The Rag Blog

The Turks would need six hundred thousand men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had one hundred thousand men available… The Turk was stupid and would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of absolute warfare. Analogy is fudge, anyhow, and to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
–T.E. Lawrence

Previously, I had likened the upcoming Baghdad operation to the Battle of Hue, but this association is probably not the most appropriate. Hue was a clash of conventional forces in an insurgency or unconventional war that was evolving into the next phase, which was conventional. This analysis is correct even considering the irregular Vietcong units engaged in the city, as they were fighting alongside conventional North Vietnamese forces.

The Warsaw Ghetto battle of 1944, which pitted regular Nazi combat forces against the pitiable Jewish resistance forces confined to the ghetto is probably more apt.

This is not to ignore the obvious disparities. The materiel situation in Warsaw was dire. Obviously, the Baghdad resistance will have been laying in supplies; however, once the fighting begins, they will be cut off.

Although the Iraqi resistance (both Sunni and Shia) is well-armed and organized in the parity of their combat power vis a vis the American forces, they cannot possibly strategically defeat the U.S. forces. The U.S. Army will dominate all the fights, but the war is lost for us before the first shot is fired.

This is not a straight line analogy, to be sure; nothing is.

The White House said today that Iranians are aiding the insurgency in Iraq and that the US has the authority to pursue them because they “put our people at risk.”

“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

And said Vice President Dick Cheney: “Iran is fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq.”

Earlier today, the US military in Baghdad said that five Iranians arrested in northern Iraq last week were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

Raids that US President George Bush has approved against Iranian targets in Iraq are part of broad efforts to confront Tehran’s aggression, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday while in Jerusalem.

“We do not want them doing what they can to destabilise the situation inside Iraq,” Cheney said.

President Bush’s revised war strategy seeks to isolate Iran and Syria, which the US has accused of fuelling attacks in Iraq. The president also says that Iran and Syria have not done enough to block terrorists from entering Iraq over their borders.

“We know there are jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq. … We know also that Iran is supplying elements in Iraq that are attacking Iraqis and attacking our forces,” Hadley said.

“Dictators can be popular. [Fidel] Castro has been immensely popular, he has been in power for 50 years, and the same could happen with [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez. If he perseveres in his policy to promote his Bolivarian revolution by investing his petro-dollars, he could attain more successes than those achieved so far, which are not just a few.”

These are the words of Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian novelist and literary critic.

So, Mario Vargas Llosa wants to babble or battle ideologically about the popularity of alleged “dictators” and the “successes” of Hugo Chavez.

Vargas Llosa in the early 1960s was something of an admirer of Fidel and the Cuban Revolution. But tragically he later fell under the influence of the reactionary bourgeois US economist Milton Friedman, a leading and half-baked theoretician of neo-liberalism, who advised privatizing of everything in the country; abolishing social security programs for the workers, middle class, and the poor; paying half or more of gross domestic product to imperialist creditors and international financial organizations; and granting abject concessions to lure investment from foreign capitalists. The essence of neo-liberalism is the policy of enriching a few by greatly decreasing the purchasing power of the vast majority of the people.

In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru on an insane neo-liberal platform which was more extreme than the crackpot theories of bourgeois economist Milton Friedman; he lost in a run-off to Alberto Fujimori. In the 2006 presidential elections in Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was lavishly paid by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency of International Development (USAID), to support their neo-liberal candidate Lourdes Flores. Flores ran a sorry third in a field of three main candidates — revolutionary patriot Ollanta Humala and bourgeois opportunist Alan Garcia were the other two. In the run-off, Vargas Llosa, in step with the wishes of the US regime, supported Alan Garcia whom Vargas distastefully endorsed as “the lesser of two evils.” Garcia won, amid fraud charges..

During the last twenty years, as the quality and quantity of Mario Vargas Llosa’s artistic work as novelist and literary critic shrunk to pathetic levels, he intensified and expanded his political and ideological services … for handsome fees … to US imperialism. Vargas Llosa, rigid and mechanistic, has no talent for ideological struggle; he merely exploits his prestige as a novelist. Although his artistic gifts are clearly fading, he should stick to art.

Anyway.

A CONCEPT OF DEMOCRACY

Dictatorship, like democracy, admits to a number of definitions. The most widely held definition of dictatorship is some kind of negation of democracy. At the most rudimentary level, democracy, we are sometimes told, is a form of state in which:

1. Supreme power over a territory and people resides in the body of citizens entitled to vote. This sometimes called the sovereignty principle.

