The Rag Blog

Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation carries the story of how Elliot Abrams and others at the National Security Council in Bush’s White House have intervened to stop the publication of an op-ed in the New York Times by Flynt Leverett. Leverett himself served in the National Security Council until not so long ago.

For Leverett’s criticism of Bush administration Middle East policy and its mishandling of Iran since January of 2002, see this interview at Eurasia.net. He advocates US talks with Iran.

Ironically, the White House attempt to stop high-level discussion of talking to Iran comes just as the Iranian public dealt a slap in the face to extremist President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who stole the presidential elections in summer of 2005. Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani appears to have trounced Ahmadinejad’s own favorite cleric, Mohammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, an authoritarian anti-democrat.

Back to Washington. The remaining Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like David Wurmser in Cheney’s office and Abrams at the NSC have been agitating behind the scenes for war on Syria and Iran. These people hate peace the way the devil hates holy water. They confess themselves actively disappointed when a war doesn’t happen. They helped send US troops into Iraq where 24,000 have been wounded or killed, and they’d just love to expend some more lives on other pet projects.

That does it. Elliot Abrams must go. Elliot Abrams is a felon. He was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress. The Congress in the Constitution controls the budget. The Congress had cut off money to the rightwing death squads supported by Reagan and henchmen like Abrams. This elaborate criminal conspiracy inside the White House was the Right’s response. They shredded the Constitution (and ever since have been calling their critics “unpatriotic.”)

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) — Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is directing a growing share of the country’s oil profits into euros as the dollar and crude prices fall.

The dollar, down 9.4 percent against the euro this year, may face more pressure in 2007 because Venezuela and oil producers from the United Arab Emirates to Indonesia plan to funnel more money into the single European currency.

“The U.S. dollar has suffered a long process of deterioration,” Domingo Maza Zavala, one of seven board members at the central bank of Venezuela, said in a Dec. 14 interview. “The diversification strategy started this year.”

Banco Central de Venezuela has slashed the percentage of its $35.9 billion worth of reserves invested in dollars and gold to 80 percent from 95 percent a year ago, said Maza Zavala. The country, the world’s fifth-largest oil supplier, has boosted its euro holdings to 15 percent, from less than 5 percent in the same period.

The dollar has slumped against the European currency in 2006 as growth in the euro region outpaced the U.S. for the first time in five years. It rebounded 0.7 percent last week to finish at $1.308 against the euro. The U.S. currency is little changed versus the yen this year, closing on Dec. 15 at 118.17 yen.

It’s all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to prove he’s half the man his father was?

The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By now they must know it. It happened to us, too, long ago.

The talk among pols now is about finding an “exit strategy.” This means a way of pulling out without risking too many seats in Congress. Screw the troops. We must look to the elections. Do we really want an exit strategy? A friend of mine, with two tours in heavy combat in another war, has devised a splendid exit strategy. It consists of five words: “OK. On the plane. Now.” Bring your toothbrush. Everything else stays. We’re outa here.

It is a workable exit strategy, one with teeth, and comprehensible to all. But we won’t use it. We will continue killing our men, calculatedly, cynically, for the benefit of politicians. The important thing, you see, is the place in history of Bush Puppy. Screw the troops.

Face it. The soldiers are being used. They are being suckered. This isn’t new. It happened to my generation. Long after we knew that the war in Vietnam was lost, Lyndon Johnson kept it going to fertilize his vanity, and then Nixon spoke of the need to “save face”—at two hundred dead GIs a week. But of course Johnson and Nixon weren’t among the dead, or among the GIs.

I saw an interview on television long ago in which the reporter asked an infantryman near Danang, I think, what he thought of Nixon’s plan to save face. “His face, our ass,” was the reply. Just so, then, and just so now. Screw the troops. What the hell, they breed fast in Kansas anyway.

FAIRFAX, Va. (Dec. 17) – Two of the largest Episcopal parishes in Virginia voted overwhelmingly Sunday to break from The Episcopal Church and join fellow Anglican conservatives forming a rival U.S. denomination.

Truro Church in Fairfax and The Falls Church in Falls Church plan to place themselves under the leadership of Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who has called the growing acceptance of gay relationships a “satanic attack” on the church.

BAGHDAD — In a cavernous room that once displayed gifts given to Saddam Hussein, eight men in yellow prison garb sat on the floor facing the wall, guarded by two American soldiers.

Among them was Abdulla Sultan Khalaf, a Ministry of Industry employee seized by American troops who said they found 10 blasting caps and 100 sticks of TNT. When his name was called, he stood, walked into a cagelike defendant’s box and peered over the wooden slats at a panel of three Iraqi judges of the central court.

The judges reviewed evidence prepared by an American military lawyer — testimony from two soldiers, photographs and a sketch of the scene.

