The Rag Blog

War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of congressional Democrats to mount an effective challenge to President Bush’s Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla-style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.

Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the party’s readiness to go along with the President’s massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. “intelligence community” or IC—including the CIA—and on homeland security is going through the roof.

The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are essentially nonexistent. Among presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget. Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)

How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon’s budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War II wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn’t exactly the hoped-for “peace dividend,” but it wasn’t peanuts either.

However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing “Global War on Terrorism”—which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President’s two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

Neocons, war profiteers, and hardliners of all stripes still argue that the “enemy” we face is a nonexistent bugaboo called “Islamofascism.” It’s easy to imagine them laughing into their sleeves while they continue to claim that the way to battle low-tech, rag-tag bands of leftover Al Qaeda crazies is by spending billions of dollars on massively expensive, massively powerful, futuristic weapons systems.

As always, a significant part of the defense bill is eaten up by these big-ticket items. According to the reputable Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, there are at least 28 pricey weapons systems that, just by themselves, will rack up a whopping $44 billion in 2008. The projected cost of these 28 systems—which include fighter jets, the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, various advanced naval vessels, cruise-missile systems, and the ultra-expensive aircraft carriers the Navy always demands—will, in the end, be more than $1 trillion. And that’s not even including the Star Wars missile-defense system, which at the moment soaks up about $11 billion a year.

By one count, U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The United States accounts for almost half—approximately 48 percent—of the entire world’s spending on what we like to call “defense.” Again, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, U.S. defense spending this year amounts to exactly twice the combined military spending of the next six biggest military powers: China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan, and Germany.

Despite this, like presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council is pushing hard to tie the party to increased military spending. Writes journalist Aaron Glantz:

“‘America needs a bigger and better military,’ reads an October report by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that counts Senators Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., among its members.

“‘Escalating conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the all-volunteer force to the breaking point,’ the report says. ‘Democrats should step forward with a plan to repair the damage, by adding more troops, replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and reorganizing the force around the new missions of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and civil reconstruction.'”

So hostile is the atmosphere in Congress to cuts of any sort in military spending that even a recent effort by traditional defense critics to suggest ways to reorient the Pentagon’s budgetary priorities turned out to involve but the most modest of rebalancings. A coalition of these critics from organizations such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, and other left and left-center groups, including such experts as Larry Korb of CAP, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives, and William Hartung of the World Policy Institute, suggested cutting $56 billion from offensive weapons systems, but then proposed to shift fully $50 billion of it into areas such as homeland security, international peacekeeping, and “nation building.”

Why, exactly, we need to increase Pentagon spending even in those categories is mystifying, since no country is actually threatening us and—if the Iraqi and Afghani wars were settled—the problem of terrorism could be adequately dealt with by mobilizing relatively modest numbers of CIA officers and FBI and law enforcement agents. The fact that such respected defense critics feel compelled to put forward such a lame proposal is a sign of our crimped times; a sign that, pragmatically speaking, it is simply verboten to criticize Pentagon bloat, even given the current, Democrat-controlled Congress. It’s not that the public is pro-military spending either. Indeed, in a Gallup Poll conducted in February, fully 43 percent of Americans said they believed that the United States is spending “too much” on defense, while only 20 percent said “too little.” Rather, it’s a sign that the political class—perhaps swayed by the influence of the military-industrial complex and its army of lobbyists—hasn’t yet caught up to public opinion.

And it’s important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget doesn’t begin to tell the full story of American “defense” spending. In addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand total of $913 billion.

Then there are the intelligence and homeland security budgets. Back in the 1990s, when I started reporting on the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, its entire budget was about $27 billion. Last year, although the number is supposed to be top secret, the Bush administration revealed that intelligence spending had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to media reports, Congress is working on an authorization of $48 billion for our spies.

Again, when I first wrote about “homeland security” in the late 1990s—it was then called “counterterrorism”—the Clinton administration was spending $17 billion in interagency budgets in this area. For 2008, the budget of the Department of Homeland Security—that mishmash, incompetent agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from uber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even the Bush administration was initially opposed to its creation)—will be $46.4 billion.

BAGHDAD – Four years into a war that opened with “shock and awe,” U.S. warplanes have stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago.

The airpower escalation parallels a nearly four-month-old security crackdown that is bringing 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Baghdad and its surroundings, an urban campaign to restore order to an area riven with sectarian violence.

It also reflects increased availability of planes from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, and it appears to be accompanied by an increase in Iraqi civilian casualties.

In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, U.S. aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press.

“Air operations over Iraq have ratcheted up significantly in the number of sorties, the number of hours” in the air, said Col. Joe Guastella, Air Force operations chief for the region. “It has a lot to do with increased pressure on the enemy by [the Multinational Corps-Iraq] combined with more carriers.”

The Air Force report did not break down the locations in Iraq where bombings have been stepped up, but U.S.-led forces are locked in new and dangerous fronts against insurgents outside Baghdad in places such as Diyala, a province northeast of the capital.

