- Signs of the Times for Mon, 20 Mar 2006 -

• Signs Editorials
• Three Years Too Many
• Sacrifices to Yahweh
• Running the US into the Ground
• Global Chaos
• Latin America Fights Back
• Iran: How Many Years To Come?
• Mother Nature's Revenge
• Getting Down and Dirty
• Science, "Science", and Conscience
• Depopulating the Planet
• Blood, White, and Blue
• Patently Absurd

Gold closed at 554.70 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 2.2% from $542.50 for the week. The dollar closed at 0.8203 euros at Friday's close, down 2.4% from 0.8396 euros at the end of the previous week. The euro, then closed at 1.2190 dollars, compared to $1.1910 at the end of the week before. Gold in euros would be 455.05 an ounce, down 0.1% from 455.50 the week before. Oil closed at 62.89 dollars a barrel on Friday, up 4.9% from $59.96 for the week.  Oil in euros would be 51.59 euros a barrel, up 2.4% from 50.34 the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.82, down 2.6% from 9.05 at the end of the previous week. In U.S. stocks, the Dow closed at 11,279.65 on Friday, up 1.8% from 11,076.34 at the close of the previous Friday.  The NASDAQ closed at 2,306.48, up 2.0% from 2,262.04 at the end of the week before. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.67%, down 9 basis points from 4.76 at the end of the previous week.

Not too bad, all in all. Oil was up in dollar terms but still less than it was two weeks ago ($63.67/bl.). Gold is also lower than it was two weeks ago ($567.20/oz.). Why do market levels seem so normal when the underlying economic foundation seems so unstable? Could it be that military spending will take over the role of demand stimulant from consumer spending? Could it be that "the economy" will continue to look healthy while the average person sinks into servitude? While U.S. consumers are getting squeezed between lower wages and rising cost of debt and basic goods, deficit military spending is going through the roof:

U.S. War Spending to Rise 44% to $9.8 Bln a Month, Report Says
 
March 17 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will average 44 percent more in the current fiscal year than in fiscal 2005, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said.

Spending will rise to $9.8 billion a month from the $6.8 billion a month the Pentagon said it spent last year, the research service said. The group's March 10 report cites "substantial" expenses to replace or repair damaged weapons, aircraft, vehicles, radios and spare parts.

It also figures in costs for health care, fuel, national intelligence and the training of Iraqi and Afghan security forces -- "now a substantial expense," it said.
The research service said it considers "all war and occupation costs," while the Pentagon counts just the cost of personnel, maintenance and operations.

The House approved emergency funding that includes the military spending last night by a vote of 348-71. The measure authorizes $72 billion for war costs and almost $20 billion for hurricane relief. The Senate is expected to pass it next month.

Congress already has approved $50 billion in supplemental war funding for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, after spending $100 billion last year. To date, Congress has approved about $337 billion for the wars since Sept. 11, 2001.

This extra demand stimulant provided by military spending may make up, at least for a while, the loss from things like this:

Mortgage delinquencies rise in Q4
Report comes as mortgage rates cool in latest week

By Robert Schroeder, MarketWatch
Last Update: 4:54 PM ET Mar 16, 2006

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Consumers had greater trouble meeting their mortgage obligations in the fourth quarter, as borrowers faced higher energy prices, interest rates and continuing difficulties from Hurricane Katrina, a mortgage bankers' group said Thursday.

Delinquencies on residential properties climbed to 4.70% in the fourth quarter of 2005, up from 4.38% a year ago, according to a Mortgage Bankers Association survey. In the third quarter, delinquencies were 4.44%, the group said.

Doug Duncan, the bankers' group's chief economist, said the increase isn't surprising.

"We have been expecting an up-tick in delinquencies due to a number of factors," he said in a statement. He cited increased amounts of adjustable-rate and sub-prime mortgages, rising energy prices and climbing interest rates.

The group's report comes as mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac  released new figures showing home loans are getting cheaper.

The benchmark 30-year fixed rate mortgage average fell in the week ending Thursday, Freddie said, to 6.34% from 6.37%. The 15-year loan also fell, to 5.37% from 6%. One-year and five-year rates also fell, the company said.

