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Monday, March 24, 2003 |
Oligarchs R US?
How else to characterize the disdain for democracy and politico-economic cronyism so characteristic of the Bush regime?
Krugman shines a light on the underside of a particularly slimy rock – the confluence of influence-peddling and “astro-turf” politics (fake grass roots) currently being employed to frighten and cow the “American public into passive acceptance of Bush’s misguided policies.
(Atrios also discussed this here.)
Channels of Influence
By PAUL KRUGMAN
By and large, recent pro-war rallies haven't drawn nearly as many people as antiwar rallies, but they have certainly been vehement. One of the most striking took place after Natalie Maines, lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, criticized President Bush: a crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of. . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here.
Who has been organizing those pro-war rallies? The answer, it turns out, is that they are being promoted by key players in the radio industry — with close links to the Bush administration.
The CD-smashing rally was organized by KRMD, part of Cumulus Media, a radio chain that has banned the Dixie Chicks from its playlists. Most of the pro-war demonstrations around the country have, however, been organized by stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, a behemoth based in San Antonio that controls more than 1,200 stations and increasingly dominates the airwaves.
The company claims that the demonstrations, which go under the name Rally for America, reflect the initiative of individual stations. But this is unlikely: according to Eric Boehlert, who has written revelatory articles about Clear Channel in Salon, the company is notorious — and widely hated — for its iron-fisted centralized control.
Until now, complaints about Clear Channel have focused on its business practices. Critics say it uses its power to squeeze recording companies and artists and contributes to the growing blandness of broadcast music. But now the company appears to be using its clout to help one side in a political dispute that deeply divides the nation.
Why would a media company insert itself into politics this way? It could, of course, simply be a matter of personal conviction on the part of management. But there are also good reasons for Clear Channel — which became a giant only in the last few years, after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed many restrictions on media ownership — to curry favor with the ruling party. On one side, Clear Channel is feeling some heat: it is being sued over allegations that it threatens to curtail the airplay of artists who don't tour with its concert division, and there are even some politicians who want to roll back the deregulation that made the company's growth possible. On the other side, the Federal Communications Commission is considering further deregulation that would allow Clear Channel to expand even further, particularly into television.
Or perhaps the quid pro quo is more narrowly focused. Experienced Bushologists let out a collective "Aha!" when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush. The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column. When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel's chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university's endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.
There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but a good guess is that we're now seeing the next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy. As Jonathan Chait has written in The New Republic, in the Bush administration "government and business have melded into one big `us.' "On almost every aspect of domestic policy, business interests rule: "Scores of midlevel appointees . . . now oversee industries for which they once worked." We should have realized that this is a two-way street: if politicians are busy doing favors for businesses that support them, why shouldn't we expect businesses to reciprocate by doing favors for those politicians — by, for example, organizing "grass roots" rallies on their behalf?
What makes it all possible, of course, is the absence of effective watchdogs. In the Clinton years the merest hint of impropriety quickly blew up into a huge scandal; these days, the scandalmongers are more likely to go after journalists who raise questions. Anyway, don't you know there's a war on?
10:26:44 PM 
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Marines can do many things…
…but practicing diplomacy is not among them, as demonstrated by the quotes below. Just more evidence of how misguided the assumptions behind this war have been.
“The problem with these people is that you can't believe anything they say."
Could he understand the locals' distrust of the US after what happened in 1991?
"If it weren't for the liberal press, we might have taken Baghdad last time," said the sergeant.
In all fairness, they’ve been asked to tend to the hornets after Junior took a good whack at the hive.
On the other hand, it’s hard to have sympathy for someone when they insist on blaming all their difficulties – in contradiction to all facts and evidence – on their perceived domestic enemies, the “liberals.”
10:03:58 PM
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Fear, Hysteria and Jingoism
The Bush legacy: war abroad and compromised liberties here at home. The means are listed above. The manner is described below.
Bush has stampeded America into conflict
By R.C. Longworth. R.C. Longworth is a Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 23, 2003
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
----------
If the only thing we still have to fear is fear itself, there is more than enough to go around.
When President Roosevelt coined the phrase in his inaugural address in 1933, he used it to banish fear and steel the nation's courage in facing down the Great Depression.
Seventy years later to the month, President Bush is using fear as a weapon, not to build courage among Americans but to stampede them into endorsing a case for a war that has been built literally on a grab bag of possibilities, contingencies, ifs and maybes, of things that haven't happened but could happen, of bad guys who might hit us if we don't hit them first.
This is a created crisis. Now that the crisis is upon us, we can only hope that it passes quickly, with minimum loss of life on either side, and that our native skepticism prevents it from happening again.
Supporters of the war have presented some strong arguments--Saddam Hussein's repeated flouting of UN resolutions, or his reign of terror over the Iraqi people. But when Bush made his final case for war in his ultimatum speech to the nation Tuesday night, what came through instead was the voice of a frightened man trying to infect the nation with his fear.
<snip>
Most commentators, noting the macho strutting of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the president's insistence that the world is either for us or against us, have blamed the Iraq policy more on testosterone than terror, with an unhealthy dash of hyper-religious certainty mixed in. But Bush often comes across as truly frightened, convinced of threats that the rest of the world just doesn't see.
These presidential fears were on full display in his ultimatum speech.
The president claimed that Hussein has "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." By any reckoning, this just isn't true. No one doubts that Iraq has developed chemical and biological weapons of uncertain effectiveness, as have many other nations. But effective anthrax? Not known. Smallpox? No evidence. Nuclear weapons? Certainly not now.
"The danger is clear," Bush said. "Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq . . . terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in one country or another."
"Clear dangers" seldom contain so many ifs or coulds, so many varied weapons in the hands of so many unidentified terrorists intent on acting "one day . . . in one country or another." If we don't attack Hussein, the president surmised, he "might try to conduct terrorist operations."
"These attacks are not inevitable," he conceded, but "they are . . . possible. And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail."
A possibility is not a fact but a guess, a worst-case worry that could be applied to any cloud on the international horizon. If there is a threat of blackmail here, it is self-imposed.
If the U.S. does not attack now, "in one year or five years the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over," Bush said.
No sane analyst believes this. After 12 years of international sanctions, Iraq is weaker now than it was before the 1991 gulf war. Five years from now? Who knows? No one does, including the administration. But the thought that a Third World international pariah could multiply its strength and turn itself into a power sufficient to blackmail the most powerful nation in the history of the world is nothing but panic-mongering.
The result is a "pre-emptive" war that, by the administration's own admission, breaks international law.
International law permits every nation to defend itself, by force if necessary. If a nation has evidence that an attack is imminent, it is legally justified in acting first, to hit before it is hit.
But no one, not even the administration, argues that an attack by Iraq is imminent. The president himself says the danger may be five years away. To strike Iraq now is to strike against a will-o'-the-wisp, not a certain danger, to hit the other guy before he even gets the gloves on. International law forbids this.
The Bush administration knows this and says the solution is not to obey the law but to change it.
The administration's National Security Strategy, issued seven months ago, reads now like a preplanned justification for this war in its rejection of "traditional concepts of deterrence."
The paper grants that international law "conditions the legitimacy of pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat--most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack." Obviously, the Iraq situation doesn't meet that definition, so the paper says that "we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries."
In other words, if international law does not let us chase mirages, then we rewrite the law.
Spreading the fear
This is the codification of fear, which seems to be in the saddle of national policy right now.
A policy based on fear works only if the fear is widely spread. The administration has worked hard to spread it, through repeated "orange alerts" and the recommended hoarding of emergency items such as duct tape. Terrorist threats exist, as 9/11 proved, but a terrified population is in no condition to sort out the real from the imaginary and take realistic precautions.
In times like this, we look to elected officials for leadership, but some seem almost unhinged by the terror in the air. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician, wrote that "physicians and policymakers have a duty to help keep people healthy and alive." The threat from Hussein is so great and immediate, Frist said, that "preventive care" is needed now "to protect humanity. . . . Getting rid of his regime is our best inoculation."
Frist does not seem to have realized that this "inoculation" will kill thousands of people, most of them Iraqis. Or perhaps he feels that the Hippocratic oath doesn't apply to foreigners.
National hysterias come and go, leaving a great deal of damage and creating a sense of communal shame when the panic wears off: The McCarthyite era is an example. Invariably, the cause is fear--of foreigners, of nameless threats, of Reds under the bed.
The United States is going through such a hysteria now. We can only pray that not too many lives are sacrificed to it.
9:46:16 PM
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Who does this sound like?
"The current and future presence of Turkish troops in Iraq is the result of humanitarian considerations and concerns about terrorism"
"Humanitarian considerations" and "concerns about terrorism" – virtually any nation can invoke these “reasons” to do whatever the hell they want.
And now they are.
Someone should teach Bush what the word “precedent” means.
6:24:55 PM
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3:14:54 PM
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Freedom of speech includes the freedom to speak
Why is that always lost upon the “patriots” who want everyone who disagrees with them to shut up?
Here’s an interesting take (via tbogg, who is good today BTW, so visit):
(A curious sort of counter-logic is often applied to folks who criticize the government. Since they have the right to do so, the argument goes, they shouldn't – the old "They-wouldn't-let-you-do-that-in-Moscow" routine. In other words, we've got free speech in this country, so shut up.)
"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel," Samuel Johnson wrote in the 18th century. More than 100 years later, Ambrose Bierce, in "The Devil's Dictionary," amended that definition: "I beg to submit that it is the first" – although he also defined patriotism as "combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name." George Bernard Shaw insisted that "Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy."
Loath as I am to take issue with such sages, when I come across books espousing ideas I loathe (both used correctly; no e-mails on this, please), or the TV news zeroes in on someone torching the American flag to no repercussions whatsoever, my heart swells. Johnson, Bierce and Shaw notwithstanding, it makes me proud to be an American.
Arthur Salm
I say it’s interesting for several reasons.
· One because it exposes the anti-American rhetoric of “patriots” that seek to shut others up (they also tend to be blame-America-firsters – blaming Americans exercising the very rights that previous Americans died to defend).
· Another reason it is interesting is the several quotes concerning the quality of certain forms of “flag-patriotism” over the centuries – as a screen for ulterior motives.
· Certainly it is interesting because it – rightly- celebrates the freedom of speech enjoyed (although often under conditions of duress and harassment) here in the US.
· Finally I found it intriguing because of the mention of “flag-burners.” Who or where are these mythical beasts? Certainly they are not in the opposition to the war. Yet the need to propagate the myth seems to overwhelm even what seem to be otherwise intelligent, perceptive individuals, like Mr. Salm. Why the apparent need to essentially slander those whose only “crime” is to differ in their estimates of government policy?
Is this apparent urge felt by punditeers the same that that motivates Supremo Antonin Scalia to disparage the “scruffy, sandal-wearing bearded people” he regularly conjures as a foil to demonstrate his eminent “even-handedness”? Imagine - a member of the Supreme Court won’t let a thing like a beard or sandals prejudice him – give this guy a medal (whoops they already did)!
Hey haven’t I read about a scruffy, sandal-wearing bearded guy from Nazareth? Maybe they’re not all bad. And maybe Scalia shout shut his fat, slanderous mouth for a change.
2:59:35 PM
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An idea whose time has come
This is something that should be done ASAP.
The gasoline producers are no fools and they know nothing drives up prices like short supply. As a consequence their inventories tend to be roughly 40% of premium types of gasoline, despite the fact that such types account only for 10-15% of sales.
Producers have long realized that shortages in regular gas drive up all prices. So keeping regular gas supplies on a at a minimum yields wind-fall profits with the slightest roiling of the markets.
What is the easiest way to avoid this? Simple, just store more regular gasoline.
By Elizabeth Douglass, Times Staff Writer
Should California put a little gasoline in the bank?
As motorists fume at record-high gasoline prices, which soared in advance of war in Iraq, California officials are studying proposals that could help blunt future price spikes and reduce the state's growing dependence on petroleum.
One of the most ambitious options would create a "gasoline bank" that would act both as a reserve supply when refineries falter and as an independent cache of gasoline that could be auctioned daily, damping the major oil companies' hold on California's fuel supply.
<snip>
The idea for a state strategic fuel reserve dates to the last gasoline squeeze in 1999, when refinery outages sent California gas prices soaring.
After an investigation into the causes, Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer declared California's oil and gasoline markets deeply flawed, hampered by anemic competition and unique characteristics that preclude outside aid when problems arise.
Contending that government has a role to play when market forces fail, Lockyer pressed for studies, including one exploring whether a strategic fuel reserve could help stabilize the gasoline market.
Many of the studies were completed in early 2002, though they received scant attention because by then gas prices were back to normal levels.
But the recent price run-up has given new relevance to the proposals. Lawmakers in Washington and Sacramento seem primed to consider bold moves.
<snip>
The core problem is that the supply and demand remain so precariously balanced that changes in world crude oil supplies or even the tiniest of disruptions at a California refinery, port or pipeline can trigger wild price swings.
<snip>
The notion of a fuel reserve isn't new. The nation has two government-sponsored reserves now: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana and the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve, created in 2000 to prevent shortages and egregious price spikes from causing cold-related deaths.
The Northeast heating oil reserve has 2 million barrels of the fuel -- roughly a 10-day supply -- stored at sites in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island. It can be tapped when there is a so-called dislocation in the heating oil market or a regional supply shortage.
<snip>
Stillwater Associates, which studied the idea for California, has proposed a reserve consisting of 2.5 million barrels of gasoline -- about a two- or three-day supply for the state -- to be purchased over time and split between facilities in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The state's role would be to pay for the initial fill of fuel and then hire an outside firm to build and operate the gas bank. But unlike a pure reserve, the stockpile would be available for purchase through a daily auction, giving independent gasoline buyers an alternative to major refineries. It also would boost the state's overall storage capacity.
Consultant Hackett said establishing the reserve could cost taxpayers up to $140 million, depending on the price of fuel, plus annual operating costs of as much as $30 million. But possible savings to consumers could outpace those costs.
Had a reserve been available during the 1999 price run-up, consumers could have saved $500 million over three months by curbing market volatility and keeping prices low, according to the consulting firm's estimate.
Six refiners produce more than 90% of the state's gasoline, own most of the storage space and control supplies for most of California's retail gas stations.
When fuel runs short, independent gas stations often find themselves cut off. A gas bank would allow an independent company to buy fuel when supplies got tight.
Buyers would be required to take delivery of the gasoline they purchased. That would help discourage schemes in which buyers profit when prices fluctuate in a volatile market, which is what happened during California's electricity crisis.
"There are some valid concerns about the proposal," consultant Hackett said. "But we think it certainly is worth vigorous debate."
Industry experts point out that in a national emergency, the state does not have access to any government-controlled crude oil or gasoline reserve. The pipeline systems that distribute crude oil from the federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve on the Gulf Coast can't deliver any of that supply to California.
That could be yet another argument for the state establishing its own gas tank.
"When the strategic reserves were created, it didn't matter because the West Coast was a net exporter" of crude oil, said Philip Verleger, a Newport Beach-based consultant and energy analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations. "Now we're sitting high and dry out here."
1:54:48 PM
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Ashcroft’s America
FBI memos are ignored.
CIA testimony is sent back to be better "tailored" for the regime's message.
Firefighters and police and other first-responders are stiffed.
But Ashcroft's snitch program is up and running... boy do I feel safer, NOT.
When do the witch trials begin?
By Courtland Milloy
Monday, March 24, 2003; Page B01
The sign above the highway leading into the nation's capital advised motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" and gave an 800 number for the Office of Homeland Security. As a reporter, I figured this was right up my alley and set out yesterday to report on things that struck me as suspicious.
For instance, near the Jefferson Memorial, I saw a five-foot-tall metal box that was hooked up to an electrical outlet and equipped with a high-tech antenna and chrome-dome receptor. What was it?
