Perspectivating

While he was at Yale, George W. Bush was chosen to be a member of the secretive Skull & Bones society. His father, George H.W. Bush was also a member, and his grandfather had co-founded it. Skull & Bones are assigned nicknames when initiated. George Bush the Elder's nickname was "Magog." Via Alternet:

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."

(Note: graphic above is of Breugel the Elder's painting "Little Babel.")

Memorial Day: Post Traumatic Growth Disorder

Three or four times a day I see a story and think, "I should blog about that." Writing requires a measure of solitude, however, and what most hovers around me is usually cacophony. So instead of posts, little mental Post-It notes get written which then stick on each other, pile up and fade into the past. But one of those post-its boomeranged back from a week and a half ago, with personal connection, starting with a soldier going postal on a base in Iraq:

The 44-year-old signals specialist from the 54th Engineering Battalion, based in Bamberg, Germany, was charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault for Monday's shooting, which killed two military doctors and three soldiers, at a combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty, in Iraq.

Russell had been relieved of his weapon a week earlier, after making some "inappropriate remarks," his fellow soldier said, and he'd been referred to the stress clinic for counseling. But each day, the counselors "sent him back to his base," where Russell complained the doctors were refusing to take his symptoms seriously or give him the medication he thought he needed.

On Monday, the soldier says Russell was being transported back and forth to the mental health clinic by his staff sergeant escort.

After yet another argument at the clinic, he and his escort had just returned to Russell's brigade headquarters. That's when he "assaulted his escort, stole his weapon," and held him at briefly at gunpoint. Russell snatched away the keys for the vehicle, and drove back to the treatment center, where he allegedly opened fire.

The overpowered escort rushed inside to alert his command, and the battalion's physician's assistant immediately called over to the clinic, but it was too late. The call went through "just in time to hear the gun shots."

These "stress clinics" were supposed to be part of the answer, with hundreds of thousands of troops reporting symptoms of post traumatic stress, and the more severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

The clinic Sgt. Russell attacked had denied him medications he repeatedly asked for, and the new treatment he instead received is the brainchild of my wife's ex-fiancee, Major Thomas Jarrett. Shortly before a desperate, enraged vet shot up his clinic, he had this to say to a USA Today reporter:

Jarrett tells soldiers he is "fed up of hearing about" post-traumatic stress. He said he wants to talk of growing from trauma and becoming stronger because of it.

"Thriving through your combat experience" is Jarrett's mantra. All in-theatre personnel are urged to view a 90-minute video of his rap, and those who exhibit signs of PTSD will sometimes be discharged to Camp Victory to attend his "Warrior Resiliency and Thriving" class. That a positivist "Post Traumatic Growth" schtick has been enthusiastically adopted by the military should surprise no one; at this point, sending soldiers into reserve just because they're burned out by years of hunting Haji would mean calling the war off. As to the consequences, only 24 US soldiers committed suicide in the month of January, a militarily acceptable loss rate. Yet something of crucial significance is being obscured in the hokum, and bears a disquieting psychological parallel with a previous catastrophic American failure.

Can it be so bad, really? In a different way, yes it can. When soldiers in the Roman legions broke down and wouldn't fight, their comrades were gathered to watch them beaten to death. When German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War Two went AWOL ( or eventually, lost their weapons or ate too much food), they were executed. The US military isn't there yet, but in denying unpleasant facts and routinely giving its current and former soldiers the shaft, it has moved decisively in that direction. The Af-Pak war is heating up and troops are going on their 3rd and 4th combat tours. Neither legions nor SS units were asked to do the same, and war's intensity now is much higher, its operations more sustained. Including night operations, historically very rare and now routine. The psychological toll may be worse than anyone wants to admit, and Sgt. Russell represents far more than an unfortunate incident.

Following WWII, clinical psychiatrists analyzed personnel data amassed with the goal of learning how to better maintain combat effectiveness. Study results were unexpectedly and dramatically clear: all sane soldiers broke down if their combat exposure was longer than 90 days. Correlation between combat and acute breakdown was unpredictable, even curvilinear at first, but the correlation gradually tightened over time to almost 1:1. After 90 days of combat exposure, 98% of soldiers experienced incapacitating breakdown accompanied by lasting psychic distress. The 2% still functioning were psychopaths suffering from full-blown insanity, which combat progressively accentuates.

For the otherwise sane soldiers who came to the end of their ropes, the term "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" was coined. Based upon the data, the psychiatrists concluded that warfare had surpassed the ability of human beings to endure it. This insight in hand, the Pentagon soon set out to find a pharmacological means of adapting humans to industrial combat. (For a powerful overview of combat's psychological effects and the US military's generally futile attempts to ameliorate them, see Richard A. Gabriel's 'No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War.')

When I was a small boy, about 5 years old, I remember meeting a man named Sonny Seeley at a camp picnic. He was commonly referred to as Uncle Seeley, though not any known uncle of mine. He was not a common visitor, and seemed from some far-off branch of the family. As they prepared foods indoors, I heard my grandmother and Aunt Sophie talk about what beautiful letters he had written them during the war, but how when he got home he hardly ever said another thing, what a shame; my impression is his letters were from North Africa. As he sat in the aluminum folding lawn chair in the pleasant sun he didn't venture much, and would stammer what was to me an uninterpretable tremulo when someone came up to greet him or ask a question. His whole body was trembling badly enough to not be able to speak intelligibly. He shook when he sat, his knees shook when he walked all skinny and gangly, like a stick puppet over-tensioned, hunched, unable to un-slack, even 20 years and more after whatever he'd been through.

My grandfather and his brothers hosted that picnic, which may well have been on Memorial Day, and were all in that war in one service or another. They sent their wives to bring Uncle Seeley a plate of hot-buttered steamed clams, rolls and potato salad. They plied him with beer cans glistening from the cooler. While he struggled out his thank-yous and precariously worked to hold his paper plate level, I, being young and relatively free of good judgment, asked him why he was shaking. "Shell-shock," someone said in a deep hushed voice above me. "Go play with the Lawn Darts." Lawn Darts were not yet illegal and would arc meaningfully through the air, proving gravity, stabilized by colorful plastic fins. I don't remember ever seeing Uncle Seeley again, and hope he was able to find some measure of relief.

One of my wife's oldest friends, a social worker in Manhattan, once described Thomas Jarrett as "about the least empathetic person I've ever met, and I meet a lot of people." Jarrett's schtick is a bastardized version of some positivist themes of Albert Ellis, an influential psychotherapist he interned with for one summer in the late 1990s. His application for further work with Ellis was rejected, so he never finished his PhD. He never served in combat, and strongly implies that he did. Jarrett's one more fraud in a Fraud War, passing out candy-coated delusions.

