Stealing Iraq’s Oil

Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq but the entire region, is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world. Australians and all of us need to think what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq. — Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson

Though he was quickly contradicted by Prime Minister John Howard, Nelson had already blurted out the unspeakable truth: the invasion and occupation of Iraq has always been about the oil. Not WMD. Not spreading democracy. Not fighting Al Qaeda.

We invaded Iraq, and have our sights now set on Iran, because America has a serious addiction to cheap oil and Bush/Cheney decided that murdering hundreds of thousands of people and squandering hundreds of billions of dollars was better than changing the way we do business.

Currently, our attention is on the Iraqis meeting benchmarks as a sign of supposed progress — achieve A, B and C and then we’ll call it all a success and back up our guns and go home. But, like the false reasons given for the war the benchmarks are mostly just more farce.

Except for a new law that would turn Iraq’s oil over to multi-national corporations. That’s the real deal, the only benchmark that matters, the whole purpose of the whole sordid mess.

Now it’s beginning to look like the Bush gang has f’ed up once again:

“The last four years have witnessed repeated attempts at dismantling the basis for any well planned resources management for the whole nation, only to replace it with market oriented destabilization and fragmentation policies that are at variance and in competition with each other and the national interest,” said Tariq Shafiq, an Iraqi now living in Amman and London, tasked last spring by the Iraq oil minister to co-write the law. It was subsequently altered in negotiations and he now opposes it.

The Iraqis are wising up to the whole ploy and, ironically, have finally found a compelling reason to unite the many warring factions of their nation:

Last week the Iraq Freedom Congress — whose motto is “Working for a Democratic, Secular and Progressive Alternative to both the U.S. Occupation and Political Islam in Iraq” — teamed up with the new Anti Oil Law Frontier to rally masses against the law.

All the while a coalition in Iraq grows. It encompasses Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and secularists. Its goal is to keep Iraq together. But it also wants an end to the U.S. occupation.

The nerve, after all we’ve done for them….

July 12th, 2007 || PermaLink

Socialized Medicine for Those Who Need it Least

For years we’ve had to listen to Republican candidates for political office rail against the many problems with “big government” while simultaneously begging us to elect them and keep them in office. No one in the media ever points out the obvious: why would we put people who hate government in charge of the government? And why would we be surprised when a group of government-haters like the Bushies turn out to be so monumentally incompetent at governing?

Not surprisingly, these same self-serving hypocrites rail most loudly against the evils of “socialized medicine” even as they enjoy the best healthcare plan in America — provided by the very government can’t do anything right:

There is an employee/insurance deal in the U.S. that includes unlimited doctor office visits of your choosing; covers all accidents, routine exams, physical therapy, labs and X-rays; and the like; unlimited hospital visits and stays; certain chronic care and rehab; full prescription coverage; and unlimited specialty consultations. For the employee and the entire family. There are no deductibles, no co-pays, and only a $35 monthly fee taken from an annual salary of $158 thousand. Thirty-five dollars!

The group awarded this insurance looks forward to a full pension and continued coverage until their deaths. Quite a few, most in fact, were millionaires before they took on their jobs that got them such a perk. Who gets this coverage? It would be nice if it were the underprivileged or the chronically ill and debilitated or our veterans.

But no. For starters, the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, and add to that the few hundred in the upper executive and judicial branches of government.

In truth, these overfed assholes are neither anti-government nor anti-socialized-medicine. They’re anti-the-people.

Any politician, Republican or Democrat, who says that the American people cannot have exactly the same healthcare plan as the politicians get needs to be strapped to a gurney and left in some overcrowded emergency room for a long, long time.

July 11th, 2007 || PermaLink

Health Care Terror

After the recent bomb plot in Great Britain was traced to a group of doctors, right-wing loons, led by Fox’s Neil Cavuto, were quick to suggest a link between “socialized medicine” and terrorism. He didn’t actually provide a logical argument; it was enough just to say “socialized medicine” and “terrorism” in the same sentence and let Bush Americans draw their own lame-brained conclusions.

