Bloggingheads

Check out Bloggingheads.tv, a great repository of head-to-head expert dialogues via video web logs (compressed via portmanteau into "diavlogs," a great word).

Listening to an Israeli/Arab debate (rather quiet, debate-wise) about Condie's upcoming Mid-East peace conference.

Impeachy Night Deux, .2

Okay, FYI, here's the skinny on tonight's combatants:

Monday, November 19 - 7:00 p.m. Article I: Initiation and Continuation of Illegal War.

Participants include Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright, Elizabeth de la Vega, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ray McGovern, Larry Everest, and David Swanson.

Performers include Kristen Johnston, Willie Garson, Nana Mensah, Chris McKinney, Courtney Esser, and Scott Cohen.

My growing concern is that the attorneys (E. De la Vega is the person asking questions right now), who probably feel that B/C should be impeached, aren't going to go all apeshit hardball on the witnesses, who probably agree with the attorneys. So we're watching a three-hour (now two-hour) love-fest between two groups of smart people - one more versed in the lingo of law, one more loaded with historical and political terms.

The major villain seems to be ultra-right-wing political think tank PNAC - Project for the New American Century.

The gist right now: Airstrikes were ordered against Iraq right away when Bush came to power, sans inciting incident. The Bush/Cheney rhetoric was isolationist in nature, but they wanted to let the world know (paradoxically) that they'd be intervening in the region. Sans inciting incident.

Grim News/Further Evidence

As in, the news is grim, and I find it all further cause to doubt the Bush regime's ability to ethically govern an anthill, let alone Bushlandia, er, I mean, America.

Here are some of the problems: On the same day the US military announces plans to arm tribal groups in Pakistan to combat terrorism, it also announces that attacks in Iraq have fallen to their lowest levels since... last year.

Neither of these announcements strike me as Bush triumphs. The Surge (and that insipid name - it was a soft drink! a green soft drink, I tell you!) has pushed things back all the way to the golden days of Feb., 2006, when we were all so innocent about what was happening o'er yonder in the desert.

The Pakistani tribal arms-deals worry me even more. (And why announce them? Aren't these just the sort of silly clandestine activities that we're supposed to hear about thirty years later, after all involved CIA agents have retired and bought bungalows in Havana?) With the entire nation about to crack up over its dictator/president's attempt to stay in power, should the US really be meddling, somewhere in the back of party, handing out guns and whippets to a bunch of tribal dudes who - sure, may not love al-Qaeda - but also may not love the US? And whose opinions, which we probably don't know very well, could change quickly. Especially given, you know, the whole country's cracking up...

That's 5th grade wisdom, friends: Wait until the civil war clears up to start massive militias. (The Times' article's lead picture is of a member of "the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that has about 85,000 soldiers, stood guard at a bazaar.")

In gooder news (allow my purposely lapsed grammar to indicate my disdain for all this positive Republi-statusquo "we're doin' okay!"-mongering), Bush and Rice are pushing for Mid-East peace, finally, as well as peace with North Korea. This is something of a turn-around, since B&R (hereforward "The Warriors," after the movie gang) declined to continue with Bill Clinton's Mid-East/N.K. peace plans.

A friend of Roger Cohen predicts the latest Mid-East talks will be "a unique example of failure," which strikes me as fine way to phrase the general outlook for the waning Bush presidency. Failure. And not even good ole American stealin'-shit failure, as with Nixon. Bush's failure is all his own.

Finally, our last depressing world fact comes to us courtesy the National Endowment from the Arts, which reports that children aren't reading as much as they used to. Well, thanks for that statistic. "The Surge is working" (a lie disguised to keep us happy about our state of constant war?) coupled with "kids ain't reedin no mor" (a truth revealed to depress us into inaction?).

Happy Monday.

What Cheney Was Saying Decades Ago - A MUST-SEE

Wow...

Interesting Story Concerning Theater and Conflict

May 7, 2007, NYTimes, "In Iraq, the Play Was the Thing," by HUSSAIN ABDUL-HUSSAIN:

IN 1982, our second-grade teacher at Baghdad’s Mansour school made the following announcement: “The year-end play is about our war with the Persian enemy. The top 20 students in class will play Iraqis; the bottom 20 will play Persians.”

This was at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, and during our first rehearsal the students assigned to play Persians — that is, Iranians — broke out in tears. Although many of the children were, like me, from Shiite families, they insisted that they were Iraqis first, that they loved their Sunni-led country and did not want to play the role of the enemy.

