Wolfowitz (Ieft) and Riza have been dating for years. According to Wolfowitz's lawyer, it was Riza who 'worked up the numbers' at the heart of the conflict-of-interest probe that threatens to topple the World Bank president.


By Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, May 3, 2007 (Web-exclusive commentary)

Only a few years ago, Shaha Riza was what is known in journalistic parlance as a flack.
She was a media relations person, in other words—and a fairly junior one—whose job it was to reach out to reporters like me so that we would write about various World Bank activities. As recently as mid-2004, Riza was faxing and e-mailing PR releases to reporters around town, requesting that we contact her about exciting new Bank initiatives like a “$38 million investment loan to help the Government of Jordan develop efficient transport and logistics services,” or the “$359 million in loans for two projects aimed at helping the government of Iran improve housing conditions for poor and middle-income urban neighborhoods as well as expand access to clean water and coverage of sanitation services.”

At the bottom of each missive she listed her number (202 458 1592) and her e-mail (sriza@worldbank.org). Guess what? Many of us never called.

Now we’re calling and calling, and Shaha Riza just won’t pick up. The Libyan native has been quietly dating Paul Wolfowitz since at least 2000, says a longtime friend of the couple who would only speak about them anonymously.

The two shared not just a mutual attraction but also a passionate cause: transforming the Arab world, ousting Saddam, and promoting democracy and rights for women. In recent weeks, this little-known relationship has exploded into public view. It is at the center of a titanic scandal that has pitted Wolfowitz, Riza and their high-powered Washington lawyers, Bob Bennett (for him) and Victoria Toensing (for her) against many European governments who serve on the Bank’s board.

The Europeans have made their distaste for Wolfowitz—and their eagerness to see him go—very well known, and what began as minor brush fire that Wolfowitz tried to sweep aside is now engulfing him.

The immediate issue is whether Wolfowitz committed an ethical breach by setting Riza up in a high-paying job outside the bank—as he admits he did—when he took over the presidency in 2005.

But what’s really going on, says Bennett, is a power play by Europeans to take control of the bank, and to rid themselves once and for all of a top Bush administration hawk whom they hold responsible for the Iraq War.
[...more]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 1:38 AM 0 comments

 


Like OmG Paris Hilton in Jail !!?


Just for you to know Paris Hilton might be sentenced for 45 days in jail for her drunk driving incidents.


Tell me what you think about this !!





- posted by ARYABHATT @ 1:15 AM 0 comments

 

A Fate Worse Than Debt
The Jailing of Indian Farmers
By P. SAINATH, Counterpunch, May 5/6, 2007

"The tea in Kadapa jail was better than the chai we get here in Garladinne mandal. But the rest of the food was awful," says M. Nallappa Reddy. His brief sojourn behind bars has made this man in his Sixties a minor celebrity in this State. Not so much because he liked the tea in Kadapa jail. But because many see his experience as the revival of an ominous trend: the jailing of bankrupt farmers for debt in Andhra Pradesh.

"It happened before during the time of Chandrababu Naidu's government, it is happening again now. More aggressively," says Malla Reddy, general secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Ryuthu Sangham (APRS). "Banks are turning the screws on hard-up farmers, sending them to jail. Mind you, these are farmers in drought-hit regions with no crop and no capacity to pay. The same banks won't touch big industrialist defaulters who owe them crores. But farmers owing a few thousand rupees go to jail." Till recently, the website of the A.P. Debt Recovery Tribunal listed some 200 names of VIPs, industrialists, contractors, and politicians owing over Rs.1,000 crore to the banks. The money was not recovered but the site seems to have vanished. [...more]

... Media coverage following his arrest ensured Mr. Nallappa Reddy's early release. He was out in a week. Others were not so lucky. "I spent a full month inside," says Gengi Reddy in Kadiri mandal. He too went to Kadapa central jail. "That was in the time of Chandrababu Naidu's government. I too, tried for a settlement whereby I paid back both principal and more. I even offered them some of my six acres to sell and recover the money. But they [the Kadiri branch of the same bank] told me flatly: `we don't want your land. Only cash. You should go to jail.'" He did. And has since sold off irrigated land to clear his debts.

