The Mexican Revolution

2007-01-10T21:39:00.000-08:00

13 American Woman.mp3
06 Oye Como Va.mp3
(Trivia Translation of somg lyrics :
Oye Como VA=
hey hows it goin
mi ritmo = my rythym
bueno pa" gozar = is good for partying
mulata =babe That is the whole song LOL )

Forgotten History - Tuesday, January 2, 2007
"Little known facts and overlooked history"

The Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was brought on by, among other factors, tremendous disagreement among the Mexican people over the dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz, who, all told, stayed in office for thirty one years. During that span, power was concentrated in the hands of a select few; the people had no power to express their opinions or select their public officials. Wealth was likewise concentrated in the hands of the few, and injustice was everywhere, in the cities and the countryside alike.

Early in the 20th Century, a new generation of young leaders arose who wanted to participate in the political life of their country, but they were denied the opportunity by the officials who were already entrenched in power and who were not about to give it up. This group of young leaders believed that they could assume their proper role in Mexican politics once President Diaz announced publicly that Mexico was ready for democracy. Although the Mexican Constitution called for public election and other institutions of democracy, Diaz and his supporters used their political and economic resources to stay in power indefinitely.

Francisco I. Madero was one of the strongest believers that President Diaz should renounce his power and not seek reelection. Together with other young reformers, Madero created the "Anti-reeleccionista" Party, which he represented in subsequent presidential elections. Between elections, Madero travelled throughout the country, campaigning for his ideas. Francisco I. Madero was a firm supporter of democracy and of making government subject to the strict limits of the law, and the success of Madero's movement made him a threat in the eyes of President Diaz. Shortly before the elections of 1910, Madero was apprehended in Monterrey and imprisoned in San Luis Potosi. Learning of Diaz's re-election, Madero fled to the United States in October of 1910. In exile, he issued the "Plan of San Luis," a manifesto which declared that the elections had been a fraud and that he would not recognize Porfirio Diaz as the legitimate President of the Republic.

Instead, Madero make the daring move of declaring himself President Pro-Temp until new elections could be held. Madero promised to return all land which had been confiscated from the peasants, and he called for universal voting rights and for a limit of one term for the president. Madero's call for an uprising on November 20th, 1910, marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.

On November 14th, in Cuchillo Parado in the state of Chihuahua, Toribio Ortega and a small group of followers took up arms. On the 18th in Puebla, Diaz's authorities uncovered preparations for an uprising in the home of the brothers Maximo and Aquiles Serdan, who where made to pay with their lives. Back in Chihuahua, Madero was able to persuade Pascual Orozco and Francisco Villa to join the revolution. Though they had no military experience, Orozco and Villa proved to be excellent strategists, and they earned the allegiance of the people of northern Mexico, who were particularly unhappy about the abusive ranchers and landlords who ran the North.

In March of 1911, Emiliano Zapata led the uprising of the peasants of Morelos to claim their rights over local land and water. At the same time, armed revolt began in many other parts of the country. The "Maderista" troops, and the national anger which inspired them, defeated the army of Diaz within six months. The decisive victory of the Mexican Revolution was the capture of Ciudad Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, by Orozco and Villa. Porfirio Diaz then resigned as President and fled to exile in France, where he died in 1915.

With the collapse of the Diaz regime, the Mexican Congress elected Francisco Leon De La Barra as President Pro-Temp and called for national popular elections, which resulted in the victory of Francisco I. Madero as President and Jose Maria Pino Suarez as Vice-President.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. ~ George Washington Carver (1864-1903)

13 American Woman.mp3
06 Oye Como Va.mp3

Stained Glass and Strained Egos

2007-01-10T21:29:00.000-08:00

BACK STABBERS THE OJAYS.mp3
CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW-JOHNNY NASH.mp3

January 3, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Stained Glass and Strained Egos

By MAUREEN DOWD

Washington

It was a scene that Mary McCarthy could have written the devil out of: a funeral for a fine, bland fellow that filled everybody with unfine, unbland thoughts. The formal serenity of the service, disguised, but only barely, the virulent rivalries and envies and grudges and grievances that have roiled this group for many decades.

None of the eulogists noted the irony that the man who ushered out one long national nightmare had ushered in another, the one we’re living in now. It was Gerald Ford, after all, who gave America the gift of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — the gift that keeps on taking.