The problem is that the media seems to be doing its best to frighten us with two seemingly inevitable horrible near-future events:  the U.S. attack on Iran and a Bird Flu Pandemic, both of which would ruin the world economy. There are many different things that could bring on doomsday in the near future.  Why concentrate so much on an influenza epidemic? It would only make sense if you wanted to spook the markets. Indeed, the stage seems to be set for a currency collapse for the dollar.  Just in Time supply chain techniques and global sourcing of most goods make the U.S. economy more vulnerable than ever to catastrophic shortages in key items should travel and shipping restrictions be put in place in the event of a pandemic.:

Is Business Ready for a Flu Pandemic?

By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Keith Bradsher
March 16, 2006

Rome - Governments worldwide have spent billions planning for a potential influenza pandemic: buying medicines, running disaster drills, developing strategies for tighter border controls. But one piece of the plan may be missing: the ability of corporations to continue to provide vital services.

Airlines, for instance, would have to fly health experts around the world and overnight couriers would have to rush medical supplies to the front lines. Banks would need to ensure that computer systems continued to move money internationally and that local customers could get cash. News outlets would have to keep broadcasting so people could get information that might mean the difference between life and death.

"I tell companies to use their imagination to think of all the unintended consequences," said Mark Layton, global leader for enterprise risk services at Deloitte & Touche in New York. "Will suppliers be able to deliver goods? How about services they've outsourced - are they still reliable?"

Experts say that many essential functions would have to continue despite the likelihood of a depleted work force and more limited transportation. Up to 40 percent of employees could be sick at one time.

Indeed, the return of the bird migration season has touched off new worries over how a serious outbreak could interrupt business in many parts of the world simultaneously, perhaps for months on end.

…"A pandemic flu outbreak in any part of the world would potentially cripple supply chains, dramatically reduce available labor pools," the report said. "In a world where the global supply chain and real-time inventories determine most everything we do, down to the food available for purchase in our grocery stores, one begins to understand the importance of advanced planning."

…Some of the most important planning involves not employee health, but how to continue to deliver vital services in a crisis. Time Warner's Cable News Network is making preparations to stay on the air from different locations.

"If there should be something that quarantines the production center here in Hong Kong, we could hand off to London and Atlanta," Stephen Marcopoto, president of Turner International Asia Pacific, a Time Warner unit in Hong Kong, said.

Time Warner is also working to create a mechanized cart that could automatically load tape after tape into a satellite transmission system, so it could keep stations like Cartoon Network on the air - a boon if children were homebound for months.

Nice to know we will still get cartoons. 

The skillfully choreographed Fear of Flu pandemic (Remember last summer when Bush claimed to be reading a book about the 1918 flu pandemic?  That certainly was a signal for what was to come) is taking place at a time triple deficits are increasing at a rapid rate, central banks are quietly shifting funds away from the dollar and the United States is losing control of its imperial semi-periphery in Latin America. According to Bill Van Auken:

There is no doubt a profound objective significance to the coming to power of a series of Latin American regimes that in one way or another identify with the "left" and voice opposition to US economic and political policies.

In US ruling circles there is growing disquiet over the region. Thus, the latest issue of Foreign Affairs carries an article entitled "Is Washington Losing Latin America?" Its author is one Peter Hakim, head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a big business-funded think tank that promotes Washington's version of free trade in the region.

He condemns both the Clinton and Bush administrations for benign, or not so benign, neglect toward the region, allowing "... US policy on Latin America [to] drift without much steam or direction" after a period in which he claims Latin America was headed in "the right direction."

In reality, reduced US influence in Latin America is neither merely a matter of foreign policy mistakes nor the result of subjective decisions by this or that politician. Rather, it is bound up with changes in the world economy as well as the catastrophic effects of the US-backed policies introduced during the period when Hakim claims the region was headed "in the right direction."

These changes in the world economy brought on by globalization include the relative decline in the position of US capitalism vis-à-vis Western Europe and, increasingly, as we have discussed in previous reports, China.

The Monroe Doctrine - the seminal US foreign policy of opposing any outside power extending its influence into the Western Hemisphere - has effectively become a dead letter. For nearly 200 years, successive governments in Washington invoked this doctrine as the justification for US interventions in the region and, throughout the twentieth century, for the imposition of military dictatorships to suppress the revolutionary movement of the working class. For most of that period the doctrine was embraced by national bourgeois regimes that subordinated themselves to US imperialism. This consensus has been shattered by changed economic relations.

