Just Great - Political Chaos in Kabul

Hamid Karzai reads impassioned speeches to Canadians written by our own, newly political, armed forces. Another young man is sacrificed. Now it turns out that a seismic event has hit Karzai's already wobbly and corrupt Kabul government.

The New York Times reports that the Karzai government is locked in an escalating power struggle with the warlords and mujahedeen in Afghanistan's legislature.

It is said to have begun in May when the lower house overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the removal of the country's foreign minister, something Karzai has refused, calling the measure illegal.

Mr. Karzai’s opponents have promised to boycott Parliament unless he removes the minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta. In recent days, a group of more than 50 legislators, most of them members of a new opposition coalition, have threatened to quit altogether over the president’s intransigence.

“This is serious,” said Wadir Safi, a member of the faculty of law and political science at Kabul University. “It’s dangerous for the government and the nation.” The showdown, he said, is eroding whatever public confidence in the elected leadership remains.

“Karzai has a particular vision for dealing with government, and it doesn’t involve a big role for the legislative branch,” said a Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

But the president has long been dogged by criticism of ineffectiveness and chronic indecision. Government corruption and poppy cultivation are rampant and public services remain a wreck; food prices are soaring, unemployment remains high and resurgent Taliban forces in the south are pressing toward this capital.

As public confidence in Mr. Karzai has evaporated, opposition has escalated sharply from within the government, led by regional power brokers who feel he has marginalized them.

The roots of this crisis go back to Karzai's decision not to block the warlords and criminal element from being elected to his government. The Afghan foreign minister has infuriated these types by attempting to derail their legislation granting themselves amnesty for their war crimes in the 30-year old civil war. In short, Karzai put a nest of vipers in his bed and now they're threatening to attack him.

Six years now and this is what we've got to show for our sacrifice. Great, just great.

My Heart Sank

When I opened my web browser the first things I saw were the words "Canadian soldier" and the picture of a fine-looking young man in his beret and camo gear with a Canadian flag in the background. My heart sank because I knew the story could only be an announcement of this fellow's death. It was his funerary photo just like all the others.

Nathan Hornburg at 24-years old has been killed in Afghanistan. It seems he was struck by mortar shrapnel while exposed in trying to fix a thrown tread from a Leopard tank. The tank broke down, the insurgents watched and waited, Hornburg got out to repair the tread, the bad guys fired, he died.

According to the commander, General Guy Laroche, "The terrain was very rough and (tank treads falling off) is something that we see on a regular basis." They sure do because tanks aren't suited to running patrols across rough terrain. They're fighting machines, not patrol vehicles.

What were they doing when this happened? According to Laroche, it was a one-day sweep to improve security in Panjwai province. A sweep. It's what you do when you don't have enough soldiers or equipment to fight an insurgency effectively. You sweep through. The bad guys keep the initiative and their control of the territory. They decide when to fight and when to simply lay low until you're gone. If they see a vulnerability - a tank with a thrown track, for example - they take advantage of it.

Why are we squandering the lives of young men like Hornburg on this farce of a mission? Read Petraeus' counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24. You can get the whole thing in PDF format on the web, free. It prescribes a ratio of 20-25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 of the civilian population. We would need anywhere between 15-25,000 combat troops on the ground to meet that ratio in Kandahar province. Instead we're handing the job to a 1,000-strong battle group.

Supporting the troops isn't setting them up to lose by saddling them with a fight they have neither the numbers nor the equipment to win. If you support "the mission", try supporting the troops. Demand that the government get off its sanctimonious, jingoistic arse; recruit, train and properly equip the small army that's needed for this job and then get on with it - or - support the troops and leave.

Suddenly Africa Matters?

If there's one corner of the world that the Pentagon has ignored, it has to be Africa. Not North Africa so much. Places like Libya and Egypt have had plenty of attention from America's military. A little further south though, in "deepest, darkest" (read: blackest) Africa, not so much.

Barely a decade ago the Pentagon dismissed Africa in a one-liner: “Ultimately we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa.” What a difference a decade makes. Today the Pentagon has its very own branch, AFRICOM or Africa Command, that's now seeking to establish fully two dozen permanent bases throughout the continent. That's a heap of "strategic interest." So what happened to make the Pentagon change its outlook on Africa. China. China happened.

Africa has, let's call them for the sake of argument "resources." Natural resources and pretty reasonable quantities of them to boot. While America ignored Africa, taking its access to African resources for granted, China saw its opportunity to fill the vacuum. In it went.

