The Rag Blog

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.

Something is wrong with the United States. I think most of us have noticed it. There is a mortal rot in the country, made manifest by many little rots that are hard to integrate mentally yet are, I think, somehow related. The change is grave, accelerating, probably irreversible, and fascinating. Things are not as they were.

The United States is the most hated country on the planet, followed by, to the extent that there is a distinction, Israel. So far as I know, there are no other contenders. You can say “Who cares?” as many will say, or “Screw’em if they can’t take a joke,” or “I’d rather be feared than loved.” All very droll. Still, it is an interesting datum. No country ever lives up to its own PR, but there was a time when America was widely admired. Now, almost universally, it is seen as a rogue state. And is.

This carries a price. The US consulate in Guadalajara is part fortress, part prison, with barriers and cameras and bars and rentacops, and they take away a woman’s lipstick if she is going to enter. Maybe a country that fears lipstick needs to think. The French consulate around the corner is wide open, like all others that I know of. The French, Chinese, Japanese and so on aren’t hated.

The US government now lives in its own, strange, insulated world.

(2) The United States is the most militarily aggressive country on the planet, followed closely by Israel. I am aware of no other contenders.

Some of this combativeness is obvious—attacking Iraq for no good reason, occupying Afghanistan, threatening Syria and Iran, attacking Lebanon by proxy, bombing Somalia, putting troops in the Philippines to hunt Moslems. The US is also looking for trouble with Venezuela, threatening North Korea, moving to “contain” China (Doesn’t a container need to be bigger than its scontents?), embargoing Cuba, pushing into Central Asia, increasing the military budget, and pushing NATO ever closer to Russia. (How stupid can you get? Very. Stay tuned.), And the Pentagon now has Africom, African Command. Africa is now America’s business.

(3) Powerful domestic hostilities grip the United States. Maybe you have to be outside of it really to see it. I live in Mexico. You can go for…well, five years and counting, without hearing angry talk about this or that group. In America, women hate men and men are getting sick of American women. Blacks hate whites hate Hispanics. “Affirmative action” engenders intense hastily that doesn’t go away. It isn’t the normal friction found in any country. It is serious antagonism quashed by federal force.

And the black-white-brown thing has very real potential for getting nasty. This we don’t talk about.

(4) A curious state fear prevails in America, but it is a governmental creation, a calculated manipulative Disneyland. Perhaps soon we will have Terror Mouse.

In Germany, at the age of nine, I saw something on television that horrified me. It was a table lamp with a shade that looked like parchment. It had been made from the skin of a Jewish person. Disturbed by the sight of the lamp I began to wonder: what is it that makes people rob human beings of their skin? Where were the others that could have prevented this? In later years I learned that the German government had done countless other despicable things, and like many members of my age cohort I asked myself what the Nazi experience had to do with my grandparents and what it meant for me. The conclusion I reached was this: A democratic government draws its power from the population it governs, and even a tyrannical government acts in the name of that population. For this reason citizens have a moral obligation to watch their government at all times and ensure that its power remains checked. If they fail to do so, they become tainted by its deeds. To avoid becoming implicated, citizens must inform themselves. There is no right not to know.

Years passed, and I moved to the United States. On September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, I was a doctoral student at American University in Washington, DC. I was there when the university’s population of Arab students realized that they were unwelcome and decided to continue their studies in their home countries or in Europe. I shared their fear when my Arabic name led to the shut-down of ticketing computers at Ronald Reagan Airport. When the Afghanistan war began I reminded students that many civilians would die. Some responded with hate mail. This silenced me, and when the Iraq war started, I decided to ignore it.

Four years later I teach college students the politics of the Middle East. By now most Americans are convinced that the idea to invade Iraq was a bad one. Analysts point to strategic miscalculations that have taken place: the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was exaggerated, because he did not have weapons of mass destruction. Usama Bin Laden, who had long been banned from Iraq by a jealous tyrant, is now establishing a foothold in Mesopotamia. The plan of establishing a model democracy in the heart of the Middle East is doomed, because the country’s religious and ethnic groups are sliding into civil war. As Iraq disintegrates, Iran is turning into a regional hegemon, threatening U.S. interests in the region.