"This practice has now revived," says Mr. Malla Reddy. "In Mahbunagar district, just two months ago, a Dalit farmer and an OBC farmer spent two weeks in jail. This time, the State Bank of India was involved. Again, drought-hit farmers with no ability to repay."

They were only released when their families borrowed more money from usurers to pay off their bank debts. All those who have been to jail speak of meeting others in there for the same reasons.

Mr. Nallappa Reddy was more fortunate. "His neighbours love him," says one of them. "The publicity he got stopped a lot of us from also going inside." The question is: for how long? "The banks are getting more forceful now, as you can see from the Telangana cases," says Mr. Malla Reddy. "This matter can explode one day."

"The government is not interested in us," says Sainath Reddy, a nephew of the man who sank borewells in the graveyard. "They want corporate agriculture. We are a nuisance in the way. I tell you, those you wish well, ask them to stay away from agriculture. Don't even wish it on your enemies."
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 8:29 PM 0 comments

 


Adieu, Blair, Adieu
By TARIQ ALI, Counterpunch, May 10, 2007
Bush's Zombie Shuffles Off Stage

Tony Blair's success was limited to winning three general elections in a row. A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But though in many ways Blair's programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher's, the style of their departures is very different. Thatcher's overthrow by her fellow-Conservatives was a matter of high drama: an announcement outside the Louvre's glass pyramid during the Paris Congress brokering the end of the Cold War; tears; a crowded House of Commons.

Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even Blair's greatest sycophants in the British media: Martin Kettle and Michael White (The Guardian), Andrew Rawnsley (Observer), Philip Stephens (FT) confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.

A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House. In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France. He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad. If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:

"A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent...

Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago.

In the past 100 years--to take the highlights--we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans.

Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?..."

This, too, is mild compared to what is said about Blair in the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

Senior diplomats have told me on more than one occasion that it would not upset them too much if Blair were to be tried as a war criminal. [...more]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 7:16 PM 0 comments

 


- posted by ARYABHATT @ 9:54 PM 1 comments

 


Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?
Frank Rich, New York Times, May 6, 2007

IF, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA on any patsy they can find.

George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s intelligence bozo, was the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” (that’s the expurgated version).

Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader who foresaw a “cakewalk” in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General Franks and Paul Bremer were “three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots.” Richard Perle chimed in that the “huge mistakes” were “not made by neoconservatives” and instead took a shot at President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ former darling, told Dexter Filkins of The Times “the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz.”

And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.

This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The good news is that Mr. Tenet’s book rollout may be the last gasp of this farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself as the war’s innocent scapegoat.

Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency’s bin Laden unit, has accused Mr. Tenet of lacking “the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.” Even after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence until he cashed in.

Satisfying though it is to watch a circular firing squad of the war’s enablers, unfinished business awaits. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is not in the past: the war escalates even as all this finger-pointing continues.

The only White House figure to take any responsibility for the fiasco is the former Bush-Cheney pollster Matthew Dowd, who in March expressed remorse for furthering a war he now deems a mistake. For his belated act of conscience, he was promptly patronized as an incipient basket case by an administration flack, who attributed Mr. Dowd’s defection to “personal turmoil.” If that is what this vicious gang would do to a pollster, imagine what would befall Colin Powell if he spoke out. Nonetheless, Mr. Powell should summon the guts to do so. Until there is accountability for the major architects and perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.

That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and vice president at the war’s creation, she is the highest still in power and still on the taxpayers’ payroll. She is also the only one who can still get a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it that the secretary of state’s recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance that rode America into a ditch.

Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet’s book before “60 Minutes” broadcast its interview with him that night.

But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a higher standard — a k a the truth — before she too jumps ship.

It’s now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC, claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat."The question of imminence isn’t whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow” is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up the war’s origins. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” she claimed that intelligence errors before the war were “worldwide” even though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was “no evidence” of an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany’s intelligence service sent strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.’s principal informant on Saddam’s supposed biological weapons was a fraud. [...more]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 8:12 PM 0 comments

 



- posted by ARYABHATT @ 9:33 PM 0 comments

 


- posted by ARYABHATT @ 1:06 AM 0 comments

 

Photo Credit:

The Warming of Greenland
John Collins Rudolf, New York Times, January 16, 2007

Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted ...
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 12:44 AM 0 comments

 
More Bush

The Angry Arab unearths this insight into the true mindset of America's oh-so-Christian commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, from a Haaretz review of a new biography of Bush's soulmate and mentor, Ariel Sharon. Like a DNA sample from a spittlefleck, this little glimpse of Bush gives us the man in his entirety, in his essence: the empty bluster of an impotent drunk; the ineradicable vulgarity of the fratboy mentality; and the uncontrollable sexual panic of a harshly repressed psyche expressing its thwarted nature in fantasies of rape and violence. (And in Bush's case, of course, the violence is not just fantasized, but acted out – by proxy – in horrific reality across the world.)

