The Rag Blog

“We must become the change we want to see.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“In any case, I hate all Iranians.” — Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary to Defense Secretary, Robert Gates

How many times do we, the people of the US, have to go around on this queasy-making merry-go-round of propaganda and militarism before we shout — enough! — then shutdown the whole cut-rate carnival and run the scheming carnies who operate it out of town? It is imperative the nation’s citizens begin to apprehend the patterns present in this ceaseless cycle of official deceit and collective pathology. This republic, or any other, cannot survive, inhabited by a populace with such a slow learning curve.

Over the last three decades, the authoritarian right has risen to create the nation they have been longing for since their humbling by the Watergate scandal. After being subdued and humiliated by the mechanisms of a free republic, the right has turned the tables — and subdued and humiliated the republic. If the trend continues, all but unchallenged and unabated, we might as well replace the torch held aloft by Lady Liberty with a taser.

How could it come to this? How did so many US citizens grow so apathetic, oblivious, if not flat-out hostile to the tenets of a free republic?

The authoritarianism inherent to the structure of multi-conglomerate corporatism is antithetical to the concept of the rights and liberties of the individual. Most individuals — bound by a corporation’s secrecy-prone, hierarchical values — will, over time, lose the ability to display free thinking, engage in civic discourse, and even be able to envisage the notion of freedom.

This is true, from the florescent light-flooded aisles of Wal*Mart to the insular executive offices of Haliburton to the sound stages of CNN and Fox News. Under the prevailing order, reality, for the laboring class of the corporate state, has become debt slavery; in contrast, the simulacrum of reality, in which, the striver class exists, is a milieu defined by obsessive careerism. Under the hegemony of corporatism, freedom might as well be fairy dust. It only exists in an imaginary land, not the places one arrives by way of one’s morning and evening commute.

In addition, economically, by way of decades of financial chicanery, perpetrated by the nation’s business and political elite, we are eating our seed crop, and the consequences of this harvest of deceit have left the people of the US, intellectually and spiritually malnourished.

As a result, many attempt to sate the keening emptiness and mitigate the chronic unease by gorging themselves on the Junk Food Jesus of End Time mythology, which is a belief system wherein corporeal events and actions (personal and collective) have no lasting consequence because even the human body is to be cast aside, like a junk food wrapper, when the cosmic CEO decides to make the earth a part of his heavenly franchise.

Accordingly, the corporate state requires modes of being that evince obliviousness and obedience (the defining traits of the US consumer) on the part of the majority of the populace. Ergo, the rise of both Christian consumerists and the vast apparatus of the right-wing propaganda matrix that dominates news cycles via the electronic mass media.

All coming to pass, as George W. Bush — the reigning mascot of this fantasyland of infantile omnipotence and instant gratification — is rocked to sleep by his handlers cooing preposterous tales of how history will place him in the pantheon of those men whose greatness was unrecognized by the shallow and petty minds of their own era.

When, in fact, Bush, whose ruinous wars of aggression, deficit-ballooning tax breaks for the wealthy, and policies of crony capitalism (that enabled the economy-decimating, easy credit banking scams of the present) displays the character traits of a man ridden with severe psychological trauma; his attempts to tamp down immense inner turmoil, by means of his grandiose bearing, his absolute certitude regarding his own infallibility, and his bullying behavior, have resulted in an exteriorizing of his pathologies on a global scale, and this is playing out ugly, for all concerned.

Why do the people of the nation (for the most part) slouch, slack-jawed and passive, before this assault upon their collective integrity and personal dignity?

For generations, the ephemeral dazzle of pop culture paternalism and tabloid Manichaeism, as confabulated by advertising and public relations hacks and corporate news courtesans, has overwhelmed gravitas, history, even self-awareness. As all the while, shallow opportunists have been elevated to the status of pundits, experts and sages. Withal, the present system generously rewards those individuals who have mastered the art of impersonating human traits and responses in utterly contrived environments. As a whole, the majority of the populi have come to garner information about the world at large, and, worse, their own self-image, from a medium where phoniness is a treasured commodity, while authentic human traits and responses are banished to a beggar’s road.

Is it any wonder that the media types who thrive in these artificial settings have come to define authenticity as being only those attributes that appear authentic on television? Apropos, if you ask these “media personalities” about the shortcomings and corruption of the present system, they will plead the careerist’s Nuremberg Defense … of only being a stormtrooper obeisant to the “bottom line.”

Fantasy alert: One would hope that if one were to descend down a ladder constructed of these layers upon layers of bottom lines, one would arrive in a Hell reserved for those possessed with such shameless cupidity.

Reality redux: Yet as much as the human heart might yearn for such outcomes, there will never arrive the terrible majesty and bitter reckoning of anything resembling Judgement Day, heralded by celestial trumpets and legions of naked and cowering sinners; instead, in human affairs, there arises dire exigencies that can no longer be ignored nor explained away. The arrival of such a moment for the US is nearly at hand.

When a nation manifests a mixture of mass ignorance and official mendacity, in combination with uncheck power emanating from an insular and arrogant elite, a golden age of peace and plenty is as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami. As sure as a village of desperate fools who devour their seed crop, a nation that refuses universal health care to its children — yet rushes to the aid of its parasitic class of wealthy “speculators” and “investors” from the consequences of their own greed-besotted, fiscal debacles — is doomed.

This is the classic pattern of collective immolation experienced by a nation when power and privilege is increasingly consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. In essence, this is the key to the conundrum paralyzing the leadership of the Democratic Party: In a culture in which an individual’s worth is determined by the degree one can be exploited by the corrupt interests that control both the private and public sector, the public at large has little value to the political establishment … That is: other than, every few years, being bamboozled for their votes in the sham spectacles known as the US electoral process, a scam mostly financed, hence controlled, by the aforementioned big money interests.

In sum, this is the reason the Democratic Party feels little allegiance to their base. In turn, the political classes themselves are only of value to the big money corporate elite, because, by their delivery of staggering amounts of pork, massive tax cuts, and the passage of desired anti-regulatory legislation, they serve as their errand boys.

Moreover, the corporate control of congress is a microcosm of US society as a whole. Accordingly, the increasingly corporatized, ever more submissive people of the US should be termed, the Whose-Your-Daddy Nation.

Yet, since life does not exist in stasis, within this hierarchy of deceivers and dupes, we will gnaw at one another’s ankles until the whole pathetic pyramid collapses.

All around us, we can feel the shoddy structure starting to sway and buckle. Axiomatically, the value of the dollar is collapsing like the smooth facade of a con man called-out by a group of wised-up marks. At present, in the wake of the bust in the housing market, repo men are retracing the tracks of real estate grifters who fleeced legions of wishful thinkers who brought the American dream and now only possess the misery of debt slavery.

One would think the time for insurrection has arrived — that, at long last, an awakened and enraged public would rise up and foreclose on these reprobates and ne’er-do-wells squatting in the White House and skulking through Congress. The power and privilege of the corporately controlled elite of Washington should be repossessed like the Lexises of Atlanta real estate agents and the oversized pickup trucks of Tucson contractors, confiscated in the wake of the collapse of the housing market. Foreclosure signs and repossession notices should festoon the whole of official Washington.

