The Rag Blog

It isn’t amazing that 61% of Americans think the US should never have invaded Iraq. [- Courtesy NYT/CBS.]

What is amazing is that 35% still think it was a good idea.

It isn’t amazing that 76% (including 51% of Republicans) of Americans say that the increased US troop levels in Iraq have had no impact or are making things worse.

What is amazing is that 20% think that things have gotten significantly better.

It isn’t amazing that 63% of Americans support a timetable for US withdrawal ending in 2008. What is amazing is that so many do not.

It isn’t amazing that 13% want to cut off money for the Iraq War immediately, or that 69% want further funding to be tied to the meeting of specific benchmarks.

What is amazing is that %15 want the war funded with no conditions at all.

(By the way, that only 13% want to cut off all funding immediately goes a long way toward explaining the vote on the supplemental in Congress).

It isn’t amazing that 72 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraq.

What is amazing is that 23 percent approve. (Are these the horror movie fans in the Republican base?)

It isn’t amazing that 65 percent disapprove of Bush’s management of foreign policy.

What is amazing is that 25 percent approves. (They should be asked specifically of what they approve. The rest of us want to know.)

Welcome to the Show, kid.

The Democrats have “surrendered” on Iraq. Liberals are “shocked.” And all the innocents who didn’t know any better, didn’t see it coming, feel “betrayed.”

Poor Duncan Black, better known as “Atrios,” is nearly at a loss for words: “People hate Bush, hate Republicans, and hate this war,” he protests, and yet the Democrats caved!

“I don’t understand these people,” he wails.

Precisely.

Keith Olbermann, using the same tone of humorless, near-postal anger he uses in every commentary, no matter the topic, calls the Democratic rollover a “Neville Chamberlain moment.”

I prefer to think of it as a teachable moment.

At a time when even conservatives have come to loathe Bush, when people who thought he was going to round up all the “illegal aliens” and deport them are so upset, they think impeachment’s too good for him, the Democrats labor to craft legislation “acceptable” to him.

Liberals have already spent six and a half years loathing Bush — longer if they live in Texas, a state whose statutes are said to recognize two classes of persons: Fuckors and Fuckees.

(Republicans and Democrats, the big shots, belong to the former class. You and I belong to the latter.)

There is nothing particularly wrong with loathing Bush. It only becomes a problem when it prevents progressives from finally figuring out that the people they’re really going to end up having to fight are the Democrats.

As Big Walter the Thunderbird used to say, “Sho’ is tough.”

Right now, both major parties are playing dodge ball with the planet, trying to avoid “ownership” of Iraq. The only way at this point to “own” the war is to stop it, and there is no serious move afoot to make that happen.

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran’s various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

For once in my career as a medical student, I have absolute faith that my patients will be taken care of regardless of how much money they have in their pocket. Entering the Misión Barrio Adentro clinic in San Rafael de Tabay, a town in Merida, Venezuela amazes even the most jaded visitor. The local community hospital, Centro de Diagnostico Integral (CDI) brings alive Venezuela’s social revolution in health care.

The premise of Misión Barrio Adentro is simple: doctors live and work in communities providing health services free of charge to anyone.(1) In the span of four years, Barrio Adentro added 1612 modules (with 4618 under construction) to the 4,800 existing public ambulatory clinics.(2) The national goal is to have one primary care doctor for every 1250 to 2500 habitants. While Cuban doctors currently cover a large portion of this health need, new medical schools are training over 17,000 Venezuelan youth to become doctors. A corollary training program has around 3,000 Venezuelan doctors in a postgraduate residency community medicine. It’s one thing to look at the numbers, but does this massive expansion of primary health through Misión Barrio Adentro actually work? To gain perspective, I have been studying as a medical student under Venezuelan and Cuban physicians in both the traditional and revolutionary Barrio Adentro public health clinics. Beyond the reports and statistics, I carry back with me the experience of participating in egalitarian medicine, a goal I can keep in my mind’s eye.

Many who view the new health care programs as a radical departure, may not know that even before the Chavez government, all people had a right to health care, education, social protection provided free from the state. However, access was limited. A report of the Panamerican Health Organization and World Health Organization, “Barrio Adentro: the right to health and social inclusion in Venezuela” documents the history of health care in Venezuela. Before Chavez, there was an underinvestment in social programs, increased orientation to the private sector. When Chavez was first elected president in 1998, over 35 percent of the poorest 20 percent of the population indicated that they didn’t go to see a medical for their health problem because they didn’t have the money to pay for a consult, medicine, or exam.(3)

Since the 1970s until Chavez’s Administration, investment in public health did not match the expanding population’s needs. During the 80s and 90s, only 50 new public clinics were built. Meanwhile, 400 new private clinics were constructed. From the 70s to Chavez’s election, there was only one public hospital built. A 1985 study revealed that Venezuelans had trouble getting care in Caracas, even in spite of the fact that the capital had disproportionately more physicians than the rest of the country. This is for many reasons. Clinics were too far away and badly organized for the communities needs. They also lacked appropriate referral systems, and were focused on curing instead of preventing disease. In poor and rural communities, care was provided by recently graduated inexperienced physicians.(4) These results match the stories I am told by my patients.