From The pessimist was right, by Uri Dromi; review of "Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait" by Uri Dan (Haaretz):


Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 7:54 PM 0 comments

 


U.S. strike group transits Suez Canal as part of buildup of U.S. forces in Mideast
International Herald Tribune, January 30, 2007

ISMAILIYA, Egypt, A.P.-- A U.S. Navy strike group led by the assault ship USS Bataan steamed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday on its way to join the buildup of American forces in the Middle East.

The Bataan, which entered Egyptian waters Monday, spent the night at the Mediterranean harbor of Port Said and was expected to leave the Egyptian part of the Red Sea later Tuesday, a Suez Canal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The seven-vessel Bataan group includes 2,200 U.S. Marines and sailors, helicopters and Harrier fighter jets, the Navy said in Bahrain.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, will be overseeing around 50 warships in the Mideast after the arrival of the Bataan and an American aircraft carrier group in February, said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown.

The Fifth Fleet normally commands a fleet of about 45 ships, about a third of them from U.S.-allied navies, Brown said.

The Navy is in the midst of a regional buildup, with the group of the aircraft carrier

USS John C. Stennis on its way as well as 21,500 U.S. soldiers being sent to Iraq. The carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is already in the region.

The United States has not had two carriers in the Mideast since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Bataan will join a second amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer, which was on port visit in Dubai on Tuesday.


Brown said the Pentagon recently extended the tour of duty of the Boxer's U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is in Iraq.

The Bataan is on a routine six-month deployment to the region to conduct "maritime security operations" which includes boarding and searching ships suspected of carrying terrorists or nuclear components to Iran, the Navy said.
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 6:06 PM 1 comments

 

Impeachment by the People
by Howard Zinn, Commondreams.org, January 31, 2007

Courage is in short supply in Washington, D.C. The realities of the Iraq War cry out for the overthrow of a government that is criminally responsible for death, mutilation, torture, humiliation, chaos. But all we hear in the nation’s capital, which is the source of those catastrophes, is a whimper from the Democratic Party, muttering and nattering about “unity” and “bipartisanship,” in a situation that calls for bold action to immediately reverse the present course.

... Still, there seems to be a special viciousness that accompanies the current assault on human rights, in this country and in the world. We have had repressive governments before, but none has legislated the end of habeas corpus, nor openly supported torture, nor declared the possibility of war without end. No government has so casually ignored the will of the people, affirmed the right of the President to ignore the Constitution, even to set aside laws passed by Congress.

Impeach Bush
32nd Group U.S. Army Reserve from Puerto Rico, two injured one killed near Abu Ghraib, Wednesday, July 16 (AP/Dario Lopez-Mills).
George Bush July 15, 2003, deficit 50% larger than expected (AFP/Manny Ceneta)

The time is right, then, for a national campaign calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Representative John Conyers, who held extensive hearings and introduced an impeachment resolution when the Republicans controlled Congress, is now head of the House Judiciary Committee and in a position to fight for such a resolution.

He has apparently been silenced by his Democratic colleagues who throw out as nuggets of wisdom the usual political palaver about “realism” (while ignoring the realities staring them in the face) and politics being “the art of the possible” (while setting limits on what is possible). [...more]

I know I’m not the first to talk about impeachment. Indeed, judging by the public opinion polls, there are millions of Americans, indeed a majority of those polled, who declare themselves in favor if it is shown that the President lied us into war (a fact that is not debatable). There are at least a half-dozen books out on impeachment, and it’s been argued for eloquently by some of our finest journalists, John Nichols and Lewis Lapham among them. Indeed, an actual “indictment” has been drawn up by a former federal prosecutor, Elizabeth de la Vega, in a new book called United States v. George W. Bush et al, making a case, in devastating detail, to a fictional grand jury.

