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iraq
WSJ reporter's private email on IRAQ
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Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.
Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
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Pentagon wants 'uplifting accounts' about Iraq
Administration wants upbeat reports, will 'curtail' bad news about Iraq.
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Thursday morning in Baghdad multiple car bombs and rocket attacks killed at least 40 people, including many children and several US soldiers. The Bush administration, The Washington Post reports Thursday, worried that negative stories like these are dominating the news headlines during an election period, has decided to send out Iraq Americans to bring what the Defense Department calls "the good news" about the situation in Iraq to US military bases.
The Post also reports that the administration is moving to "curtail distribution" of reports that show the situation in Iraq growing worse. In particular, the US Agency of International Development said this week that it will "restrict distribution" of a report by its contractor, Kroll Security International, that showed the number of attacks by insurgents had been increasingly dramatically over the past few months. Attacks have risen to 70 a day, up from 40-50, since Iraqi Prime Minister Alawi took office in June.
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Soldiers speaks out, is threatened with court martial
photography
Nationale Zero
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To photographe a road which doesn't exist, you have to trace it.
A year ago we decided to shoot Europe by following a road which cross the 25 countries of the Union of 2004, a Transeuropean Road.
The Road ZERO.
We wanted to bring home images of that reality. Europe: what does it look like? Our road did not figure on any map. We were 10 having it in our brain. It will start in Cyprus and finish in Gibraltar. It willl cross the new 10 states, unknown, and the other 15 states, not well known.
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thanks to Street Photography mailing list
Still The Occupation
by Amira Hass
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The screaming and shouting by opponents of disengagement and the settlement lobby is creating an image of the prime minister being a man of the political center. Their threats and accusations are painting him with the colors of a persecuted peacemaker, so much so that kibbutzniks in the north are joining the Likud to help the man who sprang forth from their very tradition of farming the land, Ariel Sharon. That may be marginal, but it says something about the sympathy on that part of the electorate that regards itself as moderate, and supports a political compromise with the Palestinians and a two-state solution.
Support and sympathy from parts of the Israeli peace camp for the disengagement is a dangerous part of the plan because it enables Sharon and his partners in his world view to continue executing their real plan and to do so without public criticism, without protests, without effective opposition. Their goal is control over as much of the West Bank as possible, without Arabs or with as few Arabs as possible, and the continued expansion of settlements that separate Palestinian population centers from each other. In that vision, the Palestinians are not a nation with national rights over their land, which is entirely under Israeli control, but a collection of individual communities, and the Israeli ruler is preparing a different future for each one of those communities: two of them, in Gaza and the northern West Bank, will soon enjoy an Israeli "withdrawal."
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[more]
thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog
It is a sick society that harasses, humiliates dying patients
by Gideon Levy
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One out of every nine women gets breast cancer. There are doctors who say that statistic has worsened lately and now stands at one out of every eight. The disease is particularly violent in younger women and the primary growth in the breast spreads rapidly to the liver, the lungs, the bones and the brain. Is there anything worse than being a young woman with cancer whose chances are slim? It turns out that there is - being a young Palestinian woman with cancer whose chances are slim.
For 10 days now, F., a 28-year-old resident of Gaza, has been trying to get to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer for urgent chemotherapy in the oncology department. The story of what has happened to her during these 10 awful days sounds unbelievable, even to someone who has already heard horrible stories. The reality has succeeded in superseding even what the sickest imagination could invent.
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[more]
thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog
photography
Roses
Francoise and Daniel Cartier
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Featuring a wealth of illustrations, this exhibition will focus on "Roses," a major body of work that this closely-knit husband-and-wife artist team has been building up since 1998. Their efforts have yielded several series of photograms - images cast by the sunlight alone as it touches the light-sensitive paper surrounding the carefully chosen objets trouvés placed upon it by the artists. Here, photography is reduced to its simplest but most immediate expression. Omitting the camera, the Cartiers achieve a quasi "material" likeness of reality, at the very time when the images and world seeking to apprehend it are dematerializing before our very eyes, evanescing into the virtuality of pixels and bytes - be they mega, giga, or otherwise.
