The Rag Blog

I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, I asked him about his father.

It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said: “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added: “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mule. He passed four years in the States – in a jail.”

He continued: “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently, he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a 10th of the entire adult population, fled to the US any way that they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States,” he says.

On his release from prison, Correa’s father was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor and broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note that he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that, in Ecuador, there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, he is one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Dr Correa, I should say, with a PhD in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called, a man who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character.

He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine.

He told the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell.

He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gunpoint. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest to eat their bonds. “We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people.” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.
It was a stunning performance.

I’d met his predecessor two years ago. President Alfredo Palacio was a man of good heart who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements that I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are dead. And if we are dead, how can we pay?”

Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, which was then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand.

They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, who was then economics minister, went secretly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived. And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Once elected president, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in the US to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity.

There were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country. But Correa still wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon, where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners.

I met the Cofan’s chief. His three-year-old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water, then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there, too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that had left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company that he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its board of directors, the Condoleezza. The US secretary of state.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation demanding that the oil company clean up the crap that it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly £6 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, which is a private legal action. But, if the verdict goes in favour of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure that Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No-one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the US, the Exxon Valdez case is dragging on into its 18th year. Yet Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No-one has made such a threat to Bush and big oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Ecuador’s capital Quito, Chevron’s lawyers were not amused. I met them.

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”

Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador, was chuckling over the legal difficulties that the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco had caused their kids’ deaths.

“If there is somebody with cancer there,” the parents must prove the deaths were “caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is our crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added: “No-one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before.

When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land, the the oil men said that they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now, Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one.

Pace University environmental law professor Robert F Kennedy Jr told me that elements of crude oil production such as benzene, toluene and xylene “are well-known carcinogens.”

Kennedy told me that he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this kind of toxic dumping would mean jail time in the US.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way that they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle

The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy called Jaime Varela with a blonde bouffant hairdo wearing in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club golf course, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles that the Cofan would face.

Especially this one – Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No-one could have expected that. And Correa, who is no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush administration. But to Ecuador’s president, it’s all about justice, fairness.

“You wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Native Americans. Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America.

Brazilian President Lula, Evo Morales, who was the first Indian ever elected president of Bolivia, Chavez of Venezuela. All “leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common – they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blondes.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly: “I am negro e indio” – black and Indian, like most Venezuelans.

Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blonde-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blonde oil company executive.

He never made much in oil, but, every time that he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know that this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is good and evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up one Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water. Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves.

When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native American village of Chenega.

I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991 and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then, Kompkoff said to me, in that slow, quiet way that he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the centre of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. refugee agency on Tuesday called for $261 million this year to help hundreds of thousands of Iraqis driven from their homes by violence.

The money is needed to provide health care, financial support and other assistance to the most vulnerable of the 2 million Iraqis who have fled the country, as well as to help some 400,000 of those who have left their homes but remain in Iraq, said a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

UNHCR estimates that a total of 2.2 million people are displaced in Iraq.

“Getting help to many of them is extremely difficult because of insecurity in much of the country,” said Ron Redmond.

Most of the Iraqis who fled to other countries live in urban areas in Syria and Jordan, Redmond said.

“Many of them are running out of money and finding it increasingly difficult to get by,” he told reporters.

Redmond said the agency was unable to confirm Iraqi government reports that at least 30,000 families returned in late 2007. He said the U.N. doesn’t encourage Iraqi refugees to return home because of the security situation but supports Iraqi government efforts to help those who return voluntarily.

The agency also helps neighboring nations strained by the influx of Iraqi refugees, he said. Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and several of Gulf states, in addition to Jordan and Syria, are hosting refugees from Iraq.

The money will enable another 100,000 Iraqi refugee children to go to school this year, twice as many as last year, Redmond said.

UNHCR also assists around 41,000 non-Iraqi refugees in the country, including Iranians and Turks, but is particularly concerned about 13,000 Palestinians targeted by armed groups and unable to enter neighboring countries, he said.

The Palestinian community in Iraq has become a target for persecution in recent years, largely because they are seen as having been favored under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Redmond said UNHCR hoped to resettle the most vulnerable Palestinians.

