Looks as though the FBI has snagged some would-be terrorists – a group of Muslims originally from Bosnia, Jordan, and elsewhere allegedly crazy enough to want to attack a military installation in the U.S. Strange choice – kind of like planning to rob a police station, but never mind. A triumphal week in the never-ending, absolute total war against terrorism, right? Well… not entirely. This was also the week that Luis Posada Carriles was allowed to walk, his immigration-related charges having been thrown out by a federal judge. But this septuagenarian is not just somebody’s elderly uncle who entered the country illegally to visit a sick relative. A former C.I.A. operative, Posada is one of the alleged masterminds of the 1976 bombing of a civilian airliner that resulted in the deaths of all 73 people on board. He was jailed in connection with this charge by the Venezuelan government – not the current one, mind you, but a very pro-U.S. administration – based on an international investigation carried out by several Caribbean nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Cuba. (Check out this story on DemocracyNow! as well as related documents on the National Security Archive web site.)

Trivia question: Who was head of the C.I.A. back in the mid-seventies? George Bush the elder. Funny story – while president, the elder Bush pardoned Posada’s co-conspirator in the airliner bombing, anti-Castro fanatic Orlando Bosch, who now lives like a war hero in Miami. But this is not just another Bush story; this policy runs deep. Despite all the high-octane rhetoric, the United States has long been a fairly congenial retirement destination for aging terrorists. Posada is hardly the first, or even the most heinous, bad though he is. Aside from him and Bosch, there’ve been people like Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, leader of the Haitian paramilitary group FRAPH and another C.I.A. asset, who was living a fairly comfortable existence until being picked up in connection with a mortgage fraud scheme, to which he has pled guilty. (Kill and rape hundreds, perhaps thousands, in cold blood and you walk. But don’t defraud the consumer!) Plenty of Latin American and Southeast Asian killers have been welcomed into our neighborhoods and universities, stopping just briefly to rinse the blood off their hands as they enter. And what the hell do you call Oliver North if not a terror leader, organizing and supplying the Contra army of murderous thugs during the 1980s (an enterprise to which Posada also contributed his grisly talents) as they attacked co-op farms, clinics, and anything else they were certain was undefended.

So… some terrorists get thrown into dark cells in client states; others go to a hero’s welcome in Miami or get their own T.V. show on Fox. It’s all about targeting. If they kill people who don’t count, there are no consequences… and there are often rewards, in fact. If they threaten our friends or ourselves, it’s a whole different story. Buy letting Posada walk, we’re saying it’s okay to blow up planes if the civilians on board happen to live in a country we have some dispute with. What the hell kind of “War on Terror” is that? I mean, doesn’t our government’s very definition of terrorism incorporate violence against innocents to achieve some political end? If Posada, Bosch, and their like are deemed not worthy of prosecution, doesn’t that serve to legitimize Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center? I don’t know about you, but that disgusts the living hell out of me. Those of you who’ve been reading this column for a long time know that I am no fan of U.S. policy towards Cuba, but even if I supported the embargo, I’m sure I could distinguish between those committed to peaceful democratization of the island and those willing to blow ordinary people to bits to express their opposition to Castro.

Let Posada walk? To borrow a Steven Colbert phrase, that’s the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

luv u,

jp

Glad to see that Naomi Klein is back on the job – last week’s column in the Nation about the World Bank and Wolfowitz was a welcome antidote to the conventional wisdom that gets peddled in the mainstream media and on NPR. The World Bank in particular and the “international community” in general have a pretty heinous record with regard to anti-poverty initiatives (if forcing corrupt or corruptible to cut social services can be thought of as “anti-poverty”). So, as Klein points out, that particular pirate ship should go down with Captain Neocon, rather than set him adrift, Bly-style, while they move on to further plunder. What has the international development finance system accomplished other than consigning uncounted millions of people to ever-deepening misery? Think Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – those are the poster children. Argentina was the textbook neoliberal test case up until its total collapse a few years ago, and subsequent change of course. (There’s a success story!) Advocates of the system point with pride at Russia, where millions have lost their pensions and billions of dollars in public assets were ladled out to friends of the late Boris Yeltsin.

