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QUOTES for today

"The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the
oppressed..." -- Steven Biko

“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in
foreign policy.” -- Henry Kissinger, as quoted in Kiss the Boys Goodbye:
How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam by Monika
Jensen-Stevenson & William Stevenson

"They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your
patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their
command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never
had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war
by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people" - - Eugene
Debs

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

1 Iraqi police seize journalists in Najaf
Wednesday 25 August 2004, 23:57 Makka Time, 20:57 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/5DDCEF52-60B8-4FC6-ACFF-F794BBF8E6D7.
htm

Iraqi policemen rounded up dozens of journalists at gunpoint in a Najaf
hotel and took them to police headquarters before later releasing them.
Firing their guns in the air, the dozen odd policemen, some masked, stormed
into the rooms of journalists in the Najaf Sea hotel and forced them into
vans and a truck. An AFP correspondent, who was also forced into a van,
said the police pushed and pulled many reporters at gunpoint.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

2 Saboteurs attack about 20 Iraq pipelines :
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=274146&category=&
BCCode=&newsdate=8/26/2004
Thursday, August 26, 2004

Saboteurs have attacked about 20 oil pipelines in southern Iraq, reducing
exports from the key oil producing region by at least one third. The
cluster of pipelines was attacked late Wednesday in Berjasiya, 20 miles
southwest of the southern city of Basra, an official with the state-run
South Oil Co. said on condition of anonymity. The pipelines, which connect
the Rumeila oil fields to Berjasiya, were still ablaze Thursday.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

3 Arundhati Roy: Life Comes Between a Firebrand and Her Fiction
Monday, August 23, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/23/DDGEJ8C01K1
.DTL&type=printable

The applause started at 7:40 p.m., when she was first introduced to the
overflow crowd at the San Francisco Hilton. By the time Arundhati Roy
finished an hour later -- by the time this novelist-activist-public
intellectual completed her speech titled "Public Power in the Age of
Empire" - - the audience had given her two standing ovations, 20 more
rounds of applause and countless variations of more personal salutations
like, "That's right!"

Roy says she doesn't want to be "iconized" by the public, but it's
happening anyway. After readings and speeches, she's mobbed by people
seeking her handshake, her signature in a book or a photograph to prove
they got close to this firebrand from India. Firebrand may be an
understatement. Last Monday at the Hilton, where she addressed the American
Sociological Association, Roy generated some of her biggest responses when
she urged theUnited States to immediately pull its troops from Iraq and
"pay reparations" to Iraqis, criticized John Kerry and other Democrats
("How dare the Democrats not be anti-war!") and described President Bush's
Cabinet as "thugs."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

4 John Pilger: Bush Versus Kerry: The Fake Debate:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6789.htm

The Bush regime is both dangerous and universally loathed; but that is not
the point. We have debated lesser evilism so often on both sides of the
Atlantic that it is surely time to stop gesturing at the obvious and to
examine critically a system that produces the Bushes and their Democratic
shadows.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

5 Poll: Most NYers Support Protests
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-bc-ny--convention-poll0826aug26
,0,7508180.story?coll=ny-top-span-headlines&vote13985006=1
Thursday 26 August 2004

New York - Seventy-one percent of the city's registered voters think
protesters should be allowed to demonstrate in Central Park during the
Republican National Convention, and 11 percent plan to go to a
demonstration themselves, according to a poll released Thursday.

Most New Yorkers, 81 percent, approve of lawful demonstrations during
the convention, and 68 percent approve of nonviolent civil disobedience,
the Quinnipiac University Poll found. Nearly all disapprove of violent
protests, according to the poll.

"The city is rolling out the red carpet for the Republican delegates,
but most New Yorkers would roll out the green carpet of Central Park for
the anti-Republican demonstrators," Maurice Carroll, director of the
Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

6 Republican National Convention Schedule
New York, NY

6:00 PM Opening Prayer, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell
6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance
6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)
6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing
6:46 PM Seminar #1: Getting your kid a military deferment
7:30 PM First Presidential Beer Bong
7:35 PM Serve Freedom Fries
7:40 PM EPA Address #1: Mercury, it’s what’s for dinner
8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next
8:10 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh
8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your children
8:30 PM Roundtable discussion on reproductive rights (MEN only)
8:50 PM Seminar #2: Corporations: the government of the future
9:00 PM Condi Rice sings “I Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”
9:05 PM Second Presidential Beer Bong
9:10 PM EPA Address #2 Trees: the real cause of forest fires
9:30 PM Break for secret meetings
10:00 PM Second prayer, led by Cal Thomas
10:15 PM Lecture by Carl Rove: Doublespeak made easy
10:30 PM Rumsfeld demonstration: How to squint and talk macho
10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark deer-in-headlights stare
10:40 PM John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory Kevlar chastity belt
10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of black republicans
10:46 PM Third Presidential Beer Bong
10:50 PM Seminar #3: Education: a drain on our nation’s economy
11:10 PM Hilary Clinton Pinata
11:20 PM Second John Ashcroft Lecture: Evolutionists: the dangerous new
cult
11:30 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again
11:35 PM Blame Clinton
11:40 PM Laura serves milk and cookies
11:50 PM Closing Prayer, led by Jesus Himself
12:00 AM Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord

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7 China's Farmers Cannot Feed Hungry Cities
No Longer Self-Sufficient in Food, the Country Today Increasingly has to
Buy Abroad, Raising Global Prices
The Guardian, Jonathan Watts, August 26, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1290852,00.html

Beijing - China's leaders have raised the alarm about their country's
ability to feed itself as rapid development sucks land, water and people
from the food-producing countryside into increasingly large and hungry
cities. After a steady fall in grain harvests, the world's most populous
nation recently became a net importer of food for the first time in its
history, raising domestic political concerns and driving up international
prices of wheat, rice and soya.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

