Top Ten Ways al-Qaeda Causes Carbon Emissions and Climate Change

In an audiotape attributed to Usamah Bin Laden, the mass murderer called for a boycott of the US dollar and blamed the US for global warming. There is nothing worse than a terrorist who kills thousands of innocent people, but being a hypocrite is also a pretty bad character flaw, and Bin Laden manages both. Global terrorism is a high-carbon activity and very bad for the environment, not to mention humans and other living things.

During human history on earth, there were typically 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Low levels of carbon dioxide have coincided with ice ages over the past 400,000 years. Only once in that period, 325,000 years ago, did carbon dioxide reach 300 parts per million, coinciding with a hot climate then. There are now 390 parts per million (ppm), with the extra carbon dioxide having been produced by the industrial revolution beginning in the late 18th century-- coal-burning factories, railroad engines, etc., and then with the addition of gasoline-driven automobiles and coal- and gas-powered electricity plants in the 20th century. That is, we already have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than in any time during the past nearly half-million years! In geologic time, if we go back hundreds of millions of years, there were often as much as 1500 parts per million of C02 in the atmosphere; but the world was steamy swamp then, with average surface temperatures as much as 20 degrees higher than they are now and much higher sea levels. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is only about 120,000 years old as a species and evolved in relatively low-carbon, low-temperature conditions. We don't know how well the species would adapt to radical climate change. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat from the sun in the atmosphere that would otherwise radiate back into outer space.

Scientists such as James Hansen have concluded that 390 ppm of carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere is too much for a sustainable earth comfortable for human life, and that we need to reduce the amount to 350 ppm. The world is currently adding 2 ppm of carbon dioxide per year, so that in 2020 if that rate does not increase we will be at 410. As we approach 450 ppm, James Hansen's projections suggest large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change (global warming is only part of the effect--some places may become much colder; the point is that the climate will change dramatically). See Hansen's important new book, Storms of My Grandchildren.

The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record. Climate is complex, and everything from changing water vapor levels in the atmosphere to decades-long wind patterns affect it. But it is a myth that global warming ceased during the past decade, and it is also a myth that solar activity can account for climate change in recent decades. (It appears to have done so in history, as with the 'little ice age' of 1250-1850, but there are no such consistent climate-relevant solar patterns in the past 30 years). There are lots of other things that interfere with getting a clear read on the changing climate situation. A weakened ozone layer (caused by industrial emissions by humans may actually be protecting the Antarctic ice shelf from melting as fast as had been feared. There are also carbon sinks, which absorb carbon dioxide, such as the oceans and forests, the full capacity of which is unknown.

A large danger is that there may be sudden tipping points and positive feedback loops for climate change. Thus, reduced emissions of some gases may strengthen the ozone layer over the South Pole in coming decades, removing the wind protection from the Antarctic and allowing a rapid melting of the ice shelves. Or, the melting of Arctic tundra at the earth's other pole may rapidly release trapped carbon dioxide and methane, accelerating climate change. These are dangers, not certainties, but very dangerous dangers that it would be wise to guard against. Sudden climate tipping points appear to have been common in the earth's past.

But that over time a lot of extra human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause the average surface temperature of the earth to rise-- all other things being equal-- is basic physics. Despite the climate-change-denial industry paid for by the oil and gas corporations (and therefore adopted along with Darwin-denial as a dogma by the American Republican Party), this conclusion is not in dispute among serious scientists.

So back to terrorist hypocrisy. Here are the ways al-Qaeda causes global warming and climate change:

1. Bin Laden wants to take over Saudi Arabia and pump its oil for himself and his movement. Use of petroleum and natural gas puts more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and is a major source of climate change. In short, Saudis who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Saudi Arabia produces about 11% of all the petroleum pumped in the world every day. Al-Qaeda would not reduce exports significantly, since it would want the income they generate to pursue its political projects.

2. The attacks of September 11, using airplanes full of jet fuel and destroying skyscrapers and buildings, were--quite apart from being monstrous acts of mass murder-- among the largest discrete man-made events causing high carbon emissions in this century.

3. Bin Laden told London-based journalist Abdul Bari Atwan in 1996 that he would like to embroil the US in a war in the Middle East so that he could do to the US what the Mujahidin had done to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Hint: Provoking large-scale wars involves lots of use of aircraft carriers, tanks, and fighter-jets, as well as bombing strikes-- all of which spew large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Since 9/11 was intended to provoke the Afghanistan War, Bin Laden is single-handedly responsible for among the biggest high-carbon set of events in the twenty-first century. Not only is war itself a significant source of extra greenhouse gas emissions because of vehicle use and explosions, but it wounds and maims large numbers of people. While harming people is bad enough, and is the real tragedy, it is also true that extra health care is carbon-intensive. (In the US, the health care industry accounts for about 8 percent of the American carbon footprint.)

4. Al-Qaeda-linked groups such as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the 'Islamic State of Iraq' are responsible for hundreds of bombings in Iraq, which release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Some attacks targeted refineries and pipelines and so were responsible for very large amounts of greenhouse emissions. They have also destroyed automobiles and buildings; not only is burning such things pollution-producing, their replacement generates carbon emissions from factories. In addition, al-Qaeda-linked groups have hijacked chlorine trucks and used them as bombs; chlorine contributes to the depletion of the ozone layer. Bin Laden's 9/11 attacks were intended to bring the US military into places like Iraq, and succeeded. In 2008 Oil Change International estimated of the Iraq hostilities that "The war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year."

5. Al-Qaeda and its Taliban partners in Pakistan have committed large bombings, including the destruction of the Marriott in Islamabad, which release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and have provoked Pakistani military action in Swat and South Waziristan employing armored vehicles and artillery and US unmanned drone strikes-- all of which release large amounts of carbon.

6. Al-Qaeda affiliates in Indonesia blew up a nightclub in Bali, the Marriott in Jakarta, and set off a bomb outside the Australian Embassy. Not only are bombings themselves high-carbon events, but they provoke military and paramilitary responses that use extra fuel and so produce more carbon dioxide.

7. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula set off large numbers of bombs in Saudi Arabia in 2003-2006 and provoked Saudi military and paramilitary responses, all of which released a great deal of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Al-Qaeda attempted to blow up a major Saudi oil facility at Abqaiq, which would have spewed out enormous numbers of carbon particles.

8. Al-Qaeda attacks in Yemen have provoked air strikes and bombings from the Yemeni government. Both the terrorist bombings and the government response they provoke release substantial carbon into the atmosphere.

9. Al-Qaeda attacks on airliners have forced airports to scan baggage and passengers, using much more electricity to do so than in the past. Electricity is typically generated by coal- or gas-burning plants, and both spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

10. Increased delays at airports because of increased security measures have led to more idling automobiles at and around airports. Idling automobiles are a major source of carbon dioxide pollution.


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Coal River Mountain Protestors Meet with Governor

Coal River Mountain Protestors Meet with Governor - Huntington News Network

The closest thing you might get in today's world to Gandhists and followers of Martin Luther King, on a practical plane, are the campaigners in West Virginia against shearing off mountaintops for coal mining. Coal mining should be illegal, much less destroying the environment to do it.

As for obeying the law, the point of Satyagraha, nonviolent nonresistance, is precisely to take public action against unjust laws. They aren't all just, and if corporations can buy politicians at will, as SCOTUS just affirmed, then there will be more and more unjust ones. If you stack the deck against the people in Congress, the people will just have to find other ways to protect themselves.


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Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world

Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world - CNN.com

Coffee houses, surgical techniques, algrebra, some key institutional developments in universities and hospitals, all from Muslim science. Not to mention optics, astronomical advances (some think they influenced Copernicus), etc.

And those alcoholic stills so popular in Kentucky during Prohibition? Yup, Jabir ibn Hayyan was behind them.

I don't know if Muslims invented it, but Franz Rosenthal showed that smoking pot was a big part of medieval Muslim popular culture (the Qur'an forbids date wine but doesn't say anything about pot, though many clerics forbade it by analogy. Like most clerical prohibitions, a lot of people paid no attention.)





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NATO, Afghan Troops Clash, 4 killed; Call for Talks with Taliban Rejected

NATO troops appear to have made a horrible error in Afghanistan on Friday, as they clashed with what turned out to be Afghan National Army troops and called in an air strike on them, killing 4 and wounding 6. The governor of Wardak province where the fight took place said he was at a loss to explain it.

