27 June 2007
Do You Know What Really Happened In Iraq?
As the Bush administration tells us that more troops will finally yield victory, the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq seem ever clearer: the mismanaged occupation of a profoundly different nation; the vast lies; the increasing desperation when reality can no longer be denied.
There are, however, two important differences. The first is that for all the mistakes America made in Vietnam, it was a work of genius compared to the occupation of Iraq. If the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and the entire cast of Saturday Night Live made a war movie together, they couldn’t come remotely close to what the Bush administration actually did. What I found even more shocking than the decisions themselves was how they had been made: secretly, in a nearly perfect vacuum of information, by less than 10 people who had virtually no relevant knowledge or experience. Most had never even served in the military, and none had ever been in combat or overseen an occupation.
The second difference between Iraq and Vietnam, however, is that we can’t simply leave. This is not to say that The Surge will work; it won’t. But neither will a complete exit; we’ve dug ourselves — and the Iraqis — into too deep a hole.
I received my first dose of Iraqi reality in 2004, when I had dinner with George Packer, who was preparing to write The Assassins’ Gate. By the time I began making my film No End In Sight a year later, I thought I understood how bad things were.
But when I started doing serious research, I was simply stunned. Nothing had prepared me for the black comedy of stupidity, arrogance, incompetence, and dishonesty that I uncovered. And so I learned, for example, that when the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was established to run postwar Iraq — only 50 days before the war — it was given offices that had no computers. When ORHA entered Baghdad a week after the war ended, it had no armored vehicles, only a dozen people who spoke Arabic, and no email, Internet access, or telephones. Baghdad was devastated by unchecked looting; Ahmed Chalabi’s private militia went around committing carjackings, one of them literally in front of the administrator of Baghdad and the general in charge of U.S. ground forces.
And then came L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Appointed in late April 2003, within a month Bremer made three catastrophic decisions. First, he halted the formation of an Iraqi interim government and instituted a long-term U.S. occupation. Second, he purged the senior levels of the Iraqi government of all members of the Ba’ath Party, including the technocrats and professionals necessary for a functioning government. Third and most fatally, on May 23, 2003 Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army, Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, intelligence services, and secret police, firing over half a million armed men with zero notice and zero severance pay. This in a desperately poor society which, after a decade of economic sanctions, had a 50 percent unemployment rate.
By destroying their livelihoods and honor, Bremer drove these men into the insurgency. Iraqi officers repeatedly approached the U.S. military, the CPA, and the UN, warning that insurgency was inevitable unless their positions were restored. Even after joining the insurgency, former Iraqi officers approached the UN, offering to negotiate. Senior UN diplomats approached Bremer, who refused to speak with them.
Insurgents and criminal gangs began looting the dozens of huge weapons caches left unguarded due to insufficient troop levels and poor intelligence. By late 2003 kidnapping, looting, and carjacking became major industries, Baghdad alone had 700 murders per month, and automatic weapons, mortars, and rocket propelled grenades were sold openly in neighborhood markets.
Yet the Administration lives in a fantasy world. In a recent article in The Washington Post, Bremer still defends his decisions. By far the most astonishing of Bremer’s many false and distorted claims is the following: “So, after full coordination within the U.S. government, including the military, I issued an order to build a new, all-volunteer army.”
This is a complete lie. What really happened was this:
Immediately after the war ORHA and the U.S. military, concerned about lawlessness and insufficient troop levels, started to recall the Iraqi Army, planning to use it to keep order and to aid reconstruction. ORHA planned to filter returning Iraqi military personnel, to remove Saddam loyalists and assist those leaving the military to reintegrate themselves into civilian life. By early May of 2003, ORHA had obtained registration statements from 137,000 men by working with two groups of senior Iraqi Army officers, comprising Shiites as well as Sunnis.
But on May 1, Bremer had started work at the Pentagon. Between May 1 and May 9, Bremer met with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Undersecretary Douglas Feith, and Walter Slocombe, who had been appointed by Rumsfeld to oversee policy towards the Iraqi military. None of them had visited postwar Iraq, none had ever worked in the Mideast, none any experience with occupations or postwar reconstruction. In fact none of them except Rumsfeld, who had been a Navy pilot in the 1950s, had ever served in the military.
Unknown to ORHA, on May 9 these five men in Washington DC simply decided to dissolve the Iraqi Army. On that same day, they ordered General Paul Eaton to build a new, token army from scratch, with a budget of under $200 million. In reaching this momentous decision, they did not consult with the military commanders in Iraq, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ORHA, the State Department, or the CIA, all of whom opposed the decision when they learned of it. Paul Hughes, the Army colonel directly in charge of dealing with the Iraqi Army for ORHA, learned of the decision by watching its public announcement on television on May 23. Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage learned of it the same way, as Armitage states on camera in my film. In short, the process was completely insane.
Let us hope America has learned something from this: that wars and occupations are serious business, and that we must deliberate and plan carefully before undertaking them. For Iraq, and for thousands of dead American soldiers, it is now too late. Now, we must concentrate on avoiding the very worst, preventing genocide and regional war, in the hope that eventually Iraq will stabilize when a new generation tires of killing and extremism.
George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I hope that to some small extent my film, and the books written by George Packer and others, will help us understand — and remember — the decisions that brought us here.
Leaving No Tracks
By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 27, 2007; Page A01
Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.
“This is Dick Cheney,” said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. “I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House.”
Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.
In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.
Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.
First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.
Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.
The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.
By combining unwavering ideological positions — such as the priority of economic interests over protected fish — with a deep practical knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, Cheney has made an indelible mark on the administration’s approach to everything from air and water quality to the preservation of national parks and forests.
It was Cheney’s insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.
The vice president also pushed to make Nevada’s Yucca Mountain the nation’s repository for nuclear and radioactive waste, aides said, a victory for the nuclear power industry over those with long-standing safety concerns. And his office was a powerful force behind the White House’s decision to rewrite a Clinton-era land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the national forests off limits to logging, mining and most development, former Cheney staff members said.
Cheney’s pro-business drive to ease regulations, however, has often set the administration on a collision course with the judicial branch.
The administration, for example, is appealing the order of a federal judge who reinstated the forest protections after she ruled that officials didn’t adequately study the environmental consequences of giving states more development authority.
And in April, the Supreme Court rejected two other policies closely associated with Cheney. It rebuffed the effort, ongoing since Whitman’s resignation, to loosen some rules under the Clean Air Act. The court also rebuked the administration for not regulating greenhouse gases associated with global warming, issuing its ruling less than two months after Cheney declared that “conflicting viewpoints” remain about the extent of the human contribution to the problem.
In the latter case, Cheney made his environmental views clear in public. But with some notable exceptions, he generally has preferred to operate with stealth, aided by loyalists who owe him for their careers.
