeli-dropped cluster bombs in south Lebanon are turning up an average of 10 new sites per month, while Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods. A single cluster bomb can disperse hundreds of bomblets.

All these weapons systems are computerised and grid references are entered before the bombs drop. Not receiving the cluster bomb strike data from the Israelis remains our biggest obstacle to clearance,” Dalya Farran, a spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre for South Lebanon (MACSL), told IRIN. The UN estimates that Israel rained down around four million bomblets - most US-supplied - onto south Lebanon in the last three days of its 2006 July war with Hezbollah fighters, when a ceasefire had already been agreed.

Cluster bombs, or sub-munitions, are legal, and manufacturers say their failure rates should be between 10-15 percent. The UN estimates in general the weapons fail between 20-30 percent of the time. In south Lebanon MACSL estimates between 30-40 percent of the bombs dropped failed to explode, rising up to 80 percent in some places.

The high failure rate may partly be explained by Israel’s use of Vietnam-war era munitions, such as the M42, M77 and Blue 63, all US or Israeli-made and the MZD2, made in China, many of which MACSL said had gone beyond their expiry date by the time they were dropped on Lebanon.

The Israelis also dropped the new M85 cluster bomb that is designed to self destruct if it fails to explode on impact and which manufacturers say has a 1 percent failure rate. MACSL’s Dalya Farran said they estimate the bomb, used for the first time on battlefields in Lebanon, had a 10 percent failure rate."

Refusing to assist in clearing these weapons or at least disclosing where they can be found is state terrorism, plain and simple. These weapons are serving no military purpose unless the Israeli government and its military see some benefit in killing and maiming Lebanese civilians.

It Could've Been Worse - A Bit Worse Anyway

A few days back I wrote that if the Manley report didn't address the lack of troops in Kandahar, it would be rubbish.

Surprise, surprise. The report does focus on the force level issue and says that, if NATO doesn't put up an extra 1,000 soldiers to aid the Canadian contingent, we ought to say sayonara and leave.

What's unclear is whether Manley is talking about an extra 1,000 combat troops. That would actually double the existing Canadian fighting force. It would also require an additional contingent of support personnel.

The report also is understood to focus on the need for medium-lift helicopters. Those are already on order but aren't expected to begin arriving until 2011.

So, what would an extra 1,000 troops do in a province that's 54,000 sq. kms. in area with a population just shy of 900,000? The sad truth is, not much. That would be one combat soldier or counterinsurgent for every 450-civilians, not the 1:25 ratio formulated by Petraeus in the new US counterinsurgency field manual. Together with new helicopters it would permit us to establish a respectable fast reaction force but it wouldn't be enough to maintain permanent security in the villages throughout the countryside. Even with the additional forces we'll still be a garrison force with a few firebases or outposts.

Then there are all the "what ifs" in these recommendations. What if Brussels, already on notice that the Dutch are leaving in 2010, can't come up with the reinforcements the Manley report identifies as essential? What if we don't come up with the medium-lift helicopters? What if NATO does deliver the reinforcements but they come with the "caveats" so many nations impose that render them essentially useless?

Overall, I give the report a D+/C-. It's not as bad as I was expecting but its recommendations are still pretty lame and much too narrowly focused to be helpful. It treats Canada and Kandahar as somehow autonomous, a war within a war, not as an integral component of a larger ISAF and US operation. Perhaps this "heads down" approach was necessary to avoid having to weigh the Canadian mission in the failing context of the larger operation. Yet does anyone think we can really sort out our problems in Kandahar immune to the troubles that beset the rest of southern Afghanistan, that lurk across the border in Pakistan's Tribal Lands and that are smouldering in the warlords' dens in northern Afghanistan?

Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.

Now Isn't That Quaint - MLK And REL In the Same Spotlight

Is it just me or does anyone else see anything a bit contradictory, even offensive, in this?

It's Martin Luther King day in the US. Yeah! In Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, however, it's also Robert E. Lee day. Yeah? Huh?

King's birthday was January 15, Lee's fell on January 19. In Arkansas state employees were given the choice of holiday - Lee's birthday, King's birthday or, the ever popular, their own birthday. Finally it was decided to toss King in with Lee and celebrate them both on January 19.

Fresh Paint on Dry Rot

John Manley's Afghanistan report reminds me of a boat with dry rot - it's leaking all over the place. And, if these leaks are to be believed, Manley's decidedly "blue" ribbon panel on the future of Canada's mission to Afghanistan is going to recommend that we "stay the course", perhaps until 2011.

I'm not going to comment on what the report is "expected" by this source or that to recommend. There'll be plenty of time for that after the it's released and we actually see what's in it.

I do, however, want to talk about another concern and, again, it's a dry rot problem. It's the dry rot that's spread through the Karzai government in Kabul. It comes in the form of corruption (rot at the gunwales), infiltration (rot at the transom) and public alienation (rot at the bow). It's the rot that is unstoppable when warlords, drug barons and common criminals pull the strings. It may be an exaggeration to call the Kabul government a criminal enterprise but it's not much of an exaggeration.

But the hull isn't the only problem. There's also the engine - that's NATO - that stutters and burps, it's fouled plugs firing on just a few of its multi-cylinders. It's weak, faltering and unreliable. It is barely able to keep the bow into the wind but doesn't have enough power to make much headway.

If you've never been in a bad storm at sea, I have. There are times when all that stands between you and the bottom are a solid hull and a strong engine. Neither one will save you, it takes both.

Right now Afghanistan is a stormy sea that could get a lot worse in a very short time. I'll be waiting to see how Manley suggests we patch the rot in the hull and get the engine firing on all cylinders again. I'm not optimistic that he'll do both or either. If the leaks are right, he'll want to throw on a fresh coat of paint and keep steering the same course.

Man-Made Evolution - Demise of the Big Tusker

It's taken a century and a half of intensive poaching, but the days of the Big Tusker seem to be at an end.

The world's elephant population has evolved much smaller tusks, half as small as the norm just 150-years ago. The phenomenon has been recorded among both African and Indian elephants. From Environmental News Network:

"Experts believe the rapid evolution of the massive land mammals is due to poaching. Zoologists from Oxford University suggest that ivory poachers, who go for the largest males with the largest tusks, have caused the breeding behaviors of the animals to change rapidly in a short time.

"The largest male African elephants have the largest tusks. These tusks are extremely important in elephant behavior, with the largest tusks usually resulting in more successful intimidation of smaller males or winning fights for female elephants. But when the largest animals are killed, it changes the breeding patterns of the animals. In short, without the largest males for competition, the smaller males with their smaller tusks will breed more successfully, and their offspring will have smaller tusks."

When Your Pals Torture, It's Not Torture

Canada's federal bootlickers, the SHarper government, are falling all over themselves to avoid their pals being called what they are, torturers. From CanWest:

ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it "wrong" and demanding it be rewritten.

"I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department's torture awareness training," said Bernier in a statement.

"It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten," said Bernier.

After making this pronouncement, Maxie swung deftly back to his perch and whiled away the rest of the afternoon tossing his own waste at passing children.

America doesn't torture? Israel doesn't torture?

Let's begin with Israel and this BBC report from February, 2000:

"An official Israeli report has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli security service tortured detainees during the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, between 1988 and 1992.

The report, written five years ago but kept secret until now, said the leadership of the security service Shin Bet knew about the torture but did nothing to stop it.

The report did not detail the torture methods used, but human rights organisations say some detainees died or were left paralysed."

"Most of the violations were not caused by lack of knowledge of the line between what was permitted and what was forbidden, but were committed knowingly," the report said.

"At the Gaza facility, veteran and even senior investigators committed very grave and systematic violations."

So, Maxi-pad, that ought to whet your intellectual appetite on the subject of Israel and torture, if you had the slightest interest in anything beyond whitewashing your government's buddies.

As for the United States? Well we know at least the tip of the iceberg on the waterboarding business. That, Maxi, is also torture - plain and simple just the way you like it. Even former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has just condemned waterboarding as torture because, well because it is dimmo.

Then there's that special rendition business - kidnapping folks and flying them off to sunny destinations where, for a few bags of cash, you can hire people to do your torturing for you. Hey Maxi, remember that guy, Maher Arar? He got done up pretty good, didn't he? We paid him ten million bucks. Why was that again? Oh yeah, I remember now - we paid him because he spent a year in captivity as America's guest being tortured.

There's something really creepy about people like the Harpies who choose to erase the historical record to whitewash the evils of their friends. At the end of the day, they all wind up with the same stench.

The Stupidest Man in Canada

And the winner is... Alberta premier Ed "Special Ed" Stelmach.

Only a man utterly bereft of a scintilla of intellect could fly to Washington, have a special audience with Cardinal His Holiness Cheney, and emerge, his clothes in disarray to announce that Alberta can rest assured, America won't turn off Atabasca's Tar Sands tap.

Gee Ed, are you sure? You got that in writing? Remember to give Dick a "happy ending?"

"We are the No. 1 gas supplier and soon to be the No. 1 oil supplier," Stelmach told the Calgary Herald.

"There's a long-term future not only in supply of oil and natural gas, but I am of the strong opinion there is a long-term future in us supplying the research and the technology that Americans will be looking to our expertise in terms of extracting oil out of shale in the United States."

Hey Ed, word to the wise. Next time you head south for assurances, try to pick someone who's not the most reviled man in his own country and make sure you're talking to someone whose days in office aren't a toss up between a wall calendar and a chronically diseased cardiovascular system. Cheney's toast pal, someone at home should've told you that. In just twelve months the crews will descend, toss every remaining trace of Dick into a hazmat bag, and haul it all off in the middle of a very dark night to a Homeland Security incinerator in Jersey. Don't worry Ed, they'll probably burn the polaroids too.

"Monica Lewinsky's Ex-Boyfriend's Wife for President."

Ross Perot has come out of seclusion, if only to denounce Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Perot recently called Newsweek reporter Jonathon Alter out of the blue to give his first interview in years.

The diminutive Texan wants to settle old scores recalling how McCain called him "nuttier than a fruitcake" in 1992.

"Perot's real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. "There's evidence, evidence, evidence," Perot claims. "McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs."

Other remarks Perot made suggest he's still a tad nutty.

"When I asked about Barack Obama, Perot said he admired his eloquence but thought it "a little odd that we would be less concerned about his background than being a Mormon." Perot was pleasantly surprised when I told him that Obama was a Christian, not a Muslim, and relieved when I informed him that the e-mail Perot (and untold others) received about Obama not respecting the Pledge of Allegiance was a fraud.

