Showing posts with label Bush stupidity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush stupidity. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Friday, August 31, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Bush and Alcohol in Brazil
An awful lot of baloney in Brazil
Bush wants a show of cooperation with the Brazilians over biofuels - while keeping the stuff out of the US.
Ian Williams
March 7, 2007 8:00 PM |
President Bush begins his tour of Latin America this week, hitting Brazil on March 9, in his attempt to woo America's backyard away from the seductions of Hugo Chavez. In an iconic display of content-free concern, Bush wants to engage Lula, the Brazilian president, in a show of cooperation over biofuels, in which Brazil is world leader - while keeping the stuff out of the USA.
Once upon a time, anyone who drank cachaça, Brazilian rum, could see why the Brazilians decided it may be better to use it to run their cars than stock their bars. However, times have changed. Aged cachaça and the caipirinhas made from them are high-end drinks in the world's cocktail lounges.
And the gasohol in Brazilian cars that used to cover the smell of alcohol on the breath of drivers is now an ecological blessing for a world where the oil is running out and the temperature is running up. Brazil's sugar plantations produce fuel that can compete on the world markets with the black stuff from the Gulf, and it is selling its technology to other sugar-producing countries. Renewable bio-fuels are good for the carbon cycle and global warming, and reduce dependence on fossil fuel which tends to come from countries whose rulers get uppity with Washington. They can also create economic opportunities in the developing world.
There are legitimate concerns about what the expansion of Brazilian sugar-cane production may have on its own society. However Lula has little choice but to use whatever comparative economic advantages the global economy gives him, while trying to spread the gains around domestically.
But the response from the industrialised world is, as usual, to protect its own climatic disadvantages with discriminatory trade practices. In Europe they subsidise sugar beet production - developed by Napoleon to beat British control of the Caribbean cane fields. But in the US, Brazil's hoped for biofuel market, there is a 54 cents a US gallon tariff imposed by the country that wants to impose free trade on everyone else in the world.
Two of the most potent lobbies, major sucklers at the teat of corporate welfare, have dressed themselves in a green figleaf with the bioscam. Archer Daniel Midland, and the exiled Cuban sugar barons, one of whom was, you may remember, important enough to interrupt Bill Clinton in his sort of suckling with his intern in Oval Office are generous donors to both parties.
Their campaign cheques are a sound investment. American biofuels and sweeteners made from corn or maize (as the British prefer to call it) can only compete with Brazilian sugar and ethanol because of the tariff wall, and because Washington subsidises corn syrup production and sugar production to the tune of billions of dollars.
So not only are American consumers paying over twice the world price for sugar, while their government effectively stomps on the chances for economic development of significant parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, but the diversion of a large proportion of corn towards syrup and ethanol production is raising American and world corn prices. Milton Friedman would not have approved.
The American companies concerned are fighting any attempt to reduce or remove the 54 cents a gallon ethanol tariff. Their spokesman told Businessweek that the tariff offsets the 51 cents a gallon tax credit for biofuels - making it fairly plain that the purpose of the tax credit was not to encourage better use of renewables but to boost the bottom line of Archer Daniels Midland and their colleagues.
So Bush's concern for biofuels will have all the sincerity of a Scooter Libby denial, and give Hugo Chavez yet more ammunition to highlight the hypocrisy of the gringos. Well done W.
Bush wants a show of cooperation with the Brazilians over biofuels - while keeping the stuff out of the US.
Ian Williams
March 7, 2007 8:00 PM |
President Bush begins his tour of Latin America this week, hitting Brazil on March 9, in his attempt to woo America's backyard away from the seductions of Hugo Chavez. In an iconic display of content-free concern, Bush wants to engage Lula, the Brazilian president, in a show of cooperation over biofuels, in which Brazil is world leader - while keeping the stuff out of the USA.
Once upon a time, anyone who drank cachaça, Brazilian rum, could see why the Brazilians decided it may be better to use it to run their cars than stock their bars. However, times have changed. Aged cachaça and the caipirinhas made from them are high-end drinks in the world's cocktail lounges.
And the gasohol in Brazilian cars that used to cover the smell of alcohol on the breath of drivers is now an ecological blessing for a world where the oil is running out and the temperature is running up. Brazil's sugar plantations produce fuel that can compete on the world markets with the black stuff from the Gulf, and it is selling its technology to other sugar-producing countries. Renewable bio-fuels are good for the carbon cycle and global warming, and reduce dependence on fossil fuel which tends to come from countries whose rulers get uppity with Washington. They can also create economic opportunities in the developing world.
There are legitimate concerns about what the expansion of Brazilian sugar-cane production may have on its own society. However Lula has little choice but to use whatever comparative economic advantages the global economy gives him, while trying to spread the gains around domestically.
But the response from the industrialised world is, as usual, to protect its own climatic disadvantages with discriminatory trade practices. In Europe they subsidise sugar beet production - developed by Napoleon to beat British control of the Caribbean cane fields. But in the US, Brazil's hoped for biofuel market, there is a 54 cents a US gallon tariff imposed by the country that wants to impose free trade on everyone else in the world.
Two of the most potent lobbies, major sucklers at the teat of corporate welfare, have dressed themselves in a green figleaf with the bioscam. Archer Daniel Midland, and the exiled Cuban sugar barons, one of whom was, you may remember, important enough to interrupt Bill Clinton in his sort of suckling with his intern in Oval Office are generous donors to both parties.
Their campaign cheques are a sound investment. American biofuels and sweeteners made from corn or maize (as the British prefer to call it) can only compete with Brazilian sugar and ethanol because of the tariff wall, and because Washington subsidises corn syrup production and sugar production to the tune of billions of dollars.
So not only are American consumers paying over twice the world price for sugar, while their government effectively stomps on the chances for economic development of significant parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, but the diversion of a large proportion of corn towards syrup and ethanol production is raising American and world corn prices. Milton Friedman would not have approved.
The American companies concerned are fighting any attempt to reduce or remove the 54 cents a gallon ethanol tariff. Their spokesman told Businessweek that the tariff offsets the 51 cents a gallon tax credit for biofuels - making it fairly plain that the purpose of the tax credit was not to encourage better use of renewables but to boost the bottom line of Archer Daniels Midland and their colleagues.
So Bush's concern for biofuels will have all the sincerity of a Scooter Libby denial, and give Hugo Chavez yet more ammunition to highlight the hypocrisy of the gringos. Well done W.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Bush and Alcohol -and Brazil
Latest Guardian Comment is Free on Bush's infatuation with American alcohol
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Global smarming
Global smarming
Exxon Mobil and the White House are united in denying global warming. But new solutions exist, and even God isn't on their side.
Latest Guardian Comment is Free
February 19, 2007 5:14 PM
Montreal and Kyoto are a hemisphere apart geographically, and a world apart in their environmental policy. The Montreal protocol, which effectively cut back damage to ozone layer, was signed in 1987 and applied in record time. Kofi Annan described it as "Perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date..." Kyoto, agreed upon 10 years later and widely considered inadequate at the time, has still not been implemented with any effectiveness.
I had always thought that one reason for the disparity was that the ozone hole threatened fair-skinned and fairly affluent people like me with cancer, while global warming and consequent sea level rise was only going to drown brown-skinned paupers - so who cares? (As an editor at the Scotsman at the time told me, "you ken, some of us think it may be no bad thing for London to be 200ft under water.")