When the vice president got wind of a petition to list the cutthroat trout in Yellowstone National Park as a protected species, his office turned to one of his former congressional aides.
The aide, Paul Hoffman, landed his job as deputy assistant interior secretary for fish and wildlife after Cheney recommended him. In an interview, Hoffman said the vice president knew that listing the cutthroat trout would harm the recreational fishing industry in his home state of Wyoming and that he “followed the issue closely.” In 2001 and again in 2006, Hoffman’s agency declined to list the trout as threatened.
Hoffman also was well positioned to help his former boss with what Cheney aides said was one of the vice president’s pet peeves: the Clinton-era ban on snowmobiling in national parks. “He impressed upon us that so many people enjoyed snowmobiling in the Tetons,” former Cheney aide Ron Christie said.
With Cheney’s encouragement, the administration lifted the ban in 2002, and Hoffman followed up in 2005 by writing a proposal to fundamentally change the way national parks are managed. That plan, which would have emphasized recreational use over conservation, attracted so much opposition from park managers and the public that the Interior Department withdrew it. Still, the Bush administration continues to press for expanded snowmobile access, despite numerous studies showing that the vehicles harm the parks’ environment and polls showing majority support for the ban.
Hoffman, now in another job at the Interior Department, said Cheney never told him what to do on either issue — he didn’t have to.
“His genius,” Hoffman said, is that “he builds networks and puts the right people in the right places, and then trusts them to make well-informed decisions that comport with his overall vision.”
‘Political Ramifications’
Robert F. Smith had grown desperate by the time he turned to the vice president for help.
The former Republican congressman from Oregon represented farmers in the Klamath basin who had relied on a government-operated complex of dams and canals built almost a century ago along the Oregon-California border to irrigate nearly a quarter-million acres of arid land.
In April 2001, with the region gripped by the worst drought in memory, the spigot was shut off.
Studies by the federal government’s scientists concluded unequivocally that diverting water would harm two federally protected species of fish, violating the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The Bureau of Reclamation was forced to declare that farmers must go without in order to maintain higher water levels so that two types of suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake and the coho salmon that spawn in the Klamath River could survive the dry spell.
Farmers and their families, furious and fearing for their livelihoods, formed a symbolic 10,000-person bucket brigade. Then they took saws and blowtorches to dam gates, clashing with U.S. marshals as water streamed into the canals that fed their withering fields, before the government stopped the flow again.
What they didn’t know was that the vice president was already on the case.
Smith had served with Cheney on the House Interior Committee in the 1980s, and the former congressman said he turned to the vice president because he knew him as a man of the West who didn’t take kindly to federal bureaucrats meddling with private use of public land. “He saw, as every other person did, what a ridiculous disaster shutting off the water was,” Smith said.
Cheney recognized, even before the shut-off and long before others at the White House, that what “at first blush didn’t seem like a big deal” had “a lot of political ramifications,” said Dylan Glenn, a former aide to President Bush.
Bush and Cheney couldn’t afford to anger thousands of solidly Republican farmers and ranchers during the midterm elections and beyond. The case also was rapidly becoming a test for conservatives nationwide of the administration’s commitment to fixing what they saw as an imbalance between conservation and economics.
“What does the law say?” Christie, the former aide, recalled the vice president asking. “Isn’t there some way around it?”
Next, Cheney called Wooldridge, who was then deputy chief of staff to Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and the woman handling the Klamath situation.
Aides praise Cheney’s habit of reaching down to officials who are best informed on a subject he is tackling. But the effect of his calls often leads those mid-level officials scrambling to do what they presume to be his bidding.
That’s what happened when a mortified Wooldridge finally returned the vice president’s call, after receiving a tart follow-up inquiry from one of his aides. Cheney, she said, “was coming from the perspective that the farmers had to be able to farm — that was his concern. The fact that the vice president was interested meant that everyone paid attention.”
Cheney made sure that attention did not wander. He had Wooldridge brief his staff weekly and, Smith said, he also called the interior secretary directly.
“For months and months, at almost every briefing it was ‘Sir, here’s where we stand on the Klamath basin,’” recalled Christie, who is now a lobbyist. “His hands-on involvement, it’s safe to say, elevated the issue.”
‘Let the Water Flow’
There was, as it happened, an established exemption to the Endangered Species Act.
A rarely invoked panel of seven Cabinet officials, known informally as the “God Squad,” is empowered by the statute to determine that economic hardship outweighs the benefit of protecting threatened wildlife. But after discussing the option with Smith, Cheney rejected that course. He had another idea, one that would not put the administration on record as advocating the extinction of endangered or threatened species.
The thing to do, Cheney told Smith, was to get science on the side of the farmers. And the way to do that was to ask the National Academy of Sciences to scrutinize the work of the federal biologists who wanted to protect the fish.
Smith said he told Cheney that he thought that was a roll of the dice. Academy panels are independently appointed, receive no payment and must reach a conclusion that can withstand peer review.
“It worried me that these are individuals who are unreachable,” Smith said of the academy members. But Cheney was firm, expressing no such concerns about the result. “He felt we had to match the science.”
Smith also wasn’t sure that the Klamath case — “a small place in a small corner of the country” — would meet the science academy’s rigorous internal process for deciding what to study. Cheney took care of that. “He called them and said, ‘Please look at this, it’s important,’” Smith said. “Everyone just went flying at it.”
William Kearney, a spokesman for the National Academies, said he was unaware of any direct contact from Cheney on the matter. The official request came from the Interior Department, he said.
It was Norton who announced the review, and it was Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove who traveled to Oregon in February 2002 to assure farmers that they had the administration’s support. A month later, Cheney got what he wanted when the science academy delivered a preliminary report finding “no substantial scientific foundation” to justify withholding water from the farmers.
There was not enough clear evidence that proposed higher lake levels would benefit suckerfish, the report found. And it hypothesized that the practice of releasing warm lake water into the river during spawning season might do more harm than good to the coho, which thrive in lower temperatures. [Read the report.]
Norton flew to Klamath Falls in March to open the head gate as farmers chanted “Let the water flow!” And seizing on the report’s draft findings, the Bureau of Reclamation immediately submitted a new decade-long plan to give the farmers their full share of water.
When the lead biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service team critiqued the science academy’s report in a draft opinion objecting to the plan, the critique was edited out by superiors and his objections were overruled, he said. The biologist, Michael Kelly, who has since quit the federal agency, said in a whistle-blower claim that it was clear to him that “someone at a higher level” had ordered his agency to endorse the proposal regardless of the consequences to the fish.