08/01/08 “ICH” — – In the runup to this year’s political circus, the buzzwords of hope and change are being bandied about like the cheap currency they are. Divested of any real meaning by their repetition and cynical misapplication, they quickly become the empty slogans that make “election” season all the more depressing. Newspeak, long the vernacular of a self-perpetuating media corporatocracy, has rendered the worst year in Iraq into proof that “the surge is working.” By continually culling the arguments, adjusting the lens, and narrowing the field of discussion and inquiry, the media run by a shrinking oligarchy has assured the US electorate that up is down: while creative if misleading permutations of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ clog the airwaves, there is virtually no chance at all that we will see anything but more regurgitations of the status quo.

The most recent and depressing, if predictable, variation on this insanity comes with the decisions to exclude Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul from various debates in the New Hampshire primary: Paul from a Fox-sponsored debate, and Kucinich from one hosted by ABC and Facebook. But you can see the point: for years the major parties and their allies in the media have worked hard to exclude “fringe” candidates from third parties or other wackos from foisting their dangerous opinions on unsuspecting voters. Consequently, voters have been well protected over the years from loony proposals such as the eight-hour day, abolition of slavery, and an end to whatever imperialist adventure we may have been involved in at the time.

Not only have malcontents like Paul and Kucinich managed to get elected under the tent of the major respective parties and hold these elective offices for years; they have the audacity to try to move up the chain and hold the parties to their core values. For shame!

While one may argue that, having poked their noses under the fumigation tent of their respective wings of the War Party, these men get what they deserve. Why shouldn’t they choke on the same poison used to sanitize the field of public debate to which all other politicians are subjected?

I can’t mount a defense that rises above simple logic, a kryptonite to which the system has obviously proved itself increasingly impervious. But why candidates who are obviously competing in the arena set out by the gatekeepers should be excluded in the very first contested primary is simply beyond the pale. Who the hell are they to restrict access to our airwaves in this way? It is wise to remember that: they are controlling our airwaves with the people’s permission. Yet emboldened by their successes in squelching debate in recent years, the media kingmakers have determined that they can go the extra mile. And the parties, co-conspirators in every crime against humanity wrought by this criminal administration despite their weak protests, are quick to tighten the noose. Liberals have had no real voice in the Democratic Party in a generation, so protests will be feeble. At least the New Hampshire Republicans had the integrity to withdraw their co-sponsorship of the Fox debate in protest.

So US voters have no need to hear the only candidate who embraces single-payer health care, a solution adopted to some degree by almost every developed nation on earth, and an answer to a crisis of enormous proportions. Likewise, we have no use for the only candidate who steadfastly opposes the expansion of US empire. All the other candidates will keep us in Iraq for a very long time. None will speak up for the Palestinians in any meaningful way, or challenge the unspoken ban on open discussion of issues in the Middle East. None will face up to the dragon in the room, which is the disastrous and resource-devouring war machine that is quickly sucking the life and spirit out of our democracy and society.

Leftists—or what passes for such in the US today—wrinkle their noses at Paul; I, for one, take him at his word that he has a lot in common with someone like Kucinich. And really, who is to say what society might be formed over the rotten carcass of the War Party? Paul himself has said that there is a lot of common work to be done before he gets to the parts of his program where left and right diverge—and that is a hell of a long way from where we are today. Who is to say what taxes we would want or need, what government programs we could afford, once the trillions in The Skim are redirected away from the bloated military and arms manufacturers. We in the US face an anomaly faced by no other polity on earth, spending as much on war as all other nations combined. There is simply no discussion either possible or necessary before this monster is tamed, and true distinctions of left and right seem almost impossible.

And as for the welfare state, Libertarian Paul agrees with the left argument that much of it is consumed by the corporate welfare state: handouts to corporations dwarf any money spent on humans, and always have. In addition, this cozy relationship between business and government is quickly leading to a proto-fascist restriction of civil liberties that all conscientious revolutionaries predict and abhor. And the next president had better be prepared to lead a post-imperial America, whether advocates of dismantling that empire are excluded from debate or not. The whole world already knows what US politicians can’t seem to grasp. Reality around the world will catch up to us while candy-coated sound bites about This Great Nation, Our Destiny, and all the other triumphalist crap is still ringing in our ears.

