The Rag Blog

With over half of America’s 1 million active and reserve soldiers enlisted as teens, the military is luring kids as young as 13 using a PR machine that would make Joe Camel proud.

Congratulations: You have lived long enough to cringe at the bad decisions you were seduced, dared, stoned, bullied, or inspired into making as a teenager.

Thousands of America’s children, however, are not so lucky. Almost 600,000 of America’s 1 million active and reserve soldiers enlisted as teens. The military lures these physiologically immature kids with a PR machine that would make Joe Camel proud.

While the age of legal and cultural adulthood can vary, science is now able to determine the physiological markers of maturity. A recent study headed by Jay Giedd of the National Institutes of Health using MRI scans shows that the brain of an 18-year-old is not fully developed, with the limbic cortex-brain structures, the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex still undergoing substantial changes.

As of March 31, the U.S. military included 81,000 teenagers. Its 7,350 17-year-olds needed parental consent to enlist, and only this April were all barred from battle zones.

But the military aims even lower, marketing itself to children as young as 13 with multimedia videos, school visits and cold calls to teens’ homes and cell phones. In Junior ROTC, kids get uniforms, win medals, fire real guns and play soldier, while adults trained in psychological manipulation steer them toward the army. The Army’s JROTC website lists such motivating activities as “eating at concession stands.”

A mature prefrontal cortex, “the area of sober second thought,” is vital not only to deciding whether to enlist, but also to choices made under the stress of deployment and the terrors of combat. But the prefrontal cortex, “important for controlling impulses, is among the last brain regions to mature,” according to Giedd, and doesn’t reach “adult dimensions until the early 20s.”

Teenagers’ brains simply lack the impulse control that can prevent a lifetime of regret, psychological and physical disability, and preventable deathstheir own, their fellow soldiers’ and those of civilians.

The child soldier problem Is global and so is America’s part in it. More than 300,000 children around the world, some as young as seven, serve as soldiers, or, in the case of girls, as military sex slaves. The State Department reports that 10 countries are violating international treaties against child soldiers. Washington provides military assistance to nine of these outlaw nations: Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Uganda.

The reason the United States and other militaries target children is their need for cannon fodder, coupled with the vulnerability of youth. In 2002, almost half of Marine recruits were 17 or 18. A Pentagon survey found that “for both males and females, propensity [to enlist] is highest among 16- and 17-year-olds.” That “propensity” quickly declines with age.

A 2004 Pentagon database listed the number of 16- and 17-year- olds who applied for active service enlistment at 69,000 and 18- year-olds at 73,000. By 19, the count had dropped to 49,000 and by age 24 had plummeted to 9,700.

The Department of Defense (DoD) spends more than $4 billion a year on recruiting, with $1.5 billion for advertising and maintaining the recruiting stations staffed by more than 22,000 recruiters. Much of that money goes to convincing children to become soldiers.

“Supporting The Troops” And Suppressing A National Discussion

Of all the slogans that are used to stifle opposition to America’s aggressive foreign policy, the most infamous is “Support Our Troops.” At once after dispatching its massive force across the Atlantic, the American “public relations industry” threw this phrase into the public forum. [1] A scheme undoubtedly contrived for the effect it would have, the American public began probing itself for those who did not “support the troops.” The intended effect of suppression took root and all discussion about America’s fighting force was off the table. A national discussion about the composition, effectiveness, or readiness of America’s armed forces was, therefore, absent. It was a three-pronged plot to asphyxiate opposition, divert people’s attention, and drum up support for the war policy.

Accordingly, those who feared being accused of not “supporting the troops” became subservient to an empty slogan; a slogan that was supposedly a verbal display of admiration for those who volunteered to put their lives on the line so that others did not have to. [2] The population became immersed in a squabbling match, which continues today with no end in sight, about who “supported the troops” and who did not. Even more, Jingoists came out of the woodwork and slapped magnetic ribbons on their vehicles with the empty, suppressive slogan, “Support Our Troops,” to show their devotion to keeping their mouths shut about their nation going to war. It was a genius plan with impeccable timing. However, out of all the consequences—intended or unintended—to have come out from this ruse, one of the most disastrous has been the suppression of a national discussion about the reality of America’s “all-volunteer” fighting force.

Economic Forces Behind The “All Volunteer” Fighting Force

Undoubtedly there are many patriotic individuals who seek to genuinely defend the United States. Hence, they choose to join the armed services. However, not all of the men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces are enlisted by choice. In fact, a large portion is not. Though the media figure heads would have people believe otherwise, with their talking-points about the “all-volunteer” fighting force, many people do not join the armed services because they want to; they join because they have to.

