Thank you America!!

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare. Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation—remnants of a once great and glorious white athletic centrality.

Of course, there were sports fans who loved the stars on their favorite teams without regard to race. Sometimes, they even liked black athletes the most. Such white men tended to be liberals. They were no use to Bush. He needed to take care of his more immediate constituency. If he had a covert strength, it was his knowledge of the unspoken things that bothered American white men the most—just those matters they were not always ready to admit to themselves. The first was that people hipped on sports can get overaddicted to victory. Sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag had become a go-for-the-win triumvirate that had developed many psychic connections with the military.

After all, war was, with all else, the most dramatic and serious extrapolation of sports. The concept of victory could be seen by some as the noblest species of profit in union with patriotism. So Bush knew that a big victory in an easy war would work for the good white American male. If blacks and Hispanics were representative of their share of the population in the enlisted ranks, still they were not a majority, and the faces of the officer corps (as seen on the tube) suggested that the percentage of white men increased as one rose in rank to field and general officers. Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super-Marines, and—one magical ace in the hole—the best air force that ever existed. If we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of the covert but real reasons we went looking for war. We knew we were likely to be good at it.

In the course, however, of all the quick events of the last few months, our military passed through a transmogrification. Indeed, it was one hellion of a morph. We went, willy-nilly, from a potentially great athlete to serving as an emergency intern required to operate at high speed on an awfully sick patient full of frustration, outrage, and violence. Now in the last month, even as the patient is getting stitched up somewhat, a new and troubling question arises: Have any fresh medicines been developed to deal with what seem to be teeming infections? Do we really know how to treat livid suppurations? Or would it be better to just keep trusting our great American luck, our faith in our divinely protected can-do luck? We are, by custom, gung-ho. If these suppurations prove to be unmanageable, or just too time-consuming, may we not leave them behind? We could move on to the next venue. Syria, we might declare in our best John Wayne voice: You can run, but you can't hide. Saudi Arabia, you overrated tank of blubber, do you need us more than ever? And Iran, watch it, we have eyes for you. You could be a real meal. Because when we fight, we feel good, we are ready to go, and then go some more. We have had a taste. Why, there's a basketful of billions to be made in the Middle East just so long as we can stay ahead of the trillions of debts that are coming after us back home.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Be it said: the motives that lead to a nation's major historical acts can probably rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of its leadership. While George W. may not know as much as he believes he knows about the dispositions of God's blessing, he is driving us at high speed all the same —this man at the wheel whose most legitimate boast might be that he knew how to parlay the part-ownership of a major-league baseball team into a gubernatorial win in Texas. And—shall we ever forget?—was catapulted, by legal finesse and finagling, into a now-tainted but still almighty hymn: Hail to the Chief!

No, we will rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of our leadership. And now that the ardor of victory has begun to cool, some will see how it is flawed. For we are victim once again of all those advertising sciences that depend on mendacity and manipulation. We have been gulled about the real reasons for this war, tweaked and poked by some of the best button-pushers around to believe that we won a noble and necessary contest when, in fact, the opponent was a hollowed-out palooka whose monstrosities were ebbing into old age.

Perhaps he was not that old. Perhaps Saddam made a decision to go underground with as much wealth as he had spirited away, and would fund al-Qaeda or some extension of it in a collaboration of sorts with Osama bin Laden—a new underground team, the Incompatible Terrorist Twins. That is a hypothesis as mad as the world we are beginning to live in.

Democracy, more than any other political system, depends on a modicum of honesty. Ultimately, it is much at the mercy of a leader who has never been embarrassed by himself. What is to be said of a man who spent two years in the Air Force of the National Guard (as a way of not having to go to Vietnam) and proceeded—like many another spoiled and wealthy father's son—not to bother to show up for duty in his second year of service? Most of us have episodes in our youth that can cause us shame on reflection. It is a mark of maturation that we do not try to profit from our early lacks and vices but do our best to learn from them. Bush proceeded, however, to turn his declaration of the Iraqi campaign's end into a mighty fashion show. He chose—this overnight clone of Honest Abe—to arrive on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on an S-3B Viking jet that came in with a dramatic tail-hook landing. The carrier was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been able to show himself in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.

