Perhaps one of the reasons I have been posting less on my blogs recently is that mentally I have been close to political burnout. I've used the phrase "same old, same old" when it comes to politics. Very little politically stimulates me any more- or at least to the level it used to. I think I will sit down at some point soonish and blog about why exactly I've lost much of the political bug. Perhaps it will come back sooner than anticipated. It's just at the moment I feel that anything I say or do or write when it comes to politics has no effect whatsoever on anyone else. Perhaps it has been like that for a long time, but perhaps it is only in the past few months I've come to realise it. Hope I don't sound like a self-pitying winger saying that!
However, I haven't lost interest completely. Greg Palast still writes interesting stuff, and avoids a lot of the cliches Planet Leftie writers fall into. No "duckspeak" (to use a phrase from Nineteen Eighty-Four). While I was on nights I got two pieces by GP winged to my inbox & I thought you may like to read them.
WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY, by Greg Palast, Thursday, January 11, 2007
George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.
Been there. Done that. In 1965, Tom Paxton sang,
Lyndon Johnson told the nation
Have no fear of escalation.
I am trying everyone to please.
Though it isn't really war,
We're sending 50,000 more
To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.
Four decades later, Bush is asking us to save Iraq from the Iraqis.
There's always a problem with giving a junkie another fix. It can only make things worse. Our maximum leader says that unless he gets to mainline another 21,000 troops, "Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons," and terrorists "would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people."
Excuse me, but didn't we hear that same promise in 2003? Nearly four years ago, on the eve of invasion, this same George Bush promised, "The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed."
Instead of diminishing the threat from terrorists, Bush now admits, "Al Qaeda has a home base in Anbar province" -- something inconceivable under Saddam's rule.
Four years ago, Bush promised us, "When the dictator has departed, [Iraq] can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation." Just send in the 82d Airborne and, lickety-split, we'd have, "A new Iraq that is prosperous and free."
Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Here's my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?
We know the US military didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)
We know the Iraqi government didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).
So who wants the occupation to continue? The answer is in Riyadh. When the King of Saudi Arabia hauled Dick Cheney before his throne on Thanksgiving weekend, the keeper of America's oil laid down the law to Veep: the US will not withdraw from Iraq.
According to Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi who signals to the US government the commands and diktats of the House of Saud, the Saudis are concerned that a US pull-out will leave their Sunni brothers in Iraq to be slaughtered by Shia militias. More important, the Saudis will not tolerate a Shia-majority government in Iraq controlled by the Shia mullahs of Iran. A Shia combine would threaten Saudi Arabia's hegemony in the OPEC oil cartel.
In other words, it's about the oil.
So what's the solution? What's my plan? How do we get out of Iraq? Answer: the same way we got out of 'Nam. In ships.
But can we just watch from the ship rail as Shia slaughter Sunnis in Baghdad, Sunnis murder Shia in Anbar, Kurds "cleanse" Kirkuk of Turkmen and so on in a sickening daisy-chain of ethnic atrocities?
No. There's a real alternative. And it isn't more troops, George.
Let's imagine that somehow we could rip away the strings that allow Cheney and Rove and Abdullah to control our puppet president and he somehow, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly grew a brain. His speech last night would have sounded like this:
"My fellow Americans. Iraq is going to hell in a handbag. So the whole shebang doesn't collapse into mayhem and madness, we need to send in 21,000 more troops. So I've just wired King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and told him to send them.
"My missive to the monarch reads: Dear Abdullah. It's time your 16,000 princelings got out of their Rolls Royces and formed the core of an Islamic Peacekeeping Force to prevent mass murder in Iraq. The American people are tired of you using the 82nd Airborne as your private mercenary army. It seems like the Saudi military's marching song is, 'Onward Christian Soldiers.'
"Well, King Ab, we're out of here. We're folding tents and loading the wagons. For four years now, Saudis have been secretly funding the berserkers in the Iraqi 'insurgency' while the Iranians are backing the crazies in the militias. Well, we're telling you and the Persians: you're going to have to stop using your checkbooks to fund a proxy war and instead start keeping the peace. It's time you put your own tushies in the line of fire for a change."
"If the African Union nations, poor as they are, can maintain a peacekeeping force to stop killings in Sudan and Senegal, you Saudis, with all the military toys we've sold you, can certainly join with your Muslim brothers in Jordan, Iran and Turkey to take responsibility for your region's peace.
