The Rag Blog

Few notice huge shift towards globalization as frothing masses distracted by climate change debate

05/06/07 “Infowars” — – In a sweeping move that has garnered surprisingly little attention this week the United States and the European Union have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership that will see regulatory standards “harmonized” and will lay the basis for a merging of the US and EU into one single market, a huge step on the path to a new globalized world order.

The BBC reported from the Summit in Washington on Monday:

“economic council” to push ahead with regulatory convergence in nearly 40 areas, including intellectual property, financial services, business takeovers and the motor industry.

Skipping over what the fall out from a single Western market will be, the BBC simply announced “The aim is to increase trade and lower costs.” before moving swiftly on to analyse what this means in terms of global warming.

While the masses are being whipped up into a never ending frenzy over climate change at every given opportunity, hardcore political actions that will affect the lives of everyone on the planet in the here and now are being skated over with little or no attention being paid to them.

The proponents and architects of a one world order have worked long and hard behind the scenes for a long time pushing a gradual erosion of national sovereignty via a harmonization of all areas of life, economic, social, cultural and environmental.

Such harmonization and elimination of diversity is the only way to maximize the profit of the few at the expense of the many, while maintaining tight controls over society as a whole in order for a long continuation of that status quo.

The global corporate elite are the only ones who will benefit from essentially wiping out the free market and eliminating economic competition across nations.

The EU has long been used as a tool for such harmonizing globalization and has now reached the point at which it has become a supranational federal government for Europe. Over the years, what was originally sold as a simple free trade treaty has slowly been built from the bottom up into an all encompassing monolithic authority over the entire region.

The areas it now seeks to dominate also include public health, social policy, transport, justice, agriculture, fisheries, energy, economic and social cohesion, the environment, internal and external trade, and consumer protection.

It has recently been highlighted that European globalists such as Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Angela Merkel are seeking to implement by stealth areas of the EU constitution regardless of its blanket rejection by voters. Senior British Cabinet sources have warned that they are also pushing hard for Brussels to be given a full-time unelected president, who would serve a five year term and speak as the voice of Europe on the world stage.

It is commonly accepted that reforms to strengthen the European Parliament, scheduled to be implemented before 2009, could undermine the ability of member states to opt out of EU laws, as Britain does at present, effectively ending national sovereignty.

In their important history of the EU, The Great Deception, British authors Christopher Booker and Richard North, concluded that the 27 member nations now entangled in the union have ceded their sovereignty in a carefully planned stealth operation. They grudgingly credit european globalists with accomplishing “a slow-motion coup d’etat: the most spectacular coup d’etat in history.”

The authors of The Great Deception summarized the effect of the Treaty of Rome: “Thus did the central deception of the whole story become established. From now on, the real agenda, political integration, was to be deliberately concealed under the guise of economic integration. Building Europe was to be presented as a matter of trade and jobs.”

In addition dissidents and outcasts such as Vladimir Bukovksy have warned that an elite plan has long existed whereby the EU would be hijacked and transformed into a Soviet style Socialist superstate that would eliminate the individual nation state’s power and create a governing body with no accountability or direct representation.

The Italian media compare Nicolas Sarkozy to Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the fascist Alleanza Nationale party. Sarkozy has shown to be greatly influenced by the Nazis’ ‘eugenic’ theory of ‘superior race’. It is also revealed that Sarkozy was involved in violation of international humanitarian law concerning immigrants. If elected, Sarkozy will polarise France, incite hatred and divisions, and return France to a violent imperialist power.

With 85 per cent of French electorate – the highest in generations – voting in the first round of the French elections on April 22, Sarkozy’s right-wing Union for Popular Movement (UMP) party won 31.10 per cent of the vote, ahead of Ségolène Royal of the “Socialist” Party at 25.85 per cent. François Bayrou of the Union for French Democracy (UDF) party won 18.55 per cent of the vote, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist and xenophobic National Front won 10.51 per cent. The decline in Le Pen’s popularity is due to Sarkozy’s appeal to Le Pen voters. Le Pen was understandably furious, and accused Sarkozy of stealing “my ideas and my votes”. Because the French Constitution requires that a candidate receive an absolute majority of votes in order to be elected president, the results mean a run-off on May 06 between Sarkozy UMP and Royal’s Socialist Party for the French presidency.

In its recent article “Le Vrai Sarkozy” (The Real Sarkozy), the French weekly Marianne (PDF) (20 April, 2007), sheds light on the man who wants to become France’s president. Marianne describes Sarkozy as an “egomaniacal, power-hungry demagogue” and a “danger” to French democracy. It adds that Sarkozy’s “folly is of the kind that in the past has served as fuel for the ambitions of many small dictators”. A member of Sarkozy’s UMP party told Marianne: “It is said that [Sarkozy] is narcissistic, an egotist. These words are weak. I’ve never encountered anyone with such a capacity to spontaneously erase from his surroundings everything that is not a reflection of himself. Sarko is sort of a blind man regarding the exterior world who can only look at his interior world. He looks at himself, he looks at himself constantly, but he can’t look at anything else”. It is a familiar portrait of past European dictators.