Denial is one survival mechanism for when a truth is too painful to face; delusion is another, for when you're not interested in the truth at all. For when it's hanging by the teeth it embedded in your ass. When you stride about in front of grunts who have made fun of the dead and dish warmed-over dianetics, delusion is your friend. Admittedly, denial and delusion are endemic qualities, possibly even necessary to military life, and often aren't obvious. We're set up that way. Truth is harsh, believing in nonsense comes almost as naturally as the urge to spread it. There's more truth to be found in 5 minutes of myths and fables than an hour of nightly news. Speaking of parallels, folk still commonly blame or take credit for protests at home halting the war in Vietnam, a "stabbed in the back" variant. On the contrary, that war stopped because soldiers were increasingly turning weapons on their superiors, mutiny was in the air and there weren't enough combat-ready units left to conduct field operations. Nearing the end, everybody there was just going through the motions.

Vietnam produced more PTSD victims than any other war in American history, both in total number and frequency, despite the Pentagon's emphasis on instilling the desire to kill into recruits, based again on data from WWII and Korean War which indicated only a small fraction of combat troops actually tried to shoot an individual enemy. In their inevitable post-war analyses, the Pentagon fingered low morale of draftees as the primary fault, resolving to go into their future conflicts strictly with volunteers, ones who remain annoyingly human to this day. To quote Richard Gabriel:

"...war exacts a terrible cost in human emotions quite apart from the usual costs calculated in terms of dollars, dead, and wounded. It is a cost every soldier will pay if he is exposed long enough to the horrors of the battlefield. Weakness or cowardice has nothing to do with the probability that a soldier will collapse under the strain of battle. It is not man that is too weak; it is the conduct of war that imposes too great a strain for the sane to endure."

People think soldiers who break down under the strains of ongoing sleep deprivation, constant threat of ambush, seeing friends get blown apart and killing civilians are weak, defective, or somehow exceptions to the rule. They are the rule, it is a well-measured rule, one denoting a reality which does not mesh well with a politically cynical, inherently paranoid "Long War." If indeed we are in a Long War, rather than squander hard power and soldier well-being as if they were limitless, flushing them down strategically harmless hell-holes, the American people would be better served by leaders who recognize that sending troops on combat patrols and driving over IEDs for years straight dulls their effectiveness. Eight years of tactical Action-Jackson approach has served no military purpose but that of potential enemies, who gauge our exhaustion and impending poverty with glee. Modern war serves money, and Iraq and Afghanistan have so far done horribly even at that.

That's one skeptic's opinion. This is not: what's done abroad comes back home, and there is no such thing as "thriving through your combat experience." That's either craven or self-delusional bullshit conceived to advance one individual's career. Which it has, and which my wife foresaw. When she heard some years ago that Jarrett was going back into the military as a counselor, she immediately expressed a hunch he was going to damage a lot of people. The kind of damage that, she thought, might provoke one of his patients to kill him.

Naturally, when she told me about the news coverage of an ex's half-baked treatment scheme, I remembered the 20-year veteran sergeant who snapped and went looking for the ludicrous son of a bitch who told him to grin and bear it, killing 5 mental health staffers in the process. I thought of Uncle Seeley shaking, of grunts sent to Tony Robbins seminars, and of new-fangled fates worse than death.

Those Who Study History Are Condemned To Know It

And speaking of Henry Kissinger, he floated a paper ("Seizing Arab Oil") under the nom de plume "Miles Ignotus" (Unknown Soldier) in Harper's back in 1975 about America solving its oil problems by invading Saudi Arabia and seizing its infrastructure. It may not have been his idea originally, since James Schlesinger (Richard Nixon's SecDef) advocated the same thing in 1973, and tried to rev up the sullen British on a joint operation which included Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Britain responded by making another James Bond movie, but the Gift Zwerg (from german, lit "poison dwarf") never gave up on the idea.

James Akins was the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1973-75, when he was dismissed for telling Kissinger to perform an unnatural act. He returned to lobby against the planned war, and later personally filed a winning suit against AIPAC which went to the US Supreme Court in 1998.

Akins remarked at the imminent start of the Iraq invasion in 2003, "It's the Kissinger Plan! I thought it'd been killed, but it's back."

Iraq's Quick, Dirty, Happy Ending

Under what will be known as the Obama Doctrine starting in 2009, the U.S. will seek to withdraw all its troops from Iraq in 16 months, the speediest exit military experts think it can be achieved. Various factors will make this withdrawal's timing less relevant than its context, its extent far more dependent on matters outside Presidential control. This is good, because unilateral voluntary withdrawal would invite a great deal of resistance, denial, and wheel-spinning. Predictions are arrogant, foolhardy, and as the professional futilitarians so often prove, ineluctably wrong. Therefore, I'm going to tell exactly what's going to happen in Iraq in 2009. In short, the Iraqis are going to make it simple for us.

Currently, Bush Doctrine jockeys are holding $50 billion in accrued oil revenues hostage from Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al Maliki. He wants the money, but to get it he has to promise US rights to permanent bases in his country. Three problems: he doesn't have the votes, he doesn't have the country, and if he signs the deal on his own authority, he won't have lungs. He is now in a position where Iraqi power brokers will tell him what to do, and by extension, they will also determine what a US withdrawal will look like.

To recap, Iraq was a secular nation made up of three main ethno-religious groups in descending numerical order: Shi'a Persians, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. While there is considerable complexity and strife going on within each of those labels, the geographic separation and cohesion of these basic groups has become much sharper over the past 5 years as upwards of 30% of the total population either relocated or fled the country entirely, and the unspooling "blood borders" dynamic has made the guesswork much simpler.

A basic question is, why bother continuing to have an Iraq? There are all sorts of reasons against it, and only a few big reasons for it. While the Kurds and Sunnis would love to have separate states of their own, but they also realize these would quickly be overpowered; Moqtada al-Sadr and al-Sistani, the most important Shia leaders, both want a unified Iraq; and finally, Iran does not want to inherit or administer a "Shia rump," not even with its oil, greatly preferring a car-bomb free existence and a stable neighbor to the south. (The Saudis? Screwed.) All the stakeholders come out ahead by forging a stable country, whether as a federation, a coalition of self-administered states, or the present parliament. The system is secondary to the agreement, upon which rests the logic of continuing as a single nation.

Sadr and Sistani realize the quickest way to achieve a stability which favors them is to get the Americans out. Thence, they're insisting the deal for American bases be decided by referendum, which will overwhelmingly reject it. This rejection will leave a political power vacuum, which Sistani will happily let Sadr fill; Sistani simply wants Najaf to return to its rightful place as spiritual center of the Shia world. As for the Sunnis, they remember the solidarity and aid Sadr showed to Fallujah, his general history of restraint, and far prefer him over Maliki; the Iranians have seen his effectiveness, approve his co-existential nationalism, and have extended him protection. The Kurds will grouchily join and give up much of Kirkuk's oil in return for continuing autonomy and protection against Turkey, something the US no longer even pretends to offer.

