Author: jameswagner

another war

The bodies aren’t warm yet in Iraq, and in fact many on both sides don’t even know yet that they are about to be dead, yet White House political necessity is about to create another war, the Bush regime arguing now that it’s absolutely sure that this time it is Syria which is the real threat to the security of the United States.
No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, but our boys in Washington say that those notorious Iraqi WMDs have been spirited away to Damascas.

Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where, they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harbored, as well as the delivery systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the invading troops. Evidence to date of a “grave and gathering” threat: precisely zero.
. . . .
The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence – which has every motivation for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbors– and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.
Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.
But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock’s films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.
If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

guerilla billboards

Ron English borrows billboards to advertise his politics.

Ron English puts up illegal billboards, so he has only one way of knowing if it has been a good day.
“I consider it a success if I don’t go to jail,” he explained. He should know. He has had two very unsuccessful days in the past.
You may have seen Mr. English, a 43-year-old father of two, wandering around the streets of Manhattan or New Jersey with a bucket of glue, a set of rollers and a crew of accomplices. He plasters his original paintings in broad daylight on billboards he does not own. This is a conscious decision, because billboarding in the dark would only look more suspicious. “If you’re out at night,” he said, “it’s obvious that you’re not supposed to be there.”
. . . .
“Ron’s kind of a one-man billboard hurricane,” said Jack Napier, the founder of the Billboard Liberation Front, a San Francisco-based movement considered one of the first to alter such advertising. “He’s done some brilliant stuff.”
Two weeks ago, Mr. English pasted up three works in Jersey City, where he lives and paints. One reads: “Saddam’s SUV’s. Oil Dependence Day Sale.” It ends with the Chevy logo and the tag “Like Iraq.”

He frankly admits, in his own words, “I guess I’m a criminal. But I don’t think I’m a nuisance to society.”

if we’ve won the battle, we’ve lost the war

We are going to be paying for our stupidity for generations.

[The Americans] pulled up in a tank and are Westerners, the same people who promised all last century that the Arab world would be able to throw off the yoke of colonialism yet never let them.
Proof? Look at Israel, they say here, a Western colonial outpost planted on Arab soil in 1948. The United States has for decades been promising the Palestinians a state with freedom and self-determination. What have they delivered? Nothing.
There, in that sense of historical impotence and betrayal, is the root of the frustration, sadness and rage that shot through the Arab world on Wednesday when an American armored vehicle toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in the heart of Baghdad.
“Saddam Hussein fomented a miracle: he took history backwards many generations,” Talal Salman, the publisher of the respected Al-Safir newspaper in Beirut, wrote in a bitter front page editorial, grieving the loss of the richest Arab civilization to what he described as a colonial power.
“What a tragedy again plaguing the great people of Iraq,” he wrote. “They have to chose between the night of tyranny and the night of humiliation stemming from foreign occupation.”
Toward the end, even when they knew the game was lost, many Arabs were rooting for the idea that even Iraqis who despised Mr. Hussein would take up arms along side his troops. A little more of him seemed preferable to a lot of Americans.
“They know that the Saddam Hussein regime will eventually end one day, he will die,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor of social sciences at the Lebanese American University. “With America you have a whole system, an entirely different system. The threat from America is far greater than the threat from a government that will disappear one day.”
There is a small constituency of writers, editors and intellectuals that believes the United States will in fact create a better Iraq, a civil society run by Iraqis. They argue that the rapid collapse of Mr. Hussein’s government should serve as a slap in the face, a warning that Arabs need to jettison their dictators and their socialist police states and learn to compete in the modern world.
But many, perhaps most, suspect the war is just to grab oil and to castrate the one country that remained a potential threat to Israel. Democracy delivered at gunpoint appears a dubious proposition.

media blackouts

See Bloggy today for a sense of what is really happening in Baghdad, Washington and New York.
Sample, straight from the Department of Defense itself:

Rumsfeld: Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases?” (Laughter.) “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”

Those who are now making the effort to look outside the country for news are having an experience similar to that which was common in occupied Europe when a shortwave radio in the attic was the only source of real information – and hope. And yet for today’s true patriot there seems to be little cause for hope (no sign of a liberating army, as in the 40’s), and our current effective media blackout may be even more demoralizing than that of sixty years ago. The Bush regime hasn’t even had to physically take over the dissemination of news or ban the radios. Americans have simply decided neither to report nor seek the truth.

removed from life support, then killed

The Israeli government has killed another young International, as he tried to shield children from a tank-mounted machine gun in Gaza.
About a dozen members of the peace movement had been trying to set up a protest tent on a road in an attempt to block Israeli army incursions into a Gaza refugee camp.

