Well, it should be two strikes and you’re out for the foam-at-the-mouth warmongers. It should come as no surprise that the same people who ranted and raved for war with Iraq were also ranting and raving for war with Iran.
Their much-touted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were nonexistent, and now it turns out that Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the latest subject of their rants, is nonexistent, according to a consensus of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.
It also turns out that Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who bravely tried to tell the American people the truth, was right. He was right about Iraq. He is right about Iran. Yet this faithful public servant was brutally maligned and attacked by the warmongers. The Bush administration reportedly tapped his telephones and tried to prevent him from being re-elected to his post. Fortunately, the Bushies failed.
I cannot think of lower, more despicable human beings than people who try to frighten their country into a war they are all too old to fight by printing and broadcasting false information fed to them by the worst political administration since Ulysses Grant. They added to their sins by attacking honest people for speaking the truth.
These so-called foreign-policy experts are a contemptible lot. If they were honorable people, they would confess their error and apologize to the people they tried to discredit, but of course they are not honorable people.
The worst of the lot are those who pose as journalists but who really are water-carriers for the administration, the Republican Party, the neoconservative clique or, in some cases, Israel. They deserve people see them on television pontificating, they will know that those journalists are a bought bunch.
A real journalist has loyalty to only one group--his readers or listeners. He has an obligation to tell them the truth as best as he can determine it and not to pass on propaganda from someone behind the scenes.
The Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution protection for the free press because they realized that only a well-informed public can govern themselves. Misinforming the public is a direct attack on a free society. It is a direct attempt to subvert the democratic process. It is as much a crime against freedom as rigging an election.
The warmongers have blood on their hands. They bear almost equal responsibility with the government for the dead and wounded of the Iraq War. Thank God that this time the intelligence analysts stood firm against the administration’s pressure to politicize the results of their work, or these miserable warmongers would have had even more blood on their hands.
And don’t expect them to let up on trying to paint Iran as an imminent danger to the world. The truth is that there are only two countries in the world that could threaten America or Europe. Those are Russia and China. When you are assessing threats, you have to look at capabilities, not at rhetoric or intentions. Only China and Russia have the capability to attack the U.S.
Given this fact, you would think the administration would pay more attention to relations with these countries than to getting its drawers in a tizzy over Third World countries that lack the capability of harming us in any meaningful way.
The future grows dark for the United States. We have a bad administration that is corrupt, secretive, incompetent and disdainful of liberty. We have a press that for the most part cannot distinguish news from celebrity gossip. We have an education system that is manufacturing functional illiterates. We have a public that seemingly believes the only things worthwhile in life are entertainment and consumption.
The public debt is $9.1 trillion, and interest increases that debt by $1.4 billion per day. That alone will do us in if we fail to confront it. As for war, we can’t even afford the two we are in.
Charley Reese
ANTIWAR.COM

An Iraqi Arab residing in the Kurdish city of Kirkuk, receives a compensation check to leave Kurdistan back to his homeland in central or southern Iraq, Oct. 8.

Umm Nasser sits on a curb in northern Iraq, trying to decide where her home is. The black-draped Shiite woman left her native Baghdad for this contested city 27 years ago--one of tens of thousands lured by Saddam Hussein’s campaign to settle Arabs in this oil-rich area near Iran and Turkey while displacing Kurds he did not trust because of their separatist views.
Saddam redrew the province’s borders to maximize its Arab population, and paid Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq to move here.
Now Arabs like Umm Nasser are being encouraged to leave as part of a constitutional mandate to undo the demographic changes Saddam forced on this community. Kurds hope the population shift will pave the way for their autonomous administration to take control of Kirkuk and its vast oil wealth.
But Turkey and other countries in the region with Kurdish minorities have long feared that Kurdish rule of Kirkuk would encourage separatist sentiment within their own borders.
A referendum is expected next year on whether Kirkuk will join the semiautonomous Kurdish zone to its north, or continue to be ruled by Baghdad.
When she arrived nearly three decades ago, Umm Nasser was a fresh-faced newlywed, pregnant with the first of what would be six children--all born in Kirkuk.
Now the 47-year-old sits in the street outside a government building, lining up to register to leave the province.
The Arabs who came here under Saddam--still called Wafadeen, or “newcomers,“ in Arabic--receive about $16,000 in exchange for transferring their residency and food ration cards to their ancestral homelands, mainly in Baghdad and the south. The moves are all voluntary.
