The Rag Blog

ABU DHABI, 29 Jan 2007 (IRIN) – “My family is from Baghdad where we have been living for a very long time. My daughter Retaj is four years old and has been diagnosed with Ichthyosis [a dermatological condition caused by genetic abnormalities] since birth. Her outer skin is dry and exfoliates like a fish and then after it exfoliates, her skin sticks out of her body and swells.

“Since I found out about her disease, I have never left her. I have always tried to find treatment for her. Doctors in Iraq don’t understand what it is. Because there is no treatment, she gets worse by the day. The disease took over her face and her body.

“From her birth until today, I’ve only been using Petroleum Jelly. It eases her symptoms somewhat but it is not the solution. In Baghdad, I can’t leave my house because of the violence. I can’t go and see a doctor. I can’t even go to a nearby clinic.

“Sometimes, I can’t even go outside to buy Petroleum Jelly, which is Retaj’s only means of getting relief. I have left her without any treatment or Petroleum Jelly for seven months straight before because we were not able to leave our homes.

”No one wants to have children anymore because they don’t want the children to have to suffer from untreatable diseases caused by all the wars and their effects.”

“The worst thing in Iraq now is that the air is highly polluted. I can’t take her outside at all now. I believe that the weapons that have been used by US troops have affected the weather immensely. These weapons have affected the weather and the weather has affected our children.

“Breathing in Iraq is very difficult. You always smell burning from the fighting and from explosions. This intensifies the air pollution and affects the most vulnerable, our children.

“I have had enough. I am continually stressed and am on the brink of a nervous breakdown because of what is happening to my daughter and because of everything that is happening in Iraq – it is a 24-hour war zone.

By “car-free”, I mean that Peggy and I haven’t owned a car since January 31st of 1997.

So, what is the difference between a person who, through denial, apathy, illness, or self-loathing, commits suicide by ignoring their addictions, and someone who hastens the destruction of a planetary life support system through denial of their addiction and its consequences?

The only difference I see is that people who commit suicide through substance abuse are just hurting themselves, and those who care about them.

But people who would poison an entire planet because they refuse to face their own addictions, are not only suicidal, but homicidal, genocidal, and biocidal as well.

Are we that oblivious to reality, and to our own responsibilities?

Do we just not give a damn, or do we feel too hopelessly addicted to our old habits? Or, are we just in denial that there is a real problem, and that each one of us is a big part of it?

Of the thousands of cars which drive by us every week, blowing exhaust in our faces as we walk around Big Bear, how many of the drivers ever think about what they’re doing, or about our health, or the stench they’re spewing into rarefied mountain air belonging to everybody?

Why is something like that legal?

Should it be legal for me to shit all over everyone and everything?

What’s the difference?

Legal or not, it’s most certainly immoral!

Todays’ infernal combustion automobile is probably the worst of our addictions, because of the magnitude of its destructiveness, but our disease goes much deeper than that.

How often have you heard the term “for the benefit of mankind”?

Humankind, blinded by its own cleverness, and imagined self-importance, values each technology primarily for the benefits to mankind.

Wouldn’t a species with the slightest bit of common sense, and some desire for long-term survival, assess technologies primarily on their benefits to all life on Earth and the long-term health of their ecosystem?

Isn’t survival considered a benefit to mankind?

We have grossly overpopulated the planet through the invention and use of technologies which supposedly benefit mankind. Yet it is becoming clearer every day that those very technologies may soon render our planet uninhabitable for those who would breathe oxygen, including the mankind they allegedly benefit.

Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller responded today to Gov. Rick Perry’s decision that schoolgirls in Texas must be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

“Today’s decision by the governor is not just a positive step forward in efforts to promote women’s health. It is also an important acknowledgment that health and science should not be held hostage to politics and ideology.”

BAGHDAD — Alarmed by rising tensions between the United States and Iran, Iraqi government officials fear their country is in danger of being dragged into the middle of a new conflict between its two main allies.