I don’t endorse Ron Paul, or Dennis Kucinich, or anyone else involved in this farce. Neither will have much effect on a system so rotten and rigged as to make real change anathema to the system, and therefore out of bounds for polite discussion. And before the cynics call me cynical, I believe firmly that hope springs eternal, and that true and lasting change is the only real hope for our country and our world. It is the peddling of false hope that constitutes a war crime. Both the Japanese and Nazi empires peddled such hope to the end, and had their people firmly convinced that victory was around the corner. So perhaps I’m still a bit naïve after all. Still, and contrary to experience, I continue to be shocked at how brazen the agents of the system will be in their attempt to drive citizens toward the cattle chute of ideological pablum. And until Americans shake off their political rufinol and realize that the excluded candidates speak for them more often than the approved ones, we can forget any improvements to a system driving us into bankruptcy and financial slavery: the only real change we can count on is the dwindling few coins that jingle in our pockets.

Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School ( http://www.greenhouseschool.org ). Translations of articles are available in over two dozen languages.

08/01/08 “ICH” — — I seem to have been demonstrating against American racism, imperialism, wars and mass murder all my adult life from the Vietnam era of the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Back in the 1960s decent people chanted “Hay, hay LBJ, how many kids will you kill today?” (LBJ being US President Lyndon Baines Johnson who presided over the Indochina War – 13 million excess deaths in total – from the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) in 1963 to the accession of President Richard Nixon in 1969.

These days we have been chanting “Bush, Blair, CIA, how many kids did you kill today?” or the more general “Hay, hay USA, how many kids did you kill today?” This article by a senior biological scientist attempts to answer this question QUANTITATIVELY using the best available data from UNICEF (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ) and the UN Population Division (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ).

We can get an UPPER LIMIT estimate from determining the number of children who die avoidably on Spaceship Earth with George Bush in charge of the flight deck. I have published a huge book recently called “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”. (G.M. Polya, Melbourne; copies in some major libraries; see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Careful research over several years and involving every country in the world ultimately obtained the estimate that 16 million people die avoidably each year (2003 data) of whom 9.6 million are under-5 year old infants.

We can accordingly estimate that Bush US is COMPLICIT in about 9.6 million avoidable infant deaths on Spaceship Earth each year (26,000 daily). However complicity is not the same as actual, actionable RESPONSIBILITY.

However while Bush America cannot be held responsible for every country in the world, under International Law it is certainly responsible for all countries actually violently occupied by the US (Occupied Iraq, Occupied Afghanistan, Occupied Diego Garcia) or by its war criminal surrogates Ethiopia and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel (Occupied Haiti, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Somalia).

This culpability is clearly set out in Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ), QUOTE:

Article 55
To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.

The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods.

The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.

Article 56

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.

If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21.

In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory. END QUOTE.

Using data from UNICEF it can be estimated that 608,000 under-5 year old infants die ANNUALLY in the US- or US surrogate-occupied Occupied Territories listed above, 90% avoidably – i.e. 550,000 – and due to Occupier war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention.

A quick inspection of the WHO (World Health Organization) website (see: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ) reveals that total annual medical expenditure in US dollars permitted by the war criminal Occupiers is only $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $82 (Occupied Haiti), $135 (Occupied Iraq), ? (Occupied Somalia) and ? (Occupied Palestinian Territory) as compared to the following hugely greater values for the racist, war-criminal, mass pedocidal US Alliance Occupier Countries: $3,123 (Australia), $3,173 (Canada), $3,040 (France), $3,171 (Germany), $2,560 (the UK) and $6.096 (the US).

Accordingly Bush, Dr Rice (aka Dr Death), Bush America and indeed ALL Bush-supporting Americans are responsible for the 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths EACH YEAR in the above Occupied countries. For detailed data and analysis see “US Occupation & Terror & Occupation. War crimes & huge infant deaths”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11968/42/ , from which one obtains the following summary data:

Year 2005 under-5 infant deaths” / “year 2005 population” is 370,000 / 29.9 million (Occupied Afghanistan); 122,000 / 28.8 million (Occupied Iraq); 82,000 / 8.2 million (Occupied Somalia); 31,000 / 8.5 million (Occupied Haiti); and 3,000 / 3.7 million (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 1,500 / 20.2 million (Occupi-er Australia) and 800 / 6.4 million (Occupi-er Israel).

