The Rag Blog

At midnight on Thursday, I lay on my back in the Colosseum and looked at a pageant of stars above Rome. Where the lions tore into gladiators, and only a few metres from the cross marking the place of Saint Paul’s crucifixion – “martyrdom”, of course, has become an uneasy word in this age of the suicide bomber – I could only reflect on how a centre of cruelty could become one of the greatest tourist attractions of our time. An Italian television station had asked me to talk about capital punishment in the Middle East for a series on American executions and death row prisoners. Two generators had melted down in an attempt to flood the ancient arena with light. Hence, the moment of reflection.

Readers with serious money may also like to know that it costs £75,000 to hire the Colosseum for 24 hours, a cool £10,500 just for our little night under the stars. Yet who could not think of capital punishment in the Colosseum?

Watching the first episode of the Italian television series – which recounted the visits of an Italian man and woman to two Americans who had spent years on death row in Texas – I was struck by how both prisoners, who may or may not have remembered amid their drug-induced comas whether or not they murdered anyone, had clearly “reformed”. Both deeply regretted their crimes, both prayed that one day they could return to live good lives, to care for their children, to go shopping, walk the dog. In other words, they were no longer the criminals they were when they were sentenced.

Given their predicament, I guess anyone would reform. But I suspect that guilt or innocence is not what the death sentence is about. My Dad was perfectly aware that the young Australian soldier he was ordered to execute in the First World War had killed a British military policeman in Paris, but the Australian promised to live “an upright and straightforward life” if pardoned. My father refused to kill the Australian. Someone else shot him instead. Capital punishment, for those who believe in it, is almost a passion. I rather think it is close to an addiction, something – like smoking or alcohol – which can be cured only by total abstinence. And no excuses for secret Japanese executions or lethal injections in Texas or head-chopping outside Saudi Arabian mosques. But how do you reach this stage when humanity is so obsessed with death in so barbaric a form?

Whenever the Iranians string up drug-dealers or rapists – and who knows their guilt or innocence – the cranes which hoist these unfortunates into the sky like dead thrushes are always surrounded by thousands of men and women, often chanting “God is Great”. They did this even when a young woman was hanged.

Surely some of these people are against such terrible punishment. But there is, it seems, something primal in our desire for judicial killings. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall, there would be a packed house every night. I’m sure he was right. Did not those thousands of Romans pack this very same, sinister Colosseum in which I was lying to watch just such carnage? Was not Saddam Hussein’s execution part of our own attempt to distract the Iraqis with bread and circuses, the shrieking executioners on the mobile phone video the Baghdad equivalent of the gladiators putting their enemies to the sword? Nor, let us remember, is execution only the prerogative of states and presidents. The IRA practised capital punishment. The Taliban practises execution and so does al-Qa’ida. Osama bin Laden – and I heard this from him in person – believes in the “Islamic” punishment of head chopping.

I remember the crowds who lynched three Palestinian collaborators in Hebron in 2001, their near-naked bodies later swinging from electric pylons while small children threw stones at their torsos, the thousands who cheered when their carcasses were tossed with a roar of laughter into a garbage truck. I was so appalled that I could not write in my notebook and instead drew pictures of this obscenity. They are still in the pages of my notebook today, hanging upside down like Saint Paul, legs askew above their heads, their bodies punctured by cigarette burns.

The leading antagonists in the preposterous “war on terror” which we are all supposed to be fighting – Messrs Bush and bin Laden – are always talking about death and sacrifice although, in his latest videotape, the latter showed a touching faith in American democracy when he claimed the American people had voted for Bush’s first presidency.

For bin Laden, 11 September 2001 was “punishment” for America’s bloodshed in the Muslim world; indeed, more and more attacks by both guerrillas and orthodox soldiers are turning into revenge operations. Was not the first siege of Fallujah revenge for the killing and desecration of the bodies of American mercenaries? Wasn’t Abu Ghraib part of “our” revenge for 11 September and for our failures in Iraq?