Turn about would be fair play. Since, the rise of Reaganism, the financial sector has been engaged in selling off the assets of the nation’s public sector to the highest bidders. It is amazing that, at this point, this klavern of kleptocrats haven’t yet torn from the walls and absconded with all the copper plumbing fixtures and fittings on Capitol Hill.

Is a turnaround possible?

If we wake-up and smell the jackboot. From the miasma of right-wing media propaganda, to the proliferation of predatory capitalism, to the corruption and cupidity of the prison industrial complex, to the pandemic of police brutality and the trampling of the rights of the accused, to perennial civilian shooting sprees, to the muzzling of descent, to the rise of the national surveillance state, to the use and acceptance of torture as state policy, to the adoption of an unlawful, immoral foreign policy doctrine that promotes policies of perpetual war, one is forced to conclude that bullying, and deferring to bullies, has become the dominate mode of being in the US.

Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy and engagement. The gaining of empathy alleviates the pathological need to be a bully, while social and political engagement mitigates feelings of powerlessness that authoritarian bully-boys, such as Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, et al., exploit.

In short, remedial human lessons for the US population, in general, and for the corporate and political classes, in particular.

Let us start the process by having a period of grief and repentance for the death and suffering that our government, in our name, has inflicted on the people of Iraq. This should be done as the US begins the process of a complete military withdrawal from their decimated nation, and the bestowing of economic reparations upon the millions of Iraqis who have suffered under the brutal machinations and murderous mayhem unloosed by our country’s contemptible invasion and occupation.

To do so, might save the people of our next target, Iran (as well as ourselves) a world of grief.

“But if the middle space [Russia and the former Soviet Union] rebuffs the West [the European Union and America], becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South [Middle East] or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor [China], then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically. The same would be the case if the two major Eastern players were somehow to unite. Finally, any ejection of America by its Western partners [the Franco-German entente] from its perch on the western periphery [Europe] would automatically spell the end of America’s participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space [e.g. Russia].” -Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997)

10/12/07 “Global Research” Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” These precepts of physics can also be used in the social sciences, specifically with reference to social relations and geo-politics.

America and Britain, the Anglo-American alliance, have engaged in an ambitious project to control global energy resources. Their actions have resulted in a series of complicated reactions, which have established a Eurasian-based coalition which is preparing to challenge the Anglo-American axis.

Encircling Russia and China: Anglo-American Global Ambitions Backfire

“Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force — military force — in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.” – Vladimir Putin at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in Germany (February 11, 2007)

What American leaders and officials called the “New World Order” is what the Chinese and Russians consider a “Unipolar World.” This is the vision or hallucination, depending on perspective, that has bridged the Sino-Russian divide between Beijing and Moscow.

China and Russia are well aware of the fact that they are targets of the Anglo-American alliance. Their mutual fears of encirclement have brought them together. It is no accident that in the same year that NATO bombarded Yugoslavia, President Jiang Zemin of China and President Boris Yeltsin of Russia made an anticipated joint declaration at a historic summit in December of 1999 that revealed that China and the Russian Federation would join hands to resist the “New World Order.” The seeds for this Sino-Russian declaration were in fact laid in 1996 when both sides declared that they opposed the global imposition of single-state hegemony.

Both Jiang Zemin and Boris Yeltsin stated that all nation-states should be treated equally, enjoy security, respect each other’s sovereignty, and most importantly not interfere in the internal affairs of other nation-states. These statements were directed at the U.S. government and its partners.

The Chinese and Russians also called for the establishment of a more equitable economic and political global order. Both nations also indicated that America was behind separatist movements in their respective countries. They also underscored American-led amibitions to balkanize and finlandize the nation-states of Eurasia. Influential Americans such as Zbigniew Brzezinski had already advocated for de-centralizing and eventually dividing up the Russian Federation.

Both the Chinese and Russians issued a statement warning that the creation of an international missile shield and the contravention of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) would destabilize the international environment and polarize the globe. In 1999, the Chinese and Russians were aware of what was to come and the direction that America was headed towards. In June 2002, less than a year before the onslaught of the “Global War on Terror,” George W. Bush Jr. announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.

On July 24, 2001, less than two months before September 11, 2001, China and Russia signed the Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation. The latter is a softly worded mutual defence pact against the U.S., NATO, and the U.S. sponsored Asian military network which was surrounding China. [1]

The military pact of the Shanghai Treaty Organization (SCO) also follows the same softly worded format. It is also worth noting that Article 12 of the 2001 Sino-Russian bilateral treaty stipulates that China and Russia will work together to maintain the global strategic balance, “observation of the basic agreements relevant to the safeguard and maintenance of strategic stability,” and “promote the process of nuclear disarmament.” [2] This seems to be an insinuation about a nuclear threat posed from the United States.

Standing in the Way of America and Britain: A “Chinese-Russian-Iranian Coalition”

As a result of the Anglo-American drive to encircle and ultimately dismantle China and Russia, Moscow and Beijing have joined ranks and the SCO has slowly evolved and emerged in the heart of Eurasia as a powerful international body.

The main objectives of the SCO are defensive in nature. The economic objectives of the SCO are to integrate and unite Eurasian economies against the economic and financial onslaught and manipulation from the “Trilateral” of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, which controls significant portions of the global economy.

The SCO charter was also created, using Western national security jargon, to combat “terrorism, separatism, and extremism.” Terrorist activities, separatist movements, and extremist movements in Russia, China, and Central Asia are all forces traditionally nurtured, funded, armed, and covertly supported by the British and the U.S. governments. Several separatist and extremist groups that have destabilized SCO members even have offices in London.

Iran, India, Pakistan, and Mongolia are all SCO observer members. The observer status of Iran in the SCO is misleading. Iran is a de facto member. The observer status is intended to hide the nature of trilateral cooperation between Iran, Russia, and China so that the SCO cannot be labeled and demonized as an anti-American or anti-Western military grouping.

The stated interests of China and Russia are to ensure the continuity of a “Multi-Polar World.” Zbigniew Brzezinski prefigured in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and the Geostrategic Imperatives and warned against the creation or “emergence of a hostile [Eurasian-based] coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.” [3] He also called this potential Eurasian coalition an “‘antihegemonic’ alliance” that would be formed from a “Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition” with China as its linchpin. [4] This is the SCO and several Eurasian groups that are connected to the SCO.

In 1993, Brzezinski wrote “In assessing China’s future options, one has to consider also the possibility that an economically successful and politically self-confident China — but one which feels excluded from the global system and which decides to become both the advocate and the leader of the deprived states of the world — may decide to pose not only an articulate doctrinal but also a powerful geopolitical challenge to the dominant trilateral world [a reference to the economic front formed by North America, Western Europe, and Japan].” [5]

Brzezinski warns that Beijing’s answer to challenging the global status quo would be the creation of a Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition: “For Chinese strategists, confronting the trilateral coalition of America and Europe and Japan, the most effective geopolitical counter might well be to try and fashion a triple alliance of its own, linking China with Iran in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region and with Russia in the area of the former Soviet Union [and Eastern Europe].” [6] Brzezinski goes on to say that the Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition, which he moreover calls an “antiestablishmentarian [anti-establishmentarian] coalition,” could be a potent magnet for other states [e.g., Venezuela] dissatisfied with the [global] status quo.” [7]

Furthermore, Brzezinski warned in 1997 that “The most immediate task [for the U.S.] is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.” [8] It may be that his warnings were forgotten, because the U.S. has been repealed from Central Asia and U.S. forces have been evicted from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

“Velvet Revolutions” Backfire in Central Asia

Central Asia was the scene of several British-sponsored and American-sponsored attempts at regime change. The latter were characterised by velvet revolutions similar to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia.

