The Rag Blog

Today, The Emperor Bush declared :” More sacrifices will take place in Eye Raq.”
Take it to mean : More Iraqi blood will be spilled , more death, more carnage, more torture, more mayhem, more rape, more theft…more of the same . A Christmas present.
Maliki, the not so smart , not so bright puppet said to the effect : ” Ok I agree, more troops. On condition that we finish off the Resistance, contain the lunatic Muqtada and oh well , as for the Badr Brigades and the Magawir of the Ministry of Interior – later, later.”
They gave him Nejef as a token of appreciation and handed it to the “Iraqi Army.” Another Christmas present.
Brace yourselves for a massive attempt at a deadly blow to the Resistance.
Resist , we have and we will. Nothing can stop us now.

But let us leave aside realpolitik for a moment . Let us concentrate instead on the spirit of Christmas.
Since America is being so generous with her presents ,I, as a good hospitable Arab would like to reciprocate. I am thinking of offering you a special gift on this holy occasion.

I heard that in America (by the way, I don’t like to call it U.S.A – I like the sound America better- hope you don’t mind- it’s more musical to my ears), there is a traditional craft called patchwork.
Seems you folks and specially the women are very skilled at it.
In Britain, and if I am not mistaken , they are called quilts. Do correct me if I am a little “behind” in my terminology.
Good old, hand made, home covers. Women sit for days on end taking pieces of disregarded fabrics , diligently sewing those single bits together. What you get at the end is a work of art. A story emerging from behind those abandoned, tattered cloths.

The erosion of a target country’s integrity and viability has always been a conscious goal of the Western colonial project. Creating instability and dissatisfaction with existing reality was a necessary prerequisite to “tame” and then integrate native peoples into the dominant hierarchical model. Today, of course, we are told that colonialism is a thing of the past. The leading nations of the international community no longer seek to enslave their less fortunate neighbours, but rather pursue policies of world benefaction – within the limits imposed by healthy competition, of course. When this miraculous conversion took place we are not told, but perhaps it occurred incrementally, parallel to the increasing divide between the world’s rich and poor. In any case, a casual glance at the state of the Muslim world is enough to shatter this foolish delusion.

As Iraqi society descends further and further into mayhem, comedians, satirists and commentators of all kinds have made great hay from the supposed incompetence and stupidity of our leaders. But as the Canadian Spectator suggested recently, if it should happen that the United States is not run by buffoons, “one must conclude that chaos, impoverishment and civil war in the Muslim world…far from being the unintended consequences, are precisely the objectives of U.S. policy.” (1)

As with 9/11, the trigger event for the War on Terror, incompetence is the preferred explanation for the nightmare scenario in Iraq today. Though counterintuitive to the domesticated populations of the West, a plan to deliberately fragment Iraq along ethnic lines is amply confirmed by the published record. Resuscitating earlier Zionist schemes, the US Council on Foreign Relations recently called for the dissolution of the “unnatural Iraqi state.” (2) On the grounds of its ethnic diversity, Iraq is said to be a false, artificial construct, a product of arbitrary colonial decisions in the early 20th century. It is a judgment that could apply to many of the world’s countries, and yet the theme is being enthusiastically adopted by reams of ‘experts’ who would never dream of questioning state sovereignty in Quebec, the Basque Country or Northern Ireland. In typical fashion, policy analyst Michael Klare recently dismissed Iraq as an “invented country…to facilitate their exploitation of oil in the region [the British] created the fictitious “Kingdom of Iraq” by patching together three provinces of the former Ottoman Empire…and by parachuting in a fake king from what later became Saudi Arabia.” (3) Accepting the Bush Administration’s bogus rationale for the invasion, Klare ascribed Sunni resistance to the desire for a bigger share of oil revenues in the future partition of the country. Missing is any idea that resistance extends beyond “Sunnis” or could be motivated by Iraqi nationalism or the need for self-determination.

Islamist terrorists pose the greatest threat to Britain’s security since the Second World War, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has warned.

With police and security services on heightened alert for a possible attack over Christmas and the New Year, Sir Ian Blair echoed fears in the intelligence community that the risk of an atrocity has increased substantially in recent months.

He said he had no specific intelligence about a plot to target Britain over the holiday period, but added: “The threat of another terrorist attempt is ever present. Christmas is a period when that might happen. We have no specific intelligence to do [with] that.”

He added: “There was a terrorist plot in Germany against one of their Christmas markets in 2002, so it’s a possibility.”

Sir Ian also said the danger to the public was of an “unparalleled nature and growing”.

“It is a far graver threat in terms of civilians than either the Cold War or the Second World War,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “You have to go back to that threat – it’s a much graver threat than that posed by Irish Republican terrorism.”

The commissioner said the IRA usually did not want to cause mass casualties, did not want its attackers to die, gave warnings and was “heavily penetrated” by intelligence agents. “None of those four applies with al-Qa’ida and its affiliates,” he said.

Sir Ian also acknowledged that efforts to infilitrate terrorist cells were at an early stage.

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” Hermann Goering (1893-1946), SS Nazi leader

“Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah. with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.” President George W. Bush, November 10, 2006

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing but only after they’ve exhausted every other possibility.” Winston Churchill(1874-1965), former Prime Minister of England

Sometimes, when a snake tries to swallow a porcupine, it gets stuck in its throat and the predator has no choice but to spew it out. The neoconservative Bush-Cheney administration, under the pro-Israel Lobby’s influence, thought that Iraq would be an easy meal, to be savored while doing an easy “cakewalk”, in the words of neocon Ken Adelman: “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.” Now, the Bush-Cheney administration will spend the next two years it has left attempting to extricate itself from the morass they have brought upon Iraq and upon the United States.

