(S)UN Spots, Katrina, Dubai & Dubya

The irrationality of some people about the United Nations leads one to impertinent questions. Did a UN peacekeeper wearing nothing but a blue UN helmet jump out of the woodpile today and frighten them when they were children?

The New York Sun led with what has to be one of strangest and stretchiest attacks on Kofi Annan yet. The UN Secretary General had won a half million dollar environmental prize from Dubai and therefore kept silent about the whole ports affair.

Why Annan should adumbrate on the affair at all is a mystery. And since the rest of the article bashes the UN for being anti-Israeli, one could assume that Annan's default position would be pro-Arab and thus supportive of Dubai against the waves of xenophobia slurping oleaginously around the US. Why would Dubai bribe someone who the New York Sun is accusing of being prejudiced in favor of Arabs anyway?

What complicates this perfect conspiracy theory even further is that Annan was donating the prize to charity, as he did, for example the Nobel peace price he won, which personally I think is pretty noble, what with his retirement looming at the end of the year. But then the Sun spots, what about the interest on the money while it is waiting?

Obviously the Sun has Kofi Annan confused with some Congressman or other whose voice and votes await the drop of a lobbyist check.

So consider the news values inherent in the selection of stories. AP last week ran a story that seemed to be confined to the back pages of most papers. Ten years ago, some of the UAE sheiks had sent at least a million dollars to the George H.W. Bush memorial library. Which of course had nothing to do with Dubya's decision to do the right thing by Dubai about the P&O ports takeover.

The AP reported, less than half a year ago, the UAE, including of course Dubai, sent a $100 million in cash donation to the US after Katrina. The Bush administration could have given it to charities for discretionary spending, but instead sent two thirds to FEMA and one third for educational expenditure in the New Orleans region.

To take a sneering tip from the Sun, one cannot help wondering if the checks were just endorsed to Halliburton to save on accounting costs and bank charges.

However, sneering apart, that means is that they took Dubai's generously donated money, and used it to reduce Federal expenditure, in other words to help finance their tax cuts. Think about this carefully. This is not understandable materiel, logistics supports and aid in kind to meet unprecedented shortages.

It was cash. That puts the US in the same position as a third world country that needs budgetary support to carry out its duties to its citizens after a disaster.

Perhaps that is one reason it has taken almost half a year for this news to leak out. At least the administration was not as stupid as Giuliani, who returned a multi-million dollar Arab check because it did not come with a round of applause for Ariel Sharon.

But there are a lot of homeless people from New Orleans who would have thanked the Emirates for their kindness, if any of it had trickled in their direction. So why did the administration keep it secret? And why did it appropriate it for Federal Agencies instead to using it supplement Federal cash?

And while I still think Bush is right about the Dubai World Ports, I do indeed suspect he was right for the wrong reasons, and that he went about it in the same arrogant and secretive way he has transacted most of this administration's business.

Annual Report from George W. Tinytree

This is my Speculator column in the February 2006 IR magazine which is a homage, sort of, to the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett. It's the State of the Union as a CEO's letter to shareholders.
It can be seen in its full graphic glory at
http://www.ianwilliams.info/images/speculator.pdf

The Sage of Texas
Ian Williams passes on this year's letter to shareholders
from the CEO of Tinytree Holdings

Well, it's that time of year again, and our vice president Dick and I were sitting by the fire chewing the fat about the corporation. We don't have time for fooling about with interns at the White House, writing books and all that kind of stuff.

Even during the holidays we were thinking of you all the time here at the ranch, and one of the things we've been mulling is how the media is always so negative, adding all kinds of bull manure to our news releases and advertorials. For example, you may remember that our New Orleans plant took a bit of a beating this past year and, wow, so did we. But it was so unfair!

As part of our streamlining, we'd introduced just-in-time techniques for disaster management. I am not saying there weren't a few hiccups in this pilot program but, even so, events there showed how we had successfully cut the inventory down so we did not have to pay for keeping rescue equipment and personnel hanging around idle most of the year. Did the media give us any credit for that? No, of course not. Those reporters just focused on the few weeks it took us to get things ready.

See what I mean? Negative.

As you know, our strategy is growth by acquisition, and some of our takeovers have been a little bit hostile. The media has been suggesting we did not practice full disclosure when we took over Mesopotamia – but what the heck, we had copyright on that WMD thing. Our experience is that whenever we are considering a hostile takeover, talking about WMDs is better than saying 'underlying synergies', and let me tell you, it's a lot easier to pronounce.

What's more, we were right about unlocking hidden value. All those underlying oil reserves we acquired are now worth twice as much as when we started. To fight back against all this media negativity, our corporate secretary, Condoleezza Wheat, recently went on a European roadshow to see some of our subsidiaries and other stakeholders.

Between you and me, I've had some lectures from her in the past, and I feel sorry for those Europeans. That Condie really knows her stuff. She hasn't allowed any negative remarks about management here, and won't allow it out there, either.

The things people worry about! Our headhunting, interviewing techniques and personnel acquisition policies may be innovative, but they are very, very effective, according to our backroom boys. Of course, the results are proprietary, so I am sure I can rely on the discretion of our American stockholders in not asking too many questions. Not like those French and Germans.

The media also have some folks fretting that we are outsourcing too much. Well, it's no biggie. Alan Greenspan, our CFO, was explaining this to me over a burger recently, and it's fascinating. Did you know that most imports come from abroad? That was a revelation to me. I was pretty worried to begin with, until Alan explained.

The deal is, we get what we need from China and pay for it with paper, which China really likes. At Chinese funerals they burn paper money, so maybe it's a cultural thing.

On a final note, Dick and I can reassure you that when it comes to burning money, our company can hold its head high against any Chinese competition, as a quick glance at the red ink in the annual report will prove. So don't you guys worry your pretty little heads none about that. We're in charge, come high water or hell.

George W Tinytree,
President, chairman and CEO, Tinytree Holdings, Texas

Dubya on Dubai

In Dubyious Battle

I haven't had so much fun since I was invited into the cockpit of a Cubana Airbus and told the pilot to take me to Havana. (He did, but it was a scheduled flight). On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, I declared that George 'Dubya' Bush was right. I was sure it was an accident, but like the proverbial stopped clock, for once he was indeed correct.

(See the link for a somewhat inaccurate transcript where Charles Schumer has become 'Barbara Shumer.' I am happy to accuse the Senator of deserting his principles, but not his gender http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11520458/)

We were of course talking about the invented furor against handing over six American ports to Arab terrorists, or, in the real world, the purchase by Dubai World Ports of the British company P&O, which owned terminals in five ports.

The fuss seems to have originated with the Democrat legislators, who, if not as all-round xenophobic as the Republicans, do not usually have to be pushed hard to grandstand on an anti-Arab platform. While most of their voters, for example, considered the Iraq war a disastrous mistake even before it was started, neither New York Senator Charles Schumer, nor Hilary Clinton have yet to withdraw their support for it. And they led the charge against Dubai, almost the only ally the US has in the region. For a New York politico, the only good Arab is a pilloried one.

Throw together the American fear of terrorism and Arabs, and the resulting heady brew drives out all reasonable discourse. No wonder the Republicans, already wondering whether the Bush administration was a lame duck or a paraplegic parrot, broke ranks to join the silliness.

Anti-Arabism is the only form of racism socially permitted in the US. For example, Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign returned donations from Arab-American groups, and that was ten years before September 11. It is unimaginable for that to happen to any other ethnic group in the USA.

While we now hear many patriotic effusions about any foreigners operating terminals in the ports, no one has shown any signs of apprehension hitherto. A Chinese state owned company has a terminal in Los Angeles for example.

All these politicians who watched American exports disappear as they applauded the off-shoring of manufacturing to China, customer care to India, and going into deep hock to Asian banks, now want to resort to the last refuge of the scoundrel, patriotism.