A second aircraft carrier on station since February in the Persian Gulf has added about 80 warplanes to the U.S. air arsenal in the region.

At the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S. airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body Count, a London-based antiwar research group that maintains a database compiling media reports on Iraq war deaths.

The rate of such reported civilian deaths appeared to climb steadily through 2006, the group reports, averaging a few a month in early 2006, hitting some 40 a month by year’s end and averaging more than 50 a month so far this year.

Those are maximum tolls based on news reports, and they count civilians killed by Army helicopter fire as well as by warplanes, said John Sloboda, of Iraq Body Count. The count is regarded as conservative, since it doesn’t include deaths missed by the international media.

The U.S. military says it doesn’t track civilian casualties.

“The reality of civilian deaths is a year-on-year increase,” said Sloboda,. “This particular part of it, airstrikes, have rocketed up more than any other.”

Examples of attacks, as reported in the Air Force’s daily summary:

•Friday, an Air Force F-16 dropped a guided 500-pound bomb near the northern city of Tal Afar that destroyed a vehicle laden with explosives to be used as a bomb.

•Thursday, an F-16 dropped a similar bomb on “an inaccessible building being used by insurgents” near Samarra, north of Baghdad, with “good effects.”

On one of the busiest days of the year at the state Capitol, 22 demonstrators were arrested Friday as they called for universal health care and a single-payer health system.

The activists were taken into custody at various locations throughout the building, prompting the heaviest police presence at the Capitol this year. Officers were stationed in the House and Senate galleries and outside the doors of the chambers to ensure order.

Nine protesters were arrested outside Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s office, after they staged a sit-in and refused to leave. Sixteen uniformed police officers moved in to make the arrests.

Capitol Police Chief Michael J. Fallon said that all 22 protesters were charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, for their actions at a time when both the House and Senate were in session. Some were arrested for blocking the stairways, and those outside the governor’s office were told in advance that they would be arrested if they did not leave.

“Although they were arrested, they were ladies and gentlemen,” said Fallon, a former Hartford Police Department veteran who joined the Capitol police in December. “Despite the initial interruption, things did go orderly. This type of behavior was disruptive to the legislative process.”

Robert Madore, director of Region 9A of the 67,000- member United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America union, said the activists showed up outside Rell’s office after she failed to respond to a written request for a meeting at 4 p.m. Friday.

“We’ve been trying to communicate with the governor since December,” Madore said as he sat on the floor outside Rell’s office. “She didn’t even have the courtesy to respond, nor did she call, nor did she fax. We prepared to be [arrested], and we’re going to wait as long as we have to. We think this issue needs to be brought to a head.”

The activists noted that Rell has not embraced universal health care as a way to provide coverage for an estimated 400,000 uninsured. Rell says the state has been making steady progress in signing up thousands of children in the popular HUSKY health insurance program in an effort to ensure that all children are covered.

Brian Petronella, president of Local 317 of the 11,000- member United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said he was fighting to get universal health care because many low-wage workers are forced to have their children on the state-operated HUSKY program. Petronella, a 51- year-old Norwalk resident, noted that he lost an election against Robert Genuario, a former Norwalk senator who is now Rell’s budget director. Despite that connection, Petronella said, he could not get a meeting with Rell and so he was sitting on the floor outside the office.

Given the centrality of oil not only to current geo-politics but also to the politics of global warming, it is interesting to recall that the G7 is a by-product of the 1973 oil crisis. Almost 35 years later, the now-G8 — Russia was formally admitted in 1998 — is again facing a crisis of global energy policies brought about by the increased public pressure for action to reduce carbon gas emissions, the looming fact of peak oil and, not least, the G8’s incapacity over the past three decades to think beyond their own interests. But in 2007, the situation is very different from the ‘unglobalised’ world of 1973 (although with some surprising similarities) and the G8 is not the only game in town.

FOCUS ON TRADE

Economically the G8 countries are still very significant: although they represent under 14 % of the world population, they account for nearly two-thirds of the world’s economic output measured by gross domestic product. In fact, Russia is the only G8 country not in the World Bank’s 2006 listing of the top ten economies, coming in at number 14. Significantly, the Peoples Republic of China and Brazil are in the top ten (numbers 4 and 10 respectively), and even India at number 12 outranks Russia.

THE G8 IN CRISIS

Politically, however, many of the G8 members are in some form of crisis, transition or stasis. In the US, Bush is facing the last 18 months of his presidency having lost control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Although the administration’s provocation of Iran is clearly a exercise in bravado designed to deter attention from the debacle in Iraq, it is a high risk strategy given the extreme volatility of the Middle East (one of the similarities with 1973) and the massive domestic opposition to the US’ continuing military presence in Iraq (another similarity to 1973 when the US’s war on Vietnam was becoming increasingly untenable, both politically and militarily). As one commentator remarked, this administration has “lost forever the capacity to set the terms of political debate”- and Bush’s colleagues in the G8 know it.

