These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”.

Within this deadly context, George W. Bush proposed the Mérida Initiative, dubbed "Plan Mexico" due to its striking similarity to Plan Colombia. Plan Mexico is a US aid package that will provide equipment, training, and resources to the Mexican police, army, and government to support Calderón's doomed war on drugs and organized crime. While it was originally valued at $1.4 billion over a period of three years, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Barack Obama have both stated that Bush's proposal falls short and that much more money over many more years will be necessary to fulfill Plan Mexico's mandate.

the forgotten vietnam-iraq parallel:
The Republicans are showing an uncanny ability to control the public debate. Remember just a couple of months ago, when it was Democratic Party gospel that this was indeed a war we couldn’t win? Somehow the gospel is being rewritten. As the Washington Post reports, the Dem party line now says that we are indeed “making progress” on the military front. Our troops are doing a superb job. It’s just those incompetent Iraqi politicians — looking for “power, revenge, and personal advantage,” Hillary Clinton says — who are blocking the path to a glorious victory.
(...) Long ago, historians of the Vietnam war noted that the intense debate about the war that gripped America rarely made much reference to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Only “peaceniks” on the far left paid much attention to the two million or more Vietnamese who died, to the corpses and torched villages and napalmed children that were the living — and dying — reality of the war. In the mainstream, where the “serious” discussion unfolded, the only question that mattered was: What is this war doing to the USA? Is it to our benefit to keep on fighting, or are we better off withdrawing?
(...) Is it Bush and Cheney or their antiwar critics who are wearing the white hats? That’s for you to decide. In either case, political leaders and the mainstream media make it clear that you are deciding for a particular vision of what America is all about, what makes America great, and what direction America should take in the future. What happens to the people of Iraq is mentioned only in passing, if at all.
(...) Sad to say, this is probably a fairly accurate reflection of U.S. public opinion. Most people here don’t care too much what happened to the people of Vietnam or what is happening to the people of Iraq. A recent poll showed that the average American thinks under 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in this war — a vast underestimate. More importantly, the number of Iraqi dead scarcely figures into the public debate. As with the Vietnam war, it’s all about what is happening to us.
(...) That is why Bush’s speechwriters could take the gamble of raising the specter of Vietnam, and why they may very well win. Since the war was turned into a fictional drama, few people know, or care, what really happened in Vietnam. Therefore, it’s easy to change the story around. Few can refute Bush’s absurd version, in which the forecast “bloodbath” supposedly actually happened, and the U.S. withdrawal triggered the Khmer Rouge outrages in Cambodia.
(...) On all those counts, the yarn Bush is spinning could easily prove a winner. It says that we were close to winning in Vietnam. But then the antiwar “cut and run” crowd snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That let loose a bloody tide of chaos that engulfed southeast Asia, humiliated the U.S., and emboldened the terrorists, who now want to make Iraq a home base from which to launch their next attack upon us. But we have a chance to right all those wrongs — to stem the tide of chaos, regain our pride, crush the terrorists, keep our children safe, and show what America is really made of — if only we have the courage to fight for God’s truth.

bush rewrites history:
“The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he’s counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.
(...) he’s not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.

bush, vietnam, and 14 more GIs dead:
Naturally, Mr. Bush fails to note that if the United States had never been in Vietnam, there would not have been the need to add these terms to "our vocabulary." It was the decision by Washington to refuse the right of the Vietnamese to hold countrywide elections as agreed to in the 1954 Geneva agreements and the subsequent machinations by the US military and intelligence agencies to install a client government in southern Vietnam that created the situation that precipitated all of the newly termed phenomena.

the FBI in peace and war:
The CIA also collected files. In 1982, in response to an FOIA request, the Agency sent me copies of letters I had written to and received from friends in the Soviet Union and Cuba. From the 1950s on, the CIA spied on thousands of U.S. citizens. In June 1970, President Nixon brought together Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms and other intelligence heavies to expand and “coordinate efforts against domestic dissenters,” (Verne Lyon, former CIA undercover operative, Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1990.)
(...) According to ABC's “The Blotter,” a recent unclassified report told Congress that the FBI, driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush, wants to recruit more than 15,000 informants in the U.S., entailing a complete overhaul of its database systems at a cost of around $22 million. The FBI apparently wants to maximize the information provided by "more than 15,000" informants. Many of the new and old informants will apparently be U.S. citizens and residents, but the FBI also wants to go overseas.

