The Rag Blog

VENEZUELA initiates new stage of revolution

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Bolivian President Evo Morales, and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa chat while U.S. puppet Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez sits wringing his hands. From Jan. 11 through 15 three leftist Latin American presidents were sworn in. This surely made the White House more nervous about this region of the world.

Early on Jan. 11, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was sworn in at the National Assembly after having won a landslide election on Dec. 3. Ironically, this was the same day that, in the north of the American continent, U.S. President George W. Bush would announce his new policy for more death and destruction in his war on “terrorism” and Iraq.

Several of Chávez’s speeches point to a new stage of the Bolivarian Revolution that will intensify the development of his proposed “Socialism of the 21st Century” in Venezuela. These included a call for the formation of a Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela, a new party that would coalesce all the pro-revolution groups existing in the country; the nationalization of important sectors of the economy, including telecommunications, electricity and the Central Bank—which up to now has been an autonomous entity—and several other measures intended to move toward the construction of a socialist society.

Sandinistas back in office in NICARAGUA

After being sworn in, Chávez flew to Nicaragua to attend the inauguration of President Daniel Ortega. After a lapse of many years, in a completely new situation in the country, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation was back in office on Jan. 11, represented by Ortega. The Sandinistas, who had tried earlier to bring revolutionary change to Nicaragua, had been forced out in 1990 after a contra war sponsored by the U.S. that cost billions of dollars of damage, followed by Washington’s direct intervention in Nicaragua’s elections in support of an opposition it had created.

In fact, the World Court in 1988 actually ruled that the U.S. should pay Nicaragua some $12 billion to $17 billion in reparations for the damage of the contra war—a ruling Washington ignored.

The Nicaraguan masses have suffered terribly—first during the U.S.-contra dirty war and then, after the pro-U.S. regime was installed, by neoliberal economic policies dictated from Wall Street.

The rightwing smear campaign against Barack Obama, waged by a magazine funded by the far rightwing Korean businessman and part-time messiah, the Reverend Moon, has foundered on CNN’s good reporting. The allegation was that he had gone to a radical “Saudi-funded” madrasah. Wolf Blitzer had the professionalism to send out an experienced reporter to the school that Obama attended when he was 6 years old in Indonesia. He found it just an ordinary modern school with boys and girls and both male and female teachers, which taught modern subjects.

The smear campaign would be hilarious if it weren’t so satanic.

01/22/07 “ICHBlog” — — Just why did the US attack Somalia two weeks ago? Of course, the answer given for the US military intervention and the generally accepted notion is the hunt for terrorists. But is it? Are terrorists the only bone of contention the US has with Somalia? When the US military devised “Operation Restore Hope” in 1993 which was short-lived after they were whipsawed by rag-tag militia in and around Mogadishu, were they fighting the ‘war on terror’?

They couldn’t have been because this war was to start much later, If anything it is a post-Sept 11 phenomenon. So then why did the US bomb ICU extremists in the name of Al Qaeda terrorists and not throughout last year when they occupied Mogadishu?
Just why is Somalia so important to the US, and by extension the big boys of Europe and some Gulf states? A UN Somalia Monitoring Group report released in November 2005 reveals that a dozen countries, namely Yemen, Djibouti, Libya, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Uganda were all poking their noses into the Somalia pie.

What the UN Somalia Monitoring Group didn’t reveal, however, is that these were not the only countries which were interested in the country. The little known yet well-heeled contact group, consisting of Norway, the US, UK, France and Tanzania (just an appendage) are also deeply enmeshed in Somalia.

While the terrorism theory holds some water, the reality of the factors contributing to the mess in Somalia is pegged on natural resources. Oil and gas are Somalia’s Achilles heel. It is an open secret that four US oil giants are sitting pretty on money-spinning concessions expecting to reap huge windfalls from massive resources of both oil and gas in Somalia.

The story of Somalia and oil goes back to the colonial period. British and Italian geologists first identified oil deposits during that period of imperialism. The first oil wells historically referred to as the Daga Shabell series were dug in the 1960s. Tiny gas discoveries adjacent to Socotra were also noted.

