The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON – President Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” long seen by much of the world as a shell for a largely U.S. operation in Iraq, is quickly becoming a coalition of the unwilling.

Even as Bush sends more American forces to Baghdad, longtime war ally Tony Blair is pulling out British troops. Denmark is leaving. Lithuania says it may withdraw its tiny 53-troop contingent.

Bush’s alliance is breaking up as opposition firms against the U.S. troop buildup – among the American and Iraqi people, in Congress and among Iraq’s neighbors and some former U.S. allies.

“There is no military solution to the sectarian and insurgent conflict in Iraq,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the U.S. should follow the British prime minister’s lead and start reducing forces.

The British announcement reverberated on the U.S. presidential campaign trail as well.

“I hope that since the president seems unwilling to listen to the results of the November election or to the new Democratic majority in Congress, that he would at least listen to someone who he has claimed has been his strongest ally in this effort,” Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said.

In its anxious search for energy security, the United States has embarked on a risky strategy to arm and train the militaries of oil-producing West African countries under the rationale of pursuing the Global War on Terror. Over the past 15 years, amidst widening crises in the Middle East and volatile petroleum markets, the U.S. has quietly institutionalized a West African-based oil supply strategy, closely focused on an “Oil Triangle” centered on the Gulf of Guinea. These policies are deeply flawed because they will serve to undermine America’s energy security even as they breed growing resentment and violence against U.S. economic and strategic interests.

In order to manage this policy, the U.S. Department of Defense just announced the establishment of an African military command—AFRICOM—to spearhead an “oil and terrorism” policy, which will oversee the deployment of U.S. forces in the area and supervise distribution of money, materiel and military training to regional militaries and proxies. Pentagon analysts and generals claim that vast “uncontrolled spaces” in Saharan and Sahelian Africa, which are said to include large portions of northern Nigeria, are rife with terrorists seeking to damage the United States, even though the evidence for such claims is woefully thin. Nevertheless, a $500 million “Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative” (TSCTI), which will tie African militaries to American policies, is in the works. Given the internal security problems often found in resource rich countries, it is much more likely that the newly-acquired skills and equipment will be directed against domestic opponents than global terrorists.

The contradictions of this policy are evident in Nigeria, which currently provides 10-12 percent of U.S. oil imports and serves as the cornerstone of the strategy even as it demonstrates its deeply-flawed reasoning. Since the end of 2005, the on- and offshore oilfields of the Niger Delta––the major source of the country’s oil and gas––have essentially become ungovernable as a site of on-going and violent contestation between local ethnic groups, oil corporations and the Nigerian government. This violence results in repeated reductions and shutdowns of oil, sometimes exceeding 500,000 barrels per day. Moreover, reports the World Bank, some 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil monies flow to one percent of the population, while 75 percent of the country’s people live on roughly one dollar per day. In other words, the United States is relying on increased oil production from the African Oil Triangle to reduce its dependence on Middle East petroleum, but could replace one set of insecurities with another.

02/21/07 “AP” — – Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud and drug trafficking among anti-terror cases in the four years after 9/11 even though no evidence linked them to terror activity, a Justice Department audit said Tuesday.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine were either diminished or inflated. Only two of 26 sets of department data reported between 2001 and 2005 were accurate, the audit found.

Responding, a Justice spokesman pointed to figures showing that prosecutors in the department’s headquarters for the most part either accurately or underreported their data — underscoring what he called efforts to avoid pumping up federal terror statistics.

The numbers, used to monitor the department’s progress in battling terrorists, are reported to Congress and the public and help, in part, shape the department’s budget.

“For these and other reasons, it is essential that the department report accurate terrorism-related statistics,” the audit concluded.

Fine’s office took care to say the flawed data appear to be the result of “decentralized and haphazard” methods of collection or disagreement over how the numbers are reported, and do not appear to be intentional.

Still, the errors led Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., to question whether the department had exaggerated the number of terror cases.