Look upon this and lament, fellow Americans. You – yes, you – and I are, at best, one misstep away from penury… and the same “market forces” that have been unleashed upon most of the rest of humanity are now growling at our door as well. Just glance at our national priorities and you can see the game that’s being played. We’re spending borrowed money on military technology and a criminal war to export not democracy but neoliberal economics to Iraq. That massive increase in our national debt will, if allowed to go unchecked, force the downsizing of public services and the eventual piratization (er, I mean, privatization) of such public institutions as Social Security. That’s the intention, it would appear – kind of a win-win for the masters of neoliberal economics. Not only do we help them scuttle the Iraqi state, but in so doing dig a hole under our own public sector, as well.

What’s their latest target? That country in the horn of Africa that we’ve helped out so much through the years (note: irony) – Somalia, now the subject of a massive U.S. supported occupation by neighboring Ethiopia, reported on by Salim Lone of the Kenyan Daily Nation, on Democracy Now! This is the war you never hear about – the war that the major news media can’t find space to report; that the United Nations has virtually ignored, except to attempt to round up a “coalition of the willing” to help prop up the puppet government Ethiopia has installed there by force of arms. Yes, the stated reasoning behind this mess is terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, but there’s little evidence to back up that reasoning, and there appear to be more concrete motivations – the U.S./Ethiopian-backed regime is congenial to the return of western oil companies, which have been out of the country since 1991. Somalia also has a strategic location U.S. planners have coveted since the Carter administration, when Iran stopped being a client state and we started pumping money into the corrupt regime of former Somali president Mohamed Siad Barre.

Look out, Mogadishu. More help is on the way.

luv u,

jp

Look out, folks – here comes the straight talk express, charging down the track straight toward you. For what seems like the twelfth time in as many months, John McCain has launched (or re-launched) his presidential bid, trying to trade on any of his former selves that the public will buy – Mister Independent, Mister Inevitable, Mister Iraq Victory, etc. Pick your favorite McCain… or collect all three! At this stage, the Arizona senator’s flagging campaign appears to be centered on his dogged support for the Iraq project, albeit a “better managed” variant of that catastrophe. The calculation is a simple one – McCain supports the troop increase because he believes it’s right, even though it’s unpopular; a position that is supposed to lend him an aura of integrity and moral authority. Everyone else is playing politics with the war, but not McCain. That’s his card, and he’s playing it for all it’s worth, equating troop withdrawals with “surrender” and any war funding conditions with abandonment of our troops (mainstream G.O.P. positions, in essence).

Okay – so here’s my question. How is McCain’s position any less “political” than anyone else’s? He’s just betting on “war futures” like all those who voted for this policy in the first place. If in nine months Iraq is even marginally more quiet, McCain can claim vindication. If things go even more septic and Congress forces even a partial withdrawal of the additional “surge” forces, he will be able to claim that the continuing disaster is the result of not following his sage counsel. And if the American project in Iraq ultimately succeeds (i.e. if a government congenial to U.S. influence and permanent military bases ever takes hold), it will be good news for McCain, though decidedly not for the U.S. troops and Iraqis who will have died in the meantime, not to mention the millions of Iraqis who will have had their national sovereignty compromised by a foreign power, and the millions of Americans who have been made demonstrably less safe because of this stupid war. In other words, no one benefits from “victory” except politicians like McCain.

McCain talks as though he has the right to speak for everyone in uniform. Frankly, I don’t see why. He is not the only person who suffered during the Vietnam War, not by a long shot. Plenty of Americans had a rougher time of it than McCain, and something like 58,000 never came back at all. That’s to say nothing of what the Vietnamese and other southeast Asians endured during that war. From what I’ve seen, I doubt very many of those incarcerated by the Saigon regime or the U.S. military / C.I.A. during those years are now trotting around the countryside angling for votes. (Most are in unmarked graves or sleeping with the fishes, as they say.) Just this week I ran across an article about how the enormous tonnage of high explosives we dropped on Cambodia in 1965 – 1973 was in fact a gross underestimate – a number now revised upwards to more than 2,756,941 tons. Needless to say, that relentless campaign of terror bombing did not lead to peace and prosperity, nor was it intended to. The same may be said of the conflict in Iraq.

War clearly has its uses. For some.

luv u,

jp

It’s one thing to try and scope out why someone would want to gun down dozens of people in cold blood; it’s quite another to consider how so clearly disturbed an individual could get his twitchy hands on such deadly weapons in the first place. The first problem is one experts, talking heads, journalists, psychologists, etc., will be grappling with on television and in print for years to come. The second is a bit simpler: mail order, gun shops, and Wal*Mart. Obviously if you haven’t yet killed anyone or committed a serious crime but are, in fact, dead set on annihilating a whole building full of people, it’s not so hard to procure military-grade weapons designed to mow down as many folks as possible in the least amount of time. And you can even buy your ammo within easy walking distance of campus in Virginia and elsewhere in our bullet-headed nation.

