The Rag Blog

23/02/08 – — – BAGHDAD, Feb 22 (IPS) – What the U.S. has been calling the success of a “surge”, many Iraqis see as evidence of catastrophe. Where U.S. forces point to peace and calm, local Iraqis find an eerie silence.

And when U.S. forces speak of a reduction in violence, many Iraqis simply do not know what they are talking about.

Hundreds died in a series of explosions in Baghdad last month. This was despite the strongest ever security measures taken by the U.S. military, riding the “surge” in security forces and their activities.

The death toll is high, according to the website icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and security deaths.

In January this year 485 civilians were killed, according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports, and that “actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.”

The average month in 2005, before the “surge” was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the month before the “surge” began, 590 civilians died.

Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.

“Two car bombs exploded in Jadriya, killing so many people, the day the American Secretary of Defence (Robert Gates) was visiting Baghdad last week,” a captain from the Karrada district police in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.

“Another car bomb killed eight people and injured 20 Thursday (last week) in the Muraidy market of Sadr City, east of Baghdad, although the Mehdi army (the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr) provides strict protection to the city,” the officer said. “There is no security in this country any more.”

Unidentified bodies of Iraqis killed by militias continue to appear in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The Iraqi government has issued instructions to all security and health offices not to give out the body count to the media. Dozens of bodies are found every day across Baghdad, residents say. Morgue officials confirm this.

“We are not authorised to issue any numbers, but I can tell you that we are still receiving human bodies every day; the men have no identity on them,” a doctor at the Baghdad morgue told IPS. “The bodies that have signs of torture are the Sunnis killed by Shia militias; those with a bullet in the head are usually policemen, translators or contractors who worked for the Americans.”

The “surge” of 30,000 additional troops came to Iraq, mostly Baghdad, in February of last year. The total current number of U.S. troops in Iraq is approximately 157,000. They were sent to end violence, and with a declared aim of helping political reconciliation.

But where peace of sorts has descended in Baghdad, Iraq’s capital city of six million (in a population of 25 million), it comes from a partitioning of people along sectarian lines. The Iraqi Red Crescent reports that one in four residents has been driven out of their homes by death squads, or by the “surge”.

According to an Iraqi Red Crescent report titled ‘The Internally Displaced People in Iraq’ released Jan. 27, 1,364,978 residents of Baghdad have been displaced.

The Environment News Service reported Jan. 7 that “many of the capital’s once mixed areas have become either purely Sunni or Shia after militias forced families out for belonging to the other religious branch of Islam.”

Some of the eerie calm in areas of Baghdad comes because togetherness has ended. Sunnis and Shias who lived together for generations are now partitioned. This is not the peace many Iraqis were looking for, surge or no surge.

On Jan. 8, UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond announced that there were at least 2.2 million Iraqis internally displaced within the country, and that at least another two million had fled the country altogether. This, no doubt, would make many areas quieter.

The U.S. military has erected three to four metre high concrete walls around several neighbourhoods, forcing residents to choose either Sunni or Shia areas in which to live. Such separation has brought large-scale displacement, and protests.

Sunni Muslims seem to have the worst of it. Many Iraqis are outraged by the number of Sunni detainees the “surge” has taken.

Residents of Amiriya district of western Baghdad demonstrated Feb. 11 against mistreatment by U.S. and Iraqi forces involved in the “surge”. The “surge” aims to eradicate al-Qaeda from Iraq, but this has meant that most military operations have been carried out in Sunni areas like Amiriya.

“We are here to protest against the unfair arrests and raids conducted against the innocent people of Amiriya,” Salih al-Mutlag, chief of the Arab Dialogue Council in the Iraqi government told IPS at the demonstration. “This has gone too far under the flag of fighting terror.”

Al-Mutlag said they were also demonstrating against arrests in the western parts of Baghdad, despite an apparently peaceful situation there as a result of residents’ cooperation with Iraqi army units. Large numbers of residents came out in the Dora region of southwest Baghdad to protest against the U.S. military for arresting 18 people, including an 80-year-old man.

“We are the ones who improved the situation in western parts of Baghdad without any interference from the Americans and their puppet Iraqi government,” former Iraqi Army Major Abu Wussam told IPS in Amiriya. “We negotiated with our brothers in the Iraqi national resistance who agreed to conduct their activities in a different way from the traditional way they used to work.

“It seems Americans did not like it, and so they are punishing us for it, instead of releasing our detainees as they promised.”

Some of the apparent peace on the street is a consequence of rising detentions. In November last year Karl Matley, head of the Iraqi branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, declared that more than 60,000 prisoners and detainees are held in prisons and other detention centres. A large number of these were taken during the “surge”.

By August 2007, half a year into the “surge”, the number of detainees held by the U.S.-led military forces in Iraq had swelled by 50 percent, with the inmate population growing to 24,500, from 16,000 in February, according to U.S. military officers in Iraq.

The officers reported that nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs.