After some negotiations, the girls were spared and only the boys from the lower half were selected to play the roles of the “soldiers of Khomeini the hypocrite.” Their script was scrapped, and instead they were told simply to run across stage as the rest of us, playing the role of the Iraqi Army, mowed them down in battle.

But the play did not end when the curtain fell. Those of us from the Iraqi cast took to bragging and, in the tradition of schoolchildren everywhere, bullying the “Persians.” With tears in their eyes, they repeatedly had to beg the teacher to make us stop.

Now, a quarter of a century later, I called one of my classmates, Ayad, a Shiite who still lives in Iraq. I reminded him of the play, and of how he and I, the top two students in the class, got to play the roles of the Iraqi generals who would win the war against the Iranians. “It was the good old days,” he told me.

Ayad owns a hotel in the southern city of Karbala, home to two of Shiism’s most important shrines. His wife and two daughters wear veils. He believes that the violence in Iraq is a Sunni and American conspiracy against Shiites, and he argues that Iran is the best ally of Iraqi Shiites.

Ayad has two elder brothers. One was conscripted during the Iran-Iraq war and received medals for his courageous performance in battle. The other ran away when he was drafted and ended up living as a refugee in Iran. However, he was treated poorly there, living in poverty and under permanent suspicion, so after some years he fled to Beirut. After the Americans ousted Saddam Hussein, he returned to Iraq, and now works at Ayad’s hotel.

“We think America did a great thing by toppling Saddam,” Ayad told me, speaking for himself and his family. “But now they should hand us the country and leave.”

I asked him whether he fears that an American withdrawal might allow the Sunni insurgents to strike harder in Shiite areas. “We outnumber them,” he said. “And with the support of our Iranian brothers, we can take the Sunnis.”

“And then what?” I replied.

“Then the Shiites will rule Iraq.”

Ayad believes that there is no problem in establishing an Islamic government in Baghdad styled after that of the Iranian Republic. The Sunnis, he said, have “oppressed us since the days of the Prophet, and now it is our chance to hit back and rule.”

According to Ayad, a Shiite takeover in Iraq would set a good model for the Shiites of Lebanon, where they number about a third of the population, and Bahrain, where they are a majority.

“Perhaps the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia will act too, rid themselves of the Sunni oppression against them, and rule or at least separate themselves from Riyadh and create their own state,” my friend argued.

It is exactly this possibility that has made the Sunni Arab regimes fear a Shiite regional revolt and moved some to support the Sunni insurgency in Iraq or at least to voice their resentment of the Iraqi Shiite government, which is seen as being biased against Iraqi Sunnis. “But we are Iraqis,” I told Ayad. “We are Arabs. We have our cultural differences with the Persians. We don’t even speak the same language.”

Ayad insisted otherwise: “When we fought the Persians during the 1980s, we were wrong. We’re Shiites before being Iraqis. Sunnis invented national identity to rule us.”

At this point, I understood that it was pointless to argue further. When the Baathist regime collapsed, I initially felt that there was a good chance for national unity, that Sunnis and Shiites would band together in the absence of the dictator who had played them against each other. Talking to Ayad, I realized how wrong I had been.

To change the subject, I asked Ayad about his business. He told me he had just erected flags on top of the entrance to his hotel. He chose the flags of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Bahrain. When I asked why he chose the flags of these four nations, he said: “These are the countries where Shiites come from to do their pilgrimage in Karbala,” he said. “It is good for business.”

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a media analyst, is a former reporter for The Daily Star of Lebanon.

Three Snippets Of Life On May 4, 2007

1. Ms. Rice gets a cookie for doing her fucking job, wtf. (Thanks, Nancy P.; you still my boo.)

From "U.S. and Syria Discuss Iraq in Rare Meeting," By HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL SLACKMAN, NYTimes:

The White House in April sharply criticized the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for visiting Syria’s capital, Damascus, and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, even going so far as calling the trip “bad behavior,” in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Less than a month later, Ms. Rice walked through the cavernous hallways of a conference center in this desert resort town and into the “Sun” room to sit down with Mr. Moallem.

2. For those of you who imagined that America had miraculously transcended racism, there are better examples of its persistent existence than Don Imus's use of the word "ho." Case in point is the treatment of yesterday's rioters by police in California. Welcome to the new slave-empire: We pay you silly "Illegals" (sort of), so how can you blame us?

