The Rag Blog

There is something ludicrous about the attempt by the US military in Iraq to persuade the world that the simple but devastating roadside bomb or IED (improvised explosive device) is a highly developed weapon requiring Iranian expertise.

Here is the official police report of one IED attack. It reads: “At about 8.25am, 100 men of the X Regt with their colonel in charge, marched with their band from the military barracks at Y to their rifle range via fixed route. When they got to place Z a land mine exploded, killing three outright and wounding 22 others, three of these died shortly afterwards. The mine was connected to an electric battery by about 150 yards of cable. It is believed that there were only two men involved in carrying out this outrage.”

This is fairly typical of a roadside bomb. It might have happened in Iraq yesterday – except it didn’t. The IED in question exploded in the town of Youghal in County Cork on 21 June 1921. I happen to have read the Royal Irish Constabulary report on the incident, because I was born 29 years later about two miles away from the site.

IEDs have not changed much in the decades that followed. They have been used everywhere from Cyprus to Vietnam. They are cheap and easy to make, and can be detonated by a single person. They came as a nasty shock to the incoming US soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 because they were so well equipped to fight the Soviet army – American military procurement long ago detached itself from real conditions on the battlefield.

In early 2004 I met some US combat engineers, or sappers, charged with the lethal job of finding these bombs, which were nicknamed “convoy killers”. Because the Pentagon was in a state of denial about their very existence, the sappers had received no training in locating them. A sergeant told me that he had obtained with great difficulty an old but still valid US army handbook, printed during the Vietnam War, about IEDs. The book had not been reissued because to do so might appear to contradict the Pentagon’s line that Iraq was not like Vietnam.

The US Army is pretending that “explosively formed penetrators” are a new form of weapon which could only have been obtained in Iran. It claimed last week that the so-called EFPs had been supplied to the Shia militias and had killed 170 US troops. But the US has been primarily fighting a Sunni insurgency, and has had only intermittent clashes with Shia militiamen.

18 February 2007 – From a thriving middle income economy in the 1970’s and 1980’s, one third of today’s Iraqi population lives in poverty with more than 5 per cent living in extreme poverty, a new United Nations-backed study says.

Prepared by the Iraqi Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology with the support of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the statistics show that a high percentage of people in Iraq live under various levels of poverty and human deprivation despite the country’s huge economic and natural resources.

The policies applied to transform the Iraqi economy to a free market, such as the lifting of subsidies and the dismantling of state instruments, are exacerbating deprivation levels, UNDP said.

The study also highlights significant variations in living standards across the country, with the southern region in Iraq showing the highest level of deprivation, followed by the centre and then the north. Rural areas show three times higher levels of deprivation than urban areas, with the Baghdad area being the best in the country.

“This study will be an important addition to the toolkit of policy makers, development planners and practitioners” said UNDP Iraq Director Paolo Lembo.

The Democrats and Republicans who oppose Bush’s war in Iraq face a political quandary–pulling the plug on the war seems (or can be portrayed as) pulling the plug on the American troops before they’ve finished their mission there. But the mission there has become so complex, and so interwoven with other issues, that it’s become a Gordian Knot–so intricately interwoven it can not be untangled. Well, the myth tells us that the real Gordian Knot was undone with a simple slice of a sword. Similarly, opponents of the war can slice through it with an equally elegant solution, which can be summarized in two words:

The last few of weeks were very busy. I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia and South Korea, and I’ll share two of my pictures with you below.

But more importantly, I spent the weekend translating this leaked copy of the Iraqi oil law with niki (thank you salam for sending me the link). Translating legal documents can be really hard!

We just finished the translation, and you can download it by clicking here.

Please feel free to widely distribute this document. It’s important to start a stronger debate and to try to educate Iraqis and Americans about this catastrophic law that will facilitate the further looting of Iraqi oil, and will achieve nothing other than increasing the levels of violence and anger in Iraq.

This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq’s enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. (Feb. 18) – Republican presidential candidate John McCain , looking to improve his standing with the party’s conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.

“I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned,” the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.

McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who “strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench.”

The landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade gave women the right to choose an abortion to terminate a pregnancy. The Supreme Court has narrowly upheld the decision, with the presence of an increasing number of more conservative justices on the court raising the possibility that abortion rights would be limited.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Feb. 18) – A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condos and beachside bars, where glitz and glamour mix with spring break revelry, lies an underwater dump – up to 2 million old tires strewn across the ocean floor.

