New Iraq: DOA

TomDispatch.com has this piece by Dahr Jamail. If there ever was a bleaker, more heartbreaking picture of the disintegration of Iraq, I haven't seen it.

Everything in Iraq is set against the backdrop of shattered infrastructure and a nearly complete lack of reconstruction. What the Americans turn out to be best at is, once again, promises - and propaganda. During the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority ruled Iraq from Baghdad's Green Zone, their handouts often read like this one released on May 21, 2004: "The Coalition Provisional Authority has recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi children in Ramadi, Kerbala, and Hilla. Iraqi women from Hilla sewed the soccer balls, which are emblazoned with the phrase 'All of Us Participate in a NewIraq.'"

This would be merely pathetic except for the fact that we're turning the "New Iraq" into a hellhole. No clean water (therefore rampant disease) or electricity; no security; no dignity; no work. Would we tolerate such living conditions? Not to put too fine a point on it, would we expect any Western (read white) people to tolerate such living conditions? And yet we expect the Iraqis to be--what? Grateful? Cooperative? How is this not racism?

Nothing to Add

From Riverbend blog:

How is our current situation going to secure America? How is a complete generation that is growing up in fear and chaos going to view Americans ten years from now? Does anyone ask that? After September 11, because of what a few fanatics did, Americans decided to become infected with a collective case of xenophobia. Yet after all Iraqis have been through under the occupation, we're expected to be tolerant and grateful. Why? Because we get more wheat in our diets?

Terror isn't just worrying about a plane hitting a skyscraper--terrorism is being caught in traffic and hearing the crack of an AK-47 a few meters away because the National Guard want to let an American humvee or Iraqi official through. Terror is watching your house being raided and knowing that the silliest thing might get you dragged away to Abu Ghraib where soldiers can torture, beat and kill. Terror is that first moment after a series of machine-gun shots, when you lift your head frantically to make sure your loved ones are still in one piece. Terror is trying to pick the shards of glass resulting from a nearby explosion out of the living-room couch and trying not to imagine what would have happened if a person had been sitting there.

The weapons never existed. It's like having a loved one sentenced to death for a crime they didn't commit- having your country burned and bombed beyond recognition, almost. Then, after two years of grieving for the lost people, and mourning the lost sovereignty, we're told we were innocent of harboring those weapons. We were never a threat to America...

Congratulations Bush- we are a threat now.

Squeaky Wheel Manifesto

Media Matters looks at who appears on cable news. It's time to expose the liberal media myth once and for all for the self-serving lie that it is. I don't know about you, but I'm awfully sick of our national discourse being hijacked by the right while they pose as victims. They want to whine and complain, fine. Let's give them something to complain about.

Please make note of the contact information in this article. Use it well.

Animal Story

So let's see--the administration would like to make permanent tax cuts the bulk of which go to the wealthy and which, along with the cost of occupying Iraq, have rung up deficits to the tune of $412 billion last year. Then, in order to try to pull the country back from the brink of financial ruin and to prove that they're really, really serious about cutting the deficit(!), they're going to propose cuts in Medicaid?

Let there not be a shred of bipartisan cover for this or any other attempt to shift our debt burden onto the backs of the poor and disabled. Let Democrats utter the words "moral values" as often as Mr. Bush spoke of "freedom" in his speech yesterday--a word that curdles in his mouth like toads falling from the lips of the evil sister in a Mother Goose fairy tale. In fairy tales, of course, the bad characters get eaten by wolves. Life should be so simple.

Fun With Math

From the Progress Report, some telling numbers:

$40 million: Cost of Bush inaugural ball festivities, not counting security costs.

$20,000: Cost of yellow roses purchased for inaugural festivities by D.C.'s Ritz Carlton.

200: Number of Humvees outfitted with top-of-the-line armor for troops in Iraq that could have been purchased with the amount of money blown on the inauguration.

$10,000: Price of an inaugural package at the Fairmont Hotel, which includes a Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon reception, a chauffeured Rolls Royce and two actors posing as "faux" Secret Service agents, complete with black sunglasses and cufflink walkie-talkies.

22 million: Number of children in regions devastated by the tsunami who could have received vaccinations and preventive health care with the amount of money spent on the inauguration.

1,160,000: Number of girls who could be sent to school for a year in Afghanistan with the amount of money lavished on the inauguration.

$15,000: The down payment to rent a fur coat paid by one gala attendee who didn't want the hassle of schlepping her own through the airport.

2,500: Number of U.S. troops used to stand guard as President Bush takes his oath of office.

26,000: Number of Kevlar vests for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be purchased for $40 million.

Pretty much says it all, dudn' it?

On the Nature of God, or Wake Up and Smell the Sneakers

This is not about politics. This is about a fish.

Ergo:


This beastie was found on a beach in SE Asia after the tsunami, along with other assorted denizens of the deep who, I'm sure, have never (literally) seen the light of day before. The displacement of water at deepest levels had brought them to the surface.

Life, we're told, occurs in the most inhospitable places. (I can almost imagine creatures like these living beneath the surface of Mars or Titan.) It takes on strange and wonderful, even grotesque forms.