So hysteria apart, in Dubai, most of the productive economic work is done by expatriates such as American David Sanborn who recently left the offending company to become the U.S. maritime administrator. Brits staff the London headquarters of P&O, and Americans do the port work in the USA. The customs, policing, coast guard are also American.

It is worth remembering that Dubai also owns the Emirates airline, one of the fastest growing in the world, with at least two flights a day, direct from what some people seem to think is terrorist central, straight into New York.

You would never guess that Dubai has never been at war with the US and provides huge logistic backup for US forces in the Gulf. And certainly the White House is unlikely to explain that its allies can do that because, in common with the other Emirates. it is a feudal monarchy that has never bought into the democracy thing, and so does not have to worry about what the Arabs on the ground think.

In contrast, the Britain, home to the previous owners of the ports, once burnt down the White House. (Come back Admiral Cochrane, all is forgiven.)


We should not get dewy eyed at the thought of brave Bush standing up for the underdog. For a start, it would be foolish not to assume that there isn't a dynastic, Texan, or Republican connection between Dubya and Dubai. Halliburton's Dubai subsidiary alone is enough to get any conspiracy theorist a good head of steam.

Even so, in the larger scheme of things, the barking in Congress sends signals across the world. It reinforces the perception that the globalization that successive US administrations have been forcing down other countries' throats, means that they have to allow US companies to buy any asset they want, but that foreigners need not apply in the US itself.

In the Arab world it reinforces the idea that Arabs and Muslims are special, suspected and reviled group. One conclusion for a sensible Arab ruler would be that if he can't spend his dollars in the US, he would be much better off demanding Euros, Yen or gold for his oil. And then we will see what Wall St has to say to Schumer and Clinton.

But in the meantime, the one sane point in the point-scoring is that more should be done on port security. And the solution is simple. Stop pouring hundreds of billions into occupying Iraq and fomenting terrorism, and spend a fraction of it on port security. Sadly, I do not expect to hear it anytime soon from the New York Senatorial delegation.

The Axis of Emulation: Bushido, Bush or Die and All That

Well folks, you owe this one to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and his other guest Claudia Rossett, both dedicated to the principle that if the UN says it's winter, it must be summer. When I was on doing my lion thrown to the Christians act last Thursday, they managed to excoriate the Human Rights Commission for a) not functioning properly, and b) functioning properly over Gitmo. Ironically they correctly condemned the Commission for having human rights violators as members - but did not seem to mind that the US has been practicing "Rendition" to the same torturers. Go Figure.

Ian Williams

Books I am Reading

An imperial power was invading and occupying other countries, and since it was convinced that its troops were invincible, it never bothered with the Geneva Conventions when it took combatants prisoners. It treated them as if it were outside the law.

Welcome to the Bushido Empire of Japan from 1941 to 1945. Welcome to the Bush Empire of America from 2001 to now.

Click to buy

Ulrich Straus's well-timed book, The Anguish of Surrender, is about Japanese prisoners taken in the Second World War, how their own leaders had indoctrinated them, and how the Allies treated them. It is more than an academic treatise on an obscure nook of the past. Even more than most histories it has lessons for today, not least if read in conjunction with the report of the UN Human Rights Commission experts on Guantanamo Bay last Thursday which concluded that "Terrorism suspects should be detained in accordance with criminal procedure that respects the safeguards enshrined in relevant international law." The experts also demanded the detention facility in Guantanamo should be closed, since it was clear that its sole purpose was evade those safeguards.

A reader of either work can only conclude that there was much less externally applied anguish for a captured would-be kamikaze pilot then than there is now for a suspected Taliban. Needless to say, the Bush or Die night crowd, ignoring the recent revelatory pictures from Abu Ghraib, shamelessly attacked the messenger, used the occasion to attack Kofi Annan and the UN.

Author of Anguish of Surrender, Ulrich Straus is a German born Jewish American retired diplomat who is wryly aware of the absurdities of prejudice in his adopted USA, as well as the rest of world. He had spent seven years in Tokyo with his family before coming to the US as war loomed. As an "enemy alien" he was unable to volunteer for military service where he could use his knowledge of Japan, although, with engagingly xenophobic logic, he was still liable for conscription. Despite the bureaucratic obstacles, he managed to enroll in a Japanese language program designed to provide trained linguists for military intelligence. As he points out, the US did not intern him as a German enemy alien, although it did intern all citizens of Japanese origin en masse. The Nisei were highly unlikely to become commissioned officers. Straus finally qualified.

In contrast, almost the only way out of the internment camps for Japanese Americans was to allow themselves to be conscripted to join the armed forces. And even then, as they fought abroad for the four freedoms, their families remained encaged until the end of the war. Then as now, there was a fear of the other. It was as perilous to your civil liberties to look Japanese then as it was to be visibly Muslim now. As feet of clay for idols like FDR go, this has to be a size fifteen..

However, as Straus points out in his fascinating study, the US was scrupulous in its official attachment to the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war when it captured Japanese. I say official, since his research backs up what I have heard from some veterans of the time, that in the immediate heat of battle GI's were less likely to have international law at the forefront of their thoughts and so prisoners were not exactly guaranteed safe transit to the rear.

Nonetheless, his book indicates that the US treatment of Japanese prisoners once they were officially processed, was immeasurably more moral, civilized, and effective than the Troll-like behavior now condoned and encouraged by the White House. Japanese prisoners were fed, clothed and, if wounded, hospitalized alongside wounded GI's. They were not shackled, hooded, sense-deprived, or locked in open cages, let alone subject to the varying degrees of torture from the admitted at Abu Ghraib to the re-defined in Guantanamo.

Since the expectations of capture fostered by the Imperial Japanese command were pretty dire, prisoners' main worry seems to have been how to look each other in the face with the shame of not fighting to the death. However, it seems that many, impressed by the humane conduct of their captors, ended up cooperating to an amazing degree, even in some cases to the point of helping target artillery against their own fortifications, or providing much sought details on the capabilities of the Japanese Navy's super-dreadnoughts. "The fact that humane treatment came as a total surprise only added to its effectiveness," Straus writes. That it is still a total shock six decades later to the US administration is a testament to how vindictiveness can always induce amnesia about historical lessons.

Straus's conclusions deal with the legacy of the Bushido-era no-surrender policy on present and future Japanese policy. "Sooner or later, the issue of how to treat its own and its enemy's POW's will have to be addressed even in a Pacifist Japan," he concludes, correctly, since some Japanese politicians have as much difficulty about addressing their past as some American politicians have in dealing with their present.

However, with the present degree of militaristic hubris and lawlessness of the Supreme Commander of the US forces, one might also almost recommend Straus's book as the core for a guidebook for GI's taken prisoner in the many future wars the White House seems to envisage, since they may be captured by enemies who think that Washington has effectively abrogated its commitment to the Geneva conventions.

There is in fact a clear precedent: as I reminded readers of the previous incarnation of Deadline Pundit on Globalvision.com (http://www.gvnews.net/html/Crisis/gvalert001.html) the Allies tried Wermacht General Alfred Jodl at Nuremburg. The charges included shackling captured Canadian commandos and passing on Hitler's orders that commandos, partisans and the like should not be treated as POW's, refusing them the benefit of a tribunal to determine whether they were in fact enemy combatants.

The Nuremberg Court's judgment said, "Jodl testified he was strongly opposed on moral and legal grounds, but could not refuse to pass it (Hitler's Order) on. He insists he tried to mitigate its harshness in practice by not informing Hitler when it was not carried out."

Nonetheless the Allied judges concluded, "Participation in such crimes as these has never been required of any soldier and he cannot now shield himself behind a mythical requirement of soldierly obedience at all costs as his excuse for commission of these crimes." Jodl was hanged in 1946. Bush was re-elected President in 2004.