8 The end of false progress - Origins of materialism, and implications for
our future in the post-petroleum reality
http://www.culturechange.org/e-letter-endfalseprogress.html
by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change

What will be the alternative to today's consumerism and fear of material
insecurity? This essay looks toward the next mainstream culture: Life
after petroleum-culture collapse. To help explain
today's lack of preparation for fundamental change, we examine historical
practices particularly in Europe. This installment focuses on the history
of food production vis-à-vis political power and worldview.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

9 Doomsday nearer than you think
http://www.kansan.com/getstory.aspx?id=337be2a3-1f14-4e00-9a49-0e09cf990c6
f

Nadine didn’t flinch when she acknowledged the inevitability of an oil
shortage, which was remarkable because it would probably result in the end
of civilization as we know it. “Yeah, it’s going to happen,” said
Nadine Appenbrink, a Westwood senior majoring in environmental science.
While this didn’t make her an expert on the matter, it did make her a lot
more informed than I was on the subject.

“I mean, of course, life won’t be anything like it is now,” she said
with a fairly matter-of-fact resignation. “It’s pretty scary, isn’t
it?” Hell yeah.

It quickly dawned on me that no matter how successful I become, I may never
be able to buy my mom that Hummer she’s always wanted. I’m not going to
enjoy record rates of consumption, a complacent suburban lifestyle, a
quarterly trip to the Cayman Islands, relaxed nights in front of the big
screen and, most probably, any hopes of a “normal” future. Chances are
I’d be dead by 40. If not, I’ll most likely be roughing it in the
backcountry of the Ozarks living off small game and vermin or maybe my
fellow human beings.

OK, so maybe I’m overreacting. But what if I’m not?
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10 Bolivia Heats Up Once Again
A "Communal Justice" Killing and the Imprisonment of a Landless Movement
Activist Shake the Country
http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1051.html
By Pablo Francischelli August 24, 2004
2004 Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholar

La Paz, BOLIVIA: An unusual murder, a clash of cultures, and an upheaval in
the social movements mark a new socio-political moment in Bolivia. On June
14, Benjamín Altamirano, mayor of the small town of Ayo Ayo, was
kidnapped, tortured, assassinated, and burned. His body was then displayed
in a public plaza. The town’s entire population, most of them ethnic
Aymaras, took part in the act, which was explained as part of the tradition
of communal justice. Since these events took place, several leaders of
local social movements have been imprisoned, despite the lack of any
concrete evidence against them. Among the most prominent of these detained
leaders is Gabriel Pinto, regional head of the Bolivian Landless Movement
(MST in its Spanish initials). Pinto’s August 12 imprisonment has the
potential to set off a series of acts of resistance by social movements
across the country.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

11 What do we call the enemy? (COMPLETE)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1687

Last week, through a front-page reconsideration of its Iraq reporting
written by media columnist Howard Kurtz (The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story)
the Washington Post finally hung out a piece or two of its dirty laundry.

This comes three months after the New York Times buried its Iraq mea culpa
on page 10 (and then its ombudsman Daniel Okrent did a far more forthcoming
consideration of the same). The fact is that while its editorial page was
beating the drums for war, Post prewar reportage was generally marginally
better than that of the Times. They had no obvious raging embarrassments
like Times' reporter Judith Miller's shameful pieces and more recently,
from Walter Pincus to Mike Allen to Dana Priest, they were on the beat of
real Bush administration stories in Washington far sooner than their Times
equivalents. Still, they have a good deal to apologize for ("From August
2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war, The Post ran more than
140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric
against Iraq. Some examples: 'Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is Justified'; 'War
Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack'; 'Bush Tells United Nations It Must Stand
Up
to Hussein or U.S. Will'; 'Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat'; 'Bush Tells
Troops: Prepare for War.'), though you'll find no apologies here, certainly
not for the front-paging of administration war propaganda and the nixing or
burying of what prewar questioning its reporters did.

You'll also find the following howler from Executive Editor Leonard Downie
Jr., "[W]e were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration
was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it
wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the
administration's rationale," not to speak of Bob Woodward's claim that "We
had no alternative sources of information" -- at a moment when he knew from
the horse's mouth, so to speak, that the Bush administration was intent on
war with Iraq. (Of course, you didn't need insider sources to grasp this,
just a pair of eyes and ears.) Imagine, though, that Washington's imperial
paper of record was focused only on discovering what then couldn't have
been more obvious to tens of millions of people around the world: that the
Bush administration was hell-bent on and determined only to go to war, WMDs
or no. So imagine, in turn, Kurtz is the best we can hope for a year and a
quarter after Baghdad was taken, after a series of Tsunami-like events that
have sent the Bush administration reeling, long after every aspect of its
WMD claims has gone down those "aluminum tubes" (doubts about which the
Post admits to having back-paged) and into oblivion. And they say the
President has a tough time acknowledging error!

Self-censorship, conformity, and craven bowing to administration propaganda
of the sort admitted to by the Washington Post are, however, just the tip
of the media iceberg. The Post, via Kurtz, is only not-apologizing for what
was actually written and where it was placed in the paper. It remains
beyond anyone's wildest dreams to hope that our major papers would devote
the slightest thought to stories that logically should have been covered
but simply went missing-in-action. So for the rest of this dispatch, let me
just focus on American Iraq reportage since the taking of Baghdad and offer
my own little non-inclusive list of occupation/war stories that seem to me
to have gone MIA -- and these are only the ones that, with my limited
public sources and limited knowledge, I can see from here. Then, because
every war has its war words that are meant to bend embattled reality to
someone's advantage, I want to consider a few recent examples of Iraq war
words and how the press has dealt with them.

