elmegil scooped on this article:

The Iraq War is Over, and the Winner Is... Iran
By Juan Cole
Thursday 21 July 2005

Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.

Iraq's new government has been trumpeted by the Bush administration as a close friend and a model for democracy in the region. In contrast, Bush calls Iran part of an axis of evil and dismisses its elections and government as illegitimate. So the Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week.

The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia. Oil pipelines, port access, pilgrimage, trade, security, military assistance, were all on the table in Tehran. All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east.

Jaafari's visit was a blow to the Bush administration's strategic vision, but a sweet triumph for political Shiism. In the dark days of 1982, Tehran was swarming with Iraqi Shiite expatriates who had been forced to flee Saddam Hussein's death decree against them. They had been forced abroad, to a country with which Iraq was then at war. Ayatollah Khomeini, the newly installed theocrat of Iran, pressured the expatriates to form an umbrella organization, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which he hoped would eventually take over Iraq. Among its members were Jaafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. On Jan. 30, 2005, Khomeini's dream finally came true, courtesy of the Bush administration, when the Supreme Council and the Dawa Party won the Iraqi elections....

Iraq has a Shiite Muslim majority of some 62 percent. Iran's Shiite majority is thought to be closer to 90 percent. The Shiites of the two countries have had a special relationship for over a millennium. Saddam had sealed the border for more than two decades, but throughout centuries, tens of thousands of Iranians have come on pilgrimage to the holy Shiite shrines of Najaf and Karbala every year. Iraqis likewise go to Iran for pilgrimage, study and trade. Although neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz maintained before the Iraq war that Iraqis are more secular and less interested in an Islamic state than Iranians, in fact the ideas of Khomeini had had a deep impact among Iraqi Shiites. When they could vote in January earlier this year, they put the Khomeini-influenced Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in control of seven of the nine southern provinces, along with Baghdad itself....

When Jaafari met the head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, on Tuesday, the two discussed expanding judicial cooperation between the two countries. Shahrudi said that cooperation with Iran's Draconian "justice system" has had a positive impact on other Muslim countries. He called for Iraq to coordinate with something called the "Islamic Human Rights Organization" -- an Orwellian phrase in dictatorial Iran, a state that tortures political prisoners and engages in other acts of brutality. And he urged the Iraqi government to put greater reliance on "popular forces" (local and national Shiite militias) in establishing security....

For his polite forbearance as his Iranian hosts boasted of the superiority of their Islamic government and grumbled about all those trouble-making American troops in the Iraqi countryside, Jaafari was richly rewarded. Iran offered to pay for three pipelines that would stretch across the southern border of the two countries. Iraq will ship 150,000 barrels a day of light crude to Iran to be refined, and Iran will ship back processed petroleum, kerosene and gasoline....

In addition, Iran will supply electricity. Iran will sell Iraq 200,000 tons of wheat. Iran is offering Iraq use of its ports to transship goods to Iraq. Iran is offering a billion dollars in foreign aid. Iran will step up cooperation in policing the borders of the two countries. Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei has called for the preservation of the territorial integrity of Iraq. In fact, Iran is offering so much for so little that it looks an awful lot like influence peddling.

The previous week, Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi had made a preparatory trip to Tehran, exploring the possibility of military cooperation between the two countries. At one point it even seemed that the two had reached an agreement that Iran would help train Iraqi troops. One can only imagine that Washington went ballistic and applied enormous pressure on Jaafari to back off this plan. The Iraqi government abandoned it, on the grounds that an international agreement had already specified that out-of-country training of Iraqi troops in the region should be done in Jordan. But the Iraqi government did give Tehran assurances that they would not allow Iraqi territory to be used in any attack on Iran -- presumably a reference to the United States....

Iranian leaders pressed Jaafari on the continued presence in Iraq of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist organization with ties to the Pentagon, elements in the Israeli lobby, and members of the U.S. Congress and Senate. Saddam had used the MEK to foment trouble for Iran. Jaafari promised that they had been disarmed and would not be allowed to conduct terrorist raids from Iraqi soil....