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history doesn't stop
I finished Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. What I said about it in my last post remains unchanged. What I wanted to add was that the fall of the Ottoman Empire isn't over yet. It's not over yet in the sense that the replacement for the Ottoman Empire hasn't happened. Yet.
Too often we see history as a series of events that have a beginning and an end. WWI began in 1914 with the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand and ended in 1918. Then WWII started in 1939 with the invasion of Poland and ended in 1945. The bigger pictures is somewhat different. The reality is that WWII was a continuation of WWI. History isn't a series of disconnected events. It's a continuum.
What is happening in the Middle East started in 1798 with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Since that time the Western world has tried to take over and colonize the Middle East. WWI finally caused the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Wester powers have been aquabbling over the spoils ever since. Britain came out on top after WWI but then the US muscled Britain aside after WWII.
"Peace to End All Peace" covers from 1912 to 1922. The Western Powers have been controlling the Middle East ever since and the native populations have been resisting ever since. They will continue to resist until they have control over their own lives.
This book is essential to understanding the Middle East.
r.i.p.
TAMRON ANNOUNCES THE DISCONTINUATION OF BRONICA SLR CAMERAS
SALES DECLINE IN THE DIGITAL AGE FUELS THE DISCONTINUATION OF BRONICA MEDIUM FORMAT SLR PRODUCTS
thanks to Street Photography mailing list
Bronica was the Japanese answer to Hassleblad. This is a Bronica S2A from the early 70s. A fiend had one with the 40mm Nikkor. I had the opportunity to shoot it. Nice! Sad to see it go.
election 2004
What I learned from Bush at the debate:
Being President is really hard work, we mustn't give mixed messages (don't ever change), and it's really hard work. If it's so fucking hard maybe he should find another line of work. Smarmy bastard!
Tweet Smell of Success
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In birding, those fanatical about building up the life lists of species are known as "twitchers." But there was no bigger twitcher last night than the bird-hating Bush, who once ignorantly shot a killdeer during a photo op thinking it was a dove, according to Karen Hughes' merde-eating memoir. Bush's face suffered a silent outbreak of Tourette's Syndrome; he grimaced, smirked, sniffed, rolled his eyes, and did some weird thing with his mouth that as yet has no diagnostic name. He was President Twitchy, giving a performance that critics hailed as "peevish" and "petulant."
We've seen President Twitchy before. When Helen Thomas persisted in asking Bush why he was trying to tear down the walls between church and state, and wouldn't be sluffed off with one of his standard nonanswers, Bush, as I wrote in Attack Poodles, went through a battery of irked expressions that ended with him imitating Tony Perkins in the final shot of Psycho, looking as if he had a fly on his nose.
Since then Bush has been wheeled out into forums where no one can dare question or contradict his majesty, where he can lean forward and repeat ad nauseam his patented soundbites. Last night I believe we saw the ugly comeback of the private face of Bush--the irritable expressions he flashes subordinates when he's presented with information he doesn't like or feels someone's taken up too much of his time or is pressed to explain himself to people he shouldn't have to explain himself to because he's the president and fuck you. The notion that Bush is "likeable" has always been laughable. It takes a Washington pundit to be that dumb. He's an angry, spoiled, resentful little big man--I use "little big man" in the Reichian sense of a small personality who puffs himself up to look big through bluster and swagger but remains a scheming coward inside--and next to a genuinely big man like Kerry, shrunk before the camera's eyes.
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[more]
thanks to Eschaton
See Bush Debate. See Him Squirm
He looked like a hapless teen called on the carpet as Kerry channeled Poppy and termed the Iraq invasion a "colossal error"
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But Bush, the onetime black sheep of his family, wanted to wipe away the "wimp factor" stain that his old man had left on the Bush clan. And so he rebelled against the family mantra of prudence in all things. Last night, he looked for all the world like a sputtering screwup -- again.
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[more]
thanks to Eschaton
Naked Emperor
by Steve Gilliard
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What happened last night is not that Bush lost the election or Kerry won it, but that Bush perfomed as bad in a debate as he did with Prime Minister Allawi. Which is frightening. If he does no better, and given his public performances over the last few years, better would take a lot, then the next debate should be a total train wreck. Even his fans had to admit that it didn't go well for him.
