Down the rabbit hole with morons and idiots

July 1st, 2008

In years past, I’ve used the rabbit hole metaphor [and very early on] — I’ve used the word ’surreal’ to define our experience — I’ve made reference to any number of fantasy plots, including The Matrix and The Wizard of Oz. That’s because reality is like an onion, it takes a lifetime to peel away the layers to get to your own personal core; the outward, decaying and diseased layer that has become our national identity is even harder to get a good hold on, especially when we’re surrounded by people who think it’s the only layer there is. Non-sense. Utter and complete.

Want an example? Carpetbagger ran a piece about a real Moron and Idiot, entitled Guess Who’s Sponsoring the Federal Marriage Amendment?

Check it out:

You just can’t make this stuff up: Larry “Wide Stance” Craig and David “Just a Massage” Vitter are now original co-sponsors of the new Federal Marriage Amendment (aka Marriage Protection Amendment).

That’s the kind of curiouser and curiouser surrealism that has finally been noted and legitimized by the federal court, in finding for a detainee [article below] — and, using Lewis Carroll’s work as an illustration to reveal the “nonsense.” Craig and Vitter are standing up for ‘fidelity?’ That’s as laughable as George Bush standing up for democracy … and even more obvious.

In terms of energy shift, we’re in another interesting spot, now … we’re being faced with a parade of characters whose intentions are so grievously transparent that you can only think of them as morons and idiots, to quote a piece below — and yet, believing all their own mythology, they speed ahead as if we hadn’t noticed. They seem to be so entrenched in their own power and persona that each inhabits their own psychic “spider hole” from which they can’t escape. This is aided and abetted by both a Congressional body and a media that still assumes the corporate position [kiss-ass] and dispenses the Kool Aid without much awareness that we’ve stopped drinking; why is it that they’re ALWAYS behind public perception by months and miles? [Warning: let this be a cautionary tale about believing your own bullshit -- once we begin a narrative about ourselves, it's hard to change direction.]

Credibility is built upon success. After Katrina, Bush and his government had a moral bank account of, roughly, zero; there was a great sucking sound of wind rushing into the void that had been established in national reality. Dubby’s War remains too far away — too intellectually sanitized to give us the shocks we required for a wake-up; Louisiana was just a few red states away. Since then, the curiouser and curiouser properties of life in the US of A has taken us on a fun-house ride, rushing ahead with us strapped, hapless and helpless, in our seats. We’re nearing the exit, now … we’re exhausted, we’re disturbed, we’re pissed off. And there’s little in the way of feather-smoothing on the horizon — we have to embrace the process.

Here’s the Light at the end of the tunnel, dearhearts — peeling the layers IS the business at hand … but it’s not a rabbit hole; it’s the antithesis of delusion.

Below, articles on three leaders who have failed their people and made themselves into moronic cartoons; Mugabe, Berlusconi and our very own home-grown tyrant, GWB, as we examine his actual legacy: allowing Al Qaeda to become more than a band of thugs and zealots, and position themselves to do more than random harm.

As bonus, three really good reads on the oil issue — it was always the oil, wasn’t it? Nothing curious there … now that we’ve finally noticed.

Jude

Judges cite nonsense poem in Guantanamo case
MATT APUZZO, AP
Mon Jun 30

WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court reviewing evidence at Guantanamo Bay compared a Bush administration legal argument to one made by a hapless, dimwitted character in a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the 1876 poem, “The Hunting of the Snark,” in ruling that the military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim as an enemy combatant. The ruling was issued last week but an unclassified version of the opinion was released only Monday.

It was the first time a court has reviewed the military’s decision-making and considered whether a detainee should be held. The ruling provides guidance to federal district judges, who are about to begin reviewing dozens of such cases now that the Supreme Court says detainees can challenge their detention in federal court.

The appeals court said military review panels, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals, were unable to assess much of the evidence against the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, and at times treated accusations as evidence.

“The big issue now is, can any CSRT decision survive this kind of scrutiny?” Parhat’s lawyer, Susan Baker Manning said.

Parhat is one of a group of Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, being held at Guantanamo Bay. Their case has become a diplomatic and legal headache for the U.S., which has tried to find a country willing to accept the Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurs) even as it defended its decision to hold them as enemy combatants.