Given that the majority of the detained are Sunnis, the “surge”, rather than bridging political differences and aiding reconciliation between Sunni and Shia groups, appears to have had the opposite effect.

And yet, there could be more dangerous reasons to doubt such success of the “surge” that is claimed.

Among the recent arrests in Baghdad, the U.S. military counted six members of the Sahwa (Awakening) forces. This is a force of resistance fighters now ostensibly working with the U.S. military. The U.S. pays each member 300 dollars monthly. More than 80 percent of about 70,000 Sahwa members are Sunni.

The arrest of some Sahwa members is indication of U.S. military doubts about the loyalties of some of these Sahwa fighters. Shia political parties and militias already accuse them of being resistance fighters in disguise. Many believe that large numbers of Sahwa forces are resistance fighters simply riding the “surge”.

“How come Sunni parts of Baghdad became so quiet all of a sudden,” says Jawad Salman, a former resident of Amiriya who fled his house in 2006 after Iraqi resistance members accused him of being a government spy. “It is a game well played by terrorists to divert the fight against Shia groups. I lived there and I know that all residents fully support what the U.S. calls the terrorists.”

The Sahwa strategy has brought down the number of U.S. casualties – for now. But the U.S. strategy seems to have done less for Iraq than for its own forces.

23/02/08 “ICH” — — THE US occupying army in Iraq (euphemistically called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. Its December 2007 report of a study of focus groups was uncharacteristically upbeat.

The report concluded that the survey “provides very strong evidence” to refute the common view that “national reconciliation is neither anticipated nor possible”. On the contrary, the survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups … and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis.”

This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results”, Karen deYoung reports in The Washington Post.

The “shared beliefs” were identified in the report. To quote deYoung, “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.”

So, according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis.

The report did not mention other good news: Iraqis appear to accept the highest values of Americans, as established at the Nuremberg Tribunal — specifically, that aggression — “invasion by its armed forces” by one state “of the territory of another state” — is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply its principles to ourselves.

Unlike Iraqis, the United States, indeed the West generally, rejects the lofty values professed at Nuremberg, an interesting indication of the substance of the famous “clash of civilisations”.

More good news was reported by Gen David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker during the extravaganza staged on September 11, 2007. Only a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing the “supreme international crime” they were defending the world against terror — which increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to an analysis last year by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.

Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to show that the Iraqi government was greatly accelerating spending on reconstruction, reaching a quarter of the funding set aside for that purpose. Good news indeed, until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth of what Petraeus and Crocker reported, a 50 per cent decline from the preceding year.

More good news is the decline in sectarian violence, attributable in part to the success of the murderous ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion; there are fewer targets for sectarian killing. But it is also attributable to Washington’s decision to support the tribal groups that had organised to drive out Iraqi Al Qaeda, and to an increase in US troops.

It is possible that Petraeus’s strategy may approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where fighting is now “limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom” after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack, CJ Chivers reports in the New York Times last September.

Perhaps some day Baghdad and Fallujah too will enjoy “electricity restored in many neighbourhoods, new businesses opening and the city’s main streets repaved”, as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, considering the likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian violence, adding to the “accumulated evil” of the aggression. Iraqis are not alone in believing that national reconciliation is possible. A Canadian-run poll found that Afghans are hopeful about the future and favour the presence of Canadian and other foreign troops — the “good news” that made the headlines.

The small print suggests some qualifications. Only 20 per cent “think the Taleban will prevail once foreign troops leave”. Three-quarters support negotiations between the US-backed Karzai government and the Taleban, and over half favour a coalition government. The great majority therefore strongly disagree with the US-Canadian stance, and believe that peace is possible with a turn towards peaceful means. Though the question was not asked in the poll, it seems a reasonable surmise that the foreign presence is favoured for aid and reconstruction.

There are, of course, numerous questions about polls in countries under foreign military occupation, particularly in places like southern Afghanistan. But the results of the Iraq and Afghan studies conform to earlier ones, and should not be dismissed.

Recent polls in Pakistan also provide “good news” for Washington. Fully 5 per cent favour allowing US or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan “to pursue or capture Al Qaeda fighters”. Nine per cent favour allowing US forces “to pursue and capture Taleban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan”.

Almost half favour allowing Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little more than 80 per cent regard the US military presence in Asia and Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the United States is trying to harm the Islamic world. The good news is that these results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll found that “eighty-three per cent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the Taleban, with a mere three per cent expressing support for the United States,” and over 80 per cent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and six per cent a terrorist.

Amid the outpouring of good news from across the region, there is now much earnest debate among political candidates, government officials and commentators concerning the options available to the US in Iraq. One voice is consistently missing: that of Iraqis. Their “shared beliefs” are well known, as in the past. But they cannot be permitted to choose their own path any more than young children can. Only the conquerors have that right.

Perhaps here too there are some lessons about the “clash of civilisations”.

