Unoriginal title - Baghdad/Saigon: dejá vue, all over again

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Bush can prattle on about "victory" till he is blue in the face, but this news item from the Washington Post says all that needs to be said about the direction the war in Iraq is taking... taking with breakneck speed. DS

Envoy Urges Visas For Iraqis Aiding U.S. - Washington Post
Abstract: The American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker, has asked the Bush administration to take the unusual step of granting immigrant visas to all Iraqis employed by the U.S. government in Iraq because of growing concern that they will quit and flee the country if they cannot be assured eventual safe passage to the United States. Crocker's request comes as the administration is struggling to respond to the flood of Iraqis who have sought refuge in neighboring countries since sectarian fighting escalated early last year. The United States has admitted 133 Iraqi refugees since October, despite predicting that it would process 7,000 by the end of September. "Our [Iraqi staff members] work under extremely difficult conditions, and are targets for violence including murder and kidnapping," Crocker wrote Undersecretary of State Henrietta H. Fore. "Unless they know that there is some hope of an [immigrant visa] in the future, many will continue to seek asylum, leaving our Mission lacking in one of our most valuable assets."(...) Overall estimates of the number of Iraqis who may be targeted as collaborators because of their work for U.S., coalition or foreign reconstruction groups are as high as 110,000. The U.N. refugee agency has estimated that 20,000 Iraqi refugees need permanent resettlement. In the cable he sent July 9, Crocker highlighted the plight of Iraqis who have assumed great risk by helping the United States. Since June 2004, at least nine U.S. Embassy employees have been killed -- including a married couple last month. But Iraqi employees other than interpreters and translators generally cannot obtain U.S. immigrant visas, and until a recent expansion that took the annual quota to 500 from 50, interpreter-translator applicants faced a nine-year backlog. As a result, Crocker said, the embassy is referring two workers per week to a U.S. asylum program. Outside analysts and former officials say the number of Iraqi staffers at the embassy has fallen by about half from 200 last year, while rough estimates place the number of Iraqi employees of the U.S. government in the low thousands. A 43-year-old former engineer for the U.S. Embassy who gave his name as Abu Ali said Iraqis working with Americans at any level must trust no one, use fake names, conceal their travel and telephone use, and withhold their employment even from family members. Despite such extreme precautions, he said they are viewed as traitors by some countrymen and are still mistrusted by the U.S. government. "We have no good end or finish for us," said Ali, who quit the embassy in June and moved to Dubai with his four children. READ IT ALL

Global Warming... changing the subject?

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Clarification: I am not a global warming skeptic. I think it obvious that our model of development and our idea of what constitutes "prosperity" and the "good life" are unsustainable even in the medium term. If every Chinese and Indian family get a car... I believe that global warming is by far the greatest threat to our planet etc, etc.. so I am not a revisionist or anything like it.

However, having said that, I am getting a little suspicious of the political use that global warming is being put to right now. Anything Tony Blair is pushing makes me suspicious to begin with, but what makes me really suspicious is Hollywood's enormous enthusiasm for the subject. "Hollywood" is the name for the most manipulative, phony, snake oil salesmen in the history of our planet. It occurs to me that they are pumping up global warming and climate change paranoia to change the subject from America's criminal responsibility in Iraq and make American "progressives", feel good about something so they don't get so depressed they stop buying tickets.

American "progressives" have absolutely nothing to feel good about. They are with out any doubt the greatest collection of useless wankers on earth... They should feel terrible. What has been done to Iraq and to the people of Iraq is, with the possible exception of the Cambodian genocide, the most criminal episode in international affairs since WWII. American progressives have shown themselves totally ineffectual in preventing it or stopping it and now Hollywood is going to give them a "cause" that will make them feel good! They should wake up with Iraq every morning, think about Iraq all day long, every day and dream about it at night, all night, every night (if they can sleep).

If I am a fan of Al Gore's it has nothing to do with global warming. I'm a fan because he should have been president and if he had been, he wouldn't have invaded Iraq and all these people wouldn't have been killed and tortured and maimed and robbed and the archaeological treasures of Mesopotamia would not have been looted and the priceless manuscripts burned. In short until those responsible for this massive catalog of war crimes are brought to justice we are simply a criminal nation and have absolutely nothing to feel good about... ever again. DS

US in Iraq: Karma watch

David Seaton's News Links

The most important thing to remember about America's invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq is that it is an unprovoked, criminal, act.

The people who perpetrated it, and especially those who ordered this slow torture and decimation of the people of Iraq are simply criminals and the citizens and institutions who supported them are no less than accessories to horrible crimes.

And unlike Hitler's Germany, no American can ever say that they didn't know all this was or is happening.... America, after all, is a "free country".

