Chilcot Chicanery

Unless you live in the UK, you might have missed the fact that former Prime Minister Tony Blair was questioned Friday by the Chilcot Inquiry. Wait, unless you live in the UK you might not have heard of the Chilcot Inquiry. Well, let's be honest, even if you live in the UK, you probably don't care, while if you were in the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on Friday, you might have mistaken the questioning for a celebrity roast. After all, there's so much more important stuff happening in the world besides figuring out how your country ended up taking part in a conflict that has resulted in a couple hundred thousand deaths and cost trillions of dollars.

The remit of the Chilcot Inquiry is to consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. To consider the UK's involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in the future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country. Sounds so nice, doesn't it? Noble almost - to learn from the mistakes of the past about how to behave in the future. Yet, we won't learn much, there won't be a smoking gun, instead of prosecuting politicians for committing illegal acts, a public forum has been created for Mr Blair and his kind to spread their hate, lies and deceit. Instead of fireworks Friday, we got a pop and fizzle; instead of revelations we got the seven techniques of propaganda as only Tony Blair could deliver them.

When was the last time an inquiry such as this has actually produced any results? The 9/11 Commission? The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? The Copenhagen shenanigan? Any G-7, 8 or 20 meeting? All smokescreens, staged farces that are nothing but transfer propaganda. When public scepticism erupts in response to such extremes of criminality and violence that even the media are powerless to deny, the illusion must be bolstered. Somehow, these meetings still lend a stamp of some sort of approval for a good many people that something's being done, justice being served. Hopes of this were raised just two days before Blair took the stand, a bombshell was dropped by his senior legal adviser of that era, Lord Goldsmith. The counsel had changed his mind over the legality of the conflict on the eve of the invasion after being whisked to Washington for a tete-a-tete with Condaleeza Rice and US government "lawyers". (Is that what we're calling the hired muscle these days?)

Anyway, the scene was set for a showdown between Blair and the hostile inquiry members. Oh, but wait, did I say hostile? Inquisitive perhaps? At least impartial? No, on all counts I'm afraid. If I'd have said hospitable, war-mongerers, handpicked by Gordon Brown to refer to the five members I'd have been on target, which explains the easy questioning of Blair. The biggest lie of the whole inquiry came only 10 minutes into it's first session back in November when Sir John Chilcot said: "My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind." Let's quickly look at the five members:

Martin Gilbert penned a piece December 26, 2004 on Blair and Bush likening them to Churchill and Roosevelt for their heroic leadership on Iraq. During the run up to war Sir Roderick Lyne was point man in deflecting Russian opposition in his role as ambassador in Moscow. Sir Lawrence Freedman wrote much of the speech Blair delivered in Chicago in 1999 outlining justifications for regime change, then later spoke of the "rather noble criteria" which lay behind the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. During a Chilcot session in December he volunteered the information that he had "instigated" a pre-war seminar for Blair to discuss Iraq because, he said, "I was aware of misgivings among some specialists in Iraq about the direction of policy". Baroness Prashar, another cozy insider who also ticks the female and minority boxes, is governor of the Ditchley Foundation, whose director, Sir Jeremy Greenstock was the UK Ambassador to the UN who presented the lies about Iraqi WMD. And of course Chilcot himself was part of the Butler Review whose job it was to whitewash the fabrication of evidence of said WMD's.

The biggest shock for me reading and watching the Blair testimony from Friday was how many references he made to Iran in an inquiry set up to discover the reasons for invading Iraq. You would think, as the UK's special envoy to the Quartet on the Middle East, he would be promoting what the group claims to promote, peace, instead of excusing atrocities and promoting war. "It's a constant problem for Israel, they use great force in retaliation. Before you've gone two weeks, they're the people that started it all." After saying that in the aftermath of the last Gaza conflict it should have come as no surprise to hear him hammering away using the oldest, most facile propaganda trick known to man, Name Calling. With an election on the horizon and Labour's popularity lagging, Tony's obviously decided to do his best for the team. He managed to squeeze the word Iran in 58 times over his testimony. Here's a transcript. It's even more interesting if you notice the context in which he mentions the Persian state, references to 9/11, WMD and al-Queda are peppered among his soliloquies to Iran. Blair said many of the arguments that led him to confront the "profoundly wicked, almost psychopathic" Saddam Hussein seven years ago now applied to the regime in Tehran. "We face the same problem about Iran today".

What do you do when dealt a bad hand? Well if you're Tony Blair and everything you asserted about Iraq before the war has been proven wrong, you do a little Card Stacking propaganda. This seemed to be his strategy heading in, to convince us that it's a better world thanks to the removal of Saddam Hussein as well as the inevitability of the war. "I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we would still have had to have dealt with him, possibly in circumstances where the threat was worse." More astonishingly, he was then allowed to turn questioner at his own questioning, "What if I had not invaded Iraq? Where would we be then?"

Not recognizing the astonishing insensitivity of saying such a thing in a room in which at least 20 people could have replied: "My son would still be alive today", Mr Blair went on to paint a picture of Iraq emerging blinking and frail from the darkness of despotism into the sunlight of freedom. Most Iraqis, he argued, are better off now, ignoring that the Iraq war made the Middle East less secure, emboldening Iran and making future moves to disarm Tehran doubly difficult. It debased the moral case for humanitarian intervention by undermining the authority of international law, legitimizing unilateral action by imperious governments. Mr. Blair believes the end justified the means. But the methods used to take Britain to war perverted law and democracy. That was not some unfortunate byproduct of a greater moral endeavour, it was a fatal corruption of the diplomatic process that might have led to a better outcome for Iraq. The means sabotaged the end.

