The Rag Blog

There was a meeting on the weekend of December 9-10 in Cochabamba in Bolivia of major South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn’t read that wire service report, I’ll read a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

The South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of major nations, and there was the two-day summit of what’s called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the AP report, left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, the South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Saudi Arabia, fearful of a nuclear Iran and a Shiite Iraq, is taking steps to influence U.S. policy in Iraq. The kingdom may also be building its own nuclear program.

Early in November, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, in a memo leaked to the press recommended that Saudi Arabia play a leadership role in talks about Iraq’s future. But even before the memo landed on Bush’s White House desk, the Saudis were positioning themselves to directly influence strategy in Iraq:

• While the debate about negotiating with the Iranians and the Syrians raged in America’s leading circles, Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Riyadh for talks. Topic of conversation? The safety of Iraq’s Sunni minority should American forces disengage. Simply put: the king read the riot act to the vice president.
• A few weeks later the Iraq Study Group asserted that Saudi private citizens, and probably a few members of the Saudi royal family, have been financing the Sunni opposition in Iraq all along. This is the same opposition that is targeting U.S. troops. Last week, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah confirmed that his loyalty must lie with Iraq’s Sunni tribal chiefs, even if his support also helps insurgents who have been fighting Americans and the Brits.
• Early in November, the Saudis announced their intention to build a $10 billion wall (give or take a few billion) on the border with Iraq, with Raytheon as the top bidder. Raytheon, one of America’s premier weapons manufacturers, has close ties to the neocons, including Richard Armitage, former undersecretary of state and Sean O’Keefe, secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. Raytheon’s stock price is hovering near a seven-year high.

“Stand Up for Canada” appears to have been devised as a technique of mass deception, under the joint auspices of former ultra-right wing Alliance Party and U.S. Republican Party advisors.

In the last 2006 Federal Election, the Conservative Party kept trumpeting its slogan that it would “Stand up for Canada”. Then, Opposition Leader Stephen Harper during that election indicated that he would similarly “Stand Up” for Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Mr. Harper portrayed his party, as a party which would govern Canada with integrity and openness in a spirit of renewed democracy, in contrast with the ‘corruption’ of the Martin Liberals. As it turns out, these assertions by Mr. Harper could not be further from the truth.

Mel Hurtig, the founder of the Council of Canadians, and also a variety of other reliable sources including veteran CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, now reveal that senior elected representatives and advisors to the Conservative Party, are currently planning a scheme that would hand over Canada to the Bush regime by 2007. The official name for this scheme, is called “North American Union”.

Alberta “Conservatives”, including at least one former Premier, are reportedly among prominent Harper Government operatives of this ultra-right wing effort.
Mel Hurtig, a noted Canadian author and publisher who was the elected leader of the National Party of Canada, provided researchers with the agenda and attendee list of the so-called “North American Forum” at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Sept. 12-14, 2006.

Mr. Hurtig said the “secret meeting was designed to undermine the democratic process.” In addition, the reported Agenda undermines the Statutory position of Her Majesty the Queen of Canada, as the constitutional expression of a Canada independent from the U.S.

A highly sympathetic crowd of a few hundred people gave Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada standing ovations before, during and after a speech at the Church of the Crossroads in Moiliili.

Watada, a Honolulu native, faces court-martial in Fort Lewis, Wash., next month on six counts for refusing to deploy to Iraq and for conduct unbecoming an officer, charges that carry a maximum six years’ imprisonment. He was back in Honolulu to meet with his attorney and visit with family.

Watada acknowledged that his actions have divided the community. “That was not my intent,” he said. But upon learning the facts of the war, he said he was in turmoil.

He called the war in Iraq an illegal war of aggression.

He quoted Nazi Germany’s Hermann Goering, who said while the common people are usually not willing to go to war, “all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.”

Watada said the American people were deceived by the Bush administration, which manipulated intelligence to fit policy and regime change in Iraq.

“We have been lied to, deceived and betrayed,” he said. “A crime has been committed against the constitution.”

The United States’ so-called “liberation” of Iraqi women has made them less free than they were under the Baathist regime, with abduction, rape, and “honor” killings now a daily reality.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently issued a frightening report documenting the growing practice of public executions of women by Shia Militia. One of the report’s more grisly accounts was a story of a young woman dragged by a wire wound around her neck to a close-by football field and then hung to the goal post. They pierced her body with bullets. Her brother came running trying to defend his sister. He was also shot and killed. Sunni extremists are no better: OWFI members estimate that no less than 30 women are executed monthly for honor related reasons.