While the mainstream media like to portray Sarkozy as “a changed man”, Sarkozy is, in reality, an extremist in sheep’s clothing, who has attacked minorities, oppressed civil liberties and divided the French people.

Sarkozy’s main target is the marginalised Muslims and Muslim immigrants in France. Like other Western leaders, Sarkozy is banking on the current anti-Muslim plague – the contagious Islamophobia virus – in the West. With his rhetoric of false patriotism and negative nationalism, Sarkozy is playing on people’s imagined fears and tapping into a growing pool of hardcore racists. He has called for more Nazi-like repression against immigrants, and he is in favour of creating a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity.

As France’s Minister of the Interior in 2005, Sarkozy was involved in illegal deportation of immigrants and engaged “in expulsion quotas and charter flights”. Sarkozy’s attacks on French youth (mostly descendants of Muslim and non-Muslim African immigrant families) demonstrating against discrimination and police violence, calling them “scum” and “riff-raff”, and saying that they should be hosed with “Karcherized” (pressurized water). This brought him notoriety and revealed his real colour.

Furthermore, Sarkozy has made public that he is in favour of the Nazis’ ideology of ‘superior race’. (See Sarkozy’s interview in Philosopie Magazine conducted by French Philosopher, Michel Onfray).

If we look back at world history, we can see that Sarkozy is using a “blueprint” to turn France into a dictatorial (fascist) state. It is a frightening time when Western politicians conveniently forget the horrors of the Holocaust.

Furthermore, Sarkozy is one of the few European politicians to support the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ongoing murderous occupation of that country by the U.S. and Britain. His policy on Israel and the Palestinians is a U.S. policy; he has said he will “defend Israel’s security”, a deliberately constructed Western cliché designed to justify Israeli terror, Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and dispossession of the land and rights of Palestinian people. He has praised France’s imperialist past, including French crimes against humanity. His attitude to Turkey’s membership in the European Union (EU) is: “If you let 100 million Turkish Muslims come in, what will come of it?” Of course the comment is grossly misleading and Sarkozy is engages in fear mongering and spreading of the Islamophobia virus.

Contrary to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media, Sarkozy is not the “answer to France’s problems”. With 8.6 per cent overall unemployment (although a very high rate among youths), France is doing better than many countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “[M]ost French have jobs and love their security; all French love their efficient public transport, high-speed trains running like clockwork at 320km/h, efficient urban planning, fine health services and excellent state primary and secondary schools”, wrote Professor Charles Sowerwine, of Melbourne University and the author of France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society. It is evident why, in 2005, the French voted against the (neoliberal) EU constitution.

In addition, Professor Tony Judt of the Remarque Institute at New York University wrote in a New York Times op-ed (NYT, April 22, 2007) that: “French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the United States or Britain, and there are fewer poor people”. Professor Judt added: “Yes, France has high youth unemployment, thanks to institutionalized impediments to job creation. But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls”. If elected, Sarkozy will rollback all these achievements in favour of the ‘Neoliberalism’ that has infected other countries and destroyed many lives.

Finally, the highly respected Berliner Tageszeitung described Nicolas Sarkozy as a “tricolore George Bush who wants to impose on France a right-wing American ideology of neoconservativism”, an ideology characterised by perpetual violence, racism, violation of international laws and civil liberties.

If elected, Sarkozy will follow in George Bush’s footsteps. Sarkozy will compromise France’s independence, disregard international laws and civilised norms, and destroy constitutional freedoms. On May 6, the French people will have an important choice to make: to reject extremism.

The U.S. bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya and three days before a large anti-war action in Washington, January 27. Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN) was present in Nairobi, and after returning home asked out loud how ‘to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?’ Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, she suggested one reason I think valid: ‘Perhaps US-based organizations don’t have the proper analytical framework from which to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos, with ‘fundamental Islamic’ forces not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of ‘terrorists’.’ To that I would add: the major U.S. media’s role in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa. ‘The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the worst in more than a decade — but you’d hardly know it from your nightly news,’ wrote Andrew Cawthorne from Nairobi for Reuters last week. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now recently examined ABC’s, NBC’s and CBS’s coverage of Somalia in the evening newscasts since the invasion. ABC and NBC had not mentioned the war at all. CBS mentioned the war once, dedicating a whole three sentences to it. This, despite the fact that there have been more casualties in this war than in the recent fighting in Lebanon.

While the major U.S. print media has not completely ignored the conflict, its reporting is even shallower than its reporting was prior to the invasion of Iraq. As recently as last week, Reuters was still maintaining that Ethiopian troops had invaded its neighbor with the ‘tacit’ support of the United States. At least the New York Times has taken to describing it as ‘covert American support.’ Both characterizations obscure the truth. The attack on Somalia was preplanned and would never have taken place without being approved by the White House. We now know that the Bush Administration gave the Ethiopian government the go ahead to ignore its own imposed ban on weapons purchases from North Korea in order to gear up for the battle ahead. U.S. military forces took part in the assault.

‘US political and military alliance with Ethiopia – which openly violated international law in its aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a new shift in the way the US plans to have permanent and active military presence in Africa,’ wrote Kadane.