The United States, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, stands as “the most unequal among advanced industrialized nations.” [3] The gap between the rich and poor in America is enormous with a “scale of poverty among the poorest… comparable to that [found] in parts of the Third World.” [4] The domestic economic system, which has been immensely restructured in the past seven years, is currently running at full capacity to benefit “a tiny minority,” while the general population is feeling the effects of “downward mobility.” [5] In March the Commerce Department reported that “the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record, with data going back to” the year of when the Great Depression began. [6] It also noted that the “share of national income captured by corporate profits, in contrast, was at its highest level on record.” [7] With massive corporate profits and huge tax cuts for the rich that have redistributed the country’s wealth in a way never before seen, working wages have steadily “stagnated or declined.” [8] The proliferation of “[l]ow-wage jobs, houses under foreclosure, and the inability to afford food and medical care” has led to experiences of plight across the spectrum. [9]

The priorities in the “New American Century” are obvious; the swelling poverty rate says it all. [10] The proportion of “Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high,” as “millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line.” [11] Moreover, “the number of severely poor Americans” has grown more than “26 percent” since 2000; millions are living in severe poverty. [12] It is no wonder that the United States has the “second worst newborn death rate” in the developed world. [13] That is, equal to that of Malaysia. [14]

If all this was not enough, the Center for Disease Control recently released a report titled “Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, January – September 2006.” It concluded that at the time of the interview nearly 45 million people of all ages were uninsured, 31 million had been uninsured for more than a year, and 55 million had been uninsured for at least part of the year prior to. [15] Hence, not only is a steady amount of the population going without healthcare, there is also a steady fluctuation of individuals being able to acquire “partial coverage” part of the time.

Education And Enlistment

In February the New York Times reported that “the most recent test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the national report card,” showed “that American 12th graders are… performing worse in reading” than they have in the past ten years. [16] Moreover, “performance in reading has been distressingly flat since 2002 and only about 35 percent of 12th graders are proficient in reading.” [17] Hence, “a majority of the country’s 12th graders have trouble understanding what they read fully enough to make inferences, draw conclusions and see connections between what they read and their own experiences.” [18]

According to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, approximately “1 in 3 high school students in the Class of 2006 [did] not graduate.” [19] In California alone, the “graduation rate dropped to [a] 10-year low… as a third of the Class of 2006 left without a diploma,” according to Department of Education numbers. [20] If this was not enough, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publication, National Review, recently reported that a study conducted by Michigan State University political scientist Jon D. Miller found that “216 Americans are scientifically illiterate.” [21] The report noted that this is a dangerous situation for a democratic society “that assumes a baseline of citizen knowledge,” where only “a cadre of elites knows and understands the essentials of the science that underpins [its] civilization. [22]

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, emphasizes “testing rather than education.” [23] Inquiry and discovery, the heart of human progress, is greatly lacking in the classroom. Requirements for teaching the youth how to do, instead how to think, are abundant in the curriculum. Educators around the country have been persistent in pointing out that the act’s concentration on standardized assessment is part of the problem in the plight of the public school education system, the dumbing-down of new generations of Americans, and dwindling graduation rates. [24] Yet, the current administration claims it to be a policy for the improvement thereof.

All together, Americans are facing an economic downward spiral and an ever increasing struggle to survive and feed their families. Moreover, young, poorly educated Americans (by way of legislation), with or without a high school diploma, are facing an unforgiving, fast-paced, technology-based society and have very limited options and/or no direction. Hence, enlistment appears to be the only viable option. In other words, they are forced to volunteer for the “all-volunteer” fighting force, as it provides relief from the despair and uncertainty they face. The “modest but steady wages, the guaranteed housing allowance, the solid retirement plan and the health benefits of the armed forces” is appealing when the rest of society is moving “in the opposite direction.” [25]

The Power Differential And Recruitment

The armed forces is comprised of many individuals “who commonly join up to advance themselves” in light of the dismal alternatives presented to them. [26] These alternatives include: “difficult job searches, little or no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education, and expensive higher education.” [27] Hence, there is eventual enrollment, attributable to miniscule prospects in the civilian world, by “those to whom other channels of advancement are often blocked.” [28]