Year 2005 annual under-5 infant death rate” (i.e. as a percentage: deaths for every 100 under-5 year old infants in 2005 in a particular country) was 6.7% (Occupied Afghanistan); 2.8% (Occupied Iraq); 5.5% (Occupied Somalia); 2.7% (Occupied Haiti); and 0.47% (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 0.12% (Occupi-er Australia) and 0.12% (Occupi-er Israel).

Total excess deaths for impoverished developing countries is about 1.4 times the total under-5 infant deaths (see “Layperson’s Guide to Counting Iraq deaths”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ (for detailed analysis see my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (copies in major libraries): http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Accordingly annual excess deaths in the above Occupied Countries = 608,000 x 1.4 = 850,000.

THE ANSWERS to the questions posed above are that Bush America will be responsible for (a) 850,000 excess deaths in US- or US surrogate-occupied Territories in 2008 (of whom well over 50% will be kids) and (b) 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths in these Occupied Territories in 2008 or 550,000/365 = 1,500 avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths DAILY.

Terrorism whether state terrorism or non-state terrorism is evil and repugnant.

Muslim-origin non-state terrorists have murdered 7,000 Western civilians in the last 40 (FORTY) years (including Israelis and assuming no US or Israeli complicity in 9/11 – ignoring the fact that in November 2007 former President and intelligence-intimate Francesco Cossiga of Italy announced unequivocally that 9/11 was due to the US CIA and Israeli Mossad) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/ ).

However the 21st century Bush Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been associated (SO FAR) with post-invasion excess deaths of 1.5-2 million and 3-6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths of 0.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively; and refugees totalling 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19121/42/ and http://www.countercurrents.org/polya071007.htm ).

From these UN agency- and medical literature-derived figures Bush US is clearly the world’s #1 terrorist state and the current world’s #1 for mass murder and mass pedocide (mass murder of children).

What sort of human beings can be complicit in such mass murder? What sort of Americans are complicit in this mass murder? What sort of American WOMEN are complicit in this horrendous mass murder of BORN INFANTS? Well, George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice (aka Wicked Witch of the West, Dr Death), Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Hilary Clinton for starters.

Of course ugly, racist Americans such as the Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) Bush-ites might argue that Muslim, Arab, Asian, South Asian, African, or non-European infants “don’t count” (that, of course, having been continuous, sustained American policy since the time of the racist, genocidal, God-fearing first European settlers of America 500 years ago) but what about the 20,000 AMERICAN INFANTS who die avoidably EACH YEAR because of Bush policies (see “How Bush killed 100,000 American infants”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/7102/26/ ).

Bush America is undoubtedly well ahead of the rest as the world’s #1 climate criminal state, and the #1 for terrorism, and mass pedocide. US state terrorism (USST), US climate criminality, and US nuclear terrorism are the #1 threats facing the world today.

Those who KNOWINGLY deny, ignore, excuse, minimize, obfuscate, support, advocate or are otherwise complicit in the mass murder of CHILDREN have crossed the line separating decent humanity from proto-Nazi barbarism, from the unthinkable but real, barbaric actuality of Bush America.

Small wonder therefore that outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist, author, activist, Holocaust hero and Holocaust survivor George Soros has demanded the “de-Nazification” of Bush America (see: “George Soros: Bush America needs de-Nazification”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12714/26/ ).

What can decent people do to counter this horrendous Bush American barbarism in 2008? Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent folk must (a) inform others and (b) act ethically by applying Sanctions and Boycotts in relation to all their avoidable dealings with individuals, corporations and countries complicit in this continuing mass pedocide, this continuing, remorseless Bush-ite mass murder of innocent children.

We’re in big trouble if even half of what Sibel Edmonds says is true…

“The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack,” averred ABC’s Charles Gibson at Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate. “The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?”

It’s a question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no easy answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most seemed baffled. Hillary Clinton made sure she used the word “retaliation” with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she would retaliate against “stateless” terrorists nevertheless insisted that she would indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to have a “haven” somewhere within a state.