The two former Ford officials, who doomed Iraq to civil war and despoiled American values, were honorary pallbearers yesterday, as was that other slippery and solipsistic courtier, Henry Kissinger.

The Group was even more on edge because of a remarkable trellis of peppery opinions that had tumbled out of the man in the coffin, posthumously. The late president, hailed as the most understated and decent guy in the world, had given a series of interviews on the condition they be held until his death — a belated but bracing smackdown of many of his distinguished mourners.

It was impossible not to wonder what the luminaries were truly thinking, as they sat listening to fugues of Bach and Brahms and encomiums to the ordinary-guy leader.

Nancy Reagan’s imperturbable expression behind her big square sunglasses did not disguise the gloating words visible in the bubble over her head: “And they call this a funeral?”

It could not compare, of course, to the incredible Princess of Wales treatment that her husband had for his state funeral. And Nancy, hypersensitive to any slights to her Ronnie, would not have been pleased with Mr. Ford’s interview with Michael Beschloss published in Newsweek, in which he blamed Ronald Reagan for costing him the 1976 election by challenging his nomination and then failing to hit the trail for him.

It was good of Mr. Ford to bring 41 and 43 together in a solemn respite from their uneasy competition over Iraq.

“Told you so, you sons of guns — we were right to stop at Safwan and stay out of Baghdad,” the father’s bubble read, as he watched Rummy and Henry the K, both of whom had treated Poppy with such veiled contempt, as though he were a feather duster. “Those vicious Moktada-loving Shiites dancing around Saddam’s dead body prove that Brent and I were right.”

Lynne Cheney glared at Poppy as he gave his eulogy, knowing that he privately thinks that the vice president has destroyed not only Iraq and American foreign policy, but the Bush family name. Her storm cloud of a bubble is expurgated.

Hillary’s bubble was full of mockery for another New Yorker in the National Cathedral: “You think you’re so smart, Rudy, but you leave your entire presidential battle plan in a hotel room for your rivals to find? The victim role doesn’t suit you.” Condi’s bubble was as opaquely dark as Hillary’s was risibly light — drooping with the inchoate fear that her nearby erstwhile mentor, Brent Scowcroft, had been right about Iraq after all.

As Poppy spoke from the altar, praising Mr. Ford’s generosity, he must have been mulling that his predecessor was ungenerous in spitting on him from the grave. Mr. Ford told Mr. Beschloss that Bush Sr. had sold out the party to the hard right and had taken a phony, pandering position on abortion.

Poppy had to have enjoyed watching Dr. K get up and lavish praise on his old boss, after Mr. Ford had sniggered to Bob Woodward that the “coy” Bavarian diva had “the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.”

W. graciously walked Betty Ford down the aisle, even as he must have curdled inside about her husband’s telling Mr. Woodward that it had been “a big mistake” on the part of W., Dick Cheney and Rummy to justify the Iraq war with nonexistent W.M.D. “I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security,” he said.

Ex-presidents weren’t supposed to criticize sitting presidents. Adding insult to injury, Woodward himself was in the cathedral. How did he manage to get all these deathbed confessions, W. had to wonder. “Jeez,” his bubble read, “does he have an interview with my old man in the can?”

Rummy’s pop-up was as cocky as ever: “Golly, I’ve been gone three weeks and things are really looking up in Iraq.”

James Baker’s secret thoughts were as bright as his tie: “I tried to help you out, son, but you’re too dang stubborn. Or ‘resolute.’ Stubolute. A clear case of TMC — too much Cheney.”

Dick Cheney’s bubble was trouble: “I’m surging, I’m surging, I’m surging.”

Home

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
BACK STABBERS THE OJAYS.mp3
CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW-JOHNNY NASH.mp3

W pushes envelope on U.S. spying

2007-01-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

07 Dont Bring Me Down.mp3

18 What a Fool Believes.mp3

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

W pushes envelope on U.S. spying
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, January 4th, 2007

WASHINGTON - President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

"Despite the President's statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people's mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

"The danger is they're reading Americans' mail," she said.

"You have to be concerned," agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush's claim. "It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we've ever known."

A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised, "It's something we're going to look into."

Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval.

Yet in his statement Bush said he will "construe" an exception, "which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent ... with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

Bush cited as examples the need to "protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection."

White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore denied Bush was claiming any new authority.