 

Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says
By DAVID E. SANGER - NY Times


WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.

The acknowledgment came after a day of questions — and sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials — about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a warning that White House officials say never reached them.

"There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa," the statement said. "However, the information is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that attempts were in fact made."

In other words, said one senior official, "we couldn't prove it, and it might in fact be wrong."

Separately tonight, The Washington Post quoted an unidentifed senior administration official as declaring that "knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." Some administration officials have expressed similar sentiments in interviews in the past two weeks.

Asked about the statement early today, before President Bush departed for a six-day tour of Africa, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said, "There is zero, nada, nothing new here." He said that "we've long acknowledged" that information on the attempted purchases from Niger "did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect."

But in public, administration officials have defended the president's statement in the State of Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

While Mr. Bush cited the British report, seemingly giving the account the credibility of coming from a non-American intelligence service, Britain itself relied in part on information provided by the C.I.A., American and British officials have said.

But today a report from a parliamentary committee that conducted an investigation into the British assertions also questioned the credibility of what the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had published.

The committee went on to say that Mr. Blair's government had asserted it had other evidence of Iraqi attempts to procure uranium. But eight months later the government still had not told Parliament what that other information was.

While Mr. Bush quoted the British report, his statement was apparently primarily based on American intelligence — a classified "National Intelligence Estimate" published in October of last year that also identified two other countries, Congo and Somalia, where Iraq had sought the material, in addition to Niger.

But many analysts did not believe those reports at the time, and were shocked to hear the president make such a flat, declarative statement.

Asked about the accuracy of the president's statement this morning, Mr. Fleischer said, "We see nothing that would dissuade us from the president's broader statement." But when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later today.

Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement.

How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence estimate.

That document contained a footnote — in a separate section of the report, on another subject — noting that State Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium.

If the intelligence was true, it would have buttressed statements by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapon, and could build one in a year or less if he obtained enough nuclear material.

In early March, before the invasion of Iraq began, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the uranium reports about Niger, noting that they were based on forged documents.

In an interview late last month, a senior administration official said that the news of the fraud was not brought to the attention of the White House until after Mr. Bush had spoken.

But even then, White House officials made no effort to correct the president's remarks. Indeed, as recently as a few weeks ago they were arguing that Mr. Bush had quite deliberately avoided mentioning Niger, and noted that he had spoken more generally about efforts to obtain "yellowcake," the substance from which uranium is extracted, from African nations.

Tonight's statement, though, calls even those reports into question. In interviews in recent days, a number of administration officials have conceded that Mr. Bush never should have made the claims, given the weakness of the case. One senior official said that the uranium purchases were "only one small part" of a broader effort to reconstitute the nuclear program, and that Mr. Bush probably should have dwelled on others.

White House officials would not say, however, how the statement was approved. They have suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency approved the wording, though the C.I.A. has said none of its senior leaders had reviewed it. Other key members of the administration said the information was discounted early on, and that by the time the president delivered the State of the Union address, there were widespread questions about the quality of the intelligence.

"We only found that out later," said one official involved in the speech.

 

Now we pay the warlords to tyrannise the Afghan people

The Taliban fell but - thanks to coalition policy - things did not get better

Isabel Hilton
Thursday July 31, 2003


Diehard defenders of military intervention in Iraq argue that it's too soon to carp, that time is required to restore order and prosperity to a country ravaged by every type of misfortune. Time, certainly, is needed, but is time enough? If the example of Afghanistan is anything to go by, time makes things worse rather than better. More than 18 months after the collapse of the Taliban regime, there is a remarkable consensus among aid workers, NGOs and UN officials that the situation is deteriorating.