Britain’s Tony Blair is also at the end of his prime ministership, although when that might be is another matter. Having secured an inglorious place in history for promoting and participating in the invasion of Iraq, Blair is now trying to rewrite his legacy by setting in place the UK’s disengagement from Iraq and taking on climate change with the same quasi-religious zeal that he applied to his moral mission in Iraq. This G8 – almost certainly his last — offers Blair one last chance to be the visionary statesman that he imagines himself to be.

In Germany, Angela Merkel is struggling with a cumbersome “grand coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats so weighed down with compromises that it is virtually unable to move, let alone take the lead on any issues. And in France and Italy, presidential elections and volatile coalitions have disabled these governments while everyone waits to see which way the electorates blow. The more general problem, though, for the European members of the G8 is the palpable anti-US sentiment and the unabated public opposition to the invasion of Iraq – vindicated with every news report from Baghdad — which means that governments must tread carefully in their relations with Washington: being pro-Bush is definitely not a vote winner these days.

President Vladimir Putin – secure in the knowledge that he controls about as much oil and gas as anyone could need — is making up for Russia’s humiliation in the 1990s by aggressively re-negotiating relations with the West, most significantly with the US, while shoring up connections and influence in the East, and keeping everyone else on a short leash at home. On recent form, Putin is giving even the G8 a bad name. Japan and Canada – the other two members of the G8 – are irrelevant in this discussion.

All this adds up to a crisis for the G8 and its capacity to convey a convincing message of leadership, control, unity and vision. The US – the “natural leader” of the G8 – has lost its legitimacy (not least because it acts as the “G1” even in the G8) and there is no other country either with the credentials or (probably) the interest to “step up to the plate”. Yet as the G8’s power declines, other alliances and groupings based on geography or mutual interests are emerging. Some of these groupings may pose a challenge to the G8’s hegemony as the most significant “G” while others — such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) – are experimenting with new governance frameworks that may offer alternatives to the traditional elite politics.

THE G8 IN DECLINE

BAGHDAD: Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.

The assessment offers the first comprehensive look at the progress of the effort to stabilize Baghdad with the heavy influx of additional troops. The last remaining American units in the troop increase are just now arriving.

Violence has diminished in many areas, but it is especially chronic in mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhoods in western Baghdad, several senior officers said. Over all, improvements have not yet been as widespread or lasting across Baghdad, they acknowledged.

CHICAGO — The American interrogator was afraid. Of what and why, he couldn’t say. He was riding the L train in Chicago, and his throat was closing.

In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the crotch of a man’s pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it in prisoners’ sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning. He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled skin trembling.

But on this evening, Lagouranis was back in Illinois, taking the train to a bar. His girlfriend thought he was a hero. His best friend hung out with him, watching reruns of “Hawaii Five-O.” And yet he felt afraid.

“I tortured people,” said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January 2005. “You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing that.”

Being an interrogator, Lagouranis discovered, can be torture. At first, he was eager to try coercive techniques. In training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., instructors stressed the Geneva Conventions, he recalled, while classmates privately admired Israeli and British methods. “The British were tough,” Lagouranis said. “They seemed like real interrogators.”

But interrogators for countries that pride themselves on adhering to the rule of law, such as Britain, the United States and Israel, operate in a moral war zone. They are on the front lines in fighting terrorism, crucial for intelligence-gathering. Yet they use methods that conflict with their societies’ values.

The border between coercion and torture is often in dispute, and the U.S. government is debating it now. The Bush administration is nearing completion of a new executive order setting secret rules for CIA interrogation that may ban waterboarding, a practice that simulates drowning. Last September, President Bush endorsed an “alternative set of procedures,” which he described as “tough,” for questioning high-level detainees. And in Iraq last month, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander, warned troops that the military does not sanction “torture or other expedient methods to obtain information.”

The world of the interrogator is largely closed. But three interrogators allowed a rare peek into their lives — an American rookie who served with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion and two veteran interrogators from Britain and Israel. The veterans, whose wartime experiences stretch back decades, are more practiced at finding moral balance. They use denial, humor, indignation. Even so, these older men grapple with their own fears — and with a clash of values.

That clash, said Darius Rejali, a political scientist who has studied torture and democracy, can torment interrogators: “Nothing is more toxic than guilt, which is typical with democratic interrogators. Nazis, on the other hand, don’t have these problems.”

For Lagouranis, problems include “a creeping anxiety” on the train, he said. The 45-minute ride to Chicago’s O’Hare airport “kills me.” He feels as if he can’t get out “until they let me out.” Lagouranis’s voice was boyish, but his face was gray. The evening deepened his 5 o’clock shadow and the puffy smudges under his eyes.

Not long ago in Iraq, he felt “absolute power,” he said, over men kept in cages. Lagouranis had forced a grandfather to kneel all night in the cold and bombarded others in metal shipping containers with the tape of the self-help parody “Feel This Book: An Essential Guide to Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy, and Sexual Satisfaction,” by comedians Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo. (“They hated it,” Lagouranis recalled. “Like, ‘Please! Just stop that voice!’ “)

Now Lagouranis’s power had dissolved into a weakness so fearful it dampened his upper lip. Sometimes, on the train, he has to get up and pace. But he can’t escape.