I asked a couple of National Park Service workers and some Cherry Blossom Festival organizers whose tent was set up next to the thing if they knew. Little did I know that my inquiry would become a suspicious activity in itself.
"We hear you've been asking curious questions," U.S. Park Police officer Michael Ramirez said as he and fellow officer Karl Spilde approached me from behind a blossomless cherry tree. "Why are you doing that?"
Both officers carried 9mm semiautomatic pistols, Mace and batons. Perhaps because I had just left the Jefferson Memorial, where I'd read a few lines about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and "all men are created equal," I felt bold enough to pose a question of my own: "Why are you asking me that?"
What I really wanted to know was why my questions about the box had made me suspect. Or was it that an African American -- whom someone may have mistaken for a Middle Easterner -- was asking them?
The only way to get to the bottom of this, I thought, was to ask more questions.
"Let me see your ID," Spilde said.
"Why?" I asked.
Wrong response.
"Call for backup," Spilde eventually told Ramirez as he seized my notebook and pen and began to search me. Was I being arrested, I asked before turning over my driver's license.
Eight officers responded to the call for backup. One told me that, legally, I was not being arrested, just subject to "investigative detention."
Said Sgt. R.J. Steinheimer, "There have been reports of suspicious activity regarding you."
"By whom?" I asked.
"Can't tell you that," he replied.
"What kind of suspicious activity?" I asked.
"Apparently you have been showing interest in equipment on the grounds, making notes, that sort of thing," he said. "Are you interested in talking to us about what you're doing?"
I could have told him right then that I was a journalist. But I figured that any citizen should be able to ask a couple of questions without being detained as a suspicious person. I told him that I simply wanted to know what kind of machine it was.
"Are you aware of the current threat level?" Officer J. Keyser asked.
I told him I was. The United States had, after all, just launched an attack on Iraq knowing that it would increase the chances of terrorist attacks at home. But that didn't explain why I was being associated with Code Orange.
Officer E. Sinkeldam asked if I'd seen the ABC-TV piece on "20/20" about how "al Qaeda operatives had posed as tourists and had used their video cameras for surveillance before 9/11. In this heightened state of alert," he explained, "if anyone shows a particular interest in something, we get suspicious."
I pointed out that people all around us were using video cameras and cameras of all kinds to photograph who knows what. Even knowing I'd never get a straight answer, I pointedly asked whether I had been detained because I was African American or whether I looked Middle Eastern. The officers just smiled wryly. A Park Police detective would later say that "a tourist" had reported me to police. As soon as I heard that, I knew which one it was. I recalled that as I began photographing the metal box, a woman pulled out her cell phone and began keeping a not-so-discreet eye on me.
After an hour and a half, when word finally got around that I was a writer for The Washington Post, the atmosphere lightened up considerably. The officers even answered my question about that contraption: It was simply an air quality testing device.
And as if to let me know that we were all on the same side now, Officer Keyser asked, "Have you noticed any suspicious activity in the area?"
E-mail: milloyc@washpost.com
1:30:33 PM
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US Credibility
It is shocking but somehow not only have the Bushies handcuffed the military with politico-type restrictions but they are also losing the politico-propaganda war.
DailyKos gives us some of the reasons why (apart from the attempt to bully the world into endorsing our unprovoked, unilateral war of aggression).
Propaganda
The US is really starting to lose the propaganda war, as everything it says turns out to be lies.
Witness:
· Saddam is dead! Ok, no he's not.
· Iraq fired a Scud at Kuwait! Ok, no it wasn't.
· Umm Qasr is taken! Ok, no it's not.
· The Iraqi 51st Division surrendered en masse! Ok, not it hasn't.
· Republican Guard commanders will surrender! Ok, no they won't.
· Basra is taken! Ok, no it's not.
· We found a chemical weapons factory! Ok, maybe it isn't.
The Agonist is now saying the following:
10:03 EST No chemical weapons at Najaf MSNBC reports.