Yes, well, that’s not necessarily true, but what if that “haven” is… right here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?

Say what?

Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of telephone intercepts and has now told the London Times that several top U.S. government officials conspired with foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets and sell them on the black market. The Times reports:

“Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of U.S. officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

“Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the U.S. State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: ‘He was aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.’

“She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents. ‘If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,’ she said.”

Edmonds brought all this to the attention of lawmakers, as well as the American media, and several news organizations filed reports – until a federal judge issued an unprecedented gag order. Edmonds’ story was deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed to know what she knows, according to our government, America’s national security would be severely impaired. Yet now she is speaking out, and what she has to say is unsettling, to say the least.

Edmonds has named at least one of the officials: he is Marc Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s defense secretary, William S. Cohen.

Edmonds contends that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.

As a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many hours of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and Pakistanis, Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit. Thousands of hours of intercepted calls revealed a network of moles placed in various military installations and academic venues dealing with nuclear technology. Edmonds gives us the details, via the Times:

“Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. ‘The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,’ she said.

“They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official [Marc Grossman] who provided some of their moles – mainly Ph.D. students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”

And “while the FBI was investigating,” says Edmonds, “several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.” An entire wing of the national security bureaucracy, associated with the neoconservatives, has long profited from representing Turkish interests in Washington: this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser.

Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish, Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S. nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

This was no “rogue” operation, but a covert action executed by Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the chief of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, at the time. The Turks were used as intermediaries because direct ISI intervention would have roused immediate suspicion. Large amounts of cash were dropped off at the offices of Turkish-American lobbying groups, such as the American Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly picked up by at least one top U.S. official.

This Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their respective embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for potential moles, compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the Times, “contained all their ‘hooking points,’ which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.” Nice work, there.

This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted spy Larry Franklin worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel Franklin and pass it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon; Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the embassy; and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And there is indeed a connection to the Franklin case, according to the Times,

“One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. ‘He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,’ [Edmonds] said.”

Franklin delivered his “packages” to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but others, such as Grossman – according to Edmonds – did it for money. Grossman angrily denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash transactions were recorded on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S. officials were heard selling the nation’s nuclear secrets. As the Times relates:

“Well-known U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a wiretap discussing ‘nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama,’ in which the agent allegedly is heard saying: ‘We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.'”

A vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign intelligence agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials, including some “household names” – if true, it’s the story of the decade. Yet that isn’t all. The really scary aspect of this labyrinthine network of foreign agents, and their American dupes and collaborators, is its connections to terrorist organizations, specifically al-Qaeda.

To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected of having wired a large amount of money into Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank account shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times reports: “Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.”

Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. However, the U.S. authorities did round up a large number of Israelis, including these guys, and held them for several months before extraditing them back to their home country.

Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times with the story, “after reading about an al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.” That’s a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka, who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.

Now that’s curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the Times puts it: “Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But they posed no threat to Turkey at the time.”

Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists’ target was the U.S. The al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top leadership of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin Laden – to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our NATO allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel Edmonds seriously. Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into place.

The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds’ testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world’s foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:

“The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets of FBI’s counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: ‘We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.’ Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

“Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI’s investigation.”

Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of government – America’s nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign “friends,” while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big trouble.

In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to reconsider the implications of the question Charles Gibson opened with during the ABC Democratic debate:

“The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?”

Perhaps congressman Henry Waxman, who solemnly pledged to launch a public investigation into the allegations made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept his promise. Maybe even the national news media, which has been offered this story repeatedly, by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they had covered it.

Fortunately, we don’t need the “mainstream” media to get the truth out to the American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we can do an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:

As Edmonds says, “we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the intercepts – put out the truth.”

MANCHESTER, N.H. — When Hillary Clinton, seriously set back by the Iowa caucuses, landed in New Hampshire to resuscitate her presidential campaign, the first question from the audience was unsparingly blunt: “When will the troops come home?”

She replied, as she has done before, that she hopes to begin bringing them home a brigade or two a month, but will leave enough troops in Iraq to protect themselves, American civilians and Iraqis who have helped the United States. That’s not too much different from what has been proposed by Barack Obama and John Edwards.

