This quote came to mind as I thought about Big Swede’s comment below, and I think it applies to a certain Professor Natelson as well:

To be a spoiled person is not to be well-off or favored by fortune or protected from brute realities. It is to be well-off or favored by fortune or protected from brute realities and not to know it. (Christopher Hitchens)

There’s an interesting controversy developing in al-Matowa, a province in southern Iraq with a small, but larger than average, Christian minority of residents. As with all of Iraq, the Muslim faith constitutes the majority of the province, and Islam is taught in the schools. Students are taught the Qur’an, and each morning must pray and bow towards the south, or towards Mecca, the city designated by the prophet Mohammad as the holy city of the Islamic faith.

Christians of al-Matowa do not want their children raised in the Islam faith, and have protested to the local Kufat, or what we would call a school board. They have asked that their children be allowed to leave the classroom during morning prayer, and to be separately taught Bible studies rather than the Qur’an.

The Kufat recently ruled that since Iraq is a Muslim country, it was the right of the majority of Iraqis to have their religion taught in the schools.

Under Saddam Hussein, schools were secular, and religion was taught only in the mosques, or holy schools, with children dividing their time between both. Christian children at that time would stay with their parents and study the Bible, or attend religious services at their own churches. Saddam managed to hold together a tenuous peace among the various faiths by respecting each, including the minority Christians. It seemed to work. Now, with the new government and a re-assertive Muslim movement, the government is actively trying to bring Christians into the Islamic faith. It is a precept of the Muslim faith (called “masi-al-habi”) that Islam shall one day the the common faith of the entire globe.

It’s an interesting quandary for the newly-democratic Iraqis. Do they respect freedom of religion, or do they insist that the majority religion be taught to all?

Please! Someone! Click on the link above.

Hiking, backpacking and camping in place like Yellowstone and Glacier, where grizzly bears roam free, requires care, planning, and courage. Noises and shadows at night are troubling, sleep is often light and interrupted. Food has to be handled carefully, stung up high at night. We cannot eat, sleep, and store food in the same places. Pepper spray offers little consolation.

Hiking, backpacking and camping with guns in places like Yellowstone and Glacier, where grizzly bears roam free, requires no care, little planning, and no courage at all. You can shoot your way out of any situation.

I predict that in our national parks, small game will soon be targeted for sport killing, and that large mammals will routinely be killed in “life threatening” situations. Even though it has been years since anyone has been killed by a grizzly bear, they will soon be dropped whenever they even threaten a gun-toting human.

That’s what happens when cowards with guns roam free.

This is a partial transcript of an interview on Media Matters on May 17, 2009, between Bob McChesney and Chris Hedges. Hedges has traveled widely in the Middle East, reporting for the New York Times and other news organization. He’s also the author of several books, including American Fascists and War is a Force That Gives us Meaning.

His degree, oddly, is a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a reporter for fifteen years.

Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. In 2002, he received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

Bob McChesney: One of the ways I became familiar with your work, Mr. Hedges, was when you gave the commencement speech at Rockford College in 2003 I believe it was, shortly after the “Mission Accomplished” speech by then-president Bush. You were hollered off the state by irate audience members who thought you were being disrespectful of the president when you criticized the war, and not unlike Michael Moore at the Academy Awards in the sense that history, as the line goes, has absolved you, and then some. But what occurs to me from that event is that we have now seen since 2003 the Iraq War has fallen from the news to a certain extent, but it’s also been repackaged as a victory of the Surge and things are now working out there and we are on the home stretch. DO you think what we are being told by the news media is an accurate perspective of what is taking place in Iraq today?

Chris Hedges: No. Iraq has been destroyed as a unified country. That experiment that arose out of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire is finished. And it is not coming back. What we’ve done is partition Iraq, and not only partition the country, but literally partition neighborhood from neighborhood in cities like Baghdad. There’s been a frightening ethnic cleansing, which we have tacitly empowered, allowing, for instance, the Sunnis to drive Shiites out of villages enclaves and neighborhoods that they control; allowing Shiites to do the same; standing by tacitly as the Kurds do that in Northern Iraq, especially in the city of Kirkuk, which is very important to the Kurds because it is oil-rich, and if they don’t’ control Kirkuk, Northern Iraq is not sustainable as a Kurdish enclave.