These velvet revolutions financed by the U.S. failed in Central Asia, aside from Kyrgyzstan where there had been partial success with the so-called Tulip Revolution.

As a result the U.S. government has suffered major geo-strategic setbacks in Central Asia. All of Central Asia’s leaders have distanced themselves from America.

Russia and Iran have also secured energy deals in the region. America’s efforts, over several decades, to exert a hegemonic role in Central Asia seem to have been reversed overnight. The U.S. sponsored velvet revolutions have backfired. Relations between Uzbekistan and the U.S. were especially hard hit.

Uzbekistan is under the authoritarian rule of President Islam Karamov. Starting in the second half of the 1990s President Karamov was enticed into bringing Uzbekistan into the fold of the Anglo-American alliance and NATO. When there was an attempt on President Karamov’s life, he suspected the Kremlin because of his independent policy stance. This is what led Uzbekistan to leave CSTO. But Islam Karamov, years later, changed his mind as to who was attempting to get rid of him.

According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Uzbekistan represented a major obstacle to any renewed Russian control of Central Asia and was virtually invulnerable to Russian pressure; this is why it was important to secure Uzbekistan as an American protectorate in Central Asia.

Uzbekistan also has the largest military force in Central Asia. In 1998, Uzbekistan held war games with NATO troops in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was becoming heavily militarized in the same manner as Georgia was in the Caucasus. The U.S. gave Uzbekistan huge amounts of financial aid to challenge the Kremlin in Central Asia and also provided training to Uzbek forces.

With the launching of the “Global War on Terror,” in 2001, Uzbekistan, an Anglo-American ally, immediately offered bases and military facilities to the U.S. in Karshi-Khanabad.

The leadership of Uzbekistan already knew the direction the “Global War on Terror” would take. To the irritation of the Bush Jr. Administration, the Uzbek President formulated a policy of self-reliance. The honeymoon between Uzbekistan and the Anglo-American alliance ended when Washington, D.C. and London contemplated removing Islam Karamov from power. He was a little too independent for their comfort and taste. Their attempts at removing the Uzbek President failed, leading eventually to a shift in geo-political alliances.

The tragic events of Andijan on May 13, 2005 were the breaking point between Uzbekistan and the Anglo-American alliance. The people of Andijan were incited into confronting the Uzbek authorities, which resulted in a heavy security clampdown on the protesters and a loss of lives.

Armed groups were reported to have been involved. In the U.S., Britain, and the E.U., the media reports focused narrowly on human rights violations without mentioning the covert role of the Anglo-American alliance. Uzbekistan held Britain and the U.S. responsible accusing them of inciting rebellion.

M. K. Bhadrakumar, the former Indian ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998), revealed that the Hezbut Tahrir (HT) was one of the parties blamed for stirring the crowd in Andijan by the Uzbek government. [9] The group was already destabilizing Uzbekistan and using violent tactics. The headquarters of this group happens to be in London and they enjoy the support of the British government. London is a hub for many similar organizations that further Anglo-American interests in various countries, including Iran and Sudan, through destabilization campaigns. Uzbekistan even started clamping down on foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) because of the tragic events of Andijan.

The Anglo-American alliance had played its cards wrong in Central Asia. Uzbekistan officially left the GUUAM Group, a NATO-U.S. sponsored anti-Russian body. GUUAM once again became the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldava) Group on May 24, 2005.

On July 29, 2005 the U.S. military was ordered to leave Uzbekistan within a six-month period. [10] Literally, the Americans were told they were no longer welcome in Uzbekistan and Central Asia.

Russia, China, and the SCO added their voices to the demands. The U.S. cleared its airbase in Uzbekistan by November, 2005.

Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO alliance on June 26, 2006 and realigned itself, once again, with Moscow. The Uzbek President also became a vocal advocate, along with Iran, for pushing the U.S. totally out of Central Asia. [11] Unlike Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan continued to allow the U.S. to use Manas Air Base, but with restrictions and in an uncertain atmosphere. The Kyrgyz government also would make it clear that no U.S. operations could target Iran from Kyrgyzstan.

Major Geo-Strategic Error

It appears that a strategic rapprochement between Iran and America was in the works from 2001 to 2002. At the outset of the global war on terrorism, Hezbollah and Hamas, two Arab organizations supported by Iran and Syria, were kept off the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. Iran and Syria were also loosely portrayed as potential partners in the “Global War on Terror.”

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iran expressed its support for the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government. During the invasion of Iraq, the American military even attacked the Iraqi-based Iranian opposition militia, the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK/MOK/MKO). Iranian jets also attacked the Iraqi bases of the MEK in approximately the same window of time.

Iran, Britain, and the U.S. also worked together against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is worth mentioning that the Taliban were never allies of Iran. Up until 2000, the Taliban had been supported by the U.S. and Britain, working hand in glove with the Pakistani military and intelligence.

The Taliban were shocked and bewildered at what they saw as an American and British betrayal in 2001 — this is in light of the fact that in October, 2001 they had stated that they would hand over Osama bin Laden to the U.S. upon the presentation of evidence of his alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Zbigniew Brzezinski warned years before 2001 that “a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” [12] The arrogance of the Bush Jr. Administration has resulted in this shortsighted policy.

According to The Washington Post, “Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago [in 2003], an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table — including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.” [13]

The White House impressed by what they believe were “grand victories” in Iraq and Afghanistan merely ignored the letter sent through diplomatic channels by the Swiss government on behalf of Tehran.

However, it was not because of what was wrongly perceived as a quick victory in Iraq that the Bush Jr. Administration pushed Iran aside. On January 29, 2002, in a major address, President Bush Jr. confirmed that the U.S. would also target Iran, which had been added to the so-called “Axis of Evil” together with Iraq and North Korea. The U.S. and Britain intended to attack Iran, Syria, and Lebanon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact immediately following the invasion, in July 2003, the Pentagon formulated an initial war scenario entitled “Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT).”

Starting in 2002, the Bush Jr. Administration had deviated from their original geo-strategic script. France and Germany were also excluded from sharing the spoils of war in Iraq.

The intention was to act against Iran and Syria just as America and Britain had used and betrayed their Taliban allies in Afghanistan. The U.S. was also set on targeting Hezbollah and Hamas. In January of 2001, according to Daniel Sobelman, a correspondent for Haaretz, the U.S. government warned Lebanon that the U.S. would go after Hezbollah. These threats directed at Lebanon were made at the start of the presidential term of George W. Bush Jr., eight months before the events of September 11, 2001.

The conflict at the United Nations Security Council between the Anglo-American alliance and the Franco-German entente, supported by Russia and China, was a pictogram of this deviation.

American geo-strategists for years after the Cold War had scheduled the Franco-German entente to be partners in their plans for global primacy. In this regard, Zbigniew Brzezinski had acknowledged that the Franco-German entente would eventually have to be elevated in status and that the spoils of war would have to be divided with Washington’s European allies.

By the end of 2004, the Anglo-American alliance had started to correct its posture towards France and Germany. Washington had returned to its original geo-strategic script with NATO playing an expanded role in the Eastern Mediterranean. In turn, France was granted oil concessions in Iraq.