Sure, we have a culture of violence. It’s not something primarily driven by media consumption – it’s more a matter of policy. But our solutions many times deal with the more superficial aspect of violence. Pretty much all of the major broadcast news outlets have pulled the self-made video of the shooter Cho’s lunatic paranoid rantings; I can’t say that I disagree with that decision. But one piece of video I think they should broadcast again and again is the one documenting his firearm purchase – I suggest a super that reads, “See how easy this is.” And while I’m offering suggestions, how about a cable channel that shows how over-the-top these legally obtainable weapons are. Remember – these are offensive weapons. They’re easy to fire, easy to reload, and carry high-capacity ammunition clips that hold 33 rounds. Not exactly what I’d call a reasonable means of self-defense. The gun dealer in Roanoke said he was a good mannered, “clean-cut” college kid. I suppose we should be grateful the guy doesn’t sell rocket-propelled grenades or TOW missile launchers.

This is indeed a time to grieve. A lot of shooting going on – here in my hometown, another cop was shot (young guy doing a traffic stop). My feeling, though, is that the thing that is killing all these folks will once again go unaddressed, particularly since our political culture is so cowardly on this topic. I’ve heard some tepid discussion thus far of re-regulating assault weapons, but it seems like you can only hear that kind of talk when it’s balanced out by some right-wing nut job who wants to arm ALL students so that they can shoot back. (I’m not making this up. Hey dumbshit – Cho was an armed student.) And while boneheads on CNN and Fox debate the merits of facilitating schoolhouse shootouts, over in Iraq incidents like Virginia Tech happen on a daily basis. It’s hard to imagine how soul-crushing that must be.

So while Dubya offers his words of consolation, just remember – what he’s set in motion overseas is Cho times 20,000. Welcome to nutsville.

luv u,

jp

Explosion in the “Green Zone” this week, and a good number of the news accounts I’ve read have referred to the relative calm of the last few weeks in Baghdad. This is another one of those “flare ups” they’ve been referring to over the last four years; or worse, an attempt to keep the Iraqi Parliament from negotiating through key issues, such as the petroleum law. It bears pointing out that these are issues key to us, not them, and that if these people represented the vast majority of Iraqis, they wouldn’t be substantially made up of recently arrived exiles and wouldn’t have to meet in a fortified pillbox. Be that as it may, the finger of blame on this attack points inevitably to the “friendly” Iraqis. I heard one pundit opine (when she managed to tear herself away from talking about Don Imus) that this was an “inside job”. What that means I’m not certain (they only discussed Iraq for about 30 seconds), but as I’ve said before in these pages, when this Iraq policy is finally over, its failure will be the Iraqis fault… so much so that you will think they had invaded us.

From the beginning the onus has been placed on them. They were a rogue state menacing their neighbors. They were an existential threat to the United States. And yet, what the hell kind of way is this to defeat an existential threat? The last time one could claim our nation was engaged in a war with an enemy who could possibly destroy us was World War II. That brought about a national mobilization – young men were drafted by the million, many others volunteered for or were pressed into stateside service, legions were employed in war related industries, and people were taxed and had their consumption of essential goods regulated accordingly. If we are, indeed, fighting for our lives right now, why are so few of us actually involved in the fighting? Why aren’t we all being asked to sacrifice something for the salvation of America, just as the “greatest generation” was asked to do by their elders (the, I don’t know, “not-so-greatest generation”)?

Give up? Well, I’m gon’ tell yuh. It’s because we aren’t fighting for our lives. Not really. Sure there’s danger – there was danger during the cold war, too – but that danger is being aggravated by the war in Iraq, not reduced by it. There is no clear existential threat to the U.S. posed by the Iraqi insurgency, and that’s why our government feels it has the luxury to play only the safest political cards and avoid all the dicey ones. Draft? No need – we’ve got an all-volunteer force we can deploy again and again (and again…). Taxes? We’ll cut those and just borrow the billions we burn in Iraq – free money, folks! Vote for me!! Rationing? That’s just plain unAmerican and unnecessary… unless you’re (wait for it) under attack, which we plainly are not. We’re not fighting the Nazis across a 1,000 mile front. We’re not withering under the Luftwaffe’s nightly terror bombings. We’re fighting a war of choice, with the objective of securing a pro-western government in Baghdad and opening the Iraqi economy to the kind of extreme neoliberal exploitation that must surely inhabit Paul Wolfowitz’s piratical dreams.