Click on "Books I am Reading" link on the left to see my other reviews.

Blair: Tony the Tank Engine heads for another Train Wreck in Iran

The famous 'Special Relationship' between Britain and America is now in its most grovellingly servile form since the dark days of World War II. As a result, there is every indication that, if Prime Minister Tony Blair has his way, British forces will be joining the Americans in some form of military action against Syria or Iran.


Even former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson had the sense and strength to refuse to follow the USA into Vietnam, despite some horrendous arm-twisting by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.It is past time for Britain to reconsider whether the alleged special relationship with the US makes sense any longer for the country or the world. In World War II and its aftermath there were indeed rational arguments for tying Britain's waning fortunes to America. It certainly made more sense than either joining the Axis or signing up for the Warsaw Pact! But since the fall of the Soviet Union, the basic premise of the American Alliance has changed. No longer was the issue the defence of the British Isles against an existential threat, it was a discretionary tie, a linkage to the one power that had the potential to make the world a safer place.

That excuse even made some sense when Bill Clinton was President, when Tony Blair was able occasionally and importantly to affect American policy. Notably, he was able to persuade Clinton to intervene in Kosovo at a time (it seems so long ago) when the only thing the Pentagon was aggressive about was its budget.

There are some on the alleged left who think that Milosevic should have been allowed to carry on murdering his neighbours, but thanks to the intervention in Kosovo, ill-executed though it was because of Clinton's primal fear of American casualties, Milosevic is now in the dock at the Hague and a lot of Kosovars are alive who would not have been if he had remained in power. The results are far from perfect, but much more so than they would have been otherwise.

Even at the UN, for many years Britain served a useful function in acting as a bridge between the US and the rest of the world. It was a position for which it gained some respect, albeit much as one respects sewer cleaners, an essential job but not necessarily a profession that one would aspire to oneself. Sadly, the world's only Superpower is almost as indispensable to the UN as it thinks it is, although it does no service to the UN or to its own diplomatic standing by behaving the way it does.

But when Tony Blair claimed that going along with Bush on his rush to war with Iraq gave him a hand on the steering wheel, it was clear, as I wrote in the time, that he was actually on a runaway train, with no hand on the brake and the complete absence of a steering wheel. From the still smouldering ruins of that train-wreck in Iraq, all the signs are that, despite Jack Straw's resistance, Tony the tank engine is building up steam for another high speed run at the buffers. Even more so than Iraq, in Iran the issues are not of British national interest. Indeed, it is difficult to see what rational American interest there is, either in the attack on Iraq or a putative one on Iran.

Blair's support is a case of slavish pandering to a President who shows clear signs of not being in full possession of his faculties. A real ally of the United States would join the increasing number of Americans, and the vast majority of foreigners, in saying no to the White House ideologues.

There were other signs of how this servile policy is having bad effects. For example, for decades both Tory and Labour governments held firm on some principles, one of which was the application of United Nations resolutions to the Middle East question. Right through Robin Cook's tenure at the Foreign Office, the British supported resolutions that called for their implementation, even in the face of American vetoes. Even Margaret Thatcher voted against her political paramour Ronald Reagan on Middle East issues, without disturbing what many of us thought was an unhealthily close personal relationship.

Former British governments did not see that the presence of a hugely powerful pro-Israeli lobby in Washington was sufficient cause to rewrite International Law, let alone to forget the plight of the Palestinians, for which, after all Britain has more than a little historical responsibility.However, since Robin Cook left, whenever the Americans veto a resolution on Israel and Palestinian issues – and that is pretty much every time one is moved - the British now abstain instead of voting with the rest of the world.

Of course, that may be that the conjoined influence of Blair and Levy as much as dancing to the American tune. But it plays havoc with the European positions. German diplomats complain that while they could hide behind a common European position, for fairly obvious historical reasons, they are not really in a position to appear more pro-Palestinian than the British.We have already seen some of the consequences of this especially spineless approach to Washington. The Palestinian electorate, or least a very substantial proportion of it, passed a vote of no-confidence in Oslo and the Road Map with its vote for Hamas.

It was understandable. Since Oslo, life in the territories, in terms of safety, living standards, and freedom of movement, has nosedived. Israel has broken every commitment it made in the Road Map. And the Europeans have gone along with it, in large part because Britain was acting exactly as De Gaulle feared it would when he vetoed British membership of the European Com, as an American Trojan Horse inside Europe.Even on issues like Kyoto, the Prime Minister shows signs of prevarication in the face of the essentially irrational faith based approach of President Bush.

No one who saw the pig's ear of a policy that the Europeans put up at the time of the Balkan Wars would want to put all of Britain's eggs immediately in the European basket. However, any rational British foreign policy has to move that way in the future. Certainly both the US and Israel, more of whose trade is with Europe than with the US, would be inclined to listen to a unified European position, and such a unified position would be possible if Britain's prime minister were not in some form of feudal bond to the American President.

On the Middle East, on Iraq, Iran, Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, and many other vital issues for Britain, the lesson is the same. In Washington, door mats do not get listened to. They get walked over. It is time that the word 'No' was put back into Britain's diplomatic vocabulary instead of 'Up to a point, President Bush.'

Based on Tribune column, 3 February 2006


In the interests of full disclosure for pseudo-media critics, Ian Williams was paid for many years by British Rail, but it did not influence his opinions of trainwrecks in the slightest.

What Has Oslo Ever Done For Us?

It is actually quite common to dislike your enemies but if you want peace, you have to negotiate with them no matter how unpalatable. The Hamas election turns the tables on the sponsors of the peace process. The world told the Palestinians they had to control their gag reflexes and negotiate in good faith with the Israeli politicians and parties who had given them the King David Hotel bombing, and the massacres of Deir Yaseen and Sabra and Shatila, and who since Oslo have settled tens of thousands of new colonists.

Interestingly, most of the international peacemakers and negotiators have always tried to try to persuade the Palestinian leadership that they had to accommodate themselves to what Israeli public opinion could take. No one listened to Palestinian negotiators when they remonstrated that they too had a public whose opinion mattered.

The Palestinians took a tip from Monty Python's Life of Brian. They asked 'What has Oslo ever done for us?' and instead of listing the roads, the hospitals, the schools and the factories built, they listed the schools and hospitals shelled and occupied by the IDF, the roads blocked, the walls and settlements built, and the high explosive assassinations of Palestinian leaders regardless of collateral civilian life. They listed the growing daily humiliation of unemployment, poverty and harassment.

Understandably, they showed their frustration with Fatah's inability to deliver on the promises of Oslo by turning to Hamas. Fatah has its own baggage of cronyism and inefficiency, but it was really let down by the international community, the so-called Quartet, which allowed Sharon to turn the Road Map into a one way street aimed at the Palestinians. No one who saw the election results in Iran, reflecting the inability of the reformers to get any concessions from the US should have been totally surprised at the result.

Anyone who knows the Middle East also knew that the White House's mantra that democracy would solve all its problems was a fond and deluded pipe dream. Oligarchs and tyrants are much more manipulable. Even if they have exploited it, the assorted leaders of the Arab world did not create popular anger about the plight of the Palestinians. Israeli behavior did. Whenever they have had elections Arab voters have been much more intransigent than their unelected rulers.

It was a fair and democratic election, with a turnout which shames both British and US election winners. Fatah is too strong for Hamas to roll over completely so some compromises there are possible. Who knows? The Palestinian brewery may survive the victory.

So now the Israelis have to negotiate with Hamas if they want peace. Frankly, if they do not want peace, the rest of the world and the US will have to intervene to persuade them, since the consequences are literally terrifying.

The present situation is so unsustainable that even Ariel Sharon realized that it had to change, although his changes were unilateral and, in the long term ineffective. His Bantustan solution was not going to get international recognition, let alone Palestinian cooperation.

