Mike Presky's Weblog : Weekly Archive : May 16, 2004

May 20, 2004

US teetering on edge of "abyss" in Iraq.

An article in the Guardian paints a very bleak picture of the future of the American attempt to conquer Iraq.

But across town in Congress even those instinctively sympathetic to the US military cause in Iraq were warning that America was facing a strategic disaster.

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, told the Senate foreign relations committee.

The apocalyptic language is becoming increasingly common here among normally moderate and cautious politicians and observers.

Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, said: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq.

"We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction.

"There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire."

The growing fear is that the US will able neither to defeat the insurgents in Iraq nor to find an honourable means of withdrawal, while every week there will be an haemorrhaging of US credibility in the Arab world and far beyond.

"With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?" said Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the foreign relations committee.

Meanwhile, traditional conservatives who see American interests in the Middle East as focused on a regular supply of oil are anxious because it has pulled its troops out of one big producer, Saudi Arabia, without establishing a sustainable military presence in another, Iraq.

"Anyway you look at this, outside the most extreme optimistic assessments, we end up weaker," a senior Republican international strategist said.

There's really nothing new in this; at this point any competent observer of what's going on has realized that the US has lost, and that the repercussions of this disaster will come to haunt America for many years to come.

But what's really interesting about this article is that, reading it, one would get the impression that it is only the Americans who are in Iraq, and that they are the only ones with the problem. You'd never guess that the British have been there every step of the way, and that their credibility has been damaged as much as the US's. (There's not a single mention of the British presence in the article.) You'd never guess from it that British troops have also been beating and abusing prisoners.

Curious, but typical of the British, and of the Europeans in general. Blame the Americans for everything. Of course they want to share in the economic spoils of the war, and are busy taking advantage of the dollar's weakness to buy up all of the American assets they can get their hands on. But when things go bad, it's only Americans who are to blame.

But it should be made clear: Tony Blair and the British people are just as responsible for this as Bush and the Americans. If it had not been for their wholehearted support and encouragement, America could never have claimed that it was acting in the world's best interest, and that it had any support from the international community. I'd bet anything that if things had gone according to plan, the British would be boasting all over of their role.

But now there's no use of the word "coalition" to describe the problems. No, it's the "Americans" who are facing defeat, not the "coalition." It's the "Americans" who have made mistakes, not the other members of the "coalition." And these are our friends?

permalink, posted by mike on Thursday, May 20, 2004 at 05:48 PM

Interview with Arundhati Roy.

Via Common Dreams. Amy Goodman interviews Arundhati Roy on the recent elections in India and many other issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the differences between the B.J.P., which has been defeated, and the Congress party? I understand that you have just returned from the house of the man who we believe will replace Sonia Gandhi since she has turned down the prime ministership.

ARUNDHATI ROY: No, no, no not returned, but I was in the market and to come back home I had to drive past all of the politicians' houses, and I could see all the crowds outside and the television cameras and so on. I have no access to them in that sense, but, well the fundamental difference between the Congress and the BJP is that one is an overtly fascist party, proudly fascist. It doesn't feel bad if you call it that. The culture to which the BJP's big leaders subscribe to, which is the RSS, openly admires Hitler.

The Congress -- I mean, obviously, the way it has happened is that the Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes. So, somehow the BJP is the horrible specter that has emerged from the legacy of the Congress party. You know, you begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.

Economically, again, it's the same thing. You know, the Congress really was the party that opened India up to the whole neo-liberal regime. But the BJP has come in and taken it much further, to absurd levels. Today, we have a situation in which 40% of rural India has food absorption levels lower than sub-Saharan Africa. You have the biggest rural income divide ever seen in history. You have millions of tons of food grain rotting in government pogroms while starvation deaths are announced all over. You have the W.T.O. regime making it possible for the government to import food grain and milk and sugar and all of these things while Indian farmers are committing suicide not in the hundreds now, but the figures have moved into the thousands. And you have a middle class which is glittering, which is happy... I just wrote a piece about how corporate globalization and this kind of Hindu nationalism, communal fascism are so linked. If you see what has happened after the elections, after the people of India made it clear that their mandate was against communalism, their mandate was against economic reforms. Even in state governments where the Congress party had instituted these reforms, the Congress was also overthrown. It wasn't a vote for Sonia Gandhi or a vote for the congress, it was a vote against very serious issues