“The arrogance of military power has led to a grave crisis – and to a decline of the United States’ role and influence.” Mikhail Gorbachev.
“The president is living in a dream world,” US Sen. Barbara Boxer.

01/22/07 “ICHBlog” — On Iran , US Administration has reached the pre-Iraq invasion rhetoric level of 2003 , when against the UN Charter and world opinion ,President George Bush decided to invade Iraq after having assembled a naval armada and air and land forces in the region ,cheerlead by a subservient US media . Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are accusing Tehran of developing nuclear weapons and exporting terrorism, just as Saddam Hussein was allegedly doing. Iran is also not abiding by U N resolutions on its nuclear weapons program, which, like Iraq then, it denies it has. UN Nuclear Agency in Vienna has found no proof of a weapons program .Neither there was one in Iraq in 2003. Almost all accusations made by US President , his deputy and others , exaggerated by US corporate owned media proved to be false.

But after 4 years of blunders and stupidity , the situation is unlike March, 2003 , with an isolated Bush administration now under siege having become unpopular and discredited at home and with allies abroad .In Iran it faces a people with a long history of survival beginning with Alexander and his uncouth Macedonian hordes , Arabs ,Turks , Mongols and others. And they succeeded in civilizing most of them.

Even the new Chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee , John D. Rockefeller (D) took umbrage at the Bush administration’s increasingly hostile barrage against Iran .The efforts to portray it as a growing threat were uncomfortably reminiscent of the rhetoric about Iraq. “To be quite honest, I’m a little concerned that it’s Iraq again,” Senator Rockefeller said in an interview on 19 January. “This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre.” “I don’t think that policymakers in this administration particularly understand Iran,” he added. Rockefeller, a moderate , with good access to most classified intelligence about the threat from Tehran felt that US agencies still knew little about either Iran’s internal dynamics or its intentions in the Middle East.

On how President Bush has dealt with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism since 119 attacks, Rockefeller believed that the campaign against international terrorism was “still a mystery” to the President. “I don’t think he understands the world,” he said. “I don’t think he’s particularly curious about the world. I don’t think he reads like he says he does.” He added, “Every time he’s read something he tells you about it, I think.”

Over Bush’s policy of ‘Surge ‘ ie sending additional 21,500 troops to Iraq ,hot words are being exchanged between Democrat party ,resurgent after Bush’s Republican party debacle in November elections and the White House. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats are backing a nonbinding Senate Democratic resolution declaring that “It is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Iraq, particularly by escalating the US military force presence in Iraq.”

ACT 1 Scene 1 Cemeteries of the world are filled with ghosts meeting and discussing; ghosts in sheets of red, ghosts in black and red; some with gaping wounds, others without limbs, some beheaded and blinded. Some came from forgotten weed patches, others from under monumental tombstones. Some speak loud and clear, other curse under their breath – but all are filled with angry indignation.

From near and far they all declare:

All: Revenge!

To those who betrayed our trust, our fight, our sacrifice,

even as they dare to praise or speak

in our name and of our death.

We say a curse on all your kind,

we shall visit

and you shall hear our voices

amplified by the millions

and through the many languages

will be conveyed

our message:

Traitors do not tread upon our graves

Lest you lose your treasures

And more yet

your unholy alliance with all those

whose power tyrannize our people

And makes a mockery of our sacrifice.

And so speak the assembly of the ghosts of the past

addressing the rulers of the present,

former comrades

who have taken up the cudgels

of their former enemies.

They travel far and wide

to Central and South America,

to the Middle East,

Asia, Europe and

North America.

Neither color or gender

are forgotten,

or forgiven.

All those who forsake

Americans can justifiably be proud of their nation’s great libraries, including such magnificent examples as the Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress – the biggest in the world – and the New York Public Library, a wonderful repository not only of a huge collection of books but also of an outstanding art collection.

On a trip to New York in 1989, I spent many pleasant hours browsing through books in the New York Public Library. Yet I only managed to see a very tiny fraction of the millions of books on its shelves. A lady volunteer who showed me around told me that the cost of building the library had been met entirely through donations from the city’s civic-minded residents. She said that even the cost of running the library is met entirely from donations.