The race will get even uglier as Bush grows more desperate. No matter their public face,and they're conceeding the loss to the media, they have to be absolutely panicked. The Congress is looking like a disaster as well, with Oklahoma going down in flames and Illinois such a crater, Obama is now campaigning for other candidates in other states. Remember one thing, Bush must win. His whole life has been defined by the need to win and the failure to do so, over and over. That is his family dynamic.
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Nasty days are here
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Now that the dust has settled, it's more than abundantly clear that John Kerry kicked George W. Bush's squinting, smirking little kabootie in last night's debate. The polls are likely to reflect a shift in his favor. And that means it's about to get really nasty.
It's become clear (as long predicted) that the central theme of the Republicans in this year's campaign is going to be: A vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorists. (See, e.g., the ad that appeared on the RNC Website: "10 out of 10 terrorists agree: Anybody But Bush!") That was, as just noted, the context of one of Bush's more notable evasions last night.
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FWIW...
Bush Blows Debate: Talks to Rove in Earpiece!
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During the Presidential Debate Bush made what may be his most costly error- he exposed that he’s using an earpiece to help him answer debate questions. In the middle of an answer bush said, "now let me finish" as if someone was interrupting him - yet nobody did - he was talking to the person in his earpiece.
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[more]
thanks to Yolanda Flanagan
Watch carefully during the next debate.
photography
Another giant of photography dies at 81. He was on assignment at the time. I like that.
Richard Avedon, the Eye of Fashion, Dies at 81
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Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century, died yesterday in a hospital in San Antonio. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage suffered last Saturday, said his son, John. Mr. Avedon was in Texas on assignment for The New Yorker magazine, which hired him in 1992 as its first staff photographer. He had been working on a portfolio called "Democracy,'' an election-year project that included coverage of the presidential nominating conventions.
Mr. Avedon's photographs captured the freedom, excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization. No matter what the prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way to dramatize its spirit as the fashion world's creative attention swayed variously from the "New Look" of liberated Paris to pragmatic American sportswear designed in New York, and from the anti-establishment fashion of London's Carnaby Street to sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from Milan.
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The above New York Times obiturary had a couple of Avedon quotes on portraits that struck me:
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"A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks."
"A portrait is not a likeness," Richard Avedon said at the time of "In the American West. "The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
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"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." Something anyone taking or looking at a photograph should remember.
richardavedon.com
thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje
Richard Avedon: Portraits
thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje
This is another post from the Street Photography mailing list. Luis's post said it very well. Here it is in its entirety:
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An era passes, and vacancies created for those still alive who would dare take the medium forward. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and the only way ever to repay that debt is to dream large and reach beyond our horizons.
My favorite Avedon story is from his book "Observations" :
"My first sitter was Rachmaninoff. He had an apartment in the building where my grandparents lived. I was about ten, and I used to hide among the garbage cans on his back stairs, stay there hour after hour listening to him practice. One day I thought I must: must ring his bell. I asked could I take his picture with my box camera."
I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the years when he and Diane Arbus would get together after their workdays and make
the rounds of NYC parties photographing into the night. I do not know if any of those pictures were ever published.
Many are not aware that Avedon was a fabulous SP'er, even though he was famous as one of, if not the best, portraitist of our time.
Besides the pictures, he left notes along the path. Here are two personal favorites:
"I seldom see anything beautiful in a young face. I do, though in the downward curve of Maugham's lips. Isak Dinesen's hands. So much has been written there, there is so much to be read, if one could only read....(These People) are all obsessed. Obsessed with work of one sort or another. To dance, to be beautiful, tell stories, solve riddles, perform in the street. Zavartini's mouth and Escudero's eyes, the smile of Marie-Louise Bousquet: they are sermons on bravado."
and .....
"Photographers are lookers with an overdeveloped 'see'. If they are smart they push the 'see' and don't worry if they can't tell Arpege from My Sin. Photographers have to look, keep looking. The eye am the camera."
--- Luis
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threats to society
U.S. agents seize control of Free Radio Santa Cruz
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Guns drawn, agents of the U.S. Marshal Service served a warrant on a tiny Santa Cruz pirate radio station early Wednesday, rousting and frisking the pajama-clad residents of the co-op house from which the station had been broadcasting. No one was arrested.
