Summaries here and here and here.

Summaries here and here and here.

Is the official intention to scour the land of people?

“I think the Israelis are contemplating flattening villages down to the last house,” said Richard Morczynski, UNIFIL’s [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] political officer. Article

Robert Fisk’s dispatch regarding Qana.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: “For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B”. No doubt the manufacturers can call it “combat-proven” because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died. Article

Lots and lots of reports mention that civilians have been warned to “get out.” And others report that many are attempting to do so, including leaving Lebanon for about the only place there is to readily go: Syria.

In what universe, then, does it make a scintilla of sense to destroy refugees’ routes, travel capability and border crossings?

Israeli warplanes struck the main Beirut-Damascus highway border crossing at Masnaa for the third time on Monday, wounding four customs employees and a civilian, security sources said. A customs post on the Lebanese side of the border with Syria was bombed midday in an attack that destroyed a civilian vehicle. The main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria was also pounded Saturday. Massive craters from Israel’s air strikes have effectively closed the road.

But some travelers were seen abandoning their vehicles at the border Sunday, carrying their luggage and walking on foot across the border into Syria, where they hopped into taxis and continued their journey.

The sole remaining highway to Syria is via Tripoli and into Tartous in Syria. Unpaved roads into Syria exist from the Hermil, Qaa and Baalbek area, but as the main roads into Baalbek and across the Bekaa Valley have also been targeted by Israeli warplanes, the drive can be arduous at best. Article

Just found this of interest.

Iran’s refineries have a capacity of 40 million liters of gasoline a day, but demand is over 70 million liters a day.

The shortfall has up to now been met by spending billions of dollars each year on imported gasoline.

The government then takes a double hit by selling fuel at just 800 rials ($0.09, or $0.34 a gallon). Super costs 1,100 rials ($0.12, or $0.45 cents a gallon). Article

As always, snippets or linking do not necessarily imply endorsement, but there’s a lot in this piece that is intriguing and that also (but not always) parallels ye old scribe’s take on current events.

We tend to assume that governments, regardless of whether we agree with their policies or not, operate on the basis of a rational analysis of the situation, but I think it’s pretty obvious by now that this is not the case. Plans and objectives are all well and good but they need to be based in the real world of what is realisable. Gamblers still need to weigh the odds.

[snip]

So has the ‘war on terror’ run out of road? I think the ‘war on terror’ must be viewed fromtwo positions; the first is as a rationale for projecting imperial power and the second, and I contend far more important, as a rationalisation for the control of domestic populations who they view potentially at least, as a real opposition to their plans for world domination. After all, when all is said and done, it will be US and UK soldiers who will have to do the dying and in increasing numbers if their objectives are to be realised.

And without domestic support, the global plans of the USUK are almost impossible to realise unless all pretence at democratic government is abandoned and all the actions of our governments reveal this to be the case.

However, it’s not as simple as it first appears for without an enemy, whether within or without, justifying increasing repression becomes all the more difficult. Eventually, all pretence of a free society will have to completely abandoned. Article

Closing out the books: Who knew?

On 31 December, the UK will make a payment of about $83m (£45.5m) to the US and so discharge the last of its loans from World War II from its transatlantic ally.

[snip]

…the UK took a loan for $586m (about £145m at 1945 exchange rates), and a further $3,750m line of credit (about £930m at 1945 exchange rates). The loan was to be paid off in 50 annual repayments starting in 1950, although there were six years when payment was deferred because of economic or political crises.

[snip]

But the terms of the loan were extremely generous, with a fixed interest rate of 2% making it considerably less terrifying than a typical mortgage.

[snip]

And if it seems strange to the non-economist that WWII debts are still knocking around after 60 years, there are debts that predate the Napoleonic wars. Dr Leunig says the government is still paying out on these “consol” bonds, because it is better value for taxpayers to keep paying the 2.5% interest than to buy back the bonds.

And while the UK dutifully pays off its World War II debts, those from World War I remain resolutely unpaid. And are by no means trifling. In 1934, Britain owed the US $4.4bn of World War I debt (about £866m at 1934 exchange rates). Adjusted by the Retail Price Index, a typical measure of inflation, £866m would equate to £40bn now, and if adjusted by the growth of GDP, to about £225bn.