US rivals gain economic influence

The European Union has in the course of the last decade eclipsed US capitalism as the principal source of foreign direct investment and trade in South America. The US remains first in terms of trade within the Latin American region as a whole, thanks to its close ties to Mexico under the 1993 NAFTA accord. Two-thirds of US exports to the region go to Mexico, and much of these consist of parts sent across the border to the maquiladora plants set up to exploit cheaper Mexican labor in the production of goods for the US market.

Even more disturbingly for Washington, China is playing an increasingly assertive role south of the Rio Grande. Chinese President Hu Jintao and the country's vice president, Zeng Qinghong, have made two tours of Latin America in the course of the last two years, signing trade pacts and military-to-military agreements. The region has become an increasingly important source of raw materials for China's industries. China's imports from the region have increased six-fold over the past six years and are expected to reach the $100 billion-a-year mark by the end of this decade.

To secure access to scarce strategic resources, China has pledged to invest $100 billion in the building of roads, ports and other infrastructure over the course of the next decade. Beijing is pursuing a number of major projects, including initiatives aimed at securing access to Venezuelan oil, Bolivian natural gas and key minerals.

The US Congress has held two hearings on what is perceived as a Chinese menace in this longstanding US sphere of influence and semi-colonial domination. Testifying before Congress last year, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega vowed that the administration would be "attentive to any indication that economic collaboration will feed political relations that could run counter to our key objectives for the region."

In short, these changes in global economic relations mean that US capitalism is by no means the only game in town - nor in many cases the most profitable one - as far as Latin America is concerned, and the growing economic relations between the region and America's rivals have provided the region's regimes with room to maneuver that goes beyond that which was associated with the Cold War balancing act performed by many nationalist regimes between Washington and Moscow. This is one of the key material foundations of the so-called turn to the left. In some ways this trend could perhaps better be described as a turn to the euro and the yuan.

The loss of U.S. imperial control over Latin America cannot be separated from the loss of the Iraq War and the alienation of the rest of the world from U.S. policy. Around the world, the United States is despised more and feared less than it was five years ago. With the Dubai/U.S. port controversy, a new factor was added.  The economic nationalism of U.S. citizens, fueled by years of the neocon and fundamentalist demonizing of Arabs and Muslims, has provoked a reaction against the dollar (and the empire it symbolizes) in the Middle East:

Arab central banks move assets out of dollar

By Philip Thornton, Economics Correspondent
14 March 2006

Middle Eastern anger over the decision by the US to block a Dubai company from buying five of its ports hit the dollar yesterday as a number of central banks said they were considering switching reserves into euros.

The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination".

Separately, Syria responded to US sanctions against two of its banks by confirming plans to use euros instead of dollars for its external transactions.

The remarks combined to knock the dollar, which fell against the euro, pound and yen yesterday as analysts warned other central banks might follow suit.

Last week the US caused dismay after political opposition to the takeover of P&O by Dubai Ports World forced DPW to agree to transfer P&O's US port management business to a "US entity" .

The governor of the UAE central bank, Sultan Nasser al-Suweidi, said the bank was looking to convert 10 per cent of its reserves, which stand at $23bn (£13.5bn), from dollars to euros. "They are contravening their own principles," he said. "Investors are going to take this into consideration [and] will look at investment opportunities through new binoculars."

Hamad Saud al-Sayyari, the governor of the Saudi Arabian monetary authority, said: "Is it protection or discrimination? Is it okay for US companies to buy everywhere but it is not okay for other companies to buy the US?"

Syria has switched the state's foreign currency transactions to euros from dollars, the head of the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, Duraid Durgham, said.
Last week the White House told US financial institutions to terminate all correspondent accounts involving the Commercial Bank of Syria because of money-laundering concerns. Mohammad al-Hussein, Syria's finance minister, said: "Syria affirms that this decision and its timing are fundamentally political."

The euro rose a quarter of one percentage point against the dollar to a one-week high of $1.1945, although it retreated in later trading.

Monica Fan, at RBC Capital Markets, said: "The issue is whether we will see similar attitudes taken by other Middle Eastern banks. It is a question of momentum."

In such conditions, how are we to think the dollar can maintain its value?  Brad Delong published this Plato-style dialogue last week:

Global Imbalances

Agathon: You look tired.

Kapelikos: Freshly back from the other coast. Airline load factors are just too high.

Agathon: Who were you talking to?

Kapelikos: MegaBankCorp--their investors.

Agathon: What were you talking about?