Washington’s pundits, politicians, and bureaucrats, point fingers at each other, deflecting responsibility for the invasion from themselves towards their counterparts. As they do so, the various mistakes that were committed prior to the war are coming to light. The government and its neoconservative allies were war hungry. The CIA did poor research. Journalists that supplied the Washington, DC, “beltway bubble” with news swallowed information that came from the White House without checking alternative sources. Members of Congress forgot the lessons of the Gulf of Tonkin and yielded decisions over war and peace to the president. Citizens failed to demand of their leaders and their media that they provide good analysis.

Despite the fact that the Iraq debate brings mistakes to light, it leaves me with the impression that I am stuck in a bad movie, one that never gets at the real storyline. This impression is based on two observations. First, even though Americans debate the negative consequences of the war, their overriding concerns are largely self-serving. While average Americans are troubled by the cost of war, professional analysts are worried what this war will do to America’s status as the world’s superpower. The burden which the invasion has imposed on Iraqi civilians is a non-issue. Second, public discussion is marked by the latent claim that Iraqis are to blame for the failure of America’s military ambitions. It appears that this nation is mocking Iraqis twice ­ by failing to see the misery which it has inflicted on them and by attributing guilt for this misery to them.

Let me elaborate on these two points, starting with the idea, at home in numerous Internet blogs, that Iraqis are to blame for their fate. The logic of the argument goes as follows: The U.S. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in a well-intentioned effort to liberate the country from a tyrannical oppressor, enabling the people to take charge of their own fate and create a democracy. But Iraqis are refusing to do so. Instead of shaking the hands of those who came to save them, they are slapping their wrists. Thus, the liberation of the country “went wrong” because Iraqis do not want freedom.

When I discuss this claim with students, I bring up the following counterfactual. Assume that some benign power had concluded that Los Angeles was sitting on a large oilfield and that the L.A. municipal government was crudely suppressing its residents. The benign power invades, obliterates the government, the police force, the domestic infrastructure, and then waits for people to lead a better life. Only, that does not happen, because L.A.’s street gangs realize that amidst the institutional breakdown power can be grabbed by those who are willing to fight for it long enough. Chaos engulfs the city, and residents are murdered on a regular basis. What is the problem here? Is it that the citizens of Los Angeles don’t like freedom? Most who hear this example would answer in the negative. But if we concede that desire for freedom has nothing to do with what is happening in L.A., then why do we believe that Iraqis are to blame if their society goes up in flames?

Since 2003 inhabitants of Baghdad have been facing daily explosions and the killing of relatives. Gradually they are developing a historical record of injuries their families have suffered at the hands of their religious others. This record creates anger at Sunnis, Shiites, and perhaps even the foreign country that came and brought pandemonium. As the murders continue, even those who are usually quite apolitical will be drawn into the vortex of civil war. This, however, does not change a simple fact. Iraqis did not choose to have their government institutions overthrown. It was America that made this choice for them, and if anybody is to be blamed for the failure of this invasion it is America.

Let me now move to my claim that in their evaluation of the invasion, analysts and politicians fail to acknowledge the cost this war is imposing on Iraqis. For that I would like to look at the statements of those politicians who openly express the view that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. One such individual is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted against the 2002 Iraq war resolution. On March 19, 2007, she spoke in support of a bill that would tie spending increases for the war effort to a time table for troop withdrawal. According to her, what are the constituencies to whom this nation is indebted? For starters, Pelosi points to the high cost of the war, recognizing the burden that has been imposed on the country’s tax payers. Indeed, the burden is high. According to the National Priorities Project, the cost of war amounts to over $420 billion thus far. This is money which will not be spent on education or health care.