[snip]

During the crisis years of the 1930s, only one nation continued to pay in full - Finland.… Article

Pity poor little Orange Stinky Mengele.

Malaysian authorities have published a list of undesirable titles to prevent parents giving their children names such as Hitler, smelly dog or 007.

[snip]

But the ban extends further.

Parents will not be able to call their babies after animals, insects, fruit, vegetables or colours. Article

Summary here and here.

So how’s that security going?

The two armored vans left a branch of the Warka Bank on Thursday around noon, loaded with 1.191 billion dinars, or nearly $800,000. Almost immediately, on a busy street near the Baghdad zoo, the drivers spotted an oncoming Iraqi Army convoy, led by a shiny new Humvee. They followed standard procedure and pulled over.

But the convoy stopped, and an officer politely ordered the surprised drivers and guards to lay down their guns while his men searched the vans for bombs.

Within minutes all eight drivers and guards had been handcuffed and locked in the back of one of the vans on a suffocating 120-degree day, the cash had been stolen by the men in the convoy – whoever they were – and the Iraqi banking system marked another day of its slow slide into oblivion.

The only thing atypical about Thursday’s robbery, which was described by bank and Interior Ministry officials, is that most private banks try to avoid using armored vans, because they draw too much attention, and instead toss sacks of cash into ordinary cars for furtive dashes through the streets of Baghdad.

[snip]

Hussein al-Uzri, president and chairman of the Trade Bank of Iraq, a state-owned bank, said the risks of such deliveries had to be measured in relative terms. “Anywhere else in the world, throwing a few million dollars in the back of a Mazda and driving from the Central Bank is crazy,” he said. “But many people will say that living in Baghdad is crazy.”

[snip]

The banks’ troubles have had a ripple effect. Iraqi companies, already struggling in a devastated economy, cannot get enough cash to meet their payrolls, said Hashim T. Atrikchi, acting manager of the Iraqi Federation of Industries and chairman of the Arab Federation of Plastic Manufacturers.

[snip]

Bank officials estimate that there has been an average of about one major robbery a month this year. Some banks seem to be particularly unlucky: only a week before Thursday’s holdup, robbers tried to steal a shipment of $500,000 from the Warka Bank, though in that case the police foiled the attempt, bank officials said. Article

Chaos abides. The relentless quotidian wearing down of spirit.

The constant threat has forced a redesign of the urban landscape. Neighborhoods have been carved up by concrete barriers and roadblocks, forcing residents to relearn how to get around town. Soldiers and the police are everywhere.

But the violence has reconfigured the emotional geography as well – and this is what Umm Hassan was saying. Iraqis live with the creeping, paralyzing dread that anything can happen at any time, and when it does, they will be powerless to stop it.

So they struggle to control their environment by limiting their movement, cutting off all but the most essential contact with other people and staying indoors. The space in which people believe they can safely operate shrinks with every attack, no matter where it occurs.

[snip]

“There is a new saying,” she went on. “‘We’re all sentenced to death but we don’t know when.’” Indeed, one of the greatest victims of the war is certainty. There’s uncertainty about who rules and who can be trusted. There’s uncertainty about the safety of moving from point A to point B, the source of the next meal, the meaning of a glance. Article

Green is the main defendant in the Haditha murder/rape investigation (and the one being tried in the civilian court system). He’s a piece of work, huh? The others charged were ‘led’ (and followed the lead) of such as this? No one higher up flagged him immediately?

Writing in Sunday’s editions of The Washington Post, Andrew Tilghman, a former correspondent for the US military newspaper Stars And Stripes, said he interviewed Green several times in February at his unit south of Baghdad.

“I came over here because I wanted to kill people,” he quoted Green as saying. “The truth is, it wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be.

“I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience,” Green was quoted as saying. “And then I did it, and I was like, ‘All right, whatever.’”

“I shot a guy who wouldn’t stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing,” Green was quoted as saying. “Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant.

“I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’” Article

In Ramadi, the oft-neglected hot war continues.