A week after Chinese President Hu Jintao began a high-profile, eight-country African tour, during which he signed more than 50 cooperation agreements and pledged to double China’s assistance to Africa by 2009, Bush announced the creation of AFRICOM.

The Chinese moves have Bush's neo-con faithful doing it in their pants. The neo-con Heritage Foundation issued this warning: “The United States must be alert to the potential long-term disruption of American access to important raw materials and energy sources as these resources are ‘locked up’ by Chinese firms.”

The US projects that African petroleum could make up 25% of America's oil imports by 2015. That is unless China gets that oil that it too desperately wants locked up before then.

Now, as for AFRICOM, US officials have said it "..isn’t about chasing terrorists around Africa”; “AFRICOM isn’t going to be used to protect natural resources”. Strangely enough, they haven't actually said what AFRICOM is about. Go figure.

White Trash Uber Bigot - Bill O'Reilly

Media Matters for America has kicked the darling of rednecks everywhere, open mouth creep, Bill O'Reilly right back into the gutter where he belongs. Media Matters followed up on O'Reilly's latest backhanded smear of African Americans where he described having dinner with Al Sharpton at a Harlem restaurant, Sylvia's:

"I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship."

"There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

The Media Matters article catalogues several other bigoted cracks from O'Reilly, such as these:

On the August 16, 2006, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly argued extensively for "profiling of Muslims" at airports, arguing that detaining all "Muslims between the ages of 16 and 45" for questioning "isn't racial profiling," but "criminal profiling."

During the April 12, 2006, broadcast of The Radio Factor, O'Reilly claimed that on the April 11 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, guest Charles Barron, a New York City councilman, had revealed the "hidden agenda" behind the current immigration debate, which, O'Reilly said, was "to wipe out 'white privilege' and to have the browning of America."

Any decent nation has no time for people of O'Reilly's ilk. That he flourishes in the United States speaks volumes for what plagues that once great country.

Freedom Isn't Free

From the "if it sounds too good to be true..." file.

The International Herald Tribune has a story on a new, internet phone company, Pudding Media, that's offering service without any long distance charges - but there is a catch:

a start-up based in San Jose, California, is introducing an Internet phone service Monday that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype's online service — consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber's computer screen while he or she is still talking.

Maislos said that Pudding Media had considered the privacy question carefully. The company is not keeping recordings or logs of the content of any phone calls, he said, so advertisements only relate to current calls, not past ones, and will only arrive during the call itself.

Besides, [Pudding CEO Ariel] Maislos said, he thought that young people, the group his company is focusing on with the call service, are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.

"The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world," he said.

America's War Correspondent Laureate Weighs In

He's Joe Galloway and, if you don't know the name, think of him as this generation's Ernie Pyle.

Galloway made his reputation back during Vietnam. He wasn't one of the Saigon Lilies like most but a real live, "in the field" combat reporter. By the way, he's no pinko. That's why I found Galloway's verdict on George w. Bush last week so interesting that I thought I'd share some of it:

Extending the war, kicking that can down the road, was President Bush’s only strategic objective last January when he came up with the idea of escalating the number of American troops in Iraq from 130,000 to today’s 170,000. Put simply, the Decider wants to hand off the decision to pull the plug on his unwinnable war to someone else, anyone else.

Four and a half years after this president ordered the invasion of Iraq in a gross act of arrogance and ignorance based on faulty, bogus and politically twisted intelligence — and after repeatedly changing the rationales and objectives of the war as each has failed in turn — we’re going to continue this war because George W. Bush is incapable of admitting that he was wrong, wrong, wrong.

When our president talks of peace returning to the streets of Baghdad, he mistakes the silence of empty, abandoned homes and sectarian cleansing for progress. He confuses the segregation of Shia and Sunni, each in their own ghettos behind tall concrete walls, for progress. More than 3 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes and neighborhoods into exile, internal or external, and this he calls success.

Will Bush get away with this? From all the evidence at hand, the answer, sadly, is yes. Only the Democrats in Congress stand in his way, and they have yet to find their spines, or a semblance of moral courage, or even a sufficient understanding of the Constitution and its clauses on war making and war-financing, to override The Decider.

It’s a long journey from now to January 20, 2009, and the blood of many Americans and even more Iraqis will flow freely and stain the hands of those who allow this insane war to continue at the behest of a stubborn, unseeing, unthinking man from Crawford, Texas.

Joe Galloway writes for McClatchey Newspapers

Tornado Alley

No this isn't about Oklahoma. Think Luton, Farnborough, Hampshire, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and Northampton.