Israel can annex the territories, and give their people full citizenship but it will not do so since the demographics mean that it would no longer be a Jewish state. Or it could try its hand at ethnic cleansing, and risk full scale war, not least if the Muslim states really are as close to nuclear capacity as the paranoids keep saying. That should scare even the White House out of its complacency.

But the Hamas victory does offer opportunities. Israel should know that, since it was the Israeli security services that originally encouraged and fostered it as a rival to what they then saw as the more dangerous and secular Fatah. It has agreed ceasefires, although once again the propensity of the Israelis to assassinate its leaders whenever that happens makes one wonder whether the Security Services really want ceasefires.

Before, the Israelis and the Quartet negotiated with Fatah, which could not necessarily deliver Hamas. Now they can negotiate directly with a partner that can deliver, and which has shown signs of pragmatic accommodation.

We can only hope that the EU can persuade the US to ignore hardline Israeli calls to discount the results and engage in constructive discussions with the new government.  If Israel agrees its borders end at or near the Green Line, Hamas may be able to accept that it will put its fervent prayers for the eventual disappearance of Israel on a par with hopes for the coming of the Messiah as a wish, not a program. But any acceptable ceasefire will have to be two-sided, with an end to Israeli incursions and assassinations. That was the message the Palestinian electorate was sending.

The consequences of failure are really apocalyptic. The failure will be George W. Bush's as much as any new Israeli prime minister's.

Annan, Swift Boats and the DoD.

Defense Department launches new Swift Boats?

'Do not pander to the unappeasable.' The UN this week showed that it has not learnt this elementary lesson from the swift-boating of John Kerry Kerry, let alone from the swift-boating of Kofi Annan himself over the alleged UN Oil For Food Scandal, when it apologized for displaying a map that did not show Israel - which dated from before Israel existed!

As I went into the UN today, the Fox outside broadcast truck was there, and I groaned as I suspected what had brought it on a slow real news day.

I had read the Jerusalem Post, the New York Sun, and the more rabidly frothy edges of the Blogosphere and knew that well, they were at it again.

On the General Assembly-mandated day of solidarity for the Palestinian people, six weeks ago, Kofi Annan had made his mandatory appearance, and an enterprising photographer took a picture of the UN Secretary General in front of a map of mandatory Palestine in 1948.

Sometime around the Biblical forty days and forty nights later, the usual care in the community cases noticed the picture and raised a storm that because the map did not show Israel.

The UN apologized, but was wrong to do so, both in principle and tactics. Of course the map did not show Israel. The country did not exist in 1948, which is the year the map was drawn. What existed was the UN trusteeship of Palestine, which did exist.  

Let's hope the Greeks or Italians do not have an exhibition on Mediterranean civilization with maps of Alexander's or Hadrian's empire. Just imagine how many countries they would have to apologize to, from Afghanistan to Britain that would not appear on the map.

John Bolton lent the dwindling diplomatic faith and credit of the US to the furor and sent a letter to Annan complaining that 'It was entirely inappropriate for this map to be used. It can be misconstrued to suggest that the United Nations tacitly supports the abolition of Israel.'

Excuse me; this is malicious distortion, not misconstruction. The crowd that started baying about this is not 'misconstruing.' They think that the UN is an anti-American and anti-Israeli plot, and have never been shy of saying so. Indeed Mr. Bolton's own words would suggest that he is in this camp.  

It is possible that the Likudniks of the New York Sun and Jerusalem Post may want to deny history with all that guff about eternal capitals, but there is no reason whatsoever for the UN Secretariat to pander either to their anti-UN venom or their ahistorical hysteria.
They are looking for any excuse, no matter how feeble, to whip up a storm against the organization and its Secretary General, whoever that should be.

Of course, there is an understandable diffidence to combating their slanders, since one of the best pieces of advice is still 'Never argue with an idiot, by-standers can't tell you apart.' But times may be a-changing and in any case, apologizing to idiots only encourages their stupidity - and in this case overlooks their malice. The appropriate response is to sink the swift boats preemptively on the first signs of launch,


In the real world, Kofi Annan has done more to accommodate Israel in the organization than any of his predecessors for decades. In fact, there are a lot of Third World, Muslim and Arab diplomats who will tell you that he has gone too far in that respect.


It is also a matter of record that with the exception of Israel, and the US recently, and a few 'independent' Pacific coral reefs totally dependent on US funding, the nations of the world think that the Palestinians have had a raw deal, and that Israel is illegally occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and indeed the Golan heights. The Secretary General of the UN cannot and should not ignore the views of the world simply because a band of right wingers want to blog him to death on the subject.


The UN Secretariat should be handing out a press kit, showing the map again, and listing the resolutions by which the United Nations created Israel and partitioned the mandate and those since, supported by the US, that declared the West Bank and Gaza occupied territories. Ironically, by questioning the legitimacy of the organization, Annan's persecutors are implicitly undermining the State of Israel's own legal standing.

Of course. it is bad enough when the Murdoch echo chamber amplifies fact-checker-free world of the conservative fringe, but now there is another player.
In the wonderfully wacky world of the blogosphere, most postings should come with a government health warning cautioning that the contents have almost certainly not been edited, fact checked, or lawyered.

However, government health warnings are different in the modern world: they are usually warnings about the government rather than from it.

So it should not really be any surprise that the US Department of Defense has contracted a Detroit subsidiary of, and please have a wry grin, the giant French PR company Publicis, to get a favorable view of the department's work launched into the blogosphere. The company normally publishes web logs for clients like Ford and General Motors and is now tasked with recruiting bloggers prepared to present the war in Iraq through a rose colored screen. (Source: Intelligence Online No. 515, January 13th, 2006).

British political communications specialist, Tim Pendry of TPPR says of the swift-boating process that 'the use of the internet for these political purposes is as logical as the adaptation of the pornography industry to new technologies.  Indeed, wealthy foundations and individuals supported by government technical advice, as well as disinformation units, move with the times.'

He cautions, 'The next development is so-called "citizen journalism" or what my network calls "real news." This should be about ordinary people transmitting material direct into the web at crisis points (like showing the police beating up a demonstrator live) but, again, you can expect events now to be constructed at which "citizen journalists" will magically appear to deliver coverage by feed to gullible broadcasters.'

Here, I have to respectfully disagree with Tim Pendry, who is not exposed to Fox or MSNBC. Those broadcasters are by no means gullible. They are cynical and malicious. I can already see a horde of 'citizen journalists' financed by conservative foundations, out there launching swift boats.

Books I'm Reading

Diary of A Nobody: Making Friends with Hitler

Making Friends with Hitler is almost a new genre. Ian Kershaw takes one of the least effectual and most pompous British politicians of the interwar years and uses his life to trace the history of the period in a seriously revealing way.

In fact, just to call Lord Londonderry the least effectual British figure of his age is unfair. He was a world class nonentity, otherwise outstanding only by his aristocratic birth and vanity. Already promoted above his abilities, he was dropped from his position as Air Minister in 1935 and spent the rest of his life in futile correspondence asserting that his estimates of the Nazi air power had been correct.

It is funnily reminiscent of Charles Pooter in that Victorian humorous classic, the Grossmiths' "Diary of a Nobody," vainly trying to correct the spelling of his name in the guest list of the Lord Mayor's reception in the local newspaper.

Londonderry continued his peevish self-justification even when much more accurate estimates were available. The British could count the Luftwaffe's aircraft as they flew over dropping bombs on their heads, and Londonderry persisted in thinking that he had been cheated out of the high positions that the parental sperm entitled him to.

Londonderry bestrode Europe like an escaped character from P.G. Wodehouse: his full name was Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart. He was not alone. Not even Wodehouse's fervent imagination could match a name like that of Admiral Reginald Aylmer Ranfuly Plunket-Ernle-Earle-Drax, who was the emissary that Premier Neville Chamberlain sent on a very slow boat to the Baltic - to negotiate an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939. While most British wanted an alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler, Chamberlain and Halifax his foreign secretary did not. As it happens, Stalin didn't either, not when he could cut a deal with Hitler but that is another story.