2. These citizens elect at least the key representatives who actually exercise power or the so-called electoral principle.

3. These representatives are accountable to the citizens through such institutions like recall elections, reelections, separation of powers, independent judiciary, free press, etc. This of course is the celebrated accountability principle.

4. Finally, these elected representatives exercise power in accordance with the rule of law; obviously this is the often cited and extolled principle of the rule of law.

So, the most widely held definition of dictatorship seems to entail the negation of one or more of these four rudimentary democratic principles.

01/12/07 “Information Clearing House” — – Sometimes you look around and wonder how things could have gone so wrong so quickly. America has become the antithesis of everything she purports to be. We are the greatest purveyors of violence the world has ever known; the largest weapons dealers on earth; and death and misery are our principal exports. Everything is for sale here, even men’s tormented souls—at least, those who still possess them.

Our imperial leader, an impish little man with clear sociopathic symptoms, is incapable of empathy for the struggles of the common people, as those born into wealth and privilege often are. The man with his finger on the nuclear detonator is mentally ill, incapable of remorse — a fact that should terrify every world citizen. I do not say this out of malice or to demean the president; it is simply a statement of fact based upon quantifiable evidence that any student of psychology would easily recognize.

The fact that such a misfit could ascend to the presidency is testimony to the effectiveness of the capital system. Under capitalism, political power is not derived from the people, as would be the case in a democracy; nor does it not flow from the bottom up—it matriculates from the top down. It is really quite simple: The men and women who are in office were put there by people with immense wealth to represent the interests of the wealthy, to make money for them. And that is exactly what they are doing.

In many ways, George W. Bush is the perfect man for the job, if one understands what his real work entails as an emissary of the ruling class. He possesses all of the qualifications the vocation requires: callousness and indifference to the needs of others, the absence of conscience, truncated mental capacity; the inability to reason and to analyze; the incapacity to admit wrong doing; a penchant for cruelty that includes the enjoyment of inflicting pain and torture on others, as well as a powerful sense of nobility and entitlement that stems from being born into wealth and privilege. He is also a pathological liar.

From the president’s sickly perspective, the admission of failure is equivalent to a declaration of weakness and indecision, which explains his inability to change course, even if it means the destruction of America. Thus he has no guilt about sending thousands more men and women to kill and die in Iraq. You see, the president’s mind is defective. It does not work like the minds of normal human beings.

Corporate America placed George W. Bush in the White House to wage endless war; to bankrupt the federal treasury to the extent that few social programs will survive, and virtually all of our tax dollars will go into supporting the military industrial complex. The people who put him in office intend to end public ownership of the commons, as well as all government programs that do not directly benefit the wealthy.

Let me clarify what this entails. If Bush and his handlers prevail in the class struggle, all social programs of value to the middle class and the poor, including Social Security, will be privatized and run for profit. The National Parks, National Forests, and all public lands will be privatized, and divvied up to private vendors such as the Disney Corporation. The public school system, like the public airwaves, will become for profit entities to serve corporate interests. Educating our children will be of secondary importance to the profitability of the corporations managing the schools. Every public service will be transferred to the private sector in order provide more wealth to corporate America at public expense.

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in Ron Ridenour’s wonderful series on his volunteer farm work in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union which left Cuba in dire economic straits. The response of the Cuban people to their devastating losses at that time are not only creative and resourceful, but downright exemplary and inspiring. If you missed the Ridenour’s first report on his work in 1992-1993, we encourage you to read it first as it sets the stage for his second report below. – Les Blough, Editor

Food Distribution

Batabano’s Farm production director, Aldolfo Montalvo, and Contingente Col. Mambi Juan Delgado overall leader biggest headache in achieving the huge and new task of feeding much of the province of Havana was distributing the harvests before they wasted away.

I attended the first national assembly meeting in Havana concerning the progress of plan alimentario, in which distribution was discussed. Candido Palmero, the chief of Contingente Blas Roca, one of the most distinguished contingents, delivered a report to the nation’s leaders. Palmero had recently been named head of all the new agricultural contingents. He told the deputies that the contingents could guarantee the production goals for next year but there was one major problem. The large calloused-handed man paused. He and Fidel looked at one other from across the large hall. The president gestured for Candido to continue.

“What I can’t guarantee is that you will eat all the harvested crops, because we don´t have our own trucks to distribute the goods.”

Palmero now spoke to a hushed assembly. “We recommend that farm-workers should have the responsibility, the authority and the means to do the entire job, from breaking ground to delivery.”