A number of tornadoes were recorded in various parts of central and southern England today. Tornadoes, England?

Flooding, tornadoes, droughts and heat waves? Couldn't have anything to do with global warming. It's gotta be the work of those damned Druids!

Can Buddha Topple the Tyrants?

The world watches and waits as Burmese Buddhist monks hold firm in their challenge to Myanmar's despotic military junta.

For 8-days now, an estimated 10,000 monks and thousands of their supporters have staged a protest in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, demanding an end to the military's reign of oppression.

The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks has issued a statement in which they promise tocontinue the marches until they've "wiped the military dictatorship from the land." It's believed the ruling junta is being restrained from attacking the monks by China which doesn't want the black eye it could receive with its Beijing olympics nearing.

Harper Digging In on Climate Change

Most world leaders are coming to grips with the perilous realities of global warming and the need for quick and effective action. Then there are the heel-draggers - the likes of George w. Bush and our own Harpo. From the Toronto Star:

Canada has backed the U.S. position at meetings earlier this year of the G8 and the Asia Pacific countries. In his speech to the UN meeting, Harper reiterated his position that a new global agreement should follow the principles that underpin the Harper government’s climate change plan, which has been roundly criticized by environmental groups and the international community.

Harper claims to support the goal of cutting GHG emissions by half by 2050 but then puts the lie to that by endorsing the radical, fivefold expansion of the Athabasca tar sands, already Canada's primary industrial polluter. It's obvious that Harpo has taken a page out of the Bush manual of bad governance, the one that suggests saying what people want to hear and then doing just the opposite. Mission Accomplished.

Unisys in the Crosshairs

Security Unleashed – At Unisys, we’re looking at security in an entirely new way.Security is no longer a defensive measure. It’s an enabling catalyst for achievement.

That's the official line from the company's web site. According to the chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, Unisys may have bungled its $1.7-billion security contract with the department, enabling hackers to get into its computers and get information that was sent to a web service that connects to Chinese internet sites.

Representative Bennie Thompson accuses Unisys of not only failing to block the hackers but also not even noticing the cyber attacks for several months and then allegedly giving misleading information to HSD about the attacks.

Unisys has roots going back to 1873 and the creation of the E. Remington & Sons typewriter company.

Jim Crow Republicans

Is quiet racism an anchor around the Republicans' necks that will eventually send them straight to the bottom? Columnist Paul Krugman makes that case today in the New York Times.

No one even disputes any longer that Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation drove white southerners firmly into the arms of the Republican party where they today remain the party's base. The fiasco in Jena, Louisiana where six black teenagers had been charged with attempted murder following a beating sparked by some white kids who hung nooses to warn blacks not to sit under a "white" tree, has stirred the embers of southern racism.

Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered. In 2000, Mr. Bush made a pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, famed at the time for its ban on interracial dating.

And all four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have turned down an invitation to a debate on minority issues scheduled to air on PBS this week.

...to get the Republican nomination, a candidate must appeal to the base — and the base consists, in large part, of Southern whites who carry over to immigrants the same racial attitudes that brought them into the Republican fold to begin with. As a result, you have the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, pragmatists on immigration issues when they actually had to govern in diverse states, trying to reinvent themselves as defenders of Fortress America.

Krugman notes that blacks, Hispanics and Asians are turning their backs on the Republicans and strongly supporting the Democrats. Bush, in one of his brief displays of intelligence, saw how this demographic shift was threatening his party and moved to staunch the damage with his immigration bill only to see it soundly defeated by his own Republicans.

Today's Jim Crow Republicans are clinging to the rails of a sinking ship, unable to let go. When they're gone they won't be long missed.

Religious Persecution Shelved in Pasedena

Pasadena's All Saints Episcopal church has been let off the hook by the IRS. A year ago the federal agency came down on All Saints with both boots, threatening the church's tax exempt status because of a sermon from 2004.

Two days before the last presidential election the church's former Rector of 28-years delivered an anti-war sermon. In his sermon, George Regas depicted Jesus in a mock debate with then presidential candidates Bush and Kerry. According to the L.A. Times, the sermon didn't endorse or oppose either candidate. Instead, Regas is said to have "addressed the moral and religious implications of various social issues facing the nation at the time."

The IRS demanded, not just a copy of the sermon, it even ordered the church to produce its utility bills to establish costs of hosting Regas' sermon. They also summoned the Rector to furnish "a copy of all oral communications identifying candidates for public office delivered at All Saints Church or at events sponsored by All Saints Church between January 1, 2004 and November 2, 2004."