“If Obama were to somehow prevail on election night, I would be OJ Simpson-acquittal shocked…The awe part wouldn’t kick in until a few months later…If he actually lived aaaall the way from election night to the inauguration, I would be so awed I’d lead an anti-affirmative action protest in front of the NAACP’s national headquarters.” — Sean Gonsalves

I wrote that in December 2006 and if Obama’s campaign continues to roll, I just might be in front of the NAACP’s Baltimore headquarters in the days following the inauguration of America’s first black president.

That’s if (I said IF), Obama wins — and survives all the way to the inauguration.

I know. It’s a horrible thought. Survive all the way to inauguration? But, honestly — are you telling me it hasn’t run through your mind, especially with all of these comparisons to JFK and MLK?

I wasn’t even alive when John and Martin were around and I’ve wondered, once or twice, whether Barack should move around a lot – maybe throw in a head-fake, here and there — whenever he speaks in public.

Recognize: it takes courage to be in Obama’s very public place. Even a soldier like Colin Powell said no to that call.

In the May 1996 issue of Ladies Home Journal (what can I say, I read a lot), Powell’s wife, Alma, put into words the echo that still emanates from the Lorraine Motel balcony, 40 years after King’s murder.

“You think everybody loves Colin Powell,” she said. “Everybody doesn’t like Colin Powell…I don’t want to describe the hate mail we’ve gotten…A black man running for president is going to be in a dangerous position.”

Not that I’m trying to divide Obamanation, as the superdelegate situation has the potential to do, but, in case you haven’t noticed because of the unfolding Obamanomenom (or maybe you’ve just been feeling Barackward lately), this is Black History Month.

But, let’s do this the left-handed way and look beyond black history to imagine the future of black history, which is to say American history. For you righties, I’ll translate: Instead of thinking about historical “progress” as if it moves forward in linear fashion, let’s think about history as a geometrical shape, like a circle.

Recently, among my multi-racial circle of friends, political discussion turned to the Obama effect on the future of black history. If Obama is elected, does that mean black history (in America) has come full circle?

Of course, an Obama presidency would not put an end to racism, especially the institutional kind. But it would likely mean whatever political support that remains for affirmative action and other race-conscious policies will dry up like a raisin in the sun.

So, on the one hand, Obama in the White House is not quite the same thing as making it to Martin’s mountaintop. I mean, unless a person thinks African-Americans are inferior, which is the very definition of racism, you can’t say were beyond “the race problem” when black folk are disproportionately in jail, out of school, unemployed and in debt. And none of that is likely to significantly change under an Obama administration — without a mass movement behind it, as Barack has pointed out ad naseum on the campaign trail, even if the point is lost on those who criticize his hope talk.

On the other hand, an Obama presidency would definitely be a huge leap forward on several fronts, to the point where it could very well signify the Civil Rights Movement (dormant since King’s death but still very much alive in our political culture), has come full circle.

And that would be a good thing because when Martin was on the mountaintop, preaching the night before his assassination, King looked to the future of American history and saw beyond the color line — to the horizon of economic justice.

“It’s all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism,” he said. “But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It’s alright to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day.”

So like I was saying, if — if – Obama wins, and the ghosts of black history don’t condemn us to repeat the Sixties, I guess I’ll be in front of NAACP HQ in the days following the inauguration, holding a sign that’ll read: “No to race-based affirmative action.”

The other side will say: “Yes to a class-based affirmative action.”

There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held-security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.

Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”

On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ‘07.”

The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ‘06 rate.”

A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.

Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.

This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.

And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.

Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?

The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.

No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal-Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing-were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army-thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”

Tuesday’s Democratic primaries saw Barack Obama racking up over 60 percent of the white male vote in Wisconsin, riding an unprecedented historical demographic anomaly that will likely send him to the White House – barring a third consecutive general election theft by the Republicans. It appears Hillary Clinton’s goose is cooked.

Once whites demonstrated their willingness to vote for a “certain type” of Black man, in Iowa back in January, it was a foregone conclusion that African Americans would line up in overwhelming numbers behind the Illinois Senator. Before then, all that had held back the tides of Black mass commitment to Obama’s candidacy were lingering doubts that whites would support any “type” of Black person’s elevation to the nation’s highest office. When that dam broke, the African American celebration began. After 400 years in slave hell and Jim Crow purgatory, we’ve finally got a chance! Or so the crowd believes.

Obama wasn’t taking any chances. His strategy from the very beginning has been to flip the historical script by appealing directly to the most backward demographic in electoral politics: white males. This “white male strategy” – smelling eerily of a previous Republican “southern strategy” – required constant assurances to white men that Obama’s run would signal the end of race as a point of political contention in the United States. No longer would whites, especially males, be compelled to answer for their privileged status. A 40-plus year annoyance was nearly over, since Blacks had “already come 90 percent of the way” to equality. Obama told them so.