The 2006 war plans for Lebanon and the Eastern Mediterranean also point to a major shift in direction, a partnership role for the Franco-German entente, with France and Germany playing a major military role in the region.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12— In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top American commander called the Bush administration’s handling of the war incompetent and warned that the United States was “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”

In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current “surge” strategy as a “desperate” move that will not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than fours years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” Mr. Sanchez said, at a gathering here of military reporters and editors.

General Sanchez is the most senior in a string of retired generals to harshly criticize the administration’s conduct of the war. Asked following his remarks why he waited nearly a year after his retirement to outline his views, he responded that that it was not the place of active duty officers to challenge lawful orders from civilian authorities. General Sanchez, who is said to be considering a book, promised further public statements criticizing officials by name.

“There was been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding later in his remarks that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

The White House had no initial comment.

But his role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal leaves General Sanchez vulnerable to criticism that that he is shifting the blame from himself and exacting revenge against an administration that replaced him as the top commander in the aftermath of the scandal and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement.

Though he was cleared of wrongdoing in the abuse matter by an Army investigation, he nonetheless became a symbol, along with officials like L. Paul Bremer III , the chief administrator in Iraq, of the ineffective American leadership early in the occupation.

Questioned by reporters after his speech, he included the military and himself among those who made mistakes in Iraq, citing the failure to insist on a better post-invasion stabilization plan.

But his main criticism was leveled at the Bush administration, which he said he said has failed to mobilize the entire United States government, other than the military, to contribute meaningfully to reconstructing and stabilizing Iraq.

“National leadership continues to believe that victory can be achieved by military power alone,” he said. “Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory. The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.”

Asked after his remarks what strategy he favored, General Sanchez ticked off a series of steps — from promoting reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions to building effective Iraqi army and police units — that closely paralleled the list of tasks frequently cited by the Bush administration.

But he said that the administration had failed to craft a detailed strategy for achieving those steps that went beyond the use of military force.

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize – particularly the part to Al Gore – is a populist choice that cannot but devalue the Prize itself.

Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Without diminishing the importance of global warming and the work done by this year’s recipients – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) and Al Gore Jr. – it is highly disputable whether it qualifies as a PEACE prize in the spirit of Alfred Nobel – even if interpreted in the contemporary world situation and not that of 1895 when Nobel formulated his vision.

The concept and definition of peace should indeed be broad. But neither of the recipients have made contributions that can match thousands of other individuals and NGOs who devote their lives to fighting militarism, nuclearism, wars, reducing violence, work for peacebuilding, tolerance, reconciliation and co-existence – the core issues of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is also regrettable that the Prize rewards government-related work, rather than civil society – Non-Governmentals, making the implicit point that governments rather than the people make peace.

In particular, Al Gore – as vice-president under Bill Clinton between 1993 and 2001 was never heard or seen as a peace-maker. Clinton-Gore had a crash program for building up US military facilities and made military allies all around Russia – and missed history’s greatest opportunity for a new world order.

In contravention of international law and without a UN Security Council mandate, they bombed Serbia and Kosovo, based on an extremely deficient understanding of Yugoslavia and propaganda about genocide that has caused the miserable situation called Kosovo today (likely to blow up this year or the next), and they bombed in Afghanistan and Sudan.

The Prize would have been linked to the environment if it has been awarded to someone who struggles against military or other violent influence on the global environment: military pollution, thousands of bases and exercises destroying nature, deliberate environmental warfare, militarization of space and the oceans, and – of course – nuclear weapons that, if used, would create more heat than global warming.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s consists of members who have little background, if any, in the theory and practise of peace. That however can not be an excuse for making a mockery of peace and the Prize itself.

The prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has been further reduced today – adding to the disgrace that it never rewarded Gandhi but people like Kissinger, Shimon Peres, and Arafat.

“They are advocates. We are leaders.” — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in regards to “Anti-war activists.”

People of America, this is truly the problem with what was once a Representative Republic and now is a country run by “elected” officials who believe that they, individually and collectively, are above any accountability and are not answerable to their constituents. Our public servants erroneously believe that they are the leaders!

Ms. Pelosi made this statement to a group of reporters at a luncheon recently and she also went off on activists who have been participating in vigils outside of her chi-chi home in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco. The people who are vigiling outside her house regularly, in a Pelosi Watch are only exercising their rights as American citizens to make their concerns known to a Rep who was elected from a district that is wholeheartedly against the occupation of Iraq and for impeaching the liars who got us into the illegal and immoral situation.

No, Ms. Pelosi, you are not a leader. You have proven time and again in what you laughably believe is a “mistake” free run as Speaker of a Democratic House that you will do anything to protect an Imperial Presidency to the detriment of this Nation and the world, particularly the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This Democratic Congress supported BushCo’s disastrous and deadly surge; handed him over billions of their constituent’s tax dollars to wage this murder; have by their silence and votes countenanced an invasion of another country; approved more restrictions on the rights of the citizenry to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure; Ms. Pelosi does not even know if “torture” (which violates international law and the 8th Amendment in our Bill of Rights) is an impeachable offense; and worst of all the impeachment clauses were taken “off the table” in an ongoing partnership with BushCo to make the office of the presidency a Congressionally protected crime conglomerate that is rapidly sending this Nation down a crap-hole of fascism. So, Congress has led us to a few things: war, poverty, oppression, unemployment, and an inexplicable continuance of the Bush Regime.

No, Ms Pelosi, you are not even a leader in the very narrowest of definitions. We do not elect our Congressional Representatives to be leaders, not to be used as willing marionettes for the war machine and other special interests that serve the elite to the detriment of the rest of us, but to represent the will of the people. We send our elected officials to DC and pay their salaries and subsidize their benefits to do the “Will of the People.”

No matter how many times Ms. Pelosi and George Bush share tea and giggles and no matter how often she “prays’ for him, George is not the Decider and she is only the Leader of the House of Representatives not the people. We are the sovereigns in this country and I tried to demonstrate this when I demanded a meeting with another haughty public servant: George Bush.

I cannot speak for every Democrat, Independent, Green or disenchanted Republican (and there are many) in America, but the consensus from my travels all over this country is that we put Democrats back in power in both Houses of Congress to be an opposition to the Bush Regime and to stop the annoying “bobble-headed, rubber-stamping” approval of all things criminal and murderous. We did not wish to keep heading in the same direction but desired to go another way, which would have required the Dems to finally step up and forcefully counter and stop the high crimes of BushCo. They have failed.

We are sick of excuses. We are tired of the blame being diffused on the Senate, the Blue Dog Dems, the Republicans or even, incredibly, the people of Iraq. A true leader accepts responsibility in ways that are not even dreamed of by BushCo or Congress Inc. A true leader would stand up and do what is intelligent and what is right and if he/she were a leader then people would follow. A leader does not wait idly by for a crowd of sycophants to gather around her before she does her job with integrity and courage; a leader leads the way and the Democratic Congress with an approval rating even lower than George’s had better wake up to whom they need to follow: us!

We have countless examples of true leaders throughout American history and if not for them, women would not have the right to vote, much less be Speaker of the House; Black Americans would still be slaves or at the very least still drinking out of separate fountains; workers would not have the right to unionize and children would still be mining coal; we would still have troops in Southeast Asia, and we would still be under the aegis of our close Cousins in Empire: the British. Some of our courageous leaders have had to pay the ultimate price for their bravery and vision and Ms. Pelosi should be ashamed of arrogantly whining over her rubber chicken that Americans exist who want her to do her job because people are dying and lives are being ruined with her complicity.