Knowing this, divisions of recruiters are dispatched by every branch of the armed forces to scour the country in search of those looking to escape the depressing alternatives before them. Hence, this is where the funneling of those less fortunate, ignorant, and lost into the armed forces begins. At malls, sporting events, community gatherings, residences, and public school grounds recruiters disseminate their message of the “benefits” of “volunteering.” Additionally, millions are spent on a public relations campaign and creative ways to lure people, especially the youth, into signing up. [29] Pro-war films, commercials, decorated t-shirts, toys, video games, and Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps are used to make enlistment appealing and life in the armed forces a place where one can be all one can be in substitution for a world where one seems like one is nothing. [30]

Some have been keen to point out that “despair is the most powerful force driving” movements within American society that promise better alternatives. [31] Conscription is no different. Facing blocked avenues and having a “deep pessimism about the future,” individuals are forced to turn towards the offered benefits and “financial security” of the armed forces. [32] Hence the use of “creative ways” to draw in, even re-draw, recruits amid a war that is “stretching ranks to their limits” and pushing America towards imperial collapse. [33]

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because they’re opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

Last week, a majority of Iraqi lawmakers demanded a timetable for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave their country. The very next day, the Al Fadhila party, a Shi’ite party considered moderate by the (often arbitrary) standards of the commercial media, held a press conference, in which they offered a 23-point plan for stabilizing Iraq.

The plan addressed not only the current situation in Iraq — acknowledging the legitimacy of Iraqi resistance, setting a timetable for a complete withdrawal of occupation troops and rebuilding the Iraqi government and security forces in a non-sectarian fashion — but also the challenging mission of post-occupation peace-building and national reconciliation. It included provisions for disbanding militias, protecting Iraq’s unity, managing Iraq’s natural resources, building relationships with other countries based on mutual interest and the principle of non-intervention in domestic issues, and healing the wounds of more than 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and foreign occupation.

An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition. More significant even than proposals made by Iraqi political parties are those put forth by the country’s armed resistance groups — the very groups that have the ability to bring a halt to the cycle of violence. Comprehensive plans have been offered by the Baath party that ruled Iraq for three generations, The Islamic Army in Iraq and other major armed resistance groups and coalitions. The plans vary on a number of points, but all of them shared a few items in common: the occupation forces must recognize them as legitimate resistance groups and negotiate with them, and the U.S. must agree to set a timetable for a complete withdrawal from Iraq. That’s the key issue, but Iraq’s nationalists see it only as the first step in the long path to achieving national reconstruction and reconciliation.

But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

Last year, a comprehensive, 28-point proposal for stabilizing Iraq was offered by the nascent Iraqi government itself after long meetings with different Iraqi groups. According to local polls and political leaders, most Iraqis believed it was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel — the plan was attractive to the vast majority of the public, even those Iraqis affiliated with violent resistance groups. But the plan wasn’t acceptable to Washington, and was watered down so as to be unrecognizable under U.S. pressure.

Paul Wolfowitz’s departure from the World Bank signals the end of an ideological era in Washington

As Tony Blair was bidding farewell to President George W Bush in the Rose Garden on Thursday, the World Bank was preparing to kick out Paul Wolfowitz as president. Allies to the left and right in the Iraq war were falling by the wayside that day.

Was he responsible for Blair’s departure from office, Bush was asked. There had to be a reason why a prime minister who had never lost an election was being dumped. “Could be . . . I don’t know,” the president mused above the distant chant of war protesters outside the White House gates.

And what did he make of Wolfowitz’s likely resignation? “I respect him a lot and I’m sorry it has come to this,” Bush said, leaving the World Bank head to his fate.

If Bush and Dick Cheney, his vice-president, are the last men standing with responsibility for the Iraq war it is only because they are protected by their four-year terms of office. One former Bush stalwart told me: “If we had a parliamentary system, Bush would have lost a vote of confidence and have resigned by now.”

Away from the Rose Garden the funeral cortege for the fundamentalist Rev Jerry Falwell was being assembled in the heart of Bush country in Lynchburg, Virginia. The portly 73-year-old televangelist had done his utmost to assemble the coalition of conservative Christians that went on to provide Bush with two presidential victories. Now he is dead and the government sustained by his followers is looking more and more like a corpse.

The writer Christopher Hitchens, a friend of Wolfowitz and foe of Falwell, says: “The main noise in Washington right now is that of collapsing scenery. The Republican party is in total disarray. They’ve been dropping their most intelligent people over the side while the presidential candidates are all outbidding each other to be nice about the revolting carcass of Falwell.”