After returning to Cambridge not too long ago, just as all underclassfolk were leaving, many friends have asked me what I learned/did/enjoyed in the three months in Nicaragua I substituted for my Harvard spring. I've found it nigh on impossible to 'summarize', let alone describe, my time abroad - not because the depth or awesomeness of the experience makes conveying it impossible (doubtless that's how some very nice people have interpreted my inability to list 'lessons learned'), but really only because a few sentences, well thought-out or not, can never do justice to a whole semester (whether in Managua or in Harvard Yard). For those reasons I think it may not be best to post here about what happened there - at the very least, I'd be 'forcing it', a habit which my campers last summer made me promise to kick. Furthermore, all that's relevant about my trip, in the cambridgecommon sense, will probably make itself explicit in the course of posting soon enough.

For example: my final paper for the program I was enrolled in tried to discuss the 'gutting' of politics that follows from today's forced coupling of 'democracy' and capitalism. I looked at the Free Trade Zone in Nicaragua with this theme in mind - in my opinion, the premises of these types of mega-Projects - the idea, however expressed, that development can be planned by an educated, 'expert' elite - make clear the emptiness of what passes for democracy today.[1] I recently came across this news story looking at past speeches given by America's commander-in-chief (excerpt below), notable not merely because his words are shown to be flatly absurd, but also because his posturing demonstrates excellently the weakness of this country's democratic fabric.

In a "Rose Garden news conference", Bush is quoted as saying (on Iraq):

"I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well."

Not only, as the article notes, does Bush totally misinterpret public polls, his analysis is pathetic. Those who say - "get out" - are not necessarily also arguing "it's just not worth it". His need to characterize those who advocate for immediate withdrawal as pessimistic nationalists, only lacking faith, willpower, and the manly courage of their fearless leader, reflects how American politics is framed to exclude viewpoints that are fundamentally distasteful. This is so obviously inimical to democracy, precisely because it prohibits productive, deliberative, and inclusive discourse. It can never be asked, within the limits of the paradigm that Bush defines here, whether people oppose the war for reasons more principled than blind nationalism. Perhaps because the war was completely illegal and illegitimate under international law? Perhaps because its architects manufactured, cooked, and fabricated the intelligence? Perhaps because of imperial designs?

Some might suggest that I've picked an easy target - that Bushisms are hardly indicative of a political climate in critical condition. However, I insist that the Democrats are minimally different, and excluding the fringe 'hopefuls without hope' (Gravel, Kucinich), politicking in the USA requires that certain assumptions central to the sanctity of the political arena remain unshaken, if ever even challenged. Most obviously these include the belief in the essential benevolence of US foreign policy (have Democrats read "Killing Hope", by William Blum?) [we could surely name others: that the American Dream is glorious and viable, that anti-capitalism is inadmissable, that we must not question our founding fathers, etc.] Paul Street, a radical historian and activist who writes regularly for ZNet, has made it his pre-election mission to discredit Obama (in particular) and the Democrats (more generally) on these points (see, for example this and this).

What we should be challenging, more broadly and more crucially, is the "rule of experts"-ideal ensconced in this political model. Its incompleteness facilitates the calcification of these aforementioned "Points of Unity". Politicians live a politician's life; they are funded by certain groups, educated in similar ways, and usually isolated from their constituents in very real ways (financially, spatially, racially, etc.). Yet they monopolize Power. This obviously defies democracy, since democracy most deeply demands the entering of everyone into politics; it is highly egalitarian, and ideally extremely hostile to this paternalism. No one should be empowered to decide for anybody else. Instead, we must all participate in the making of our world. In the case of the Free Trade Zone in Managua, for example, Nicaragua grants a group of dogmatically-educated technocrats (a man I interviewed had five textbooks on his desk, one of which was Mankiw's "Principles of Economics" in Spanish) the right to chart a course for the future of the hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly affected by their proposals. The structure of today's politics subscribes to this basic belief in the ability of a smart, well-educated class of people to direct a country. [2] Does the autocratic essence of this arrangement not trouble us? Surely we, even as Harvardians who (all other things being equal) benefit from this status quo, still understand the integrity of a radically democratic polity?