This view may still hold water - but there are other dimensions. Last week Exxon Mobil put full-page ads in, among other papers, the New York Times. The ads sort of implied that the company was as green as a New York St Patrick's Day, which might be convincing if you forgot that Exxon Mobil is alone with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the White House in pretending that global warming has nothing to do with the product the company sells so profitably. The sound of silence has rarely been so deafening.
In fact, although most of the other major oil companies are convinced that global warming is happening, and that human activity is a major cause of it, Exxon Mobil has been using its considerable charm and influence with the White House to dump opponents from the Intergovernmental Panel of Scientists on Climate Change. The White House in turn has been doctoring Nasa reports to add levels of uncertainty to its reports on the subject.
The company is increasingly isolated in its stand, a process that began when John Browne of BP in 1997 broke with big oil omerta and committed BP to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 10% below 1990 levels by 2010. They met the target in only three years for an expenditure of $20m; the company actually made $650m in savings. (Of course they should have spent some of that cash in their Texas plant, but that's another story.)
The very fact that Exxon Mobil felt forced to put out dissimulatory ads instead of a bald denial shows that the cloud of CO2 may have a silver lining. The new Congress seems alert to public interest on the subject, reinforced by the findings of the panel. It is also helped by the British government's pushing of Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change to Congress and the UN.
Even Tony Blair begs to differ with George Bush on this one - and even as he squirms to be as deferentially non-confrontational as possible.
More significantly, God is no longer on Exxon's side. At one point, American conservatives who claimed to have a hotline to Heaven seemed to be losing the connection - as the deity sent a different kind of message. Can it be a coincidence that hurricanes keep ripping into the states that vote Republican?
More seriously, Rich Cizik, the government affairs officer for the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the legs of the Republican coalition, told me a year ago, "We have a fine history of advocacy, but it has been a little blind towards the environment, but we are beginning to change that." A Toyota hybrid driver, he quotes polls showing that over 70% of Evangelicals thought the environment was very important, and in a shot across the bows of companies like Exxon Mobil, he warned, 'We have not really used shareholder advocacy. But we are quick studies, and I think when we put our hands to the plough, then we will have a tremendous capacity to influence Wall St and corporate America." And, of course, Republican policy.
Both Stern and Jeffrey Sachs at their UN presentation last week (hosted, incidentally, by the British mission) emphasised how achievable a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is, and showed how the relatively small costs are far outweighed by the benefits. Stern also noted that the success of the Montreal Protocol was in large part because the giant chemical companies had substitutes for the destructive CFC gases.
Both of them see the adoption of carbon-sequestrating coal plants as essential to maintaining global growth and prosperity - although Sachs, at least, also recommends nuclear energy. But one of the problems here is that the tide of neo-liberalism over the last thirty years has effectively disarmed us. The old publicly owned utilities could afford to take a long-term view, and to build such prototypes regardless of the effect on the next quarter's earnings. Many are now privatized, and from California to New York to Britain, the capacity and willingness of private companies to build innovative and experimental new plants is diminshed. Stern estimated that R&D in the field has dropped by 50% since privatisation.
Sachs says that, armed with public money, private companies will be happy to design and build such generators.
Surely there is enough public interest here to take seriousa action. Why don't western governments pay for prototype CO2 efficient hydrocarbon using plants to be built in nuclear and nuclear threshold countries - North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan and Israel - in return for them giving up their nuclear programmes. It repays the historic carbon debt of the industrial countries, diminishes the threats of global warming from greenhouse emissions and global scorching from thermonuclear explosions, and develops technology that could be used worldwide.
Who knows? If Bush's friends in Exxon Mobil get a piece of the action, even they may be won over.Global smarming
Exxon Mobil and the White House are united in denying global warming. But new solutions exist, and even God isn't on their side.
Exxon Mobil and the White House are united in denying global warming. But new solutions exist, and even God isn't on their side.
Latest Guardian Comment is Free
February 19, 2007 5:14 PM
Montreal and Kyoto are a hemisphere apart geographically, and a world apart in their environmental policy. The Montreal protocol, which effectively cut back damage to ozone layer, was signed in 1987 and applied in record time. Kofi Annan described it as "Perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date..." Kyoto, agreed upon 10 years later and widely considered inadequate at the time, has still not been implemented with any effectiveness.
I had always thought that one reason for the disparity was that the ozone hole threatened fair-skinned and fairly affluent people like me with cancer, while global warming and consequent sea level rise was only going to drown brown-skinned paupers - so who cares? (As an editor at the Scotsman at the time told me, "you ken, some of us think it may be no bad thing for London to be 200ft under water.")
This view may still hold water - but there are other dimensions. Last week Exxon Mobil put full-page ads in, among other papers, the New York Times. The ads sort of implied that the company was as green as a New York St Patrick's Day, which might be convincing if you forgot that Exxon Mobil is alone with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the White House in pretending that global warming has nothing to do with the product the company sells so profitably. The sound of silence has rarely been so deafening.
In fact, although most of the other major oil companies are convinced that global warming is happening, and that human activity is a major cause of it, Exxon Mobil has been using its considerable charm and influence with the White House to dump opponents from the Intergovernmental Panel of Scientists on Climate Change. The White House in turn has been doctoring Nasa reports to add levels of uncertainty to its reports on the subject.
The company is increasingly isolated in its stand, a process that began when John Browne of BP in 1997 broke with big oil omerta and committed BP to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 10% below 1990 levels by 2010. They met the target in only three years for an expenditure of $20m; the company actually made $650m in savings. (Of course they should have spent some of that cash in their Texas plant, but that's another story.)
The very fact that Exxon Mobil felt forced to put out dissimulatory ads instead of a bald denial shows that the cloud of CO2 may have a silver lining. The new Congress seems alert to public interest on the subject, reinforced by the findings of the panel. It is also helped by the British government's pushing of Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change to Congress and the UN.
Even Tony Blair begs to differ with George Bush on this one - and even as he squirms to be as deferentially non-confrontational as possible.
More significantly, God is no longer on Exxon's side. At one point, American conservatives who claimed to have a hotline to Heaven seemed to be losing the connection - as the deity sent a different kind of message. Can it be a coincidence that hurricanes keep ripping into the states that vote Republican?
More seriously, Rich Cizik, the government affairs officer for the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the legs of the Republican coalition, told me a year ago, "We have a fine history of advocacy, but it has been a little blind towards the environment, but we are beginning to change that." A Toyota hybrid driver, he quotes polls showing that over 70% of Evangelicals thought the environment was very important, and in a shot across the bows of companies like Exxon Mobil, he warned, 'We have not really used shareholder advocacy. But we are quick studies, and I think when we put our hands to the plough, then we will have a tremendous capacity to influence Wall St and corporate America." And, of course, Republican policy.
Both Stern and Jeffrey Sachs at their UN presentation last week (hosted, incidentally, by the British mission) emphasised how achievable a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is, and showed how the relatively small costs are far outweighed by the benefits. Stern also noted that the success of the Montreal Protocol was in large part because the giant chemical companies had substitutes for the destructive CFC gases.