Kapelikos: The usual--global imbalances.

Agathon: And what did you say?

Kapelikos: That the global economy is unbalanced--that current patterns of trade are unsustainable--that things that are unsustainable eventually, somehow, stop. What else can you say?

Agathon: And the argument on the other side? I'm not sure I understand it.

Kapelikos: I know I don't.

Agathon: Is it roughly this? "U.S. real GDP is growing at about $400 billion a year. At a capital-output ratio of 3.5-to-1, that means $1.4 trillion of new America-located wealth each year. We can sell off $1 trillion of that every year to foreigners in order to finance our import bill. And still be richer than we were last year. What's unsustainable about that?" Is that the argument?

Kapelikos: Could be. But that's incoherent--it misses the difference between the trade deficit and the current account. Ten years down the road the current-account deficit is not $1 but $1.4 trillion--$1 trillion of net imports and $0.4 trillion of interest, rent, and profits owed on foreign-owned property here. To hold the annual current-account deficit at $1 trillion requires that the trade deficit shrink, which requires that the dollar decline, which means that foreigners investing in America are making bad decisions.

Agathon: And when do your models predict the dollar will fall?

Kapelikos: 2003.

Agathon: Three years ago?

Kapelikos: Yep.

Agathon: But as long as people believe the argument on the other side, the dollar doesn't decline, and the argument looks correct?

Kapelikos: Yep--for one more year.

Agathon: How many more years are you going to be saying, "Wait just one more year"?

Kapelikos: Until I can say, "I told you so."

Agathon: Can't you be more specific than that?

Kapelikos: Ok. How about this. International financial crises tend to come--currencies crash--when interest rates rise in the world economy's core. The Bank of Japan has just joined the ECB and the Federal Reserve in raising interest rates.

Think of the damage caused by currency crashes in recent decades in middle-level economies (Thailand, Argentina, Mexico, etc.) Imagine what the effects would be of a collapse of a currency which happens to be the world's reserve currency, in a country  which also happens to be the imperial hegemon and whose consumers drive world consumption.

Part of this grand manipulation involves attempts by agents of the British, American and Israeli governments to provoke a "civil war" in Iraq. This provocation includes the targetted assassination of large groups of both Sunni and Shia in Iraq, the planting of car bombs in heavily populated areas and the bombings of Shia and Sunni holy sites. The blame for these atrocities is then ascribed by the aforementioned Western governments to either Sunni or Shia militia.

In a recent interview, veteran Middle East reporter, Robert Fisk, a man who has spent over 30 years living in and reporting from Middle Eastern countries, spells out that which is patently obvious, and while he draws back from naming names, we are left in no doubt about who he thinks is behind the ongoing turmoil in Iraq:

Fisk Paints a Middle East in CRISIS

ABC Australia 03/06/06

Robert Fisk says that in his three decades of reporting from the Middle East he's never seen it more dangerous, and that he's certain another major crisis, possibly even another September 11, is coming.

ELEANOR HALL: One of the Middle East's most experienced observers is warning today that we should prepare for another major catastrophe in the region.

Robert Fisk says that in his three decades of reporting from the Middle East for British newspapers, he's never seen it more dangerous, and that he's certain another major crisis, possibly even another September 11, is coming. The veteran war reporter also says he remains baffled by just who is trying to generate civil war in Iraq.

Robert Fisk is in Australia this week to promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilization, and he joined me in The World Today studio a short time ago.

Now, you've been a bit of an optimist about Iraq and civil war, but do you think what's going on now is already civil war?

ROBERT FISK: Well, it's perfect proof that somebody wants a civil war. Um, but the problem for me is that the narrative is that the Shi'ites are being attacked by the Sunnis and their mosques are being blown up and now the Shi'ites are attacking the Sunni mosques and the Shi'ites and the Sunnis are going to fight each other.

I think that's far too simple a version of events. There's never been a civil war in Iraq. Sunnis and Shi'ites, despite the fact that the Sunnis as a minority have always effectively ruled Iraq, have never had this sectarian instinct. It's not a sectarian society, it's a tribal society. People are intermarried.

You know, I was at the funeral of a Sunni and asked his brother, you know, he'd been murdered - probably by Shi'ites, I think - I asked his brother if there was going to be a civil war and he said look, I'm married to a Shi'ite. You want me to kill my wife? Why do you westerners always want civil war?