From "Action by Police at Rally Troubles Los Angeles Chief," By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and JULIA PRESTON, NYTimes:

LOS ANGELES, May 3 — Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that the episode here in which police officers clashed with demonstrators and journalists on Tuesday at an immigration rally was the “worst incident of this type I have ever encountered in 37 years” in law enforcement.

3. Khalil Gibran--like Hafiz, Rumi, Augustine of Hippo, Basho, and many, many other poets who address spirituality in their works--is much worthier of a school's name than, say, the slave-owning George Washington et al.

And of all the none-American (i.e., non-English, non-Spanish) languages we should be teaching our youth, I can think of none better than Chinese, and, after Chinese, Arabic. These are major world tongues, and Arabs constitute a significant and growing minority in New York City and America at large.

What then is the problem with opening a new middle school in order to facilitate a better understanding of Arabic culture and language in New York? Well, let the New York Post explain! Of course the Post has a solid grasp on the logic behind its Frankenstein-inspired flame-adulation...

From "Plan for Arabic School in Brooklyn Spurs Protests," By JULIE BOSMAN, NYTimes:

Alicia Colon, a columnist for The New York Sun, wrote that Osama bin Laden must have been “delighted” to hear the news of the school. “New York City, the site of the worst terrorist attack in our history, is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals,” she said. “I say break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity.”

Yick, how disturbing...

LAWRENCE WRIGHT WINS PULITZER

Our primary homeslice Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower just won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

We congratulate him with all our hearts.

The man is a double paragon of journalistic thoroughness and good prose style. He is also one of the easiest-to-work-with people you could ever meet. And a snappy dresser.

(For those of you who missed Wright's My Trip To Al-Qaeda, stay tuned for a very short remounting of the show some time in June.)

Word Ta Tha Head-Piece, Y'all

Courtesy Word Warriors.

Did you hear the one about Syria?

So Joe Lie-berman tells us that Syria was responsible for 9/11 ! This guy makes Dick Cheney look honest.

Our Only Real Diplomat?

Nagging questions of political decorum aside (and since when did decorum, I dunno, prevent a chlorine bombing?)..., who the fuck gives somebody flak for trying to reconcile hostile powers in the Middle East?

The fact that Pelosi is not a member of the Executive branch merely underscores that branch's failures.

If Bush cannot reach out to "Axis Of Evil" leaders, he cannot hope to entice them to change their policies towards Israel, sectarian rivalry, or falafels, which, as stated earlier, must be safe to eat if the Middle East is ever to recover from its long slide back into Medieval violence and state-choking autocracy.

Anyway, here's a little blurb about our Madam Speaker's controversial trip:

From the NYTimes, April 6, 2007, "Pelosi Nudges Saudi Arabia to Give Women a Role in Politics," ASSOCIATED PRESS:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, April 5 (AP) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday visited Saudi Arabia’s unelected advisory council, the closest thing in the kingdom to a legislature, where she tried out her counterpart’s chair — a privilege not available to Saudi women because they cannot become legislators.

...

Ms. Pelosi and King Abdullah discussed at length the Arab peace initiative, which offers Israel peace with Arab states if it withdraws from lands seized in 1967 and allows the creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. Israel has said it will accept the proposal only if some changes are made.

“I explained to him that this can be a very important and historic proposal if he is prepared for a discussion and a dialogue and not a presentation on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,” said Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who is also part of the American delegation. “His reaction was very positive.”

Of course Bush should value diplomacy, too.

But if he doesn't, I vote we send in Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, the A Team, and Sam Jackson, who, as we all know from Snakes On A Plane, is a master of both conflict resolution and off-the-cuff toxicology.

Also, this is something that should get more attention/political pressure: Many Iraqi refugees in Syria (and probably in Jordan, Iran, Saudia Arabia, Yemen, etc.) are being forced in quasi-slave positions as "cabaret dancers" or domestic servants... So besides the number of deaths/serious injuries in Iraq, one must, when one appraises America's intervention there, consider the number of less enumerable vilenesses that have come to pass since April, 2003.