Both of them see the adoption of carbon-sequestrating coal plants as essential to maintaining global growth and prosperity - although Sachs, at least, also recommends nuclear energy. But one of the problems here is that the tide of neo-liberalism over the last thirty years has effectively disarmed us. The old publicly owned utilities could afford to take a long-term view, and to build such prototypes regardless of the effect on the next quarter's earnings. Many are now privatized, and from California to New York to Britain, the capacity and willingness of private companies to build innovative and experimental new plants is diminshed. Stern estimated that R&D in the field has dropped by 50% since privatisation.
Sachs says that, armed with public money, private companies will be happy to design and build such generators.
Surely there is enough public interest here to take seriousa action. Why don't western governments pay for prototype CO2 efficient hydrocarbon using plants to be built in nuclear and nuclear threshold countries - North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan and Israel - in return for them giving up their nuclear programmes. It repays the historic carbon debt of the industrial countries, diminishes the threats of global warming from greenhouse emissions and global scorching from thermonuclear explosions, and develops technology that could be used worldwide.
Who knows? If Bush's friends in Exxon Mobil get a piece of the action, even they may be won over.Global smarming
Exxon Mobil and the White House are united in denying global warming. But new solutions exist, and even God isn't on their side.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
North Korea a Precedent for Iran. Probably Not!
North Korea is a mysterious place, but Washington makes Pyongyang seem pellucidly open. We knew what Kim Jong Il and his pals wanted, and they seem to have got it. On the other hand no one was sure what the Bush administration wanted, although, now John Bolton has denounced what Christopher Hill has achieved, we can suspect that firstly, there has been a change of policy, and secondly, the change was an improvement.
There is little or nothing in this agreement that could not have been secured by the administration five years ago. In fact in terms of disarmament, it is getting back to the status quo before the Bush administration effectively reneged on the agreement. The Koreans wanted respect –normalization of relations and a guarantee that the US would not attack them, and for the price of a damp squid of a nuclear test, now they have it. If the deal goes through, that is what Washington has now offered along with lifting the financial restrictions.
It is being presented as a triumph of American diplomacy, but that is true only if we consider it the triumph of Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill in getting the White House to see sense, as much as it was a success in cajoling North Korea to the table. But even then, DPKR wanted to meet the Americans at the table all along, so whose triumph is it.
If reality really has connected, Washington will now follow up with a similar deal with Iran. But it won’t. Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council member revealed in Washington Wednesday that in 2003 Teheran offered normalization when the moderate Rafsanjani was in office. Describing it as a “serious proposal, a serious effort,” at rapprochement delivered through the Swiss embassy in Teheran. It was turned down, by both Rice and Bush, Leverett claims.
I suspect that this deal was not designed as a precedent for Iran. On the contrary, the intention is to free resources for attacking Iran. Looking at the renewal of spurious revelations of Iranian involvement in Iraq against the US, it seems that the closest the White House has come to sanity is to realize that the American military power is severely overstretched. Action against North Korea was not on the cards because neither South Korea nor China would tolerate it, and even Japan, with real issues against Pyongyang, would not want to see an Iraqi style imbroglio across the Sea of Japan, let alone a possible low level nuclear exchange.
So the administration is almost certainly cutting its losses in Korea to concentrate on Iran where it does have willing platforms and covert allies. It is not totally irrelevant that totalitarian and despotic as it is, North Korea poses no threat to Israel. Of course, in reality, neither is Iran. But while the administration may have had a brief, tangential relationship with reality over North Korea, it will normal non-reality based operations.
It is worth noticing that for all its theocratic faults, Iran is a far freer and more democratic society than Iran, and in terms of proliferation, the Islamic republic has been an importer rather than a consumer of missile technology, unlike cash strapped North Korea whose arms industry is all that is left of its vaunted industrial self reliance.
So attacking Iran will not make sense. But neither did the war in Iraq.
There is little or nothing in this agreement that could not have been secured by the administration five years ago. In fact in terms of disarmament, it is getting back to the status quo before the Bush administration effectively reneged on the agreement. The Koreans wanted respect –normalization of relations and a guarantee that the US would not attack them, and for the price of a damp squid of a nuclear test, now they have it. If the deal goes through, that is what Washington has now offered along with lifting the financial restrictions.
It is being presented as a triumph of American diplomacy, but that is true only if we consider it the triumph of Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill in getting the White House to see sense, as much as it was a success in cajoling North Korea to the table. But even then, DPKR wanted to meet the Americans at the table all along, so whose triumph is it.
If reality really has connected, Washington will now follow up with a similar deal with Iran. But it won’t. Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council member revealed in Washington Wednesday that in 2003 Teheran offered normalization when the moderate Rafsanjani was in office. Describing it as a “serious proposal, a serious effort,” at rapprochement delivered through the Swiss embassy in Teheran. It was turned down, by both Rice and Bush, Leverett claims.
I suspect that this deal was not designed as a precedent for Iran. On the contrary, the intention is to free resources for attacking Iran. Looking at the renewal of spurious revelations of Iranian involvement in Iraq against the US, it seems that the closest the White House has come to sanity is to realize that the American military power is severely overstretched. Action against North Korea was not on the cards because neither South Korea nor China would tolerate it, and even Japan, with real issues against Pyongyang, would not want to see an Iraqi style imbroglio across the Sea of Japan, let alone a possible low level nuclear exchange.
So the administration is almost certainly cutting its losses in Korea to concentrate on Iran where it does have willing platforms and covert allies. It is not totally irrelevant that totalitarian and despotic as it is, North Korea poses no threat to Israel. Of course, in reality, neither is Iran. But while the administration may have had a brief, tangential relationship with reality over North Korea, it will normal non-reality based operations.
It is worth noticing that for all its theocratic faults, Iran is a far freer and more democratic society than Iran, and in terms of proliferation, the Islamic republic has been an importer rather than a consumer of missile technology, unlike cash strapped North Korea whose arms industry is all that is left of its vaunted industrial self reliance.
So attacking Iran will not make sense. But neither did the war in Iraq.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
SCANDAL - WHAT SCANDAL?
I have been busy, speaking elsewhere, being crowned by my dentist, and meeting deadlines - my Guardian Comment is Free piece on Kosovo should be up by now and another one is already cooking.
So maybe I missed the outraged punditry of Charles Krauthammer, Claudia Rossett and the rest of the Fox UN-hunting team at the re-revelation that the US Occupation authoriities have still not been able to explain what they did with the $12 billion or so surplus that the UN handed over from the Oil For Food program to the Iraq Development Fund.
The Manhattan DA reveals an indictment of Benon Sevan for allegedly getting a couple of thousand dollars in kickbacks - which he still denies - but Bush's pal Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector still can't find out where the missing billions went.
All kudos to Henry Waxman for reviving this particular moribund equine that I have been flagellatiing for two years. And shame on the press that continue to ignore it while accepting, either implicitly or enthusiastically the NeoCon witchhunt against the UN while ignoring the real witches flying their broomsticks in formation in occupied Iraq.
So maybe I missed the outraged punditry of Charles Krauthammer, Claudia Rossett and the rest of the Fox UN-hunting team at the re-revelation that the US Occupation authoriities have still not been able to explain what they did with the $12 billion or so surplus that the UN handed over from the Oil For Food program to the Iraq Development Fund.
The Manhattan DA reveals an indictment of Benon Sevan for allegedly getting a couple of thousand dollars in kickbacks - which he still denies - but Bush's pal Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector still can't find out where the missing billions went.
