The Rag Blog

02/10/07 “The Independent’ – — Could Rifaat al-Assad’s day in court be growing closer? Yes, Rifaat – or Uncle Rifaat to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria – the man whose brother Hafez hurled him from Damascus after he tried to use his special forces troops to stage a coup. They were the same special forces who crushed the Islamist rebellion in Hama in February 1982, slaughtering up to – well, a few thousand, according to the regime, at least 10,000 according to Fisk (who was there) and up 20,000 if you believe The New York Times (which I generally don’t).

Either way, I’ve always regarded it as a war crime, along with the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut by Israel’s Lebanese militia allies a few months later. Ariel Sharon, who was held personally responsible by Israel’s own court of enquiry, is an unindicted war criminal. So is Rifaat.

That’s why the faintest breeze blew through my fax machine this week when I received a letter sent to the UN Secretary General by Malik al-Abdeh, head of the London-based Movement for Justice and Development in Syria. Abdeh left his Syrian town of Zabadani before the Hama massacres – he works now as an IT consultant for a multinational – so he’s hardly able to breathe the air of Sister Syria. But then again nor can Rifaat, who languishes – complete with bodyguards – in that nice EU island of refuge called Marbella. And refuge he probably needs. Because Abdeh is asking the UN to institute an enquiry into the Hama bloodbath in the same way that it is powering along with its tribunal into the murder almost two years ago of Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Ouch. In the letter Abdeh describes how “warplanes and tanks levelled whole districts of the city (of Hama) … the evidence clearly suggests that government forces made no distinction between armed insurgents and unarmed civilians … the assault on the city represents a clear act of war crimes and murder on a mass scale”. The letter has now been passed to the UN’s legal head, Nicolas Michel, who is also involved in the Hariri murder case. The sacred name of Rifaat has not been mentioned in the letter but it specifically demands that “those who are responsible should be held accountable and charged…”.

Now, of course, there are a few discrepancies in the facts. The Syrians did not use poison gas in Hama, as Abdeh claims. They certainly did level whole areas of the city – they are still level today, although a hotel has been built over one devastated district – and when Rifaat’s thugs combed through the ruins later, they executed any civilians who couldn’t account for their presence.

But of course, the Hama uprising was also a Sunni Muslim insurrection and the insurgents had murdered entire families of Baath party officials, sometimes by chopping off their heads. In underground tunnels, Muslim girls had exploded themselves among Syrian troops – they were among the Middle East’s first suicide bombers although we didn’t appreciate that then. And the Americans were not at all unhappy that this Islamist insurgency had been crushed by Uncle Rifaat. Readers will not need any allusion to modern and equally terrible events involving Sunni insurgents to the east of Syria. And since the Americans are getting pretty efficient at killing civilians along with gunmen, I have a dark suspicion that there won’t be any great enthusiasm in Washington for a prosecution over Hama.

But still… What strikes me is not so much the force of Abdeh’s letter but that it was written at all. When the Hama massacre occurred, neighbouring Arab states were silent. Although the Sunni prelates of the city called for a religious war, their fellow clerics in Damascus – and, indeed, in Beirut – were silent. Just as the imams and scholars of Islam were silent when the Algerians began to slaughter each other in a welter of head-chopping and security force executions in the 1990s.

STEWART, Minn. — It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready.

On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.

Family and friends had convinced him at last that the devastating mental wounds he brought home from war, wounds that triggered severe depression, violent outbursts, and eventually an uncontrollable desire to kill himself, could not be drowned in alcohol or treated with the array of antianxiety drugs he’d been prescribed.

And so, with his father and stepmother at his side, he confessed to an intake counselor that he was suicidal. He wanted to be admitted to a psychiatric ward.

But, instead, he was told that the clinician who prescreened cases like his was unavailable. Go home and wait for a phone call tomorrow, the counselor said, as Marianne Schulze, his stepmother, describes it.

When a clinical social worker called the next day, Jonathan, 25, told again of his suicidal thoughts and other symptoms. And then, with his stepmother listening in, he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list for one of the 12 beds in the center’s ward for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers.

Four days later, on Jan. 16, he wrapped a household extension cord around his neck, tied it to a beam in the basement, and hanged himself.

In life, Jonathan Schulze didn’t get nearly what he needed. But in death, this tough and troubled Marine may help get something critical done.

The apparent failure of the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer him timely and necessary care has electrified the debate on the blogs and websites that connect an increasingly networked and angry veterans community. It has triggered an internal investigation by the VA into how a serviceman with such obvious symptoms faced a wait for hospital care.

Maryam Rajavi, along with husband Massoud, leaders of the Marxist-Islamic Mujahedin-e Khalq cult and terrorist group, will provide “evidence” in an attempt to finger Iran, thus conjuring up unpalatable memories of Ahmed Chalabi.

“The Bush administration is haunted by the history of intelligence blunders about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction as the United States tries to document that Iran is providing lethal help to Iraqi fighters,” reports Yahoo News, or maybe that should be news for yahoos.

In fact, the Bush administration is not “haunted by the history of intelligence blunders,” as there was no blundering, or for that matter intelligence, but simply a series of calculated lies and fabrications, designed to pave the way for the invasion of Iraq. As should be obvious, the “Bush administration,” or rather the unelected neocons, are plotting a repeat in Iran.

“After weeks of preparation and revisions, U.S. officials are preparing to detail evidence supporting administration’s claims of Iran’s meddlesome and deadly activities. A briefing was scheduled Sunday in Baghdad.”

Translation: the neocons jumped the gun, they need more time to tweak their fairy tale about Iran providing assistance to their enemies, the Sunni resistance, comprised in large part of former Ba’athists, who invaded Iran and fought a bloody war (over a million people killed)—admittedly a large pill to swallow, but then the American people, and even most members of Congress, are accustomed to swallowing large pills. Soon enough, we will see this latest neocon scam in all its putrid glory, plastered all over newspapers, the internet, and on Fox News. Millions will mindlessly parrot the official line and demand Iran be reduced to a glass parking lot.

“The Iran dossier, some 200 pages thick in its classified form, was revised heavily after officials decided it was not ready for release as planned last month. What is made public probably would be short, and shorter on details than the administration recently had suggested.”

Shorter on details because the less details provided, the less chance the neocons will be tripped up by their lies, not that such has stopped them in the past. As the shameless lies about Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and Osama and Saddam colluding together demonstrate, never mind the inconsistencies bordering on absurdity, the neocon fairy tales cannot stand the light of day, they dry up in short order and blow away.

“No one who has seen the files has suggested the evidence is thin. But senior officials—gun-shy after the drubbing the administration took for the faulty intelligence leading to the 2003 Iraq invasion—were underwhelmed by the packaging.”

No clue precisely who has seen this classified “evidence” and declared it to be not “thin.” It remains a mystery. As usual, we are offered mere silhouettes under the predictable cover of “senior officials,” question marks masking their identities. In fact, no “drubbing” occurred after the 2003 invasion, no congressional investigations worth the name were conducted, no official charges ensued.

“Officials from several intelligence agencies scrutinized the presentation to make sure it was clear and that ‘we don’t in any way jeopardize our sources and methods in making the presentation,’ State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday.”

“The dangerous patriot: “The one who drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism . . . which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory.” James A. Donovan, Colonel, US Marine Corps

“Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.” Lord Acton (1834-1902)
“If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject… ” William Graham Sumner

On September 20, 2002, George W. Bush, in conformity with the path that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Rice and Co. had traced for him, adopted a hegemonic foreign policy and issued the famous hubristic “Bush Doctrine”. His then Security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and her assistant, Philip D. Zelikow, drafted much of the 2002 report titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States”, which has come to be known as the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emptive wars and of American assertive military hegemony around the world.

Eight months before, in his January 29, 2002 first State of the Union Address, Bush, inspired by his neocon and theologian speech writers, had singled out three disparate countries as belonging to an “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea), even though two of these countries had been at war at each other for years (Iraq and Iran) and the third (North Korea) had no visible political ties to the first two. Bush also expressed his intention that the United States control both the Earth and Outer Space, no matter what the other 191 countries of the world think and no matter what international law and international treaties call for.

On Earth, the neocon Bush-Cheney administration’s goal was to invest so much in military gear, and to take military actions if necessary, that no other country would ever challenge its status as the world’s sole military superpower.

The intention was to establish a military New American Empire for the 21st Century, along the lines of the British Empire in the 19th Century.

MUNICH: Russian President Vladimir Putin, in one of his harshest attacks on the United States in seven years in power, accused Washington on Saturday of attempting to force its will on the world.

In a speech in Germany, that one US senator said smacked of Cold War rhetoric, Putin accused the United States of making the world a more dangerous place by pursuing policies aimed at making it “one single master”.

Attacking the concept of a “unipolar” world in which the United States was the sole superpower, he said: “What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force and one single master.”

“It has nothing in common with democracy because that is the opinion of the majority taking into account the minority opinion,” he told the gathering of top security and defence officials.

“People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don’t want to learn it themselves,” he said.

The Kremlin has for several weeks been dropping hints that Putin, who steps down next year after two terms in power, was preparing a major foreign policy speech that would point the way for his successor.

Its delivery at the prestigious annual Munich meeting on security was clearly aimed at attracting maximum attention.

“The message I got from his speech was that Putin wants Russia to have the same position in the world as the former Soviet Union,” a senior European official said.

Putin spoke against a background of increasing Russian agitation over US policy on Iraq, and on the Iran and North Korea nuclear issues, as well as growing self-confidence as an emerging energy superpower.

02/10/07 “Tomdispatch” — — It has once again become fashionable for the dwindling supporters of President Bush’s futile war in Iraq to stress the danger of “Islamo-fascism” and the supposed drive by followers of Osama bin Laden to establish a monolithic, Taliban-like regime — a “Caliphate” — stretching from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The President himself has employed this term on occasion over the years, using it to describe efforts by Muslim extremists to create “a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.” While there may indeed be hundreds, even thousands, of disturbed and suicidal individuals who share this delusional vision, the world actually faces a far more substantial and universal threat, which might be dubbed: Energo-fascism, or the militarization of the global struggle over ever-diminishing supplies of energy.

Unlike Islamo-fascism, Energo-fascism will, in time, affect nearly every person on the planet. Either we will be compelled to participate in or finance foreign wars to secure vital supplies of energy, such as the current conflict in Iraq; or we will be at the mercy of those who control the energy spigot, like the customers of the Russian energy juggernaut Gazprom in Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia; or sooner or later we may find ourselves under constant state surveillance, lest we consume more than our allotted share of fuel or engage in illicit energy transactions. This is not simply some future dystopian nightmare, but a potentially all-encompassing reality whose basic features, largely unnoticed, are developing today.

These include:

• The transformation of the U.S. military into a global oil protection service whose primary mission is to defend America’s overseas sources of oil and natural gas, while patrolling the world’s major pipelines and supply routes.
• The transformation of Russia into an energy superpower with control over Eurasia’s largest supplies of oil and natural gas and the resolve to convert these assets into ever increasing political influence over neighboring states.
• A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, accompanied by recurring military interventions, the constant installation and replacement of client regimes, systemic corruption and repression, and the continued impoverishment of the great majority of those who have the misfortune to inhabit such energy-rich regions.
• Increased state intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and private life as reliance on nuclear power grows, bringing with it an increased threat of sabotage, accident, and the diversion of fissionable materials into the hands of illicit nuclear proliferators.

02/11/07 “The Independent” — — There was unprecedented élite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for US interests, however conceived. Phrases thrown in by the official Presidential Directive from the standard boilerplate about freedom that accompany every action, and are close to a historical universal, were dismissed as meaningless by reasonable people. Global opposition was utterly overwhelming, and the likely costs to the US were apparent, though the catastrophe created by the invasion went far beyond anyone’s worst expectations. It’s amusing to watch the lying as the strongest supporters of the war try to deny what they very clearly said.

On the US motives for staying in Iraq, I can only repeat what I’ve been saying for years. A sovereign Iraq, partially democratic, could well be a disaster for US planners. With a Shia majority, it is likely to continue improving relations with Iran. There is a Shia population right across the border in Saudi Arabia, bitterly oppressed by the US-backed tyranny. Any step towards sovereignty in Iraq encourages activism there for human rights and a degree of autonomy – and that happens to be where most of Saudi oil is.

Sovereignty in Iraq might well lead to a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world’s petroleum resources and independent of the US, undermining a primary goal of US foreign policy since it became the world-dominant power after the Second World War. Worse yet, though the US can intimidate Europe, it cannot intimidate China, which blithely goes its own way, even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown – the primary reason why China is considered a leading threat. An independent energy bloc in the Gulf area is likely to link up with the China-based Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council, with Russia (which has its own huge resources) as an integral part, and with the Central Asian states (already members), possibly India. Iran is already associated with them, and a Shia-dominated bloc in the Arab states might well go along. All of that would be a nightmare for US planners and their Western allies.

There are, then, very powerful reasons why the US and UK are likely to try in every possible way to maintain effective control over Iraq. The US is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis. All of this is quite separate from the expectations that matters can be arranged so that US corporations profit from the vast riches of Iraq.

These topics, though high on the agenda of planners, are not within the realm of discussion, as can easily be determined. That is only to be expected. These considerations violate the fundamental doctrine that state power has noble objectives, and while it may make terrible blunders, it can have no crass motives and is not influenced by domestic concentrations of private power. Any questioning of these Higher Truths is either ignored or bitterly denounced, also for good reasons: allowing them to be discussed could undermine power and privilege.

SEATTLE – Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said his resignation was ordered by the Bush administration without explanation seven months after he received a favorable job evaluation.

“I was ordered to resign as U.S. attorney on Dec. 7 by the Justice Department,” McKay said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. “I was given no explanation. I certainly was told of no performance issues.”

McKay, who had led the Justice Department’s Western Washington office, previously said only that he was resigning because it was time for him to move on.

His comments came one day after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had fired seven U.S. attorneys in the West in the past year, most of them for “performance-related” reasons he would not divulge.

The dismissals have been heavily criticized by Democratic lawmakers and others.

“John McKay has worked diligently for our region and it is deeply disconcerting that he could have been let go for political reasons,” said Sen. Patty Murray (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash.

Robert Lasnik, the chief federal judge for the Western District of Washington, said he and fellow judges could not understand the firing and were dismayed that the Justice Department implied there was anything wrong with McKay’s performance.

“This is unanimous among the judges: John McKay was a superb U.S. attorney,” Lasnik said. “For the Justice Department to suggest otherwise is just not fair.”