In other words, no matter who wins, Democrat or Republican, get ready for an extended war, a nagging pain that won’t go away. That simple, infuriating thought has been lost in the deluge of analysis, vote figures, handicapping and moments of drama that accompanied the Iowa caucuses and are carrying over into the frantic few days before New Hampshire’s primary.

Neither the weekend’s debates nor Clinton’s furious effort to reduce Obama’s lead in the polls gave comfort to Americans who want to end the war. For those of us who do, the most significant article of the weekend appeared on the back page of The New York Times Week In Review, saying “numbers don’t lie: for those in uniform, 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion.” The centerpiece was a powerful chart, in color, breaking down the 2,592 recorded deaths suffered last year by American and other coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish-controlled militias.

And as the candidates invoked the vague phase change, also lost in the process was the important point that a decent health insurance plan and the war are intertwined. In other words, the war is so expensive that it will be impossible for a Democratic president to keep campaign promises regarding federal health insurance while the conflict continues.

The man who asked Clinton about the war opened a question-and-answer session that lasted considerably longer than her speech. She clearly was determined to reintroduce herself in a state where she once had a strong lead in the polls.

She spoke in a large hangar at the Nashua airport, north of Manchester, after finishing third to Obama and Edwards in Iowa. It was a damaging finish, made worse for her by the size of Obama’s win and by his powerful, moving victory speech afterward.

Her New Hampshire staff had labored to give the hangar the ambiance of victory. A big American flag hung on the closed doors of the chilly building. A bus was to the right of the flag, painted in blue, red, gray and white, with a slogan on the sides: “Big Challenges, Real Solutions.” It was there to take the Clintons—Hillary, Bill and Chelsea—off on a New Hampshire tour that the senator hopes will save her campaign. “We got in at 4:30 [a.m.],” the former president told the crowd, which occupied almost half the large hangar. “I think my girls look good, don’t you?”

I was happy that the first question was about the war, and that it was asked in such a direct way. When the campaign began, the war was a critical issue. But it has come up less and less frequently in past weeks as Democratic candidates concentrated more on health care and other domestic issues.

There are reasons for this. Casualties are down. TV news directors and their counterparts in the print media and online have a short attention span and suffer from war fatigue. The economy is troubled, home foreclosures are growing, and health care horror stories abound. The polls show increased public concern about the domestic issues.

Yet, as the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole pointed out in his blog Informed Comment, the fact that the war “is tied with health care does not mean it isn’t important to voters. It means it is as important to them as the health of themselves and their loved ones, which is to say it is very important.”

The war’s cost is tremendous. Economist Scott Wallstein estimates it so far at close to $1 trillion. Economists Linda Bilnes and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, said the figure is twice that much. A 2006 study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put the cost at $2 billion a week.

Universal health care would also be very expensive. Various studies by advocates estimate the cost over several years at between $34 billion and $69 billion. Even so, it would be cheaper than the war.

The issue is tremendously important here in New Hampshire. The state is recovering from an industrial decline, with high-tech business coming in. “It started in the ’90s,” Mike Vlacich, director of the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development, told me.

But I got a gloomier view from Jay Ward, political director for the Service Employees International Union, which is supporting Edwards in the state.

It’s true, Ward said, that high-tech jobs have increased, but not enough to take up the slack from the loss of manufacturing, particular the paper mills in the northern part of the state. “These jobs allowed people to work 40 hours a week and send their kids to college,” he said. The unemployment rate remains comparatively low, he said, but the jobs are in retail and service—low paying and with minimal benefits. “There’s underemployment, which means you have three jobs,” he added.

These people need a system of Medicare for all—a form of which is advocated by Obama, Clinton and Edwards, the three real post-Iowa survivors among the Democrats.

There are differences in their plans, but they are all good.

The candidates also say they are against the war and want our troops out. But Clinton wants withdrawal in phases and wouldn’t have most troops out until 2013. After that, she would keep a residual force in Iraq. Edwards would withdraw 40,000 to 50,000 immediately and all within nine or 10 months, another phased pullout. Obama, who—unlike Clinton and Edwards—opposed the invasion, would withdraw all troops before 2010, again in phases.