Reagan-loving whites – especially the white men who have always led the “backlash” against real and perceived African American gains – found themselves wooed by a Black man who understood their sense of revulsion at “the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies.” Wow! That’s the kind of change we’ve been waiting for, exclaimed increasing numbers of white males. A new day beckoned, free at last of psychological harassment from the likes of Reverends Jesse and Al.

Obama is a world-class wooer. His white male wooing is made much easier by the fact that those who consider themselves his “sisters” and “brothers” demand nothing whatsoever from him. Just come home when you get ready, brother. Obama is free to concentrate his attentions on the hard-to-get demographics, especially white men with their peculiar notions of “change.” No need for Obama to promise the hood a damn thing, except that he’ll cut a dashing figure in the Oval Office and make the homefolks proud that he’s there, symbolically representing them.

Republicans and GOP-leaning “independents” (meaning, deep-dyed whites) are crossing over in herds to vote for Obama. They’ve gotten the message: happy days are here again, when the darkies smiled and were careful not to hurt our feelings by telling the truth. That’s the kind of “change” we’ve always “hoped” for, by golly!

The white liberal/left, ineffectual and geographically scattered, are drawn irresistibly to the Black man who regales them with sweet nothings – literally, nothing in the way of the concrete policies for peace and social justice they claim to champion. His presence in their midst is enough. Besides, Obama is someone who is “capable of forging a progressive majority,” they say.

That’s a strange concept, since Obama doesn’t act like a progressive, or claim to be one. But he has no problem with folks gathering around him. He’s a real party guy.

The no-nonsense white men that rule society and cling to ownership of the world were harder nuts to crack; you’ve got to sign a prenuptial to get skin-tight with them. No problem. Before Obama even began to strut on the national runway, he’d won the approval of the Wall Street and military/industrial (and nuclear power) branches of the Money Family. Run-of-the-mill citizens will be barred from state court relief, so as not to jam up big corporations with their silly lawsuits. Energy companies can count on their usual subsidies. The “sanctity of contracts” will not be violated to save homeowners from foreclosure, no matter how deep the credit crisis becomes. The voracious military will be fed an additional 92,000 soldiers and Marines, regardless of what happens in Iraq, to be available for more wars. Most importantly – and this is the really smooth part of Obama’s game – the ever-increasing military budget will make moot all of Barack’s and Hillary’s (near identical) promises about health care, affordable housing, the whole public agenda that has been dangled in front of those fans and groupies in the cheap seats.

Once he gets in office, many of the swooners will find out that he’s already married to the Power Mob.

But that’s OK. Obama knows his most enthusiastic supporters – the ones that claim him as their own as a matter of blood – will stick by him without complaint. Hell, their “leaders” show every sign of allowing him to wine and dine and make promises to everybody else BUT them, at least until he is comfortably in office – maybe for the entirety of his first term. For the time being, though, Black folks aren’t even hearing what he’s saying to the white men or anybody else – they’re just enjoying the music: “It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know, a change gonna come.”

Oh no it ain’t.

I would not have thought that the coverage of the US presidential campaign could get more shallow and meaningless, and then, along comes the plagiarism story.

OMG! Barack Obama, the silver-tongued front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, lifted a couple of lines and an idea from the black governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Patrick, himself something of a wordsmith, had been hit with the same attack by a wooden opponent, and responded by saying that words matter, and citing Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” line and the Declaration of Independence’s ringing “all men are created equal.”

Obama, whose oratorical skills have left the robotic and monotonous Hillary Clinton sounding like a pull-string Barbie on the stump (remember “Math is hard!”?), has had the Clinton campaign frantically casting around for a rejoinder, and the best they could come up with to date was a charge that he’s “all hat and no cattle” (itself a line lifted, uncredited, from Texas populist Jim Hightower, if I recall, though I think it has an older lineage among Texans, and has been appropriately applied to President Bush on numerous occasions). Obama decided to respond using some of Patrick’s lines.

Now, one could argue that Obama would have been better advised to give fair attribution to Gov. Patrick, but since when have politicians gone around putting footnotes on their public speeches? Most political speeches are exercises in cut and paste, full of regurgitated pablum and lifted quotes. If plagiarism were a political crime, 90 percent of members of Congress would be out on their ears. (For that matter, if plagiarism were a crime, Hillary Clinton herself would be behind bars. Her book, “It Takes a Village,” was largely written by Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University journalism prof who was reportedly offered $120,000 for the job, but her name appeared nowhere in the volume, which Clinton still claims as her own work.)

Besides, come on now! We’re not nominating an English professor, god knows. If we were, how the hell would we have had Bush for president for the last what seems like eternity, with his maddening use of the word “nukular,” his drunken “sh” slurs all over the place, his grammatical atrocities, and his mangled quotes (remember “if you fool me once…”?)?