The incident comes on top of Thursday's slaying by NATO of an Afghan religious leader, again apparently by accident.

Aljazeera Arabic is reporting that Duran Safi, an insurgent leader of the Hizb-i Islami in eastern Afghanistan, has rejected talks with the Karzai government.

The Saudi government declined President Hamid Karzai's call for Riyadh to broker a deal with the Taliban, saying that first the latter must cut off their relationship with Usamah Bin Laden and cease giving him safe harbor.

Ironically, at the same time India is softening on the idea of talks with the Taliban, which New Delhi initially opposed out of fear they would rehabilitate allies of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Sonia Verma explores the issue of how likely the insurgents in Pakistan are to open talks with the Kabul government. The most promising negotiations might be with Gulbadin Hikmatyar, the leader of Hizb-i Islami or the 'Islamic Party' in eastern Afghanistan. It is unlikely that Mullah Omar, leader of the Old Taliban in Quetta, will take part in talks, and even if he did, she says, he does not seem in firm operational control of the Taliban commanders, some of whom openly say they will defy him if he makes the wrong decision. Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani network in North Waziristan and south Afghanistan, will also likely not talk.

Money graf from Verma's fine piece:

'According to an unclassified report by Task Force Kandahar, only 30 per cent of insurgents fight for money. The rest take up arms because of tribal allegiances or for “other reasons,” an amorphous category that encompasses everything from revenge to land disputes. Just 10 per cent fight for religious reasons, according the analysis.'

Aljazeera English reports on the Taliban attack at Lashkar Gah late on Friday after the London conference ended.



Ajazeera English interviews a female member of parliament on the issues broachd at the London conference.



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Obama shows himself a Natural for a Second Term in Debate with Republicans

President Barack Obama was so effective in his 90-minute 'questions session' with the congressional Republican conference that some Republican leaders are said to be regretting that they allowed the session to be recorded. Fox Cable News rectified the error by pulling away its own cameras. Luckily, C-Span was there.

Obama complained about hyperbole on the Republican Right, such that the health bill, which is similar to Republican proposals of the early 1990s when Clinton was trying to overhaul health reform, is depicted as a Bolshevik plot to impose big government.

Here is the C-Span video:



My own view is that pundits and politicians are writing off Obama prematurely. He is likeable, which counts for a lot in politics. People forget now that Reagan had a deep recession, was forced out of Lebanon, and was ridiculed for saying that trees cause pollution, but he trounced Mondale. Clinton failed to pass health care reform, but he trounced the dour Dole. Inside the beltway policy wonks don't include the likeability index in their prognostications, but it was on full display in the president's back-and-forth with Republicans at Baltimore on Friday.

And, it is entirely possible that the rest of his term will see substantial job creation, which is what will really matter to voters. As it is, the economy grew by nearly 6% in the fourth quarter of 2009, and if that sort of growth continues, lots of people will be back to work.

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America's Competitors Will Use Supreme Court Ruling To Block Our Green Jobs Effort And Close Our Factories | OurFuture.org

America's Competitors Will Use Supreme Court Ruling To Block Our Green Jobs Effort And Close Our Factories | OurFuture.org

'Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports so stands to be one of the biggest losers in any pact that curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. “It’s one of the biggest threats that we are facing,” said Muhammed al-Sabban, head of the Saudi delegation to U.N. talks on climate change and a senior economic adviser to the Saudi oil ministry. [...] Climate talks posed a bigger threat, Sabban said, and subsidies for the development of renewable energy were distorting market economics in the sector, he said." '

It will be interesting to see if the oil and gas corporations directly come after Green candidates in November and shape Congress in their image. I don't think that is the Saudis' style, but it is that of Exxon-Mobil and other energy giants. (The Saudis tend to lobby already-elected high officials behind the scenes rather than doing grassroots work, and in that way are the opposite of the Israel lobbies).

The other thing is that some Saudis have an interest in green energy, including the oil minister. Look up the Empty Quarter on google if you want to guess why. And, Saudi Arabia is moving forward with solar-powered water desalinization plants, which if they can be built and operated economically, might save the arid Middle East from decades of further warfare (Israel-Syria-Jordan, Yemen, Turkey-Iraq, etc. are all looming water wars waiting to happen if there isn't such a breakthrough).

So it is not actually in the Saudis' interest to prevent the USG from throwing research money at solar energy, since they will be able to produce a lot of it and continue to get rich from energy production, and because they need it themselves for effective water plants of the future.

But if I disagree about the supposed Saudi threat to US Green candidates, I acknowledge the justice of the anxiety. Justice Alito mouthed disagreement when President Obama pointed out that the Supreme Court had opened the door to international corporations to intervene in US politics. He made this gesture because the Court has not formally ruled on whether foreign corporations have US first amendment rights of "speech" (i.e. of making propaganda infomercials and paying for them to be shown on US television). But most US corporations have plenty of foreign stockholders and partners. And, you wonder about the American corporations who are based in the Caribbean as a tax dodge? Are they 'American' persons?


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NATO to Provide $500 mn. to Bribe Taliban; Seeks Exit beginning 2011; Obama's Request for 10,000-troop NATO Surge Quietly Rejected

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown may have called the London Conference on Afghanistan for domestic political purposes, as a sort of publicity stunt. But the nearly 70 nations that gathered there unexpectedly took advantage of the meet to plot out a NATO exit strategy. Of course, how realistic it is remains to be seen. The London conference saw as many plans put forward for dealing with the low-intensity war against the Taliban there as there were countries in attendance. And, even while it was being held, major fighting broke out in the Pashtun city of Lashkar Gah. And in the Pakistani port of Karachi, Taliban attacked a NATO truck convoy. Since Afghanistan is landlocked, Karachi is serving as the major port for the war effort.

President Hamid Karzai asked for 15 years more of a substantial NATO commitment and heavy investment of foreign training and aid in the country.

Karzai also offered to open talks with the top echelons of the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar in hopes of bringing them in from the cold. While Karzai has been talking to some elements of the insurgency (including Gulbadin Hikmatyar of the Hizb-i Islami or 'Islamic Party,' one of Reagan's old 'Freedom Fighters' now incorrectly lumped in with the Taliban), he wanted the London conference to give him the resources to make them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Some European powers were unexpectedly open to the idea of a national unity government that would bring some Taliban officials in from the cold. NATO was even willing to back such efforts, putting together $500 million in bribes to bring Taliban or rural tribal forces over to the government side. The Western press is not mentioning it, but Saudi Arabia is putting in $150 mn. in aid to Afghanistan, and Karzai is pleading with King Abdullah to help negotiate a ceasefire with the Taliban.

The US is more wary, willing to bring over the everyday guerrillas but unwilling to imagine a return of Old Taliban officials to positions of power. India was apparently extremely concerned by the widespread interest in the Karzai plan, since New Delhi does not believe Taliban can be separated into 'good' and 'bad.' India remembers that the Taliban helped train guerrillas to hit Kashmir. New Delhi is also worried that any push to reintegrate the Taliban into the government might well increase Pakistani influence, and Islamabad is already offering to help Karzai negotiate with the Taliban and other insurgents. India and Pakistan are fierce rivals.

NATO was generally very unhappy at Karzai's mention of "15 years", and instead began speaking of 2011 as the beginning of a withdrawal of NATO troops, with the expectation that over time more and more of Afghanistan's provinces would be patrolled by the Afghan military without foreign assistance.

US President Barack Obama's plea for an extra 10,000 NATO troops to committed is falling on deaf ears in Europe. The NATO military commitment to Afghanistan is widely unpopular in most countries. Canada has said it would bring its troops home by 2012. France says it will send no more troops to Afghanistan and criticized Karzai's 15-year timeline. Germany is sending only 500 more troops. The Dutch may pull out their 2000 troops soon. Obama is highly unlikely to get his 10,000 quota from NATO, though that piece of the troop escalation was key to his plan.

What he'll get instead is increasing NATO troop drawdowns

There is an emerging Indo-American suspicion of the Karzai reconciliation plan, and a NATO-Pakistan-Afghanistan convergence of interest in it.

Perhaps alarmed at how far the talk of reintegration was going, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who said Monday that The Taliban would inevitably be part of any political settlement, nevertheless warned that "foreign" (presumably Arab) fighters in Afghanistan would not be part of any truce, and would have to leave the country or risk being killed.