Wolfowitz, the cerebral neocon, and Falwell, the braying theocon, had nothing in common personally. Indeed, Falwell blamed “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians” for provoking the 9/11 attacks, an explanation uncomfortably close to the views of the Taliban. But the unlikely alliance between their two movements provided the brains and the brawn behind Bush. Now the neocons have been ousted, one by one, from their positions of influence and trust while the Republican party base is desperately thrashing around for a successor to Bush that it can back in 2008.

The cleavage between the two marks the end of an era in which Bible Belt conservatives became the surprise champions of radical nation-building in the Middle East in the hope of crushing terrorism and halting the march of militant Islam. After Bush, such reforming zeal is unlikely to be repeated.

The fall of Wolfowitz is already entering the annals as a morality fable for the Bush administration in which the arrogant, narcissistic former Pentagon official and a handful of his cronies were foisted on an unwilling international institution until it finally found a way to spit them out. By this reckoning, Wolfowitz’s appointment as president of the World Bank in 2005 was an “Up yours” similar to the way the Iraq war was imposed by Bush against the wishes of the international community – with predictably dire results.

According to Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan and a persistent critic of the Iraq war: “Wolfowitz has demonstrated a penchant for cronyism and for smearing and marginalising perceived rivals as tactics for getting his way. Indeed, these tactics are typical of what might be called the neoconservative style.”

Capital and the state of all three countries of the North American Free Trade Agreement have worked together to push down wages and working conditions, undermine the social safety net, and privatize anything that could be turned into a source of profit. The aim of both NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership – the project of “Deep Integration”) is to constitutionalize the rights of capital and undermine the rights of workers and the public. By incorporating Mexico into the geography of continentally integrated production, capital has been able to lower its wage bill and increase its power over labour. Relocation and the threat of relocation has been a powerful tool in forcing concessions on flexibility, wages, and working conditions.

Workers and unions have not effectively developed strategies of continental-wide solidarity and or fight-back. There have been some efforts in that direction in terms of solidarity with specific struggles, worker to worker exchanges, increased union contacts. A coalition of Mexican unions has now proposed a strategy of struggle that could open up the door to a more class-wide and continental approach to union and workers’ struggles. While the initial proposal focused on the minimum wage, it could be broadened to include the needs of the unwaged poor as well as other rights of workers – the right to a job, the right to safe conditions of work, the right to housing. A continental fight-back around class-wide demands could reinvigorate the labour movements in all three countries. The article below focuses on the Mexican proposal and labour movement. In addition to describing the proposal, we put forth a description and analysis of Mexican unions and their role in Mexico’s deep and ongoing crisis. Mexican workers are faced not only with a neoliberal assault on their rights and standards of living but also with an increasingly brutal and repressive state veiled in a corrupt and thin electoral process.

The Mexican Coalition

A coalition of progressive Mexican unions, democratic currents in other unions and popular movements, such as the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO),have made a bold proposal for a continental workers’ struggle to raise the minimum wage in all three countries, limit the work day to eight hours, and enforce a ban on child labour. In Mexico, it is a response to the dramatic fall of real wages and the beginning of a fightback against the deepening neoliberal assault promised by the new, fraudulently elected President Calderon. The coalition campaign as the Jornada Nacional y Internacional Por la Restitución del Salario y Empleo (National and International Campaign for the Restoration of Wages and Jobs). It believes that the battle can only be won and consolidated on a continental scale. If the minimum salary and wages are raised in one country, those companies that can simply relocate to those areas where wages remain lower will do so. The floor has to be raised in all three countries

The coalition is aware that a minimum wage increase in the U.S., without an increase in Mexico, will simply increase the incentive for companies to move to Mexico. They want jobs in Mexico but not at the expense of job loss in other countries and starvation wages in Mexico. They feel that these three minimum demands create the basis for a common struggle in all three countries. And while they feel the struggle should start in the three NAFTA countries, they want to spread it later to include all of Latin America and become a global campaign.

Beyond Borders: A Call for Solidarity

This proposal is a call from workers in the South to workers in the North to engage in a joint struggle against the corporations and governments that seek to play them off against each other in order to continue the downward slide of wages and living and working standards everywhere. NAFTA is part of the neoliberal assault on workers in Canada, Mexico and the United States. This assault on workers is the major part of the reason that over ten million Mexicans have been forced to leave their homes and families to work in the U.S. as the only means to survive. The proposal seeks to unite workers – Mexican, US, Canadian, Quebecois; white, Latino, and Black; those with stable and those with precarious employment, those with unions and those without, those with legal rights and those without – in a common struggle that will unite workers in all three countries. Success will bring real and desperately needed gains in the short run while building the bases for an international workers movement in the longer run. The campaign entailed by such a proposal seeks to move beyond solidarity as support for other peoples’ struggles and toward solidarity as a common struggle.