"In certain circumstances - such as with the proverbial 'ticking bomb' - the Constitution does not require warrants for reasonable searches," she said.

Bush, however, cited "exigent circumstances" which could refer to an imminent danger or a longstanding state of emergency.

Critics point out the administration could quickly get a warrant from a criminal court or a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge to search targeted mail, and the Postal Service could block delivery in the meantime.

But the Bush White House appears to be taking no chances on a judge saying no while a terror attack is looming, national security experts agreed.

Martin said that Bush is "using the same legal reasoning to justify warrantless opening of domestic mail" as he did with warrantless eavesdropping.

WORLD WAR I AND THE BRITISH MANDATE

2007-01-10T20:13:00.000-08:00

09 Foreigners.wav

Leon Russell~Tight Wire.mp3

Forgotten History - Friday, January 5, 2007
"Little known facts and overlooked history"

WORLD WAR I AND THE BRITISH MANDATE
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman territories had become the focus of European power politics. During the previous century, enfeebled Ottoman rule had invited intense competition among European powers for commercial benefits and for spheres of influence. British interest in Iraq significantly increased when the Ottomans granted concessions to Germany to construct railroad lines from Konya in southwest Turkey to Baghdad in 1899 and from Baghdad to Basra in 1902. The British feared that a hostile German presence in the Fertile Crescent would threaten vital lines of communication to India via Iran and Afghanistan, menacing British oil interests in Iran and perhaps even India itself.

In 1914 when the British discovered that Turkey was entering the war on the side of the Germans, British forces from India landed at Al Faw on the Shatt al Arab and moved rapidly toward Basra. By the fall of 1915, when British forces were already well established in towns in the south, General Charles Townshend unsuccessfully attempted to take Baghdad. In retaliation, the Turks besieged the British garrison at Al Kut for 140 days; in April 1916, the garrison was forced to surrender unconditionally. The British quickly regrouped their forces, however, and resumed their advance under General Stanley Maude in December 1916. By March 1917 the British had captured Baghdad. Advancing northward in the spring of 1918, the British finally took Mosul in early November. As a result of the victory at Mosul, British authority was extended to all the Iraqi wilayat (sing., wilayah-province) with the exception of the Kurdish highlands bordering Turkey and Iran, the land alongside the Euphrates from Baghdad south to An Nasiriyah, and the Shia cities of Karbala and An Najaf.

On capturing Baghdad, General Maude proclaimed that Britain intended to return to Iraq some control of its own affairs. He stressed that this step would pave the way for ending the alien rule that the Iraqis had experienced since the latter days of the Abbasid caliphate. The proclamation was in accordance with the encouragement the British had given to Arab nationalists, such as Jafar al Askari; his brother-in-law, Nuri as Said; and Jamil al Midfai, who sought emancipation from Ottoman rule. The nationalists had supported the Allied powers in expectation of both the Ottoman defeat and the freedom many nationalists assumed would come with an Allied victory.

During the war, events in Iraq were greatly influenced by the Hashimite family of Husayn ibn Ali, sharif of Mecca, who claimed descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. Aspiring to become king of an independent Arab kingdom, Husayn had broken with the Ottomans, to whom he had been vassal, and had thrown in his lot with the British. Anxious for his support, the British gave Husayn reason to believe that he would have their endorsement when the war ended. Accordingly, Husayn and his sons led the June 1916 Arab Revolt, marching northward in conjunction with the British into Transjordan, Palestine, and Syria.

Anticipating the fulfillment of Allied pledges, Husayn's son, Prince Faisal (who was later to become modern Iraq's first king), arrived in Paris in 1919 as the chief spokesman for the Arab cause. Much to his disappointment, Faisal found that the Allied powers were less than enthusiastic about Arab independence.

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, Iraq was formally made a Class A mandate entrusted to Britain. This award was completed on April 25, 1920, at the San Remo Conference in Italy. Palestine also was placed under British mandate, and Syria was placed under French mandate. Faisal, who had been proclaimed king of Syria by a Syrian national congress in Damascus in March 1920, was ejected by the French in July of the same year.

09 Foreigners.wav

Leon Russell~Tight Wire.mp3

The spy

2007-01-10T17:16:00.000-08:00

The spy who offered to blow up Hitler on a suicide mission

Melissa Etheridge -Never Enough.Must be Crazy 4 Me
Melissa Etheridge -Never Enough The boy Feels Strange

Ben Macintyre

MI5 turned down plan by the safe-cracker turned double agent who wanted to end his days in a blaze of glory. Listen to Ben Macintyre audio

Eddie Chapman: recruited by the Nazis after invasion of the Channel Islands (Eddie Chapman/News of the World)

A British secret agent who offered to blow up Adolf Hitler at the height of the Second World War was dissuaded from carrying out the assassination by MI5, according to newly released wartime archives.

The offer to kill Hitler in a suicide mission was made by Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal and safe-breaker who was trained by the Nazis as a spy and went on to become one of Britain’s most successful double agents, codenamed Agent Zigzag.

Chapman was serving a sentence in Jersey prison for burglary when the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands in June 1940. He was recruited by the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and parachuted into Britain in December 1941. He immediately defected to MI5, the British security service.

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Under interrogation by MI5, the 27-year-old Chapman said that he wanted to return to Germany as a double agent, and then kill the Führer by exploding a bomb at a Nazi rally.

Files recently declassified by MI5 reveal an extraordinary conversation between Chapman and Ronnie Reed, his case officer. Reed pointed out that any attempt to kill Hitler would be suicidal: “Whether or not you succeeded, you would be liquidated immediately,” he said.

“Ah, but what a way out,” Chapman replied.

Chapman explained that his German spymaster, an Abwehr officer he knew only as “Dr Graumann”, had promised to take him to a Nazi rally if he completed his mission in Britain successfully, and place him “in the first or second row”, near Hitler’s podium, if necessary by dressing him in the uniform of a senior German officer.

“He believes I am pro-Nazi,” Chapman told Reed. “I believe Dr Graumann will keep his promise. Then I will assassinate Hitler . . . with my knowledge of explosives and incendiary material, it should be possible.”

Reed was convinced that Chapman’s offer was serious, and reported back to his MI5 superiors: “He can think of no better way of leaving this life than to have his name prominently featured throughout the world’s press, and to be immortalised in history books for all time.” Reed believed Chapman was also motivated by an intense patriotism, and a desire to make amends for his criminal past.

The offer would certainly have been brought to the attention of Winston Churchill — the Prime Minister took a personal interest in the Zigzag case and asked to kept informed of developments — but for reasons that have never been fully explained, the opportunity to kill Hitler was rejected.

Professor M.R.D. Foot, the distinguished historian of the Second World War, believes that the decision may have sprung from a number of factors, including a longstanding government policy against assassinating foreign heads of state, and mistrust of Chapman, a notorious jailbird.

“SOE [Special Operations Executive] hatched a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, but that, too, was rejected,” Professor Foot said. “Partly because it was believed to be impossible to get an armed agent into Hitler’s presence, and partly because it was thought that Hitler was more use alive than dead, since at that point his strategy was clearly so erratic.”

Chapman did return to Germany as a double agent, but was expressly told “not to undertake any wild enterprises” by his British spymaster, Colonel Tommy “Tar” Robertson.

Chapman convinced the Germans that he had carried out his mission on British soil and was awarded the Iron Cross for his “outstanding zeal and success”, becoming the only Briton to receive the medal. He was parachuted back into Britain in 1944, and took part in a successful deception operation to misdirect the V1 flying bombs.

MI5 has now released 1,800 pages of documents from the Chapman case. The last of the Zigzag files, including information relating to Chapman’s assassination plot, was transferred to the National Archives last month.

The new evidence suggests that the German spymaster “Dr Graumann”, whose real name was Stephan von Gröning, may have been deliberately setting Chapman up as an assassin. Like many Abwehr officers, he was secretly a bitter opponent of Hitler. His offer to smuggle Chapman into a Nazi rally suggests he knew what Chapman had in mind, and that the two men may have been in league.

Chapman survived the war, fêted by both sides, and received an unofficial pardon for his numerous prewar crimes. He died in 1997.

One factor in the decision not to use Chapman as an assassin may have been the horrific reprisals that followed the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s potential successor, by British-trained Czech partisans in May 1942. But in the end, the idea may have been quashed because Chapman — “an associate of thieves” in the words of one MI5 officer — was simply not the sort of person to be deployed on such a mission. “There was a feeling in the British Establishment that you don’t trust someone who has been in jug,” Professor Foot said.