All this is not just wet, liberal, "hand wringing", it is simply an understanding of the fundamental sources of America's wealth and power and even what keeps the whole complex beast "airborne".

For unlike Hitler's Germany, one of the pillars of America's power is its commitment to habeas corpus, human rights and the rule of law. America is not an ethnic group, it is an agreement taken freely by people who have come from all over the world to live together in peace and prosperity and to materialize the ideas and hopes of the Enlightenment. Without those ideas, the United States of America is little more than a parking lot... Wal-Mart would be a more appropriate symbol of America than Abraham Lincoln.

Even Joseph Nye's insightful idea of America's "Soft Power," pales into trivial "truthiness" when speaking of presuming to be the embodiment of some of the greatest ideas of Western civilization: freedom, justice, democracy... and then gratuitously violating all those self-proclaimed standards in a "war of choice": attacking a country which had never harmed America, destroying its state, killing, torturing and humiliating the men, raping the women, terrorizing the children and scattering the priceless treasures of timeless antiquity to the winds

The only way for America to recover its prestige -- it would be pretentious to say recover its "soul" -- would be to hand over all those responsible, beginning with Bush and Cheney, to the International War Crimes Tribunals, where they could be judged in Nuremberg fashion. Sadly, unlike Hitler's Germany, America has not been defeated by a foreign power and its alien ideology... America has defeated itself. DS

Anthony Arnove - Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster - TomDispatch Abstract: Here is a short rundown of some of what George Bush's war and occupation has wrought: Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up – and they're getting worse by the day – and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis. Let that sink in for a moment. Basic foods and necessities, which even Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to provide, are now increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by the occupation's destruction of the already shaky Iraqi economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the disruption of the oil industry. Prices of vegetables, eggs, tea, cooking and heating oil, gasoline, and electricity have skyrocketed. Unemployment is regularly estimated at somewhere between 50-70%. One measure of the impact of all this has been a significant rise in child malnutrition, registered by the United Nations and other organizations.(...) In those same years, according to the best estimate available, the British medical journal The Lancet's door-to-door study of Iraqi deaths, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had died in war, occupation, and civil strife between March 2003 and June 2006. (The study offers a low-end possible figure on deaths of 392,000 and a high-end figure of 943,000.) But you could travel coast to coast without seeing the equivalents of the billboards, subway placards, full-page newspaper ads, or the like for the Iraqi dead. And you certainly won't see, as in the case of Darfur, celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq. Why is it that we are counting and thinking about the Sudanese dead as part of a high-profile, celebrity-driven campaign to "Save Darfur," yet Iraqi deaths still go effectively uncounted, and rarely seem to provoke moral outrage, let alone public campaigns to end the killing?(....) There is a general agreement across much of the political spectrum that we can blame Iraqis for the problems they face. In a much-lauded speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Sen. Barack Obama couched his criticism of Bush administration policy in a call for "no more coddling" of the Iraqi government: The United States, he insisted, "is not going to hold together this country indefinitely." Richard Perle, one of the neoconservative architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Democratic frontrunner in the 2008 presidential election, recently asked, "How much are we willing to sacrifice [for the Iraqis]?" As if the Iraqis asked us to invade their country and make their world a living hell and are now letting us down. This is what happens when the imperial burden gets too heavy. The natives come in for a lashing. READ IT ALL

Iraqi refugees... yet more shame

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Don't you wish you could read some news from Iraq that didn't make you feel deeply ashamed? DS

US criticized for limiting Iraqi refugee intake to 500 - Guardian

Abstract: Humanitarian groups have criticised the United States administration for failing to pull its weight in providing for up to 3 million Iraqis displaced from their homes, with the official quota for the number of Iraqi refugees to be allowed into the US this year standing at just 500. Aid organisations report a rapidly mounting crisis of refugees inside Iraq and in neighbouring countries as thousands flee sectarian violence every day. The United Nations estimates that more than 1.5 million Iraqis are displaced within the country and a similar number are living as refugees in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. The US administration laid down the quota of 500 Iraqi refugees for 2007 last September. It has a further 20,000 refugee places that are unspecified and could be allocated to Iraqis, but the administration has failed to provide funds even to meet its identified programme of 50,000 refugees from specific regions in 2007. So far, only 41,000 places have been funded. Robert Carey, head of resettlement at the New York-based International Rescue Committee, said a long-term refugee crisis was being created, with many of those fleeing so traumatised that they had vowed never to return to Iraq. "The need is extraordinary. From what we have heard and seen, the situation in Iraq and neighbouring countries is rapidly degrading and could destabilise the entire region. The need goes far beyond what is being offered, and only real leadership and commitment within the administration will change that," Mr Carey said. READ IT ALL