Excuse me, but we have a criminal $1-trillion war raging in Iraq that is sucking the lifeblood out of the American economy, killing American troops by the day and slaughtering innocent Iraqis by the hundred thousands, we have an economy that’s racing for the toilet like a party-goer who ate too many bad shrimps, we have bridges collapsing, we have the North Pole ice vanishing faster than Bush’s credibility, and the media are focussed laser-like on what? The momentious question of whether Obama lifted a quote from Gov. Patrick without acknowledgement?

We have Democrats trying to decide whether to select a woman senator who used insider information to make a killing in cattle futures, who has accepted massive donations from the healthcare industry and military contractors, who voted enthusiastically if cynically for George Bush’s Iraq War, and whose husband wants nothing more than a new shot at some eager White House interns, or a black senator who spoke out against that war before it happened, when to do so was to risk being called a traitor by the Commander in Chief and his minions, and the best our vaunted “independent” media pundits can do is what? Accuse Obama of plagiarism?

We could use some reporting on Clinton’s and Obama’s corporate backing, on the key people advising them on foreign affairs and domestic economic policy, some serious challenges on how each candidate will actually address climate change issues, and on how they can do anything without attacking the out-of-control military budget. Instead, we get this “big” plagiarism story as the main event of the Wisconsin primary.

Thank you, Fourth Estate, for making us a well-informed citizenry.

In his victory speech in Texas Tuesday, Barack Obama promised to end the Iraq war in 2009, a new commitment that parallels recent opinion pieces in The Nation.

Prior to his Houston remarks, Obama’s previous position favored an American combat troop withdrawal over a sixteen-to-eighteen-month timeframe. He has been less specific on the number and mission of any advisers he would leave behind.

Ending the war in the first year of his potential presidency, therefore, is the strongest stand Obama has taken thus far, and one he will be questioned on sharply by the Republicans and the media. As Juan Cole noted last year, the Bush-Cheney team is preparing a “poison pill” of disorder and blame for any future President contemplating an Iraq troop withdrawal.

Did Obama mean it? Was it only rhetoric? Perhaps, but as Obama has said over and over lately, words make a difference. He may be asked to square his 2009 goal with his previous eighteen-month timetable. To avoid inconsistencies or missteps, he might claim that he will publicly declare in 2009 that he is ending the occupation but bringing the troops home on his longer timetable. Who knows? But these were words worth holding the candidate to. The astonishing thing is that antiwar sentiment among Obama’s base is running strongly enough to push the candidate forward to a stronger commitment. By comparison, in The Audacity of Hope (2006), Obama wrote that “how quickly a complete withdrawal can be accomplished is a matter of imperfect judgment based on a series of best guesses.”

The Iraq war, and the so-called war on terrorism, are now guaranteed to loom large in the likely battle between Obama and John McCain. The American experience, first with Vietnam and now with Iraq, provides a strong reservoir of support for Obama’s skeptical position from 2002 until the present time. But McCain’s personal experience as a tough Navy pilot and prisoner of war makes him much more formidable than Hillary Clinton as a “national security” advocate against Obama. McCain’s remarks last night were focused entirely on Obama’s lack of experience in foreign affairs, and should be a wake-up call to the peace movement to become more engaged in the presidential election.

Obama faces two immediate tests aside from the primary contests ahead. First, sometime in April, General David Petraeus will be testifying in Washington that the conditions are improving in Iraq and that the United States must “stay the course.” Petraeus will be acting as a de facto surrogate for McCain in domestic politics. Obama will have to respond to the general’s serious claims without retreating from the commitment he has given to early withdrawal.

Second, the questions of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan could intensify as a symbol of America’s current policies towards terrorism. McCain has already absorbed both neoconservative doctrines and the neoconservatives themselves in his campaign against “Islamo-fascism” as the greatest threat in American history.

First, the neoconservatives will push for Obama’s (and the Democrats’) acceptance of their terminology to control the debate, or berate their opponents as weak for not recognizing “Islamo-fascism” as the new equivalent of the Communist threat during the cold war.

Next, they will attack Obama for proposing to pull the plug on Iraq just when the tide is turning.

Finally, they will question Obama’s experience in pushing for diplomacy towards Iran, and draw him out on why he favors more troops in Afghanistan and a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan if there is “actionable intelligence.” They will probe, too, into Obama’s commitment to Israel.

It will be messy and ugly, with right-wingnuts calling Obama by his middle name as often as possible.

Weeks before Obama became the front-runner, the New York Times hired William Kristol as another in-house neoconservative, as Kristol was blasting the Democratic Party for becoming “the puppet of the antiwar groups.” The Times’s own “objective” news commentary adopted the right-wing frame that the Democrats would “seem unpatriotic” by cutting funds for American troops while “under intense pressure from the antiwar faction [read: majority] of their party.” Wedge politics virtually dictates that splintering the Obama campaign, the Democrats and the antiwar movement, while uniting the right and center around “experience,” will be the strategic agenda for Republicans through November. If he is not the vice-presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman will be employed as the primary ally of the Republicans in trying to make inroads into the American Jewish community as well.