So far about 1,200 families have received checks, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials who believe some 60,000 Arabs will eventually file applications here to do so.
Meanwhile, Kurds who fled Kirkuk in the 1980s and 1990s are returning by the thousands to file repatriation claims. Some of their houses have been occupied by Arabs for decades, and about 500 Kurdish families have set up camp at a dilapidated soccer stadium, awaiting government approval to move back into the city.
The migration of both communities--Kurdish and Arab--has drastically altered Kirkuk’s landscape since the 2003 U.S. invasion. The stakes are high.
Much of Iraq’s vast oil wealth lies under the ground here, as well as in the south. Apart from the petrodollars, Kurds have a strong cultural and emotional attachment to Kirkuk, which they call “the Kurdish Jerusalem.“
“The referendum is the center of attention here, because Arabs, Turkomen and Kurds all claim historic and ethnic rights to this province,“ said Howard Keegan, head of the State Department team aiding reconstruction in Kirkuk. “They’re all tugging on the same rope.“
The referendum is mandated by the Iraqi constitution’s Article 140, which also calls for a province-wide census by the end of 2007. U.S. and Iraqi officials say few details have been worked out on how to administer the census and referendum, and it was postponed until sometime next year.
Keegan said he expected a census in about three months and the referendum in six to nine months.
“It would be difficult to achieve legitimacy in the process in a quicker time frame, but there’s pressure to do so,“ Keegan said.
Kurdish lawmakers--confident they have a majority--are pushing for a quick referendum, hoping for a political union with their economically prospering brethren to the north, he said.
Some Kurds have accused the federal government of stalling the process for fear of losing this oil-rich area to the Kurdish regional government.
“I don’t think it’s a grand plot to stop the repatriation of Kurds. It’s truly a difficult logistical problem to conduct this process fairly,“ said Army Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, the top U.S. commander in northern Iraq.
The offer of resettlement under Article 140 has given Umm Nasser a choice between her hometown of Baghdad and Kirkuk, where she and her husband started a new life 27 years ago.
She was enticed by Saddam’s incentives but also by Kirkuk’s verdant hills and quaint downtown, with buildings painted bright pink, yellow, aqua. The oil-rich economy meant jobs for her husband and a chance to leave their lower middle class life behind in Baghdad.
“As Shiites, what was safer for us at that time than doing what the Sunni dictator wanted?“ she said of the oppression she felt, even as a fellow Arab, under Saddam’s regime.
Now Umm Nasser--who gave only her nickname “mother of Nasser“ because of increasing security concerns--has swapped optimism for a new kind of fear.
She did not like Saddam. But since his ouster, she is worried about discrimination against Arabs in Kirkuk--which has a larger Kurdish community and a wealthier Turkomen one.
Ethnic and sectarian tension has burgeoned across Iraq since Saddam’s fall, as ordinary people search for a post-authoritarian identity.
In Kirkuk, the search has yielded a strong sense of nationalism among Kurds--whose deaths by the thousands under Saddam gave them a sense of entitlement once he was gone, Umm Nasser said.
Mohammad Kamal, a powerful Kurdish politician who recently helped broker an end to an Arab boycott of local politics, said he hoped more Kurds would reach out to Kirkuk’s Arabs and not repeat the same discrimination Kurds faced under Saddam.
“Arabs should feel no pressure to leave. Time has passed, and the Wafadeen who choose to stay even after Article 140 is completed will be considered the same as the original families here,“ Kamal said.
Umm Nasser acknowledged she received no threats or pressure to leave Kirkuk, but said she cannot shake the fear of being an Arab minority in a sea of Kurds.
AP.COM

The UN World Food Program estimates that, in the wake of Israel’s cutoffs,“ Food imports into the Gaza Strip are only enough to meet 41 percent of demand,“ (paraphrase by the UN-sponsored news agency, IRIN. “Only 41 percent of Gaza’s food import needs being met,“ 6 December 2007), ie. Gazan food intake has been cut by a shock 59 percent.
Even a small cut in food consumption can stunt or kill already hungry people, particularly infants in the brain-development stage.