Londonderry was at the heart of all these events, and Kershaw's account of this unimportant but self-important figure shows the modern age in formation. Londonderry is the perfect thread to illustrate how the modern world was made. He was probably the last of a generation whose genealogy alone could propel him to high office, and even in the thirties, there was enough of a meritocratic principle to put a ceiling on the career of someone whose assets of wealth and blood were not matched by overmuch in the way of grey matter. One of his ambitions, already becoming atavistic, was to be Viceroy of India.

In Britain, Londonderry and others of his ilk lost the battle for an honorable place in history. The verdict of 1940 against the appeasers is even more potent against those like him who actually sought an alliance. He had been a constant visitor to Germany, chatting with Hitler, Goering, Ribbentrop and the rest of the Nazi leadership and it is his membership and support of various pro-German and pro-Nazi groups in Britain for which he is remembered, if at all. It is worth remembering just how pervasive the influence of these groups was, not least among newspapers like the Daily Mail that have subsequently wrapped themselves in spurious super-patriotism.

However, Kershaw, while not concealing the vapidity of his subject, does add some needed perspective to many of this group. For the majority, their concern was to avoid a re-run of the First World War, and an accurate perception of the vindictiveness of Versailles and its effects of Germany. When Hitler was putting down communists, Londonderry, a coal owner, was not too worried about the briskness of the Nazi assault on civil liberties, but Kristallnacht proved too much for his sensibilities even though he was imbued with the traditional background anti-Semitism of his milieu.

However Kershaw points out that appeasement was far from being the prerogative of the right. Many left wing pacifists took part in organizations like the Anglo-German Association and opposed British re-armament. Nor is it as self-evident in retrospect that the appeasers were totally wrong. Chamberlain certainly sold the Czechs down the river, but it was far from certain that Britain had the military strength to do anything much about it, and the Chamberlain government did accelerate the rearmament which meant that the British forces were actually better prepared, albeit still not really ready, when Britain and France did declare war.
Even Londonderry had played his part during his time in the Air Ministry, by launching the development program for the Hurricanes and Spitfires that won the Battle of Britain. Indeed, when he was in government in the new Northern Ireland, he tried unsuccessfully, to end the sectarian divide between protestant and catholic school systems, which apart from possibly averting much sectarian bloodshed since, puts him far in advance of Tony Blair, who is busily trying to put government funds into faith-based schools.

With sixty five years behind us, it is possible to take a more detached and less polemical view of the role of Londonderry and others. From the point of the view of the British ruling classes, and the British Empire, Londonderry and his ilk were quite right. The decision to fight Germany was almost suicidal. An alliance with Germany could have preserved much of the Empire, and perhaps more importantly, British industrial and financial strength.

This dilemma presented itself acutely in 1940, when Churchill took over from Chamberlain with a cabinet committed to war. Britain had only half the financial reserves with which it entered World War One, and was effectively standing alone. A useful addition to Kershaw's book is Clive Ponting's 1940, Myths and Legend a wonderful piece of revisionist history, which, in the course of destroying many now popular myths about the period (Churchill's most famous radio speech was actually delivered by an actor who normally played Larry the Lamb), details the crucial decision the Cabinet took. It was a heroic determination that merits more recognition. Knowing that Britain only had financial reserves to fight the war on its own until 1943, the government decided not to cut to a deal with Hitler, but to fight on, even if it meant effectively selling the country to the USA to do so.

That is what happened, and, as Ponting demonstrates, the US took full and fairly unscrupulous advantage of the fire sale. Not many Brits had much of a real stake in the Empire anyway, and humiliating though the process of a former super power voluntarily indenturing itself to Washington has been and still is, we can assume that it was less onerous than becoming a client state of Nazi Germany. Who knows, we may have euphemized even that as a "Special Relationship," and been offering troops to military adventures overseas to prove our usefulness to the boss man in Berlin.

And on that note of connecting the threads of the past together, Londonderry successfully fought international conventions against bombers - because he felt that they were necessary for economical policing of the Empire - like in Iraq. History is like that: it keeps returning to bite us.

The Hole Where The Heart Should Be

'Nothing but good of the dead,' De mortuis nihil nisi bonum est, the old adage has it. Well as I write, Ariel Sharon is technically alive. But I have to record that when the doctors reported that he had a hole in his heart, I thought it must be a mistranslation, and in fact they reported that they had found a hole where his heart should be.

One of the big advances towards civilization this century is that politicians like Sharon, indicted in Belgium for war crimes in Sabra and Shatila,, along with Pinochet, Kissinger and others like Milosevic have begun to check with their lawyers as well their travel agents before setting off on a journey.

Sharon's exit from Middle East politics will certainly have profound effects on the peace process, but only a total amnesiac would assume that it will necessarily be a negative effect.

If you accept the possibility of miracles, it is of course possible that Sharon had a late life conversion to peace,

But nothing in his career, and nothing he has done since the withdrawal from Gaza has ever given the slightest hint of concern for the plight of the Palestinians. The settlements are still expanding, parts of Gaza are effectively free fire zones and life in the Occupied Territories gets worse by the week.

To accept Sharon as a 'Man of Peace,' we have to forget about the massacre at Qibye, the invasion and occupation of Lebanon, the siege of Beirut, and above all, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. We need to overlook the continuing massive expansion of the settlements in the teeth of Oslo and Road Map Commitments

We have to blank from our minds his provocative walkabout at Al Aqsa mosque that premeditatedly provoked the Intafada, which his friends in the security services then sedulously kept burning by assassination of Palestinian leaders whenever a ceasefire looked feasible.

Of course, Sharon owes a lot to Osama Bin Laden. Immediately after the September 11 tragedy Sharon saw his opportunity and pronounced that he would join George Bush's fight against terrorism, - but against Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian authority.

Under cover of the smoke of the World Trade Centre, he mounted the brutal armed invasion of the Palestinian Authority, and the razing of Jenin. He undertook the massive violation of international law represented by the Wall in the occupied territories, and the worse-than-apartheid humiliation and squalor forced on the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.

Even Sharon's most recent achievement, the much praised withdrawal from Gaza, was almost certainly more of a cynical ploy to hang on to most of the useful land in the West Bank than a concession to peace. He made it clear for internal audiences that there was no question of returning to the Green line of 1967, and that his vision of Palestinian independence would be like a Bantustan, without, however, the degree of independence the Afrikaners accorded.

In short, nothing he ever said or done right up to his stroke gave the slightest indication that he would accept a peace deal with the Palestinians that they could accept, or which met the standards of international law and United Nations resolutions.

It may have been rational, but it was scarcely 'heroic' to hand over territory occupied in defiance of international law and inhabited by a hostile and increasingly desperate population. No rational Israeli leader would try to hang on to it..

However, no one should doubt the scale of Sharon's diplomatic achievement. By repetition of the magic word 'terrorism,' and admittedly with help from the terrorists themselves, he passed himself off as the good guy and succeeded in switching off international condemnation for behaviour far worse than any previous Israeli administration.

While making it plain that the Road Map conditions only apply to the Palestinians, Sharon was careful not disavow it, allowing the Europeans and others to join the Americans in blaming the victims.

Amazingly, after a few desultory attempts at condemnation, stifled by George W. Bush, the British government and the Europeans have pretty much gone along with his oppressive policies since 2001.

The Europeans have now bought into Sharon's mantra that the enfeebled and besieged Palestinian authority must successfully rein in terrorists, but they make no such stipulations about the Israelis controlling the Settlers doing Brownshirt imitations across the territories.