All kudos to Henry Waxman for reviving this particular moribund equine that I have been flagellatiing for two years. And shame on the press that continue to ignore it while accepting, either implicitly or enthusiastically the NeoCon witchhunt against the UN while ignoring the real witches flying their broomsticks in formation in occupied Iraq.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Invade Canada!
This was my post on the Guardian "Comment is Free" yesterday. Many Canadians seem happy to be mentioned in any capacity. Others distressed that we may be giving the White House ideas. And some Americans still seem to think that irony was what they used to make in Pittsburgh.
Feel free to join in there!
The heat is on
For Americans, there's one obvious solution to the problems caused by global warming: invade Canada.
Ian Williams
January 31, 2007
The heat is on President Bush over global warming; we can expect a Road to Damascus conversion soon. Who says this guy is not responsive to the popular mood?
But based on his track record, we can expect the form of his conversion to be distinct and innovative. He acknowledged electoral discontent over his failure in Iraq by sending in 24,000 more troops and limbering up for a war in Iran. In short, when in a muddy hole, keep digging until you find the exit.
So we can expect the president to give some verbal recognition of global warming, and to accompany it with some forthright domestic measures - like a temporary twenty-five year tariff on hybrid cars to allow Detroit's SUV's to catch up on fuel efficiency, and a reduction of taxes on gasoline to limit the effects of climbing oil prices on motor-voters.
But there are steps that the US must take internationally as well. Increasing temperatures and rising sea levels may make many parts of the United States uninhabitable. I mean, who would buy Florida real estate on a long lease? New Orleans is already written off, and the rest of the Gulf area can't be far behind.
About the only part of US business that is competitive internationally is corn and grain production, and rising temperatures may soon lay waste those fields of waving corn. Clearly strong measures are called for. Once again, Manifest Destiny beckons.
The United States has put a lot of energy into bringing about global warming, and the main beneficiaries of our hard work are a bunch of ungrateful foreigners. Canada's grain-growing capacity is going to expand as America's shrinks. Canada's northern territories are emerging from the ice and will soon be fertile meadows - all as a result of patriotic Americans burning gas selflessly, regardless of the cost.
As the Great Plains become dustbowls and the southern states and our coastlines go under water, Americans will be driven to ducking under the wires on the 49th parallel and fleeing north to escape the heat.
Can we tolerate American citizens being turned back by hardhearted Canadian Mounties, or hunted down and deported by Canuck vigilantes? Surely not. Fortunately, the White House is believed to be considering a Nine Step Global Warming Recovery programme:
One: Canadian based forces in 1813 burnt down the White House and the Capitol - a terrorist attack for which payback time is long overdue.
Two: As the strict constructionists in the Supreme Court are well aware, Article XI of the Articles of Confederation provides for the incorporation of Canada into the Union, and just because our last attempt in 1812 was unsuccessful should not put a cap on the business.
Three: Canada is harboring Maher Arar, a Muslim terrorist with documented connections to Syrian torturers, and even paying him compensation, defying the efforts of our Ambassador David Wilkins to set them right.
Four: Canada refused to send troops to Iraq.
Five: Canada is harboring deserters from the US forces, who can't get the same safe haven in the Texas Air National Guard that they used to.
Six: Canada cannot fight terrorism effectively because it has abolished the death penalty.
Seven: Canada has a socialistic health service.
Eight: A Lot of Canadians speak French.
Nine: Canada has lots and lots of oil. And pipelines.
The logic is inescapable. Fellow Americans, there is only one way forward from here: go north!
Feel free to join in there!
The heat is on
For Americans, there's one obvious solution to the problems caused by global warming: invade Canada.
Ian Williams
January 31, 2007
The heat is on President Bush over global warming; we can expect a Road to Damascus conversion soon. Who says this guy is not responsive to the popular mood?
But based on his track record, we can expect the form of his conversion to be distinct and innovative. He acknowledged electoral discontent over his failure in Iraq by sending in 24,000 more troops and limbering up for a war in Iran. In short, when in a muddy hole, keep digging until you find the exit.
So we can expect the president to give some verbal recognition of global warming, and to accompany it with some forthright domestic measures - like a temporary twenty-five year tariff on hybrid cars to allow Detroit's SUV's to catch up on fuel efficiency, and a reduction of taxes on gasoline to limit the effects of climbing oil prices on motor-voters.
But there are steps that the US must take internationally as well. Increasing temperatures and rising sea levels may make many parts of the United States uninhabitable. I mean, who would buy Florida real estate on a long lease? New Orleans is already written off, and the rest of the Gulf area can't be far behind.
About the only part of US business that is competitive internationally is corn and grain production, and rising temperatures may soon lay waste those fields of waving corn. Clearly strong measures are called for. Once again, Manifest Destiny beckons.
The United States has put a lot of energy into bringing about global warming, and the main beneficiaries of our hard work are a bunch of ungrateful foreigners. Canada's grain-growing capacity is going to expand as America's shrinks. Canada's northern territories are emerging from the ice and will soon be fertile meadows - all as a result of patriotic Americans burning gas selflessly, regardless of the cost.
As the Great Plains become dustbowls and the southern states and our coastlines go under water, Americans will be driven to ducking under the wires on the 49th parallel and fleeing north to escape the heat.
Can we tolerate American citizens being turned back by hardhearted Canadian Mounties, or hunted down and deported by Canuck vigilantes? Surely not. Fortunately, the White House is believed to be considering a Nine Step Global Warming Recovery programme:
One: Canadian based forces in 1813 burnt down the White House and the Capitol - a terrorist attack for which payback time is long overdue.
Two: As the strict constructionists in the Supreme Court are well aware, Article XI of the Articles of Confederation provides for the incorporation of Canada into the Union, and just because our last attempt in 1812 was unsuccessful should not put a cap on the business.
Three: Canada is harboring Maher Arar, a Muslim terrorist with documented connections to Syrian torturers, and even paying him compensation, defying the efforts of our Ambassador David Wilkins to set them right.
Four: Canada refused to send troops to Iraq.
Five: Canada is harboring deserters from the US forces, who can't get the same safe haven in the Texas Air National Guard that they used to.
Six: Canada cannot fight terrorism effectively because it has abolished the death penalty.
Seven: Canada has a socialistic health service.
Eight: A Lot of Canadians speak French.
Nine: Canada has lots and lots of oil. And pipelines.
The logic is inescapable. Fellow Americans, there is only one way forward from here: go north!
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Lost in Space - Full Text
Lost in space
The US reprimand to China over its successful anti-satellite test has all the sincerity of King Herod leading a Unicef fund-raiser.
Ian Williams
Here's the full text of the Guardian Comment is Free piece for those who were too lazy or technologically challenged to click on the link.
January 19, 2007
The US reprimand to China over its successful anti-satellite test has all the sincerity of King Herod leading a Unicef fund-raiser. As inventors of the rocket, the Chinese have every bit as much tenure in orbit as the country that belatedly followed Sputnik into space.
Of course no sensible person can be happy at Beijing's action, not least if you look at the 900-plus missiles aimed at Taiwan. But test was entirely legal - and it is so because the United States has consistently blocked any international convention to "limit its freedom of manoeuvre" in space.
Restated only last year, US military doctrine is that it should control beyond earth orbit, and make sure nobody else can challenge it, which is why it will not accept any treaty demilitarizing space.