In the past week, the Bush administration has ratcheted up pressure on Iran, saying it has evidence that Tehran is arming Iraqi insurgents and pledging to hunt down Iranian agents operating in Iraq. That has fueled concerns in Baghdad that Iraq will become the battleground in a showdown between Iran and the U.S., Iraqi officials say.

Iraq’s Shiite-led government has warm relations with neighboring Iran, and it does not want that relationship compromised by an increasingly strident posture by Washington toward Tehran, Iraqi officials say.

“We want to maintain good relations with our neighbors, especially Iran,” Iraqi government spokesman Ali al- Dabbagh told a news conference Thursday in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone. “We have long borders with them, we have local interests with [them] and we would like to have this relationship not in the shadow of the others.”

Iraq also wants to maintain good relations with the U.S., he added, stressing that Iraq does not condone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq. “We want good relations with everyone, whether Iran or the U.S.,” he said. “The problems between the U.S. and Iran must not get solved in Iraq.”

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have escalated sharply in recent weeks, with the dispatch of additional U.S. warships to the Persian Gulf and the deployment of upgraded Patriot missiles to Gulf Arab countries, fueling speculation across the region that the U.S. is gearing up for a war with Iran.

Bush administration officials insist they do not intend to go to war with Iran. They have defended the targetting of Iranians in Iraq and other moves in the region as necessary to counter Tehran’s backing of Iraqi insurgents, which coincides with U.S. efforts to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

“We’ve been very clear we don’t intend to strike into Iran, in terms of what we’re doing in Iraq,” Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told National Public Radio Thursday.

But Iraq’s concern is that the U.S. is taking advantage of its presence in Iraqi territory to rein in Iran’s rising influence in the region, Iraqi officials say. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Air Force is preparing to undertake more aggressive patrols along the Iraq-Iran border to disrupt insurgent supply lines.

PARIS (Feb. 2) – International scientists and officials hailed a report Friday saying that global warming is “very likely” caused by man, and that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level “would continue for centuries” no matter how much humans control their pollution.

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called it a “very impressive document that goes several steps beyond previous research.”

A top U.S. government scientist, Susan Solomon, said “there can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities.”

The 21-page summary of the panel’s findings released Friday represents the most authoritative science on global warming. The panel comprises hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

It would be comical, if not so pathetic.

“More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger,” reports the Associated Press. “Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.”

In short, Americans are easily frightened by crass manifestations of the tawdry and shallow consumer society they passively accept, even celebrate, usually with dangerous levels of credit card debt. Fear and mistrust are now endemic, thanks to nearly six years of incessant propaganda concerning universal terrorists, Muslim evil-doers, liquid bombs, homegrown fanatics, even dire warnings of pregnant suicide bombers lurking on the local bus or train.

“Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force,’ a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball…. It said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.”

However, nothing is more surreal than the idea Muslims want to convert the world to Islam by sword or nuke, kill all the Jews, behead heretics in Thedford, Nebraska, and force all our women to wear chadors. Nothing is more ludicrous than the term “Islamofascism” and brainless comparisons between Hitler and Ahmadinejad. It is completely absurd to believe Iran will patch together a nuke one day and drop it on Israel the next. Indeed, the prospect of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover AFB in increasing numbers and over 600,000 dead Iraqis predicated on lies and absurd falsification is grotesquely and nauseatingly surreal, to say the least.

Obviously, the neocons have us right where they want us—afraid of our own shadows, mistaking such for Osama with blood-soaked scimitar in hand, and taking puerile marketing gimmicks staged by multinational “entertainment” corporations as bombs.

The Bush administration, in a sense, is getting what it wants in the wider Middle East. To battle a fictitious Shi’ite crescent (a construct by Jordan’s King Abdullah), it has emboldened even more a reactionary Sunni crescent (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates), thus exacerbating to a paroxysm the “strategy” it has already applied in Iraq: sectarianism as the golden parameter of imperial divide and rule. Historically, Sunnis and Shi’ites have co-existed amid social tensions. But never have these tensions been so cynically exploited – by Washington – as in post-invasion Iraq and the wider Middle East.