A food truck unloading in Havana. In the early-to-mid nineties old trucks like these were used to distribute food. All that has changed since the Bolivarian Revolution began in Venezuela.

Fidel enthusiastically agreed and so did the deputies, who decided that each state farm would get its own transportation to delivery production. This would first be tried in Havana’s fifteen municipalities. The bureaucratic distribution system is a centralized one in which all harvests are transported to central markets, called Acopios, where they are unloaded. Smaller distribution trucks are then assigned to load the products again and distribute them to smaller neighborhood markets. This process is almost never carried out in a timely fashion. The double work of loading and unloading, and transporting results in constant losses of edible foods.

In 1993, Defense Minister Raúl Castro said that the Farming Production Cooperatives (CPA) were six times more effective than the state collectives. CPAs had been formed in the 1960s as cooperatives of private farmers, owners and usufructaries. Members share in profits from sales and can hire day laborers at peak times. State farm workers received fix wages regardless of production quantity or quality. Raúl proposed that most of the granjas, which held 80% of agricultural lands (four million hectares), be transformed into new usufruct cooperatives with some CPA benefits.

The government then established a new cooperative structure, Basic Unit of Co-operative Production-UBPC, “to simulate greater production”.
Key features of the new UBPC decree-law 142 are:

* Co-operative members have full use of the land without owning it—unlike CPAs where co-operators are full owners.

* UBPC members are owners of production, like the CPAs, in that they are free to work and organize as they choose but must sell their produce to the state at agreed upon prices.

* Farm equipment, seed, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, petroleum, parts, irrigation and other supplies are provided by the state on credit.

* Labor is paid, in part, by profit-sharing. The state advances an average monthly wage and capital to get started. Credit is repaid from the sale of harvests.

* UBPCs must be cost-accountable, profitable enterprises.

* UBPC members elect their leadership, which is subject to recall. Worker leadership represents all workers before state managers and state investors.

Hidden behind the smoke of firing guns and chaotic scenes in Iraq is the greedy face of Multinational Corporations and their political patrons, who have been waiting to make a killing in the oil fields of Iraq. Oil exploration and extraction used to be a state enterprise of Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. With Saddam Hussein through the gallows, one obstruction is cleared.

Oil, the “Black-Blood” of Global Economy, is an Iraqi natural resource. But the draft legislation is on the table to be presented to the Iraqi parliament to sign it into a law. It is currently being termed as “Hydrocarbon Law”. This law will allow oil-hawks to take a bigger bite out of the energy resource in the war ridden and collapsed state of Iraq. It is going to be called Production Sharing Agreement (PSA). Common practice for investments is to offers rights for extraction for 10-15 year whereas in case of Iraq it may be up to 30 years. Until the costs of a project have been recovered oil companies would be allowed to keep 70% of the profit. Elsewhere 40% would be a standard. Once the costs are recouped the companies’ share falls to 20%, which is still double other comparable agreement.

There were prophetic voices in the world alarming about greed for oil when WMD-danger was being moved as an argument for invasion of Iraq. British and the US high officials, at that time, had vehemently denied any intentions of controlling Iraqi oil. Tony Blair went to the extent of saying that Iraqi oil should be put into a trust fund to be run by UN for Iraqis. Obviously, it seems that the promises made before the war have been conveniently forgotten.

There are vast oil reserves in many parts of the world. Iraq has about 115 billion barrels, the second largest in the world. Despite the present violence there, it appears to be most promising for future profits. Elsewhere there are hindrances like tight controls of states, limitations on extraction of oil as in Venezuela by Hugo Chavez, and high cost of drilling out of North America etc. These are few factors for looking at huge oil fields in Iraq where the oil geological stratum is not too far deep under the surface. It will translate into the lowest cost of extraction in the whole world.

In a scenario where cost of extraction remains the same as the selling price is not a viable business strategy, to state the obvious; projections in case of Iraq are that there will be high yield with good profit margins. Oil corporations have always been aware of this fact. This fact alone makes the core of US Middle East foreign policy that was turning progressively hawkish against Iraq over the decades, partly due to the absence of polarity in the world that former Soviet Union provided and partly due to Saddam Hussein’s nationalism-based opposition to opening oil fields to private corporations for extraction of oil.

Here we have one branch of the Traditional Media reporting the true facts on the ground only to have the elite crew in the White House press corps ignore it when the president lies about these same facts to the very uniformed military personnel he intends to send into harm’s way.