An Island in the Mediterranean

James, an amiable man with a red-to-white beard, shook his head when told of Lagouranis: “He’s full of self-pity.”

James, 65, was one of Britain’s most experienced interrogators in Northern Ireland. Starting in 1971, James said, he worked for the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), interrogating Irish nationalists Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands and others whom the British government suspected of being terrorists. Peter Taylor, a leading historian of the conflict in Northern Ireland, said he believes that “James’s account is entirely credible.”

Late one night in 1993, three Irish Republican Army gunmen crept up to James’s door. “They came to get me,” James said. Given a 20-minute warning following a tip to the RUC, he and his wife escaped, ultimately to an island in the Mediterranean. James agreed to talk if his last name and location were withheld. “They haven’t a clue I’m here.”

Driving along winding, stony roads, past goats and grapevines, James had this advice for Lagouranis in Chicago: “You’ve got to get up and get on with it — that’s what we did.”

James had had no training, but the 18-hour days that made his neck ache taught him what he needed: good rapport, good intelligence, great fear. “Yes, a bloke would get a cuff in the ear or he might brace against the wall. Yes, they had sleep deprivation,” he said. “But we did not torture.”

Once, IRA leader Brendan Hughes claimed that James had cocked a gun to his head. James does not deny it. “You fight fire with fire,” he said, the memory igniting his blue eyes.

He noted that the sectarian killings dropped off: “If it’s going to save lives, you’re entitled to use whatever means you can.” How do you fight bad guys and stay good? “You don’t. You can’t.”

The only interrogation James regrets was of Patrick McGee, under arrest for IRA activity. McGee did not crack, which meant he would go free. As McGee walked out, “he just stared at you,” James recalled. “Evil was hanging out of him.” James spat in his face. “He never even blinked. It was not satisfying, it was humiliating. I lost my cool.”

James stopped his car at the edge of the ocean. According to Greek mythology, a god frolicked on this beach. Vacationers drank iced coffee and oiled the air with coconut lotion. But James seemed to be somewhere else, cloudy and turbulent, in his head.

“My friend once saw a guy planting a bomb,” he said. He laughed. “My friend tied a rope around the guy’s ankle, and made him defuse it. Now t hat’s how to deal with a ticking bomb.”
Chicago, 8 p.m.

“All of Iraq was a ticking time bomb,” Lagouranis said, downing his fourth of seven beers. He had joined the Army before 9/11 to learn Arabic. He didn’t expect to go to war.

He was sitting on a night off at the California Clipper bar, where he works as a bouncer. The bartender joked that Lagouranis should be tougher on customers: “You should ‘go Abu Ghraib.’ “

At Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the 2003-04 abuse scandal, Lagouranis used to relax in the old execution chamber. He and a friend would sit near the trapdoor and read the Arabic scratched into the wall. They found a dirty brown rope. It was the hangman’s noose. “If there is an evil spot in the world, that was one of them,” Lagouranis said.

At Abu Ghraib and sometimes at the facilities in Mosul, north Babil province and other places where Lagouranis worked, the Americans were shot at and attacked with mortar fire. “Then I get a prisoner who may have done it,” he said. “What are you going to do? You just want to get back at somebody, so you bring this dog in. ‘Finally, I got you.’ “

Lagouranis’s tools included stress positions, a staged execution and hypothermia so extreme the detainees’ lips turned purple. He has written an account of his experiences in a book, “Fear Up Harsh,” which has been read by the Pentagon and will be published this week. Stephen Lewis, an interrogator who was deployed with Lagouranis, confirmed the account, and Staff Sgt. Shawn Campbell, who was Lagouranis’s team leader and direct supervisor, said Lagouranis’s assertions were “as true as true can get. It’s all verifiable.” John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the group investigated many of Lagouranis’s claims about abuses and independently corroborated them.

“At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying,” Lagouranis said. “Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it’s thrilling.”

In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal shipping container they called “the disco,” with blaring music and lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps “like a car inspection at a parking garage.” Once a week, an Iraqi councilman and an American colonel visited. “We had to hide the tortured guys,” Lagouranis said.

Then a soldier’s aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:

There are continuing reports, seemingly based upon authoritative backgrounding out of Baghdad and Washington, suggesting that variations on a “Plan B” are being developed. While support continues to be voiced for the current “surge”, doubt is beginning to be expressed even by military and White House officials that a confident evaluation of the surge is unlikely by the promised deadline of September. It may take longer, perhaps to the end of the year. General Odierno was quite forceful in insisting that a serious evaluation cannot be made until January.

From the military point of view, the surge is evidently not producing the desired results of improving security in Baghdad, and is unlikely to do so under current plans and force levels. After an initial slight lull, the level of violence is back up to pre-surge levels, and then some in the case of US deaths. The political component of the surge, the overriding importance of which has been underscored by General Petraeus, is also stalled. It has failed to bring about any significant reonciliation between contending Iraqi factions nor has it led to progress on key legislation, the adoption of which is supposed to lead to a more stable political environment.