Months later, the first of an estimated 77,000 dead salmon began washing up on the banks of the warm, slow-moving river. Not only were threatened coho dying — so were chinook salmon, the staple of commercial fishing in Oregon and Northern California. State and federal biologists soon concluded that the diversion of water to farms was at least partly responsible.
Fishermen filed lawsuits and courts ruled that the new irrigation plan violated the Endangered Species Act. Echoing Kelly’s objections, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit observed that the 10-year plan wouldn’t provide enough water for the fish until year nine. By then, the 2005 opinion said, “all the water in the world” could not save the fish, “for there will be none to protect.” In March 2006, a federal judge prohibited the government from diverting water for agricultural use whenever water levels dropped beneath a certain point.
Last summer, the federal government declared a “commercial fishery failure” on the West Coast after several years of poor chinook returns virtually shut down the industry, opening the way for Congress to approve more than $60 million in disaster aid to help fishermen recover their losses. That came on top of the $15 million that the government has paid Klamath farmers since 2002 not to farm, in order to reduce demand.
The science academy panel, in its final report, acknowledged that its draft report was “controversial,” but it stood by its conclusions. Instead of focusing on the irrigation spigot, it recommended broad and expensive changes to improve fish habitat.
“The farmers were grateful for our decision, but we made the decision based on the scientific outcome,” said the panel chairman, William Lewis, a biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “It just so happened the outcome favored the farmers.”
But J.B. Ruhl, another member of the panel and a Florida State University law professor who specializes in endangered species cases, said the Bureau of Reclamation went “too far,” making judgments that were not backed up by the academy’s draft report. “The approach they took was inviting criticism,” Ruhl said, “and I didn’t think it was supported by our recommendations.”
‘More Pro-Industry’
Whitman, then head of the EPA, was on vacation with her family in Colorado when her cellphone rang. The vice president was on the line, and he was clearly irked.
Why was the agency dragging its feet on easing pollution rules for aging power and oil refinery plants?, Cheney wanted to know. An industry that had contributed heavily to the Bush-Cheney campaign was clamoring for change, and the vice president told Whitman that she “hadn’t moved it fast enough,” she recalled.
Whitman protested, warning Cheney that the administration had to proceed cautiously. It was August 2001, just seven months into the first term. We need to “document this according to the books,” she said she told him, “so we don’t look like we are ramrodding something through. Because it’s going to court.”
But the vice president’s main concern was getting it done fast, she said, and “doing it in a way that didn’t hamper industry.”
At issue was a provision of the Clean Air Act known as the New Source Review, which requires older plants that belch millions of tons of smog and soot each year to install modern pollution controls when they are refurbished in a way that increases emissions.
Industry officials complained to the White House that even when they had merely performed routine maintenance and repairs, the Clinton administration hit them with violations and multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Cheney’s energy task force ordered the EPA to reconsider the rule.
Whitman had already gone several rounds with the vice president over the issue.
She and Cheney first got to know each other in one of the Nixon administration’s anti-poverty agencies, working under Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Cheney offered her the job in the Bush administration, the former New Jersey governor marveled at how far both had come. But as with Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill, another longtime friend who owed his Cabinet post to Cheney, Whitman’s differences with the vice president would lead to her departure.
Sitting through Cheney’s task force meetings, Whitman had been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA’s regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants. “I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table,” she said.
Whitman said she had to fight “tooth and nail” to prevent Cheney’s task force from handing over the job of reforming the New Source Review to the Energy Department, a battle she said she won only after appealing to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. This was an environmental issue with major implications for air quality and health, she believed, and it shouldn’t be driven by a task force primarily concerned with increasing production.
Whitman agreed that the exception for routine maintenance and repair needed to be clarified, but not in a way that undercut the ongoing Clinton-era lawsuits — many of which had merit, she said.
Cheney listened to her arguments, and as usual didn’t say much. Whitman said she also met with the president to “explain my concerns” and to offer an alternative.
She wanted to work a political trade with industry — eliminating the New Source Review in return for support of Bush’s 2002 “Clear Skies” initiative, which outlined a market-based approach to reducing emissions over time. But Clear Skies went nowhere. “There was never any follow-up,” Whitman said, and moreover, there was no reason for industry to embrace even a modest pollution control initiative when the vice president was pushing to change the rules for nothing.
She decided to go back to Bush one last time. It was a crapshoot — the EPA administrator had already been rolled by Cheney when the president reversed himself on a campaign promise to limit carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming — so she came armed with a political argument.
Whitman said she plunked down two sets of folders filled with news clips. This one, she said, pointing to a stack about 2-1/2 inches thick, contained articles, mostly negative, about the administration’s controversial proposal to suspend tough new standards governing arsenic in drinking water. And this one, she said as she pointed to a pile four or five times as thick, are the articles about the rules on aging power plants and refineries — and the administration hadn’t even done anything yet.
“If you think arsenic was bad,” she recalled telling Bush, “look at what has already been written about this.”
But Whitman left the meeting with the feeling that “the decision had already been made.” Cheney had a clear mandate from the president on all things energy-related, she said, and while she could take her case directly to Bush, “you leave and the vice president’s still there. So together, they would then shape policy.”
What happened next was “a perfect example” of that, she said.
The EPA sent rule revisions to White House officials. The read-back was that they weren’t happy and “wanted something that would be more pro-industry,” she said.
The end result, which she said was written at the direction of the White House and announced in August 2003, vastly broadened the definition of routine maintenance. It allowed some of the nation’s dirtiest plants to make major modifications without installing costly new pollution controls.
By that time, Whitman had already announced her resignation, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family. But the real reason, she said, was the new rule.
“I just couldn’t sign it,” she said. “The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn’t.”
A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world.”
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
25 June 2007
Don’t let technology take over
New York – “America’s been hijacked by technology,” I complained into the headset, aware of the irony that I was calling my wife from the United States on a cellphone. I was only a week into my book tour and already homesick for the low-tech life we enjoy in Costa Rica.
Since I had arrived in the US, everyone had been talking – not to the person next to him, but to someone who wasn’t there. In fact, two dear friends first greeted me while speaking into their cellphones. One apologized later, confiding that she often argues with her husband over his habit of walking into the house after work talking on his cell. And then her cellphone interrupted our conversation.
After six years of living as an expatriate in Costa Rica, it’s always a trip – in more ways than one – to return to my native land. And on this visit I was struck by the extent to which technology has become so bound up with the American experience. It’s as if everyone is accompanied by an electronic counterpart, and you can’t deal with the flesh-and-blood person without relating to his or her disembodied double.
The first BlackBerry user I noticed seemed to me like an escapee from a mental ward. When a side view afforded me a glimpse of the black and silver clip in his ear, I felt I was in the presence of the Borg. In a way, I was: He seemed to have been assimilated into his technology. Is this the “larger life” that BlackBerry ads promise?