Some say that with the US withdrawal from Iraq ahead of schedule, Washington will be willing to take on Afghanistan itself if NATO is not willing to commit to a long-term mission. But Afghanistan is a big, craggy country armed to the teeth, and US resources are not what they once were.

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Gopal, Afraid of the Dark in Afghanistan

Tomgram: Anand Gopal, Afraid of the Dark in Afghanistan | TomDispatch

"The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates, and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. He had spent time in Kuwait, and the Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, U.S. forces released Rahman’s cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since."

Worth a read. Doesn't sound like winning hearts and minds.

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Israeli Militarism, Local Conflicts Driving Palestinian Children Crazy

Flesh and Stone - War is hell on the brain: Doctors map psychological disorders in Gaza and the West Bank

"23.2 percent had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 17.3 percent had an anxiety disorder (other than PTSD or acute stress disorder), and 15.3 percent had depression.

PTSD was more frequently identified in children under age 15, while depression was the main symptom observed in adults. Among children under 15, factors significantly associated with PTSD included being witness to murder or physical abuse, receiving threats, and property destruction or loss. "

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Foreign Affairs in Obama's State of the Union: Caught between the Utopian and the Propagandistic

Understandably, President Obama concentrated on domestic issues, especially job creation, in his State of the Union address. But there were a few paragraphs toward the end about foreign affairs that I want to talk about. While I thought the speech generally strong, and the flash polls suggest that the public did, as well, I felt that there were significant problems with the foreign policy passages that signal trouble ahead.

' In Afghanistan, we are increasing our troops and training Afghan Security Forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. We will reward good governance, reduce corruption, and support the rights of all Afghans – men and women alike. We are joined by allies and partners who have increased their own commitment, and who will come together tomorrow in London to reaffirm our common purpose. There will be difficult days ahead. But I am confident we will succeed.'

This passage was one of the few lauded by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in the Republican response. But it is among the weaker parts of the speech.

1. Reserve Col. Lawrence Sellin, a Ph.D. and a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, summarized the problems with training the Afghan army:

a. The US has already spent more than $17 bn. since 2001 building the Afghanistan National Army, but without much success.

b. Although the government of President Hamid Karzai claims that the army numbers 100,000 now, in fact some battalions are at half strength and not combat ready. The chance that the ANA can be expanded to 240,000 effective soldiers for another $16 bn. in a year or two is slim to none.

c. If a new Afghan army can be built at all, it will take at least 4 years, and it is not plausible that US troops will withdraw beginning in 2011. Moreover, Memos of US ambassador Karl Eikenberry in Kabul insist that President Hamid Karzai is unreliable and refuses to try to take command of the country, so that he is not deploying the army he already has. The profound divisions within the Obama camp, among the most experienced Afghan hands, make it anything but certain that the counter-insurgency strategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to which Obama committed himself, can succeed.

d. Veteran NBC war correspondent Richard Engel maintains that staff officers work short hours and are corrupt. Only some of the small companies of troops deployed in the countryside can effectively be said to be at war. Even these are 90% illiterate, and some have received only 2 weeks of 'show and tell' training. Drug use is rampant among troops, and some 25 percent go AWOL. See Engle on the Rachel Maddow show:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As is often the case, in this paragraph Obama was attempting to please both right and left, with a troop escalation advertised as a mere prelude to withdrawal. But the task, of training an effective 240,000-man AFghanistan National Army is an enormous one and cannot be even partially completed by summer 2011.

He then turned, more sure-footedly, to Iraq.

' As we take the fight to al Qaeda, we are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as President. We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August. We will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: this war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.'

Obama sees the Iraq War as irrelevant to the war on terrorism, and is putting all his military eggs in the Afghanistan basket. He is quite clear that the US military is departing Iraq on the timetable worked out with the Iraqi parliament, virtually no matter what. I've noted his determination and consistency on the Iraq withdrawal elsewhere. This passage is the strongest on foreign policy, and he sent an unmistakeable message that he in my view has too seldom discussed with the American public.

Obama goes on to pledge to work on nuclear disarmament and maintains that such negotiations (mainly with Russia) will enhance US credibility with the international community in dealing with North Korea and Iran

Doesn't actually sound very likely to me.

' These diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of these weapons. That is why North Korea now faces increased isolation, and stronger sanctions – sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That is why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran's leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: they, too, will face growing consequences. '

Sanctions won't work on Iran to produce regme change. They can keep a country weak and harm civilians, as we saw in iraq. But they cannot dislodge a ruling elite in an oil country, because oil is too easily smuggled and converted into cash, which can then be squirreled away by the ruling party. Congress's infatuation with sanctions on Iran is highly unlikely to be productive, especially since China declines to go along with them.

Moreover, Washington's tightening of sanctions may make it harder for Obama to engage the regime in serious negotiations, as he had earlier pledged to do. This speech is essentially a capitulation to Neoconservative themes on Iran, rather than retaining Obama's central plank of keeping negotiating lines open to Tehran.

' That is the leadership that we are providing – engagement that advances the common security and prosperity of all people. We are working through the G-20 to sustain a lasting global recovery. We are working with Muslim communities around the world to promote science, education and innovation.'

I'm not sure what this last part, about promoting education and innovation in the Muslim world, even means, and cannot think of any practical change in US development policy with regard to the Muslim world in the past year. The big steps toward education and science are being undertaken by Qatar's government in its Education City and the new Saudi King Abdulaziz University of Science and Technology. It may be that Obama is referring to the planned $7.5 bn. in aid pledged to Pakistan, some of which would go toward education.

In any case, Obama's reference to relations with the Muslim world was essentially a soft throw-away line. What would improve US relations with Muslims would be a swift movement toward a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine and an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza's children. A frank acknowledgment that the US has been powerless to make headway on this essential issue would have been welcome. So too would be an acknowledgment by the president of the justice of the letter calling on Israel to desist from its blockade of Gaza circulated by 54 Democratic members of the House of Representatives, in a rare act of defiance toward the powerful Israel lobbies.

This is the final relevant paragraph:

' As we have for over sixty years, America takes these actions because our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores. But we also do it because it is right. That is why, as we meet here tonight, over 10,000 Americans are working with many nations to help the people of Haiti recover and rebuild. That is why we stand with the girl who yearns to go to school in Afghanistan; we support the human rights of the women marching through the streets of Iran; and we advocate for the young man denied a job by corruption in Guinea. For America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity. '

The attempt to position the US military occupation of Afghanistan and the sabre-rattling and threatened sanctions against Iran as somehow beneficial to women in those countries is a continuation of Bush administration rhetoric that is unworthy of Obama. These themes may appeal to the Mavis Leno faction of American feminists, but are unconnected to Afghan and Iranian women's lived reality. The position of women in Afghanistan is better now than under the Taliban, but the new Afghanistan is still an Islamic republic, and president Karzai pandered for votes among the Shiite Hazaras by allowing Shiite law to operate among them on personal status issues, rather than national law. One implication of this step is that Hazara women are now liable to marital rape. So this is the liberation the Obama administration is bringing Afghan women? Moreover, Obama's escalation of the war will have a negative impact on women and families caught in the crossfire. It is a foolish argument to make because so easily disproven.

Moreover, many of the female protesters in Iran have been traditionalists in full veil, who support the ideals of the regime but were disappointed that Ahmadinejad stole the election. The idea that the Iranian opposition is made up of people just like Obama and his supporters is an American myth.

These few paragraphs on foreign policy in the speech were among its weakest. The plans for Afghanistan and nuclear disarmament seemed thin and utopian. The threats launched against Iran seemed empty. The use of a kind of 'imperial feminism' to justify Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan war seemed just pandering to some of his constituency without holding much promise of genuine change for Afghan women. As for Iran, further economic sanctions will harm women and families most of all. Only in his express determination to withdraw from Iraq on schedule did Obama achieve the fire and conviction characteristic of much of the rest of the speech.

While it now seems as though the domestic economy and job creation are far more important than these foreign policy issues, the issues of Afghanistan, Pakistan (not mentioned), Iran and Palestine will likely generate among the more important crises in Obama's presidency, and he needs desperately to get a better handle on them and take control of policy, or his opponents will maneuever him into playing either Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. Just because he says he would be satisfied with a single term is no reason to let the hawks impose one on him.