The planning for the invasion actually began last summer when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of the Somali government. It, too, was supposed to be a slam dunk. The U.S.- Ethiopian version of shock and awe was to swiftly bring about the desired regime change, installing the Washington-favored, government-in-exile of President Abdullahi Yusuf. Only a few days after their troops entered the country, Ethiopian officials said their forces lacked the resources to stay in Somalia and they would be leaving soon. At one point, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared – Bushlike – that the invaders’ mission had been successfully accomplished and two-thirds of his troops were returning home. That turned out not to be true. Three months later the Ethiopians are still in Somalia committing what numerous observers are calling horrendous war crimes.

‘The obviously indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in the capital has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, and forced over 200,000 more to flee for their lives.’ Walter Lindner, German Ambassador to Somalia, wrote to the country’s acting president last week. Displaced persons are ‘at great risk of being subjected to looting, extortion and rape – including by uniformed troops’ at a various “checkpoints.”

“Cholera – endemic to the region during the rainy season – is beginning to cut a swathe through the displaced,’ he continued, adding that attempts by international groups to offer assistance to the victims are being obstructed by militias who are stealing supplies, demanding ‘taxes’ and threatening relief workers.

On April 3, the Associated Press reported that a senior European Union security official had sent an email to the head of the EU delegation for Somalia warning that ‘Ethiopian and Somali military forces there may have committed war crimes and that donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them. I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have, through commission or omission, violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” the e-mail said.

In the meantime, the Bush Administration has worked hard to raise troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job. Promises were made, but with one exception, remain unfulfilled. In a telephone conversation, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised President Bush to provide between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia’s transitional government and train its troops. The Ugandans arrived but are said to have been largely confined to their quarters, refraining from taking part in the effort to crush the opposition. Meanwhile, the ‘Transitional Government’ and Ethiopian forces have been reported shelling civilian areas in the capital from the government compound they are supposedly guarding.

None of the reporters on the scene appear to have explored the question of why the other African governments have failed to send troops but I think the answer is obvious. They would be called ‘peacekeepers’ but would be called upon to inject themselves into a civil conflict on the side of an unpopular puppet government, something they are loathed to do.

Three months ago, I wrote in this space that ‘If the unfolding events in Iraq are any indication, what started out as a swift invasion and occupation could turn out to be a long and widening war.’ That was an understatement. As of this writing, about 1,300 people are reported to have perished in the fighting, over 4,300 wounded and nearly 400,000 have fled their homes.

Refugees trying to cross the Red Sea are reported drowning off the Somali coast.

“There is a massive tragedy unfolding in Mogadishu, but from the world’s silence, you would think it’s Christmas,” the head of a Mogadishu political think- tank told Cawthorne. ‘Somalis, caught up in Mogadishu’s worst violence for 16 years, are painfully aware of their place on the global agenda.’

“Nobody cares about Somalia, even if we die in our millions,” Cawthorne was told by Abdirahman Ali, a 29- year-old father- of-two who works as a security guard in Mogadishu.

And, just as in Iraq, the U.S. supported forces – the small army of the enthroned and very unpopular government and the invaders – are caught up in a civil war, set in motion by the invasion and occupation. In addition to the forces loyal to the overthrown Islamist government, the regime in power is opposed by the Hawiye, one of the country’s largest clans. A spokesman for the clan recently called upon ‘the Somali people, wherever it exists, to unity in the fight against the Ethiopians. The war is not between Ethiopia and our tribe, it is between Ethiopia and all Somali people,’ he said.

“For the major [world] leaders, there is a tremendous embarrassment over Somalia,” Michael Weinstein, a US expert on Somalia at Purdue University told Reuters. “They have committed themselves to supporting the interim government — a government that has no broad legitimacy, a failing government.

This is the heart of the problem. … But Western leaders can’t back out now, so of course they have 100% no interest in bringing global attention to Somalia. There is no doubt that Somalia has been shoved aside by major media outlets and global leaders, and the Somali Diaspora is left crying in the wilderness.”

Last week, during what was described as a lull in the fight, Ethiopian soldiers were moving from house to house in the capital Mogadishu, taking hundreds of men away by the truckloads to an uncertain fate. Meanwhile, the traumatized residents of the rubble strewn city were reported gathering up bodies, many of them rotting, for burial. ‘Most of the displaced civilians are encamped on Mogadishu’s outskirts, where the scenes are medieval,’ reported The Economist last week. ‘People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter.’

Martin Fletcher wrote in the London Times, April 26, about five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed many ordinary Somalis. ‘Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians.’

Last week the Washington Post reported that interviews it conducted in Ethiopia and testimony given to diplomats and human rights groups, ‘paint a picture of a nation that jails its citizens without reason or trial, and tortures many of them — despite government claims to the contrary.’

‘Such cases are especially troubling because the U.S. government, a key Ethiopian ally, has acknowledged interrogating terrorism suspects in Ethiopian prisons, where some detainees were sent after being arrested in connection with Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December,’ said the Post story. ‘There have been no reports that those jailed have been tortured.’ The following day, the paper reported, ‘More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia’s capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees — including a U.S. citizen — picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city, according to Ethiopian and U.S. officials who say the interrogations are lawful.’

