Will Trump Sue Bannon? Don't Hold Your Breath.

It would be a real Punch & Judy show.  Trump wailing away on his former campaign CEO and chief political strategist, using a confidentiality agreement to bludgeon both Bannon and the vaunted First Amendment to the American Constitution.  I'd pay a buck and a quarter to see that, wouldn't you?

Only it's not going to happen. Nobody is getting sued especially not by the 45th president of the United States of America.

Why not? Trump has a well earned reputation for being litigious. There was a time he'd sue anybody, almost everybody. That time, era if you like, was when he was DJT the private citizen. Nobody paid much attention to those law suits save for the occasional item buried on page six of the morning paper.  Now he's POTUS and his every allegation would be scrutinized, dissected, probed, day after day right up there on page one, in the court of public opinion which, these days, is already hostile enough to the Mango Mussolini.

Remember during the election campaign when Trump vowed to sue those dozen plus women who came forward to accuse him of sexually molesting them? Once the election was over he was going to give them what for. He'd take them into court and make them pay for their vile lies. Only that hasn't happened either. That's looking a lot like another empty threat. Because it always was. After all, those women mainly said things that Trump himself has boasted doing to women, total strangers.

Then there's the whole raft of problems associated with trying to enforce a confidentiality agreement. A lot of what Bannon has said that most irks Trump alleges that, in Bannon's opinion, certain conduct by members of the campaign may have been criminal acts. Bannon didn't say they were. He said in his opinion they were. There's a difference. And Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort weren't ordinary citizens. They were senior officials of a presidential campaign and that surely transforms them into public figures. Ask Bob Mueller about that point.

Imagine Team Trump having to contest an individual's right to speak out on an apparent crime all due to a confidentiality agreement, a gag order. There are limits as to what can be protected by a confidentiality agreement. Bannon knows that. So does Trump. You can bet the team of lawyers retained by Michael Wolff's publishers know that extremely well.

My guess is what really pulled the pin on Trump's cranial grenade were the references to money laundering.  That is Trump's Achilles' Heel and it always has been. That's the glue that sticks him to Russian money and ties the collusion business together. Anyone imagine Trump wants that evidence laid out before a court - and the public - in a civil action?

Finally there's Trump himself. He's about the worst client any lawyer could have. The top guns won't go near him because he won't listen, he won't control his impulses and he lies gratuitously and constantly. He's a nutter. He's showing signs of mental impairment, possibly senility.  At this point I don't think Dershowitz would touch him.

So, what is Trump's next move? His now standard practice is to stage some diversion, something outrageous. I don't know, bombing Iran maybe? A pre-emptive strike on North Korea? Hard to say but it's a safe bet that the war departments in capitals around the world are busy gaming this one.

And This Is Where We Need to Worry

China is in the process of ascending to superpowerdom, displacing America from its perch. And the US Navy is worried that they'll get away with it without a fight.

There have been instances where a dominant power, an empire, yields to another peacefully. The transition from the British Empire to American dominance is a fine example. However the experts tell us that nearly two thirds of these events result in warfare at some point in the transition.

Jeebus but it sounds like the Americans want to repeat the Alamo only on a global, possibly nuclear scale.

"PRC is the most pressing threat in the Pacific," one U.S. military official in the region said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China. While North Korea is a near-term issue, "it's a fight we could win," the official said — but he worries about a fight with China.

Among the U.S. concerns: China's controversial island-building, theft of technology, currency manipulation, cyberattacks, and both military and non-military aggression.

The U.S. military officials in the region warn that China's ultimate goal is to become dominant by slowly making changes to the international order. China will use the laws it likes, ignore the ones it doesn't and eventually other nations will have to adapt, thereby re-setting the rules in China's favor.

"China is on a path to win without a fight," one official said.

No fair, China. Who do you think you are becoming dominant by slowly making changes to the international order, the United States of America? Imagine the nerve, using laws you like, ignoring ones you don't and eventually leaving other nations to adapt, thereby re-setting the rules in China's favour? Hey, rice-munchers, only America gets to do that.

What's that awful stench? Oh yeah, that's American hypocrisy. China, doing much the same as America did in the immediate postwar era when the rest of the world was still in rubble and ashes.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford returned from a six-day trip to the Pacific late Monday night. He agreed that while North Korea is the immediate threat to the U.S., China is the enduring threat.