In just four months, one Marine has fired 27 rockets. Another estimates he’s fired 5,000 rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun. One marksman has 20 confirmed kills. His superiors believe he’s probably killed another 40 but they aren’t sure.

[snip]

Residents of Ramadi are afraid of even walking near the offices of the Anbar provincial government, which is supposed to administer an area the size of North Carolina, and with about one million inhabitants.

[snip]

U.S. officials hope the national unity government that took office this spring with greater Sunni Arab representation will persuade some insurgents to lay down their arms. But the provincial government here — comparable to state governments in the United States — is still run by officials handpicked by Americans or U.S.-chosen councils. Article

Heck, this is a Congress with the majority of the same party as holds the White House, filled with cheerleaders for the administration, and they are shut out, snubbed and treated as doormats. How often do the holders of the pursestrings in Congress have to be proven to have been kept in the dark, shilled and stepped on before they sit up and take notice? (emphasis added)

The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. Article

Nothing to comment about paticularly, just a sidelight of passing interest.

One of Command Sgt. Major Lawrence A. Hall’s biggest worries in Iraq is Gatorade.…

Hall, of the Army’s 1st Squadron, 167th Cavalry, learned that the medical staff is starting to notice an increase in kidney stones and gall stones in troops. They believe its because the guys … and gals … are drinking a lot of Gatorade and at the same time, not getting enough exercise. So soldiers are encouraged to either exercise more or drink water instead of Gatorade. Theyre also rationing the amount of Gatorade troops can pick up at the dining facility to two bottles per person, whereas in the past, troops could … and often did … fill up every pocket with a bottle of the green or orange liquid. Article

Keeping up with the international push-pull.

Yes, there is an established Jewish community in Iran (though this is no longer so in Iraq).

Moris Motamed’s political headquarters highlight the well-practiced survival skills of Iran’s remaining 25,000 Jews — caught again in a political no man’s land by the fighting between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Any public expression of sympathy for Israel would invite a sharp crackdown from authorities and hard-line Islamic groups.

“We are Iranians. We work for what’s best for Iran. The fighting, fortunately, does not affect the Jewish community in Iran,” said Motamed, who holds the single parliament seat reserved for Jews. Other seats are set aside for the Christian Armenian and Assyrian minorities and followers of Iran’s pre-Islamic Zoroastrian faith.

[snip]

Iranian Jews face no restrictions on their religious practices, but they must follow Islamic codes such as head scarves for women in public. The same rules apply to the larger Christian and Zoroastrian communities. Article

What’s up.

Afghanistan is going through its bloodiest phase of violence since the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001, with most violence occurring in the south where NATO will take over security from the U.S.-led coalition on Monday.

Underlining the instability and danger NATO-led forces will face, a Taliban spokesman, Qari Muhammad Yousuf, told Reuters late on Saturday that militants had kidnapped an engineer working for a U.S. company. Article

Summary here and here.

Related:

The UN estimates that 800,000 Lebanese have been displaced, a huge number for a country of 3.5 million.

“The scale of the problem is of an unbelievable proportion,” said Sami Haddad, the Lebanese minister of economy.

“We have between 20% and 25% of our population that is turned into refugees. What government can cope with that?”

…with the vast scale of the destruction, even if the war stopped now the country would still face a housing shortage in the light of the 100,000 to 200,000 people whose homes have been levelled.

[snip]

An old man in a white crocheted cap lay on a mat under a ceiling hung with drying tobacco leaves. He needed medicine but his family had no car and could not afford the $800 taxi fare to Beirut.

Many people were still reeling from the shock of losing loved ones in the violence. Anaya Bezzeh, a woman in her 40s, sat crumpled on a plastic lawn chair in the yard of the Tyre Rest House - a hotel that has been descended on by refugees. Her husband had died, and she escaped with her children two days ago from Bint Jbeil, the town of the heaviest fighting.

In Rmeish, people milled around and waited. Tufik Deeb, a 77-year-old Rmeish resident, said he had been surviving on yoghurt and rice for more than a week.

In the centre of town, a family with four small children waited inside an old Mercedes.