History will probably record the Ethiopian government’s decision to team up with the U.S. Administration for regime change in Somalia as the height of folly. The country has enough problems at home. This was brought into sharp relief April 24, when forces of an ethnic- Somali separatist group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, raided an oil exploration facility, killing 74 people, including nine employees of a Chinese oil company. ‘As Much as China’s – and indeed America’s – ally Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, might like to be on top of security across the Horn, he is not always able to deliver,’ said the Financial Times editorially April 26. ‘His army is the region’s most powerful conventional force. But under his rule, Ethiopia is fraying again around the edges. Armed separatist groups are now changing tactics. Unable to match the army on the battlefield, the Ogaden National Liberation Front has chosen the spectacular to draw attention to its cause. Only recently, a separatist group in the north tried something similar, by kidnapping a group of British diplomats.’

‘Both horrific events can be attributed partly to fallout from Ethiopia’s messy intervention in neighboring Somalia,’ said the newspaper. ‘Initial battles last December were decisively in Ethiopia’s favor. But like the Americans in Iraq, the Ethiopians in Somalia were ill prepared for the aftermath. A growing insurgency has delayed the withdrawal of their troops, exposing the government to attacks at home. It has also inflamed tension among ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia, who fight for the ONLF.

‘Ironically, the Chinese workers killed near Ethiopia’s border with Somalia may have been victims more of Washington’s policy in the region than of Beijing’s. The US has actively backed Mr. Meles’s Somali adventure. In doing so it has undermined multilateral efforts to bring about peace.’

‘There are two main questions that Colonel Yusuf’s and Ethiopia’s western backers should now ask themselves,’ said the Guardian April 26. ‘What was gained by encouraging the Ethiopian army to topple the Islamic Courts? The US allowed Ethiopia to arm itself with North Korean weapons and also participated in the turkey shoot by using gunships against suspected insurgents hiding in villages near the Kenyan border. Washington was convinced that the Islamic Courts were sheltering foreign terror suspects. But how many did they get and what price have Somalis paid?’

‘America can be more heavily criticized for subordinating Somali interests to its own desire to catch a handful of al- Qaeda men who may (or may not) have been hiding in Mogadishu,’said The Economist. ‘None has been caught, many innocents have died in air strikes, and anti-American feeling has deepened. Western, especially European, diplomats watching Somalia from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya to the south, have sounded the alarm. Their governments have done little.’ Chatham House, a British think tank of the independent Royal Institute of International Affairs, has concluded, “In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors — especially Ethiopia and the United States — following their own foreign policy agendas.’

Actually, there is no more reason to believe the Bush Administration promoted this war, in clear violation of international law and the UN Charter, ‘to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men,’ than that the invasion of Iraq was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. What has unfolded in over the past three months, flows from much larger strategic calculations in Washington. The invasion and occupation of Somalia coincided with the Pentagon’s now operational plan to build a new ‘Africa Command to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed ‘Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda.’

When I first visited this subject shortly after the invasion, I quoted a 10 percent figure for the proportion of petroleum our country takes in from Africa and noted that some experts were saying the U.S. will need to up that percentage to 25 by 2010. Wrong again. Last week came the news that the U.S. now imports more oil from Africa than the Middle East, with Nigeria, Angola and Algeria providing nearly one-fifth of it — more than from Saudi Arabia. While the rulers in Addis Ababa claim the invasion was a preemptive attack on a threatening Somalia and the Bush Administration says giving a wink and a nod to the attack was only a chance to capture a few terrorist holed up in Somalia, for most of the media and diplomatic observers outside the U.S. it was another strategic move to secure positioning in the region where there is a lot of oil. On file are plans – put on hold amid continuing conflicts – for nearly two-thirds of Somalia’s oil fields to be allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. It was recently reported that the U.S. – backed prime minister of Somalia has proposed enactment of a new oil law to encourage the return of foreign oil companies to the country. Salim Lone, spokesperson for the United Nation mission in Iraq in 2003, now a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya, recently told Democracy Now: ‘the prime minister’s attempt to lure Western oil companies is on a par with his crying wolf about al-Qaeda at every turn. Every time you interview a Somalia official, the first thing you hear is al-Qaeda and terrorists. They’re using that. No one believes it. No one believes it at all, because all independent reports say the contrary.’

I spoke with Kidane last week and she allowed that the situation in Somalia might seem complex to many in the peace and social justice movements. However, she said it is impossible to overlook the parallel with the situation in the Iraq. ‘It’s aggression, that is undeniable, and the same language is being used to justify it,’ she said. Kidane is on target in insisting that the movements for peace and justice in the U.S. – and elsewhere – must take up the issue. The unlawful U.S.- Ethiopian invasion and occupation of that country and the accompanying human suffering and human rights abuses constitute a new – and still mostly hidden – war in many ways similar to that in Iraq. And, waged for the same reason.

The great liberator of Iraq was actually the hyena that cleaned out the nation.