Then there was that e-mail I received from a renowned book critic. To my surprise, the word “and” was spelled “aamnd,” and “you” had been reduced to “u.” At the bottom it said the message had been sent via a BlackBerry.
Now if words hadn’t been my correspondent’s stock in trade, I might not have expected good spelling – which brings me to another point: The particular way we use a technology and the unique way it fits into our lives are as important as the function and features touted by advertisers.
During my visit, I stayed with a friend who wished a pox on his cellphone because it allowed his boss to pester him 24/7. My elderly mother loves hers because she can keep it with her and use it in an emergency. I’ve heard that many rely on cellphones as a palliative for loneliness or boredom, but perhaps the real cure for these folks would be to start talking to the people around them.
Clearly, the same technology will have a different effect on each of our lives, so we shouldn’t assume that we’ll be better off with the latest stuff. I know millions are spent in the US to keep the public’s attention on what’s coming up (iPhones and digital TV), not on what’s going down (pagers and PDAs). But if Americans don’t start to pay attention to the personal impact of their technologies – and choose or reject them on that basis – what’s going down might just be the quality of their lives.
When I stayed with my cousin in Long Island, his home entertainment center took up most of the living room. As we watched “American Idol” on his high definition TV, I marveled at the vividness of the picture and sound while simultaneously wondering whether anyone would care to read a book in that room, let alone practice his or her own singing. The massive screen seemed to emit a metamessage: Leave entertainment to the professionals, and be sure to buy the products advertised!
The next afternoon, my cousin’s 10-year-old son and his friend hooked up their PlayStations to the TV to play virtual basketball. They pushed around their joysticks expertly, hooting with excitement when they scored for their NBA teams. But what about that basketball hoop mounted outside next to the garage?
I thought back with fondness to our little village in Costa Rica where the children all play outside and people actually drop by your house to tell you things. Though we have cellphones and other technology, the human connection still trumps the cellular one. The world might stream into our living-room TVs, but we spend more time relating directly to our own little corner of it. It’s a “Mr. Rogers neighborhood” set in the tropics, I mused. But then I remembered.
If the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) passes in the next few months, our national telecommunications system will be broken up and privatized, and we will probably be inundated with competing cellular phone companies, along with a flood of new electronics. Globalization will run its course, and I may eventually have to write a similar op-ed in Spanish to the citizens of my adopted land. Like the inhabitants of Main Street America 50 years ago, Costa Ricans may not know what they’ve got till it’s gone.
Liquid Fire
>The Empire of Clowns Continues on Its Murderous, Genocidal Path
At this moment in the monstrously bloody course of American Empire, I suppose I might take the sardonically grateful point of view. At least we now have some direct experience of how easy it was for nauseatingly corrupt Roman leaders to impose their will upon the ignorant hordes, and literally to get away with murder. Hell, who needed to “get away” with murder? Bloody, painful, lingering, ungraspably sadistic murder was one of the major entertainments.
And so it is with us, for the majority of Americans are now both stupid and cruel. Comfort yourselves with fantasies about “good Americans” who “mean well” if you wish; the facts provide you scant support. The criminal slaughter in Iraq goes on from day to day…look, Paris Hilton is being dragged off to jail! Again! It becomes clearer with every day that passes that metastasizing mayhem in the Middle East is not an unfortunate byproduct of a plan gone awry: it was the goal from the start. It provides the perfect excuse for a significant American military presence for decades to come — which was also the plan from the beginning.
A number of Americans may be decent people individually; in the aggregate, they are entirely ignorant of history, both their own and everyone else’s. The elites who rule us are no better. The governing class insists that, from its inception, the United States was granted a special dispensation from God, or Nature, or some mysterious, never to be understood combination of galactic forces: we have been endowed with the “Truth” and the One True Way. It is our mission to share this Truth with the rest of the world. When some of the “lesser peoples” unaccountably resist recognizing the Truth which belongs to us and to us alone…well, that’s why God gave us the greatest military the world has ever seen. If resistance by these “others” proves especially nettlesome…well, that’s why nukes were invented. Why would God, or Nature, or the galactic forces provide such bounty to the United States if we were not meant to use it — or at least threaten to use it? After all, serious leaders know that all options must be kept on the table. Our table is the whole damned planet, baby! The fact that we are willing to obliterate it in its entirety and turn all of life into dust only proves the strength of our dedication to What Is Right. (We’ve already done this on a horrifying scale, you know, and then lied about every aspect of it. We had our reasons, and you are not to question them.)
If we knew anything about history, we would know that all such claims have been made many times before. Every notable civilization of the past was convinced it was the recipient of special favor; each fervently believed it was unique in this respect. We are not even unique in our claim to being unique. So it goes. And so they went, all those past civilizations. So we will, too — and soon, if we continue on our present path. In our determination to prevent anyone from questioning our status as Ultimate Guardians of the Truth, we may take the whole game down with us. Earlier empires couldn’t do that, but we can. This is not precisely a good thing.
Meanwhile, as our governing class courts further mayhem and more widespread murder, our media play their part in the charade. They resolutely refuse to tell us anything beyond the trivial. If you seek for signs that indicate what is still to come, the media will not provide any guidance to you. So you may well have missed two stories from the past week. They’re important stories, but almost no one will have told you that. The governing class only wants you to hear about those stories that make their rule easier. Besides, they are endowed with special knowledge denied to the rest of us. Most Americans don’t care in any event, not with so many great programs on the teevee.
In connection with the ongoing criminal occupation of Iraq, Jim Lobe writes:
It seems the Democratic-led House of Representatives Thursday approved an amendment that, contrary to the leadership’s intention, lays the legal groundwork for a protracted – if not “permanent” — U.S. military presence in Iraq.
During debate on the 2008 Foreign Operations bill, the House approved by voice vote an amendment submitted by Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King that inserted the word “permanent” before “basing rights agreement” in the following text:
“SEC. 685. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Government of the United States to enter into a basing rights agreement between the United States and Iraq.”
As King has pointed out in the past, the United States has never had a “permanent” basing rights agreement with any country where, like Germany, Japan, and South Korea, Washington has based troops for decades. So the amendment, if it becomes law, means that the administration may now use funds to enter into any kind of basing rights agreement with the government of Iraq that it wishes – be it five, ten, 25 or even 50 years. Jim Fine of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) explained the effect of the amendment in a memo last month after King almost succeeded in getting the same amendment attached to the defense authorization bill.
I derive considerable amusement from the linguistic pretzel-logic of this approach. If the world is going to come to an end, we might as well laugh as it does. This is quite a neat trick, when you consider it: by prohibiting “permanent” base agreements, you make possible a decades-long occupation, perhaps even for 50 years or more. It has a certain elegance.