"And when you get to Fallujah, don't forget to drop us a postcard."
Well, that's my fantasy. But instead, War Junkie George will get his fix of another 21,000 American soldiers.
It reminds me far too chillingly of a Pete Seeger tune written when LBJ was saving Vietnam from Vietnamese. It was based on the true story of a US platoon in training, wading into the rising Mississippi, whose commander order them to keep going, deeper and deeper -- until they drowned.
We're waste deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
GP Missive 2:
Off the Rails: Big Oil, Big Brother Win Big in the State of the Union, by Greg Palast
23 January, 2006
There was that tongue again. When the President lies he's got this weird nervous tick: He sticks the tip of his tongue out between his lips. Like a little boy who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat.
In his State of the Union tonight the President did his tongue thing 124 times -- my kids kept count.
But it wasn't all rat-licking lies.
Most pundits concentrated on Iraq and wacky health insurance stuff. But that's just bubbles and blather. The real agenda is in the small stuff. The little razors in the policy apple, the nasty little pieces of policy shrapnel that whiz by between the appearances of the Presidential tongue.
First, there was the announcement the regime will, "give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers." In case you missed that one, the President is talking about creating a federal citizen profile database.
There's a problem with that idea. It's against the law. The law in question is the United States Constitution. The Founding Fathers thought the government had no right to keep track on a citizen unless there is evidence they have committed, or planned to commit, a crime.
But the Founding Fathers didn't imagine there were millions and billions of dollars to be made by private contractors ready to perform this KGB operation for the Department of Homeland Security, tracking each and every one of us to keep tabs on our "status."
These work databases will tie into "voter verification" databases required by the Help America Vote Act. And these will tie to the databases on citizenship and so on.
Will Big Brother abuse these snoop lists? The biggest purveyor of such hit lists is Choice Point, Inc. – those characters who, before the 2000 election, helped Jeb Bush purge innocent voters as "felons" from Florida voter rolls. Will they abuse the new super-lists? Does Dick Cheney shoot in the woods?
There were several other little IEDs (improvised execrable policy devices) planted in the State of the Union. Did you catch the one about doubling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? If you're unfamiliar with the SPR, it is supposed to be the stash of oil we keep in case the price of crude gets too high.
Well, the price of oil has been horribly high but Dick Cheney, the official who sits on the Reserve's spigots, has refused to release the oil into the market.
Instead of unleashing the Reserve and busting Big Oil's price gouging Bush will double the Reserve, which will require buying three-quarters of a billion barrels of oil. This is a nice $40 billion pay-out to Big Oil from the US Treasury. Compare this to the President's health insurance plan which will be "revenue neutral" -- that is, have a net investment of zero.
But the $40 billion in loot the oilmen will get from us taxpayers for doubling the Reserve is nothing compared to the boost in the worldwide price of crude caused by this massive, mad purchase. While the Congressional audience didn't even bother polite applause for the reserve purchase plan, there's no doubt they were whooping it up in Saudi Arabia. Clearly, the state of the Saudi-Bush union is still pretty good.
But why end on a cynical note? I must admit I was moved by the President's praise of Wesley Autrey, a New Yorker who, last month, threw himself on top of a man who had fallen on subway tracks -- and held him between the track rails as the train passed over them.
While the President properly acknowledged Autrey's courage in saving the man who fell on the subway tracks, Mr. Bush still did not explain why Dick Cheney pushed the man in the first place.
Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse (details via his website and available at all good bookshops in the English-speaking world) was for me the best politics book of 2006. One of the most interesting bits of it is how the Saudis manipulate their oil production, and hence the oil price, to affect politics elsewhere. For instance, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudis flooded the oil market, pushing the oil price down. As a consequence, Soviet oil revenues fell drastically in the 1980s, which probably had more of an effect bringing about the collapse of the "Evil Empire" than Ronnie and Maggie talking tough to the Bolshevik hordes (Armed Madhouse, p.87). (BTW Margaret Thatcher is the only British PM to have signed away British territory to an avowedly Communist regime ie Hong Kong in 1984. Although, as Thatcher's conduct as PM with the then European Economic Community shows, her so-called patriotism went out the window in the chase for a fast buck).
Similarly, "the only other time in the past decade the Saudis have produced flat out to bring down the price of oil was just before the 2004 US presidential election" (Armed Madhouse, p.88).
Well, I still have the political bug, I guess, a bit, anyhow. It's just finding people with the same strain...
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