April 2005

April 30, 2005

Thirty Years Later

Gabriel Kolko writes that:

There are so many obvious parallels with their futile projects in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and the lessons are so clear, that we have to conclude that successive administrations in Washington have no capacity whatsoever to learn from past errors. Total defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: wars are too complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological, and economic challenges also. The events of South Vietnam 30 years ago should have proven that. It did not.

But the historical blindness, and mind-boggling hypocrisy, extends beyond Presidential Administrations, verily permeating the entire culture. Consider:

• Results 1 - 10 of about 121,000 for "liberation of iraq" (0.22 seconds).

• Results 1 - 10 of about 2,140 for "liberation of vietnam" (0.51 seconds).

And it's not just that the Iraq war, being more current, is simply a much bigger story than is Vietnam: a search for "fall of baghdad" yields 114,000 pages. So, logically, a search for "fall of saigon" should yield about 2,000 results if that were the case, but instead turns up 71,500 pages.

Even more telling, perhaps, is the following:

Battlefield Vietnam is a very popular, very well-reviewed videogame, which has even spawned a loyal "community".

While the blowhards in the FCC are going apeshit over Janet Jackson's nipple, war games are all the rage. But, can you imagine the apoplexy that would result in a "Battlefield America" game in which the player takes on the role of an Islamic Jihadist, and whose objective is to successfully carry out suicide bombings throughout the United States? Or a "Battlefield Europe" game in which the player takes on the role of a grunt in the Nazi army, and whose objective is to finally be able to conquer England and Russia, and to be able to complete the "final solution"?

(In fact, if anybody reading this has any graphics and/or web-design skillz, get in touch. It would be interesting to create a mock advertisment and companion website for the aforementioned "Battlefield America" game and watch the reactions as we tried to get it placed into gaming and computer mags -- or the talk-radio shit-storm if the ad were actually accepted by some publications.)

So atrophied is our historical memory, in fact, that Creedence Clearwater and the Jefferson Airplane are now to be used to "drown out enemy gunfire":

But wait, it gets worse:

That's right. Napalm "can't do it all". But it certainly did plenty (so much so that it's been brought back for use in Iraq, alongside god-knows-what-else in Fallujah).

Back to our previous example, what would be the reaction to an ad for the "Battlefield Europe" game exhorting prospective players that the "ovens can't kill everybody"?

Well, we kinda already know how dastardly chemical weapons are considered to be when there's a chance that they might be used against us. But when we're the ones unleashing the WMD (as we almost always are), it's as a-okay now as it was thirty years ago.

Can hardly wait for the "Battlefield Iraq" game, in which we're duly warned that "Depleted Uranium and Cluster Bombs can't do it all", and whose soundtrack is supplied by Rage Against The Machine and the Dixie Chicks.

What you can do: Seriously, please do get in touch if you've web-design and/or graphical/photo-manipulation abilities, and we'll see what we can do. Otherwise, e-mail Electronic Arts and tell them that war isn't a fucking game, while requesting that all profits made from their war games are donated to victim-relief funds. Yours truly did so a while back, and did not receive a response. But, who knows what might happen if enough people register their opinions?

April 28, 2005

Yawn...More Lies

Under pressure from Congress, the Bush administration reversed gears yesterday and released a report showing an upsurge in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2004 after first withholding the statistics from the public.

The number of "significant attacks" grew to about 651 last year, from 208 in 2003, according to statistics released by the National Counterterrorism Center. The 2004 total includes 201 attacks in Iraq.

But senior officials said the threefold increase was a result of changes in methodology and urged reporters not to compare this year's terrorism numbers with previous ones. [...]

"The numbers can't be compared in any meaningful way," said John Brennan, acting head of the center, which compiled the statistics. He said his agency had revamped the process of counting terrorist attacks after last year's embarrassment in which the State Department withdrew its first report and admitted it had significantly understated what turned out to be a record number of attacks.

That's a lot of lies per word, even by Bush Administration standards.