[1] In my opinion, development should never be understood as a technology of government, since that necessarily de-links it from politics. It is not simply the likely result of certain, correct set of policies, but most importantly a state of politics - a way of organizing government that empowers and liberates each citizen.
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, pioneer of world-systems theory, traces the origins of this arrangement very persuasively: "Liberals put their faith in one key premise of Enlightenment thought: that rational thought and action were the path to salvation, that is, to progress. (...) It followed that ‘normal political change’ ought to follow the path indicated by those who were most rational—that is, most educated, most skilled, therefore most wise. These men could design the best paths of political change to pursue; that is, these men could indicate the necessary reforms to undertake and enact." (from this essay; PIN needed).

the democratic mandate:
"Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq," he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. "I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course."
(...) "A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?" he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. "When are you going to win?" Also in that session, Bush said: "I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well." In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving — not winning — is their main goal.
(...) In one released Friday by CBS and the New York Times, 63 percent supported a troop withdrawal timetable of sometime next year. Another earlier this month from USA Today and Gallup found 59 percent backing a withdrawal deadline that the U.S. should stick to no matter what's happening in Iraq. Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out.
(...) Terrorists remain dangerous, and fighting them in Iraq is key to neutralizing the threat, he says. "It's hard for some Americans to see that, I fully understand it," Bush said. "I see it clearly."
(...) It was the same the next day in Michigan. "If you make decisions based upon the latest opinion poll, you won't be thinking long-term strategy on behalf of the American people," the president said.
(...) "This is a very tricky thing in our politics. We want to think that we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion. But we also like to think of ourselves as being in a democracy where we are listened to," Fields said. "He risks either the notion of being thought out of touch ... or to be thought simply duplicitous." [how absurd! we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion!? in other words, declare themselves intentionally anti-democratic?]

astonishing!:
"We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation," he said at a White House press conference.
(...)"If they were to say 'leave', we would leave.

the imperial imperative (chalmers johnson):
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
(...) As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
(...) And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.
(...) Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.
(...) In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way: "All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed... So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.... What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."
(...) The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).
(...) Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
(...) a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote: "There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"
(...) The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war.
(...) Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.
(...) One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.
(...) the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts.
(...) America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.
(...) The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department.
(...) Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.
(...) This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year. Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."
(...) I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.
(...) Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.
(...) Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
(...) Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.
(...) We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return[!?] to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.
(...) In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence.
(...) In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade." [and what of capital?]
(...) When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. [and that dirty war, chalmers?] But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

this is democracy:
A judge has sentenced a British civil servant to six months in prison for leaking a classified memo about a meeting between Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, and George Bush, the US president.
(...) The leak was judged to be a breach of the country's Official Secrets Act.

boy george:
In the leaked Downing Street Memo of 23 July 2002, it was revealed by top British military intelligence officials that English authorities learned something remarkable from Bush and his team. “Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the British discovered. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action,” the Memo reads, “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
(...) Things got positively weird between Team Bush and the rulers of England five months later. In a two-hour meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair that took place in the White House office on January 31, 2003, Bush discussed several ways to provoke a confrontation. One of the methods he proposed was to paint a U.S. surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of anti-aircraft fire that could be used to justify an invasion.