"China's path of capability development," said Dunford, "and their efforts I think to address our power projection capability, our ability to deploy when and where necessary to advance our interests, is very much the long-term challenge in the region."

The official said the U.S. military spends a lot of time making sure they don't forget about the long-term existential problem.

"We are ready" for North Korea, the official said. But the peer-level fight with China "is the real challenge."

The Americans refuse to concede how much they're doing to antagonize China. The latest move is their alliance with India to contain China and, if desired, cut off Beijing's sea access even across its own waters, the East and South China Seas. Would America tolerate that sort of thing along its Pacific coast. Not in a million years. Only subordinate nations have to endure that sort of provocation.

America has no sense of how deeply some Chinese, especially China's military leadership, perceive their "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of Europeans and Americans. And that's what makes this transition so dangerous, so worrisome. There's a reason why China is moving to quickly narrow the weapons technology gap with the United States. In some critical areas, such as hypersonics, it's thought they're already well ahead of the Americans.

The Chinese know that, while America has to squander its national treasure on immensely wasteful spending to maintain a military presence in most every corner of the world, they can bring Goliath down if they can defeat it in one or two core technologies. America's greatest weakness is America.

That said, America might not be able to abide China's ascendancy without going to war over it. Remember the Bush Doctrine? Remember when Bush, on behalf of America, reserved the right to launch pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that endangered America dominance, economic or military? I remember.

Taking Stock

Most of us just don't want to know.  Most of the rest are coming to feel the same way a lot of the time.

Interesting op-ed by Quincy Saul, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."  It deserves a read.

Ecology: The global climate is officially destabilized. Major tipping points have passed, and while the struggle to remain within others must continue, we have already lost the battle to preserve life on earth as we know it. Rising seas will reshape continents and spreading deserts will drive mass migrations. Climate change will redraw the world map and will literally shake the earth.

...We are in the middle of a mass extinction, which all accounts and reports indicate will continue to accelerate. If current rates of extinction continue, by the middle of this century, between one- and two-thirds of all living species on the planet may disappear. While superstorms and melting ice caps may be more dramatic, this accelerating loss of biological diversity in the long run is even more catastrophic. In the early 1980s, biologist E.O. Wilson compared this threat to others facing the world at that time;

"Energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war or conquest by a totalitarian government. . . . As terrible as those catastrophes would be for us, they could be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendants are least likely to forgive us."

If we live in times of prophecy, then ecological catastrophe is the black horseman of the apocalypse, carrying the scales of a radically unbalanced earth system, leaving famine in its wake.

Economy: The world economic system is in a structural crisis from which it will not recover. The morbid symptoms of its demise are increasingly evident. It is now mainstream knowledge that the major banks of the world routinely launder moneyfor the drug and arms trade.

Furthermore, the so-called middle class is at an end, even if the working class has not yet stepped up to replace it. Inequality is at an all-time high, with rates of poverty and affluence, malnutrition and obesity, reaching ever more epidemic proportions.

One-third of all food is wasted. Women own only 1 percent of the world's property. The absurdities of our economic system are increasingly well known and recognized. An article by Matt Taibbi in the Rolling Stone had a comprehensive title: "Everything is Rigged:"


"Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. . . . Forget the Illuminati - this is the real thing, and it's no secret. . . . The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure."

The economy is the white horseman of the apocalypse, representing both evil and righteousness, wearing a crown and armed for conquest.

War: Former US Vice President Dick Cheney promised the world "a war that will not end in our lifetimes," and we are now beginning to see the form it will take. Resource wars in the Middle East and North Africa are now joined by wars born of political turmoil. Global military expenditure is currently soaring at $1.6 trillion per year, an increase of 53 percent over 14 years ago.

Today in Egypt and Syria, we witness the seeds of a bloody and tangled future, where mass social movements for national liberation and self-determination are converted into proxy wars between the global potentates. Collapsing ecosystems and economies together fan the flames of war higher. In these geopolitical nightmares, carried to a fevered pitch by the society of the spectacle, nothing is true and everything is permitted.

War rides the red horse of the apocalypse.