Perot isn't a Hillary hater, but he's not a fan either, relating the bumper sticker he received that reads: "Monica Lewinsky's Ex-Boyfriend's Wife for President."

Perot is appalled at the specter of big banks having to borrow from foreigners to stay afloat: "We have to go around the world with a tambourine and a tin cup."

Japan's Strange Notion of Sexual Harassment

Japan is legendary as the country where men routinely grope women in crammed subway and train cars. Well now Japan has identified a new form of sexual harassment - public display of a man's hairy chest. From the Sydney Morning Herald (where else?).

"JR East, the biggest train company in the world, slapped a ban on a poster featuring a man's moderately hairy chest - an image it considered so shocking to Japanese women that it constituted an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment.

"As sexual harassment becomes more of a problem, the standards for displaying posters in public spaces are becoming stricter," a representative of the Morioka branch of JR East instructed the Mainichi Shimbun.

The poster, an advertisement for a 1000-year-old nudity festival where men in loincloths attempt to ward off plague and ensure good harvests, "wasn't just out of line because there was nakedness; the pictures showed things that were particularly unpleasant for women, such as chest hair, and it was decided that showing them things they didn't want to see was sexual harassment".

One woman told the paper that Japanese women loathe chest hair by a 4 to 1 margin.

Afghanistan - Getting Under Everyone's Skin

Western policitians pretty much fall into one of two camps today: those who are relieved they kept their nation's forces out of Afghanistan and those who wish they had.

When career bureaucrat, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates lashed out at NATO this week for not being properly trained for the counterinsurgency role it was a sign of frustration, even exasperation.

The Liberal leader Stephane Dion returned to Canada with a muddled idea, depending on how you interpret his words, that NATO forces should assist Pakistan in the tribal lands although he was vague to the point of meaningless about what that meant. His words naturally set off a wave of controversy.

Maybe Afghanistan has reached the critical mass achieved in Iraq that led US military commanders to bemoan that there were no options, merely varying degrees of bad options. I suspect they all see the same thing but can't bring themselves to say it - we're losing.

The Dutch, who were supposed to conclude their combat assignment this year, have extended to 2010 to save face. We've already extended once, to 2009, but now confront the awful reality that we might have to bear the blame for pulling the plug on the NATO mission if we actually go.

Gates, of course, is saddled with the incompetence and irresponsibility bequeathed to him by his predecessor Rumsfeld and the delusional adventures of Bush/Cheney. He only has to juggle his way through the remaining year but there's still a great risk that "the mission" will come undone before he can make his getaway.

NATO faces a make or break moment when the next summit is held in Bucharest this April. If NATO is going to back the Afghan mission that will have to be written in stone at this summit. So far there's not much sign that will happen.

Asia Times suggests that Gates' frustrations are a reflection of the criticisms in a recent paper written by the US general who commanded forces in Afghanistan from 2003 until 2005, Lt. Gen. David Barno.

He chose to begin his paper devoted to the counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, citing lines by ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest road to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Barno wrote that Afghan people's tolerance for a foreign presence was "a bag of capital [that was] finite and had to be spent slowly and frugally" and, therefore, under his charge US forces took great care to avoid Afghan casualties, detainee abuse, or transgressions in observance of respect to tribal leaders or causing offence to traditional Afghan culture.

According to Barno, the slide began in mid-2005 after he and [Zalmay] Khalilzad were reassigned. Washington then decided to publicly announce that NATO was assuming responsibility for the war and that the US was making a token withdrawal of 2,500 troops.

"Unsurprisingly, this was widely viewed in the region as the first signal that the United States was 'moving for the exits', thus reinforcing long-held doubts about the prospects of sustained American commitment. In my judgement, these public moves have served more than any other US actions since 2001 [the fall of the Taliban] to alter the calculus of both our friends and our adversaries across the region - and not in our favor."

Barno implied NATO messed up the top-notch command structure he created. The result is, "With the advent of NATO military leadership, there is today no single comprehensive strategy to guide the US, NATO, or international effort." Consequently, he says, the unity of purpose - both interagency and international - has suffered and unity of command is fragmented, and tactics have "seemingly reverted to earlier practices such as the aggressive use of airpower".

Barno makes some chilling conclusions. First, he says the "bag of capital" representing the tolerance of Afghan people for foreign forces is diminishing. Second, NATO narrowly focuses on the "20% military dimension" of the war, while ignoring the 80% comprising non-military components. Third, the "center of gravity" of the war is no longer the Afghan people but the "enemy". Fourth, President Hamid Karzai's government is ineffectual "under growing pressure from powerful interests within his administration". Fifth, corruption, crime, poverty and a burgeoning narcotics trade have eroded public confidence in Karzai. Finally, "NATO, the designated heir to an originally popular international effort, is threatened by the prospects of mounting disaffection among the Afghan people."

The worst part of Barno's observations is that he's probably right. He may gild his own performance and overlook the fact that NATO got handed a bag of dirt but his conclusions seem well borne out by the facts. The solution, according to Asia Times, appears to be in reconciliation with the Taliban.

"The heart of the matter is Pashtun alienation. The Taliban represent Pashtun aspirations. As long as Pashtuns are denied their historical role in Kabul, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and Pakistan will remain in turmoil. Musharraf said, "There should be a change of strategy right away. You [NATO] should make political overtures to win the Pashtuns over."

This may also be the raison d'etre of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon's intriguing choice of a Briton as his new special representative. Conceivably, the inscrutable Ban has been told by Washington that Ashdown is just the right man to walk on an upcoming secretive bridge, which will intricately connect New York, Washington, London, Riyadh, Islamabad and Kabul.

The point is, Britain grasps the Pashtun problem. Britain realizes that the induction of US special forces into the Pakistani tribal areas, or the custodianship of Pakistan's nuclear stockpile, or an al-Qaeda takeover in Pakistan isn't quite the issue today.

By any measure Washington blundered in demonizing the Taliban. Despite all the propaganda it's well known that the Taliban weren't supporting al-Qaeda, it was actually the other way around. There's been no sign whatsoever that the Taliban were aware of the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11. Sure they're Islamic fundamentalist nutjobs but that description also fits the Northern Alliance warlords they were fighting until the end. Karzai has no intention of dragging Afghanistan out of fundamentalism.

The Americans have heralded their great success in Iraq in getting the Sunni resistance to turn on the Sunni al-Qaeda terrorists in their midst. There has been some success in that initiative, unquestionably. The Taliban may now be the key to undercutting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan if a way can be found to drive a wedge between the two. We've tried the stick - over and over again - and it hasn't worked. Maybe it's time to see what we can do with a few carrots.

West Africa's Food Crisis

It's not so much that there's a shortage of food but, instead, it's a shortage of money to afford it in the face of rapidly rising food prices.

The UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs reports a crisis looming in West Africa.

"Almost all farming in West Africa is rain-fed, meaning farmers experience an intense burst of activity during the June to November rainy season, when they must grow and sell enough food to see them through until the next year.

By June, many of the poorest families in the region have run out of money and food. The period is known as the “hunger gap” or “lean season” and is usually accompanied by quickly accelerating malnutrition rates as families skip meals and in extreme cases rely on wild foods like weeds, leaves and berries and rubbish for sustenance.

For some families, the lean season starts as early as January or February. Even slight shifts in market prices can have a dramatic impact on peoples’ ability to get through the lean season, as all their reserves and credit are already used up.

The hardest hit people are in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad which are among the poorest countries in the world and together form West Africa’s semi-arid Sahel region. The World Food Programme estimates that there are 1.5 million children under five suffering from under-nutrition in those countries."

“Traders are still buying in as much as possible to hold onto it until the price has doubled or more,” said Salif Sow, regional representative of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) food monitoring group. FEWS NET has recorded rising prices at important markets in northern Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and Benin.

Sow suggested the increase in maize prices could prove to be the most serious factor for the poorest families.

“Maize is what people usually buy during the lean season because that is what is cheapest. This year maize will still be on the market but it is going to be really expensive,” he said.

It's Hard Work - and Drafty Too

Yesterday an elite group of Italy's labour force held a protest and to make their point they kept their clothes on.

Italy's 300 or so nude, artist models have gone on strike. The complain that only one in six has a proper contract, the rest being hired by the hour at roughly 25 euros per. From The Guardian:

Antonella Migliorini, 42, told Italy's La Stampa newspaper: "Our work is not recognised. We pose for eight hours a day and still the colleges treat us like teaching tools.
"We do a difficult job, with a great tradition resting on our shoulders, which requires both imagination and great physical concentration."

She added that being a life model was a "tough, cold job" and that most models who were lucky enough to have a full-time job only made around €900 a month.

An official from the Italian education ministry has agreed to meet with the models.

It's Mardi Gras in Washington

President George w. Bush has just the cure to avert America's looming recession - borrow money. It's the same answer he uses when he wants to wage war without end or let the very richest people in America slip their fair share of taxes - borrow money (just make sure you put it on the little guy's tab). Oh sure it causes big deficits and enormous long-term debt but, hey, that's for the kids to worry about 20 years from now, huh?

So here's the deal. Bush wants to borrow America's way out of recession to the tune of about $145-billion. That would be doled out in the guise of tax "rebates" although the idiocy of purporting to rebate money you don't have isn't being mentioned in the White House or in Congress for that matter. From the New York Times:

“Letting Americans keep more of their own money should increase consumer spending,” the president said, repeating a theme he has embraced time and again during his presidency, although perhaps never when, in the opinion of many analysts, the economy was teetering on the brink of recession.
There was speculation beforehand that the relief package would amount to $800 rebates for individual taxpayers and $1,600 for households. Based on the $140 billion to $145 billion range of the entire package, it appeared that the rebates would not exceed $800 and $1,600.

The president called again for Congress to make permanent the tax cuts that were enacted several years ago and are to expire in the next three years. Otherwise, he said, there will be such uncertainty that jobs and economic growth will be jeopardized. But the president did not insist on getting his way as a condition of negotiations on short-term relief.

Letting Americans keep more of their own money? No, chum, you're doling out money you're borrowing in their name, loans a lot of them couldn't get right now. All you're giving them is some cash and an equivalent in interest-bearing debt - leaving aside the question of how the working and middle class are going to repay that faux largesse to be sorted out by another government at another time. Meanwhile, let's enshrine those tax cuts for the rich. They deserve them after all, they're rich aren't they?