The first people to mention civil war were the occupation authorities. The Iraqis were not. Some.

ELEANOR HALL: But the Iraqis are now. I mean, Al-Jaafari's talking about civil war.

ROBERT FISK: They're not talking about civil war, they're talking about being frightened of who's doing the bombing. But, you see, we still don't know who's doing the bombings. How many names have we been given of the suicide bombers? Two out of, what, 320 suicide bombings now. Where do they come from, these people?

I mean, we keep hearing about kidnaps. In every case they were kidnapped by people, quote, "wearing police uniforms," unquote. There's a police station on the airport road, it was overrun and all the policemen executed by men wearing, quote, "army uniforms," unquote.

Now, we used to have this phenomenon in Algeria, when I was covering the Islamist government war there, and it took a while before we realised that they were policemen and they were soldiers.

In other words, they were being paid by the authorities. These were not people. there's not a huge wardrobe factory in Fallujah with, you know, 8,000 policemen's uniforms, waiting for the next suicide bomber. It's not like that. What we've got is death squads, and some of them are clearly working for government institutions within Baghdad.

ELEANOR HALL: So you're saying there are death squads, there's chaos, but it's not civil war?

ROBERT FISK: Well, it's certainly chaos, and it's certainly death squads. But I don't regard this as a civil war at the moment. As I said, somebody wants a civil war. I mean, if you really try hard and you kill enough people you may be able to produce this.

ELEANOR HALL: So somebody wants a civil war?

ROBERT FISK: Yes.

ELEANOR HALL: You must have some clues about who.

ROBERT FISK: I don't have. I have suspicions, I don't have clues. I spend a lot of time, when I'm in Baghdad, trying to find out who this is and what this is. Clearly, the Interior Ministry have been torturing people to death, and clearly the Interior Ministry have people who do operate death squads.

But you've got to remember something, that a very prominent figure in politics, and a close friend of the United States, was accused just before the first elections of executing, quote, "insurgents," unquote, in a police station, a police station I know very well. This was reported in Australia at the time.

I suspect the story is true. I think he was a murderer, and he was working for the Americans, and he was a former CIA operative, as we know. I'm not saying the CIA are doing the death squads and this is an American plot - no, I'm not. But I think that there are all kinds of tendencies and fractures within the current authorities, who all live in the green zone in the former Republican palace of Saddam, surrounded by American barbed wire and American protection.

ELEANOR HALL: What's the rationale of this though? I mean, if these people are in government, why do they want a civil war?

ROBERT FISK: I think what they want to do is to produce a situation in which their side, or their party, will control Iraq.

You've got to realise the insurgents too, most of whom but not all are Sunni, we keep seeing the insurgents as people who want to get the Americans out. But that's a very short-sighted view of it. That's our view of it.

It's quite clear the insurgents want to get the Americans out, but they want to get the Americans out so they can say afterwards, we liberated our country, we want a place in power. That is what this is about. This is about securing political power after the withdrawal of the United States.

ELEANOR HALL: What about the political negotiations that are going on at the moment though? I mean, is there no faith placed in those?

ROBERT FISK: Look, I'm sorry to sound so pessimistic, but all the political negotiations are going on within a few square acres, guarded by American tanks, from which nobody emerges. These people who are negotiating, they don't go into the streets of Baghdad, they don't see the people, they don't see the bombs.

ELEANOR HALL: But the people voted for them.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, the Shi'ites voted for them mostly.

Look, people want to vote. People would like freedom. But they'd also like freedom from us, and that we will not accept, because we want to go on controlling Iraq and making sure Iraq does what we want. We want to control the government of Iraq.

I mean, they have a democratic election, and what happens? Bush comes on the telephone and says come on, we want some unity, get moving.

ELEANOR HALL: You say the US will have to get out of Iraq, but it will need the help of Iran and Syria to do so.

ROBERT FISK: Of course, of course it will.

ELEANOR HALL: Now, how would that work?

ROBERT FISK: It'll need the help of Iran to make sure that all Shi'ite resistance to the United States ends during the withdrawal, and it'll need the help of the Syrians, who do have a lot of influence along the border with Iraq, to make sure that there is some kind of deal with the insurgents that the Americans can leave not under fire.

You see, I mean I've said this before, but the terrible equation, of course politically, from an American political point of view as well, in Iraq, is that the Americans must leave, and they will leave, and they can't leave.