Piece by piece, Halliburton over here, a corrupt company over there, we have heard various individual cases of overcharging and fraud by American firms in the reconstruction of Iraq. Last weekend, a Globe story connected some of the dots of corruption. Of $20.7 billion in Iraqi bank accounts and oil revenues seized by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the US-led invasion of Iraq, $14 billion was given out for reconstruction but tens of millions of dollars were unaccounted for. A year ago, an audit by the inspector general found no evidence of work done or goods delivered on 154 of 198 contracts. Sixty cases of potential swindles are under investigation.

Halliburton and its hundreds of millions of dollars of overcharges or baseless costs are well known. But millions more were taken by companies that promised to build or restore libraries or police facilities, or deliver trucks and construction equipment. Money was given to the puppet government with no follow-up. US government investigators can account for only a third of the $1.5 billion given by the CPA to the interim government and it appears that a substantial portion of the $8 billion given to Iraqi ministries went to ”ghost employees.”

Because of the way the United States set things up after the invasion, contractors are immune from prosecution by Iraqis. And even when firms are prosecuted, the millions of dollars in fines go to the US Treasury, not the Iraqi people. It amounts to two invasions. First the bombs. Then the banks.

This is robbery, not reconstruction.

It also amounts to yet another slow-motion lie by the Bush administration. The magnitude of the corruption brings into sharper relief the claims made by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz a month before the war.

The claims came from the same infamous testimony before the House Budget Committee where Wolfowitz said Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was ”wildly off the mark” for saying several hundred thousand troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq. Wolfowitz told the committee that the administration was ”doing everything possible in our planning now to make post-war recovery smoother and less expensive.”

Besides pooh-poohing Shinseki’s estimates, Wolfowitz said a Washington Post story that quoted administration officials as saying the initial invasion would cost $60 billion to $95 billion was also way off the mark. Speaking about such administration officials, Wolfowitz said, ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking – he or she knows what they’re talking about. I mean, I think the idea that it’s going to be eclipsed by these monstrous future costs ignores the nature of the country we’re dealing with.”

”It’s got already, I believe, on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports, which can finally – might finally be turned to a good use instead of building Saddam’s palaces. It has one of the most valuable undeveloped sources of natural resources in the world. And let me emphasize, if we liberate Iraq, those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them.”

”It is a country that has somewhere between, I believe, over $10 billion — let me not put a number on it – in an escrow account run by the United Nations. It’s a country that has $10 billion to $20 billion in frozen assets from the Gulf War, and I don’t know how many billions that are closeted away by Saddam and his henchmen. But there’s a lot of money there and to assume that we’re going to pay for it is just wrong.”

Wolfowitz was wrong on nearly every point, except for the idea that there was about $20 billion floating around Iraq to seize. It has been three years and all Iraq has become is a ”free-fraud zone,” according to one of the attorneys for whistleblowers in Iraqi swindles. Recently, the Army found that Halliburton had $263 million of exaggerated or unexplainable costs on a $2.4 billion no-bid contract, yet still paid Halliburton $253 million of the $263 million.

BAGHDAD — U.S. officers here say they are increasingly troubled by the high number of innocent Iraqis being detained and held — in some cases for many months — by the Iraqi army.

Several officers who serve as advisers to the Iraqis said at least half the people detained by the Iraqi army in Baghdad are innocent.

And the advisers say their close association with the units doing the detaining is placing the Americans on the horns of an ethical dilemma: On one hand, they are forbidden from taking unilateral action in order to free the prisoners; on the other hand, by not freeing innocent detainees being held by their close allies, they feel complicit in what some termed “a war crime.”

In at least one case, a U.S. officer received a letter of admonishment from a general officer after taking it upon himself to free 35 prisoners he knew had been wrongly detained.

All U.S. officers interviewed for this story also said that the practice of locking up people who have done nothing wrong is counterproductive, and directly contrary to the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual.

“In (counterinsurgency) environments, distinguishing an insurgent from a civilian is difficult and often impossible,” the manual states. “Treating a civilian like an insurgent, however, is a sure recipe for failure.”

U.S. and Iraqi army officers said the problems worsened March 1, when, as part of the new Baghdad security plan, the U.S. military transferred authority for running operations in Baghdad to the Iraqi military and the Iraqis assumed responsibility for detainees. Prior to March 1, U.S. officers down to the battalion level had the authority to order the release of detainees, according to a senior U.S. Army official in Baghdad.

Reasons behind detaining

U.S. officers see two main reasons why the Iraqi army detains so many innocents.

The first is what some termed the Iraqis’ “dragnet” approach of arresting all military-age males in the vicinity of an attack on U.S. or Iraqi forces, or of a large weapons cache at the time of its discovery by Iraqi troops.

Lt. Col. Steve Duke, leader of the U.S. military transition team of advisers for the 5th Brigade of the Iraqi army’s 6th Division, cited two recent examples of this dynamic at work.

In late March, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 10th Iraqi Army Division detained 54 men in Baghdad after an improvised explosive device attack, he said.

“If you were near the IED, or you could spell IED, you were detained,” he said.

It took “a couple of weeks” before the Iraqis released any of them, he said.