This has been yet another of those remarkable obsessions of the Republican right and neocons, going back to the Reagan administration.
One of the Bush administration's first reactions to the distinctly sub-orbital airliners smashing into the World Trade Center was to boost spending on the "Strategic Defence Initiative" - Star Wars. The US has spent well over $100 billion so far on it. And so far it has fairly consistently failed to hit the missile equivalent of a brightly painted fish glued in a barrel.
MIT professor Theodore A Postol has over the years unveiled the outright deceptions perpetrated by the Pentagon to claim success from abject failure in the hugely expensive anti-missile programme. Now, since it all depends on US spy satellites, the Chinese test threatens to bring the whole faith-based programme tumbling out of orbit to impact on solid reality.
Indeed, for a hugely expensive military failure, its only competition in costliness has been the Iraq War itself - which is of course one of the reasons that the Chinese could persuade themselves that the test was necessary.
This obsession with outer space, shown in his decision to invade Mars, is almost as mysterious as George W Bush's fixation on Iraq. Ironically his Yale Transcript gave him his very lowest score in Astronomy with 69, even lower than his 71 in political science classes.
Even so, if you sometimes suspect that Darth Vader is stalking the corridors of a reality-challenged White House and Pentagon, you may not be so far wrong. Along with the "Strategic Defence Initiative," Bush's Moon and Mars projects are an almost certainly motivated by an attempt to ensure that the Force is always with US.
And the genesis of the Star Wars programme was indeed science fiction. Hard-right hard-SF writer Larry Niven boasted: "The scheme that drove the Soviet Union bankrupt was first-drafted at my house in Tarzana, by about fifty good people invited and led by Jerry Pournelle (another SF writer of similar views). We were gathered to build a space program, with costs and schedules, to submit to Ronald Reagan via his science adviser. We generated the Space Defense Initiative (or 'Star Wars' if you didn't like it.)"
Niven recounted that other SF writers, like Robert A Heinlein (Starship Troopers!) and Poul Anderson, along with retired general Daniel Graham and the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, joined lobbyists from companies like Boeing in the "Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy", which he credits with Reagan's 1983 Star Wars speech.
As Frances FitzGerald author of Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, put it laconically about the myth of Star Wars crashing the Evil Empire: "The evidence for this proposition is wanting." She explains, "Soviet spending on strategic weapons was a very small fraction of the overall Soviet military budget."
The people who invented Iraqi WMD's had a dry run on this one. FitzGerald noted that the analysts who actually looked at the data concluded that Moscow's weapons procurement programs were flat, while its spending on strategic missile systems had actually dropped by 40% from 1976 to 1983. The administration suppressed those reports in favour of more threatening and politically correct estimates, just as later Star Wars test failures were rewritten as successes.
Other countries have every right to protest the Chinese test, which presumably has showered yet more debris to threaten satellites in orbit. But until they turn on Washington and demand that it supports effective demilitarization of space, they are allies in hypocrisy and fantasy with the Bush administration.
The US reprimand to China over its successful anti-satellite test has all the sincerity of King Herod leading a Unicef fund-raiser.
Ian Williams
Here's the full text of the Guardian Comment is Free piece for those who were too lazy or technologically challenged to click on the link.
January 19, 2007
The US reprimand to China over its successful anti-satellite test has all the sincerity of King Herod leading a Unicef fund-raiser. As inventors of the rocket, the Chinese have every bit as much tenure in orbit as the country that belatedly followed Sputnik into space.
Of course no sensible person can be happy at Beijing's action, not least if you look at the 900-plus missiles aimed at Taiwan. But test was entirely legal - and it is so because the United States has consistently blocked any international convention to "limit its freedom of manoeuvre" in space.
Restated only last year, US military doctrine is that it should control beyond earth orbit, and make sure nobody else can challenge it, which is why it will not accept any treaty demilitarizing space.
This has been yet another of those remarkable obsessions of the Republican right and neocons, going back to the Reagan administration.
One of the Bush administration's first reactions to the distinctly sub-orbital airliners smashing into the World Trade Center was to boost spending on the "Strategic Defence Initiative" - Star Wars. The US has spent well over $100 billion so far on it. And so far it has fairly consistently failed to hit the missile equivalent of a brightly painted fish glued in a barrel.
MIT professor Theodore A Postol has over the years unveiled the outright deceptions perpetrated by the Pentagon to claim success from abject failure in the hugely expensive anti-missile programme. Now, since it all depends on US spy satellites, the Chinese test threatens to bring the whole faith-based programme tumbling out of orbit to impact on solid reality.
Indeed, for a hugely expensive military failure, its only competition in costliness has been the Iraq War itself - which is of course one of the reasons that the Chinese could persuade themselves that the test was necessary.
This obsession with outer space, shown in his decision to invade Mars, is almost as mysterious as George W Bush's fixation on Iraq. Ironically his Yale Transcript gave him his very lowest score in Astronomy with 69, even lower than his 71 in political science classes.
Even so, if you sometimes suspect that Darth Vader is stalking the corridors of a reality-challenged White House and Pentagon, you may not be so far wrong. Along with the "Strategic Defence Initiative," Bush's Moon and Mars projects are an almost certainly motivated by an attempt to ensure that the Force is always with US.
And the genesis of the Star Wars programme was indeed science fiction. Hard-right hard-SF writer Larry Niven boasted: "The scheme that drove the Soviet Union bankrupt was first-drafted at my house in Tarzana, by about fifty good people invited and led by Jerry Pournelle (another SF writer of similar views). We were gathered to build a space program, with costs and schedules, to submit to Ronald Reagan via his science adviser. We generated the Space Defense Initiative (or 'Star Wars' if you didn't like it.)"
Niven recounted that other SF writers, like Robert A Heinlein (Starship Troopers!) and Poul Anderson, along with retired general Daniel Graham and the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, joined lobbyists from companies like Boeing in the "Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy", which he credits with Reagan's 1983 Star Wars speech.
As Frances FitzGerald author of Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, put it laconically about the myth of Star Wars crashing the Evil Empire: "The evidence for this proposition is wanting." She explains, "Soviet spending on strategic weapons was a very small fraction of the overall Soviet military budget."
The people who invented Iraqi WMD's had a dry run on this one. FitzGerald noted that the analysts who actually looked at the data concluded that Moscow's weapons procurement programs were flat, while its spending on strategic missile systems had actually dropped by 40% from 1976 to 1983. The administration suppressed those reports in favour of more threatening and politically correct estimates, just as later Star Wars test failures were rewritten as successes.
Other countries have every right to protest the Chinese test, which presumably has showered yet more debris to threaten satellites in orbit. But until they turn on Washington and demand that it supports effective demilitarization of space, they are allies in hypocrisy and fantasy with the Bush administration.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Star Wars. Darth Vader in the White House.
My latest Guardian Comment is Free piece suggests that US protests over the Chinese shooting down of their own satellite, "has all the sincerity of King Herod leading a UNICEF fundraiser."
It retraces the science-fiction behind the GOP's Star Wars obsession. At least this one is not theological!
It retraces the science-fiction behind the GOP's Star Wars obsession. At least this one is not theological!