Misión Barrio Adentro was founded in 2003 as a part of 17 Misións, or comprehensive national social service programs, that together have similar explicit objectives to overturn decades of growing social inequalities. By recognizing the social rights of health, education, nutrition, housing, and employment, the Misións create sustainable new power relations based on democratic and participative ideals.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.

This “second surge” of troops in Iraq, which is being executed by extending tours for brigades already there and by deploying more units, could boost the number of combat troops to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year. When support troops are included, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 — the most ever — by the end of the year.

The efforts to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq are being carried out without the fanfare that accompanied President Bush’s initial troop surge in January.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, the U.S. commander who led NATO troops into Bosnia in late 1995, when asked to comment on the analysis of deployment orders, said: “It doesn’t surprise me that they’re not talking about it. I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this.”

The first surge was prominently proclaimed by Bush in a nationally televised address Jan. 10, when he ordered five additional combat brigades to join 15 brigades already in Iraq.

The buildup was designed to give commanders the 20 combat brigades that Pentagon planners said were needed to provide security in Baghdad and in western Anbar province.

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraq’s defence ministry will buy new weapons worth more than 1.5 billion dollars (1.11 billion euros), including helicopters and US rifles, the minister announced on Monday.

The purchases will be made possible by a 26 percent increase in the country’s defence budget, to 4.1 billion dollars (three billion euros) for the current fiscal year.

“The Iraqi government has signed a contract with the American government to set up a foreign weapons sales office to buy weapons that Iraq needs,” Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim Mohammed said at a Baghdad press conference.

“This programme will help Iraq to buy modern weapons and to ensure arrival of these weapons when the ministry asks for them,” he added.

Iraq has started importing American-made M-16 and M-4 rifles, which are slowly replacing the ubiquitous Soviet-designed AK-47 Kalashnikov among the Iraqi forces struggling to bring order to the country.

Mohammed is also looking to beef up the country’s air force and navy with the purchase of 29 Soviet-designed M-17 helicopters, six reconnaissance planes, 10 patrol boats from Italy and 26 from the United States.

The gradual switchover from the AK-47 to the M-16 began earlier this month, when a graduating class of Iraqi military recruits became the first of 1,600 rookie soldiers to start receiving the weapons.

The M-16 fires a 5.56mm round, standard among most modern armies and lighter than the 7.62mm used in the rugged Kalashnikov.

Iraq is awash with Kalashnikovs looted from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s defunct armed forces, smuggled from around the region by militants and imported by the United States to arm new Iraqi security units.

ARBIL (IPS) – The working environment for Iraq’s journalists is becoming increasingly dangerous and difficult, with 31 killed just since the start of this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

The dire situation has prompted both international and local media groups to design a new “safety strategy” involving the creation of special offices charged with protecting journalists in the face of “kidnappings, targeted killings and other threats to media”. These offices will be set up in Baghdad and Arbil, and government and well as media outlets will have representatives there.

Hasado also criticized the lack of a modern press law in Iraq almost four years after the official end of the war, noting that the same law used to deal with journalists during Saddam Hussein’s regime remains in place.

“That old law has severely restricted the freedom of press… and as a result, every institution gives itself the right to bring charges against journalists based on their own conclusions,” Hasado told IPS.

Several journalists have been sued by officials for stories they published, yet none has been sentenced so far and the cases have been settled behind closed doors, Hasado said.

On Jan. 26, for example, the security forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan arrested freelance journalist Muhammad Siyasi Ashkanayi, accusing him of spying for Parastin, the intelligence agency of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

At the end of March, he had not been charged with an offence nor referred to an investigative judge, and remained in detention, the U.N. reported.

A new press law drafted by the KJS to be discussed in the regional parliament would decriminalize media work and prevent journalists from being put behind bars for their reporting.

BAGHDAD, May 21 (IPS) – Killings, crime, lack of medical care, collapse of educationàthe list goes on. But with the occupation by U.S.-led forces now into a fifth year, and a supposedly democratic government in place, no one knows who to hold accountable for all that is going wrong.

It is the occupation forces, particularly the United States and Britain, that must be held accountable, many Iraqis say.

“It is good of these people to discuss accountability for theft, but the most important thing to account for is Iraqi blood,” Numan Ahmed, a human rights activist from the Adhamiya neighbourhood in Baghdad told IPS.

The British medical journal Lancet has reported that by July 2006, 655,000 people had died as “a consequence of the war.” It has reported that the risk of death among civilians is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

“By now a million Iraqis have been killed for no reason, and many millions disabled or badly injured just because of some thieves in Baghdad and Washington,” Ahmed said. “We are prepared to reveal the documents to condemn them even if takes us a lifetime.”