“The Iraqis are not good at field interviews … and there’s a perception that subordinate commanders do not have the authority to release, but they do have the authority to detain,” Duke said.

Authority to release any detainee rests with Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abud Ganbar Hashimi, who heads the Baghdad Operational Command, said Maj. Michael Philipak, a U.S. Army intelligence officer who advises the Iraqi army 6th Division.

The second reason cited by U.S. officers is that the Iraqi defense and interior ministries are drawing up lists of individuals to be detained and sending them down to brigade and even battalion levels of the Iraqi army, all based on “intelligence” that is never shared with either Iraqi commanders or their U.S. counterparts, according to American and Iraqi officers.

“In the old days — and now — we are the ones who create intelligence according to information we receive from sources,” said Capt. Amjad Abbas Hasson, intelligence officer for 3rd Battalion, 5th Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division.

May I interrupt the clamorous political debate raging in Washington over Iraq to set the record straight? Contrary to what his critics say, President Bush does have a timetable for ending the war. He plans to hand the disaster over to his successor at high noon on Jan. 20, 2009.

If Iraq is going to have an ugly ending, as it almost surely will, Bush is determined to see that it doesn’t happen on his watch, and there’s not much the Congress can do to foil him short of cutting off funds for the war, a step Democrats apparently are not ready to take.

Bush will keep asking for more time and money. As long as American forces are in Iraq, as long the fighting goes on, the war cannot be labeled a failure, at least in Bush’s mind. To admit defeat, to acknowledge that they blundered and destroyed a nation in the process, and maybe set the stage for even greater mayhem in the Middle East, is not the way of the swaggering pseudo-cowboy from Texas or his delusional and treacherous vice president.

Iraq is an immense human tragedy and major foreign policy debacle, and Bush’s troop surge only delays the terrible day when this fact must be faced. At this point, what happens in Iraq is far more consequential than what happens in Washington, and there is little reason to expect much good news from Iraq in the coming months. So far, the main result of the troop surge is a painful spike in U.S. casualties. It has not quelled the violence or moved Iraq’s sectarian factions closer to political reconciliation. There is no reason to believe the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, even if it wanted to, is capable of reaching a political accord acceptable to the minority Sunni insurgents, who are inflicting most of the U.S. casualties.

Other than the cost in American blood, does it really matter whether we start withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq on Oct. 1, as the Democrats called for in the bill Bush vetoed last week, or after the next presidential election? The outcome is likely to be the same – bloody chaos as sectarian factions slaughter each other and settle scores. Is postponing that awful day of reckoning worth the lives and the limbs of hundreds or even thousands more American soldiers?

The president talks about a “way forward” in Iraq; Democrats are talking about a way out of Iraq, and most Americans are with them. But Bush continues to defy both.

05/04/07 – – – BAGHDAD, May 2 (UPI) — As calls in the U.S. Congress grow for a scheduled troop withdrawal from Iraq, similar demands are escalating in Iraq’s National Assembly.

Some 133 Iraqi lawmakers from different political blocs, calling themselves the “free deputies,” signed a document demanding a scheduled withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational troops from their country, according to the Sadrist bloc in Parliament.

A legislator from the Sadrist bloc, Saleh al-Okaili, told reporters Wednesday that his group initiated the document ahead of a U.N. Security Council review on Iraq slated for next month. The Sadrist bloc, whose Cabinet ministers had resigned, represents members of a group led by Shiite maverick leader Moqtada Sadr, who has been calling for setting a timetable to end the U.S.-British occupation of Iraq.

Okaili said the memo signed by the lawmakers in the 275-seat Parliament would be handed over to the U.N. Security Council and its secretary-general, the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Iraqi government.

05/04/07 “ICH” — – And, like every other one since last you can remember, it’s gonna be an ugly morning.

One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits.

One day you’re gonna wake up and be furious at the monstrous tax burden you are carrying, a tab which accounts for fifty of the seventy hours you must work each week just to eke by. You might even figure out why your tax bill is so high. You might remember that the government you once supported shifted the tax burden from the rich onto people like you, and from the taxpayers of the time onto those of today. And that they borrowed money in astonishing quantities to fund their sleight-of-hand, so that you work thirty hours a week just to pay the interest on a mountain of money borrowed decades ago.

One day you’re gonna wake up in anger at the absurdly poor education your children are receiving. You’re gonna remember that it wasn’t always that way, that even after the military’s voracious appetite was temporarily sated, your country still managed to find a few bucks to at least educate a workforce. No more. And you’re gonna remember how you applauded when your educational system was twisted in to a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think.

One day you’re gonna wake up literally sick and tired. You’re gonna want treatment for your maladies but you won’t be able to touch the cost. You’re gonna wonder what you were thinking when believed your country had the best healthcare system in the world, even though it was the only advanced democracy in the world that didn’t provide universal care, even though it devoted fifty percent more of its economy than those other countries to pay for a system that left fifty million people uninsured, and even though there were massive layers of unnecessary and harmful private sector bureaucracy skimming hundreds of billions of dollars of profits out of the system in the name of free enterprise.