First of all, if we'll recall last year's fiasco, it had nothing to do with methodology. Rather, it was caused by the Administration's having "neglected" to include the final two months of 2003 in its 2004 report. Honest "mistakes", not political pressure, were to blame for the undercounting, according to Colin Powell. Either way, there wasn't any need to "revamp the process" -- just to include the entire year under study in the yearly report.

Secondly, even supposing the "process" were in need of being "revamped", one might -- just might -- think that rather than scotching the entire report (which report is, after all, mandated by law) without even telling anybody until the news is leaked on a former analyst's blog, it could simply have been announced at some point in the following year that the "process" had been "revamped".

Note too that Colin Powell was, at the time of last year's brouhaha, quick to point out that the report is not just a compilation of statistics, but rather a narrative -- and that the statistics could only be fully understood when taken in the context of the narrative. So if you've nothing to hide, why not release the report this year, with the same proviso?

Thirdly, even if the "process" has been "revamped", it'd be extremely easy to compare the "numbers" in a "meaningful way": simply retroactively apply the new methodology to the previous twenty years' data, et voila!, the "numbers" have now been normalised -- a solution that any fucking third-grader would be able to produce in a moment's time.

Fourthly, the Administration wants us to believe that it "revamped the process of counting terrorist attacks after last year's embarrassment". Yet when the story first broke (all of twelve days ago) we were told that:

Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology used by the National Counterterrorism Center to generate statistics had flaws, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

So, if we assume that the Bush Administration is not lying to us (har har), that means that the new methodology -- instituted to correct for last year's "flawed" report -- has flaws in it (necessitating the scotching of this year's report)! If they're not lying (har har), they're perhaps the most incompetent boobs in the history of counting. In which case, if there aren't some god damned medals handed out in the aftermath of this SNAFU, we'd better get to writin' some outraged letters!

This year, Brennan said, 10 full-time intelligence analysts -- up from three part-timers -- searched for terrorist incidents to include, resulting in a much higher total than met the government's criteria for classification as a "significant" attack.

Uhhhh...wow. That, right there, is some seriously incompetent lying. Forget third-graders: are there any kindergartners that couldn't see through this? More analysts searching for terror attacks "results" in a much higher total that meet the criteria for classification as attacks (including, apparently, some "incidents" that "may not have been terrorism", yet meet the criteria anyway)? Who the fuck is supposed to believe this shit? Seriously, if these motherfuckers are not lying, could we maybe get some fucking pre-school class to compile the report next year? A fucking pack of rhesus monkeys? Fuck, we could probably even get some niggers to do the job, and still be relatively confident that they'd be able to figure the damned thing out.

In the meantime, expect the Bush Administration to soon announce that as a consequence of more people having been invited to this year's Whitehouse Easter Egg Hunt than in previous years, more eggs were found than were actually hidden (including some eggs that may not have been eggs despite their meeting the government's criteria for classification as eggs).

Although the officials called the data seriously flawed, they said they issued the report to avoid criticism that the State Department was trying to avoid admitting setbacks in the fight against terrorism by not publishing the data.

"If we didn't put out these numbers today, you'd say we're withholding data. That's why we're putting them out," said Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Understand? We're not putting out "these numbers" because we're genuinely interested in informing the public of what we're up to, nor even because it's mandated by law -- we, after all, are above the law -- but only because we, the Republican Party, the absolute bedrock of ethical administration, don't want our name dragged scurrilously through the mud.

And, oh yeah, the other only reason we're putting "these numbers" out is because we got caught trying to sweep them under the rug, so we really don't have much choice.

The totals raised questions about the administration's claims that it is winning the war on terrorism.

That's right: before this there weren't any questions concerning that matter. At least not in the media. But back here in the "reality-based" world, one might well ask for one single piece of evidence to indicate that the Bush Administration is winning the "War On Terrorism".

Here's Tom DeLay's brilliant analysis (circa December, 2003):

If we don't find weapons of mass destruction -- and I think we will, and we've already found evidence that not only did he have it, but he violated United Nations resolutions all along the lines, particularly when it comes to weapons instructions. So, you know, we are winning this war on terror.

And here's Dick Cheney's brilliant analysis (via his "Winning The 'War On Terror' Tour" undertaken last year):

The tour highlights John Kerry's inconsistent support for our troops and his troubling record on national security.