But Iraqis have no means to take action against occupiers.

The United States has not accepted jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which has the power to investigate complaints of genocide. The United States took the view that the court could conduct “politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of U.S. military and political officials and personnel.”

U.S. opposition to the ICC is in stark contrast to the strong support for the Court by most of its closest allies. But Iraqis have found no way to proceed against these either.

With no doors of justice open to them, many Iraqis are now taking to unlawful ways to hit back at occupation forces and government targets.

“The only way to do it is at gunpoint,” 32-year-old Ali Aziz from Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, told IPS. “They invaded us at gunpoint and we find it ridiculous to talk about any other way of getting back what belongs to us.”

Aziz said he had lost several friends in attacks by U.S. soldiers. “The whole world is dealing with this in a hypocritical way, and there is only us to claim our rights the way we find proper.”

The human rights group al-Raya filed a case in a local court in Fallujah against U.S. forces in 2004, following a massive military crackdown. About three-quarters of all buildings in the city were destroyed or heavily damaged during the U.S. assault in November 2004.

But U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces have hit out at the human rights group. “The secretary-general for the organisation has now been arrested by Fallujah police for reasons that we are not aware of, and the organisation is not functioning any more,” a member of the board, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS in Baghdad.

“It is not the right time to talk about accountability when daily killings by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are still ongoing. God knows if it will ever be possible.”

A case for accountability could well be made. A judge from the United States wrote at the time of the trial of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in Germany in 1946: “To initiate a war of aggressionàis not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was judged by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Sep. 16, 2004 as “an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.”

The lack of accountability appears now to be leading to greater support for armed resistance against occupation forces.

“What accountability are you talking about, sir,” said Abu Jassim from Fallujah, who lost four members of his family when a U.S. bomb destroyed his home during the first U.S. offensive in the city in April 2004. “Americans are criminals, and the whole world is covering up for their crimes.” They will be held accountable, he said, by “Allah” and by “the heroes of the Iraqi resistance.”

Iraqis are also angry over destruction of their civilian infrastructure, for which no one has been held responsible.

“The U.S. crime of deliberately crushing Iraqi infrastructure must be looked at as a crime against humanity,” chief engineer Jalal Abdulla at Baghdad’s Ministry of Electricity told IPS. “They did not have to do this to support their military effort, but they did it just to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths for no reason but cruelty.”

CANBERRA, Australia: Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war verged on criminal negligence, a former Australian army lawyer turned political candidate said Tuesday.

Col. Mike Kelly, who ended a 20-year military career last week to run as an opposition candidate at federal elections later this year, gave his first television interview about his experiences in Iraq to Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Kelly, who was among the most senior Australian officers in Iraq during 2003 and 2004, was scathing of Rumsfeld’s role.

“If I look at people like Donald Rumsfeld, all I can say is, that verges on criminal negligence,” Kelly told the ABC of Rumsfeld’s failure to acknowledge problems in Iraq.

Kelly — an expert on the law of occupation and peacemaking operations with experience in Somalia, Bosnia and East Timor — said he offered a plan to stop looting and protect infrastructure soon after former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was toppled.

“We knew exactly what needed to be done,” Kelly told the ABC.

“Then Rumsfeld came in and overruled that concept and basically threw it out the window and that was where things really started to go wrong,” he said.

A full year after Hurricane Katrina, 73,000 New Orleans residents remained encamped in FEMA trailer parks, an aluminum gulag spread all the way to Texas. They were waiting for a chance to reconstruct their homes. They’re still waiting. There’s little or no insurance money, and no one is even allowed to rebuild, nearly two years after the flood, in some of the poorer areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.

But waiting on compensation from Washington, waiting for a hand-out, waiting for anyone to help save the city is simply not in the constitution of Malik Rahim. The water was still high when Rahim helped create a guerrilla reconstruction corps of local residents. They call themselves Common Ground. When you see progress in the poor sections of New Orleans, you’re often seeing the group’s work crews.

The organization started out distributing food and water to hurricane victims and running a free, volunteer-staffed medical clinic (See, YES! Issue 39). It was an insurgent action, neither financed nor sanctioned by state or federal government. Since then, they have organized thousands of volunteers to gut water-damaged homes, removing deadly mold, and in the process trained residents in construction skills.

When we were filming in New Orleans, I visited The Woodlands, where Common Ground was doing a gut rehab on 350 apartment units. The residents themselves did most of the work. With sweat equity and small-scratch donations, Common Ground built hurricane-proof homes, a health clinic, even a restaurant for employment of residents once construction was complete.

Then, a week before Christmas, the owners of The Woodlands, who’d agreed to sell the property, rendered nearly worthless by the hurricane, to Common Ground, sent every resident an eviction notice. Now that the place was spiffed-up and rebuilt, it was worth a fortune in the tight New Orleans market. In January, marshals removed every Woodlands family, including a paraplegic who’d been a resident for decades. Following a too-familiar pattern, there was no compensation.