Missing Stories

1. Air Power: Air power has been at the heart of the American-style of war
since World War II. With the sole exception of Central America in the
Reagan
era, from the Korean War in the early 1950s to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia
in the 1960s to the 2001 "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad, the
application
of massive air power (or more recently of cruise missiles), often
unopposed,
has been the essence of war as Americans have fought it. It strikes us as
completely normal to be able to bring air power to bear in situations where
the enemy of choice has neither air power of its own, nor any but the most
minimal air defenses.

When under the onslaught, if the enemy then takes refuge in places that
would normally be forbidden to bomb -- hospitals, schools, temples,
mosques,
or among the civilian population -- this is seen as a "cowardly" act,
placing our military at such a disadvantage as to nullify the "rules of
war." And this is a theme sometimes taken up in the press. In a recent
piece
(Why the Najaf Offensive Is on Hold), for instance, Time's Tony Karon, who
generally writes interesting analysis, picked up a phrase made popular in
the Vietnam era in discussing the recent fighting near the Imam Ali Shrine
in Najaf: "While the estimated 1,000 lightly armed Mehdi militiamen," he
wrote, "were no match for more than 3,000 U.S. troops and an undisclosed
number of Iraqi personnel deployed there, the political circumstances in
which the battle was waged forced the Marines to fight with one hand tied
behind their backs."

Now this is literally true. For fear of further damaging the Shrine of Imam
Ali, the Marines are evidently at present under orders, if fired upon from
the direction of the Shrine, not to fire back. What's missing in action
here, however, is the other part of the story: When we employ Apache
helicopters, Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles, and F-16s (not
to
speak of tanks) in heavily populated urban areas against an enemy armed
mainly with AK-47s and RPGs, how many hands do we have in front of our
backs? Six? Ten? Eighty-seven?

Now that significant portions of Iraq, city by city, seem to be blinking
off
the American map, our military is increasingly releasing air power as the
weapon of choice in those heavily populated urban areas. In the last week,
we have bombed, missiled, or strafed (sometimes a combination of all three)
in Sadr City, the Shiite slum holding an estimated 2 million of Baghdad's
inhabitants, Samarra, Kut, Najaf, Fallujah (more than once) and possibly in
Ramadi and Hilla as well among other places. If you have the time to read
deep into Iraq coverage, follow various news wires, check out historian
Juan
Cole's invaluable Informed Comment website, check Antiwar.com and troll
various representatives of the foreign press on-line, you can certainly
piece much of this together. So, in Kut, Agence France Presse (AFP)
reported:

"Heavy overnight US bombing of Kut killed 84 people and wounded nearly
180 others, a day after clashes between Iraqi police and Shiite militiamen
in the southern city, a hospital official said… Police Colonel Salam
Fakhri
said the bombing started at 1:00 am Wednesday and lasted until 3:00 am.
'The
bombing was concentrated in Al-Sharkia district as the US military felt
there were a lot of Shiite militiamen in that area. It also has an office
of
(radical Shiite Muslim cleric and militia chief) Moqtada Sadr,' he said."

Meanwhile, on Thursday in Samarra, 500-pound bombs were dropped on two
"known enemy locations" killing, according to the American military, a
suspiciously well-rounded-off 50 "anti-Iraqi forces" ("But Dr Abdul Hamid
al-Samarrai told AFP news agency at the main hospital that most of the
casualties were women and children").

What's striking is that, while such bombings seem on the increase, I've
noted no significant articles in our press on the loosing of American air
power in Iraq, the dangers and possible illegalities involved in bombing
heavily populated civilian areas of a country you still functionally
"occupy," or of the size and positioning of American air power in Iraq. If
you're an Internet news junky, of course, you can go to the
globalsecurity.org website and check out for yourself the American Air
Force
in Southwest Asia and where our planes are based in Iraq (as best as can be
known), but you might think that the widespread, increasingly commonplace
bombing of civilian areas in cities would be a story the media might want
to
cover in something more than the odd paragraph deep into pieces on other
subjects.

There's an old Vietnam-era lesson in this -- as a friend and expert on our
experience in Vietnam recently pointed out to me. Reporters can generally
follow and cover fighting on the ground. It's harder to be "on the spot"
for
bombing, and as the military take for granted (and as was true of our
largely uncovered massive air assaults on the South Vietnamese countryside,
and parts of Laos and Cambodia back in the late 1960s and early 1970s), for
the American press, out of sight is out of mind. (See point 4 below.)

2. Permanent Bases: Here's another desperately uncovered story of the Iraq
War/occupation/war, one I've harped on since April of 2003 -- our permanent
bases (charmingly referred to as "enduring camps") in Iraq. The possibility
that four of these might be built was discussed on the front page of the
New
York Times while the invasion of Iraq was still in progress (and vehemently
denied by the Pentagon). A year later, in the spring of 2004, the Chicago
Tribune had a couple of pieces on the up-to-14 enduring camps being
prepared. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, our permanent bases, plans for
them, the building of them, and what they might mean, strategically
speaking
have gone almost completely unmentioned in our media. And enormous as they
evidently are, they should be hard to overlook. Here's the only reference
I've found, in an obscure engineering journal, to their overall size and
the
enormity of the funds being pouted into them, based on an email interview
with Lt. Col. David (Mark) Holt of the Army Corps of Engineers, "who is
tasked with facilities development." It reads:

"U.S. Base Construction--The third major mission the army's engineers
are engaged in is building facilities for the bed-down of U.S. forces.
'Again the numbers are staggering,' Holt says. Most of work is being done
through KBR. 'Interesting program in the several billion dollar range,'
Holt
says."