The Coherence Vacuum

These days the leaders of Canada's two top parties - and no, that doesn't include the NDP - are eager to avoid having to set actual policy. With their support wobbling like jello in the low to mid-30's, it's as though each sees the way forward as something of a minefield where one mistep could be fatal.

Harper has done almost nothing of consequence this past session of parliament save to lower the GST by one point. He doesn't dare bring out his social conservative agenda for fear he might hand the Liberals a solid majority by default. He talks about global warming and greenhouse gas curbs but ducks and weaves his way around any concrete action. He even dodges Afghanistan, the one issue where his opinions are fixed.

Then there's Stephane Dion, the man most responsible for Harper maintaining even a slim lead in the polls. He says he's green but won't say what that means in terms of the Athabasca Tar Sands and its pending expansion. He says he wants Canada out of its combat role in Afghanistan but wants NATO to somehow kick ass inside Pakistan. He too seems to have less to offer by the day.

Nobody has a coherent policy save, perhaps, for Smilin' Jack, the guy whose greatest ambition is to advance out of the political cellar. Safe from the prospect of ever having to govern, Layton is the very image of clarity and decisiveness. Policies are wonderful things when you'll never have to enact any of them. Wind and noise, that's all there is to Jack Layton.

Mr. Layton's posturing, however insincere and opportunistic, lets neither Dion nor Harper off the hook for failing to express coherent, effective and acceptable policies of their own.

My guess is that Harper truly doesn't want to act. He certainly doesn't want to betray his ideological fellows by being responsible for withdrawal of the Canadian contingent in Kandahar. That may account for the deft way in which he backed Canada into a "too late to leave" corner. It may be duplicitous, manipulative, even despicable but it's been done and, for the far right, it is at least a temporary victory.

On global warming and carbon emission reductions, I suspect that Harper only feigns his conversion to belief. He probably still sees the potential advantages of also backing Canada into a deadlock where economic growth is only notionally balanced against emissions. After all, when it comes to carbon curbs, it's a charlatan's paradise. That's not to say he won't set some emission reduction targets. He will. Yet they'll likely be little more than "intensity based" tomfoolery, mere window dressing.

In these things, Harper will be aided and abetted by Stephane Dion. The well-intentioned but timid Mr. Dion has shown that he's unwilling to genuinely press Harper because that would require him to spell out clear and meaningful policies of his own. That is a risk only to be taken by someone who can capture the public's imagination, confidence and support. That is the work of a leader of a nation, not a mere party boss.

There's talk of Mr. Dion triggering an election. Maybe that's just what we need to get the long overdue debate on so many important issues.

Is Bilingualism Dion's Problem?

Stephane Dion's ability to communicate in English isn't poor, it's awful. His skills in the first language of most Canadians are awkward and halting. He struggles to find the correct word. Sometimes he says things he later has to retract.

On Afghanistan, Dion clearly talked about NATO getting involved in Pakistan. He now says he didn't mean military action inside Pakistan but that certainly was the impression he gave in his comments. That's also the way the government of Pakistan took Mr. Dion's words, calling his suggestion "irrational."

Pakistan's High Commission released a scathing rebuke. "We are dismayed by the statement of the leader of Opposition. It shows a lack of understanding of the ground realities."

Mr. Dion does not connect with the Canadian people, not even in his home province. He trails Harper and Layton by a large margin in polls.

At this point, the Liberal Party should not expect to form a government under this leader. This is one point on which the party and the Canadian people are seriously at odds.


The Reuters news service is running a story this morning claiming that the Liberals are eyeing an election and claiming that their chances of ousting Harper have improved. Why not? Let's get it over with. Stephane Dion has had plenty of time to establish himself as a leader in the eyes of the Canadian voter. Might as well let them have their say.

What's In a Name? Plenty and We Need to Understand That.

We're just now finally coming to grips with the realities of Afghanistan's ethnic melange but we also need to understand what's next door, in Pakistan. The name gives it away.

The name of the country was crafted by a bunch of university students at England's Cambridge. It's an acronym. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind, and the "tan," they say, for Baluchistan.

The country is essentially run by and for the military which is predominantly Punjabi. Benazir Bhutto and her ancestors belonged to the Sindhs. The Pashtun are blended into the Afghans and the Balochs are, of course, the tribesmen of the part of Balochistan that Pakistan shares with Afghanistan. Out of those five groups, the Punjabis and Sindhs vie for power. The others - Kashmiri, Pashtun and Baloch are beset by a variety of insurgents, terrorists and nationalist secessionists.

You don't just go into one part of Pakistan to clean up insurgencies. You effectively take one side against one or more or even all of the others. If the Punjabis can't bring order and security to the Baloch and Pashtun tribal lands, just what do we think NATO is going to accomplish? There's a reason the Punjabi-run military keeps trying to negotiate ceasefires with these tribes.

So let's drop the fanciful notions of bringing a little Western "know how" to sort out the tribal lands once and for all. That place isn't like southern Afghanistan with its level, wide open spaces and largely passive farmers. The tribal lands are extremely rugged, mountainous territory. It's the sort of terrain that doesn't lend itself to armoured vehicles, artillery and air support, the high tech firepower we so depend upon. In fact it's the sort of place where tanks and helicopters go to die.

By the way, another point of misunderstanding I've noticed popping up concerns Pakistan's military. Some suggest they just need a few extra soldiers from NATO to drive the Taliban out of their country. Think again.

The Pakistani military consists of 602,000 active duty personnel. Add in the coast guard and paramilitaries and it just clears 1,000,000 in total. They're all volunteers and they make up the 7th largest military in the world. They also have a reputation as very capable fighters. That's the military that hasn't been able to tame the tribal lands.

The Mighty Yangtze Humbled

Asia's longest river, the Yangtze, has fallen to its lowest level in 142 years. Prolonged drought is blamed for the drop which has disrupted drinking supplies, stranded ships and imperilled already endangered species of marine life. Fron the Sydney Morning Herald:

The scale of the problem was revealed by the Yangtze Water Resources Commission in a report on the Xinhua news agency's website. It said that the Hankou hydrological centre near Wuhan city found the river's depth had fallen to its lowest level in 142 years.

The measurement confirmed fears raised in recent weeks by the appearance of islands and mudflats not normally seen at this time of year. Local farmers reported far more ships than usual being trapped in unnavigable shallow waters.

Jianli county is among the areas suffering water shortages. Officials say the problem has grown worse in the past 10 years, raising concerns of a link to climate change.

"Before 1996, we were short of water for three months of the year, but now there are only three months when we can use water as normal," Wu Chunping, the vice-manager of Jianli county's water utility, said

Along the endangered animals likely to be affected are the finless porpoise and the Chinese sturgeon, which returns to the sea at this time of year.

With the Yangtze three times as crowded with traffic as the Mississippi, conservationists fear the animals will be torn up by boat propellers or contaminated by more concentrated pollution from the 9000 chemical plants along the Yangtze.

Mr. Dion's Creep

A common feature of failed counterinsurgency warfare is the eventual drift into "mission creep."

Mission creep is the temptation when the original mission isn't working to either expand the initial commitment or move on to an even bigger mission. It happens - all too often - and it almost always winds up the same way, in failure.

Vietnam is the classic example of mission creep. America originally sent in military advisors to work with the South Vietnamese forces. Then that progressed into combat formations with a massive supporting effort from the US Air Force and US Navy. Carrier battle groups lined up off the North Vietnamese coast. Bombers flying in from Thailand and Guam. Air war over North Vietnam. Carpet bombing in Laos. Invasion of Cambodia. Eventually just under 600,000 US soldiers in South Vietnam. And it all ended with helicopters flying off the rooftop of a hastily abandoned American embassy. What began with Eisenhower ended with Nixon/Ford, claiming the lives of 50,000 Americans on the battlefield and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, the countrysides still littered with mines and unexploded ordinance and the generational scourge of Agent Orange. All for a little country that, at the end of the day, really didn't matter very much at all.

Now Stephane Dion has concluded that NATO's efforts in Afghanistan are probably doomed to failure without taking the fight to the insurgent and terrorist strongholds inside Pakistan's tribal lands. He's probably right.

Unfortunately Mr. Dion has the same blinkered vision that Richard Nixon had when he authorized the secret invasion of Cambodia. Neither of them realized that they were addressing but one of several fatal flaws. Nixon thought he would destroy North Vietnam's sanctuary infrastructure in Cambodia and eliminate the threat to the south coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. It didn't work for Nixon and the same thinking won't work for Dion and NATO either.

At best - at the very best - you can staunch the flow of the insurgency temporarily but only temporarily. Much as I hate this hackneyed phrase, "we have all the watches, but they have all the time." Time is not on our side. It is on theirs. They're the home team, not us. It's Year Six of this fumbled effort and that means that Year One options are long foreclosed. If there was ever a time for a military operation to sweep the tribal lands it was at the outset before the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to get their infrastructure established there and cement their alliances with the locals. They haven't survived this long by being fools. They have almost certainly prepared a long time ago for the possibility of the arrival of westerners in the tribal lands.

Speaking of the locals, the Pashtun and Baloch tribesmen of the border regions, what sort of reaction do we expect from them? Do we think they haven't been watching where this war has gone these past six years? Do we think they're going to be any more welcoming to us than they have been to the Pakstani army in recent years or to the British armies of the past? If an infidel force shows up, even with the support of the Pakistani army, what might that do to the simmering Baloch secessionist movement, how might that spread and, in turn, destabilize Islamabad?

Six years, six lost years and what have we learned? We ought to have learned that counterinsurgency warfare cannot be fought "on the cheap." We ought to have learned that but we haven't. We don't even have but a fraction of the force needed to secure Kandahar province so we have to send our soldiers out on patrols, trolling for IEDs. NATO cannot maintain the existing force structure. If it could, it would be able to relieve us with another nation's soldiers but it can't and it won't.

There's no appetite among the NATO membership for the existing war so where are we going to conjure up support for a new and wider war, one that could have repercussions throughout the region that we can't even begin to contemplate much less hope to control?

Yesterday US Defence Secretary Robert Gates stirred up a hornets' nest by slagging NATO forces as not up to the job of counterinsurgency warfare. Guess what? He's right. He's right except that he's disingenuous if he doesn't include his own forces in that description. That's why his own forces haven't laid their hands on bin Laden in six years. That's why the Taliban has come back, resurgent. That's why al-Qaeda has morphed into a much harder target spread throughout the Islamic world, Europe and even North America. That's why the bulk of his own army languishes, worn out, in Iraq.