Obama Doctrine or no, Iraq is going to demand that the US leave, and it can readily obtain the means of enforcement. After the coming referendum, the Prime Minister's job is his anytime he wants it, and his first act would be to draft a resolution calling for American withdrawal. As soon as American troops start leaving, the violence will plummet. Maliki will decamp with his pieds-noirs for the quiet life in Provence. Obama will fork over the $50 billion in return for soft-power access and influence, knowing that long-term bases are more than not needed, they're the biggest problem.

And then, of course, we'll hear every dubious neo-twit flathead shout with glee clear down into the grave, "You see? We were right all along, it worked just like we said! You said we were wrong, you insulted us, but it was you, it was you who was wrong. And we were right!!" If you ever find yourself within arm's reach of a neocon, a short, sharp, two-knuckled punch into the solar plexus will serve quite nicely.

Well That Didn't Take Long

The day after presidential aspirant General "Surgemaster" Petraeus took over CENTCOM command from Admiral William Fallon, two Iranian boats were fired on in the Persian Gulf. Oil went over $120 a barrel, a 20% raise in the last month. In concert, Joint Chiefs Chair Adm. Mike Mullen focused on Iran's role in Iraq yesterday, (NYTimes, WaPo) stating that military action against Iran is okey-dokey.

The nation's top military officer said yesterday that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" as one of several options against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq.....

"It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability," he said at a Pentagon news conference.

More Pentagon talking points delivered to the NY Times:

The administration has, in fact, discussed whether to attack training camps, safe houses and weapons storehouses inside Iran that intelligence reports say are being used by the Quds Force to train fighters, according to two senior administration officials.

Looks like Cheney has some room left to run. People who say the US can't attack Iran, because to do so would be illogical, are very nice, well-meaning folk whom I'd dearly love to believe.

Bush Versus The Today Show

"Bush: And as people are now beginning to see, Iraq is changing, democracy is beginning to tak[e] hold. And I'm convinced 50 years from now people look back and say thank God there was those who were willing to sacrifice.

"Curry: But you're saying you're going to have to carry that burden... Some Americans believe that they feel they're carrying the burden because of this economy.

"Bush: Yeah, well --

"Curry: They say -- they say they're suffering because of this.

"Bush: I don't agree with that.

"Curry: You don't agree with that? Has nothing do with the economy, the war? The spending on the war?

"Bush: I don't think so. I think actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs.

"Curry: Oh, yeah?

"Bush: Yeah, because we're buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses."

Opium Crops Started In Iraq

Should have predicted this one. It will no doubt be used as proof of close al-Qaeda ties between Iraq and Afghanistan:

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.

Afghans with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad. (via Patrick Cockburn, The Independent UK.)

At this point, Al-Qaeda is the least of Iraq's problems. It's only logical that farmers are getting into opium, which if I think about it, is actually a positive step: people who live in failed states need money and jobs, and opium is a great cash crop. It does give some indication of how bad things have gotten for people in the Sunni Triangle. Michael Massing reviewed a book about the Iraqi journalists who work and write for the McClatchy Newspapers, which set up a blog they run called Inside Iraq. He summarizes that Iraq is what the end of the world looks like:

The overwhelming sense [from the McClatchy journalists' blog] is that of a society undergoing a catastrophic breakdown from the never-ending waves of violence, criminality, and brutality inflicted on it by insurgents, militias, jihadis, terrorists, policemen, bodyguards, mercenaries, armed gangs, warlords, kidnappers, and everyday thugs. "Inside Iraq" suggests how the relentless and cumulative effects of these vicious crimes have degraded virtually every aspect of the nation's social, economic, professional, and personal life.

Despite all the mortuary work and make-up, all the sartorial wonders of The Surge, the country formerly known as Iraq is a corpse. As in dead country, not walking. BushCo and Congress, the corporate media and the chattering classes regularly pull up a dolly and pop back a coffin lid, they point out that the thing inside has finely rouged cheeks, a nicely pinned-back business suit, that its limbs (lifted with a complex array of monofilament lines) move so as to appear amazingly life-like, and that it even plays pre-recorded speech. Two non-trivial problems: it's still frigging dead, and it makes everyone who looks too closely at it puke.

As soon as the Shiite and then the Sunni extremists who we paid to fight other Sunni extremists stop getting paid, they'll start blowing up Western troops with greater enthusiasm. Our crusaders are not welcome in Iraq, where opium production now looks like a smart way out. In context, it probably is. At least something is growing.

(With thank-you credits to Empire Burlesque, Inside Iraq, and Cryptogon.)

Iran Facts Update, Pt. II: Strategic Fulcrum & Schwerpunkt

(Note: big research credit owed to Church and Empire, since this is basically his post. I'm plagiarizing like crazy below, I'm just not entirely sure yet from whom.)

Washington has now shifted into full "All Iran, All The Time" mode. This should be a big tip-off to what may be coming next. Rumors circulate that an Executive Order has already been signed for attacking Iran. Someone with access to Cheney's office leaked the preferred scenario: an Israeli attack on the Natanz reactor project, followed by an Iranian response against Israel, followed by a "shock and awe" bombing campaign from the US targeting Iran's entire infrastructure, including bridges, utilities, pumping stations, and ports.

While you or I might not think it's a good idea to bomb a country which hasn't attacked anything since the 18th century, and while a bombing campaign is likely to provoke even the dissident Iranians into hating the US, it might be helpful to know why, under certain strategic analyses, "It Must Be Done." And now, I must hand the blog for a suitably brief period to Mr. Paul Wolfowitz:

"Defense Planning Guidance for 1994-99", Paul Wolfowitz

• "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union..."

The War Department is always looking to nip new threats in the bud. That's natural. But the focal point of its attention was further expanded as follows:

...to ensure that the United States - and no one else - controls the energy supplies of the Persian Gulf and adjacent areas of Asia.

The first part of that sentence has been the most basic precept of US foreign policy since the 1950s. In fact, written in invisible ink on the door of the Oval Office is this phrase: Don't Lose the Gulf, Dipshit! (It was a class trip, the tour guide looked away...what can I say?) Now, the Bush Doctrine goes much further. "Adjacent areas of Asia" covers a lot of ground. The Vulcans radically expanded the Carter Doctrine, and turned away from, even trashed, the Eisenhower Doctrine (better known as "Containment"). Amongst other things, the Bush Doctrine clearly stipulates that Iran has to knuckle under. Even if that's impossible.

In short, the Bush Administration wants access to all the oil and gas in the Caspian Sea, which is currently (mostly) under Russian control. Iran happens to be blocking the way of "our" pipelines with "their" pipelines. Even worse, Iran is undermining the Petro-dollar standard by selling its oil directly to countries, for example to Japan in exchange for Yen. Big no-no in Bush World. Chavez is a gnat in that mental sphere, whereas Iran is a bee-hive.