Although officials in Washington felt constrained to issue polite assurances that they want good relations between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and hawks in the Bush administration all have a grudge against Iran, and would as soon overthrow the mullahs as spit at them. But thanks to the Iraq debacle, that is no longer a viable option. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack revealed the true amount of influence Washington has in Baghdad when he admitted that the Bush administration has not "had a chance" to discuss Jaafari's trip to Iran with the prime minister.

The Iranians hold a powerful hand in the Iraqi poker game. They have geopolitical advantages, are flush with petroleum profits because of the high price of oil, and have much to offer their new Shiite Iraqi partners. Their long alliance with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani gives them Kurdish support as well. Bush's invasion removed the most powerful and dangerous regional enemy of Iran, Saddam Hussein, from power. In its aftermath, the religious Shiites came to power at the ballot box in Iraq, bestowing on Tehran firm allies in Baghdad for the first time since the 1950s. And in a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime -- but succeeded only in defeating itself.

The ongoing chaos in Iraq has made it impossible for Bush administration hawks to carry out their long-held dream of overthrowing the Iranian regime, or even of forcing it to end its nuclear ambitions. (The Iranian nuclear research program will almost certainly continue, since the Iranians are bright enough to see what happened to the one member of the "axis of evil" that did not have an active nuclear weapons program.) The United States lacks the troops, but perhaps even more critically, it is now dependent on Iran to help it deal with a vicious guerrilla war that it cannot win. In the Middle East, the twists and turns of history tend to make strange bedfellows -- something the neocons, whose breathtaking ignorance of the region helped bring us to this place, are now learning to their dismay.

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

Worst. President. Ever.

I have been scarce. Slashdot jumped the shark, as far as I'm concerned. Do people with subscriptions have to wait for indeterminate numbers of minutes, greater than two, between posts these days? DailyKos has no such restriction. Therefore, some links from Kos:

Rove signed a very restrictive NDA, forbiding him from outing a whole bunch CIA agents for political gain. And, trying pathetically to cover it up is probably also a crime.

Tired of reading? Eight minutes of high-quality AudiRove (requires Real Player) from this thread on the Brewster, Jennings, and Associates Kos story.

Do you know what Brewster, Jennings, and Associates is? You should.

Tired of Rove and the Downing Street Memos?

Does Judy Miller deserve to be in jail?

Tired but don't want to leave /.?

Did GITMO General Miller lie to Congress?

And now, for your moment of WTF:

Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org

For Release -- 1:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, July 6, 2005

U.S. Government Fining Activists for Taking Medicine to Iraq

A Federal District Court heard additional oral arguments today in the case of activists with the campaign Voices in the Wilderness who openly violated the U.S. economic embargo against Iraq.

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control alleges that a 1998 Voices delegation violated economic sanctions law when it delivered medical supplies to Iraqis. Voices organized over 70 such delegations as part of a campaign of civil disobedience from 1996 to 2003.

KATHY KELLY, kathy@vitw.org, http://www.vitw.org
BERT SACKS, bert.sacks@gmail.com
BILL QUIGLEY, duprestars@msn.com
Quigley, the attorney representing Voices in the Wilderness, said this afternoon shortly after leaving the courtroom: "The judge was particularly focused on why the government waited for years to issue these fines. The fines were issued shortly after members of Voices in the Wilderness were prominently involved in anti-war protests on October 26, 2002. He said that he will decide in the coming weeks if he will compel the government to turn over their papers on the case."
Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, said today: "UN economic sanctions punished Iraq's most vulnerable people who couldn't possibly have controlled the dictatorship under which they lived. A 1999 UNICEF report found that UN economic sanctions directly contributed to the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children under age five. But because we challenged sanctions by delivering medicines to Iraq from 1996 to 2003, and because we oppose occupation, Voices has been fined $20,000 and hauled into federal court. It's clear that the U.S. policy towards Iraq for the past 15 years has been economic domination followed by direct occupation." Kelly's recently-released book is titled "Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison"
Sacks, the first person to be fined by the government for breaking the sanctions on Iraq, said today: "Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control paid almost no attention to U.S. oil companies that violated economic sanctions so they could make millions of dollars and yet was swift to threaten and penalize people who traveled to Iraq for humanitarian reasons." A profile of Sacks is available at: <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0617-02.htm>. He was most recently in Iraq in September 2002 with Congressman Jim McDermott.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

