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Let Slip the Dogs of War and Demonize Ahmadinejad
My column at Salon.com is online: Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1: Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war." Excerpt:
’Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.
The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.
Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran’s 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament. . .
The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state. ’
Iraq Relents on Blackwater
Bush to ask for Nearly $200 bn.
The Iraqi government is backing off its demand that the Blackwater security firm be expelled from Iraq in the wake of apparently unprovoked shootings that left 11 Iraqis dead, according to the LAT. Apparently the argument has been made to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that the 1,000 Blackwater guards who escort US embassy personnel would have to be replaced by troops, who would have to be pulled out of their current attempt to drive Sunni Arab militants out of Baghdad neighborhoods.
A big feature of the literature on decolonization is the delight leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ruhollah Khomeini took in abrogating laws bestowing ’extra-territoriality’ on colonial personnel and even just civilians from the metropole, while in the subject country. Now extra-territoriality is back with a vengeance; and, of course, no colonial enterprise can be run without it. One can’t have persons of the superior race hauled before a native judge; bad show, old boy, to let the wily oriental gentlemen get the upper hand that way.
The argument about whether Cheney/Bush went into Iraq over petroleum is not interesting. Of course they did, one way or another. The question is what exactly they thought they were doing about Iraq’s petroleum. I would argue that they threw public resources (perhaps as much as two trillion dollars worth when all is said and done) to secure profits for private companies. Otherwise, the US public will never, ever realize the sort of savings from the development of Iraqi petroleum that would compensate them for the blood and treasure they have spent in Iraq. (Not to mention the opportunity costs of squandering so many resources on a quagmire, when the public investment could have been put to much better uses).
Over twenty retired generals have now spoken out against the Iraq War, a gut-wrenching decision for these highly conservative lifelong Republicans.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat writing in Arabic reports that Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned against any partition of Iraq. He urged national reconciliation, instead. He also criticized Iran for intervening in Iraqi affairs and called for restraint among the country’s neighbors.
At the (Global Affairs group blog->http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/09/bush-cheney-threaten-us-security-dems.html], Barnett Rubin imagines what he would say about accountability and the Bush administration if he were a politician rather than an analyst:
’ The Bush-Cheney administration has surrendered much of Afghanistan to the Taliban and much of Pakistan to al-Qaida. They have turned most of Iraq over to Iran, creating the very danger over which they now threaten another disastrous war; they have strained the U.S. Armed Forces to the point of exhaustion, turned the Defense Department over to private contractors, the Justice Department over to the Republican National Committee, and the national debt over to foreign creditors, while leading a party whose single most basic belief is supposed to be that individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions. And they dare to lecture us on national security?’
Then Rubin restates the case from an analytical point of view. It is a beautiful thing to behold. Read the whole thing.
At the Napoleon’s Egypt blog, Lacuee writes:
’ Egypt has not the slightest resemblance to what has been said of it by our writers. Its soil, indeed, is fruitful, but there is little of it. Nature asks only to produce; but the land is bare, and almost uncultivated. The natives, degraded by slavery, are relapsed into the savage state, retaining nothing of their former civilization but superstition and religious intolerance. I have found them resembling, in every circumstance, the islanders of the South Sea, described by Cook and Forster.
In a word, this country is nothing at present. It merely offers magnificent recollections of the past, and vast, but distant hopes of the future. It is not worth conquering in its present condition: but if statesmen, above all, if able administrators should undertake the management of it for ten years;—if for the same space of time we should employ all our care on it, and sacrifice the whole of its revenues, it might become the most valuable colony of Europe, and effect an important change in the commerce of the world!
But where are they,—these able administrators? ’
Where, indeed?