[...more]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 5:59 PM 0 comments

 
Bush 'spoiling for a fight' with Iran
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, January 31, 2007

US officials in Baghdad and Washington are expected to unveil a secret intelligence "dossier" this week detailing evidence of Iran's alleged complicity in attacks on American troops in Iraq.

The move, uncomfortably echoing Downing Street's dossier debacle in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is one more sign that the Bush administration is building a case for war.
[...more]

But as was also the case in the days before Saddam Hussein fell, powerful external forces, ranging from exiled Iranian opposition groups to leading Israeli politicians, appear intent on stoking the fire - and winding up the White House. [...more]

Israel is also pushing the intelligence case while upping the ante, claiming to have knowledge that Tehran is within a year or two of acquiring basic nuclear weapons-making capability. In a BBC interview last week former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu compared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime to Hitler's Nazis. Speaking in Davos the deputy prime minister, Shimon Peres, demanded immediate regime change or failing that, military intervention.

The US "push back" against Iran comprises many other elements beyond Iraq.

Unconfirmed reports suggest Vice-President Dick Cheney has cut a deal with Saudi Arabia to keep oil production up even as prices fall, to undercut Iran's main source of foreign currency. Washington is pursuing expanding, non-UN global financial sanctions against Tehran; encouraging and arming a "new alignment" of Sunni Arab Gulf states; and highlighting Iran's role in "supporting terrorism" in Palestine, where it helps bankroll the Hamas government, and Lebanon, where it backs Hizbullah.

The US is also deploying powerful naval forces in the Gulf that are of little help in Iraq but could more easily be used to mount air strikes on Iran.

Almost any one of these developments might produce a casus belli. And when taken together, despite official protestations, they seem to point in only one direction. The Bush administration, an American commentator suggested, is "once again spoiling for a fight".
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 5:44 PM 0 comments

 
Within The Gated Subdivision Of The American Mind: A Monument To My Comfort Zone
Phil Rockstroh, The People's Voice, September 19, 2006

They should erect war memorials in honor of us Americans here on the home front: a statue depicting us...sprawled on our sofas, TV remote fixed in our hands, steely in our resolve to remain distracted.

Where are our much-vaunted freedoms in the present day United States? Are they, perhaps, hidden among the phantom oaks of Oakdale Estates?


Sadly, it appears, for a depressingly large percent of our citizenry, the loss of our rights and liberties are missed and remembered to the same extent as the felled trees of Oakdale Estates.

At morning, during their commute to work, the residents of Oakdale Estates sit, stranded in traffic,on ever more congested "freeways"; they, as is the case with most of us, remain steadfast in our fantasy that automobiles provide us with freedom.

Rarely do we consider the fact that, in all likelihood, a bank or finance company owns the vehicles, while, in order to meet our loan payments, we must continue to work ever-longer hours and spend evermore time stuck in those self-same vehicles, in order to reach the jobs that devour evermore of our "free time," so that we can afford to pay the exorbitant price the "freedom"to "own" an automobile allegedly bestows upon us.

If this is our standard of freedom: Is it any wonder far too many Americans still believe that our soldiers are dying daily in Iraq to "keep us free?"

Perhaps, if we look closely, we can catch a glimpse ofthe freed souls of the war dead...now lounging in the cool shade of paradise beneath the trees of OakdaleEstates.

For we Americans will think of our war dead, often.Yes, of course, we will...about as often as the residents of Oakdale Estates think of the dispatched oaks.

And we Americans will mourn the dead of the war in Iraq...to the same degree we mourn the loss of our right to dissent. But rejoice: We're free to continue working for the freedom to be owned by the corporate class.

Moreover, our soldiers are free to continue to kill and be killed for our right to be oblivious to their deaths.

This is the best of all possible worlds, in the best of all possible lands -- why would anyone ever raise a harsh voice in protest against it in the first place? If you lament our losses, then the terrorist will have won. Can't you see: Unlike the terrorist, we have the freedom to choose to lose our freedoms and not give a damn. And that is why they hate us.