So, having secured the White House and a pretext for wars intended to control pipelines, BushCo wasted no time in taking its spiffy new Doctrine out for a spin in early 2001 by:

• unilaterally pulling out of the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
  
• announcing new high-tech arms sales to Taiwan

The Russians and the Chinese did not miss the significance of these gestures. How could they? Warm spit was dripping off their expression-frozen faces. The Cold War was back on, baby. Following these opening provocations, a sizable, sustained, and fairly successful effort was made to destabilize the goverments of the obscure new countries (sometimes referred to as "Trashcanistans") surrounding the Caspian basin. Then, on May 4, 2006 Vice President Dick Cheney went to Lithuania, and made some rather blunt public statements which could be considered hilarious, insane, or hypocritical, but probably above all rude. Among other things, he accused:

• Kremlin officials of "unfairly and improperly" restricting the rights of Russian citizens
  
• Russia using the country's abundant oil and gas supplies as "tools of intimidation [and] blackmail" against its neighbors
  
• Moscow of attempting to "monopolize the transportation" of oil and gas supplies in Eurasia
  

The next day, Cheney flew to Kazakhstan, urging them to:

• ship their plentiful oil through a US-sponsored pipeline to Turkey and the Mediterranean rather than through Russian-controlled pipelines to Europe.

In tag-team bonhomie, on June 3, 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went after China by pointing out:

• Beijing's "lack of transparency" with respect to its military spending "understandably causes concerns for some of its neighbors"
• plans for increased spending on the F-22A fighter and Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, weapons only useful in an Armageddon War for which there were just two possible adversaries - Russia and China

So they're right. This is a Long War. Whether it should be fought or not is a good question, but the economic prizes are considerable. If you look at a map of new US military bases in Africa and Asia, the correlation with proximity to oil assets is nearly perfect. For its part, China has been extremely aggressive in securing energy resources, often paying unbelievable sums of cash (dollars, of course) for lease and development rights. After Kerry fumbled in '04 they went around the world signing deal after deal...it was like watching Mike Tyson and his entourage on a shopping spree for new bling-bling, only instead of being the youngest heavyweight champion of all time, China is the world's oldest civilization, with trillions of suddenly accumulated dollars to get rid of. In addition, it is willing to fight proxy wars in pursuit of energy reserves and is addressing its biggest military gap by:

• use of arms transfers and other military aid as inducements to such countries as Iran and Sudan to gain access to energy reserves
  
• acquiring warships "that could serve as the basis for a force capable of power projection" into the oil-producing regions of the planet

Where's Iran in all this? Stuck right between the US, Russia, and China. Geographically, the country:

• spans from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, positioning Tehran to play a significant role in the two areas of greatest concern to the nuclear powers
• owns part of the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz - a narrow waterway from the Gulf to the Indian Ocean, the bottleneck which moves over one-quarter of the world's oil every day
• is the most obvious transit route for the delivery of oil and natural gas from the Caspian countries to global markets, especially those in Europe, India, and Japan

• supposedly possesses the world's second-largest reserves of petroleum - an estimated 132 billion barrels (11.1% of the world's known reservoirs); and also the second-largest reserves of natural gas - 971 trillion cubic feet (27.5 trillion cubic meters, or 15.3% of known reservoirs)

Bush policies seem almost intentionally designed to drive Iran into Russia and China's arms. China, in particular, benefits from the US shunning and sanctioning Iran:

• US firms are barred from investing; European companies face US economic penalties if they do so
  
• China signed a US$50 billion cash deal in 2004 to develop the massive Yadavaran gas field
  
• China signed deal to purchase 10 million tons of Iranian liquefied natural gas annually for 25 years.

Russia's designs on Iran are primarily defensive, but the two countries have extensive ties. Russia's perspective:

• major strategic loss if Iran falls under US control
  
• primary supplier of nuclear equipment and technology, future role in developing Iran's energy infrastructure
• Russian firms are completing the construction of a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southwestern Iran
  

So if the US could pull off regime change in Iran, it would hit another "Trifecta." Not only would complete control of the Persian Gulf be ensured for a generation, but oil companies would (continue to) make more money than God, and the US would be able to...umm....what was that Cheney phrase again? Oh, yeah: "use abundant oil and gas supplies as tools of intimidation and blackmail."

Now wouldn't those be handy tools to have? A self-respecting Empire wouldn't be caught dead without them. The only flaw in all this brilliant logic is that the Bush Doctrine's distinctive flair for execution has been, to be kind, dubious and underwhelming:

• Long-term US prospects in Central Asia have seriously dimmed
  
• US-European relations weakened, halting if not tenuous
  
• The Coalition of the Swilling sham doesn't hide that Europe stayed on the sidelines
• Our closest allies are interested in securing Iran's oil flows for themselves
• Turkey has refused to provide airbase support for bombing Iran
• Encouraging a separate Kurdistan gives Turkey and Iran a common interest
  

Bottom line, the American Corporate State is bankrupt. By its leaders' calculations, however, taking Iraq's oil cost only a trillion dollars and is worth thirty trillion. A return of 3,000%! The Empire is saved. (Chipmunks demonstrate better math competency.) The pink-red areas on the map above represent ethnic Shia populations. How happy will they be if Iran is bombed...for not having The Bomb? Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese are solvent, right next door to Iran, and accumulating increasingly large gobs of cash. My friend Jon in Wisconsin recently quoted his drinking buddy Sun Tzu, who summed up the Bush Doctrine and dumb-assed Vulcans pretty well:

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first, and then seek to win."

Of Mercenaries And Black Waters

A good rule of thumb in military history is to bet against a belligerent which hires mercenaries. For bad ideas, it generally ranks up there with press-ganging peasants into service and sending them into battle armored with straw, carrying scythes and pruning hooks. Commingling the former with the latter is more than a rule of thumb, the results as predictable as throwing a match into a keg of gunpowder which is lying under an outhouse near a propeller. Unless, of course, one adversary is determined to outbid the other in terms of simple stupidity. There is an undeniable element of luck in battle, as those who lived through them attest. The famous Hans Holbein engraving, attached above, conveys the image of confusion without the blood.

There are exceptions to these rules, of course. In the article below, for example, economic warlock Paul Krugman needlessly takes Machiavelli far out of context, even falsely construes his meaning, in order to denigrate the US security services firm, and the regrettable haven of our bad fortunes, Blackwater USA.

In truth, Machiavelli did not say mercenaries are worthless. He said they're unreliable, and also wrote a great deal about their relative utility and employment, praising in particular the dreaded Swiss pikemen who were renowned for their competence and ruthlessness. In the Hundred Years' War, if you didn't have your Swiss piker contingent, or a larger one than your opponent, the starting odds were considered as stacked against you. They were impervious to cavalry charge and pretty much everything else but another heavily armed pike box, such as another formation of Swiss mercenaries. They wouldn't fight each other, however. Their supremacy in Europe only began to dim with the increasing effectiveness of firearms circa 1500, but they remained on the battlefields there until the early 1800s. Even today, their last contingent guards the Vatican.

