The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (Dec. 22) – The Selective Service System is making plans to test its draft machinery in case Congress and President Bush need it, even though the White House says it doesn’t want to bring back the draft.

The agency is planning a comprehensive test – not run since 1998 – of its military draft systems, a Selective Service official said. The test itself would not likely occur until 2009.

Scott Campbell, the service’s director for operations and chief information officer, cautioned that the “readiness exercise” does not mean the agency is gearing up to resume the draft.

“We’re kind of like a fire extinguisher. We sit on a shelf,” Campbell told The Associated Press. “Unless the president and Congress get together and say, ‘Turn the machine on’ … we’re still on the shelf.”

Ladies and gentlemen, when I first went to the Middle East — on holiday from Belfast, of all places — 1972, I went to Egypt, and anxious to try and pick up a few first words of Arabic, I had the misfortune of purchasing a very old book produced by the British army in Egypt in the 19th century. I still recall the three principal clauses which you were advised to learn if you were an Englishman: “We shall board the steamship, for there is talk of war,” “Help,” and “Where is the British embassy?” And I can tell you, I never believed I would actually watch people say these things, as I had to in Lebanon this last summer. There were all the refugees, all the foreigners, boarding the steamships because there was a real war, all wanting help and all demanding to know the way to their national embassies. “So it has come to this,” I thought to myself.

You know, in the last 30 years that I have been in the Middle East, there has been one — no, two major changes. The first is that Muslims are no longer afraid. When I first went to Lebanon, if the Israelis crossed the border, for example, many, many, many Palestinians who were in the south would be rushing to Beirut. People would flee the south, run away. Whether it was the siege of Beirut in 1982 or not, I don’t know. But now, they do not run away. Muslims do not run away when they’re attacked, when they’re under air attack.

Do we in fact really understand the extent of injustice in the Middle East? When I finished writing my new book, I realized how amazed I was that after the past 90 years of injustice, betrayal, slaughter, terror, torture, secret policemen and dictators, how restrained Muslims had been, I realized, towards the West, because I don’t think we Westerners care about Muslims. I don’t think we care about Muslim Arabs. You only have to look at the reporting of Iraq. Every time an American or British soldier is killed, we know his name, his age, whether he was married, the names of his children. But 500,000-600,000 Iraqis, how many of their names have found their way onto our television programs, our radio shows, our newspapers? They are just numbers, and we don’t even know the statistic.

Do you remember the time when George Bush was pushed and pushed: what were the figures of the Iraqi dead? At that stage, it was less, and he said, “Oh, 30,000. More or less.” Can you imagine if he had been asked how many Americans had died, and he said “3,000, more or less”? Those words, “more or less,” somehow said it all.

Now, take this one. This is the Associated Press doing its job. It uses the Freedom of Information Act to get official documents out of Guantanamo Bay and managed in a long story, but buried deep within it, not at the top, to uncover the following. It’s the official account of a court case inside Guantanamo of Feroz Ali Abbasi. He’s actually a British citizen. He has since been released and is now at home.

It’s not yet the last days in Iraq, but it might as well be. A recent poll shows that 71% of Americans oppose the way Pres. Bush is handling the war, and only 9% believe we will win. No such consensus was ever reached over Vietnam. Nixon was elected twice against opponents who would have ended the war sooner.

A back-room agreement that could have been achieved with the North Vietnamese in 1969 was postponed for six bloody years while the Nixon administration finagled a way to save face.

They were permitted this delay because the public had been long persuaded that we were fighting the evil of Communism. The Iraq war has been painfully protracted already, since Pres. Bush has petulantly refused to admit that any course is right except his own, for the same reason. Terrorists represent absolute evil. This indisputable point, it seems, covers any wrong committed by the U.S. in terms of casualties and human rights violations.

If absolute evil looks so clear to us, why does the rest of the world disagree? Are we to assume that only America knows the truth? The reason we find ourselves so isolated and hated can be directly traced back to blinded moral certainty. The right wing promulgated the myth that Reagan brought down Communism by resisting “the evil empire” (no matter that the Soviet Union collapsed from its own internal corruption and decay), so now we get “the axis of evil,” warring against enemy countries that can’t be considered part of the civilized world.

Until this year, Parsons Corp. was about as quiet as a $3 billion engineering and construction firm with 12,000 employees could be. That’s the way the firm’s chief executive for the past decade — a soft-spoken, white-haired Army veteran named James F. McNulty — liked it.

But Iraq has changed everything.