Melissa Etheridge -Never Enough.Must be Crazy 4 Me
Melissa Etheridge -Never Enough The boy Feels Strange

Dems Prepare Slew of Oversight Hearings

2007-01-10T16:43:00.000-08:00

Dems Prepare Slew of Oversight Hearings
By Jim Kuhnenn
The Associated Press

Saturday 06 January 2007

20 The Rubberband Man.mp3

16 Dust in the Wind.mp3

Washington - In this new era of divided government, the congressional hearing room is where the executive and legislative branches will clash.

Over the next few weeks, Senate Democrats plan to hold at least 11 hearings just on Iraq. In the House, one of the Democrats' most dogged investigators is waiting to spring his committee on a different mission - suspected government fraud.

From the war to environmental policy and secret surveillance, the Democrats who now control both the House and Senate are armed with subpoena power and ready to summon panels of witnesses.

These newly empowered Democrats plan to put the Bush administration under scrutiny like never before.

"One of the clearest messages of the last election was that the Republican leadership was just AWOL when it came to holding the Bush administration accountable," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The congressional hearing room is a Washington set piece: A lonely witness at a table covered in red velvet, klieg lights glaring, a determined inquisitor across the floor. Congressional power in its rawest form.

Iraq is the focal point of Democratic efforts.

Beginning this week, when Bush is expected to disclose his new war strategy, three Senate and at least two House committees plan to call Cabinet members to testify about the president's policy.

"We will use these hearings to ask tough questions, demand real solutions and keep working to bring this war to a close," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Saturday in his party's weekly radio address.

The hearings are one way for Democrats to respond to the party's anti-war wing. Last week, as Democrats prepared to assume power in the new Congress, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and a group of protesters interrupted a Democratic press conference, chanting "De-escalate. Investigate. Troops home now!"

The outburst highlighted the limited options Democrats have on redirecting policy in Iraq. Short of cutting off money for the war - a step Democratic leaders say they will not take - Congress has little recourse but to agitate publicly against Bush's strategy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Reid wrote Bush last week to express their opposition to a potential temporary increase in the number of troops in Iraq - an idea Bush is said to be considering.

Some Democrats, so far a minority, want Congress to take a stand against an emergency spending bill that Bush is expected to send to Congress to pay for military and reconstruction operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That bill "is a vehicle for continuing the war through the end of Bush's term" in early 2009, said Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, who is running for president in 2008. "You cannot say you oppose the war and continue to fund it."

Reid on Friday reiterated that Democrats would not use spending legislation to try to change the course of the war. In fact, Democratic strategists say it is far better for the party to keep the war focus on Bush than it is to devise a detailed exit plan for Iraq.

"We are not at a point at this moment where I can say we have a specific strategy, but we have several options," said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democratic leader.

One idea under consideration would cap the number of troops Bush could send to Iraq.

"It could be legislation that requires the president to come for congressional approval for troops over a certain level," Durbin said, quickly adding there was no Democratic agreement on such an option. "I'm giving you speculation. This is not strategy."

Besides the focus on Iraq, Democratic committee chairmen are planning their own policy oversight sessions with Bush officials.

"We need to be the watchdog," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

From his perch as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Waxman said he intends to tackle instances of "waste, fraud and abuse." He did not specify his first target, but previously has expressed interest in investigating federal contracts in Iraq and in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina struck.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he will examine the administration's policies on torture and other human rights issues. His request for data exposed one of the first rifts between the new Congress and the administration when the Justice Department refused to provide the committee with two secret documents that describe CIA detention and interrogation policies for suspected terrorists.

Leahy, D-Vt., stopped short of threatening the use of a subpoena to get the documents. But he told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that he "would pursue this matter further" when the committee holds its first oversight hearing.

Now that Bush had accepted the resignation of Harriet Miers as his top in-house lawyer, the White House is preparing to revamp its counsel's office in anticipation of a more aggressive and demanding Congress.

Miers was one of Reid's favorite White House officials and the senator applauded Bush for nominating her to the Supreme Court in 2005 - though she eventually withdrew from consideration. Her replacement probably will not elicit the same warm response.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Martin Luther King, Jr.

20 The Rubberband Man.mp3

16 Dust in the Wind.mp3

IS This Why We are fighting in Iraq?

2007-01-10T16:10:00.001-08:00

Western Oil Companies a Step Away from Iraq's 'Prize'

By Andrew Murray-Watson and Danny Fortson and Tim Webb, The Independent UK. Posted January 7, 2007.
[Not hing I Can Do About It Now.wav
03 Thats the Way (I Like It).mp3

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.

Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.

Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."

Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.

Greg Muttitt, a researcher for Platform, a human rights and environmental group which monitors the oil industry, said Iraq was being asked to pay an enormous price over the next 30 years for its present instability. "They would lose out massively," he said, "because they don't have the capacity at the moment to strike a good deal."

Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, who chairs the country's oil committee, is expected to unveil the legislation as early as today. "It is a redrawing of the whole Iraqi oil industry [to] a modern standard," said Khaled Salih, spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government, a party to the negotiations. The Iraqi government hopes to have the law on the books by March.

Several major oil companies are said to have sent teams into the country in recent months to lobby for deals ahead of the law, though the big names are considered unlikely to invest until the violence in Iraq abates.

James Paul, executive director at the Global Policy Forum, the international government watchdog, said: "It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of the population would be opposed to this. To do it anyway, with minimal discussion within the [Iraqi] parliament is really just pouring more oil on the fire."

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a former chief economist at Shell, said it was crucial that any deal would guarantee funds for rebuilding Iraq. "It is absolutely vital that the revenue from the oil industry goes into Iraqi development and is seen to do so," he said. "Although it does make sense to collaborate with foreign investors, it is very important the terms are seen to be fair."
[Not hing I Can Do About It Now.wav
03 Thats the Way (I Like It).mp3

IS This Why We are fighting in Iraq?

2007-01-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

Western Oil Companies a Step Away from Iraq's 'Prize'

By Andrew Murray-Watson and Danny Fortson and Tim Webb, The Independent UK. Posted January 7, 2007.

Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.

Past Time to Get Real on Iraq

2007-01-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

January 9, 2007

Editorial
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05 Why Cant We Be Friends-.mp3

Past Time to Get Real on Iraq

We’ve been down this road before. This time, it has to be different.

There have been too many times that President Bush has promised a new strategy on Iraq, only to repeat the same old set of failed approaches and unachievable objectives. Americans need to hear Mr. Bush offer something truly new — not more glossy statements about ultimate victory, condescending platitudes about what hard work war is, or aimless vows to remain “until the job is done.”

If the voters sent one clear message to Mr. Bush last November, it was that it is time to start winding down America’s involvement in this going-nowhere war.

What they need is for the president to acknowledge how bad things have gotten in Iraq (not just that it is not going as well as he planned) and to be honest about how limited the remaining options truly are. The country wants to know how Mr. Bush plans to end its involvement in a way that preserves as much of the nation’s remaining honor and influence as possible, limits the suffering of the Iraqi people and the harm to Iraq’s neighbors, and gives Iraqi leaders a chance — should they finally decide to take it — to rescue their country from an even worse disaster once the Americans are gone.

The reality that Mr. Bush needs to acknowledge when he speaks to the nation tomorrow night is that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is feeding rather than restraining Iraq’s brutal civil war. The Iraqi Army cannot be relied on to impose order even in Baghdad, while the Iraqi police forces — dominated by sectarian militias — are inciting the mayhem.

Mr. Bush must acknowledge that there is no military solution for Iraq. Whatever plan he offers needs to start with a tough set of political benchmarks for national reconciliation that the Iraqi government is finally expected to meet. It needs to concentrate enough forces in Baghdad to bring some security to streets and neighborhoods, giving Iraq’s leaders one last opportunity to try to bargain their way out of civil war.

His plan needs to lay out tight timetables in which the Iraqis must take major steps to solve fundamental issues, including equitably dividing their oil wealth and disarming vengeful militias. There must also be a clear and rapid timetable for achieving enough stability in Baghdad to hand back significant military responsibilities to the Iraqis.

The last time America presented Mr. Maliki with a set of political benchmarks, he bluntly rejected them. If he does that again, there is no way America can or should try to secure Iraq on its own. Mr. Bush must make clear to both Iraqis and Americans that without significant progress, American forces will not remain.

We’re under no illusions. Meeting those challenges is going to be extremely tough. And Iraq’s unraveling may already be too far gone.

For Mr. Bush, this means resisting any vague Nixonian formula of “peace with honor” that translates into more years of fighting on for the same ever-receding goals. Democrats in Congress should also resist euphemistic formulas like “phased redeployment,” which really means trying to achieve with even fewer troops what Washington failed to achieve with current force levels.