Mister Dion may be right, the key to the future of Afghanistan may depend on what happens across the border in Pakistan but that is just one issue that will ultimately dictate what fate befalls Afghanistan, just one key.

America's Media - Still Cheney's Lapdog

The past six years have been perhaps the darkest in the history of American journalism. Time and again the networks and print jockeys have fallen on bended knee, opened wide and swallowed whatever incredulous bucket of swill was chucked their way. Some have been gullible, some stupid, some cowed into unquestioning servitude, some have just been well-rewarded collaborators.

There was reason to hope that, after the Iraq WMD scam, the American media would find their feet again and stand up. Forget it.

Historian and US national security policy analyst Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reveals how the media were all too willing dupes for a planted story about Iranian threats in the Persian Gulf:

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself.

Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a navy production, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three US warships occurred very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. No information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the US Navy by any stretch of the imagination."

By January 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell.

The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Captain David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Cosgriff, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on January 7. A week later, Commander Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire".

By any measure it's not sage these days to take much of what comes out of the American media, or their like-minded allies here in Canada, at face value. They've simply allowed themselves - whether out of fear or gullibility, coercion or reward - to become full-fledged partners in a massive and powerful propaganda machine.

You and Whose Army, Stephane?

Stephane Dion says if Pakistan won't clean the insurgents and terrorists out of its ungovernable tribal areas, NATO forces should go in and do it for them.

Say what?

This is what the National Spot claims Dion said: "We are going to have to discuss that very actively if they (the Pakistanis) are not able to deal with it on their own. We could consider that option with the NATO forces in order to help Pakistan help us pacify Afghanistan."

At the same time Dion proposed NATO take on a mission in Pakistan far tougher than the one it's currently bungling in Afghanistan, the Liberal leader reiterated that he wants Canadian troops out of their Kandahar combat mission very soon.

Is this guy serious? Just where does Dion think NATO is going to conjure up the masses of troops that would be needed to attempt to conquer and occupy Pakistan's tribal lands? Dion seems to think the answer is easy.

"For the mission to succeed, NATO must apply the principle of rotation. When a country is in the most difficult combat mission during three years, there must be a time for rotation," he said.

Memo to Stephane: 1. NATO doesn't have any soldiers available to rotate in to relieve us in Kandahar. The "principle of rotation" is nothing more than fantasy. 2. If NATO can't muster an effective troop level to secure Afghanistan, there's not one chance in hell it would be able to amass a force several times that large to move on Pakistan's tribal lands.

Sorry, Dion supporters but this performance was simply embarassing. If we're going to get rid of Stephen Harper, we're going to need a much better leader than this.

Pull The Other One

The George Bush White House hasn't been known for saving US taxpayers' money but that's not always the case.

Take the tape backup system meant to preserve records, including White House e-mails, in case of a disaster. Well the White House spared the taxpayers a few thousand dollars by recycling those tapes right up until 2003. Now it was just coincidence, a pure fluke, that in reusing those tapes White House e-mails pertaining to the Valerie Plame scandal disappeared - gone forever. Oopsie! Won't happen again. Promise.

From the Washington Post:

The back-ups are meant to preserve records in case of a disaster. They also serve a role in ensuring that federal record-keeping laws are met, according to administration officials and records management experts. Two separate statutes require the White House to preserve federal or presidential records.
The prospects for recovering data that has been overwritten is uncertain, especially if the tapes were re-recorded numerous times, according to technology experts.

In a court affidavit filed shortly before midnight Tuesday, the official in charge of overseeing White House computer systems said that recycling, or overwriting, the backup tapes was "consistent with industry best practices related to tape media management."

But Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the Office of Administration, also said the White House stopped the practice in October 2003 and that back-ups made since then have been preserved.

Payton did not explain in her sworn statement why the White House stopped recycling its back-up tapes. She also said that White House officials have not determined whether e-mail also is missing from 2003 to 2005.

"At this stage, this office does not know if any emails were not properly preserved in the archiving process" during that time, Payton said. "We are continuing our efforts."

Hey, c'mon, we're talking about George Bush and Dick Cheney here - the most powerful man in America and his trained chimp. You don't think they'd pull an underhanded stunt like erasing 18-minutes of White House tapes, do you? Oh, I forgot, that was the other crook.

Bush Clears US Navy to Keep Blasting Sonars

US Weasel-in-Chief, George w. Bush, used his middle eastern tour to quietly sign an order exempting the US Navy from an environmental law that would have restricted it from using submarine sonars off the California coast.

From The Guardian:

The Navy training exercises, including the use of sonar, "are in the paramount interest of the United States'' and its national security, Bush said in a memorandum.

"This exemption will enable the Navy to train effectively and to certify carrier and expeditionary strike groups for deployment in support of worldwide operational and combat activities, which are essential to national security,'' the memo said.

The decision drew immediate criticism from environmentalists who had fought to stop the Navy's sonar training.

"The president's action is an attack on the rule of law,'' said Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. ``By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the president is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission and a ruling by the federal court."

NATO Not Good Enough for Afghanistan - US Defence Secretary

According to US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, NATO troops don't cut it when it comes to fighting insurgents in Afghanistan. From The Guardian:

Gates told the Los Angeles Times: "I'm worried we're deploying [military advisers] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations."

He added: "Most of the European forces, Nato forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap," a reference to the German region where a Soviet land invasion of western Europe was regarded as most likely.

Gates' remarks caught NATO secretary general Scheffer flat footed as usual. "I'm surprised because I have no indication - and neither has the military chain of command - that any country or countries are not exercising their tasks to the highest levels."

Gates later backpedalled furiously, saying he wasn't referring to NATO forces actually in Afghanistan - Brits, Canadians, Dutch, Estonians and Czechs. He said he was referring to NATO members at large.

"However, Gates' remarks reflect increasing tension and frustration within Nato about how to cope with the Taliban insurgency.

Whatever the concerns expressed by Gates, British military commanders have themselves accused the US of heavy-handed tactics, including aerial bombing - which frequently leads to civilian casualties - and have suggested that is the result of America's lack of experience in counter-insurgency warfare.

In turn, US commanders in Afghanistan have recently criticised British plans to support local militia and civil defence forces in the south of the country.

"One way forward is to increase our support for community defence initiatives, where local volunteers are recruited to defend homes and families modelled on traditional Afghan arbakai [village militias]," Gordon Brown told the Commons last month.

Gen Dan McNeill, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, warned that the plan could fuel insurgency."

One thing is clear, if sanctimonious hypocrisy could defeat the Taliban, Rumsfeld and Gates would have had Afghanistan wrapped up years ago.

UPDATE:

Gates might have tried to save his backside by backpeddalling but the Dutch aren't buying it. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the US ambassador to the Netherlands has been hauled onto the carpet to answer for the defence secretary's remarks:

"We do not recognise ourselves in the image conjured" by Gates, Dutch Defence Secretary Eimert van Middelkoop told reporters.

He argued that Dutch troops had acted with experience and professionalism.

At present, nearly 1,665 Dutch soldiers are deployed in Uruzgan in southern Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)."

Whaling Activists Held Hostage

In the Antarctic Ocean yesterday two Sea Shepherd activists boarded a Japanese whaling ship. They were there to inform the Japanese their whaling was illegal and to demand the ships left the hunting grounds.

The Japanese crew responded by seizing the activists and locking them up. Sea Shepherd claims the pair were first lashed to the ship's mast for two hours before being taken below.

Australia, which claims jurisdiction over these waters, has contacted Japan demanding that the activists be released and, as of yesterday, it seemed they would be returned to their own ship.

Now, it turns out, the Sea Shepherd crewmembers are being held hostage. Captain Paul Watson told Reuters that the Japanese have said they won't release the activists until the get Watson's undertaking not to use his ship against them (ramming) and to keep the Sea Shepherd vessel at least 10 nautical miles distant at all times.

Feed A Man a Fish... Teach a Man to Fish... Take Away His Fish

Oh hell, kumbaya, here goes - feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. But what if you then go one step further and take away that man 's fish altogether?

In a number of ways, that's happening right now in Africa. Along the west coast of Africa, European, Asian and other fishing fleets are emptying the seas. The Euros put the blame on corrupt African officials who oversell fishing quotas in their territorial waters - as though blame was going to relieve the people of this region of the abrupt end of their fish supply. This overfishing is now blamed for an exodus of migrants heading north from West Africa.

Another way we're screwing these people up is garden-variety, climate change. They put out about as little greenhouse gas as any people on the planet but they get the most severe impacts. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, another centre of massive northern migration.

Global warming brings a brand new meaning to the old saw about how "it never rains but it pours." It never rains - until it pours. Few know the meaning of this better than the people of Zimbabwe. Already bearing the scourge of a maniacal tryrant, Robert Mugabe, and his ZANU-PF brigands, these folks have also endured a 6-year drought that crippled their agriculture. That drought ended this year.

The deluge arrived in December, the wettest month Zimbabwe has experienced in 127-years. At the end of the month the government declared a state of disaster and, in Zimbabwe, conditions have to get borderline apocalyptic to warrant a disaster declaration. From the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office:

"Farmers in flood-affected districts, who had planted early, trying to take advantage of the predicted good rains, have seen their crops drowned, along with hopes of a marketable surplus.

"We prayed for the rains but the rains have now caused us pain and suffering," said a despairing Esther Chiwodza, a communal farmer in the low-lying district of Chiredzi in Midlands Province.

She invested in seeds and fertiliser and planted early in October. "All the crops I spent my entire savings on have been washed away and there is no prospect of saving any crops, as the whole fields are waterlogged and the remaining crops will not survive the current rains."

Neighbours lost livestock and homes collapsed. "After the rainy season is over everyone in my village will become a candidate for food aid, and if the donor agencies do not come we will starve to death," said Chiwodza."

Not all regions of Zimbabwe have been as hard hit. Some of the best farmland in northern areas has, so far, escaped flooding. And, while the deluge may wipe out crops in the rest, the excessive rains are expected to eventually restore the parched earth for grazing.

The world's food supply is coming under unprecedented stresses and global warming is just one cause. Another is the diversion of grain stocks, particularly corn, from food into biofuel. According to the Financial Post, corn prices have shot up 44% over the past 15-months. That's an enormous hit for poorer nations with populations dependent on corn for sustenance, countries as nearby as Mexico.