There is a further point of consensus: that the deterioration is a direct consequence of "coalition" policy. Some 60 aid agencies have issued a joint statement pleading with the international community to deploy forces across Afghanistan to bring some order. While waiting for the elusive international cavalry, they have been forced to reduce operations in the north, where the warlords fight each other, and in the south, where the "coalition" forces try to fight the Taliban. Privately, many aid workers fear that it is too late. Even if the political will existed, foreign troops may no longer be in a position to restore order. To do so would require going to war with the warlords themselves.

The warlords, of course, as friends of the "coalition", are also part of the government. They have private armies, raise private funds, pursue private interests and control private treasuries. None of these do they wish to give up. All of them threaten the long-term future of Afghanistan, the short-term prospects of holding elections, the immediate possibilities of reconstruction and the threadbare credibility of Hamid Karzai's government.

It is not Karzai's fault. He is a prisoner within his own government: a respected, liberal Pashtun who nominally heads a government in which former Northern Alliance commanders - and figures like the Tajik defence minister Mohammed Fahim - hold the real power.

In the country that is fantasy Afghanistan - or the Afghanistan of western promise - a national army is being created which represents all ethnic groups, and elections next year will produce a representative, democratic government. In real Afghanistan, Fahim does not want to admit other ethnic groups to his army, which could create the conditions for a future civil war.

The new national army is supposed to be 70,000-strong. Last year, only 4,000 men were trained. The new recruits were vetted for Taliban connections and drug trafficking, but not for past human rights abuses. The defence ministry is a Tajik fiefdom; arms and cash, including British taxpayers' money, continue to be funnelled to the warlords; and senior UN officials have publicly doubted whether the elections will happen at all.

The funds offered to Afghanistan for reconstruction have been slow to arrive and less than promised, but aid agencies argue that the most urgent problems are not primarily a question of money. The bad news is that they are, therefore, not problems money will solve. What is needed is a fundamental change in the power structure. But this continues to be supported, on grounds of security, by both the British and the US governments.

There is money in Afghanistan, but it is in the wrong hands. Local warlords control local roads and exact crippling tolls that impede trade. Karzai is not able to exact the remittance of this money to Kabul.The government therefore, depends on funds from outside, part of which it uses, in turn, to buy off the warlords. At no stage of this dismal process do funds trickle down to the people of Afghanistan. The only dependable source of revenue for many returned farmers is the opium poppy.

Two million refugees have returned to Afghanistan, encouraged by the UNHCR and their weary host countries. For many this has been a tale of woe. There are few jobs; poverty and hunger continue.

Development and reconstruction experts agree that postwar reconstruction should begin with security and include the early encouragement of labour-intensive infrastructure projects which help the country and put wages into the pockets of those who need them. But this has not been applied in Afghanistan. Security never came because, when the Taliban fell, the US would not agree to the deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) outside Kabul. Why? Because the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was already planning the invasion of Iraq and did not want men tied down in peacekeeping.

The Pentagon prefers to pay the warlords to run the country outside Kabul, dressing up the exercise with a loya jirga in which 80% of those "elected" were warlords. Washington sources report that when Karzai appealed to Rumsfeld for support to confront one of the most notorious warlords, Rumsfeld declined to give it. The result has been that reconstruction is crippled, political progress is non-existent and human rights abuses are piling up.

Even straightforward reconstruction projects fail to bring maximum benefit to the Afghan people. To give only one example: road repair could be an opportunity to spend money usefully and to provide employment. But on the key road from Kandahar to Iran, which had not been repaired for 30 years, the central government failed to gain the cooperation of local powers. The stalemate was resolved when the repair contract was awarded to a US firm that brought in heavy machinery instead of using local labour.

What progress there has been is now threatened. The proportion of girls in school - never more than half - has begun to decline again: girls' schools have been attacked, and girls threatened and harassed on their way to classes.

A Human Rights Watch report published on Tuesday documents crimes of kidnapping, rape, intimidation, robbery, extortion and murder, committed not in spite of the government but by its forces - by the warlords and their police and soldiers, who are paid, directly and indirectly, by US and British taxpayers.

The British have been shipping cash to Hazrat Ali, the head of Afghanistan's eastern military command and the warlord of Nangahar, who worked with the US at Tora Bora. His men specialise in arresting people on the pretext that they are Taliban supporters and torturing them until their families pay up.