Nor can America simply turn its back on whatever happens to Iraq after it leaves. With or without American troops, a nightmare future for Iraq is a nightmare future for the United States, too, whether it consists of an expanding civil war that turns into a regional war or millions of Iraq’s people and its oil fields falling under the tightening grip of a more powerful Iran.

Mr. Bush is widely expected to announce a significant increase in American troops to deploy in Baghdad’s violent neighborhoods. He needs to explain to Congress and the American people where the dangerously tapped-out military is going to find those troops. And he needs to place a strict time limit on any increase, or it will turn into a thinly disguised escalation of the American combat role.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that just under 23,000 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently in 2006, more than 17,000 of them in the last six months. That is a damning indictment of the Maliki government, and of current American military strategy.

That is the Iraq that Americans want Mr. Bush to deal with tomorrow night.

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The Imperial Presidency 2.0

2007-01-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

The Imperial Presidency 2.0
The New York Times

Sunday 07 January 2007

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Observing President Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.

That year, the White House used the fear of terrorism to scare American voters into cementing the Republican domination of Congress. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney then embarked on an expansion of presidential power chilling both in its sweep and in the damage it did to the constitutional system of checks and balances.

In 2006, the voters sent Mr. Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Mr. Bush understands that - or even realizes that the Democrats are now in control of the Congress. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party's drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Just before the Christmas break, the Justice Department served notice to Senator Patrick Leahy - the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee - that it intended to keep stonewalling Congressional inquiries into Mr. Bush's inhumane and unconstitutional treatment of prisoners taken in anti-terrorist campaigns. It refused to hand over two documents, including one in which Mr. Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to establish secret prisons beyond the reach of American law or international treaties. The other set forth the interrogation methods authorized in these prisons - which we now know ranged from abuse to outright torture.

Also last month, Mr. Bush issued another of his infamous "presidential signing statements," which he has used scores of times to make clear he does not intend to respect the requirements of a particular law - in this case a little-noticed Postal Service bill. The statement suggested that Mr. Bush does not believe the government must obtain a court order before opening Americans' first-class mail. It said the administration had the right to "conduct searches in exigent circumstances," which include not only protecting lives, but also unspecified "foreign intelligence collection."

The law is clear on this. A warrant is required to open Americans' mail under a statute that was passed to stop just this sort of abuse using just this sort of pretext. But then again, the law is also clear on the need to obtain a warrant before intercepting Americans' telephone calls and e-mail. Mr. Bush began openly defying that law after Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail between the United States and other countries.

News accounts have also reminded us of the shameful state of American military prisons, where supposed terrorist suspects are kept without respect for civil or human rights, and on the basis of evidence so deeply tainted by abuse, hearsay or secrecy that it is essentially worthless.

Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose Padilla, who was once - but no longer is - accused of plotting to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States. Mr. Padilla was held for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush's power grab, the administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to terrorists.

But just as the government abandoned the "dirty bomb" case against Mr. Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed, with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr. Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being held there as an "illegal enemy combatant" under the anti-constitutional military tribunals act that was rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress just before last November's elections.

Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration practice: "extraordinary rendition," in which foreign citizens are snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the American government. Mr. Mohamed - whose name appears nowhere in either of the cases against Mr. Padilla - has said he was tortured in Morocco until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim, and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.

The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bush's rogue intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high priorities for them.

We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr. Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now "look ahead" rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush's one-party rule.

This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the past. The administration's assault on some of the nation's founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.

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Bush’s Troop-Increase Plan Is Expected to Draw Six Guard Brigades to Iraq

2007-01-10T13:17:00.000-08:00

Bush’s Troop-Increase Plan Is Expected to Draw Six Guard Brigades to Iraq

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By DAVID S. CLOUD and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 — President Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq is expected to require the Army eventually to send as many as six National Guard combat brigades to Iraq, beginning in 2008.

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The increased demand on the National Guard in coming years is a likely byproduct of Mr. Bush’s decision, expected to be announced in a speech Wednesday night, to send five active-duty combat brigades, or about 20,000 troops, to Iraq, starting at the end of this month, according to current and former officials.

Two of those brigades are likely to be in place in Iraq by mid-February, with the rest flowing in one a month until May, according to a military official with access to a recent version of the plan. The Bush blueprint also envisions sending two additional Marine battalions to Anbar Province, as well as delaying the departure of 2,200 additional Marines now in the province.