It's the reason we must hate them, in turn.
It's why our soldiers must find them, face them, and then kill them, without question, doubt nor equivocation.
It's why George W. Bush, when it was his time to serve, went, with unwavering resolve, and faced down (make that: went face down into) blizzards of Columbian babble powder.
It's why we must never cease to mind-lessly labor for the benefit of the corporate classes and never question the sanity of why we believe the act of living far beyond our means is a meaningful way of life.
It's why it's our patriotic duty to seek perpetual distraction within the media hologram.

In the end, it's because: If we were to feel the sorrow of the world, then our soldiers will have died in vain.

They must die so that our comfort level can be maintained.
In turn, we must do our part and strive to remain comfortable. [...more]

After the long commute home from work, the residents of Oakdale Estates might, like many of us, sit at the dinner table in exhausted silence or, have their minds further churned to spittle, staring stupefied at the television.

If I was seated, among them, I'd be tempted to ask an intemperate question, addressing it to the whole miserable family of the present day United States – to all of us - to my collective family -

we – suburban somnambulants, urban careerist cretins, Fundamentalist Christian fantasists, neo-con pendants, polite liberal ninnies, vapid trendies, hipster ironists (I plead guilty and offer this piece of writing as evidence against myself), right-wing bullyboys and girls,

and all those laboring class masses of wage slaves who've been rendered mindless, by way of exhaustion from long work hours and endless bombardment by the mass media.

I wish to ask this: Who is missing from our dinner table?

Who hasn't been extended an invitation? Who has been disinherited?

Where are the black sheep of the family -- those members neither invited nor spoken about (in a similar manner as those aforementioned dead soldiers, Iraqis, and oak trees) when our clan gathers?

What of the inspired misfits, indomitable freaks, defiant outcasts, and magnificent failures --the sorts who might broach uncomfortable topics, reveal family secrets, or too vividly display our flaws?

Where are those who have been cast out, orphaned from our family, and therefore, who, like a tragic hero from myth, are free to blunder upon unbearable truths. Where are the scorned and forsakenones?

All those banished from our thoughts, because they see our family for what it is, not what it strives to appear to be.

We need these wayward members of our family now, more than ever.

For this reason: As is the case with nature herself, a nation needs its mutant strains of innovative freaks, because, by introducing variation, they have the ability to transform the closed, negative entropy-generating genetic systems on this inbred planet. Thus, they enable life to diversify and flourish.

In this manner, we might avoid the fate of becoming a global clan of thin-blooded, wall-eyed trailer court imbeciles.

Perish the thought of: Planet Alabama.
Though it might already be too late.
How else can we explain the Bush presidency?

This is why we must perpetrate acts of everyday antagonism; why we must not supplicate ourselves before the bloodless gods of false propriety;

why it's imperative we rage and weep at the memory of squandered oak trees, dead soldiers, and forsaken freedoms.


Now is not the time for paeans to the polite and appropriate. Systems (including empires) don't collapse in a polite and decorous manner.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is one rude bastard.
Negative entropy did not attend the finest finishing schools and will not be presented to genteel society in an elegant debutante ball.

There are harrowing reasons for our fear-engendered obduracy and compulsive complicity.

For deep within the gated communities of our minds, we Americans know this: That if we continue to ignore the storm gathering outside the insular subdivisions of our cultural awareness, then those who survive us on this abiding earth will remember us and grieve our passing
to the same extent the residents of Oakdale Estates mourned the memory of its namesake oak trees.
-###-
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 5:30 PM 0 comments

 


Targeting Iran
Why Can't Americans See What's Coming?
by Paul Craig Roberts , Counterpunch, 27-28 Jan, 2007

The American public and the US Congress are getting their backs up about the Bush Regime's determination to escalate the war in Iraq. A Massive protest demonstration is occurring in Washington DC today, and Congress is expressing its disagreement with Bush's decision to intensify the war in Iraq.

This is all to the good. However, it misses the real issue--the Bush Regime's looming attack on Iran.

Rather than winding down one war, Bush is starting another. The entire world knows this and is discussing Bush's planned attack on Iran in many forums. It is only Americans who haven't caught on. A few senators have said that Bush must not attack Iran without the approval of Congress, and postings on the Internet demonstrate world wide awareness that Iran is in the Bush Regime's cross hairs. But Congress and the Media--and the demonstration in Washington--are focused on Iraq.

What can be done to bring American awareness up to the standard of the rest of the world?