The UN sponsored IRIN news service reports that “Israeli travel and trade restrictions have led to a decline in purchasing power in Gaza. A recent WFP survey found that of the 62 percent of people who said they had reduced their expenditure in recent months, 97 percent reported a decrease in spending on clothing and 93 percent on food.“
IRIN cites the case of Naheda Ghabaien, “a mother of five in the Beach refugee camp in central Gaza“ whose husband “used to work three or four days a week bringing home about US$10 a day“ but now, post sanctions, “only works a few days a month.“
At least the Ghabaien family is getting some aid, unlike so many other nutritionally threatened people around the world. Every twelve weeks, another UN agency (UNRWA) gives them “amounts of rice, flour, oil and sugar that can last for four to six weeks. The family rarely eats meat anymore, relying mostly on vegetables.“
“’When the agency food runs out,’“ IRIN quotes Naheda Ghabaien as saying, “we buy the food we need on credit from the grocer. When my husband works, most of his daily earnings go to settling the debt.“
The news agency notes that “(a)id workers say these sorts of coping mechanisms are reaching their limits“ and cannot keep yielding food for Gaza’s straitened people much longer.
Israel’s government says that its sanctions are legal--ie. are not a disproportionate reprisal, which is a war crime--so it is logically saying that these food and other cutoffs are not worse than the Gazan rocketing of Israel.
So, if that is the case, Israel should be willing to agree to a simple switch: Gaza gets the power and right to effectively cut off 59% of Israel’s food (as well as being able to shut its electricity, fuel, communications, medical supplies, travel rights, airspace etc.), and Israel gets the right to rocket Gaza as Gaza has rocketed Israel, ie. in a manner that has killed Israeli civilians at the rate of roughly one every four months.
Would the Israeli government agree to this bargain that is strictly based on its own legal logic?
Of course not. They’d be foolish if they did. They already bomb and shell Gaza, and other places, at will, killing Palestinian and Arab civilians at roughly the rate of ten for each Israeli civilian (for statistics within the Occupied Territories, see the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, http://www.btselem.org), and if anyone were to cut more than half of Israel’s food, as Israel is now doing to Gaza, that place would immediately be leveled by Israel, and/or the United States.
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

An unfamiliar country keeps popping up in press reports about drug trafficking: Guinea Bissau. This West African state of 1.5 million people is one of the poorest in the world. Its chief exports? Cashews, shrimp, and cocaine. Cocaine, in a country with no coca bush? That’s right. More than four tons of cocaine have been seized in West Africa this year, a 35 percent increase over the haul for 2006. Drugs are also being seized in international waters off the Gulf of Guinea.
One reason why this region is becoming a major drug trafficking hub is its location. West Africa is an ideal staging point along the route from South America to the cocaine markets of Europe. Big shipments are hidden on fishing boats and freighters, then broken up into smaller consignments that are sent by fast boats up the coast to Morocco or Spain.
Moreover, Africa’s weak states offer the least resistance as a substitute for traditional cocaine smuggling routes in Central America and the Caribbean, which are being blocked.
To appreciate the malaise of a country like Guinea Bissau, imagine that you are a policeman there and are tipped off about a drug shipment coming in by plane. First, you have to find a car to drive to the landing strip and get official permission and money to fill up the gas tank. There is no two-way radio to call for backup and no electricity to charge your mobile phone. If you reach the scene of the drop in time, the next challenge is to build a makeshift roadblock to stop the truck from off-loading the cocaine.
Strangely, the truck’s driver is wearing an army uniform and is not too concerned when you seize his cargo. You take him to the police station in the back of the car--without handcuffs, because you don’t have any. A senior government official intervenes to try to secure his release. The police chief refuses, and is so incorruptible that he sleeps beside the drugs to prevent the multi-million-dollar evidence from disappearing. Later that week, the suspect is released into the care of the military, and the police chief is fired.
This is a true story. And it is not an isolated case.
Nor is Guinea Bissau the only country in the region vulnerable to serious organized crime. Convoys of heavily armed four-wheel-drive vehicles travel at high speed across the Sahel region of Western Africa, bringing hashish from Morocco via Mauritania, Mali, and Niger to Chad and beyond.
Countries like Guinea Bissau need help, fast. While the amount of investment needed is minimal, failure to act will be very costly.
Antonio Maria Costa
Executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime
PROJECT-SYNDICATE.ORG