Pelosi also acknowledges the country’s debt to the troops. She recognizes that the armed forces have borne the brunt of the military campaign, and that 3,400 troops have lost their lives. And Pelosi is right. The women and men who are stationed in Iraq are paying a high price for the government’s poor decisions. They are left to sort out a mess that is hard to bring under control. Many of those who survive the war will not do so intact, suffering either physical injuries or emotional trauma. To these individuals Pelosi expresses her gratitude. She salutes them for their courage, their patriotism, and their sacrifice. Then she goes on to say: “The debt which can never be repaid is to those whose lives have been lost in the war, and as a nation, we mourn them.”

Well, the number of those whose lives have been lost is far greater than 3,200. It includes more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians who were either killed by coalition military action or by local insurgents. To put this tragedy in perspective, imagine two thousand shootings of the kind Virginia Tech experienced. But even though Iraqis bear an enormous burden, Pelosi does not refer to them when she says that the nation mourns those whose lives have been lost. Why is this? I believe the reason lies in the fact that Iraqis cannot vote in federal elections.

It is hard to accept that Americans mourn only Americans. All those who die deserve recognition, because they are human beings and have the right to live. A nation that views itself as a role model for the rest of the world must do better than inflicting suffering on others and then either blaming them for their misfortune or ignoring it entirely. It is time that members of this nation become aware of their moral obligations and take responsibility for what their government does in their name. As a first step in that direction we should stop viewing the war as a costly experiment that has gone wrong. Let’s treat it as the catastrophe that it really is.

As everyone except for a dwindling band of Bush supporters now knows, the US is in a terrible situation in Iraq from which it cannot extract itself. For Bush and Cheney, their own pride and delusion are more compelling than US casualties, the destruction of Iraq and its people, and the inflaming of sectarian strife and anti-American violence throughout the Middle East.

Congress is complicit in the great strategic blunder. Republican flag-wavers led Americans like lemmings into the abyss. The Democrats have already abandoned the electorate that gave them Control of Congress six months ago in the false hope that the Democrats would corral the White House Moron and lead America out of the abyss.

Like the Republicans, the Democrats serve the few special interest groups that benefit, or believe that they benefit, from the war. By now we all know who these groups are: the oil industry, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby, AIPAC. This contrived war, based on lies and deception, serves no other interest.

There is no longer any question whatsoever, not a single sliver of doubt, that Americans were deceived into this disastrous war. The President of the United States lied to the American people, as did the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Undersecretary of Defense, as did every neoconservative in the Bush administration, think tanks, and media.

The fact that the American people were lied to and deceived does not absolve them from blame. The lie was transparent, the logic nonexistent, the true facts available and easy to discover.

America failed, because the American people failed. The American people failed, because their self-righteousness and their hubris made them easy saps for deception.

Even now after five years of a disastrous policy, Republicans cannot accept the facts about the US invasion and failed occupation of Iraq. At the recent “debate” between Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina, US Representative Ron Paul dared to tell the truth. Rep. Paul said that our difficulties in the Middle East are “blowback” from our government’s determined attempts to exercise hegemony over the Middle East.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani, a person who sunk so low as to frame innocents while serving as US Attorney in order to boost his name recognition , played the self-righteous card to extreme. How dare Ron Paul suggest that US policy toward Muslims has anything whatsoever to do with attacks on the US! With all the outrage he could muster, Guiliani asked Rep. Paul “to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

The thunderous applause from the Republican audience to Guiliani’s put-down of the only honest person present underlines that the Republican Party is incapable of leadership to end a futile and lost war that under international standards is a war crime, an unprovoked naked aggression based entirely on lies, deception and a secret agenda.

At other times, the Republican audience applauded in support of torture and greeted John McCain’s protest against the practice with cold silence.

