In getting fodder for this page I scan through a wide variety of sources, some of which I think you might want to check out. Here are a few links:
On Afghanistan
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/05/helmand_i_barely_know_him.php
On Washington's realization that the War in Iraq is already over
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/08/iraqs_reality_sinks_in.php
The New Face of al-Qaeda in Pakistan
http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=400&issue_id=3101&article_id=2368659
The Myths about Drugs and Terrorism
http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=400&issue_id=3116&article_id=2368732
Changing al-Qaeda Tactics - Targetting the House of Saud
http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2369847
Do It Yourself Terrorism - The Internet Guide
http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2370103
The Inevitable Solution to the Global Obesity Epidemic
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20The%20Fat%20and%20the%20Starving.txt
Sinners Rejoice - Cleansing the Conscience with a bit of Soap and Water
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157665847364&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467
Friday, September 08, 2006
Another Day, Another Dollar, Another Gordo
Just last week, Canada's Defence Minister, Gord O'Connor, dressed up in his finest camouflage war-fightin' costume and pronounced to Canadian reporters in Afghanistan how he'd like to send Canadian troops into the mountain regions of Pakistan to dig out the Taliban.
Yesterday this same O'Connor, in a Reuters interview from Australia, seemed to be flat out of macho. Last week he wanted to tear the Taliban a new one but now he says we can't handle the one the Taliban already has in Kandahar province:
Yesterday this same O'Connor, in a Reuters interview from Australia, seemed to be flat out of macho. Last week he wanted to tear the Taliban a new one but now he says we can't handle the one the Taliban already has in Kandahar province:
"We cannot eliminate the Taliban, not militarily
anyway. ...we've got to get them back to some
kind of acceptable level, so they don't threaten
other areas."
Okay, which O'Connor do you believe? The nice thing is you've got such a wide choice. Who knows what this guy will say next week.
When the federal government got seduced into 'the mission' by General Rick Hillier it was a pretty bold move. Canadian troops were going to take responsibility for taming Kandahar province by kicking the Taliban's backside and establishing security for the Karzai government. Hillier assured us all that the force of 2,300 he wrangled for the job would be plenty to handle the challenge. Of course he said the Taliban 'scumbags' in Kandahar were only a matter of several dozen in numbers. That would mean Canada could secure the province and rebuild the infrastructure essential to establish proper government control. We were supposed to be something like an armed Peace Corps, fighting if necessary but not necessarily fighting.
There is a gossamer thin line between bravado and hubris. The distinction lies in an overbearing pride that blinds us to obvious perils and weaknesses. Hubris brought us to Kandahar and hubris is now exacting its price on 'the mission.'
O'Connor isn't quite yelling 'uncle' yet but he sure is griping about the burden our soldiers are carrying, the very burden he and General Hillier chose for them. As a swipe to less-engaged NATO nations, O'Connor muttered:
"All loads aren't equal, let's put it that way."
Next memo to Gord: If there was anything obvious when General Hillier dreamed up the Kandahar gig it was that the loads weren't equally shared by the NATO membership. No, we were stepping out to show the big guys that we were in the game, real players. If, in fact, we'd wanted the load shared equally, we wouldn't have asked for the Kandahar mission. NATO didn't ask us, we asked them for the shot and we got it. You and your general assured the Canadian people that our force could handle it. Of course there were going to be casualties but vanquishing the Taliban and saving Afghanistan for the Karzai government were sure things.
Well there are no sure things anymore, there never were. We sent over too small a force and did nothing to reinforce its numbers as the Taliban-led insurgency grew rapidly. We adopted the very same counter-insurgency tactics that have failed every time they've been attempted. We're on 'search and destroy' missions which result in a limited war of attrition against an enemy that has shown itself willing and able to bear our 'kill rate' and knows that time is entirely on their side.
I don't want to read too much into this change of heart, mainly because I don't think Gord is that bright, but could this be the opening of a tide change by a government feeling an awful lot of heat from the Canadian public? Are we probing for an opportunity to scapegoat the NATO alliance to pave the way for pulling out of Afghanistan? Little Stevie is absolutely capable of that.
Stephen Harper's focus isn't on a bunch of soldiers stuck in Kandahar, it's on doing everything he can to win a majority in the next election. Right now he's treading water, stuck in the polls and hurting badly in Quebec. Afghanistan has become a weight tied to Harper's ankles that threatens to pull him under. Do you believe that Little Stevie believes Afghanistan is worth that price?
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Just What are We Fighting For?
Those who endorse 'the mission' in Afghanistan are quick to tell us who we're fighting against. We're there, supposedly, to defeat the Taliban or at least hold them at bay until we just get tired of the whole business in three or four or nine or more years.
Okay, that's what we're fighting against. Now, what are we fighting for? We're told that we're fighting for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan. That sounds pretty good but what does it mean?
Add one measure of 'freedom' and blend with two measures of 'democracy' and you have secular, liberal democracy. That's what we're fighting for, to establish a secular, liberal democracy in Afghanistan. That's what the Afghan people want, isn't it? Well, not really.
In Islamic countries, fledgling democracies tend to head straight into theocracies. These are societies that are wedded to Islam and strict Islamic law. That's not the stuff of secular, free thinkers, the sort who like to dwell on the rights of the individual against the state, for example. That's not to say they won't eventually get around to our style of democracy. It might happen at some point, just not any time soon.
Our politicians and generals really like to heap praise on Hamid Karzai and his government. They never want to mention just how corrupt and terminally compromised Karzai has already allowed his government to become. Here's the way the International Herald Tribune sees him:
Okay, that's what we're fighting against. Now, what are we fighting for? We're told that we're fighting for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan. That sounds pretty good but what does it mean?
Add one measure of 'freedom' and blend with two measures of 'democracy' and you have secular, liberal democracy. That's what we're fighting for, to establish a secular, liberal democracy in Afghanistan. That's what the Afghan people want, isn't it? Well, not really.
In Islamic countries, fledgling democracies tend to head straight into theocracies. These are societies that are wedded to Islam and strict Islamic law. That's not the stuff of secular, free thinkers, the sort who like to dwell on the rights of the individual against the state, for example. That's not to say they won't eventually get around to our style of democracy. It might happen at some point, just not any time soon.
Our politicians and generals really like to heap praise on Hamid Karzai and his government. They never want to mention just how corrupt and terminally compromised Karzai has already allowed his government to become. Here's the way the International Herald Tribune sees him:
"Karzai cannot deliver security and redevelopment without sustained
and effective international help. But he should be doing
a lot more to curb the corruption of his political allies
and appointees.
"Their ostentatious greed has widened the gap,
and sharpened political antagonisms, between
the favored few and the desperately poor majority
in one of the world's least developed countries. Such
venality isa gift to austere Taliban recruiters.
"So is the notorious corruption of the police and judges, which makes
it impossible for people to win redress of simple grievances.
Frustration with the courts is again driving people to look to the
swift and brutal punishments that have always been a Taliban
speciality. Karzai did himself no favors by appointing a warlord
and organized-crime figure as Kabul's chief of police earlier this year."
That's what we are fighting for, a government the Afghan people are shunning with contempt. If this is the prize, just how much Canadian blood is it worth?
Ah, but they tell us, the problems are only in the south, the Pashtun provinces. The rest of the country is peaceful and happy. What they don't tell you is that it's not Hamid Karzai who rules those regions but the warlords/drug lords and it's only peaceful there until we try to stop their trade in opium.
But then we get back to the Global War Without End on Terror. There's a bit of sleight of hand here. Those pushing this argument deliberately blur the distinctions between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Five years after they were sent packing, there's little evidence that the Taliban were actively involved in terrorism. If there was you would have heard plenty about it from those promoting this war. The Taliban let bin Laden's people set up training camps there but that was about it. They were certainly religious zealots but that's not really terrorism of the sort that's coming to your airport any time soon. They waged a brutal civil war against a similarly brutal opponent, the Northern Alliance (today's warlord/druglords).
Now the Afghan people are turning to the Taliban, not away from them, and that makes the people our unwanted enemy. Once they win over a sizeable percentage of the populace, it's all over. At that point all we can do is keep killing and keep dying until we leave.
Defending Universal Health Care - Just Look at the Alternative
Stephen Harper would like nothing better than to undo Canada's health care system. Here are a few quote from Stevie on the subject:
"Universality has been extremely reduced: it is dead as
a concept in most areas of public policy. ...These achievements
are due in part to the Reform Party."
"It's past time the feds scrapped the Canada Health Act."
"We also support the exploration of alternative ways to
deliver health care. Moving toward alternatives,
including those provided by the private sector, is
a natural development of our health care system."
"It is a call to action. We are going to reduce wait times,
we are going to hold governments accountable for their
commitments, we are going to do what it takes to protect
the public health-care system and respect the charter."
If that last quote doesn't seem to square with Harper's previous sentiments, it might be because it was delivered during the last election campaign.
The push to privatize health care in Canada, or adopt a two-tier system with a top tier for those who can afford it, is taking full advantage of problems we have allowed to set into the public system. We must weigh the actual costs and merits of fixing the public system before we debate privatized health care.
The United States stands alone as the bastion of for-profit health care. Why? There are two reasons: 1) there is a great deal of money to be made and 2) the idea of giving a hand up to the poorest hasn't really had much traction down there.
We think that privatizing health care is going to lead to a more efficient, more effective system. If you use the American model that's not the case. The health care system in the U.S. isn't really as privatized as you might expect. In fact, the U.S. government spends, on a per capita basis, an amount that equals a good hunk of what our governments spend in Canada. The private health care regime sits atop that. Together the private and public health care expenditures make America the biggest spender on health care services in the Western world and look at the accomplishments:
You can start with longevity, the age the average citizen can expect to live. America is way down the list. Some of that is Washington's fascination with getting its young people gainfully employed in war zones, some of it is America's gun culture, but a lot of it reflects the pretty miserable median standard of health care.