We have the right to hold both of the political parties accountable. We not only have the right, we have the responsibility.

We not only have the right and the responsibility we have the power.

Turkish tanks and artillery have begun shelling suspected PKK guerrilla positions in towns and villages in Kurdish Northern Iraq. An incursion and possible outright invasion now seems imminent. A Turkish army almost the size of the American occupation forces, some 140,000 Turkish troops are poised on the Iraqi border waiting for Parliamentary approval which is likely to come next week. If the Turks are to invade it will have to be soon, before the mountains separating the countries become impassable with Winter snow.

The US and Iraqi governments have vehemently opposed the idea and have no forces left capable of dealing with the turmoil that will ensue in the previously relatively calm north. However, Ankara looks likely to ignore the appeals of the US and Iraq, if there is no viable alternative offered to control the PKK guerrillas. Some 4,000 of these fighters who struggle for independence of the Kurdish region of Turkey are suspected of hiding in safe havens in Kurdish Iraq from where they cross the border to engage Turkish forces in hit and run attacks. An attack near the Iraqi border in which 13 Turkish troops were killed has sparked the recent crisis. However, there has been a steady and massive build up of Turkish forces since Spring this year. The Turks fear that the increasing autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan will become independent and thereby act as a magnet for Kurds in Turkey to split away and unify with their brethren across the border.

For Tina Jones, life was plenty busy before her oldest son became one of the now famous Jena Six. Jones, a nursing assistant and mother of two boys, Bryant Purvis, 17, and Dyrek Jones, 7, has become a tireless activist since Dec. 5, 2006, when Bryant was expelled from Jena

High School in Jena, La. Working closely with the other Jena Six parents, Jones has helped organize a local chapter of the NAACP, has reached out to the local and national media, and has worked to speed up her son’s hearing and trial.

Bryant Purvis, along with five other black students, originally faced charges of attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, after school officials alleged that the six boys attacked a white classmate and beat him unconscious. Purvis denies being involved but is now awaiting trial.

It all started when several black students sat under a tree at the high school where white students normally gathered. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree. Three months of racial tensions followed, culminating in a fight on school grounds on Dec. 4, 2006.

National support for the Jena Six has continued to grow. A rally took place in Jena on Sept. 20, with more than 15,000 protesters marching to the courthouse with the families.

As In These Times went to press, Purvis was the only member of the Jena Six yet to be arraigned. If convicted, he faces 80 years-to-life in prison. One hopeful sign is that Mychal Bell, the first of the six to be tried, had his conviction thrown out. He was released on bail on Sept. 27, after 10 months behind bars.

In These Times talked with Jones about the case that has come to resonate beyond Jena and the responsibilities she’s assumed as a civil rights spokesperson.

How would you describe your son Bryant?

Bryant was an honor student throughout his first three years of high school. He also played basketball and football, but his main thing was basketball. Hopefully, he’ll get to graduate and go to college and play basketball. If not, he wants to become a coach.

He’s also a people person. When people see his car or somebody finds out he’s here, everybody just walks over to visit.

When did you first know that your son might face legal trouble because of the events at the high school?

Bryant came home and told me that there was a fight at school and that several kids were arrested. Lo and behold, the next day when I get to work, my aunt comes and tells me that Bryant was at the courthouse. I didn’t think it was anything related to the fight. I thought something else had happened.

I rushed down there and they told me that Bryant had been charged.

You were shocked to hear Bryant was being charged. Was Bryant as surprised as you were?

He was very surprised, because he wasn’t in the fight at all. Bryant wasn’t involved in anything that led up to the fight.

It took everybody a day or two to get over the shock of what they [local law enforcement] were doing to these kids. Then the parents of the six students got together and looked online, trying to find ways to help get them out of this mess. [Local radio host] Tony Brown helped get the word out, and he found several lawyers who were interested in helping with the case. That’s how I found my lawyer.

Bryant hasn’t even been arraigned, and it’s going on a year since he was charged. My lawyer filed motions to arraign Bryant, drop the charges or produce evidence. We have a court date set for Nov. 7.

You feel the proceedings have been dragged out?

Absolutely. My lawyer feels that the authorities feel Bryant had nothing to do with the fight and are not bringing him to court because they don’t have anything to work with. We probably wouldn’t have a court date now if my lawyer hadn’t filed these motions. Other than charging him, they haven’t done anything with the case.

How has the delay affected you?

That’s a horrible feeling, to wake up every morning and know that your son has been charged with attempted murder and know that the rest of his life could be decided by a district attorney. All the help and all these people coming in to Jena makes you feel better. But at the end of the day when you go to bed, or when you wake up the next morning, those charges are still facing you. Until they go away, I’m not going to feel relief.

You have talked widely about your son’s experience and the implications it has on civil rights. Has the case become a full-time job?

It could be. We just turn down a lot of stuff. I just came back last night from Washington, D.C. The students’ parents went to the Children’s Defense Fund there. We had a panel and a discussion on the case. Everybody wants us to come in. They want to hear our story and have a question-and-answer session.

There’s something that needs to be done every day. I have a 7-year-old too. I can’t be gone all the time. They invited us to the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine [the first nine students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.]. We are supposed to do that this weekend. We were supposed to have done the Montel Williams Show this week and Dr. Phil’s show. We missed all that because all the families were in Washington. We just can’t be everywhere.

Does your younger son understand what’s going on?

I don’t know that he understands the significance. When I’ll talk to him, he’ll say, “Momma, the Jena Six stuff was on television, and they were talking about you.” I don’t sit down and talk to him about it. He’s only 7 years old. Maybe when he’s older.

After we had the rally [on Sept. 20], everybody started getting these threatening phone calls. It’s kinda scary. So if somebody’s knocking on the door, my young son Dyrek looks scared. If the phone rings, he thinks it’s one of those phone calls.

How safe do you feel right now in Jena?

I’m not going to say I feel threatened, but I am concerned. A lot of the calls, I’m sure, are pranks. But at the same time, you don’t take that stuff lightly. I’m aware of my surroundings when I go out and go places. If I feel like I need security, I will call and have someone take me where I need to go or follow me where I need to go.

Some of us have gotten hate mail. We’re all concerned about that. We’re all determined to continue on until some kind of justice is won.

As of now, Bryant is out on bail and still waiting to be arraigned. You’ve found a lawyer to represent him once charges are presented at the hearing. What do you expect to come out of the court cases?

With the eyes of the nation on this town, you’re always hopeful. They can’t just throw out any convenient excuse without us fighting or taking the necessary steps to have it overturned. It’s going to be a long, drawn-out case. I think that at the end of the day—or the end of trial—we should get some kind of justice. But it may take us a long time to get there.

When we first started this, I never dreamed in a million years that it would get this kind of attention. We were just reaching out for help. To have this blow out into a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge story is beyond me.

Sometimes I think, “What in the world have I gotten myself into?” We’re all just normal people working to make a living and take care of our kids. To be dragged into something that you really hadn’t intended to get to this point—it’s crazy. I’m hopeful it will make a difference though.

What impact did the Sept. 20 rally have?