But there are Republican weaknesses to expose too, beginning with their attempt to perpetuate an endless trillion-dollar war in Iraq. MoveOn and others will strike hard at that Republican vulnerability. According to counterinsurgency doctrine, the current Iraq war is expected to last throughout the next presidential term, longer than most Americans can imagine supporting it. On Iran, the recent National Intelligence Estimate has dampened any White House plans for an American strike, though the Israelis may act as a dangerous surrogate before December.

Then there is the quagmire of Afghanistan, where no military solution is in sight. And finally, in Pakistan, $11 billion invested in the Musharraf regime was swept away by the voters yesterday. The Pakistanis do not want to be pawns in the American war on terrorism. They know that a military fight with the Taliban or Al Qaeda is also a bottomless battle against Pashtun nationalism with implications for Pakistan’s stability as a whole.

The danger for Obama lies in being challenged by McCain, the neoconservatives and the right-wing conservatives to prove his credentials as a militarist or face being painted as another Democrat too weak to be Commander-in-Chief.

The opportunity for the peace movement is to engage in open political and intellectual battle, from precincts to public forums, against the neoconservative agenda for a permanent war against Muslim radicals and on behalf of American access to oil with dire consequences at home.

From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

21/02/08 ” Chicago Tribune” — — ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war’s largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors’ pockets, records show.

Federal prosecutors in Rock Island have indicted four former supervisors from KBR, the giant defense firm that holds the contract, along with a decorated Army officer and five executives from KBR subcontractors based in the U.S. or the Middle East. Those defendants, along with two other KBR employees who have pleaded guilty in Virginia, account for a third of the 36 people indicted to date on Iraq war-contract crimes, Justice Department records show.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Rock Island sentenced the Army official, Chief Warrant Officer Peleti “Pete” Peleti Jr., to 28 months in prison for taking bribes. One Middle Eastern subcontractor treated him to a trip to the 2006 Super Bowl, a defense investigator said.

Prosecutors would not confirm or deny ongoing grand jury activity. But court records identify a dozen FBI, IRS and military investigative agents who have been assigned to the case. Interviews as well as testimony at the sentencing for Peleti, who has cooperated with authorities, suggest an active probe.

Rock Island serves as a center for the probe of war profiteering because Army brass at the arsenal here administer KBR’s so-called LOGCAP III contract to feed, shelter and support U.S. soldiers, and to help restore Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

In one case, a freight-shipping subcontractor confessed to giving $25,000 in illegal gratuities to five unnamed KBR employees “to build relationships to get additional business,” according to the man’s December 2007 statement to a federal judge in the Rock Island court. Separately, Peleti named five military colleagues who allegedly accepted bribes. Prosecutors also have identified three senior KBR executives who allegedly approved inflated bids. None of those 13 people has been charged.

A common thread runs through these cases and other KBR scandals in Iraq, from allegations the firm failed to protect employees sexually assaulted by co-workers to findings that it charged $45 per can of soda: The Pentagon has outsourced crucial troop support jobs while slashing the number of government contract watchdogs.

The dollar value of Army contracts quadrupled from $23.3 billion in 1992 to $100.6 billion in 2006, according to a recent report by a Pentagon panel. But the number of Army contract supervisors was cut from 10,000 in 1990 to 5,500 currently.

Last week, the Army pledged to add 1,400 positions to its contracting command. But even those embroiled in the frauds acknowledge the impact of so much war privatization.

“I think we downsized past the point of general competency,” said subcontractor Christopher Cahill, who for a decade prepared military supply depots under LOGCAP. Now serving 30 months in federal prison for fraud, Cahill added: “The point of a standing army is to have them equipped.”

KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton Co., says it has been paid $28 billion under LOGCAP III. The firm says it quickly reports all instances of suspected fraud and has repaid the Defense Department more than $1 million for questionable invoices.

In a statement, KBR said its roughly 20,000 employees and 40,000 subcontractors have performed laudably in a war zone where Army demands shift rapidly and local suppliers don’t always maintain ledger books. Spokeswoman Heather Browne wrote: “Ethics and integrity are core values for KBR.”

But a wiretapped transcript recently released in Rock Island underscores the brazen nature of the exceptions.

In October 2005, with federal agents tailing them, three war contractors slipped through London’s posh Cumberland hotel before meeting in a quiet lounge. For the rest of that afternoon, the men sipped cognac and whiskey and discussed the bribes that had greased contracts to supply U.S. troops in Iraq.

Former KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans, who was wearing a wire strapped on by a Rock Island agent, wondered aloud whether to return $65,000 in kickbacks he got from his two companions, executives from the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co.

One of the men, Tamimi operations director Shabbir Khan, urged him to hide the money by concocting phony business records.

“Just do the paperwork,” Khan said.