They wanted to join the convoy that was leaving to Tyre, but they had no petrol. Still, they sat patiently in the heat of the afternoon, hoping someone would give them the means to reach some sort of safety. Article

37 who have forever lost all promise, whether Rice’s “false promise” or any other.

Thirty-seven children were among the dead in the air raid on the southern village of Qana, the bloodiest single attack in Israel’s nearly three week war with the Lebanese guerrilla group.

The attack prompted Beirut’s government to call off scheduled talks with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, telling her she was unwelcome before a ceasefire was in place. U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Jerusalem Israel’s decision to suspend the aerial bombardment was to allow for an investigation into the Qana attack.

[snip]

A Lebanese foreign ministry official told an urgent session of the U.N. Security Council on Sunday that more than 60 people were killed. But police in Lebanon put the death toll at 54. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Security Council to condemn the attack and call for an immediate end to hostilities. “I am deeply dismayed that my earlier calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities were not heeded,” Annan said.

[snip]

Rice, who said she had called off her trip to Beirut, expressed her sadness by the Qana raid, but stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Her mediation drive in tatters, she will leave Israel for Washington on Monday to work on a U.N. resolution that could achieve what the White House called a “sustainable” ceasefire that changes the pre-war status quo. Article

Related, from the Red Cross:

Issuing advance warning to the civilian population of impending attacks in no way relieves a warring party of its obligations under the rules and principles of international humanitarian law. In particular, the principles of distinction and proportionality must be respected at all times. Article

Cost of war: fouling the Mediterranean coast.

Lebanon is facing an environmental crisis after an Israeli air strike on the Jiyeh power station, about 20km south of Beirut caused 10,000 tonnes of oil to spill into the Mediterranean sea.

The air strikes on 13 and 15 July hit the power station’s fuel tanks and the leaking oil was pushed north by winds, and a thick sludge now coats much of the Lebanese coastline. At least 80km of the 200km coastline is affected.

Officials at Lebanon’s environment ministry say that the clean-up operation will take at least a year to complete and at an estimated cost of more than US $ 130 million.

“It is about 10,000 tonnes of oil, but because of the security situation we cannot go into the sea to see what the real situation is,” said a spokeswoman at the ministry, who requested anonymity.

There are fears that more oil could spill into the sea due to a fire at the facility that began on Thursday and now threatens a undamaged tank that contains 15,000 tonnes of oil.

[snip]

Officials have warned people who live near the sea to keep their windows closed and stay away from the oil as the fumes can cause skin and breathing problems.v

The spill will also threaten Lebanon’s marine life and endangered species such as the Green Turtle and the Blue Fin Tuna. Article

More follow-up on the controversy of U.S. arm twisting in the U.K.

Bombs destined to be used by Israel are being flown via Scotland only because the Irish government refused to allow them to land on its soil.

Scotland on Sunday can reveal that after the conflict in Lebanon began three weeks ago, Ireland turned down a United States request for planes carrying 600lb so-called bunker busters to refuel at Shannon airport in Co Clare.

As a result, cargo planes carrying the bombs, which the Israeli army is using in its offensive against the Hezbollah, are being flown via Prestwick airport in Ayrshire.

The use of Prestwick triggered a furious diplomatic row last week after it emerged that the US had broken aviation rules by failing to notify Britain about the flights.

That row is intensifying this weekend as two further American planes carrying ‘hazardous’ material to Tel Aviv land at the airport.

[snip]

The latest revelations are set to crush hopes among British diplomats that the row over Prestwick would die down following President George Bush’s apology to Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday.

[snip]

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said the fact that more flights were now landing in Scotland was “adding insult to injury”.

He said: “What price the president’s apology now? Article

The trail of tears of imperial ambition. Pride goeth before a fall – a truism of history which goes repeatedly unheeded.

As the end is restoring democratic process, so the means should be democratic. It’s true that since 2004 the president’s positive ratings in the polls have plummeted, but there is no guarantee that this shift in opinion will translate into Republican defeats in the forthcoming congressional election, and a renewal of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress would add another stamp of approval to the Bush policies, however misguided.