But, c’mon, let’s stop kidding around. This was always the plan. No one hid it, or even tried to. For God’s sake, we have a global empire of military bases — close to 1,000 bases in over 130 countries around the world. Almost no one is talking about reducing any of that. No. One. The entire governing class, and virtually every national politician in both parties, believes in American world hegemony. Hegemony needs bases, baby! So about the Democratic leadership of the House: either they don’t understand what this language means and what its effect will be, in which case they are too stupid to be on the city council of Flat Ass, Alabama — or they know exactly what it means, in which case they belong in jail.
In fact, there are exactly two people in Congress seriously opposed to Imperial America, and both of them put in an appearance in connection with the second story. One of those individuals is Dennis Kucinich, who tells us what happened:
Today the House of Representatives passed H. Con.Res.21, a resolution that pressures the United Nations Security Council to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on Genocide and the United Nations Charter because of his alleged calls for the destruction of Israel.
“There is reasonable doubt with regard to the accuracy of the translations of President Ahmadinejad’s words in this resolution. President Ahmadinejad’s speeches can also be translated as a call for regime change, much in the same manner the Bush Administration has called for regime change in Iraq and Iran, making this resolution very ironic,” Kucinich said.
Kucinich attempted to insert into the Congressional Record two independent translations of the speech from The New York Times and Middle East Media Research Institute, which contain significant differences in the translations of the speech compared to the resolution before the House. However, Members objected formally and the attempt was blocked.
“When I learned of these translations, I felt obligated to bring it to the attention of the House. It seems that much has been lost in translation. Members have a right to know of the translations and the refusal to permit them to become a part of the Congressional Record does a disservice to Members.”
…
“I object to resolutions that lay the groundwork for an offensive, unprovoked war.
“The resolution passed by the House today sets a dangerous precedent in foreign affairs. A mistranslation could become a cause of war. The United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with Iran.
“We must make every effort to ascertain the truth because peace in the world may hang in the balance. The only way to definitively know what President Ahmadinejad meant is for the United States to engage in meaningful, diplomatic relations with the country of Iran.”
More about this mistranslation will be found in this entry from Juan Cole, and in this article (some links via Eric Garris).
Kucinich does make one serious mistake in his comments, when he says, “The United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with Iran.” C’mon, Dennis. The United States has a long history of aggressive war — the Spanish-American War and the Philippines occupation, Vietnam, numerous covert operations all over the world (including endless such operations in the Middle East ever since World War II), the Clinton interventions of the 1990s – on top of which, every leading national politician, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, agitates endlessly for confrontation with Iran. There is nothing remotely “unwitting” about any of this. Endless wars and unceasing slaughter didn’t just “happen” while we were minding our business elsewhere. We believe we are entitled to world hegemony. It is our destiny to rule the world. We will have our way. “Unwitting”? Please.
Two people — two — voted against the House resolution, Kucinich and Ron Paul. Of course, we all know they’re just silly people, laughingstocks in fact. They aren’t “serious.” If you aren’t committed to American hegemony, world empire, and the unprovoked murder of possibly millions of people, you aren’t “serious.” So they should shut up and go away somewhere.
I draw your attention to one further point buried in the middle of the Iran resolution:
Whereas Iran has aggressively pursued a clandestine effort to arm itself with nuclear weapons….
And that, as they say, is the ball game. In this manner, the Democratic House concedes, sanctifies, and gives its nearly unanimous support to the major propaganda point of the Bush-Cheney-Israel drive to war with Iran.
Thank God the Democrats took back Congress. That’s all I can say. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened! Why, we might be on our way to a nuclear world war!
Please note: Iran disputes, as it has always disputed, the truth of this charge. Moreover, it is very far from clear just how far Iran may have gotten in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, even if one assumes that is what they are doing.
And I repeat: even if Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, SO WHAT?
But now, the House is fully on board with the Bush-Cheney-Israel program. When Bush gives his speech announcing that bombing runs began four hours earlier, that some of Iran’s nuclear installations have already been destroyed, and that the rest of them will be similarly destroyed in another two or three days, on what grounds will the Democrats object? As war, possibly with nuclear weapons, spreads across the Middle East and beyond, on what grounds will the Democrats object?
Of course, if the Democrats actually disagreed, there are a number of actions they could take. But they do not disagree, so they won’t take those actions. In the same way, there are a number of actions leading liberal and progressive bloggers could take in an effort to get Democrats to at least try to prevent Armageddon. But they have done next to nothing, other than endlessly blather about how awful it would all be (with nary a mention of the invaluable aid to the Bush-Cheney-Israel war program now provided by the Democrats themselves), and there is no indication they ever will. So I say again that, if the worst should happen, I don’t want to hear a single goddamned word from any of these people.
And if the worst does happen, I plan to drink in copious quantities, take some excellent drugs, and fuck my brains out. And laugh a lot.
An Empire of Clowns. What a ridiculous, sickeningly homicidal, disgusting nation we’ve become.
[My only income at present is from donations in connection with my writing. I am filled with immense gratitude, and a not inconsiderable sense of wonder, for the incredible generosity of so many readers who help to keep me going. So if you enjoyed this essay and find my writing in general of some value, I would be very thankful if you considered making a donation in any amount. For various unpleasant reasons, I’m having a donation drive right now. More details will be found here.
Many thanks to all of you for your kind consideration.] posted by Arthur Silber at 9:12 AM
22 June 2007
Why the Deficit Isn’t Under Control
While there has been a fair amount of press about the federal budget approaching the “balanced” line, it’s important to note this “balancing” is in fact a neat accounting trick that belies that actual result of the last six years of federal policy. When all the facts come into play, the deficit situation is in fact much worse than the figures reported in the press.
Let’s start with a few definitions which I’ll use in the following paragraphs.
Government revenues — money the government takes in, primarily from taxes
Government expenditures — money the government spends
Intra-government debt — one government agency borrowing money from another government agency
Publicly held debt — U.S. government debt sold to the public
Is everybody still with me? Good. Here we go.
The numbers reported by the financial press include all of the figures mentioned above. They take into account all government revenues and expenditures along with the social security trust fund. Let’s see how this works by looking at a particular year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2006 the government took in $2.407 trillion in revenue and spent $2.655 trillion for a total deficit of -$248.2 billion. That doesn’t look too bad. In fact it looks good compared to the deficit of -$318.3 billion in 2005 and -$412.7 billion in 2004. It looks like we’re making progress and everything will be fine within a few years.
Here’s the problem with that line of thinking. It’s not accurate. The figures quoted in the financial press take into account the social security trust fund. These figures are added to the numbers reported in the deficit, which assumes there in fact is money in the trust fund. In addition, no one reports on the total amount of federal debt — both public and intra-governmental.