Nowadays, however, in the post-9/11 era, even libraries in America are under siege. Under the provisions of the draconian Patriot Act, which was enacted by the US Congress in October 2001 with hardly any debate, in the wake of 9/11, the FBI has the right to obtain a court order to access any records that American public libraries have of books borrowed by customers.

Here’s what can happen: Say you’re living in the port city of San Diego and have borrowed a book on scuba diving from your local library and are reading it one afternoon in your backyard. A nosey neighbour spots you reading the book and telephones the FBI. “Ah ha!” cries the FBI. “A book on scuba diving! It’s obviously someone planning an underwater attack on naval installations in San Diego.”

So off goes the FBI and obtains a court order to access your library records. The next thing you know an FBI team has burst into your house with drawn guns and hauled you off downtown for interrogation. “How do we know you’re not a terrorist?” screams an FBI agent. “Down on the floor. Spread your legs. Who are your contacts in Al Qaeda,” screams another agent. It could be days before you’re able to prove your innocence and are released.

You can’t make this stuff up. George Bush believes that “the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.” On the other side of the political divide, Presidential hopeful Joseph Biden — a sponsor of the anti-surge legislation pending before Congress — maintains that we’ve “done enough for the Iraqis.”

What a strange war we’re having Iraq. After four years of shifting rationales, Americans remain clueless about why Bush opened this Pandora’s box. The cold math that led to this disastrous imperial project is just too much for the pundits to own up to.

Far too many Americans trip over whatever happens to be the latest rationale for sending half our army half way around the world to fight a people that did us no harm. Even the anti-war camp is crowded with pundits whose gripe de jour is that Bush is a messianic Samaritan idealist who miscalculated the cost of exporting liberty to Iraqi ingrates.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s very gratifying to see the war party’s constituency dwindle to an irredentist thirty percent of the population. It wasn’t so long ago that opponents of the Iraq war were rewarded with scarlet letters identifying them as subversive Al-Qaeda apologists.

But if Gerald Ford went to the great beyond believing that Bush’s Iraqi expedition was motivated by a desire to ‘free people’ — we have a serious problem on our hand. Because that was hardly the mission in Iraq.

We ended up getting into this Mesopotamian mess because a number of constituencies — represented by skillful political operatives and lobbyists — combined forces to promote this debacle of choice.

There’s no denying the primary role of the neo-con think tanks and their Likudnik mass media collaborators in orchestrating this war. But let’s not forget that the Gulf States rolled out the red carpet for the Anglo-American invasion forces. Down on Main Street, the Armageddon worshipping dispensationalists fielded the jingoistic mobs that subscribe to the notion that a little hellfire and damnation in the Middle East will bring on the end of times. And, of course, there is that little detail about Iraqi oil reserves. Did I fail to mention Halliburton and the military industrial complex?

Yet for many Americans, launching this illegal war of aggression was just a primal act of vengeance in retribution for the atrocities of 9/11. This particular constituency enthusiastically lined up to join the war party — without the slightest need for an elaborate WMD hoax. They just wanted to kill as many Arabs as possible. Did it matter that the secular Baathist regime in Baghdad had nothing to do with Al Qaeda? Not a bit.

In Juan Cole’s news roundup this morning, he notes:

CSM [the Christian Science Monitor] writes on new counter-insurgency efforts by US in Iraq. The article points out that such efforts depend on good intelligence on the enemy. I’m not sure how we are going to get that.

In fact, there’s been extensive discussion in the blogiverse the past few days over an article detailing how awful U.S. intelligence is in Iraq, with CIA staff unable to leave the Green Zone (or American military bases) because it’s too unsafe.

By contrast, the people we’re trying to impose our will on in Iraq have intelligence like this (more via Laura Rozen):

The armored sport-utility vehicles whisked into a government compound in the city of Karbala with speed and urgency, the way most Americans and foreign dignitaries travel along Iraq’s treacherous roads these days.

Iraqi guards at checkpoints waved them through Saturday afternoon because the men wore what appeared to be legitimate U.S. military uniforms and badges, and drove cars commonly used by foreigners, the provincial governor said.