More commonly, mercenaries, the Swiss included, have always been known for their abominable behavior off the battlefield. They are known for freebooting, looting, murder, pillage, rape, protection rackets, and the indiscriminate application of senseless violence. Nearly four hundred years after the fact, bad memories of mercenaries remain compressed into an expression of disgust in German: Schwedentrunk, or "Swede's mead." In the Thirty Years' War, in which 20%-40% of Germany's entire population died, Swedish troops swarmed down throughout the land to ostensibly persecute Catholics. Their rear, or "black" guards devised an expedient to aid in finding hidden food, treasure, and women: they would take manure and liquify it with urine, fill a funnel with it, and force a servant or farmer's jaw open. The practice was recorded in the baroque satirical memoir of that war, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (English title: Simplicissimus):

They lay the bound servant on the ground, stuck a wooden wedge into his mouth, and poured into his belly a bucket full of foul manure water, which they called a Swedish Drink.

The quibble with Krugman is past history. Blackwater USA, founded by evangelical crusader Erik Prince in the here and now, is the private muscle of the Bush Administration. Prince has donated $168,000 to the Republican National Committee. Iraq's population has been preyed upon by its lawless mercenaries and 20% of its population is already dead, maimed, tortured, robbed, raped or displaced. Blackwater had a lot of help with that, but they did play a prominently annointed part. To think that Blackwater's mercenary role departs from the norms of history is utterly naive, which most of my fellow citizens still choose to be, as is thinking that the American Legacy retains its former status. Which we all prefer to do. Here's the article (via Cat in the Bag):

by Paul Krugman
NY Times

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn’t get out of their way.

Yeah. We know pretty well what happened. And what else is happening. Krugman goes on in language suitable for polite society at the NY Times.

The Ride Of The Valkyrie, Apocalypse Now, And The Sergeants' Revolt

The New York Times, Sunday, August 19th, 2007
By Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance T. Gray, and Jeremy A. Murphy

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the "battle space" remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers' expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a "time-sensitive target acquisition mission" on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse - namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington's insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made - de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government - places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict - as we do now - will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. "Lucky" Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, "We need security, not free food."

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

##Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.##

Iraq: It's The August Place To Be!

It's 117 degrees in Baghdad, and the water pumps are silent. No running water. Typhus and cholera cannot withstand the power of The Surge, but if those peaceful maladies claim any victims, they won't count. We won't hear about them. We also won't hear what the ground commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, really thinks. Because the White House is going to write his report on the Surge effects for him.

The video attached above, "Inside The Surge,"tells the story from the ground, with troopers in A Company of a Stryker battalion in Baghdad. If you want to see reporting like the best of what came out of Vietnam, watch. Soldiers speak, complete with their names and rank. They speak of being pushed beyond maximum endurance and giving out. (Their suicide rate just hit an all-time modern high.) As a reminder, Vietnam ended not because of civilian resistance at home, but because US regular Army and Marine units could no longer function as effective fighting forces in the field. They did not want to be there, and could see they were doing no good. The mission was too muddled, the fantasy was too far gone.

One can only wonder what the Iraqis are feeling as their proto-government has its August vacation. More than a vacation. In truth, many of their representatives have fled for the hills like caged badgers, and will never set foot in a parliament building again. In the video above, a taxi driver is killed, shot through the throat while looking for his fare's address because the soldiers of 2nd Platoon were nervous about snipers. They thought he might be spotting for the enemy.

I read a news article on the Huffington Post this weekend in which a journalist interviewed a disaffected PR unit and got them to go off-script. The Press Affairs Team blurted out stuff like this:

Lieutenant X: "We're just keeping beat-down soldiers in-theatre. It's a numbers game. And Jee-zus, it's hot! This war makes absolutely no freakin' sense anymore."

Specialist Y: "They keep telling us to write positive stories. But why can't we just tell you the..IED!! GO, GO, GO, GO! HIT THE HORN. HIT 'EM. DON'T STOP!!" (Fires machine gun.)

Captain Z: "No, it's ok, we're past it. OK. Calm down. Everybody ok? OK. Pull over to the shade. Over there. That building there. On the right. Whee-ooo. I'm fixin' to get heat stroke again. Where the hell's my hemorrhoid cream?"

Ok, it was a little different than that. A lot different. But having just blown a half-hour unsuccessfully Googling for the story, you can treat the quotes as apocryphal. The point is, the grunts are feeling burnt out and hopeless. The writer of the article even got some officers to go on record describing the condition of the troops. (In short: pretty damned bad.) The PR team assigned to the reporter was supposed to refer to their positive talking points, not tell him how crappy things really are. The press team just didn't give a damn, and conveyed an attitude of extreme disaffection. You can imagine how pissed the troops are if the Fobbits are at the end of their tethers. Kilroy isn't there anymore.

(Update: Found it. Originally published by the Guardian UK, it is titled "Fatigue Cripples US Army in Iraq." The Free Republic has issued an 'MSM Treason Alert' over it and their commenters are having seizures so severe two of them spilled bottles of Miller High Life across their keyboards. (You can tell by their spelling.) I highly recommend reading the article if you haven't already. It's a crack in the curtain, and that's how the light gets in. Here's a short quote:

This is a different kind of war,' says [Major Stacie] Caswell. 'In World War II it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all around. And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to do...'

'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene. They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.'

'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is no decompression.'

The Army is being ground to bits, grunt by grunt, while twits like Tim Casey from the Heritage Foundation are going on media offensives saying, "Wow. It's a great thing for soldiers to serve their country. The Surge is working. And it was their free choice!" Ah-ah--reality check--the surge is not working. It's 117 degrees in Baghdad, and there's no running water. We can fill in the blanks.)

A Simple Solution For Africa's Woes

Enlist their hardened soldiers into the US Army, then use them to occupy Iraq. It's win-win. They get jobs perfect for a keenly honed sense of sadism backed by a few hundred years of bottled-up rage, by therapeutically focusing their attention on surly, resistant Arabs. The United States gets an endless supply of cheaper new centurions without the nasty fallout of having American men and women go crazy, be forced to commit atrocities, and die for no honest reason in corpse-strewn hellholes. It's win-win! And it's already happening. 800 Kenyans have been recruited to go to Iraq, with more to come:

Kenyan recruits to serve in Iraq

By Steve Mkawale

A company contracted by the US Government has been recruiting ex-military men and former police officers to serve in war-torn Iraq.

The Standard has established that Sentry Security of East Africa Limited, a liaison company for Sentry Security of East Africa, USA, is targeting to take some 800 Kenyans to serve in Iraq.

The first batch of ex-army soldiers and former police officers with clean service records is expected to leave the country sometime this month, according to sources privy to the exercise.

The recruitment of the former security personnel, aged between 30 and 50, has been going on across the country for the past two months.

Necessary documents have been made available

A team of 65 ex-military men code-named Gilgil One is scheduled to meet in Gilgil town on Saturday, the sources said on Thursday.