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22 Dead, 80 wounded in Baghdad Crime Lab Bombing,

AP reports that guerrillas drove a car bomb into an Interior Ministry crime lab in the Karrada district of Baghdad on Tuesday, only a day after a coordinated bombing attack on the city's hotel district, killing 22.

Al-Zaman says that a number of high-ranking officers are among the dead, and that some 80 are wounded. Many Iraqi politicians live in Karrada, an upscale Shiite neighborhood. Haydar al-Jurani, a member of parliament in the Islamic Mission Party (Hizb al-Da'wa) to which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki belongs, was walking near the building and was taken to hospital with a mild head wound.

If the attacks were meant to demoralize, they seem to be succeeding. Al-Zaman reports that many in Baghdad blame the security forces for either being incompetent, or for being actively complicit (e.g. taking bribes to allow cars through checkpoints) in the bombings.

The crime lab, which had been recently renovated with American aid funds, was almost completely destroyed. Obviously, a terrorist group would want to disrupt the forensics capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.

The Australian Broadcasting Co. has a video report:



AP's Brian Murphy also quotes Gen. Ray Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, to the effect that the explosives used in the past two days appear to have been less powerful than in the August and December attacks, but that guerrillas have developed new tactics-- having an armed band shoot it out with building security forces, e.g., clearing the way for a car bomb to be driven into the building. The US military suspects that there are bomb-making factories in the semi-rural areas just outside Baghdad, from which the payloads are driven into the capital. The guerrillas' strategy has also shifted, Odierno, said, from a attempt to mount a popular insurgency to overwhelm the capital [in 2004-2005] to a rearguard set of small terrorist actions aimed at destabilizing the Shiite-dominated government. [Cole would add that the reason for this shift is that the Sunni Arabs have been largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so that it is no longer plausible for them to take over the capital using their old demographic base in e.g. al-Mansur. Thus the spoiler actions of bombing downtown buildings, which cannot change the government but can keep it weak.]

Muhammad A. Salih reports for IPS that the Accountability and Justice Commission, which excluded some 500 candidates from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections, may be softening. It recently reinstated 59 candidates. The ostensible reason given for the exclusions was that the candidates were too closely linked to the banned Baath Party. But among those excluded was Salih al-Mutlak, who had sat in parliament as leader of the 11-seat National Dialogue Bloc and who had left the Baath Party in 1977. I am quoted saying that this move by the committee comes as too little, too late, and that the goal of the exclusions seems to be to make sure that the Shiite religious parties retain control of parliament, whichthey have had since January 2005.

Carnegie has a good overview of the politics of the exclusions. The authors maintain that Shiite ex-Baaithists were also banned, and that most of the 500 were minor political figures, but that the more prominent of them were Sunni Arabs, creating an impression of sectarian bias. The head of the Commission is a fundamentalist Shiite also running for parliament, a situation many have decried as inherently unfair.

The next big security challenge comes this weekend, with the advent of the 40th day commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at his shrine in the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad. Some 20,000 army troops, police and other security men have been positioned through the city to forestall bombings of the pilgrims or the shrine, which would have the potential to throw Iraq back into intense ethno-sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Pilgrims are being forbidden to wear burial shrouds, which some do to symbolize their willingness to be martyred along with Imam Husayn for the truth. I suppose authorities feel that the loose shrouds could too easily hide a belt bomb.


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Four charged in phone scheme at Sen. Landrieu's office ; Or, Rightwing Politics is Mostly Dirty Tricks

Four charged in phone scheme at Sen. Landrieu's office - USATODAY.com

James O'Keefe, the rightwing activist who tried to punk ACORN by dressing as a pimp, was endorsed in a resolution by 31 Republican congressmen as a role model. Yes, the very model of an upright gentleman.

So the political right wing ruled the United States for 8 years, holding all three branches of government during some of the W. era, and the result was a Democratic landslide in 2008. The more the Right is in power, the less it is liked.

But the Right in the US wants its way no matter what, and is constantly anxious that maybe the people will wake up to the scam that is being pulled on them by people who actually represent big corporations but claim to speak for the "people." Politics nowadays is about fatally crippling Obama and rolling back the Democratic surge, by any means possible.

Thus, you had the Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to defame at will candidates who don't kowtow to them, deploying all the billions at their disposal. This overturning of a hundred years of precedent by five far-right Republicans on the court was a deliberate attempt to undo the 2008 Democratic victory.

And now you have a Watergate-style break-in by James O'Keefe and associates at the Louisiana offices of Senator Mary Landrieu, seeking to bug her office.

O'Keefe played a role in attempting to discredit ACORN, an organization that aims at increasing voting rates among the poor (and therefore an object of hatred on the part of the Right, which thinks you shouldn't feed 'stray animals,' much less encourage them to vote.)

Ironically, O'Keefe is now charged with a felony, whereas it was never proven that, despite unprofessional trash talking in O'Keefe's videotape, the ACORN employees he sought to entrap ever actually did anything illegal.

Dirty tricks are nothing new from the Right, and are necessary, since they don't offer good governance and their main argument is that the Market will magically take care of everyone if only unscrupulous businessmen are left completely unregulated by the government.

This ideology is what got us into the present mess. So since the platform of the Right is obviously untrue, what is left but scummy attack videos and illegal office break-ins and bugging. The public after all has an extremely short memory or mostly doesn't much care about politics, so why not try to manipulate them? Maybe you could even convince them in the midst of a Depression that the Market loves them and will put them to work if only the super-rich can be unleashed on their behalf again and the bad Government can be handcuffed.

Why, we should even let Bernie Madoff out of jail to vindicate himself-- the pyramid really does work if only you let it go on, you know.

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Beauty in Arab Culture Quizas in Arabic: Riachi's "Belaaks"

Headline news of the sort on which I concentrate on at Informed Comment is driven by dramatic events, with violence being the most dramatic. But it is also important to fight back against the reduction of Arab culture to stereotypes that have become all too common in the West. So I want to offset some of the gloomier entries with some cultural stories or just pleasant experiences.

One of the more original Arabic music albums of 2009 was Jean-Marie Riachi's "Belaaks," a hybrid of jazz, gypsy, Latin American and other influences performed by some of today's leading Lebanese singers. The CD exemplifies the role of Beirut in not just transmitting culture between east and west but in achieving creative syntheses that underline the more positive side of globalization.

The title single-- "Belaaks" [On the Contrary]- Arab jazz from - Jean Marie Riachi Feat. Rami Ayach & Abir Nehme -- is an Arabic version of of the 1947 hit, "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés, which has been covered by many artists, including Cole Porter, Doris Day, Celia Cruz, Samantha Fox and the Pussycat Dolls.

Belaaks:



This is the iTunes preview of the CD.


Abir Nehme

Riachi produced the theme song for the Hollywood film, "Spy Games."

From Riachi's website:

“For years, my passion for music changed my life. Some songs are like an old, dependable friend. I've always tried to interpret and perform these songs differently: my way. My love for these songs and my passion for music made me create "Belaaks".

In 2006, I left Beirut and went to Orsay, a southwestern suburb of Paris. I lived in a small inn of 8 rooms and invited musicians to work on the Belaaks project, my very own “timeless” album.
Musicians travelled from Brazil, Algeria, France and other parts of Europe. . .

Once I returned to Beirut, I invited many of my friends, Rami, Yara, Jihad Akl, Abir, Sevine and Aline Lahoud to add their Lebanese charm to the album. They were as excited as I was, and brought their own passion to the music.

The title song Belaaks is a version of the classic Quizás, Quizás, Quizás that has been through several interpretations, Riachi’s being the most recent. The track starts with a quarrel between two loved ones about a promise to love each other forever that turned out to be just the opposite, “belaaks, belaaks, belaaks”. However as the song climaxes the couple make up and declare their love for each other.

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Juan Cole in Second Life, Virtually Speaking, Thursday at 9 ET

Juan Cole will be a guest in the Second Life virtual world on Jay Ackroyd's Virtually Speaking interview show at 9 pm Eastern, 1/28/2010.

Note that this is much better than just passively watching that Avatar movie over and over again.

Listen live on Blog Talk Radio:
Virtually Speaking with Juan Cole

Subscribe - free - to Virtually Speaking podcasts on iTunes
1. Log into iTunes
2. Select iTunes Store
3. Seach Virtually Speaking

Join the
Virtually Speaking FB page for weekly program announcements

Join the studio audience in Second Life:

Free Second Life accounts start here.


