Antiwar.com Blog

Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of articles that came over the news service I read within minutes of one another:

Fallujah savors peace

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) – Two months after U.S. Marines pulled out, residents of Fallujah feel safe again, sleeping on their roofs to escape the heat without fear of the once-constant nighttime gunbattles, and traveling the streets without worrying they could be stopped or detained.

Fallujah, they say, is savoring its most peaceful spell in more than a year. U.S. forces camped on the city’s outskirts say they want to return to help out, but no one here is interested……

U.S. Airstrike in Fallujah Kills 14

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A U.S. airstrike Sunday on a Fallujah neighborhood previously targeted by American forces destroyed a house and killed 14 people, hospital and local officials said.

Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s office said he had given the go-ahead for the attack. U.S. officials declined to provide details of the strike.

I guess, considering the history of the American Occupation forces’ violent relationship with the people of Fallujah, having a house bombed every now and then could be said to be relatively peaceful.

Recently, a reader, Bill Kelsey, sent me a nicely considered discussion of why Intervention for Good Reasons is still trouble. Here are his thoughts:

“Here in the States it is illegal for a political party or campaign to accept foreign money. When this happens it is also a scandal and very bad PR for the candidate. We don’t like to believe that we are manipulated by foreigners. A good idea can be poisoned when improperly introduced or imposed by foreigners. And in America we are only talking about money, not military force. Imagine a Chinese occupation enforcing abortion rights and the one child policy in a part of the United States. It is not far fetched to say that is what Islamic societies are perceiving when ideas are brought in and enforced by a foreign invasion. (Whether they are good ideas or bad ones is secondary – they are foreign and are introduced by foreign forces who are getting local folks killed).

“It is true that colonized people accepted and excelled at many things brought in by the foreign armies – soccer, cricket, and bagpipe bands come to mind. But deeper things of religion and gender relations are a lot more delicate. One thing to bear in mind is that whatever the debates are in our society about women’s issues, to many in the Third World their understanding of emancipation of women western style is what they see on the Jerry Springer show (yup they get this stuff over there) and our movies.

“One place where women’s rights got confused as a result of foreign militarism was in Algeria and its independence war in the late fifties and early sixties. Women’s rights French style and Islamic repression of the same were given by the French as a justification for their war and in turn the concept became associated with collaborationism in the minds of Algerian patriots.

“People who support the US invasion of Afghanistan usually don’t realize that just about all their justifications for it are the same as those offered by the Soviets – fighting Islamic fundamentalism and backward warlords, war against terrorism, and most significantly for this discussion – emancipation of women. When Americans of many political stripes were feeling all sorts of warm fuzzy romantic feelings about the ‘muj’ and their patriotic resistance against the Soviets, the women of Afghanistan in Soviet controlled cities had more freedoms than ever before. The muj beat the Soviets, had their own civil wars out of which came the Taliban and greater repression of women than ever before. Women’s freedoms were something associated with Soviet invasion. Now the US is in the position of fighting Afghan traditionalists and many women are somewhat emancipated in Kabul. Indeed they are grateful to George Bush – as their mothers had been to the Soviets.

“It’s not an easy dilemma for someone trying to take a truly principled ethical position. I do believe that if or when the US invasion fails – or the US ‘declares a victory and withdraws’ – the advances of women risk being brutally reversed by virtue of having been brought in by American invaders.”

And for some compelling pictures of and stories about women in Afghanistan, you can see the work of Peggy Kelsey, Bill’s spouse, who traveled around Afghanistan in the summer of ’03.

Commenter Bill Kelsey writes about the unintended consequences of interventionism on Catallarchy.

Lounsbury on the uselessness of airstrikes as a counter insurgency method.

The Bush Administration is having problems controlling the press.

From idleworm: Ever notice how you never see Iyad Allawi and Saddam Hussein in the same place at the same time? The Butcher of Baghdad cleans up real nice…

U.S. Election Held Yesterday “Just to Be Safe” If you intend to vote, you should have.

Terror in the Skies!!! I really detest drama queens like the one who wrote the article dissected in this World ‘O Crap post and all the morons who sympathised with her.