The 'I'm gonna puke' moment didn't hit me until I saw Teflon Tony's Plain Folks propaganda gambit. He had previously admitted in an interview that the WMD's hadn't really mattered in his decision to attack Saddam. In this exchange he tries to display that old Blair charm, instead he comes off like a double talking fool.


The out of the blue comments I'll put under the testimonial propaganda banner. Between 2000 and 2002, Blair stated: "[Iraq] had a child mortality rate of 130 children per 1,000, as bad as in the Congo... Now the figure is 40 child deaths per 1,000…" Was this a dig at the Congo for some past slight or simply an attempt to deceive? Of course the statistic fails to take into account the draconian UN blockade of Iraq, under which child mortality more than doubled between 1990 and 1999, rising from 56 per 1,000 live births in the period 1984-89 to 131 per 1,000 in 1994-99. Later, his interlocutors allowed him to answer a question about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with a reply about military action taken alongside Bill Clinton in 1998. He was permitted to repeatedly make the claim that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions in general and 1441 in particular when in fact they weren't.

Apparently, most people were surprised that Iran would try to destabilize post-Saddam Iraq, therefore who would have planned on that? Worse, he played on the surprise that al-Queda moved in post invasion by using the fact that most people were trying to argue they weren't there pre-invasion. Um, yeah, that's the point, the invasion gave them a foothold you pompous fool! "People didn’t think that al-Qaeda and Iran would play the role that they did. It was really the external elements of al-Qaeda and Iran that really caused this mission very nearly to fail." So, though al-Qaeda had, as Lord Blair kept reminding us Friday, "changed everything" with 9/11 and were one of the reasons why the British and Americans invaded Iraq because the Americans said Saddam had links with al-Qa'ida and might give them weapons of mass destruction, when it turned out that the links were as non-existent as the weapons, Lord Blair was surprised to find al-Qaeda turning up in post-invasion Iraq. "People did not think that al-Qaeda and Iran would play the role that they did."



Remember the 'coalition of the willing'? Well Bandwagon propaganda is and was featured in the build up to war, drumming up support, or at least attempting to convey the illusion of support. Blair's zeal as the head cheerleader of the tiny club has always been on display, and the pompoms were out Friday. Blair managed to get in some of that team America spirit at every turn, "I never regarded September 11 as an attack on America, I regarded it as an attack on us. And I had said we would stand shoulder to shoulder with them." Pressed on the subject of the April 2002 Crawford meeting with Dubya in 2002 where some have claimed he signed his name in blood for invasion, he would only admit to "I think what he [Bush] took from that was exactly what he should have taken, which was if it came to military action, because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him."



Last comes Glittering Generalities, Blair's specialty, a man who obviously has no time for details, only grand gestures. Forgotten by most people today, Friday's session shed a bit of light on an intelligence report, the September dossier, which contained among other things the infamous 45 minute claim. While most American will recognize the dossier for Dubya's State of the Union claim "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa", it was this sexed up report that was used by Blair to convince his ministers and ultimately parliament to go to war. In the foreword to the dossier, Tony Blair said the intelligence shows "beyond doubt" that Saddam was a WMD threat. Not only a vague, nebulous threat, but that Iraqi forces had WMD that could be used within 45 minutes of an order being given.

Of course since then, every claim, every one, has since been proven false. Friday we heard the former prime minister lightly dismiss it by saying that the dossier "assumed a vastly exaggerated importance later". Yet it was Mr Blair, as the panel did not remind him, who invested that document with such importance by recalling Parliament for an emergency session so that he could wave it around to terrify MPs and a nation. He had been told by his own officials that the intelligence was "sporadic and patchy" and yet he represented it to the Commons as "detailed and authoritative". Asked why he had not asked essential questions about the nature of the so-called intelligence, he was allowed to escape with the insouciant shrug, "I didn't focus on it a great deal."

Many had hoped for an "I'm sorry for lying" moment but Blair obviously looked upon his testimony as a chance to road-test the defiant passages planned for the self-justificatory chapters of his memoirs. Yet, if nothing else, Blair's testimony left little doubt that his religious fervor in support of war wasn't diminished by his snap conversion to Catholicism. Sadly, he seems to embody the rule rather than the exception when it comes to his kind showing any kind of remorse or contrition for perpetrating a crime against humanity. Therefore he'll be able to go back to giving economic and political advice to governments and companies such as JP Morgan through his business venture, Tony Blair Associates, as well as giving lectures across the world. This helps soothe any pangs of conscience he might feel as he's believed to have amassed a personal fortune of £15 million since leaving office in 2007, including a significant amount in the Middle East. So, much like Edith...

The Decade of Nothingness

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;

         -Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act III, Scene 2

I heard, or rather read, the decade that's now coming to a close referred to as the aught's the other day. Looking back at the disastrous past ten years makes we think we need a more descriptive moniker. The Brits say noughties but maybe we should have something with zero in it seeing as the world hasn't put any points on the scoreboard over the decade, I guess the double zeros would do, or double oh's, the oh-oh's. (Is it the teens next before the 20's, the tens?) For a variety of reasons no one seems to even try to understand the problems we face anymore, instead they rely on some talking head's opinion or blogger's spin. Ten years ago we had the Kyoto Protocol, hopes for a final Mideast peace agreement and an economic boom with no end in sight. How did it all go so wrong? Fear could be one explanation. Fear that our beliefs are wrong, fear that our lifestyles are destroying our world and fear of the other. Fear, the old fight or flight, paralyzes and poisons as it confuses, robbing us of our self-control. Most frustrating of all, faced with the triple threat of climate, finance and terrorism, instead of focusing on facts and solutions, the rhetoric of fear has driven us onto a self-destructive path through lies and misinformation.