Not surprisingly, this is a total reversal of the truth; the real “medical terrorists” all reside in the US, and are virtually all overfed white guys. And they are the only ones terrorized at the thought of a more moral, efficient, and effective sociable healthcare system coming to America.

It is grasping-at-straws time for the status quo in American healthcare: after decades of scaring Americans with the prospect of the nation going communist if it dares to offer all of its citizens the sort of sane and sensible healthcare that the rest of the world’s leading democracies enjoy, they’re shifting to the bogeyman of the moment — Islamic terrorism.

But their arguments have become so craven, so totally transparent, we can only hope the American people are ready to wise up and give these bums the hook.

As Paul Krugman writes:

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” So declared F.D.R. in 1937, in words that apply perfectly to health care today. This isn’t one of those cases where we face painful tradeoffs - here, doing the right thing is also cost-efficient. Universal health care would save thousands of American lives each year, while actually saving money.

So this is a test. The only things standing in the way of universal health care are the fear-mongering and influence-buying of interest groups. If we can’t overcome those forces here, there’s not much hope for America’s future.

July 10th, 2007 || PermaLink

Destroying the Troops

Leading up to and throughout the whole Iraq fiasco, Mr. Bush has repeatedly said that all key decisions were in the hands of “the Generals.” Of course, that has meant firing or otherwise marginalizing many good soldiers who recommended actions counter to Bush/Cheney plans. Some of the best unheeded advise has come from retired General William E Odom.

The general has a lot to say, especially on the whole notion that “supporting the troops” means going along with the current Bush policies:

No U.S. forces have ever been compelled to stay in sustained combat conditions for as long as the Army units have in Iraq. In World War II, soldiers were considered combat-exhausted after about 180 days in the line. They were withdrawn for rest periods. Moreover, for weeks at a time, large sectors of the front were quiet, giving them time for both physical and psychological rehabilitation. During some periods of the Korean War, units had to fight steadily for fairly long periods but not for a year at a time. In Vietnam, tours were one year in length, and combat was intermittent with significant break periods.

In Iraq, combat units take over an area of operations and patrol it daily, making soldiers face the prospect of death from an IED or small arms fire or mortar fire several hours each day. Day in and day out for a full year, with only a single two-week break, they confront the prospect of death, losing limbs or eyes, or suffering other serious wounds. Although total losses in Iraq have been relatively small compared to most previous conflicts, the individual soldier is risking death or serious injury day after day for a year. The impact on the psyche accumulates, eventually producing what is now called “post-traumatic stress disorders.” In other words, they are combat-exhausted to the point of losing effectiveness. The occasional willful killing of civilians in a few cases is probably indicative of such loss of effectiveness. These incidents don’t seem to occur during the first half of a unit’s deployment in Iraq.

After the first year, following a few months back home, these same soldiers are sent back for a second year, then a third year, and now, many are facing a fourth deployment! Little wonder more and more soldiers and veterans are psychologically disabled.

Not the sort of info that the neocon chickenhawk brigade is interested in. They’re too busy accusing the rest of us of not supporting the troops when we demand that Bush bring them home now.

If the Democrats truly want to succeed in forcing President Bush to begin withdrawing from Iraq, the first step is to redefine “supporting the troops” as withdrawing them, citing the mass of accumulating evidence of the psychological as well as the physical damage that the president is forcing them to endure because he did not raise adequate forces. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress could confirm this evidence and lay the blame for “not supporting the troops” where it really belongs - on the president. And they could rightly claim to the public that they are supporting the troops by cutting off the funds that he uses to keep U.S. forces in Iraq.

July 7th, 2007 || PermaLink

Pox Americana

Though it’s difficult to decide on a “worst legacy” of the Bush years — so many candidates to choose from — the utter lack of accountability is my current choice. Libby’s commutation is just the latest example of a Bush official let off the hook, and ultimately well-rewarded, for monumental screw-ups.

But it’s not just Bush officials. We’ve also had a long line of pundits who have made god-awful predictions and given horribly foolish advice and yet who continue to pen best-selling books and speak regularly from their TV perches, with nary a nod to their past mistakes.