To his credit, Dubya did, during last year's Republican National Convention, attempt to quantify the Administration's supposed success :

President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he would tell the Republican convention that three-quarters of known al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed, an increase from an earlier estimate of two-thirds.

For months, the CIA had privately advocated switching to the 75 percent figure, though the White House balked at using it publicly. Critics say the estimate is meaningless as losses by a decentralized al Qaeda are ever harder to estimate.

Notice, though, what he didn't say. He didn't say, "And therefore, the 'War On Terror' is 75% finished. We should have it wrapped up by next summer, after which we'll no longer need to worry about terrorism, and we can spend the rest of our days vacationing on our respective ranches."

Uh-uh. In fact, Dick Cheney has predicted that the "War On Terror" will "not end in our lifetime", and Dubya hisself has allowed that he does not think that "you can win it".

So, yeah, his flight-suit-strutting and "Hoo-ah!"-speechifying antics are indeed pretty meaningless.

Meanwhile, not only are terrorist attacks on the rise (including, it must be stated, those perpetrated and/or funded and/or supported by the United States), but so is terrorist recruitment -- in sharp contradistinction to U.S. military recruitment. So the Bush Administration is getting its ass kicked ten ways from Sunday. But of course, this failure of execution (and, much more importantly, philosophy) hasn't affected his ability to vacation at the ranch.

Rather, it redounds to the rest of us in the form of crumbling infrastructure, sharp cuts in social programs, and increased global instability. But that's okay: it'll all be worth it so long as Dubya will receive a medal or two for his magnificent stewardship of the "GWOT".

April 26, 2005

Question For Military Experts

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a sailor who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Hospitalman Aaron A. Kent, 28, of Portland, Oregon, died Apr. 23, from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations near Fallujah, Iraq. Kent was assigned to 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward), Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Yours truly is exceedingly ignorant in these matters. But, is it normal procedure for Sailors to be conducting combat operations on land? Or is it rather a further sign of the Army's and Marine Corps' decreasing manpower? There was also a report the other day that a Marine Sailor had died doing the same thing: conducting combat operations in Fallujah.

(Which, of course, raises another question: what is going on in Fallujah? If, after absolutely leveling the city, and requiring residents to obtain ID cards to get back to their flattened homes, the "Multinational Force" is still not in control there; just how much in-control can we expect it to be in the rest of the country?)

Update: Commenter GD informs that the case noted above is not out-of-the-ordinary. However, many thanks to commenter John Seal for the serendipitous link to a story in today's Boston Globe concerning the practice of using lightly-trained soldiers to paper over the Military's personnel shortages:

At least 3,000 Navy and Air Force personnel such as Peters -- trained mainly in non-combat specialties such as mechanics and construction -- are serving on the front lines of the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraq war is the first military engagement in which such large numbers of air and naval personnel are serving in combat roles on the ground, facing imminent threat of attack.

''Airmen are driving trucks in Iraq because the Army didn't have enough of them," Brigadier General S. Taco Gilbert, the Air Force's deputy director for strategic planning, said in a recent interview. ''They're manning .50-caliber machine guns."

April 24, 2005

What Could You Do With $2 Billion?

The Halliburton corporation, already the Iraq war's poster child for "waste, fraud, and abuse", has been hit with a new double-whammy.

The new over-charges bring to $2 billion, or 42 percent of the contract amounts, the grand total of questionable bills from Halliburton.

Forty-two percent! And that doesn't even account for the "legitimate" profits that Halliburton would realise without over-charging. Apart from the destruction wrought by the invasion and occupation (including the use of banned weapons -- Depleted Uranium, napalm and other chemical weapons, cluster bombs), this might be the biggest story of the war: the fucking Vice President's former company (from whom he still receives compensation) is sluicing billions -- BILLIONS -- of taxpayer dollars straight into said former company's coffers. The admixture of State and Corporate interests is the very essence of Fascism. Yet when it occurs in the baldest form imaginable, it's just barely a news item.

What you can do: Tax Resistance, people! This blogger has urged War Tax Resistance many, many times over. And he will now do so again.