The decade of fear brought many global threats, from SARS and swine flu to Jenny McCarthy and Osama Bin Laden. The shadow of 9/11 pushed terrorism into our everyday lives with threat level updates and two intractable, open-ended conflicts. While acknowledging that we were dealing with a new kind of enemy, our leaders responded in the traditional manner, war and increased defence spending. The jingoistic fear factory pumped up the rhetoric as Dubya and his cronies fed a nation's desire for revenge with the Bush Doctrine which imperceptibly altered an entire country's mindset, guiding a bloodthirsty nation to war.

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

-Otto von Bismarck

In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the window that opens between a shock and analysis, a disorientation gap where a new set of beliefs find fertile ground. When planes hit the WTC on September 11th, 2001, that window was blown wide open and a new narrative was created. First in Afghanistan, the "With Us or Against Us" doctrine provided the justification for not only pursuing Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but also for deposing the Taliban. If you ever wonder why no one knows the reason we're still in Afghanistan, don't worry you're not alone, that was the idea. While Condi Rice first came up with the "no distinction" idea, it was Darth Cheney who first started calling it the "Bush Doctrine" in public. Blurring the lines between terrorists and states that harbour them was a propaganda coup. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: "We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts."

It wasn't until the anthrax and smallpox threat hysteria broke out that the justification for war in Iraq achieved critical mass. With a leap of faith, and a huge dose of fabrication (think WMD's and "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."), Iraq was linked with every terror plot ever hatched against the US, giving birth to the war of preemption. Even today, many would link Saddam and Osama in their minds as one and the same threat. Only now, after Obama has picked up his Nobel Peace Prize, do we realize the extent to which the public have become disoriented. Instead of seeing the honour as an incentive to change and repudiate the disastrous actions of the last decade, the US press and public responded like a wounded animal, lashing out, forcing Obama's hand into escalating a war he cannot win.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Unwinnable War in Afghanistan
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

We've entered the truly bizarro world where putting an end date on a war is wrong after having wasted more that 8 years ensuring there can be no resolution to the conflict. The cognitive dissonance involved when claiming to promote liberal democracy on the one hand while supporting a corrupt leader who stole an election with the other at a cost of a million dollars per soldier must be painful (yes, 30,000 extra troops will cost about $30 billion a year). I guess it's nothing having fundamentally shifted from the knowledge that torture was wrong with even Reagan signing the UN Convention on Torture to a society that produces Abu Ghraib and believing torture can now be justified and certainly not prosecutable.

Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist
-Warren Buffett

The efficacy of fear as a manipulator has been further tested in the financial world, selling us the need to put capitalism on permanent life support. Taking a page out of the terrorism playbook, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson played a little game of fear tag team with Geithner, Bernanke, Bush, the IMF and Warren Buffet to pull off the greatest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the rich in history. Somewhere between $4.7 and $23.7 trillion in the US alone. Buffet, the world’s sometimes richest man, threw his weight behind the programme in order to avoid "an economic Pearl Harbour", then going further, saying "...we were at the brink of something that would have made anything that’s happened in financial history pale...I’m not saying the Paulson plan will eliminate the problem but it’s absolutely necessary, in my view, to avoid going off the precipice." Wasn't there a line about fear during the real Depression, yeah, some Roosevelt quote, er, what was it again? Oh yeah, "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself". How adorable, so folksy, but then again, that was another time. A time when instead of handing the economy over to those who ruined it, rules and policies were implemented to try to ensure it didn't happen again.

This time, normal legislative procedures were bypassed as congressmen were warned of civil unrest, martial law and stock market collapse if they failed to pass the bank bailout. Never mind the true cause of the failure of the economic model, an over-concentration of wealth and power brought about by globalization, tax-policy and focus on short term profits. Instead of fixing the inequity brought about by the failed policies of the past, the world was hoodwinked into transferring trillions over to those who caused the problem. A decade that began with the internet bubble and merger between AOL and Time Warner is ending with their quiet divorce and the entire financial world on life support. The warnings were there all along if we'd of just paid attention and connected the dots from WorldCom to Enron, Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff, Tyco to Parmalat (a list of corporate scandals in 2000-2002 only!), putting power in the hands of the few as the world rushed to embrace the madness of the markets. Instead, every action seemed to reinforce bad behaviour; as CEO pay and bonuses grew, taxes were sliced for the privileged few. Those left behind saw their power shrink along with their wages until a breaking point was reached, inequality not seen since the Great Depression. The top 1% of earners now earn a higher percentage of income than anytime since 1928 while income mobility, the chances of being born poor and becoming rich, has shrunk to pre-Horacio Alger levels. Somehow though there isn't enough evidence to convince the true corporate shills, those Ayn Rand dreamers, who wholeheartedly believe in the superiority of the rich, that their financial pyramid is all an illusion. Fear of collapse seems to be enough to keep us all chasing our tails.

"They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”
- Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936

Fear has been the sales tool of the decade. It's worked great for the military industrial complex, selling us two wars. It's worked even better convincing us that we need to have rich, large, powerful corporations controlling our lives. Sadly, we can be fooled into killing foreigners and giving money to bankers but we can't be 'tricked' by those pesky fear-mongering scientists into any kind of real action to prevent a global catastrophe resulting from climate change. It's become clear that this marketing tool doesn't always work as witnessed by the dismal failure to sell the world on the need to save it from ourselves. We've been inundated with stories of melting glaciers, shrinking ice caps, sinking islands and polar bears eating their cubs for the past decade in an attempt to convince the world that we're hurtling towards disaster. So why has shock and awe environmentalism failed so miserably? Why does it seem more important to the deniers that Al Gore may profit from green energy than Goldman Sachs profited from the bailout or Blackwater and Haliburton from the wars of preemption? How can we justify subsidizing an oil based economy that enriches kings in Saudi Arabia over investing in new technologies at home to lessen our reliance on others and spark a real economic recovery? Why is Obama labeled as 'dithering' for delaying a decision to send young men to die in a futile effort while the reality is he's playing the part of the prototypical Danish procrastinator Hamlet in his native land, trying to sell us some more smoke and mirrors wrapped in hope and change and carbon trading, driving us all to the inevitable tragic conclusion of the play?