Imagine, "in the several billion dollar range" and being built by
Halliburton subsidiary KBR. Some of them like Camp Anaconda are evidently
comparable in size to the vast Vietnam-era bases that we built in places
like Danang. These go unmentioned and yet if you don't grasp that, from the
beginning, the Pentagon was planning a major string of "enduring camps" in
Iraq, then you really can't grasp why the Bush administration had no exit
strategy from that country -- because, of course, it had no plans to
depart.
These permanent bases also help explain why the Coalition Provisional
Administration of L. Paul Bremer so confidently disbanded the Iraqi
military
of 400,000 and made plans instead to rebuild a modest-sized force (but not
an air force) of perhaps 35,000-40,000 lightly armed, tank-less troops (as
was said again and again from the time of the invasion on). Instead of
maintaining anything close to a Saddam-sized military, the neocons and
Pentagon hawks in Washington planned to stick around and provide the air
power and muscle needed in such a heavily armed region ourselves, as indeed
is happening, though under far different circumstances than our policy
makers imagined. Of all the subjects one can understand not being covered
in
Iraq right now due to the obvious dangers to foreign reporters, these
American bases certainly should be a reasonably safe exception.

3. Urban warfare and slaughter: One of the fears of the military at the
time
of invasion of Iraq was that American troops might be bogged down in urban
guerrilla warfare in Baghdad, a situation in which our immense
technological
advantages in war-fighting could be constrained or partially nullified in a
maze of city streets. There were scores of articles about this fearful
possibility then and a slew of reports about American preparations for such
a fate. (A good example of such pieces is New York Times reporter Alan
Cowell's House to House: Urban Warfare: Long a Key Part of an Underdog's
Down-to-Earth Arsenal, published on March 27, 2003.) In the end, Baghdad
fell largely without a struggle. Critics -- and there were many, including
military ones, who raised the possibility of urban warfare -- were
essentially laughed off the premises as what in the Vietnam era would have
been known as "nervous Nellies," and the subject was forgotten. Now, this
American nightmare seems to be coming true. From Mosul in the north to
Basra
in the South, U.S. and British troops are involved in spreading urban
guerrilla warfare. Yet while this is obvious, it also goes largely
uncommented upon. There is no real discussion of, or analysis of this in
our
press that I've seen, though reporters would largely only have to revisit
their own or their colleagues' reportage from the spring of 2003 to begin.

Certainly, the recent warfare in the streets of, and amid the tombstones
of,
Najaf has been covered in some daily detail. There have been descriptions
of
"bloody" fighting and fierce "hand-to-hand" combat in Najaf's vast holy
cemetery and in the alleyways of the old city. These accounts give a sense
of equality in struggle (as in hands tied behind backs). However, if you
look at the casualty figures, it seems that so far perhaps 8 American
soldiers have died in the fighting as opposed to many hundreds of Iraqis.
Even if American "body counts" of dead Mahdi Army militiamen, announced at
over three hundred almost as the battle began, are exaggerated (and even if
some of those dead are assumed to be civilians caught up in fighting in a
sizeable city rather than "anti-Iraqi forces"), the casualty figures are
still grotesquely disproportionate (though remarkably similar to those in
most 19th century colonial wars). On the face of it, this should really not
simply be labeled "bloody fighting" or "fierce hand-to-hand combat"
(however
fearsome and dangerous it may be for American soldiers). Another word
should
be added: slaughter. On this, the casualty figures do not lie. I assure
you,
though, that you can search our media high and low and not find that word,
or anything similar.

4. American strategy in Iraq: I discussed this in my last dispatch, but let
me just repeat briefly. When the new State Department/CIA team arrived
during the June "transition," led by soft-spoken ambassador John
Negroponte,
they clearly had a plan -- put new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and other
Iraqi spokesmen in front of the cameras and get American policy-makers
inside the Green Zone to shut up. They did so and, miraculously, evidently
lacking access, sources, leaks, or quotable voices, reporters simply
stopped
writing accounts, analyses, speculations on the nature of or meaning of
American strategic planning in Iraq. Green Zone officialdom simply
disappeared from our press, which largely dealt with the fighting that
could
be seen in Najaf and Allawi's supposed decisions in relation to Najaf. It
may be obvious to any sane observer that the Americans are still in charge
and that American strategic decisions are largely being implemented by
Americans, not Iraqis; it may also be plausible that the offensive against
Najaf results from an American urge (however ill-advised) to crush what
looked to be the easiest of the oppositional forces in the country,
al-Sadr's lightly armed, ill-trained militiamen, and perhaps somehow take
Iraq off front pages until November, but as a news story, all strategic
thinking in Baghdad is, at the moment, missing in action.

5. The Imam Ali Shrine and Shiism: In the context of points 1-4, this may
seem a small matter, but while the Imam Ali Shrine is almost generically
referred to as "holy" in any story or perhaps as Shiism's most holy site or
one of Islam's most holy sites, and its golden dome is sometimes mentioned,
and the Shrine itself has regularly been front-paged in stories in the last
weeks and can be found near the top of the TV news, I have yet to see a
full
background piece on the shrine or a full description of its history and
meaning. The best I've noticed anyway was a sidebar prepared by the "staff
"of the Christian Science Monitor, for Scott Balduff"s canny piece Sadr
plays to power of martyrdom. Generally speaking, the same goes for Shiism
itself. With the exception of Juan Cole, an expert on Shiism, who has been
a
one-man press corps when it comes to explaining the Shiite world to those
of
us who visit his site regularly, I would nominate "Shiite" as the least
defined noun and the least meaning-filled adjective in our press at the
moment..