If paying warlords had been an emergency measure, there would be room to hope that it would no longer be necessary once elections were held and a legitimate government in place. But this is a policy the consequence of which is that there is unlikely to be long-term peace or a democratic government.

The promised election date is less than a year away. The choice is to allow these local tyrannies to be painted over by a voting exercise conducted for propaganda purposes, or to challenge the warlords. Is Nato, which takes over ISAF in August, really prepared to do so? Somehow I doubt it.

 

Vile Britannia

It's a Hollywood rule: Americans always get to play the heroes - and Brits are invariably the villains.

John Patterson
Thursday August 7, 2003


Every time Tony Blair shows up in Washington to exult in his role as top sprig in the Figleaf of the Willing and to enjoy confabs and photo-ops with Gee Dubya, I have to wonder once again what we, the Brits, actually get out of this long-treasured, murkily defined "special relationship" between former imperial oppressor and former colonial upstart. As Tony lurks at Furious George's right hand, calamitously clad in his usual vacationing geography teacher's nerd ensemble, one has to presume he's there simply to make George look good, or just to share the heat. What Blair gains, if anything, is impossible to quantify.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood and London, the movie version of the special relationship has long played itself out in like manner. Our cut-price actors come over and do their dirty work, as villains and baddies and psychopaths, even American ones, while the cream of their prohibitively expensive acting talent Concordes it over the pond to steal the lion's share of our heroic roles. Either way, we lose.

Pirates of the Caribbean manages to embody this phenomenon from both sides at once. The ghostly pirates of the Black Pearl, commanded by Geoffrey Rush (an Aussie, but never mind, Americans think he's a Brit), all talk with the absurd Jolly Jack Tar accents that one associates with press gangs, poop decks and Plymouth Hoe.

The snooty island governor and his worthless son are played by Jonathan Pryce and Jack Davenport, their Englishness a shorthand for all manner of class-based unseemliness and degeneracy. The hero, Jack Swallow, is also a Brit, but he's played by the American Johnny Depp, hidden behind an accent apparently purloined from a comatose Keef Richards. Depp was also the English policeman hero in From Hell, in which he found himself neck-deep in creepy posh Brits and at daggers drawn with Jack the Ripper, who, you'll not be surprised to learn, was not played by an American.

Likewise Tomb Raider 2, in which Angelina Jolie stars as English rose Lara Croft, with an accent that sounds like Princess Margaret throwing up, while Ciaran Hinds, the luckless Brit, gets to play a psychopathic bioterrorist. In both movies the true Brits take it in the neck while the fake Brits take it to the bank.

So what do they really think of us? What qualifies us to play their baddies? Firstly, there's that all-important umbilical connection between Britain and America, the cord they cut when it suddenly looked as though the 13 colonies might end up as part of a British empire in which slavery was illegal (abolition didn't happen until 1833, but it was certainly a galvanising factor in 1776).

In the American folk memory, we are the original oppressors, the imperial bullies who had the nerve to ask a bunch of rich white men to pay their taxes. All those guns that present-day rednecks keep under the bed? They're for when General Cornwallis and his boys come calling at four in the morning.

Paul Revere's famous cry, "The British are coming!", retained its folkloric potency long after we had kissed and made up, suggesting that Americans are still predisposed by national myth to regard us as an enemy. This was proved by The Patriot three years ago, in which Jason Isaacs played an English colonel as a variation on Adolf Eichmann, merrily burning women and children to death in a church (though no such atrocity - or any remotely like it - ever took place in the revolutionary war).

The outlines of that original conflict - starchy, uptight roast-beef John Bulls in easy-to-aim-at red coats, versus plucky little camouflaged guerilla-fighter farmers - can easily be displaced into other scenarios, like the Roman empire, the second world war, and even the contemporary political scene.