God, time and money. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims to be "doing God's work while the same deity guided Dubya "'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did.". Meanwhile, those pesky scientists are once again questioning the divine by saying that man may actually be influencing his environment. Typical human arrogance, thinking we hold god-like influence over our planet. Fear also fails here due to the time scale, to work it cannot be an implied threat of something too far in the future, or people will lose interest. This is especially true as climate gets mixed up with weather all too easily in people's minds and there are too many cold winter days between now and the tipping point for people to feel any urgency. Given enough time and resources one can convince the majority of folks just about anything. The most remarkable aspect of the deniers success is that they've convinced a large segment of the population that they are really smart because they can recite the rhetoric the global plutocracy has tricked them into believing instead of actually believing in science. Such beauties as: "Remember global cooling", "Medieval Warm Period", "No warming since 1998", "Faulty evidence", "Solar energy output", "Plants need CO2", "Water Vapour is a greenhouse gas"; most have truth to them, but all have been misused and disseminated to the public in order to confuse the masses.

All the while the ultimate fear card is played over and over. "Climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth". It's here that the real irony starts to hit home. Not only can sharp reductions in emissions be attained with limited impact on growth at low costs, but an agreement in Copenhagen could have been the recipe for real economic recovery. But here's the real kicker. The fear factory may have already cost itself its place at the top of the global pecking order by refusing to see the obvious. Climate change feedback loops are self-reinforcing cycles; problems that echo off each other and quickly spiral out of control. Here’s how it goes: Melting tundra in Siberia releases methane into the atmosphere, which raises the water temperature, which melts sea ice, causing more solar heat to be absorbed by the oceans. As the Arctic has been melting and America has been acting the part of a 2-year old who can close his eyes and make the world go away, Russia and China have put themselves in position to reap the resource rewards, a sort of global power feedback loop. The last lie has been that we'll run out of cheap oil soon enough forcing the market to solve the problem for us. But the effects of a warmer planet are not only making it easier to dig up northern Alberta, it's also thawing the cover off of the final poisoned payload. Not only will we be sailing across the pole, a quarter of the world's mineral wealth will also be accessible, ensuring that we'll keep burning until we're truly burning. At the same time, China has positioned herself to lead the world, if not through some kind of carbon treaty, then she has at least bought up enough of Africa and South America to feed herself during the coming droughts and to maintain a steady supply of resources. Droughts? Let's not even get started on freshwater.

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought 

-Shakespeare Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

Put it all together with the latest "Climategate" (nice name-calling propaganda technique wouldn't you say?) scandal involving the hacked emails and public confidence in climatology is probably at its lowest point in at least the past decade. The facts are simple though. The planet is warming; for 150 years we've known that CO2, even in low concentrations, acts as a greenhouse gas; man is contributing to the increase in CO2. No, we don't know for certain that we are driving the warmth, but as then-Vice President Dick Cheney said when faced with concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to Al Qaeda "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response." Well Dick, I'd say that we're at least 1% sure about us playing a part in global warming, so, shouldn't we respond?

Cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? About $1 trillion to date
Cost of the financial bailout? About $5 trillion
Cost to save the planet? You guessed it...priceless

Sorry

Could it be that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually has a point? There's been a lot of talk about the fact that Barack Obama gave his first interview to a foreign network, an Arab network no less. Of course the American networks felt slighted, with some, OK, one, the FOX "network" going so far as pretending to not be able to pronounce Al-Arabiya (check it out here, was she being ignorant or condescending?). As expected the right's response is to scream about being weak in the face of the enemy - remember talking and exchanging ideas is a Republican weakness - but I want to focus on the comments made by everyone's favourite Persian leader.

In his first public address since Obama's inauguration and interview, Ahmadinejad said:
"Those who say they want to make change, this is the change they should make: they should apologise to the Iranian nation and try to make up for their dark background and the crimes they have committed against the Iranian nation."

Here's the thing: he's right. While Obama took the first step by reaching out his hand, much of the Muslim world still sees that hand as a clenched fist. How could they not when one considers some of the things that the US has done to Iran and other countries over the years, most of which many Americans themselves have no idea about. If one wants to get a small idea of the propaganda and censorship that forms the world view of many Americans, this is a quick and easy start. Ahmadinejad listed some of the grievances of his people that he wishes an apology for, beginning with American support for the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled until he was ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Also on the list is the shooting down of an Iran Air Airbus A300 by the United States Navy’s missile cruiser Vincennes over the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing 290 people. American military commanders said at the time that the passenger plane had been mistaken for an F-14 fighter jet, and they defended the warship’s actions.

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

Oh, and there was that little thing where the US backed Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the 1980's in the war against Iran leading to the deaths of over a million people. Of course over on FOX "news" (read story here), the only US 'crime' that is mentioned is trying to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. That's the only bad thing America has done, ever.