And that's the equation that turns sand into blood. And that remains the case. It's very easy to invade other people's countries; it's very difficult to get out of them. It should be the other way around, but unfortunately it's not. That's how it happens.

And the Brits found that, you know, all over the Middle East. And every time, every time, every time the authorities of the occupying power say the same things - we will not talk to terrorists. The Americans say it too. And they don't read history books, because at the end of the day the Americans will have to talk to the insurgents in Iraq, and they will, they will.

ELEANOR HALL: Now, the victory for Hamas, in the Palestinian elections, how closely is the West's reaction to this being watched in the Arab world?

ROBERT FISK: With its usual cynicism, yes. It's the same old story - we demand democracy, we demand they have freedom to vote, and they vote for the wrong people, so we try to destroy the government that's been freely elected. We love democracy, providing the Muslim nations elect the people we want.

I mean, we keep hearing the Israelis will not deal with Hamas. The Israelis created Hamas. When the PLO were in Beirut, and the Israelis wanted to counteract the PLO, they urged Hamas to set up more mosques and social institutions in Gaza.

Even after Oslo a senior Israeli officer, and this was reported on the front page of The Jerusalem Post, held official talks with Hamas officials in Jerusalem. Israel won't deal with Hamas. This is just a facade of narrative, for us, the press.

There is a narrative being set down for us where there will not be negotiations, but there can be any time the Israelis want, and if they find it in their interest, they will.

ELEANOR HALL: And yet you're in no doubt that Hamas, or certain members of Hamas, are terrorists?

ROBERT FISK: Look, I don't use the word terrorist about anybody. This has become a semantically meaningless word. Look, there are people in the Hamas movement who support the murder of innocent people, yes, of course.

There are. I'm not trying to make equivalences here, but when you have an Israeli air force officer, as we did at one occasion in Gaza, who bombs a block of apartments, knowing that he will kill innocent children, as well as a man who is believed to be behind suicide bombings, what is that man? What goes on in his brain too?

ELEANOR HALL: Now, you make the point in your book about the targeted killing of Hamas leaders coming back .

ROBERT FISK: The murder. I don't say targeted killing.

ELEANOR HALL: Okay.

ROBERT FISK: The murder.

ELEANOR HALL: The killing of leaders of Hamas will come back to haunt the leaders of the West. What do you mean.

ROBERT FISK: Well, we already did have - a year and a half ago I think - the murder of an Israeli Government minister in Jerusalem.

Um, you see, once you start going for leaderships, you're opening a door that can come back at you. And the great danger is once you say, you know, we might kill Yasser Arafat, well he died of his own accord, but I mean that was constantly said, so then you open the door to someone saying well, let's kill the Israeli leadership, or let's kill the British leadership.

Once you say we're going to kill Osama Bin Laden, what does that allow him to do? He doesn't need permission of course. But what doors are you opening.

ELEANOR HALL: Aren't these doors already open?

ROBERT FISK: Oh, they've been opened now, yes.

ELEANOR HALL: But weren't they already open for people like.

ROBERT FISK: The moment we turned our back on international law and gave up on justice and wanted revenge, that was the end.

ELEANOR HALL: Now, you describe in your book, you were there for Rafiq Hariri's killing in Lebanon.

ROBERT FISK: I was 400 metres away, yes.

ELEANOR HALL: After that you write you're increasingly stunned by the growing tragedy of the Middle East. Now, I would've thought that's a big statement from someone who's been reporting from the Middle East for 30 years.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, but the Middle East has never been in such a terrible situation, it's never been so dangerous. I've never found myself going on assignments of such danger as I do now. Iraq's the worst assignment I've ever been on, ever.

I think that our hypocrisy towards the Middle East, and the ruthlessness of its own leaders, Arab leaders, has reached such a stage now that there's some kind of. I mean, some kind of explosion is going to come.

I did a CBC interview in Toronto, which I've got a copy of, three years before 2001, and I said an explosion is coming. And obviously...

ELEANOR HALL: But do you think an explosion is still coming?

ROBERT FISK: Oh yes. I don't. it doesn't have to be a real physical one like 'bang'. It might be. But something is coming. I mean, I feel it very strongly.

When I go back, when I went back for the book, I realised I was feeling it because I live there, I live in a Muslim society, I live in the Middle East, and all the people around me are Muslims.

