The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserted Tuesday the increase in U.S. forces in Iraq is “not the last chance” to succeed and conceded he’s considering what steps to take if the buildup doesn’t work.

“I would be irresponsible if I weren’t thinking about what the alternatives might be,” Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Gates was grilled on the war as the full Senate remained stalled over Democratic leaders’ efforts to begin a debate over President Bush’s course for Iraq.

Gates did not say what other options he was considering if the addition of 21,500 troops fails to control the violence in Baghdad and western Anbar province, where the Sunni insurgency is based.

“As fool’s paradise is a wise man’s hell.”
Thomas Fuller

You’ve heard the term, “fool’s paradise,” but have you ever wondered what one looks like? The trouble is real fool’s paradises are a bit like sub-atomic particles, they have such short half-lives that it’s hard to observe in real time. But, like Quarks, they do reveal themselves, if not in the flesh, at least in the data. The careful observer can see them coming, if they bother to look. Later. once they pass, you can observe the effect they had on their surroundings.

So it’s not surprising that so many Americans are living and planning as though nothing were amiss. The stock market — the worst of all possible fool’s paradise indicators — is perking right along as though these were boom times. Housing values are down a bit, but have yet to collapse. Consumers continue spending, now dipping into savings to do so. And when savings run out and lower wages can’t keep up, they borrow.

The federal government apparently thinks there’s not a thing wrong in continuing to borrow over $8 billion a month — month in and month out — to finance a war of choice.

Meanwhile our whole damn country runs on oil, the stuff is not only running out, but comes mostly from parts of the world busily tearing themselves apart.

The above behavior has turned our atmosphere into a trash pile which has finally caught fire — feel the heat? Ice caps are melting so fast you can watch them shrink in real time. Prime beach-front real estate is on the way to being submerged beneath up to five feet of water over the next few decades. The days left for thousands of low lying islands — and the people that live on them — are numbered.

Yet, by observing the behavior of government, businesses or the general population, you wouldn’t think any of that was going on, or that if it is, that it mattered little. That’s where the careful observer can detect a fool’s paradise in the making.

Maybe you’re one of those who has not noticed. If you don’t look, you can’t see it, or even feel it. But trust me, all the data says it’s so. Even as you read these words it’s ripping at the fabric of the comfortable and familiar life most of us still enjoy, and veneer that surrounds daily life. By the time you can see through it, it’ll be too late.

Noam Chomsky is as prolific and controversial as ever. Beginning his career with pioneering and immense contributions to the field of linguistics and early cognitive science, Professor Chomsky of M.I.T. turned his attention to politics during the Vietnam War. He has published condemnations and critiques of corporate media control, American foreign policy and imperialism, global capitalism, and economic inequality in an unrelenting torrent since then. Chomsky’s contrarian and sweeping dissents, and unreconstructed (some would say anarchistic) politics have earned him adulation in some quarters and derision in others. He has been described by the New York Review of Books as “the most widely-read voice on foreign policy on the planet” and an “anti-American fascist“ by David Horowitz. In his forthcoming book, Interventions, Chomsky continues this wide ranging and impassioned contribution to the policy debate with a collection of 30 essays covering issues from Hurricane Katrina to Iraq, and from Intelligent Design to Hamas. Campus Progress called Chomsky this week to talk about the current state of the globalization, the United States, activism, and why there is still hope for the future.

What do you see as most fundamental obstacle to a functioning and socially-just democracy in America?

Well the most pressing obstacle was one of the themes of the leading American social political philosopher of the 20 th century, John Dewey. He pointed out that, as long as we live under what he called industrial feudalism, rather than industrial democracy (by industrial feudalism he meant the corporate, capitalist structure) then politics will be nothing more than the shadow cast by business over society. Industrial democracy would mean placing economic decisions and workplaces under democratic control. And yes, that’s true. As long as there’s a very high concentration of private power, essentially unaccountable to the public and overwhelming influence in state policy, then yes, politics will be the shadow cast by business over society. That’s a major obstacle. You can’t have a democratic society, a functioning one, where the major decisions are out of public control.

How does current antiwar activism compare to that of the Vietnam era, and what effect has it had?