Consequences? Yes, potentially. But they're miniscule compared with the certain consequences of consenting to pay one's taxes: thousands upon thousands murdered in cold blood, vast regions of the Third World irradiated (and DU is thought impossible to clean up once it has been introduced into the environment) and littered with unexploded ordnance, the militarisation of outer space, nuclear proliferation, post-traumatic time-bombs walking our streets, BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars sluiced into Dick Cheney's friends' pockets while the budget deficit spirals out of control.

So what are the potential consequences of WTR? They do not include jail time (except in extremely rare cases). They boil down to a chance that the IRS will eventually be able to, by various measures, collect the owed taxes, plus interest and penalties. There are ways of preventing this from happening, and ways of minimising the impact when it does happen.

Note, by the way, that "Tax Day" doesn't arrive once a year -- it arrives twice monthly, assuming Federal Income Taxes are withheld from one's paycheck (there are ways of preventing this from happening, too).

See more responses to common concerns regarding WTR. And then, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee can put you in touch with a WTR counselor in your area.

By taking control of our paychecks, we not only tell the warmongers/Fascists where to stick it, we also take a concrete step in withholding from them the means to conduct their madness. What could be more important?

Update, 4/25/05: Federal agencies under the Bush administration are sweeping vast amounts of public information behind a curtain of secrecy in the name of fighting terrorism, using 50 to 60 loosely defined security designations that can be imposed by officials as low-ranking as government clerks.

For years, a citizen who wanted to know the name and phone number of a Pentagon official could buy a copy of the Defense Department directory at a government printing office. But since 2001, the directory has been stamped ''For Official Use Only," meaning the public may not have access to such basic information about the vast military bureaucracy.

That's Taxation Without Representation, folks. Are you really going to continue to give these fuckers your money? There's a fun slogan -- "Don't vote: it only encourages them" -- a Google search for which returns 2,350 hits. But an equally appropriate slogan -- "Don't pay taxes: it only encourages them" -- doesn't return a single hit. Why so?

April 21, 2005

Cold War 2.0?

Enquiring minds may really be wondering what's between Condi's ears after her latest attempt at diplomacy:

"The centralization of state power in the presidency at the expense of countervailing institutions like the Duma or an independent judiciary is clearly very worrying," Rice said, referring to the lower house of Russia's parliament. "The absence of an independent media on the electronic side is clearly very worrying." [...]

...the former Soviet specialist said the concentration of power should not begin to "mimic the Soviet state". [...]

Rice also warned Moscow that its role as chair of a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized democracies next year will require it to demonstrate a commitment to democracy. [...]

"Moscow should make every effort to convince the world that they understand those responsibilities that attend inclusion in organizations such as the G-8," Rice said. She said the G-8 was intended to be a "a group of democracies" committed to "free-market principles, free trade, the rule of law".

You can see our dilemma, here. If Condi -- never known 'round these parts as possessing anything approaching the supreme intellect for which she's so often credited -- is really so stupid that she fails to notice the glaring hypocrisy dripping from her every word, that would quite possibly make her stupider than even The Superbrain himself. But if that were true, it would spell an existential crisis for the space-time continuum.

So we must assume that she knowlingly perpetrates such crimes of knowledge. If so, though, how does she do so with a straight face? Is she, like her President, a cyborg? Pehaps, but her eyes, speech patterns, and motor skills don't suggest as much.

So Condi's a bit of a riddle.

Kidding aside, one has to wonder just what the Bush Administration hopes to gain by its provocations. Condi's remarks came shortly after similarly insulting words care of Gee-Dub. And "lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced legislation to suspend Russia from participation in the G-8 because, they say, it is no longer a democracy."

If we accept the premise that the downfall of the Soviet Union was accomplished solely (with maybe a little bit of help from the Pope) by St. Reagan's having guilely bogged it down fighting Islmaic guerillas in Afghanistan while also conniving it into trying to match the U.S. of A. missile-for-missile (never mind Reaganomics' long-term effects upon the United States); it's not too difficult to imagaine a similar reverse scenario developing at the present moment.