Many of the suicide attacks in the Middle East – in “Palestine”, in Afghanistan, in Iraq – are specifically named after “martyrs” killed in previous operations. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq stated quite explicitly that it had “executed” US troops in retaliation for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl south of Baghdad.

Yet I fear the real problem goes beyond the individual act of killing, judicial or otherwise. In a weird, frightening way, we believe in violent death. We regard it as a policy option, as much to do with self-preservation on a national scale as punishment for named and individual wrongdoers. We believe in war. For what is aggression – the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example – except capital punishment on a mass scale? We “civilised” nations – like the dark armies we believe we are fighting – are convinced that the infliction of death on an awesome scale can be morally justified.

After the elaborate theatrics just performed in the house of mirrors of Washington, US President George W Bush is now recommending to the nation what he told top Iraq commander General David Petraeus to recommend to him. Only those paying more attention to the botched comeback of the “fat” lip-synching Britney Spears will be fooled by Petraeus, the iPod general – a player of what is fed by his master’s voice, the White House.

The facts are stark: by next summer, and even next September (two months before the presidential election), Washington will have the same number of boots on the ground (130,000) in Iraq’s US$3-billion-a-week war that it had before the “surge”, compounding – indeed amplifying – the existing ethical, political and strategic disaster.

Petraeus’ key argument this week to prove his steering of the Bush-devised “surge” was a “success” was to spin the close collaboration between the occupation and the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad on the one side with Sunni tribal leaders in al-Anbar province on the other. Petraeus framed it as if this “sustainable” solution was a huge counterinsurgency success of his own making. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The success story in Anbar is not due to the general’s wily ways, but to an Iraqi sheikh: Abdul Satter Abu Risha, the leader of a coalition of tribes, including 200 sheikhs, formed in the autumn of 2006 under the name Anbar Sovereignty Council (now it’s called Iraq Awakening).

Asia Times Online talked to Abu Risha this past spring in Iraq. He explained, crucially, that he had set up the council after his father and two brothers were killed by al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers. Yes, it was personal. Petraeus then joined the bandwagon. Abu Risha is not, and never was, a Salafi-jihadi. He considers himself an Iraqi nationalist. He’s not in favor of a caliphate. But he’s definitely in favor of restored power to Sunni Iraqis.

Petraeus was indeed smart enough to marvel at the possibilities of a marriage of convenience between the occupation and Sunni tribes. Al-Qaeda for its part was clumsy enough to force “Talibanization” down Anbar people’s throats. But this does not mean that Abu Risha and his 200 tribal leaders are pro-occupation, or even pro-Iraqi government. Eighty percent of these tribes are sub-clans of the very powerful Dulaimi tribe. Al-Qaeda’s close relationship is with the Mashadani tribe, which used to be very close to Saddam Hussein. What matters is that with varying degrees of disgust, both big tribes detest the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad.

Way beyond any “success” claimed by Petraeus, what’s happening in Anbar is once again a replay of what happened in eastern Afghanistan in 2001. Local tribes profit from US largesse – and weapons – and then proceed with their own tribal and/or nationalist agenda. What matters for all these players, most of all, is restoration of Sunni power. The Dulaimi tribe and sub-clans, armed by the Americans, as soon as they have a chance, will try to topple the US-sponsored puppet government in Baghdad.

Petraeus has not been able to seduce or bribe Sunni guerrillas. Far from it: leading groups such as the Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance make it very clear their enemies remain the US occupation, the Maliki government and al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers.

This summer, three of these groups – the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Ansar al-Sunna and Iraqi Hamas – formed the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance, a public political alliance basically to throw out all of Petraeus’s troops, block any collaboration with occupation-endorsed political institutions, and declare null and void any agreement between the US and the Iraqi government.

By this time, way into the “surge”, Petraeus had certainly figured out that Anbar was not a relevant war theater anymore. He can use it to spin the “success” of his counterinsurgency methods, but he knows the three really relevant, internal wars in Iraq, for the near future, will be in Baghdad (between Sunnis and Shi’ites), in Basra (between Shi’ite militias, to see who gets to control the oil) and in Kirkuk (between Kurds and Arabs/Turkomans, for the same reason).

