The Rag Blog

CHICAGO – The nightmares didn’t start until months after Alicia Flores returned home. The images were stark and disturbing: In one dream, a dying Iraqi man desperately grabbed her arm. In another, she was lost in a blinding sandstorm.

Sometimes, Flores awakened to discover her mouth was dust-dry — as if she were really stumbling through the scorching, 120-degree desert.

The nightmares bring Flores back to Iraq, and her service in the Army’s 92nd Chemical Company. She was just 19 when her unit arrived there. Now 23, she’s left with memories of women and children being killed, of hauling bodies, of shooting a teenage Iraqi fighter. (“It was him or me,” she says.)

American Free Press has learned that a group of foreign companies, which currently lease a toll road in Indiana and are looking at buying up other highways across the country, has its eyes on the Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC. The TTC is a planned toll road system through the Lone Star State that will largely be used for trucking foreign merchandise into the United States on the wings of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

It will be a major leg of the so-called “NAFTA Superhighway,” and, according to watchdog groups, it will lead to more cheap goods flooding the country and will be devastating to the U.S.-based trucking industry.

In the April 17, 2006 edition, AFP reported that ITR Concessions LLC, a partnership of Cintra of Spain and the McQuarie Bank of Australia, spent $3.85 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road from the state for 75 years.

Now that same coalition is branching out into Texas. On Nov. 21, the Internet version of The Lone Star Iconoclast, a Crawford, Tex.-based publication, reported that Todd Spencer, the executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, or OOIDA, “is asking truckers to bypass the Indiana Toll Road that has been leased to the Spanish consortium, Cintra, the same outfit that Gov. [Rick] Perry and TXDOT (The Texas Department of Transportation) contracted with to operate the hated Trans Texas Corridor.”

Dec. 4 – With millions of dollars in alleged contract abuse, former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has become a symbol of the rampant corporate fraud driven by the Iraq war. But a settlement announced last week by the US Justice Department reveals that KBR’s malfeasance began long before “shock and awe” hit Baghdad.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Wednesday that it had reached an $8 million settlement with KBR over allegations that the company overcharged the US Army for support services provided during operations in the Balkans in 1999 and 2000. According to a DoJ statement, KBR continues to provide services to the military in the region.

The Justice Department would not reveal how much KBR, a construction and engineering company, was originally accused of overcharging.

“The Department of Justice remains committed to vigorously pursuing allegations of procurement abuses affecting the military,” Peter D. Keisler, an assistant attorney general, said in a statement announcing the settlement.

The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No.

Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed. Maybe that will happen after the Iraqi civil war is resolved, maybe not. It is in any case out of our hands.

…

1. Rumsfeld doesn’t understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn’t working fast enough or well enough. So maybe make some changes — apparently any old changes will do because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to spend.

2. Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss. Consider these phrases:

‘Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made) . . .

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist. . . ‘

You read the news from Iraq – the death squads, the increasing number of kidnappings of government workers, the mosques used as execution chambers, the 3700 people murdered in October alone – and you wonder: what is going on inside the head of Tony Blair?

The question may not interest the many British commentators, from the left and right, who regularly assert that Blair has messianic delusions, is a liar, or even an outright scoundrel.

But those who see Blair as both more complicated and more decent than the caricature allows – a man whose strengths and flaws are in the normal range – must wonder how he feels. Does he believe he made a catastrophic mistake? Does he turn off the unbearable TV news, lie awake at night? He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. As his prime ministership enters its final months, and rumours spread that both the Government and the bureaucracy are stalled, awaiting his departure, he is still feverishly announcing policy initiatives. Yet he looks older almost by the day; the once-easy smile is often a fixed grin. He seems oddly pumped up and his words sound at times overblown. “Here, in this extraordinary desert, is where the future of world security in the early 21st century is going to be played out,” he told British troops in Afghanistan two weeks ago.

The gulf’s two military powers, Sunni-Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, are lining up behind their warring religious brethren in Iraq in a potentially explosive showdown, as expectations grow in both countries that America is preparing a pull-out of its troops.

The Saudis, America’s closest allies in the Arab World, were reported – in an article last week by Nawaf Obaid, a senior government security adviser- to be considering providing anti-US Sunni military leaders with funding, logistical support and even arms – as Iran already does for Shia militia in Iraq.

Riyadh is alarmed that Sunnis in Iraq could be abandoned to their fate – military and political – at the hands of the Shia majority.

Indeed, President George W Bush dispatched his vice-president Dick Cheney to Saudi last weekend after the kingdom demanded high-level consultations about their concerns.

DAMASCUS, Syria: A top spokesman for the former Baath party of Iraq said in a recent interview that his group will not reconcile with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad nor stop its active support of the insurgency unless the Iraqi government and U.S. officials first meet strict conditions including the withdrawal of American troops.

The interview with the man who identified himself as Abu Mohammed came after repeated efforts by The Associated Press to make contact in Syria with supporters of the insurgency in Iraq.

The man, who appeared in person at the interview, is believed to be Khudair al-Murshidi, a former head of the Iraqi Doctors Syndicate under the rule of Saddam Hussein. He refused to give his real name during the interview and also refused to be photographed but said he was in Syria temporarily while on his way to other Mideast countries to advance the party’s goals.

Al-Murshidi also appeared last month on the pan-Arab al-Jazeera television network, also using the pseudonym Abu Mohammed.

Bilal al-Hassan is writes a regular political column for Asharq al-Awsat. (He happens to be Palestinian, apparently the younger brother of one of the longest-serving “historical Fatah” figures and former Arafat associates Hani al-Hassan). His column today (Sunday December 3) on Iraq and the Bush administration is notable for a number of reasons. Here is a summary of his argument:

While the Bush administration seems to be rejecting the idea of talks with Syria and Iran, this would be a mistake, because these are two countries through which fighters and weapons transit to Iraq, and serious discussions with them could result in putting a stop to that, thus contributing greatly to Iraqi internal stability. Moreover, there are indications that both Syria and Iran are being amenable. For instance, Syria refused the invitation to participate in a three-way summit in Tehran, out of deference to the Arab position; and Iran, for its part, has said there is an important role in the Iraq-pacification process for both Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The Bush administration, al-Hassan says, should pay careful heed to these signs.

WASHINGTON (Dec. 1) — When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The first caller to the station in Washington said that Klein must be “off his rocker.” The second congratulated him and added: “Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country … they are here to kill us.”

Another said that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver’s licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. “What good is identifying them?” he asked. “You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans.”

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of “the threat in our midst” would alleviate the public’s fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

“I can’t believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said,” he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL, which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland.