Category: Grave

While elections may be newsworthy in both Iowa and Iran of late, it’s the lack of elections in Iraq that’s generating all sorts of press these days.
Here’s one primer, courtesy of Dilip Hiro, in the February 2, 2004 issue of The Nation. As American presidential candidates begin to discuss “planting the seeds of democracy” and ponder the status of United States-led plans for a “post-Saddam” Iraq, bear the following in mind:

“This internecine power struggle is being conducted under the hegemony of the US occupiers, who have their own scenario of the New Iraq: secular, democratic, unabashedly capitalist and openly tied to Washington politically (with its government committed in advance to welcoming US military bases), economically (with unfettered access to Iraqi oil) and strategically (as a pressure point against the regimes in Iran and Syria).
Washington’s vision is a nightmare to most Sunni and Shiite Arabs. Militant Sunnis, imbued with Iraqi nationalism, are in the forefront of the continuing armed resistance. So far Shiites, three-fifths of Iraq’s population, have generally been quiescent, hoping to emerge as the leading political force by exercising their franchise. But even as early as last April, some 1.5 million Shiites marched to Karbala to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein (martyred in AD 680), shouting, “No, no to America! Yes, yes to Islam!” At Hussein’s shrine, a deputy of Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani declared, “Our celebration will be perfect only when the American occupier is gone and the Iraqi people are able to rule themselves by the principles of Islam.” Recent demonstrations in the Shiite cities of Basra, Amara and Kut are symptomatic of rising Shiite discontent against Anglo-American occupation.
In the wake of the dissolution of the Sunni-dominated Baath Party, the Shiites are now the most organized community, led by the redoubtable Sistani. In June he issued a religious decree that only directly elected bodies have the right to administer Iraq or draft its Constitution; he reiterated this demand on January 11. In between he stated that he wants clerics to act as watchdogs to insure that Iraqi legislation does not contradict Islam, and he has disapproved of the way the Coalition Provisional Authority and its handpicked IGC altered laws on nationality and foreign investment, both of which impinge on Islamic principles. He has pointedly refused to meet CPA chief Paul Bremer.”

Well, that doesn’t bode well for American plans for a non-Islamic fundamentalist Iraq. And, were there to be democratically-held elections, with 56 percent of the nation’s voters expressing support for a Sistani-styled government, it would certainly be embarrassing for the Bush administration to have sponsored the creation of an Islamic nation built on this Iranian paradigm, what with all of the President’s talk over the past few months of human rights and feminism and democratic principles.

“The only way Bremer can counterbalance the power of Shiites is by co-opting the Sunnis (which has proved next to impossible) and getting them to coalesce with the Kurds. But while Kurds are 95 percent Sunni, they identify themselves first and foremost on ethnic, not sectarian, grounds.And their leaders have been no more eager to form an alliance with the Shiites. Powerful Shiite clerics would most likely oppose Kurdish demands for a federated Iraq, on the ground that in Islam there are different sects but not different ethnic groups.

All talk of “fuzzy math” aside, there is no mathematical way these numbers can lead to any sort of positive scenario for the American architects of the war in Iraq, at least while adhering to respected, internationally-sanctioned principles of democratic behavior. You know, that old adage about “one person, one vote.” In this vein, Monday’s papers documented a day-long march by almost 100,000 Iraqi Shiites in support of Ayatollah Sistani and his vision for an Iraq governed according to tenets of Islamic law.

“American helicopters buzzed overhead as an announcer with a bullhorn urged the marchers onward. ‘Say yes, yes to elections and no, no to appointing the people in any way other than elections,’ he said.”

Admittedly, the protester’s refrain isn’t nearly as catchy as, say, “Hey hey, ho ho, the appointed council’s got to go,” or the even less popular, “Hey hey, it’s time, we Shiites have such scorn for rhyme,” but like all works of translation, the announcer’s cry was better in the original, I’m sure.

Illustration: John Kerry refuels on the campaign trail
Talking Points’ Joshua Micah Marshall has spent the past few days examining the most recent flurry of fluctuating poll results in anticipation of Monday’s Democratic primary in Iowa, and by his measure, one thing seems to have become at least somewhat clear, at least according to Zogby’s polls: John Kerry is, or may very well be, ascending in popularity with Iowa’s voters. And while that last sentence is so incredibly tepid in its support of a position, this hesitancy is important, because, well, we’re dealing with tracking polls, which, of course, haven’t been the most historically accurate source of election data in the past.
Hey, man, John “fucking” Kerry doesn’t give a damn about statistics! He’s riding high on endorsements right now–including one from Iowa’s First Lady, and yesterday’s from former Sen. Bob Kerrey, his similarly-named Vietnam veteran alter-ego, himself a former presidential candidate. Today’s Washington Post features some highlights of Kerry’s speech at a campaign stop yesterday, including this entertaining nugget:

“Do you like the surge?” Kerry hollered Thursday as he piloted his campaign helicopter into Sioux City to whip up his growing legion of supporters. “Do you like the surge? Are you ready to make more and more surge a surprise on Monday?”

Yes, it’s true that we digitally inserted that PowerAde-like sports drink into the accompanying photo, but those lines sampled above are actual quotes.
While Zogby hasn’t yet made their polling data for the elusive 18-24 year-old male demographic available yet, we’re fairly confident that, come Monday, John Kerry will be available in Extreme Lemon Lime, Power Cherry, and Blue Raspberry flavors.

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968

“Look, I didn’t know anything about the gay community when I signed the civil-unions bill. I grew up in the same homophobic milieu that everybody else did. I was told the same thing about gay people that all heterosexuals were. And most gay people were told the same thing themselves— by parents, ministers and everybody else. I was uncomfortable, and I said so. And I got a lot of flak for it. But I still thought it was the right thing to do.”

— Howard Dean in the Feb. 5, 2004 issue of Rolling Stone

Howard, I thought we talked about this last week!

As expected, the most secretive administration in recent U.S. history has moved into attack mode in the wake of President Bush’s former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill’s possible “leaking” of “secret” documents to author Ron Suskind for the publication of his long anticipated book (by “long anticipated”, I mean, as of yesterday, when news of O’Neill’s comments initially broke) which is now destined to be an immediate, though short-lived, bestseller, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill”.
O’Neill, appearing on NBC’s “Today” show this morning, has denied any wrongdoing, saying that

the documents were given to him by the Treasury’s chief legal officer after he requested them to help former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind write a book on O’Neill’s time in the Cabinet.
“I said to him (the general counsel) I would like to have the documents that are OK for me to have. About three weeks later, the general counsel, the chief legal officer, sent me a couple of CDs, which I frankly never opened,” O’Neill said in Tuesday’s interview. He resigned under pressure a year ago in a shake-up of Bush’s economic team.
O’Neill, the first major Bush insider to criticize the president, said he had given the compact disc with the documents to Suskind.
“I don’t honestly think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 sheets,” said O’Neill, adding only the cover sheet shown on television bore the words “secret.”

President Bush, a notorious baseball fanatic, must be doubly disappointed by the behavior of his former cabinet member, as the flap over O’Neill’s comments inevitably knocks Pete Rose’s revelatory text down a few notches in the cultural radar.
In the interim, Bush (or more accurately, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett) may want to begin boning up on some responses to this issue for the presidential debates this fall, since these off-the-cuff comments don’t function very well as an adequate and logical defense of his foreign policy of late:

Speaking in Mexico, Mr Bush rejected Mr O’Neill’s claims that he had planned the Iraq war within days of becoming President, and not as a result of the terrorism that shook the US.
“No, the stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear,” he said. “Like the previous (Clinton) administration, we were for regime change. And then all of a sudden September 11 hit,” Mr Bush said in Monterrey at a press conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox.
Asked if he regretted going to war, given that nearly 500 Americans had now been killed, Mr Bush defended his “tough” decision, saying “history will prove it’s the right one for the world”.

Oh, and as an afterthought, Brit Hume weighs in on the O’Neill matter with some entirely irrelevant, Roger Ailes-inspired logic over at FOX News:

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was forced out of the Bush administration in 2002, has criticized the president on everything from his demeanor in Cabinet meetings to the war in Iraq this week. But these recent attacks contradict statements O’Neill made in a television interview just after his ouster. O’Neill told KDKA Television in Pittsburgh last January — “I’m a supporter of the institution of the presidency, and I’m determined not to say any negative things about the president and the Bush administration. They have enough to do without having me as a sharpshooter.”

Though this will come as no surprise to those who regularly read the news, the latest actions by the United States government once again reinforce the notion that the flimsily-defined conceit of so-called “intellectual property”, or IP, has taken a greater precedence in political and diplomatic relations than, say, human rights, poverty, or feminism.
While it’s highly unlikely that modern-day IP expert Lawrence Lessig is booking the next flight to Seoul to better examine these issues, those in South Korea who profit in the trade of bootlegged Tom Cruise films and G-Unit compact discs are being closely watched by U.S. trade officials. Correction: “priority watched”, which is the official term given by the American officials, who feel that the nation’s relative inattention to policing the trade of copyrighted-but-bootlegged works falls short of the desired standards, to say the least, and could potentially lead to the United States’ enforcing economic sanctions against South Korea in the near future. “Economic sanctions”, of course, are the punitive trade policies against which pundits on both the left and the right customarily speak out.
If you failed history and/or geography, or just have trouble locating smaller nations like Burkina Faso on a map, bear in mind that while South Korea is in Asia, it is not China, the most prominently piracy-prone nation on the continent (but we can’t go about enacting bold economic sanctions against our pseudo-communist, secretly-capitalist cheap-goods trade partner, right?).
In that vein, the gist of the complaint seems to be leveled against “online piracy” moreso than the old-fashioned street vendor system. While it’s understandable that the American entertainment industry would want to protect its own interests, it’s nonetheless hard to empathize with the record labels and studios of late, what with all those lawsuits against music fans and increased ticket prices and screener bans and “fair use” violations.
South Korea, remember: you’re on “priority watch,” lest you wind up in the “Axis of Sanctions,” joining your neighbors to the North, as well as Syria, Libya, and Burma, to name but a few.
Because, of course, it’s only fair to group IP violations with human rights issues, right? And that’s why the United States is considering sanctions against China, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, et al. Oh, wait…the U.S. is not considering sanctions against these nations?
I’m sorry, I must having been too busy watching my illegally downloaded double-CD DivX copy of “The Mirror Has Two Faces” to have expected the United States to have a consistent set of values in its multilateral relations.