Why should this matter? One answer is: Because Islam is not a familiar
religion to most Americans (despite growing numbers of converts here), and
so, unlike more familiar "holy" sites, either religious or political, the
Imam Ali Shrine has no resonance for us. The impact of the fighting so near
to, and the threat to the Shrine, doesn't really register here, even as it
is deeply unnerving Muslims (not to speak of others) elsewhere in the
world.
If (in some fantasy future) a rebellious priest, no matter how extreme his
views, were locked inside the Vatican with his self-appointed militia
fending off an occupying army from some powerful Arab state, I assure you
the reporting would be different indeed. It matters that we, who simply
read
about this, can't even begin to put ourselves in the shoes of Iraqis
experiencing it -- although this should at least give us insight into why
American policy makers and military men, no less ignorant than the rest of
us, can make such staggering tactical blunders.

[Note: In expectation of e-letters from those of you who have seen articles
on any of the above subjects, I should quickly admit that, while I read as
widely as I can and Google around as much as possible, I have no way of
catching even a fraction of everything that's written. I'm interested
though. Just, if possible, when you write in to tell me I'm an ignorant sot
for any or all of the above, do send along the headlines of the relevant
pieces as well as the names of reporters, dates published, and urls.]

War Words

What do we call the enemy? George and Laura Bush were the guests on Larry
King Live this Sunday,. In the context of the latest fighting in Najaf,
King
said to the President: "We've had more today, there are more eruptions in
Iraq. And it seems never-ending, does[n't] it? What does it do to you?"

The President replied:

"We've got a great leader in Prime Minister Allawi. He's a tough guy
who
believes in free societies. And more and more Iraqis are being trained. And
more and more Iraqis are stepping up to do the hard work of bringing these
terrorists, these former Baathist and some foreign fighters to justice. And
that's why we are going to prevail."

So the President thinks that in Najaf we're up against Baathists, foreign
fighters, and terrorists. In a similar vein, Secretary of State Colin
Powell
said the following of the fighting in Najaf at a recent press conference:

"In this case, the violence is being perpetrated by outlaws and by
former regime elements and by terrorists who respect no truce, respect
nothing except force. And as long as those individuals don't understand the
spirit of peace and reconciliation, are not willing to work for democratic,
free Iraq, they have to be dealt with. And so your question really should
not be addressed to us. It should be addressed to those who are causing the
violence, who are setting off the bombs, who are destroying the hopes of
the
Iraqi people."

Now statements like Powell's tend to be reported quite straightforwardly in
our press even though the one thing you certainly couldn't say about the
Mahdi Army in Najaf is that it's made up of former "regime elements" or
"Baathists." These are, after all, the Shiites of southern Iraq whom Saddam
brutally repressed in 1991 and whom we claimed our invasion was meant to
liberate. It should be remembered, in fact, that the last army to reach the
Imam Ali Shrine with intent to harm was Saddam's.

Should you want to imagine what the present situation looks like from the
point of view of many Shiites and you're willing to search, you can
probably
find the odd comment buried somewhere in our torrent or Iraq reportage
("Saddam made mass graves in 1991," Abbos fumed. "Now the Americans are
making mass graves in 2004, filled with Shiites again."), or you can go
offshore or into cyberspace, where, for instance, Jim Lobe of Inter Press
Service offers the following in the Asia Times on-line, quoting (the
ubiquitous) Juan Cole:

"'What's going on right now looks a lot like April 1991, when it was
[Iraqi president] Saddam [Hussein] who was crushing a Shi'ite uprising. But
now it's the Marines who are playing the role of the Republican Guard,'
Cole
told Inter Press Service, adding that US policy in Iraq was looking
increasingly like 'Ba'ath-lite,' particularly under Allawi."

Or you can read the piece (mentioned above) by Scott Balduff, who has done
some superb on-the-spot reporting from Najaf, and writes:

"If the Americans and Iraqi Army do end up assaulting the Shrine of
Ali,
they will not be the first. Hussein threw the full force of his military
against the shrine in 1991 after Shiite rebels launched an abortive
rebellion. Artillery barrages damaged the shrine complex and special-forces
soldiers killed the rebels inside the complex itself. The brutality of this
crackdown at such a holy site turned most Shiites against Hussein, even
those who had defended him in the past."

Of course, the labeling of guerrillas, rebels, and insurgents, religious or
otherwise, as "outlaws" and "terrorists" has a long history in European
colonial wars as also, for instance, in Japanese depredations in China in
the 1930s. Similarly the language in the statements coming out of our
military in Iraq these days has a familiar ring for anyone who knows
something of the history of counterinsurgency warfare. For instance, here's
part of a statement quoted in the Washington Post by Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel,
identified by the Post reporter as "Deputy Director for Operations of the
U.S. led multi-national force":

"Clearing operations by Iraqi Security Forces and Multi-National Forces
today in Najaf continue to further isolate the militia and restore control
of the city to the government and people of Najaf… The combined Iraqi and
multi-national security forces continue to operate in strict compliance
with
guidance from the Prime Minister [interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi]
to safeguard and prevent possible harm to these holy shrines as well as
protect the citizens and future of Iraq."

Our operations involving Predator drones, Apache helicopters, and jets in
downtown Najaf, then, are "clearing operations" (though who exactly is
being
"cleared" isn't made particularly clear), and the forces, almost totally
American, conducting these clearing operations are dubbed "multinational,"
and all this is supposedly being done under the "guidance" of Prime
Minister
Allawi to "safeguard… these holy shrines." Of course, it's obviously in
the
interest of American policy makers and military men to put forward such
lies
even at a moment when the only non-American troops fighting on our side in
Najaf, the sparse Iraqi battalions we've trained, are evidently deserting
in
droves, as Hannah Allam, Tom Lasseter and Dogen Hannah of Knight Ridder
have
recently reported. ("'I'm ready to fight for my country's independence and
for my country's stability,' one lieutenant colonel said. 'But I won't
fight
my own people.'") But if this sort of language is simply reproduced without
comment in our news, then Americans will have little way to grasp the
nature
of what's happening in Iraq.