In the opening years of the 21st century the Republicans have made it clear that they are willing to sacrifice the US Constitution and Bill of Rights in order to wage “war against terrorism.” This willingness makes the Republican Party a more dangerous threat to Americans than Muslim terrorists. Muslim terrorists cannot destroy our country’s reputation, trash our civil liberties and wreck our system of accountable government, but the Republican Party has done a thorough job of it.

The Democratic Party is complicit in the Republican Party’s crimes, but unlike the Republican electorate, the Democratic electorate does not support the occupation, the domestic police state measures, and the Bush administration’s decision to send more combat troops to Iraq. Although none of the current frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination are independent of the special interests that benefit from the war, it might still be possible for a Democrat to emerge who will represent the Democratic electorate instead of the special interests.

Republican support for Bush’s contrived war against Iraq has diminished the Republican party. Intelligent and decent people have abandoned the party, which has morphed into a Brownshirt Party with which fewer people are willing to be associated. The diminished Republican ranks will make it difficult for the party to steal any more elections.

The press dispatches bring the news; it belongs to the Astute Class, the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than two decades.

“A nuclear reactor will allow it to navigate without refuelling during its 25 year of service. Since it makes its own oxigen and drinking water, it can circumnavigate the globe without needing to surface,” was the statement to the BBC by Nigel Ward, head of the shipyards.

“It’s a mean looking beast”, says another.

“Looming above us is a construction shed 12 storeys high. Within it are 3 nuclear-powered submarines at different stages of construction,” assures yet another.

Someone says that “it can observe the movements of cruisers in New York Harbor right from the English Channel, drawing close to the coast without being detected and listen to conversations on cell phones”. “In addition, it can transport special troops in mini-subs that, at the same time, will be able to fire lethal Tomahawk missiles for distances of 1,400 miles”, a fourth person declares.

El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper, emphatically spreads the news.

The UK Royal Navy declares that it will be one of the most advanced in the world. The first of them will be launched on June 8 and will go into service in January of 2009.

It can transport up to 38 Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes, capable of destroying a large warship. It will possess a permanent crew of 98 sailors who will even be able to watch movies on giant plasma screens.

The new Astute will carry the latest generation of Block 4 Tomahawk torpedoes which can be reprogrammed in flight. It will be the first one not having a system of conventional periscopes and, instead, will be using fibre optics, infrared waves and thermal imaging.

“BAE Systems, the armaments manufacturer, will build two other submarines of the same class,” AP reported. The total cost of the three submarines, according to calculations that will certainly be below the mark, is 7.5 billion dollars.

What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build 3 thousand polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.

Cuba is currently training thousands of young people from other countries as medical doctors.

In any remote African village, a Cuban doctor can impart medical knowledge to any youth from the village or from the surrounding municipality who has the equivalent of a grade twelve education, using videos and computers energized by a small solar panel; the youth does not even have to leave his hometown, nor does he need to be contaminated with the consumer habits of a large city.

The important thing is the patients who are suffering from malaria or any other of the typical and unmistakable diseases that the student will be seeing together the doctor.

The method has been tested with surprising results. The knowledge and practical experience accumulated for years have no possible comparison.

The non-lucrative practice of medicine is capable of winning over all noble hearts.

Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.

We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.

We cannot forget that for centuries, and until recently, England was called the Queen of the Seas. Today, what remains of that privileged position is merely a fraction of the hegemonic power of her ally and leader, the United States.

Churchill said: Sink the Bismarck! Today Blair says: Sink whatever remains of Great Britain’s prestige!

For that purpose, or for the holocaust of the species, is what his “marvellous submarine” will be good for.

Democrats talked tough on trade to win a majority. Now they’re poised to enter into a deal with Bush and his cronies that not one labor, environmental, small business, public health or consumer group supports.

Just 100 days after the Democrats rode into Washington on a fair trade mandate, shock has morphed into rage over last Thursday’s surprise announcement by the Bush administration, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Ways and Means and Finance Committee Chairs Charles Rangel and Max Baucus, and a coterie of New Democrats and CAFTA 15’ers of a “Deathstar Deal” on trade. The deal could facilitate passage of various awful, pending Bush “free trade agreements” (FTAs), not to mention the danger it may pose to Democrats who go along with its terms. (See here and here for the blow by blow.)