For domestic political consumption, the White House seems to be addressing all of this, at least for now, through its familiar tactics of pushing out the time when success can be expected (originally it was six months from the initiation of the surge, then September sometime) and dampening expectations by predicting the obvious–increased US casualties. In other words, things will get worse before they get better.

Meanwhile, work on a Plan B continues, with the options apparently ranging from elements of the Iraq Study Group Report (reduce US forces, concentrate on training the Iraqi army and force protection and continuing interdiction of al Qaeda) to variations on partition. Most recently, the President and others have suggested establishing a long-term US military base presence in Iraq to provide local and regional stability, citing as an example the continuing US military presence in Korea. (This example is so inept historically and strategically as to cast further doubt on the competence and and strategic objectives of the Administration.) Presumably the bases are the three huge installations the Pentagon built a while ago with permanancy in mind.

Much of the Plan B planning, as reported, seems to be the product of wishful thinking about the current situation today in Iraq and what realistic options might exist in the 6 months ahead, and beyond leading to U.S. elections. To this observor, given the history of our performance in Iraq, any new plan must be subjected to early and very critical evaluation.

Politically, Iraq today is a failed state. Its writ runs only through part of the Green Zone. It cannot control the use of force domestically nor can it protect its frontiers. Its continuing existance depends upon the US. The US is the occupying power and provides significant financing and what little security exists outside the Green Zone. Baghdad and the rest of the country are under the control of warring factions and militias. Corruption is endemic and overwelming. The loyalties of the police and army are as suspect as their professional competence. How will any plan B change that? How will the existance of large, permanent US bases in Iraq help the present Government expand its authority and gain legitimacy?

Militarily, it is important to project what might happen if, in six months, the US implements a Plan B whose principal elements consist of a troop drawdown to 100,000 in 2008, dedicated to Iraqi army training, force protection and al Qaeda interdiction. But is there any reason to hope that in six months’ time the Iraqi army will stand tall and demonstrate the competence that the surge was designed to showcase? That the police will be anything other than hopeless? That their loyalties will be directed to their elected government? None of this is very likely, in which case what happens to the US presence in the Green Zone and, indeed, to the Iraqi government that is pretty much confined to the Green Zone? What reason is there to think that a new training regimen, presumably with embedded US trainers (who will be very vulnerable), will be any more successful than what has passed for training during much of the last four years. Will it really take large numbers of US troops in three permanent bases to to chase down 1-2,000 El Qaeda? Should it really be the job of the US to defend Iraq against foreign invasions? And who is about to invade (except for maybe the Turks to punish the Kurds)?

To this obeserver, there is nothing in the suggested Plan B, even if in part based on the Iraq Study Group Report, that would recommend it as an alternative to an announced, scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, that could also incorporate the elements of the Study Group report. Such a schedule would have the virtue of forcing the contending factions in Iraq, and Iraq’s neighbors, to face up to their responsibilities to find a political accommodation, or to face the consequences of their (and our) failures. This is not rocket science; it’s hardball politics in which the US is just one of the pawns that various Iraqi factions are trying to manipulate.

But there remains the question of the permanent bases, a concept now being floated by the Administration but one which must have been in the minds of the White House and our military planners from the time when these massive installations were first projected. Congress should probe this one very carefully and insist that the Administration’s plans should be on the public record. Whatever their purposes, and certainly there has been little candor on the part of the Administration as to what these are, the bases will never be accepted either by the Iraqi people, of whatever faction (except the Kurds). It will violate every concept of independence, national pride and Arab identity that have been the hallmarks of the post-colonial period. Any Iraqi government that supported it would not only fail, but would be despised. Such bases might have the dubious benefit of uniting all Iraqis in opposition. Only a US Administration that expected to be greeted with flowers by the Iraqis could convince itself that those same Iraqis will tolerate such bases and that such bases could survive in hostile territory, with long and endangered supply lines.

Not to be forgotten is that a delay in evaluating the surge, much less the kind of Plan B that seems to be emerging, will impact the domestic political process. There is restiveness in the Republican ranks. The polls are clear that a growing majorirty of Americans want out. The Republican establishment realizes full well that if the current level of violence continues into next year, with US deaths approaching 5,000 by November 2008, then the GOP will suffer a disastrous defeat in November. Moreover, the Democrats are unlikely to be as accommodating as they were with the last supplemental. It is the budget, and the need to continue financing the war, that will constitute the center of the debate beginning in September. Republicans up for reelection in ’08 will have to fish or cut bait on Iraq. As for Mr. Bush, he still seems to be on track to hand over the entire mess to his successor, including his permanent bases.

On May 21, 2007, the New England Journal of Medicine reported a study that found GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia is associated with a 43% increase in heart attacks and possibly a 64% increase in cardiovascular death. The NEJM said it posted the article online ahead of its June 6, 2007 print edition because of its medical importance.