The truth is, without American intervention there would be no Ahmadinejads, Bin Ladens or Kim Jong-ils in this world and therefore not only owes the Iranian people, but the whole world a big sorry. Yes, the world also owes America a great big thank-you for all the good it's done as well. However, she must face up to the fact that much wrong has resulted from her actions. From genocide at home to Chile through Iraq, America has made it's share of errors (pretty good list here, CIA interventions here). The last eight years saw a dangerous shift in American foreign policy, specifically the pre-emptive war doctrine and increased support for Israel in their genocidal fight against the Palestinian people. The predictable result has been the increase in radicalism seen in the Muslim nations, making the world a much more dangerous place. Now there's news that the Obama administration is drafting a letter to the Iranian people in response to a letter of congratulations received after the election victory in November. What should the letter say? What tone should it strike? Should it be addressed directly to the people of Iran? All important questions, but I think one word would go a long way to healing the wounds: Sorry.

True (well, not so true) to the End

The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 1, Ch. 10

Why oh why do they keep lying and deceiving? Oh yeah, it's because a whole bunch of people eat this stuff up. Stumbled across another case in point of the smokescreen that is the Republican party and the wacky right, a little number released by the White House called the 'Highlights of Accomplishments and Results The Administration of President George W. Bush 2001-2009'. The legacy book is yet another example of the distorted way in which these people actually see the world. So, in celebration of the final moments of the Bush presidency let's try to once again for old time sakes to expose the truth by looking at this publication point by painful point.

The report has five main categories, the first of which is the claim that Dubya "Kept America Safe and Promoted Liberty Abroad". The four supporting arguments are that he waged the global war on terror, transformed the institutions and the tools of war, established the freedom agenda to spread hope through liberty and finally, established a new approach to international development. The first claim is based on the fact that US soil hasn't seen a terrorist attack against it since 9/11. True, but as I've read in many places, the previous 7 years hadn't seen one either. What's been swept under the rug and somehow forgotten is that it was on Bush's watch that 9/11 happened. Have we forgotten that Bush responded to the August 6, 2001 memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" by going on vacation? Or that he hardly paid any attention to the intelligence dating back to January 2001 which insisted that al-Qaeda was an "urgent" threat? The truth here is that the Bush administration has made America and the world a much less safe place, especially vis-a-vis terrorism. The neocon strategy of spreading democracy through war has proved to be an abysmal failure. Yes, they transformed war by instituting a policy of pre-emptive war in Iraq and the tools were sharpened through the unsigning of the ICC and ignoring the Geneva Convention. The use of torture condoned by his cohorts has created a much more dangerous world for troops abroad. The State Department, traditionally the main tool of foreign policy, has become an afterthought, understaffed, underfunded and suffering from low morale. Reading about this 'freedom agenda' is confusing. If it's the measure introduced to but not passed by congress it represents some of the higher ideals of the Republican party. However, the more nebulous 'freedom agenda' held by Dubya and fellow neocons has truly been a disaster. Beyond Iraq, one need look no further than South America or central Asia, where American influence has waned considerably. As for the colour-coded revolutions, well, most have been revealed as nothing more than a smoke screen, whose initial success has faded away much like the smoke. Did I mention Afghanistan? Guess I forgot about it too...

Bush on the economy, another laugher. Section numero dos is headed: Lowered Taxes and Instituted Pro-Growth Policies. Should read: Made the rich richer and sold the rest down river. More than any one single reason for the financial crisis is the culture of lies and deceit that the Bush administration helped to perpetuate. If you aren't so philosophical and need concrete reasons for the crisis, luckily I've got a few. Doubling the national debt after inheriting a budget surplus, pushing for deregulation and the ever widening income gap are good starting points. A doubling of the nation's debt to over $11 trillion while today the richest 1% of Americans share of national income is 22.1% compared to 16.1% in 2002 with the bottom 50%'s share today being 12.5% compared to 14.2% six years ago. In 2007 real median household income dropped 1% while corporate profits jumped 68%. But really, one need only look at Bush's advice to the American consumer which basically boiled down to "go shopping!". Yes, that's right, declare a 'war on terror' and instead of asking the people to make sacrifices, ask them to mortgage their financial future - and of course that's what Joe and Sally did. In previous wars citizens were encouraged to invest in war bonds and the likes, Dubya told the people "to get down to Disney World". Imagine how bad things would be today if he'd had his way and Social Security had been privatized.

Next up, George the second apparently "Reformed Government to Better Serve Americans". The first subsection is about education and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, part of the Bush pledge in 2000 to improve education when he lamented, "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?". The results have been mixed with reading and math scores showing improvement but many questioning the neglect of other subjects; an overhaul awaits the Obama administration. On health care the report mentions the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. Whatever it's merits the cost represent another boldface lie told to the American people as the White House continually low-balled the price tag in order to ensure passage. Sound familiar? Refresher: Back in 2003 the Bush Administration wanted to put the price tag of a war in Iraq at around $50 billion. White House Economic Advisor Larry Lindsey was fired for suggesting it could be $100 to $200 billion, that's right, fired for stepping out of line. The real cost could come in somewhere around $5 trillion! Only missed that one by a factor of 100. Oh yeah, there are over 46 million Americans without any kind of health insurance today, an increase of more than 8 million since 2000. The next part is the creepy one for us small 'g' god people; Dubya's administration has "Improved lives by partnering with faith-based and community groups". Whether or not one supports the president's Faith-Based and Community Initiative (FBCI), what is undeniable is that it will be a part of the Bush legacy as it has changed the rules of the game. The Constitutional line between church and state has been blurred and a new way of handing out money to political allies was created, sound familiar? It should as cronyism is a central theme in the last section here, where Bush II "Provided unprecedented resources for those who defended our freedom". Yes, sending over 4000 folks to die in a war tends to put pressure on you to spend some money on the armed forces. The silver lining? Well, at least Dick Cheney and Haliburton got richer.