The minimum wage in Mexico has fallen in real purchasing power by 75% in the last thirty years. During the presidency of Vicente Fox alone from 2000-2006, it fell by 22%. Ten million workers, 24% of the economically active population, make the minimum wage or less. Fifty million Mexicans live below the poverty line. Of these, 30 million live on 30 pesos per day ($3 US), 10 million live on 22 pesos daily, another 10 million on less than 10 pesos daily. In order to buy what is officially defined as a basic household basket, a worker would have to work 48 hours daily! As well, the minimum wage affects vast layers of workers receiving more than the minimum wage as many collective agreements and labour contracts are formally or informally tied to changes in the official minimum wage.

Hey, aren’t we the most exceptional nation in history? George Bush and his pals thought so — and they were in a great American tradition of exceptionalism. Of course, they were imagining us as the most exceptional empire in history (or maybe at the end of it), the ultimate New Rome. Anyway, explain this to me: Among all the exceptional things we claim to do, how come we never take credit for what may be the most exceptional of all, our success of successes, the thing that makes us uniquely ourselves on this war-ridden planet — peddling more arms to Earthlings than anyone else in the neighborhood? Why do we hide this rare talent under a bushel? In the interest of shining a proud light on an under-rated national skill, I asked Frida Berrigan to return the United States to its rightful place in the Pantheon of arms-dealing nations. Tom

After all, what does a drug dealer do? He creates a need and then fills it. He encourages an appetite or (even more lucratively) an addiction and then feeds it.

Arms dealers do the same thing. They suggest to foreign officials that their military just might need a slight upgrade. After all, they’ll point out, haven’t you noticed that your neighbor just upgraded in jets, submarines, and tanks? And didn’t you guys fight a war a few years back? Doesn’t that make you feel insecure? And why feel insecure for another moment when, for just a few billion bucks, we’ll get you suited up with the latest model military… even better than what we sold them — or you the last time around.

Why does Turkey, which already has 215 fighter planes, need 100 extras in an even higher-tech version? It doesn’t… but Lockheed Martin, working the Pentagon, made them think they did.

Venezuela is changing. Fast. No other word captures the speed and magnitude of change as well as that weighty word–‘revolution.’ This is indeed the word used by many of the Venezuelans I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing during ten days in March. Venezuela is undergoing a ‘Bolivarian’ revolution. But what does ‘Bolivarianism’ entail?

Contrary to the image often portrayed in the foreign media, Chavez has gone overboard in seeking to include as many as possible in the Bolivarian state. He has time and again extended an olive branch to his enemies.

To be honest, Zhou Enlai’s quip about the results of the French Revolution—that it is ‘too early to tell’—is doubly applicable to Venezuela. Radically different constituencies, political visions and potential futures are today co-existing more or less harmoniously within the dramatic process of change. This is perhaps inevitable. But some of the wide ranging ambiguity about the future direction of Bolivarianism has to do with Chavez’s crucial strategic choice in favour of peaceful social change. Contrary to the image often portrayed in the foreign media, Chavez has gone overboard in seeking to include as many as possible in the Bolivarian state. He has time and again extended an olive branch to his enemies.

For example, immediately after the failed coup against him, his first act was to guarantee the constitutional rights of the coup leaders, none of whom have been harmed. Likewise, he has consistently avoided using military and police forces under his command to repress the opposition, and had been exceedingly cautious towards foreign companies and investors. Some of his strongest supporters therefore consider Chavez excessively soft. The ideological message of Bolivarianism is straddling this society — deeply divided by class — with a strong Venezuelan and pan-latinoamerican nationalism. The ambiguity is patently visible in the street iconography of Caracas, which combines the faces of the aristocratic liberal Simon Bolivar and the radical communist Che Guevara, both sharing the landscape with huge billboards of fashionable young women advertising beer.

Yet if the future is foggy, the present is dramatically clear. Under pressure from Venezuela’s poor, on whose support Chavez’s political survival depends, the government moved decidedly leftwards over the course of the last few years. This leftward move consists in two processes: democratization and redistribution.

