The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has passed without a lot of fanfare, as will the sixth, seventh … it will eventually be a non-event or one in which various fringe elements assemble on street corners to preach to a shrinking choir. The news media is currently in de-emphasize mode, hyping up other stories and virtually ignoring the conflict. It’s a testimony to how much they are in control of the agenda. We talk about whatever they put in our face. If there ain’t pictures, there ain’t news.

Foreign policy is mostly a staid affair attended to by the graduates of our elite schools. It’s neither fun nor pretty. The business of state and the business of corporate America are one. The world is full of crises, but only certain of them make the radar screen. Rwanda passes without notice (no American corporate interests threatened), while Iraq, a relatively calm place threatening no one becomes an emergency. We’re totally tooled up by the media and driven by the corporate agenda. The trick is to make an elite undertaking seem like a popular movement.

Iraq had been on the agenda for a long while, long before the fall of the Soviet Union, but not within our grasp until that event. Prior to 1990 Saddam Hussein had played one superpower against the other with relative skill, and there was deep resentment of him in Washington for that reason. We supported him when he invaded Iran, of course, as we are not the slightest troubled by invasions when they serve our interests. But we also made him strong – we gave him the weapons that we later claimed threatened us. Without us he would have had no chemical weaponry – the only thing that ever really threatened us (and the real reason why George H.W. Bush pulled back in 1991).

When opportunity presented itself in the post-Soviet world, as it did in 1990, we attacked, and rained hell on the country and its electrical grids and sewage systems. It was no accident – we meant to do that. They were a country with a first-world infrastructure, and we destroyed it. We spent the next ten years applying a vice, squeezing them hard, sanctioning food and medicine and killing their children while withholding the the tools necessary to repair their infrastructure. We meant to do that.

In the Clinton years we looked to get rid of those weapons and clear the way for an attack. It is here that Saddam failed his people, why he may in retrospect be seen as one of the biggest fools in history. He cooperated with weapons inspectors, canned his nuclear program, destroyed his chemical-bearing rocketry, and left his country basically defenseless.

It was then that the U.S. attacked, and it is now that we celebrate the fifth anniversary of that attack. I cited an article below that highlights how, seventeen years after the 1991 attack, we have still not managed to fix those sewers and electrical grids. It’s no accident. We mean to rain hell on them, we mean to impoverish them, we mean to make them suffer, scatter their factions, install our superbases that will permanently house 100,000 troops, control their government and watch and terrorize their internal factions as closely as Castro ever did his enemies.

We mean to be in power there. It was the goal in 1989, 1991, throughout the Clinton years and well into Bush’s term. When the weapons were finally gone, when the path to invasion and occupation was finally cleared, we moved. True, things didn’t go according to plan. It’s been costly, for us anyway. But clear heads in Washington realize that it’s a price that must be paid.

Some people marked the passing of the fifth anniversary of the invasion as if it were a significant milestone. It wasn’t. It’s no big deal. Presidents will come and go, but the troops will stay. Orators and pundits will prattle on about democracy and how we toppled an evil government – grist for the mill. It was a resource grab. It’s in its infancy.

There’ll be many more anniversaries.

The following article exposes a disgraceful situation. It is unfathomable that a country as rich as ours does not provide basic foodstuffs and medical care to the Iraqi people. We could also repair of sewage and electrical systems that we destroyed in the First Gulf War. It’s been seventeen years!

The Iraqi people, once a proud and wealthy country with subsidized health care and education to the highest levels, has been decimated by two brutal and barbaric attacks, one in 1991, the other in 2003. There are apparently no serious efforts to put the country back on its feet.

After five years it rings hollow to say that the Bush Administration is merely incompetent, or to blame the victims, as Americans are wont to do. At a certain point one has to admit the possibility that the policy might well be destruction of the country, of scattering its factions to the winds, this to allow for for permanent military occupation and thereby control of its oil.

That Iraqi people happen to live atop that oil? That is the problem. They’ve been a damned incovenience from the very start.

I challenge any who have, by display of bumper-stickers and other courageous acts, supported this war. Defend, if you would, the unconscionable human toll that has followed the military occupation and conquest of Iraq, 1990 to present.