Just to know that thousands of people were with us, supporting the cause—that was a great feeling. I hadn’t felt so happy since all this happened with my son, until this particular day.

As we were marching up to the school, if you turned around, all you could see was people. That was a beautiful sight—to see that many people behind you. Everything seemed positive about the whole ordeal.

But then you wake up Friday morning after the rally, and people are calling, looking for Bryant, threatening, calling you names. That was a setback for me. It took me a day to get over it. I thought, ‘Oh my God, is it worth this? Is it worth my life?’

Then I realized that I’m fighting for my son. I know a lot of people have lost their lives for different causes. At the end of the day, I have to keep fighting for my son regardless of how the situation turns out. They’re not going to run me into a corner.

Is there anything you would like people to know?

Just to stay behind us, support us. When we have court dates, please come out and support us. The more people we have, the more we feel we’re being supported.

Contracting soldiers of fortune is only one example of our recent philosophy of government

Those seeking to pinpoint the date that propelled the private military firm Blackwater into its prominent (and disastrous) position in the U.S. military apparatus might look toward Sept. 11, 2001. Al Clark, one of the company’s co-founders, once remarked, “Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today.” And two weeks after 9/11, Erik Prince, the company’s other co-founder and current CEO, told Bill O’Reilly that, after four years in the business, “I was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security. The phone is ringing off the hook now.”

However, in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein suggests that we should turn the calendar back one day and read the speech that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon staffers on Sept. 10, 2001. The day before 19 hijackers flew passenger flights into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Rumsfeld darkly warned of “a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. … With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Who was this dastardly adversary? “[T]he Pentagon bureaucracy.”

Declaring “an all-out campaign to shift the Pentagon’s resources from bureaucracy to battlefield, from tail to the tooth,” Rumsfeld told his staff to “scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing.” He mentioned healthcare, housing and custodial work, and said that, outside of “warfighting,” “we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively.”

As Jeremy Scahill has reported, the implementation of that plan has been wildly successful, with at least 180,000 private contractors currently employed in Iraq, outnumbering U.S. troops by 20,000, even after the “surge.” (In the first Gulf war, the soldier-to-contractor ratio was 60:1.) But the results have been disastrous, from the deplorable conditions at the recently privatized Walter Reed military hospital, to the contaminated food and fecal-soiled bathing water that Halliburton provided to U.S. troops, to the gung-ho Blackwater contractors who prefer to shoot Iraqi hearts rather than win them.

This outsourcing of the military’s core services is in keeping with the Bush administration’s philosophy of government. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that we’ve seen the same dynamic at work in the IRS, with the agency outsourcing debt collection of back taxes to private companies, which then receive a share of the return for their work.

But to lay the blame solely at the feet of the Bush administration is to overlook the complicity of Democrats in accepting a neoliberal agenda that has gutted government services and redistributed its wealth into the hands of private interests. After all, the Clinton administration first expanded the use of military contractors, deploying them in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and Colombia.

In fact, in late September, as the most recent Blackwater massacres started to gain mainstream press attention, hundreds of corporate luminaries joined Bill Clinton in New York City to extol the charitable efforts of the Clinton Global Initiative. The former president said his humanitarian endeavor is needed to tackle education, poverty and global warming because these are issues the “government won’t solve, or that government alone can’t solve.”

Wanting everything is not the problem. Always getting what we want is.

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE

Right now I am doing something only someone as fucked up as an American-style lefty could possibly do: waiting for Hurricane Dean to strike my rickety shack and masturbating an indignant essay about “the global class struggle.”

Fatty It seems we Americans as a people are much given to personal indignation, if not national action, excepting perhaps aerial bombing and mass surveillance. But the poor of these Caribbean villages struggling for merest daily sustenance — the money for which is so often doled out by a well-scrubbed white hand much like my own — cannot afford open indignation much less “class struggle.”

Meanwhile, two gecko lizards are staring at one another on the wall above my laptop, as the small TV in my cabana blares an update on approaching Hurricane Dean. But the rain hammers the tin roof so loudly it’s impossible to hear what is being said, even with the sound turned all the way up. So I watch the hot blonde, the satellite pics and blurry shots of storm tortured palms and hope for the best.

Thanks to Hurricane Dean, for the next few days this Garifuna household of six, the Castillos, is sleeping several to a bed with the Rubio family, including this old gringo, who is most grateful to have drawn an older boy, not a little one still pissing on the sheets. The Rubios are a fishing family, evacuees are from the black “bakkatown” (back of town) shacks out on the reefs, which usually get smashed in such storms, even when not struck by the ‘cane itself.

Every plastic jug, pot and pan is filled with fresh water, and we cook the hell out of tortillas, beans, rice and everything else in an already near barren cupboard, stretching food between us and waiting for the power to go out — which also shuts down our meager trickle of a water system — a certainty given that it happens a couple times a week anyway without the help of a storm. So far, there is not a trace of panic. Between the hammering squalls, the sun cracks open brightly, the guy across the road goes back to work on his roof, and the lady of our house, Marzlyn, stands under the mango tree mashing plantains with a 4-foot wooden mortar and pestle. And Hurricane Dean just blew through Jamaica and past the Cayman Islands at 150 miles per hour. Look out, Cancun.

By the second day it’s beginning to look like we’re far enough south to miss the eye of Dean, if not some torrential rains and high winds. With luck we will not get enough rain to blow out the four-mile dirt road to the main highway (3-foot deep stretches forty feet across are not uncommon this time of year), and high winds will not strip our mango, lime, plantain, soursop and breadfruit trees — important staples — of their not yet ripe fruits.

At the same time we may get nothing more than a severe rain storm, severe here being in a whole other league than in the United States. Picture 8 inches in an hour. Such is middle-class life in the hundreds of Caribbean villages you never see on American TV, even when they are wiped off the map by hurricanes, places with names like Seine Bight and Monkey River Town. Places that provide the groundskeepers and table wipers for the destination resorts such as Caye Chapel island golf course ($200 and up to tee off) where the likes of Bill Gates fly in to enjoy ’round the clock concierge, what has got to be the most challenging windage factor in all of golfdom, and disciplined black or Hispanic attendants to their every whim, in a country where the minimum wage is USD $1.50 for those lucky enough to find employment that actually pays it. All this happens without so much as a whisper of the subject of class on anyone’s part, black or white.

The poor cannot afford open indignation, much less class justice. Granted, I tend to see class issues behind every curtain because of the powerless redneck class that shaped me from birth. Anyway, the leopard does not change its spots, so I still smoke, cuss, put too much salt on everything and have enough class anger to burn down every gated community and refurbished Manhattan brownstone and university in the country (sparing maybe Evergreen up there in the Northwest).

But that is because I can afford financially to be angry. Even though I voluntarily live on $4,000 a year, an economic penitent if you will, I am nevertheless among the 6 percent world’s rich and white human beings called Americans. Last week my neighbor, a middle aged barrel-chested man working as a resort security guard, sat on my porch and told of his dream of a national union for resort workers. We both looked down from the porch at his wife and daughter and his yet unpaid for house.