First, redistribution. Having wrestled control of the national oil company from the old oligarchy, Chavez redirected a portion of Venezuela’s significant oil revenues to new social projects, called missions, each targeting a specific social privation. The bulk of the resources were earmarked for non-cash benefits such as education and health. But government policies have also helped more people to move out of the informal economy and take formal jobs, affecting a significant rise in cash wages for the poorest workers. An international chorus of snickers erupts whenever these social spending programs are mentioned. Most completely miss the point. Is there corruption? Inefficiency? Probably. But by relying on the army, the national oil company, and ad hoc communal organizing rather than on the traditional state bureaucracy, the social missions manage a level of efficiency that is quite stunning.

U.S. occupation troops forced their way into the offices of the Antiquities Department with its chief denouncing the move as “a violation.”

In a statement to Azzaman, Abbas al-Hussaini, said the raid was the second in a week. Earlier a force of four U.S. military vehicles had forced its way into the department’s offices.

“This action is a violation of the Iraqi ancient heritage,” Hussaini said.

The department offices are adjacent to the Iraq Museum which was looted shortly after U.S. invasion troops entered Baghdad.

The department faces an uphill battle to protect Iraqi ancient sites of which there are more than 10,000 archaeologically significant ones in the country.

Illegal digging is reported to be taking place at some of the most famous Mesopotamian metropolitans such as Nimrud and Khorsabad in the north and Ur and Borsipa in the south.

At least 10,000 pieces of Iraq Museum treasures are still missing following the museum’s plunder and looting as U.S. invasion troops entered Baghdad.

Baghdad, May 19, (VOI) – The Iraqi interior ministry will call on all staff from security agencies during the time of the former regime to appear at the ministry’s institutions and police stations, “otherwise they will be dealt with in accordance with the terrorism law,” an official source said.

“The decision to bring back the old security staff includes those who worked in intelligence, public security and special services, except those who have reached the age of retirement,” Maj. General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, the interior ministry’s national command center chief, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
“Security staff outside Iraq will have to refer to the country’s consulates and interest sections in 90 days, and those inside the country have to refer to the interior ministry in 60 days,” added Khalaf.

The interior ministry official affirmed that those “who fail to report to the security organizations in the country, during the mentioned period of time, will be considered involved in acts of hostility against the Iraqi people.”

GORDON Brown will remove all British forces from Iraq before the next election under a plan to rebuild support among disillusioned Labour voters.

Scotland on Sunday can reveal the Prime Minister elect is working on a withdrawal plan that could see troop numbers slashed from 7,000 to as few as 2,000 within 12 months.

If implemented, the strategy would culminate in total withdrawal no later than spring 2010, the date by which Brown must go to the country to seek his own mandate.

Policy under Tony Blair involved keeping a small force in Iraq for many years to come. But it emerged last night that President George Bush has been briefed by White House officials to expect an announcement from Downing Street within Brown’s first 100 days in power.

Progressives should think twice before rejoicing over Wolfie’s departure.

When Paul Wolfowitz’s name was put forward to become president of the World Bank in 2005, I wrote a piece entitled: “Top 10 Reasons Why Paul Wolfowitz Would Make a Good World Bank President”. As he gracefully steps down from that job, I believe that history has proven me right. Consider the following:

1. He personally helped address the nagging problem of unequal pay for women by giving his “female companion” a $47,000 raise.

2. This past week, he diverted Bush cabinet officials from fighting the Iraq War, spinning Alberto Gonzales, and figuring out a way to invade Iran by keeping them on the phone to foreign governments to defend his proud record.

3. He weakened the Bush administration’s Iraq War brain trust by bringing other key neo-conservative bureaucrats from the Pentagon with him to run the Bank and badger its staff.

4. He buttressed the “Coalition of the Willing” (the brave countries that backed Bush’s invasion of Iraq) by promoting unqualified people from those countries into numerous top positions at the Bank.

5. He managed to convince governments of the world’s eight most powerful countries to give the Bank key global leadership role in the fight against climate change while the Bank continued to be the world’s largest subsidizer of fossil fuels.

6. He made the difficult concept of corruption real to ordinary people.

7. He unified the World Bank staff against a common enemy.

8. He took up so much of The Washington Post the day after tendering his “resignation” that Paris Hilton’s sentencing got pushed to page three of the “Style” section.

9. His scandal drew attention to three decades of terrific work by World Bank critics on everything from the environment to worker rights to family planning to the irony of someone who makes nearly $400,000 offering advice to those who make less than a dollar a day.