Gee, wonder why the rest of the world is skeptical about claims coming out of the Bush regime… What the heck have they been right about?
It seems that the psych warfare techniques that helped the “Mayberry Machiavellis” cow the US media and the Democrats (project inevitability, never compromise, never admit error and vicious retribution) don’t work either at the UN or in actual warfare. Do they even have a plan B?
Oh yeah, gag the protesters and brand them as terrorists!
Is that what Jesus would do… or what Saddam would do?
1:13:53 PM
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Airmen on Iraqi TV
Just reported on BBC – picking up a feed from French news service – that the crew of the downed Apache are alive and safe but now POWs.
1:02:43 PM
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Illogic of those who condemn protesters
Please explain to me how Americans who exercise their constitutional liberties (aren’t we always lamenting that more don’t?) are somehow “terrorists”?
Last I recall a “terrorist” was someone who used fear and violence to end debate – not someone who peacefully poses uncomfortable questions to try and spark debate.
Bin Laden has much more in common with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (remember, all three blamed 9/11 on America’s permissive culture) than he does with courageous Americans doing what the founders intended them to do – speaking the truth (as they see it) to power.
Wait though, I think Atrios has the recipe:
You see, Saddam is trying to kill us because the anti-war folk make our country wimpy because they care about casualties. If only we didn't care about casualties, Saddam would have no reason to kill us so he wouldn't.
If we just embrace the Bush’s war then the casualties will go away…
…and if I just drink X brand of beer women will disrobe at my feet…
…and if we don’t count all the votes the “winner” will be legitimate!
12:12:20 PM
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Photos of Downed Apache Helicopter
Outside Karbala (50 miles south of Baghdad) being shown on BBC.
update: Looks like a controlled crash landing. The entire craft is intact and was likely not shot down but encountered other difficulties. Crew probably at large trying to get back to friendly lines. Identified as a longbow of the 7th cavalry.
Update 2: Iraqi military press conference (via BBC) claims to have shot down two copters and captured (some of) the crew.
They also dispute charges of violating Geneva convention, predictably (and one must admit with some justice) arguing that a regime that unilaterally launches an unprovoked assault in contravention of the UN charter and security council has little room to gripe, also when that same regime has already shown photos of captured Iraqi civilians/pows, that regime has no place shedding "crocodile tears" over the Geneva convention. Pledged Iraq would adhere to the Geneva convention.
1:22:36 AM
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Royal Marines to clean up Umm Qasr?
That is what the BBC just reported… (you can see the links below) that the Brits (who have experience in N. Ireland) are being brought into Umm Qasr ahead of schedule to relieve what has become an embarrassing situation with US marines unable to secure the port, which is critical to resupply and humanitarian aid. The Brits made it sound as if they were having to clean up a US mess.
1:03:09 AM
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12:57:08 AM
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12:52:11 AM
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12:48:28 AM
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Thirst in a Desert: “Weapon of Mass Destruction”?
Was “liberating” them from water also part of Rumsfeld’s master plan?
The Red Cross is warning of a humanitarian emergency in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
A spokesman for the Red Cross says water and electricity supplies have been cut for the past 48 hours.
He says engineers need to reach a major pumping station under the control of coalition forces.
"We are now actively trying to obtain the possibility to send a team of engineers across the line to be able to reach the main water station that serves 1.9 million people in southern Iraq.
"They have been without water for the past 48 hours and it is an humanitarian emergency that they should be given access to clear water."
12:46:29 AM
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“…it is very difficult for the US to credibly call on other nations to follow international law and follow the Geneva Convention when they so flagrantly flout it themselves - not just with this illegal war but what they've been doing at Guantanamo Bay," [Australian] Senator Bartlett said.
12:24:43 AM
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So much for the claims…
…on behalf of precision smart weapons.
Wonder how much we’ll hear about this in the US media?
12:20:56 AM
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Allies arguing like colonial powers…
…over the division of Iraqi market.
Only this time it is not about oil but about wheat and the predatory use of “humanitarian aid” to effectively undercut the Australian share of the market.
PS what the heck is a "stoush"?