Childhood Is Dying

Inter Press Service
By Dahr Jamail and Ahmed Ali*

BAQUBA, Mar 10 (IPS) – Iraq’s children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.

The United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during more than 12 years of economic sanctions that preceded the U.S. invasion of March 2003, primarily as a result of malnutrition and disease.

But childhood malnutrition in Iraq has increased 9 percent since then, according to an Oxfam International report released last July.

A report from the non-governmental relief organisation Save the Children shows Iraq continues to have the highest mortality for children under five. Since the first Gulf War, this has increased 150 percent. It is estimated that one in eight children in Iraq dies before the fifth birthday: 122,000 children died in 2005 alone. Iraq has a population of about 25 million.

According to a UN Children’s Fund report released this month, “at least two million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition, according to the World Food Programme assessment of food insecurity in 2006, and face a range of other threats including interrupted education, lack of immunisation services and diarrhoea diseases.”

IPS interviewed three children from different districts of Baquba, the capital city of Iraq’s volatile Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.

Firas Muhsin is seven, and lives in Baquba with his mother. His father was killed two years ago by militants who shot him in his shop.

Firas attends school four hours every day near his house. On rare occasions he gets to play with neighbours’ children, but always under the eyes of his mother.

Firas is allowed to move no more than ten metres from the house; his mother is afraid of strangers. Kidnapping of Iraqi children is common now, and many are believed to have been sold as child labourers or as sex workers.

Iraqi officials and aid workers have recently expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq’s unstable environment.

Omar Khalif is vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA), an NGO established in 2004 to register cases of the missing and trafficked. He told reporters in January that on average at least two Iraqi children are sold by their parents every week. In addition, another four are reported missing every week.

“The numbers are alarming,” Khalif said. “There is an increase of 20 percent in the reported cases of missing children over a year.”

Firas spends hours each day sitting at the door looking at people. The door is his only outlet. In the afternoon, his mother calls him inside to do his homework. After dinner, his big hope is to watch cartoons — if there is electricity from their private generator.

The mother faces a shortage of kerosene needed just for heating. “My children feel cold and I cannot afford kerosene,” she told IPS.

Many children Firas’s age do not get to school at all. According to the UN, 17 percent of Iraqi children are permanently out of primary school, and an estimated 220,000 more are missing school because they and their families have been displaced. That adds up to 760,000 children out of primary school in 2006.

These are in-country figures, and do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and youth whose education is interrupted or ended because their families have fled to other countries. UNHCR estimates that at least 2.25 million Iraqis have fled their country.

Qusay Ameen is five, and lives with his mother, father, two sisters and a brother. His father was a sergeant in the former military, and is now unemployed. He receives a monthly pension of 110 dollars. He tries to support the family by selling cigarettes on the roadside. Qusay’s mother is a housekeeper. Qusay hopes to begin school next year when he turns six.

After breakfast, always something simple like fried tomato with bread, Qusay wants to play, but he has nothing to play with but a small broken plastic car his brother found near the neighbour’s door. He spends most of the morning playing with this car. He seems happiest when he gets to visit his neighbour’s house, because they have a swing in the garden.

Like most Iraqi children now, Qusay has grown used to being in need. He rarely gets sweets, or new clothes.

The family house is incredibly small — one bedroom and a place used as both kitchen and bathroom. Everyone sleeps in one room, which is extremely cold through the winter months. There are not enough beds or covering, and everyone has to sleep close together for warmth.

The house has few basic necessities, and of course no television or useful household appliances. There is a small kerosene cooker used for both cooking and heating.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, only 40 percent of children nationwide have access to safe drinking water, and only 20 percent of people outside Baghdad have a working sewerage service. About 75,000 children are among families living in temporary shelters.

Ali Mahmood, 6, has lived with his uncle in Baquba after his parents were killed by a mortar explosion two years ago in random shelling by militants. Next year he will join primary school near his uncle’s house.

Ali’s days are alike, and quiet. His only friends are his uncle’s children. When they go to school, he simply spends his time alone. It does seem the uncle’s family is not able to look after him as well as his own might have. His uncle Thamir is doing his best, but life is difficult, and Thamir has responsibility for a big family.

