This is a very interesting, and unsettling, piece about how our government acts towards the world. And they wonder why they hate us.

McNeill Interview with Noam Chomsky

I mean, serious planners are well aware of this. [Former National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew] Brzezinski recently pointed out that victory and control in Iraq would give the US what he called critical leverage over Asian and European economies, so the US will have its hand on the spigot. I mean it already does to a substantial extent but this will be much greater. In fact, back in the 1940s the Middle East was described as a stupendous source of strategic power, the most strategically important area in the world, and the US remained an oil exporter into the 1970s but still pursued the same policies. You have got to control that massive resource, it is a source of world control. If the US or UK were to shift to renewable energy it would still stick to the same policies. It doesn't really need...I mean it does use the oil but it has other sources and the oil goes on the market anyway so it doesn't matter. But control over it does matter. And the profit from it also matters, and having bases there that allow you to organize the region in your own interests, of course that matters. So this is nothing like Vietnam. It is totally different. In Vietnam the US basically won its major goals.

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Steve Bell

  thanks to Information Clearing House

What They’re Not Telling You About the “Election”
by Dahr Jamail

The day of blood and elections has passed, and the blaring trumpets of corporate media hailing it as a successful show of “democracy” have subsided to a dull roar. After a day which left 50 people dead in Iraq, both civilians and soldiers, the death toll was hailed as a figure that was “lower than expected.” Thus…acceptable, by Bush Administration/corporate media standards. After all, only of them was an American, the rest were Iraqis civilians and British soldiers.

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This election will change the world. But not in the way the Americans imagined
by Robert Fisk

Shias are about to inherit Iraq, but the election tomorrow that will bring them to power is creating deep fears among the Arab kings and dictators of the Middle East that their Sunni leadership is under threat. America has insisted on these elections - which will produce a largely Shia parliament representing Iraq's largest religious community - because they are supposed to provide an exit strategy for embattled US forces, but they seem set to change the geopolitical map of the Arab world in ways the Americans could never have imagined. For George Bush and Tony Blair this is the law of unintended consequences writ large.

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"Free" Iraqis Still Waiting for the Wind of Change
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
by Robert Fisk

More and more, we feel this vast, cosmic distance between real Iraq and the fantasy Iraq of Washington and London. I watch Blair talking nervously, his body language defensive, his eyes spiritual, telling us what a stupendous success the election has been. But he chose to keep the extent of the extent of the RAF Hercules tragedy secret from his people when he spoke on Sunday night. So why the surprise when the Americans and British still keep secret the number of Iraqis who are killed here every day? Twice in the morning, there are huge explosions which roar over Baghdad. I hear a gun battle near Sadr City. But the local Iraqi radio carries no explanation of this. At mid-morning, two police cars overtake me, sirens squealing, Kalashnikovs waving out the windows at motorists, the cops mouthing oaths at anyone who blocks their way. No reason again. They are the real world, hooded and unidentifiable. Fast and stirring dust. Like the wind.

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What I Heard about Iraq

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’ In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’ That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’

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  thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!

Closing in on Vietnam

It is $80 billion and halfway home to Vietnam. The fresh $80 billion just requested by President Bush pushes the war costs of Iraq and the amazing shrinking asterisk of Afghanistan (Osama been where?) past the $300 billion mark. The estimated cost of Vietnam in current dollars was $584 billion, according to the Congressional Research Office. Iraq has already cost more in current dollars than either the Civil War or World War I. It is about to pass the Korean War. We are on pace to pass Vietnam in two or three years.

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Marine recruiting down

For the first time in nearly a decade, the Marine Corps in January missed its monthly recruiting goal, in what military officials said was the latest troubling indicator of the Iraq war's impact on the armed services.

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