The administration of US President George W Bush was forced to acknowledge that the monumental disaster of occupied Iraq had to be blamed on a new scapegoat. Thus the umpteenth twist in the “war on terror”: exit al-Qaeda, enter Iran.

The Sunni Arab “axis of fear” is merrily playing along. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia even complained in a Kuwaiti newspaper that Iran is trying to convert Sunni Arabs to Shi’ism. Even Israel is now by all means allied with Saudi Arabia against Iran – Mecca/Jerusalem against Qom; Muslims and Jews battling Muslims.

It’s enlightening to compare this development with how Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, sees it – as nothing other than a replay of the British Empire’s divide-and-rule. Washington is once again sowing the seeds of discord among Muslims: “Bush and his allies are in favor of further unrest, turmoil and crises so that they can justify deployment of their troops in the region.”

Shi’ites also happen to live in the midst of the “axis of fear” – such as in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies. Beyond sectarianism, Arab popular perception is alert enough to identify this for what it is: a war of the US – supported by dictatorial Arab regimes – against Islam. And the target is not only Iran: the Saudi/Israeli link is also anti-Hamas – an obvious point as the House of Saud is little else than an annex of Washington.

A recent survey of Arab public opinion by the British YouGov group revealed that Israel (88%) is the “greatest threat to the security and future” of the Middle East, followed by the US, al-Qaeda and finally Iran (33%). This has not prevented the bulk of Arab mainstream media from engaging in a systematic anti-Iranian propaganda wave.

NAJAF, Iraq, Jan 31 (IPS) – Iraqi government lies over the killing of hundreds of Shias in an attack on Sunday stand exposed by independent investigations carried out by IPS in Iraq.

Conflicting reports had arisen earlier on how and why a huge battle broke out around the small village Zarqa, located just a few kilometres northeast of the Shia holy city Najaf, which is 90 km south of Baghdad.

One thing certain is that when the smoke cleared, more than 200 people lay dead after more than half a day of fighting Sunday Jan. 28. A U.S. helicopter was shot down, killing two soldiers. Twenty-five members of the Iraqi security force were also killed.

“We were going to conduct the usual ceremonies that we conduct every year when we were attacked by Iraqi soldiers,” Jabbar al-Hatami, a leader of the al-Hatami Shia Arab tribe told IPS.

“We thought it was one of the usual mistakes of the Iraqi army killing civilians, so we advanced to explain to the soldiers that they killed five of us for no reason. But we were surprised by more gunfire from the soldiers.”

The confrontation took place on the Shia holiday of Ashura which commemorates Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the most revered of Shia saints. Emotions run high at this time, and self-flagellation in public is the norm.

Many southern Shia Arabs do not follow Iranian-born cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They believe the religious leadership should be kept in the hands of Arab clerics. Al-Hatami and al-Khazaali are two major tribes that do not follow Sistani.

Tribal members from both believe the attack was launched by the central government of Baghdad to stifle growing Shia-Sunni unity in the area.

“Our convoy was close to the al-Hatami convoy on the way to Najaf when we heard the massive shooting, and so we ran to help them because our tribe and theirs are bound with a strong alliance,” a 45-year-old man who asked to be referred to as Ahmed told IPS.

Ahmed, a member of the al-Khazali tribe said “our two tribes have a strong belief that Iranians are provoking sectarian war in Iraq which is against the belief of all Muslims, and so we announced an alliance with Sunni brothers against any sectarian violence in the country. That did not make our Iranian dominated government happy.”

The fighting took place on the Diwaniya-Najaf road and spread into nearby date-palm plantations after pilgrims sought refuge there.

“American helicopters participated in the slaughter,” Jassim Abbas, a farmer from the area told IPS. “They were soon there to kill those pilgrims without hesitation, but they were never there for helping Iraqis in anything they need. We just watched them getting killed group by group while trapped in those plantations.”