Who is Muqtada al-Sadr?

In the Washington Post Outlook section this Sunday, correspondent Robin
Wright wrote a particularly execrable piece (Not Just A Battle For Najaf)
about the situation in Iraq, whose language might have been taken directly
from Bush administration press releases. There are fantasy passages like
the
following, no less pure in their deceptions than those of Brig. Gen.
Lessel:
"A deepening backlash [in Iraq] could further complicate this second phase
of the three-part political transition and damage the quest to build a
model
new democracy that would inspire a wider transformation in the Arab and
l[sl]amic worlds." I'm sorry, but you'll have to remind me: What was the
first phase of that three-part transition? And I was under the obviously
mistaken impression that the new, silent American occupation regime inside
Baghdad's Green Zone had left all thoughts of building "a model new
democracy that would inspire…" etc. behind and opted instead for an
ex-Baathist thug who has an iron fist tied behind his back.

But I wander. What I wanted to focus on was a relatively innocuous sentence
about Muqtada al-Sadr and his men in Wright's piece: "The stakes are now
far
greater than whether a rogue cleric and his renegade militia can diminish
the fledgling Iraqi government and its U.S. patrons." It's a modest but
interesting example of how word choice sets the frame within which we view
the world. On the one side Wright has marshaled two negative adjectives:
"rogue" and "renegade." Both work well within the framework laid out by
Colin Powell. After all "rogue clerics," like "rogue elephants," and their
"renegade militias" fit easily enough into the category of "outlaws." In
such a context, you couldn't even bring to mind an adjective like
"nationalist" or "patriot" (even though we, here in the U.S., don't
necessarily find any necessary contradiction between American religious
fundamentalism and American patriotism). On the other side, you have that
wonderful adjective "fledgling" linked to "government." No rogue elephants
here just a fragile little government chick in a nest overseen by "patrons"
(a word which, while it may have some modest negative connotations, brings
to mind rich people who give money to the arts or museums).

As a start then Wright accepts that, whatever Allawi's group may be, it is
indeed a "government," and we are nothing but its "patrons." No "puppets"
and "masters" possible here. Not even "interim administration" and
"occupiers." So before you get near the supposed content of what she's
writing about, so much is already settled -- and settled in favor of a
useful official fantasy about the nature of reality in Iraq; useful, that
is, for an administration trying desperately to limp through to November.

Perhaps it's the nature of reporting, a trade done on the run and at top
speed, that much of reality must regularly fall into a series of easily
re-used set phrases and descriptions. After all, familiar modifiers have
been wielded this way since Homer ("the fleet-footed Achilles") to remind,
identify, and categorize. So it's always interesting when you see one or
two
of those identifying phrases change, as I did last week in reports by Alex
Berenson and John Burns of the New York Times on the fighting in Najaf.
It's
always a small indication that journalists are registering a change in the
landscape. So twice in that week in front page stories those two reporters
put an adjective in front of al Sadr that hadn't been used before --
"populist" ("Guns fell silent across most of the city as Iraqi government
representatives met into the night at the provincial governor's
headquarters
with emissaries of Mr. Sadr, the populist Shiite cleric.") That description
was followed by another word that, I believe, had simply not appeared
previously in Times reportage: "insurrection." In regard to the Sunni areas
to the north, the word "insurgency" and "insurgents" had long been used to
describe what was happening (a cautious usage I adopted myself), but here
they suddenly wrote of a "widespread insurrection," as in general uprising.
("His stand against American forces here has stirred a widespread
insurrection across southern Iraq, starting in Najaf and then quickly
setting off fighting in at least eight other predominantly Shiite cities.")

Burns and Berenson used these two words on Saturday and then repeated them
on Sunday. This represented a small but telling shift in the Times'
assessment of what's happening in Iraq.

What to call -- how to label and categorize -- Muqtada al-Sadr has been a
curious problem for American reporters and the Times reporting has
reflected
that. In one of the earliest Times references to Sadr, on May 12, 2003,
Susan Sachs referred to him as "another ambitious cleric, Moktada al-Sadr"
("Iraqis More Bemused Than Enthused by Cleric"). Generally, when he
appeared
as a bit player in the paper's pages in the early months after Baghdad
fell,
he was little more than "young" or "ambitious." In his initial appearance
on
the Times op-ed page on August 29, 2003, Reuel Marc Gerecht referred to him
as "a 22 year old firebrand" (though the age was wrong). On September 24,
al-Sadr was still imagined to be nothing but a "marginal" figure and Noah
Feldman wrote of him as "the rejectionist Moktada al-Sadr." ("Wisely, the
coalition has declined to arrest Mr. Sadr; his hopes for a living martyrdom
denied, he increasingly looks more like a small-time annoyance than the
catalyst of a popular movement" -- from "Democracy: Closer Every Day"). In
October 2003, in "Bomb at Turkish Embassy In Baghdad Kills Bystander," Alex
Berenson and Ian Fisher spoke of him as " a radical, anti-American Shiite
cleric." In May 2004, Ed Wong uniquely spoke of him as "the maverick Shiite
cleric" ("U.S. Military Says Shiite Rebels Seem to Have Ceded Karbala"),
but
generally in these months he was referred to in headlines and texts simply
as "the radical cleric."

