The Rag Blog

The tragedy unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq defies description. According to the most recent findings of the Lancet medical journal, the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq since the U.S. invasion is more than 650,000. “Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world,” according to Refugee International: nearly two million Iraqis have fled the country entirely, while at least another 500,000 are internally displaced. Basic foods and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis because of massive inflation. “A gallon of gasoline cost as little as 4 cents in November. Now, after the International Monetary Fund pushed the Oil Ministry to cut its subsidies, the official price is about 67 cents,” the New York Times notes. “The spike has come as a shock to Iraqis, who make only about $150 a month on average-if they have jobs,” an important proviso, since unemployment is roughly 60­70 percent nationally.

October 2006 proved to be the bloodiest month of the entire occupation, with more than six thousand civilians killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops have been sent since August with the claim they would restore order and stability in the city, but instead only sparked more violence. United Nations special investigator Manfred Nowak notes that torture “is totally out of hand” in Iraq. “The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.” The number of U.S soldiers dead is now more than 2,900, with more than 21,000 wounded, many severely.

The underlying trend is clear: each day the occupation continues, life gets worse for most Iraqis. Rather than stemming civil war or sectarian conflict, the occupation is spurring it. Rather than being a source of stability, the occupation is the major source of instability and chaos.

A determined outpouring of 40,000 people, stretching 20 city blocks, rallied here on Dec. 16 to denounce the police killing of 23-year-old Sean Bell, an unarmed Black man who died after a hail of 50 police bullets on the morning of his wedding day. The crowd loudly chanted their demand for an end to racist police brutality.

Demonstrators marched down Fifth Avenue, home to some of Manhattan’s most high-end department stores and boutiques, on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The police, who had originally penned in one lane of traffic for the protest, were forced to open the entire avenue for the crowd.

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.