Other benchmarks include infant mortality. Again the U.S. leads the rest of the industrialized nations on this one.
Private sector health care has a couple of really fatal (pun intended) flaws. One of these is the amount of health care spending that gets siphoned off into administration costs. There are a considerable number of HMO's in the states. Their systems, such as accounting, vary according to each company's preferences. HMO's have to deal with hospitals and doctors. That means the health care providers have to have their own administrations to 'liase' with the HMO's and their various accounting systems. These administration costs eat 25-cents out of every healthcare dollar.
Private sector health care is another way of saying "for profit" health care. Out of the remaining 75-cents of every health care dollar, the companies have to find their reward. Think that's cheap? Think again.
How does a company generate profit? By keeping revenues up and expenses down, that's how. For-profit health insurers have a vested interest in keeping expenses down. There are two means of doing this: by finding any conceivable way to deny coverage to the insured and by negotiating with the health care provider to make treatment choices based on cost. Product X may be the latest and greatest, just what the patient really needs, but Product Y is a fraction of the cost and, well, it'll do.
What an enormous, and potentially deadly, conflict of interest. You're paying handsomely to have this HMO provide your health care needs and they're working their butts off to find ways not to have to deliver or to give you the cheapest treatment they can get away with. That's why the HMO administration costs are so high. They're funneling off a big hunk of your premiums to pay staffers to keep your health care costs to a bare minimum.
There are some of the advantages to the public health care system. Administration costs are minimal, more of every health care dollar is available to spend on your health. Doctors can give you the treatment you need, not just the best deal they can negotiate out of your HMO. Your health isn't being held hostage to some company's profit margins. That, to me, makes a lot of sense. You pay less and you get to live longer to boot.
This is not to say that we don't have serious problems besetting Canada's health care system. Obviously we do and we should always be looking for ways to improve it. We need to cut down waiting times, especially in critical areas such as cancer, heart disease and joint replacements. Remember, the Liberals actually wanted to implement that very reform. Hey, it was their idea.
You don't hear much about that from the new bunch.
We also need to accept the changing reality. We live longer than we ever expected when we created the health care model. Old people, on average, require more drugs and more treatments. When you increase longevity, it doesn't happen in youth. Wouldn't it be great if we could stay 20 for, say, 10-years? No, the extension comes at the last years and they're medically expensive years. There's no way around it, we have to adjust funding to the health care system to reflect this reality. Maybe we should go for a two-tier system. You can have the cheaper health care but we have to kill you when you hit 70. How attractive does that sound?
Deutschland Uber Alles - Again?
Germany, it seems, is rising again. After a decade or more of sluggish performance and the burden of reunification of East and West, the German economy is again taking off.
There are many factors at play here. One of them is a shift in attitude of German industry. Instead of indulging shareholders with big dividends, German industry has begun re-investing profits in the industry itself and it's paying off.
When you think about the world's exporting giants, who comes to mind? Korea? Probably not. Japan? That's an obvious choice. China? Bingo. Wrong, wrong and wrong. It's quiet little Germany that exports more product than any other nation.
Think about that. The United States, for all its prowess, is a lumbering debt machine. It sells to the world vastly less than it buys from the world, roughly half a trillion dollars a year worth. America doesn't make what its people want and what it does make isn't wanted anywhere else. What it doesn't buy from the world it borrows, another half trillion a year for the federal government alone and plenty more for state and municipal governments. Hey, somebody is lending the American public the vast sums they're borrowing too. Do you see a pattern here?
America does generate a lot of money that goes into investment, just not in the U.S. America invests it's money in other countries, places like China, where the returns are better. The trouble is that this is a telltale symptom of a country in decline. It's happened to all the grand empires in the past - Holland, Spain and Britain, each in turn. When you pump your wealth into growing somebody else's economy instead of your own it's just a matter of time.
The American economy is now driven by its housing market and even the World Bank fears the global consequences of a burst bubble there. This is a fascinating phenonmenon, a veritable Mardi Gras of indulgence fueled by cheap rates and tax deductible mortgage interest. Fully half of new mortgages in California are "interest only." At the same time, American homeowner equity levels have never been lower. Americans use the mortgage-interest deductibility to expand their purchasing power. They siphon the notional equity out of their homes to buy - well, to buy all those BMWs and Infinitys.
Canada, of course, is a net exporter to the U.S. We have a substantial and potentially dangerous balance of trade surplus with America which buys something in the order of 70 plus percent of our exports. Thanks to NAFTA, we're tied to the American economy as never before. What do the Europeans buy from us, maple syrup? Here, we're a lot like the U.S. Canada runs a very large balance of trade deficit with Europe. Our economic ties to the European Union are broken.
We have a balance of trade surplus thanks only to our natural resources and to America's insatiable appetite for our fossil fuels. Without that, where are we? That's a question you need to ponder for a while.
Economically, America is the luxury cruiser and we're the dinghy tied fast and floating merrily along behind. The trouble is the cruiser has sprung a lot of leaks and is taking on water. If it sinks, it's taking us down with it. Let's see: we know the big boat is shipping water and may well sink. What should we do? The obvious thing would be to cut the line or at least leave it tied very loosely so that we don't have to go down if the cruiser sinks. Does that make sense?
Our leaders have largely neglected our trade relationship with Europe. The balance of trade surplus has left them comfortably lethargic, drowsy. Don't worry, be happy. It is time that we start to sit up and shake off our stupor. Time to take notice of just where we are, the nature and magnitude of our vulnerabilities, and what options we should be pursuing. Something has to give.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Into the Arms of the Taliban
Canadian newspapers tend to give an upbeat, often jingoistic, portrayal of Canada's military effort in Afghanistan. No doubt that our troops over there are terrific and stoked for a fight and they're undertaking real battle against Taliban insurgents and yet a nagging uneasiness remains when most Canadians weigh "the mission."
What we don't get in our media is very much on the state of the Afghani people in Kandahar province. You can, however, find plenty of information, most of it troubling, from non-Canadian sources. These sources include studies done by some prestigious think tanks such as the Inernational Institute for Strategic Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and quality papers such as The Guardian, even The New York Times. The picture they portray is of a mission going downhill fast.
We jumped the gun on Afghanistan's opium farmers. A lot of little guys were left destitute when our soldiers destroyed their crops. That was their only means of feeding their families. We took away their livelihood but failed to give them alternative ways to earn enough to fend off starvation. With nowhere else to turn, where do they go? Straight to the Taliban.
It's difficult to imagine how we can give these people hope with this naive approach to the opium problem. Even if we were able to come up with alternatives, they probably wouldn't have much chance of taking hold unless we were also able to provide these farmers with proper security. The insurgents thrive off the opium trade and what farmer, without day and night, permanent security is going to defy the Taliban and start growing onions? We're not going to achieve that level of security for years, maybe not ever.
Think "the mission" is going to change? Ask yourself what are the chances Stephen Harper is going to tell General Rick Hillier to let the opium fields bloom again? Our morality just doesn't fit the reality on the ground in Kandahar and we're driving these people straight into the arms of our enemy.
What we don't get in our media is very much on the state of the Afghani people in Kandahar province. You can, however, find plenty of information, most of it troubling, from non-Canadian sources. These sources include studies done by some prestigious think tanks such as the Inernational Institute for Strategic Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and quality papers such as The Guardian, even The New York Times. The picture they portray is of a mission going downhill fast.
We jumped the gun on Afghanistan's opium farmers. A lot of little guys were left destitute when our soldiers destroyed their crops. That was their only means of feeding their families. We took away their livelihood but failed to give them alternative ways to earn enough to fend off starvation. With nowhere else to turn, where do they go? Straight to the Taliban.
It's difficult to imagine how we can give these people hope with this naive approach to the opium problem. Even if we were able to come up with alternatives, they probably wouldn't have much chance of taking hold unless we were also able to provide these farmers with proper security. The insurgents thrive off the opium trade and what farmer, without day and night, permanent security is going to defy the Taliban and start growing onions? We're not going to achieve that level of security for years, maybe not ever.
Think "the mission" is going to change? Ask yourself what are the chances Stephen Harper is going to tell General Rick Hillier to let the opium fields bloom again? Our morality just doesn't fit the reality on the ground in Kandahar and we're driving these people straight into the arms of our enemy.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Bush is a Loonie
Here's the metaphor I've been looking for for so long. Imagine you live in a small town. And imagine that everyone knows that at noon on Friday, Jim comes to the town square, performs a little dance and barks like a dog because he thinks that'll bring rains to the parched fields. Jim keeps showing up, like clockwork, every Friday and goes through the same bizarre dance each time and, each time, there is no rain. How long would you let Jim do this before you could accept that he was insane? How long would you wait for Jim to deliver up rain before you figured out it was time to dig a well?
Look at the mid-term congressional contests that have got George Bush out making speeches. Then listen to his speeches. This guy is actually trying to use Osama bin Laden, his greatest personal failure, to recruit votes for the Republican candidates. He tells you that democracy and the defeat of terrorism in Iraq is just one more dance away and then he starts barking. Isn't it time to dig that well?
Look at the mid-term congressional contests that have got George Bush out making speeches. Then listen to his speeches. This guy is actually trying to use Osama bin Laden, his greatest personal failure, to recruit votes for the Republican candidates. He tells you that democracy and the defeat of terrorism in Iraq is just one more dance away and then he starts barking. Isn't it time to dig that well?
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Time Takes Its Toll on All
One of the best known men in the world today is Donald Rumsfeld, America's Minister of Death. We know him as this guy, aka The Praying Mantis:
But how many of us remember the younger Donald, back before he kicked the habit:
But how many of us remember the younger Donald, back before he kicked the habit:
Dangers of Delusion
When you've been doing something for half a century and you still find it doesn't work would you want to look back to the start and see if you've missed something that may account for your failures? If your shoes are way too small and keep giving you blisters on your feet, do you lay in a big supply of band aids or would you be happier getting shoes that fit?