Citing Iranian involvement with Iraqi militias and Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the Bush administration has shifted to offense in its confrontation with Iran — building up the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf and promising more aggressive moves against Iranian operatives in Iraq and Lebanon.

The behind-the-scenes struggle between the two nations could explode into open warfare over a single misstep, analysts and U.S. military officials warn.

This is the preeminent, really the only question in American politics today: Do we want to go to war with Iran or not? With the escalating chaos in Iraq and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, is it in our interests or not to get into a shooting war with Iran? The debate over the ‘surge’ of US troops into Baghdad is significant in its own way, but it pales in comparison to this one.

I’ve always viewed the fears that the White House would try expand the war into Iran with a mix of deep skepticism, fascination and latent foreboding. Logically, it makes no sense on any number of counts. But the last half dozen years has taught us all that that’s simply not a significant obstacle. There are any number of ridiculous gambits I was sure these guys wouldn’t try before they did try them.

Again, the ‘sensible’ interpretation of what’s happening right now is that the administration is trying to regain control of the situation in Iraq. And to further that aim they’re rattling their sabres at Iran to get them to back off and stop making trouble. That’s the sensible explanation. But we’re not dealing with sensible people. And much more important, the folks who are running this show are simply too stupid to be trusted to execute such a delicate and perilous feint.

I don’t mean they’re dumb people. I’m sure they have high IQs. Most went to prestigious universities. They have lists of accomplishments. But the record of the last six years shows so many mistakes, such a record of incapability and incompetence, so many misjudgements, screw-ups and boners that there’s no other suitable word.

Through plan or imbecility (and most likely, given who were talking about, both) they’re drifting toward war with Iran.

As I wrote last night, I think the new campaign of anonymous leaks suggesting Iranian involvement in the Najaf raid has rather less than no credibility. But even if you assumed, for the sake of discussion, that it were tied to, say, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and that (as the narrative goes) the attack was retaliation for the Erbil raid on the Iranian consulate, that still would not change the question we face: is it in our national interest to go to war with Iran or not?

Everything flows from the answer to that question. Tits for tats or who started what fade into the background. If the answers no, we should be calibrating our actions to avoid such an outcome, not taking actions likely to provoke it. We need a regional plan to walk this mess back from the brink rather than simply yanking every thread on this already frayed fabric and watching it disintegrate in front of us.

We’ve heard a few squawks and warnings from members of Congress. But now is the time for members of the House and the Senate to get serious about asserting some control over this rapid descent.

I’ve said this before. But perhaps it seems like hyperbole. So I’ll say it again. The president’s interests are now radically disjoined from the country’s. We can handle a setback like Iraq. It really is a big disaster. But America will certainly surive it. President Bush — in the sense of his legacy and historical record — won’t. It’s all Iraq for him. And Iraq is all disaster. So, from his perspective (that is to say, through the prism of his interests rather than the country’s — which he probably can’t separate) reckless gambits aimed at breaking out of this ever-tightening box make sense.

Think of it like this. He’s a death row prisoner concocting a thousand-to-one plan to break out of prison. For him, those are good odds. The rest of us are doing three months for disorderly conduct. And he’s trying to rope us into his harebrained scheme. Like I said, his interests are very different from ours.

BEIJING (Reuters) – President Bush should scrap his unilateral approach and respect religious diversity in his “war on terror” to resolve troubles in Iraq, a senior Chinese official said in comments published on Thursday.

Recent anti-war protests across the United States illustrated that the Iraq war was unjust, Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, wrote in the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, in rare public criticism of U.S. policy.

Ye’s bureau oversees Christianity, Buddhism and Islam in the atheist country which only tolerates state-sanctioned religious institutions.

He criticized inflammatory terms such as “crusade” and “Islamic fascism” which Bush had used in the past when speaking of the fight against terrorism and Muslim militants.