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37 Killed, over 100 wounded in Hotel Bombings in Baghdad; Guerrillas Seek to Isolate, Destabilize Maliki Gov't; Chemical Ali Executed

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic on Monday's string of bombings in Baghdad, in which late reports say 37 persons were killed and more than 100 wounded. The bombings especially targeted the Jadiriya district, where many foreigners, diplomats, and Iraqi policiticians reside. Al-Zaman says that most leaders of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, including Ammar al-Hakim and parliamentarian Humam al-Hamudi, live there and there is a presence as guards of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of ISCI.

Two car bombs targeted the Palestine Meridien and the Babil hotels.

Other bombings sought to damage Al-Zuhur Hotel in a complex of hotel buildings that includes the al-Hamra' and the Qurtaj.

Al-Hayat says that an Interior Ministry official alleged that all the bombings were suicide bombings. A Baghdad security official was quoted as saying that the suicide bomber who targeted the al-Hamra Hotel was accompanied by a band of armed men who shot it out with the hotel guards before the bomber ran his car into the building and detonated its payload.

Al=Zaman says that three katyusha rockets also targeted the US embassy in the green zone downtown. Parliament abruptly ended its session, with parliamentarians and their guards shouting that the katyushas falling on the green zone could target their session at any moment, and hurrying out of the hall.

In other violence on Monday, 7 were killed in political attacks in Mosul and two policemen were attacked in the northern contested city of Kirkuk.

AP has video:



The bombings are similar to those in August and December, so that it is probably not accurate to tie them to the upcoming parliamentary elections as some observers. including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are doing. They are not connected to specific events, but rather the manifestation of a still-powerful Sunni Arab guerrilla insurgency unreconciled to the emergence of a Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated Iraq, and which is determined to destabilize and overthrow this new ruling government.

Sawt al-Iraq transmits analysis from the Kuwaiti al-Qabas that points out that the attacks demonstrate the existence of a sophisticated intelligence and planning cell within the insurgency that is capable of gathering the detailed information necessary for such an attack and coordinating multiple field officers. The piece also laments that Iraqi government security forces seem still to be relatively incompetent at forestalling these periodic big assaults on Baghdad's landmarks. Those security forces are at the moment a laughingstock because of their preference for phoney 'bomb-detecting devices' that are just a scam of some British company, which the UK government has now forbidden to export to Iraq.

Al-Qabas also argues that the attacks on fancy hotels were clearly aimed at hurting foreign investment in Iraq, at discouraging foreigners from visiting the country (and thus isolating it) and in hurting public confidence. The hotels also have the advantage of being relatively soft targets with regard to security, as compared to Iraqi military installations. Since so many journalists stay in those hotels, the attacks were sure to get a lot of publicity and to send the signal that the new Iraq is unstable and perhaps unsustainable.

But if the bombings are not necessarily motivated by upcoming elections, the article says, they are nevertheless likely to have an effect on them. They come after 500 mostly Sunni Arab candidates were disqualified from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections, and at a time when rumors are rife that high-ranking Sunni Arabs will be purged from the military and security agencies.

These steps derive in part from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's preoccupation with the threat of a Baathist comeback, but the purges he backs risk further alienating ordinary Sunni Arabs who had joined the party for instrumental rather than ideological reasons. The party after all ruled for 35 years, and few Iraqis had nothing at all to do with it.

And the attacks came on the day that the Iraqi government executed Ali Hasan al-Majid al-Tikriti, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, who used poison gas to repress the Kurds in 1988 (killing 5000 at Halabja), and who brutally put down a Shiite rebellion in spring, 1991, after the Gulf War. Aljazeera English has his obituary:



Iraqi Kurdistan erupted with joy at the news of the execution, though some Kurds expressed disappointment that it was not televised. The Iraqi government took pride in the execution having not been marred by the taunting and use of cell phones to record it that marred the execution of Saddam Hussein, and Kurdistan officials concurred. One regret many Kurds had was that the judgment against "Chemical Ali" had condemned him for "crimes against humanity" rather than, as they had wanted, for "genocide."

The president of the Kurdistan super-province of Iraq, Massoud Barzani, is in Washington for consultations with President Barack Obama, another point of pride for Iraqi Kurds.

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Roberts: Death Rates don't Actually Decline During Wars

Leslie F. Roberts writes in a guest op-ed for Informed Comment

An astonishing version of the Human Security Report was released this past week. It was astonishing for its primary headline: “NEW REPORT REVEALS THAT DEATH RATES DECLINE DURING TODAY’S WARS.”

The researchers at Simon Fraser University used the war-monitoring PIRO dataset in Sweden, along with UN and World Bank data, and expert guesses, to examine a variety of recent conflicts. They focused on UN statistics of under-5 mortality to assess the health effects of these conflicts. In most of the wars they examined, under-5 death rates were lower at the end of the conflict than at the start. They attribute this previously unseen pattern to the changing nature of war, health development in general, and humanitarian assistance in those countries affected by conflict. This would be great news, if only it were true.

In learning these lessons, the authors defined wars as causing at least 1000 deaths in a country irrespective of size and to be continuing when at least 25 deaths per year were occurring. This means that many of the wars they examined (in places like Chad, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, and Senegal) involved tiny fractions of the total population for short periods of time. The nation-wide surveys on which the UN bases its under-5 mortality estimates are typically conducted with host governments and repeated every few years. Imagine someone saying that the inflation adjusted median income in the US rose between 1997 and 2002 therefore terrorist attacks are good for people’s finances. That is a similar leap of logic as the finding that mortality rates go down in times of war.

The report’s analysis also does not weigh the wars so that the largest wars are weighted more… in fact the conclusions basically exclude the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This also has the effect of exaggerating the importance of minor conflicts such as those in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire and diminishing the lessons from major conflicts in Sudan, Cambodia, and DR Congo. The report concludes that small focused surveys done in real-time to report war deaths are so potentially fraught with limitations, that they should not be conducted.

Why is this important for the average American? This is very much about the ability of governments to control the message when it comes to civilians dying, and the inability to hold the UN accountable for humanitarian situations which are ignored. This report, and the UN, advocate measuring mortality in partnership with combating governments via large nationwide surveys every few years. This approach has little value for documenting the sorts of crises unfolding at this moment in the Central African Republic or Haiti. For that, smaller, careful surveys, limited to the areas of crisis, with just a few questions, are more useful. These real-time surveys tend to be conducted by private NGO’s, relief agencies, or academics. They consistently record more deaths than government statistics or media reports. This is not usually an issue of honesty, it is that the household surveys with their focus and short periods of recall are typically more accurate. For example, over the past 8 years, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of random households has estimated the number of jobs created as almost 50% higher than its employer payroll monitoring of 150,000 major employers. The household surveys just capture more little events, be they people dying or people starting to work for themselves.

The Bush Administration benefited enormously from the confusion it was able to trigger and support in the debate over how many people died because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The highest profile estimates made were published in the British medical journal The Lancet. (And, for example, reporters who called the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) when the first 2004 Iraq report in The Lancet was released were referred to a “Harvard statistician” familiar with the study…a statistician actually at the American Enterprise Institute and who had been a signatory on the Project for a New American Century call for Iraqi invasion.) Perhaps the most aggressive critic of those studies was a previously little known economist at the Royal Holloway University named Michael Spagat, who, it was revealed in the Huffington Post on Saturday, was a “technical advisor” on this new Human Security Report.

In war-induced crisis after crisis, be it Biafra in the 1960’s or Somalia today, NGO’s or scientists with small, statistically weak samples undertaken in the most difficult of settings, have brought the world’s attention to the places it most needed to be. This report is a brazen attack on the ability of non-state and non-UN actors to tell the world about humanitarian crises. It would be a tragedy indeed if an indirect effect of the US invasion of Iraq was to create a more cynical, disempowered, and ineffective humanitarian community.


Leslie F. Roberts
Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University

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Oregon's rich getting richer and all others falling behind, wage study shows | But it's a National Trend and We are Becoming Florence

Oregon's rich getting richer and all others falling behind, wage study shows | Oregon Business News - OregonLive.com

' The free-market fervor that has gripped the country since the Ronald Reagan administration has allowed the country, for the most part, to remain competitive in a globalized economy. But some contend that the trickle-down economy has sent just that -- a trickle -- to the masses, while steering a torrent of riches to the wealthy.