A well-intentioned attempt in 1972 to create what was touted as the world’s largest artificial reef made of tires has become an ecological disaster.

The idea was simple: Create new marine habitat and alternate dive sites to relieve pressure on natural reefs, while disposing of tires that were clogging landfills.

Decades later it’s clear the plan failed miserably.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the bundles bound together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against the nearby natural reef some 70 feet below the sea surface, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life. Similar problems have been reported at tire reefs worldwide.

So far the Quartet response to the Palestinian Mecca agreement on 8 February 2007 has treated it much as the US treated a short-lived unity agreement last September. But both Fatah and Hamas are ready for peace if Israel is ready to end its occupation and have said so officially and unofficially, including in a leaked Hamas document late last year. And there is growing Arab and European insistence on resolving the conflict. The Institute’s Senior Fellow Nadia Hijab argues that these are the signals the Quartet should consider when it reconvenes in Berlin on February 21 after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

On 11 September 2006, there was brief Palestinian agreement on a unity government. Fatah and Hamas had discussed cabinet seats; Hamas had said it would accept past agreements that were “in the national interest of the Palestinian people;” a ceasefire with Israel would have been reaffirmed. That achievement was scuttled because the US insisted on the letter of the three demands made by the Quartet (US, Russia, the EU, and the United Nations) in order to lift sanctions against dealing with the Palestinian Authority after the January 2006 election of Hamas to government: recognize Israel, recognize past agreements with Israel, and renounce violence. Rice so informed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly that September. [1]

Palestinians Want Sanctions Lifted But Put Premium on Unity

The 8 February Mecca agreement still does not meet the letter of the Quartet demands although Hamas has inched closer to them. For example, instead of the earlier formulation, Hamas agreed to “respect” past peace agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which do recognize Israel. In addition, Hamas has abided by several ceasefires in the past, and, since November 2006, a ceasefire has largely held between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, although Israel continues to assassinate and arrest Palestinians in the West Bank. Yet Hamas would not be able to recognize Israel outright in the absence of Israel’s ending the occupation and agreement on issues such as the Palestinian right of return and the status of Jerusalem. There is evidence that Hamas would do so if there were such an agreement, including credible reports in December 2006 that a key advisor had fleshed out the broad lines of a five-year hudna (truce) with Israel that would lead to recognition (see below).

The Palestinians, whose need for unity is more pressing even than lifting the Quartet’s sanctions, have pressed on with implementation of the Mecca agreement. Abbas on February 15 designated outgoing Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, to form a new government that divides posts between Hamas, Fateh, and independents. Haniyeh has up to five weeks to do so.

The US is Unhappy But Nuanced

Although the US Administration was unhappy about the deal and the Quartet’s demands were reaffirmed, Rice did not cancel her Middle East trip. Indeed, the US had reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert not to dismiss the Mecca agreement out of hand so that the trilateral meeting between Rice, Abbas, and Olmert could go ahead. [2] Rice also said the US would continue to view Abbas as a partner even if Fatah sat in a unity government with Hamas.

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses—much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

Someday, you are going to read a whole lot about the shenanigans of one Douglas J. Feith and an elaborate scheme to get the United States to invade Iraq. That is because Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has been determined to get to the bottom of this sordid tale and is now, fortunately, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and thereby empowered to get at the truth.

Last week, his focus led to the partial declassification of a report produced by the Pentagon’s inspector general. Although its shocking revelations did not get the coverage they deserved — what with a jealous astronaut under arrest and the death of a certain voluptuous stripper/heiress — efforts such as Levin’s eventually will uncover the full picture of why President Bush committed to a war costing tens of thousands of lives and an expected $1 trillion that served no valid national security purpose.

The tale begins with Feith, who was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy in the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after Bush was installed in the White House in 2000 by the Supreme Court. Feith’s office manufactured an “Alternative Analysis on the Iraq-Al Qaeda Relationship,” which ignored the consensus of the intelligence community that the two natural enemies — one a secular Arab government, the other a fundamentalist terror group bent on destruction of same — were not, nor ever had been, working together, despite a shared enmity for the United States.

Most important, as the Pentagon’s independent inspector general noted, the intelligence did not support any connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the brutal Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, such an apocryphal connection was asserted repeatedly by the Bush administration based largely on the cherry-picked information compiled and presented by Feith’s highly ideological group within the Pentagon.

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Five and a half years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre Walter Reed Army Medical Center into a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely — a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them — the majority soldiers, with some Marines — have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.