[snip]

#8230;The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world’s greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else - if conceived in terms of military force - has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force - and the fool of history.

[snip]

What the true greatness - or true power - of the United States is or can be for the world in our time is an absorbing question in pressing need of an answer. Our very conceptions of greatness and power - military, economic, political, moral - would need searching reconsideration. Those true powers - especially the economic - also have an “imperial” aspect, but that is another debate. An advantage of that debate is that it would be about things that are real. Jettisoning the mirage of military domination of the globe that has addled so many American brains for more than half a century and also shunning the panic-stricken fears of impotence that have accompanied the inevitable frustration of these delusions, the debate would take realistic stock of the nation’s very considerable yet limited resources and ask what is being done with them, for good or ill, and what should be done. Perhaps it will still be possible to shoehorn the United States into a stretched definition of “empire”, but it would look nothing like Britain or Rome. Or perhaps, as I believe, a United States rededicated to its constitutional traditions and embarked on a cooperative course with other nations would find that it possesses untapped reserves of political power, though it will take time for US prestige to recover from Bush’s squandering of it.

[snip]

8230;The lesson most of the US learned from Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown too strong. (In general, America’s imperial-minded presidents have had much more success rolling back freedom at home than extending it abroad.)

Vice President Dick Cheney, who had served as chief of staff for president Gerald Ford, drew an opposite lesson - that the powers others called imperial were in fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put it: “Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority … the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area.”

Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary tale, Cheney sees new usurpation as restoration. In doing so, he brings an old theme back in new guise - that US weakness in the world is caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion - this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition - is the country’s problem.

Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being heard advising that the opposition to the Iraq war and the failed vision it embodies should, with the next election in mind, now embrace a generalized new readiness to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the sorry history of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is exactly the opposite - to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must say re-relearn, the lessons regarding the limitations on the use of force that have been taught and then rejected so many times in recent decades. Only then will we be able to stop repeating ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial grandeur, start saying and doing something new. Article

Sloughs off the utter gravity of the Constitutional crisis and the situation a bit too readily, but still it is vital that the topic be presented and re-presented via the traditional media until it has been pounded into the general public’s consciousness.

For some reason, that separation-of-powers idea seems to throw President Bush for a loop. Indeed, he seems to have thought not much at all about the meaning — or the purpose — of the entire Constitution. To watch him in action, one might imagine he regards the document as a cheerful compilation of suggestions — a hodgepodge of sensible advice worth dipping into now and then.

But of course the Constitution is far more than a compendium of pretty-good ideas. Indeed, there’s nothing “a la carte” about it. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it blueprint of American democracy, which describes the architecture of American government. Its division of authority among three branches — legislative, executive and judicial — is America’s surest shield against autocracy. Article

With no skilled hand on the tiller (which in any case has been frozen in position by “stay the course”), waterfalls loom ever closer.

The planet pays the price of the maladroit G. Walker crowd. With great power comes great responsibility, a dictum they wantonly ignore.

It is often said of the Mideast peace process that it resembles a shark: If it does not continue in motion, it will perish. The overlapping crises Rice is now trying to get under control have taken their current menacing form, in large part, because President Bush and advisers addicted to illusions of unilateralism have abdicated America’s role as an irreplaceable mediator in the Mideast.

[snip]

History cannot be scrolled backward, and there can be no certainty about what might have happened in the Mideast if Bush had not been seduced into passivity by a doctrine of refusing to negotiate with a select set of rogues, despots, and enemies. What is certain is the tally of disasters that have followed from Bush’s diplomatic inertia. Article

Wal-Mart retreats.

The stake through the heart of the Constitution, death rattle of America bill (proposed and sponsored by you-know-who).

G. Walker and his minions have moved to the final extension of Reagan’s spurious mantra (”government is the problem”) — the administration is now blatantly and openly positing that “America is the problem.”

Freedom, we hardly knew ye.

Summary here.

“Catapulting the propaganda” is bad enough, Believing the bpropaganda, and using it a a basis for policy formulation, is inexcusable. As is an officer corps cowed enough and so bereft of conscience as to put career over country.