No, it’s not a story about somebody remaking Airplane!, it’s about how a woman and her husband were terrorized on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles by a group of Middle Eastern men who went to the bathroom a lot. Fraught glances are also exchanged, and somebody carries a McDonald’s sack on board. It’s pretty intense stuff.

Check out the customer reviews on Amazon of My Pet Goat. Link from The Poorman via Sadly, No!

Amazingly, Michael Bérubé has an actual letter sent by GW Bush to General Pervez Musharraf posted on his blog.

Mark at Rafah Kid Rambles has a post up about a woman living in the West Bank who wrote about trying to get to the village of Abu Dis:

“We went to a meeting last week in a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem . A 10 minute journey from Damascus gate in the old city to the village, took 2 hours. First we had to go all the way around east Jerusalem to the village of Abu Dis. The taxi driver let us off at a ‘hole in the wall’ (literally) but unfortunately there was a checkpoint there and the soldiers wouldn’t let us through.

Luckily we were rescued by the women from Machsom watch who had been there monitoring the checkpoint since 6am that morning. They drove us to another hole in the wall where we were able to climb through and get a taxi on to our destination.”

Go to the post to see the picture. Then, look at the picture of the village of Abu Dis Lawrence of Cyberia has posted here, kicking off an excellent post about the ICJ and The Wall. On the subject of the ICJ, I thought Stephan Kinsella had an interesting insight:

With the danger of the UN turning into a one-world government looking remoter all the time (if anything, the US is more likely to do this), the UN is looking more attractive, if only as a brake on US bellicosity and imperialism.

Summarizing the ICJ’s decision, Kinsella writes:

The latest praiseworthy action by the UN is the ruling by its top court, the International Court of Justice (sometimes called the World Court) that the West Bank barrier is illegal.

In this case, the ICJ was asked “to urgently render an advisory opinion on the following question”:

“What are the legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, as described in the report of the Secretary-General, considering the rules and principles of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions?”

The court ruled today “that the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank breaches international law and cannot be justified by Israel’s security concerns. ‘The wall … cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order,’ said Judge Shi Jiuyong of China. ‘The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law.'”

See Kinsella’s LRC post for included links.

A letter writer to Madison’s Capital Times finds herself “troubled by the hostility and even hysteria of those opposed to the Madison Rafah sister city proposal.”

“Hysterical” is certainly a good word to describe Madison Jewish Community Council board member Lester Pines’ charge that the proposal is “linked to larger efforts to label Israel as racist and destroy it.” Wittlingly or not, Pines is employing an old Stalinist trick–when you’re caught with your hand in someone else’s pocket, yell “Thief! Thief!” That is, it is Israel which is carrying out “what is clearly a systematic campaign to destroy the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, the Toronto Star reports that “Bush is Sowing Fear for Votes: Critics.” Not mentioned, but certainly among the critics, is The (ultra liberal) Capital Times.

To its credit, The Capital Times has rebuked the MJCC. In the process, however, it equivocated on the proposal itself and has never noted that the MJCC is sowing fear for city council votes in much the same deplorable way as the Bush Administration sows fear for presidential votes. And it continues to equivocate and equivocate.

The associate editor of The Capital Times is John Nichols, well-known to readers of The Nation and Commondreams.org as a relentless critic of Bush’s policies and tactics. He has yet to weigh in on Madison/Rafah in his twice a week Capital Times column.

Another relentless Bush critic is Matthew Rothschild, editor of The (Madison-based) Progressive. Apparently, Rothschild also has yet to voice an opinion on Madison/Rafah. With the city council to vote on the proposal in four days, it will be interesting to see if any comments by Madison’s “progressive” media elites show up on the Sister City Project’s debate page. And remember, think globally, act locally.

Well, someone from the Sister City Project just let me know that I’m being unfair to Rothschild, he was one of about a hundred who signed a petition saying “I’m Jewish and support the project.”

Does the US hide detainees from the Red Cross? Here’s the answer:

(Helen Thomas questioning) Q Does the President — does the United States harbor or hold secret detainees who are not available to the International Red Cross?