Now the tables have been turned. The IRS has shelved the matter but it's not over yet. After a battle that cost the All Saints congregation some $200,000, they've got a few questions of their own. According to the LA Times, " e-mails obtained by the church through Freedom of Information Act requests, appear to show that Justice Department officials were involved in the All Saints case before the IRS made any formal referral of it for possible prosecution, an attorney for the church said. The discussions raise concerns that the IRS' investigation was politically motivated, church officials said. One e-mail, for example, appears to show coordination between IRS and Justice Department officials about a request to the church for documents. Others discuss the timing of the request and news coverage about the case."

No, say it ain't so. The same Justice Department then headed by Alberto Gonzales pulling an underhanded, partisan stunt like this? How could anyone possibly believe he'd do something as despicable - hell we're talking Jesus here, make that "evil" - as that?

All Saints is demanding a full explanation, from the revenue service and the injustice department - and a full apology.

And Where It Stops, Nobody Knows

The LA Times reports that President George w. Bush is about to ask congress to authorize $200-billion to fund his Middle East wars for 2008. That funding relates to direct costs, not the actual costs resulting from Bush's folly which are substantially higher.

Someone is making out like a bandit on this war. The Times pointed out that the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been increasing dramatically with every passing year: In 2004, the two conflicts together cost $94 billion; in 2005, they cost $108 billion; in 2006, $122 billion.

Let's face it. It ain't cheap to lose two wars at once.

You And Whose Army?

Iraq's Minister for National Security says charges will be laid against Blackwater personnel in connection with the recent shooting deaths of eight or more civilians in Baghdad.

According to a report in the New York Times: a preliminary report of findings by the Interior Ministry, the National Security Ministry and the Defense Ministry stated that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation.”

My question is just who is going to round up these suspects and bring them before an Iraqi court? Blackwater's mercenary army in Iraq is unquestionably as powerful as any Iraqi armed force, save perhaps for the country's militias. I suppose the US military could take them into custody but, no, I've heard reliable reports that Dick Cheney isn't dead yet. Maybe Blackwater will just surrender these guys. What are the chances?

Nouri al-Maliki has taken a stab at banning Blackwater outright but it wasn't much of a stab and it missed. Blackwater remains very much on the job on America's payroll. So much for Iraqi sovereignty.

Maliki has picked a fight he may not be able to win but may not survive if he loses.

America's Wasted Treasure

Just how much does the Iraq war cost? If you go by current accounts it's about $12-billion a month. In reality it's much, much more.

Today's Washington Post reports that the actual costs of the Iraq war are estimated at $720-million dollars a day. The estimates were produced by the anti-war, American Friends Service Committee:

The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.

The estimates made by the group, which opposes the conflict, include not only the immediate costs of war but also ongoing factors such as long-term health care for veterans, interest on debt and replacement of military hardware.

"The wounded are coming home, and many of them have severe brain and spinal injuries, which will require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives," said Michael McConnell, Great Lakes regional director of the AFSC, a peace group affiliated with the Quaker church.

The $720 million figure breaks down into $280 million a day from Iraq war supplementary funding bills passed by Congress, plus $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs.

And just what could America do with that kind of money? According to the AFSC, the money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity.

As for the neo-cons, they don't care:

"Either you think the war in Iraq supports America's national security, or not," said Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "If you think national security won't be harmed by withdrawing from Iraq, of course you would want to see that money spent elsewhere. I myself think that belief, on a certain level, is absurd, so the question of focusing on how much money we are spending there is irrelevant."

The Squandering Generation

It's sad to say but I think my generation, the vaunted Baby Boomers, may some day come to be known as the "Squandering Generation." Certainly in North America, ours may be the generation that took more than it deserved and left little but problems for those to follow us.

I suppose a lot of this is simply the culmination of human nature and opportunity. Previous generations prevailed over enormous hardships and deprivations to create nations, economies and societies that enjoyed bounties unknown in the history of man and enough stability to allow us to rapaciously harvest those blessings without regard for either the past or the future.

The former editor of Harper's magazine, Lewis Lapham, attributes the demise of America's greatness to a change that began in the Nixon years in which his countrymen came to confuse wealth for virtue. Once wealth, in its own right, became the object of worship, the accumulation of this faux virtue became the national obsession. Caution was thrown to the wind along with any residual notion of posterity.