Of course much of this was derived from the strong personal relationship between George W Bush and Sharon. Bush had announced support for a Palestinian state at the UN just after the World Trade Centre attack. Within months, after a visit from Sharon, the President moved from restraining Israeli attacks to providing diplomatic cover for the attack on Jenin. Would Benjamin Netanyahu have the same influence, not least since he was too rigidly dogmatic to see the pragmatic need to evacuate Gaza?

It is just possible, if not exactly probable, that the removal of Sharon may entail more resistance from the US to Israeli demands, especially if Netanyahu wins. However, in the long run, the basic problem remains. For Israel's long term survival, it has to come to an accommodation with the Palestinians. And as long as Israel's leaders are given a 'get out of jail free' card by Washington and to a lesser extent the EU, then the US and the West will not be able to convince the Muslim world of its good faith.

The best practical solution put forward so far is the two state solution, which will not be feasible on the line of the Security Wall.

Perhaps Sharon's demise will now allow the politicians of the West to take off their blinkers and to see that the deceased had shredded and twisted their cherished Road Map into an Origami dead duck.

They have to chart a more direct course to peace, and enforce international law on all parties to the dispute. Sharon's stroke gives them one less recidivist law breaker to pander to.

The Sound of Silence: As in Dogs Not Barking

It was like hearing the first cuckoo of spring. MSNBC called this week to see if I would be interested in discussing the UN's waste, mismanagement and corruption in handling the Tsunami funds twelve months ago. It was they suggested, 'The biggest financial scandal since Oil for Food.'

It was, in fact, deja vu over again. Twelve months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Tsunami, I was being ferried around the studios to discuss the shock and horror of UN Humanitarian Affairs chief Jan Egeland calling the US 'mean.'

Mere technical details like the fact that he had said no such thing did not dam the tidal wave of indignation bouncing off the walls of the conservative echo-chamber.

Egeland had actually said that the developed countries had almost all failed to meet their own targets of 0.7% of GDP going to Overseas Development Assistance, which is indisputably true. He did not specify that of all of them, the US was the meanest, but I had no compunction about reminding viewers.

In fact the US had offered an initial $30 million at the time of the Tsunami, which the talking heads all considered as the height of generosity. As the scale of the tragedy broke, the administration added several zeroes to its initial offer. However the purpose of the show was not to congratulate me on my prescience, it was to find another excuse to attack the UN.

In fact, I am somewhat surprised that no one has yet found a way to link the Hurricane Katrina debacle to the UN. But somehow the right does not want to remind people about the New Orleans debacle.

I doubt that we have heard the last of this newly launched Tsunami canard, not least since Bill Clinton's position as UN Special Envoy makes it a double whammy for the right. The UN is always wrong, it is simply a question of pinning its inherent wrongness to a topical peg.

However we can draw some comfort. Could it be that that 'Oil for Food' as a subject has lost its appeal even for the rabid right?

On one level, this is probably no bad thing, since the voluminous but vapid Volcker Report finally said all there was to say, and probably a lot more than was worth saying, about the alleged scandal.

De minimis Lex non curat, says the old legal saw, 'The law does not concern itself with trifles.' If only we could say the same of much of the media, which of course concerns itself with little else.

For a year every minute item about the Oil For Food Program has been bellowed breathlessly from the conservative media.

And suddenly, there is silence. Last month Kojo Annan, son of Kofi ,was awarded large damages against the Murdoch-owned London Sunday Times, which has to admit that its story connecting him to Oil For Food contracts had no substance. You did not see the story on Fox, MSNBC, or any of the usual cabal.

In December, the US charged two colonels who had worked for the 'Coalition Provisional Authority' with accepting bribes of $200,000 a month for steering contracts to companies that were seemingly just shells. They worked with someone whom the Coalition Provisional Authority hired as comptroller with a budget of $82 million - despite a previous felony conviction for fraud.

It did not make the headlines. Senator Norm Coleman and Congressman Henry Hyde did not call for the resignation of the chief executive of the organization involved, one George W. Bush.

And no one mentioned that much of the money involved presumably came from the $10 billion surplus that the UN Oil For Food Fund had handed over to the Development Fund for Iraq, controlled by the CPA. During its blessedly short life span, the American dominated CPA spent nearly $20 billion of the $23.34 billion of Iraqi funds it had under its control for just over a year. It spent just $300 million of the US taxpayer funding pledges of $18.4 billion for Iraq's reconstruction.

At a press conference at the UN on Wednesday 28 December the members of the International Accounting and Monitoring Board set up by the Security Council to monitor CPI spending of DFI funds, reinforced the impression that the Pentagon's efforts to freeze them out were a waste of effort. The body bared its gums and refused to bark at the clear evidence of gross waste, mismanagement and corruption by the CPA.

The board simply examined 24 sole sourced contracts that the CPA awarded worth more than five million dollars. In fact, we discovered during the press conference, they had paid KPMG to 'audit' 23 of them, representing some $600 million which it was suggested was mostly a process of examining American government audits.

The Pentagon had heavily censored what they provided to the IAMB until Congressman Henry Waxman posted their devastating reports on his website.

The biggest sole-sourced contract was Kellogg Brown Root, the Halliburton subsidiary which walked off with $1.6 billion. KPMG recused itself from this, so the IAMB relied on the work of the Special Inspector General for Iraq as well as the Pentagon audits.

Just consider. The US gave a sole sourced contract to a subsidiary of the company that had had Vice President Dick Cheney CEO from which he is still rolling up deferred compensation. The audit was carried out by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General, appointed by President George W. Bush, whose lawyer he had been in various forms way back to his time as Governor of Texas.

Through almost complete media silence about this ultimate in potential whitewashes, one cannot help but hear echoes, of the febrile demands for transparency from the UN, on the need for external checks. If Kofi Annan had appointed his own lawyer to conduct the Inquiry that Volcker actually headed, can you imagine the frothy indignation?

It also emerges that the IAMB did not examine the other contracts at all, not even to check the open-ness and fairness of the bidding, let alone to see if the money from the Development Fund was in fact spent on behalf of the Iraqi people as mandated.

In fact, even Bowen's report managed more indignation than the IAMB has so far mustered. Almost the only admonition from the Board has been to suggest mildly that the US reimburse the $200 million plus that KBR overcharged for fuel supplies to Iraq. Bowen found a massive $8.8 billion of Development Fund for Iraq money could not be accounted for

That was the result of Defense Department Audits that the Pentagon tried to conceal from the IAMB, and which were only revealed by Waxman who has managed far more indignation about it than the IAMB's public statements display. One cannot help suspecting that some of the board's five members have had words with US administration officials. Even Bowen complained about this one.

As Waxman said back in June, 'there has been a stark and telling contrast between Congress' approach to the Oil For Food Program and the DFI. Five separate congressional committees have been investigating U.N. mismanagement of the Oil for Food Program, and more than a dozen hearings have been held. But before today there was not a single hearing in Congress on U.S. mismanagement of the Development Fund for Iraq,' which, as he points out, is the successor to the Oil For Food program.
(see http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20050629132455-23867.pdf )

Waxman reported that the CPA withdrew no less than $12 billion in cash from the New York Federal Reserve Bank DFI and flew it to Iraq, comments - no less than 363 tons of $100 bills, the largest cash withdrawal in history. In its final feeding frenzy, in the last month the CPA took out $4 billion from the mother of all ATM's in New York including the largest cash withdrawal in history, $2.4 billion.

In a partial audit of $120 million of the $600 million handed out to US military officials for local reconstruction, more 80% could not be accounted for, and $7 million was simply missing.

When I raised the fate of these funds at Kofi Annan's press conference just before Christmas, I was later berated by John Bolton's press officer as an 'apologist for the UN,' as he questioned my journalistic integrity and accused me of 'blurring the line' between the Oil for Food kickbacks and what he characterized the CPA's accounting irregularities. I told him that I was not blurring the line. I was drawing a straight line between them.