The Justice Department concedes that Parhat never fought against the U.S. and says it has no evidence he was planning to do so. The case hinges on Parhat’s connection to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that demands separation from China. Parhat says he considers China, not the United States, the enemy.

The U.S. says it has classified intelligence that ETIM is affiliated with al-Qaida, though officials have not identified the source of that intelligence. The judges said there’s credible evidence that the source is the Chinese government, “which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.”

The three-member court, which was made up of two Republican judges and one Democrat, was particularly pointed in its criticism of the argument that evidence is reliable because it appears on multiple documents.

“The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case,” the court wrote. “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.”

The judges compared the argument to the logic in Carroll’s nonsense poem, in which a hapless crew hunts for a creature that is never quite defined. The Bellman, the ship’s leader, led his men across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeating himself.

“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true,” the Bellman says in the poem.

“Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true,” the court wrote.

The court said Parhat deserved a new hearing or should be released — though it didn’t say to where he would be released. The U.S. does not want to send him to China for fear he will be tortured. Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said the agency is evaluating its options. ++

CRY ZIMBABWE
My Father Was Loyal to Mugabe. It Didn’t Matter.
Anonymous, WaPo
Sunday, June 29, 2008

HARARE, Zimbabwe - My father, who lives in Zimbabwe’s countryside, sent me a letter the other day. The 74-year-old man wrote that he had not had soap, cooking oil, sugar or tea leaves — virtually anything — for a very long time. Could I help? And if I had any old shoes that I was no longer using, could I send them to him?

I felt castrated as I read his words. Like many Zimbabweans, I am in no position to aid my loved ones; I had been out of a job for a whole year when I got the letter. My father might have forgotten that, or simply been so desperate that he had to let me know about his plight. The company where I used to work closed down without any fanfare, and severance packages were not paid. In an eerie way, the demise of our business mirrored the demise of our country: The bosses at the top had proven adept at ruining the company, not at running it efficiently with the welfare of the people at heart. So we paid the price.

Now here was my father, asking for help I was honor-bound to give but simply could not provide. I was filled with impotent rage — the same feeling my fellow citizens get as we watch Zimbabwe spiral out of control, caught in the turbulence of bad, self-serving decisions by the powers that be, ostensibly on our behalf but always at our expense.

In particular, my father’s case fills me with simmering fury because he has been a staunch supporter of President Robert Mugabe’s party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) since the 1960s, when he had served the liberation fighters in any way he could in their struggle against then-Rhodesia’s British overlords. Back in the 1990s, when Mugabe’s rule was turning sour, I was amazed to find in my father’s house — even then — an official portrait of the president. When my father was in his early 60s, he wrote to inform me that he had taken a job in a different district as a secretary for his beloved party. He was eventually forced to retire, and he has been trying to eke out a living as a peasant farmer ever since. My father has been devoted to the party that he says has nurtured him over the years. What does he have to show for it? The very people to whom he pledged his loyalty over the decades are the ones responsible for his plight.

It is not only my father who is writing letters of lamentation; almost every one of us has plumbed the bottoms of our hearts every day. We may never write those thoughts down, but each moment we spend agonizing about how we are going to make ends meet is, in essence, the sending of a plea — one that no one, sadly, seems to be able to answer. The hope of change offered by the March 29 presidential election has been ruthlessly and systematically crushed, and all that remains is the stain of our butchered dreams. Like my father, we have all been betrayed, mistreated and victimized for daring to speak our minds. In Zimbabwe, if you question a wrong or criticize an injustice, you are labeled a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Since the regime rabidly calls the opposition puppets of the West, that label can have dire consequences.

One relative, a tobacco seller in his early 40s, was particularly bitter about the youth militia that is carrying out most of the regime’s dirty work: boys and girls barely out of their teens who are ordering elderly men and women about with impunity. “Tisu tirikutonga,” they declare: We are the ones in power and control. And so they are.

“What hurts me the most,” one of my relatives said, “is that at my age, I have to live in constant fear. To come here to Harare, we had to ask for permission, and on our return, we have to go and report that we are back. . . . I am not a politician. I just want to earn a decent living and get by.”

