The Rag Blog

This unending sequel to I, II & III contains foul language. You don’t like it ? Tough!
I have been way too polite with you lot so far – Enough is enough.
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I read that the criminal you voted for not once but twice and don’t give me this crap about your rigged elections – this is your screwed democracy and this is not my problem and you voted TWICE for a bastard, criminal, thug , so shut up and don’t you interrupt because I have heaps to tell you…

So this bastard of yours wants 3 trillion dollars for his war efforts in Iraq.
Four years down the line and your fucked up country with its equally fucked up military has not managed to control and seize a country the size of California.
You can stuff your flags right where the sun does not shine for starters.

Three trillion dollars to kill more innocent,poor people who have done absolutely nothing to you. Nor they nor their President Saddam Hussein nor his government.

And dont’you give me the crap about your upholding a dictator.
For us he was a saint not a dictator and when you could not get him through years and years of inflicting misery and starvation through your smart criminal sanctions, you got us and him with your filthy smart bombs…And tell that shitty anti-war “liberal” “progressive” reps of yours that you did not uphold him in power, the people of Iraq did, by hook or by crook…and however much you hate it.

So get off your high sham pedestals for you are nothing and deserve nothing but the utmost contempt and get that truth right into your thick little skulls, skulls numbed with drugs, junk food, violence and trashy soap operas and of course…dollars.

I don’t know how it ends. I saw a bleak presentiment, five years ago. Saw destruction hang like a dark satanic cloud over the bully’s pulpit at the UN, where the President preached his disdainful jeremiad to the lesser nations. I heard the blood dimmed tide roar when the Secretary of State proclaimed his holy justification for the slaughter of innocents.

Still, I blew on the embers of hope as best I could. Cooler heads could yet prevail. Grownups could come to the rescue, a light could spring over the dark brink eastward.

Now I find it hard to look. Our president can’t. He foretells ends that confound reason. Full of passionate intensity, he professes beliefs that reveal only a fool’s understanding. Yet even so, I hope, I pray, I hope again, that it will somehow turn out. Not good, maybe but please God, not disastrously bad.

Inshallah, not apocalypse bad, not Gotterdammerung bad.

But I don’t know how that happens.

And I got a bad, bad feeling.

For I can see the American president, desperate to arrest what he at long last grasps is a long slide to ruin, turning to Iran. Some captain sent to patrol in confrontational territory provokes another captain. Shots are fired, men die. Bombs explode. Hamas and Hizbolla are stirred. Israel, threatened, and given a long-awaited opportunity, attacks. The Straits of Hormuz are blocked.

Oil goes to $150. Iraq vanishes from the television screens as quickly as Afghanistan before it. Congress doesn’t know whether to stagger into the street or stand at attention. The president is a wartime president again.

None of the other possibilities look much better.

For the streets, now red with blood, could become rivers. Sunni and Shia and Kurd slaughter each other at genocidal rates. The Saudis call on the president in private. This cannot go on, they say. The Turks threaten to calm by force a destabilizing Kurdistan. The Russians put their fingers meaningfully to their lips. The worried rulers of the “moderate” oil states, contemplating the conflagration’s spread, hint that they may have to intervene if Washington does not do something.

Bush announces, “Powell was right. We broke it. And now we own it. Regrettably, liberation will have to wait Bottom line–we invaded it and we conquered it, and now its ours.” He halts forty years’ practice of sanctioning the government of client states by locals, and says “You know the trouble was, we just weren’t running the place like a business. And this time it by god will pay for itself.”

The longer the US and Britain back dictatorial regimes in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become

Politicians, especially in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, coined the term “detente”. Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word “moderates” to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies.

Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to western audiences. And, as the word moderate has been repeated by western leaders and echoed in the international media, these rulers have begun to believe their own billing. But who are they, and are they moderate? Their selection has been fluid at the periphery but solid at the core. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt clearly qualify, whereas Syria, an ally during the 1990-91 Gulf war, was once at the periphery but fell out of step with US interests after 9/11. Likewise, after the death of Arafat and the victory of Hamas, Fatah became moderate, while Iran, moderate under the shah, became “radical” after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

This minuet of political marketing may play well in the west, but not in the Arab world, where the double standards and manipulation are all too plain to see. The Saudi Wahhabis are, after all, fanatics; Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is intolerant of dissent; and Jordan, the state closest to the western ideal, is a marginal player. These countries’ appalling human rights records, lack of transparency and repression rank them among the world’s least moderate. Is there such a thing as a “moderate public beheading”? For the US and UK governments there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in “tradition”. Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate.

Nothing, it seems, is more moderate than inertia. So inertia pays. Egypt has received an average of $1.3bn a year in military aid from the US since 1979, and $815m a year in economic assistance. Saudi Arabia relies on oil revenues and the international legitimacy provided by membership of such moderate bulwarks as the WTO and the IMF.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the Defense Department’s inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took “inappropriate” actions in advancing conclusions on al Qaeda connections not backed up by the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,” they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.

“I can’t think of a more devastating commentary,” said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan.