One day you’re gonna wake up too tired to go to work anymore. You’re gonna want to retire in dignity but will be left instead to laugh bitterly at the cruelty of that joke. And you’re gonna wonder what in the world you had been thinking voting for a president who’s primary goal was to allow Wall Street to raid Social Security, destroying what had once been considered the most successful domestic program in human history.

One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that it wasn’t so bloody hot, and that there weren’t so many diseases and species eradications and violent storms lashing the planet. And maybe you’ll even remember that you once supported a government that lied about the very existence of global warming – back when it might have been curtailed – a government that scuttled the barest remedy for the problem in order to protect oil company profits.

Venezuela’s decision this week to pull out of the IMF and the World Bank will be seen in the United States as just another example of the ongoing feud between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the Bush Administration. But it is likely to be viewed differently in the rest of the world, and could have an impact on both institutions, whose power and legitimacy in developing countries has been waning steadily in recent years.

Other countries may follow. President Rafael Correa of Ecuador announced last week that it was kicking the World Bank’s representative out of the country. It was an unprecedented action, which President Correa punctuated by stating that “we will not stand for extortion by this international bureaucracy.” In 2005, the World Bank withheld a previously approved $100 million loan to Ecuador to try to force the government to use windfall oil revenues for debt repayment, rather than the government’s choice of social spending.

This is the way these two institutions have operated for decades. With the IMF as leader, and the U.S. Treasury department holding veto power, they have run a “creditors’ cartel” that has been able to exert enormous pressure on governments over a wide variety of economic issues. This pressure has not only generated widespread resentment, but has also often led to economic failure in the countries and regions where the IMF and World Bank have had the most influence. Over the last 25 years Latin America has had its worst long-term economic growth performance in more than a century.

Venezuela also has specific grievances against the IMF, which are likely to generate sympathy in other developing countries with democratic, left-of-center governments. On April 12, 2002, just hours after Venezuela’s democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup, the IMF stated publicly that it was “ready to assist the new administration [of Pedro Carmona] in whatever manner they find suitable.”

This instantaneous show of financial support for a newly installed dictatorship – one which immediately dissolved the country’s constitution, general assembly, and Supreme Court – was unprecedented in the IMF’s history. Typically the IMF does not react so quickly, even to an elected government. It is no wonder that this move was seen in Venezuela and elsewhere as an attempt by the IMF to support the coup itself. Washington, which dominates the Fund, had advance knowledge of the coup, supported it, and funded some of its leaders – according to U.S. government documents.

In additions, Venezuela has not been happy with the IMF’s consistently under-projecting its economic growth in recent years, as the Fund has also done with Argentina. The IMF’s forecasts are widely used and can therefore influence investors.

But the resentment against the IMF and World Bank, and demands for change, are worldwide. The scandal over Paul Wolfowitz’s leadership at the World Bank, which is about to topple the Bank’s most unwanted president ever, is just the tip of the iceberg. Last month the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office stated that since 1999, nearly three-quarters of aid to the poor countries of Sub-Saharan Africa are not being spent. Rather, at the IMF’s request, it is being used to pay off debt and accumulate reserves. This is a terrible thing to do to some of the poorest countries in the world, who desperately need to spend this money on such pressing needs as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Venezuela’s decision is likely to strengthen the hand of developing nations within the IMF and World Bank who are demanding serious reforms. Right now the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has more votes in the IMF than countries representing the majority of the planet. The world’s developing countries, which bear the brunt of these institutions’ mistakes, have little or no voice in their decision-making. Venezuela’s move – and any other countries that follow – will show the IMF and World Bank that the option of quitting these institutions altogether is a real one.

Putting their personal lives on hold, women in the Mexican state of Oaxaca helped shut down the government, took over a TV station, and stood up to police violence.

“Everything is the movement,” says Patricia Jimenez Alvarado, looking at me across her kitchen table. “You don’t have a personal life anymore.” She leans her face into her open palms, and weeps.

Jimenez, in her mid-forties, is a thesis advisor at Oaxaca State University by profession. But the government of Oaxaca accuses her of being an “urban guerrilla.” Her house and car have just been broken into and searched. She regularly receives text-message death threats on her cellular phone. A warrant has been issued for her arrest. And for the first time in her children’s lives, she has missed their birthdays—several months ago she sent her children to live with her sister-in-law to keep them safe.

Sitting down with me for this interview is the first moment of calm she’s had since mid-June, Jimenez says. That’s when she and thousands of other women—many of whom had never participated in a march or rally before—orchestrated the takeover of the state television and radio stations and broadcast live their opposition to state violence. Their actions earned these women a place among Oaxaca’s most wanted activists, sought by the para-police gangs that serve the state government.

Roots of the protests

In the beginning, the civil disobedience in Oaxaca was not organized primarily by women. It began on May 22 as a teachers’ strike to demand higher federal and state education budgets. The striking teachers set up a protest camp in Oaxaca City, a tent city that filled the touristy town square and stretched out for blocks, housing tens of thousands of teachers from across the state.

In 2004, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, had been sworn in as governor under serious allegations of electoral fraud. But instead of mending bridges, he announced a policy of no tolerance for protests, even moving the state government offices into guarded compounds miles outside the city center.