Ali is deprived of just about everything in childhood; he has no place to play, or things to play with. And he has nobody to think of his future.

And already, he has responsibilities waiting; he has been told he must take care of his younger brother when he grows up.

Firas, Qusay and Ali are all children, but none the way children should be.

(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq’s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

Democrats often tell us that we have to support their right-leaning candidates in order to get some of what we want. Settling for less is their way of existence. So when Steve Kelly of Bozeman ran against Dennis Rehberg in 2002, Democrats dropped him like a hot stone. Acquiescence is not Kelly’s strong suit.

Kelly is a bright and creative man, and would have made an excellent Congressman. His passion is the environment, and he is one of the founders of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, an aggressive and non-compromising environmental group. He had a letter in yesterday’s Bozeman Chronicle (not available on line) about environmental toadies.

Back when Marc Racicot was governor and Republicans controlled the legislature, they came up with a scheme for dealing with environmentalists called “Consensus Councils”. The idea was to get everyone to sit down at a table and talk out their problems, with government officials acting as mere facilitators. However, in cynical Racicot fashion, the councils were soon turned on their ears, and facilitators were trumpeting concessions by environmentalists that had never been made. It was a triangulation process designed to work against them. These were Clinton times.

Consensus Councils have gone away, but the concept lives. Recently here in Bozeman quiet trail users lost their shirts in a facilitated set of meetings put on by Gallatin National Forest. Trails formerly devoted to quiet use were turned over to motorized users for the majority of the time. True to form, GNF trumpeted the loss of quiet time as a wonderful achievement of accommodation by trail users.

Which brings us to Steve Kelly. He’s not a consensus guy. He’s a fighter. He wrote to the Chronicle in response to two op-eds put up by Bob Ekey of the Wilderness Society, who is making a big deal about “civility” and “collaboration”. Kelly doesn’t care for Ekey’s tendency to seek agreement by yielding ground.

Civility requires politeness and courtesy, as well as an understanding that some independent-minded people have no interest in abandoning strongly held positions based on principles. Excoriating “radicals” because they won’t compromise is hardly a recipe for collaborative success. This kind of father-knows-best attitude breeds all sorts of mistrust and discontent and fuels the myth that all environmentalists are elitist.

Indeed. The faulty logic behind the consensus process is that the answer always lies somewhere in the middle. In the Gallatin trails dispute, for example, it was perfectly appropriate to insist on no motorized vehicles on our quiet trails. But that position was seen as radical. As soon as the quiet trail users sat down at the table to negotiate, they lost.

I believe we have institutions and political processes in place that need reform. What we don’t need is a substitute (stakeholder) process that relieves our elected public officials and agencies of their mandatory duty to make tough political and policy decisions.

And that is the driving force behind these consensus processes – public officials are intimidated by the noisy, belligerent factions, usually the motorized crowd. Fearing to take them on, and also fearing back-door backlash from higher-up elected officials (usually the late Conrad Burns, but also Dennis Rehberg), forest service and other public employees have opted for the collaboration process. It’s a way of dodging bullets.

What’s wrong with decisions based on sound economic and scientific evidence, and the rule of law? Public participation is the mechanism anyone, and everyone, can use to keep the pressure on during government decision-making processes.

Protecting wilderness, old growth habitat, lynx and grizzly bear habitat and key bull trout watersheds is controversial business. We don’t give up, and we don’t give in without a fight. In this age of political correctness, there are still a few environmentalists out there who believe in results.

Being well-liked by one’s opponents is so conveniently compromising.

Kelly pretty much sums up the problem we have with Democrats, in addition to milquetoasty environmental groups. He underlines why that party abandoned him in 2002. He’s everything modern Democrats aren’t, bold and thorough and possessing courage of convictions. Both the party and the environmental community could use a few more like him.

I frankly don’t think that either Obama or Clinton will get us our of Iraq. Look at the stakes – they are much too high. We invaded to take control of their oil and establish permanent military bases. Those were bipartisan goals – it is no accident that Clinton voted for the war. She still supports it. Most likely Obama too. Candidates don’t get much media attention unless they are ballplayers, and Obama has never lacked for media attention.