''This is not a criminal action against people,'' said Supervising Deputy Cheryl Koel.
The target was Free Radio Santa Cruz, an FM micro-station boasting 35 to 40 watts of power and offering round-the-clock music, activism and other local programming, in addition to such national programming as Radio Pacifica's ''Democracy Now'' -- all in defiance of federal licensing laws.
The blue-jacketed marshals along with agents of the Federal Communications Commission dismantled the station's equipment and carried it to a waiting pickup with a camper shell as the crowd of perhaps 60 people yelled ''Shame! Shame!'' and ''Go home!''
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[more]
thanks to Yolanda Flanagan
These Marshals are nothing more than corporate goons. Their primary job is not to protect the people but to protect the corporations. Government of the Corporation, by the Corporation, for the Corporation.
update
Yolanda Flanagan sent me two more links. Come on, folks. We're supposedly worried about terrorists raping and pillaging throughout America and we are busting pirate radio stations that say things that Corporations don't like to hear.
San Francisco Liberation Radio Raided!
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Approximately 10 federal agents, 10 San Francisco police, and 5 FCC agents raided San Francisco Liberation Radio (SFLR) studios yesterday. The raid began at 11 a.m., and lasted for approximately 2 hours. They arrived equipped with battering ram and firearms, although neither was necessary. The FCC confiscated all equipment in the station at the time, including a 16 channel Mackie sound board, microphones, a computer, CD, record, and tape players, and so much more.
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[more]
KFAR Shut Down by the FBI
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Knoxville First Amendment Radio (KFAR 90.9 FM) has been highly critical of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) over the course of the station’s 3-year history, challenging TVA’s nuclear power program and its burning of coal mined in Mountain Top Removal operations. KFAR is the only voice on the Knoxville airwaves that has consistently spoken out on important issues like the war in Iraq and nuclear weapons production in Oak Ridge. KFAR broadcasts over 15 independent news programs each week which are not available through any other source in Knoxville, and it is the only local radio station owned and operated by regular citizens.
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[more]
We can't actually have a public radio that is done by the public. Heavens!
photography
This is a site that I discovered at the Street Photography mailing list. Rami has some very nice images and be sure to check out his links page. Some really good images to be found there.
rami.pl
Street Photography
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Thursday September 30 2004
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photography
I've been busy chronicling my start with street photography. It started out as a blog entry. It was getting pretty long when the power went out and I lost it all. I took the hint and made it part of my photography section.
Street Photography and a Frankencamera
or
I start playing in the street
[more]
Once I did that page and tried to put it in my photography section I discovered that I had to reorganize the entire photography section. That's done. I hope all the links work. Now I can get on with life.
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Tuesday September 28 2004
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vote for change
Last night I went to see Keb' Mo', Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne as part of Move On's Vote for Change Tour. It was a birthday present from Andrew and Kathy. A wonderful time was had by all and Bonnie Raitt stole the show. There were people handing out various cards and bumper stickers inside and outside of the venue. This is my favorite. It's from a local T-shirt company.
T-shirts that Bite
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guerrilla marketing
Freeway Blogger
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Here's My Offer: I'll match every sign you put up in your state with three of my own. If Arizona sends me pictures of 25 signs, I'll go there and put up 75. Same for you New Mexico. You too Colorado. This offer valid for hand-painted signs only.
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photography
Postcards from Paradise
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As a professional photographer, I have often taken photographs of that diverse group of people we call refugees. These are photographs that will influence the shape of public opinion, because most of us only know about refugees from the media.
The refugees have no influence over how or in which context the photographer’s images represent them in the media.That is why I – in collaboration with the Danish Red Cross Asylum Department – decided to give 100 disposable cameras to refugees in centers across Denmark. I wanted to let them represent themselves with images that would shape our opinion about them.
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journalism
This isn't your ordinary must read. This is an absolute must read. For real.
Journalism Under Fire
by Bill Moyers
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They helped me relearn another of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of “bias,” or, these days, even a point of view, there’s no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. I remember what Izzy Stone said about this. For years he was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.”