Experts point out that the studies analyzed for the NEJM report were not designed to look for heart risks, many were only 24 weeks long, and it may be that higher risks will appear after a longer term of use. Dr David Nathan, chief of diabetes care at Massachusetts General Hospital, who reviewed the paper for the NEJM, told the Associated Press, “This analysis is just scratching the surface of what may be there.”

Avandia (rosiglitazone) was FDA approved in 1999 for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, a disease that affects between 18 to 20 million Americans.

When approved, Glaxo promoted Avandia as being safer than Rezulin, a diabetes drug removed from the market in 2000 after serious cases of liver damage developed in patients taking the drug.

Avandia is currently the top selling diabetes drug with total US sales of $2.2 billion in 2006, according to IMS Health, a healthcare tracking information firm. A one-month supply sells for between $90 and $170, the Associated Press reported on May 23, 2007.

“More than 6 million people worldwide,” the Associated Press reports, “have taken the drug to control blood sugar since it came on the market eight years ago, and about 1 million Americans use it now.”

The FDA is going to have an extremely tough time wiggling out from under the rug of blame for this regulatory failure. The situation “reflects very badly on the FDA and on Glaxo,” Dr Nathan said. “It’s the FDA’s responsibility to be monitoring this stuff.”

In an editorial that accompanied the study in the NEJM, Dr Bruce Psaty of the University of Washington and Dr Furberg of Wake Forest University wrote: The drug “represents a major failure of the drug-use and drug-approval processes in the United States.”

They also state that “the rationale for prescribing rosiglitazone at this time is unclear,” because when the drug was approved its benefits were “at best mixed.”

Documents dating back 7 years show the FDA knew about the risks associated with Avandia and did nothing to protect consumers. The day after the new study appeared online, on May 23, 2007, Dr Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen, a non-profit health research group, sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, which described a July 16, 2002 FDA memo that showed FDA scientists had recommended that the label for Avandia be amended to include post-marketing reports of heart failure among patients taking the drug.

“The failure of the FDA to act on the recommendations made almost five years ago by its Division of Drug Risk Evaluation is yet another case in which the conclusions of scientists who are engaged in post-market drug safety review are not taken seriously enough or addressed soon enough,” Dr Wolfe said in a press release.

In the late 80’s while a group of us were hanging around the newsroom of a weekly newspaper in a town on the California coast complaining about Reagan and wars and things of that nature one of my colleagues a guy named Walter said something very simply, “I don’t like soldiers. They kill people.” He knew whereof he spoke, he and two family members escaped from the Ukraine in the mid-1940s to Canada. The rest of his family were killed or “left to die in the death camps”, as he put it. When someone asked him whose army it was that killed his family, the Soviets or the Nazis, he answered, “What difference does that make?” He never did tell us the answer.

Around the same time the owner of the paper, Mr. Blake, an old time newspaper man from the Chicago Tribune had been sending out memos for weeks headed “Very Important” with the message that soon smoking would no longer be permitted at the newspaper. In the memos he confided that while he sympathized with the smokers for he had once “happily smoked many a cigar” he had no choice but to issue the edict. The folks in advertising got real upset. How could they work without smoking? With increasing frequency Mr. Blake tacked up new memos warning of the impending deadline of the smoking ban.

The day of the cease-smoking arrived. One avid cigarette smoker in advertising had a mini-breakdown. She literally had to go to the hospital. The same group of us commented on her demise. “Poor Shirley,” Walter the guy from the Ukraine said.

Suddenly the door burst open. It was Doug the graphic artist and Vietnam vet who somehow missed seeing all the memos, somehow missed all the agitated talk in the advertising room where the people had been hysterical for weeks about the no-smoking ban. Somehow missed Shirley being carted off to the hospital.

“What is this crap, that I can’t smoke?” he screamed at us. He didn’t often come into our end of the newspaper but I guess he figured his anger was worth sharing. “What do you mean I can’t smoke!” he shouted again. “I fought a fucking war for you people and this is what I get for it”?

The sports writer looked up from his copy. “Yeah”, he said nonchalantly. “But you didn’t win.”

At that Doug slammed his tattered brief case into a nearby trash can and stormed out. It remained in the trash for three days while he went on a bender. He retrieved it when he eventually came back to work. Shirley had come back too. She was adjusting to smoking standing outside the building under the eaves in the rain.

Forty years ago many of us knew that the State, either through conscription as in the Vietnam war, or what it devised after that war, a standing professional army, sends its military men and women off to other countries to kill people because the ruling classes decide they want a war. These wars have nothing to do with you or me. They have nothing to do with our defense or spreading democracy or overcoming evil rogue leaders. Wars are done in the interests of the ruling classes who propagandize a sentimental message of patriotism. And even patriotism isn’t enough. The soldier or the taxpayer must be given a “moral stake” in a war, a “moral responsibility” to put down “evil.”