In Davos, Switzerland, the meeting of the World Economic Forum, a conference where economic globalism issues are discussed, opened January 24 with a discussion of Bush's planned attack on Iran. The Secretary General of the League of Arab States and bankers and businessmen from such US allies as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all warned of the coming attack and its catastrophic consequences for the MIddle East and the world. [...more]

...Both Bush and Cheney have made it clear in public statements that they will ignore any congressional opposition to their war plans.
For example, CBS News reported (Jan. 25) that Cheney said that a congressional resolution against escalating the war in Iraq "won't stop us." According to the Associated Press and Yahoo News, Bush dismissed congressional disapproval with his statement, "I'm the decision-maker."

Everything is in place for an attack on Iran.
Two aircraft carrier attack forces are deployed to the Persian Gulf, US attack aircraft have been moved to Turkey and other countries on Iran's borders, Patriot anti-missile defense systems are being moved to the Middle East to protect oil facilities and US bases from retaliation from Iranian missiles, and growing reams of disinformation alleging Iran's responsibility for the insurgency in Iraq are being fed to the gullible US Media.

General Ivashof and everyone in the Middle East and at the Davos globalization conference in Europe understands the Bush Regime's agenda.

Why cannot Americans understand?

Why hasn't Congress told Bush and Cheney that they will both be instantly impeached if they initiate a wider war?
...............

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 2:29 AM 0 comments

 


No Exit? What It Means to "Salvage U.S. Prestige" in Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, November 17, 2006

Things are always complicated. In the Washington Post, for instance, James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans recently suggested that it was far "too simplistic" to claim "the appointment of Robert M. Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld [represents] the triumph of Bush the Father's administration over Bush the Son's."


James Baker III Robert Gates, new Defence Secretary

Still, I prefer the analysis of Washington Post reporter (and author of Fiasco) Thomas Ricks. When asked by the Post's media columnist Howard Kurtz whether a Newsweek headline, "Father knows best," was just "an easy, cheap Oedipal way for the press to characterize what's going on," Ricks replied: "Well, just because it's easy and cheap doesn't mean it's wrong."


At a moment when every version of the dramatic arrival of James A. Baker III and Robert Gates on the scene -- and the scuttling of Rumsfeld's Titanic -- is at least suspect, it's still worth considering the bare bones of what can be seen and known -- and then asking what we have.
[...more]

Permanent Facts on the Ground

As the New York Times revealed in a front-page piece by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt on April 19, 2003, just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon arrived in the Iraqi capital with plans already on the drawing board to build four massive military bases (that no official, then or now, will ever call "permanent").



Today, according to our former Secretary of Defense, we have 55 bases of every size in Iraq (down from over 100); five or six of these, including Balad Airbase, north of Baghdad, the huge base first named Camp Victory adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, and al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province, are enormous -- big enough to be reasonable-sized American towns with multiple bus routes, neighborhoods, a range of fast-food restaurants, multiple PX's, pools, mini-golf courses and the like.

Though among the safest places in Iraq for American reporters, these bases have, with rare exceptions, gone completely undescribed and undiscussed in our press (or on the television news).

From an engineering journal, we know that before the end of 2003, several billion dollars had already been sunk into them. We know that in early 2006, the major ones, already mega-structures, were still being built up into a state of advanced permanency.



Balad, for instance, already handled the levels of daily air traffic you would normally see at Chicago's ultra-busy O'Hare and in February its facilities were still being ramped up. We know, from the reliable Ed Harriman, in the latest of his devastating accounts of corruption in Iraq in the London Review of Books, that, as you read, the four mega-bases always imagined as our permanent jumping-off spots in what Bush administration officials once liked to call "the arc of instability" were still undergoing improvement.


Without taking the fate of those monstrous, always-meant-to-be-permanent bases into account -- and they are, after all, just about the only uniformly successfully construction projects in that country -- no American plans for Iraq, whatever label they go by, will make much sense. And yet months go by without any reporting on them appearing. In fact, these last months have gone by with only a single peep (that I've found) from any mainstream publication on the subject.

The sole bit of base news I've noticed anywhere made an obscure mid-October appearance in a Turkish paper, which reported that the U.S. was now building a "military airport" in Kurdistan. A few days later, a UPI report picked up by the Washington Times had this: "Following hints U.S. troops may remain in Iraq for years, the United States is reportedly building a massive military base at Arbil, in Kurdish northern Iraq."