And, clearly, living there, breathing that environment, I knew something was going to happen. And I still think something's going to happen. I don't mean September 11, but something.

ELEANOR HALL: But like what?

ROBERT FISK: Well, I mean, the Americans being driven out of Iraq is one, isn't it?

ELEANOR HALL: But if the Americans leave Iraq the suggestion is that that will create more stability there. Is that not likely to.

ROBERT FISK: Well, I hope it would, yes. Um, yeah but, you see, if the Americans leave Iraq it's an enormous blow to US military and political and strategic prestige throughout the world, there's no doubt about it.

ELEANOR HALL: So you've been warned. That's the Middle East Correspondent for the British newspaper, The Independent, Robert Fisk, who's been reporting on the Middle East for 30 years and is in Australia this week to promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilization. He was speaking to me earlier this morning.

In Iraq, the Johns Hopkins study last September made an accounting of the full death toll wrought by the devastation of the US invasion and occupation. It concluded that "about 100,000 excess deaths" (in fact 98,000) among men, women, and children had occurred in just under eighteen months. Violent deaths alone had soared twentyfold. But, as in most wars, the bulk of the carnage was due to the indirect effects of the invasion, notably the breakdown of the Iraqi health system.

Re-working the Johns Hopkins study with the benefit of better techniques of statistical analysis Andrew Cockburn concluded here early in the New Year that on the basis of the raw sample data compiled by Iraqis for the Johns Hopkins study, the true number of dead in Iraq in consequence of the war had probably hit around 180,000, with a possibility that it had already reached as high as half a million. Of course all sets of numbers, whatever statistical analysis you accept, have been climbing steadily ever since.

This week the Pentagon announced it may be increasing its troop strength by a thousand or so.

Iraq itself is a disaster, teetering on the brink of full blown-civil war. Conditions of life in the capital and other major cities have steadily worsened across three years. As a functioning state Iraq has collapsed, the ministers in its government hastening overseas as often as they can or, when home, looting public assets while never daring to venture out of the green zone.

Mention of the "green zone", a bubble of corruption and delusion, takes us from Baghdad to Washington, and its green zone, secluded from reality, in which the Democrats now dwell.

As a political matter one would have thought that few leaders in recorded history would be more vulnerable to attack than Bush and Cheney, regarding their war in Iraq. The justifications for the attack have been exposed so many times that the lies are now taken as given, except by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where any concession to reality is regarded as a death penalty offense.

The pretexts have been discredited; the purported aims have long since evaporated, as the present U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, concedes wanly: "We seem to have opened a Pandora's Box." Not so long ago, as Norman Solomon recently recalled on this site Chris Mathews was telling his audience on MSNBC , "We're are all neo-cons now", and then a few months later, "Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton. Women like A GUY [as] president. Check it out. I think we like having a hero as our president."

These are lonely times for Matthews, as Bush sags to the lowest presidential approval ratings in the last century. Even the women of Indiana have abandoned their guy, as his standing in that state tumbles to below 40.

Across the past year the peace movement didn't do much, so far as we could tell, but was bailed out by two great champions who changed the political picture. The first was Cindy Sheehan, who haunted the man Hugo Chavez taunts as "the king of vacations" for those crucial weeks in the late summer of 2005, outside his ranch in Texas. (Has any president ever had a worse stretch than Bush did between the founding of Sheehan's Camp Casey, through hurricane Katrina, to the exposure of the domestic spying program, with Cheney shooting one of their top funders as lagniappe.)

The second champion was Jack Murtha, the 73-year old former U.S. Marine and life-long hawk who turned on the war in a sensational press conference on the Hill in November, calling for "immediate withdrawal", and repeating that call in vigorous interviews and speeches. Murtha effortlessly swatted down the Republican libels of him and the usual devious efforts to undercut him from prime-time hawks like CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

But the subsequent fate of Sheehan's and Murtha's campaigns is highly instructive. Sheehan threatened a challenge to Senator Diane Feinstein who is running for her third term this year. Because CounterPuncher Todd Chretien has got the Green Party nomination, Sheehan thought aloud about challenging Feinstein in the Democratic Primary. Why not? Feinstein has been unwavering in her support for the war and her husband Richard Blum has made millions in war-related contracts. Sentiment against the war across the state is strong. Sheehan is well known. But then Senator Barbara Boxer intervened, and publicly pleaded with Sheehan to stand down. She did. Result? Politically speaking, Sheehan has vanished.