Why can’t we trust Iraqis? Because they can’t trust us. This they know from experience.

God bless you, Mr. Rosewater. Just a word for Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away this week. Great thinker, great writer, great humanist. This old interview on Fresh Air gives you some idea why.

luv u,

jp

Perennial presidential candidate John McCain made his way to a Baghdad market this week, surrounded by a phalanx of U.S. soldiers, security guards, and kevlar body armor, then returned to the nearby Green Zone (i.e. crusader castle) alive. God be praised! What are we to make of this great triumph? That the incalculable suffering of the past four years has somehow been worth it now that McCain and some other bonehead politicians can go shopping in downtown Baghdad under heavy guard? Not sure, but I think they could have done that more easily before they started this stupid war. (One can only hope they’re not planning any shopping trips to Tehran in the near future.) It’s obvious that McCain is playing to the idiot Republican base – those folks that would support Bush if he knifed their grandchildren in front of them. And the administration, desperate for any sign of success in Iraq, is more than glad to glom onto the senator’s grandstanding.

Watching all this, you have to think that our leaders take us for abject morons. They assume that we remember none of the wild flourishes of rhetoric with which they regaled us four years, four months, or even four days ago. When we invaded Iraq, it was to advance a bold agenda of remaking the middle east, so we were told. Now the objective is holding Haifa street long enough for a senator to go sight-seeing. When the Mahdi army and the Sunni guerillas make the strategic decision to allow our troops to operate relatively unmolested in central Baghdad, we act as though we’d just defeated Pompey’s legions. For chrissake – surge or no surge, we’re only able to move an inch in that city because its inhabitants have chosen to tolerate our presence for the time being, probably in the hope that this will make us leave sooner. It’s not our city, nor will it ever be, and as a saner Republican senator recently observed, Iraq just doesn’t belong to us. Probably best to remember that as we ponder what to do next.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity for the anti-war movement in all of this happy talk. What the hell – if it’s going so well over there, why don’t we leave? Let’s call their bluff. Baghdad is safe? Fine! Everybody go home. That’s what a majority of Americans and a supermajority of Iraqis want, right? There’s one way to make everybody happy. Of course, that would bring us down to the core issue of this whole bloody enterprise – our government doesn’t want to leave Iraq. They didn’t go through all the trouble of contriving and sustaining this invasion just to be pushed out a measly four years later. For all intents and purposes, America is in Iraq to stay, which means we won’t leave until there is simply no other alternative. I happen to believe only Americans can bring and end to this, but so long as we as a nation behave as though the war doesn’t exist, it will go on and on and on.

That’s what the administration calls success. And friends… it sucks.

luv u,

jp

Things heated up this week in our serial overseas conflicts, to be sure. As of this writing, Iran is still holding some British soldiers, and there appear to be some flourishes of diplomatic activity in and amongst the public posturing. Though Bush and friends (including the ever-reliable Joe Lieberman, peace be upon him) engaged in some highly qualified pre-gloating over the “progress” being seen in Iraq as a result of the “surge”, people are still dying by the score over there. As Juan Cole points out, figures from the Iraqi government on February casualties ran somewhere around 61 deaths per day – that’s just slightly fewer than in January. Progress, Lieberman style! (What have you got for the health care crisis, Joe?) It makes you wonder if any U.S. politician really has any idea what a statistic like 60 deaths a day means in human terms.

As a consequence of this cock-brained optimism, the U.S. is alienating the few corruptible friends it has in the Arab world. One by one, Gulf states are making it known that they won’t play any role in an invasion of Iran. Even Saudi Arabia – second only to Texas in the Bush family’s desiccated heart – took the opportunity of this week’s Arab summit to call the American occupation of Iraq “Illegitimate.” Mildly put, but accurate, at least, and that was not the Saudi king’s only criticism of U.S. policy in the region. There were also a few words about that other occupation… the one that turns 40 this year. Abdullah reintroduced the Saudi plan for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, based upon Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 borders. Basically the same formula that’s been on the table since, well, 1967, and the basis of a longstanding international consensus on the question from which only the U.S. and Israel have consistently dissented. Bush must have seen this as a bit of a poke in the eye, particularly now that he’s staggering around, punch drunk.