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Attack on Iran Will Run
Mission to be Accomplished for Deserter-in-Chief
When, back in 2002, I said that the US would attack Iraq, people thought I was alarmist. I was not. I was alarmed. I am getting the same feeling now about Iran. (Indeed my alarm alternates between Syria and Iran) Iran will be attacked. And it will be a disaster. It may also be that the famous "surge" is actually in preparation for Iran rather than Iraq.
It really is déjà vu all over again. In the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the steady drum beat from the NeoCons and quasi-Likudnik Israel supporters, and the statements from the Bush administration showed that they were intent on doing it. And of course there was the matter of military resources being diverted away from Afghanistan towards Iraq.
President Bush is certainly consistent. He supported the continuation of the Vietnam War from the safety of the Texas Air National Guard, and even when he was AWOL in Arkansas. He has had a lot of support in his irrational endeavours in Iraq – and does now for Iran. History shows that George W. Bush, executioner in chief of Texas, does not need a long rope to lose his head.
And now he supports continuing the war in Iraq from the safety of the White House and even when he is on his frequent vacations in his ranch in Texas. He is not going to give up on this war, no matter how many people die to exorcise whatever deep personal “Rosebud” the Deserter-in-Chief has impelling him forward to match his father's genuine war record.
Israel wanted to remove the only Arab state in the area that posed any kind of threat. Since then it has been claimed that Sharon warned Bush against regime change, but one cannot be totally convinced. The Israeli prime minister may have warned against any hopes for democracy, but he is conveniently unavailable to testify and in any case, there was near unanimity in support of the war from the most fervent Israeli supporters in USA.
However, despite the considerable power of the Israeli lobby, it could not and cannot force the US into a war that is against American interests – but it can provide very useful backing for others who want that.
So was it oil? I think not. While the current laws being forced on the Iraqis would put the Western oil companies in a very favoured position, the costs outweigh the benefits. The oil companies could buy the Iraqi oil whoever was extracting it.
The Neocons certainly are vociferous supporters of Israel, but to be fair, they also have other ideological motives. As the (far removed) ideological descendants of Trotskyist schisms in New York, they genuinely believed that the US Army could take democracy to the Middle East on the bayonets of the US Army, in the same way that Leon Trotsky thought he could take socialism to Warsaw on the bayonets of the Red Army.
The Neocons could also call upon a group of idealist liberal interventionists, including Tony Blair, who genuinely, and correctly, thought that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant, but who, patently incorrectly, thought that his removal would make all well. To win these over, the Neocons had to hold their noses while the administration and Blair invoked the UN and the resolutions that Saddam was defying. That paper trail of resolutions was crucial in giving the attack some residual legitimacy to persuade some over-scrupulously legalistic types, like Britain's Attorney General.
Gideon Rachman in today's Financial Times succinctly shows the role of the Neocons in the media in advancing all these separate arguments, and we could rely on them not to draw attention to the other countries that were defying UN resolutions, whether Israel in the territories, or Morocco in Western Sahara.
While their active role in spreading the Big Lie: that Saddam Hussein was behind Al Qaeda and 9-11 was crucial, even more important was the silence of most of the media in the face of that. This was a very active passivity in its way, as the Victorian poet put it in his version of the Ten Commandments.
"Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly"
Certainly few of the major media were taking shot at this duck when it started doing a victory roll over the Potomac.
So what about Iran? All the signs are the same. Iran is being demonized to the extent where fair-minded people could almost feel sympathy for the authoritarian theocrats running it.
The US has twisted the elbows of the Security Council to secure a resolution that Iran will refuse to accept, giving Bush (and maybe even Blair) a UN-blue figleaf of a legal justification for action.
Iran is to blame for the "setbacks" in Iraq: even though it is the Iranian-leaning Shi'as who are the (very expedient) backbone of the Baghdad government.
Iran is behind Al-Qaeda: which is as likely as a conspiracy between the Reverend Ian Paisley and the Pope. Israeli supporters are jumping up and down demanding action.
Iran has weapons of mass destruction: just like Iraq, and despite continual reports from the IAEA and other intelligence agencies suggesting that it has none.
US forces are being directed to the Gulf – and there is talk of a green light, or at least not a red light from the Bush administration to the Israelis to attack using bunker busting bombs on Iran (see Sunday Times ).
That may appeal to some in Washington as a disclaimable act. However, the horror of crossing the nuclear threshold would be apparent to the rest of the world. So would American complicity if, for example, the Israeli planes attacked across Iraq without challenge from the USAF, or indeed if the US did not immediately impose sanctions against Israel for using nuclear weapons.
One suspects that if the US is encouraging the Israelis, the purpose of the US forces in the region is to contain Iranian retaliation, and that the "Surge" also has this in mind. This was, after all, the administration that took resources chasing after Bin Laden in Afghanistan and diverted them to Iraq.
However the real effect of the "surge" will be to provide a lot more targets for the Shi'a militia who are presently not attacking Coalition forces but definitely will be.
The effects of the attack will be much more profound than the attack on Iraq, and it is all down to the President. He is the catalyst that unites all the various factors in this deranged enterprise.
To exorcise the ghosts of George W. Bush's cowardice during Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of American and US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf will be put at risk – along with the world's oil supplies, the dollar and the world economy. And that could pale into insignificance at the future consequences of a complete collapse of nuclear non-proliferation efforts if Israel crosses the nuclear threshold with, or indeed even without, American complicity.
It is, of course, all totally irrational – but this White House is on the record as thinking that reality can be moulded to its desires. It is also on the record, most recently from the "Surge" in seeing that it learns nothing from its demonstrable failures.
And of course, to refresh your memory on W's skimpy war record, click on "Deserter."
When, back in 2002, I said that the US would attack Iraq, people thought I was alarmist. I was not. I was alarmed. I am getting the same feeling now about Iran. (Indeed my alarm alternates between Syria and Iran) Iran will be attacked. And it will be a disaster. It may also be that the famous "surge" is actually in preparation for Iran rather than Iraq.
It really is déjà vu all over again. In the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the steady drum beat from the NeoCons and quasi-Likudnik Israel supporters, and the statements from the Bush administration showed that they were intent on doing it. And of course there was the matter of military resources being diverted away from Afghanistan towards Iraq.
President Bush is certainly consistent. He supported the continuation of the Vietnam War from the safety of the Texas Air National Guard, and even when he was AWOL in Arkansas. He has had a lot of support in his irrational endeavours in Iraq – and does now for Iran. History shows that George W. Bush, executioner in chief of Texas, does not need a long rope to lose his head.
And now he supports continuing the war in Iraq from the safety of the White House and even when he is on his frequent vacations in his ranch in Texas. He is not going to give up on this war, no matter how many people die to exorcise whatever deep personal “Rosebud” the Deserter-in-Chief has impelling him forward to match his father's genuine war record.
Israel wanted to remove the only Arab state in the area that posed any kind of threat. Since then it has been claimed that Sharon warned Bush against regime change, but one cannot be totally convinced. The Israeli prime minister may have warned against any hopes for democracy, but he is conveniently unavailable to testify and in any case, there was near unanimity in support of the war from the most fervent Israeli supporters in USA.
However, despite the considerable power of the Israeli lobby, it could not and cannot force the US into a war that is against American interests – but it can provide very useful backing for others who want that.
So was it oil? I think not. While the current laws being forced on the Iraqis would put the Western oil companies in a very favoured position, the costs outweigh the benefits. The oil companies could buy the Iraqi oil whoever was extracting it.