And then there are the new gorillas joining the rest bouncing around the room - China and India. FP quotes Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group as warning of a global food catastrophe that's due to hit later this year:

"It's not a matter of if, but when," he warned investors. "It's going to hit this year hard."

Mr. Coxe said the sharp rise in raw food prices in the past year will intensify in the next few years amid increased demand for meat and dairy products from the growing middle classes of countries such as China and India as well as heavy demand from the biofuels industry.

"The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically," he said.

Let's get this straight. The "greatest challenge" to the world is to do whatever it takes to ensure that the emerging Chinese and Indian middle class can eat the way our middle class does?

Mr. Coxe said crop yields around the world need to increase to something close to what is achieved in the state of Illinois, which produces over 200 corn bushes an acre compared with an average 30 bushes an acre in the rest of the world.
"That will be done with more fertilizer, with genetically modified seeds, and with advanced machinery and technology," he said.

Sounds like a piece of cake. A few more bags of fertilizer, man-made seeds and some state of the art machinery and - bingo. Curious that Mr. Coxe hasn't factored in the spreading drought and deluge pattern or the rapid exhaustion of groundwater reserves worldwide in his calculations of ramping up production of one of the most water-intensive crops of all.

Dion Undercut by Afghan Ambassador

If Stephane Dion thought he was able to have a private conversation with Afghan president Karzai in Kabul, Afghanistan's ambassador to Canada set him straight on that.

According to the Toronto Star, Ambassador Omar Samad reports that Karzai told Dion that "calls by the federal Liberals for a new, non-combat role for Canadian troops in Afghanistan could undo the gains made so far and mean the sacrifices made by slain soldiers have been in vain."

"This type of threat, in the form of terrorism and extremism, needs to be dealt with directly and head-on. That point had been made by the president."

After his meeting on Saturday, Dion said Karzai would "welcome" whatever role Canada plays in rebuilding his troubled country even if it's not a combat mission.

Samad didn't indicate when Karzai intends to sling his drug baron brother's ass in jail or, for that matter, any of the other drug lords Karzai is dependent upon, the very people whose opium industry funds the insurgency. Then there's the corruption and compromise that undermines the Afgan government and leaves Karzai, in effect, the mayor of Kabul. If Samad and Karzai want to find something that "needs to be dealt with directly and head-on" they can begin by taking a real close look at themselves.

How Do You Rebate Money You Don't Have?

The US economy is either in a recession or teetering on the edge of one. Every leading American paper, even the real right wingers, forecasts the country will be in a hard recession come summer in any case.

Congress knows what's happening, so does the White House. That's led them both to scramble about looking for ways to stimulate economic activity. Even Bush, after having spent the first seven years of his presidency catering to the "Haves and the Have-Mores" now claims to see the need to help working and middle-class Americans (as an aside, since when has the middle-class not actually been made up of working people just with slightly larger paycheques?).

Suddenly there's talk about tax rebates for the lowly working folk. Rebates? Surely the notion of a rebate implies the return of something but what if there's nothing to return? A government mired in debt and sitting atop other layers of government mired in debt is already thoroughly in the hole. To rebate money to the taxpaying class the feds will have to borrow money on the workers' behalf that the taxpaying workers will have to repay along with interest at some point in the future unless they manage to pawn that little bag of nastiness off onto their kids and grandkids.

Bear in mind that those talking about rebates are also fully intent on making permanent Bush's tax cuts for the rich and continuing the bottomless money pit called the Iraq war. Their idea of economic stimulus is to come up with ways to make their government even more indebted than it already is.

And these are supposed conservatives. What ever happened to the "conserve" part?

Your Privacy Up In Smoke

It's called the International Information Consortium and Canada's part of it. It's planning the free flow of biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information across network linking the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The US designed programme is called "Server In The Sky." There's not much information to be found about IIC but it's already creating concerns about the wholesale loss of privacy. From The Guardian:

The plan will make groups anxious to safeguard personal privacy question how much access to UK databases is granted to foreign law enforcement agencies. There will also be concern over security, particularly after embarrassing data losses within the UK, and accuracy: in one case, an arrest for a terror offence by US investigators used what turned out to be misidentified fingerprint matches.

The FBI told the Guardian: "Server in the Sky is an FBI initiative designed to foster the advanced search and exchange of biometric information on a global scale. While it is currently in the concept and design stages, once complete it will provide a technical forum for member nations to submit biometric search requests to other nations. It will maintain a core holding of the world's 'worst of the worst' individuals. Any identifications of these people will be sent as a priority message to the requesting nation."

In theory, Sky Server makes a lot of sense. What's missing, as you might expect, is any discussion of how information sharing will be regulated to preserve the privacy of ordinary citizens against the whim of those operating the system. With rapid advances in biometrics technology, the day isn't far off where we may all be recognizable and we won't be needing bar codes tattooed on our foreheads either.

Militants Biting the Hand that Fed Them

Many of the violent events of the past several decades have come in the form of "blowback." It's a term that describes the potentially deadly plume of flame that blasts out of the backend when a shoulder-mounted rocket is fired. If you're not careful, your own weapon can inadvertently kill you.

The al-Qaeda movement is blowback. The progeny of the United States and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency, al-Qaeda was trained, equipped and funded to help drive the Soviet forces out of Afghanistan. Afterward al-Qaeda turned on its American benefactors and ever since then Rudy Guiliani has had 9/11 Tourette Syndrome.

Outfits like this are risky but that hasn't stopped Pakistan's ISI from continuing to play the game, especially using the militants to block Afghani collaboration with India.

Now even the Pakistanis are reeling from blowback. From the New York Times:

"Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto."

Does this mean that Pakistan, its military and the ISI are finally going to turn on the militants? Maybe but I suspect they're as likely to wind up with some form of fresh accommodation involving the tribal lands adjacent to Afghanistan. The ISI has practised duplicity on a level that would make Machiavelli jealous and it's difficult to imagine that agency going "straight" anytime soon.

Just As Terrific As Last Year's Steak!

The US Food and Drug Administration has declared food from cloned animals fit for human consumption. Think about that, eating the same steer - year after year after year.

The ruling allows meat and dairy products from clones of prize animals to be stocked on supermarket shelves.

“Following extensive review, the risk assessment did not identify any unique risks for human food from cattle, swine or goat clones, and concluded that there is sufficient information to determine that food from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally bred counterparts," the agency said in a statement.

The industry's plans are to use clones of prize animals as breeding stock to produce animals for slaughter and human consumption. The idea is meeting considerable consumer and retailer resistance. Some stores have said they'll not stock meat or dairy products that come from cloned stock.

Science races on. Today's decision comes just ten years after Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was created.

The Antarctic Ocean Heats Up - Sea Shepherd vesus Japanese Whalers

The latest run-in between Japanese whalers and anti-whaling Sea Shepherd activists has been nothing if not dramatic.

Two of the Sea Shepherd crew - an Australian and a Briton - were grabbed as they attempted to board the Japanese whaler. A report from The Times of London claims the two were mistreated:

"The incarceration of Giles Lane and Benjamin Potts, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, follows their attempts to board the Yushin Maru No 2 — a vessel engaged on Japan’s hugely controversial “scientific” pursuit of minke and fin whales.

According to their fellow activists, watching from a helicopter, the two men endured a two-hour ordeal during which they were strapped to the mast of the Japanese vessel.
With the ship now steaming away, Paul Watson, the captain of the protestors’ flagship, the Steve Irwin, told The Times that it was now “very hard to imagine getting our two missing crew members back any time soon”. He called on the Governments of Britain and Australia to demand the immediate return of its citizens."

Hours earlier an Australian court ruled Japan's whale hunt illegal and ordered the ships to leave the Antarctic hunting grounds.

Archbishop Ernie in Hot Water Again

America's latest hot pants Holy Roller, Archbishop Ernie Paulk of Atlanta's Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church is facing a perjury charge for allegedly lying about his philandering.

According to the Associated Press, Ernie is accused of lying for saying that he only had sex outside of marriage with one woman. Seems there was more than one.

"Former church employee Mona Brewer is suing Paulk, his brother and the church on allegations that Paulk manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only path to salvation. In a 2006 deposition stemming from the lawsuit, the archbishop said under oath that the only woman he had ever had sex with outside of his marriage was Brewer.

But the results of a court-ordered paternity test revealed in October that Paulk is the biological father of his brother's son, D.E. Paulk, who is now head pastor at the church. As part of Brewer's lawsuit, eight women have given sworn depositions that they were coerced into sexual relationships with Earl Paulk.

A judge ordered the paternity test at the request of the Cobb County district attorney's office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. District Attorney Pat Head declined to comment when reached at his home Monday night.

Paulk and his brother, Don, have been hit with lawsuits from former members alleging they were coerced into sexual affairs, but this is the first time criminal charges have been filed against the archbishop."

Don, of course, is the legal father of D.E. or Donnie Earl Paulk, the current head pastor. He's just not his son's biological father, an honour claimed by his brother. Keeping this straight is giving me a headache. Your uncle is your dad so does that make your dad your uncle? Now there's eight more women? Earl, when did you find time for preaching?

Wringing In The New Year

In a debt-ridden, import-addicted, consumer-driven economy, any cut in consumer spending can be the economic equivalent of an aneurism. This is the very scenario that appears to be developing in the United States just as the president and congress try to come to grips with the aftershocks of the credit crunch resulting from the subprime mortgage meltdown.

About the only debate in the business news is whether America is already in a recession or on the eve of one. From the New York Times:

"Strong evidence is emerging that consumer spending, a bulwark against recession over the last year even as energy prices surged and the housing market sputtered, has begun to slow sharply at every level of the American economy, from the working class to the wealthy.

The abrupt pullback raises the possibility that the country may be experiencing a rare decline in personal consumption, not just a slower rate of growth. Such a decline would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.

There are mounting anecdotal signs that beginning in December Americans cut back significantly on personal consumption, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy.

And consumer confidence, an important barometer of economic health, has plunged. Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, says consumer satisfaction with the economy has reached a 15-year low, according to the firm’s polling.

Even wealthier consumers, who were seen as invulnerable to rising gasoline prices and falling home values, are feeling the squeeze.

Even in tough economic times Americans rarely reduce their consumption, preferring instead to slow the growth in their spending. Since 1980, they have cut spending in only five quarters — a total of 15 months — most of them in the depths of a recession. The 2001 recession passed without a cutback in consumer spending.