Not one labor, environmental, small business, public health or consumer group supports the deal. Huge corporations praised it — they see it as essential to the passage of more corporate trade agreements. Among these monied voices was the Chamber of Commerce president, who celebrated the deal’s unveiling with a statement in which he said he was psyched about “assurances” he had received that the deal’s labor provisions “cannot be read to require compliance” with international labor standards.

Why would Democrats pass a politically poisonous trade deal with the Bush administration instead of launching their own proactive trade agenda? Why not propose a forward-looking strategy that could satisfy public demand for new trade rules that tackle the stability-threatening trade deficit, stagnant wages and other urgent problems?

Most Democrats are asking the same question. The Deathstar Deal was negotiated in secret, legal texts were not made public, and it was abruptly announced without warning to most Democrats or Democratic base groups.

Reaction from the majority-making House Democratic freshmen, key Democratic members and labor and other party constituents concerned with trade ranged from stunned to horrified. Former Teamster President Jim Hoffa summed up what many were thinking when he said that the Deathstar Deal “sells out American workers” and that his union “will fight like hell to oppose this shortsighted agreement.”

A growing group of American activists and politicians are on a mission to end our Cold War-era embargo on Cuba. They believe that business, not isolation, is a better way to change governments.

“Don” Albert Fox, a stocky Floridian who talks in a hushed, confidential tone, has his own custom cigar bands and a retired master cigar roller in Havana who keeps him well stocked.

The tiny labels contain a Cuban flag and an American flag, representing the friendships that Albert A. Fox, Jr. has been carefully nurturing since about 2000.

In the late 1990s Fox tried to take his aging mother to Cuba, her birthplace. The U.S. government denied them permission to travel there.

Since that first denial, the Tampa political operative has been to Cuba more than 60 times. He’s met with President Fidel Castro on nine of those visits and has contacts at many levels within the Cuban government.

And he knows his cigars.

Fox fancies Cuban shirts, because they have more pockets. To hold cigars. Every time I saw him, he had fat ones, long ones, sweet and smelly ones sticking out of every pocket. He handed them out everywhere. Slipping one from a pocket, his head bowed, he offered them slightly concealed.

“You smoke cigars?” he growled.

Occasionally he had one in his mouth. A glass of Bucanero, the best Cuban beer, in one hand.

Fox is among a small but growing clique of activists in the United States who are on a mission to end our Cold War-era embargo on the Communist-run nation just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

Their foot soldiers include U.S. politicians like Idaho Gov. C. L. “Butch” Otter, the most recent in a string of state officials who have visited Cuba on what are generally billed as trade missions.

“They’ve gone to Cuba to sell grain, and then once they’re there, they see that we’re in the middle of one of the biggest foreign policy screw-ups in our history,” said Phil Peters, an expert on Cuba at the Lexington Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C.

Otter first visited Cuba in March 2003 with the Lexington Institute as a congressman. I traveled to Cuba in April to cover the Idaho governor’s fourth trip to the island.

“We’re doing the exact same things that we did in the ’50s when we cut Cuba off and threw them into the arms of the Russians,” Otter told me, riding in the front of an air-conditioned Havanatur bus. “We’re isolating ourselves from them, we’re not talking, we’re not doing business deals, we’re not exchanging products, thereby exchanging values. We don’t have to agree with everything they do. But understand it.”

Cuba is not an easy place to understand.

A recent story in the Miami Herald, citing a dozen people in positions to know, asserted that Washington “is now largely ignorant of what is happening within the inner circles in Havana as Cuba undergoes a transfer of power” from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul.

And as I prepared for my recent trip, I got a not-so-subtle message that Cuban spin doctors are weary of Norteamericano reporters coming down to the island to speculate on the impending implosion of Caribbean Socialism.