In a governmentwide effort to expand the American commitment to Iraq, a program to operate Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq will be doubled and renamed as Provincial Support Teams, a senior administration official said Tuesday. Currently, the United States operates seven of these teams and allies operate three; the Bush plan will call for adding nine more. They will be staffed by personnel from across the government — the Departments of State, Defense, Agriculture and Justice — to help neighborhoods manage economic and political development, the official said.

It remains unclear whether Mr. Bush will discuss the heightened future demand on the National Guard during his much-anticipated address but identifying the additional units for possible deployment is likely to begin in the days and weeks after he delivers the speech. That process would raise the political stakes for Mr. Bush, since it would highlight the increased contribution his plan would require from reserve units.

The full extent of the National Guard role in future years will also depend on whether conditions in Iraq improve enough to permit significant overall troop reductions. Of the 15 combat brigades now in Iraq, only one is from the Guard. Depending on how it is organized, an Army brigade typically has between 3,500 and 5,000 troops, and a battalion about 1,200.

National Guard combat units that have already gone to Iraq and returned may have to be sent back for second tours in order to relieve some of the stress on the active duty Army, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. Such a move would most likely require revising a Pentagon policy that has limited mobilization of Guard units to 24 months every five years, officials said.

National Guard officials said Tuesday that they had not been notified that Mr. Bush would require a greater combat role for the Guard beginning next year. Guard officials have spent the last several months fighting attempts by some Army officials to have the 24-month deployment limit loosened.

But several Guard officials said Tuesday they would not be surprised to see Mr. Bush make changes in mobilization time limits so that Guard units would be eligible for duty in Iraq sooner.

Maj. Gen. Roger Lemke, the head of Nebraska National Guard and of the association that represents state Guard officials, said in an interview that many guard units were short of equipment and would need to be re-equipped to be useful in Iraq. He also said the Guard would like to shorten the predeployment training in the United States, and do more of it in the units’ home states to lessen the burden on their soldiers, who must leave civilian jobs to serve.

The first active-duty unit that are likely to move to Baghdad would be a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division now in Kuwait, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. The elite light infantry of the brigade is especially useful in urban operations.

Should Mr. Bush want other brigades to accelerate their arrival in Iraq, he then would look to a brigade of the Third Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Ga., that is already set to head for Iraq later this month but whose departure could be pushed up. The next brigade in line for Iraq is one from the First Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Tex., military officials said.

Pentagon and military officials said Tuesday that large and continued deployments in Iraq would put particular strain on those performing certain military tasks in the National Guard and Reserve, in particular military police, engineers, civil affairs, and transportation and trucking units. But efforts are under way to fill the need through volunteers from within the Guard and Reserve before resorting to forced remobilizations.

A range of senior Army officials have said since the autumn that the Iraq mission could not be sustained without fuller access to the reserves.

The question of how best to manage them presents the Bush administration with a political conundrum: how to balance the pressing need for troops in the field against promises to limit overseas deployments for the Guard.

While the National Guard’s goal is to guarantee five years at home between foreign deployments, it has been sending units every three to four years, according to Guard officials. The Guard and Reserve were used most extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004, and have regularly supplied brigades throughout the fighting.

Also presenting a problem is that many Guard members have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan as individuals, and not with their full units, and in that process have come close to fulfilling their 24 months under the president’s current mobilization order.

In what officers call “Swiss cheese units,” some military units have been hollowed out by members who could be off-limits for overseas duty, restricting the ability to send the entire team, unless the restrictions are reinterpreted or erased so that these individual members, who have already deployed, could be sent overseas again with their entire units.

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New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush

2007-01-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush
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New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush
By Chris Floyd
t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent

Monday 08 January 2007

I. Surging Toward the Ultimate Prize

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reported. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of Iraqi Oil."

From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry - while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits - more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.

Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" - i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq - prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.

The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."

The "surged" troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will go on and on - the Bush administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises to uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" - as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions.

So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse - as it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" - a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."

This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neo-cons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.

II. The Win-Win Scenario

And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.

And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below.

Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases.

The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh - have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.

The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry - and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.

But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine - 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.

Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths - or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.

[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues - the neo-cons - somehow "hijacked" US foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neo-cons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes - as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]

So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.

So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq - these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is - and they like it.

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