“If the Department of Justice can’t even get their own books in order, how are we supposed to have any confidence they are doing the job they should be?” said Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the department. “Whether this is just an accounting error or an attempt to pad terror prosecution statistics for some other reason, the Department of Justice of all places should be classifying cases for what they are, not what they want us to think them to be.”

Auditors looked at 26 categories of statistics — including numbers of suspects charged and convicted in terror cases, and terror-related threats against cities and other U.S. targets — compiled by the FBI, Justice’s Criminal Division, and the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys.

“The US economy is in danger of a recession that will prove unusually long and severe. By any measure it is in far worse shape than in 2001-02 and the unraveling of the housing bubble is clearly at hand. It seems that the continuous buoyancy of the financial markets is again deluding many people about the gravity of the economic situation.” Dr. Kurt Richebacher

“The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles.” Karl Marx

02/21/07 “ICH” — — This week’s data on the sagging real estate market leaves no doubt that the housing bubble is quickly crashing to earth and that hard times are on the way. “The slump in home prices from the end of 2005 to the end of 2006 was the biggest year over year drop since the National Association of Realtors started keeping track in 1982.” (New York Times) The Commerce Dept announced that the construction of new homes fell in January by a whopping 14.3%. Prices fell in half of the nation’s major markets and “existing home sales declined in 40 states”. Arizona, Florida, California, and Virginia have seen precipitous drops in sales. The Commerce Department also reported that “the number of vacant homes increased by 34% in 2006 to 2.1 million at the end of the year, nearly double the long-term vacancy rate.” (Marketwatch)

The bottom line is that inventories are up, sales are down, profits are eroding, and the building industry is facing a steady downturn well into the foreseeable future.

The ripple effects of the housing crash will be felt throughout the overall economy; shrinking GDP, slowing consumer spending and putting more workers in the growing unemployment lines.

Congress is now looking into the shabby lending practices that shoehorned millions of people into homes that they clearly cannot afford. But their efforts will have no affect on the loans that are already in place. $1 trillion in ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) are due to reset in 2007 which guarantees that millions of over-leveraged homeowners will default on their mortgages putting pressure on the banks and sending the economy into a tailspin. We are at the beginning of a major shake-up and there’s going to be a lot more blood on the tracks before things settle down.

The banks and mortgage lenders are scrambling for creative ways to keep people in their homes but the subprime market is already teetering and foreclosures are on the rise.

There’s no doubt now, that Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s plan to pump zillions of dollars into the system via “low interest rates” has created the biggest monster-bubble of all time and set the stage for a deep economic retrenchment. Greenspan’s inflationary policies were designed to expand the “wealth gap” and create greater economic polarization between the classes. By the time the housing bubble deflates, millions of working class Americans will be left to pay off loans that are considerably higher than the current value of their home. This will inevitably create deeper societal divisions and, very likely, a permanent underclass of mortgage-slaves.

A shrewd economist and student of history like Greenspan knew exactly what the consequences of his low interest rates would be. The trap was set to lure in unsuspecting borrowers who felt they could augment their stagnant wages by joining the housing gold rush. It was a great way to mask a deteriorating economy by expanding personal debt.

The meltdown in housing will soon be felt in the stock market which appears to be lagging the real estate market by about 6 months. Soon, reality will set in on Wall Street just as it has in the housing sector and the “loose money” that Greenspan generated with his mighty printing press will flee to foreign shores.

Every time I go to the United States (I have just returned from two weeks in Washington), I am astonished by the antic security, by the proliferation of admonitions and alarms and inchoate fear. Now it is illegal to carry toothpaste on airplanes. I find myself wondering: Is this just another spasm of periodic hysteria, like Prohibition, the Sixties, and a Commie Under Every Bed? Or is it calculated political programming?