MR. McCLELLAN: Actually, this is an issue that came up earlier in the week and I talked about it at that point. When it comes to the International Committee for the Red Cross, we work very closely with them on detainee issues, and we —

Q I have a follow-up.

MR. McCLELLAN: Okay — we stay in close and regular contact with the Red Cross on all the issues related to detainees. And they do, from time to time, raise issues and we work to address those issues directly —

Q Why don’t you answer the question? Do we have secret detainees and is it possible that they could be subjected to the same treatment as in Baghdad prisons?

MR. McCLELLAN: We work to address these issues that the Red Cross raises directly with the Red Cross. And any issues that they have, we respond directly to the —

Q That’s not the answer to the question.

MR. McCLELLAN: — Red Cross. We meet with them on a regular basis at a variety of levels, and we stay in close and constant contact with them. And I really don’t have anything else to add to this issue.

Q You don’t know whether we have secret detainees —

MR. McCLELLAN: Like I said, Helen, I don’t have anything else to add to this issue.

Q Why?

OK, then. So now you know.

Ted Friedman comments on “The New Energy ‘Crisis’ and Iraq“:

This is a confusing post that sees to suggest that Peak Oil is a “theory” based on “junk science.” Mathew Simmons seems to have excellent credentials. Much better than the author of this post. His quote carries way more punch than the author’s conflicted and confusing claims based on unrelated predictions about food supply. Notice there are no links to any scientific data to back the claim of highly regarded experts such as Colin Campbell or Mathew Simmons.

If the science is indeed junk, where are the links to the real science that disputes it? Instead the author quotes Simmons a world-renowned expert with a vast fortune and reputation refuting his unsubstantiated claims.

The evidence supporting the argument that no catastrophic shortage of fuel is likely to occur is economic and historical. In a capitalist economic system – one based on ‘money’ (any efficient symbol-based exchange system), voluntary exchange, and private property – profit accrues to those who conserve commodities (often through efficiency-increasing innovation) and those who substitute less expensive for more expensive commodities. Scarcity is an important aspect of price: given unchanging or rising demand for a commodity, scarcity raises that commodity’s price; the rising price, in turn, raises the incentive for conservation and substitution. The system is self-regulating, barring political, or other, shock. The method used by the peak oil theorists – estimate future consumption based on current trends, then subtract this estimate from estimated supply – is bogus, as demonstrated by two centuries of failed predictions. Whether or not scientists currently have an accurate estimate of oil reserves is irrelevant.

Tim Gillin adds to his previous comments:

For a critique of the “Hubbert’s Peak” oil scare see “Inflaming the oil crisis” by Joe Kaplinsky and EnergySeer.com.

Of course for a more radical view of the petroleum supply situation one can turn to “heretical” astrophysicist Thomas Gold who argued that petroleum had an abiotic origin. “Fuel’s Paradise” by Oliver Morton:

“Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, Gold has been saying that the Earth is hugely well endowed with these hydrocarbons – hundreds of times more so than most geologists, or oil companies, or OPEC leaders believe. The general belief in scarcity that drives up gas prices and causes fears of inflation, Gold argues, is a mirage that has served vested interests among oil producers for decades.”

George Mason University Professor of Physics Robert Ehrlich reviews a range of offbeat scientific ideas, including Gold’s, in his Nine Crazy Ideas In Science. He evaluates them via his “cuckoo scale.” Four cuckoos means “certainly false.” Zero cuckoos means “why not?” Gold got zero cuckoos.

And Tom Lowe of Borrego Springs, California warns that the oilman’s revenge is coming:

I was born in Casper, Wyoming, an oil town. I am a petroleum engineer, the very best the world has to offer. I have a MS in it from the University of Texas at Austin, co-published three papers while earning that degree, led the Student Chapter of the Society of Petroleum Engineers there as its President to a #1 world ranking in the 1984-85 academic year, and was hired in 1986 by Schlumberger Ltd. To work as a Wireline Field Engineer in Patagonian Chile and Argentina to the tune of $60k annual, where I did very well on the job and have documents to back all that up.