…when U.S. forces have cracked down in one place, Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists have popped up in another. Some towns have been pacified multiple times, only to return to chaos as soon as the Americans reduced troop numbers. In cities such as Baghdad, Kirkuk, Samarra and Ramadi, bloodshed ebbs and flows, but security is never a given.

[snip]

“This is exactly what happens when there aren’t enough troops: You extend people and you deplete your theater reserve,” said an American defense official in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

[snip]

Almost no high-ranking, active-duty U.S. officers are willing to discuss their concerns about troop levels publicly, for fear of being reprimanded or having their careers cut short. There’s an unwritten understanding, they said, that the Bush administration doesn’t want to hear about the need for more troops.

[snip]

“They’re not allowed to ask for more troops,” the U.S. defense official in Iraq said. “If you say something you’re gone, you’re relieved, you’re not in the Army anymore.”

A number of senior military officials in the United States agreed. “There’s an overall feeling that if you ask for more you’re going to get hammered,” one said. Article

Is the head of the Joint Chiefs calling Afghanistan an endless commitment and a stand-off?

Summary here.

Yuppers, especially the last three paragraphs.

Summary here and here.

40 months in, bringing the tanks back into urban warfare in Baghdad.

The United States military is signalling that it will maintain or possibly increase the current level of about 130,000 troops in Iraq as commanders develop a plan to move as many as 5,000 soldiers with heavy armour into embattled Baghdad.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that roughly 21,000 Army soldiers and Marines have been told they are scheduled to go to Iraq during the current 2006-2008 rotation.

Combined with two previous announcements of about 113,000 American service members scheduled for this rotation period, this could bring the number of US troops there to as many as 134,000, if all units are deployed.

[snip]

As part of the Baghdad security plan, all flights out for soldiers currently at the end of their deployment were cancelled as of Tuesday as commanders wrestled with the plan and how to supply troops needed for it, a third official said.

…About 30,000 US troops were in Baghdad before the new plan.

[snip]

Defence experts inside and outside the Pentagon worry that diverting US troops to Baghdad could weaken their ability in other parts of the country. They say the plan reverses an earlier effort to make Americans less visible and put Iraqi forces out front in the fight.

[snip]

Asked if bringing tanks and armour back to Baghdad would run counter to plans for reducing the visibility of US forces, one military official said: “There is definitely a fine line between overwhelming amounts of combat power versus enough to make you feel safe.

“I don’t think we’re talking a tank on every street corner,” the official said. Article

Note the use of “make you feel safe” — not make things safe. Additionally, should anyone think that missions of the “trained” Iraqi forces are not vetted by the U.S. occupying forces — well, there’s this piece of bottom land you might be interested in purchasing…

Hitching a ride on the despot’s coattails:

Blackwater says the government’s unprecedented reliance on private contractors on the battlefield has made them so indistinguishable from uniformed personnel that the company should enjoy the same immunity from liability as the government.

“You can’t separate the contractors from the troops anymore,” Joseph Schmitz, general counsel of Blackwater’s parent company, said after a March federal appeals court hearing in Richmond.

In court papers, Blackwater says its contractors perform “a classic military function” and asserts that the courts “may not impose liability for casualties sustained in the battlefield in the performance of these duties.”

Blackwater casts its defense in constitutional terms, arguing that the separation of powers and presidential authority are at stake.

“The judiciary may not impose standards on the manner in which the President oversees and commands the private component of the Total Force in foreign military operations,” the company says in one brief.

To that, the plaintiffs in the Fallujah case reply that Blackwater is trying to have it both ways – acting as a private entity on one hand and aligning itself with the government on the other.

In their filing, they argue: “Blackwater cannot have its cake and eat it too. As a private security company, reaping private profits, they should be held accountable for their wrongful conduct, just like every other private corporation in America.” Article

No, no no. This must be squelched as a rationale with utmost immediacy. D.O.A. Privatization of miltary duties does not bring those so privatized under the cloak of the commander-in-chief, no matter how one defines that position’s authorities. If the private, contracted manufacturers of MREs prouced any that led to illness or death, they woul be legally liable.

Segregation and ghettoization. Chaos abides.