Activism is much higher than it was in the ‘60s. You hear the opposite. People say, “Well how come we don’t have a 1960s style anti-war movement,” [but] people have completely forgotten that antiwar protest was so limited in the ‘60s. Most people don’t even know that John F. Kennedy attacked South Vietnam outright in 1962. That was war, but there was no protest. You could barely get three people in a room to talk about it. It was years before a protest developed. In October 1965, when there were already hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in South Vietnam and the country had been destroyed, we had the first national day of protest in Boston. It was broken up by counter protests, and to the applause of liberal press.

At any comparable stage, the protest is far higher right now than it was in the ‘60s. It did develop in the late ‘60s into a significant enough force to truly influence policy, as has already happened with Iraq. That’s part of the reason there are constraints on the extent to which the U.S. can use violence in Iraq. There should be a lot more in my opinion, just as there should’ve been far more in Vietnam, but what’s happened is significant.

Why have college students organized a very large and effective movement against the genocide in Darfur, but not against the war in Iraq?

You can say the same about columnists in the press, or commentators and editorial writers. They’re very upset about the atrocities in Darfur, but not the atrocities that we carry out. There’s a very simple reason. It’s extremely easy to condemn the crimes of others, especially when you’re not making a proposal to do anything about it. The condemnations of the crimes in Darfur are not accompanied by any proposal about what we should do. Nobody’s saying “let’s send an expeditionary force to end it.” The proposals are all in the form of, “Why don’t you do something about it, and we’ll applaud.”

Furthermore, in the case of Darfur, the crimes happened to be carried out by an official enemy, Arabs. There’s nothing easier than condemning the crimes of an official enemy. On the other hand, looking at your own crimes, that takes moral integrity. And that’s difficult. You don’t get praised and lauded: You get denounced and vilified. It’s not just true of the United States. If you were in the old Soviet Union, it would’ve been very easy to protest American crimes, with great drama and breast-beating, but how about Soviet crimes? That would’ve been different.

Cuba is a country of avid readers and since 1982 its annual International Book Fair attracts people from all walks of life and ages. It’s a chance to expand home libraries and have a good time as well, in a nation where literacy is a given.

This year’s event, spotlighting Argentine authors, publishers and culture, runs in Havana from February 8 to18 before extending island-wide to 40 cities and concluding in eastern Santiago de Cuba on March 11.

A visitor from the United States, who had to violate his country’s travel ban on Cuba to attend the fair in 2006, said “Seeing so many people interested in literature restores one’s faith that books can hold their own in the electronic age, at least in Cuba.”

The fair begins at the 18th century San Carlos de la Cabaña Fortress that the Revolution turned into a permanent museum-cultural center. The facility has a breathtaking view of the Havana harbor and skyline and has large, well-kept grassy areas where people picnic and children get a first glimpse of their new books.

First time foreign visitors are stunned by the huge daily turnouts —more like crowds that one would expect for a soccer game or a salsa concert— to attend book launchings, lectures, poetry readings and make purchases. The large number of activities for children including dance, clowns, theater and readings make the outing a family affair.

Entrance tickets, still costing the equivalent of 8 cents US, are on sale at numerous Havana bookstores that will also be selling titles from the fair at the same discount prices.

The selection from dozens of Cuban publishing houses will run from a few cents for children’s books to 25 cents to a dollar for thicker volumes of poetry, fiction or non-fiction. Cuban’s reading tastes are varied but children’s literature is always of greatest demand at the fair.

In a move that many grassroots activists believe signals a coming trend, two states have put taxpayer-financed toll roads up for sale to foreign companies. More disconcerting is the fact that these have the potential becoming a massive network of toll roads facilitating free trade throughout North America under the framework of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

In Indiana, foreign interests are obtaining the first lease agreement with a state government to privately operate an existing toll road—paying $3.8 billion for a 75-year lease to operate the Indiana Toll Road.

In addition, the historically significant Pennsylvania Turnpike also may be headed to the proverbial auction block, as confirmed by American Free Press. But apparently it’s not a done deal.

AFP reported last December that Pennsylvania state Rep. Richard Geist had planned to introduce House Bill 1 to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to private investors. The Indiana Toll Road deal prompted Hoosiers to send scores of “Ditch Mitch” bumper stickers critical of Gov. Mitch Daniels’s unwavering support of the sale. It involved a deal between the state and ITR Concessions LLC, a partnership of the Cintra Company of Spain and the McQuarie Bank of Australia.