Once inside, however, the men unleashed one of the deadliest and most brazen attacks on U.S. forces in a secure area. Five American service members were killed in a hail of grenades and gunfire in a breach of security that Iraqi officials called unprecedented.

As the New York Times notes:

The sophisticated attack hinted at what could be a new threat for American troops as they start a fresh security plan centered on small bases in Baghdad’s bloodiest neighborhoods, where soldiers will live and work with Iraqi forces. Military officials have said that one of their greatest concerns is that troops will be vulnerable to attack from killers who appear to be colleagues.

A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another – a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris.

Gadsden got out of the war zone alive because of the Department of Defense’s network of frontline trauma care and rapid air transport known as the evacuation chain. Minutes after the attack, a helicopter touched down in the desert. Combat medics stanched the marine’s bleeding, inflated his collapsed lung, and eased his pain. He was airlifted to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, located in an old health care facility called the Ibn Sina, which had formerly catered to the Baathist elite. Army surgeons there repaired Gadsden’s cranium, removed his injured spleen, and pumped him full of broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infection.

Three days later, he was flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital in Europe. He was treated for his burns, and his spine was stabilized for the 18-hour flight to the US. Just a week after nearly dying in the desert, Gadsden was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother, Zeada, at his bedside.

The surgeons, nurses, medics, and pilots of the evacuation chain have saved thousands of lives. Soldiers wounded in Vietnam were six weeks of transit time away from US hospitals, and one out of every four of them died. By contrast, a soldier’s odds of surviving battle injuries in Iraq are nine out of 10. Unfortunately, this remarkable advance in battlefield logistics has also resulted in an increase in the number of traumatically injured patients who are particularly susceptible to infections during their recovery. In Gadsden’s case, from the moment he was carried into the Ibn Sina, the injured marine was in the crosshairs of an enemy he didn’t even know was there.

At first, he did quite well. By early September, Gadsden was weaned off his ventilator and breathing on his own. For weeks he gradually improved. His buddies took him to a Washington Redskins game in his wheelchair, and the next day he navigated 50 feet with a walker. Soon Gadsden was transferred to a veterans’ hospital in Florida called the James A. Haley Medical Center, where he offered to serve as the eyes of a fellow marine blinded in an ambush. The doctors told Zeada that her son might be able to go home by the end of October.

But he still had mysterious symptoms that he couldn’t shake, like headaches, rashes, and intermittent fevers. His doctors gave him CT scans, laxatives, methadone, beta-blockers, Xanax, more surgery, and more antibiotics. An accurate evaluation of his case was difficult, however, because portions of his medical records never arrived from Bethesda. If they had, they would have shown a positive test for a kind of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii.

TOPEKA, Kan. – President Bush is losing the heartland.

Conservative Kansas – home to the Army’s Fort Riley, the U.S. Cavalry Museum, Republican icons Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole, and the place that gave Bush back to back landslide majorities – is turning against the Iraq war.

Kansas Democrats are quicker to oppose Bush, but growing numbers of Kansas Republicans also are rejecting his plan to send more troops to Iraq and the war itself. That threatens Bush’s hope to maintain a solid base of support for his war policies and undermines White House efforts to portray war opposition as partisan Democratic politics.

“The president’s war ideas are not very popular here,” said Tim Shallenburger, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. “Even good Republicans are getting frustrated and believe the president is being stubborn. … Seven out of 10 good conservative Republicans may not want to say it, but they oppose the war.”

If true, that would be a far more negative vote on the war than registered by Republicans nationally. Although Americans overwhelmingly oppose the Iraq war, 61 percent of Republicans still approve of Bush’s handling of it, according to the Gallup poll.

Their opposition is almost whispered among friends, largely under the surface in a state where Republicans are reluctant to protest or criticize the commander in chief, the title many use in discussing Bush.

But it’s there and it’s growing, say locals from small prairie towns to the suburbs of Kansas City, a simmering opposition in the heart of conservative country that explains why some Republicans in Congress increasingly feel free to turn against the president over the war.