“The problem is that there are people who did not tell Mugabe the truth,” another relative pointed out. “They lied to him that he was still popular. When he came to address rallies, they bused people from all over the province, and it was the same crowds that were ferried to the different venues, most of them forced. When Mugabe saw them teeming in their multitudes, dutifully cheering and applauding him, he thought they truly loved him.”

No longer. If anything, our trials and tribulations deepened when the elections of March 29 failed to materialize into meaningful change — a stillborn hope that haunts us.

There is a surreal quality to the crisis unfolding here. For the many citizens who depend on the state media, it is business as usual, with robust coverage of Mugabe’s campaign appearances. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the run-off vote held last Friday was treated like a non-event. One neighbor, a devout soccer fan, observed, “This is like having a penalty shootout with only one team.” But Mugabe seems to see nothing wrong with banging the ball into an empty net, then sprinting down the field celebrating his victory. In fact, he does not seem to mind playing the entire match on his own. As long as he is playing, all is well with him.

But for the rest of us — for my father, my relatives and friends, my country — all is not well. The other day, a devout Mugabe supporter assured a friend of mine that once Mugabe had clinched his victory, the terrible inflation wracking the economy would subside, probably a day or so after his inauguration. Such people seem to believe that diesel could come out of a rock. We ordinary Zimbabweans do not deal with inflation by making unrealistic assurances; we deal with it at its grittiest, in our day-to-day struggle for survival. Last week, Zimbabwe’s dollar fell a staggering 80 percent on the country’s illegal currency markets as people hunkered down before the presidential runoff. In barely a week, the price of a loaf of bread — which can be found only on the black market — has shot up from $1 billion to more than $6 billion, but even that could have changed by the time this article appears. In less than two weeks, we have watched the fares for a commuter omnibus, our common means of public transportation, shoot up from $500 million to a price somewhere in the billions.

In Zimbabwe, we talk about these billions without batting an eye. A friend from my neighborhood has a 4-year-old son who is in kindergarten. The other day, I saw this boy holding a wad of $50 million notes; unless they all amounted to a billion of our dollars, he couldn’t even buy a sweet with them. Even our kindergarteners have to be billionaires these days. Zimbabwean tycoons now talk in terms of quadrillions of dollars. I still haven’t been able to get my artistic mind around nine zeroes, much less 15. You should see the people frowning, trying to count the bank notes.

As I count, I think of my father. His needs cannot be met, let alone my own. The skyrocketing cost of transportation and basic goods, most of which can be bought only on the black market, means that what one earns is less than what one must spend to survive. Yet day in and day out, people trek to and from work. I suppose this means that we have all been turned into criminals of one kind or another, selling and buying on the black market in order to make ends meet — which they barely do. And all we want is a better life for ourselves and our children — and an aging father who once believed in Robert Mugabe. ++

The author is a Zimbabwean writer. The Washington Post is withholding his name for safety reasons.

Berlusconi is back and more brash than ever
Italy’s bronzed leader is accused of persecuting Gypsies and evading corruption allegations by granting himself immunity from prosecution. Still he finds time to solicit roles for favourite actresses.
Ed Vulliamy, The Observer
Sunday June 29, 2008

[thanks, Christine]

Brazen, brash, bronzed and breezy, Silvio Berlusconi has reminded Italy and the world that he is back with a vengeance and doing what his critics claim he does best: governing the bel paese in his own interests.

While Jewish and Catholic leaders say that a climate of hostility towards immigrants and a policy to fingerprint Gypsy children recall the dark days of fascism, Berlusconi has been caught telephoning state television executives to ensure that his ‘little butterflies’ - as he calls his favourite actresses and female dancers, and one in particular who is annoying him - get to play the roles they want in TV soaps. ‘They’re all Marilyn Monroe,’ he promised one producer.

As the people who elected him in March continue to indicate their priorities in the polls are the same as usual - salaries, taxes and pensions - Berlusconi is using his office to embark on the final offensive of his longest-running and most heartfelt battle: the fight against Italy’s judiciary.

‘Some of them want me like this,’ he scoffed in a speech at the Renzo Piano theatre in Rome, mimicking himself in handcuffs and calling the judges ‘a cancer in our democracy’.