The View from the Grass

I’ve been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we’ve decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century — but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.

The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning — that’s what I told the kids — inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.

That’s exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries — the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad — much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the former was beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one noticed at first was named “revolution”; the early twenty-first century version might have been called “localism” or maybe “anarchism,” or even “civil society regnant.” In some strange way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.

That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the grassroots where the choices were so much more basic and significant than, for instance, the one between fundamentalism and consumerism that was on everyone’s lips in the years of the Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age of dinosaurs — of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald’s, globalized entertainment networks, and information superhighways — the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.

It’s no wonder the federal government did not want to release details for a year, because once again, it’s all handouts to Big Oil who set new records in profitability while sticking the middle class with the bill. Good grief, can we re-set priorities and worry about the middle class again and quit giving more welfare and handouts to the richest?

If Exxon can give half a billion dollars to the CEO, I see no reason why taxpayers should have to fund their business since they seem to be doing pretty well without taxpayer handouts. These are not small companies who need help to get started, but very mature companies who bathe their executives with lavish compensation packages and then pass on the bill to governments around the world, rich and poor alike. I don’t know what is worse between them asking or governments actually giving over the money.

The study, which the Interior Department refused to release for more than a year, estimates that current inducements could allow drilling companies in the Gulf of Mexico to escape tens of billions of dollars in royalties that they would otherwise pay the government for oil and gas produced in areas that belong to American taxpayers.

But the study predicts that the inducements would cause only a tiny increase in production even if they were offered without some of the limitations now in place. It also suggests that the cost of that additional oil could be as much as $80 a barrel, far more than the government would have to pay if it simply bought the oil on its own.

“They are giving up a lot of money and not getting much in return,” said Robert A. Speir, a former analyst at the Energy Department who worked on the report. “If they took that money, they could buy a whole lot more oil with it on the open market.”

Oil closed Thursday at $62.66 a barrel in regular trading.

Introduction: Escalation of Warfare

To understand US-Latin American relations this year and its likely trajectory in 2007 it is obligatory to consider three dimensions: 1) the global context of US-LA relations; 2) internal dynamics of the US and 3) the real practical political-economic consequences of the 2006 elections in Latin America.

US imperial policy continues to pursue military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, to give unconditional support to Israel’s war against the elected Palestinian Government and to threaten a direct or Israeli attack on Iran. In other words, the prolonged, costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine during 2006 will continue in 2007. Further military escalation, includes increased US troops and spending for wars in the Middle East; an extra $800 million USD in addition to the annual $3 billion USD for Israeli war plans against Lebanon, Palestine and especially Iran. Those commentators who interpreted US policy via public opinion polls, electoral processes (the victory of the Democrats), advisory reports (Baker’s Iraq Study Group) and casualty rates in Iraq, and predicted a ‘gradual’ withdrawal, failed to understand the logic of the White House’s political strategy. For the Bush regime, the military failures are a result of the application of insufficient power: what is necessary, they argue, is greater numbers of soldiers and bigger military budgets (BBC 12/16/06).

Polarization

Both in the United States, Latin America and in the world at large, profound and deepening divisions are driving policy and provoking increasing conflicts. The lines of division in the United States on the fundamental questions of confrontation or negotiation in the Middle East and Latin America cut across the two major parties, and the liberal-conservative spectrum. On the one side the White House, backed by pro-war Democrats, Republicans, the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, right-wing veteran groups and neo-conservative intellectuals and the majority of the corporate mass media. On the other side, minorities in the major parties and mass media, the majority of public opinion, sectors of the active and retired military officers, establishment intellectual and prominent political critics of the Zionist lobby and war policies like Brzezinski, James Carter, James Baker among others.

Similar divisions appear with regard to Latin American policy. The White House, backed by the Cuban (exile) lobby, the Pentagon and a minority of right-wing ideologues and business groups favor forceful pressure and intervention against Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia and support of illegitimate President Calderon, the Santa Cruz separatists in Bolivia and other authoritarian extremists in the region. In varying degrees of opposition, stand liberal and conservative congress-members backed by agro-business exporters, tourists agencies, a majority of public opinion and sectors of the State Department headed by Undersecretary for Latin American Affairs, Shannon, who support greater emphasis on diplomacy, negotiations and a ‘two-track’ approach.

Don’t let on that fruits & vegetables improve your health or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will throw you in the slammer. The FDA threatened 29 cherry growers with confiscation and prosecution for revealing on their websites that cherries contain chemicals that reduce arthritic inflammation. The FDA’s power-grab logic is: Health claims magically transform food into drugs, requiring FDA approval. So don’t say “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” or the FDA will put you away.

Yet, once the FDA blesses a toxic substance, as in the case of Aspartame/NutraSweet/Equal, the toxin can do no wrong and may saturate our food supply unhindered. In 2005, a peer-reviewed, three-year study on 1,800 rats by Dr. Morando Soffritti of the Cancer Research Center of the European Foundation of Oncology & Environmental Sciences confirmed that aspartame is a multi-potential carcinogen, just as the FDA knew and had itself declared some 25 years ago. Yet, the product continues to be sold today in the United States and many other countries.

The FDA Once Fought Aspartame