We like to think of ourselves as enlightened, rational people. We get the facts and use them to make the best decisions possible. We expect our governments to follow that same path. What happens, however, when myth takes hold and displaces fact in the minds of one generation after another and numerous, successive governments? If the myth is powerful enough it can blind us to the truth and, instead, wed us to its delusions.
Welcome to the Middle East, a region in the death grip of myth that threatens us all.
We in the West have been fed some real whoppers that have shaped our perceptions of the Arab world. The Arabs are untrustworthy, they are pernicious in their ways, Arabs are besotted with violence, their culture is irredeemably backward and their religion is - oh come on - it's evil. Once you have absorbed this outlook you can tolerate or else comfortably ignore pretty much everything we've done to the Arabs and the Muslims generally going as far back as Napoleon. Because they're mysterious and threatening not to mention stuck in time and simply different, we can avoid dwelling on how we would react if we'd been in their shoes.
The Western nations have been interfering in the Arab world from the medieval period and the crusades. Back then we saw what is modern Israel as our own Holy Land. However we didn't really get into it until we found out these people had an astonishing amount of oil.
The 20th Century, in particular, witnessed rampant conquest, betrayal, deception, and oppression of the Muslim world by the West. Until the end of WWI, most of the Middle East was dominated by the Ottoman Empire (we call'em Turks today). Unfortunately, for them, the Ottomans thought Germany would be winning that war and sided with them. Bad choice.
Britain saw a chance to exploit Arab resentment of the Ottomans. It sent Colonel T.E. Lawrence (that's right, Lawrence of Arabia - picture Peter O'Toole in tropical uniform) to launch an Arab uprising. Lawrence was told to promise them that, once Germany was defeated, the Ottomans would be swept out of the region and the Arabs would be allowed to establish their own sovereign countries. Here's the best part - those backward Arabs fell for it.
When the dust settled, the Kaiser and the Ottomans were no more. This was the point where the Arabs were supposed to get their sovereignty. Oh dear, maybe not. Britain and France decided they might as well just take over from the Ottomans and divvy up the place between themselves. And that is what they did and that is a key to a whole pile of the problems that confront us today.
Glance at a map of the region and notice all those straight lines. Those lines, which today stand as borders, were actually drawn for the convenience of Europeans to mark their respective possessions. Big mistake. Huge blunder. What was convenient for Britain and France worked great mischief on the tribal, ethnic and social realities of the region.
Take the Kurds - please. The Kurds are a stateless people. What was their nation, Kurdistan, disappeared when the pencils and rulers came out in Paris and London. Where was Kurdistan? Here:
You'll see that the historical land of the Kurds just happened to lie at the junction of a number of nations including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan and even Armenia. Thanks to fate and the self-interest of European states, the promise of Kurdistan vanished. For years the Kurds have waged a rebellion in Turkey that has been ruthlessly suppressed. Saddam, as we know, did his best to exterminate Iraq's Kurds. Iran has been playing both sides of the Iraq/Kurd conflict.
Why no Kurdistan? There was supposed to be such a state. It was specified in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres between the WWI allies and the Ottomans. Then a couple of things happened. Along came Turkey's legendary Ataturk and the allies discovered that what was to be the southern part of Kurdistan was rich in - you guessed it - oil. New deal, 1923, Treaty of Lausanne, divided up the Kurdish homeland between Turkey and the allies who put their part, the oil rich part, into another of their possessions, Iraq. Sorry Kurds, it's not you, it's the oil.
The Kurds now refer to their autonomous region in Iraq as "southern Kurdistan" a name that suggests there is more to follow. The first target is the Kurdish territory in Turkey and that has the Turks really up in arms. If Iraq plunges into full-blown civil war, it is quite likely that the Kurdish region will be invaded by Turkey's powerful army. That could well be enough to trigger some of Iraq's other neighbours to take their share, particularly Iran. America has always worried about the possibility of Iran wresting control of Iraq's oilfields but that's another story. Another war, Enduring Freedom II perhaps? Quite likely.
What can we do to keep these tensions from erupting? Well, for starters, we can treat the Muslim peoples as entitled to make their own decisions, even if we don't like what they decide. IT'S THEIR OIL. Say that a few times until it sinks in: it's their oil, it's their oil, it's their oil. What right have we to control their oil? On what basis do we think we can install thugs and puppet rulers who will serve our interests over their own peoples'?
Letting the Arab peoples decide sounds pretty straightforward except for - Israel. We have a whole nest of myths that have become ingrained in our culture, our society, our governments' foreign policies that aren't working because, well because they're myths. Myth #1 - Israel somehow popped into existance out of nowhere after WWII. In fact, Israel has been a work in progress since the late 1800's with the advent of the Zionist movement. Myth #2 - Israel was carved out of lands that no one else wanted, lands to which no other group held any ancient claim. Wrong, wrong and wrong. The Palestinian people lived there for, well almost forever. Myth #3 - the Palestinian Arabs left their homes in Israel in 1948 at the direction of their Arab leaders. This is the nub of it all - they were driven out, by violence, by the Zionists. It was terrorism, plain and simple. It was also what we know today as "ethnic cleansing."
So long as we continue to prop up this dark farce, the Muslims will see us as their enemies. The Palestinian issue burns in their minds, in their hearts. It shines as a clear example of what the Arab people mean to us in the West.
If anything, we are now probably in a pretty good position to settle the Israel/Palestine dilemma. Everyone knows the answer - Israel goes back to its pre-1967 war borders, Israel either grants the Palestinians who were driven out a right of return or Israel (that is the Western nations) properly compensate the victims for what was wrongfully taken from them; Jerusalem becomes an "Open City" under a permanent, UN mandate so that the interests of Jews, Muslims and Christians can be fully accommodated.
This is the answer but to get there we have to get past the myths. So long as we don't we're deluding ourselves. This lunacy has been tried and failed, repeatedly, for fifty years. The dangers of our delusion are getting much worse and it's time we got back to history, not fiction.
We like to think of ourselves as enlightened, rational people. We get the facts and use them to make the best decisions possible. We expect our governments to follow that same path. What happens, however, when myth takes hold and displaces fact in the minds of one generation after another and numerous, successive governments? If the myth is powerful enough it can blind us to the truth and, instead, wed us to its delusions.
Welcome to the Middle East, a region in the death grip of myth that threatens us all.
We in the West have been fed some real whoppers that have shaped our perceptions of the Arab world. The Arabs are untrustworthy, they are pernicious in their ways, Arabs are besotted with violence, their culture is irredeemably backward and their religion is - oh come on - it's evil. Once you have absorbed this outlook you can tolerate or else comfortably ignore pretty much everything we've done to the Arabs and the Muslims generally going as far back as Napoleon. Because they're mysterious and threatening not to mention stuck in time and simply different, we can avoid dwelling on how we would react if we'd been in their shoes.
The Western nations have been interfering in the Arab world from the medieval period and the crusades. Back then we saw what is modern Israel as our own Holy Land. However we didn't really get into it until we found out these people had an astonishing amount of oil.
The 20th Century, in particular, witnessed rampant conquest, betrayal, deception, and oppression of the Muslim world by the West. Until the end of WWI, most of the Middle East was dominated by the Ottoman Empire (we call'em Turks today). Unfortunately, for them, the Ottomans thought Germany would be winning that war and sided with them. Bad choice.
Britain saw a chance to exploit Arab resentment of the Ottomans. It sent Colonel T.E. Lawrence (that's right, Lawrence of Arabia - picture Peter O'Toole in tropical uniform) to launch an Arab uprising. Lawrence was told to promise them that, once Germany was defeated, the Ottomans would be swept out of the region and the Arabs would be allowed to establish their own sovereign countries. Here's the best part - those backward Arabs fell for it.
When the dust settled, the Kaiser and the Ottomans were no more. This was the point where the Arabs were supposed to get their sovereignty. Oh dear, maybe not. Britain and France decided they might as well just take over from the Ottomans and divvy up the place between themselves. And that is what they did and that is a key to a whole pile of the problems that confront us today.
Glance at a map of the region and notice all those straight lines. Those lines, which today stand as borders, were actually drawn for the convenience of Europeans to mark their respective possessions. Big mistake. Huge blunder. What was convenient for Britain and France worked great mischief on the tribal, ethnic and social realities of the region.
Take the Kurds - please. The Kurds are a stateless people. What was their nation, Kurdistan, disappeared when the pencils and rulers came out in Paris and London. Where was Kurdistan? Here:
You'll see that the historical land of the Kurds just happened to lie at the junction of a number of nations including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan and even Armenia. Thanks to fate and the self-interest of European states, the promise of Kurdistan vanished. For years the Kurds have waged a rebellion in Turkey that has been ruthlessly suppressed. Saddam, as we know, did his best to exterminate Iraq's Kurds. Iran has been playing both sides of the Iraq/Kurd conflict.
Why no Kurdistan? There was supposed to be such a state. It was specified in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres between the WWI allies and the Ottomans. Then a couple of things happened. Along came Turkey's legendary Ataturk and the allies discovered that what was to be the southern part of Kurdistan was rich in - you guessed it - oil. New deal, 1923, Treaty of Lausanne, divided up the Kurdish homeland between Turkey and the allies who put their part, the oil rich part, into another of their possessions, Iraq. Sorry Kurds, it's not you, it's the oil.