chris floyd on iraq:
So there you are. We have American casualties swelling with the still-rising wave of the Bush-McCain-Romney-Guiliani-Lieberman surge, with even more deaths expected as the escalation crests. We have American soldiers flung into the brutal service of the Bush Regime's criminal enterprise becoming more brutalized and criminalized themselves -- with thousands of troops admitting that they have beaten or despoiled innocent civilians, and tens of thousands embracing the torture of prisoners and rejecting the very notion that the people they have come to "liberate" should be treated with dignity and respect, according to the Pentagon's own examination of the fraying mental health of its forces. We have Iraqi citizens cowering in fear of the American-trained "security" forces of their own government. We have the ghetto-building campaign by the occupying liberators sealing whole quadrants of Baghdad into open-air prisons whose inhabitants are left to the tender mercies of the violent sectarians locked in with them, creating "mini-Islamic republics," as one Iraqi government official admitted to The Independent. We have literally millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes, eating the bitter bread of exile in foreign lands or else on the run from ethnic cleansing inside Iraq -- one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. We have a never-ending hellstorm of death and chaos, lies and looting, incompetence and arrogance -- and unfathomable, unendurable human suffering -- all of it spawned by the illegal, immoral and unnecessary war of aggression launched at the order of George W. Bush, and championed or countenanced for years by the "great and the good" of American society.

cockburn on iraq in 2007 (introduction to paperback version of his book):
At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting which was featured on Kurdish television.
(...) In the event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad.
(...) If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war.
(...) The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war -- such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 -- that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.
(...) President Bush did the exact opposite of what the Baker-Hamilton report had proposed. He identified Iran and Syria as America's prime enemies in Iraq, stating: "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Instead of reducing the American commitment, Bush pledged to send 20,000 extra troops to Iraq to try to secure Baghdad. In other words, the U.S. was going to respond to its lack of success in the conflict by escalating both the war in Iraq and America's confrontation with Iran in the Middle East as a whole. The invasion of 2003 had destabilized the whole region; now Bush was about to deepen that instability.
(...) "People are saying that Bush's speech means that the occupation is going to go on a long time," the Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Attiyah told me soon after the President had stopped speaking. Although the new U.S. security plan for Baghdad, which began on February 14th, was sold as a temporary "surge" in troop numbers, it was evident that the reinforcements were there to stay.
(...) Training and equipping Iraqi troops to replace American soldiers -- so they could be withdrawn from Iraq -- had been the cornerstone of U.S. military planning since 2005. Now, the policy was being quietly downgraded, though not abandoned altogether.
(...) The U.S. Army was to go on fighting the five-million-strong Sunni community, as it had been doing since the capture of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was not being met. At the same time, the U.S. was going to deal more aggressively with the 17 million Shias in Iraq. It would contest the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq of the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia led by the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shia Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was also more openly going to confront Iran, the most powerful of Iraq's neighbors.
(...) Iran was easy to demonize in the U.S., just as Saddam Hussein had been blamed four years earlier for everything wrong in Iraq and the Middle East. The New York Times, which had once uncritically repeated White House claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, now ran articles on its front page saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated roadside bombs to Iraq that were killing American soldiers. There was no reference to the embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just such bombs in Baghdad and Basra.
(...) The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled -- even in the heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army, supported by Iraqi army troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who ruled it.
(...) American commanders often genuinely believed that they were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis, including the local police, told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently claiming that they were winning the fight against the Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.
(...) The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some difference to security in the capital. The number of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and dumped in the street, went down from the horrific levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or of army and police units collaborating with them.
(...) A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market places. These did not stop and improved security measures made little difference.
(...) There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied.
(...) Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November 2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was so large as to make it difficult to control and impossible to eliminate them.
(...) Some American soldiers see that the problem is not about a few infiltrators. "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been assassinated or targeted for assassination is giving information or support to the insurgents," one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is already dead."
(...) A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped President Bush senior pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam after defeating the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991. After 2003, Washington was in the same quandary: If elections were held, the Shia, comprising 60% of the population that had been long excluded from power, were bound to win.
(...) At first, the U.S. tried to postpone elections, claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile with the Sunni -- though exactly how Shia and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main Sunni demand is a timetable for an American withdrawal, has never been clear.
(...) For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory (as I explain in my book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.
(...) Over the next three years, they paid $3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam Hussein that had failed disastrously. For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear." Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
(...) In the course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated into a dozen hostile cities at war with each other. There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the city like a poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be frightened of: Sunni insurgent groups; the Shia militias, Mehdi Army, and the Badr Organization; police and police commandos; the Iraqi army and the Americans.
(...) I was in contact with a Sunni family called al-Mashadani who lived in the west Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack by Shia militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced to leave his job when the repair yard was taken over by Shia militiamen. He stayed away and asked a Shia fellow worker to pick up his salary. This worked until the Shia militias found out what was happening and threatened to kill any Shia who passed on the salary of a Sunni.
(...) Nadia blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war that had engulfed her family. She says: "We were living together, Sunni and Shia, and there was no sign of sectarian differences between us in Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists." Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.
(...) America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.
(...) At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