All these plans would leave troops there for a substantial time. And that’s assuming that the winner can keep a withdrawal promise. It’s easy to imagine what will happen when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the so-called wise men and women of the Washington foreign policy establishment start “talking sense” to the new president, urging him or her to keep a strong force in Iraq to guard strategic interests and oil supplies in the Middle East and to protect Israel. Only Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich favor an immediate pullout.

Republicans John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney all support the war and oppose even setting a timetable for withdrawal. And none of them favor a decent federal health insurance plan.

The headline in last Friday’s Washington Post says it all: “No Murder Charges Filed in Haditha Case.”

Two years ago, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians — including women and children cowering in their own homes — in a revenge rampage in Haditha. Once the story emerged from the usual layers of lies and cover-up, the atrocity flared briefly on the public stage, and eight of the Marines and their officers were charged “with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime,” as the Post reports. But public attention moved swiftly on, and over the past few months, the Pentagon’s “military justice” system has quietly reduced or dropped charges against most of the men. Yesterday’s announcement signaled the final climb-down in the case, leaving only a single Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and lesser charges against one other enlisted man and two officers.

Two dozen civilians slaughtered, as confirmed by the Pentagon itself — and yet there was no murder. Indeed, Brian Rooney, the lawyer for one of the officer charged with failing to investigate the killings, now says “it’s clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward.” Twenty-four actual, physical dead bodies in the ground — yet the incident was a “legal fiction” — “no massacre occurred.”

The Pentagon has decided that the beserkers who killed two dozen innocent civilians were essentially following the accepted rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq — a revealing fact in itself. As the Post notes:

Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.

Even the indictment of Wuterich contains mitigating circumstances in the charge itself, which, the Post notes, alleges “that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing ‘in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.'”

“Adequate provocation” to kill twenty-four unarmed civilians in cold blood — or rather, as the indictment terms it, in hot blood, “the heat of sudden passion.”

There is little I can say about this case beyond what I first wrote about it in 2006 in a piece called “The Line of Atrocity: From the White House to Haditha.”

“Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha ­ now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources ­ to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.

“For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation ­ from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence ­ is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.

“….Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the carnage [at Haditha]. ‘One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer,’ the Sunday Times reports. ‘They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes.’ The victims ‘included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy,’ the Observer reports. “In one house an entire family, including seven children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl survived.’ A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the attackers had ‘suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership.’

“Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war. There has indeed been a “total breakdown in morality and leadership” in Iraq; but it’s not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.

“This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies ­ a majority of U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show ­ and sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against the infected tide.

“These massacres aren’t just momentary outbursts of revenging anger; they’re learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a cut-off of the city’s water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city’s residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans’ first targets were the city’s hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.

“The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus there was no real military purpose to the city’s destruction, which had been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole, non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in Haditha.

“…Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few ‘bad apples’ but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite detention, ‘extrajudicial killing,’ rendition and concentration camps official national policy. This moral rot is Bush’s true historical legacy.”

It is also the historical legacy of every single public figure and presidential candidate who fails to stand up — right now, today, and every single day– and demand that this abomination come to an immediate end, and that its perpetrators face the full measure of justice for what they have done. Who gives a damn about Obama’s “elevating rhetoric” or Hillary’s “tough fight-back” in New Hampshire — or any of the other soul-rotting bullshit of the presidential campaign — when this innocent blood drenches us all, day after day after day? Moral insanity has gripped this nation — and we are all of us, every single one, tainted and corrupted by it…and are passing it on to our children. Who will break this chain of madness? And where will we find mercy for these crimes?

Already, the “surge” of US troops into Baghdad is beginning to recede, leaving behind a country where, by most accounts, levels of political violence are much reduced.

But the surge has not accomplished the goal that the administration of US President George W. Bush set when it announced the policy at the beginning of last year – to buy time for Iraqi politicians to reach compromises on the country’s future that would reconcile its feuding ethnic and sectarian factions.

US officers say that such a grand compromise may not be so important. They have achieved “bottom-up” reconciliation by cementing local alliances and arranging for the amnesty of prisoners, the pensioning off of former regime officials and other measures to win Sunni acceptance for the Shia-led government.