Today we have whole tracts of three, four, even five-thousand square foot houses that sit as shrines to the virtue of wealth, largely unused and yet heated and lighted and tended to as their enormity demands. We have people congesting our streets in massive, unarmoured personnel carriers for no other purpose than to drop the kids off at school or take in an afternoon of shopping at the mall or even to attend some consciousness-raising event. We are a generation gone mad.

We have turned inward, devoting our attention to what we have amassed and how we will amass even more for that is the quest in which our lives are to find purpose. By turning inward, we turn our backs on our own society and its future. We're far too busy indulging ourselves in our achievements to be bothered. Problems are to be resolved by easy payment plans or ignored altogether. Posterity is a quaint irrelevance, antithetical to the aggregation society.

There was a time when we looked to the future and actually strove for the ideal of a better tomorrow for those to come. We took real pride in imagining what that world would be like, how those generations would enjoy and appreciate what we were creating. Of course that wasn't "we" at all. That was "them", the builders, those who preceded us.

It's been decades since we stopped building for the future. Now we build for today, for us and no one else. Where's the proof of this fantastic accusation? It's right before our eyes in the undeniable fact that we live unsustainably. We take more than our share, as much as we can get our hands on, and in so doing we ensure that there will be less, much less for those who will follow us. To them we bequeath only our consequences. They'll live in the midden of our excess, a world raped of its promise and in contaminated retreat. For we are the Squandering Generation and our legacy is very nearly complete.

Strap Him Down and Sedate Him - Fast

I saw this last night on the Daily Show, a breathtaking example of how utterly screwed up America's presidency has become. It was George w. Bush hisself opining on the sad fate of Nelson Mandela:

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas."

George Bush, by all accounts is not a stupid man. Oh hell, he is so.

"All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

The Wrecking Crew

When you've got a country that needs wrecking, even if it's your own, you need the professionals, The Wrecking Crew. No matter how good, no matter how bad, we can - and will -make it worse and we guarantee it. And don't forget, The Wrecking Crew doesn't just do countries - be sure to ask about our Regional Rates too.

The Wrecking Crew, We Git'er Done!

Our Destructer In Chief

Some Really Angry Dude

Who Really Likes to Make Stuff Up

Mr. Shock & Awe

Screws Up Everything He Touches

No Human Rights Stand in His Way


Pull The String and She'll Say Anything



Him Too




Intelligence That Doesn't Just Suck
- It Blows




Who're You Looking At?
You Lookin' At Me?
-
Complete Psycho



Can Screw Up an Entire Country
In a Single Bound




Director of Applied Sycophancy

Chief of Defence Stooges

In House Gaydar

The Wrecking Crew, in business since 2000. Imagine where the world would be today without us!

She Got What She Deserved

It appears that the FoxNews/Newsmax brain rot has spread to Canada. It seems to get established in the dim-witted and, once it takes hold, moves virulently through their ranks.

I see signs of it here every now and then, generally whenever I post anything about Harper, the neo-cons or global warming. That's when these goofy little comments will appear that often simply make no sense or are rooted in ignorance and bigotry.

These trolls crawled out from beneath their bridges yesterday to denounce the conviction of Myriam Bedard, the former olympian found guilty of child abduction. Fervently they attacked the justice system as a Liberal institution packed with Liberal judges who were driven to rig the trial against Bedard in retaliation for her embarrassing a former Liberal government.

Of course what these partisan dummies conveniently overlooked is that the judge (whether Liberal or PQ or even Tory) presiding over Bedard's case had very little to do with the result. It was a jury trial. Bedard's lawyers asked for that and got it. As in all jury trials, counsel on both sides had the opportunity to question and challenge jurors. They even had pre-emptory challenges if they simply didn't like the look of the potential juror.

A rigged election? Hardly. Just don't try to tell that to the trolls.

Did Blackwater Spring al-Samarri From Iraq Prison?

The US defence contractor, Blackwater, seems to be a law unto itself, at least in Iraq. Atop the US military's 160,000 personnel in Iraq there are an estimated 180,000 contract employees doing everything from the soldiers' laundry to servicing their weapons and providing security to the American and Iraqi bureaucracies. The number of mercenaries is believed to be in the range of 20-30,000.

Blackwater has recently become embroiled in controversy over the purported shooting of Iraqi civilians by some of the company's mercenaries. Now it's alleged that Blackwater operatives helped break a major Iraqi swindler out of prison and spirit him out to the United States. Former Electricity Minister Ahyam al-Samarrai was in prison awaiting sentencing for stealing $2.5-Billion in reconstruction funds.

Until now the name of the private security company said to have been involved has been kept quiet. Today an Iraqi official told McClatchey news the company was Blackwater.