In a headline for a piece reported by "Alex Berenson; Sabrina Tavernise and
Iraqi employees of The Times, whose names have been withheld for security"
("Radical Cleric in Iraq Sets Off Day of Fighting) on August 6, just eleven
days ago, he was still being called this. But on August 11, a change set
in.
In the very first paragraph of a Berenson piece that day (U.S. Forces,
Close
to Attack in Najaf, Decide to Hold Off), he was referred to as "the rebel
Shiite cleric," as he was again the next day before, on the 13th, he
morphed
into a "populist" cleric (populist, or agrarian rebel, still has quite a
positive ring in the American lexicon) "sparking" a "widespread
insurrection," before today in two front-page pieces (Alex Berenson and
John
Burns, 8-Day Battle for Najaf: From Attack to Stalemate and Alex Berenson
and Sabrina Tavernise, Cleric in Najaf Refuses to Meet Iraqi Mediators), he
once again became a "rebel Shiite cleric" or a "rebel cleric." (The
Berenson
and Burns piece, by the way, quotes for the first time in a while "Senior
officers in Baghdad, as well White House officials," who throw the blame
for
the launching of the Najaf offensive largely onto the shoulders of local
Marine commanders, with Ambassador Negroponte only later deciding "to
pursue
the case." Although anything is possible, this seems unlikely to me.)

If you want a fuller picture of al-Sadr, you might -- and I apologize for
directing you to his work so often -- check out Juan Cole's piece, It Takes
a Following to Make an Ayatollah in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook
section on him, his movement, and the larger Shiite context of the moment
and consider the wonderful, unexpected adjective he uses to describe him
(along with "lower-ranking cleric" and "fiery") -- "beefy." Or consider the
Scott Balduff piece mentioned above, which quotes "Amatzia Baram, a noted
scholar on Shiite Islam at the United States Institute for Peace in
Washington" as calling him a 'shrewd politician.'" Not a description we
would normally read here.

In fact, while most of the Times' descriptive adjectives seem to catch
something of al-Sadr, they do so within the context of his relationship to
us, or at least within the context of the words available to us to describe
political actors who fall somewhere between Colin Powell's very American
"outlaw" and the Times' recent very American "populist." None of them
surely
catch al-Sadr in his Iraqi context particularly well and, given the general
lack of Iraqi voices in our media, we're not soon likely to find out what
the Iraqi descriptive range might be.

How the naming of embattled reality is brokered in our newsrooms and how it
changes is a fascinating subject, though one you're unlikely ever to find
discussed in the press itself. A couple of passing phrases from that
inadvertently revealing Howard Kurtz mea-almost-culpa in the Washington
Post
might, however, offer a little help. For instance, the editorial
decision-making that resulted in the highlighting of administration prewar
propaganda and the burying of all critical thought in the back pages of the
paper is referred to in the piece as "groupthink," or as Karen DeYoung,
reporter and former assistant managing editor, commented bluntly: "'We are
inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power… If the
president stands up and says something, we report what the president
said.'"
Amen. Tom
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

12 Bush's Superficial Wounds in the Vietnam Era (COMPLETE)
http://www.juancole.com/
Monday, August 23, 2004
Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

The debate that a handful of Texas multi-millionnaires close to the Bush
family have cleverly manufactured over John Kerry's war record is absurd in
every way. The charges that they have put some vets up to making against
Kerry are false and can be demonstrated by the historical record to be
false. Most of those making the charges have even flip-flopped,
contradicting themselves. Or they weren't eyewitnesses and are just lying.

But to address the substance of this Big Lie is to risk falling into its
logic. The true absurdity of the entire situation is easily appreciated
when
we consider that George W. Bush never showed any bravery at all at any
point
in his life. He has never lived in a war zone. If some of John Kerry's
wounds were superficial, Bush received no wounds. (And, a piece of shrapnel
in the forearm that caused only a minor wound would have killed had it hit
an eye and gone into the brain; the shrapnel being in your body
demonstrates
you were in mortal danger and didn't absent yourself from it. That is the
logic of the medal). Kerry saved a man's life while under fire. Bush did no
such thing.

What was Bush doing with his youth? He was drinking. He was drinking like a
fish, every night, into the wee hours. For decades. He gave no service to
anyone, risked nothing, and did not even slack off efficiently. At what
point he became addicted to cocaine, in addition to demon rum, is unclear.

The history of alcoholism and cocaine use is a key issue because it not
only
speaks to Bush's character as an addictive personality, but tells us
something about his erratic and alarming actions as president. His
explosive
temper probably provoked the disastrous siege of Fallujah last spring,
killing 600 Iraqis, most of them women and children, in revenge for the
deaths of 4 civilian mercenaries, one of them a South African. (Newsweek
reported that Bush commanded his cabinet, "Let heads roll!") That temper is
only one problem. Bush has a sadistic streak. He clearly enjoyed, as
governor, watching executions. His delight in killing people became a
campaign issue in 2000 when he seemed, in one debate, to enjoy the prospect
of executing wrong-doers a little too much. He has clearly gone on enjoying
killing people on a large scale in Iraq. Cocaine use permanently affects
the
ability of the person to feel deep emotions like empathy. Two decades of
pickling his nervous system in various highly toxic substances have left
Bush damaged goods. That he managed to get on the wagon (though with that
pretzel incident, you wonder how firmly) is laudable. But no one should
pretend that he is an normal person in the aftermath.

We all know by now that Bush did not even do his full service with the
Texas
Air National Guard, absenting himself to work on the Alabama senate
campaign
of Winton "Red" Blount. Whether he was actually AWOL during this stint is
unclear. But it is clear that not only did Bush slack off on his National
Guard service, but he also slacked off from his campaign work.