What combination of random chance and ruthless elimination came up with this critter? It's almost easier to believe that there is a god, if god were a troubled teenager with a drawing pad and a sick sense of humor. (And almighty powers--also a few stubborn zits, a nose ring, a bit of stubble and a t-shirt [black] that says "god".) Take that, Jerry Falwell. Take that, James Dobson. (What twisted evolutionary process came up with them?) Fall on your knees before the smelly sneakers of the almighty, dude.

For lo! the lord loves bottom-feeders, but there is no place in all creation for any such as you.

Update: Apparently these creatures were actually found as part of a joint Australia-New Zealand deep-sea expedition in 2003.

Babylon Addendum

A reader points out in response to a previous post that we're leaving plenty behind in Iraq: depleted uranium, flattened cities, dead people, hate. Fair enough. And that legacy and its consequences will remain, maybe forever. It's all the things we say we didn't intend that will live on. Meanwhile, our grandiose plans--our sense that we could make a people over into the image of ourselves and that they would be happy about it--are collapsing under their own delusional weight. It's everything we said we did intend that will disappear as if it never existed.

And that's as close to a definition of futility as I can think of.

Hope that helps.

Leaving Babylon

In the desert of southern Utah, where I live most of the time, we are surrounded by the legacy of ancients; the ruins and rock art are part of the timelessness of a landscape that reveals itself in billion-year-old layers of stone. There is a fourth dimension of time that you can see and touch, and it makes the desert vivid and strong, more real than mere three-dimensional reality. Maybe my reverence for it comes naturally--I like old things, and I was taught to respect my elders--but it seems to demand it too, unforgiving beauty always ready to remind me of my place in the scheme of things.

Which is why I was so saddened to read in The Guardian about how the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq has been damaged by the occupying forces (mostly American) who have used it as a military depot(!). They've dug trenches, built helicopter landing pads, crushed ancient stones with their vehicles.

"The significance of Babylon is not lost on the coalition," [a military spokeman says]. "The site dates back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, but there are very few visible original remains to the untrained eye."

Which is of course exactly why it should have been left alone in the first place. (Or do they mean that it doesn't matter because what's valuable there can't be seen? Or do they mean that there's little that remains after two years of destruction?)

When I stand in the desert I am humbled. Our grandiose vision of ourselves as the "liberators" of Iraq, the creators of a brave new world of justice, consumerism and 24-hour cable news, will surely crumble, leaving not so much as a stone behind.

Agenda Item

News is the Social Security Administration is creating a "tactical plan" to market the idea that it faces "dire financial problems requiring immediate action".

Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush's agenda.

Their mission is to support Bush's agenda? Gee, thanks. Whatever happened to the days of faceless bureacrats who cared for nothing but doing their jobs either badly or well?

Actually, agency employees are complaining that they're being used to fight an ideological battle, and with trust fund monies at that. The "planning" is being conducted by Andrew Biggs, associate commissioner of Social Security for retirement policy and former Cato Institute analyst.

Be Very Afraid

As reported in Newsweek, the blogosphere and elsewhere, the Pentagon is considering sending US Special Forces to

advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers...

Shades of the contras (no coincidence I'm sure, since John Negroponte, who coordinated the Reagan-era contra campaign from his post as ambassador to Honduras, is now running the show as ambassador to Iraq), Operation Phoenix and every other murderous, desperate attempt to salvage a losing war.

Maj. Gen. Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service, says:

"The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," [he said]. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

So we will have Kurdish and Shiite hit men--excuse me, "freedom fighters"--carrying out a campaign of collective punishment against the Sunni population in order to balance the terror equation. Can you say recipe for civil war? Can you say, death squads for democracy?

Will we as a nation be able to retain any shred of good will, credibility or respect when this is all over--if it ever is? Or are we becoming the new Evil Empire? (This is not a rhetorical question.)

Smarter Than Monkeys?

Salon's Michelle Goldberg writes a rather pessimistic article about how the Dover PA school board decided to include the teaching of "creation science" in its schools. Only I guess they're calling it "intelligent design" now...whatever.

Whatever they choose to call it, it ain't science. Science means that you have a theory based on a sound, experimentally tested hypothesis. How exactly do you test "creation science"? How do you prove or disprove it? By flipping a bible to see if it lands heads or tails?

Faith-based science isn't science. But maybe they don't believe in that either.

Getting a Grip, Part One

Catching up with news and events after the holiday break has been difficult because it all seems so overwhelming: the looming shadow of the new Bush administration and the start of the congressional term; the nomination of the odious Alberto Gonzales as Democrats roll over yet again; the horror of the tsunami in South Asia; the mind-numbing violence in Iraq. And those are just the headlines. One hardly knows where to start.

But since we have to start somewhere:

Is it just my imagination, or has all this heartstring-plucking, button-pushing reporting on the tsunami disaster become more than a little grotesque? See the videos of screaming tourists fleeing the oncoming wave! (Guess which ones made it and which didn't.) See the devastated but cute orphans clutching their bottled water! I don't mean to diminish in any way the scope of this tragedy--but this is voyeurism, not news. It's not helping us to understand how and why this happened--the poverty that pushes people into areas that aren't safe to live in, the degrading of the coastal environment, the reckless development. It's disaster pornography, an artificial heightening of emotion that reassures us that we can still feel something--at least until we change the channel, or until the next celebrity murder trial.