And there is money in the trust fund — in the form of intra-government debt. Various federal agencies are borrowing the FICA money for current operations and replacing the funds with what is essentially as IOU saying, “We’ll pay you back sometime in the future.”
Here’s the end result of the last six years of fiscal policy. Below is the total amount of intra-governmental and publicly held debt outstanding at the end of each of the last fiscal years and the total increase in federal government debt from the preceding year. This information comes from the Treasury Department.
Year — Total Government Debt — Increase From Preceding Year
09/30/2006 — $8,506,973,899,215.23 — $574,264,237,491.7309/30/2005 — $7,932,709,661,723.50 — $553,656,965,393.18
09/30/2004 — $7,379,052,696,330.32 — $595,821,633,586.70
09/30/2003 — $6,783,231,062,743.62 — $554,995,097,146.46
09/30/2002 — $6,228,235,965,597.16 — $420,772,553,397.10
09/30/2001 — $5,807,463,412,200.06
Notice that the amount of debt issued every year is a lot bigger than the amount of the deficit reported in the financial press. This leads to an interesting question: “If the deficit is under control, why is the U.S. government issuing so much debt?”
The answer is the deficit isn’t under control in any way. The U.S. government is issuing mammoth amounts of debt and has continued to do so for the last five years.
For those of you interested in economic and market commentary, please go to the Bonddad Blog.
19 June 2007
Air Support Insanity
by William S. Lind
for Center for Cultural Conservatism
Washington (UPI) June 15, 2007
Looking idly at the front page of last Wednesday’s Washington Post Express as I rode the Metro to work, I received a shock. It showed a railroad station in Iraq, recently destroyed by an American air strike. So now we are bombing the railroad stations in a country we occupy? What comes next, bombing Iraq’s power plants and oil refineries? How about the Green Zone? If the Iraqi Parliament doesn’t pass the legislation we want it to, we can always lay a couple of JDAMs on it.It turns out the bombed railroad station was no fluke. According to other reports, U.S. aircraft have dropped more than 200 bombs or missiles on Iraqi ground targets this year in support of U.S. ground forces at a rate double that of last year.
Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the “surge” is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: It isn’t.
Worse, the growing number of air strikes shows that, despite what the Marines have accomplished in Anbar province and Gen. David Petraeus’s best efforts, our high command remains as incapable as ever of grasping Fourth Generation war.
To put it bluntly, there is no surer or faster way to lose in 4GW than by calling in airstrikes. It is a disaster on every level. Physically, it inevitably kills far more civilians than enemies, enraging the population against us and driving them into the arms of our opponents. Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air.
Morally, it turns us into Goliath, a monster every real man has to fight. So negative are the results of air strikes in this kind of war that there is only one possible good number of them: zero, unless we are employing the “Hama model” of seeking total destruction, which we are not.
What explains this military lunacy, beyond simple desperation? Part of the answer, I suspect, is Air Force generals. Jointness demands they get their share of command billets in Iraq, and with very few exceptions they are mere military technicians. They know how to put bombs on targets, but they know nothing else. So, they do what they know how to do, with no comprehension of the consequences.
In fact, the U.S. Air Force recently announced it is developing its own counter-insurgency doctrine, precisely because “some people” are suggesting air strikes are counterproductive in such conflicts. Well, yes, that is what anyone with any understanding of counter-insurgency would suggest. The Air Force, of course, cares not a whit about the realities of counter-insurgency. It cares only about protecting its bureaucratic turf, its myth of “winning through air power” and its high-performance fighter-bombers, which truly are its knights in shining armor, useful only for tournaments.
Once again, we see the U.S. military riding the perfect sine wave. It will seem as if it is beginning to get things right, only to ride the wave back down again into the depths of unknowing. It brings to mind one of my favorite Bob Newhart skits. Newhart is walking slowly behind a line of an infinite number of monkeys, seated at an infinite number of typewriters, trying to write the world’s great books. Bob pauses behind one of the monkeys. “Uh, Fred, come here a minute. I think this one’s got something. ‘To be or not to be, that is the … gzrbnklap.’ Forget about it, Fred.”
In this case, the gzrgnklap is airstrikes in 4GW, and the monkey is wearing Air Force blue.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
The Pentagon v. Peak Oil
How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them
By Michael T. KlareSixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.
Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million — and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.
Such numbers cannot do full justice to the extraordinary gas-guzzling expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, for every soldier stationed “in theater,” there are two more in transit, in training, or otherwise in line for eventual deployment to the war zone — soldiers who also consume enormous amounts of oil, even if less than their compatriots overseas. Moreover, to sustain an “expeditionary” army located halfway around the world, the Department of Defense must move millions of tons of arms, ammunition, food, fuel, and equipment every year by plane or ship, consuming additional tanker-loads of petroleum. Add this to the tally and the Pentagon’s war-related oil budget jumps appreciably, though exactly how much we have no real way of knowing.
And foreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon’s total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world’s largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems — virtually all powered by oil — the Department of Defense (DoD) is, in fact, the world’s leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD’s daily oil hit, but an April 2007 report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (14 million gallons) every day. This is greater than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.
Not “Guns v. Butter,” but “Guns v. Oil”
For anyone who drives a motor vehicle these days, this has ominous implications. With the price of gasoline now 75 cents to a dollar more than it was just six months ago, it’s obvious that the Pentagon is facing a potentially serious budgetary crunch. Just like any ordinary American family, the DoD has to make some hard choices: It can use its normal amount of petroleum and pay more at the Pentagon’s equivalent of the pump, while cutting back on other basic expenses; or it can cut back on its gas use in order to protect favored weapons systems under development. Of course, the DoD has a third option: It can go before Congress and plead for yet another supplemental budget hike, but this is sure to provoke renewed calls for a timetable for an American troop withdrawal from Iraq, and so is an unlikely prospect at this time.
Nor is this destined to prove a temporary issue. As recently as two years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was confidently predicting that the price of crude oil would hover in the $30 per barrel range for another quarter century or so, leading to gasoline prices of about $2 per gallon. But then came Hurricane Katrina, the crisis in Iran, the insurgency in southern Nigeria, and a host of other problems that tightened the oil market, prompting the DoE to raise its long-range price projection into the $50 per barrel range. This is the amount that figures in many current governmental budgetary forecasts — including, presumably, those of the Department of Defense. But just how realistic is this? The price of a barrel of crude oil today is hovering in the $66 range. Many energy analysts now say that a price range of $70-$80 per barrel (or possibly even significantly more) is far more likely to be our fate for the foreseeable future.
