Throwing shoes at politicians? Soon a barefoot world.

Muntazer al-Zaidi threw the shoe heard round the world

Zaidi's action won him widespread plaudits in the Arab world where Bush's policies have drawn broad hostility. The Lebanese television channel NTV, known for its opposition to Washington, went as far as offering a job to the journalist. In its evening news bulletin on Monday, it said that if he takes the job, he will be paid "from the moment the first shoe was thrown". Zaidi A manager at the channel told AFP that it had made its offer known to Zaidi and was ready to post bail on his behalf.(...) In Gaza, around 20 Palestinian gunmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, a hardline militant group that has been behind a spate of rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks, staged a demonstration in support of Zaidi. Wearing fatigues and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, they stamped on photographs of the US president and held banners in support of the journalist. Egyptian independent daily Al-Badeel carried a frontpage caricature of the US flag with the sole of a shoe replacing the stars in the top corner. Even government-owned newspapers in Cairo praised Zaidi's actions. "Pelting the American president with shoes was the best way for expressing what Iraqis and Arabs feel toward Bush," wrote Al-Gomhuria editor Mohammad Ali Ibrahim. AFP

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Bush is lucky they don't play baseball in Iraq. If Americans start throwing shoes at politicians this could get serious.

It was a beautiful moment though and I wish I knew the Arabic for "it's about bloody time"; however, with the way things are going, if this catches on, we could soon have a barefoot world. DS

Bacevich's questions for candidates

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Professor Andrew Bacevich is one of the clearest thinking political analysts working in the United States. As a graduate of West Point he knows that strategic thinking begins with asking the right questions.

Answers to those questions themselves may change with the circumstances, but woe to the strategist that asks the wrong questions.

Obviously to ask the right questions you have to have a realistic idea of who you are, where you are and what you hope to achieve. For example, if you are in Paris and ask a passerby directions to "Times Square", you will probably find that unproductive.

As Professor Bacevich points out, all serious discussion of Iraq and post-Iraq revolves around recognizing that the United States has failed in Iraq. All presidential candidates should then ask themselves, "who we are, where we are and what we hope achieve". If they don't have plausible answers to those questions they have no business asking Americans for their votes. DS

Bacevich: 'Your Iraq plan?' is a pointless question - Los Angeles Times

Abstract: For today's presidential candidates, the question is unavoidable: What is your plan for Iraq?(...) However sincere, such questions are also pointless. To pose them is to invite dissembling. The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off. The questions that ought to be asked now — but so far have not been — are of a different order.(...) Recall that Bush saw Baghdad not as the final destination of his global war on terror but as a point of departure. He imagined that liberating Iraq might trigger a flowering of Arab democracy.(...) None of that has come to pass. Baghdad has become a cul-de-sac. Having plunged into a war he cannot win, Bush will not relent. Iraq consumes his presidency because the president wills that it should. He has become Captain Ahab: His identification with his war is absolute. As a consequence, the "global" effort aimed at eliminating Islamic terror, launched back in September 2001, has narrowed in scope. Today the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia.(...) Ritualistic allusions to freedom as the antidote to terrorism still occasionally crop up in presidential speeches, but rhetoric no longer translates into action. An administration that once touted its expansive and principled approach to preventing another 9/11 has abandoned principle. Now there is only Iraq and the effort to ensure that today's news out of Baghdad isn't any worse than yesterday's. Our political attention, then, needs to turn to whether the president's would-be successors can do what Bush cannot: acknowledge our failure in Iraq and look beyond it. Candidates who still find merit in an open-ended global war on terror should explain how we prevail in such an enterprise. Given the lessons of Iraq, what exactly does it mean to wage such a global war? Where can we expect to fight next, and against whom? What will victory look like? Candidates who, in light of Iraq, have become skeptical of open-ended global war as a response to violent Islamic radicalism should be pressed to describe their alternative. How do they define the threat? How do they propose to deal with it? Will they isolate it? Contain it? Subvert it? Relying on what means and at what costs? "What's your plan for Iraq?" was the right question back in 2002 and 2003 — although it went largely unasked and almost completely unanswered then. But as we approach the 2008 presidential election, though the tragedy of Iraq continues to unfold, that question is moot. The one that matters is this: As President Bush departs and leaves the United States bereft of a coherent strategy, what should fill that void? READ IT ALL

Subject: decadence

How do you explain to the thousands of American troops now being poured into Baghdad that they will have to wait until the summer for the protective armor that could easily mean the difference between life and death?
Editorial - New York Times - 2006/2/15

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To answer the above question from today's New York Times editorial, I suggest reading an article William Pfaff wrote nearly a year ago, excerpted below. It is entitled "Making Things", but it could be entitled, "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire".