Over the next year, as neighbourhoods, towns and districts lose the US garrisons that helped suppress sectarian militias and insurgent groups and maintain the balance of power, the ability of these improvised measures to withstand the centrifugal forces of Iraqi sectarian politics will be put to the test.

US forces numbered approximately 160,000 at the end of December, down from a high of over 170,000 in October. Robert Gates, US defence secretary, said last month that the military should be able to withdraw five brigades, or around 20,000 soldiers, by mid-2008, and hoped to take out another five by the end of this year.

British troops will also be winding down their deployment in Iraq, with numbers expected to fall from 5,000 to 2,500 in the middle of next year.

In terms of reducing violence, the strategy orchestrated by General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, appears to have succeeded beyond its planners’ expectations. Both US military casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties have fallen dramatically since the summer.

But many Iraqi politicians and Iraq analysts fear that unless the government can reach agreement with its political opponents, the lull in violence may not last. “If this improvement in security is not matched by improvements in political life, economy, unemployment and the services for the standard of living, [or] if there is no reconciliation, nobody can guarantee that this security would not deteriorate again,” says Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish politician.

“What Petraeus has accomplished is a lull that is sustainable through the American elections [in November 2008],” says Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank. “It’s not indefinitely sustainable without political accommodation at the top . . . This is conventional wisdom and it makes sense.”

Gen Petraeus himself said last month that, although the violence that had brought Iraq to the “brink of civil war” had receded, the progress had been “tenuous in many areas and could be reversed”.

According to American officers, the surge worked by allowing the US and Iraqi governments to blanket strategic districts, in some cases placing troops in positions where they could overlook virtually every main road junction.

This allowed US forces to intercept guerrillas moving in and out – and, more importantly, to break the hold that insurgents had gained on neighbourhoods via intimidation. Fatalities suffered by the US-led coalition fell to 40 a month in October and November, and 23 in December, from well over 100 a month in each of April, May and June. Figures for civilian dead also suggest a drop of more than 50 per cent since the summer.

In addition, both Sunni and Shia armed groups appear to have suffered a significant loss of legitimacy among their support bases. Members of both sects say that the gunmen alienated the civilian population by imposing a puritan version of Islamic law or by killing locals suspected of being informants.

Iraq’s al-Qaeda network, in particular, sparked a massive backlash. Over 70,000 paramilitaries, or “concerned local citizens”, enlisted in neighbourhood patrols targeted mainly at the radical Sunni movement.

Shia militants also appear to have lost legitimacy. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, continues to enforce a ban on all armed activity in areas controlled by his movement, and his deputies say that that they have formed a special “Golden Unit” to purge members suspected of criminal violence or sectarian killing.

However, the retreat of the armed movements does not appear to have been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the authority and legitimacy of the Iraqi state. Gen Petraeus has said that as al-Qaeda activity lessens in Sunni areas, “mafia-like” criminal organisations practising kidnapping and extortion expand to fill the gap. Meanwhile, the British military’s recent withdrawal from Basra city stems from the realisation that it could do little to stop feuding among Islamist militia groups.

Some analysts have suggested Basra is a glimpse into Iraq’s medium-term future. The violence there, which probably results in several dozen dead a month, is hardly a serious threat to the Iraqi state. But the climate of lawlessness ensures that investors steer clear of an oil-rich port city that could be Iraq’s economic and commercial capital – and that the middle class, which fled en masse to neighbouring countries, does not return.

Meanwhile, Iraqi politicians have failed to deliver the hoped-for “national reconciliation” package of legislation. Parliament adjourned at the end of the year without having approved important legislation on the distribution of oil revenues and the fate of members of the former ruling Ba’ath party. Given the heated rhetoric that continues to fly between Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia, it appears that the much-vaunted “consensus” may not in fact exist.

It could be the US troop presence, rather than low-profile trust-building measures, that is the crucial factor in keeping the feuding factions apart. “The Americans can [prevent local conflicts] now because they have leverage through the military,” says Mr Hiltermann.

The US surge does appear to have interrupted the cycle of violence that a year ago seemed to be pushing Iraq inexorably into all-out sectarian war. But it has not bought Iraqis enough time to resolve their differences and it is unclear whether local ceasefires can last without US troops to help resolve disagreements and prevent groups from settling their disputes by force.