Surveillance States: 1984 has arrived, only 30 years after Orwell predicted. The revelations brought to us by Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden show us a world in which everything is under surveillance. Julian Assange has written with great eloquence about the death of civil society overseen by the surveillance state. (1) Today in the United States alone there are more than 5 million people working under security clearances - more than the population of Norway. The mirror image of this army of spies is the enormous number of people in prison, including more African Americans under state control than there were slaves prior to the Civil War.

This is the last stage of the state, the totalitarianism that is the last gasp of every totality. The surveillance state has the capacity for not only genocide, but also extinction: It is capable of repressing and destroying the revolutionary movements that still have hope to fight for life.

The surveillance state rides the pale horse of the apocalypse, representing death.
It's at this point that Saul offers us a glimmer of hope.

...in the ancient Greek, apocalypse and revelation are the same word. What is the tipping point between the end of the world and the beginning of the world?

You are. We are. It's time to realize it. Time to seize the day and never let go.

What Are We Getting Ourselves Into?

Before long the Middle East will look like a parking lot for Western jet fighters. The place will be awash in Hornets and Super Hornets, F-16s, F-22s, Eurofighters and Rafales and Tornados.  They'll be flying about over Syria and Iraq searching for something, anything to bomb into rubble and pulp.

Nobody thinks that airstrikes are going to win this "conflict" with IS or ISIS or ISIL or whatever they happen to be called this week or next.  We'll run out of targets first. Then what?

The job unfinished, we will probably succumb to "mission creep."  Airpower didn't do the trick, let's switch to the ground game.  It will be sold to us as a choice in which we have no other choice.  We'll do it because we must.

At this early point it's timely for us to dwell a bit on just what we've gotten ourselves into.  Is this a war or, as I suggested a few days ago, just a bunch of battles strung together a bit incoherently?  Do we have an actual enemy or are we just banging away at the group fronting for the actual enemy we work so hard to avoid recognizing?

Are we standing, unaware, on the very edge of WW III?  That's not my question but it is being asked in some very high places.

Dr. Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, rebukes the US in a paper he published on Thursday.  On the great difficulty of implementing coalition-based strategy, he writes: "This is particularly true when the US fails to honestly address its own problems and mistakes, minimises the costs and risks involved, and exaggerates criticism of its allies."

...But ask him about that Franz Ferdinand moment and suggestions pour out of him.  Syria could shoot down a Turkish aircraft; the humanitarian dimension could be messed up; human displacement - "you can surely count on people to not understand that intervening to deal with a few thousand people can displace hundreds of thousands"; if IS advanced to a position from which it "threatened all of Iraq"; Iraq's Sunnis could refuse to co-operate with the new Shiite dominated government in Baghdad; if violence broke out between Turkey and its Kurdish minority and Iraq's Kurds attempted to join in; if the Assad government in Syria was to stop up its bombing of rebel forces "it could become a political problem too big to ignore"'; and lastly, if IS was to lash out with a campaign of terrorist attacks that would provoke demands to escalate the coalition campaign.

"Fully agreeing" with the idea that the conflict has been miscast as war in two countries, rather than as a regional or even bigger conflict, veteran White House adviser and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel's response to questions was a dire email in which he posits the current crisis in a seriously global framework.

"Al Qaedaism, the ideology, is stronger today than ever, thanks to the failure of the Arab Spring [which we welcomed] and the battlefield has expanded from Mali to Pakistan and beyond to Australia and Europe," he writes.

"The worst nightmare for me is a terror attack that provokes Indo-Pakistan war; second, is a Mubai-like attack in a Western city."

Another veteran observer of the region warns this is going to take years, possibly decades to play out and during that interval could well spill out across the Middle East/South Asia region.

"There is a serious risk that the entire region will blow up," Lakhdar Brahimi warned in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, in which he predicted dire consequences for Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. "The conflict is not going to stay inside Syria.  It will spill over into the region.  It's already destablising Lebanon [where there are] 1.5 million refugees."  

Analysing the global misreading of how events might unfold in Syria, Brahimi harped back to an earlier assignment in his career": "It reminds me a lot of 1999 - then, I resigned from my first assignment as a UN special envoy to Afghanistan, because the UN Security Council had no interest in Afghanistan, a small country, poor, far away.  I said one day it's going to blow up in your faces - it did [and] Syria is much worse."

