The Rag Blog

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.

BAGHDAD, 18 February (IRIN) – Umm Muhammad Jalal, 39, starts every day walking to a river 7km away from her temporary home in a displacement camp on the outskirts of Fallujah, 70km west of the capital, Baghdad. Because of severe water shortages, she and many others make the daily trip to the river to collect water for all their needs.

“For the past four months we have been forced to drink, wash and clean with the river water. There is a dire shortage of potable water in Fallujah and nearby cities,” Umm Muhammad said.

“My children are sick with diarrhoea but I have no option. They cannot live without water,” she added. “Aid agencies that were helping us with their trucks of potable water are less and less frequent these days for security reasons. For the same reason, the military doesn’t want the [aid] convoys to get too close to some areas.”

Umm Muhammad knows how dangerous drinking water from the river can be with associated waterborne diseases. But she is desperate and needs water to survive.

“Each day we receive less in assistance. The government is not helping us and we have to find our own ways of surviving. I never imagined that one day I would have to drink water from a dirty river,” she said.

Millions of Iraqis lack potable water and live with bad sewage systems, which have increased the incidence of waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea.

“The water shortage is a real problem in some parts of Iraq as a large part of the country is desert. But the existing networks have also suffered from lack of maintenance or by being destroyed during the war,” said Cedric Turlan, information officer for the NGOs Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI).

According to the Ministry of Water Resources, only 32 percent of the Iraqi population has access to clean drinking water, and only 19 percent has access to a good sewage system.

Vulnerable groups, such as internally displaced people (IDPs), have had no choice but to drink from rivers.

The United States has 140,000 troops occupying Iraq, a country thousands of miles from its borders. Iran borders Iraq. Which nation has the greater interest in Iraq’s future?

According to the U.S. media, the Bush Administration, and many Democrats, the answer is the country whose borders are thousands of miles away. And while America is free to invade, bomb, and kill thousands of Iraqis, many believe that Iran’s “meddling” in the affairs of its neighbor justifies the United States bombing Iran as well. International law does not grant America the unilateral right to intervene everywhere, but it does give other nations the right to protect their borders. The fact that so many Americans believe otherwise explains why we are now mired in Iraq, and why Iran is a potential target.

The American media’s focus on whether there is evidence of Iran “meddling” in Iraq—while describing America’s 140,000 troops there as necessary to prevent violence—is a tribute to the idea that America has the God-given right to operate by its own set of international rules. The notion that Iran, which shares a border and common religion with Iraq, has less of a right to be involved in that nation’s affairs than the United States could only be accepted by those steeped in “America is always right” propaganda from an early age.

Recall the controversial presidential election in Mexico in 2006. Let’s assume that Iran decided that the PAN Party’s admitted violation of Mexican election laws, and the resulting subversion of democracy, required military intervention to install Lopez-Obrador as President in place of the official winner, Felipe Calderon.

After bombing and invading Mexico, assume Iran used its military might to not only install Lopez-Obrador as President, but to maintain an occupying force to protect the democratic process from insurgents.

And assume that Iran not only kept this force in Mexico for nearly four years, but was now increasing its presence as part of its “surge” strategy to reduce violence.

Can anyone imagine America not “meddling” in Mexico in order to prevent Iran’s action?

And if we “meddled” in our neighbor Mexico’s affairs, would Americans’ think that gave Iran the right to bomb us?

America’s “Monroe Doctrine” unilaterally declared in 1823 that European nations should stay out of the affairs of the American continents. The Doctrine applied not just to North America, but to South America as well.

But while America opposes interventions in our hemisphere, U.S. troops have traveled the world invading other countries and overthrowing their governments. Our CIA even helped overthrow the democratically elected Iranian government in 1954—think that might explain why America is not real popular in Iran?

The rest of the world already thinks that America poses the greatest threat to world peace. Our election of George W. Bush in 2004—knowing full well that he lied about WMD’s in Iraq and that he was a dangerous psychopath—is viewed throughout the world as a harsh indictment of the American character.

Now the world looks on as the American media debates whether Iran is “meddling” in Iraq, and whether such meddling warrants U.S. military intervention. The fundamental question of why America has a greater legal or moral right than Iran to “meddle” in Iraq is virtually never addressed.

Nor has the media reminded Americans that the U.S. installed regime in Iraq is aligned with Iran, as this would destroy the narrative that has Iran undermining American efforts to bring regional stability. I know Americans are an ahistorical people, but have millions already forgotten that Sadaam Hussein was Iran’s chief enemy, and that Iran was thrilled when he was toppled from power?