Most of it impinges at best lightly upon reality. For example, measures for security at airports are largely useless—if their purpose is to increase security. Think about it. Time and again the public-address system warns that vehicles left unattended in passenger-loading zones “may be ticketed and towed.” Why? By the time anyone notices that the truck is unattended, by definition the driver will be somewhere else. He will certainly be able to walk a hundred yards before the tow-truck arrives—and push the button. Boom. In the case of a suicide bomber (which is what we are worried about, no?) it doesn’t matter anyway. Boom.

For that matter, at any airport you can drive up, load a hundred pounds of suitcases containing god knows what onto a baggage cart, and go into a crowded waiting area. Boom. You probably couldn’t get them onto an airplane. Why would you need to? Terroristically, killing two hundred people in the airport is as good as dropping an airliner.

Most of security is just theater. Over and over, the PA system tells you not to leave baggage unattended or it may be destroyed by security personnel. This doubtless serves to make legitimate passengers watch their luggage. Who cares? A suitcase full of bras and socks isn’t perilous. But none of this keeps a terrorist from leaving a baggage cart and walking for two minutes, far enough to be outside the blast radius.

No, I’m not giving ideas to terrorists. Everything in this column is obvious to anyone with a three-digit IQ.

It gets sillier. If you ride Metro, Washington’s subway, you will incessantly hear things like, “Passengers! Look up from your papers occasionally. Be alert! Report any suspicious behavior to Metro employees.”

Yeah, sure. As a security measure, this is worthless. Why? First, a terrorist would be careful not to look suspicious. Second, what is suspicious behavior on an urban subway? You’ve got rastas, Goths, spike-haired young in leathers, semi-derelicts, blacks from the slums, people from India, Guatemala, Morocco, drunks, stoners, people talking to Mars through the transmitters the CIA put in their teeth, and swarthy men speaking languages you can’t identify. What’s suspicious?

So how do report any of this? You could get off the train at the next stop, go up the escalators, and find the Metro kiosk by the exit gates. You find a bored guy inside waiting for his shift to end.

“Hey, I saw this suspicious guy on the train!” you say.

“Yeah? What was he doing?”

“He had a backpack, and he was looking around a lot like he was nervous, and I think he was sweating.”

When questioned about the peace process, or rather the absence of one, Israeli officials are fond of laying the blame on Palestinian divisions.

We don’t have a partner for peace, they say. The Palestinians don’t have a single address. We are willing to talk but whom should we talk to, was their favoured bleat.

In recent months, their mantra had the ring of truth. The military wings of Fatah and Hamas fought on the streets of Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Esmail Haniya were at odds. There were whispers that an all out civil war was in the cards.

But now that Fatah and Hamas have come together to announce a unity government that will represent most Palestinian factions, the Israelis and their US backers have acted predictably by imposing pre-conditions on their recognition of the new entity.

These are the recognition of Israel, the renouncement of “terror” and agreement to honour prior agreements between Israel and the former Palestinian leadership.

This set of conditions is a one-way street. We must ask ourselves who is terrorising whom, the occupier or the occupied?

Which party is most terrifying? The one with the F16s, the helicopter gunships and the tanks or the one with homemade missiles that more often or not fail to reach their targets?

As for the recognition of Israel and a commitment to honour previous agreements, this is implied in the Makkah Accord, brokered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and signed by Abbas and exiled Hamas leader Khalid Mesha’al.

But such subtleties aren’t good enough for Ehud Olmert and friends. They want total prostration. Total humiliation, when they just might hand the Palestinians a few crumbs. No guarantees, mind you.

It’s ironic, too, that Israel hasn’t abided by any of the agreements it is demanding the new unity government ratify, and neither has it adhered to decades of UN resolutions requiring it to pull back to pre-’67 borders and refrain from building illegal colonies.

This situation could be equated to a man whose home is taken over by squatters. The squatters have guns and the man has only stones. The squatters imprison and starve the man in his own basement and will only agree to talk about handing over one of the bedrooms when the man agrees to recognise the squatter’s rights to his home and throws away his rights together with his stones.