The Kurds now refer to their autonomous region in Iraq as "southern Kurdistan" a name that suggests there is more to follow. The first target is the Kurdish territory in Turkey and that has the Turks really up in arms. If Iraq plunges into full-blown civil war, it is quite likely that the Kurdish region will be invaded by Turkey's powerful army. That could well be enough to trigger some of Iraq's other neighbours to take their share, particularly Iran. America has always worried about the possibility of Iran wresting control of Iraq's oilfields but that's another story. Another war, Enduring Freedom II perhaps? Quite likely.
What can we do to keep these tensions from erupting? Well, for starters, we can treat the Muslim peoples as entitled to make their own decisions, even if we don't like what they decide. IT'S THEIR OIL. Say that a few times until it sinks in: it's their oil, it's their oil, it's their oil. What right have we to control their oil? On what basis do we think we can install thugs and puppet rulers who will serve our interests over their own peoples'?
Letting the Arab peoples decide sounds pretty straightforward except for - Israel. We have a whole nest of myths that have become ingrained in our culture, our society, our governments' foreign policies that aren't working because, well because they're myths. Myth #1 - Israel somehow popped into existance out of nowhere after WWII. In fact, Israel has been a work in progress since the late 1800's with the advent of the Zionist movement. Myth #2 - Israel was carved out of lands that no one else wanted, lands to which no other group held any ancient claim. Wrong, wrong and wrong. The Palestinian people lived there for, well almost forever. Myth #3 - the Palestinian Arabs left their homes in Israel in 1948 at the direction of their Arab leaders. This is the nub of it all - they were driven out, by violence, by the Zionists. It was terrorism, plain and simple. It was also what we know today as "ethnic cleansing."
So long as we continue to prop up this dark farce, the Muslims will see us as their enemies. The Palestinian issue burns in their minds, in their hearts. It shines as a clear example of what the Arab people mean to us in the West.
If anything, we are now probably in a pretty good position to settle the Israel/Palestine dilemma. Everyone knows the answer - Israel goes back to its pre-1967 war borders, Israel either grants the Palestinians who were driven out a right of return or Israel (that is the Western nations) properly compensate the victims for what was wrongfully taken from them; Jerusalem becomes an "Open City" under a permanent, UN mandate so that the interests of Jews, Muslims and Christians can be fully accommodated.
This is the answer but to get there we have to get past the myths. So long as we don't we're deluding ourselves. This lunacy has been tried and failed, repeatedly, for fifty years. The dangers of our delusion are getting much worse and it's time we got back to history, not fiction.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
On to Islamabad
Mission CreepMemo to Gord: You're not "in" the military anymore. You're now a civilian. Someone even made you Minister of Defence. You don't need camo combat fatigues, even if they do have your name emblazoned on them. "Rambo" was only a movie Gord, honestly.
From the "It just keeps getting nuttier" file, word just out that Canada's Defence Minister, Gordon "Killer" O'Conner has decided that failing to control the Taliban in Afghanistan's unruly Kandahar province isn't enough, he also wants our already limited ground force there to start prowling the mountains of Pakistan.
Look, Gord. The Canadian people already are pretty fed up with Afghanistan and "the mission." They support our troops but they don't believe in the mission and they don't believe Afghanistan is worth it. It's your job and Steve's to persuade the Canadian people to support this and you haven't. That means you've failed to do your job. Are you so insensible that you think we're chomping at the bit to have you make our soldiers' lives more difficult, even more dangerous? You had better start paying attention to the Canadian people, Gord, because they're starting to pay attention to you and, in your case, that's not a good thing.
Why not Pakistan? Where to begin? The Pakistani Army doesn't even like going in there because they tend to get mauled pretty badly by the mountain tribesmen. These fierce folks don't like their own army, how do you think they're going to welcome ours?
This is a pretty big job. Just how many battalions do you think it's going to take to tackle the Taliban in Pakistan? Of course, if you're not going to send a sizeable force, why send a token force? Do you think maybe a few Canadians would be all the Pakistanis would need to actually get up the courage to go after the Taliban? Have you not been wearing your matching camo sun hat, Gord? That sun's wicked hot out there, you know. Best be careful.
Then there's Mr. Big himself, Pakistan's boss, General Musharraf. He's been riding a razorblade for years, trying to keep the radicals at bay. He's dodged a few bullets - real bullets. It's hard to say just how risky it would be for the General to start letting infidels mess with his military but I'm sure if he wanted us there, he'd have asked. That's the thing when you're moving your army around, it's usually better to wait until you're invited.
Oh yeah, and there's Parliament. You know them Gord, that's the bunch of civilians you actually belong with. Those opposition guys, they know they've got the voters behind them on this one, Gord, and they're going to eat you alive on the Pakistan business. No Mr. Minister, this idea is a complete non-starter. Besides, if we get all of our guys tied down in Pakistan, what are we going to have left to put up when George culls together his next coalition, the one to invade Iran?
By the way, the caption beneath the picture of Minister O'Connor, "Mission Creep", is a term that describes the tendency of military operations to grow or 'creep' into new areas or tasks, usually with bad results. In Iraq, for example, the Bush administration believed their forces would be in and out within as little as 60-days. Now The Decider can't even foresee getting American troops out of that quagmire. Start off small and you wind up neck deep and treading water.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Musical Chairs - From Iraq to Iran
I'm not going to vouch for claims made by American commanders in Iraq. There have been so many promises, so many arguments, assurances and assertions from the succession of these types and so few of them have come to pass. However there was one yesterday from the current commander in theatre, General George Casey, that deserves to be considered. Despite evidence of the ongoing insurgency, growing civil war and instability of the Iraqi government, General Casey pronounced yesterday that American forces might be able to be out of Iraq within a year. Really? What are we to read into Casey's claims?
American forces have been in Iraq for three years and victory continues to stay out of their reach. General Casey points to a supposed drop in the number of deaths in Baghdad due to suicide bombers following redeployment of American forces into the capital as clear evidence of success. I'll tell you who doesn't believe that, General Casey.
General Casey knows that fighting an insurgency with a conventional military force is like herding cats. He also knows that conventional military forces have an awful track record in defeating insurgencies. The terrorists that the U.S. forces are grappling with are really mostly insurgents. Suicide bombers are terrorists, sure. They aren't the insurgency, that's home grown. Insurgents are in it for the long run. Against their conventional enemy the insurgents can't hope to match them in numbers, certainly not in firepower, or in mobility, artillery or air support. Insurgents have to take maximum advantage of what they do have going for them and their greatest edge comes from holding the initiative. Because the insurgents are locals, they can vanish into the civilian population. That allows them to decide when and where they will offer combat and when they will refuse combat and disappear. Every now and then the other side gets lucky or gets a useful tip and tracks down some of the insurgents but delivering an outright defeat to them is as challenging as alchemy. So General Casey knows that throwing out body counts as evidence of victory over the insurgents is essentially meaningless.
What then are we to make of Casey's claim that American troops might be out of Iraq within a year? This is when it can be really useful to cast around for other snippets of information that may shed a bit of light.
Start with the "Guns or Butter" dilemma that seems to be catching up with the Bush administration. This refers to the choice all leaders must make between spending their treasury on civil programmes or on the military. Since he became president, Shrub has been trying to play this both ways. He wants his guns and he wants his butter in the form of tax cuts. No other wartime president has ever cut taxes in the midst of conflict. Iraq has become a great hole into which the U.S. treasury is hemorrhaging. Meanwhile, the military is getting squeezed.
Michael Hirsh, in an article in the online version of Newsweek, reports that three years of sand and heat have worn out a lot of the American army's tanks and humvees and other vehicles. Now the military is having to resort to cannibalizing the vehicles remaining stateside to furnish spares to keep the stuff in Iraq operating. It's pretty obvious this sort of thing is a band aid solution at best. Meanwhile, some of the troops now being sent to Iraq are on their third tours there. Their level of mission fatigue is growing. At the same time, Pentagon officials are beginning to worry about the vaunted "Green Zone", the fortification behind which the American command and the wobbly Iraqi government shelter from the insurgency,and whether it can hold. It's said that some are now calling it the "Yellow Zone."
There is one thing, perhaps only one, you can count on from Incurious George: he won't rescind his tax cuts. That means he won't open the money taps for the treasury. That also means he will have to fund this enormously costly adventure on debt. That little obligation will be left to future generations to repay. Patriotism or lunacy?
Times may be getting tougher for the American military in Iraq but they still have a few good fights left in them. The question is how best to use that remaining capability? Do you deplete it in Iraq which may already be a lost cause? Do you use it elsewhere?
Washington's focus on Iran has increased mightily over the past few months. It is widely reported that Bush wants his presidential legacy to be the defanging of Iran through the destruction of that country's nuclear programme and the toppling of its theocratic rulers. The spin mills are going flat out. The intelligence is being fixed and spoonfed to Congress and the American people. The juggernaut is picking up speed.
At first, Don Rumsfeld wanted to eliminate Iran's nuclear capability by strategic bombing. He even mused about using mini-nuclear bombs to take out underground facilities. The trouble is that the pentagon just doesn't have enough intelligence as to what Iran has and where to pull that off. The alternative is to use America's awesome air power to support a land intervention.
One of the strongest arguments about attacking Iran has been the peril that could be faced by U.S. forces in Iraq from a popular uprising against them. One way to safeguard American forces from that threat would be for them not to be in Iraq but, perhaps, in Iran. Using the already deployed troops and equipment against neighbouring Iran makes a lot more sense than raising a fresh force in the U.S. and then shipping the troops and vehicles over. Besides, Bush is nearing his 2-year countdown. He doesn't have enough time remaining in his presidency to start this all over from scratch. There is also the very real risk of Congress falling to the Democrats this November and seeing his plans thwarted from Capital Hill.
If Bush really does want to build his legacy on Iran, he doesn't have time to lose. Wars don't just start overnight, unannounced. That nonsense pretty much ended with Pearl Harbour. There are plenty of signs that war is coming. One of these is the insertion of special forces teams into the intended battlefield to collect intelligence, establish contact with dissidents and identify targets. It's a poorly held secret that U.S. special forces teams, possibly British also, have been roaming around Iran for several months already.