As much as a US bombing of Iran seems insane, Dick Cheney has already proved himself delusional. Since he recently stated that we are making great progress in Iraq, he could also believe that bombing Iran would shift attention from the Iraq debacle, and be the only way to save the Bush Presidency.

One thing we know for sure. If Bush ordered the bombing of Iran, all Republicans, some Democrats, and nearly all DC pundits would be warning that Congress cannot cut off funding for the Iran war out of loyalty to our troops.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Kiki Munshi was showcased by the media in September as a seasoned U.S. diplomat who came out of retirement to lead a rebuilding group in Iraq.

Now she is back home, angry, and convinced that President George W. Bush’s new strategy of doubling the number of such groups to 20 along with a troop surge of 21,500 will not help stabilize Iraq.

A diplomat for 22 years, she quit her job last month as leader of a Provincial Reconstruction Team — groups made up of about 50 civilian and military experts that try to help Iraqi communities build their own government while strengthening moderates.

“In spite of the magnificent and often heroic work being done out there by a lot of truly wonderful people, the PRTs themselves aren’t succeeding. The obstacles are too great,” Munshi said this week in Washington, where she was pressing her view at the State Department and to Congress.

“Once again we are proceeding to lay people’s lives on a line drawn with faulty information. Once again the fantasies of the ‘policy-makers’ drive decisions without much link to the realities on the ground,” said Munshi, who retired from the foreign service in 2002 .

Her postings included Romania, India and Sierra Leone before Iraq, where Munshi said he had felt a “moral obligation to sort out the mess we have made there.”

An audit by the special inspector general for Iraq last October found similar problems with the PRTs to those listed by Munshi, including an “ever-changing security situation, the difficulty of integrating civilian and military personnel, the lack of a finalized agreement on PRT operational requirements and responsibilities.”

REJECTION

Members of Congress have also been critical of the program, which suffered early on from not being able to attract enough civilian staff and a dispute between the State and Defense departments over who would provide security for the teams.

The Bush administration rejects Munshi’s views and the State Department said the expanded PRT plan was more focused, requiring team members to do pre-deployment training and with a clear goal of bolstering moderates and sidelining militants.

“We have been very mindful of the problems our PRT leaders have reported to us. We have worked very hard to streamline it,” said Barbara Stephenson, the deputy coordinator for Iraq at the State Department, which oversees the PRT plan.

Munshi said the PRT plan was ill-conceived, under-funded and poorly staffed.

She said security was so bad that the council in the town in Diyala province where she was based had not had a quorum since last October and that death squads were rife.

PRT members found it hard to meet with Iraqis because of intimidation, she said, giving the example of training sessions that had been canceled because of poor security.

The PRTs are embedded with the military, a tactic Munshi says has varying results depending on the ability of the unit.

“All the PRTs embedded with the military are subject to the vicissitudes of military fortune, for good or ill,” she said.

But the State Department countered that Munshi’s experiences were not repeated in all the provinces and set up interviews with two PRT leaders who said while there were difficulties, they believed their work was making an impact.

Stephanie Miley, a PRT leader in the Iraqi town of Tikrit, said her teams managed to get out to see Iraqi officials five or six times a week but security issues meant they could not stay for long.

(Ynet News): A delegation of American senators is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Sunday.

The senators are members of a joint Senate-Knesset committee headed by Senator Jon Kyl, who is close to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Member of Knesset Yuval Steinitz (Likud) is hosting the delegation. Together with Senator Kyl, he established the committee four years ago to strengthen defense cooperation between the two countries.

‘We formed the committee four years ago, when I was Chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. It is the only joint committee between the American Congress and another country,’ said Steinitz.

‘We think that it is important that the members of the delegation feel the connection and understand Israel better. They are mostly non-Jewish and we want them to feel some obligation to the country,’ he added.

‘The ability of the Senate and the Congress to promote issues is just as important as that of the American administration. They will be briefed by Mossad Officials about Iran, Hezbollah and global Jihad,’ he said.

‘The committee has had major achievements and we hope that this visit will lead to additional feats,’ he concluded. One of the committee’s successes to date is receiving funding for a project to develop a rocket-interception system.

The two-day visit includes meetings with Opposition Chairman MK Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Chief of the Mossad. Later on they will also meet Deputy President and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.