Someone wrote recently that Cindy Sheehan perhaps finally figured out that the “system” was the “real problem” and that sudden realization is what caused her to give up her fight against our obscene killing of other people in foreign countries. What is the system? Is this not merely a euphemism for the State? And what propels the perpetuation of the aggrandizement of the State? The military. And what propels the military? Among other things, our sentimental attachment to soldiers.

I have little sympathy for hired killers. Why not call a spade a spade? I’m still angry about the funerals I went to in the 60’s and 70’s where I saw my classmates dead from that other war. I still think about those boys, some I had known from the third grade. But I agree with the Ukrainian who refused to sentimentalize what it is they do. Patriotism is for fools. Sympathy for grieving mothers whose children get killed in America’s wars sucks us in even further which is why we see the constant drone of grieving parents on television telling us how their kids died believing in the “fight for freedom.” The “system” in one way or another turns us all into cannon fodder.

As far as world public opinion is concerned, as reflected in the international media, the pronouncements of freedom of expression groups, and of miscellaneous governments, Venezuela has finally taken the ultimate step to prove its opposition right: that Venezuela is heading towards a dictatorship. Judging by these pronouncements, freedom of speech is becoming ever more restricted in Venezuela as a result of the non-renewal of the broadcast license of the oppositional TV network RCTV. With RCTV going off the air at midnight of May 27th, the country’s most powerful opposition voice has supposedly been silenced.

It is generally taken for granted that any silencing of opposition voices is anti-freedom of speech. But is an opposition voice really being silenced? Is this the correct metaphor? Is the director of RCTV, Marcel Granier, actually being silenced? No, a better metaphor is that the megaphone that Granier (and others) used for the exercise of his free speech is being returned to its actual owners–a megaphone that he had borrowed, but never owned. Not only that, he is still allowed to use a smaller megaphone (cable & satellite).

In other words, the radio frequency that RCTV used for over half a century is being returned to its original owners-the Venezuelan people-under the management of its democratically elected leadership. Still, while the decision about how to use the airwaves might be the prerogative of the government (as many critics concede), critics of the move have a point when they complain that the freedom to use the airwaves cannot be solely a matter of majority rule. After all, shouldn’t minorities (in this case a mostly relatively wealthy minority) also have access to the megaphone, so it may use it to convince the majority of its point-of-view? At least, progressives who defend the rights of traditionally disenfranchised minorities would argue that minorities should always have access to the media. [1] Even though Marcel Granier and his friends cannot be considered to be a disenfranchised minority, surely this minority deserves to be heard in the media, at least a little bit, in the name of pluralism.

Alarming tales of a most prevalent and problematic substance

THE PORT OF PLYMOUTH in southwestern England is no longer listed among the scenic towns of the British Isles, although prior to World War II it would have qualified. During six nights of March and April 1941, Nazi bombs destroyed seventy-five thousand buildings in what is remembered as the Plymouth Blitz. When the annihilated city center was rebuilt, a modern concrete grid was superimposed on Plymouth’s crooked cobbled lanes, burying its medieval past in memory.

But the main history of Plymouth lies at its edge, in the natural harbor formed at the confluence of two rivers, the Plym and the Tamar, where they join the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This is the Plymouth from which the Pilgrims departed; they named their American landfall across the sea in its honor. All three of Captain Cook’s Pacific expeditions began here, as did Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. And, on December 27, 1831, H.M.S. Beagle set sail from Plymouth Harbor, with twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin aboard.

University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson spends a lot of time pacing Plymouth’s historic edge. He especially goes in winter, when the beaches along the harbor’s estuaries are empty—a tall man in jeans, boots, blue windbreaker, and zippered fleece sweater, his bald pate hatless, his long fingers gloveless as he bends to probe the sand. Thompson’s doctoral study was on slimy stuff that mollusks such as limpets and winkles like to eat: diatoms, cyanobacteria, algae, and tiny plants that cling to seaweed. What he’s now known for, however, has less to do with marine life than with the growing presence of things in the ocean that have never been alive at all.

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, what has dominated his life’s work began when he was still an undergraduate in the 1980s, spending autumn weekends organizing the Liverpool contingent of Great Britain’s national beach cleanup. In his final year, he had 170 teammates amassing metric tons of rubbish along eighty-five miles of shoreline. Apart from items that apparently had dropped from boats, such as Greek salt boxes and Italian oil cruets, from the labels he could see that most debris was blowing east from Ireland. In turn, Sweden’s shores were the receptacles for trash from England. Any packaging that trapped enough air to protrude from the water seemed to obey the wind currents, which in these latitudes are easterly.

Smaller, lower-profile fragments, however, were apparently controlled by currents in the water. Each year, as he compiled the team’s annual reports, Thompson noticed more and more garbage that was smaller and smaller amid the usual bottles and automobile tires. He and another student began collecting sand samples along beach strand lines. They sieved the tiniest particles of whatever appeared unnatural, and tried to identify them under a microscope. This proved tricky. Their subjects were usually too small to allow them to pinpoint the bottles, toys, or appliances from which they sprang.