So why not spice it all up with some extra divide and rule – to justify an eternal US presence? Arming Sunni tribals in Anbar, under these circumstances, makes sense. The occupation does not need to fight Sunnis in oil-deprived Anbar. The Bush administration is now full steam ahead on fighting Shi’ites – both in Iran (the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) and in Iraq (from the Maliki government to Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army). Shi’ites in both Iran and southern Iraq are sitting over a wealth of oil. The Sunnis are needed to advance this agenda.

A (minor) problem is what Iraqi Sunnis think of all this. According to the latest BBC/ABC News poll, no less than 97% of Iraqi Sunnis want a unified, centralized Iraq with Baghdad as capital. Only 56% of Shi’ites want it, not to mention only 9% of Kurds. No less than 98% of Sunnis are against the Maliki government. And no less than 92% of Sunnis are in favor of attacks against occupation troops, including, of course, all those Dulaimis now supported by the Americans.

Petraeus knows this: virtually no Iraqi Sunni wants to hug him and kiss him. They want the US out. But he also knows the US simply cannot go – what with the new mega-embassy, the secluded military bases, and all that oil.

The magic word “oil” mysteriously vanished from the whole drama performed this week in front of Congress. To get it, the answer is once again divide and rule – let’s have those Sunnis and Shi’ites tear each other to bits while we “stay the course” pretending to protect them from themselves while trying to protect “our” oil. Bush’s “surge” may indeed be a success – but for all the reasons the general would not dare tell the world.

PARIS (Sept. 15) – Arctic ice coverage has receded this week to record lows, the European Space Agency said, raising the prospect of greater maritime traffic through a long-sought waterway known as the Northwest Passage.

Until now, the passage has been expected to remain closed even during reduced ice cover by multiyear ice pack – sea ice that remains through one or more summers, ESA said.

Satellite images this week showed Arctic ice cover fell to the lowest level since scientists started collecting such information in 1978, according to a statement on Paris-based ESA’s Web site Saturday.

Many experts believe that global warming is to blame for melting the passage. The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia compared with the current routes through the Panama Canal.

Ice has retreated to about 1 million square miles, Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said in the statement. ESA said the previous low was 1.5 million square miles, back in 2005.

Ice levels in the Arctic ebb and flow with the seasons, allowing for intermittent traffic between Europe and Asia across northern Canada – a route explorers and traders have long dreamt could open fully.

Environmentalists fear increased maritime traffic and efforts to tap natural resources in the area could one day lead to oil spills and harm regional wildlife.

Pedersen said the extreme retreat this year suggested the passage could fully open sooner than expected – but ESA did not say when that might be. Efforts to contact ESA officials in Paris and Noordwik, the Netherlands, were unsuccessful.

09/14/07 “OneWorld US ” — – – PROVIDENCE – Observers of the situation in Iraq lashed out at the Bush administration Thursday ahead of the president’s prime time address to the nation.

They contend that General David Petraeus gave a misleading report to Congress this week when he said “significant progress” was being made in Iraq, including a sharp drop in the number of attacks on American forces and a lessening of sectarian violence.

“What people came away with from the report is that the situation is better for people living in Iraq and that’s just not true,” said Yifat Susskind of the women’s rights organization MADRE. “That’s refuted both by the fact that statistics don’t bear it out and in the experiences of the regular Iraqis we speak to on a daily basis.”

A joint ABC/BBC poll released this week shows 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated since the Bush administration increased the number of troops in Iraq this Spring. Some 60 percent believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified, a number that includes 93 percent of Sunnis.

According to the poll, only 29 percent of Iraqis now think the situation will get better, compared to 64 percent who shared that optimism before the so-called “surge” of troops began.

“One of the most cynical things General Petraeus did was celebrate the fact that there’s a decline in sectarian violence,” Susskind said. “But that drop reflects the success of ethnic cleansing rather than anything the U.S. military has done. The reality is that there are places where killing is down because there’s nobody left to kill.”