A price rise of this magnitude, when translated into the cost of gasoline, aviation fuel, diesel fuel, home-heating oil, and petrochemicals will play havoc with the budgets of families, farms, businesses, and local governments. Sooner or later, it will force people to make profound changes in their daily lives — as benign as purchasing a hybrid vehicle in place of an SUV or as painful as cutting back on home heating or health care simply to make an unavoidable drive to work. It will have an equally severe affect on the Pentagon budget. As the world’s number one consumer of petroleum products, the DoD will obviously be disproportionately affected by a doubling in the price of crude oil. If it can’t turn to Congress for redress, it will have to reduce its profligate consumption of oil and/or cut back on other expenses, including weapons purchases.
The rising price of oil is producing what Pentagon contractor LMI calls a “fiscal disconnect” between the military’s long-range objectives and the realities of the energy marketplace. “The need to recapitalize obsolete and damaged equipment [from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan] and to develop high-technology systems to implement future operational concepts is growing,” it explained in an April 2007 report. However, an inability “to control increased energy costs from fuel and supporting infrastructure diverts resources that would otherwise be available to procure new capabilities.”
And this is likely to be the least of the Pentagon’s worries. The Department of Defense is, after all, the world’s richest military organization, and so can be expected to tap into hidden accounts of one sort or another in order to pay its oil bills and finance its many pet weapons projects. However, this assumes that sufficient petroleum will be available on world markets to meet the Pentagon’s ever-growing needs — by no means a foregone conclusion. Like every other large consumer, the DoD must now confront the looming — but hard to assess — reality of “Peak Oil”; the very real possibility that global oil production is at or near its maximum sustainable (”peak”) output and will soon commence an irreversible decline.
That global oil output will eventually reach a peak and then decline is no longer a matter of debate; all major energy organizations have now embraced this view. What remains open for argument is precisely when this moment will arrive. Some experts place it comfortably in the future — meaning two or three decades down the pike — while others put it in this very decade. If there is a consensus emerging, it is that peak-oil output will occur somewhere around 2015. Whatever the timing of this momentous event, it is apparent that the world faces a profound shift in the global availability of energy, as we move from a situation of relative abundance to one of relative scarcity. It should be noted, moreover, that this shift will apply, above all, to the form of energy most in demand by the Pentagon: the petroleum liquids used to power planes, ships, and armored vehicles.
The Bush Doctrine Faces Peak Oil
Peak oil is not one of the global threats the Department of Defense has ever had to face before; and, like other U.S. government agencies, it tended to avoid the issue, viewing it until recently as a peripheral matter. As intimations of peak oil’s imminent arrival increased, however, it has been forced to sit up and take notice. Spurred perhaps by rising fuel prices, or by the growing attention being devoted to “energy security” by academic strategists, the DoD has suddenly taken an interest in the problem. To guide its exploration of the issue, the Office of Force Transformation within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy commissioned LMI to conduct a study on the implications of future energy scarcity for Pentagon strategic planning.
The resulting study, “Transforming the Way the DoD Looks at Energy,” was a bombshell. Determining that the Pentagon’s favored strategy of global military engagement is incompatible with a world of declining oil output, LMI concluded that “current planning presents a situation in which the aggregate operational capability of the force may be unsustainable in the long term.”
LMI arrived at this conclusion from a careful analysis of current U.S. military doctrine. At the heart of the national military strategy imposed by the Bush administration — the Bush Doctrine — are two core principles: transformation, or the conversion of America’s stodgy, tank-heavy Cold War military apparatus into an agile, continent-hopping high-tech, futuristic war machine; and pre-emption, or the initiation of hostilities against “rogue states” like Iraq and Iran, thought to be pursuing weapons of mass destruction. What both principles entail is a substantial increase in the Pentagon’s consumption of petroleum products — either because such plans rely, to an increased extent, on air and sea-power or because they imply an accelerated tempo of military operations.
As summarized by LMI, implementation of the Bush Doctrine requires that “our forces must expand geographically and be more mobile and expeditionary so that they can be engaged in more theaters and prepared for expedient deployment anywhere in the world”; at the same time, they “must transition from a reactive to a proactive force posture to deter enemy forces from organizing for and conducting potentially catastrophic attacks.” It follows that, “to carry out these activities, the U.S. military will have to be even more energy intense…. Considering the trend in operational fuel consumption and future capability needs, this ‘new’ force employment construct will likely demand more energy/fuel in the deployed setting.”
The resulting increase in petroleum consumption is likely to prove dramatic. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the average American soldier consumed only four gallons of oil per day; as a result of George W. Bush’s initiatives, a U.S. soldier in Iraq is now using four times as much. If this rate of increase continues unabated, the next major war could entail an expenditure of 64 gallons per soldier per day.
It was the unassailable logic of this situation that led LMI to conclude that there is a severe “operational disconnect” between the Bush administration’s principles for future war-fighting and the global energy situation. The administration has, the company notes, “tethered operational capability to high-technology solutions that require continued growth in energy sources” — and done so at the worst possible moment historically. After all, the likelihood is that the global energy supply is about to begin diminishing rather than expanding. Clearly, writes LMI in its April 2007 report, “it may not be possible to execute operational concepts and capabilities to achieve our security strategy if the energy implications are not considered.” And when those energy implications are considered, the strategy appears “unsustainable.”
The Pentagon as a Global Oil-Protection Service
How will the military respond to this unexpected challenge? One approach, favored by some within the DoD, is to go “green” — that is, to emphasize the accelerated development and acquisition of fuel-efficient weapons systems so that the Pentagon can retain its commitment to the Bush Doctrine, but consume less oil while doing so. This approach, if feasible, would have the obvious attraction of allowing the Pentagon to assume an environmentally-friendly facade while maintaining and developing its existing, interventionist force structure.
But there is also a more sinister approach that may be far more highly favored by senior officials: To ensure itself a “reliable” source of oil in perpetuity, the Pentagon will increase its efforts to maintain control over foreign sources of supply, notably oil fields and refineries in the Persian Gulf region, especially in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. This would help explain the recent talk of U.S. plans to retain “enduring” bases in Iraq, along with its already impressive and elaborate basing infrastructure in these other countries.
The U.S. military first began procuring petroleum products from Persian Gulf suppliers to sustain combat operations in the Middle East and Asia during World War II, and has been doing so ever since. It was, in part, to protect this vital source of petroleum for military purposes that, in 1945, President Roosevelt first proposed the deployment of an American military presence in the Persian Gulf region. Later, the protection of Persian Gulf oil became more important for the economic well-being of the United States, as articulated in President Jimmy Carter’s “Carter Doctrine” speech of January 23, 1980 as well as in President George H. W. Bush’s August 1990 decision to stop Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which led to the first Gulf War — and, many would argue, the decision of the younger Bush to invade Iraq over a decade later.