And as for the notion implicit in the rhetoric of Obama and his coalition cheerleaders, that Syria somehow is to be rescued by and into the civilised world, Brahimi thinks otherwise - "It will become another Somalia.  It will not be divided as many have predicted.  It's going to be a failed state, with warlords all over the place."

Funny How We Choose Who We'll Fight and Who We'll Coddle

ISIS is known for atrocity.  They're murderous swine, real butchers.  But, as CBC's Neil Macdonald reminds us there's a world full of their type, real pros, and we don't give a damn.

Back in July, Barack Obama signed an executive order punishing anyone responsible for some of the hideous excesses of the Congolese civil war. 

Hardly anyone noticed Obama's order. But for the record, the people it targets have reportedly committed: mass rape (of men and women, by rebels and government soldiers) often in front of communities and families, or forcing people to rape each other, as a weapon of war; inventive torture (forcing men to copulate with holes in the ground lined with razor blades, forcing women to eat excrement or flesh of relatives); casual and varied forms of murder (including firing weapons up women's vaginas); use of child soldiers; and ethnic cleansing.

The list goes on.

The Congo war has killed five million people, directly and indirectly, since 1998 — more than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq put together, as one national newspaper here noted recently.

Obama's punishment for the culprits? Financial discomfort. 

...The most charitable view is that national leaders tend to act on the fears and desires and preoccupations of their voters, and while ISIS has terrified Americans by beheading a handful of Westerners, nobody really cares what goes on in the Congo.

It's far away, in the middle of a continent widely perceived as dirty and savage, and the victims are all, well, black Africans.

Western politicians also take their cues from news outlets, and while editors don't like to discuss such things, Africa (along with a few other wretched parts of the Earth) barely makes the news menu, if at all.

A struggling baby panda in some zoo will easily knock an African genocide off the nightly newscast.

...But even within the Middle East, where brutality and savagery are often considered normal governance, ISIS has assumed a special status as evil incarnate.

Yes, ISIS has carried out beheadings, often for apostasy, which in ISIS's book means not following its deranged interpretation of Islam.

But so has the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose princes walk hand in hand, sometimes literally, with American presidents, and are welcomed in the society salons of Georgetown.

The Saudis have beheaded 46 people so far this year, including 19 in the first three weeks of August. Like ISIS, the Saudis favour public beheadings, and have sometimes strung the decapitated corpses up to rot in public.

Grounds for beheading in Saudi Arabia include sorcery. Seriously, sorcery.

And, of course, apostasy. (The Saudian Arabian version of Islam, Wahabbism, isn't all that different from the ferocious ISIS interpretation.)

...Which probably brings us to what's really at issue here: oil.

The Saudis have lots of it, and as long as they're willing to be good fellows and keep selling it on the open market, well, their virulent extremism is just the religious quirk of a close and valued ally.

ISIS, meanwhile, made the gross error of beheading some white people, and has taken over oil refineries, and sold the oil, and threatened the order of things, and there are few crimes more serious than that.

So, to war? Again?

Update:  Michael Harris offers a great insight into how Stephen Harper is conning the Canadian people on ISIS and our mission to Iraq.  

Harris notes, as others have documented, that ISIS is just one extremist group that traces its origins back to surreptitious funding from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.  Our double-dealing supposed allies are said to have funded an entire nest of vipers.  This raises the question of who's next if we ever succeed in destroying ISIS?  

It's common wisdom that the only way to kill a snake is to cut off its head.  In this case the head resides in the palaces of Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.  We seem unable to find enough targets worth bombing in Iraq.  Maybe we ought to put our bombs where they can do some real good.

Is War With China Actually Possible? Is War of Some Sort Inevitable?

Is China on the verge of war?  War with whom?

There are factors building that suggest China faces the sort of instability that could force war on China and some other country.

For the past few decades, Russia and China have been closely allied but their relationship since the end of WWII has been at times turbulent.

Russia is now speaking openly about a perceived threat from China to Siberia and other Russian territory in the east.   President Dmitry Medvedev has announced a build up of Russia's naval power in the Pacific.   Meanwhile some prominent Chinese are promoting the idea of a Chinese military presence in the Arctic.

America is training for a first-strike air war on China.   That led to a complex air war exercise in Alaska called Operation Chimichanga.  The Pentagon is also developing what they call the Air Sea Battle strategy that has been criticized as a dangerous and potentially disastrous provocation of China.

