The Rag Blog

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of “buying time” for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a “surge” of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. “We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria,” he said. “And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

“Networks” means Iran. “There is solid evidence,” said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, “that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government.” Like Bush’s and Blair’s claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the “evidence” lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, “neocon” fanatics such as Vice-President Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran’s oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington’s Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their “strategy” is to end Iran’s nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.

Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear program to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to “go anywhere and see anything.” They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei says that an attack on Iran will have “catastrophic consequences” and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso has criticised U.S. policy in Iraq, saying American actions following the initial fighting in 2003 have been “immature,” Japanese media reports said on Sunday.

The comments follow remarks by Japan’s defense minister last month saying President Bush had been wrong to start the Iraq war, and may damage ties with Washington ahead of a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney on February 20-22.

“Rumsfeld went ahead and did it, but the operation after occupation was very immature and did not work so well, so that’s why there’s still trouble now,” the financial daily Nikkei quoted Aso as saying in a speech on Saturday, referring to former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Army 1st Lt. Antonio Hardy took a slow look around the east Baghdad neighborhood that he and his men were patrolling. He grimaced at the sound of gunshots in the distance. A machine gunner on top of a Humvee scanned the rooftops for snipers. Some of Hardy’s men wondered aloud if they’d get hit by a roadside bomb on the way back to their base.

“To be honest, it’s going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do,” said Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. “I think some people in America don’t want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated.”

While senior military officials and the Bush administration say the president’s decision to send more American troops to pacify Baghdad will succeed, many of the soldiers who’re already there say it’s a lost cause.

“What is victory supposed to look like? Every time we turn around and go in a new area there’s somebody new waiting to kill us,” said Sgt. 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, Tenn., as his Humvee rumbled down a dark Baghdad highway one evening last week. “Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years, and we’re not going to change that overnight.”

“Once more raids start happening, they’ll (insurgents) melt away,” said Gill, who serves with the 1st Infantry Division in east Baghdad. “And then two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they’ll come back.”

There are other things to say about the escape from Babylon, but first I have wanted to illustrate a point of the last post with something I heard recently.

Every discussion about energy use per force always includes some variation of urban legend that someone has invented a fuel delivery system (it used to always be a carburetor until those fell out of common use entirely) which will enable a gasoline powered vehicle to get 200 mpg. The reason you don’t have one on your car is that all the oil companies have conspired to buy up the patents and keep the device off the market to prevent a drastic decline in the consumption and price of gasoline. Now, my take has always been that if such a device existed, keeping a lid on it or its use would be impossible. It would, for example, be so valuable that people would make them in secret machine shops and fit them to your car for a hefty fee. Wouldn’t you buy one?

The legend persists. Locked away somewhere in the vaults of the US Patent offices there is the design for a gizmo that would solve the world’s energy crisis, reduce pollution, ease global warming, and give the world’s economy a shot in the arm such that it has never seen. Yet Exxon or Citgo or some such has bought up the patent in order to keep it off the market.

I heard a rumor much like that recently and dismissed it out of hand. If this device really existed, it would virtually wipe out an entire industry in a short span of time. The proponents of the magic carburetor theory would say that this industry would buy up the patent and keep this device off the market so as not to lose nearly the entirety of their sales. I say knowledge of it would be impossible to contain, and the absence of this device in reality is proof of its non-existence.

Are you ready for this? I warn you it’s far fetched, but I really did hear this. There is a type of camera that someone has invented that doesn’t use photographic film. No. It uses a photosensitive electronic plate and makes a digital image on a memory chip! The rumor goes that you can take dozens of pictures of excellent quality, then transfer them to a computer, and use the camera over and over again without having to replace anything but the batteries. And here’s where it gets really unlikely, it is powered by common AA or AAA batteries which are supposed to last for weeks. AND the whole thing could sell for about $200.