Along the way, the American military has been transformed into a “global oil-protection service” for the benefit of U.S. corporations and consumers, fighting overseas battles and establishing its bases to ensure that we get our daily fuel fix. It would be both sad and ironic, if the military now began fighting wars mainly so that it could be guaranteed the fuel to run its own planes, ships, and tanks — consuming hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could instead be spent on the development of petroleum alternatives.
Michael T. Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, is the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books).
The Iraqi Parliament Votes for a Timetable for U.S. Withdrawal
Late last month, Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar published a very important article on AlterNet that exposes the ugliest part of the U.S. occupation. This is exactly the sort of news that the mainstream media should be publishing on the front page as part of the constitutional mandate to speak truth to power. But, alas, in the three weeks since this article was published, there has not been more than a hint of coverage in the major outlets.
The article reported on the recent vote by a parliamentary majority in Iraq, demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign troops from Iraq (an item that received mere mention in American media) and on a major new (and comprehensive) 23 point plan by the Al Fadhila party (a key “moderate” Shia party) for stabilizing the country.
This plan is opposed by the United States. This should not be surprising, since the U.S. has also opposed a number of similarly promising plans (also unreported in the major media) forwarded by a variety of key players in Iraq — including at various times the major Sunni insurgent groups and the leadership of the largest and most ferocious of the Shia militia). American opposition will almost certainly doom this plan, as it has its predecessors.
Here is the ugly truth about U.S. opposition to the plan and its predecessors, according to Holland and Jarrar:
“These plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals, and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy.”
There are three horrible lessons to be drawn from this almost invisible incident.
First, it demonstrates that depth of Bush Administration commitment to maintaining a powerful and dominant U.S. presence inside Iraq and the Middle East more generally. Their refusal to explore these options shows that a permanent American presence (including the five major military bases costing over two billion dollars) and the “opening” of the Iraqi oil economy to exploitation by private multinational oil companies are non-negotiable demands of the Bush Administration.
Second, the failure of the Democrats — either the Congressional leadership or the cadre of Presidential candidates — to publicize this refusal and to explore and/or embrace these initiatives is a depressing reminder that they continue to be the “loyal opposition.” That is, while they oppose the details of Bush Administration policy (e.g., the use of the surge instead of redeployment), they are not willing to oppose the larger mission — maintaining a major U.S. military presence in Iraq while imposing neoliberal reform on their economy.
Third, the mainstream American media is still failing to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to speak truth to power. The “press” is only mentioned in the First Amendment because the authors of the Constitution were depending on it to expose the tyrannical tendencies that inhere in any large and powerful government. That means they are supposed to blast away at events like this, where the U.S. government uses its military presence in another country to stop their lawmakers from pursuing important initiatives that could reduce the monumental suffering of their people.
Until we develop a powerful antiwar movement that does not depend on either the Democratic leadership or on the mainstream media, these sorts of Iraqi initiatives will continue to fail, and the slaughter may continue indefinitely.
Scientists Demonstrate Best Way To Use Caffeine
Here is some useful news you can use. Morning “big gulp” coffee drinkers are misusing the power of caffeine. Researchers at the Sleep Disorders Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago along with colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have shown that caffeine is best admnistered in a larger number of smaller doses with the doses coming later in the day.
Chicago – People who take small amounts of caffeine regularly during the day may be able to avoid falling asleep and perform well on cognitive tests without affecting their nighttime sleep habits.
Researchers from Rush University Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have discovered that caffeine works by thwarting one of two interacting physiological systems that govern the human sleep-wake cycle. The researchers, who report their findings in the May issue of the journal SLEEP, propose a novel regimen, consisting of frequent low doses of caffeine, to help shift workers, medical residents, truck drivers, and others who need to stay awake get a bigger boost from their tea or coffee.
“I hate to say it, but most of the population is using caffeine the wrong way by drinking a few mugs of coffee or tea in the morning, or three cups from their Starbuck’s grande on the way to work. This means that caffeine levels in the brain will be falling as the day goes on. Unfortunately, the physiological process they need to counteract is not a major player until the latter half of the day,” said James Wyatt, PhD, sleep researcher at Rush University Medical Center and lead author on the study.
Though many studies have measured caffeine’s sleep-averting effects, most do not take into account that sleep is governed by two opposing but interacting processes. The circadian system promotes sleep rhythmically—an internal clock releases melatonin and other hormones in a cyclical fashion. In contrast, the homeostatic system drives sleep appetitively—it builds the longer one is awake. If the two drives worked together, the drive for sleep would be overwhelming. As it turns out, they oppose one another.
Caffeine is thought to block the receptor for adenosine, a critical chemical messenger involved in the homeostatic drive for sleep. If that were true, then caffeine would be most effective if it were administered in parallel with growing pressure from the sleep homeostatic system, and also with accumulating adenosine.
To test their hypothesis, the scientists studied 16 male subjects in private suites, free of time cues, for 29 days. Instead of keeping to a 24-hour day, researchers scheduled the subjects to live on a 42.85–hour day (28.57-hour wake episodes), simulating the duration of extended wakefulness commonly encountered by doctors, and military and emergency services personnel. The extended day was also designed to disrupt the subjects’ circadian system while maximizing the effects of the homeostatic push for sleep.
Following a randomized, double-blind protocol, subjects received either one caffeine pill, containing 0.3 mg per kilogram of body weight, roughly the equivalent of two ounces of coffee, or an identical-looking placebo. They took the pills upon waking and then once every hour. The goal of the steady dosing was to progressively build up caffeine levels in a way that would coincide with—and ultimately, counteract—the progressive push of the homeostatic system, which grows stronger the longer a subject stays awake.
The strategy worked. Subjects who took the low-dose caffeine performed better on cognitive tests. They also exhibited fewer accidental sleep onsets, or microsleeps. EEG tests showed that placebo subjects were unintentionally asleep 1.57 percent of the time during the scheduled wake episodes, compared with 0.32 percent for those receiving caffeine. Despite their enhanced wakefulness, the caffeine-taking subjects reported feeling sleepier than their placebo counterparts, suggesting that the wake-promoting effects of caffeine do not replace the restorative effects gained through sleep.
Coffee, tea, and other caffeine-containing beverages are tools. Don’t drink more than you need to and slow the rate of your drinking to spread it out. Keep in mind that once you reach the point where you don’t need to maintain a high feeling of wakefulness that you should immediately stop drinking it. If you need something more powerful then consider Provigil (modafinil). My strongly felt advice is to stay away from methamphetamine or other amphetamines because they cause brain damage. I don’t have any specific knowledge about toxic effects of caffeine or modafinil on neurons. But sleep deprivation is definitely harmful. A life lived with a constant need for anti-sleep stmulants is a life that is in need of some serious restructuring to allow for more sleep time.