Then we have the controversial F-35 joint strike fighter, in reality a stealth first-strike, light attack bomber.   The United States and all its key allies are signing on to buy this monstrously expensive warplane even as defence planners now openly admit its stealth technology is "perishable" and probably will be obsolete within five to ten years.

Why would so many countries buy a warplane with a dwindling "best before" date unless they foresee some potential need for it before then?   Are we buying the F-35 with the intent of flying it on combat sorties into Chinese airspace?

The question becomes what else would we do with it?   It lacks dual engine reliability.  It doesn't have the fuel capacity for long range patrol and interception.   It doesn't carry the sort of payload needed for ground support or the sort of missions we flew over Libya.  And it's a sub-par fighter, deficient in speed, climb rate and maneuverability.  We're signing on to buy a very expensive bomb truck.   Why?

But why would China, on the verge of economic superpowerdom, go to war?   The simple answer is that China is a country facing powerful environmental, social, resource and population challenges that may already be beyond its control.

China has a serious problem with desertification.   It is losing overworked, exhausted farmland that is being transformed into useless desert.   And roughly 40% of what arable farmland remains is beset with airborne contaminants, arsenic and heavy metals from industry, that render crops unsafe for consumption.   While the situation continues to worsen, it already leads to the ruin of 12-billion kilograms of foodstocks per year.  

Much of China's fresh water resources are seriously contaminated.  Worse yet, China is already facing rapid depletion of its groundwater resources, its aquifers.   The shrinking supply of groundwater for irrigation has Chinese officials calling for the country to step up food imports.   Meanwhile the government's failure to crack down on criminal contamination of food supplies is generating unrest.

Some African countries are suspicious of China's benevolence and fear that it may be looking to them as a repository of between 300 and 500-million surplus Chinese.    The Africans believe China has become so environmentally and resource degraded that it can no longer support a population of more than 700-million and that assessment may not be far off the mark.

Another problem is the disparity in wealth in China.   While the country now has some billionaires, it has vastly more thousandaires.   Yes, the masses may be somewhat better off than they were prior to China's economic "miracle" but it's a marginal improvement at best.   And if China has to go to already hard hit world markets to get food for its people, their share of the miracle will evaporate very suddenly.   The rich can easily weather high food prices, the masses can't.   A Chinese journalist recently wrote, "For thousands of years the power of China's rulers hinged on their ability to feed the people. Revolutions aren't caused by political differences, they're caused by a lack of bread."

China's dilemma is unprecedented.   The world has never known a country that had hundreds of millions, perhaps a half-billion more people than it could support.   That's a nation, a people and a government that face almost unimaginable threats to their stability and their survival.   By any measure China seems to have outgrown its boundaries.   It needs lebensraum.

Relocating half a billion Chinese to Africa is the stuff of fantastic nightmares.   It simply can't be done.   Even if China could find some means of conveying that population, Africa, backed by the rest of the world wouldn't abide it.

So, short of a mass extermination of its own people, what is the Chinese government to do with them?   I think Dmitry Medvedev has an idea of what might be in store.   China has to find a big chunk of unoccupied or lightly occupied territory to house its overflow.   That it shares a 4,300-kilometre border with the largest nation on earth that itself has a declining population not much more than a tenth of China's might seem divinely fortuitous to Beijing.  The Russian president is already speaking out about Russia's perceived threat of a Chinese takeover.

America now views China as its greatest threat and takes it seriously enough to trigger a major pivot of its forces from the Middle East to South and East Asia.  China, especially its military leaders, are showing serious hostility toward the West and America in particular.  They're said to be looking for revenge for a "century of humiliation."

The United States appears content to build up its military presence in China's backyard and wait.   But, as Operation Chimichanga revealed, America is also preparing for a massive aerial first strike to take down China's air defences should the need arise.   The only real glitch is the delay in fielding the F-35.

The White House and the Pentagon aren't looking for a war with China but they must fear that China has become a human time bomb that, in one way or another, is likely to blow.   Russia will have to try to contain the blast from the north and northwest, India will try to hold the west while America and her allies police China's southern flank, prepared to intervene should the need arise.