With Berlusconi, such provocations come with the territory. Among opposition supporters and in the media, the events of the past few days have inspired sighing references to a film of two years ago, Il Caimano (as in the species of reptile), in which Nanni Moretti plays a fictionalised Berlusconi sentenced to jail, who none the less walks free from the court while a mob hurls debris and a petrol bomb at the judges.

Berlusconi’s real-life cabinet decided on Friday to make his office of Prime Minister - and other high offices of state - immune from prosecution, putting Berlusconi in a battle with the judiciary to avoid being tried and convicted for corruption.

Another law aims to suspend for a year trials relating to a range of alleged financial crimes committed before June 2002, potentially derailing a bribery case against Berlusconi, as has happened so many times before.

Meanwhile, Berlusconi’s government is pressing ahead with draconian controls over one of the examining judges’ main tools of investigation, wiretapping, and over leaks of wiretaps to the press.

On 18 June, the Senate approved curbs on the use of telephone interceptions, with prison sentences for journalists who publish leaks. That gambit was dramatically undercut however, when a magazine, l’Espresso, last week published a highly comic package of wiretaps in which not only Berlusconi himself but some of his closest aides and opposition leaders apparently pressurise state television executives to cast parts for their favourite actresses.

Judges investigating corruption by an executive of the state television network RAI uncovered a blizzard of calls by politicians of all colours mixing with actresses - and even those women who bounce around on primetime television, a distinctive Italian style pioneered by Berlusconi - and trying to secure them roles on screen.

Berlusconi’s own intervention, made when he was leader of the opposition, is heartfelt. The Italian Prime Minister is recorded as seeking a part for a comely blonde called Antonella Troise, of whom he says to the executive: ‘This nutter has taken it into her head that I hate her, and am blocking her career, so do me this favour because she’s getting dangerous.’

Calling a producer named Guido de Angelis, Berlusconi says: ‘Look, for all these little butterflies I thank you; you’ve found places for all I’ve given you? You want divas? They’re all Marilyn Monroes!’ ‘Mata Haris more like’, replies the producer. ‘Guido,’ Berlusconi responds. ‘I propose Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that will teach them.’

It’s not only Berlusconi who is involved. His senior adviser, Gianni Letta, wanted a role for a lady in a series called A Place In the Sun, and his lifelong ally, Fedele Confalonieri, has also been on the line to RAI - as has the centre-left champion Francesco Rutelli (trounced at the recent Roman mayoral elections by a neo-Fascist candidate) who is trying to get a part for an acquaintance called Maria Scicolone in a series about Sophia Loren’s family.

Rather than wince at the absurdity of the exchanges, and the networks of influence they appear to expose, Berlusconi and his government have rounded on the judiciary and its manipulation of wiretapping and the media for ‘political purposes’, demanding changes to the wiretapping law as a matter of ‘extreme urgency’. So the starlets and their putative roles have become yet another cause célèbre for Berlusconi as he pursues his enemies in the legal profession.

The reasons for Berlusconi’s animosity are many, but the most urgent is that he is currently accused of ‘judicial corruption’ along with David Mills, estranged husband of the British Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, having allegedly paid Mills a bribe of $600,000 in return for giving false testimony on his behalf. Since 1981 Mills, a corporate lawyer, has established an offshore network of companies on behalf of Berlusconi’s Fininvest umbrella company. Both men deny all charges and wrongdoing.

Examining judges in Milan say they are nearing the end of gathering testimony and could reach a verdict before the summer recess (though another charge of money-laundering against Berlusconi and Mills is running into the sands, once again under the statute of limitations).

So the battle that began in earnest with Berlusconi’s entry into politics in 1993 continues. Back then Italy was at the end of an extraordinary period during which an entire political class became the subject of a judicial investigation known as Mani pulite (Clean Hands). The examining judges were beginning to close in on Berlusconi’s media networks and Fininvest business empire and their connections to senior politicians. Then, in a move which transformed the country’s politics, Berlusconi formed his Forza Italia party and filled the vacuum at the top by winning the election of 1994.

The spearhead of Clean Hands, Judge Antonio Di Pietro, said on Friday, following the wiretap scandal: ‘This is not a matter of a Prime Minister put in the mire by a magazine, but the behaviour of a television proprietor who happens to be Prime Minister and intervenes to ask favours. If that is not a conflict of interests, I don’t know what is.’