If Benon Sevan's $160,000, alleged by the Volcker Inquiry, is headline news for the best part of the year, then I think it is a legitimate question to ask why the CPA's attested multi billion scandal scarcely merits a paragraph in the back pages.

Or is the profession saying that this is a dog bites man/man bites dog scenario? That if the UN is corrupt it is unusual, but massive corruption is too commonplace in this Bush administration to merit mention?

I suspect that this is not what the news editors and producers are saying. But it would be interesting to hear an explanation about what news values mandate that the mote in the UN's eye deserves minute attention but that the beam in the White House's can be overlooked.

Hugo, Haggis and Hogmanay

We are not only approaching Hogmanay, the new year taken so seriously by Scots, Russians and others, we are also approaching Burns Night, when wannabee Scots such as myself use the occasion to drink dangerous amounts of Scotch whisky and plunge daggers into Haggis while reciting verses from the immortal Rabbie Burns. Wordsworth was never this much fun.

I join in on the strength of a Scottish great grandparent, a partiality to a drop of malt, and a positive love of haggis - a spiced pudding of sheeps' entrails, lungs and blood mixed with cereal and boiled in a sheep's stomach.

Apart from such obvious culinary attractions, Rabbie Burns wrote one of the most pithy lines that every writer about international affairs should have carved on their desk.
Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel's as others see us!

It is a telling warning against double standards, and nowhere is this more potent than in the case of Hugo Chavez where even the most urbane of American commentators show the pervasive effects of wall-to-wall invective from the right. BusinessWeek's Geri Smith wrote this week, in an otherwise fair article, "What's worrisome is that Chavez, though democratically elected, has consolidated his grip on power by packing the Supreme Court, electoral council, and Central Bank with his followers."

Now let us see ourselves in the US as others see us -indeed as many of us see ourselves when our minds are not befogged by 24 hour cable diatribes. Hugo Chavez, a veteran coup leader, clearly has an authoritarian streak, but let us pause to consider another President we know all to well.

George W. Bush was originally elected in a dubious election where the Supreme Court, acting as the electoral council, had a partisan majority, created in part by his father, which koshered the exotic voting customs of the state where this brother controlled the electoral machinery. And not content with that, George W. Bush is busy trying to pack the Supreme Court to make it even more complaisant.

Alan Greenspan, the veteran poodle Bush reappointed as head of the Central Bank, has never found a Democratic deficit he can applaud, nor a Republican one he can condemn.

And as for authoritarian! Does breaking the constitution on habeas corpus, defying legislation against domestic spying, and organizing third party torture sessions across the globe qualify?

Chavez, as an ex-military man appears too often in military garb, but then so does George W. Bush whose own military career ended up in ignominious war-time desertion from whose consequences he was saved only by his plutocratic and nepotistic connections.

Chavez also currently stands accused of supporting the election of the first indigenous President of Bolivia ever. Unlike, of course, all the electoral assistance from the US to the various rainbow revolutions in the former Soviet Union and Lebanon.

The old principle of "My enemy's enemy is my friend," is a very dubious one. Some of those people who US money helped overthrow richly deserved their going, and based on Chavez's previous record I will not go overboard in my support.

He is blessed with some very stupid enemies, however. Between the opposition's stupidity in not contesting the elections, Pat Robertson's incitement to assassination, and George W. Bush's chronic inability to understand that good works can lead to good friends, Chavez has some world class idiots ranged against him.

But one cannot help admiring someone who is putting oil-money to good use at home and abroad. The cries of "unfair" are actually pretty rib-tickling. Imagine the low cunning of helping cash-strapped developing countries lower their debt burden: the fiendish Machiavellianism of extending health care and education to people at home and abroad who have never had it! Imagine the diabolical duplicity of supporting the election of people in other countries who want to do the same. Just consider the chutzpah of helping poor people in the richest country in the world survive the winter with cheap heating oil.

Whatever reservations I have about Chavez tend to disappear in the face of such praiseworthy deeds,

In fulfillment of the Burns' suggestion of seeing ourselves as others do, I often suggest to diehard nationalists to substitute the names of their own country and tribe with the enemy in their declarations, and see if it makes as much sense when reversed. Somehow, the equations of sacred rights, divine promises and historical destiny never seem as self-evident when they are reversed in this way. Every argument raised for regime change in Venezuela applies with equal and more force to the wannabee Caudillo from Texas currently in the White House.

And by the way. Happy Hogmanay.

Christmas Spirit and Governor Scrooge

I have to almost agree with Bill O’Reilly. Charles Dickens wrote ’Christmas Carol’, not ’Holiday Song’, But I wonder whether modern America has missed the point. Dickens did not cast Ebenezer Scrooge as a hero, let alone a role model, because he was mean and nasty to his employee Bob Cratchit.

It was after the visits of the ghosts of Christmas, past present and future and Scrooge had become a kind, considerate and model employer that Dickens wanted people to emulate him.

The day before Christmas Eve, the agent for the debt collection agency who has been trying to recoup unpaid fees from an overseas publisher called me up. Of course it is asking a bit much for a debt collection agency to show any great signs of Christmas Spirit, but he and all his colleagues had just been told they had ten days to move across the continent to another office, or collect their pink slips on New Year’s Eve.

There was no offer of help to relocate their homes and families, and no redundancy package. Instead, there was a combined threat, or promise, that if they stayed to the very last day, they would retain health insurance for a further thirty days, but if they left a day early, their coverage would be cut off immediately.

Of course there was no union in the place, so what we saw was “Labour Market flexibility” of the kind that European emulators of American barbarism are trying to force through. Employers should be able to fire workers at a whim, with little or no notice, no consultation – and precious few benefits for those thrown on the street.

Of course, in that other outstanding example of Christmas spirit Governor George Pataki did come across unions. He essentially engineered a Transit strike in the week before Christmas so that he could come across as a tough guy for the impending Republican presidential primaries. I think it was Pataki I heard on the radio eulogizing the sacrifice of troops fighting for freedom in Iraq, while the Transport Workers, by implication, were backing the insurgents by demanding the same pension rights for new workers as existing staff.

I gather that the freedom to strike was not one of the freedoms for which the troops are fighting. Indeed, the International Labour Organization has in the past considered the laws in American states like New York banning strikes by public workers as in violation of the conventions against forced labour.

Remember, the management could go to the courts to get fines against the union for refusing to work without a mutually acceptable contract, but there is no legal mechanism for the unions to take the management to court for worsening existing conditions. As Anatole France said over a century ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

And remember the background. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is controlled by the Governor, beholden to Republican rural counties in upstate New York who do not use the system. If they come into Manhattan, they are driving SUV’s or using the proportionately more heavily subsidized commuter railroad system.

It is of course a telling subtext that they are overwhelming white while a good proportion of MTA passengers, and a distinct majority of the transit workers, are not. So when they call Roger Toussaint, the Trinidadian Transport Workers Union leader “thuggish” they were using coded language. I mean, it is bad enough white white-collar workers expecting pensions and healthcare, but they can be fired. But when uppity black blue- collar workers want to keep them, who do they think they are!

The citizens of the city of New York were not asked about whether they agree that the MTA can hide a billion dollar surplus when it was raising fares and then spend it down rapidly so they could plead poverty before the wage negotiations. And they will not vote for Pataki anyway. I trust the ghost of Christmas present will haunt the rest of his presidential primary campaign and consign him to the political oblivion he has worked so hard to deserve.

Merry Christmas Governor Scrooge.

Deja Vu all over again: these people do not learn!

In 2002, some people thought I was alarmist because I said that the Bush administration had set its sights on invading Iraq. They did, of course. Vindication apart, like most people on the globe, I wish it had not happened.