Ruiz refused to meet with the teachers union or answer their demands. Then, at dawn on June 14, 2006, he sent state riot police using tear gas and helicopters to violently dismantle the striking teachers’ camp, leaving scores of men, women, and children injured.

The city exploded. Thousands, including Jimenez, took to the streets to help the teachers, tend the injured, and offer food and water. But to everyone’s surprise, these citizens went one step further—they counterattacked, retook the town square, and drove the police out of town.

This spontaneous rejection of police violence, along with the outpouring of support for the teachers, ignited a five-month civil disobedience uprising. It would put a half million people on the streets in marches and tens of thousands in protest camps across Oaxaca City, paralyze the state government, and send the governor into hiding.

To encourage people’s participation in developing strategies for long-term organizing, the teachers’ union called indigenous organizations, human rights groups, and local unions into an assembly. Together these groups formed the Oaxaca People’s Popular Assembly (APPO), which they opened to all who signed on to demand the ouster or resignation of Ruiz for ordering the police raid. The provisional leadership of the APPO was almost entirely male, with women relegated to lesser roles.

Meanwhile, back at the treasury

Undaunted, women formed neighborhood groups in order to join the APPO and participated in the marathon discussions that guided the protesters’ actions. When the APPO decided to launch a civil disobedience offensive on July 26—setting up camps around the state legislature, courts, and the governor’s offices to shut down all three branches of government—many women volunteered to set up camp outside the state treasury, a building low on the APPO’s priority list. There, during the first nights at their protest camp, they cooked up the idea of a women-only march on August 1.

The march drew some 5,000 women, all banging on pots and pans with meat tenderizers, ladles, and soup spoons. The raucous cacophony had the women so jazzed that when they reached their destination (the protester-occupied town square), they decided to keep going, to the state-owned television station, Channel 9. The only statewide local station, Channel 9 failed to report on the June 14 police violence and later presented the protesters as vandals and hooligans. At first the women demanded only an hour on television to tell their version of the events of June 14 and why they wanted Ruiz out of office. But Mercedes Rojas Saldaña, the station director, refused. The women asked for less time, then even less, but were repeatedly rebuffed. Finally, they walked past the director, with pots and pans in hand, and took over the station.

As Jimenez and the other women rounded up the station’s employees, several of her former students recognized her. One asked, “Teacher, what are you doing here?

“Well, taking over the station,” she said. “No choice.”

Another asked: “Teacher, why are you dragging us into this mess? Aren’t you an academic?

“And so?” Jimenez replied. “I’m also one of the people.”

Employees had taken the station off the air as the women stormed the office. Now the women scrambled to get the station back on the air before the police came to retake the station. Jimenez herself tried to figure out how to work the cameras.

But the police did not come. Instead, thousands of residents from the surrounding neighborhood flooded the streets to guard the station, taking over city buses and parking them across the street to block all approaching traffic.

One technician who knew Jimenez agreed to tell her where the antennas were and how to get the transmission going again if Jimenez would let her go. Jimenez told her, “Here there are no friendships and no privileges. Here we make the decisions in collective.” Then she led the employee off to meet with the other women and negotiated the release of all the employees—none of whom had been harmed in the takeover—in return for their help in getting the station back on the air.

Within three hours, for the first time in Mexican history, a protest movement occupied a state television station and broadcast live. Viewers saw a tight group of women without makeup or designer dresses, pots and pans still in hand, all facing the camera. Their message: if the media insist on airbrushing state violence from the news and distorting social protest into an “urban guerrilla” movement, then the people will take the media in order to tell their own story of suffering, police repression, and organizing social protests.

Moving forward

Meanwhile, from late August through November, the conflict escalated. The government attacked Channel 9, destroying the station’s antennas and knocking the women’s revolutionary media off the air. Plainclothes police officers and PRI party militants regularly opened fire on protestors and, over the course of 3 months, killed at least 16 people, including New York-based journalist Brad Will.

Protesters organized thousands of nighttime barricades across the city to prevent armed attacks. They also took over private radio stations to continue broadcasting their denunciations of state violence and to call for further protests to oust the governor.

On November 25, federal police cracked down on protesters after a small group began to throw rocks and fire bottle rockets at the police. The police rounded up and beat more than 140 protesters, then carted them off to federal prison in Nayarit, four states away. State and federal police patrolled the streets to grab organizers, and hundreds of people went underground. Jimenez cut her brown hair short, dyed it jet black, and sneaked out of town.

But two weeks later she was back to join a delegation of APPO protesters set to hold talks with the federal government and then to stage marches demanding the release of those taken prisoner on November 25. In December she helped organize another high-energy march and a free outdoor concert where the Oaxaca-born musician Lila Downs joined in singing Christmas carols retooled to denounce state violence.

“We have shown that women’s participation in these movements is fundamental,” Jimenez said.

On January 8, I saw Jimenez again. She was on the way to an APPO assembly meeting. “We have to endure! We can’t give up!” she said, her voice hoarse with a bad cold. “We can only go forward. There is no other way.”

Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol’ tie-dyers some respect

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.