As for the immunity package, Di Pietro called for the gathering of signatures in the streets and squares for a referendum over the proposed law, with a view to abolishing it through plebiscite. ‘Berlusconi may be shrewd, but I’m not a dunce,’ he said. Meanwhile, the vice-president of the judiciary, Nicola Mancino, condemned the suspension of cases as ‘an occult amnesty’.

Having elected Berlusconi, the Italian public does not share his concern about the judiciary. Recent polls show the usual preoccupations with salaries and pensions, with only 3.4 per cent interested in the magistrature. His anti-immigration policies are popular, with large majorities favouring the demolition of gypsy camps around Rome and other cities.

However, the new climate, and a move to fingerprint gypsy children, has brought condemnations from the Catholic charity Caritas, Unicef and Amos Luzzatto, former head of the Union of Jewish Communities, who said that the move recalled ‘days when I could not go to school, and people would point at me saying: “Look, mummy, it’s a Jew”. This is a country that has lost its memory.’

But the sensitivities of Italy’s migrant populations are the last thing on Berlusconi’s mind. ++

Bush’s plans falter, al-Qaida establishes new base of operations
Steve Benen, Salon
Monday, June 30, 2008

In late 2007, Bush administration officials drafted a secret plan, giving the Defense Department’s Special Operations forces greater ease to go into the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the goal of targeting al-Qaida’s top leaders.

The plan sounded very encouraging on paper — it would sidestep turf wars between Washington and Islamabad, and target high-value targets where we know they are. So what happened? More than six months later, the plan has not yet been executed, and the Special Operations forces are still standing by, waiting for orders. Bureaucratic disputes within the administration have slowed the whole initiative down to a stop.

The New York Times reports that it’s all part of a broader problem with Bush’s counterterrorism strategy.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world …

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the creation of a Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways inevitable — that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a dispirited terrorism network to find refuge. The American and Pakistani officials also blame a disastrous cease-fire brokered between the Pakistani government and militants in 2006.

But more than four dozen interviews in Washington and Pakistan tell another story. American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the C.I.A. in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A., including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.

Inside the C.I.A., the fights included clashes between the agency’s outposts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad. There were also battles between field officers and the Counterterrorist Center at C.I.A. headquarters, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via Predator missile strikes, was derided by officers in the Islamabad station as the work of “boys with toys.”

The article went on to explain that many of the top, experienced intelligence officers who would have been assigned to the al-Qaida hunt weren’t available. As one official put it, “Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.”

So the war in Iraq created an opportunity for al-Qaida to recruit more terrorists and, at the same time, made it harder to go after al-Qaida terrorists. ++

America Is the Rogue Nation
Charley Reese, AntiWar via ICH
29/06/08 ”

One gets the impression that there are some people in Washington who believe that Israel or the U.S. can bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, fly home, and it will be mission complete.

It makes you wonder if perhaps there is a virus going around that is gradually making people stupid. If we or Israel attack Iran, we will have a new war on our hands. The Iranians are not going to shrug off an attack and say, “You naughty boys, you.”

Consider how much trouble Iraq has given us. Some 4,000 dead and 29,000 wounded, a half a trillion dollars in cost and still climbing, and five years later, we cannot say that the country is pacified.

Iraq is a small country compared with Iran. Iran has about 70 million people. Its western mountains border the Persian Gulf. In other words, its missiles and guns look down on the U.S. ships below it. And it has lots of missiles, from short-range to intermediate-range (around 2,200 kilometers).

More to the point, it has been equipped by Russia with the fastest anti-ship missile on the planet. The SS-N-22 Sunburn can travel at Mach 3 at high altitude and at Mach 2.2 at low altitude. That is faster than anything in our arsenal.

Iran’s conventional forces include an army of 540,000 men and 300,000 reserves, including 120,000 Iranian Guards especially trained in unconventional warfare. It has more than 1,600 main battle tanks and 21,000 other armored combat vehicles. It has 3,200 artillery pieces, three submarines, 59 surface warships and 10 amphibious ships.