So the surge was a clever tactic in that it for a while mollified. You remember the huge car bombings in 2006, when really the mission was collapsing. But over the long term, we don’t own these people, we rent them. When they turn on us, and there are signs that they are already turning – as I speak remember there’s been a spate of suicide bombings in the last couple weeks in Baghdad – this war will once again, I think, unleash the kind of carnage we saw a couple of years ago. The occupation is not sustainable in Iraq, just as it is not sustainable in Afghanistan.

McChesney: Before we go to Afghanistan, just to complete the point here on Iraq, do you sense there is a difference between the Obama Administration policies in Iraq from those of the Bush Administration?

Hedges: No. It’s virtually the same. And it’s the same with McCain. They’re going to try and pull off ‘Occupation Lite’ in Iraq. I’m not sure it’s gonna work. Remember that they are leaning very heavily on a huge mercenary force in Iraq, and they are going to not bring these people home but transfer them to the Afghan theatre, because Afghanistan is really deteriorating. And I think that’s probably the precariousness of the Karzai government, the rapid expansion of Taliban control, perhaps not as widely understood (certainly understood by the Obama Administration and his national security team, but probably the American public doesn’t realize how dangerous the situation in Afghanistan has become for NATO troops.

McChesney: What would happen if the United States just withdrew as quickly as possible from both Iraq and Afghanistan?

Hedges: Well, that’s what I don’t want to see happen.

McChesney: Well, it won’t happen, don’t worry. I was just curious …

Hedges: I mean I don’t want to see the mission collapse. You’ve seen this – go back and look what happened with the partition plan with India and Pakistan, or the abrupt British withdrawal from Palestine, which triggered the 1948 war. This is the kind of thing you don’t want to see or Vietnam. But of course if they don’t begin planning for it, that is what will happen.

So people are once again walking into the embrace of the Taliban for much the same reason.

McChesney: And so to sum up, your sense is that the Obama Administration’s surge in Afghanistan is not going to solve the problem.

Hedges: Well they are hanging on by their fingertips. If you watch the news reports closely, there are attacks being carried out. There was one jus the other day in the center of Kabul. As a foreigner, you can’t walk around. If you look like me – I have blond hair – you can’t walk around the street of Kabul. It’s too dangerous. You have to get into a cab. And forget going outside the city limits unless you are embedded in the NATO forces. That’s also true in Kandahar. When the Human Rights Watch went to do its report on civilian bombings, which is of course another huge issue, their representative couldn’t leave Kandahar. They had to hire Afghans to bring people who had been affected by the bombing into the city to interview. It’s just too dangerous to go out on the roads.

So are we.

McChesney: When I was listening to you and reading your stuff I recalled, and correct me if I’m wrong, that as a consequence of your commencement address at Rockford College, there was pressure on the New York Times to reprimand you for taking such a strong opinion on the way. And the paper did actually do some sort of reprimand. Is that correct?

Hedges: Yes. My book, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, had come out in the fall of 2002, and or course I’d just spent seven years in the Middle East, and inevitably I would be asked on Charlie Rose and all these kinds of shows what I thought about the impending invasion of Iraq. Like any Arabist, including all the Arabists in the State Department, intelligence community and the Pentagon, I realized that invading Iraq was a disaster. We wouldn’t be greeted as liberators, democracy would not be planted in Baghdad and emanate outwards across the Middle East, the oil revenues wouldn’t pay for the reconstruction. The non-reality belief system, the one championed by lunatics like Wolfowitz and Pearle and Cheney, none of whom know anything about the Middle East, and frankly, the world outside the backstabbing world of Washington. I also understood that as news reporter, to make those kinds of statements was to court professional suicide.

And then I wasn’t allowed to speak out about the way anymore. At that point I started looking for something else to do because I just wasn’t going to be muzzled. I’m one of the few Americans in this country- one of a few thousand – that has intimate experience in the Middle East, and of course months of my life in Iraq, and I just felt that it was worth leaving the paper, which I did.