Party houses, prostitutes

In October 2002, five months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Khan threw a birthday party for Seamans at a Tamimi “party house” near the Kuwait base known as Camp Arifjan. Khan “provided Seamans with a prostitute as a present,” Rock Island prosecutors wrote in court papers. Driving Seamans back to his quarters, Khan offered kickbacks that would total $130,000.

Five days later, with Seamans and Khan hammering out the fine print, KBR awarded Tamimi the war’s first $14.4 million mess hall subcontract, court records show.

In April 2003, as American troops poured into Iraq, Seamans gave Khan inside information that enabled Tamimi to secure a $2 million KBR subcontract to establish a mess hall at a Baghdad palace. Seamans submitted change orders that inflated that subcontract to $7.4 million.

By June, Seamans and fellow KBR procurement manager Jeff Mazon, a Country Club Hills resident, had executed subcontracts worth $321 million. At least one deal put U.S. soldiers at risk.

The Army LOGCAP contract required KBR to medically screen the thousands of kitchen workers that subcontractors like Tamimi imported from impoverished villages in Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

But when Pentagon officials asked for medical records in March 2004, Khan presented “bogus” files for 550 Tamimi workers, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeffrey Lang said in a court hearing last year.

KBR retested those 550 workers at a Kuwait City clinic and found 172 positive for exposure to hepatitis A, Lang told the judge. Khan tried to suppress those findings, warning the clinic director that Tamimi would do no more business with his medical office if he “told KBR about these results,” Lang said in court. The infectious virus can cause fatigue and other symptoms that arise weeks after contact.

Retesting of the 172 found that none had contagious hepatitis A, Lang said, and Khan’s attorneys said in court that no soldiers caught diseases from the workers or from meals they prepared. It remains unclear if that is because the workers were treated or because they did not remain infectious after the onset of symptoms.

Still, the incident shows how even mundane meal contracts can put troops at risk. Similar disease-testing breaches cropped up at cafeterias outsourced to firms besides Tamimi, former KBR Area Supervisor Rene Robinson said in a Tribune interview.

“That was an ongoing problem,” Robinson said. “When the military asked for paperwork, it was spotty.” KBR was forced to begin vaccinating the employees at their work sites, he added.

Tamimi and its U.S. lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said it is cooperating with federal authorities.

By July 2005, Tamimi had secured some 30 KBR troop feeding subcontracts worth $793.5 million, records show. Khan continued to negotiate Iraq war subcontracts for Tamimi until shortly before he was arrested in Rock Island in March 2006.

He is now serving a 51-month prison sentence for lying to federal agents about the kickbacks he wired to Seamans, who pleaded guilty and served a year and a day in prison. Both declined to comment.

Seamans, a 46-year-old Air Force veteran, once taught ethics to junior KBR employees. At his December 2006 sentencing hearing, he expressed remorse for taking the kickbacks, telling the judge: “It is not the way that Americans do business.”

It was another repentant LOGCAP veteran standing before a Rock Island judge on Wednesday. Peleti, formerly the military’s top food service adviser for the Middle East, wept as he admitted taking bribes from Tamimi and three other subcontractors between 2003 and early 2006.

Ribbons and badges glittered across Peleti’s pressed green Army shirt. “I stand here before you today to convey my remorse and sincere regret,” he said, then broke down.

One subcontractor, Public Warehousing Co., took Peleti and another top Army official to the Super Bowl, a defense investigator said in court Wednesday. The firm has denied wrongdoing. Khan also bribed Peleti to influence LOGCAP contracts with cash. Peleti was arrested in 2006 while re-entering the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base with a duffel bag stuffed with watches and jewelry as well as about $40,000 concealed in his clothing.

While prosecutors documented kickbacks in only the first two of Tamimi’s mess hall subcontracts, they contend that the tone was set to corrupt the system.

“Tamimi and Mr. Khan have their hooks into Mr. Seamans, they have their hooks into KBR,” Lang said in court last year. “It is difficult to assess the kind of damage that did to the integrity of the subcontracting process when the first two subcontracts are corrupted.”

Auditors in the basement

Military auditors say they closely monitor the layers of KBR subcontractors who actually perform most of the LOGCAP work, stationing teams in Iraq. But one Rock Island search warrant said auditors working back in the U.S. could manage only limited reviews of the cascade of deals.

In the basement of one of KBR’s Houston office buildings, a 25-member team from the Defense Contract Audit Agency had “no communications” with “personnel on the ground,” so they could not confirm whether goods and services actually were delivered, the search warrant application said.

In the absence of oversight, some Middle Eastern businessmen would offer “Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and the KBR guys weren’t shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff,” said Paul Morrell, whose firm The Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor.

Such questionable relationships continued long after early procurement managers like Seamans had been rooted out. Early subcontractors such as Tamimi became almost indispensable in part by outfitting Army cafeterias with expensive power generators and refrigeration systems, records and interviews show.

“If you ever gave Tamimi a hard time, you’d get a call,” former KBR subcontract manager Harry DeWolf told the Tribune.