Fearing sectarian death squads, Iraqis are trading homes with trusted friends from the other sect, surrounding themselves with those who share their faith but creating segregated neighborhoods increasingly wary of one other.

Iraqi officers say about 1,500 families have fled this religiously mixed city 25 miles west of Baghdad. Many others have moved to neighborhoods where their sect predominates - either deserting their former homes or exchanging them with people from the other brand of Islam.

[snip]

…the trucks packed with household goods that shuttle between neighborhoods underscore the sectarian fault line. Iraqi soldiers have tried to persuade residents to stay, but they acknowledge that influential tribal and religious leaders have encouraged many to leave.

[snip]

Nationwide, 26,858 families - or about 160,000 people - have been displaced by sectarian violence since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, according to Migration Minister Abdul-Samad Rahman.

[snip]

“We need a political solution. I can’t do anything because it’s not my job,” said Brig. Gen. Tarek, commander of the 1st Iraqi army division who would only provide his surname for fear of insurgent reprisal. “I could put a squad in every house … but that’s outside of my capabilities.” Article

Snatch ‘n’ grab via a five finger megaton discount.

That the radical restructuring of Iraq’s political economy has received so little critical attention — even as Iraq’s nascent government threatens to crash and burn — is a testament to how deeply indoctrinated we are –especially our media — in the narrative of what “American-style” capitalism is. It was taken as a given that after knocking off Saddam, we’d rapidly privatize huge swaths of Iraq’s national companies, get rid of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, completely restructure the country’s tax and finance laws and throw Iraq’s economy wide open for foreign multinationals. File it under bringing “democracy and capitalism” to the poor, backward Arabs.

The reality is that the economic policies we imposed on Iraq were not some generic form of “capitalism”; they included the most radical business-state rules imaginable — policies that developing countries have vehemently resisted for over a decade. What’s more, imposing them at the point of a gun appears to have violated both international and U.S. laws. There’s nothing “normal” about it.

And while “democratization” and “free markets” supposedly go hand-in-hand, the truth is that Iraq’s economic transformation was mutually exclusive with the goal of forming a legitimate government, and the Bush administration knew it well in advance of the occupation.

That’s because it’s universally accepted — even among the most vocal proponents of the very model of corporate globalization that inspired Iraq’s new economy — that in the short-term those policies create economic pain, displacement, anger and civil unrest, as well as a lack of faith in government. That’s no way to win hearts and minds.

[snip]

Pushing those policies in a country like Iraq was a matter of ideological preference and greed, not necessity. A good example is Iraq’s new flat-tax, established by Order #37 (now Law #37). As the Mi>Washington Post reported : “It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen – to accomplish what eluded [Republicans] over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.”

[snip]

Now look at Order #1 in relation to Order #39, which made it a violation of Iraqi law fo the government to favor local Iraqi businesses or Iraqi workers for reconstruction work, meaning that all those pissed off, heavily-armed andd newly unemployed men could not be put to work rebuilding their country.

That killed the State Department’s own exhaustively prepared plans for post-war Iraq — plans that the administration had announced they’d follow prior to the invasion. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies….

[snip]

That’s not to say these policies caused the insurgency — it’s not that direct — but they created circumstances in which it could flourish and guaranteed it would have some popular support. This was, after all, an economic order that had led people living in much better circumstances in places like Seattle, Geneva and Montreal to riot. It was predictable that, on the heels of an invasion, they’d be greeted with violent resistance. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution was right when he called post-conflict Iraq “a debacle that was foreseeable and indeed foreseen by most experts in the field.”

Much of this policy mix also violated international and U.S. law. It’s no small irony given that one of the reasons given for the invasion was to confront a “rogue” regime that scoffed at international law.

Article 43 of the Hague Convention says that an occupying power must “take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” The only law that the American forces left standing was Saddam Hussein’s ban on public-sector unions.

[snip]

…common sense has always been in short supply in the Bush administration, and they chose to make the country into a trough full of slop for the big multinationals. Make no mistake about it, Iraq’s economic transformation is an example of war profiteering by other means, and the disastrous results are plain to see. Article

Summary here.