Modern China is caught in the throes of the toxic manipulations of Mao Tse Tung.   As Tim Flannery explains in "Here on Earth":

"...perhaps the most enduring environmental legacy was Mao's encouragement of population growth.  At the beginning of his time in power China had around five hundred million people, and was widely believed by experts to be on the verge of dangerous overpopulation.   Yet Mao made contraceptives hard to get and exhorted women to have large families.   As one Chinese census on Mao has direct responsibility for the population problem.   As Party Chairman, policy depended upon him.   When he said "With Many People, Strength is Great" that was the last word on the subject."

- note - every major point in this post is accurately sourced and linked.   most links here are to earlier posts that are, in turn, linked to original source materials.

update - since posting this piece I stumbled across a report of a study by Jianguo "Jack" Liu, director of Michigan State University's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability on China's water woes.

China's crisis is daunting, though not unique: Two-thirds of China's 669 cities have water shortages, more than 40 percent of its rivers are severely polluted, 80 percent of its lakes suffer from eutrophication -- an over abundance of nutrients -- and about 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water.

Liu says China's approach to its water crisis as an engineering problem won't is short-sighted.



"There is an inescapable complexity with water," Liu said. "When you generate energy, you need water; when you produce food, you need water. However, to provide more water, more energy and more land are needed, thus creating more challenges for energy and food production, which in turn use more water and pollute more water.

"In the end, goals are often contradictory to each other. Everybody wants something, but doesn't take a systems approach that is essential for us to see the whole picture."

Reading Between the Lines

Thomas Walkom, writing in today's Toronto Star, castigates the Senate defence committee for issuing a report that fails to say what it screams when read between the lines: that Canada's "mission" to Afghanistan isn't going to succeed.

The problem isn't with the Canadian soldiers over there. They've proven themselves courageous and dedicated. It's that there aren't nearly enough of them over there, especially not enough over there from other NATO members.

It's that Afghanistan is a medieval society that has no interest in transforming itself into a Western-style democracy.

It's that the government of Hamid Karzai, the one we're propping up, the one our soldiers are fighting and dying for, "routinely shakes down its own citizens. Its army and police are, in the words of committee chair Colin Kenny, 'corrupt and corrupter.'"

The report asks whether Canadians are, "...willing to commit themselves to decades of involvement in Afghanistan, which could cost hundreds of Canadians lives and billions of dollars, with no guarantee of ending up with anything like the kind of society that makes sense to us? If we aren't willing to hang in for the long haul, what will have been the point of five years of Canadian lives and Canadian money disappearing?"

"To ask these questions is to answer them. Most Canadians will not agree to a war that takes decades to prosecute yet produces no results. And if, as the senators conclude, this is the prognosis, then the last five years of Canadian involvement – and Canadian deaths – have been pointless."

So where does this leave us? In my view, we have done our post 9/11 bit for the United States. The reason we're still in Afghanistan is because the US stupidly drained off its fighting force to wage a war of whim in Iraq. Every day our soldiers go into battle, they're paying for George Bush's duplicity.

We have done our job as babysitters in Kandahar while the Americans went out for their night on the town in Baghdad. Time for them to come home and take care of their own kids just like any responsible parents. This babysitter, Canada, needs to go home too.

Crying "Wolf"

The credibility of the Bush White House has all but tanked. After its Iraq scam, details of which are continuing to emerge almost five years later, the Bush administration isn't getting the benefit of the doubt on its intelligence claims about Iran.

The problem is that, having lied so outrageously to so many in the run up to the conquest of Iraq, the Bushies are now relying on circumstantial evidence to support assumptions that allow it to allege that senior Iranian officials are providing weapons to groups in Iraq to use against American soldiers. It's like saying, "here's a grenade, it was made in Iran, so we want you to assume that it was sent to Iraq by the president Ahmadinejad in order that it could be tossed at American soldiers."

If they have nothing else going for them, Bush/Cheney have a completely shameless audacity. On Iraq they produced intelligence - twisted, stretched, manipulated, sometimes even fabricated, but intelligence - while for Iran they're not even claiming they've got intelligence, they just want people to rely on thin assumptions instead. Even their top general won't back them up on this one.

The worrisome part is that this chicanery suggests that Bush is intent on attacking Iran no matter what. He has to come up with some justification but he can't so he's willing to manufacture some. This is what we get as the "Leader of the Free World?"