This little-noted interview with Blount's nephew Murph Archibald, which
appeared on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered on March 23,
2004, gives a devastating insight into what it was like to have to suffer
through Bush in that period.


"All Things Considered (8:00 PM ET) - NPR

March 30, 2004 Tuesday

This campaign season, there have been questions about whether George W.
Bush
fulfilled his obligations to the National Guard as a young lieutenant in
the
early 1970s. For weeks, reporters scoured Alabama in search of pilots or
anyone who might have remembered seeing Mr. Bush at the time he was serving
in the National Guard there. There is one place in Alabama where Mr. Bush
was present nearly every day: the headquarters in Montgomery of US Senate
candidate Winton "Red" Blount. President Bush has always said that working
for Blount was the reason he transferred to the Alabama Air National Guard.
NPR's Wade Goodwyn has this report about Mr. Bush's time on that campaign.

WADE GOODWYN reporting:

In 1972, Baba Groom was a smart, funny young woman smack-dab in the
middle of an exciting US Senate campaign. Groom was Republican Red Blount's
scheduler, and in that job, she was the hub in the campaign wheel. Ask her
about the handsome young man from Texas, and she remembers him 32 years
later like it was yesterday.

Ms. BABA GROOM (Former Campaign Worker): He would wear khaki trousers
and some old jacket. He was always ready to go out on the road. On the
phone, you could hear his accent. It was a Texas accent. But he just melded
with everybody.

GOODWYN: The candidate Mr. Bush was working for, Red Blount, had gotten
rich in Alabama in the construction business. Prominent Southern
Republicans
were something of a rare breed in those days. Blount's support of the party
led him to be appointed Richard Nixon's postmaster general. In Washington,
Blount became friends and tennis partners with Mr. Bush's father, then
Congressman Bush. That was how 26-year-old Lieutenant Bush came to
Montgomery, at his father's urging . . . It was Mr. Bush's job to organize
the Republican county chairpersons in the 67 Alabama counties. Back in 1972
in the Deep South, many rural counties didn't have much in the way of
official Republican Party apparatus. But throughout Alabama, there were
Republicans and Democrats who wanted to help Red Blount. It was the young
Texan's job to find out what each county leader needed in the way of
campaign supplies and get those supplies to them. Groom says this job
helped
Mr. Bush understand how even in a statewide Senate campaign, politics are
local.

. . . Murph Archibald is Red Blount's nephew by marriage, and in 1972,
he was coming off a 15-month tour in Vietnam in the infantry. Archibald
says
that in a campaign full of dedicated workers, Mr. Bush was not one of them.

Mr. MURPH ARCHIBALD (Nephew of Red Blount): Well, I was coming in early
in the morning and leaving in mid-evenings. Ordinarily, George would come
in
around noon; he would ordinarily leave around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening.

GOODWYN: Archibald says that two months before the election, in
September of '72, Red Blount's campaign manager came to him and asked that
he quietly take over Mr. Bush's job because the campaign materials were not
getting out to the counties.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: George certainly didn't seem to have any concerns about
my taking over this work with the campaign workers there. My overall
impression was that he didn't seem as interested in the campaign as the
other people who were working at the state headquarters.

GOODWYN: Murph Archibald says that at first, he didn't know that Mr.
Bush was serving in the Air National Guard. After he found out from
somebody
else, Archibald attempted to talk to Mr. Bush about it. The president was a
lieutenant and Archibald had been a lieutenant, too; he figured they had
something to talk about.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: George didn't have any interest at all in talking about
the military. In fact, when I broached the subject with him, he simply
changed the subject. He wasn't unpleasant about it, but he just changed the
subject and wouldn't talk about it.

GOODWYN: Far from Texas and Washington, DC, Mr. Bush enjoyed his
freedom. He dated a beautiful young woman working on the campaign. He went
out in the evenings and had a good time. In fact, he left the house he
rented in such disrepair--with damage to the walls and a chandelier
destroyed--that the Montgomery family who owned it still grumble about the
unpaid repair bill. Archibald says Mr. Bush would come into the office and,
in a friendly way, offer up stories about the drinking he'd done the night
before, kind of as a conversation starter.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: People have different ways of starting the days in any
office. They're going to talk about their kids, they're going to talk about
football, they're going to talk about the weather. And this was simply his
opening gambit; he would start talking about that he had been out late the
night before drinking.

GOODWYN: Archibald says the frequency with which Mr. Bush discussed the
subject was off-putting to him.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: I mean, at that time, I was 28; George would have been
25
or 26. And I thought it was really unusual that someone in their mid-20s
would initiate conversations, particularly in the context of something as
serious as a US senatorial campaign, by talking about their drinking the
night before. I thought it unusual and, frankly, inappropriate.

GOODWYN: According to Archibald, Mr. Bush would also sometimes tell
stories about his days at Yale in New Haven, and how whenever he got pulled
over for erratic driving, he was let go after the officers discovered he
was
the grandson of a Connecticut US senator. Archibald, a middle-class Alabama
boy--who, by the way, is now a registered Democrat--didn't like that story.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: He told us whenever he was stopped, as soon as the law
enforcement found out that he was the grandson of Prescott Bush, they would
let him go. And he would always laugh about that. "

Goodwyn dutifully notes that Baba Groom didn't remember George telling
drunk
stories. But that means nothing, since they weren't the sort of things guys
like Bush told the "girls". He was trying to buddy with Archibald and
impress him.

Again, decades of this sort of behavior do not leave a person untouched.
Our
world is in crisis and our Republic is in danger. It should not be left in
the hands of a man who spent his life like this.

posted by Juan @ 8/23/2004 06:40:15 AM

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