12:17:46 AM
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A British View…
…of the ongoing effort to invest the small town of Umm Qasr (pop: 4,000).
It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the operation “newspeak.”
But then Bush and Rumsfeld basically pulled the pin on a live grenade, handed it to the pentagon folks and asked them to defuse it.
Thanks… any other hornet nests you want to whack, Junior?
(tip of the cap to the Agonist)
By Daniel McGrory and Tim Butcher in Umm Qasr
THE skies over Umm Qasr burned orange last night as the allies brought in tanks, aircraft and heavy artillery in an attempt to bring to an end a three-day siege.
The scale of the resistance met by allied forces in Iraq’s only deep-water port has stunned coalition forces.
Intelligence officers had assured the US Marines that they would meet at most a handful of Iraqi diehards refusing to surrender when they marched into Umm Qasr, and on Friday allies spoke of “pockets of resistance”.
By last night that assessment had proved so wide of the mark that Marine commanders, edging nervously through the backstreets of this decrepit port, refused to predict how many more gunmen might be waiting for them. One officer said: “The fighting has got worse with each day. So much for the walkover we were told to expect.”
What started as a skirmish with a few armed Iraqis near a port in the south turned into the Battle of Umm Qasr, a full-blown pyrotechnic display of mainly American military muscle. In spite of 150 US Marines, four main battle tanks, an FA18 warplane and an RAF Harrier jump-jet, the Iraqis stood firm.
By nightfall their position still had not been silenced, raising questions about how fast US troops will be able to mop up resistance elsewhere in Iraq, especially in Baghdad.
“I guess you can call it a battle,” Staff Sergeant Nick Lerma, 33, said in the Texan drawl of his hometown, San Antonio. “It started off small, but it got pretty big.”
Yesterday the allies waited until dark to unleash their barrage on a band of Republican Guards thought to be hiding in some dilapidated warehouses in the port.
There were a dozen explosions in swift succession, shaking buildings as far as six miles away, which Marine commanders were confident would finally wipe out the resistance that was proving an embarrassment to their efforts to open up Iraq’s only deep- water port.
What happened next astounded allied commanders as Iraqi units sent back a volley of artillery fire.
Like a maestro conducting an orchestra, Staff Sergeant Lerma spent most of yesterday striding on an earth berm 900 yards from the target, egging on his young troops from 1 Platoon of Fox Company.
Urging them in the bluest of language to stay behind cover and to don helmets, he stalked behind them, talking one moment into his radio microphone and then shouting commands the next. “I have got a bunch of young men here just out of training and they are like a load of young dogs all straining at the leash, so they take some handling.”
It was Staff Sergeant Lerma who called for the deployment of two Javelins to launch rockets to destroy the target. One missed, but the other slammed into the building.
“Thank God we fired those things,” Lance Corporal Samuel Balderama, 20, from Baltimore, Maryland, said. “They weigh 40lb each, so now we have two less to carry home.”
At around midday two RAF Harriers dipped towards the rusting storage depot where the main group of Iraqis was holed up. The first 500lb bomb fell just wide of the mark, but moments later the second went home.
On the outskirts of the port, which British troops need to open swiftly to get the humanitarian operation under way, US Marines swung a line of Bradley fighting vehicles towards a rusting warehouse where they believed that a group of officers was holed up.
In the street behind them, there were seven Iraqi bodies lying in the dust. All that was seen of Umm Qasr’s 4,000 frightened residents was the occasional glimpse at a window of one being used as a human shield by gunmen.
By late last night the US Marines were thinking of calling in yet more weaponry, this time Cobra attack helicopters, but they had too little time to organise the mission. Instead, three ½in-calibre sniper rifles were used and they were banging away by nightfall, but still not neutralising the target. “Fire! Fire!” a soldier screamed. “They are using binos to spot against us. Fire! Fire!”
If the display of firepower had not been so devastating, the whole operation might have been comical.
“If the Americans are like this when they have one building to deal with, what are they going to be like when they get to Baghdad?” a British officer asked.
12:07:59 AM
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