Apart from the Bush rhetoric, I based my prophecy of doon on the steady attrition of leaks and briefings from the NeoCon edge of the administration. At least they could come up with a credible motive – taking out Iraq would be good for Israel. Apart from George W. Bush’s aside that Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his father, no one else has really come up with an excuse for the war that would hold water, let alone all the oil and blood that has been spilt.

So when in aftermath of the invasion in 2003 I began to see signs of a similar move on Syria, I warned about the impending invasion. My evidence was that there were demands for it from Israel, and ever an administration has proved to be a tail-waggable canine, then this is it. There were also the leaks and briefings: the missing weapons of mass destruction had been seen heading across the border into Syria; the insurgent Jihadists had been seen heading across the border from Syria; Damascus supported Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

At one point, famously George W. Bush even discovered that, shock, horror, there were Baathists in Damascus. That the founder of the Baath party was a Christian, and that the secular (albeit fascistic) programs of the party made it a very unlikely supporter of Al Qaida were mere technical details, quibbles from realists with no standing in faith based circles.

The Syrians did support Hizbollah, whose successful long term war of attrition against Israel had cleared the occupation from Lebanon, which led to long standing grudges against the regime in Damascus, compounded by Syrian ineptitude in keeping the Shaba Farms issue hot. Of course their ambivalent attitude to Lebanon did not help either.

However, my Cassandra-like prophesy of an attack on Syria did not come to pass – yet. The casualty rate in Iraq sapped any domestic US enthusiasm for it.

But like the end of the world, it is only postponed, not cancelled. Looking at the intensive activity over Lebanon at the United Nations, it is highly likely that the road to Damascus now goes through Beirut.

The pattern is the same as it was over Iraq, equally aided by the ineptitude of its rulers. Now the US has the support of the French, who for their own reasons are interested in restoring Francophiles to power in Beirut, but who seem insouciantly unaware that they may be getting taken for a ride – to Damascus.

Of course it is possible that Washington is just concerned about Lebanese independence, and sovereignty in the face of Syrian occupation. The test for such altruistic support for national boundaries would of course be strong US resolutions against the Occupiers of the West Bank, Golan and Western Sahara, or even pressure on Ethiopia to honor its commitments to the settlement of the border dispute wit Eritrea.

In absence of any such signs of concern from Washington, we can safely assume that regime change in Syria is indeed back on the agenda. Somewhere between Foggy Bottom and Capitol Hill, I am confident that there are planning groups working on the hypothesis that it would take hardly any troops at all to roll over Syria, and that the key to stemming the insurgency in Iraq is to do just that. All the previous excuses still apply. And of course, well timed unequivocal victory in Syria, a pushover they would say, may play well next year with the mid term elections.

Between the gullibility of other UN members and the stupidity of the Syrians, it may even have some degree of UN approval!

Equally worrying, but meeting more resistance, are the signs that Iran is getting the same treatment. And the new government there seems equally cooperative in providing plausible excuses. But we should remember what it looks like to the reality based world. John Bolton, the US Ambassador, who is on the record with profound skepticism about both the United Nations and international law, wants the UN Security Council to take action against Iran for alleged violations of the Non-Proliferation treaty whose strengthening he opposed the year before. It may be worth mentioning that Iran is not in violation of the treaty – but that the US and UK are, while Israel, which is pushing for action against Iran has not even signed the treaty.

No matter, it may not be a full-scale invasion of Iran since even the looniest NeoCon may baulk at that. But they do think that some sort of regime change is effectible and that as in Iraq (and Syria) the masses are just waiting for their oppressive regimes to be gone to declare their undying love for George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. In Iran, of course, the masses have just ditched the reformers, who were anyway scorned and isolated by the US for hardliner they now have to deal with. He may not be nice, but neither is George Bush. And both were elected by their faithbased constituencies.

I really do not see why need to waste money on NASA when we have a government that is so clearly mentally in orbit, and certainly looking at another planet when they make their plans

The Means Always Shape the Ends

It is a Western thing, and more specifically an American thing, to give sincerity undue weight in evaluating people's actions. Hitler and Stalin were sincere. They both thought that the future of humanity would be vastly improved by liquidating millions, and any mix-ups on the way were worth the price of future perfection.

When I was called to go on Fox's Neil Cavuto show, I had only just finished reading "Stalin andf his Hangmen," a recent book by Donald Rayfield, who charts the horrific results of the Bolsheviks' determination that ends will not be tainted by means. History has proven differently.

The thesis that I was called upon to rebut was that Europeans are ungrateful for the USA saving their lives from terrorists. Condoleezza Rice was going to read the riot act to the Europeans for suggesting that they disapproved of Secret Police kidnapping people, transporting them anonymously without trial in sealed airplains across Europe and then torturing them either in secret prisons run by the CIA, or by less scrupulous allied police forces in the Middle East.

Well, I mean, between ETA, the Red Brigades, Bader Meinhof and the rest, it is hardly as if the Europeans had to wait until September 11 2001 to discover terrorism.

If anyone can explain how what the CIA is doing is different from what the KGB or the Gestapo did, I would like to hear. If in doubt, remember that the administration has been trying to exclude the agency from Congressional strictures on torture, while backstopping that effort with an attempt to redefine torture. Mock drownings don't count it appears.

More potently, it shows that the US leadership is running mad. If there is one successful terrorist tactic, it is to provoke governments into repressive and unjust actions that unite populations against them. Levelling Fallujah is, perhaps, a localized example. But every time someone is kidnapped this way, it is almost proving Osama Bin Laden's point about the US.

Firstly, it mostly happens to Muslims, secondly it convinces billions that all the talk of democracy and rule of law is persiflage, covering up entirely different motives and thirdly, it sets a very ominous precedent for a government for dealing with other types of opposition.

The means shape the ends. Effectively abrogating the Geneva Conventions, violating internatonal conventions on torture, and breaking every constitutional guarantee of due process is a funny way to set an example to the world.

Below is the News Hounds version of the show. My heart goes out to these people. I cannot even watch TV, but wall to wall Fox --- these guys are on the line for us all.

News Hounds

http://www.newshounds.us/2005/12/05/fox_turns_cia_rendition_issue_into_a_fairy_tale.php
We watch FOX so you don't have to.

December 05, 2005

Fox Turns CIA Rendition Issue into a Fairy Tale

Fox turned the issue of CIA kidnappings, secret prisons, and torture into a fairy tale about an ungrateful Europe today (December 5, 2005) on Your World w/Neil Cavuto.

Ian Williams, the UN correspondent for The Nation magazine was Cavuto's guest. The title of the segment, reflected in a chyron that repeatedly appeared on screen, was, "Are Europeans Ingrates When it Comes to the War on Terror?" Cavuto opened the segment by telling the audience that Condoleezza Rice would be in Europe this week where she "will be pressed by a number of EU leaders" about "those secret CIA prison allegations" (the full extent of the background given on the topic). Cavuto said that Rice claims the "people of Europe are safer because of the US war on terror and its intelligence gathering. So, we ask," he said, "instead of the questions from Europe, where is the thanks?"

Williams did a fantastic job of talking about the larger issue despite Cavuto's repeated attempts to make Europe's alleged lack of gratitude stay front and center, "whether we question these guys harshly or not." Williams repeatedly made the point that, "The worst thing the terrorists can do is provoke governments into behaving unreasonably. Once they've done that, they're succeeding and in this case, Osama bin Laden and all the others, they've provoked the United States into illegal detentions. They're kidnapping people. We are arresting the wrong people."

Comment: In the fall of 2004, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) released a study titled, "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters." The study showed that Fox News watchers had more misconceptions about the War on Terror and other national and international issues than those who got their news from other sources. Given the way the CIA torture matter morphed into one about an ever ungrateful Europe on Fox today, Fox's viewers undoubtedly continue to have misconceptions about what's going on in the world. And that, I'm sure, is precisely the objective.

Reported by Melanie at December 5, 2005 07:28 PM