cockburn on iraq in 2007 (introduction to paperback version of his book):
At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting which was featured on Kurdish television.
(...) In the event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad.
(...) If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war.
(...) The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war -- such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 -- that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.
(...) President Bush did the exact opposite of what the Baker-Hamilton report had proposed. He identified Iran and Syria as America's prime enemies in Iraq, stating: "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Instead of reducing the American commitment, Bush pledged to send 20,000 extra troops to Iraq to try to secure Baghdad. In other words, the U.S. was going to respond to its lack of success in the conflict by escalating both the war in Iraq and America's confrontation with Iran in the Middle East as a whole. The invasion of 2003 had destabilized the whole region; now Bush was about to deepen that instability.
(...) "People are saying that Bush's speech means that the occupation is going to go on a long time," the Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Attiyah told me soon after the President had stopped speaking. Although the new U.S. security plan for Baghdad, which began on February 14th, was sold as a temporary "surge" in troop numbers, it was evident that the reinforcements were there to stay.
(...) Training and equipping Iraqi troops to replace American soldiers -- so they could be withdrawn from Iraq -- had been the cornerstone of U.S. military planning since 2005. Now, the policy was being quietly downgraded, though not abandoned altogether.
(...) The U.S. Army was to go on fighting the five-million-strong Sunni community, as it had been doing since the capture of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was not being met. At the same time, the U.S. was going to deal more aggressively with the 17 million Shias in Iraq. It would contest the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq of the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia led by the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shia Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was also more openly going to confront Iran, the most powerful of Iraq's neighbors.
(...) Iran was easy to demonize in the U.S., just as Saddam Hussein had been blamed four years earlier for everything wrong in Iraq and the Middle East. The New York Times, which had once uncritically repeated White House claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, now ran articles on its front page saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated roadside bombs to Iraq that were killing American soldiers. There was no reference to the embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just such bombs in Baghdad and Basra.
(...) The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled -- even in the heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army, supported by Iraqi army troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who ruled it.
(...) American commanders often genuinely believed that they were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis, including the local police, told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently claiming that they were winning the fight against the Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.
(...) The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some difference to security in the capital. The number of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and dumped in the street, went down from the horrific levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or of army and police units collaborating with them.
(...) A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market places. These did not stop and improved security measures made little difference.
(...) There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied.
(...) Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November 2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was so large as to make it difficult to control and impossible to eliminate them.
(...) Some American soldiers see that the problem is not about a few infiltrators. "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been assassinated or targeted for assassination is giving information or support to the insurgents," one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is already dead."
(...) A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped President Bush senior pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam after defeating the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991. After 2003, Washington was in the same quandary: If elections were held, the Shia, comprising 60% of the population that had been long excluded from power, were bound to win.
(...) At first, the U.S. tried to postpone elections, claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile with the Sunni -- though exactly how Shia and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main Sunni demand is a timetable for an American withdrawal, has never been clear.
(...) For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory (as I explain in my book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.
(...) Over the next three years, they paid $3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam Hussein that had failed disastrously. For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear." Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
(...) In the course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated into a dozen hostile cities at war with each other. There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the city like a poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be frightened of: Sunni insurgent groups; the Shia militias, Mehdi Army, and the Badr Organization; police and police commandos; the Iraqi army and the Americans.
(...) I was in contact with a Sunni family called al-Mashadani who lived in the west Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack by Shia militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced to leave his job when the repair yard was taken over by Shia militiamen. He stayed away and asked a Shia fellow worker to pick up his salary. This worked until the Shia militias found out what was happening and threatened to kill any Shia who passed on the salary of a Sunni.
(...) Nadia blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war that had engulfed her family. She says: "We were living together, Sunni and Shia, and there was no sign of sectarian differences between us in Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists." Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.
(...) America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.
(...) At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