Now really! If such a device existed, you know Fuji and Kodak would spare no expenses to keep it a secret, or at least keep it a rumor, and buy up every patent to keep it off the market … IF such a thing could be done. But I say, if it actually existed, which it doesn’t, everyone would have one. Film sales and film developing would go into the toilet in a matter of months. The photographic film industry would just about disappear. Moreover, if that device were really possible and feasible what would prevent it being incorporated into other common devices such as ….oh …. I don’t know …. PDA’s and cell phones? And the photos themselves, if they were really digital images, why, software could be developed to enhance, modify, crop, and otherwise manipulate the pictures. One hour photo shops would disappear because now photos would be one second, you could photograph an event and have it on the internet in seconds.

LIMA (AFP) – Between 30,000 and 50,000 mercenaries are working in Iraq, making them the second largest military force there after the occupying United States.

The case of Iraq “is a new manifestation of the use of mercenaries that has caught the US by surprise”, Spain’s Jose Luis Gomez del Prado — a member of the UN working group on mercenaries — said Fridayduring a visit to Peru.

The United States has 130,000 soldiers in Iraq, he noted. Britain has 10,000 troops.

Gomez del Prado told a news conference thousands of Peruvians, Chileans, Colombians, Hondurans and Ecuadorans had been contracted to work as mercenaries in Iraq, thanks to an array of legal loopholes.

The trend has caused widespread public concern in Peru.

Rights workers have voiced concern that people are being hired to work as security guards in Iraq but are then given military training and asked to perform “previously unforseen tasks” which draw them into full combat.

Gomez del Prado’s Colombian colleague, Amada Guevara, told the news conference that in some cases, workers were contracted by existing companies who exploited legal loopholes. But in other cases, they were taken on by ghost firms who arrived in a country, opened an office for a month, contracted workers and then disappeared without trace.

“This amounts to privatisation of warfare,” she said.

A study released today by the Congressional Budget Office shows that the real troop increase associated with President Bush’s escalation policy could be as high as 48,000, more than double the 21,500 soldiers that Bush has claimed.

As DefenseTech notes, extra forces are expected because the combat units being sent into Iraq “need to be backed up by support troops, ‘including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services.’” The CBO’s low estimate envisions at least 15,000 additional support personnel. The alternative scenario “would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops.”

Additionally, the cost of the escalation could be as much as five times higher than White House estimates:

According to the study, the costs for the “surge” would also be dramatically different than the President has said. The White House estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding, the CBO now believes “that costs would range from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment, depending upon the total number of troops deployed.”

Wayne S. Smith is now a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. and an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1979 to 1982.

Raúl Castro has been acting president of Cuba since July 31, 2006. His brother, Fidel, passed the office to him then because of a serious illness. At this point, it is not clear whether Fidel Castro will recover and resume the presidency. It seems unlikely. But regardless of whether he does or not, he is now 80 and in poor health. One way or the other, his almost half-century rule in Cuba is nearing an end. What will be his legacy? Has the Cuba he leaves behind registered gains over Cuba as it was when he took power in 1959? Will it have a brighter future? And is it supported by the Cuban people?

The answers to those questions are mixed. Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He despises any system in which one class or group of people lives much better than another. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all — enough to eat, health care, adequate housing and education. The authoritarian nature of the Cuban Revolution stems largely from his commitment to that goal. Castro was convinced that he was right, and that his system was for the good of the people. Thus, anyone who stood against the revolution stood also against the Cuban people and that, in Castro’s eyes, was simply unacceptable. There is, then, very little in the way of individual freedoms – especially freedom of expression and assembly. And there are political prisoners — those who have expressed positions against the revolution — though today only some 300, down markedly from the number at the outset of the revolution.

And did the system provide that promised better way of life? It can be said that during the years of the Cuban-Soviet alliance, when Cuba enjoyed most favorable terms of trade with the Soviet Union, resulting in what amounted to a subsidy of five to six billion dollars a year, the Cuban people were indeed well off. They had free (and excellent) health care, education up through the post-graduate level, adequate housing, enough to eat, and various other benefits. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cuba’s subsidy. Cuba went through some very difficult years — years of serious shortages of almost everything — of 18-hour-a-day blackouts and other difficulties.