From the (rather dark, X-Files-chic) CIA website:

current situation: Syria is a destination country for women from South and Southeast Asia and Africa for domestic servitude and from Eastern Europe and Iraq for sexual exploitation; women are recruited for work in Syria as domestic servants, but some face conditions of exploitation and involuntary servitude including long hours, non-payment of wages, withholding of passports and other restrictions on movement, and physical and sexual abuse; Eastern European women recruited for work in Syria as cabaret dancers are not permitted to leave their work premises without permission and have their passports withheld; some displaced Iraqi women and children are reportedly forced into sexual exploitation
tier rating: Tier 3 - Syria does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so

We should engage Syria diplomatically if for no other reason than to pressure them to reform/transform/abolish their domestic servant/sex trade.

Tom Paine/Obama In 08

Snippets:

1. Iran sends home their 15 pet sailing-Brits, one plus a hijab. Here's a great fish-eyed picture of the vicious Anglo-trespassers in their second-hand Persian suits. (I want one!)



From today's NYTimes:

“Throughout, we have taken a measured approach, firm but calm, not negotiating but not confronting either,” Mr. Blair said. Britain bore no ill will toward the Iranian people, he told reporters, and respected Iran’s “proud and dignified history.”

So... Britain wouldn't negotiate or confront? Meaning the only option left to explore was... to ignore the situation and hope cooler heads prevailed in Tehran. Gotcha. Isn't that basically "chance-based engagement" (a term I just made up that I will continue to apply to this hope-it-goes-away brand of diplomacy, such as Bush's/America's re: Hamas, DPRNK, Castro, &c.).

I don't know which was lamer, the Brit's faith/head-in-sand-based conflict resolution or the Iranian's lame video/pictorial propaganda about how "sorry" the sailors were (really, for real, guys), which featured a much be-Sharpied map of the Iran/Iraq aqua-divide and a dour-looking Revolutionary Guardsman pointing to the obviously offensive Brit-boat coordinate.

(In other news, Russia plans to build a GPS system to rival our own... Competition is a good thing.)

2. Again we favour Israel bearing arms rather than brown people bearing them. Also from today's Times:

WASHINGTON, April 4 — A major arms-sale package that the Bush administration is planning to offer Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies to deter Iran has been delayed because of objections from Israel, which says that the advanced weaponry would erode its military advantage over its regional rivals, according to senior United States officials.

This is the other backbone of American policy: Fucking things up. To prevent dictatorships, Communism, religious radicalism, and anti-selling-us-oil governments in general, we prop up crazy dictators. To prevent war, we sell arms to side X, which makes side Y want to go to war, meaning we have to give more arms to side Z to create an "equilibrium," though it's easy to misinterpret how to do that, and with whom...

3. John Edwards is "roaring" with Christ's power.

Actually, I'm not going to make fun of him, even though I'm all about some Age Of Reason non-theistic (i.e., non-carrot-&-stick-based) morality. Check out this:

I think he would be happy with the fact that I have focused on people who live in poverty here and people without healthcare. And the suffering of others in other parts of the world, like some of the work that I've done on humanitarian issues in Africa, for example, and going to the slums outside of Delhi and India.

Focusing on problems in a very personal way that exist, and without regard to my own selfish ambitions, talking about things that may not seem so politically powerful, but are important to me, and I think important to God.

That sounds about right. Except that talking about morality should be a part of politics, as it once was (see below; buy the book).

Possibly even better is:

Do you think that America is a Christian nation?

...I never thought of it quite that way. There's a lot of America that's Christian. I would not describe us, though, on the whole, as a Christian nation. I guess the word "Christian" is what bothers me, even though I'm a Christian.

Correct/bravo. Can you imagine Pres. John Edwards (and I am an electorally-monogamous Obama man mydamnself) talking to Middle Eastern leaders? I can--more than I can imagine Bush, another serious Christian, doing so. Because, unlike Bush, Edwards seems to have a grasp on the idea of many faiths/one nation, or of the continually self-revising nature of history... Which leads me to:

4. Paul Collins is THE MAN, as is Tom Paine. Best recognize.

You should buy this book by the former/about the latter. Right now.

US Priorities = Fucked

1. Africa

...should be a huge priority. Easy-to-slow down or stop human rights crises abound. See: Yesterday's post about Central African Republic. Or check out today's NYTimes, "Showing Mugabe the Door," by PETER GODWIN:

Zimbabwe lacks the two exports necessary to interest the United States in direct intervention: oil and terrorism. International sanctions on Zimbabwe are now minuscule. We could ramp up “smart sanctions” against Mr. Mugabe and his coterie, for example by freezing their ill-gotten external assets, but any wider sanctions would probably only hurt those at the bottom of the food chain, not the elite kleptocracy. Megaphone diplomacy tends to feed Mr. Mugabe’s portrayal of Western powers as shrill, hectoring, imperialist bullies.