Along the way, the protesters were joined by several children, the witnesses said. When the group was about 200 yards away from three tanks, soldiers opened fire from a tank-mounted machine gun, the witnesses said.
Hurndall and another foreign activist tried to get two children out of the line of fire, [the witnesses] said. “Thomas (Hurndall) grabbed one of their hands and as soon as he did that a tank fired at him, hitting him in the head,” [AP photographer] Hamra said.
The photographer said the children were not throwing rocks at the troops and that he saw nothing that would have provoked the troops.

The incident occurred yesterday, friday. Today the beautiful 21-year-old Manchester, England, photographer has been declared brain dead. As I am writing this, there is a report that he has been removed from life support. On the scale of decades of Israeli and American crimes in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, this news would be unlikely to shock a world inured to news about the mad policies which have already removed so many others from our support for their very lives.

are we nuts, or just crass materialists?

In today’s anniversary memorial to both the pragmatism and the idealism of the 1930’s the NYTimes seems to say it’s the latter.

On April 6, 1933, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that would have made the standard work week 30 hours. Anything more would be overtime.
The bill passed by the Senate was an effort to reduce a national unemployment rate that stood at 25 percent. It had strong support from labor and religious leaders who argued that working people needed time for family, education, recreation and spirituality as much as they needed higher wages. But the bill failed in the House. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed five years later, gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek.

The report goes on to say that while American productivity is now several times what it was 70 years ago, most of us still find it hard to get our work done in 40 hours, and millions are without work altogether.

What happened? In effect, the United States as a society took all of its increases in labor productivity in the form of money and stuff instead of time. Of course, we didn’t all get the money; the very poor earn even less in real terms than they did then, and the largest share of the increase went to the richest Americans.
The harmful effects of working more hours are being felt in many areas of society. Stress is a leading cause of heart disease and weakened immune systems. Consumption of fast foods and lack of time for exercise has led to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Many parents complain that they do not have enough time to spend with their children, much less become involved in their community. Worker productivity declines during the latter part of long work shifts.

To put this in perspective, we could look at the picture in Europe. Because of differences in workweek hours and vacation time, Americans now labor a full nine weeks more each year than Western Europeans.

. . . over the past 30 years, Europeans have made a different choice — to live simpler, more balanced lives and work fewer hours. The average Norwegian, for instance, works 29 percent less than the average American — 14 weeks per year — yet his average income is only 16 percent less. Western Europeans average five to six weeks of paid vacation a year; we average two.
Work and consumption are not necessarily bad. But producing and consuming can become the focus of a person’s life — at the expense of other values.

And now with fears fanned by a radical nationalist regime since September 11, the freedoms which have always been the most worthy blessings of American society are being traded for an illusory security. What can we offer ourselves, or anyone outside who might manage to make it through the walls surrounding the new fortress America, but more stuff we never have time to appreciate? In the end is that all that will remain of the idea of America?

“I hate what’s going on”

Alnajar’s father, Bassam, declares himnself “100 percent against the war,” but he says he told his son: “You must do the best you can. You are an American soldier.”

The story is familiar, almost trite. But the Alnajjar family lives with complicated layers of feelings because its members are Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians.
While a son, a Navy airman aboard the Abraham Lincoln, has just ended his duty in the Persian Gulf, the family feels keenly the horror suffered by Iraqi civilians. First it was images of civilian carnage via Al Jazeera television, which they receive on satellite, and lately it is scenes of looting and chaos.
“I’m really scared now, more than I was scared before,” Suad Abuhasna said yesterday. “God only knows what is going on with all these killings, the burning of the buildings.”
Yet she said she is proud that her son, Airman Bashar Alnajjar, 22, took part in the war. “He did his duty to help the people liberate themselves from the Iraqi regime,” Ms. Abuhasna said. “I’m very happy he’s not there anymore. But what about the people?” Asked whether the regime’s removal was worth the military effort, she said, “I’m not Iraqi.”
Her husband, Bassam Alnajjar, declares himself “100 percent against the war,” but says he supports in equal measure his son’s “fighting for democracy.”
“I have 250,000 sons and friends and brothers there,” he said of the American forces. “I have 26 million Iraqi brothers dying. I hate what’s going on.”

the shame of “victory”

Today there’s another report from Robert Fisk describing the hell that we have made of a Baghdad hospital.

A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I didn’t have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl.
There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful, and it was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children outside the wards. Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces and arms and chests and legs; naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless arms held upwards, each beseeching a non-existing savior to rescue him from his pain.
“No! No! No!” another young man screamed as doctors tried to cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but now he was a child again and he cried: “Umma, Umma [Mummy, mummy]”.