According to the group Refugees International, nearly 5 million Iraqis have been forced from their homes since the fall of Saddam Hussein. More than 2 million people are now displaced inside the country, the group says, and an additional 2.5 million have fled to neighboring countries.

The numbers continue to grow with as many as 100,000 per month newly displaced within the country and another 40,000 to 60,000 fleeing to Syria.

The Bush administration has allowed only a few thousand Iraqis to enter the United States.

In addition, two retired Generals — Lt. General Robert Gard (U.S. Army, Retired), who now works at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, and Brigadier General John Johns (U.S. Army, Retired), a board member at the non-profit Council for a Livable World — released a statement arguing the continued American occupation of Iraq is destroying the U.S. military.

“Continued engagement in Iraq’s civil war distracts the United States from our more urgent missions in Afghanistan and enhanced homeland security, stretches the U.S. military to the breaking point, inflicts psychological scars on returning veterans and breaks up their families, causes mounting American casualties, increases the drain on the U.S. treasury, and erodes our stature in the world,” the Generals wrote in a statement.

Gard, who served in combat during both the Korean and Vietnam wars, said Petraeus’ report and Bush’s speech tonight remind him of 1967, when then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Lyndon Johnson that he thought the Vietnam war was lost.

“Lyndon Johnson privately agreed, but no president wants to lose a war,” Gard told OneWorld. “So we surged. In 1968, we had lost 24,000 young men. Five years later we had lost 58,000 and nothing was accomplished.”

“Now we’re going down the same path,” he said. “We didn’t alter the outcome by that surge and now you’ve got Bush in office and he isn’t going to be changed unless he’s forced to do so.”

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a new benchmark now, and it’s called “return on success.”

Even before President Bush took to the airwaves Thursday evening, one of those mysterious unnamed “senior administration officials” explained the principle in a news briefing: “The more we succeed, the more troops we can bring home from Iraq. The president calls this policy ‘return on success,’ and that will be a major emphasis of the speech.”

And darned if it wasn’t. When a measured, somber President Bush addressed the American public in prime time, he explained “return on success” as “the more successful we are, the more American troops can return home.”

Success, like expectations, is a word supple with ambiguity. Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines it as a “favorable or satisfactory outcome or result.” Victory, meanwhile, is “final and complete supremacy or superiority in battle or war.” Yeah, there’s a difference.

Presidents bend the English language like George Reeves did with metal pipes as “Superman.” What makes this different is that it seems sprung from a game of buzzword bingo around the conference table. It has echoes of “return on investment,” which is strictly about the Benjamins. “I thought it was a good phrase,” says former Bush speechwriter David Frum in a telephone interview. “The problem is the public forms its own views about whether you’re succeeding or not, and there’s a danger with you insisting you are succeeding when the public sees no evidence of that proposition.

“I thought the way to go was televise from the map room and stand there with a bunch of maps and a laser pointer,” Frum, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says. “Don’t worry about the phrasing. At this point language doesn’t matter very much.”

Heather Hurlburt, referring to the former Bush speechwriter and current op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, says: “They really miss Mike Gerson, don’t they?”

“It was clever,” Hurlburt, a speechwriter for the Clinton administration, continued, “but trying to force a business metaphor in there is out of whack with where most Americans are on Iraq. There might be tiny groups of people who think business metaphors are an appropriate way to think about what needs to happen in Iraq. But regardless of where they stand on the war, most people see it framed in terms of great sacrifice and a great national security risk, none of which business metaphors are applicable to.”

Whether the American public will buy into the concept of the “return on success” in Iraq remains to be seen. But the president might have added to the CEO-speak of the country’s corporate retreats and Monday team-building sessions.

On Aug. 29, hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets of Santiago, Chile, to protest neoliberal economic policies and demand wage equality, better pensions, and greater access to healthcare and education.

The demonstrations were billed as a “National Day of Action,” and were initiated by the largest federation of trade unions in Chile, known as United Workers Central. Simultaneous demonstrations in other cities and towns across the country were also attended by hundreds of thousands of union members and their supporters, and included union organizing activities in addition to street protests.