on the propaganda for the war on somalia:
Right out of the gate, in the second paragraph, Tomlinson asserts – without any qualification or attribution whatsoever – that those resisting the American-backed invasion of their country by are "threatening to turn the country back into a haven for al-Qaeda." (9/11! 9/11!) Just two paragraphs later, he provides this description of the Islamic Courts council that had brought Somalia its first measure of peace and stability in 15 years before its overthrow by Ethiopian tanks and American bombs:

...Islamic radicals who grabbed power for six months last year, filling Somalia's power vacuum with a strict religious government. Like the Taliban who once ruled Afghanistan and hosted Osama bin Laden, the Somali movement, the Council of Islamic Courts, harbors al-Qaeda terrorists, U.S. officials say.

Just like the Taliban! Osama bin Laden! 9/11! 9/11! At least this paragraph offers one of Tomlinson's rare uses of a source – albeit unnamed ones – to back up his bald assertions. But the import is clear: the Islamic Courts council is the same thing as the Taliban and al Qaeda, and thus the invasion of Somalia is entirely justified as part of the noble War on Terror that President Bush is waging to keep Americans safe.
(...) Nowhere does Tomlinson offer even a pro forma mention of the Islamic Courts' constant denials of any involvement with al Qaeda. Nor does he mention – doubtless because, in his sweet ignorance, he does not know – that the Courts themselves were comprised of various factions of varying degrees of religious fervor, from moderates to more hard-core fundamentalists. They were never simply a monolithic bloc of Taliban-style fanatics. You'd have to look to Mr. Bush's longtime family friends, the Saudi royals, for that kind of thing; their kingdom is by far the most repressive religious regime on the face of the earth – and also a haven for not a few al-Qaeda supporters, including some very highly placed and quite wealthy ones.
(...) Tomlinson breathlessly relates that a whole ten "al Qaeda operatives remain in Somalia," and are "at least partially responsible for the growing violence in the capital." Who knew that these wily al Qaeda operators were somehow able to sneak into the tanks and artillery batteries of the American-trained Ethiopian army, which has been the source of most of the "violence in the capital" in the last month, when more than 1,400 people were killed, most of them civilians? Gadzooks, is there nothing these evil masterminds can't do?
(...) But this is not a story designed to provide readers with the news of what is happening in Somalia. It is designed to convey – without a single dissenting viewpoint – the official line of the Bush Administration regarding the murderous proxy war that it has greenlighted in Somalia. There is no mention of the American air strikes against fleeing refugees in the early days of the war – an ostensible attempt to kill alleged al Qaeda operatives that instead murdered dozens of innocent civilians. There is no mention of the "rendition" of refugees – including innocent American citizens – into Ethiopia's torture chambers. There is no mention of the years, and millions of dollars, that the Bush administration has spent in arming and training the repressive Ethiopian military. There is no mention of the complexities of the political situation in Somalia, just constant invocations of "Taliban" and "al Qaeda" to evoke a Pavlovian response of fear – and unquestioning acquiescence to the Terror War policies of the Bush Administration. After all, who could possibly oppose a righteous operation to keep Somalia from "turning back into a haven for al Qaeda"?
(...)
But then, the Terror War has never been about curtailing the terrorist threat against Americans. This is blatantly obvious, as every aspect of the "War" has only exacerbated terrorism and anti-American feeling around the world. The Terror War is about securing even more loot and power for elite factions in the American Establishment (and selected foreign cronies). Somalia's oil and its strategic location make it a prime target for the Terror Warriors; hence the invasion and the blood-soaked occupation.