The United States is bogged down by Islamic guerillas in Iraq, so much so that its military is on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile, "Iraq-style resistance is to be activated in Afghanistan", according to the Asia Times (which also reports that Pakistan is in danger of boiling over).

Forget, on the other hand, about Russia's presumably idle claim that it "will develop missiles impervious to any defense". Russia is already supplying Syria and Iran with weaponry, and has planned joing military exercises for later this year with China (whose military, oh-by-the-way, Blowback author Chalmers Johnson notes, quoting professor Arthur Lauder, "is the only one being developed anywhere in the world today that is specifically configured to fight the United States of America").

Oh yeah, Russia has also struck deal to sell 100,000 AK-47s and "as many as 50 Russian attaack helicopters" to Venezuela. (Ever game, Donald H. Rumsfeld says he "can't imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47s". What are the odds, do you suppose, that Donald H.'s confusion will be cause enough for the Russians to reconsider?)

One could conceive, in other words, of the United States battling Russian-supplied guerillas in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela; and/or of Islamic fundamentalists in control in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and/or of the United States embroiled in a war with China -- a war, according to Johnson, that it "would almost surely lose".

If that's not enough, investment adviser Jephraim Gundzik recently warned that:

In 2005 Russia is likely to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil exporter. This, combined with continued contraction of global oil stocks, gives Moscow enormous leverage over international oil prices. Russia could easily push the price of crude oil above $100 per barrel by reducing oil production. No other oil-producing country, including Saudi Arabia, has sufficient spare production capacity to counter a production cut by Russia.

Rather than establishing economic and geopolitical hegemony around the world, the "war on terrorism" is making the U.S. increasingly vulnerable to a sharp economic recession delivered to Washington by Moscow.

If she keeps it up, not only does Condi personally risk getting whacked over the head by a chess-board, but the Bush Administration may well find itself on the losing end of a Cold War rematch.

Sure, Condi's charges are by and large accurate. But when have such principles ever been any concern of hers, her President's, or the United States'? So, what does the Bush Administration hope to gain from its badgering? Beats me.

And back to the initial question: what's between Condi's ears? Rocks? Air? Circuitry? It's a conundrum.

April 17, 2005

Well, That's One Way To Create Your Own Reality

October, 2004: ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

April, 2005: The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

We already know that the Bush Administration is probably U.S. history's most depraved. But we might ask ourselves whether it's also U.S. history's most entertaining?

Update, 4/18/05: From today's Paul Krugman column:

Last week fears of a return to stagflation sent stock prices to a five-month low. What few seem to have noticed, however, is that a mild form of stagflation -- rising inflation in an economy still well short of full employment -- has already arrived. [...]

Things could be, and have been, worse. But those whose standard of living depends on wages, not capital gains -- in other words, the vast majority of Americans -- aren't feeling particularly prosperous. By two to one, people tell pollsters that the economy is "only fair" or "poor", not "good" or "excellent".

Why, then, has the Fed been raising interest rates? Because it is worried about inflation, which has risen to the top end of the 2 to 3 percent range the Fed prefers. [...]

We shouldn't overstate the case: we're not back to the economic misery of the 1970s. But the fact that we're already experiencing mild stagflation means that there will be no good options if something else goes wrong.

Or suppose that there's some kind of oil supply disruption -- or that warnings about declining production from Saudi oil fields turn out to be right. Suppose that Asian central banks decide that they already have too many dollars. Suppose that the housing bubble bursts. Any of these events could easily turn our mild case of stagflation into something much more serious. [...]

So if any of these things does come to pass, we'll just have to see how well an administration in which political operatives make all economic policy decisions, and the Treasury secretary is only a salesman, handles crises.

I think we all know precisely how the Bush Administration would handle the crisis: it would "create its own reality" by ceasing to make economic data available to the public.

April 11, 2005

Is This What "Liberation" Looks Like?

Chanting "Death to America" and burning effigies of President Bush and Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Iraqis flooded central Baghdad yesterday in what police called the largest anti-American protest since the fall of Baghdad, the capital, exactly two years ago.

(Firdaus Square pix spotted at the Iraq Occupation Watch Information Center.)