Fresh evidence of a pullback is pouring in from many quarters as Americans confront the triple threats of higher energy costs, falling home prices and a volatile stock market.

Perhaps the strongest barometer over the last 30 days is the performance of the country’s big chain stores. December turned out to be a blood bath for retailers at every rung on the economic ladder, with sales for the month growing at the slowest rate in seven years.

But it is the trouble at the highest reaches of retailing that has economists most worried about a recession. Over the last year, even as low-wage and middle-income consumers have cut back, the wealthy have spent freely, keeping high-end chains insulated from the economic turbulence.

That started to change in December, as shoppers held off on buying $300 designer shoes and $500 dresses. For example, store sales fell 4 percent at Nordstrom, the high-end department store.

A "made in America" recession would be felt globally throughout the developed world, probably in Canada as much as anywhere. This time, however, the effects may be softened by sustained, strong growth in the 7% range in the developing world which may offset some loss of trade to the United States.

Conservative Lead Evaporates - Again

Given the unreliability of polls, let's call it a statistical tie. After supposedly being up on the Libs by 7% over the Christmas holiday, Ipsos-Reid reports the Conservatives have now fallen to two points behind. Ipsos' tally - Libs 35%, Cons 33%.

The poll was conducted January 8-10, well before Harpo's aides called Danny Williams a liar.

Gee, with talent like Harper, Baird, Clement, O'Connor, Ambrose, MacKay and Flaherty, it's hard to understand why these folks aren't riding a comfortable majority. Maybe it's because we still remember the last majority Conservative prime minister. Then again, so does Harper.

Here We Go Again, Bush on the Rampage!

President George w. Bush isn't one to let intelligence (his own limited supply or anyone else's) get in his way. It sure didn't stop him in his obsessive quest to conquer Iraq.

The latest Newsweek reports that Bush isn't about to let a bothersome National Intelligence Estimate on Iran get in his way now either.

"...in private conversations with Israeli prime minister Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

Bush's behind-the-scenes assurances may help to quiet a rising chorus of voices inside Israel's defense community that are calling for unilateral military action against Iran. Olmert, asked by NEWSWEEK after Bush's departure on Friday whether he felt reassured, replied: "I am very happy." A source close to the Israeli leader said Bush first briefed Olmert about the intelligence estimate a week before it was published, during talks in Washington that preceded the Annapolis peace conference in November. According to the source, who also refused to be named discussing the issue, Bush told Olmert he was uncomfortable with the findings and seemed almost apologetic."

"Bush's national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, told reporters in Jerusalem that Bush had only said to Olmert privately what he's already said publicly, which is that he believes Iran remains "a threat" no matter what the NIE says. But the president may be trying to tell his allies something more: that he thinks the document is a dead letter."

Writing Internal Combustion's Obituary

The reign the internal combustion engine is drawing to a close.

That's not from Greenpeace or the IPCC or some loonie lefty. It's straight from the mouth of Rick Wagoner, chairman and CEO of General Motors. From the Sydney Morning Herald reporting from the Detroit Motor Show:

In a stunning announcement at the opening of the Detroit motor show, Rick Wagoner, GM's chairman and chief executive, also said ethanol was an "important interim solution" to the world's demand for oil, until battery technology improved to give electric cars the same driving range as petrol-powered cars.

Mr Wagoner cited US Department of Energy figures which show the world is consuming roughly 1000 barrels of oil every second of the day, and yet demand for oil is likely to increase by 70 per cent over the next 20 years. Some experts believe the supply of oil peaked in 2006.

The remaining oil reserves are deeper below the Earth's surface and therefore more costly to mine and refine.

"There is no doubt demand for oil is outpacing supply at a rapid pace, and has been for some time now," Mr Wagoner said. "As a business necessity and an obligation to society we need to develop alternative sources of propulsion."

He added: "So, are electrically driven vehicles the answer for the mid- and long-term? Yes, for sure. But … we need something else to significantly reduce our reliance on petroleum in the interim."

GM is so convinced about ethanol it has signed an agreement with a supplier that claims to have come up with a way of producing ethanol that is cheaper and more efficient than refining oil. The supplier claims it can produce ethanol from "almost any material" such as farm waste, municipal waste, discarded plastics - even old tyres.

Shattering the Myth of Homo Economicus

No college economics course would be complete without Homo Economicus. He's the the rational, self-maximizing and efficient human onto whose frame many economics principles are draped.

There's one problem - we're not him.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

Surprisingly -- stunningly, in fact -- research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?

This result is one among thousands of experiments in behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and evolutionary economics conclusively demonstrating that we are every bit as irrational when it comes to money as we are in most other aspects of our lives. In this case, relative social ranking trumps absolute financial status. Here's a related thought experiment. Would you rather be A or B?

A is waiting in line at a movie theater. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that as he is the 100,000th customer of the theater, he has just won $100.

B is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him wins $1,000 for being the 1-millionth customer of the theater. Mr. B wins $150.

Amazingly, most people said that they would prefer to be A. In other words, they would rather forgo $50 in order to alleviate the feeling of regret that comes with not winning the thousand bucks. Essentially, they were willing to pay $50 for regret therapy."

We're entering an era when a lot of classical economic truisms developed in the 40s and 50s and learned by rote by generations of college kids ever since are being challenged and disproved. The most remarkable thing is that it's taken so many decades to begin noticing the obvious. Bringing economics theorems back into the realm of reality is a breakthrough that's long overdue.

When Exit Polls Matter.

Exit polls seem a lot more important when you're looking at some other country's elections.

The Washington-based International Republican Institute conducted exit polls that are said to show that Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki suffered a resounding defeat in last month's disputed election. From McClatchey Newspapers:

"Opposition leader Raila Odinga led Kibaki by roughly 8 percentage points in the poll, which surveyed voters as they left polling places during the election Dec. 27, according to one senior Western official who's seen the data, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. That's a sharp departure from the results that Kenyan election officials certified, which gave Kibaki a winning margin of 231,728 votes over Odinga, about 3 percentage points.
U.S. and European observers have criticized the official results, which came after long, unexplained delays in counting the votes, primarily from Kibaki strongholds. Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said over the weekend that there were "serious irregularities in the vote tallying, which made it impossible to determine with certainty the final result."

It wasn't clear why the International Republican Institute — which has conducted opinion polls and observed elections in Kenya since 1992 — isn't releasing its data. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kenya confirmed that a poll was conducted but referred questions to the institute, where officials couldn't be reached for comment."

It isn't clear why the International Republican Institute isn't releasing its data? Maybe if they did, John Kerry would have to finish out the remaining 11-months of the term of office that he won, according to exit polls, in 2004.

Harpo - No Fat Chicks, No Small Provinces!

According to Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams, our Furious Leader, Stevie Harper, has disdain for Canada's smaller provinces. From Canadian Press:

"At one point during that meeting he said to me, 'I don't need Newfoundland and Labrador to win an election,' " Williams said Monday.
"I didn't respond to that at the time. I let it go in the interests of having a cordial meeting. I perceived it as an attempt to bait me into confrontation during that meeting and the bait was not taken."

A spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office denied the premier's accusation.

"It never happened," Dimitri Soudas said.

Williams said smaller provinces should take note of Harper's comment.

"If that's his attitude and he doesn't feel that Newfoundland and Labrador is significant because it only has seven seats, then provinces like Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the territories and others have to be very, very concerned if they don't fill his political appetite," he said.

Williams said he doesn't expect the people in the province will vote for the Conservatives in the next election.

"I think the people of Newfoundland and Labrador will clearly state to ... the Conservative Party of Canada that they're not going to electing any candidates," he said.

"I will be very strongly, strongly advocating that, that there be no Conservative candidates elected in this province."

I guess Williams' reaction is understandable. After all when a PMO staffer calls a premier a liar that can get under a guy's skin, eh?

The Mildewed Recesses of Lorne Gunter's Mind

I wasn't surprised to see Lorne Gunter praise Ezra Levant's heroic performance before the Alberta Human Rights Commission last week but I found it amusing how far this rightwing nutjob would strain history to do it. From the National Spot:

"...Ezra decided to take advantage of the ancient Anglo-Saxon right to free expression and published the cartoons.

What he was reminded of, almost immediately, is that Canada is no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation. Gone is the robust belief held by our ancestors for 800 years that the citizen is sovereign, that he is free to do as he wishes unless the state can show unambiguously that there is an overriding need to limit his liberty temporarily. It has been replaced by the continental notion that nothing is allowed unless it is expressly permitted by the state. The belief that the citizen owes the government an explanation of his actions, not the other way around, has gripped our politicians, bureaucrats, judges and professors."

Gunter's claim that, for eight centuries, our (or at least his and, presumably, Levant's) ancestors have robustly held the citizen sovereign, free to do as he chooses unless the state discharges some burden of proving the need to limit him temporarily exposes him as an historical charlatan, if not an ignoramus. Now I don't know what Anglo-Saxon lineage Gunter cleaves to but I can assure him that his ancestors eight centuries ago weren't running about thumbing their noses at their monarch and proclaiming their sovereignty as citizens. If they were, the Gunter line would have assuredly died out a long, long time ago.

As for the complaint that, in today's Canada, "...the citizen owes the government an explanation of his actions, not the other way around," Gunter's remarks are surely better directed to his favourite government, the one immediately south of our own, the land of "total information awareness" and secret surveillance.

I don't think it at all accidental that Gunter's defence of Levant is built on a house of hyperbole and historical distortion. In fact, that's the one thing that makes perfect sense.

Zimbabwe's Misery Deepens

The damage the madness of Robert Mugabe has caused the people of Zimbabwe at times seems almost bottomless.

Today the Zimbabwe National Water Authority announced to the citizens of the capital, Harare, and the nearby town of Chitungwiza that all water supplies will be cut off for a week. Imagine being dirt poor in the midst of an economy in complete shambles and being told that you'll have to do without water for a week.

The government agency is blaming the water disruption on power failures at the region's waterworks.

Waterborne diseases are already spreading through Harare and are expected to increase.

Water authority workers have told UN observers that the utility's problems aren't caused by power failures but the inability of the water authority to obtain chemicals to treat the water from Malawi and Zambia.

Some locals blame the problems on mismanagement triggered in 2001 when Mugabe's ZANU-PF government replaced elected city officials with its own commission. There are reports that industrial and residential effluents are being pumped into the city's water supply dam which might explain the discoloured water that has been coming from city taps.