So we’re not about to reverse course based on election year politicking. It’s just not in the cards. It’s about as likely as renegotiation of NAFTA.

Nonetheless, I liked this ad. Emotionally, and for no good reason, I’m pulling for Obama. Clinton strikes me as having that hungry look, even if not lean.

1. A guy with a company that makes razors went to his boss and said “Hey – I know a way to double our sales. Put two blades in each razor.” (They’re up to five now.)

2. A guy with a beer company went to his boss and said “Hey – let’s take some of the calories out of beer so people will drink more of it. We can charge the same price.”

I am privileged to speak out on the man who represents me in Helena, Representative Roger Koopman of Bozeman, our own version of Eric Coobs. Koopman, I think by all standards and definitions, is a wingnut. He wiles away his hours in Helena proposing legislation that goes nowhere while at the same time alienating the people he has to work with to get anything accomplished. He’s a classic crank. Even when he speaks in a friendly manner and tries to sound reasonable, I can feel the rage beneath. This is not a sane man.

Koopman’s latest gambit is an attack on his fellow Republicans, namely, those who were so bold as to make a deal with Governor Schweitzer to formulate a workable budget in 2007. Koopman, in the name of ideological purity and calling them “socialists”, is forming a movement to run true believers against them. It’s going to be somewhat comical.

The list was complied based on a voting index released last fall by Missoula law professor Rob Natelson. Here’s his hit list: Llew Jones (Conrad), Walter McNutt (Sidkeny), Duane Ankney (Colstrip), Jesse O’Hara (Great Falls), Bill Glaser (Huntley), Bruce Malcolm (Emigrant), John Ward (Helena), Carol Lambert (Broadus), Elsie Arntzen (Billings), Gary McLaren (Victor), and Mike Milburn (Cascade).

It’s hard to predict the fallout here. Koopman is a fringe player, though not necessarily marginalized within his own party. Primary battles between the socialists listed above and hard right foes could well further polarize the party and give the Democrats a workable majority. Maybe in Montana, unlike Washington, a majority can get something done.

Another possible outcome: The Republican Party regroups, expels its far-right radical elements, and once again becomes a bastion for common-sense conservatives.

Somehow, I don’t see that happening. These are tempestuous times, and the extremes rule. More likely, Koopman and Natelson will have modest success, and we end up with another standoff in Helena with the far right entrenched, and the reasonable people advised, quoting Billings Senator Mike Lange, to shove it up their asses.

What would you do with a man who was convicted of planting a bomb on an airplane that killed 73 people? The plane was blown up in the air, an explicit act of terrorism. What if this same man orchestrated bombings of hotels that killed numerous people, including a high-profile and completely innocent Italian businessman. What if he was arrested and convicted of plotting to blow up an auditorium full of students, trying to get to Fidel Castro? (He actually had the equipment to do it when arrested – this is no pizza delivery boy.) What if he supervised torture, attaching electrodes to penises, kicking an eight month pregnant woman in the belly, killing the baby? What if he forced a mother to watch as he crushed lit cigarettes on her baby?

Such a man ought to be shot or hanged or at least incarcerated for life without parole. I favor his death in a most painful manner.

His name is Luis Posada Carriles. He now lives in Miami. The Venezuelan government would like to extradite him and try him, but get this – the U.S. refused to allow the deportation because they fear the Venezuelans would torture him. He’s roaming free in this country, and will apparently never pay a price for his crimes against humanity.

The Bush Administration reserves the right to bomb countries that harbor terrorists. If they are consistent in enforcing this policy, they should now unleash B52’s and fighter jets on Washington, D.C.

I’m linking here to Mike because that’s what we bloggers do. We link to one another. Mike will pick up on the link, and he’ll come here and read what I say, and he might comment. It’s only fair. He put up something really interesting, and I commented over there. If he comments here, the circle will be complete.