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photography
Timothy Greenfield-sanders
Toni Morrison
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
The studio shown in the portraits section is a natural light studio. The curtains are drawn or removed to control the light. You don't see many of these any more. I have a monograph from the turn of the last century on natural light studios. Someday, when I finish all my other projects, I'll scan it and put it up. Nice portraits, too.
iraq
Iraq Elections a Disaster in the Making
by Juan Cole
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Both Bush and Allawi affirmed on Thursday that elections would be held as promised. Donald Rumsfeld, whose uncontrollable mouth is sometimes useful insofar as he lets the truth slip, said that elections might not be possible in all the provinces. Allawi minimized the violence, saying that it was confined to three of Iraq's 18 provinces. This assertion is simply untrue, and is anyway misleading because Baghdad is one of the three Allawi had in mind! Could an election that excluded the capital, with at least five million inhabitants, be considered valid? Denis D. Gray of AP notes:
"However, at least six provinces – Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Nineveh – have been the scene of significant attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi authorities in the past month. The only areas not plagued by bloodshed are the three northern provinces controlled by Kurds. The situation in many areas, however, is unknown since journalists' travel is restricted by security fears."
[...]
The situation is even worse than Gray allows. As recently as August, the British expended 100,000 rounds of ammunition in Maysan province at Amara, saying they had the most intense fighting since the Korean War! Likewise there was heavy fighting in Wasit (Kut) and Najaf. In the map below I made the present security-challenged provinces red, and those that saw recent heavy fighting are purple. I ask you if this looks like the problems are in "three of 18 provinces," or whether it looks to you like elections held only in the white areas (as Donald Rumsfeld seems to envision) would produce a legitimate government:
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Hell
Salon's war correspondent on the Iraq inferno.
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Three years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, attacks in which they played no part, the people of Iraq have been liberated from one tyranny only to be remanded to another: continuous urban warfare, religious extremism and a contagion of fear. The celebrated hand of the free market in Iraq has brought not only cellphones and satellite TV, it has also brought down prices for automatic weapons, making them affordable to the average Iraqi. The last time I checked, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher cost about $250.
In his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Bush told a subdued General Assembly, "Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all." The words of the president ring hollow.
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Traveller 2000, the Iraq edition
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And this is where Bush comes in.
He resolutely refuses to admit he's failing, badly. Iraq is a failure. It is now a terrorist training ground. The resistance is widely supported by Iraqis. If it wasn't, people with guns wouldn't have to hide their faces, Translators wouldn't have to fear being ratted out by kindly old ladies.
His statements deny reality. The media isn't hiding the truth of reconstruction, there IS NO reconstruction. There is no way to build anything, when the engineers guide the guerrillas to the points in the piplelines to blow them up. Over 60 attacks in a year, about one a week or so. All effective.
The fact that the reconstruction was run like a Stalinist hiring bureau, with ideological tests at every corner, and then promptly run into the ground like a Five Year plan, but quicker, is of note.
We have done one thing, turn Iraq into a Steve Jackson game. A violent netherworld where the strongest gang has F-15's on call.
Democracy? Elections? Not even in the room.
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[more]
Incident on Haifa Street
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But let's turn from the large and statistical to a single incident that made the news repeatedly last week, an incident on Baghdad's Haifa Street, known locally as "Death Street" for the regular ambushes that take place there. The thoroughfare, part of a Sunni neighborhood in the capital that has been a hotbed of opposition to the Americans, lies across the Tigris river from, but only several hundred yards away from what's now being called the "International Zone" (as in neocolonial Shanghai) but is better known as the Green Zone, the highly fortified area where the U.S. embassy and the Allawi government have existed, until recently, in air-conditioned (relative) splendor.
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photography
Eddie Adams, Journalist Who Showed Violence of Vietnam, Dies at 71
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Eddie Adams, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and combat photographer who produced one of the most riveting images of the Vietnam War, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 71.
[...]
In a 45-year career, much of it spent in the front ranks of news photographers, he worked for The Associated Press, Time and Parade, covering 13 wars and amassing about 500 photojournalism awards. But it was a 1968 photograph from Vietnam, taken for The A.P., that cemented his reputation in the public eye and among his peers. That black-and-white image captured the exact moment that Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then serving as the national police chief of South Vietnam, fired a bullet at the head of a Vietcong prisoner standing an arm's length away on a Saigon street.