I watched the movie Charlie Wilson’s War last week. I did not anticipate anything worthwhile, as Hollywood seldom shows much flair for depth or detail. And, as expected, Charlie was glamorized, the U.S. role in destabilizing Afghanistan minimized, and the war was portrayed as yet another rescue operation. Russians were the bad guys. But I had read a little bit more about Charlie himself, and was curious how Hollywood would portray him.

Russians really were bad guys, by the way. They killed hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens using sophisticated weaponry against a peasant population, just like we do. They left in their wake fields littered with bomblets that look like toys, blowing the limbs off children, just like we do. (Israel recently used cluster bombs, the source of the disabling bomblets, against Palestinians. The U.S. used them in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and in Serbia in 1999. I do not know if the U.S. is currently using cluster bombs in Afghanistan. It would reveal our inner Soviet to do so.)

The people who made this movie don’t know that we do all this stuff too, of course. It would not help if they did know it – it would only interfere with a good story.

According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. set out in the summer of 1979, while Carter was still president, to lure the Soviets into an Afghanistan adventure.

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Hollywood should appreciate this, but doesn’t. They do make movies like Alien vs. Predator, where monsters fight it out while set extras look on. That was the 1980 conflict between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The people of Afghanistan were mere extras.

Anyway, Charlie comes off as a lovable drunk/party boy/cocaine user – a man with a quick wit and good heart. His compadre in this adventure, Gust Avrakotos (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), is also witty and quick and very smart. The movie was enjoyable, though Julia Roberts, who played Houston socialite/philanthropist Joanne Herring, is almost repulsive and detracts from the movie. She has all the acting skills of John Wayne (same character placed in different situations).

Of course, it’s all nonsense. No surprises there. Poor Afghanistan, then, as now, caught in the middle of the Great Game. At that time the game included Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in addition to the usual suspects. Each had its own ambitions, none cared about the people of the region.

The Russian/American war of the 1980’s destroyed the Afghanistan economy and left in its wake a country without a government. Then both walked away. The movie mentions this – Charlie is heartbroken that he can’t get any humanitarian aid for the place. But the power vacuum was soon filled by the war orphans who came to be known as “Taliban”. Afghanistan, barely able to feed itself, did produce one cash crop – poppies.

After the U.S. and the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1988, the country descended into “one of the more horrific wars of the twentieth century” (Chalmers Johnson). The CIA did not pay much attention until the former Mujahadeen, reconstituted (and renamed “Al Qaida” by the U.S.) bombed U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in the summer of 1998. Later, as official history goes, these same ragtags assembled and carried out the nefarious deeds of 9/11/01. The fact that most of the hijackers on that date were Saudis fits perfectly with the backdrop of the war of the 1980’s. Many of the soldiers the U.S. recruited to fight the Soviets were Saudi nationals.

The U.S. decided to re-enter Afghanistan in 2001, purportedly in the hunt for Osama, though they never really tried very hard to find him. Instead, they unseated the Taliban and installed a puppet government, just as the Soviets did in 1980. That government now controls Kabul and Kandahār, and not much else. Lately the U.S. has stepped up its efforts as the Taliban has reemerged and grown strong again. The war is spilling over into Pakistan, as the boundaries in the area are mostly symbolic anyway. It is developing into a regional conflict that may well spin out of control. Obama may have his Vietnam.

And, of course, the people of the area are mere set extras. The U.S. shows no more regard for them now than the Soviets in the 1980’s, gunning them down with impunity. We use drones – the Soviets used Hind helicopter gunships. The results are identical.

One must not discount the proximity of Afghanistan to Caspian Basin oil. Some of that oil now passes through Turkey and Kosovo (guarded in Kosovo by U.S. Camp Bondsteel, constructed after our 1999 attack on Serbia). The logical direction of the oil would be east, to India and China, but the U.S. doesn’t want that outcome. Looking at a map of the region, the logical solution is to pipe it through Afghanistan and Pakistan to ports on the Indian Ocean. But this requires a stable government in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). It may never happen.

U.S. foreign policy does not change, one administration to another, Democrat or Republican. Obama is carrying out the Clinton/Bush policy, though the conflict is intensifying. McCain would be doing the same.

And philanthropist/idealist Charlie Wilson? He recently had a heart transplant, the old one having been worn out by so damned much caring.