If any Democrat had the sort of manly credibility Matthews craves, it was surely Jack Murtha. He's a former Marine drill instructor, a war vet and, in Congress, had a proven record as paid-up member of the Military Industrial Complex with his years as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Here was no peacenik turning against the war. But the day he did, the Democratic delegation in Congress fled him, almost to the last man and woman. (As did too many on the left, who whined that somehow Murtha's withdrawal plan wasn't quite radical enough. What did they want? To have Murtha hold up the Little Red Book and swear allegiance to the memory of Mao?)

In its present form the Democratic Party has ceased to be a credible opposition. It is constitutionally incapable of confronting the Administration, on the war or anything else.

Their only strategy is to let George Bush self-destruct, as a kind of political suicide bomber. They don't care how many are killed in Iraq or how many items in the Bill of Rights Bush and Cheney tear up. They are terrified of actually doing or saying something substantive, except to taunt Mexicans crossing the border in search of work or to thump the nativist drum about Arabs owning American assets..

Is this too cruel? Surely the Democrats have some fight left in them. After all, the first edition of the Patriot Act in 2002 passed with only one No vote in the Senate. Russell Feingold's. When the second edition of the Patriot Act passed in recent weeks, there were ten votes against, one of from a former Republican,. Jeffords of Vermont. The Democrats invented a new form of "safe opposition" here. When Russ Feingold tried to lead a filibuster against the Patriot Act, his Democratic colleagues conducted "test votes" where many of them puffed up their chests and boldly said they opposed the Patriot Act. Then they came to the real vote, chests subsided and the numbers dwindled to eight.

Feingold has now introduced into the Senate a censure motion of the President, charging him with violating the law in the NSA eavesdropping. Dana Milbanke in the Washington Post had an entertaining piece last Wednesday describing the panic of Feingold's Democratic colleagues when asked for their views on his motion.

Barrack Obama of Illinois: "I haven't read it."

Ben Nelson of Nebraska: "I just don't have enough information."

John Kerry of Massachusetts: "I really can't [comment] right now."

Hillary Clinton of New York rushed past reporters shaking her head, then trying to hide behind the 4'11" Barbara Mikulski.

Charles Schumer of New York, who would normally run over his grandmother to get to a microphone: "I'm not going to comment."

Mary Landrieu of Louisiana: "Senator Feingold has a point he wants to make. We have a point that we want to make, talking about the budget."

Chris Dodd of Connecticut: "Most of us feel at best it's premature. I don't think anyone can say with any certainty at this juncture that what happened [i.e., the NSA's eavesdropping] is illegal."

In the face of this preen of yellow feathers Feingold said, "If there's any Democrat who can't say the President has no right to make up his own laws, I don't know if that Democrat really is the right candidate for president."

Right on Russ, but you know the answer already. You're in a race for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008 where you are the only candidate thus far prepared to say the President is a law breaker and that the war is illegal and should be ended immediately and the Patriot Act repealed. Why are you in this party? You come from a state which eighty years ago saw the bold stand of Robert LaFollette who broke away to form a third party. Why don't you do the same? Look at Jim Jeffords of Vermont. He broke free, defied the Republican whip is now an independent and has more stature in his state than Patrick Leahy. Be that "guy" that Mathews craves for. Jump! Someone has to seize the day.

Footnote: It looks as if the fire escape chosen by Bush to save him from those low thirties numbers is the old neocon refrain of the Iranian menace. This clashes with the official line of the pundit legions, which is that the neocons have been sent out to pasture and replaced in the corridors of power by "pragmatists". We even heard Michael Gordon of the New York Times and his co-author Bernard Trainor, while flacking their new history of the Iraq war on Amy Goodman, claim that the neocons were "on the outside" during the planning and execution of the Iraq war. That was before Goodman spoiled Gordon's day by bringing up all those WMD fantasy pieces he wrote with Judy Miller. Anyone who needs reminding on just how the neocons did it last time, the better to prepare for the next war, would do worse than keep by their hand the IHS Press compilation Neo-Conned Again, which kicks off with a contribution from your two CounterPunch editors.
Comment on this Editorial

I've been critical of journalistic buckraking since the mid-1990s, when I wrote about a $30,000 speech that Sam Donaldson had given to an insurance group… The issue began to fade as a number of news organizations, including ABC and NBC, banned the practice.