He continued working the annual cleanup during graduate studies at Newcastle. Once he completed his PhD and began teaching at Plymouth, his department acquired a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, a device that passes a microbeam through a substance, then compares its infrared spectrum to a database of known material. Now he could know what he was looking at, which only deepened his concern.

“Any idea what these are?” Thompson is guiding a visitor along the shore of the Plym River estuary, near where it joins the sea. With a full moonrise just a few hours off, the tide is out nearly two hundred meters, exposing a sandy flat scattered with bladderwrack and cockle shells. A breeze skims the tidal pools, shivering rows of reflected hillside housing projects. Thompson bends over the strand line of detritus left by the forward edge of waves lapping the shore, looking for anything recognizable: hunks of nylon rope, syringes, topless plastic food containers, half a ship’s float, pebbled remains of polystyrene packaging, and a rainbow of assorted bottle caps. Most plentiful of all are multicolored plastic shafts of cotton ear-swabs. But there are also the odd little uniform shapes he challenges people to identify. Among twigs and seaweed fibers in his fistful of sand are a couple dozen blue and green plastic cylinders about two millimeters high.
“They’re called nurdles. They’re the raw materials of plastic production. They melt these down to make all kinds of things.” He walks a little farther, then scoops up another handful. It contains more of the same plastic bits: pale blue ones, greens, reds, and tans. Each handful, he calculates, is about 20 percent plastic, and each holds at least thirty pellets.

“You find these things on virtually every beach these days. Obviously they are from some factory.”

However, there is no plastic manufacturing anywhere nearby. The pellets have ridden some current over a great distance until they were deposited here—collected and sized by the wind and tide.

IN THOMPSON’S LABORATORY AT THE UNIVERSITY of Plymouth, graduate student Mark Browne unpacks foil-wrapped beach samples that arrive in clear zip-lock bags sent by an international network of colleagues. He transfers these to a glass separating funnel, filled with a concentrated solution of sea salt to float off the plastic particles. He filters out some he thinks he recognizes, such as pieces of the ubiquitous colored ear-swab shafts—to check under the microscope. Anything really unusual goes to the FTIR Spectrometer.

Each takes more than an hour to identify. About one-third turn out to be natural fibers such as seaweed, another third are plastic, and another third are unknown—meaning that they haven’t found a match in their polymer database, or that the particle has been in the water so long its color has degraded, or that it’s too small for their machine, which analyzes fragments only to twenty microns—slightly thinner than a human hair.

“That means we’re underestimating the amount of plastic that we’re finding. The true answer is we just don’t know how much is out there.”

What they do know is that there’s much more than ever before. During the early twentieth century, Plymouth marine biologist Alistair Hardy developed an apparatus that could be towed behind an Antarctic expedition boat, ten meters below the surface, to sample krill—the ant-sized, shrimplike invertebrate on which much of the planet’s food chain rests. In the 1930s, he modified it to measure even smaller plankton. It employed an impeller to turn a moving band of silk, similar to how a dispenser in a public lavatory moves cloth towels. As the silk passed over an opening, it filtered plankton from water passing through it. Each band of silk had a sampling capacity of five hundred nautical miles. Hardy was able to convince English merchant vessels using commercial shipping lanes throughout the North Atlantic to drag his Continuous Plankton Recorder for several decades, amassing a database so valuable he was eventually knighted for his contributions to marine science.

He took so many samples from around the British Isles that only every second one was analyzed. Decades later, Richard Thompson realized that the ones that remained stored in a climate-controlled Plymouth warehouse were a time capsule containing a record of growing contamination. He picked two routes out of northern Scotland that had been sampled regularly: one to Iceland, one to the Shetland Islands. His team pored over rolls of silk reeking of chemical preservative, looking for old plastic. There was no reason to examine years prior to World War II because until then plastic barely existed, except for the Bakelite used in telephones and radios, appliances so durable they had yet to enter the waste chain. Disposable plastic packaging hadn’t yet been invented.

By the 1960s, however, they were seeing increasing numbers of increasing kinds of plastic particles. By the 1990s, the samples were flecked with triple the amount of acrylic, polyester, and crumbs of other synthetic polymers than had been present three decades earlier. Especially troubling was that Hardy’s plankton recorder had trapped all this plastic ten meters below the surface, suspended in the water. Since plastic mostly floats, that meant they were seeing just a fraction of what was actually there. Not only was the amount of plastic in the ocean increasing, but ever smaller bits of it were appearing—small enough to ride global sea currents.

Thompson’s team realized that slow mechanical action—waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches—were now doing the same to plastics. The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments.

“We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”

He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on poly-ethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawai’i dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of forty-four pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds.

There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-sized quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.

When the particles lodged in their intestines, the resulting constipation was terminal. But if the pieces were small enough, they passed through the invertebrates’ digestive tracts and emerged, seemingly harmlessly, out the other end. Did that mean that plastics were so stable that they weren’t toxic? At what point would they start to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms some time far in the future?