He cited Gimble’s findings that Feith’s office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were “multiple areas of cooperation” between Iraq and al Qaeda, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

For the first time, one of Iraq’s principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.

The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet – but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.

Al-Jeelani’s group, which also calls itself the “20th Revolution Brigades”, is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters.

Shia militias are nowhere mentioned. The demands include the cancellation of the entire Iraqi constitution – almost certainly because the document, in effect, awards oil-bearing areas of Iraq to Shia and Kurds, but not to the minority Sunni community. Yet the Sunnis remain Washington’s principal enemies in the Iraqi war.

“Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues,” al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. “Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances.”

Al-Jeelani suggests the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations and would have to guarantee the security of the participants.

Then come the conditions:

* The release of 5,000 detainees held in Iraqi prisons as “proof of goodwill”.

* Recognition “of the legitimacy of the resistance and the legitimacy of its role in representing the will of the Iraqi people”.

* An internationally guaranteed timetable for all agreements.

* The negotiations to take place in public.

* The resistance “must be represented by a committee comprising the representatives of all the jihadist brigades”.

BAGHDAD, 8 Feb 2007 (IRIN) – “I’m an 11-year-old boy who has never been to school – so I can neither read nor write. For the past two years I have been living on the streets of Baghdad, surviving on leftovers that I scavenge from garbage or by stealing from people and shop-lifting.

“When I first started, I was scared that at any time the police would catch me for stealing. Now it has become easy for me to steal. I have become an expert and the proof is the title my peers have given me. They call me ‘the young king’.

“People might be surprised to hear a child like me being happy for being an expert at stealing and looting things but in a country like Iraq, where most people are without homes and food, the hero is the one who can survive by whatever means.

“I’m an orphan and don’t know who my parents are. Nor do I know if they are alive or dead. I was taken into an orphanage when I was four years old and since then different people have been taking care of me. They were not good people. During [former president Saddam Hussein] Saddam’s time, police officers sometimes used to come and have sex with older boys.

“I ran away from the orphanage during the [US-led] invasion with another three boys in 2003. But three months ago they abandoned me as they discovered the world of drugs.

Let me make an argument about Bush administration Iran policy — about the possibility that a regime-change-style, shock-and-awe air assault might someday be launched on Iranian nuclear facilities and associated targets — based on no insider knowledge, just the logic of George-and-Dick’s Thelma-and-Louise-style imperialism.

Of course, we all know at least half the story by now. Is there anybody in official Washington — other than our President, Vice President, the Vice President’s secretive imperial staff, assorted backs-against-the-wall neocon supporters lodged in the federal bureaucracy, and associated right-wing think tanks — who isn’t sweating blood, popping pills, and wondering what in the world to do about our delusional leaders?

You only have to pick up the morning paper to find the most mainstream of official types in an over-the-top mode that, bare months ago, would have been confined to the distant peripheries of political argument. There’s Senator Joe Biden, the very definition of a mainstream man, grilling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about whether she believes the administration already has the authority to attack Iran and swearing, if she does, that it “will generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate, I predict to you.” (You can add the exclamation point to that comment or to similar ones from the likes of Senators James Webb and Chuck Hagel among others.) Or how about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on presidential pronouncements in January?

“Much has been made about President Bush’s recent saber rattling toward Iran. This morning, I’d like to be clear: The President does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking Congressional authorization — the current use of force resolution for Iraq does not give him such authorization.”

Former officials are now crawling out of the Washington woodwork to denounce Bush/Cheney policy in Iraq and Iran with the fervor (however masked by official Washington language) of an exorcism. There, for instance, is former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in front of Congress, more or less predicting the end of the Roman… sorry, the American empire:

“The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability… If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large… A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated…”

Imagine the police are called in to investigate an alleged beating, but interview only the suspects and don’t speak to the alleged victim. Then imagine detectives close the investigation after all the suspects have made statements insisting they are innocent. This is not an imagined scenario: this is how justice is administered at Guantanamo Bay.

Last October, Sgt. Heather Cerveny, a Pentagon paralegal assisting in the case US v Omar Khadr, had a few drinks at the Windjammers Club at Guantanamo. Cerveny spent about an hour chatting with guards– what she heard was shocking. According to a sworn statement made by Cerveny:

“[A guard named] Bo told the other guards and me about him beating different detainees held being held in the prison. One such story Bo told involved him taking a detainee by the head and hitting the the detainee’s head into the cell door. Bo said his actions were known by others. … [Another guard named Steven] stated that he used to work in Camp 5 but now works in Camp 6. He works on one of the ‘blocks’ as a guard. He told me that even when a detainee is being good, they will take their personal items away. He said they do this to anger the detainees so that they can punish them when they object or complain. I asked Steven why he treats the detainees this way. He said it is because he hates the detainees and that they are bad people. … In addition to the above incidents, about 5 others in the group admitted hitting detainees, to including ‘punching in the face.’ From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice.”

The US Southern Command deemed the statement “credible” and tasked Army Col. Richard Basset to investigate. The result, according the AP, was that “Basset told Cerveny the guards denied her account of their conversation in a Guantanamo bar — and the investigator accused her of having made a false statement.”