The U.S. President has put himself inside a reality bubble from which he can spin some pretty wild fantasies. One of them is the belief that an attack on Iran will trigger a popular uprising by local, pro-democracy dissidents. Unfortunately that too seems to be a fantasy. Dissidents who have spoken out have made clear that they are Iranians first and any foreign intervention will only drive them back into the arms of the government to resist the invaders. That doesn't mean that Little Georgie will accept this reality.
My guess is that Bush doesn't know which route to go but he wants to keep the military option very much open. He's going to do the Security Council theatre again but he's already shown that he's not willing to be constrained by international law.
Iran presents Bush with a number of bad options and no good options. He has pretty much squandered his political capital as far as the Middle East is concerned and the Israeli debacle in Lebanon has undercut his military influence also. America's best option is to negotiate with Iran and yet Bush's many blunders have undermined his bargaining power and just when he needs it most.
Bush may view attacking Iran as the only route to saving Israel from nuclear attack. He certainly believes that he is the only one with the courage to take on Iran and that whoever succeeds him won't be willing to do it. Iraq has proven to be an utter shambles and Shrub doesn't want that to be his legacy. To avoid that shame, he'll have to pull a rabbit out of his hat and Iran is probably the only bunny on his radar.
We still can't tell where George is going to go with this but we can focus on his options and look for the little signs that give all away. I'm guessing but I think we'll know within the next few months pretty much how this is going to play out. To use the American's own scale, I'd put us at Condition Orange - Elevated right now.
By the way, keep an eye on Britain's force redeployment from last week. Where did they go when they abandoned their base in Amara? Down into the oil fields and Iranian border areas of Maysan province. It could all be coincidence but it's worth watching.
American forces have been in Iraq for three years and victory continues to stay out of their reach. General Casey points to a supposed drop in the number of deaths in Baghdad due to suicide bombers following redeployment of American forces into the capital as clear evidence of success. I'll tell you who doesn't believe that, General Casey.
General Casey knows that fighting an insurgency with a conventional military force is like herding cats. He also knows that conventional military forces have an awful track record in defeating insurgencies. The terrorists that the U.S. forces are grappling with are really mostly insurgents. Suicide bombers are terrorists, sure. They aren't the insurgency, that's home grown. Insurgents are in it for the long run. Against their conventional enemy the insurgents can't hope to match them in numbers, certainly not in firepower, or in mobility, artillery or air support. Insurgents have to take maximum advantage of what they do have going for them and their greatest edge comes from holding the initiative. Because the insurgents are locals, they can vanish into the civilian population. That allows them to decide when and where they will offer combat and when they will refuse combat and disappear. Every now and then the other side gets lucky or gets a useful tip and tracks down some of the insurgents but delivering an outright defeat to them is as challenging as alchemy. So General Casey knows that throwing out body counts as evidence of victory over the insurgents is essentially meaningless.
What then are we to make of Casey's claim that American troops might be out of Iraq within a year? This is when it can be really useful to cast around for other snippets of information that may shed a bit of light.
Start with the "Guns or Butter" dilemma that seems to be catching up with the Bush administration. This refers to the choice all leaders must make between spending their treasury on civil programmes or on the military. Since he became president, Shrub has been trying to play this both ways. He wants his guns and he wants his butter in the form of tax cuts. No other wartime president has ever cut taxes in the midst of conflict. Iraq has become a great hole into which the U.S. treasury is hemorrhaging. Meanwhile, the military is getting squeezed.
Michael Hirsh, in an article in the online version of Newsweek, reports that three years of sand and heat have worn out a lot of the American army's tanks and humvees and other vehicles. Now the military is having to resort to cannibalizing the vehicles remaining stateside to furnish spares to keep the stuff in Iraq operating. It's pretty obvious this sort of thing is a band aid solution at best. Meanwhile, some of the troops now being sent to Iraq are on their third tours there. Their level of mission fatigue is growing. At the same time, Pentagon officials are beginning to worry about the vaunted "Green Zone", the fortification behind which the American command and the wobbly Iraqi government shelter from the insurgency,and whether it can hold. It's said that some are now calling it the "Yellow Zone."
There is one thing, perhaps only one, you can count on from Incurious George: he won't rescind his tax cuts. That means he won't open the money taps for the treasury. That also means he will have to fund this enormously costly adventure on debt. That little obligation will be left to future generations to repay. Patriotism or lunacy?
Times may be getting tougher for the American military in Iraq but they still have a few good fights left in them. The question is how best to use that remaining capability? Do you deplete it in Iraq which may already be a lost cause? Do you use it elsewhere?
Washington's focus on Iran has increased mightily over the past few months. It is widely reported that Bush wants his presidential legacy to be the defanging of Iran through the destruction of that country's nuclear programme and the toppling of its theocratic rulers. The spin mills are going flat out. The intelligence is being fixed and spoonfed to Congress and the American people. The juggernaut is picking up speed.
At first, Don Rumsfeld wanted to eliminate Iran's nuclear capability by strategic bombing. He even mused about using mini-nuclear bombs to take out underground facilities. The trouble is that the pentagon just doesn't have enough intelligence as to what Iran has and where to pull that off. The alternative is to use America's awesome air power to support a land intervention.
One of the strongest arguments about attacking Iran has been the peril that could be faced by U.S. forces in Iraq from a popular uprising against them. One way to safeguard American forces from that threat would be for them not to be in Iraq but, perhaps, in Iran. Using the already deployed troops and equipment against neighbouring Iran makes a lot more sense than raising a fresh force in the U.S. and then shipping the troops and vehicles over. Besides, Bush is nearing his 2-year countdown. He doesn't have enough time remaining in his presidency to start this all over from scratch. There is also the very real risk of Congress falling to the Democrats this November and seeing his plans thwarted from Capital Hill.
If Bush really does want to build his legacy on Iran, he doesn't have time to lose. Wars don't just start overnight, unannounced. That nonsense pretty much ended with Pearl Harbour. There are plenty of signs that war is coming. One of these is the insertion of special forces teams into the intended battlefield to collect intelligence, establish contact with dissidents and identify targets. It's a poorly held secret that U.S. special forces teams, possibly British also, have been roaming around Iran for several months already.
The U.S. President has put himself inside a reality bubble from which he can spin some pretty wild fantasies. One of them is the belief that an attack on Iran will trigger a popular uprising by local, pro-democracy dissidents. Unfortunately that too seems to be a fantasy. Dissidents who have spoken out have made clear that they are Iranians first and any foreign intervention will only drive them back into the arms of the government to resist the invaders. That doesn't mean that Little Georgie will accept this reality.
My guess is that Bush doesn't know which route to go but he wants to keep the military option very much open. He's going to do the Security Council theatre again but he's already shown that he's not willing to be constrained by international law.
Iran presents Bush with a number of bad options and no good options. He has pretty much squandered his political capital as far as the Middle East is concerned and the Israeli debacle in Lebanon has undercut his military influence also. America's best option is to negotiate with Iran and yet Bush's many blunders have undermined his bargaining power and just when he needs it most.
Bush may view attacking Iran as the only route to saving Israel from nuclear attack. He certainly believes that he is the only one with the courage to take on Iran and that whoever succeeds him won't be willing to do it. Iraq has proven to be an utter shambles and Shrub doesn't want that to be his legacy. To avoid that shame, he'll have to pull a rabbit out of his hat and Iran is probably the only bunny on his radar.
We still can't tell where George is going to go with this but we can focus on his options and look for the little signs that give all away. I'm guessing but I think we'll know within the next few months pretty much how this is going to play out. To use the American's own scale, I'd put us at Condition Orange - Elevated right now.
By the way, keep an eye on Britain's force redeployment from last week. Where did they go when they abandoned their base in Amara? Down into the oil fields and Iranian border areas of Maysan province. It could all be coincidence but it's worth watching.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Have we been Punk'd?
Remember the Great London Bombing Scare, the dastardly al-Qaeda plot, no liquids in carry-on bags, full cavity body searches? Well, according to a Brit named Craig Murray, we might have just been punk'd.
A word about Craig Murray (of www.craigmurray.co.uk). Craig had been relatively obscure until he shot his big mouth off about torture. At the time, Murray was Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan which was then a 'partner' in America's War Without End on Terror. Murray was given his cards (in England, that's a way of saying 'you're fired') because he refused to remain mum about Uzbekistan President Karimov's fascination with torture.
Lip off to Karimov and that means you're an Islamic terrorist and then you're really in hot water. No, I mean it - hot water. Karimov has a reputation of waging the War Without End on Terror by immersing his opponents in boiling water. That's right, he pops them in the cauldron just like lobsters. Anyway, at the time of Murray's outspokeness, Uzbekistan was considered America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region and Rumsfeld was pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into their army. Murray just had to go.
Craig Murray is still mouthing off which you'll see if you go to his website. He's even really skeptical about the Great London Bomb Plot. He thinks the whole thing was stage-managed to help prop up the increasingly unpopular Blair and Bush administrations. Among his contentions:
- "None ofthe alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports which, given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency, would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
- "In the absnece of bombs and airline tickets and, in many cases, passports, it could be difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that these individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, despite whatever rash stuff they may have bragged about in internet chat rooms.
- "Many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests."
Murray criticizes the dodgy 'intelligence' obtained by Pakistani interrogators known for their ability to make "people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistank you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth."
Time hasn't dimmed Murray's skepticism: "Still, after eight days of detention, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evdience yet on something that was 'imminent' and 'Mass murder on an unbelievable scale' is, to say the least, rather peculiar."
Here's something else that really smells about the London Bombing Plot. Until this dastardly plot was thwarted, you and I and everyone else, could take liquids aboard aircraft in our carry-on luggage. Our airlines weren't concerned, our security services weren't concerned. No problem.