Unfortunately, when the man shouts for help he discovers that the police are firmly on the side of the squatters and even urge the squatters to make the man’s life as difficult as possible. When the man calls upon his friends and neighbours to come to his aid, they throw a little food over the wall now and again, and call out a few words of encouragement, hoping that the squatters and their friends don’t decide to call on them.

I’m sure that Israelis will object to being called squatters, but under international law they are indeed squatting on land occupied in 1967.

Following the 1967 war, the UN passed Resolution 242, under its Chapter 7 powers, calling for Israel’s withdrawal from “territories of recent conflict.”

Moreover, according to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, reaffirmed by the 1948 Nuremburg Tribunal, the acquisition of territory using military means is outlawed, while maintaining the integrity of international borders is enshrined in the UN Charter.

In this case, why on Earth should the Palestinians or anyone else recognise Israel’s right to exist on land it illegally grabbed in 1967?

Here’s one for the “stranger than fiction” department: Stand on any street corner in Alabama selling guns and dildoes, and guess which one can land you in jail for a year? You got it: Those deadly dildoes!

In a unanimous decision, the three judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on February 16th upheld a 1998 Alabama statute that outlaws the sale of devices used to stimulate human genitals. Instruments to blow out someone’s brains are perfectly fine. Sounds about right for a state with a rich history of slavery, lynchings and beatings of civil rights activists.

Alabama’s not the only state where you can’t buy a vibrator or cock ring at your favorite porno store. There’s also Georgia, Mississippi, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. Talk about a Hall of Shame.

‘Security Forces’ Rob Baghdad Academics (Sunday Times)

One of the most curious, and ominous, aspects of life in the Bush gang’s Babylonian satrapy has been the continual, unrelenting and clearly deliberate targeting of Iraq’s academics, intellectuals, technicians – basically, anyone who might be capable of independent thought and action, transcending the sectarian, ethnic and tribal cliques empowered by Bush’s aggression, and outside the control of the occupiers and their sycophants as well.

The sectarians, such as the Shiite death squads enthroned by Bush, want to get rid of the intelligentsia because they stand in the way of the fundamentalists’ desire to impose religious obscurantism on Iraqi society. In addition, many of the intelligentsia – though by no means all – are Sunni, owing to the prejudice in favor of Sunni advancement under the old regime. Meanwhile, certain factions of the Sunni insurgency (which contains its own religious fanatics) also target the intelligentsia in order to make the nation ungovernable under the occupation. Meanwhile, the Bush animus toward any independent thought that might challenge the murderous fantasies of the Leader is also well-known.

In other words, to be an independent thinker in Iraq, educated and capable of taking effective action in civic society – the supposed goal of the “liberation” for all Iraqis – actually makes one an avowed enemy of all the factions either deliberately empowered or inadvertantly loosed in Iraq by Bush, including the land’s most powerful faction: the White House, backed up by the U.S. military, which Bush has turned into his own private militia, serving the financial, political and ideological interests of his own little clique, at the expense of the peace, prosperity and liberty of the American people.

The new “surge” ordered by Bush has only accelerated this purging of the Iraqi intelligentsia, as the Sunday Times reports. The “sovereign” Iraqi government – whose security organs are in large part scarcely distinguishable from the Shiite death squads – are using the “crackdown” to ramp up the brain drain, harassing, robbing and beating academics.

But this is to be expected. As Arthur Silber succinctly notes, no good thing can come from America’s criminal enterprise in Iraq. Conceived in evil – in lies, in the lust for blood, loot and dominion – it can only breed more evil. And it will go on breeding evil, on scales large and small, for as long as it is allowed to continue. Silber’s conclusion is the whole and utter truth of the matter: “We should never have been there. Get out now. Make what reparations we can. If we have any remaining sense of decency at all, that is all we can do — and what we must do.”