If I’m lying, you’re dying: Pres. Bush was caught rewriting recent history in a speech he gave Thursday to the troops at Ft. Benning, Georgia, some of whom are preparing for their third deployment to Iraq. Here is the transcript of the president’s load of bull:

“The [Iraqi] Prime Minister came and said, look, I understand we’ve got to do something about this violence, and here is what I suggest we do. Our commanders looked at it, helped fine-tune it so it would work. . . .

“The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to — by the way, that’s what you want your Commander-in-Chief to do. You don’t want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. And they analyzed the plan and they said to me, and to the Iraqi government, this won’t work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence. . . .

“And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, Mr. President, it’s not going to work until — unless we support — provide more troops. And so last night I told the country that I’ve committed an additional — a little over 20,000 more troops, five brigades of which will be in Baghdad.”

Meanwhile, back in reality, the facts are quite different. The strategy of escalating the war came from the West Wing, not the Iraqi leadership or Bush’s generals:

[A Washington Post story Wednesday] made it abundantly clear that adding U.S. troops was not an idea that emerged from the American commanders — nor, for that matter, from the Iraqis.

And, as it turns out, two stories in this morning’s New York Times add to the evidence: “A narrative pieced together from interviews with participants and from public testimony suggests that through much of the process, generals who had been on the ground in Iraq during the past year had favored that the new strategy begin with a substantially smaller force than the one that President Bush announced to the nation on Wednesday night. In the end, it was Mr. Bush who appeared to drive his commanders along to the conclusion that more troops were needed.”

Not only were the Iraqis not involved in creating the plan, they are not happy about it, according to another Times report:

So, not surprisingly: “Iraq’s Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush’s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan.”

Where was the White House press corps on this? Didn’t anyone in that elite corps of journalists know the facts about the origins of the escalation?

Or maybe the president lies so often, they’re inured to it.

The Armed Forces can’t adequately equip those already in uniform, but the Pentagon is committing itself to massive corporate contracts for new high-tech weapons systems slated to come on-line decades from now.

We are not winning the war on terrorism (and would not be even if we knew what victory looked like) or the war in Iraq. Our track record in Afghanistan, as well as in the allied “war” on drugs, is hardly better. Yet the Pentagon is hard at work, spending your money, planning and preparing for future conflicts of every imaginable sort.

From wars in space to sci-fi battlescapes without soldiers, scenarios are being scripted and weaponry prepared, largely out of public view, which ensures not future victories, but limitless spending that Americans can ill-afford now or 20 years from now.

Even though today the Armed Forces can’t recruit enough soldiers or adequately equip those already in uniform, the Pentagon is committing itself to massive corporate contracts for new high-tech weapons systems slated to come on-line years, even decades, from now, guaranteed only to enrich their makers.

Future Combat Systems

The typical soldier in Iraq carries about half his or her body weight in gear and suffers the resulting back pain. Body armor, weapon(s), ammunition, water, first aid kit — it adds up in the 120 degree heat of Basra or Baghdad.

As usual, it takes a few days for the truth to emerge, not that the corporate media here in America notices.

Instead of killing Fazul Abdullah Moham-med, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Taha al-Sudani, supposedly “al-Qaeda” operatives responsible for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the Pentagon killed “herdsmen … gathered with their animals around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes” in Somalia, according to the Independent.

“Oxfam yesterday confirmed at least 70 nomads in the Afmadow district near the border with Kenya had been killed. The nomads were bombed at night and during the day while searching for water sources. Meanwhile, the US ambassador to Kenya has acknowledged that the onslaught on Islamist fighters failed to kill any of the three prime targets,” described as “backfir[ing] spectacularly” by the British newspaper.

The American company appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management.

BearingPoint is fighting to restore its reputation in the US after falling more than a year behind in reporting its own financial results, prompting legal actions from its creditors and shareholders.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 (£60,000) to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor. Other recipients include three prominent Congressmen on the House of Representatives’ defence sub-committee, which oversees defence department contracts.

BearingPoint is being paid $240m for its work in Iraq, winning an initial contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It was charged with supporting the then Coalition Provisional Authority to introduce policies “which are designed to create a competitive private sector”. Its role is to examine laws, regulations and institutions that regulate trade, commerce and investment, and to advise ministries and the central bank.

Last week The Independent on Sunday revealed that a BearingPoint employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, had been tasked with advising the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up a new hydrocarbon law. The legislation, which is due to be presented to Iraq’s parliament within days, will give Western oil companies a large slice of profits from the country’s oil fields in exchange for investing in new oil infrastructure.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.

Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.

The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.

Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a “limited basis.”

Pentagon officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they were part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics — a priority of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.

Government lawyers say the legal authority for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to use national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.