Kurdistan has always been a logical fallback position for U.S. forces "withdrawing" from a failed Iraq. But so far nothing more substantial has been written on the subject.

There is, however, another symbol of American "permanency" in Iraq that has gotten just slightly more attention in the U.S. press in recent months -- the new U.S. embassy now going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone and nicknamed by Baghdadis (in a sly reference to Saddam Hussein's enormous, self-important edifices) "George W's Palace."



It's almost the size of Vatican City, will have its own apartment buildings (six of them) for its bulked-up "staff" of literally thousands and its own electricity, well-water, and waste-treatment facilities to guarantee "100 percent independence from city utilities," not to speak of a "swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building" and it's own anti-missile system. Ed Harriman tells us that it's a billion dollar-plus project -- and unlike just about every other construction project in the country, it's going up efficiently and on schedule. It will be the most imperial embassy on the planet, not exactly the perfect signal of a sovereign Iraqi future.
[...more]

The Uncovered War

Here's another mystery of Iraq (and Afghani) coverage: The essential American way of war -- air power -- has long been completely MIA, except at websites like this one. There has been not a single mainstream piece of any significance on the air war these last years, with the single exception of journalist Seymour Hersh's remarkable December 2005 report, "Up in the Air," in the New Yorker. ("A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower.

Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units.")

It is, of course, an irony that the only American reporter to look up and notice all those planes, helicopters, and drones overhead has never been to Iraq.

Such modest coverage of the air war in Iraq as exists in our press generally comes in the form of infrequent paragraphs buried in wire service round-ups as in a November 14th Associated Press piece headlined, "U.S. General Confronts Iraqi Leader on Security":


All you have to do is imagine such a thing happening in an American city to grasp the barbarism involved.

And yet, over these years in which such targeting has been commonplace and, in larger campaigns, parts of cities like Najaf and Falluja have been destroyed from the air, hardly a single reporter has gone to an air base like Balad and simply spent time with American pilots.

Not surprisingly, this remains a non-issue in this country.

How could Americans react, when there's no news to react to, when there's next to no information to be had -- which doesn't mean that information on our ongoing air campaigns is unavailable.

In fact, the Air Force is proud as punch of the job it's doing; so any reporter, not to speak of any citizen, can go to the Air Force website and look at daily reports of air missions over both Iraq and Afghanistan. The report of November 15th, for instance, offers the following:
[...more]

Here's the crucial thing: American troop levels simply cannot be slowly drawn-down in Iraq without -- as in Vietnam -- some increase in the use of air power.

And yet, you can look far and wide and find no indication of any public discussion of this at the White House, in Congress, or in what we know of the deliberations of the Iraq Study Group. And yet, as the Iraqi chaos and strife grows while the American public increasingly backs off, air power will be one answer. You can count on that.

And air power -- especially in or "near" cities -- simply means civilian carnage. It will be called "collateral damage" (if anyone bothers to call it anything at all), but -- make no mistake -- it will be at the heart of any new strategy that calls for "redeployment" but does not mean to get us out of Iraq.

"A True Disaster for the Iraqi People"

On ABC's Sunday political talk show, "This Week," White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten had this to say: "I don't think we're going to be receptive to the notion there's a fixed timetable at which we automatically pull out,
because that could be a true disaster for the Iraqi people."

With hundreds of thousands of dead and more following daily, it makes you wonder exactly what it's been so far for the Iraqi people, as Bolten sees it.

But perhaps he's right; perhaps the disaster behind us will be nothing compared to the disaster ahead, especially if Daddy's Boys, the Iraq Study Group, other Democratic and Republican movers and shakers, and all those generals and former generals floating around our world decide that this isn't the moment to rediscover a Colin Powell-style "exit strategy," but "one last chance" to succeed by any definition in Iraq.

Then, god help us -- and the Iraqis. Sooner or later, we'll undoubtedly be gone from a land so determinedly hostile to being occupied by us, but that end moment could still be a long, long time in coming.