"There's something going on at the very top, an explosion of the 'uber-rich,'" said Bryce Ward, a senior economist with Portland-based consulting firm ECONorthwest. "There's been no growth in a decade for the middle." '

Not just Oregon-- its the whole country. And if you project it out at current tax rates and loopholes, it looks like a permanent oligarchy.

US becoming late medieval Florence, with new Medicis:

'During a reign of 30 years, Cosimo [Medici] uses his fortune to maintain absolute control over the internal affairs of Florence. Opponents find themselves squeezed to financial extinction.

Within the city this control is discreet. Outside, in relations with other powers, it is generally acknowledged that Cosimo is the ruler of Florence - by now a city state of considerable significance.

The expansion of Florentine control over the surrounding region accelerates before and during Cosimo's lifetime. Arezzo falls to a Florentine army in 1384. Pisa, a great prize, is taken in 1406. Livorno, of immense value as a seaport, is purchased in 1421.'

Substitute Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley for Cosimo, Iraq and Afghanistan for Arezzo and Pisa.

Note that in 1527 republicans in Florence made a last attempt to eject the Medicis. Instead they get saddled with a Duke for succeeding centuries. We are in danger of becoming a grand duchy.

The unbridled wealth of a few financiers is as fatal to a republic as the unrivaled power of a few generals.

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Afghanistan postpones parliamentary elections

Afghanistan postpones parliamentary elections - latimes.com

The LAT lays out the basic facts around the postponement of parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. The Afghan press stresses two factors aboveall:

Afghanpaper.com writing in Dari Persian says it was told by concerned Afghan officials who declined to allow their names to be used that the four-month delay was almost entirely a result of pressure from the Obama administration and its Western allies, and was aimed at allowing UN election workers to allow for anti-fraud and anti-corruption measures to be taken so as to forestall a fiasco like the August presidential election, where substantial numbers of ballots were disqualified.

In addition, the electoral commission says it only has $70 mn. in the kitty to hold the parliamentary elections, which will cost $120. President Hamid Karzai is asking the international community for the other $50 mn., so presumably he had the Independent Electoral Commission make this announcement now so that he can go hat in hand to international donors at the Istanbul and London conferences. So the postponement is being positioned by Karzai and his people as a fundraising stunt (the political scientists would speak of the extraction of strategic rent).

But Afghanpaper.com suggests that the money shortfall is only a cover story, and if we took that position seriously it would indicate that the Obama team just does not want another election fiasco in Afghanistan in the build-up to the 2010 midterms.





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The Irrelevance of Bin Ladin

An audio message allegedly from Usamah Bin Laden was released Sunday, claiming that the attempted Christmas day airline attack over Detroit was his work.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert two things about the audio. First, I do not think it is genuine. Second, I think it demonstrates that Bin Laden, whether he is dead or alive, is now irrelevant.

Nothing about this 'message' smells right.

The audio's claim that Bin Laden was behind the Christmas day bombing is dubious. The modus operandi of Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab bore no resemblance to that of Bin Ladin's al-Qaeda. Bin Laden plans operations for years beforehand; attempts to arrange for simultaneous large attacks or attacks on symbolic targets; and uses teams. One guy hastily recruited in an amateurish attempt that only blows up his own crotch? That isn't al-Qaeda.

All the police work so far in the public record points to Yemen as the place Abdulmutallab was radicalized, trained and equipped for this mission. Bin Laden has no command and control capabilities in Yemen, and that his father hailed from there before moving to Saudi Arabia in the early 20th century is irrelevant. "Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" is 300 guys holed up in isolated Maarib in Yemen. Bin Laden has no means to communicate with them (he no longer uses cell or satellite phones because the US can trace them). AQAP already announced that it was behind the Christmas bomb plot, and it wouldn't be like the real Bin Laden to upstage them.

Then there is the mystery that the USG Open Source Center, which monitors radical Muslim web sites, reported that there was no sign of the Bin Laden audio being posted to them on Sunday:

'FYI -- Bin Ladin Audio Statement Not Observed on Jihadist Websites on 24 January
Jihadist Websites -- OSC Summary
Sunday, January 24, 2010 . . .

As of 1200 GMT on 24 January, jihadist websites monitored by OSC have not been observed to post the Bin Ladin audio statement released on an Arab media website and filed as GMP20100124635002.'

I think even the jihadis know that this thing is likely a fraud, and that in any case it adds nothing to the significance of Mutallab's operation (already claimed by others) or to the debate over the plight of the Palestinians. If it is Bin Laden, it is a pitiful Bin Laden trying to stay relevant by grandstanding and stealing others' thunder.

Aljazeera Arabic also demoted it. The channel aired part of it in conjunction with an interview with former US ambassador Edward P. Djerejian, now head of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. I can't remember another instance where Aljazeera gave a prominent US voice a real-time opportunity to rebut a Bin Laden tape. Djerejian sensibly pointed out that the Obama administration is trying hard for a two-state solution that would in fact ameliorate the conditions of the Gazans, so that Bin Laden's ire seemed misdirected. Aljazeera's editorial board clearly considered the audio not very newsworthy and moreover they like the Obama administration enough to give a US former diplomat the opportunity to refute it.

By the way, Obama's argument that his election and his approach to Middle East issues would in itself put al-Qaeda in a difficult position is borne out by Aljazeera's approach to this Bin Laden audio. Aljazeera is aware that Obama is pressuring the Israelis to halt settlements in the West Bank and that he is trying to close Guantanamo (where one innocent Aljazeera correspondent was imprisoned on false charges for some years).

Another clue: the alleged Usamah listed only one grievance, that of Palestine, and he framed it in terms of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Wouldn't he have some concerns about the US drone strikes on the positions of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest of Pakistan and in Afghanistan? About Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan war? If this is a recent audio, as shown by the reference to the December 25 attack, why not gloat about the attack on the CIA forward operating base by an al-Qaeda double agent only a few days afterward?

It is not like him to attempt to steal the thunder of Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas has already told al-Qaeda to butt out. Moreover, if all he has to offer is a lament about Gaza, then there is nothing distinctive about that. It makes him seem as though he is hitching his wagon to someone else's star. Bin Laden comes from a business background, and one of his principles was always to seek leverage. When a Muslim radical group already has a lively insurgency going, he feels, there is little point in his putting money and resources into it. That is one reason he never focused on Palestine. He is about encouraging operations that would not otherwise be undertaken, as against US embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole at Aden, and New York and Washington.

The diction about the suffering people in Gaza, moreover, is not Bin Laden's style. Contrary to what is often alleged, his concerns with Palestine go back to at least the 1980s, and are real and central to his ideology. The al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in the 1980s used to get together and give each other sermons on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem on a frequent basis. Bin Laden's partner until 1989, Abdullah Azzam, was a Palestinian activist who thought that fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was more realistic than the PLO struggle against Israel at that point in time, and more likely to redound to the cause of political Islam; but Palestine was always on the agenda for the future.

But Bin Laden has never been interested in Palestinian nationalism, or, indeed, in nationalism of any sort. His devotion is to pan-Islam. His objection is the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. He has always been focused on Muslim control of Islamic sacred space. Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam, associated in Muslim lore with the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey and miraculous ascension into heaven, and a city that Muslims ruled longer than any other Power in its history (from the 7th to the early 20th century). Bin Laden's objection to US troops being in Saudi Arabia was that they then represented an 'occupation' of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He invoked the same sort of trope with regard to Jerusalem.

Last winter during the Gaza War, an audio tape attributed to Bin Laden did not neglect to mention the need to recover al-Aqsa Mosque (the Muslim holy site in Jerusalem) for Islam. Before 9/11, in early 2001, Bin Laden was penning odes to the liberation of Jerusalem and reading them at his son's wedding.

The new audio makes no reference to Jerusalem or al-Aqsa at all, just to Gaza. It would just be uncharacteristic for Bin Laden to neglect to mention them.

I am not arguing that the Israeli colonization of the West Bank and siege of poor little Gaza does not generate anti-Western sentiment or make for a set of recruiting tools for al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias are right about that. I am arguing that in this audio, "Bin Laden" is not speaking as he usually would about the issue. For Arab nationalists, a Palestinian state that could accede to the Arab League is what they are fighting for. For pan-Islamists like Bin Laden, it is the holy city of Jerusalem to be returned to Muslim rule.