The Year the Great Migration Begins?

Over the past several years Europe has been struggling to deal with illegal migration out of Africa. Each year, tens of thousands of migrants, many from the sub-Saharan region, have been heading north hoping to reach the shores of Europe and a new life.

For the past month reports have been coming in from all over Africa suggesting that this year is going to be different, much different. Migrants in record numbers are said to have massed in northern Africa, waiting for an opportunity to get out.

Libya is reported to be inundated with two million migrants, at least half of whom hope to make their way to the UK. Now Yemen is pleading for international aid to help with legal and illegal migrants it claims have reached 800,000, many of them who have fled for their lives from wartorn homelands.

Mass migration has been forecast for some time and is expected to continue as wars spread and climate change and desertification make parts of southern African uninhabitable. This is going to present a huge challenge for the European Union countries which are examining their options, few of them very pleasant.

Big Wood, Big Mouths

No doubt about it. As far as the American lumber industry is concerned, Canada is their bitch. When Harpo's feckless trade min, David Emerson, folded Canada's hand and turned over to the US lumber companies a war chest in the hundreds of millions of dollars it was pretty obvious that we had just given our lunch money to the schoolyard bully. At that point it was only a matter of when, not if, they'd be back and, as expected, it wasn't long in coming.

The US Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, an outfit that sees fairness as an entirely one-sided issue (theirs in case you didn't figure that out), is howling mad at Harpo's national community development trust fund.

Although the Harpies have earmarked the meagre, one billion dollar fund for job retraining and community infrastructure programmes, America's Big Wood is claiming that the funds will somehow be used to reduce liabilities of Canadian forestry companies in violation of the 2006 Canada-US softwood lumber capitulation pact.

Wouldn't it be great to see Harper actually "stand up for Canada" and tell Washington to get lost? Let's face it kids, we're their biggest supplier of energy and the only one they can take for granted. Maybe it's time to tweak their attitudes just a tad.

Does Anyone Think We Can Really Leave?

Layton says Canada should pull out, Dion says we need to find a new job, Harpo is pretty much a good Bushie "stay the course" guy. A small majority of the Canadian people want the mission to Afghanistan wrapped up.

Everybody's got an opinion. No matter what side they're on, I don't know if any of us thinks the Canadian contingent in Kandahar can just pull up stakes and leave.

What would leaving Kandahar mean for Kabul, for the Afghani people and for our NATO allies (or at least the few that are actually showing up for work)?

For starters, it would leave a hole, a big hole. It would open an avenue between the unruly Pakistan tribal areas and Kandahar city. On Helmand province, it would leave the Brit's flank exposed to the east and the Dutch flank open to the south in Uruzgan province.

One way or another that hole would be filled in short order. It's what happens when power vacuums emerge in contested areas. The only question would be whether Kandahar would be lost to the insurgency or would be held for the Karzai government by an infusion of American troops.

I expect the US would step in although there'd probably be holy hell to pay for it in Ottawa. NATO boss Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has been an abject failure at his defining task of rallying NATO member support for Afghanistan. If Canada simply pulls out, it's hard to imagine that would somehow strengthen Scheffer's powers of persuasion.

There is another option that hasn't been discussed but I expect soon will be - extending "the mission" for an additional year in order to withdraw in conjunction with the Dutch who claim they're determined to pull out in 2010. I have my suspicions that the Dutch extended to 2010 hoping that Canada will indeed leave in 2009 but I guess that's neither here nor there.

Of course factoring into this decision is what happens in the US elections in November. The Democratic candidates are all talking about substantially reducing America's military burden in Iraq which ought to provide the Pentagon with some ability to expand its Afghanistan force. If, however, Hillary and Obama so botch this election (and they well might) and a Republican like McCain takes over, all bets are off.

This factor can't be over-emphasized. The only reason we got into Afghanistan in the first place was due to the needs and demands of the United States. The one nation, other than Afghanistan itself, that will be impacted most by our departure will be the United States. The depth of that impact will be directly affected by who is running the White House and the state of affairs in Iraq at that time. Don't even think about what might happen if Bush, as a parting gesture, decides to attack Iran while he still can.

When it comes right down to it, the merits of leaving Afghanistan are shot through with uncertainties, layers upon layers of them. It'll be interesting to see how these complexities are acknowledged and addressed when Manley's report comes out this month.

Sniping at the US Tax Code

Talk about looking for trouble. American actor Wesley Snipes goes on trial this week for tax evasion. From 1999 to 2004 Snipes earned $38-million for making a half dozen movies. Out of that bundle he paid zero in taxes. Why? Because, as Snipes plans to argue this week, the US tax code doesn't actually require people to pay income tax. From the New York Times:

Mr. Snipes, who is scheduled to go on trial Monday in Ocala, Fla., has become an unlikely public face for the antitax movement, whose members maintain that Americans are not obligated to pay income taxes and that the government extracts taxes from its citizens illegally.

Tax deniers maintain that the law only appears to require payment of taxes. All their theories have been rejected by the courts, including the one invoked by Mr. Snipes, which is known as the 861 position, after a section of the federal tax code.
Adherents say a regulation applying the 861 provision does not list wages as taxable, though it does say that “compensation for services” is taxable. The courts have uniformly rejected all such theories, and eight people have been sentenced to prison after not paying taxes based on the 861 argument.

Despite the court rulings, juries have acquitted some prominent tax resisters in recent years, and failed prosecutions have encouraged others to join. Even when the government has failed to obtain convictions, it succeeded in collecting the taxes through civil enforcement.

Snipes won't be standing alone at trial. In the prisoner's dock with him will be the two guys who told Snipes he didn't have to pay:

One is Douglas Rosile, who was stripped of his accounting license in 1997. The other is Eddie Kahn, who has served prison time for tax crimes. Both are under federal court order to stop promoting tax evasion, including the 861 position.

The charges Snipes faces go a fair distance beyond garden variety failure to pay taxes:

Mr. Snipes, 45, is charged with two felonies: conspiracy to defraud the government and filing a false claim for a $7 million refund (a claim for the year 1997, before he stopped paying taxes). He is also charged with failing to file tax returns for the six years starting in 1999. Prosecutors say they intend to show that Mr. Snipes moved tens of millions of untaxed dollars offshore and gave the government three worthless checks totaling $14 million to cover some taxes.

Some experts say the bad cheques aspect pretty much blows his "mistaken but honest belief" argument right out of the water.

But Dear, I'm Just Taking My Medicine

Beer lovers of the world take heed. Our favourite, golden nectar, sublime tribute to the gods of hops, may become a life saver. From the glorious Sydney Morning Herald:

"Researchers in Germany say that a cancer-fighting substance found in hops could be enhanced to brew a special anti-cancer beer.

The discovery could lead to healthier beers and food supplements.

One day when you hold up a glass and say, "To your health," you would actually be toasting a triumph of the brewer's art over disease.

The preliminary studies indicate xanthohumol, found in hops, inhibits a family of enzymes that can trigger the cancer process, as well as help the body detoxify carcinogens, according to the science newswire Ivanhoe.

"It's very healthy. I think the ingredients in the beer are very good," says Dr Werner Back, a brewing technology expert at the Technical University of Munich.

Xanthohumol contains more powerful antioxidants than vitamin E and some studies indicate it helps reduce oxidation of bad cholesterol, the newswire reported.

"Xanthohumol has been shown to be a very active substance against cancer," says Dr Markus Herrmann, also of Munich. "It comes in small sticky beads, which you find within the hops."

Hops have always been known to possess medicinal properties and are used in herbal medicines as a muscle relaxant. Other compounds found in hops are potent phytoestrogens. Scientists say these compounds could ultimately help prevent post-menopausal hot flashes and osteoporosis.

So, darling, please - this isn't a beer gut, it's my medicine chest.

Will Connie the Con Continue to Pen from the Pen?

Much as I find Con-victed Felon Con-rad Black the egomaniacal equivalent of ten pounds of solid waste in a five pound, soggy paper bag, I do find his journalism at times amusing. I found myself dwelling on that as I read Lord Crossharbour's pre-incarceration op-ed piece in the National Spot endorsing John McCain as the next president of the United States.

Having recently torn a strip off two former friends, Henry Kissinger and William F. Buckley, it appears Con Con is in the mood to lay waste to all and sundry who may have the misfortune to catch his eye.

Here are a couple of his observations from primary night in New Hampshire:

"Though quite enterprising, Wolf Blitzer, when he worked for us at the Jerusalem Post, was one of the most avaricious journalists I have known. After about 40 assertions from him in 20 minutes on New Hampshire night, that CNN has "the top news team on television," I had either to change channels or find a sick bag. Prevention prevailed over convalescence, but the other channels weren't much better."

On, "... the greatest American political myth-maker of the last 35 years, Bob Woodward":

"He it was who first gave us the story of the cloven-footed, horned, trident-tailed Richard Nixon, (undoubtedly, in fact, one of America's 10 greatest presidents, despite his ethical and stylistic frailties). Woodward completely fabricated a visit to the hospital room of dying CIA chief William Casey, after the Iran-Contra side-show in 1987, in his supposedly non-fiction book, Veil. But Last Tuesday night, he not only admitted error, but volunteered what he had expected to say when Obama had won. He was the only honest commentator that I saw in hours of almost prayerful channel-surfing in search of one."

On Michelle Obama:

"With trepidation, but not embarrassment, I offer the thought that Mrs. Obama, a formerly disadvantaged alumna of Princeton and Harvard, to judge from her well-strategized appearances on national television in exiguous dresses and trousers, is as callipygian as Jennifer Lopez. (That is my only concession to political correctness for 2008; you look it up if you must.) I saw her on YouTube saying that, "Reform must be from the bottom up." In her well-favoured case, this could be a double-entendre."

On the glory of a commander-in-chief of proven, military mettle:

"In 29 of the 43 U.S. presidential elections prior to 1960, someone best known as a senior army officer was a serious nominee for national office and winner of electoral votes; successfully in 19 of those elections. These included some of the greatest names of U.S. history: Washington, Jackson, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, (successful, as a group, in 10 of 12 national elections.) Being demonstrably patriotic, brave, successfully commanding in crises and untainted by political log-rolling has never lost its appeal to Americans.