Long story short: Zimbabwe is the poorest, most messed-up country on the planet. And Democrats and Republicans aren't going to do anything to help the people there.

(Check out Alex Cockburn's perfectly motley, perfectly reasoned discussion of latter-day Radicalism, and why he's not a card-carryin' Dem. Then go out and vote Freak Power Party, when I run for NY Senate...)

2. Iraq

Read George Packard's excellent, excellent discussion of how we treat our own allies--or, rather, how we grossly mistreat our own allies in Iraq.

From the article:

From the hotel window, Othman could see the palace domes of the Green Zone directly across the Tigris River. “It’s sad,” he told me. “With all the hopes that we had, and all the dreams, I was totally against the word ‘invasion.’ Wherever I go, I was defending the Americans and strongly saying, ‘America was here to make a change.’ Now I have my doubts.”

Laith was more blunt: “Sometimes, I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

3. America

From the NYTimes' "Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims," By NINA BERNSTEIN:

In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

But the brief being filed today is a rare case of members of a third generation stepping up to defend legal protections that were lost to their grandparents, and that their parents devoted their lives to reclaiming.

“I feel that racial profiling is absolutely wrong and unjustifiable,” Ms. Yasui, 53, wrote in an e-mail message from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she works as a writer and graphic designer. “That my grandmother was treated by the U.S. government as a ‘dangerous enemy alien’ was a travesty. And it killed my grandfather.”

Meaning history repeats, because we turn our eyes from it.

4.

We must at least consider--as a nation, from the highest benches of government on down--that the starving, oppressed peoples of Africa might just be worthy of our help, even if such help does not result in any financial or political gain for us. We must consider that we might really have to help them, just because it is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do in the MLK II/Faulkner/Mos Def sense--the sense that does not take explaining or theorizing or justifying--just doing.

We must consider the fact that, by treating our Iraqi allies in Baghdad badly and replacing them with Jordanians and Uzbeks, we might be harming both the Iraqi people and the American people. We might be placing ourselves at a continually greater risk of terrorist attack by neglecting to follow the advice of the Iraqis who want to help us fix Iraq.

And finally we must treat each and every American citizen as a citizen; in fact, we must treat as citizens even those proto-citizens who are prevented from joining this Union by right wing xenophobics. We must not treat Muslims like terrorists simply because they are Muslims.

Sure, the Quran and Bible and Torah and other religious/doctrinal texts advocate or don't advocate violence against various groups and for various reasons and via various metaphors and with various room for diplomatic out-bowing... But more important than all that hogwashing is the fact that most US Muslims--must Muslims everywhere--aren't "violent" and shouldn't be treated as dangerous outsiders. They pay taxes, watch the Super Bowl and eat at frickin Chucky Cheese, just like everyone else (except Tax Skippin Jimmy) in New Jersey.

Which all leads me to one more short mosaic-piece of information for you to ponder over. O ye who saw Guantánamo: Honorbound to Defend Freedom here at CP, weep! Then stop weeping. Then write your senator, your rep, your local judges, your PTA people, and your President. Just copy the paragraph below and X it out with chicken's blood. (That's called "Bad Bird" houdou.) Anyway, here it is:

5. Sad, Sad Tidings

From the NYTimes' "Supreme Court Denies Guantánamo Appeal," By LINDA GREENHOUSE:

WASHINGTON, April 2 — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear urgent appeals from two groups of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The 45 men sought to challenge the constitutionality of a new law stripping federal judges of the authority to hear challenges to the open-ended confinement of foreign citizens held at the American naval base in Cuba and designated as enemy combatants.

The Next Inconvenient Truth...?

Written and presented by award-winning author and screenwriter Lawrence Wright, My Trip To Al-Qaeda is a must-see multimedia presentation based on Mr. Wright’s recent bestseller The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

This unique production follows in Al Gore’s footsteps by using facts, figures, sounds, and slides to weave the details of a complex global issue--in this case, the rise and rise of Al-Qaeda--into a compelling, eye-opening story.

Mr. Wright, who is about to embark on a nationwide tour of My Trip to Al-Qaeda, is the author of The Siege, starring Bruce Willis, and Noriega: God’s Favorite, among many others. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.