It’s been receiving help in arming itself from China, North Korea and Russia. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s forces have not been worn down with bombing, wars and sanctions. It also has a new anti-aircraft defense system from Russia that I’ve heard is pretty snazzy.

So, if you think we or Israel can attack Iran and not expect retaliation, I’d have to say with regret that you are a moron. If you think we could easily handle Iran in an all-out war, I’d have to promote you to idiot.

Attacking Iran would be folly, but we seem to be living in the Age of Folly. Morons and idiots took us into an unjustified war against Iraq before we had finished the job in Afghanistan. Now we have troops tied down in both countries.

For some years now, I’ve worried that we seem to be more and more like Colonial England – arrogant, racist, overestimating our own capacity and underestimating that of our enemies. As the fate of the British Empire demonstrates, that is a fatal flaw.

The British never dreamed that the “little yellow people” could come ashore by land and take Singapore from the rear or that they would sink the pride of the British fleet, but they did both.

I suppose no one in Washington can imagine the Iranians sinking one of our carriers in the Persian Gulf. How’d you like to be the president who has to tell the American people that we’ve lost a carrier for the first time since World War II?

Exactly how the Iranians will respond to an attack, I don’t know, but they will respond. In keeping with our present policy, our attack on Iran would be illegal, since under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Who would have thought that we would become the rogue nation committing acts of aggression around the globe? ++

bonus

‘Oh Happy Day’
BOB HERBERT, NYT
July 1, 2008

It’s getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. The deals, expected to be finalized in the next 30 days, were the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies are also on the verge of signing contracts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil-company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Mr. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn’t wait. It didn’t matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, American troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target — the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry — not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry — probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq’s vast oil reserves. As The Times reported Monday, “At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry.”

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the U.S., where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans — in July! — are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

And then there’s the so-called war on terror.

The latest news is that Al Qaeda, the terror network that actually did attack the U.S., has successfully regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan and has reconstituted its ability to institute terror attacks from the region.

For an administration joined at the hip to the oil industry, the lure of Iraq’s enormous reserves was stronger even than the impulse to conquer an enemy that murdered more than 2,700 civilians on Sept. 11, a toll greater than the number of Americans killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Referring to Al Qaeda members who regrouped in Pakistan, The Times reported on Monday:

“Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.”

Who knows how long it will be before the U.S. disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.

How long will it take before that finally sinks in? ++

It Was Oil, All Along
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, BuzzFlash
Fri, 06/27/2008

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be….the bottom line. It is about oil.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, “…Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He elaborated in an interview with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war.”

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice.
“…We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of oil.”

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie “There Will Be Blood.” Half-mad, he exclaims, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” then adds, “No one can get at it except for me!”

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except… guess who?

Here’s a recent headline in The New York Times: “Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back.” Read on: “Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.”

There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts — that’s right, sweetheart deals such as those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.

Let’s go back a few years to the 1990’s, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That’s when he told the oil industry that, “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

Fast forward to Cheney’s first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEOs and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq — and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don’t know what they were about. What we know is that the oil industry is enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq — the press mogul Rupert Murdoch — once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

At a Congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly 20 years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there’s a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.

Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus 5 million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an “energy protection force,” doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the Earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood.” His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul. ++

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.

Operation Horse’s Head: U.S. Raid Sends Message on Iraq “Agreement”
Chris Floyd, EmpireBurlesque
Sunday, 29 June 2008

As we know from The Godfather — that seminal work of American political philosophy which serves as the Bible for policy-making in the Bush Administration — a horse’s head in the bed can be highly effective tool in difficult contract negotiations. Last Friday, Bush went his fictional mentors one better in the “negotiations” over an agreement setting out the public terms of a de facto permanent American occupation of the conquered land: he laid the corpse of a kinsman on the doorstep of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

McClatchy Newspapers reports that U.S. Special Forces launched a deadly raid in al-Maliki’s home province — which has supposedly been returned to the full control of the Iraqi government. Without any warning to Iraqi forces, the American unit stormed the rural town of Janaja at dawn on Friday with 60 troops and in the course of the raid killed Ali Abdulhussein Razak al Maliki, one of the prime minister’s many relatives in the area, where he was born and where his tribe is based.