Mike’s a smart guy, but when it comes to politics, it’s really hard to tell about people. As with religion, some very smart people can believe some very weird stuff. But Mike, for all his weirdness, is having a revelation of sorts, and it is one so important that I hope other bloggers link to me as I link to him, or bypass me and link directly to him. What he has discovered (and he is not surprised, I must emphasize), is that Obama is being duplicitous about NAFTA. Obama really supports NAFTA in its current form. He’s just trash-talking it because he wants to win the Ohio primary. Ohioans, in their dense stupidity, think they’ve been hurt by NAFTA.

Go and read Mike’s post, please, so I don’t have to repeat everything here.

Sometime I’m going to read more about NAFTA. All I have is vague impressions. I assume that the treaty was written by and crafted to benefit American corporations, and that no one spoke for Mexican campesinos at that time. They don’t matter. I assume it was merely a continuation of our old habits – imperialism, we used to call it. We need two things from backward countries, mainly those to the south of us – cheap labor and cheap commodities. We do not, repeat, do not, want them to develop. Quite the opposite. If they try to do so, we will fight them every step of the way. At the same time, there are things we need to protect – “intellectual property”, we call it – our ideas and patents on seed technology and our weapons technology and, of course, our movie and music industries, but not our jobs, as our leaders and our corporations don’t care about our jobs, and think we are overpaid anyway.

So NAFTA, if crafted correctly, would give us access to their cheap labor and commodities while protecting our most important assets. But not our jobs.

So I assume that when NAFTA was crafted, it would be done so with hardly any input from workers here, none from those abroad, and when the expected fallout occurred, that economists working for American corporations and the universities and think tanks they support would tell us how really good NAFTA is for us. That’s how it’s done – it’s a circle back-pat, to be delicate. (They did negotiate “side agreements” on labor and the environment in response to public pressure fourteen years ago, but that was just window dressing.)

Fallout from NAFTA? Loss of jobs here. Mexican farmers have been devastated by cheap corn going down there, and in turn are coming here in droves to work the underground economy undercut our wage structure. And our corporations hire them for less than they would have to pay Americans. Win-win.

But it’s all theoretical – I mean, Ohioans really aren’t that stupid, and might know a thing or two, and there really is a massive migration from south to north going on since NAFTA passed. But our economists tell us that this is all good, or that if it is bad, that it wasn’t caused by NAFTA.

(Just a side note – in Mike’s links, they talk about how good NAFTA has been for us, and give NAFTA credit for every positive thing that has happened these last fourteen years since its passage, assuming if two things happen at once, once caused the other. Much of that is probably devil-in-detail kind of stuff, some of it just professional manipulation of statistics, but the interesting thing is this – they only talk about what is good for the U.S. – not Mexico or Canada. And they don’t talk about the migration.)

Anyway, here’s something critical – our politicians of both parties are supported by the corporations who crafted NAFTA, and are not going to do anything to change it. In fact, they will support its expansion to every other backward country foolish enough (or whose politicians are bought enough) to go along. So Clinton and Obama, who are bashing NAFTA in public in Ohio, are not serious. So it would make sense that they would reassure Canadian leadership by back channel not to pay attention. And that’s what they did. That’s what Mike wrote about.

Do yourself a favor, link to Mike, link to me, let’s make a circle link. Let’s spread the word amongst ourselves. Obama and Clinton are lying about NAFTA. Mike exposed them.

It’s going to get a lot dumber than this before it is over.

Now there must be one floating around somewhere that has Bill answering the phone and trying to sneak out the back door.

From Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michale Pollan:

The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when a huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principle ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America’s forests with the surplus chemical, to help out the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II”.

Corn produced by ammonium nitrate has been in super abundance since the policies of the Nixon Administration set it off, and prices have usually been depressed even as farmers grew more and more. But corn is now selling for over $5.00 a bushel, the result of yet another government program – ethanol. Government is now using up the surplus it created. The snake is consuming its own tail.

Before free market enthusiasts respond that this is yet another example of government meddling screwing things up, think back to that time in our history, the Great Depression, when farmers produced so much that they had no market for their product. Market economics in agriculture, as in health care and utilities and education and mail delivery, apply wonderful academic theories to a real world that simply doesn’t respond.