The question often asked is, what will happen when Cuba opens up? But the growing coalition of Congressional bedfellows who oppose the embargo, like to remind us that it is not Cuba that is closed. It is the United States.

WHAT KIND OF TANK?

On my last night in Cuba, an older European woman who has lived there most of her life asked me about think tanks.

She wanted to know if it was “tank” as in fish tank or as in army tank.

I was momentarily stumped.

Is the growing support in places like Idaho for normalized relations with Cuba a result of thoughtful humanitarian motivations (aquarium) or an imperialistic bent (M1 Abrams)?

Folks like Peters at the Lexington Institute and libertarian-minded politicos like the Idaho governor are not exactly the type of people you’d expect to be doing the bidding of socialist stalwarts like Fidel Castro. Not if there isn’t anything in it for them, or at least for the economy.

“I’m not a fan of Communism at all,” Peters told me. “I would hope that the Cubans could find their own way toward a more open society with political and economic freedom.”

Idaho’s Governor Otter, who sold french fries all over the world for Simplot International before entering the political sphere, is no fan of Communism either.

While the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons known as “Complex 2030.”

Only days before the fifth anniversary of September 11, President George W. Bush addressed military officers in Washington to warn that nuclear-armed terrorists could “blackmail the free world and spread their ideologies of hate and raise a moral threat to America.”

This alarmist vision was accompanied by the White House’s release of “A National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,” which painted a picture of a “troubling potential WMD terrorism nexus emanating from Tehran.” The administration is building the case for war against Iran — a job made easier by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent announcement that Iran can now enrich uranium on an industrial scale — despite the fact that many Iran-watchers and nuclear experts consider their claims of enrichment capacity to be an overblown boast.

This is not the first time the “no-nuclear-weapons-for-you” ploy has been used to lay the groundwork for a war. On Oct. 7, 2002, while making the case for regime change in Iraq, President Bush said: “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Yellow cake, aluminum tubes and histrionics about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities followed … all of which were challenged at the time, and have turned out to be completely fabricated. And, when not grinding the axe of pre-emptive war as counter-proliferation strategy, the administration periodically raises the specter of nuclear terrorism, in the form of dirty bombs and suitcase-sized warheads.

But while the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons. Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the United States is allocating more funding, on average, to nuclear weapons than during the Cold War.

The Bush administration is pumping this money — more than $6 billion this year — into renovating the nuclear weapons complex and designing new nuclear weapons. Such hypocrisy is one of the main obstacles to nuclear arms reductions because it runs the risk of shattering the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in which the nuclear-armed states pledged to begin the process of disarmament if the non-nuclear states opted not to pursue the deadly technology.

The centerpiece of the administration’s move toward developing a new generation of nuclear weapons is “Complex 2030,” a multiyear plan introduced last April by the National Nuclear Security Administration (the semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons program).

Complex 2030 calls for the construction of new or upgraded facilities at each of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s eight nuclear weapons-related sites throughout the country. The plan also calls for building a new nuclear weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), inside the old warheads. The program was conceived in response to concerns that the cores of existing nuclear weapons could be wearing out and need to be replaced. But RRW development has gone much further than that.

The Department of Energy (DOE) notes in its summary of Complex 2030 that one of the major goals of the program is to “improve the capability to design, develop, certify and complete production of new or adapted warheads in the event of new military requirements.” In short, while the Bush administration has publicly stressed reductions in nuclear weapons, it is working to produce new, more usable nuclear weapons.

Three small steps forward

As a candidate for president in 2000, and during his first months in office, Bush suggested that the United States should significantly cut its nuclear arsenal. In his first address before a joint session of Congress, the new president went so far as to pledge: “We can discard Cold War relics and reduce our own nuclear forces to reflect today’s needs.” He followed through on this promise with the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which calls for reducing the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals from 6,000 each — the limit established under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty — to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads each over a 10-year period.