The Rag Blog

Mind you, these are the qualities of most Iraqis, I brought them with me, and somehow they are built-in I cannot change them even if I want to. I still fix the photocopier at work instead of waiting for the engineer to come over, a skill I learned back home.

In the streets of Baghdad the first thing you notice is the old Japanese cars which are still running in Iraq today after more than 30 years of their make. My people invented parts and created methods to keep them going under the sanctions. And do they admit it? No. They still think the credit goes to the Japanese. They opened shops to sew torn tires with wires and put them back on the road. The same goes for air-conditioning and air-coolers motors and so on. Because of the hard life and the insecurity we went through all our lives we became harder than life itself.

We’ve been very clever in identifying our enemies inside and outside the country, but how to deal with them is the question.

BAGHDAD, Iraq: A government committee drafting a new law to resolve the politically charged question of distributing Iraq’s oil wealth has made significant progress, the panel’s chairman said Saturday.

The distribution of oil revenues, the mainstay of Iraq’s economy, is at the heart of some of Iraq’s most contentious political issues at present, including the push by Shiite leaders to allow the oil-rich south of Iraq to set up a self-rule region a similar to a Kurdish one in the north.

“We have reached important agreements. I cannot put a timeframe on when it will be ready, but we are very keen on achieving that as soon as possible,” Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd who chairs the committee, said. “We hope that we will reach a comprehensive agreement that will enhance the oil sector and make oil a unifying factor to all Iraqis.”

He said, however, that key issues still need to be resolved, including “the administration of the oil sector, deals and contracts.”

“We hope to reach an agreement that will please all parties,” he said.

James Baker III and the seven dwarfs of the “Iraq Study Group” have come up with some simply brilliant recommendations. Not.

Baker’s Two Big Ideas are:

1. Stay half the course. Keeping 140,000 troops in Iraq is a disaster getting more disastrous. The Baker Boys’ idea: cut the disaster in half — leave 70,000 troops there.

But here’s where dumb gets dumber: the Bakerites want to “embed” US forces in Iraqi Army units. Question one, Mr. Baker: What Iraqi Army? This so-called “army” is a rough confederation of Shia death squads. We can tell our troops to get “embedded” with them, but the Americans won’t get much sleep.

2. “Engage” Iran. This is a good one. How can we get engaged when George Bush hasn’t even asked them out for a date? What will induce the shy mullahs of Iran to accept our engagement proposal? Answer: The Bomb.

WASHINGTON (Dec. 9) — Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crime rates have contributed to the United States having the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal justice experts.

A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed that a record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000.

The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people in the highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.

KATY, Texas (Dec. 8) – A plan to build a mosque in this Houston suburb has triggered a neighborhood dispute, with community members warning the place will become a terrorist hotbed and one man threatening to hold pig races on Fridays just to offend the Muslims.

By Antonia Juhasz, ANTONIA JUHASZ is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.”
December 8, 2006

WHILE THE Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq’s importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: “It has the world’s second-largest known oil reserves.” The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves. If the proposals are followed, Iraq’s national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.

The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states in plain language that the U.S. government should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and those of its corporations are met.

It’s spelled out in Recommendation No. 63, which calls on the U.S. to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.” This recommendation would turn Iraq’s nationalized oil industry into a commercial entity that could be partly or fully privatized by foreign firms.

And that remains the American perspective, and it very accurately captures our colonialist, condescending, and racist national attitude toward Iraq and its peoples: we were doing them a favor. If it turned into a genocidal murder spree, well, that’s only because it was managed “incompetently.” Most people still will not see the inescapable moral meaning of what we have done. And most people will never acknowledge that if we had implemented a murderous plan of conquest “competently,” that would only make the results infinitely worse, not “better.”

We have murdered an entire country, and an unconscionable and entirely unforgivably huge number of innocent Iraqis. We have murdered them, without even the merest shadow of a justifiable reason.

I’m sick and tired of this patriotic, nationalistic and fascist crap. I stood through a memorial service today for a young Marine that was killed in Iraq back in April. During this memorial a number of people spoke about the guy and about his sacrifice for the country. How do you justify ‘sacrificing’ your life for a war which is not only illegal, but is being prosecuted to the extent where the only thing keeping us there is one man’s power, and his ego. A recent Marine Corps intelligence report that was leaked said that the war in the al-Anbar province is unwinnable. It said that there was nothing we could do to win the hearts and minds, or the military operations in that area. So I wonder, why are we still there? Democracy is not forced upon people at gunpoint. It’s the result of forward thinking individuals who take the initiative and risks to give their fellow countrymen a better way of life.

When I joined I took an oath. In that oath I swore to protect the Constitution of the United States. I didn’t swear to build democracies in countries on the other side of the world under the guise of “national security.” I didn’t join the military to be part of an Orwellian (“1984”) war machine that is in an obligatory war against whoever the state deems the enemy to be so that the populace can be controlled and riled up in a pro-nationalistic frenzy to support any new and oppressive law that will be the key to destroying the enemy. Example given – the Patriot Act. So aptly named, and totally against all that the constitution stands for. President Bush used the reactionary nature of our society to bring our country together and to infuse into the national psyche a need to give up their little-used rights in the hope to make our nation a little safer. The same scare tactics he used to win elections. He drones on and on about how America and the world would be a less safe place if we weren’t killing Iraqis, and that we’d have to fight the terrorists at home if we weren’t abroad. In our modern day emotive society this strategy (or strategery?) works, or had worked, up until last month’s elections.

Syrian vice-president Farouk al-Sharaa made remarks in an interview with the Syrian electronic newspaper Champress.com that are worth noting for a number of reasons, and this is a case where the commenters at Syriacomment.com (apparently mostly themselves Syrians except for the owner of the site, Josh Landis, who posted translations of parts of this) have been able to actually make their discussions meaningful enough so that even I could understand the relevance to the bigger world.

Sharaa was foreign minister until late 2005, when he was either demoted or promoted to vice-president, but in any event he is the first senior Syrian official to comment on the post-Baker situation. So that is one point.

The mission of No More Victims, a non-profit, non-sectarian, humanist organization, is to restore health and well-being to victims of war and to advocate and educate for peace. The organization was founded in September 2002.

We work to find medical sponsorships for war-injured Iraqi children and to forge ties between the children, their families and communities in the United States. We believe one of the most effective means of combating militarism is to focus on direct relief to its victims. If you want to learn more about how your community can become involved, send an email to No More Victims.