GWB "Set a Bright Course for America's Future" must be the most baffling section of the document. Apparently he advanced energy production, lessening America's dependence on oil. One almost has no words to argue against this, and I guess that's the point. But pointing to the success of ethanol subsidies when they have had a large hand in disrupting world commodity markets, threatening global famine? Maybe the authors missed out on the run up to near $150 a barrel oil last year. Or perhaps the report implicitly counts Iraqi oil production as being American now. Dubya has also protected the environment, damn, I almost can't write this stuff. An administration that has done all it can to perpetuate global warming deniers' claims while removing itself from the obligations of the Kyoto Protocol could one day be pointed at as the reason for the end of the world. Lastly in this section the administration "Reduced crime, lowered drug use, and protected vulnerable children". While having the authority to pardon crimes helped his family sleep at night while in office, it will be interesting to see how many within the inner-circle are brought to justice. Legalizing war crimes through the Military Commissions Act helped keep the streets crime free too, at least those in Washington, D.C.!

The final section is titled: Stood on Principle and Showed the Way Ahead. Thank you Mr. President for creating the environment we're in today, one where lying, deceit, greed and corruption have come together in a perfect storm that truly threatens to end the American way of life. Through it all though Dubya "promoted a culture of life", by which I guess it means for those who weren't killed in Iraq. In fact, the phrase is lifted from a speech given by Pope John Paul II on a tour of the US in 1993, and by the Vatican's standards, Dubya has sort of succeeded. The main points of this ideal are: opposition to abortion, check, opposition to capital punishment, oops, opposition to cloning, check, opposition to contraception, check, opposition to embryonic and stem cell research, check, opposition to euthanasia, check and opposition to unjust war, d'oh! Well, 5 outta 7 ain't bad I guess. Opposition to stem cell research "set research back five to six to seven years in this country," delaying potential treatments for a number of degenerative and life threatening diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And guess what, those scientists that would have been working in the US are simply in other countries doing that same research. Next, George "Appointed judges committed to ruling by the letter of the law" is the shortest section of the document, quickly mentioning the appointment of Judges Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Funny how it skips over the whole Alberto Gonzales fiasco, assuming the public has already forgotten. Guess that's the point, most already have and won't even really know what is missing, much of their civil liberties. From wire tapping to political favouritism and approval of torture, (Gonzales called parts of the Geneva Convention 'quaint') Dubya and his gang chipped away at all that Americans supposedly hold sacred, their freedom, while proclaiming to be protecting and spreading it abroad.

None of this could have happened without three main factors, 9/11, Cheney and Rove. Cheney pushed for a radical rewriting of American policies on such critical issues as surveillance and detention of terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, with virtually no oversight or input from Congress or the courts. Meanwhile Rove worked his black magic upon a sleep-walking nation, molding public opinion through his version of the truth with impunity. Before getting to the gripping "100 Things Americans Might Not Know" wrap-up, this legacy forming document proclaims that, "President Bush led with a hopeful vision, met complex and rapid-fire challenges with steady resolve, and based his decisions on principle." This seems to be the central theme of the Bush record defense, he was a victim of circumstances and he dealt with all the issues based on his principles. Herein lies the ultimate irony of the past eight years: If a man (or woman) with more sense than neocon ideology had occupied the Oval Office to face those same challenges, America and the world would be a much better and safer place today. Instead of seeing 9/11 as an opportunity to reach out to the world, it was treated as a chance to settle scores and start wars, thereby fuelling extremism and creating legions of new terrorists. Evidence of moral corrosion can be found everywhere we look, from the financial scandals of Enron to Bernie Madoff, the humiliation of Saddam Hussein to Guantanamo Bay. Thank you Mr. President, we wish we never knew you.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the ...?

Let's not generalize and call it an American thing. Maybe it's a Republican thing. Let's be even more specific, it must be a presidential candidate for the Republican party thing, as the lack of understanding of the world outside US borders does seem to be a recurrent theme. In a scene reminiscent of good ol' Dubya while running for president, John 'McBush' McCain didn't seem to know who the president of Spain was yesterday while being interviewed by a Florida affiliate of Spanish radio network Union Radio. When asked whether he would invite Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to the White House if he won in November, McBush replied: "All I can tell you is that I have a clear record of working with leaders in the hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not. And that's judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region." You know, he's not sure if Spain is a friend or not, let alone where Spain is located.



Of course McBush's handlers jumped to his defence, with his foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann claiming McBush's refusal to confirm that he'd meet with Zapatero was deliberate, lumping Zapatero together with 'radical' South American leftist leaders such as Chavez and Morales. Listen to the whole interview though, the interviewer tries to clarify McBush's statement many times. When she finally realizes the poor man is lost after the above quote she goes as far as saying: "I'm talking about the president of Spain". Really, it's lose-lose for the McBush spin camp. Either he confused where Spain was or who Zapatero was, or he feels that the friendship between Spain and the US is on a par with such countries as Venezuela and Bolivia, who have of course just recently expelled their respective American ambassadors. Maybe we should scratch the surface a little more to reveal another possible truth: The Bush doctrine will be continued if we see 4 more years of McBush. Four more years of "with us or against us". You see one of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's campaign promises in the Spanish presidential election was to pull Spanish forces out of Iraq, something he did upon entering office in 2004. Since that time, the relationship between the two countries has cooled considerably as Bush punishes a country and its leader for doing what the majority of the people wanted. But wait a minute, the man formerly known as McCain said back in an April interview that as president he would seek to repair relations with Spain. Now, I'm really confused, who is McBush and what does he believe?