Excerpts from the Sunday Times:

The security forces separated the men from the women and then ordered [Mohammad] Jabouri’s wife to give them a suitcase filled with jewellery and £20,000 in cash. When she argued they threatened to shoot her. Then they destroyed the furniture and broke the windows of the cars in the garage. “The same militiamen who used to raid our areas in the past are now conducting the security crackdown, using this as a chance to attack us further,” Jabouri said.

Later the same night, security forces raided a compound containing the homes of 110 university professors and their families. Professor Hameed al-Aathami described what happened: “They dragged us out of our beds as we slept with our wives and children, took us outside, bound our hands and blindfolded us. They beat, cursed and insulted us.”

Dr Salah Bidayat, the dean of the school of law, fired two shots from his licensed gun in the air to get the soldiers’ attention. “They caught him, lay him on the ground and proceeded to beat, kick and curse him in the most aggressive manner and when he explained we were teachers and professors they told him you are all a bunch of asses and terrorists,” Aathami said.

“They gathered all the men in the centre of the compound and proceeded to their homes, where they broke furniture, stole money, mobile telephones and jewellery as we sat outside listening to our women and children scream and cry,” he said.

“It was very hard for us to go through this. This is the security crackdown they have been bragging about. There is no such thing as a security plan; it is all an attempt to rid the country of the few remaining educated and decent people,” said Aathami, who is planning to leave Iraq as soon as he can.

Editor’s note: Jabria Jassim, an Elgin Community College chemistry professor, recently visited Baghdad to see relatives. She left Iraq years ago. Here is an edited essay on her observations.

Baghdad in 2007

This past December, I had a chance to visit Iraq for about two weeks. Previous to my travel, I was warned that landing at Baghdad’s airport is too dangerous and too risky, so I took a plane from Amman to Irbil, which is in the northern region. The majority of Irbil residents are Kurds. I found the city to be very peaceful, and the people there live “normal” lives. However, the living expenses for an outsider are very high due to the large influx of immigrants coming from Baghdad and a few other cities to the east and south of Baghdad where the violence is predominant. People who had lived in these areas either left their houses by choice or were forced to leave by the insurgents.

I stayed in Irbil for few days before heading to Baghdad. As I traveled across the land with some companions, we were stopped along the way at many checkpoints — some guarded by Americans and some by Iraqi soldiers. Tanks and artillery were on both sides of the highways so we all felt safe; but I was bothered by the reality of these so-called checkpoints. They either don’t check at all or the checking was not adequate. I heard comments from some travelers (Kurds, Arabs, and even foreigners) that these checkpoints were useless, and only there to slow the traffic.

The insurgents know this fact very well; so they continue to smuggle weapons and terrorists into Iraq from the neighboring countries. My gut feeling told me that it was too risky and too dangerous for the soldiers at the checkpoints to even peak into let alone to check inside cars and trucks.

What’s in Baghdad

At first sight, the city looked more damaged and brutally wounded, and more devastated than when I left it last year. Not a single hour passes without one hearing an explosion, a car bomb, or devastated women and children screaming for help. I saw people running from a suicide bomber and others trying to pull bodies from a fire. Sirens from ambulances and police cars and helicopters flying day and night all over the city all join in to create a constant roar of horrible noises.

My beloved Baghdad has a 9 p.m. curfew. The government-run power plants provide residential electricity one hour a day, but not every day. Private sources of electricity are available at very high rates so they are only for people who can afford the high rates. One source is a man located at the end of the block from where I’m staying. He runs a huge generator, and his deal is $100/month for four hours of electricity a day. If we remember that the average salary of an Iraqi college graduate is only $300/month, then we have to agree that the price is a little steep. Most of the people are jobless due to lack of security, the fear of kidnapping, and all the other atrocities being committed on a daily basis. Others buy their own generator run on either gasoline or benzene, which cost about $5/gallon. This is also sold by a private enterprise and the supplies are not always available. Therefore, people look for a few liters of fuel in the black market and pay double if not triple the cost.