Here, for instance, is Robert Gates' thinking eighteen months ago in a seminar at the Panetta Institute at California State University in Monterey on "phased troop withdrawals" from Iraq:


So hold onto your hats. Tragedy and more tragedy seems almost guaranteed, and the Pentagon has just submitted to Congress a staggering $160 billion supplemental appropriation request in order to continue its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[...more]

In the Vietnam era, President Richard M. Nixon went on a well-armed, years-long hunt for something he called "peace with honor."

Today, the catchword is finding an "exit strategy" that can "salvage U.S. prestige." What we want, it seems, is peace with "dignity."

In Vietnam, there was no honor left, only horror.

There is no American dignity to be found in Iraq either, only horror. In a Washington of suddenly lowered expectations, dignity is defined as hanging in there until an Iraqi government that can't even control its own Interior Ministry or the police in the capital gains "stability," until the Sunni insurgency becomes a mild irritation,
and until that American embassy, that eighth wonder of the world of security and comfort, becomes an eye-catching landmark on the capital's skyline.

Imagine. That's all we want. That's our dignity.

And for that dignity and the imagined imperial stability of the world, our top movers and shakers will proceed to monkey around for months creating and implementing plans that will only ensure further catastrophe (which, in turn, will but breed more rage, more terrorism that spreads disaster to the Middle East and actually lessens American power around the world). [...more]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 6:10 PM 0 comments

 
America Faces a Future of Managing Imperial Decline
by Martin Jacques, The Guardian, Novenber 16, 2006

Bush's failure to grasp the limits of US global power has led to an adventurism for which his successors will pay a heavy price

Just a few years ago, the world was in thrall to the idea of American power. The neoconservative agenda not only infused the outlook of the White House, it also dominated the global debate about the future of international relations. Following 9/11, we had, in quick succession, the "war on terror", the "axis of evil", the idea of a new American empire, the overarching importance of military power, the notion and desirability of regime change, the invasion of Iraq, and the proposition that western-style democracy was relevant and applicable to every land in the world, starting with the Middle East.

Much of that has unwound with a speed that barely anyone anticipated. With the abject failure of the American occupation of Iraq - to the point where even the American electorate now recognises the fact - the neoconservative era would appear to be in its death throes.

But what precisely is coming to an end?

Neoconservatism in all its pomp conceived - in the Project for a New American Century - that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world could be remade in the American image, that the previous bipolar world could be replaced by a unipolar one in which the US was the dominant arbiter of global and regional affairs. In fact, the Bush administration never came close to this. For a short time it did succeed in persuading the great majority of countries to accept the priority of the war against terror and seemingly to sign up for it: even the intervention in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of 9/11, elicited widespread acquiescence.

But the US singularly failed to command a majority of states in support of the invasion of Iraq and garnered even less support when it came to global public opinion. It demonstrated its unilateral intent by ignoring its failure to gain assent within the UN and invading Iraq, but the subsequent failure of its Iraqi adventure has served only to reinforce its isolation and demonstrate the folly of its unilateralism. Its strategy in the Middle East - always the epicentre of the neoconservative global project - lies in tatters. [...more]

... it is increasingly confronted with a world marked by the growing power of a range of new national actors, notably - but by no means only - China, India and Brazil.

Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century.

Rather, the US seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline. And, as a footnote, one might add that this is a task for which pragmatists are rather better suited than ideologues.

Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 5:57 PM 0 comments

 
The 1918 U.S. 24-cent airmail stamp known as the 'Inverted Jenny' is seen in this picture from November 2, 2005. A Florida voter may have unwittingly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by using an extremely rare stamp to mail an absentee ballot in Tuesday's congressional election, a government official said Friday. The 1918 Inverted Jenny stamp, which takes its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside-down, turned up Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale, where election officials were inspecting ballots from parts of south Florida, Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom told Reuters. (Mystic Stamp Company/Handout/Reuters)
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 10:35 PM 0 comments

 


Remembering Arafat : Palestinian children, wearing chequered scarves and shirts bearing the picture of later Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, carry wreath during a parade in their Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in the Lebanese southern port city if Sidon, to mark the second anniversary of the death of their historical leader. (AFP/Mahmoud Zayat)
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 10:29 PM 0 comments

 

Marijuana plants growing under lights. Wary of their funny-tasting burgers, two New Mexico cops arrested three employees of a Burger King restaurant they had visited after finding that the meat they were sold was laced with marijuana.(AFP/File/Robyn Beck)
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 8:57 PM 0 comments