The evidence went largely unchallenged, because Mr. Khalaf had no lawyer. The judges appointed one, but Mr. Khalaf had no chance to speak with him. Mr. Khalaf told the judges that the soldiers were probably chasing a rogue nephew and denied that the explosives were his or ever in his house. “Let me examine the pictures,” he insisted. The judges ignored him. His lawyer said nothing, beyond declaring Mr. Khalaf’s innocence. The trial lasted 15 minutes.

BAGHDAD — Browsing the shelves of a cosmetics store in the Karrada shopping district, Zahra Khalid felt giddy at the sight of Alberto shampoo and Miss Rose eye shadow, blusher and powder.

Before leaving her house, she had covered her body in a billowing black abaya and wrapped a black head scarf around her thick brown hair. She had asked her brother to drive. She had done all the things that a woman living in Baghdad is supposed to do these days to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was the first time she had left home in two months.

“For a woman, it’s just like being in jail,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere.”

Life has become more difficult for most Iraqis since the February bombing of a Shiite Muslim mosque in Samarra sparked a rise in sectarian killings and overall lawlessness. For many women, though, it has become unbearable.

As Islamic fundamentalism seeps into society and sectarian warfare escalates, more and more women live in fear of being kidnapped or raped. They receive death threats because of their religious sects and careers. They are harassed for not abiding by the strict dress code of long skirts and head scarves or for driving cars.

For much of the 20th century, and under various leaders, Iraq was one of the most progressive Middle Eastern countries in its treatment of women, who were encouraged to go to school and enter the work force. Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party espoused a secular Arab nationalism that advocated women’s full participation in society. But years of war changed that.

In the days after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many women were hopeful that they would enjoy greater parity with men. President Bush said that increasing women’s rights was essential to creating a new, democratic Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Gunmen in Iraqi army uniforms burst into Red Crescent offices on Sunday and kidnapped two dozen employees and visitors at the humanitarian organization in the latest sign of the country’s growing lawlessness.

“Our task – ours, the Americans, the whole of the coalition, the international community and the Iraqis themselves – is to make sure that the forces of terrorism don’t defeat the will of the people to have a democracy,” Blair said.

In the latest violence, gunmen in five pickup trucks pulled up at the office of the Iraqi Red Crescent in downtown Baghdad and abducted 20 to 30 employees and visitors, the aid group and police said.

Here is a rather bleak prediction for Santa and the rest of his elves.

Abrupt ice retreat could produce ice-free arctic summers by 2040
nächste Meldung
12.12.2006

The recent retreat of Arctic sea ice is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean could become nearly devoid of ice during summertime as early as 2040, according to new research published in the December 12 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The study, by a team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the University of Washington, and McGill University, analyzes the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic. Scenarios run on supercomputers show that the extent of sea ice each September could be reduced so abruptly that, within about 20 years, it may begin retreating four times faster than at any time in the observed record.

“We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research suggests that the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that has happened so far,” says NCAR scientist Marika Holland, the study’s lead author. “These changes are surprisingly rapid.”

MOSCOW — Russian authorities pulled hundreds of opposition activists off buses and trains and detained them along with scores of others on Saturday ahead of a rare anti-government rally in Moscow, organizers said.

The police action did not prevent more than 2,000 people from gathering in a central square, where leftist and liberal groups demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin stop what they called Russia’s retreat from democracy.

“In 15 months political power will be changed,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now an opposition leader, referring to the March 2008 presidential election.

“Next year everyone should make a personal decision about what to do with our country, whether we allow these people to continue their illegal undertakings … or we finally make our main goal to build a democratic and socially oriented state,” Kasyanov told demonstrators.

Garry Kasparov, the former chess grand master who has emerged as one of the Kremlin’s most prominent critics, said the mere fact that the rally took place made it a success, given the efforts by authorities to stop it.

“We are protesting and it means that authorities are not as monolithic and powerful” as they believe, he said. “They are afraid that one day we will tell them ’enough.”’

The demonstrators chanted “Freedom” and held banners reading “No to Police State” and “Russia Without Putin.”

Since he took office in 2000, Putin has taken steady, gradual steps to centralize power and eliminate democratic checks and balances.

The Baathists were miffed and said that the conference “does not concern them.” Guerrilla leader Abu Wisam al-Jash’ami told al-Hayat that he thought he had an agreement with al-Maliki, that the PM would ask parliament to debate the question of debaathification. Instead, al-Maliki foreclosed the debate by just asking parliament to consider abolishing the debaathification law. (Most Sunni Arabs had a connection to the Baath Party, which has been used by triumphant Shiites and Kurds to throw them out of government and military service.)

Al-Hayat also says that Secretary of State Condi Rice has sent envoys to the major Arab countries informing them that Washington will not talk with Syria about Iraq (with the quid pro quo that Damascus gets a free hand in Lebanon), and will not talk to Iran (with the quid pro quo that they get a pass on the nuclear research program).