What doesn't make any sense is why all those who are supposed to protect us were so complacent. In 1995, that's right eleven years ago, al-Qaeda hatched a plot in the Philippines to use these same liquid explosives to make bombs to be brought aboard U.S. bound airliners in carry-on luggage. The volatile liquids were to be disguised in contact eye lens solution bottles. Twelve airliners were to be attacked. The whole thing fell apart when fire broke out in the plotters' apartment base. They fled but they left behind a laptop that survived the fire and it contained all the details of the scheme.
That was 1995. Why then, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was nothing, absolutely nothing, done to close off this known threat to the travelling public? Am I the only one who finds it curious that our media aren't asking that obvious question?
By the way, you can confirm the details of the 1995 plot by a quick Google search. Just type in "1995 Manilla al-Qaeda bomb plot" or reasonable facsimile. Or just go to www.airliners.net or any of the many other credible sites with all the details on this. This isn't the stuff of conspiracy nuts but and yet nobody is asking the question.
A word about Craig Murray (of www.craigmurray.co.uk). Craig had been relatively obscure until he shot his big mouth off about torture. At the time, Murray was Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan which was then a 'partner' in America's War Without End on Terror. Murray was given his cards (in England, that's a way of saying 'you're fired') because he refused to remain mum about Uzbekistan President Karimov's fascination with torture.
Lip off to Karimov and that means you're an Islamic terrorist and then you're really in hot water. No, I mean it - hot water. Karimov has a reputation of waging the War Without End on Terror by immersing his opponents in boiling water. That's right, he pops them in the cauldron just like lobsters. Anyway, at the time of Murray's outspokeness, Uzbekistan was considered America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region and Rumsfeld was pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into their army. Murray just had to go.
Craig Murray is still mouthing off which you'll see if you go to his website. He's even really skeptical about the Great London Bomb Plot. He thinks the whole thing was stage-managed to help prop up the increasingly unpopular Blair and Bush administrations. Among his contentions:
- "None ofthe alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports which, given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency, would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
- "In the absnece of bombs and airline tickets and, in many cases, passports, it could be difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that these individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, despite whatever rash stuff they may have bragged about in internet chat rooms.
- "Many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests."
Murray criticizes the dodgy 'intelligence' obtained by Pakistani interrogators known for their ability to make "people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistank you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth."
Time hasn't dimmed Murray's skepticism: "Still, after eight days of detention, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evdience yet on something that was 'imminent' and 'Mass murder on an unbelievable scale' is, to say the least, rather peculiar."
Here's something else that really smells about the London Bombing Plot. Until this dastardly plot was thwarted, you and I and everyone else, could take liquids aboard aircraft in our carry-on luggage. Our airlines weren't concerned, our security services weren't concerned. No problem.
What doesn't make any sense is why all those who are supposed to protect us were so complacent. In 1995, that's right eleven years ago, al-Qaeda hatched a plot in the Philippines to use these same liquid explosives to make bombs to be brought aboard U.S. bound airliners in carry-on luggage. The volatile liquids were to be disguised in contact eye lens solution bottles. Twelve airliners were to be attacked. The whole thing fell apart when fire broke out in the plotters' apartment base. They fled but they left behind a laptop that survived the fire and it contained all the details of the scheme.
That was 1995. Why then, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was nothing, absolutely nothing, done to close off this known threat to the travelling public? Am I the only one who finds it curious that our media aren't asking that obvious question?
By the way, you can confirm the details of the 1995 plot by a quick Google search. Just type in "1995 Manilla al-Qaeda bomb plot" or reasonable facsimile. Or just go to www.airliners.net or any of the many other credible sites with all the details on this. This isn't the stuff of conspiracy nuts but and yet nobody is asking the question.
I'm Sorry, I Just Don't Get It
There was an item in today's news out of Venezuela where Chavez claims the U.S. government is channelling millions to fund opposition movements. Turns out he's right. USAID (sure, that's a bit of an oxymoron but let's not go there right now) has a branch called the Office of Transition Initiatives. Now it just happens that the OTI sends its millions to countries the U.S. doesn't much like, countries such as Cuba and Venezuela.
I e-mailed USAID to find out what they were doing to fund pro-democracy movements in places such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Within a very short time I had a reply, sort of. They really dodged the bullet on Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but did enlighten me as to their Agency's 'Four Goals':
- Strengthening the Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights
- Promoting More Genuine and Competitive Elections & Political Processes
- Increased Development of a Politically Active Civil Society
- More Transparent and Accountable Governance
noting (wryly?) that, "progress in all four areas is necessary to achieve sustainable democracy."
This is all too Orwellian for me. Whatever happened to "Physician, heal thyself"?
I e-mailed USAID to find out what they were doing to fund pro-democracy movements in places such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Within a very short time I had a reply, sort of. They really dodged the bullet on Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but did enlighten me as to their Agency's 'Four Goals':
- Strengthening the Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights
- Promoting More Genuine and Competitive Elections & Political Processes
- Increased Development of a Politically Active Civil Society
- More Transparent and Accountable Governance
noting (wryly?) that, "progress in all four areas is necessary to achieve sustainable democracy."
This is all too Orwellian for me. Whatever happened to "Physician, heal thyself"?
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
The Rich Get Theirs and the Po' - Who Cares?
The favourite games of airlines these days are shedding employees and gutting their pension plans. According to The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) Northwest Airlines has taken the art of showing employees the door to a new level. Northwest's latest layoffs were given a booklet containing 101 tips on how to save money. Included were gems such as, "don't be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash." For more gutbusting laughs, you can read all 101 tips at the Smoking Gun website.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Many Challenges, Many Questions
It seems inevitable that each generation makes many choices that bear directly on the generation that follows. The First World War was spawned by the rival empires that started the whole business in motion decades earlier. Second World War - another generation drawn into mass destruction due to the unsettled business left by their parents. Cold War - several subsequent generations saddled with the result of the unresolved issues of their parents' war. Now we've got the War Without End (WWE), the Global War on Terror, and nobody can tell where that is going to wind up.
Today our world is making massive, breathtaking strides. We have vastly extended lifespans from just a few generations earlier. We have been blessed with great innovations and conveniences. We know that, as surely as dawn follows night, tomorrow there'll be even more but at what price?
It's barely taken two generations for us to forget how to make our own food. If the grocery store shelves fall bare, we starve. Don't delude yourself about that. Imagine what would happen if the gas pumps went dry tomorrow? What if there was a great, electro magnetic pulse (EMP) and all the computers went down for hundreds, possibly thousands of miles? Hospitals wouldn't function, transportation would come to a sudden halt, communications would be completely disrupted, you wouldn't have electricity in your house and your food would spoil.
This may sound apocalyptic, the stuff of science fiction novels, but it's not. It is part of our everyday reality. Mankind has not adapted socially to the advances and changes in our technology and this whole process continues to speed up. All of us need to start paying attention, really paying attention to how our world is being transformed. We may be able to get through this relatively unscathed but the decisions we take or avoid taking may shape the future for our grandchildren and may even determine their fate.
There needs to be a full and informed debate on the role science plays in our society and how we want it to serve us in the future. We need to examine the privatization of science and the merits of open scientific research in the public sector. We need to start paying attention to the genuine dangers of uncontrolled scientific development and how we can regulate and monitor the genies that are already out of their bottles. We need to realize that, if we don't get a handle on these issues, we risk going back to something resembling the dark ages, the rejection of enlightenment and forfeiture of liberal democracy.
I know this is a real bummer but we need to take a look at some of the issues that may, not necessarily will, arise in the coming decades. Some of these dangers are actually quite remote, others are already building. The best catalogue of these things I have read has been written by Sir Martin Rees. Rees is a Cosmologist and, no, that doesn't mean he does makeup and nails. A cosmologist is an astronomer who studies the universe in its entirety and, by extension, man's place in it. No, these people aren't kooks, they're real scientists. Sir Martin Rees is Royal Society Professor at Cambridge, a Fellow of King's College, and England's Astronomer Royal. Put another way, this guy is really bright.
In his book, Our Final Hour, Perseus Book Group, 2003, Rees explores a variety of potential dangers that man ignores at his peril. Terrorism is an obvious starting point. We're already living with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How long before they're used and what do we need to do to actually minimize that risk? The more likely danger of bioterrorism and controlling the spread of this knowledge and the possession and trade in pathogens.
A very interesting part of Rees discussion focuses on the privatization of science and the decline of government-funded, "pure" research. Government has all too gladly offloaded scientific research to the private sector. The dimensions of this run pretty deep. For example, corporate research is usually product oriented, profit driven and extremely secretive. What happens to a scientific breakthrough that could be of immense benefit to society in many areas beyond the corporation's focus? Is it good enough to let corporations keep this knowledge buried? Should they be placed under some obligation of disclosure?
Another aspect of this is that scientific research can sometimes lead to some horrible mistakes such as "bio-error" (as distinguished from bioterror). There's an awful lot of genetic work going on today. What if some private lab's research reaches the point of recklessness and somehow escapes? It has happened. We need to ensure that we devise controls to keep it from happening again.
Are we doing enough to maintain ourselves as masters of our own technology? Consumer-driven technology has already long passed the stage of convenience into the reality of dependence. The very food that sustains us travels hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to reach our grocery stores. If that transportation link becomes severed, how much food is available locally to sustain your community? The answer is obvious: not nearly enough.
Has personal privacy become a quaint notion from the past? It wasn't all that long ago that people treasured their privacy and became quite upset if it was violated. Then we began adopting technologies such as credit cards and computers and, gradually, our daily life from what we eat to what we buy to our medical records was fed into a giant data stream. Surveillance has spread rapidly through our cities and towns. Closed circuit cameras keep a constant vigil on our streets and in buildings. With modern face recognition software it will soon be possible to put your name to your picture as you transit through the camera's eye. Then that too will go into the data stream. Just how much of you do you want someone knowing and who do you want to have that knowledge? How can it be used to help you and how can it be used against you? Should our government or the courts control access to this powerful pool of personal information?