A senior US Army officer, only identified as Colonel Franks, attended the first meeting in Nairobi, an indication that the recruitment has the blessings of both the Kenyan and American governments.

Our sources said the Kenya Government was aware of the exercise and all necessary documents have been made available.

"An exercise of such magnitude cannot take place without the knowledge of the President, who is the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces," said one of the ex-army officers, who would be among the first batch leaving for Iraq.

While in Iraq the ex-soldiers would serve as guards at US military installations in the war torn country and also provide escort services.

Qualified applicants to serve in Iraq for 12 months

On Thursday, SSEA Country Director Mr J Kimuri confirmed that they were recruiting ex-soldiers to serve as guards and escorts.

Kimuri said they were recruiting ex-military personnel because they have experience to serve in places like Iraq and Sudan, which are experiencing war.

He, however, could not reveal when the recruits would leave for the mission in Iraq dubbed SSEA-Iraq.

Sources privy to the recruitment said the qualified applicants would serve in Iraq for a period of 12 months.

US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger has, however, said he was not aware of an exercise involving the recruitment of Kenya ex-soldiers and that the US Agency Sentry Securities was a private company and is not in anyway connected with the American Government.

Rome wasn't burned in a day. First they outsourced working their land to foreign slaves who had no prospects of becoming citizens. The farms became bigger and bigger, until there were so few landowners that there were no citizens to man the ranks of the Army. They eventually turned to Northern Africa and elsewhere to fill their ranks, and promising the recruits citizenship and a plot of land in the provinces if they made it through twenty-five years. It worked for a while, during which time it was said of the Romans, "They make a wasteland and call it democracy." The recruiting strategy initiated by Marius led to a dynamic in which legionares' loyalties were to their generals rather than Rome. Loyalty to commanders, and not to nation, is what burned Rome down.

(research credit to Lord Wife)

Children Of Men: Movie Review

"Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men."
Psalms 89:3

Recently, I listed the film of this post's title as a favorite movie. It asks questions: what value have our selfish genes, and the cultures they sprang from? Is their enshrinement worth the price of the world?

Well before I saw it, Bruce at The River Blog gave fair warning. Here was his run-down:

Basically, the new dystopian sci-fi thriller is a documentary.

For the battle scenes, substitute the urban warfare of Iraq.

For the scapegoating and caging of immigrants, substitute “terrorists” and Halliburton detention camps.

For the suicide drug Quietus, substitute Prozac.

For troops on the streets, substitute post-Katrina New Orleans or present-day Baghdad, or....

For The Uprising, substitute Hezbollah or Hamas.

For the infertility epidemic, substitute despair due to pollution, global warming, and the tyranny of elite scumbags.

For the pot-smoking, philosophizing Michael Caine, substitute you and me.

And for the birth, substitute the second coming, hope, and salvation, obviously.

Bruce's glowing review failed to completely dissuade Lord Wife and me from attending a showing as a comedic pick-me-up one Baby-Sitter Saturday night. Generically, Children of Men is a road movie spiced up by a spiritual quest welded into sci-fi and Grail sub-genres. My only sureties going in were that its Anti-Goodman, Clive Owen, had turned down the role of James Bond in Casino Royale to act in it, and that it would bring intellectual trouble. Verily, verily. It would try to suck the brains out of our heads. Which it did, and thus, it's hard to write about, forcing an examination of one's self as much as the movie.

The director of the Oscar-winning Y Tu Mama Tambien, Alfonso Cuaron, took a 1992 novel by the British writer P.D. James and turned it into a meditation on evolving United States and European Union foreign and domestic policies, and where they could lead. Cauron was the one doing the projecting, here, not me. He filmically considers the fate of his countrymen from Mexico in a North American future set in England which teems with refugee camps, sporadic resistance, general despair, rampant corporatism, blight, and horrifyingly sadistic Homeland Security. I would surmise Mr. Cauron is a highly intelligent and extremely well-read man, who has been searched in airports not a few. In his movie, immigration, racism, and salvation are not sub-plots. Rather, they serve as silver, holographic screens to catch and reflect the lights of his intended creation and give it full dimension.

The film was released on Christmas Day in North America, if that provides any clue, and is set in 2027 Britain after the world has undergone twenty years of complete infertility. Visually, the gritty, ground-breaking verisimilitudes provided by masterful 6 and 10-minute single-shot action scenes will influence film-makers everywhere. That brilliance is obvious, but the plot themes are too elusive and contemporary to easily codify. And if one thinks deeply about how the world might react to 20 straight years of infertility, his dystopic view is restrained, and simplified. It doesn't dwell on the Task Forces on Immortality such an occurrence would naturally call forth, to the breeding prizes, the international blame-storming, the superstitious potions quaffed and the rampant, reflexively irredentist violence which would ensue. Indeed, the movie begins by Clive Owen buying a latte in a Starbucks and narrowly missing its explosive demise by suicide bomber. If only Starbucks, absent new customers, could survive that long.

Practically, there are always pluses and minuses of high levels of immigration. People with no rights bring new blood, hoping to climb the ladder to a better life for their children, just as the forebears of almost all current US citizens did, just as immigrants into other countries. Many still carry the restless, adventurous gene denoted by the D4-7 allele, a perch on the genome which defines an exploratory, expansive, optimistic and sometimes transcending culture which successive waves of opportunist immigrants wrought. To quote the Bible again: "For Joseph is a fruitful bough, whose branches run over the wall." But what if this restless expansion, this heat sink of mania is stymied by suffocating foams of racism, and the optimistic expansion fizzles thereby? What if the doors of these migratory experiments are closed out of fear?

In Children of Men, the first woman to carry a child after 20 years of emptiness, Kee, is an illegal black immigrant from Africa. At the end of a heart-rending quest, the formerly privileged Clive Owens (Theo Faron) uses his body and soul to deliver and protect her baby, perhaps the savior of humanity. Having accomplished his task, Theo bleeds to death. He is glad, and it is no matter that Madonna and Son's skin tones are black as night. Having passed through roads of anarchy and cruelty, they bring hope of continuation and a chance for absolution the world has lacked.

Alfonso Cauron sees a brown future for America, a continuation of the melting pot with less and less emphasis on WASP rule. He recognizes that the transition will not go at all smoothly. Personally, being low on melatonin and easily freckled, I'm not sure how to feel about that. But my prejudices and preferences mean nothing, in the end. A mere continuance of our race should be enough for me. Human survival, should it be expressed in yellow, black, and brown, should give peaceful thoughts to even the denizens of die-off, the docents of www.savethewhitefolks.org, people like Dick and Lynne Cheney. After 20 years of barren wombs on this earth, no one would give a flying damn what skin color the first little baby had. It would be treated as a resurrected Savior, as is illustrated in the movie's final scenes, when the Baby is given safe passage and about to be picked up by a ship named Tomorrow.