sharm el-sheikh conference:
This week, the foreign ministers of Iraq's neighbouring countries, along with Egypt and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and other members of the G8, are meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh to discuss ways of lending political support to the beleaguered Iraqi government as it struggles to establish a semblance of authority in a country largely beyond its control. The consultations precede the launching of the so-called "International Compact with Iraq" in a two- day conference to be held in the Red Sea resort, Thursday, through Friday with the expected participation of 40 delegations of concerned countries and organisations, similarly meant to help bolster Iraq's increasingly unpopular Shia-dominated government.
(...) Not all participants in this week's consultative meetings agree with this sentiment. Many privately believe the meetings are not so much about lending support to the Iraqi government as helping address the anxieties of the Bush administration, at a time when signs abound of its failure in Iraq. Many Arab and non-Arab diplomats who spoke to the Weekly said this week's event was essentially a photo opportunity for the American press.
(...) In the text of statements to be adopted tomorrow evening, the Iraqi government receives qualified recognition from participants for its efforts to induce a semblance of stability in Iraq. On the other hand, the text includes demands that the Iraqi government take clear steps towards revising many of the policies that until now have been a source of pride for the Shia-dominated ruling regime -- in particular the revision of its stance on de- Baathification.
(...) Meanwhile, no agreement seems in the offing on the controversial issue of the distribution of Iraq's oil revenues, which is a source of considerable inter-Iraqi conflict. Also, no agreement, spoken or unspoken, is forthcoming on the long-standing request of the Iraqi government that Arab diplomatic representation return to Baghdad. Silence also surrounded the so far inconclusive security plan adopted by the Iraqi government, as well as US plans to construct separation walls that many see as sectarian, in dozens of Baghdad neighbourhoods.
(...) Overall, despite commitments with regards to the cancelling of some Iraqi debts, not much was expected to come out of this week's meetings in terms of concrete action. In the words of one informed Arab diplomat, "there is not even firm evidence that whatever good intentions were reflected in the meetings, including from the Iraqi side, would be translated into executive policies."
(...) George W Bush and Congressional Democrats over the funding of the war in Iraq, in the wake of Bush vetoing a military spending bill that included a timetable for US withdrawal. The veto came exactly four years after Bush, speaking aboard a US aircraft carrier under a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner, declared "major combat operations" over in Iraq, following the US-led invasion of March 2003.

on bush-driven diplomacy:
And so, knowing that his "diplomatic" efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has "tried everything"; that "his patience has run out"; and that he can "no longer risk the security of the American people" by "indulging in further fruitless negotiations," thereby allowing the Iranians "to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making," and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz -- and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well -- will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.

