The Rag Blog

“And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling the world that things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without “birth pangs” when the midwife is killing the baby.”

A few days after Lebanon’s latest war came to an end, I went through many of the reporter’s notebooks I have used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some contained the names of dead colleagues, others the individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds and Christians and Jews. One, dated 1991, is even splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil that came raining down on us from the skies over the Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to happen on 11 September 2001.

And sure enough, in one notebook, part of a transcript of an interview I gave in Toronto in the late 1990s, I see myself trying to discourage the Middle East optimism of my host. “There is an explosion coming in the Middle East,” I tell him. What was this explosion I was talking about? I find myself writing almost the same thing a couple of years later in The Independent – I refer to “the explosion to come” without locating it in the Middle East at all. What was I talking about? And then, most disturbingly, I re-run parts of a film series I made with the late Michael Dutfield for Channel 4 and Discovery in 1993. Called From Beirut to Bosnia, it was billed as an attempt to record “Muslims growing anger towards the West.”

We are ruled by a male cheerleader who favors torture. I wonder what things twist in the inner fog.

Given a president who seems chiefly concerned to display his indomitable manhood, the question arises: What restraints keep him from absolute control of a formidably armed nation of three hundred million? The Constitution, noblest of fables, was designed to do just this. But absent the will to enforce them, checks and balances do not exist, and laws, principles, and constitutions mean nothing. If no one says “no,” the president simply behaves as he wants. The genius of the strange little man in the White House has been to recognize this, to divine the weakness of the American political order.

If you have ever wondered how a serial murderer — a murderer who is sane and fully aware of the acts he has committed — can remain steadfastly convinced of his own moral superiority and show not even the slightest glimmer of remorse, you should not wonder any longer.

The United States government is such a murderer. It conducts its murders in full view of the entire world. It even boasts of them. Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means — and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a “success.”

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 — Internal military documents released Thursday provided new details about the Defense Department’s collection of information on demonstrations nationwide last year by students, Quakers and others opposed to the Iraq war.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show, for instance, that military officials labeled as “potential terrorist activity” events like a “Stop the War Now” rally in Akron, Ohio, in March 2005.

The Defense Department acknowledged last year that its analysts had maintained records on war protests in an internal database past the 90 days its guidelines allowed, and even after it was determined there was no threat.

A department spokesman said Thursday that the “questionable data collection” had led to a tightening of military procedures to ensure that only information relevant to terrorism and other threats was collected. The spokesman, Maj. Patrick Ryder, said in response to the release of the documents that the department “views with great concern any potential violation” of the policy.

KHALDIYA, Oct 12 (IPS) – The bomb went off just outside the school as the IPS correspondent stood speaking to children and teachers within.

The headmaster smiled. “You will hear many of these every day if you stay here another day or two,” he said. “The resistance will not stop until the last American leaves.”

The children too took no notice of the blast, which shook the doors and windows of the half-destroyed school in this town near Fallujah, 70km west of Baghdad.

The children are growing up in occupied Iraq – and they are resisting it.

“Americans are bad,” said 11-year-old Mustafa. “They killed my family.” The family were killed in Operation Phantom Fury of November 2004 as they tried to flee the city, teachers said. That operation killed thousands and destroyed much of Fallujah and towns around it.

“God will send all Americans to hellfire,” cried another child in the classroom. Attempts to suggest that not everyone they thought American was bad proved fruitless.

“How can we teach them forgiveness when they see Americans killing their family members every day,” the teacher in the classroom who gave her name as Shyamaa told IPS. “Words cannot cover the stream of blood and these signs of destruction, and words cannot hide the daily raids they see.”

For the headmaster, the idea of a clash of civilisations is not just an idea.

CAIRO – From the moment the Iraq war began, the question of who is suffering and in what numbers has been a hotly contested battleground for supporters and opponents of the US decision to invade. Each side has sought to score moral points for their cause by pointing to an alleviation, or growth, in Iraqi suffering.

It’s not surprising that a finding this week that 601,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the war is controversial. The figure, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, is 10 times higher than previous estimates. “Not credible,” President Bush said succinctly following its release Wednesday. “Exceeds reality in an unreasonable way,” was the assessment of an Iraqi government spokesman.

There is no doubt that Iraq is now an extremely violent place, as Baghdad’s official September murder toll of 2,667 makes clear.

But why are the number of Iraqi deaths so difficult to pin down? The short answer is that much of the country is too dangerous for researchers or government officials to travel in search of accurate statistics. The best tally would come from counting every death certificate issued in the country in the three years before and three years since the invasion. But there is no central reporting mechanism for this in the country.

So instead, the researchers, backed up by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, relied on the same polling methodology that is used to measure voter preferences or what their favorite TV shows are.