The Neocons certainly are vociferous supporters of Israel, but to be fair, they also have other ideological motives. As the (far removed) ideological descendants of Trotskyist schisms in New York, they genuinely believed that the US Army could take democracy to the Middle East on the bayonets of the US Army, in the same way that Leon Trotsky thought he could take socialism to Warsaw on the bayonets of the Red Army.
The Neocons could also call upon a group of idealist liberal interventionists, including Tony Blair, who genuinely, and correctly, thought that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant, but who, patently incorrectly, thought that his removal would make all well. To win these over, the Neocons had to hold their noses while the administration and Blair invoked the UN and the resolutions that Saddam was defying. That paper trail of resolutions was crucial in giving the attack some residual legitimacy to persuade some over-scrupulously legalistic types, like Britain's Attorney General.
Gideon Rachman in today's Financial Times succinctly shows the role of the Neocons in the media in advancing all these separate arguments, and we could rely on them not to draw attention to the other countries that were defying UN resolutions, whether Israel in the territories, or Morocco in Western Sahara.
While their active role in spreading the Big Lie: that Saddam Hussein was behind Al Qaeda and 9-11 was crucial, even more important was the silence of most of the media in the face of that. This was a very active passivity in its way, as the Victorian poet put it in his version of the Ten Commandments.
"Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly"
Certainly few of the major media were taking shot at this duck when it started doing a victory roll over the Potomac.
So what about Iran? All the signs are the same. Iran is being demonized to the extent where fair-minded people could almost feel sympathy for the authoritarian theocrats running it.
The US has twisted the elbows of the Security Council to secure a resolution that Iran will refuse to accept, giving Bush (and maybe even Blair) a UN-blue figleaf of a legal justification for action.
Iran is to blame for the "setbacks" in Iraq: even though it is the Iranian-leaning Shi'as who are the (very expedient) backbone of the Baghdad government.
Iran is behind Al-Qaeda: which is as likely as a conspiracy between the Reverend Ian Paisley and the Pope. Israeli supporters are jumping up and down demanding action.
Iran has weapons of mass destruction: just like Iraq, and despite continual reports from the IAEA and other intelligence agencies suggesting that it has none.
US forces are being directed to the Gulf – and there is talk of a green light, or at least not a red light from the Bush administration to the Israelis to attack using bunker busting bombs on Iran (see Sunday Times ).
That may appeal to some in Washington as a disclaimable act. However, the horror of crossing the nuclear threshold would be apparent to the rest of the world. So would American complicity if, for example, the Israeli planes attacked across Iraq without challenge from the USAF, or indeed if the US did not immediately impose sanctions against Israel for using nuclear weapons.
One suspects that if the US is encouraging the Israelis, the purpose of the US forces in the region is to contain Iranian retaliation, and that the "Surge" also has this in mind. This was, after all, the administration that took resources chasing after Bin Laden in Afghanistan and diverted them to Iraq.
However the real effect of the "surge" will be to provide a lot more targets for the Shi'a militia who are presently not attacking Coalition forces but definitely will be.
The effects of the attack will be much more profound than the attack on Iraq, and it is all down to the President. He is the catalyst that unites all the various factors in this deranged enterprise.
To exorcise the ghosts of George W. Bush's cowardice during Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of American and US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf will be put at risk – along with the world's oil supplies, the dollar and the world economy. And that could pale into insignificance at the future consequences of a complete collapse of nuclear non-proliferation efforts if Israel crosses the nuclear threshold with, or indeed even without, American complicity.
It is, of course, all totally irrational – but this White House is on the record as thinking that reality can be moulded to its desires. It is also on the record, most recently from the "Surge" in seeing that it learns nothing from its demonstrable failures.
And of course, to refresh your memory on W's skimpy war record, click on "Deserter."
Monday, January 08, 2007
A Clark's Tale
I really do think there is a solid case for impeaching George W. Bush – and Dick Cheney as well come to think of it. But when I got an email passed on from Ramsey Clark, asking me to support his impeachment campaign, I had to demur.
There are many good reasons for opposing the war, but none of them involve the innocence of Saddam Hussein, Clark's erstwhile client. Bush lied about the war. The Bush dynasty covered up their complicity in Saddam's crimes, but that does not exonerate the latter.
Ramsey Clark has simply no credibility on this matter. He has a consistently recidivist record of defending war criminals, tyrants and butchers from Milosevic to Saddam. My article on Clark in Salon in 1999 still holds in still holds, and if anything, he has probably gone down hill since.
There were legitimate war resisters in the Second World War. Few of them had the bad taste to defend Hitler and Mussolini, yet what is about so much of what passes for the Left in America that they are so undiscriminating. They ally themselves with supporters of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in Rwanda, and now the butcher of Kurdistan. It is perfectly acceptably, and indeed politically much more sensible to recognize that the US war can still be wrong even though Saddam Hussein was indeed an evil dictator.
And what is worse, Clark is a lousy lawyer. For example, in his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, aligned with Neocon sentiment against multinational tribunals -- somewhat ironically for a case originating in Texas -- said his client faced execution if extradited. Unlike Texas, the Tribunal, of course, has no death penalty, and indeed when it found Ntakirutimana guilty of participating in the killing of hundreds who had sought refuge in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, it only sentenced him to ten years – about what he would get for a driving offence while black in Texas.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Clark's clients are all found guilty are imprisoned, die in prison or are executed. I would sooner trust him with brain surgery than with drawing up credible articles of impeachment. I groan when I see him representing war resisters from the forces, seeing any legal defense disappear in a cloud of Neo-Trotsykite rhetoric inspired by his sponsors.
There are many good reasons for opposing the war, but none of them involve the innocence of Saddam Hussein, Clark's erstwhile client. Bush lied about the war. The Bush dynasty covered up their complicity in Saddam's crimes, but that does not exonerate the latter.
Ramsey Clark has simply no credibility on this matter. He has a consistently recidivist record of defending war criminals, tyrants and butchers from Milosevic to Saddam. My article on Clark in Salon in 1999 still holds in still holds, and if anything, he has probably gone down hill since.
There were legitimate war resisters in the Second World War. Few of them had the bad taste to defend Hitler and Mussolini, yet what is about so much of what passes for the Left in America that they are so undiscriminating. They ally themselves with supporters of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in Rwanda, and now the butcher of Kurdistan. It is perfectly acceptably, and indeed politically much more sensible to recognize that the US war can still be wrong even though Saddam Hussein was indeed an evil dictator.
And what is worse, Clark is a lousy lawyer. For example, in his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, aligned with Neocon sentiment against multinational tribunals -- somewhat ironically for a case originating in Texas -- said his client faced execution if extradited. Unlike Texas, the Tribunal, of course, has no death penalty, and indeed when it found Ntakirutimana guilty of participating in the killing of hundreds who had sought refuge in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, it only sentenced him to ten years – about what he would get for a driving offence while black in Texas.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Clark's clients are all found guilty are imprisoned, die in prison or are executed. I would sooner trust him with brain surgery than with drawing up credible articles of impeachment. I groan when I see him representing war resisters from the forces, seeing any legal defense disappear in a cloud of Neo-Trotsykite rhetoric inspired by his sponsors.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Worse than Criminal- Stupid
Napoleon's talk of liberation of other countries soon turned into chaos and oppression as well. It was the hasty execution of another high-ranking threat to an aggressive regime that led Talleyrand, the French statesman, to say "That was worse than a crime; it was a mistake." In 1804, Napoleon had sent a snatch squad across the border and "rendered" the Duke of Enghien, one of the last of the Bourbons who was then executed after a hastily convened kangaroo military tribunal.
The echoes are deafening with the sordid execution of Saddam Hussein, of whom it must be said, nothing became him like his going.
Early media accounts carried the interpretation of one Iraqi official who claimed that he saw fear in the eyes of the victim. In contrast, on the grainy cell phone video and the officially released version, Saddam Hussein maintained his dignity when all around showed none.
With the help of a ghoulish participant voyeur with a cell-phone camera, those whom the US has put in power have made a martyr of a mass murderer. Congratulations are due. To hang someone, in such a sordid ambience, on the eve of the great Feast of Sacrifice, with a Koran in his hand, the Islamic declaration of faith on his lips, while the undisciplined bunch of thugs crowding the execution chamber heckled and chanted sectarian Shi'a slogans…. Really, short of inviting the Israelis to pull the lever, there is little more they could have done to vindicate the tyrant.
After four years of occupation, the US has succeeded in handing over the reins of power to a government that is so infiltrated with sectarian militia that it could not restrain them, nor even stop one of them poking his cell-phone under the trap door to catch the last unruly moments. Thanks to the technophile ghoul we can now hear why the official video was released without a soundtrack.
They even made Silvio Berlusconi seem saintly. Doubtless sensitized by the treatment of his political forebear Benito Mussolini at the hands of a lynch mob, he decried the execution as a betrayal of the civilization that Italian troops had been invited to take to Iraq. He was, in his own rightist way, entirely right. Compare that with the silence of known death penalty opponent Tony Blair, or the Pontius Pilate behaviour of British Foreign Secretary Margaret Becket, who said it was up to the Iraqis, perhaps forgetting Blair's retrospective attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq by saying it was to put a stop to the barbarism of the Saddam regime.
It is now claimed that the US tried to stop the execution being held so precipitately… but George W Bush is every bit as guilty as if he had personally tightened the noose. I have yet to hear a single convincing explanation for the invasion of Iraq, and the trial did not enlighten us at all. But throughout, there has been some deeply personal motivation on the part of George W. Bush against Saddam. "He tried to kill my father," Bush claimed in 2003 and without getting too Freudian, one can see that the wastrel draft-dodging frat boy did sincerely want to vindicate himself against his father's genuine war record.
But officially, Saddam was hanged for a mass execution in 1982. That was a very expedient charge. As I have said before, it was picked very carefully, and it was not just Republican prejudice against multinational tribunals that led them to conduct an in-house trial.
In an international tribunal he could have called on witnesses to testify how much support he had had from the US. He killed far more people after1982, and the US went on to support him diplomatically, financially and militarily for the duration of the long bloody war of attrition with Iran. It covered for him while he gassed the Kurds, and killed untold thousands of his opponents.
The US cynically incited the Kurds and Shi'a to rise after the first Gulf War, and then equally cynically abandoned them to their fate at the hands of the regime.
But think of the things that Saddam Hussein was not hanged for. He did not in any way assist or condone the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, but dearly hath he paid for the Bush propaganda machine's association of him with it. And he paid for it on the week when US military dead reached 3,000, over-reaching the dead of 9-11. Not to mention anything up to half a million Iraqis dead, and as many more who have fled their country in fear of the consequences of American liberation. That is a very heavy price to pay for not having anything to do with Al-Qaeda or the World Trade Center. And one hopes that other panderers to Washington around the world draw the lesson of how deeply and murderously ungrateful the new Empire is to client states.
Not to mention how stupid, in converting a genuinely evil and murderous dictator into a martyr. In a crucially placed area, they have created Hobbesian anarchy and call it victory.
The echoes are deafening with the sordid execution of Saddam Hussein, of whom it must be said, nothing became him like his going.
Early media accounts carried the interpretation of one Iraqi official who claimed that he saw fear in the eyes of the victim. In contrast, on the grainy cell phone video and the officially released version, Saddam Hussein maintained his dignity when all around showed none.
With the help of a ghoulish participant voyeur with a cell-phone camera, those whom the US has put in power have made a martyr of a mass murderer. Congratulations are due. To hang someone, in such a sordid ambience, on the eve of the great Feast of Sacrifice, with a Koran in his hand, the Islamic declaration of faith on his lips, while the undisciplined bunch of thugs crowding the execution chamber heckled and chanted sectarian Shi'a slogans…. Really, short of inviting the Israelis to pull the lever, there is little more they could have done to vindicate the tyrant.
After four years of occupation, the US has succeeded in handing over the reins of power to a government that is so infiltrated with sectarian militia that it could not restrain them, nor even stop one of them poking his cell-phone under the trap door to catch the last unruly moments. Thanks to the technophile ghoul we can now hear why the official video was released without a soundtrack.
They even made Silvio Berlusconi seem saintly. Doubtless sensitized by the treatment of his political forebear Benito Mussolini at the hands of a lynch mob, he decried the execution as a betrayal of the civilization that Italian troops had been invited to take to Iraq. He was, in his own rightist way, entirely right. Compare that with the silence of known death penalty opponent Tony Blair, or the Pontius Pilate behaviour of British Foreign Secretary Margaret Becket, who said it was up to the Iraqis, perhaps forgetting Blair's retrospective attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq by saying it was to put a stop to the barbarism of the Saddam regime.
It is now claimed that the US tried to stop the execution being held so precipitately… but George W Bush is every bit as guilty as if he had personally tightened the noose. I have yet to hear a single convincing explanation for the invasion of Iraq, and the trial did not enlighten us at all. But throughout, there has been some deeply personal motivation on the part of George W. Bush against Saddam. "He tried to kill my father," Bush claimed in 2003 and without getting too Freudian, one can see that the wastrel draft-dodging frat boy did sincerely want to vindicate himself against his father's genuine war record.
But officially, Saddam was hanged for a mass execution in 1982. That was a very expedient charge. As I have said before, it was picked very carefully, and it was not just Republican prejudice against multinational tribunals that led them to conduct an in-house trial.
In an international tribunal he could have called on witnesses to testify how much support he had had from the US. He killed far more people after1982, and the US went on to support him diplomatically, financially and militarily for the duration of the long bloody war of attrition with Iran. It covered for him while he gassed the Kurds, and killed untold thousands of his opponents.
The US cynically incited the Kurds and Shi'a to rise after the first Gulf War, and then equally cynically abandoned them to their fate at the hands of the regime.
But think of the things that Saddam Hussein was not hanged for. He did not in any way assist or condone the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, but dearly hath he paid for the Bush propaganda machine's association of him with it. And he paid for it on the week when US military dead reached 3,000, over-reaching the dead of 9-11. Not to mention anything up to half a million Iraqis dead, and as many more who have fled their country in fear of the consequences of American liberation. That is a very heavy price to pay for not having anything to do with Al-Qaeda or the World Trade Center. And one hopes that other panderers to Washington around the world draw the lesson of how deeply and murderously ungrateful the new Empire is to client states.
Not to mention how stupid, in converting a genuinely evil and murderous dictator into a martyr. In a crucially placed area, they have created Hobbesian anarchy and call it victory.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)