Let's wind this up then with some sad geography facts. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, one-third of young Americans recently polled couldn’t locate Louisiana on a map and nearly half were unable to identify Mississippi. Step outside the US, and it gets worse as early in the illegal Iraq invasion, in 2002, one in seven, about 13%, of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military service, could find Iraq, while 17% could find Afghanistan. Four years of war later, with the accompanying TV coverage to 'educate' the masses, and 63% could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East, and 75% could not point out Iran or Israel. 44% couldn't find any one of those four countries. It's the attitude toward knowledge of the outside world that's most astounding as fewer than 30% thought it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14% believe speaking another language is a necessary skill. I guess it must be nice to live in a glass cage, you get what you deserve, go on, vote McBush for four more years of ignorance.

Blame Canada

Hey Canada! What's up? It used to be that the only complaints people had from up north focused on Celine Dion. Lately, I can't seem to look at the news without seeing a negative, disturbing or simply ridiculous story coming out of my homeland. Could it have been the federal election in 2006 bringing Stephen Harper and his Conservatives into power? Is it the unknown addictive substance that Tim Horton's must put in their coffee? Whatever the reason you can't deny that the stream of news flowing out of Canada of late has ranged from the bizarre to the tragic. Regardless of the cause for the shift, the world's view of Canada is undergoing a transformation from an idyllic, if frozen, land of peacekeepers and natural beauty to one more in line with it's neighbour to the south.

The easiest line of attack is the environmental angle. While much of the world thinks of green spaces, majestic mountains and lush forests, the truth is Canadian government has possibly done more harm to the environmental effort than the Bush administration. While it could be expected that the US in their greed and lust for profits wouldn't ratify the Kyoto Protocol, Canada could have been a shining example to the world. They were one of the first countries to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Since that time however, led by the Conservative party, both federally and provincially, they have taken the low road. In typical wild west fashion, the governments have turned a blind eye to the developing disaster of the Albertan oil sands. The ecological damage is mind-boggling, while the environmental disaster has forced the government to change the definitions of pollution emissions. Congratulations Canada, while only making up 1/2% of the world's population, you´re the world's eighth largest producer of carbon dioxide.

We could talk about immigration if you'd prefer, Canada is a land of immigrants, where the term multiculturalism was born. A land where many have dreamt of starting a new life. Well, hopefully you´re not a confused Polish immigrant landing at the Vancouver International Airport with those dreams. Yes, the world watched in horror as some of those fine young men in powerful uniforms, RCMP officers, tasered Robert Dziekanski to death. If you're looking to come to Canada to avoid fighting in an illegal war, don't bother either. Last month Canada expelled the first US army deserter to have arrived since the Iraq invasion, and now Jeremy Hinzman is set to join Robin Long. Both face court martial and five years in prison for refusing to serve in Iraq. It is estimated that there are about 200 deserters in Canada.

If you're looking for the low point, you need look no further than the current governments support of the US "war on terror". After the previous government's refusal to join "the coalition of the willing" in an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, the biggest worry that most Canadians had was that relations with their southern neighbour would be soured. Fear not, the new Conservative government led by Stephen Harper has saved the day. Just ask Maher Arar, a Syrian born Canadian university graduate who tried to return his home in Canada from vacation in Tunisia on September 26, 2002 and wound up in a Syrian prison, a victim of the US' secret rendition program. There he was repeatedly tortured. His family had no idea of his whereabouts for days and he didn't see them for 376 days. If you have time, here's the link to the official Arar Commission report, basically Judge O'Connor blasts the RCMP for providing U.S. authorities with inaccurate intelligence that resulted in Mr. Arar, and his wife Monia Mazigh, being put on a border watch list as dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist suspects. That same report confirmed their complete innocence. Oh yeah, there are a few more cases just like this.

It gets worse, friends. Maybe you somehow missed the video of Omar Khadr that was released in July. We'd all like to think that if our government and country knew that I was being held without charges and tortured they would do something about it. Well, according the the footage, Omar told the Canadian interviewers what was happening to him and yet nothing was done. Being only 15 when he was seized by US forces after a firefight in Afghanistan in July of 2002, he was thrown into prison on a Caribbean island with no rights and no charges. The cold indifference of his Canadian interrogators about seven months later is truly shocking, if you haven't seen it, you should, here:

Prime Minister Harper said in July that he would not interfere in Mr Khadr's military tribunal, due to begin at Guantanamo on 8 October. “Mr. Khadr is accused of very serious things. There is a legal process in the United States … Frankly, we do not have a real alternative to that process to get to the truth about those accusations.” Even Khadr’s American military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, found that “preposterous.” Harper, he said, should “stand up as the Prime Minister of Canada and protect the rights of a Canadian citizen, and stop taking his orders from the Bush administration and stop being the last leader of a Western country to support a failed process in Guantanamo Bay.”

Of course I shouldn't lose my head over all this, not much has changed, has it? I guess that's another point, Canadians seem to be losing theirs, literally. Whether sitting on a dreary bus journey across the prairies or in prison in Saudi Arabia, heads seem to be rolling. In case you missed it, 40-year-old Vince Weiguang Li was charged with second degree murder for decapitating a 22-year-old fellow passenger Tim McLean on July 30th. After pulling out a hunting knife and stabbing McLean as many as 40 or 50 times, witnesses said, Li displayed the victim's severed head to horrified passengers who had already fled the bus. What the? It's not even hockey season yet, so I've no idea what could have pissed him off so much. Meanwhile one Canadian as already been sentenced to death and another still awaits trial in Saudi Arabia, and the punishment is beheading. The 18 and 23-year-old brothers both face death by sword for their role in the death of a 19-year-old Syrian in a schoolyard incident last year.