Cauron's message is this: "Hey, gringos...survival should be enough for us all." At the very end of Children of Men, Kee the Black Madonna has the good grace to name her baby, her hours-old girl, after her dying Parsifal's son Dylan, who was long since lost. There are worse things than honor and memory.

One False Move And The Iraqi Gets It!

I, along with much of the rest of the world, have been subjected to a shower of slimy Republican Talking Points which are losing their powers of supplication in inverse proportion to the strenghtening reek of decaying entrails, re: Iraq and dangers of pulling out thereof. But there's no escape from the blitz of the Mighty Wurlitzer that keeps blaring these dusty old 45s they keep on steady rotation. We at Casa Lord don't even watch grown-up TV, and still they found us. Here is the most-repeated play, which went to #1 with a bullet and has stayed for 128 weeks at the top of the charts:

"If we pull out of Iraq, there will be a civil war!"

It's time for an emetic and a bath. It's also time I got around to calling a BCA (Bullshit Curtain Alert): umm, Iraq is already in a civil war. The T.P.'s crazy logic is reminescent of the famous Cleavon Little scene in "Blazing Saddles" where he holds himself hostage to escape a hostile crowd. Using this phrase as an occupation's justificatioin is every bit as surreal as the scene in Blazing Saddles, and up until now it was just as effective. It's getting a little old for even the most respectable members of the crowd, such as eminent War-Whores like Senators Lugar and Warner, who are introducing a bill to start pulling troops back. The difference with this bill is the authors claim to be from the same party as the President. Which is a matter of fair conjecture, at this point. Who can be sure what to call what occupies the White House now. (The Vietnam Re-enactment Society? The Non-Veterans of Foreign Wars?)

Many professionals would disagree with my analysis below, believing that if the US pulls out of Iraq, conditions there will worsen. That's fine if they disagree, because they're wrong, so wrong their skulls seem to be permanently stuck in their pelvic cavities. How they've kept breathing so long through those straws is plum amazin'.

A former wargaming partner with real tactical talents asked me three years ago how Iran (the real M.-E. objective) could be beaten. Since Iran had already won, this was a tough question, but there might've once been a last-ditch way to get them. Pull out as fast as possible, and create a surprise power vacuum. In other words, get them to invade Iraq, which would make our problems their problems and rally the countries in the region against them to create dynamic, albeit bloody, stability. The idea was to fast-forward what's likely to happen anyway, skipping over a few steps, possibly decades, of regional conflict to achieve "Blood Borders." The flaw in my plan was that even three years ago, Iran probably wasn't dumb enough to get trapped. Their mistakes had not been exploitable and they continued to play brilliantly. Still, they would get drawn into the vacuum by proxy, naturally so: through SCIRI, a porous mutual border, and via a number of other Shiite parties with close Iranian ties.

The US, by contrast, has been not only dumb, but desperate. Israel has already gotten its tail sucked into a humiliating defeat because of it. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers have been doing show-and-tells on "Why I Got My Ass Kicked in Lebanon Last Summer." Now the US-Israeli-UK axis is trying to execute the last part of the Surround and Starve Iran Plan. The current BushCo-Cheney idea, evocative of the Leonard Cohen song of similar cadence, boils down to: "First we take Damascus. Then we take Tehran!" Neutralizing Syria ostensibly cuts off Iran. And Lebanon from Iran. Neat, huh? Slight problems: 1) it doesn't really cut off Iran, but drives them further into Russian, Chinese, even Indian arms; 2) there is a Russian naval base in Syria; 3) Russia is Israel's primary petro-products supplier.

Even with relatively easy military victories in Syria and Lebanon, which are very doubtful, it's hard to see how Israel can come out ahead. Hezbollah's cohesion in Lebanon isn't breakable, and attacking it again may even result in serious incursions into Israel itself, loss of position in the Bekaa Valley, and loss of controlling much-needed river waters in that area. Syrian forces have entered 3km into Lebanon, and have been building defensive positions there for at least the past month. Whether Israel's gambit succeeds or not, the US can pull back and stay in Balad, Basra, the Green Zone, and the super-base going up in Kirkuk for the next 10 years, like crusaders retreating to castles to stave off the Saracens. But so what? That's not victory. It's a lease on defeat with a four-year warranty.

It's much easier to see how a detente between the Saudis, Yemenis, Iranians, Syrians, Emirates, and Kuwaitis could form around the extraction of the huge oil reserves in Western Iraq. Doing so would open up a revenue stream that would benefit everybody and have profound effects on the region. Even the West would benefit. While Western oil companies would lose majority control over their beloved sludge and its profits, they could still participate as minorities. Iran would be mollified, able to get enough refined gasoline (which they don't produce much of, so they must import it), and happy with direct influence in a new Southern-Shia Rump of Iraq, with the Tigris a natural border and limit between Persians and Arabs. As I previously wrote in "Turkey Masses 150,000 on Northern Iraq Border...And Much, Much More!" Turkey could grab Kurdistan, or exert increased control over it, getting oil in exchange for being wracked by an indefinite ethnic insurgency.

The federation which would result from a near-complete US retreat from Iraq, a Mid-East Council for Cooperation and Assistance (MECCA, if you're into acronyms) is the vehicle for bringing peace to Iraq and the entire Mid-East conflict. It could easily make a truce with Israel, because it can offer Israel much closer access to oil and gas, granting it the energy security the US has failed to provide. In other words, Israel would get a direct pipeline to the relatively close-by Iraqi fields, and could even become an international oil player by building refineries. Israel's quid pro quo to the pan-Arab federation would be to end the Palestinian apartheid and finally grant Palestine national autonomy. Thus the required keystone to Peace's unfinished archway in the Mid-East can be fitted. This is what Jim Baker saw as the political solution. It is expressed in veiled language in his Iraq Study Groups 79 points. Like him, I know that given the staggering amounts of money and liquid security involved, it would work. There is lot of bad blood to get over, but money, new partnerships, and intermarriage have been the historical means of the atonements which secure peace. Women may be wreakers of all manner of domestic strife, but on tribal to national scales they have long been called "the vessels of peace."

There are a number of personally unattractive consequences to the above approach and consequences. To whom are they most unattractive?

Not The Bin Laden Group. It would be quite content, and would largely push its competitor Halliburton out of regional oil services. As a result of its central position of power and utility, that family might quickly become the titular as well as de facto rulers of Saudi Arabia. Even if the facade of the current Saudi Royal Family is maintained, an oil sinecure for the Sunnis in Iraq is thereby ensured, which is what they're fighting hardest over. They won't stop until they get it or all die. Official Bin Laden control of Saudi Arabia would bring stability to the wahabist Saudis, who generally desire to see the Saudi royal family roasted like luau-ed like pigs. And once the Bin Ladens gain full control at home, they would set about forming a United States of Pan-Arabia. Hopefully they will choose a different name. (I still like MECCA.)