Nobody had to say aloud that the risk was just too great, or that the resort owners, U.S. speculators and the foreign shadow governments such as the U.S., (and increasingly, the Taiwanese buying up Belizean property and investing toward a soft landing when they are finally booted from their island stronghold) will never let that happen. Class struggle does not happen in Belize for the same reasons it does not happen in the U.S.: Fear. The global issue of class is however starting to be dealt with, and not-so-small fires of liberation are breaking out all over in Venezuela, Bolivia, Oaxaca, the Philippines, Indonesia … and other “terrorist states unimpressed by Kevlar-clad GI Joes or the latest or the antics of Paris Hilton. Class will one day be dealt with in America too.

In fact, it’s starting to be discussed by people other than internet socialists and old greybeard Jewish lefties in musty apartments in Paterson, New Jersey. Even the GOP is scouring the bushes for someone among them who can make populist noises into a microphone. And at this point, for reasons too numerous to go into here, they have a better chance of coming up with such a person than the Democrats. Populism is the newest term being used by both parties and the media to avoid the nasty C word, another brilliant cooption of liberal language for conservative purposes. It’s hard to argue with the fact that we are all people (except for Muslim Americans, of course).

The term carries echoes “of the people, for the people and by the people.” You don’t revolt against the ghost of Abe Lincoln. Yet, were there to be a class revolution in the U.S. next week, and the old folks looted the drug stores (I’d be right there with ’em, though probably not for the same drugs) and even if that pack of Gucci whores at the Fed said: “Fuck it, let’s spread all the geet we’ve looted equally among every American,” we still will not have begun to touch the core of our national disease, our uniquely American supersized version of a universal one — individual greed. The national mindset of “I want all I can grab for myself and I want it now, even if it has to be on credit,” constitutes a much bigger crisis than class in and of itself, and is the driver of our unfolding national catastrophe.

Garden variety personal greed may be a human constant in history — and we certainly have our share of it here in Hopkins — but it has been dangerous only on the part of the rich and powerful. After all, when was the last time selling someone a lame camel, a rotten mango or a quarter ounce of ditch weed oppressed millions? But few civilizations have ever upheld greed as the highest common virtue and civic responsibility as the American culture has. We do this under such false labels as self-advancement, opportunity, success, national economic good, or entitlement, but mostly because “I fucking want one of those!” The wanting is not the problem. The problem is that we get what we want. Or more correctly, we get what we are told to want, and are told to want more of everything from Louis Vuitton purses to Gameboys, depending upon our class, while the families such as the two piled into this household tonight are told to expect nothing.

Is American economic culture inherently cruel and oblivious? Well, yes. Are Americans themselves moreover cruel or oblivious? This time last year I would have said that, granting the obvious exceptions to any generalization, yes. I have come to understand that, although we may well be conditioned to obliviousness by our market culture (our culture IS the market), and more recently, kept in a state of fear by a corporately backed criminal leadership, we are by no means especially cruel. In our socially alienated market society, in which we don’t need each other so much as we need money to insulate ourselves from each other (what the fuck, poverty and bad taste might be contagious!), we are simply denied any real opportunity for face-to-face, on-the-ground compassion and service to our fellow man. Instead, our altruism is channeled through BIG BROTHER CHARITY INC, the United Way, the Red Cross, the Sierra Club, or any of the American Christian Syndicate’s save the children rackets. What changed my mind? Living (as much as possible at least) in Hopkins. But before I again inadvertently unleash a flood of email enquiries regarding the Belizean coast as an expat paradise, let me say this: As I write this, I am watching the influx of fairly rich American assholes escaping the coming economic disaster up there in Gringolia. They are building their sterile fortified communities on either end of the village, stealing and bulldozing many Garifuna-owned acres, including the village’s heritage-laden graveyard (illegal as hell, outright brazen theft, but as Old Charlie the Garifuna fisherman told me last night over a beer, “The man has not yet been born in this village who can lead us against this thing that is happening.” We’ve got the same problem, Charlie.

But for every U.S. bloodsucker I’ve encountered here, I have also met an American, usually a young backpacker — but sometimes a retired couple having what they know will be their last ruggedly romantic adventure together — give their last damned dollar to a villager in need. Sometimes they keep back only enough for bus fair for the 35-mile ride into Dangriga to punch the ATM for cash on their Visa cards, knowing it is going to hurt like hell when they get home to pay the tab on a fixed income. They are never the rich, who don’t come into the village, anyway, except to hire a house slave or two.

Turkey recalled its ambassador from Washington last night in repsonse to a US Congressional decision to label the First World War-era killings of Armenians as genocide.

Despite intense lobbying by Turkey and a last-gasp intervention by the US President George Bush, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill on Wednesday by a 27-21 vote – in a move seen as an insult by most Turks.

Turkey’s Foreign ministry said the ambassador would return to Turkey for a stay of “a week or 10 days”. “We are not withdrawing our ambassador,” said a ministry spokesman Levent Bilman. “We have asked him to come to Turkey for some consultations.”

In a statement yesterday, the Turkish government condemned the vote: “It is not possible to accept such an accusation of a crime which was never committed by the Turkish nation”.

“27 foolish Americans,” ran the front page of the Turkish daily Vatan, in reference to legislators who voted in favour of the bill. Hurriyet called the resolution a “Bill of hatred”.

President Abdullah Gül said: “Unfortunately, some politicians in the US have once again sacrificed important matters to petty domestic politics despite all calls to common sense.”

Members of the left-wing Workers’ Party laid a black wreath in front of the US Embassy building in Ankara and drew a crescent-and-star on its wall in protest at the resolution.

The vote was a body-blow to attempts by politicians and diplomats behind the scenes in Washington and Ankara to put Turkish-American relations back on a normal footing. The two countries have been on bad terms since March 2003 when a group of rebels in the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) joined with the opposition to thwart government attempts to get authority for Turkey to support the invasion of Iraq from the north. A few months later, parliament reversed its decision but by then the US was no longer interested in support from the Turks.

Over the past three years, hard-line conservatives in the US administration have not forgiven the Turks for not doing what the US expects of an ally. Turkish public opinion, horrified by the nearby violence in Iraq, has been equally uncomplimentary with TV dramas and novels attacking the US enjoying an enthusiastic reception.

Yet in both countries, many politicians have been searching for ways to mend the damage, believing that the two countries need each other. Both Mr Gül, while serving as Foreign minister, and the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have made several visits to Washington.

Apart from leading to a squeeze on US use of the Incirlik base in Turkey and air and surface transit, the resolution could open the way for a Turkish military incursion into Iraq to halt PKK attacks on targets in south-east Turkey creating confrontation between Turkey and the US.

Sixteen Turkish soldiers have died in the past week in south-east Turkey as a result of PKK attacks. Several hundred more have been killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq which was followed by a revival of the PKK’s fortunes.

Against this background, the resolution could be the straw which broke the camel’s back for Turkish-US relations. There are several strands to the Turkish refusal to tolerate even a non-binding Congressional resolution. They include national resentment at what is seen as a climate of institutional prejudice against Turkey in Western societies; anger at the assassination of more than 40 Turkish diplomats by Armenians in the 1970s and 1980s; the expulsion of 800,000 to 1 million Azerbaijani Muslims from their homes in the Caucasus in the 1990s by Armenian nationalist forces; and suspicion that compensation claims may follow some day. Around half of Turkey’s population are the descendants of Muslims forced out of what are now Christian lands and regard Western partiality for Armenians as outrageous.

Attitudes are unlikely to soften. News of the vote coincided with reports that two Turkish Armenians, Arat Dink and Serkis Seropian, had been given one-year suspended jail sentences in in Istanbul for “belittling Turkishness” in an Istanbul Armenian-language newspaper.