Decadence is not just a bunch of shagged out Romans peeling grapes. It sometimes takes historians centuries to figure out all the factors that cause a powerful society to crumble. Losing the ability to do what made you powerful in the first place is one of the most common causes.

I'm sure you'll agree that decadence is a fascinating subject, but I'm sure you'll also agree that it sure as hell reads a lot better than it plays. DS

On the Ability to Make Things - William Pfaff - 2006/3/8
Abstract: Troops continue to complain that while available body armor may be adequate to protect against shrapnel it provides insufficient protection against the growing threat of snipers using rifles with optical sights and high-velocity ammunition aimed at the separations between armor plates in the existing American jackets.

Surely these should be trivial and quickly remedied problems for the most powerful military machine on earth? In 1940, as the second world war began in Europe, the United States Army consisted of 268 thousand men and women. The United States then had some 40% (132 million) of the population it has today. A year later, in 1941, the military draft was in place and training began for a projected force of two million soldiers. Then came Pearl Harbor. Four years later – just one year longer than the United States has already been in Iraq -- the army had eight million men under arms, with more than six million more serving in the navy, Marine Corps, and Army Air Force, all fully equipped. Tens of thousands of aircraft and tanks had been manufactured, thousands of ships, millions of weapons.

In October 1941, four months after Hitler invaded Russia, Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Joseph Stalin to promise to supply some 67 war-essential goods to Russia. This, he added, was just the start. He promised that the U.S. would immediately ship to Russia 5,600 military trucks, and in every subsequent month would ship 10 thousand more trucks. It would send one thousand tons of armor-plate monthly, 10 thousand tons of TNT monthly, and each month supply the Soviet army with 200 thousand pairs of army boots. The other items promised included aircraft and other kinds of vehicles. The United States armed and made mobile the Russian army while doing the same for itself. READ IT ALL

Neocons trying for Little Big Horn

George Armstrong Custer

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The Surge: At this point, Iraq having descended into total chaos, the neocons are advocating a classic, "boots on the ground - hearts and minds", counterinsurgency operation. With Iraqis now only in agreement on one thing, they hate Americans, having American soldiers intensively patrolling the streets of Iraq is an invitation to hundreds of tiny battles of the Little Big Horn. The "butcher's bill" (charming British army term) will be dreadful. "Force Protection" is the obsession of America's professional military. Any hint that US infantry is being used as cannon fodder would dry up recruiting totally. The neocons are famous as "chicken hawks", very generous with the lives of others... especially those of the young rednecks that make up the backbone of America's military caste and who provoke so much derision from Borat. The danger of American unity being openly split on ethnic, class, caste and tribal lines is real. DS

Neocon old guard back on Iraq policy - Los Angeles Times
Abstract: Ever since Iraq began spiraling toward chaos, the war's intellectual architects — the so-called neoconservatives — have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration.(...) But now, a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.(...) If Bush goes ahead with the surge idea, along with a shift to a more aggressive counterinsurgency, it would in many ways represent a wholesale repudiation of the outgoing Pentagon leadership. These leaders — particularly former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the departing Middle East commander — strongly resisted more U.S. troops and a larger push into troubled neighborhoods out of fear it would prevent Iraqis from taking over the job themselves and exacerbate the image of America as an occupying power.(...) The neoconservative group had been the driving force in Washington behind a move against Iraq, even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They saw Hussein as a lingering threat to world security — a view bolstered within the administration following 9/11. And they argued that transforming Iraq into a democracy could serve as a model to remake the Middle East's political dynamics. The problems with the war gradually undermined the clout they had wielded. But perhaps the more important hurdle to their views being heeded — especially on military matters — was the White House's refusal to see its Iraq policy as a failure. READ IT ALL

Iraq today... living the hell of American Empire

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While perusing my daily ration of Juan Cole, I happened on this extraordinary report on the state of Baghdad by probably the best American reporter to ever have worked there, Hannah Allam of the McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) newspapers. A voyage to hell. One of the most nauseating trends in today's punditocracy is to blame the Iraqis themselves for their suffering. This indescribable hell is the result of criminal decisions taken of their own free will by people with names well known to all. They bask in smug immunity today. The most that can happen to them is that they lose their present jobs and join the lecture circuit, the defense industry or some think tank. What is going to be needed, perhaps for decades to come, is some new Simon Wiesenthal to hunt these criminals down and bring them to trial to answer for their crimes, no matter how long it takes. DS