Here is a translation of the new Bin Laden audio file:

' "In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful
"Peace be upon those who follow the right path
"On behalf of Osama to Obama: if our message could be sent to you by the word, we should not have sent in by planes.

"The message we wanted to provide you with the aircraft of the hero Umar Farouk, May God lighten his sufferings confirms the previous messages transmitted by the heroes of September 11, which were repeated before and after that date.

"The message is that the United States can not aspire to security before it becomes a reality in Palestine. It is unfair that you have a quiet life while our brethren in Gaza live in bad conditions."

"By the will of God, our attacks against you will continue as long as your support the Israelis.

"Peace be upon those who follow the right path." '

I don't know if the old monster is dead, and some clever young engineers just have a program to emulate his voice, or whether he is alive and horribly disfigured (we have not seen him in an authentic video since October 2004). But I do have the severest doubts that he issued this audio message. And the interesting thing is that even if he did, almost no one in the Muslim world seems to care.

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Gates Strikes out In Pakistan; Obama's AfPak Policies in Disarray

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates's trip to Pakistan this weekend has in many ways been public relations disaster, and I think it is fair to say that he came away empty-handed with regard to his chief policy goals in Islamabad. Getting Pakistan right is key to President Barack Obama's policy of escalating the Afghanistan War, and judging by Gates's visit to Islamabad, Obama is in worse shape on the AfPak front than he is even in Massachusetts. Since he has bet so heavily on Afghanistan and Pakistan, this rocky road could be momentous for his presidency.

In one of a series of gaffes, Gates seemed to admit in a television interview that the private security firm, Blackwater, was active in Pakistan.

The Pakistani public has a widespread resentment against US incursions against the country's sovereignty (64% say the US is a danger to the country's stability). But it also has a sort of paranoid obsession with Blackwater, which they suspect of covert operations to disrupt security in the country (i.e. they blame Blackwater for bombings that Americans see as the work of the Taliban). Thus, Gates's statement produced a media frenzy. (Jeremy Scahill has alleged in The Nation that Blackwater is in fact in Pakistan in a support role to CIA drone attacks in the country's mountainous Northwest on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets).

Dawn, a relatively pro-Western English daily, quoted the exchange, saying Gates was asked by the interviewer on a private television station,

' “And I want to talk, of course, about another issue that has come up again and again about the private security companies that have been operating in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan. . . Xe International, formerly known as Blackwater and Dyncorp. Under what rules are they operating here in Pakistan?”

Gates replied,

' “Well, they’re operating as individual companies here in Pakistan, in Afghanistan and in Iraq because there are theatres of war involving the United States.”

The Urdu press concluded that he had admitted Blackwater is active on Pakistani soil, while noting denials from the US embassy in Islamabad that that was what Gates had meant. The News, the mainstream English-language sister of Jang, was also insistent that Gates had let the cat out of the bag.

Gates had one strike against him, since he came to Pakistan from India. Moreover while in New Delhi he clearly was a traveling salesman for the US war materiel industries, who would like to pick up some of the $60 billion India is planning to spend on weapons in the next few years. During the Cold War, the US had mainly supplied Pakistan's military, and had been lukewarm to India, which Washington felt tilted toward Moscow. The current shift of US strategy to wooing India to offset growing Chinese power in Asia is taken by some Pakistanis as a demotion.

Then, he encouraged a greater Indian role in Afghanistan, including, according to the Times of London, possibly in training Afghan police. Pakistan considers Afghanistan its sphere of influence and the last thing it wants is a role for Indian security forces in training (and perhaps shaping the loyalty) of Afghan police. Germany is currently in charge of the police training program, but India is afraid that in the next few years NATO will depart, and that Pakistan will then redeploy its Taliban allies to capture the country for Islamabad's purposes. India is also concerned about significant Chinese investments, as in a big copper mine, in Afghanistan. So New Delhi is considering the police training mission.

In addition, Gates had praised Indian restraint in the face of the fall, 2008 attack on Mumbai (Bombay) by the Pakistani terrorist organization, the Lashkar-i Tayyiba [Army of the Good]. He warned the Pakistani leadership that India's forbearance could not be taken for granted the next time. That is a fair point, but it is not the sort of thing you say publicly on your way to Islamabad from Delhi if you want to be received as an honest broker. Pakistanis feel that India has inflicted many provocations on them, too, not least of which was the Indian security forces' often brutal repression in Muslim-majority Kashmir, where thousands have died since 1989 in a separatist movement with which Pakistanis deeply sympathize. (Pakistani guerrilla groups also did routinely slip into Indian Kashmir in support of local separatists).

Prominent members of the Pakistani Senate denounced Gates for setting up Pakistan as a sort of patsy and hostage to communal violence in India, and of fomenting a Washington-New Delhi 'conspiracy' against Islamabad. What if some Indian terrorist group carried out an attack in India? wasn't Gates giving New Delhi carte blanche, they asked, to blame Pakistan for it even in the absence of any evidence, and then to launch a war of aggression on Pakistan with the incident as a pretext?

The LAT said that "Gates, on the first day of a visit here, urged government officials to build on their offensives against militants . . ."

In fact, Gates was careful not to over-emphasize such demands, but there was a general public perception that he was doing so. The editorials in Urdu newspapers on Jan. 23, which the USG Open Source Center analyzed, complained bitterly about this further demand. Express sniffed that the US should establish security in Afghanistan and then everything would settle down in Pakistan's northwest. Khabrain rather cleverly pointed out that Pakistan has concentrated on limited territory in fighting its Taliban, which is wiser than the US policy of opening several fronts at once and getting bogged down.

Jang, which is mildly anti-American, said,

Describing Robert Gates' pro-Indian statements irresponsible, the editorial says: "It is believed that the political and military leaderships of Pakistan, with one voice, have made it clear to Gates and the titanic-size delegation accompanying him that in the present circumstances, it is not possible for Pakistan to accede to the persistent US demands of 'do more' and to further expand military operations in the tribal areas, because Pakistan not only has to secure the areas that it has taken control of from the militants but also has to strengthen and stabilize its position there."

Then the Pakistani military spokesman came out and flatly told Gates that the Swat and South Waziristan campaigns were it for now. The BBC reports, 'Maj Gen Abbas, head of public relations for the Pakistan army, told the BBC: "We are not going to conduct any major new operations against the militants over the next 12 months. . . The Pakistan army is overstretched and it is not in a position to open any new fronts. Obviously, we will continue our present operations in Waziristan and Swat." '

To be fair, the Pakistani military committed tens of thousands of troops to these two campaigns, in Swat and South Waziristan, and is in fact attempting to garrison the captured areas so as to prevent the return of the Pakistani Taliban. In the past two years, the Pakistani army has lost over 2,000 soldiers in such fighting against Taliban in the Northwest, a little less than half the troops the US lost in its 6-year Iraq War.

The Pakistani military campaigns of the past year, however, have not targeted those radical groups most active in cross-border raids into Afghanistan-- the Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar's Old Taliban, the Haqqani Network of Siraj Haqqani in North Waziristan, or whatever cells exist in Pakistan of the largely Afghanistan-based Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) of Gulbadin Hikmatyar. Washington worries that the effectiveness of its own troop escalation in Afghanistan will be blunted if these three continue to have havens on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. And, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani worries that the US offensive in Afghanistan will push thousands radicals over the border into Pakistan, further destabilizing the country's northwest.

Gates made a clumsy attempt to mollify Pakistani public opinion over the very unpopular US drone strikes on suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban cells in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, by offering the Pakistani military 12 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones of its own. But the Pakistani military pointed out that the outdated RQ-7 Shadow UAV's on offer were unarmed and merely for aerial reconnaissance, and maintained that Pakistan's arsenal already contained such drones.

Gates addressed the Pakistani cadets at the National Defense University, attempting to emphasize that he wanted more of these future officers to study in the US, and that Pakistan is in the driver's seat with regard to the anti-Taliban counter-insurgency campaign. Its message was largely missed in the civilian Urdu press.

Does it matter? One sometimes see Americans dismiss Pakistan as "small" or "unimportant." Think again. Pakistan is the world's sixth-largest country by population (170 million),just after Brazil (200 million). It is as big as California, Oregon and Washington state rolled together. Pakistan's 550,000-man military is among the best-trained and best-equipped in the global South. Pakistan has within it a middle class with a Western-style education and way of life (automobiles, access to internet and international media) of some 37 million-- roughly 5 million families. (Pakistan has over 5 million automobiles now and is an emerging auto producer and market, with auto production at 16 percent of its manufaturing sector). If we go by local purchasing power, it is the world's 27th largest economy. It is a nuclear power with a sophisticated if small scientific establishment, and produced a Nobelist in physics.

Gates went to Pakistan to emphasize to Islamabad that the US was not again going to abandon it and Afghanistan, as it had in the past. Pakistan, he wanted to say, is now a very long-term ally of Washington. He hoped for cooperation against the Haqqani, Taliban and Hizb-i Islami guerrillas. He wanted to allay conspiracy theories about US mercenary armies crawling over Pakistan, occasionally blowing things up (and then blaming the explosions on Pakistanis) in order to destabilize the country and manipulate its policies.

The message his mission inadvertently sent was that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated; that he is pressuring Pakistan to take on further counter-insurgency operations against Taliban in the Northwest, which the country flatly lacks the resources to do; and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it.

In baseball terms, Gates struck out. In cricket terms, Gates was out in the most embarrassing way a batsman can be out, that is, leg before wicket.

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Milne: Haiti's poverty is treated as some ­baffling quirk of history...when in reality it is the direct ­consequence of " . . . colonial exploitation

Seumas Milne: "Haiti's poverty is treated as some ­baffling quirk of history...when in reality it is the direct ­consequence of a uniquely brutal ­relationship with the outside world — notably the US, France and Britain — stretching back centuries." (h/t reddit.com).

One of the many ways in which Aljazeera is superior to American news programs is that it has a frequent 5-minute History spot, in which reporters review some key historical turning point. In all the wall-to-wall coverage of Haiti's earthquake that I have seen on US news channels, I cannot remember Toussaint L'Ouverture being mentioned even once. I cannot remember any extended consideration of the decades when the US Marines ruled the country or why FDR stopped that. I can't remember a report on recent US history with Aristide.

It is as though a top executive actively ordered the reporters to avoid any context, any background, any history. The so-called "History Channel" has nothing about Haiti. The shows are "Sniper," "Extreme Marksmen," "Seven Signs of the Apocalypse," and the "Nostradamus Effect."

There have been a couple of good essays at the History News Network, but they are more impassioned op-eds than explanations of the history (see "Too Hard for the White Folks? Americans and the Haitian Revolution," and Haiti's troubled history with the US and France.

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the History!"

Since MSNBC is positioning itself as a 'progressive' news network, couldn't it do up some inexpensive short spots on historical background?

Milne continues:

"When the liberation theologist Aristide was elected on a platform of development and social justice, his challenge to Haiti's oligarchy and its international sponsors led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004. Since then, thousands of UN troops have provided security for a discredited political system, while ­global financial institutions have imposed a relentlessly neoliberal diet, pauperising Haitians still further.

Thirty years ago, for example, Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple of rice. In the mid-90s the IMF forced it to slash tariffs, the US dumped its subsidised surplus on the country, and Haiti now imports the bulk of its rice. Tens of thousands of rice farmers were forced to move to the jerry-built slums of Port-au-Prince. Many died as a result last week."

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Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules

Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules | World news | guardian.co.uk

Of course it was illegal. There are only two conditions under which war may be launched according to the United Nations Charter, which most countries have signed. One is self-defense. Iraq did not attack the US in 2003. The other is if the UN Security Council authorizes a war, as with the Gulf War where collective security was invoked to push back the aggression on Kuwait. The UNSC could also authorize intervention to stop genocide, e.g.

Craig Murray, then a UK ambassador to a Muslim-majority country who was copied with diplomatic positions from London, confirms that the initial position of the Blair government was that previous UNSC resolutions did not provide an automatic trigger for war. The British inquiry into the Iraq War, which sheds loads of illumination on the Bushies' lies and crimes, is being studiously ignored by US mass media.

There was no UNSC authorization, and no issue of self-defense. The most egregious violation of the post- World War II international order by a major Power we have yet seen. I said all this in my first blog posting here at Informed Comment in April of 2002.

You kind of hope it means Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley and the Neocons can never safely vacation in Europe again.



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(Vote for this entry at Reddit.com).

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Biden Attempts to Mediate Sunni-Shiite Struggle in lead-up to Elections

Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Baghdad on Friday in a bid to settle conflicts over the March 7 parliamentary elections.

The exclusion of hundreds of candidates from the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections by the Accountability and Justice Committee, and signed off on by the High Electoral Commission, continues to generate lively controversy in Iraq. On Friday, the HEC head, Faraj al-Haidari, told AP that he expected yet more candidates to be excluded. Most of the ex-Baathists being forbidden from running are Sunni Arabs, many running on secular parties, so that the move benefits the Shiite religious parties. Some suspect that the latter are being pressured by Iran or are trying to please it by excluding Arab nationalists (many of whom supported Iraq's invasion of Iran in the 1980s). Reidar Vissar breaks down the some 500 candidates excluded by party and finds that the list targets the secular parties.

For the Obama administration, the stakes are high. If current Sunni-Shiite tensions over the elections boil over, the ensuing instability could endanger the withdrawal timetable to which Obama is committed. The 110,000 US troops now in Iraq will help lock the country down for the March 7 elections, and after that more than half will be withdrawn through the spring and summer.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Biden met with the presidential council (President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi (a Sunni Arab); and Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi (a Shiite). Abdul Mahdi is recently returned from Iran, and is said to have briefed Biden on Tehran's view of the Iraq crisis. Biden then met separately with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Zaman says that Biden agrees with Talabani that the Accountability and Justice Committee has no legal standing, and urged Iraqi leaders nt to allow it to damage the credibility of the March parliamentary elections.

Al-Hayat writing in Arabic points out that there is a conflict between President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over the issue. Talabani questioned the legitimacy of the Accountability and Justice Committee, saying no such body had been authorized by the parliament. He also said that while those who followed or were close to Saddam Hussein could be legitimately excluded from politics, mere former members of the Baath Party should not (the party ruled Iraq for 35 years and lots of people felt they had to join for various reasons, even just to get a passport.) Al-Maliki has supported the exclusions, though he went further in a speech on Friday and said that the electoral commission alone could not hope to wipe out the Baath legacy, but rather it was the task of the Iraqi electorate.

Biden's mission was rejected as outside interference by several Iraqi politicians, including Abdul Karim Anazi, a leader of the (Shiite fundamentalist) Islamic Dawa- Internal Organization, and al-Maliki spokesman Ali Dabbagh.

One possible solution suggested by some is to have Salih Mutlak, the most prominent of the politicians excluded from runnin in March, sign a formal disavowel of the Baath Party. Mutlak's National Dialogue Bloc has 11 seats in the current parliament and is part of the joint Sunni-Shiite, secular-leaning National Coalition. On Friday, Mutlak said he would sign no disavowal, since it was effectively a 'test of honorability' to which he could not subject himself. He has appealed the ruling of the High Electoral Commission to the courts, and says he expects to be reinstated as a candidate.

Aljazeera English reports on the electoral controversy in Iraq over the exclusion of 'Baathist' candidates and parties.



The Baath or 'resurrection' party was formed in the 1940s and combined pan-Arab nationalism with socialist economic principles. After a short-lived coup in 1963, it came to power in Iraq in 1968 and ruled until overthrown by George W. Bush in 2003. A one-party state, it created a large public sector and repressed dissent. In the period 1988-1992 it committed massacres of Kurds and Shiites over their perceived inclination toward Iran, with which Iraq fought a vicious war 1980-1988. From 1979, the head of the party was Saddam Hussein, a particularly brutal dictator who promoted a disproportionate number of Sunni Arabs into leadership roles.

The Baath era still haunts Iraqi politics. On Friday, Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr denounced his Shiite rival, cleric Ammar al-Hakim, for cooperating with the American occupation and being soft on the Baathists. Al-Hakim leads the Shiite fundamentalist Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has indeed cooperated with the US. But ISCI is as anti-Baath as the other Shiite religious parties. Sadr is likely trying to hurt ISCI's electoral chances.



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