Almost four years into the Bush Administration’s ill fated adventure in Iraq, Iraqi women are worse off than they were under the Baathist regime in a country where, for decades, the freedoms and rights enjoyed by Iraqi women were the envy of women in most other countries of the Middle East.

Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women had high levels of education. Their strong and independent women’s movement had successfully forced Saddam’s government to pass the groundbreaking 1959 Family Law Act which ensured equal rights in matters of personal law. Iraqi women could inherit land and property; they had equal rights to divorce and custody of their children; they were protected from domestic violence within the marriage. In other words, they had achieved real gains in the struggle for equality between women and men. Iraqi women, like all Iraqis, certainly suffered from the political repression and lack of freedom, but the secular — albeit brutal — Baathist regime protected women from the religious extremism that denies freedom to a majority of women in the Arab world.

Even realism has an obligation to be realistic. –George Packer.

The only piece of political journalism ever to make me cry was Ron Suskind’s article, Without a Doubt, published in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the 2004 election. It was in that article that the famous passage appeared quoting a senior administration official on the myopia of the “reality-based community” when it came to understanding the government of George W. Bush.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about that article because the “realist” school in foreign policy is thought to be back in charge. The release of the Iraq Study Group’s report on December 6th and the re-emergence of James Baker, famous for being pragmatist, a realist, and a fixer, were the triggers for this observation. The Guardian’s report was typical: “This is a return to the realist policy of Mr. Bush’s father.”

Dan Froomkin said the report and reactions to it “marked a restoration of reality in Washington.”

Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are quite different ideas. We shouldn’t fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that–fuzzing things up–because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004. Of course, neither did the political system. Or the Republican party, or its sensible wing– the elders, the responsible people.

I think they all regret it now. But they’re happy with this month’s theme, “realists are back.” It sounds almost… normal.

A rare joke was circulating among Iraqis shortly before their prime minister met George Bush in Amman recently. What would the US president be demanding? Answer: a timetable for Iraqis to withdraw from Iraq.

It was a barbed reference to the huge number of Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homeland since the US invaded and presided over a catastrophic collapse in security. Up to 3,000 are leaving every day, according to the UN.

The joke also encapsulated the growing Iraqi feeling that the Americans are reaching the climax of a three-year exercise in shifting blame. Whatever has gone wrong in Iraq, it was always the Iraqis’ fault. First they looted their own country in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s downfall. Then they let foreign jihadis and suicide bombers come in and attack the Americans. Now they are indulging in an orgy of sectarian violence and mindless revenge killings which are beyond the powers of the kind and well-meaning Americans to control. Could anyone have imagined that ingratitude for liberation would ever reach such depths? The only way to save Iraq is to remove every Iraqi. Messrs Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would then have an empty field on which to build their model Middle Eastern state.

The line that “it’s all up to the Iraqis now” also runs through the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, albeit in a subtle form. The report calls for Iraq’s neighbours to play a constructive part in stabilising the country. It calls on the US military to accelerate the training of Iraqi troops and give them better equipment. But the central thrust is that Iraqis have to solve their own problems. They cannot expect the US to have an open-ended commitment to help.

The year 2006 will be remembered as one in which the American people and the world rose up to challenge the criminal actions and deceit of the Bush Administration.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant,” released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk — taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture.” The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The Bush administration, always bursting with embarrassing information, is famously addicted to the document-dump. I discovered long ago that the ritual dumps on Friday evenings had become so widely anticipated that the White House began experimenting with Thursday document-dumps. But any convenient day for burying the bad news will be welcome among this gang.

Given that Robert Gates was sworn in as the new Defense Secretary yesterday, I naturally went looking to see what information the Pentagon would be flushing out the back. The website did not make it particularly easy to discover where the trash was buried. No mention on the “Today in DOD” or the “News releases” pages.

But eventually I smelled it out. I knew there would be something, somewhere. It’s the week before Christmas.

Robert Gates, Bush’s nominee for Defense Secretary, was sworn in on Monday. Gates immediately exhibited the single most important characteristic that the President seeks in those joining his administration: The ability to remain delusional in the face of overwhelming reality.

Gates gave the obligatory post-swearing speech and without even cracking a smile, like Bush et al, pretended Iraq wasn’t all ready a lost cause. “Failure in Iraq at this juncture,” Gates said, ignoring the fact that Bush’s policy passed failure months and months ago, “would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come.” Well, of course, being a member of Team Bush, he had to throw in the scare words like “haunt” and fear mongering phrases such as, “endanger Americans for decades to come.” It’s all childish hyperbole, but it ensures Dobson and Falwell’s followers remain convinced of a coming Islamic horde. Since they are the base and the only people still fooled by Bush’s delusions, the administration likes to maintain the fear-factor. Gates did a fine Bush-like job in that area.