Demystifying Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

A slim bone for Blair to take home.

U.S. President George W. Bush apologized on Friday to British Prime Minister Tony Blair after Britain complained Washington had not followed correct procedures for sending bombs to Israel via a British airport, a British official said. Article

Not failure for lack of initiatives, active failure stemming from the deliberate and premeditated ignoring and turning topsy-turvy a role which helped keep the lid on and served as a restraint. Kevin Drum puts it succinctly:

…what I think you learn when you watch the region over time is that things can always get worse. And quite a lot of effort is often required to keep things on the barely tolerable level of miserable without slipping into the truly horrible. To prevent going from one to the other is a job of international management that really a greater power alone can accomplish. Us. Us with the Europeans. Probably also the Russians and even the Chinese. Easy? No. Do these different countries have different agendas, not all of them wholesome? Sure. But that’s life. Or rather, that’s running the world. Source

This after recent revelations of the withholding from Congress of information on Pakistan’s plutonium production. Everything the woebegone G. Walker administration touches involves and is indeliby infused with covertness, underhandedness, misdirection and a distorted, funhouse mirror version of candor and disclosure. Everything.

Democratic lawmakers on Friday requested an investigation into why the State Department delayed word of sanctions on two Indian companies for Iran-related dealings until after the U.S. House of Representatives approved a nuclear agreement with New Delhi.

In a letter, Rep. Ellen Tauscher of California and two colleagues asked the State Department’s inspector general — who is authorized to conduct independent reviews of department activities and personnel — to determine if a report detailing the sanctions was intentionally withheld.

“Not only did the State Department have a legal responsibility to deliver this report to Congress, they have a responsibility to the American people not to play games when it comes to national security,” Tauscher said in a statement released by her office.

[snip]

The sanctions were imposed under terms of the U.S. Iran-Syria Non-proliferation Act, which aims to stem the transfer of weapons-related technology to two states Washington considers threats.

The department is supposed to report violators to Congress every six months but the report released this week was months late.

Tauscher said the report still has not been released, although members of the House International Relations Committee were informed about the sanctions the day of the vote on the India deal. Article

Outrage piled upon outrage, without end.

The American Civil Liberties Union released a compilation of covert government surveillance of war protesters and other political activists in California, decrying it as evidence of a “greater expansion of government power and the abuse of power” since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

[snip]

“We recognize that much of what we’ve learned, we’ve learned by chance, and what that tells us is that this report is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dorothy Ehrlich, the group’s executive director. Article

G. Walker mumbles, fumbles and manages to squeeze in a reference to 9/11 (no news there) and once again gets if completely wrong. Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. (and this is not to defend heinous actions which can be laid at their doorstep) are not “root causes” – they sprung up as a consequence and a symptom of root causes (bolstered, true, with claims of religious fervor and legitimacy, but also true is that the freedom of the individual, is antithetical to the subservience demanded of believers by the power structure or the elite of any religion), including resentment, powerlessness and retalitaion fomented or abetted by the activities of stronger or militant world powers. The administration’s bizarre, wrong-headed, nigh-obsessive evocations amount to and eliminating the coughing as a root cause of lung cancer, or attacking graffiti as a root cause of poverty and disaffection. If one set out to purposefully create a creche of chaos, a blizzard of bloodletting, a reservoir of revenge, then the woebegone G. Walker administration’s methods would be right up there on a list of options.

Playing ‘our moralism can whup your moralism’ is no way to attempt to co-exist, much less govern short of tyranny. One can win all the battles and emerge unvictoriuous in such a war unless one is the last one standing; if kill’em all is the national and the moralistic strategy, then nothing – nothing – separates the ‘civilized’ actors from the ‘uncivilized enemy.’ And that whole “they hate freedom” meme has always been a simplistic crock. Were that the case and the motivation, there are any number of easier targets (say, Bermuda. Or Iceand. – but they do not create and enforce policies deemed inimical to the region). Naming (rightly or not) an “enemy” is insufficient without serious investigation and introspection of what creates an enemy. The administration can call an apple an orange until the universe ends; that does not make it an orange.