That wonderful Schlumberger career lasted exactly 361 days. (Vestment was to be at 366 days.) That was 1987 during a period in which Schlumberger offed a third of its South American engineers (one by one to keep the profile low), along with other global cuts in a successful effort to acquire funding to buy the major drilling company South Eastern Drilling Co. (SEDCO). It was a very, very bad move: Schlumberger was in the Fortune 20 then, but today it is not even to be found on the Fortune 500. Ha-ha – whoops! …

For the past 17 years I have had to sit on my arse as an underemployed, selling stamps, postal history and postcards because there has been no work. And now, for the past one-plus year I have actually had to sit on my arse watching the US CPA steal $20 billion of Iraqi oil proceeds.

Where is it, folks? …

Here is the way it is with oil:

1. There is plenty of oil out there to be found – but at the right price, which is higher than it is today. What they are actually doing is complaining that all of the “easy oil” is gone, which is largely true. But there is plenty of “difficult oil” out there to be extracted when prices rise enough to make extraction economically feasible.

2. Since the late 1980s, oil companies have found it cheaper to buy others’ reserves than to invest in frontier explorations. This of course was a major part of the Reagan-era merger/ acquisition antitrust pillage whereby the oil industry was reduced from hundreds of companies to less than 100 and true industry competition was effectively politically murdered. (See Oil & Gas Journal issues listing the O&GJ 500 over the years. Last time I checked, the O&GJ 500 had become the O&GJ 100 due to lack of surviving competition, a fact which OG&J itself loudly lamented.)

3. The same is true of the ridiculous, fateful maneuver recently perpetrated in Iraq: it was cheaper to usurp, use up and waste that $200+ billion of money and manpower resources of the American people to steal oil reserves from Iraq at gunpoint on behalf of western oil concerns and their customers than it would be to pay me and a bunch of other people $35-$125 per hour to go out to the distant wilds and find more oil in a truly responsible manner, which oil is definitely out there. This is just one of the reasons Iraq was invaded, but it is one reason nevertheless, and an important one that should cease to continue to be denied by some: if $20 billion has been stolen thus far at 1+ year on 2 million BPD production, then in ten years it will be about $200 billion, and that is at today’s relatively anemic current Iraqi production levels. If they get it up to 4 million BPD, then it will be $40 billion per year stolen, making the ten year investment outlook a “good one” at ~$400 million if it works out, which it likely will not since the whole world is watching them make war criminals of themselves in broad daylight on global TV – with their pants literally down around their ankles, no less.

4. Because of their rather embarrassing cultural ignorance in general and deeply ingrained cultural prejudices as a whole, Americans, though generally sincere and technically quite adept as a lot, have never been able to work with Iraqis well on joint oil projects due to those vast cultural differences. Nor are Great Britain or any of its dominions any better at it in spite of some absurd and patently false claims they have made regarding their war criminal work in Southern Iraq. But Russia and especially France, on the other hand, have always worked well with Iraqis in the oilfield, and we will inevitably see a return to that historically natural working relationship as the years ahead unfold, if for no other reason than the sheer dictates of production economics. … And over and above all of this, at present the Iraqis hate Americans with a passion, and due to the illegal invasion, they will continue to do so for a very long time.

5. Until the price gets high enough, energy concerns will continue to buy and/or steal others’ reserves, after which time they will then find it mathematically economical to send out the geo-exploration parties.

6. When the oil moguls finally come to me and the others with their hat in their hands and on bended knees, we are going to recoup our two decades of vast financial and personal losses before we ever do a single stinking thing for those bastards. Payback is coming for them eventually, right in their wallet, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch. They will definitely be held up for salary and bonus ransom all the way until we have got back everything and then some. And after that re-compensation business is settled, only then will we go find them their precious oil. Meantime, they are only buying and/or stealing each others’ oil in what can only be called a grand charade of market churning and unhealthy takeoveritis, with Iraq being the foremost, most socially heinous, and most illegal example.

There is plenty of oil out there to be found. And here I am, world, the answer to your whole oil problem – warming the bench year after year after year. …