castro on may day:
Possibly, the population of the world then was not more than 500 million. We know that in 1830, world population reached the first billion mark, one hundred and thirty years later it multiplied by three, and forty-six years later the total number of inhabitants on the planet had grown to 6.5 billion; the immense majority of these were poor, having to share their food with domestic animals and from now on with biofuels.
(...) The large American transnationals, which produce this biofuel investing tens of billion dollars at an accelerated pace, had demanded from the imperial leader the distribution in the American market of no less than thirty-five billions (35,000,000,000) of gallons of this fuel every year. The combination of protective tariffs and real subsidies would raise that figure to almost one hundred billion dollars each year. Insatiable in its demand, the empire had flung into the world the slogan of producing biofuels in order to liberate the United States, the world's supreme energy consumer, from all external dependency on hydrocarbons.
(...) History shows that sugar as a single crop was closely associated with the enslaving of Africans, forcibly uprooted from their natural communities, and brought to Cuba, Haiti and other Caribbean islands. In Brazil, the exact same thing happened in the growing of sugar cane.
(...) Today, in that country, almost 80% of sugar cane is cut by hand. Sources and studies made by Brazilian researchers affirm that a sugarcane cutter, a piece- work laborer, must produce no less than twelve tons in order to meet basic needs. This worker needs to perform 36,630 flexing movements with his legs, make small trips 800 times carrying 15 kilos of cane in his arms and walk 8,800 meters in his chores. He loses an average of 8 liters of water every day. Only by burning cane can this productivity per man be achieved. Cane cut by hand or by machines is usually burned to protect people from nasty bites and especially to increase productivity. Even though the established norm for a working day is from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, this type of piece-work cane cutting tends to go on for a 12 hour working day. The temperature will at times rise to 45 degrees centigrade by noon.
(...) The great agricultural yields of the United States were achieved by rotating the gramineae (corn, wheat, oats, millet and other similar grains) with the legumes (soy, alfalfa, beans, etc.). These contribute nitrogen and organic material to the soil. The corn crop yield in the United States in 2005, according to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) data was 9.3 tons per hectare. In Brazil they only obtain 3 tons of this same grain in the same area. The total production registered by this sister nation that year was thirty-four million six hundred thousand tons, consumed internally as food. It cannot contribute corn to the world market.
(...) The prices for this grain, the staple diet in numerous countries of the region, have almost doubled. What will happen when hundreds of millions of tons of corn are redirected towards the production of biofuel? And I rather not mention the amounts of wheat, millet, oats, barley, sorghum and other cereals that industrialized countries will use as a source of fuel for its engines.
(...) We know that the poorest workers from various states are the ones who gravitate towards cane cutting out of necessity. Sometimes, they must spend many months away from their families. That is what happened in Cuba until the triumph of the Revolution, when the cutting and hauling of sugarcane was done by hand, and mechanized cultivation or transportation hardly existed. With the demise of the brutal system forced on our society the cane-cutters, massively taught to read and write, abandoned their wanderings in a few years and it became necessary to replace them with hundreds of thousands of voluntary workers.
(...) Nothing could prevent American and European capital from funding the production of biofuels. They could even send the funds as gifts to Brazil and Latin America. The United States, Europe and the other industrialized countries would save more than one hundred and forty billion dollars each year, without having to worry about the consequences for the climate and the hunger which would affect the countries of the Third World in the first place. They would always be left with enough money for biofuels and to acquire the little food available on the world market at any price.
(...) Another risk of a different nature facing the world is an economic recession in the United States. In the past few days, the dollar has broken records at losing value. On the other hand, every country has most of its reserves in convertible currencies precisely in this paper currency and in American bonds.

statement from RAWA:
The American forces act so reckless and hasty in killing innocent civilians everyday, that they seem to have come here for taking revenge of the 3,000 victims of the 9/11 from the people rather than to targeting the terrorist of their own creation, the Taliban. The death toll of these innocents throughout Afghanistan is now much higher than that of 9/11. This has indeed provoked and enraged the wrath of the people, encouraging the Taliban terrorists, who definitely receive the maximum benefits.
(...) The US first installed the Northern Alliance criminals. Now they find ways to share power with Gulbaddin, Taliban terrorists, using Mojaddedi, their former godfather as the mediator just to get out from the current swamp. This indicates more than ever the dependency of the Afghan government and the true nature of the so called "War on Terrorism." As has been proven again and again, the US and the UN look only for their vested interest in Afghanistan and do not care for the freedom, democracy and prosperity of Afghan people. The Bush Administration and the UN bring the most insane fundamentalists and Khalqies and Purchamies traitors to one table, and once they grind their teeth to each other, they will use one against another.
(...) The pro-government intellectuals and politicians cry, blaming Pakistan as the only cause of Afghanistan's ongoing tragedies. Yet they forget that many of their lords like Rabbani, Massoud, Sayyaf, Qanoni and others grew up, were nurtured and became "leaders" through the ISI with some still continuing to worship this agency. On the other hand, suppose this or that circle in Pakistan stopped supporting the Taliban, will the current crisis end? Will the barbaric rule of the Northern Alliance criminals cease? Afghanis who love their country know the answer: "No!" With the Iranian regime's interference obviously being far more dreadful than that of Pakistan's, Karzai cannot wrap his government's failures in this garb any longer.
(...) The last five years have given a clear message to our people, particularly the anti-fundamentalists and democratic forces, that neither the US nor any outside force can liberate this ill-fated nation from the fetters of the fundamentalists. Instead we require a decisive and united struggle, relying on our own power, courage, and daring sacrifice as we unite with freedom-loving people around the world.