It is a tribute to the durability of the Cuban people, and to a number of reforms to the economy carried out by the government, that they survived. But survive they did, and survive also did the revolution. At this point, the Cuban economy is making a strong comeback, thanks in part to new economic relationships with Venezuela and China, to a possible new oil field off the north coast, with other nations already bidding for drilling rights, to the fact that the price of nickel, Cuba’s largest export, is at an all-time high and that tourism continues to flourish and bring in much-needed hard currency despite U.S. travel controls blocking American tourists. The economy grew by at least eight percent in 2005 and closer to 12 percent in 2006.

For the average Cuban, life is still difficult. There are still shortages of almost all the basic necessities. Few go hungry, but the diet tends to be monotonous. Even so, the blackouts are now a thing of the past and there is renewed hope for the future. And they still have their free health care and education—something they do not want to give up!

Expectations in Miami and Washington had been that once Fidel Castro disappeared from the scene, the Revolution would crumble. But that, of course, has not been the case. Six months after Fidel passed the baton to Raúl, there has been no sign whatever of unrest. The Cuban people have accepted the transition with calm maturity—indicating a higher level of support for the Revolution than the exiles in Miami or the Bush administration had thought possible. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll conducted in Cuba indicated that 49 percent of the Cuban people supported Fidel Castro. Cuban officials strongly contest that finding, insisting that the percentage of supporters is much, much higher. But even as it stands, the poll indicates that a higher percentage of Cubans support Fidel than the percentage of Americans who support President Bush!

And what about Cuba’s place, its prestige, on the world stage? Here the gains are unquestionable. Before 1959, Cuba was considered as something of a banana republic. It played virtually no role in the international arena. But under Castro, it has played a prominent role, indeed at times a role that often resembled that of a world power.

The revelation yesterday that Scooter Libby acknowledged in November 2003 that he and Vice President Cheney may have talked in July about whether to tell reporters that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA further bolsters the theory that Cheney may be the prime force behind this whole sordid tale.

The conversation in question took place on July 12, 2003, as Cheney and his then-chief of staff were flying back from an event in Norfolk on Air Force Two.

According to multiple reports, Cheney was talking about how to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, who was making trouble with his suggestion that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq. Wilson felt the administration had intentionally disregarded the findings of a trip to Niger he had undertaken for the CIA.

A few days earlier, Cheney had scrawled in the margin of an offending op-ed piece by Wilson: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?”

Yesterday, an FBI agent testified that Libby raised the possibility in a November 2003 interview that “there was a discussion whether to report to the press that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA,” during that July 12 flight. “Mr. Libby told us he believed they may have talked about it but he wasn’t sure.”

The timing is key. Because according to special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s indictment and reporting by the National Journal’s Murray Waas, it was immediately after disembarking from Air Force Two that Libby started working the phones.

Libby promptly called Judith Miller. He had already met with the then-New York Times reporter twice by that point. But in his phone conversation that afternoon, according to Miller, he mentioned Valerie Plame for a third time and pushed that angle sufficiently that she felt obliged to tell him that the Times wasn’t interested in writing a story about it.

Aside from winning, there aren’t that many ways of ending wars. Governments pay attention when the troops mutiny, when there are riots outside recruiting offices, when there’s revolution on the home front, when the money runs out.

In Vietnam the troops mutinied. Units shot their officers in the back or threw grenades into their tents. Navy ratings pushed aircraft off the side of aircraft carriers. In 1971 the Pentagon counted 503,926 “incidents of desertion” over the previous five years and reckoned that more than half of US ground forces openly opposed the war. At Christmastime in 1971 Vietnam Vets Against the War seized the Statue of Liberty, draping it with a banner demanding Bring our Brothers Home.