I knew that the folks in the BJP were pretty rotten, but I didn't realize just how bad they were. She also reports on something extremely frightening, the virtual enslavement of Indians by the Americans to serve in Iraq. I can't believe the degree and extent of the horrors Americans are perpetrating all over the world these days.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking with Arundhati Roy in India. We have also gotten these reports of some Indian workers who were working for a western contractor in Iraq, who alleged that they were kept there against their will, hardly being paid. It was a report that was first reported in the Hindu and then followed up in this country, a group of 20 Indians who ran away from a U.S. Military camp in Iraq where they worked in the kitchen claiming they had been abused for nine months. Is this a story that you have been following? They have returned, I believe, now, to India.

ARUNDHATI ROY: They are all people from Kerala which is where I come from, you know, and apparently, these kind of job contractors took them to Kuwait, pretending that they had got them work there. A lot of people from Kerala work in the Middle East. And then they were put on a bus basically and they realized they were in Baghdad before they knew it. So, I think, you know, this is the bottom end of the privatization of war. Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too? Eventually, you have a situation also in which -- as it becomes more and more obvious to the American government that when American soldiers die on the battlefield, pressure goes up at home. so they're going to try to hire other soldiers to do their work for them. You know, they're going to try to hire poor people from poor countries who would be willing to do it. I'm sure they're going to try that. They're trying that already, trying to get, of course, the Indian army and so on in -- we know Hamid Karzai's securities are all privatized. I think it's a nightmare and ultimately, terrorism, in way, is a privatization of war. It's the belief that it's not only states that can wage war, why not private people? Why not have your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All of these policies that America upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization, all of these things are going to mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous things.

The complete transcript of the interview is here, at the Democracy Now site. Also see Arundhati's recent article in the Guardian, Let us hope the darkness has passed, as well as an article she wrote last fall, in response to the American occupation of Iraq, We should consider ourselves at war.

permalink, posted by mike on Thursday, May 20, 2004 at 05:25 PM

Hugo-nominated fiction online.

The nominations for the 2004 Hugo awards (for best science fiction and fantasy) have been announced, and many of the nominees are available for online reading here. Not the novels, which they define as being over 40,000 words, and just the fiction-related works, but still quite a bit of interesting reading. Plus some other sf-related links and such.

permalink, posted by mike on Thursday, May 20, 2004 at 01:49 PM

May 16, 2004

First chapters from Canada.

The Toronto-based Globe and Mail has a nice page of first chapters from various recently published Canadian books, both fiction and nonfiction.

"First chapters", an idea that has gradually been spreading around the publishing world, allows online readers to sample a bit of a book, but not too much, in the hope they might go on to get the full paper version.

The NY Times has been doing this for years, and have quite a substantial sampling of recent books, here, part of their book section. There are hundreds of authors to sample.

Addendum: I don't think I should have posted these particular links. At least not on a Sunday afternoon. I ended up wasting several potentially very useful hours reading several potentially very useful books on several potentially very useful topics, ending up with a clearly totally useless selection from a book written by one Steve Martin, entitled, fittingly enough, Pure Drivel, which you shouldn't link to if you have anything useful to do, or even the possibility of doing anything potentially useful at all. I'm not sure where the title comes from, or what it means, it undoubtedly being explained in later chapters, since a competent writer would certainly not want to give it all away in the first chapter, and even more certainly not for free. I suspect though that it was probably the only title under which a writer from LA could get something published in the NY Times, "pure drivel" being all most New Yorkers can imagine coming out of California. Pretty funny though.

permalink, posted by mike on Sunday, May 16, 2004 at 01:02 PM

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