Western oil companies would come up on the short end of the stick, as they would neither be wanted or much needed. Russian and Chinese capital are fully capable of financing development in the region, and their hoards of foreign exchange beg to be put to this use. Their arms industries would be winners, too. Cheaper, effective Russian and Chicom weapons would provide the non-political means of the region's security. Another big winner would be Iran (oh, the humiliation), and the Great Game would be effectively over, those with the natural advantages in geography, proximity, logistics, and intelligence having, unsurprisingly and finally, won after 150 years of continuous struggle over Tehran and Baghdad.

The big losers would be the Carlyle Group, the US/Western Miltary Industry, a few huge neo-colonial Western oil companies, and Halliburton. This, of course, cannot be allowed to happen. One must think Cheney and others would rather see the whole region burnt to brimstone and treacle. So, professional or not, it's anybody's guess how this will play out.

Turkey Masses 150,000 On Northern Iraq Border...And Much, Much More!

It's great to see Turkey finally doing its part to help out with the region's stability. At the preceding link, the Bush Administration claims that there is no build-up, which means they're taking this time-honored imperial diplomatic approach: "Oh, crap! Now what?? What did we promise the Turkeys, again?" Of course, Turkey has been making noise since at least April, noise of the shooting kind, and has been going over the border into Kurdistan to chase the ethnic secessionist Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) militias. That was with only 30,000 troops. If my math is correct, this is something bigger. For some reason, Turkey feels like they're owed some Kurdish oil in exchange for helping out with Gulf Wars I and II, and they think the US welched on the deal. Whether the build-up is gamesmanship or for real remains to be seen, but a Turkish invasion of Kurdistan is much closer to a "for real" than it was a year ago, now backed by 15 combat divisions.

Next, Israel has mobilized its divisions to either get ready to attack Syria or to re-invade Lebanon. How do I know this? Oh, you know...I listen to Hebrew hip-hop, eat at a kosher deli, that kinda stuff. Syria today just warned all Syrians to leave Lebanon ahead of a military "eruption" they think will take place next week. Plus, Israel is outraged that Hezbollah has been preparing defensive positions in southern Lebanon, somewhat like when France built the Maginot Line defenses, it outraged Hitler.

I and others believe Israel plans to attack over the Golan Heights, stomp on the conventional Syrian army, make Assad flee, then wheel around and attack Hezbollah in Lebanon from the rear pay-back style. The Syrians and Hezbollah Lebanese will get to try out all their new Russian weapons, including the world's most advanced anti-aircraft missile systems and more of the same portable anti-tank weapons that took out Merkava tanks. Amazingly, the Israelis, who still fight blitzkrieg-style using WWII armored-column tactics, didn't learn their lesson in Lebanon last summer. They might make it through Syria. But they'll get out-boxed in Lebanon, and worse this time than the last. Their troopers are thoroughly demoralized, and even if their equipment issues are solved, they are ill-led. Highly motivated foot soldiers equipped with heavy-punch weapons can tie down armored columns if they can make the air assets stand off. Especially coming off a popular victory. Last summer, Hezbollah learned it took very few missiles to make Israeli pilots skittish. So they went out and stocked up on them like they were Roman candles.

Finally, rumors of Iraq withdrawal discussions in the White House abound. Yes, there will be an Iraq withdrawal just like there was always going to be: to 3-6 permanent bases manned by 3-4 divisions and @50,000 mercenaries. This is not a "bring the troops home" pull-back. It's a "let's free them up to use somewhere else" strategy. And that won't work either. In other news today, the Mahdi Army clashed today with US forces north of Baghdad last night. The Sadrists are the most numerous, main-stream, and powerful group in the country, and they've been holding back based upon their leader Moqtada's say-so. This blows no good.

As you know, I'm a bit skeptical about the Occupants of the White House ever leaving it. But I neglected to mention another increasingly likely scenario: outright military defeat and devolution into Mid-East regional chaos. This has already been taken as a given by the countries in Iraq's sphere for over a year. Even loyal Saudi Arabia is planning for war. Turkey's build-up is like a vulture edging up to a tourist dying of thirst. The proxies of the surrounding countries which correspond to the dominant domestic interest groups will move in to stabilize the remnants of Iraq whether the US wants them to or not. When, not if. Proximity and intelligence are vast advantages in war's logistics.

It might be the Republican Party which, suffering from Cheney Fatigue, will stop the war. The cabal is the war, so stopping it is congruent to throwing them out of power. In a possibly delicious historical irony, it was George Bush Senior, who, while chair of the Republican National Committee, penned the letter to Nixon asking him to resign for the good of the country. Too hopeful? Maybe. But the military situation on the ground is rapidly coming to a head, it's not developing in our Empire's favor, and a growing number of insiders finally are coming to acknowledge the White House can't control that reality.

(Update: Picture above is of Turkish tank column rolling through a small Kurdish village 40 km from the Iraq border on June 1, 2007. The Guardian article is a good brief, available here.)

HopeSpringsATurtle & Chalmers Johnson Tag-Team

I didn't ask permission of Hope, as I call her, to cross-post this from Deep Confusion but I'm pressed for time and am fairly sure she won't mind. She's one of my Caravan Palaces, or Caravanserai, the outposts and fortified havens they once put up for traders to shelter in on the Silk Road. Hope found a vid of Chalmers Johnson that I'm raring to watch. The same Chalmers Johnson who wrote the powerful, prophetic, and elegaic article "Blowback" in the Nation shortly following 9/11. Jeremiah never gathered round and walked the future down better during the reign of King Zedekiah, and the article was published so fast, by the October 15th issue, that I have a little hunch Mr. Johnson may have already been working on it before The Trifecta.

There are four sides to intelligence organizations. A dark side; a light side; a grey side; and a side behind the other three sides. Chalmers Johnson is the intellectual Andre The Giant of the CIA, and represents the very best of what comes from the light side:

"I present here a video by Chalmers Johnson, the foremost expert on American hegemony and the dangers of "blowback". He presents a stunning report on the status of the permanent military bases being constructed in Iraq. Six different mini-cities, American style. From the documentary, The Bases Are Loaded:

"...Clearly, what went into the thinking of the war against Iraq was to conquer it..." "Whoever controls Iraq, controls the world. Iraq sits n the largest world reserves of oil. When Saudi oil has long run out, when all nations are without petroleum resources, Iraq would still sit on a sea of oil. The country that controls Iraq is the country that will essentially dictate the world economy for the next generation and possibly longer"

The lies that brought us into this conquering of Iraq and subsequent occupation have continued unabated. These bases are being constructed with American tax dollars; no-bid, cost-plus contracts that DIRECTLY benefit members of the Bush crime family. These are the facts. There is no dispute about them. The Dems in congress do nothing but make empty threats to an out-of-control regime bent on the destruction of America as we know it. Do your homework, find out for yourself. This is the beginning of the end and still impeachment is "off the table." Watch this 30 minute video and make your own decision."

Thanks, Hope! Glad things are starting to settle down in your new digs. (Btw, Fleming, if you read this, Hope introduced me to Naj.)