No Iraqi authority was notified of this heavily armed raid — complete with jets and helicopters — on supposedly “sovereign,” supposedly Iraqi-controlled territory. Certainly the prime minister himself knew nothing of the impending attack on his hometown. And once the operation was over, Iraqi military officers — trained, funded, armed and embedded with U.S. forces — said that “the Americans had acted on faulty intelligence.”

The raid comes at what appears to be a delicate juncture in the on-going talks to establish a “status of forces agreement” for the American military presence in Iraq. Iraqi government officials have publicly balked at some of the most howlingly sinister, moustache-twirling proposals of the Bush Administration: 5o American bases! Complete legal immunity from Iraqi law! Right to launch deadly attacks anytime, anywhere in the country! Right to launch attacks on other nations from Iraq! Total control of Iraqi airspace! and so on. The Bush Administration has made a show of “recalibrating” some of its demands and, in the end, will probably modify a few of them: 30 permanent bases, say, instead of 50, or, as has already been suggested, putting Iraqi guard posts outside the gargantuan U.S. military plantations and pretending they are actually Iraqi bases with a few invited guests inside.

But the openly stated goal of the Bush Faction — even before they seized power in 2000 — has always been to reduce Iraq to a client state with a permanent American military presence and a kicked-down “open door” for exploitation by Western corporate interests. This overarching goal of the entire American enterprise in Iraq has been abundantly clear from the very beginning. That’s why the occupation has seemed so haphazard and chaotic: because the Bushists literally don’t care how the deal gets done — as long as they get what they want in the end. The details — nor the human cost — of installing and maintaining a pliable “government” in Baghdad didn’t matter: sectarian war, painting schools, rampant terrorism, passing out candy, mass roundups, civics lessons, the decimation of whole cities, building a soccer field, surges, ceremonies, a million people dead — who cares? Try anything and everything, as long as you keep your eyes on the prize: a client state and forward bastion in the American empire of military bases — with the second biggest oil reserves in the world.

In the al-Maliki government, the Bushists have their best shot at nailing down the ultimate prize down at last. So it’s going to be hardball in the “negotiations” of the “status of forces agreement” (which even the corporate media recognizes as a transparent sham to avoid a Congressional vote on America’s acquisition of a new colony. Although given the track record of the Democratic “opposition,” it’s hard to see why the Bushists would be too worried about pushing a formal treaty down the collective throat of Congress. Can’t you hear Barack Obama now, announcing, in solemn tones, that although he does not agree with every aspect of the Iraq treaty, “it represents the best hope for bringing this tragic conflict to a close, ensuring the future of the Iraqi people and honoring the sacrifices of our fallen soldiers. Therefore I will support this measure.”)

As Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman noted, the raid was a “big embarrassment” for al-Maliki, “because he was in that area two days before the incident, telling his people that we are the masters in our country and the decisions were ours to make.” Clearly, the attack on al-Maliki’s hometown and the killing of his kinsman were intended to send a double message. First, that any notion of Iraqi “sovereignty” is and always will be a joke, whatever pious verbiage gets spouted for the rubes back home. And second — well, it goes something like this: “Hey, Nouri, see Cousin Ali here? You’re next, pal, if you don’t play ball!”

No doubt there will be a passing “political crisis” in Iraq over this hit job — as there have been about so many other incidents before, from Haditha to Ishaqi to the Blackwater killing spree — but it won’t matter in the end. The cobbled-together conglomeration of collaborators and corruptocrats in the Baghdad “government” know they cannot survive without direct and massive American military support. The most they can hope for is to kick the negotiations down the road a bit, and see if they can get a slightly better deal from the next administration in Washington. (Obama, being such an “anti-war” candidate and all, would probably settle for, oh, 25 long-term “leases” on military bases for the tens of thousands of troops he intends on keeping in Iraq to carry out “counter-terrorism operations,” train Iraqi forces and provide security for “American interests” throughout the land, including the bristling, sprawling “Fortress America” embassy in the heart of Baghdad.)

But Friday’s operation was a strong indication that the Bushists might not be willing to let al-Maliki dally too much longer over an agreement. To avert once more to that seminal work: either al-Maliki’s brains or his signature will be on that sheet of paper before the final credits roll. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves