War Porn: Occupation, Sex, Prostitution

Several years ago I linked to articles that report the rise of prostitution among young Iraqi girls. Many of these prostitutes serviced US military men in Iraq.



As usual, the press has ignored this story, as it has much of the reality on the ground, such as the sexual hrassment of femake US soldiers by their male comrades, the use of chemical weapons in Falluja, the atrocities committed by US soldiers, the toll on civilians of the air campaign and so on.

Now a story out of Syria, where almost a million Iraqi refugees have fled, documents a flourishing sex trade that exploits penurious Iraqis. Reuters writes:

A score of young Iraqi women in tight, shimmering gowns shuffle across the nightclub dance floor under the hungry eyes of Gulf Arabs at nearby tables.

The band blasts out Iraqi songs into the early hours as the watching youths join the dancing or summon girls to sit with them -- there is little pretence about what gets transacted at this neon-lit nightspot half an hour's drive north of Damascus.

The dancers, some in their early teens, do not want to talk, but one said she had no other way to support her family. "My father was killed in Baghdad and our money is finished," muttered the dark-haired girl in a black and silver dress.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR calls it "survival sex", a desperate way to cope for Iraqi refugees whose savings have run out since they escaped the violence at home.

As I noted before, the human toll of war expands far beyond destruction of lives and property. It destroys human spirits. Read more!

The Cages of Birds in a Fat House

Like cages full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.

Their evil deeds have no limit;
they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it,
they do not defend the rights of the poor.

Should I not punish them for this?”
declares the Lord.
“Should I not avenge myself
on such a nation as this?

“A horrible and shocking thing
has happened in the land:

The prophets prophesy lies,
the priests rule by their own authority,
and my people love it this way.
But what will you do in the end?
--- Jer. 5:25-31

In a recent poll, 90 percent of Iraqis expressed growing despair in what's become a civil war in their country. Their psychological distress no doubt reflects what some have described as hell. (Also, see this essay on "The Creation of Hell.")

What is even more apparent, though, is that the US public has little comprehension of the daily terror and uncertainty of this life in Iraq. Perhaps many think of Iraq's civil war along the lines of America's own ghettos where gangs fight over turf and where innocents are killed.

I have argued in the past that many Americans willingly suppress their awareness of these realities. Perhaps it is out of apathy, busyness, or even a malicious disregard for the suffering of those we consider the enemy.

I would argue, though, that all of these excuses are manifestations of a form of despair that is spiritual and ethical in nature and that represents an evil so great that it creates the conditions for greater evils.

Talk of what led up to the war rarely broaches issues that you can characterize as spiritual. Even those religious commentators who don't simply spout the rhetoric of Xtendom facing down the enemies of civilization and Christian culture usually frame their discussion in political terms that reflect a liberal vocabulary that seems empty to me, if simply because that vocabulary is spiritually vacant.

The spiritual malaise that led to this war originates in fear and the reaction that people exhibited at the 911 attack exhibited little public virtue, as the Machiavellians might put it. Instead of facing such atrocity with any semblance of courage, the country's leaders responded as so many bullies whose worst fear had come to light: their own feelings of inadequacy and weakness.

Nor did they exhibit anything that you might call religious courage. To speak of a religious courage opposed to an ethical courage may appear odd, yet it is easy enough to cite examples of this kind of courage. The early Christian church martyrs exhibited just such courage. In the face of immense oppression and persecution, not to mention torture, these martyrs faced the possibility of extinction with joy and hope. They did not react in violence, nor did they band together to wreak vengeance.

As much as Americans hate to think that there's any meaning to corporate sinfulness—relying instead on some corrupt image of the monadic individual--this war and its aftermath must bring to consciousness exactly that realization of sin perpetrated by a horde. After all, the majority of people in the US backed this war until it started going bad. Many voted for the man who perpetrated the fiasco.

Until Americans begin to plumb the depths of their spirits and acknowledge their complicity in this monumental crime against the Iraqi people, they will never solve the problem of terror.

In all the religious rhetoric that the Xtian preachers spout--even those from the Left--few invoke the words and message of the Hebrew prophets. This is shameful. For those prophets like Jeremiah inveighing against imperial pretensions and injustice made in the name of a nation state point not simply to the leaders but also the corrupt and spiritual blindness of an entire nation.

These words might seems to echo the more fanatical cries of the Jihadis. I can only say that Americans must stand up to the hate-filled and unjust violence purveyed by these fanatics. But to do so, they must take the road of faith and repentance, with an open heart disciplined by failure and the experience of imperial folly. But not only must they hear the fanatics in the street outside but they must also hear the voices of those they invite into their own homes.

Americans must begin to see their world as larger than the environs of US borders. They must begin to see themselves as world citizens where the actions that they perform in their food market or gas station can potentially affect the lives of others. Americans must reject their narcissistic egotism that sees the world in their own image and begin to see that others are different and believe differently.

True justice demands not that we see the world as having the same desires, needs, and dreams as we do. It demands seeing ourselves in the nothingness that is common to us all in our most painful and powerless moments. It is embracing that nothingness and taking it into our hearts and forming our will around the contours of its freedom and liberating breath.

As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, any God that’s worth its/his/her salt demands justice. If that justice does not include the less fortunate and those forgotten by us in our busyness, then that simply means that we refuse to listen to the calls for justice.

It is obvious that the leaders of this country—whether left, right, or center—borrow an old grammar and vocabulary whose story will result in instituting the machinery of injustice. For the new world that is taking shape through war and struggle, the old stories do not work any longer. They are fairy tales that the nation-state nanny tells its cowed and fearful children to keep away the terrors of night.

But the terror is real; the boogeyman does have teeth and does eat children. Like so many stories of family and personal tragedy show, often the perpetrator is someone known, a relative and no stranger. The beast sits in the heart of the very fathers and brothers and mothers who are meant to protect us but whose hearts have been warped by temptation and corruption to betray and terrorize their own.

Indeed, the prophet is right. The prophets lie, the priests rule in their own name and we do indeed love it. Read more!

The Dead Will Laugh George Bush to Hell: The Historian Reviews the Lie that Is Bush's Iraq

Martin van Creveld likes to tell it like it is. He said Bush's invasion of Iraq was the worst military decision in 2,000 years and now he says the US and the world can live with a nuclear Iran. As pinpointed repeatedly thruout this blog, this view only echoes expert assessments that a nuclear Iran threatening world peace is a nightmare propagated by people who want Iranian oil fields. The US Army war College itself has written extensively about this issue.

Creveld--an Israeli military historian whom some consider the greatest war historian alive--echoes these views when he writes:

Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.

General John Abizaid, the former commander of United States Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts to argue that the world can live with a nuclear Iran. Their views deserve to be carefully considered, lest Ahmadinejad’s fear-driven posturing cause anybody to do something stupid.

But like everything else in this environment of PR and propaganda, such informed and rational views may go unheeded until it is too late.

There's a tinge in Creveld's opposition to the Israel/US position vis a vis Iran. They come out in a statement like the following:

And behind Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stands President Bush — the same President Bush who four years ago needed no reason at all to take on Iran’s neighbor to the west and demolish it to the point where it may never rise again.

For a historian who knows the way words can deceive, such a statement is a big deal coming from such an eminent historian.

Creveld's comments should be seen as a commentary on the following description provided by journalist Nir Rosen concerning the true reality of post-Bush Iraq:

What will happen to Iraq? Think Mogadishu, small warlords controlling various neighborhoods, militias preying on those left behind, more powerful warlords controlling areas with resources, such as oil fields, ports, and lucrative pilgrimage routes and shrines. Irredentist Sunni militias will attempt to retake their lost land, but they will be pushed into the Anbar Province, Jordan, and Syria, where they may link up with local Islamist militants to destabilize Amman and Damascus. Some will look to fight elsewhere; unable to continue the jihad in Iraq they will find common cause with Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and others alienated from their societies and hateful of Shias. The new rump Shia statelet, including Baghdad and the South, will be quarantined by the Sunni states in the region and pushed inexorably into Iranian hands whether Shia Iraqis want this or not. It will be isolated and radicalized, and Shia militias loyal to Muqtada al Sadr, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, Muhamad al Yaqubi, and others will battle for power.

There is no “surge.” At best it can be called an ooze, a slow increase of American occupying forces by a mere 15 percent, consisting of few new soldiers and many whose terms of service have been merely extended. Yet the U.S. has doubled the size of its mission, announcing it will also take on the Shia militias as well as the Sunni ones. On the ground, that means American soldiers secure areas and then hand them over to Iraqi security forces who impose a reign of terror on the inhabitants. In the Iraqi civil war the army and police are not the solution; they are combatants, fighting on behalf of Shia-sectarian Islamist parties. The vaunted efforts to train Iraqi security forces have merely trained better death squads. The Americans continue to imprison thousands of Iraqis, and kill many others. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations that would normally demand that the United States comply with international law and hand over imprisoned Iraqis to the “sovereign” Iraqi government are not doing so, knowing that their treatment at the hands of the government would be far worse than anything they would endure while in American captivity. The occupation is not benign. It is profoundly painful, humiliating, and lethal.

All hail Rex Judas. All hail hell and the poor souls George Bush will hear laughing at him on his way to hell.

UpdateWar and Piece recently noted that HaAretz reports that Israeli Foreign Minister Livni writes:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

The article also reveals for the first time a document Livni prepared and sent to Olmert a few months after the Second Lebanon War proposing a new division of labor between the two. "Enclosed is a proposal for work procedures between us, with the aim of providing an answer to Israel's strategic needs and facilitating early planning and the formulation of coordinated Israeli positions ... within the framework of cooperative relations, full transparency and continuous mutual updates," wrote Livni. ...

Explain to me again why the US press does not report these things. Read more!

Sadr City: A Second Falluja?

They're kidding right? Anyone who knows what happened at Falluja will be horrified at the idea that the US military would consider this a serious option. By many accounts, Falluja set the Iraqi insurgency in motion. If they "shake and bake" Sadr City, the insurgency would enter a regional phase. Do you really want to see that happen?

There's no way to stop this insane person at the head of our government except impeachment. The Dems don't have the balls to do that and the Reps are cravenly denying the people the right to have a say in how their government conducts itself. Read more!

Brzezinski Book Reviewed

An excellent review of Zbigniew Brzinski's new book by Lenin's Tomb's Richard Seymour. Brzezinski slams not only the idiot King's Iraq/War on Terror but lambastes the last 50 three regimes for ineptitude and gross imperial mistakes.

Finding Brzezinski refreshingly candid, Seymour faults the former Secretary of State:

Brzezinski’s amoral realism allows him to perceive and state bluntly what most of Bush’s apologists cannot, but his analysis is nevertheless flawed in several respects. First, little attention is paid to the role of capital. There is a bluff acknowledgment of ‘interests’, but the treatment is glancing and superficial. As with most foreign policy ‘realists’, the state’s primacy as a unit in international relations is tautologically assumed. The global projection of ad hoc military power is reduced to a matter of statecraft. Second, Bush’s decision to wage war on Iraq is reduced to hubris and arrogance. There is little attempt to understand the strategic reasons for the decision. For instance, while the administration’s gamble on Iraq was arguably reckless, the strategic advantages of creating a pro-American regime with its hands on the oil spigot in Iraq were sufficiently compelling that most of the US political class and business press vocally supported the war, not just the hardcore of neoconservatives and energy capitalists supportive of Bush. Even in the midst of failure, most Democrats and Republicans are unwilling to withdraw, fearing a Saigon moment. Third, while critical of the failure of any US president since 1990 to press meaningfully for a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict along the lines of officially espoused support for UN Resolution 242, Brzezinski offers little in the way of analysis as to why this is so. He credits domestic ‘lobbies’ with a distorting influence that takes no account of how the policies advocated by, for instance, the ‘Israel lobby’ resonate with pre-existing strategies. Aside from this analytical vacuity, the book suffers from a surfeit of cliches. We are reminded that the British also had an empire, that there may be comparisons made with the Roman one, that democracy cannot be imposed on traditional societies overnight (here Brzezinski derides ‘shortsighted American efforts’ in Palestine, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) and that nemesis follows hubris.

What Seymour fails to do is to go into a longer term view of capital's role in the extension of the American empire. While granting that China is a formidable force, Seymour and Brzezinski do not undertake to understand what it is that makes American capitalism so appealing tot he rets of the world. At least one aspect, American culture has sometimes presented itself in Brzezinski's TV appearances, Seymour has little to say about it in his review. It is this aspect of capital, along with the false consciousness that it spawns, which makes American imperial power formidable--well beyond the economic or political dimensions.
class="fullpost"> Read more!

Another Reason to Attack Iraq

Let's not forget that one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to find a country that could be friends with Israel. George Bush himself has said so, and this assumption is either assumed by or stated outright in various documents emanating from the AEI.

After recently reading Adam Smith on "The Wealth of Nations," I formulated something of mini-theory on why the US needed to invade Iraq--at least from the oligarch's standpoint.

Looked at from a historical perspective, that is, Iraq had become what very few if any nations outside Europe had become--a modern nation. Its educational system was top-notch, the industrial sector was well-developed, it had a commercial base that, although based on a single resource, could quite plausibly diversify. On top of that, it had what Smith says is paramount to any commercial nation: the ability to feed itself.

If these points are true--not all have to be--then the reason to demolish Iraq and reduce it as close to a pre-modern state was to teach the world a lesson: no one modernizes w2ithout following the blueprint laid out by the US.

On top of that, of course, is the idea that no nation in the mid-East can be a modern state that shows up Israel or outpaces it in the eyes of the world in regards to being "modern." Read more!

MercenariesUSA Inc.

I must admit that I missed the President's State of the Union Speech (SOUS), so I also missed the following little tidbit that's also seemingly left unnoted by Leiter and Pilger. ...

Brian Pilger (via Leiter) rightly remarks on the reference to a form of civilian conscription being proposed by Bush. Pilger quotes the following from the SOUS:

A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.

No doubt Pilger is right to highlight his reading of this segment. On the other hand, I wonder whether there's not something like a ticking bomb in those words that Pilger misses; specifically, changes to laws that cover the use of private soldiers abroad, also known as mercenaries.

I do not know what restrictions there are on using mercenaries in other countries by the US, but there is no doubt that private soldiers are being used extensively in Iraq. According to the Washington Post, there are about 100,000 mercenaries in Iraq (h/t Lenin's Tomb):

There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield.

The survey finding, which includes Americans, Iraqis and third-party nationals hired by companies operating under U.S. government contracts, is significantly higher and wider in scope than the Pentagon's only previous estimate, which said there were 25,000 security contractors in the country.

It is also 10 times the estimated number of contractors that deployed during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, reflecting the Pentagon's growing post-Cold War reliance on contractors for such jobs as providing security, interrogating prisoners, cooking meals, fixing equipment and constructing bases that were once reserved for soldiers.

Certainly, not all of these "contractors" are engaged in lethal activities. Yet, there's also no doubt that many are--in either direct military action or in security and intelligence operations.

As Democracy Now points out, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made privatizing the military a top priority. Jeremy Scahill says:

Now, what’s interesting, Amy, is that two years ago Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater USA, was speaking at a military conference. He only comes out of his headquarters to speak in front of military audiences. He does not speak in front of civilians. He's on panels with top brass and others. He’s very secretive. He gave a major address in which he called for the creation of what he called a "contractor brigade." And I actually -- I can read you what he said. He said -- this is two years ago, before Bush called for his civilian reserve corps. Erik Prince, head of Blackwater USA: "There’s consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army. We want to add 30,000 people." And they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier. And then, Prince added, "We could do it certainly cheaper."

You don't have to be a trained textualist to see how closely this guy's words--spoken two years ago--mirror those of the President's, as expressed several months later in the SOUS.

Blackwater is the largest of those private army outfits vying for work in Iraq and now--according to Democracy Now--the Sudan. They even showed up in New Orleans carrying weapons and with orders to use deadly force when needed. Read more!

Welcome to the Roach Motel Iraq

I bury those cockroaches!
-- Tony Montana, "Scarface"

The President just gave his plan on Iraq in what came across as a sober, grim speech that is being touted for its realism and sincerity. The plan comprises several parts, the most prominent of which is the so-called "surge" of troops to Iraq, specifically Baghdad.

I must admit that Pres. Bush's performance last night was one of the few times I could actually listen to him and not find myself in wonderland. He connected sentences in a way that I think his college rhetoric professor would have found laudable. ...

Unfortunately, the disconnect between the old Bush whose almost aphasic news conferences and this new Bush caused my brain to overheat in paranoiac visions.

As I heard Bush unfold his "strategery" I almost (seriously) said out loud "Roach Motel." I swear the man was describing a vision so absurd and so bizarre that I saw US troops being lured into this large trap and dying slow deaths like roaches stuck in glue.

Those unfamiliar with student housing might not have seen a roach motel. These little devices for killing the pests involves luring them into a rectangular box that has an incredibly sticky glue on all sides. The roaches enter, get stuck, and die over several days. In places where the roaches are bad, these motels can literally fill up the entire space of the box.

Why isn't anyone discussing the dangers of this strategy? Are people seriously unconcerned about buddying up US troops with Iraqis whose loyalties appear to be less than certain--and probably more anti-Us than pro-US?

What are the chances that insurgent strategists are rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of having US soldiers concentrated in one area, open to encirclement and a war of attrition by booby trap and bushwacking?

On top of this, there's that old nagging feeling that you'll have heavily armed potential traitors behind you as you barge in on their neighbors and relatives to find and kill the guy who was a friend last week.

Welcome to the Roach Motel Iraq--where many a soldier in the next few months will feel like they're going nowhere but into the bogs of hell. Read more!

War Porn: A New Genre of the Dead

The spectacle of the tyrant, the most despised man on earth--as Americans like to think of their country--is over. The tyrant is dead, long live the tyrant. America the tyrant killer, the castrater of dictators, the lyncher of Babylon, regains its renown for frontier justice in a shoddy, sometimes despicable, affair that the politicians call justice, though a few call it what it is: a piece of theater whose genre has increasingly become known as Iraqi snuff films. ...

Like many an egotist, I imagine, who blogs, I watch my sitemeter readings religiously. Perhaps the best interpretation of this is that I--with my background in marketing and business writing--want to perform a minute by minute audience analysis so I can gauge the reading habits, the likes and dislikes of those poor souls who happen upon these pitiful postings.

Early on in this blog's evolution, I picked up on articles that piqued my fancy and either provided a blurb about the piece or simply quoted it and provided a link. One of those pieces was on an article about Iraqi war porn, which was first brought to my attention by Helena Cobban. I wrote some chatter about it and provided a link to the pages where these XXXXXXXX porn pictures were (once) housed.

(Also see Occupation, Sex, Murder, and Prositution, and Trophy Video.)

If I were to rate the most entered page on my blog--according to my maniacal site meter reading habit--it would have to be this posting about Iraqi porn. I know this because sitemeter provides a listing on the search terms that the visitor used on the search engine that pointed them to my blog posting. I can only imagine their consternation when they see that the posting contains some tripe about how immoral this type of porn is.

I first became aware from a Law and Order: CI show that there's a subculture that's grown up around this type of porn. The issue is rather tangential to the storyline of the show, but it's interesting nonetheless that the phenomenon has reached a level where it can form part of the action of the characters in the plot.

The genre of War Porn itself became known in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture revelations. The couple involved in that torture were filming their acts and hording them, along with their own personal BDSM porn.

The fascination of BDSM porn is best exemplified by the David Cronenberg's film, Videodrome. There the main character (played by James Woods) is a small-time cable owner trying to find content that will increase his audience share. The famous scenes of moderate masochism with Blondie singer Deborah Harry is only a prelude to more and more violent forms of sadomasochism.

In one scene, the James Woods character is watching the torture of naked women and says something along the lines of, "I can't take my eyes off of it. There are no production costs. It's genius."

The moral of the story is that the signal carrying the can't-take-your-eyes-off-it video causes cancerous tumors in the viewer. The whole thing turns out to be the effort by a zealous Christian-style group who wants to kill off anyone who doesn't have the moral sensibility to react in revulsion at the pictures and instead becomes hooked on it like heroin.

I doubt that our own theocrats are smart enough to carry off anything similar to the one shown in Videodrome, especially given their anti-scientific prejudices. Yet, the underlying premise--that a normal, god-loving individual will find such acts shameful and therefore will turn in revulsion--that our god-given shame shields us from such temptations, is one that many Xtian believers assume, though they rarely state it.

(See my postings on Martha Nussbaum's work [here, here, and here]. She has documented this type of argument that is marshaled by those on the right to defend a conservative legal agenda.)

Yet, the film's message makes a powerful statement about the attraction of violence to a sensory-hungry public whose jaded palates crave more and more stimulating images that go farther and farther into depicting the dehumanization of other human beings.

Having said this, let me make a confession. I wanted to see the execution of Hussein on television. I think that it should've been beamed into every household in America and the world. If the man was a monster, and American justice was triumphing in having this execution go forward, then there should have been no qualms about televising it.

Perhaps this is the lesson then: Americans are so dishonest that we can't or won't face the products of our own violence in Iraq. Instead, we want to cover it up, hide it away, make like it didn't happen. But this type of repression is how neuroses form, not to mention psychoses.

Or is the repression itself an indication of the mass psychosis that realizes itself in a delusory world where the horrible deaths of men, women, and children become fantasy attractions for a libidinous tyranny that refuses to acknowledge its own depravity?

And maybe Videodrome is more realistic and prophetic than I imagine.

PS Sorry to all you folks on bloglines who'll see this posting twice; but anyway: I just remembered something I heard on a show dealing with Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker, who terrorized LA during the mid-19080s. According to one source interviewed for the expose, as a young teen Ramirez used to visit a former ViteNam vet with whom he did drugs. The Vet also showed Ramirez pictures that the Vet had taken of his rape, torture and mutilation of Vietnamese women.

With the prevalence of war porn on the web, it makes you wonder how many young Ramirez's are being formed for future night stalkings and that unique brand of American terrorist, aka serial killer. Read more!

Leopold & George: Kings of Atrocity [& Corruption]

Adam Hochschild, the author of "King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa", a novel that exposed the genocidal colonialist project of Belgium's King Leopold, has some words for GW.

(h/t Crooked Timber for linking to the article and for this post's title, which in my mind alludes to Leopold and Loeb)

NB Belgium's Congo was the inspiration for Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

PS Hochschild seems to be responding to reports that GW has read the book.

Hochschild writes in the LATimes:

First, as you [GW] now know, the long effort by King Leopold II of Belgium to bring Congo under his control was driven by his avid quest for a commodity central to industry and transportation: rubber. Does that remind you of anything?

What's more, the king justified his grab for Congo's natural resources with much talk about bringing philanthropy and Christianity to darkest Africa. Now what did that remind you of?

Leopold cleared at least $1.1 billion in today's dollars during the 23 years he controlled Congo, and his businessmen friends made additional huge sums. Much of the money flowed into companies with special royal concession rights to exploit the rain forest. Final question, for extra credit: Do those companies remind you of anything? If you mentioned Halliburton or DynCorp, you're right again.

As a reader of history, you must have been interested, I'm sure, in something else in the Congo story: the case of another world leader facing his own Abu Ghraib scandal.

As you noticed, Mr. President, King Leopold II was a master of public relations. He was really his own Karl Rove — which saved money on staff salaries at the royal palace in Brussels. For years the press at home and abroad dutifully praised his efforts to bring "civilization" to Africa; a whole shipload of Belgian journalists went to Congo in 1898 to enthuse about the opening of a new railroad.

But, like you, he got into big trouble through photographs. These were mainly taken by a British missionary named Alice Harris, and they showed Congolese being whipped, chained as hostages and with their hands cut off by Leopold's soldiers. Through the efforts of a British journalist named Edmund Dene Morel, whom the king liked about as much as you like Seymour Hersh, these photos were splashed on front pages all over the world.

Read more!

Takfir and Sunni/Shia Alliances

This Sunni Shiite thing, aka takfir, has been abrogated in recent statements by some major Muslim clerics. According to one source, the only Islamic school of thought that wants to maintain this practice is Saudi Wahhabism. ...

The signers of this document include:

In accordance with the fatwas issued by the honourable and respectable Grand Imam Sheikh Al Azhar.

The Grand Ayatollah Al Sayyid Ali Al Sistani, the honourable and respectable grand mufti of Egypt, the honourable and respectable Shiite clerics (both Jaafari and Zaydi), the honourable and respectable grand mufti of the Sultanate of Oman.

The Islamic Fiqh Academy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the grand council for Religious Affairs of Turkey.

The honourable and respectable grand mufti of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the respectable members of its National Fatwa Committee, and the honourable and respectable Sheikh Dr Yusuf Al Qaradawi;

And in accordance with what was mentioned in the speech of His Majesty King Abdullah during the opening session of our conference;

Note Sistani's name. He's the major religious authority in Shia Islam.

I wonder whether recent moves by Saudi Arabia to head off Iran and support hardline Sunnis in Iraq are not related to this statement in some way. IE the Saudis are scared that any consolidation of ties between Iran and Iraq will undermine their own interpretation of Islam.

These comments should also be juxtaposed with Cobban's reading of Moqtada al-Sadr's attempts to forge an alliance between Shiite, Sunni, and secular elements in Iraq. Read more!

"The Politics of Atrocity"

In a recent posting, former defense intelligence Col. Pat Lang (ret'd) responds to an analysis by Alexander Cockburn of the social chaos that is tearing Iraq apart. Cockburn documents the lack of concern inside the US for the suffering and pain that has resulted from the Bush preemptive war on what the President calls "terror."

Lang suggests that whatever the US does, Iraq will never recover its cohesion again and will instead descend into a hell that will devastate and ruin even more than it has now. According to Lang, Iraq has become a nexus of criminality and bestiality where, he says, the normal operating procedure is "the politics of atrocity." …

Lang writes:

We are going to go all the way down, down down.... All the way down to whatever circle is reserved for the ignorant, proud and presumptuous.

And the Iraqis, whomever they are? They are going to go with us although perhaps to a different circle. Their's may be one reserved for the bloody minded who can't see their neighbors as other than mortar targets.

Bolstering Lang's claims is the Lancet report. Based on sophisticated statistical survey models, this report estimates that between 300-650,000 Iraqis died after the US invasion in rates higher than would have during less violent times.

In Congress’ December session, Representative Dennis Kucinich held a hearing on the Lancet report. That hearing and the report's conclusion did not find their way into the mainstream press. Much like Pres. Bush did when he responded to a question by a reporter on the report's findings, the MSM has turned a blind eye to the report and its necrotic statistics.

For Bush, only 30,000 or so Iraqis have died since the US invasion. Either the President is lying or he is woefully unable to grasp such large numbers. The latter possibility would enhance Bush's image as intellectually challenged. (Does he use that bumpkin image for political advantage, maybe as a way of impugning such "intellectual" studies.

That is, striking that bumpkin pose he can speak to the common man in a way that communicates to him that any results of eggheads are not serious enough for discussion, since it's obvious that they are politically motivated anyway.

Perhaps a better insight into the President's spiritual state vis a vis the war is his recent statement that he sleeps well at night. I am not sure that he should have said this, even if it's true. Maybe he doesn't lose sleep over the deaths of 30,000 dead Iraqis. But it does seem callous not to lose sleep over the deaths of American soldiers.

This indifference to human suffering seems endemic to those who know the reins of power. Rupert Murdoch recently said that only 3,000 US soldiers had given their lives so far in this war. From the view of this man who knows and understands more about the workings of human nature and its world, these are small potatoes. More people have died in other wars, so the expenditure here in this war is minuscule and bearable—no doubt from a profit/loss analysis.

These men with big visions—who see the world from that God-view I’ve discussed before—understand that little men think about such matters. Anything of great import requires sacrifice and suffering. Those who question this wisdom just don't have that vision or the will to dream those great plans and fight for them.

Such themes are immortalized by Dostoevsky's novels and short stories. More disturbing, though, to those in positions to worry about America's soul is that such comments might represent a situation of one so alienated from the ideas that inform these views that such thoughts are meaningless.

The aspirations to greatness seem typically American, informed as it by the Renaissance republican humanist ideals. But what makes the recent imperial plans of the Bush admin and the neoconservative policymakers different from Renaissance ideals is a limiting factor that Machiavelli accepted as paramount.

This limiting factor says that all actions must not just benefit a few but the whole community. The economic abuses of this war have yet to be comprehensively documented, but there are already signs that members of the ruling class have benefited financially from this war.

Of course, for Machiavelli financial gain is not the only factor that determines political corruption. Anything that unfairly benefits one part of society over another and makes the one dependent on another is inherently corrupt and corrupting.

Selfish actions—including those that involve political and social or cultural status—are included. In contemporary American politics, the economic benefits of this war are counter-balanced by the grasping for unlimited political power by the executive branch. Also, the social and cultural battles over who determines the communal ethos show that politicians hope to use war as a pretext for gaining a hegemony of ideals defining who and what this country means.

One thing that's becoming apparent from this war is that America might have to begin defining social interest to mean more than the boundaries of the nation-state. Instead, the US political ideology must start understanding itself in international terms that do not simply give lip service to human aspirations or an intellectually barren notion of democracy.

This expanded consciousness would not only see its own suffering as worthy of concern but also the suffering of others upon whom it visits immense social chaos and human misery.

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US Army Threatened by Loss in a Morass

This question is not simply metaphor or hyperbole. There is a real danger, as I noted over nine months ago that the US could literally lose its army in Iraq. This would occur were the army's supply lines to be cut and then surrounded by various forces that have a unified strategy to surround the army and kill it. ..

William S. Lind is now reiterating those concerns. For Lind, this potential for a devastating defeat and bloodbath would occur if the Iranians are either attacked by Israel/US or they take the initiative and press their strategic positions.

Lind lays out several scenarios for how such a debacle might occur. Unfortunately, as Lind notes, the thinking among the technocrats and the military is immune to these dangers.

Lind writes:

Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the fact that, just as the French high command refused to consider the possibility of a German attack through the Ardennes in 1940, Washington will not consider the possibility that an attack on Iran could cost us our army in Iraq. We have made one of the most common military mistakes—believing our own propaganda. Over and over, the U.S. military tells the world and itself, “No one can defeat us. No one can even fight us. We are the greatest military the world has ever seen!”

Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it’s bunk. The U.S. Armed Forces are technically well-trained, lavishly resourced Second-Generation militaries. They are today being fought and beaten by Fourth-Generation opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third-Generation opponents who can react faster than America’s process-ridden, PowerPoint-enslaved military headquarters. They can be defeated by superior strategy, by trick, by surprise, and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like unsinkable ships: they are unsinkable until something sinks them.

If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both, cutting our one line of supply and then encircling us, the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover. Nothing, not even Israel’s demands, should lead us to run this risk, which is inherent in any attack on Iran.

These points bode very ill for the US. If the Democrats continue to show the stoneless grit that they did before they won the last elections, they will have once again shown their craven kowtowing to Washington machinations and Israeli interests.

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