Heads are rolling while feet are washing up on shore. The west coast has seen at least five unidentified solo feet wash up on its shore over the course of the past year. It's a mystery that has the police, media and locals scratching their heads. The fifth foot, and first left foot, was found on June 16th near Ladner, B.C. No leads have been found, but there are enough missing people and serial killers around if the past is any indication; from Clifford Olson (killed 11 children) to Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka who killed three teenage girls, including Homolka’s sister to the biggest monster of all Robert Pickton. Pickton is alleged to have killed and dismembered the bodies of his victims, possibly as many as 49, on his pig farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Don't forget the Canadian pedophile, that swirly face picture guy, who was convicted yesterday in Thailand to 39-months in prison.

Of course none of this really matters to the Canadian psyche. What's really important is that we haven't won any medals at the Olympics yet. You'll find more outrage on the internet about the medal drought being experienced by the Canadian team than any of the above stories. The Canadian news story of the year for 2007 was the rise of the Canadian dollar versus the US buck. Woohoo! Way to go Canada, your dollar did what every other currency in the world did, appreciate versus the US dollar. Wake up Canada, there's more to life than Tim Horton's.

The more things change...

Maybe if he just changed the batteries in the remote...

As you may or may not know, I've been on vacation for the past month, unable to keep up with the news and keep my blog up to date. A couple of post-dated posts are all I've been able to put up. So, given my lack of news (yes, no internet access) I thought it might be fun to see what the news headlines from my final "connected" day were and ask you to see what's come of these stories. It's been my experience from past years of occasional media withdrawal that with the exception of the odd major events, the same stories get recycled, re-spun and repackaged for our intake. Some of the headlines from Reuter's on June 24th, 2008 were:
1. Pressure mounts to call off Zimbabwe election
2. Home prices extend record slide in April
3. Bomb kills 6 Iraqis, 4 Americans in Baghdad
4. Dow Chemical sets new price hikes, cuts output
5. Iran says EU sanctions could hurt nuclear diplomacy
6. Voters and candidates react to higher energy costs
7. First contractor convicted under US military law in Iraq
8. Economy on brink of recession, Greenspan says
9. Border farmers seek change on guest workers
10. Group denies misleading media over Amazon tribe

Now, my theory is the things don't change too much, the news seems to run in a loop. Here's a list of corresponding stories I've written in the past three months (with numbers matching above):
1. Starving Billionaires; Zimbabwe, somewhere in Africa; Zimbabwe update #3
2. On Dollars and Dinars
3. Where to start?
4. Look out! It's a dinosaur from the 70's!?
5. When Talking Became a Bad Thing
6. When first we practice to deceive - lies part 2
7. Extra! Extra! America Violates International Law! (post-dated at time of writing, you can find it yourself)
8. What a Tangled Web We Weave - Lies Part 1
9. Fear of the Other
10. Attack From Above

Ok, ok, the stories don't all match up exactly, I've only been at this blogging thing a few months. What is interesting to examine though is how much news changes over time. Looking at my original posts and the headlines today (June 24th), there isn't much difference. So, dear reader, if I was to log on today, would I find that the story has changed in the past month? Somehow I doubt it, but let me know in the comments below. See you at the beginning of August!

Oh yeah, that war

It's not just opium that's growing...

The US, UK and it's NATO allies have been conducting a war in Afghanistan for getting on seven years now. The stated intentions were to capture Osama bin Laden, destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power. In this world of "internet time" and instant gratification, it feels like this war is moving in quicksand, or worse yet, maybe in reverse. The first two goals are probably further away from being accomplished than 2001, with Osama harder to find than Waldo and al-Qaeda stronger than ever. It did feel like the third goal was accomplished for good since Dec. 9, 2001 when the Taliban reportedly lost their final territory, but the last year or so has seen a resurgence in their power.

So, what's gone wrong? Well, in a nutshell, the US was too busy in Iraq and the rest of the world was too busy being pissed off with the US to realize how desperate the situation was becoming. I guess they forgot that this is Afghanistan, a country that hasn't been kind to foreign imperialism for a good 2500 years since Darius the Great extended his influence over the region. Ok, maybe the US could be forgiven for forgetting this, but the British? The first Anglo-Afghan war (they've had a few now) from 1838 to 1842 was a disaster for them with the low-light coming in the form of a massacre of about 16,000 retreating British military personnel and civilians. And really, the Americans should remember that it was them who helped supply Mujahidin fighters in their struggle that saw the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan. The list of military debacles within it's borders is truly impressive, but the binding factor that binds them together is the intense tribalism that is constantly pushing the country apart.

No, it's not going to change. The same forces that have been driving Afghanistan up the failed state charts the past few years (8th in 2007, up from 10th in 2006 and 11th in 2005) will be around a lot longer than the NATO troops. The latest call for help is from a German NATO general who said that 6,000 additional troops are urgently required to control the situation. The funny part is that without these troops, he claimed the war would be prolonged. This follows the similar request for more troops from the outgoing commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) Gen Dan McNeill as he passed the baton to another American, Gen David McKiernan. The "success" of the surge in Iraq has led them to believe that more troops will help restore order in Afghanistan. The Soviets couldn't do it with 150,000 troops, today the Afghan army has about 58,000 and the ISAF number about 52,000, so even with 50,000 more soldiers on the ground they are doomed to failure just as the Russians almost 30 years ago.

Recent events only highlight the inability to bring the country under control. In Kandahar, home to the second largest air force base in the country, a prison break was orchestrated that freed over a thousand prisoners, with maybe 400 of them being Taliban fighters. Cross border fighting into Pakistan, with US air strikes killing Pakistani soldiers adds another dimension. The resurgence of the neo-Taliban threat is real as the hearts and minds of moderate Muslims are won over to the extremist elements, pushed by the ever growing war on terror. McBush claimed he'd stay in Iraq for 100 years, no when seems to notice they'll have to be in Afghanistan even longer.