Baiting the Trap - Cheney Style

The White House is spoiling for a fight, this time with Iran. They're making all the noises that preceded the illegal conquest of Iraq. Iran, we're told, is a threat to the world. It was, after all, pronounced a full member of the Axis of Evil by George W. Bush hisself - case closed.

Now there's the business about Iran arming Iraqi Shiite militias. A real threat if there ever was one. But wait, they're the bunch that go after the Sunni insurgents, the other bunch, the group that actually does target American soldiers, the guys who get their support from Saudi Arabia. Why isn't Bush bombing the living hell out of Riyadh? I guess that's because the House of Saud and the House of Bush are bosom buddies, eh?

To stir things up, Mr. Bush has now ordered a third, carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf. Three fleet carriers is pretty much unprecedented and observers have noted that on every occassion US carriers have deployed to the Gulf, save one, there's been combat. So, judging by past experience and the deployment of three carrier battle groups, the odds are better than even that the Bush/Cheney regime has already made its mind up to attack.

Hillary Mann, the former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf affairs warns of what's coming, "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something (the United States) would be forced to retaliate for."

Paul Krugman, writing in today's New York Times, says the White House has already got its intelligence cooker turned up high. He points out that Abram Shulsky, the guy who headed Rumsfeld's intelligence warper on Iraq, is now back in business heading the Pentagon's Iran directorate. Let's see - the guy put in charge of gaming the Iraq intelligence, instead of being fired in disgrace, is now assembling the Iran intelligence. What does that sound like?

Krugman also sees a reason for keying so much attention to Iranian ordinance found in Iraq and tying it to the deaths of US soldiers. Bush isn't about to get Congressional authorization to launch a war against Iran, simply ain't going to happen. But, if he can "earmark" the attacks as just part of the already authorized Iraq war then he can claim he doesn't need the approval of Congress.

Is attacking Iran stupid? No more stupid than invading Iraq.

American Fascists

I managed to catch the last few minutes of an interview on CBC yesterday with war correspondent/author Chris Hedges. He was flogging his latest book, American Fascists.

The gist of this book, as I understand it, is that fascism has become a powerful force in today's America. At its core Hedges sees the Christian right, the fundamentalists.

He argues that the Christian fundamentalists have preyed on America's dispossessed in areas hardest hit by globalization, people who once had well-paid manufacturing jobs and now can't find work, people living in the "have not" regions that have spread throughout the United States. Hedges mentioned that there are areas of his country that now resemble the Third World more than the vision of America. It is these people, he claims, who are most vulnerable to the Christian fundamentalist message. They embrace the Christian right's message of intolerance and resentment (a polite word for "hatred") toward specified groups such as gays, the pro-choice movement, Muslims and liberals.

Hedges is clearly concerned at the very real, very powerful political influence gained this way by the Christian right. He fears it continues to expand its power base and it seems he's right.

If you need proof of this just take a look at John McCain's transformation, his embrace of the Christian fundamentalists. In 2000 he called them "evil" and "intolerant" but now he appears as keynote speaker at Jerry Falwell's school and he mouths all the right words, the message the converted expect to hear. McCain realizes that no Republican can win the party's nomination without the support of the Christian right. It's obvious that he's holding his nose but he is definitely talking the talk.

Harper and a lot of the Reform conservatives cleave to this same movement. Canada is not the US and the fundamentalists are less powerful, less influential here so, while our democracy isn't as vulnerable, we do have to realize that the movement here is just as voracious as its big brother in America.

Here are a couple of passages from "War is a force that gives us meaning." I heartily recommend it:

We were humbled in Vietnam, purged, for a while, of a dangerous hubris, offered in our understanding and reflection about the war, a moment of grace. We became a better country.

We often become as deaf and dumb as those we condemn. We too have our terrorists. The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were hailed as "freedom fighters." Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States back in Angola's civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that outstripped the Taliban. ...President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross-run factory making artificial limbs for the victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival's wife and children to death.

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, used to tell us that we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or, as he liked to say, "the Christian fascists."

If you haven't read Hedge's "War" and if the fundamentalist threat interests you or if you're just interested in how war engages modern society, see if you can get your hands on a copy. Once I've digested "American Fascists" I'll do another post.