On the home front people fought the draft or simply fled it. In 1967 Maj. Gen. William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence, observed the great antiwar march from the roof of the Pentagon and concluded “the empire is coming apart at the seams.” He reckoned there were too few reliable troops to fight the war in Vietnam and hold the line at home.

The elites, always prone to panic in such matters, thought revolution was around the corner. The left, in those days prone to optimism, thought the same thing. In the end, Congress cut off the money. Between 1970 and 1973, Congress enacted five restrictions on funding of U.S. military operations in Indochina.

You don’t need a draft to have a vibrant antiwar movement. We saw that in the 1980s, with the campaign against US intervention in Central America. These struggles failed, but reignited a domestic spirit of resistance. Out of them, in part, came the Jackson Campaigns of 1984 and ’88. And just as the antiwar movement helped give us Jimmy Carter in ’76, in ’92 we got Bill.

Yet aside from a heartening flare-up against the WTO in Seattle, the Clinton years pretty much snuffed out the radical spark. Swallow NAFTA, sanctions against Iraq, plus welfare reform and the Effective Death Penalty Act, and you aren’t in any mindset to seize the Statue of Liberty.

Amman, Jordan – Earlier this week, I received a joyful phone call from Baghdad. Members of a family I’ve known since 1996 announced that one of their younger daughters was engaged. Broken Arabic and broken English crossed the lines: “We love you! We miss you!” My colleague here in Amman, who also knows this family well, shook her head, smiling, when I gave her the happy news. “What an amazing family,” she said. “Imagine all that they’ve survived.” A few hours later, the family sent us a text message: “Now bombs destroy all the glasses in our home – no one hurt.”

No one was home when the explosion shattered every window and damaged ceilings and walls. This was exceptionally fortunate, given that they are a family of nine living in a very small dwelling. The family has moved into an even smaller home where one daughter lives with her husband and newborn baby. It happens that their aunt and her three children are also with them. The aunt had traveled from Amman to secure needed documents in Baghdad. Seventeen people are crowded into an apartment the size of a small one car garage.

This family suddenly joined the ranks of over a million people in Iraq who are homeless, displaced. I watched television coverage of the gruesome carnage at the intersection of the street where they had lived. The blood-spattered streets, charred vehicles, and desperate bereavement are part of everyday footage filmed in cities throughout the region, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank, or Israel. The humanitarian crisis that mounts as a consequence of the catastrophic explosions and attacks is more difficult to portray.

“We need everything,” said the visiting aunt when I asked what they needed. A displaced family needs food, water, clothing, blankets, fuel and housing.

Every family in Baghdad struggles with fuel and energy crises. In Baghdad, there is one hour of electricity every 12 hours. Only the more well-to-do families can afford a generator for back-up electricity. The price of fuel for transportation has risen so high that any travel has become extremely expensive. Families with no income in a society that has 50 to 75 percent unemployment find themselves scrounging for basic necessities and not at all prepared to offer hospitality to newly displaced families.

Families who receive the dreaded knock on the door giving them 24 hours notice, – leave or you will be killed – often travel to other regions of Iraq, where they no longer have access to the rations distributed in their former neighborhoods. Many families are hungry and cold. Disease sets in, and they have no access to health care. Children aren’t easily accepted in overcrowded schools when families move into a new area. Sewage and sanitation systems are stressed by unexpected rises in neighborhood populations. A family might be welcomed by relatives who couldn’t bear to turn them away, but how are the host families and communities to manage continued hospitality with very little international relief or support available?

Consider, for instance, that over a third (38 percent) of Iraq’s people depend on the ration system for the meager allotments of lentils, rice, flour, salt and tea. If a family is displaced by an attack on their home, distance or personal safety often prohibits them from returning to pick up these supplies. Too often the agent who delivers the supplies can’t even approach the warehouse to collect them, because it is located in a “hot” area now controlled by a sect or militia to which he does not belong and which may kill him. In those cases, whole neighborhoods, already struggling and suffering, must go without a month’s supply of food.