Can democracy adapt and survive the technological, scientific and social changes the future will bring? If so, how will it and how will we have to adapt to ensure that democracy still serves our interests as individuals as well as members of societies and a community of nations?
We need to have these discussions and debates now and we need to have the broadest possible participation in them. We need to start getting you and everyone like us involved, at least to the point where they can make an informed decision of whether they want to participate. So many questions but one thing is sure. If we don't discuss these things soon, if we choose not to make these decisions, sooner or later something will happen that will lead to them being made for us. If you doubt that, take a look at America's Patriot Act.
Today our world is making massive, breathtaking strides. We have vastly extended lifespans from just a few generations earlier. We have been blessed with great innovations and conveniences. We know that, as surely as dawn follows night, tomorrow there'll be even more but at what price?
It's barely taken two generations for us to forget how to make our own food. If the grocery store shelves fall bare, we starve. Don't delude yourself about that. Imagine what would happen if the gas pumps went dry tomorrow? What if there was a great, electro magnetic pulse (EMP) and all the computers went down for hundreds, possibly thousands of miles? Hospitals wouldn't function, transportation would come to a sudden halt, communications would be completely disrupted, you wouldn't have electricity in your house and your food would spoil.
This may sound apocalyptic, the stuff of science fiction novels, but it's not. It is part of our everyday reality. Mankind has not adapted socially to the advances and changes in our technology and this whole process continues to speed up. All of us need to start paying attention, really paying attention to how our world is being transformed. We may be able to get through this relatively unscathed but the decisions we take or avoid taking may shape the future for our grandchildren and may even determine their fate.
There needs to be a full and informed debate on the role science plays in our society and how we want it to serve us in the future. We need to examine the privatization of science and the merits of open scientific research in the public sector. We need to start paying attention to the genuine dangers of uncontrolled scientific development and how we can regulate and monitor the genies that are already out of their bottles. We need to realize that, if we don't get a handle on these issues, we risk going back to something resembling the dark ages, the rejection of enlightenment and forfeiture of liberal democracy.
I know this is a real bummer but we need to take a look at some of the issues that may, not necessarily will, arise in the coming decades. Some of these dangers are actually quite remote, others are already building. The best catalogue of these things I have read has been written by Sir Martin Rees. Rees is a Cosmologist and, no, that doesn't mean he does makeup and nails. A cosmologist is an astronomer who studies the universe in its entirety and, by extension, man's place in it. No, these people aren't kooks, they're real scientists. Sir Martin Rees is Royal Society Professor at Cambridge, a Fellow of King's College, and England's Astronomer Royal. Put another way, this guy is really bright.
In his book, Our Final Hour, Perseus Book Group, 2003, Rees explores a variety of potential dangers that man ignores at his peril. Terrorism is an obvious starting point. We're already living with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How long before they're used and what do we need to do to actually minimize that risk? The more likely danger of bioterrorism and controlling the spread of this knowledge and the possession and trade in pathogens.
A very interesting part of Rees discussion focuses on the privatization of science and the decline of government-funded, "pure" research. Government has all too gladly offloaded scientific research to the private sector. The dimensions of this run pretty deep. For example, corporate research is usually product oriented, profit driven and extremely secretive. What happens to a scientific breakthrough that could be of immense benefit to society in many areas beyond the corporation's focus? Is it good enough to let corporations keep this knowledge buried? Should they be placed under some obligation of disclosure?
Another aspect of this is that scientific research can sometimes lead to some horrible mistakes such as "bio-error" (as distinguished from bioterror). There's an awful lot of genetic work going on today. What if some private lab's research reaches the point of recklessness and somehow escapes? It has happened. We need to ensure that we devise controls to keep it from happening again.
Are we doing enough to maintain ourselves as masters of our own technology? Consumer-driven technology has already long passed the stage of convenience into the reality of dependence. The very food that sustains us travels hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to reach our grocery stores. If that transportation link becomes severed, how much food is available locally to sustain your community? The answer is obvious: not nearly enough.
Has personal privacy become a quaint notion from the past? It wasn't all that long ago that people treasured their privacy and became quite upset if it was violated. Then we began adopting technologies such as credit cards and computers and, gradually, our daily life from what we eat to what we buy to our medical records was fed into a giant data stream. Surveillance has spread rapidly through our cities and towns. Closed circuit cameras keep a constant vigil on our streets and in buildings. With modern face recognition software it will soon be possible to put your name to your picture as you transit through the camera's eye. Then that too will go into the data stream. Just how much of you do you want someone knowing and who do you want to have that knowledge? How can it be used to help you and how can it be used against you? Should our government or the courts control access to this powerful pool of personal information?
Can democracy adapt and survive the technological, scientific and social changes the future will bring? If so, how will it and how will we have to adapt to ensure that democracy still serves our interests as individuals as well as members of societies and a community of nations?
We need to have these discussions and debates now and we need to have the broadest possible participation in them. We need to start getting you and everyone like us involved, at least to the point where they can make an informed decision of whether they want to participate. So many questions but one thing is sure. If we don't discuss these things soon, if we choose not to make these decisions, sooner or later something will happen that will lead to them being made for us. If you doubt that, take a look at America's Patriot Act.
Memo to Little Stevie: You Don't Want to Hear This
Dear Stevie:
Maybe you should stop singing the praises of your buddy Bush for a little while, at least until this blows over. There's some news just out that suggests the U.S. isn't really the super nation as you would have Canadians believe. Seems it's actually pretty second rate.
The latest Luxemburg Income Study shows that, when it comes to poverty levels, America is the worst of the 16-wealthiest nations. The U.S. scores that honour for child poverty levels also. Hmmm.
Remember when you told those American right-wing wackos that, "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"? Guess what country had the lowest overall poverty rate? You're not going to like this - it was Finland.
The United States is still very much Number One - on defense spending. Maybe you can make something out of that.
The United States also spends more, per capita, for health care than any other nation. Trouble is, fully 16 per cent of Americans have no health insurance whatever. Plenty more have only partial insurance. America remains Number One for bankrutpcies triggered by medical expenses. Americans are well down the list (behind all those Northern European welfare states) on longevity and dead last on infant mortality. Where does all that funding go? Oh yeah, to the H.M.O.s that administer the 'for profit' industry. Oh dear, better drop that one.
As for productivity, the Holy Grail of Wild West conservatism, America was only fifth out of sixteen even though it holds Number One spot for most weeks of work. Guess who came first? Why it was those horrible, Surrender Monkeys, the French.
So maybe this would be a good time to turn to other issues, why not crime? Lets scare the hell out of the people and maybe this will all go away.
Ah Steve, it's me again.
You should know that the word is getting out. The old scam isn't working any more. All those NASCAR dads are beginning to realize they've been getting the shaft. Some think our own people are starting to see through all this.
These last five years have been great in the U.S., at least if you were already rich. These years have been dandy, what the investment bank UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) has called "the golden era of profitability." Gross domestic product and productivity have shot up. The rich just keep getting richer.
The not-so-rich? Well, they haven't done so well. Actually, despite the pace at which the economy has grown, the median hourly wage for Americans has fallen by 2 per cent since 2003. But look at the bright side, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of America's gross domestic product since they started keeping records in 1947.
Keeping the plebs quiet has been an endless struggle since the dawn of civilization. Roman emperors had to stage gigantic gladitorial bloodbaths in the forum to distract their people. Bush got by for years by kicking Muslim ass. Oh for those good old days. Now, of course, those Muslims are really kicking back, the American people are getting tired of it and the neo-cons don't have anything else to keep their minds off how much poorer they're getting in the Land of Prosperity.
The little people in America are getting tired of being left out and they're feeling the squeeze. According to the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org/content.cfm/pm110):
- indebtedness of the average American household has increased 42 per cent over the past five years.
-level of debt as a percentage of after-tax income has never been higher, more than twice what it was 30-years ago.
-personal savings rate is at a negative, the first time since the Great Depression.
-family health costs have risen between 43-45 per cent from 2000 to 2003.
-employers are cutting back on health insurance coverage. The percent of people with employer-funded health insurance fell last year for the fourth consecutive year.
Sounds like all the fixins' for a revolution, eh Stevie? Maybe it's time not to praise Caesar but to bury him.
Maybe you should stop singing the praises of your buddy Bush for a little while, at least until this blows over. There's some news just out that suggests the U.S. isn't really the super nation as you would have Canadians believe. Seems it's actually pretty second rate.
The latest Luxemburg Income Study shows that, when it comes to poverty levels, America is the worst of the 16-wealthiest nations. The U.S. scores that honour for child poverty levels also. Hmmm.
Remember when you told those American right-wing wackos that, "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"? Guess what country had the lowest overall poverty rate? You're not going to like this - it was Finland.
The United States is still very much Number One - on defense spending. Maybe you can make something out of that.
The United States also spends more, per capita, for health care than any other nation. Trouble is, fully 16 per cent of Americans have no health insurance whatever. Plenty more have only partial insurance. America remains Number One for bankrutpcies triggered by medical expenses. Americans are well down the list (behind all those Northern European welfare states) on longevity and dead last on infant mortality. Where does all that funding go? Oh yeah, to the H.M.O.s that administer the 'for profit' industry. Oh dear, better drop that one.
As for productivity, the Holy Grail of Wild West conservatism, America was only fifth out of sixteen even though it holds Number One spot for most weeks of work. Guess who came first? Why it was those horrible, Surrender Monkeys, the French.
So maybe this would be a good time to turn to other issues, why not crime? Lets scare the hell out of the people and maybe this will all go away.