Central among the issues raised by the workers at the demonstrations was the issue of wage inequality. In many Chilean industries it is not uncommon for a supervisor to earn more than 200 times the wage of the average worker. In the mining industries, particularly copper, profits have soared by double digit percentages over the last decade yet wages for most workers have remained stagnant. Demonstrators condemned the practice of subcontracting in the mining industries, which is essentially a way for the capitalists to avoid providing workers with health insurance and other benefits.

The demonstrations also denounced the neoliberal economic policies that the imperialist powers have attempted to force on the countries of Latin America for decades. These policies include greater privatization in key industries, the opening up of markets to the imperialist powers, and strict limits on spending for social programs. In many instances, the U.S. has made emergency aid and loan packages conditional on Latin American countries implementing these policies.

Demonstrators asserted that these neoliberal policies have helped to enrich foreign corporations and the Chilean oligarchy at the expense of Chilean workers. They demanded that the government focus on the needs of Chilean workers instead of the predatory desires of the imperialist corporations.

The huge demonstrations in Chile are yet another indication of the growing resistance to neoliberalism that is surging across Latin America. Workers across Latin America are bringing to the forefront the fact that neoliberalism and free market economic policies have brought misery and suffering upon the masses while fattening the pockets of the imperialist corporations. An increasing number of governments in Latin America are shunning these policies. Governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador are in open revolt against neoliberalism and imperialism.

The demonstrators in the capital city of Santiago endured the violent tactics of the infamous Chilean riot police. The police lived up to their reputation for brutality by launching volleys of tear gas and firing water cannons into the crowds of demonstrators. More than 200 demonstrators in Santiago were injured. The police unwarrantedly arrested more than 700 demonstrators.

Despite the unprovoked violence and arrests perpetrated by the police, the countrywide demonstrations were heralded by many labor leaders as a huge success and an indication of the growing movement for fundamental economic, social, and political change that is sweeping across Chile.

The demonstrations come on the heels of huge student protests last year, where students occupied and took control of 13 schools in Santiago, and a series of strikes initiated by subcontracted mine workers that have shown the ability to effectively cripple production in the mines.

Last week George Bush flew into Iraq to meet Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, leader of Anbar province. This week General David Petraeus told the US Congress how Anbar was a model for Iraq. Yesterday Abu Risha was assassinated by bombers in Anbar

Ten days after President George Bush clasped his hand as a symbol of America’s hopes in Iraq, the man who led the US-supported revolt of Sunni sheikhs against al-Qa’ida in Iraq was assassinated.

Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha and two of his bodyguards were killed either by a roadside bomb or by explosives placed in his car by a guard, near to his home in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, the Iraqi province held up by the American political and military leadership as a model for the rest of Iraq.

His killing is a serious blow to President Bush and the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who have both portrayed the US success in Anbar, once the heart of the Sunni rebellion against US forces, as a sign that victory was attainable across Iraq.

On Monday General Petraeus told the US Congress that Anbar province was “a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose al-Qa’ida and reject its Taliban-like ideology”.

But yesterday’s assassination underlines that Iraqis in Anbar and elsewhere who closely ally themselves with the US are in danger of being killed. “It shows al-Qa’ida in Iraq remains a very dangerous and barbaric enemy,” General Petraeus said in reaction to the killing. But Abu Risha might equally have been killed by the many non al-Qa’ida insurgent groups in Anbar who saw him as betraying them.

The assassination comes at a particularly embarrassing juncture for President Bush, who was scheduled to address the American people on television last night to sell the claim made by General Petraeus that the military “surge” was proving successful in Iraq and citing the improved security situation in Anbar to prove it.

Abu Risha, 37, usually stayed inside a heavily fortified compound containing several houses where he lived with his extended family. A US tank guards the entrance to the compound, which is opposite the largest US base in Ramadi.

He spent yesterday morning meeting tribal sheikhs to discuss the future of Anbar. He also received long lines of petitioners as he drank small glasses of sweet tea and chain-smoked. He carried a pistol stuck in a holster strapped to his waist and dressed in dark flowing robes.