This early relationship has since become barnacled with more contemporary American cliches about the British. We are effete and overly educated. We're snobs. We like to be tied up and whipped. We all went to boarding school, even our footie hooligans. We think we still run the world or, to borrow Macmillan's phrase, that "we must be Greece to their Rome", ameliorating the caveman excesses of an upstart superpower. And we think we're better than the Americans in some mysterious, indefinable way. How dare we!

Whether or not any of these accusations has an iota of truth to it doesn't really matter in Hollywood. They certainly provide an excellent basis for a race of baddies: imperial arrogance, natural viciousness, sexual perviness and gay-boy accents. From there it's a simple matter of "Call Peter Ustinov/Larry Olivier/ Malcolm McDowell! We need a Nero/Crassus/Caligula!"

Jesus is usually an American in biblical epics. Judas, meanwhile, is just as likely to be a Brit. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus was a Swede (Max von Sydow), but the formula held good for David McCallum's blond betrayer. And if they're not playing Judas, then the Brits will be all over the Roman imperial power structure, raining vicious blows down on the heads of Jesus and his 12 Americans.

Heston's Judah Ben-Hur faced off against Ulsterman Stephen Boyd as the gimlet-eyed Marsalla. Kirk Douglas's live-free-or-die-tryin' Spartacus gave Lawrence Olivier what for as the fascistic Crassus, and there was just no reasoning with David Bowie's Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ. Even in Gladiator the formula was intact, despite the presence of an Australian hero and an American villain. Joaquin Phoenix may be as American as apple pie, but in order to pull off his villainous role he had to be fitted with a lisping English accent to underline his irremediable moral degeneracy.

On the sidelines were all the usual Roman-Limey weirdos, the foremost being David Hemmings with a Lucille Ball wig and eyebrows like water diviners. Must be a pervert.

From all this it's a short step to Hitler the Englishman. Was there not a single American actor prepared to play young Adolf in the recent NBC mini-series based on Ian Kershaw's biography? Of course not, so they called on Robert Carlyle, a grown-up who fancied a challenge. And for Max, a film about Hitler the art student? Noah Taylor got the job. Heydrich in HBO's Conspiracy, about the Wannsee conference? Kenneth Branagh. You were expecting Alec Baldwin?

And even when it comes to such quintessentially American bad guys as Richard Nixon, they call on us again. Anthony Hopkins will never be topped in the role, but was there really no American actor interested in such a challenging job? Likewise Michael Gambon as LBJ in John Frankenheimer's excellent The Path to War, or even Emma Thompson as an ersatz Hillary Clinton in Primary Colors. Kennedy is always played by an American, just like Jesus, but Lee Harvey Oswald? Call Gary Oldman.

It leaves one wondering who's left who looms large in the American demonology, and must therefore be played by an Englishman. Ho Chi Minh? Mao? Saddam? Osama? Imelda Marcos? Call Ben Kingsley!

The countervailing tendency is the number of Americans who show up here to star in quintessentially English roles. First there was Kevin Costner as Robin Hood, prince of surfers, and in the years since we've had Jolie as Croft, Zellweger as Bridget Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow as half the index of FR Leavis's The Great Tradition, Reese Witherspoon in The Importance of Being Earnest and Vanity Fair, and countless others. With one hand they accept from us; with the other they take from us: in movies, as in geopolitics, the only special relationship America has is with America.

 

With out a doubt the dumbest article ever written......No thought what so ever was given to this....for instance, the fact the for years many of the top actors have been from England and I like the way he omits the fact that Mel Gibson....is Australian born..Anthony Hopkins was casted by Oliver Stone...Mr.Anti America himself..

you really are a dumb ass to even cut and paste this.....you are so jealous of america aren;t you???...it sucks to be euro trash doesn't it? You are nothing but american fodder.....you are ...our bitch ...now you and the rest of Europe get back on your knees and service us or we'll bitch slap you

 

'It was punishment without trial'

Hundreds of Iraqis civilians are being held in makeshift jails run by US troops - many without being charged or even questioned. And in these prisons are children whose parents have no way of locating them. Jonathan Steele reveals the grim reality of coalition justice in Baghdad

Friday August 15, 2003
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1019096,00.html