When subcontracts came up for renegotiation, DeWolf said, companies like Tamimi “would say, ‘Fine, we’re going to pull out all of our people and equipment.’ They really had KBR and the government over the barrel.”

Complicating the investigation of war-contract crimes, the government of Kuwait has denied a U.S. request to extradite two Middle Eastern businessmen accused of LOGCAP fraud. The country’s ambassador last year sent letters to the Justice Department asking the U.S. to drop its case against one of them, arguing that international agreements forbid U.S. prosecution of Kuwaiti residents for crimes allegedly committed on Kuwaiti soil. Prosecutors disagree, but a judge is considering Kuwait’s assertion.

Investigators also have faced challenges in dealing with KBR. The company has withheld some internal company documents relating to Mazon, Seaman’s fellow KBR procurement manager, the firm’s attorneys wrote in court filings.

In response to one subpoena, the firm gave agents about 2,760 of Mazon’s computer files but withheld 398 others, saying they were covered by attorney-client privilege or other protections.

Federal prosecutors say they have given KBR no special treatment and that the company has legal rights afforded to all firms whose employees have been charged with wrongdoing. “We did withhold some documents as being privileged,” a KBR spokeswoman wrote, but added that the company has provided statements and grand jury testimony.

Mazon has pleaded not guilty to charges that he inflated a fuel contract. His attorneys say the fuel subcontract was accidentally inflated when figures were converted from U.S. dollars to Kuwaiti dinars then back again. At least 22 KBR troop support subcontracts were inflated through similar errors, Mazon’s attorney J. Scott Arthur wrote in papers filed in Rock Island.

KBR attorneys said the company informed federal officials of three similar “double conversions” on other subcontracts. But KBR said it “has not undertaken an exhaustive search of its millions of pages of procurement documents” to determine whether other such errors exist.

dyjackson@tribune.com – jgrotto@tribune.com

21/02/08 “Seattle Times” — — Iraq should have cured President George W. Bush of any further itch for starting a war. And yet there comes a rumble for an attack on Iran. Opposing this, the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation sends out emissaries, several of whom visited The Seattle Times.

Among them was Brig. Gen. John H. Johns (ret.), who was assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division and a lecturer at the Army War College. Like other generals, Johns opposed the invasion of Iraq, and he now opposes an attack on Iran.

Is such an attack possible? It is Bush’s last year in office. There is no time for a land war, and anyway, says Johns, “We don’t have the ground troops to do it.” But an air war is possible. Johns says it might destroy 1,200 to 1,600 targets.

Johns is not a spokesman for the government. Whether that makes him less credible will depend on your point of view. He lives near Washington, D.C., and socializes with retired generals and CIA officers and others from the security world. He speaks on behalf of a peace group. Take that for what it is worth.

Here is what he says: Last year, there was a push in the administration for an air war against Iran. The given reason was Iran’s plan to build an A-bomb. Then came the National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had given up on it five years ago.

Says Johns, “The intelligence community intended that to be public to lessen the president’s chance of going to war. They wanted to avoid being complicit in another war. That’s the story I get.”

Johns says a struggle is under way in Washington, D.C. Those opposed to an attack include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those wanting an attack, he says, are the deputy national-security adviser for global democracy strategy, Elliott Abrams; Vice President Dick Cheney, “and the hard-line Israel lobby.”

Bombing Iraq is how Israel scotched Saddam Hussein’s A-bomb, in 1981. Israel is much admired for that, but preventive air attack is a high-risk strategy. It stirs hatred, and it has a large downside if it fails.

Diplomacy is lower-risk, especially if there is time for it. Johns goes further, arguing against an attack even if diplomacy fails. “Even if Iran got nuclear weapons,” he says, “they’re not going to commit suicide by using them.”

There may be other pretexts for war. On Jan. 6 came an incident of Iranian speedboats zipping around U.S. Navy ships in a provocative way. It could have been another Gulf of Tonkin incident.

What would it take to have a war with Iran? Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent and author of “All the Shah’s Men” (2003), was also part of the peace delegation here. He says it might just take a decision. “The possibility of an attack is real,” he says, and notes that President Bush would not need a vote of Congress.

Air attack is an act of war. At least, Americans thought so in 1941. But despite the Constitution granting the war power to Congress, in Vietnam (1964), Kuwait (1990) and Iraq (2002) our presidents have asked Congress for permission to make war only when they expected major fighting on the ground. Even to invade Iraq, George W. Bush said he did not need permission and asked for it only after Congress, and the public, raised an outcry.

In 1999, President Clinton conducted a 78-day air war against Serbia even though the House deadlocked 213-213 on a resolution supporting it, and the Senate never voted at all. Clinton didn’t care; his position was that he didn’t need permission for an air war.

What matters is not only the Constitution; it is the outcry. Government does what it can get away with – and in the last year of the Bush presidency, it is still an open question how much that is.

Bruce Ramsey’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com.