WASHINGTON: In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government. Even the government’s online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced (and is famously difficult to use).

The contracting explosion raises questions about propriety, cost and accountability that have long troubled watchdog groups and are coming under scrutiny from the Democratic majority in Congress. While flagrant cases of fraud and waste make headlines, concerns go beyond outright wrongdoing. Among them:

Competition, intended to produce savings, appears to have sharply eroded. An analysis by The New York Times shows that fewer than half of all “contract actions” — new contracts and payments against existing contracts — are now subject to full and open competition. Just 48 percent were competitive in 2005, down from 79 percent in 2001.

– Keane devises and pushes Bush’s “surge”.
– McCaffery wants more arms and money for Iraqis.
– Hoar and Odom, little connected to military business,
call for withdrawal.
– The importance of “contractors” in sustaining the war; “doing the patriotic bit.”

As Congress weighs action on the escalation of the Iraq War, it may want to consider the business connections of retired generals who have been making recommendations, particularly those of retired four-star Army general John M. “Jack” Keane, who is one of the authors of President Bush’s “surge” policy.

Reviewing the testimony of Mr. Keane and three other former generals on January 18 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there is a distinct pattern. Those most involved in the military industry, Mr. Keane and former four-star army general Barry McCaffery, endorsed, respectively, escalation and continued investment in the Iraq War. Those with the least involvement in the military industry, former Marine General John P. Hoar and former army Lt. Gen. William Odom were for withdrawal.

JACK KEANE, who rose to the level of acting Chief of Staff and Vice Chief of Staff of the Army before retiring in December 2003, told the committee that President Bush’s “surge” plan, which calls for sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq, “is remarkably similar” to the plan he devised last fall with Fredrick Kagan, a staffer of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank that has provided analysis and justification for the Iraq War from its beginning. He told the committee that he presented the plan directly to President Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney.

Keane, who is a commentator for ABC News, is a member of the board of directors of General Dynamics, among the top 10 largest military contractors, with reported revenues in 2005 of $21 billion. The company’s 2005 annual report, appearing on its website, notes:

It is hard to determine what exactly happened in the parliamentary session in Baghdad yesterday. What we know is that the I’tilaf bloc (the Shi`a bloc) left the session in anger after the Speaker, Mahmud al-Mashhadani, read a statement by tribal leaders that contested the official version of the battle that took place in the environs of Najaf last week. The government claimed that an attack was launched by American and government forces to foil a plot by a millenarian cult that was planning to attack the holy city of Najaf during the celebrations of `Ashura and assassinate high Shi`a clerics.

According to Az-Zaman, the Iraqi police has prevented the press from covering the entirety of the heated debates in the Iraqi parliament over the events in Najaf and other issues that have sharply divided the Iraqi parliament. The Iraqi daily said that security forces prevented journalists from taking photos or covering the debates after the session degenerated into name-calling and mutual attacks.

More than 700 Palestinian refugees who have been driven out of Iraq are stranded in squalid tented camps on the Syrian border. Damascus is refusing to let them in, despite the wintry conditions and limited supplies of food, water, fuel and medicines.

“This is a human tragedy,” Tayseer Nasrallah, head the of the refugee affairs committee in the West Bank city of Nablus, protested yesterday. Other Palestinians charged the Iraqis with ethnic cleansing. Officials in Ramallah said at least 180 Palestinians had been murdered in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Human Rights Watch reported last week that only 15,000 of the 34,000 Palestinian refugees living in Baghdad before 2003 were still there. “They are harassed by the Iraqi government and are targeted by Shia militias because of the benefits they used to receive from Saddam Hussein’s government and their perceived support for the insurgency in Iraq,” said the New York-based organisation.

“Ministry of Interior officials have arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured and in a few cases forcibly ‘disappeared’ Palestinian refugees. The ministry has also imposed onerous registration requirements on Palestinian refugees, forcing them to constantly renew short-term residency permits and subjecting them to harassment.”

The human rights group accused Shia militant groups of murdering dozens of the refugees in recent months and leafleting Palestinian neighbourhoods threatening further killings if they did not get out. On 23 January unidentified men, some in police uniform, abducted 60 Palestinian men from their homes in three Baghdad neighbourhoods. When they were released, they showed signs of physical abuse. All have now left Iraq with their families.