Not to worry – the mainstream media, including the wildly left-radical (note: irony) NPR, have identified this solution as a non-starter, nothing new, off the table. Sure it is – because it’s the only plan that has a prayer of working. Still, it helped make for kind of a bad week for Dubya… not that he knows what a bad week really looks like. That takes being on the receiving end of his foreign policy, or being one of the poor sods tasked with carrying it out. Like most of us, Bush is pretty far removed from the experience of a National Guard member or reservist sent back on his/her third or fourth tour of duty; soldiers who’ve been wounded in Iraq, then denied proper care back home, discharged for “personality disorders” when they’ve obviously got PTSD and even serious physical injuries, some even having to pay back part of their signing bonus. Now, that’s a bad week.

All I can tell you young folks out there is – no matter how much they promise you, how bad the job market looks, how sorry your money situation is – listen to what Marvin tells you. Don’t. Sign. Up.

luv u,

jp

It’s been four years since the invasion of Iraq – four flaming candles on that bitter cake. (Make a wish!) Dubya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld’s “six days, six weeks… I doubt six months” war is now nearly old enough to attend kindergarten. How fast these little catastrophes grow up… my word! Seems like only yesterday we were stoking the furnace of martial fury, seldom very far below the surface of American life. Cheney and his “there can be no doubt” speech about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; Bush’s yellowcake uranium scare and “mission accomplished” fan dance; Powell’s “slam-dunk” case before the U.N.; Condi Rice’s certainty about the sole utility of those bloody aluminum tubes. I can see them all scrolling by like tired old hits on a K-Tel “Sounds of the Seventies” collection. (Right up there with Billy, Don’t Be A Hero.) Now, some 48 months later, you would think by listening to our leading politicians that America’s entry into Iraq was the result of some involuntary process, like an extraordinary rendition. In the land of “the mother of all battles”, Operation Iraqi Fiefdom is surely the most motherless of all battles.

Still, these deadbeat dads and moms all seem to have their own ideas about how this little four year old should be brought up, and most of them involve having other people’s sons and daughters remain on Iraqi soil for a good long time. They are virtually all talking about some kind of “victory” and a Nixonian “peace with honor” – the peace of the grave, though invariably someone else’s grave. And as I mentioned last week, all but the most principled of congress members appear convinced that the Pentagon is incapable of withdrawing troops from a war zone in a safe and orderly fashion when so directed. If we follow this logic to its conclusion, they’re saying our troops can never leave Iraq, because to do so is just too damn dangerous. Of course, a long-term U.S. military presence doesn’t comport well with what we know of Iraqi public opinion, which overwhelmingly – something like 70 – 80% – favors our rapid departure. You’d never know it, listening to the Iraq war debate over here. I guess those Iraqis are just supposed to accept the blame for this disaster and keep their mouths shut.

We’re like a nuclear Rome, except somewhat less subtle. I heard a report on NPR about the U.S. takeover of a key bridge in Diyala province, where Sunni insurgents have held sway. There were the usual horror stories – probably true – about Al Qaeda types committing public execution and intimidating the locals. Of course, when the U.S. troops arrived, they took over a group of houses near the bridge, displacing the owners with a promise of compensation. Much of the report is taken up with an Army lieutenant telling Iraqis that, no, he didn’t have their money and that “we don’t come into town with a trunk of money to hand people cash for the things that have happened.” He was later heard impatiently turning away Iraqi soldiers who hadn’t been paid in god knows how long and who were complaining about 12 hour duty shifts with no salary, directing them to their dysfunctional government. I’ve seen similar stories over the past week or two – Iraqis being sent out into some very uncertain streets. This is how we made friends in Fallujah… and in the Mekong Delta, come to think of it. There it took us more than ten years to leave. So far, in Iraq, it’s four.

Rachel. Another grim anniversary. Four years since young Rachel Corrie was killed while doing what we all should be doing – stopping an out-of-control Israeli government from bulldozing Palestinian neighborhoods in the occupied territories (while collecting billions from us each year). Not forgotten.

luv u,

jp

We’re just a few months into the new congress, and it’s becoming clear that the Democratic leadership doesn’t have the stomach for stopping the war in Iraq. This week the Senate failed to pass a pretty flimsy measure calling for a full withdrawal (on good news) by sometime in 2008 – not exactly good news for those shipping out to Iraq for a third or fourth tour of duty. There are many reasons for this continuing failure, but prominent among them is the Democratic leadership’s fear of appearing as though they don’t fully “support the troops.” For chrissake – how much effort does it take to knock that straw man over? Voting for funds to send soldiers into a bloody catastrophe is not “supporting the troops”; it’s killing and maiming the troops. If congress defunds this policy, the Pentagon will have plenty of money to get everyone home safe, of fucking course. And yet they remain unwilling to do what needs to be done… what they were elected to do.