Since the Second World War, the only popular and successful war the country has had, the first Gulf War, yielded a hero who did not choose to run, General Colin Powell, (though he probably would have won if he had run). So since 1960, the parties have usually nominated men proud of their military background, but not in high command positions: Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, Goldwater, McGovern, Ford, Carter, Bush Senior, Dole, Gore and Kerry (not to mention George Wallace's 1968 vice-presidential running mate, Air Force General Curtis "Lob one into the men's room in the Kremlin ... and turn North Vietnam into a parking lot" Lemay)."

"McCain, an authentic hero, though irascible and burdened with a bogus campaign-finance bill and unacceptable views on immigration, is in the best of the military-political tradition of integrity. He doesn't speak in clichés or adjust his views for the fluctuating polls, and he does have a sense of humour. If he is the presidential nominee, the genius move would be to invite Bloomberg to be his running mate. At this early point, if the office, in a phrase from Washington's time, is seeking anyone, (i.e. being successfully sought by anyone), it is John McCain."

It's easy to understand Con Con's attachment to McCain. As Conrad's own appointment behind bars approaches, the Arizona senator's years of captivity and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese must be enormously inspirational. For McCain made his imprisonment an ordeal endured in great nobility. Doubtless Mr. Black aspires to nothing less for himself.

What I wonder now is whether mister/inmate/Lord Black will continue to deliver himself of his views via the National Spot whilst a guest of the US penitentiary service. He'll undoubtedly have access to newspapers and television, even the internet perhaps. What a grand opportunity to extract revenge on those who have slighted and wronged him and to show the rest of us lesser mortals the true light of his brilliance?

Greenpeace Routs Japanese Whalers, Sea Shepherd Closing In

Greenpeace claims that its vessel, Esperanza, has chased Japanese whalers out of their southern ocean hunting grounds disrupting plans to take up to 1,000 whales. From The Guardian:

"The Greenpeace vessel, the Esperanza, chased the main Japanese ship, the Nisshin Maru, through hundreds of miles of thick fog after spotting the whaling fleet on Saturday, the group said. The fleet's catcher ships fled in another direction and will be unable to hunt as long as they are separated from the Nisshin Maru, which processes and stores captured whales.

"Now they are out of the hunting grounds they should stay out," said Sakyo Noda, a Greenpeace campaigner from Japan.

Japan warned the protesters not to interfere with the whalers as they attempt to reach this year's quota of 935 minke and 50 endangered humpback whales. The International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986 but allows Japan to conduct hunts in the name of scientific research."

As the more restrained Greenpeace dogs the Japanese whalers, the much more aggressive Sea Shepherd Society's ship Irwin is closing in for what could be a more violent clash. From http://www.seashepherd.org/:

"I'm counting on Greenpeace to slow the poachers down until we can catch up. I'm hoping they can block some harpoons and harass them enough until we can arrive to shut the criminals down."

The Greenpeace ship is still under strict orders to not cooperate with Sea Shepherd but Captain Paul Watson is a founding father of Greenpeace and he has his sources.

"We know where they are," said Captain Watson. "So there really is no need for them to withhold their position from the media and the public."

Putting Palestinian Reality on Hold

The absurdity of his statement did not prevent Canada's foreign affairs minister, Maxie Bernier, from stressing the need for democratic reform in dangling a $300-million carrot in front of the nose of unelected Palestinian underboss, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

If Bernier has such a case of the hots for democracy, he might better address his remarks to the head of Hamas, the party the Palestinian people democratically chose to lead them instead of Fatah.

But the democratic will of the Palestinian people be damned when the profoundly corrupt Fatah leadership seems about to capitulate to terms of settlement dictated by Washington, terms that will never bring peace to Israeli or Palestinian.

By just what legitimate authority can Fatah, which lost a democratic election to Hamas, claim to represent the Palestinian people is surely an issue we ought to sort out before handing a third of a billion dollars to a guy like Abbas. Then again, we're living in a right-wing fantasyland where reality is just an inconvenience.

What, You Thought There Were Only Three Stooges?

Guess Again

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

George w. Bush, head of the nation that has single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, says that Iran is threatening the security of the world and that the US and its Arab allies must confront the danger "before it's too late."

According to the word of the man whose credibility means somewhat less than nothing, fundamentalist Shiite Iran funds state terrorists, undermines stability in Lebanon and even, get this, arms the radical Sunni Taliban, its very own arch enemy. Where did he get that last one, from Peter MacKay?

Being careful to deliver his speach in Abu Dhabi, not Saudi Arabia or Egypt, Bush said (unnamed) governments will never build trust by harassing their citizens. ''You cannot expect people to believe in the promise of a better future when they are jailed for peacefully petitioning their government,'' Bush said. ''And you cannot stand up a modern, confident nation when you do not allow people to voice their legitimate criticisms.''

This from a guy who asserts he has an unfettered prerogative to take people, even Americans, off the street, declare them "enemy combattants" and have them imprisoned, secretly, indefinitely and without representation. George Bush, the most fascist president in American history, the very type that Thomas Jefferson most feared, is lecturing others on democracy.

There really is no end to this jackass.

NATO - Good for What?

Canada got involved in Afghanistan, or so the story goes, as a member in good and long-standing of the North American Treaty Organization, NATO.

We, Canada, got involved through NATO as part of ISAF which stands for the International Security Assistance Force, a hobbled together coalition of nations serving under a dysfunctional maze of individual national mandates complex enough to give Rube Goldberg a migraine (if Rube was still around to get a migraine but, sadly, Reuben passed away in 1970 survived by wife Irma and sons Thomas and George).

At first NATO and ISAF did pretty well if only because their job was limited to securing the Afghan capital, Kabul, against a thoroughly devastated Taliban insurgency. We were going to protect the central government while American forces prowled the hills hunting Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda militants and the remnants of the former Taliban government and militia.

It all might have had a happy ending if we just stuck with that script. In Washington, however, George w. Bush and Dickster Cheney, decided that Afghanistan was peanuts and thought they'd rather go after Saddam Hussein in Iraq. So, they painted Saddam as just another part of al-Qaeda terrorism and took off, after getting NATO members to agree to take over in most of the Afghan countryside.

We didn't have to worry. Rumsfeld and Cheney assured the American people that they would have the whole Iraq business wrapped up in six weeks, six months at the outside.

That was 2003, this is 2008 and America is still stuck in Iraq, leaving us, by default stuck in Afghanistan.

We told NATO we'd mind the store in Kandahar province for a couple of years while the Americans were away and then that couple of years gave way to a couple more and now we're supposed to leave in 2009 but everybody knows that's a joke. NATO knows we're only pulling their leg because we haven't been screaming at them about leaving even though they (NATO) have been doing bugger all to find a force to relieve our own soldiers.

We can't leave. We're constantly warned that if NATO fails in Afghanistan, it'll be the end of NATO. That gives rise to two questions. Is it true and, if it is, is that a bad thing?

I don't believe that a NATO pullout from Afghanistan is a failure. The failure is Washington's failure to be honest with us about Iraq. The Pentagon is effectively AWOL from Afghanistan. Stuck in Iraq by its president's needless war of whim it has the gall to point fingers at NATO.

Will leaving Afganistan truly be the end of NATO? Who can tell? NATO has already failed in Afghanistan. It has failed to provide an adequate force for the job it confronts. It has failed to deliver a coherent, effective multinational force. It has been completely unable to supply badly needed reinforcements and new contingents to relieve those already strained and nearly worn out. NATO's outspoken Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has certainly been an abject failure except at one job - mouthwork - cheerleading and hectoring.

It was Washington that drove the push to expand NATO to admit the eastern European nations into the alliance but, now that NATO is under existential threat, where are those countries, Rumsfeld's "New Europe"? They're sure as hell not lining up to pull their weight in Afghanistan. So we've taken on a solemn obligation to defend these countries - for what? It seems that was all just a ploy to advance Washington's geo-political interests against Moscow's.

No I think NATO has allowed itself to become George w. Bush's water boy for his delusional foreign policy adventures. If NATO can't find a role beyond that of serving as America's Foreign Legion, it's already finished. Maybe we should be content to remember fondly NATO's good old days and allow what remains to die with some dignity.

Brits' Bullet Budget

It's not just Canadian soldiers who are seeing far more combat in Afghanistan over the past year. The British Ministry of Defence has released its own records showing that its forces in Helmand province went through four million bullets last year, about double the amount used the previous year.

Last year the British forces in Afghanistan went through 25,000 artillery shells. That compares with 6,000 shells used by the British in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In correcting previous incorrect figures given Parliament, the British MoD also confirmed that MI6 officers met with Taliban leaders more than half a dozen times last summer.

Monkey Business

Even monkeys sometimes pay for sex. From Time.com:

According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received. Though primates have been observed trading grooming for food sharing or infant care, this is the first time this kind of exchange has been observed between male and female primates in a sexual context, says lead researcher Michael Gumert of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, demonstrating that the amount of time a male macaque "will invest in [its] partner" depends largely on how many options it has around.

Oh my God, we are not alone!

Bhutto - The Plot Thickens

Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf and US president George w. Bush both take the line that Islamist extremists assassinated Benazir Bhutto. It's the only narrative that can distance Musharraf himself, the Pakistani military and the military's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency from becoming the prime suspects.

Reports today from McClatchey Newspapers and the British paper The Independent indicate that, try as he might, Musharraf isn't getting off the hook.

McClatchey's Jonathan Landy and Saeed Shah write of a mystery crowd that slowed and then blocked Bhutto's car at the point of her assassination:

A police officer who witnessed the assassination said that a mysterious crowd stopped Bhutto's car that day, moving her to emerge through the sunroof. And a document has surfaced in the Pakistani news media that contradicts the government's version of her death and contains details on the pistol and the suicide bomb used in the murder.

The witness was Ishtiaq Hussain Shah of the Rawalpindi police. As Bhutto's car headed onto Rawalpindi's Liaquat Road after an election rally Dec. 27, a crowd appeared from nowhere and stopped the motorcade, shouting slogans of her Pakistan Peoples Party and waving party banners, according to his account.

It was Shah's job to clear the way for the motorcade. But 10 feet from where he was standing, a man in the crowd wearing a jacket and sunglasses raised his arm and shot at the former prime minister. "I jumped to overpower him," the deputy police superintendent said later. "A mighty explosion took place soon afterwards."

Who organized the crowd is only one of the mysteries two weeks after the assassination. "I don't know who they were or from where they came," the Rawalpindi officer told Dawn newspaper. "They just appeared on the road."

A Pakistani daily, The News, claims to have a report about the weapons used to kill Bhutto:

According to the document, which the paper de