Parsons has been reproved in recent federal audits for completing just a small fraction of the 150 primary health clinics originally planned to be built in Iraq and for building a police academy so flawed that human waste rained from the ceilings. For this, it has taken bipartisan hits on Capitol Hill, where its name is now whispered by war critics in the same breath as that perennial boogeyman, Halliburton.

On November 19, 2005, in Haditha, during Kilo Company’s third tour of duty in Iraq, a land mine planted by insurgents exploded beneath a Humvee, killing a 20-year-old Marine. What happened next — the slaughter of 24 Iraqi men, women, and children — was not entirely an aberration. These actions were rooted in the very conduct of the war.

I: One Morning in November

The Euphrates is a peaceful river. It meanders silently through the desert province of Anbar like a ribbon of life, flanked by the greenery that grows along its banks, sustaining palm groves and farms, and a string of well-watered cities and towns. Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. These are among the places made famous by battle—conservative, once quiet communities where American power has been checked, and where despite all the narrow measures of military success the Sunni insurgency continues to grow. On that short list, Haditha is the smallest and farthest upstream. It extends along the Euphrates’ western bank with a population of about 50,000, in a disarray of dusty streets and individual houses, many with walled gardens in which private jungles grow. It has a market, mosques, schools, and a hospital with a morgue. Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs. Before the American invasion, it was known as an idyllic spot, where families came from as far away as Baghdad to while away their summers splashing in the river and sipping tea in the shade of trees. No longer, of course. Now, all through Anbar, and indeed the Middle East, Haditha is known as a city of death, or more simply as a name, a war cry against the United States.

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber wearing an explosives-packed belt killed 14 Iraqis near a crowded police recruitment center in the capital this morning, in the latest salvo by Sunni Arab insurgents against the Shiite Muslim-dominated government.

Also today, three U.S. troops were reported to have been killed in separate combat incidents.

Meanwhile the judge in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein and six codefendants silenced testimony suggesting that Turkey, a U.S. ally, cooperated with Baghdad during a late 1980s operation to use chemical weapons to crush rebellious Kurds.

Nothing emphasizes the decline of America into an authoritarian police state more than the treatment of children as possible enemies, deviants or criminals. A few cases, involving very young children, have caught our attention this month that indicate in the current climate any sniff of power is corrupting absolutely those who believe they have it.

The AP reported today that a five year old boy has been accused of sexually harassing a kindergarten classmate:

Washington County school officials told Charles Vallance that his son pinched a girl’s buttocks earlier this month in a hallway at Lincolnshire Elementary School. The school says that meets the state’s definition of sexual harassment.

The father of the child insists that his son knows nothing about sex and was just playing. Nevertheless the “offence” will remain on the child’s file.

This is not an isolated case. The same report from the AP says that in Marlyland alone, where this incident took place, 28 kindergarten students were suspended for sex offenses in the last school year – 15 of those suspensions for sexual harassment.

Earlier this month a four year old boy was accused of “improperly touching” a female school employee. The principal of La Vega Primary School sent a letter to the parents of the boy that said the pre-kindergartener demonstrated “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment.”

The school says that the boy rubbed his face in the chest of the employee. Again the parents were outraged insisting that a four year old cannot know what it means to act sexually.

When one does not have roast beef for Christmas (we had a seafood extravaganza – see just above), it is appropriate to serve for the end of the Second Millennium, Anno Domini. Do you have any idea how few people have the good fortune to observe such a significant human chronometric event?

And if you care to recall, those of us in North America also had the opportunity to observe a very rare celestial event, a partial solar eclipse on Christmas Day. Sadly, it was overcast at Mom’s house on Christmas day, even though I got up early to see it inside my little pinhole cardboard camera box (the “over-the-shoulder” model). Thanks to the gift and scourge of television, I saw several excellent video images on CNN.

LIMA, Peru: President Alan Garcia on Tuesday suggested an unorthodox use for the coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine: Why not toss it in a salad?

“I insist that it can be consumed directly and elegantly in salad,” Garcia told foreign correspondents at the Government Palace. “It has good nutritional value.”

Garcia’s comments put him in the company of leftist presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who have publicly promoted mixing the high-calcium, vitamin-rich leaf into everything from toothpaste to soft drinks.

Coca has for centuries been considered a sacred medicinal and ceremonial plant in Andean culture, and Garcia said it should not be vilified as useful solely for producing the illegal narcotic.

Garcia said Gaston Acurio, one of Peru’s best known chefs, recently served several coca-based dishes for an event at the Government Palace.