The U.S and Iran have been moving towards a head-on collision for the last seven years. The expected collision will most probably take place in the final months of the Bush administration. The course has been set by two irreconcilable goals. Iran is adamant about gaining full mastery over nuclear technology — especially uranium enrichment. The U.S. is equally adamant that Iran should not be allowed this mastery on the grounds that the latter’s real intentions are not to use such knowledge for peaceful purposes — as Iran claims — but for weaponry.

President Bush has also assured the Israeli Prime Minister that he intends to resolve the “Iranian problem” before leaving the White House. Since he has shown little interest in pursuing a diplomatic route, one can conclude that he is aiming to resolve the issue through the military one. In 2003, he turned down in no uncertain terms an Iranian offer for a “grand bargain.” He also turned down an offer made by El-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to explore ways to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program does not expand into a military one. In fact, the administration curtly told El-Baradei to keep out of politics.

Instead on exploring the diplomatic route, the administration has increased its naval and air capabilities in the Gulf and accused Iran of killing Americans by supplying lethal weapons to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has also taken hostage a number of Iranian diplomats in Iraqi Kurdestan and ordered the military to hunt down suspected Iranians in Iraq. Close colleagues of the Vice President have gone so far as to claim that the U.S. is already in the midst of a hot war with Iran — describing it as a new World War on par with World War I and II. For its part, Iran has accused the U.S. of harboring Mojahedin guerrillas — whom the U.S. State Department itself has categorized as a “terrorist organization.” It has also accused the U.S. of trying to stir up ethnic animosities in Iranian Kurdestan, Baluchestan, and Azerbaijan. Not surprisingly, many suspect that the Bush administration’s real concern in Iran as in Iraq is not weapons of mass destruction but regime change.

Three major reasons are often given to argue that the Bush administration will shy away from military action. One, that the US military is already over stretched in Iraq. Two, that the U.S. public does not have the stomach to enter another war. Third, that military action will neither end the nuclear program nor bring about regime change. These same arguments have led some Iranian leaders — but not all — to dismiss the threat of military action as mere “psychological warfare.” The Iranian President has consistently insisted that “no man in his right senses would think of attacking Iran.”

Such conclusions would be warranted if politics had anything to do with reason and real substance. Unfortunately, politics has more to do with short-term image and public perceptions than with reason and long-range interest. The U.S public could very well find itself in the midst of a new war as a result of another Tonkin Bay incident — in other words, in a military confrontation presented to the world as initiated by the other side. American people would never be offered the choice of going or not going to war. The U.S. air force and navy, unlike the army and marines, are by no means overstretched in Iraq. They do have the capability to do considerable damage to the nuclear installations. What is more, the Bush administration could present to the American public impressive front-page pictures of these installations lying in ruins. It could then leave office claiming “Mission Accomplished.” It would work — in the short term.

The chickens would come to roast in the following months. Such military action would delay — not scuttle — the nuclear program. Iran would withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and openly strive for nuclear weapons. The regime would not fall — rather it would be strengthened since it would use national emergency to silence all opposition. What is more, air strikes would not close a chapter but would open up a new disaster — on the titanic scale of the Thirty Years’ War. Iran would retaliate where the U.S. is weakest — in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give the green light to local forces itching to take on the U.S. For the last few years, it has used all its influence to restrain the same forces in these two countries.

The change in Iranian policy would be a disaster for the U.S. — but a problem for the next President and future generations of American. The outgoing one could always claim that he left office having solved the problem. He would also claim that future problems were due to mistakes made by his predecessor. The Iraqi experience leads one to believe that Bush would get away with it. After all, how many critics of the Iraqi disaster blame the whole disaster on the initial invasion? Most blame the so-called “mistakes” on actions after the invasion. Since the American public seems to have lost the capacity to link cause and effect, politicians can get away with such disastrous wars.

Some of the most credible testimonies against the Iraq war come from those very American soldiers expected to inflict the horrors of the war on the Iraqi people.

Recently, the Iraq Veterans Against the War listed ten reasons why they oppose the war. These include: “The Iraq war is based on lies and deception;” “The Iraq war violates international law;” and “overwhelming civilian casualties are a daily occurrence in Iraq;”

Significantly, the Iraq Veterans against the War, also list as a principal reason for their opposition to the war the fact that the war dehumanizes the Iraqi people who are “subjected to humiliating and violent checkpoints, searches and home raids on a daily basis.”

This dehumanizing reality of daily life in occupied Iraq was extensively documented in an important investigation published by The Nation (July 30) in which The Nation interviewed fifty American combat veterans of the Iraq War.

The Nation’s investigation, writes the editors, “marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions.”

The picture that emerges from the interviews is that of a depraved and brutal colonial war and a deeply oppressive occupation, in sharp contrast to how the Bush administration and the influential media have been portraying the war.

The veterans’ accounts revealed a pattern of behaviour that showed callous disregard for Iraqi civilian lives, and dehumanization of the Iraqi people on a daily basis. “Dozens of those interviewed,” the report states, “witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings…” Although many interviewees said such acts were perpetrated by a minority, they described such acts as common and often go unreported.

Specialist Jeff Englehart from Colorado, who served with the Third Brigade in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, summed up the general attitude towards the Iraqis: “I guess while I was there,” he said, “the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.”

Specialist Michael Harmon from Brooklyn who served with the 167th Armor Regiment in Al-Rashidiya, near Baghdad, recounted the turning point for him:. ” An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and [a] baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything, it just looked at me like–I know she couldn’t speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?… I was just like, This is–this is it. This is ridiculous.”

In their search for insurgents, American forces usually raid suspected neighborhoods between midnight and 5 in the morning. More often than not they find nothing but leave behind them a trail of destruction, panic and humiliation.

Sgt. John Bruhns, of Philadelphia, who served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, and participated in raids of nearly 1000 Iraqi homes, describes the routine:

“You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops… will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds…and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda…?’

“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

The humiliation the veterans described was reinforced by the degrading stereotypical and racist cultural notions many soldiers had about the Arabs and Islam:: “Like it was very common,” said Specialist Englehart “for United States soldiers to call them derogatory terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger.”

American soldier who took part in neighborhood patrols told the interviewers that they often used aggressive firing. Sgt. Patrick Campbell, of Camarillo, California, who participated in many neighborhood patrols, “said his unit fired often and without much warning on Iraqi civilians in a desperate bid to ward off attacks.”

Interviewees told The Nation that the killing of unarmed Iraqis was common. Such killings were sometimes justified by framing innocents as terrorists. American troops would plant AK-47s next to the bodies of those they had just killed to make it seem as if the civilians they had just shot were combatants.

Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout Joe Hatcher, of San Diego, who served in the Fourth Cavaly in Ad Dawar, halfway between Tikrit and Samarra, said: “Every good cop carries a throwaway. If you kill someone and they’re unarmed, you just drop one on ’em.” Those who survived such shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused insurgents.”

The irrationality of the colonial war enterprise, the humiliation, dehumanization, and loss of life it inflicts on the innocent; the cost in lives lost, lives shattered and the deep emotional scars it inflicts on the perpetrators; these and other incomprehensible realities evoked unanswered questions, poignant in their relevance, trenchant in their simplicity: “Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”