Ah Steve, it's me again.
You should know that the word is getting out. The old scam isn't working any more. All those NASCAR dads are beginning to realize they've been getting the shaft. Some think our own people are starting to see through all this.
These last five years have been great in the U.S., at least if you were already rich. These years have been dandy, what the investment bank UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) has called "the golden era of profitability." Gross domestic product and productivity have shot up. The rich just keep getting richer.
The not-so-rich? Well, they haven't done so well. Actually, despite the pace at which the economy has grown, the median hourly wage for Americans has fallen by 2 per cent since 2003. But look at the bright side, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of America's gross domestic product since they started keeping records in 1947.
Keeping the plebs quiet has been an endless struggle since the dawn of civilization. Roman emperors had to stage gigantic gladitorial bloodbaths in the forum to distract their people. Bush got by for years by kicking Muslim ass. Oh for those good old days. Now, of course, those Muslims are really kicking back, the American people are getting tired of it and the neo-cons don't have anything else to keep their minds off how much poorer they're getting in the Land of Prosperity.
The little people in America are getting tired of being left out and they're feeling the squeeze. According to the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org/content.cfm/pm110):
- indebtedness of the average American household has increased 42 per cent over the past five years.
-level of debt as a percentage of after-tax income has never been higher, more than twice what it was 30-years ago.
-personal savings rate is at a negative, the first time since the Great Depression.
-family health costs have risen between 43-45 per cent from 2000 to 2003.
-employers are cutting back on health insurance coverage. The percent of people with employer-funded health insurance fell last year for the fourth consecutive year.
Sounds like all the fixins' for a revolution, eh Stevie? Maybe it's time not to praise Caesar but to bury him.
Pessimism, Optimism and Realism, huh?
The New York Times ran an editorial this morning lamenting the rise of pessimism in the U.S. as essentially un-American. The article noted that Americans were really optimistic when their forces invaded Iraq, believing that this heralded a new and better day for the Middle East and the world. That optimism was transformed into abject pessimism by the fiasco of Iraq and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
To me, pessimism is a surrender to helplessness. We're doomed, why bother? I think there's a fine but very important line that separates pessimism from realism. Realism is an acknowledgment that there are problems, plenty of them, but problems to be confronted and remedied.
The writings on this blog can seem awfully pessimistic. They may be gloomy, angry, worried but from the reality of me writing them and you reading them, there is just that little bit of impetus for change - and the belief that we can change these things lies in the beating heart of true optimism.
To me, pessimism is a surrender to helplessness. We're doomed, why bother? I think there's a fine but very important line that separates pessimism from realism. Realism is an acknowledgment that there are problems, plenty of them, but problems to be confronted and remedied.
The writings on this blog can seem awfully pessimistic. They may be gloomy, angry, worried but from the reality of me writing them and you reading them, there is just that little bit of impetus for change - and the belief that we can change these things lies in the beating heart of true optimism.
Perilous Privatization Pitfalls
It's been a long time coming. For years the far right has been fanning the flames of privatization from education to health care and beyond. They point to bureaucratic bungling and inefficiency to make their case for smaller, less-capable government.
Charter schools are institutions that have broken free of the usual, public school board system. They operate autonomously, typically with per-capita government funding. The idea is that, freed of the bureaucratic shackles of the public school system, charter schools will produce a higher standard of education.
It all sounds good in theory, especially if you have that ideological bent, but it has sure fallen short in practice. A U.S. federal study has found that charter school students generally score significantly worse in both reading and math than their public school counterparts. The concept of charter schools is that they are to be measured by performance and they must outperform the public schools. Hmm, what now? This is a red meat issue for the far right so don't expect much reaction.
Charter schools are institutions that have broken free of the usual, public school board system. They operate autonomously, typically with per-capita government funding. The idea is that, freed of the bureaucratic shackles of the public school system, charter schools will produce a higher standard of education.
It all sounds good in theory, especially if you have that ideological bent, but it has sure fallen short in practice. A U.S. federal study has found that charter school students generally score significantly worse in both reading and math than their public school counterparts. The concept of charter schools is that they are to be measured by performance and they must outperform the public schools. Hmm, what now? This is a red meat issue for the far right so don't expect much reaction.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Definitely Not Oprah's Book Club - Part Deux
The Gun and the Olive Branch, David Hirst, Nation Books, 3rd edition, 2003.
Imagine peace in the Middle East, an end to the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Now that you've imagined it, you can forget the whole idea. To reach any peaceful resolution we would first have to sweep aside the blinding fog of myth and deception that has so powerfully been used to warp our views and understanding of this dilemma that threatens all of us.
How many of us know that the roots of this violence began in the 1880's with a Rabbi in France? Would you be surprised to learn that, from the outset, the Zionist movement fully intended to use violence to drive the Palestinians from the new Jewish homeland? That's right, ethnic cleansing. Can you believe that all of us, especially in North America, have been given a highly deceptive account of these conflicts that villifies the Arabs and almost completely buries anything that reveals Israeli aggression and persecution of the Palestinians?
I am not a holocaust denier. I am not an anti-semite. I deeply resent those who use these slurs to intimidate others who are justifiably critical of the state of Israel and its deplorable treatment of the Palestinian people.
Like so many of us in the West, I was solidly pro-Israel in the years following the 1967 war. I began to have doubts when I met a Canadian army officer who had just returned from peacekeeping duties on the Gaza Strip. He told me we were being brainwashed by our media about the reality of this conflict and that the great majority of the ceasefire violations they dealt with were the doing of Israel, not the Arabs.
The Palestinian subjugation lies at the very heart of Islamic terrorism and continues to unite Muslims, Shia and Sunni, as perhaps no other issue can. If America genuinely wants to wage war on terrorism, this is the only place that war can be fought and won. Washington alone has the necessary influence to compel Israel to end this persecution and thereby undermine the terrorist cause. That, of course, is not going to happen.
America props up the myth of Israel as victim. The role and power of Christian fundamentalism, of itself, is sufficient to keep Washington on this delusional course. These powerful religious nutbars (yes, I called them dangerous lunatics) firmly believe that biblical prophesy requires Israel to conquer all of Palestine as a precondition to the Second Coming and the utter fantasy that they refer to as The Rapture. So long as these key players remain devotedly delusional this dark farce can't and won't be stopped.
I'm not going to take you through the roughly 600-pages of The Gun and the Olive Branch. I will, however, present a sampling of the reviews:
Imagine peace in the Middle East, an end to the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Now that you've imagined it, you can forget the whole idea. To reach any peaceful resolution we would first have to sweep aside the blinding fog of myth and deception that has so powerfully been used to warp our views and understanding of this dilemma that threatens all of us.
How many of us know that the roots of this violence began in the 1880's with a Rabbi in France? Would you be surprised to learn that, from the outset, the Zionist movement fully intended to use violence to drive the Palestinians from the new Jewish homeland? That's right, ethnic cleansing. Can you believe that all of us, especially in North America, have been given a highly deceptive account of these conflicts that villifies the Arabs and almost completely buries anything that reveals Israeli aggression and persecution of the Palestinians?
I am not a holocaust denier. I am not an anti-semite. I deeply resent those who use these slurs to intimidate others who are justifiably critical of the state of Israel and its deplorable treatment of the Palestinian people.
Like so many of us in the West, I was solidly pro-Israel in the years following the 1967 war. I began to have doubts when I met a Canadian army officer who had just returned from peacekeeping duties on the Gaza Strip. He told me we were being brainwashed by our media about the reality of this conflict and that the great majority of the ceasefire violations they dealt with were the doing of Israel, not the Arabs.
The Palestinian subjugation lies at the very heart of Islamic terrorism and continues to unite Muslims, Shia and Sunni, as perhaps no other issue can. If America genuinely wants to wage war on terrorism, this is the only place that war can be fought and won. Washington alone has the necessary influence to compel Israel to end this persecution and thereby undermine the terrorist cause. That, of course, is not going to happen.
America props up the myth of Israel as victim. The role and power of Christian fundamentalism, of itself, is sufficient to keep Washington on this delusional course. These powerful religious nutbars (yes, I called them dangerous lunatics) firmly believe that biblical prophesy requires Israel to conquer all of Palestine as a precondition to the Second Coming and the utter fantasy that they refer to as The Rapture. So long as these key players remain devotedly delusional this dark farce can't and won't be stopped.
I'm not going to take you through the roughly 600-pages of The Gun and the Olive Branch. I will, however, present a sampling of the reviews:
"An epic tale told relentlessly well ...a serious account
of Zionism and a sobering review of Israel's new role
as conqueror and occupier." Christopher Hitchens
"Massively documented, this book will make uncomfortable
reading for many who will no doubt do what they can to
discredit him. But they will find it difficult to challenge the
integrity of this quizzical and caustic reporter who has an
unrivalled record of offending Arab governments and being
banned by them." - Financial Times
"Amongst the many topics that are subjected to Hirst's
piercing analysis are: The Oslo peace process, the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the destabilizing
effect of Jewish settlement in the territories, the second
Intifada and the terrifying rise of suicide bombers, the
growing power of the Israel lobby - Jewish and Christian
fundamentalist - in the United States, ...and the spectre
of nuclear catastrophe that threatens to destroy the
region." - The New Statesman
A word or two about the author, David Hirst. Mr. Hirst was sent to the Middle East when he was conscripted into the British army and he stayed. He was involved in the American University in Beiruit and became the Middle East correspondent for The Guardian for about 20-years. He's been kidnapped twice and banned from six Arab countries. It's probably good to know that neither side cares very much for his critical, often scathing insights.
The Gun and the Olive Branch is a must-read. If nothing else you will come away from it realizing how our leaders - in Ottawa as well as Washington and London - are misleading us and perpetuating this extremely dangerous conflict.
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