Hannah Allam returns to Baghdad - McClatchy Newspapers
Abstract: (Hannah Allam covers the Middle East and Islamic world as bureau chief in Cairo, Egypt. She recently returned to Baghdad on assignment, where she previously spent more than two years reporting on the war in Iraq as Baghdad bureau chief. ) A certain color of stone worn a certain way is just one of the dozens of superficial clues - like dialect, style of beard, how you pin a veil - that indicate whether you're Sunni or Shiite. These little signs increasingly mean the difference between life and death at the terrifying illegal checkpoints that surround the districts of Baghdad.(...) nowadays it seems like everything in Baghdad hinges on separation. There's the Green Zone to guard the unpopular government from its suffering people, U.S. military bases where Iraqis aren't allowed to work, armored sedans to shield VIPs from the explosions that kill workaday civilians, different TV channels and newspapers for each political party, an unwritten citywide dress code to keep women from the eyes of men. Attempts to bring people together have failed miserably. I attended a symposium called "How to Solve Iraq's Militia Problem," but the main militia representatives never showed up and those of us who did were stuck inside for hours while a robot disabled a car bomb in the parking lot.(...) I asked my colleagues to arrange meetings with old Iraqi sources - politicians, professors, activists and clerics - only to be told they'd been assassinated, abducted or exiled.(...) So many blindfolded, tortured corpses turn up that an Iraqi co-worker recently told me it was "a slow day" when 17 bodies were found. Typically, the figure is 40 or more. When the overflowing morgue at Yarmouk Hospital was bombed last month, one of our drivers wearily muttered, "How many times can they kill us?" Even the toughest of my Iraqi colleagues hit their breaking points after experiencing the indignity of being forced from their homes, the trauma of a bomb outside a doorstep, the grief for a cousin killed by a mortar, the shame of staying silent while a neighbor's house was torched. (...) For them, there is no ivory-tower debate over whether they're living in a civil war.(...) Electricity is on for just a couple of hours a day in most districts. Gas lines stretch for block after block. Food prices are higher than ever, especially for fresh produce, which requires rural farmers to make the treacherous drive to Baghdad markets. The water is contaminated. Gunmen in police uniforms stage brazen mass abductions, evaporating faith in the Iraqi security forces. READ IT ALL

Bacevich cuts to the bone

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Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, formerly Colonel Andrew Bacevich, US Army, is one of the most incisive political thinkers in America's intellectual panorama. The world of American think tanks has turned US geopolitical discourse into a massive, over-funded, Swiftian Academy of Lagado, where sunbeams are extracted from cucumbers and a quick journey to the heart of any matter would put a lot of scholars out of work. Bacevich, however, cuts to the bone. His book, "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War," is an absolute 'must read': an invaluable starting point for any serious discussion about the terrible situation that the US has created for itself. Obviously, without a keystone or linchpin, without finding the axis around which the problem revolves, we will never find our way out of the labyrinth. This article from The International Herald Tribune, which is quoted below, will give you some idea of Professor Bacevich's unerring instinct for constantly locating the center of gravity of these questions. DS
Bush's illusions - International Herald Tribune
Abstract: The world's only superpower no longer acts; instead, it reacts, usually to whatever happens to be the latest bad news out of Baghdad. As events in Iraq slip out of his control, President George W. Bush's strategy for waging his "global war on terror" lies in ruins. He is navigating without a compass. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Recall that for the architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom, taking down Saddam Hussein never qualified as more than a preliminary objective. Baghdad was not Berlin. It was Normandy, the jumping-off point for a much larger enterprise.(...) Skeptics saw the Freedom Agenda as little more than eyewash. The real object of the exercise, they insisted, was to assert U.S. control over the oil-rich Gulf. The aim of the global war on terror was not to share the blessings of liberty but to expand the perimeter of the American empire. Whether the name of the game was liberation or dominion, Iraq was a crucial test case. Iraq's transformation into the first Arab democracy — or (depending on your point of view) its conversion into a compliant protectorate — promised to validate the Bush administration's concept of global war. Victory in Iraq would also affirm key assumptions underlying that concept: that U.S. forces are invincible and unstoppable; that preventive war works; that the concerns of other major powers or the absence of a UN Security Council mandate need not constrain American freedom of action. In short, Iraq constituted step one. Success there would pave the way for the Bush administration to proceed along similar lines to steps two, three and four. The disappointments and frustrations resulting from that first step now leave the entire project in a shambles. If the United States cannot democratize Iraq, then to imagine that democracy will emerge from the barrel of an American gun in Iran, Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia is simply fanciful. If U.S. troops cannot pacify Iraq, then only the truly deluded would court a further military showdown that could oblige American forces to pacify Iraq's neighbors as well. The United States already has too much war for too few soldiers.(...) As if tacitly acknowledging that they have spent all their ammunition strategically, Bush and his lieutenants now preoccupy themselves with operational matters that ought to fall within the purview of field commanders.(...) Fighting the Battle of Baghdad does not qualify as presidential business. Devising an effective response to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism does. On that score, however, the most pressing question is this: Does open-ended global war provide the proper framework for formulating that response? Or has global war, based on various illusions about American competence and American power, led to a dead end? READ IT ALL