What congress has been making a lot of noise about is the administration’s apparently politically motivated firing of a number of U.S. attorneys last year. At a time when Bush is sending badly wounded soldiers back into battle, some of whom cannot even wear body armor because of their injuries, Dems are expressing outrage over some wrongfully dismissed lawyers. Sure – the Bush White House is run out of its political office… so what’s new? How does that compete with the hell disaster of this war? Jeebus – this reminds me of the Watergate days. Richard Nixon presided over some of the most obscene abuses of law enforcement powers in U.S. history, namely the COINTELPRO program of domestic spying, political intimidation, and worse. That went virtually unchallenged. But when Nixon’s boys broke into Democratic party headquarters, that was a different kettle of fish entirely. The lesson is clear – ordinary people can be attacked with impunity, but not the powerful.

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the crisis we have ignited in the middle east. Something like 2 million Iraqis have fled that country in fear for their lives; as many as 1 million now live as refugees in Syria, with up to 50,000 more crossing the border every month. Syria is not a wealthy nation like the United States or France – this influx is putting enormous pressure on that society. And yet the United States will only accept 7,000 Iraqi refugees this year, even though our unprovoked attack is the cause of this mass exodus. Even more appalling, our government will not accept anyone who has paid ransom to kidnappers because it considers such sums paid in desperation to be tantamount to supporting terrorism! Families driven out by terrorism (ignited by us) being accused of terrorism – an irony worthy of Joseph Heller.

So listen up, Dems. If Bush is the man with two brains (one named Cheney, one named Rove), best to concentrate more on the brain that’s killing people than the one that’s firing people. Get off your sorry asses and stop this ridiculous war now.

luv u,

jp

It was another one of those discouraging weeks in Iraq — you know the type. Bombs going off. People dying in large numbers. Very… well… discouraging. But far be it from our leaders to become discouraged with the project itself. And no, I don’t mean this project they call “Middle East democracy”, because that’s just some policy hack yammering. I mean the real Iraq project involving permanent U.S. bases in country and an Iraqi government compliant with (or at least sensitive to) our wishes. Something tells me that project will withstand a good many setbacks of the type that involve loss of life and limb, so long as those lives and limbs belong only to the relatively poor and poorly connected. It was with this goal in mind that our leaders insisted on starting this disastrous war back in March 2003, and if they’ve shown an element of regret over that decision during the last four years, I’ve missed it.

Actually, the “project” was dealt a minor blow in the past couple of weeks with the drafting of legislation regulating the Iraqi oil industry. I say minor because the legislation does actually appear to allow foreign (i.e. U.S.-based) companies to invest in the Iraqi oil industry without significant limits and to repatriate most if not all of the profits from those investments. However, outright privatization of the industry has been left out of this draft. According to Christian Parenti in last week’s Nation, the law has not provided for productions sharing agreements — contracts that allow massive profit-taking and asset management advantages on the part of the petroleum multinationals. (Previous iterations of the law had been a bit kinder to Bush’s friends in the industry.) I’m certain they haven’t exhausted all of their options on this point, and the law does allow them a strong foothold in some of the richest oil fields on earth. But what isn’t really being reported on is the role these efforts play in fueling the insurgency.

Imagine just for a moment that the Iraqis are not simple, ignorant people who have been waiting since the bronze age for us to come and grant them “freedom”. Imagine that people in the insurgency and folks like Moqtada al Sadr have a somewhat subtle understanding of their own national self-interest. Imagine, too, that they have been paying attention to U.S. policy in the region over the past half century… perhaps paying it greater attention than we ourselves have done. How can we expect that they would show any enthusiasm over our apparent intention to settle in for a good long stay? How can we think that they would willingly submit themselves to a government dominated by people who were living in exile prior to the arrival of U.S. forces in 2003? Do we really think that they will sit still while our armed forces (government-run and private) are in occupation of their country and our commercial sector lobbies for greater influence?

If so, we suffer from a morbid kind of optimism, tacking somewhere between Pollyanna and Pangloss. Kind of late in the game for these sorts of illusions, isn’t it?

luv u,

jp