Such as Thomas Friedman, he of “the world is flat” pro-globilization nonsense that assured us all that the invasion of Iraq was a nifty way to democratize the Middle East. Stephen Marshall’s new book — Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing — holds Friedman accountable when no one else will:

Writing from Dakar, Senegal, where he runs the Third World Forum, Samir Amin’s thesis is essentially that liberalism, if allowed to continue on its path of creative destruction, will lead to an apocalyptic end. He likens the globalizing force of liberalism to a virus that has destroyed all ideological competitors and that is now making its final assault on its host species. According to Amin, the ethic of liberalism — “Long live competition, may the strong win” — is now ravaging societies of the Third World, causing further “social alienation and pauperization of urban classes.”

In Liberal Virus, he argues that liberalism’s most decisive effect will be to divide the world into an apartheid system that sees 3 billion peasant farmers pushed from their land and forced into the cities where they will die. This, he explains, will result from the implementation of a 2001 World Trade Organization (WTO) mandate that all agricultural markets be opened to the expansion of commercial agribusiness producers. Without the ability to make a subsistence living from their own land, half the world’s population will have to migrate to the urban centers where there is no work for them. And thus, he concludes, they will be trapped in an “organized system of apartheid” on a global scale.

It’s just this sort of “viral competition” that I write about in Thinking Peace. Friedman is like a carrier of a deadly disease blithely travelling about the world, leaving a trail of infected communities.

In Bush America, he’s a star, with no need to answer for his actions.

July 5th, 2007 || PermaLink

Rich Guy Rules

The commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence is just the latest in a long series of “it surely can’t get any worse than this” events that have plagued the nation since Bush was appointed president. The biggest surprise this time was how many people were surprised; we should all know by now that Bush doesn’t care what anyone thinks and, with no more elections before him, is likewise above political polling.

Nothing more dangerous than a lame duck with a rocket launcher in his hands. Our president.

Keith Olberman has been one of the sharper voices opposing Bush’s reign of error, and this last outrage has him especially pissed off:

The twists and turns of Plamegate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy, these are complex and often painful to follow and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush, and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal, the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the prearranged lottery all rolled into one, and it stinks.

The fact that all of this happened pre-fourth of July is particularly irksome.

It is nearly July Fourth, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history. Pressure, negotiate, impeach: get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.

And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

July 4th, 2007 || PermaLink

Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan

Every civilian dead means five new Taliban.
—a British officer in Afghanistan

From the outset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq there have been recurring reports of especially horrific “inadvertent” civilian casualties — wedding parties bombed from above, countless children caught in the crossfire, innocent families assaulted in middle-of-the-night arrests and interrogations. Americans are adept at ignoring such stories, ignorance aided by a largely pro-war media.

The official position on civilian casualties is that they are caused by the enemy: first, they forced us to invade, and then they refused to fight like real-man armies, choosing instead to hide among civilians. So, it’s not our fault when our bombs land on innocents — our intention was to kill evil doers, whereas terrorists kill innocents on purpose.

Maybe this rationale helps Americans to sleep at night … yes, yes, since 9/11 we’ve killed a hundred times more innocents than were slaughtered that day … but, we’re Americans and our intentions were noble, so get over it.

Of course, the invadees never get over it. The children growing up in Afghanistan and Iraq will never forget that it was Americans who leveled their town, killed their cousins, burned their house, arrested and tortured their parents.

Ira Chernus details the problem:

If we ever have journalists who tell the story in a more complex realistic way, we’ll see that it’s the same old story: the more we take sides in a civil war, the more harm we do, especially when we rely on massive aerial bombing as our main weapon. A heavy-handed U.S. intervention in the 1980s helped to create the Taliban. Now another heavy-handed intervention seems likely to help bring them back to power — and kill countless civilians along the way. All that (and perhaps opium too) paid for with our tax dollars.

And as the Afghans bury their dead, the whole story is buried in the back pages of our newspapers, as if the people our tax dollars killed just didn’t matter very much. While we rightly denounce the immorality of the Taliban, let’s take a moment to look in the mirror.

July 3rd, 2007 || PermaLink