As Washington steps up its campaign of propaganda and aggression against Iran, some leading European politicians and sections of the media have expressed their concern during the past week over the increasing danger of a US military provocation plunging the entire Middle East into chaos.

Parallel to preparations for a US military strike—or an Israeli provocation with US support—Washington is also increasing pressure on European companies and governments to break commercial and financial relations with Iran.

Under strong pressure from the US, European governments supported a United Nations Security Council resolution in December 2006 giving Iran 60 days to halt its uranium-enrichment program or face economic sanctions. Now, the US is stepping up the ante and demanding firm and rapid measures by European companies, banks and governments to cut their ties with Teheran.

According to a report in the New York Times, one senior US administration official declared, “We are telling the Europeans that they need to go way beyond what they’ve done to maximize pressure on Iran.” The official went on, however, to complain about the European reaction: “The European response on the economic side has been pretty weak.”

The US administration is particularly targeting loans made by European governments to Iran. According to the International Union of Credit and Investment Insurers, European loans to the Iranian government in 2005 amounted to US$18 billion. The biggest donors were Italy (US$6.2 billion/4.7 billion euros), Germany (US$5.4 billion/4.17 billion euros), France (US$1.4 billion/1.08 billion euros) and Spain and Austria, each with US$1 billion dollars (772 million euros).

Editor’s Note: This is an important article published in the private Council of Foreign Relations journal, an academic-business mainstay of imperialism since 1921. The author presents a realistic insider’s view of the United States’ main adversary in Latin America, if not the world. This description and analysis of Cuba today (“post-Fidel”) with recommendations for Washington policy change represents the position of part of big capital. Their view is to end the boycott, in order to flood their socialist adversary with consumer goods and investments, hoping to transform the egalitarian nation into a capitalist economy once again in their patio. – Ron Ridenour, Columnist
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Foreign Affairs’ Summary: The smooth transfer of power from Fidel Castro to his successors is exposing the willful ignorance and wishful thinking of U.S. policy toward Cuba. The post-Fidel transition is already well under way, and change in Cuba will come only gradually from here on out. With or without Fidel, renewed U.S. efforts to topple the revolutionary regime in Havana can do no good — and have the potential to do considerable harm.

Julia E. Sweig is Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow and Director of Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground and Friendly fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century.

Cuba after Castro?

Ever since Fidel Castro gained power in 1959, Washington and the Cuban exile community have been eagerly awaiting the moment when he would lose it — at which point, the thinking went, they would have carte blanche to remake Cuba in their own image. Without Fidel’s iron fist to keep Cubans in their place, the island would erupt into a collective demand for rapid change. The long-oppressed population would overthrow Fidel’s revolutionary cronies and clamor for capital, expertise, and leadership from the north to transform Cuba into a market democracy with strong ties to the United States.

But that moment has come and gone — and none of what Washington and the exiles anticipated has come to pass. Even as Cuba-watchers speculate about how much longer the ailing Fidel will survive, the post-Fidel transition is already well under way. Power has been successfully transferred to a new set of leaders, whose priority is to preserve the system while permitting only very gradual reform. Cubans have not revolted, and their national identity remains tied to the defense of the homeland against U.S. attacks on its sovereignty. As the post-Fidel regime responds to pent-up demands for more democratic participation and economic opportunity, Cuba will undoubtedly change — but the pace and nature of that change will be mostly imperceptible to the naked American eye.

Fidel’s almost five decades in power came to a close last summer not with the expected bang, or even really a whimper, but in slow motion, with Fidel himself orchestrating the transition. The transfer of authority from Fidel to his younger brother, Raúl, and half a dozen loyalists — who have been running the country under Fidel’s watch for decades — has been notably smooth and stable. Not one violent episode in Cuban streets. No massive exodus of refugees. And despite an initial wave of euphoria in Miami, not one boat leaving a Florida port for the 90-mile trip. Within Cuba, whether Fidel himself survives for weeks, months, or years is now in many ways beside the point.

In Washington, however, Cuba policy — aimed essentially at regime change — has long been dominated by wishful thinking ever more disconnected from the reality on the island. Thanks to the votes and campaign contributions of the 1.5 million Cuban Americans who live in Florida and New Jersey, domestic politics has driven policymaking. That tendency has been indulged by a U.S. intelligence community hamstrung by a breathtaking and largely self-imposed isolation from Cuba and reinforced by a political environment that rewards feeding the White House whatever it wants to hear. Why alter the status quo when it is so familiar, so well funded, and so rhetorically pleasing to politicians in both parties?

But if consigning Cuba to domestic politics has been the path of least resistance so far, it will begin to have real costs as the post-Fidel transition continues — for Cuba and the United States alike. Fidel’s death, especially if it comes in the run-up to a presidential election, could bring instability precisely because of the perception in the United States that Cuba will be vulnerable to meddling from abroad. Some exiles may try to draw the United States into direct conflict with Havana, whether by egging on potential Cuban refugees to take to the Florida Straits or by appealing to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to attempt to strangle the post-Fidel government.