Although there was little doubt that the captive was indeed a Vietcong infiltrator, his seemingly impromptu execution shocked millions around the world when the photograph was first published and it galvanized a growing antiwar sentiment in the United States. Mr. Adams took the image during the Tet offensive, when the Vietcong began attacks within Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. The picture received the Pulitzer Prize for breaking-news photography in 1969.
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EddieAdams
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iran
War-Gaming the Mullahs
The U.S. weighs the price of a pre-emptive strike
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Unprepared as anyone is for a showdown with Iran, the threat seems to keep growing. Many defense experts in Israel, the United States and elsewhere believe that Tehran has been taking advantage of loopholes in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is now within a year of mastering key weapons-production technology. They can't prove it, of course, and Iran's leaders deny any intention of developing the bomb. Nevertheless, last week U.S. and Israeli officials were talking of possible military action—even though some believe it's already too late to keep Iran from going nuclear (if it chooses). "We have to start accepting that Iran will probably have the bomb," says one senior Israeli source. There's only one solution, he says: "Look at ways to make sure it's not the mullahs who have their finger on the trigger."
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[more]
thanks to War and Piece
Bush, Marshal Foch and Iran
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Washington's strategic position in the Middle East is stronger than it has ever been, contrary to superficial interpretation. With much of central Iraq out of US control and a record level of close to 100 attacks a day against US forces, President George W Bush appears on the defensive. The moment recalls French Marshal Ferdinand Foch's 1914 dispatch from the Marne: "My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack." To be specific, the United States will in some form or other attack Iran while it arranges the division of Iraq.
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photography
dirk wilhelmy fotografie
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thanks to Conscientious
you're in the army now
Destroying the National Guard
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For many Guardsmen, deployment to Iraq means economic ruin. They have mortgage payments, car payments, credit card debt, all calculated on their civilian salaries. Suddenly, for a year or more, their pay drops to that of a private. The families they leave behind face the loss of everything they have. What militia wouldn't desert in that situation?
The real scope of the damage of Mr. Rumsfeld's decision to send the Guard to Iraq – 40% of the American troops in Iraq are now reservists or Guardsmen – will probably not be revealed until units return. One of the few already back saw 70% of its members leave the Guard immediately.
What the Washington elite that wages cabinet wars does not understand, or care about, is the vital role the National Guard plays on the state and local levels. Once the Guard has been destroyed, who will provide the emergency services communities need when disaster strikes? One would think that in a so-called "war against terror," where the danger to the American homeland is readily acknowledged, someone in the nation's capital would care about the local first line of defense.
The fact of the matter is that Versailles on the Potomac does not care about the rest of the country in any respect, so long as the tax dollars keep coming in.
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A Draft After the Elections?
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Obviously, Iraq has not been a "cakewalk" as was widely trumpeted by its neocon promoters in the months leading up to the American invasion. And if, as Donald Rumsfeld once said, Iraq turns out to be "a long hard slog" (it has), who then will be called on to do the slogging?
It is fair to ask how many wars our imperial nation can fight with its hard-pressed volunteer forces, many of whom are now forbidden to leave when their enlistments run out. Or, when they are finally released, how many will re-enlist. The National Guard, for example, failed to meet this year's quota of 58,000, recruiting 5,000 less people. A more pressing question is, how many Americans will be forced to fight, perhaps die for the crazed imperial dreams concocted by a small clique of extremely influential and well-funded neoconservatives, virtually none of whom ever bothered to serve in the military they so profess to love? And among Americans (the late Neil Postman once described them as "amusing themselves to death"), unless their immediate family members are in the military, how many Americans will care if a draft is reinstated and more GIs must die fighting Iraqis and Iranians who have never attacked us?
And even more ominously: There is increasing chatter in Washington among neoconservatives and their pet columnists of ever more wars ahead. They call it spreading their version of democracy; I call it aggressive and unjustifiable wars. Israel, America's client state, is now hinting at an attack on Iran while neocons here are suggesting that America's next target should be Iran. Unanswered is what happens if Iran strikes back at Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq? In fact, the issue of Iran is now being discussed behind closed doors at the White House. How many dissenters do you think are present at these sessions?
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photography
Mario Lalich
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thanks to coincidences
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