context

Alternate Power: A Change Is In The Wind
By John Carey in Washington and Adam Aston in New York, with Justin Hibbard in San Mateo, Calif., and Ronald Grover in Los Angeles
Business Week
July 4, 2005

... An array of alternative-energy, energy-efficiency, and other green technologies -- together known as "cleantech" -- are beginning to boom. A host of forces is responsible for the trend: high prices for oil, gas, and coal; expanded government incentives and mandates; advances in technology that are reducing costs; concern over global warming; and investors looking for the Next Big Thing. "What has changed dramatically is the number of mainstream institutions that have decided they can make money in this area," says Dan Reicher, president of New Energy Capital Corp. and a former top Energy Dept. official. "Who would have thought two years ago that Goldman Sachs would be investing in wind and solar power?"

Indeed, an increasing number of major corporate players like General Electric and Siemens, traditional venture-capital firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and even states are putting money into the market. In its so-called Green Wave Initiative, California plans to use $500 million from two state pension funds -- CalPERS and CalSTRS -- to seed proposals for alternative energy. "Clean technology is becoming the enabling technology of the 21st century industrial society," says Nicholas Parker, chairman of Cleantech Venture Network LLC, which tracks the field for its investor members....

"For a long time, with low gas and coal prices, renewables of all kinds couldn't compete," explains Jerry Peters, senior vice-president at Hudson United Bank. But now, with natural gas rising to more than $7 per million BTUs and eastern coal up to $60 per ton, average U.S. electricity prices, by state, now range from 5 cents to 16 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). In some states, that's a 25% jump since 1995. At the same time, technological improvements and economies of scale have significantly lowered the costs of alternatives. Wind-power costs have declined to as little as 3 cents to 5 cents per kwh, making wind cost competitive. That's one reason why GE's wind business has soared from $500 million in 2002 to a predicted $2 billion this year.

Yet wind power wouldn't be growing at its current U.S. rate of 37% per year without government mandates and incentives. When Congress delayed renewing the 1.8 cents per kwh credit for wind power last summer, for instance, the business tanked until the credit was restored.

If wind costs 5 cents, and is sold for around 10 cents on average, I hope they are using the excess to improve grid infrastructure so that we can add more wind, instead of just lining investors' pockets.

I read a bunch of comments here on Slashdot and elsewhere on Google about support from the peer-reviewed literature of the obscure yet repeatedly-proven fact that the FBI's nonviolent interrogation techniques yield better information on average than coercion.

I'm looking for those citations again, and also some kind of proof of the rather obvious fact that the use of torture by a nation does bad things to the expected outcome of the foreign travelers from that nation, e.g., that those who are kidnapped are likely to be hurt more than those who are kidnapped from a nation which doesn't use torture. Do I need double-blind statistical studies, or does that just stand on common sense?

The only part that doesn't stand on common sense is that the nonviolent FBI methods work better. Please post the best proofs of that as comments here, and I'll update this main post with those that seem to me to be the most authoritative.

Bohemian space opera.

Tax Credit Survives
by Bill Fonda
The Cape Codder
Friday, June 24, 2005

... By a 63-32 vote, senators rejected an amendment to the proposed national energy policy that would have disallowed the tax credit of 1.8 cents for each kilowatt hour of energy produced for wind projects within 20 miles of national parks, national military parks, national seashores and lakeshores and other scenic locations.

The amendment would have also required an environmental impact statement for any project within 20 miles of scenic sites and six months notice for communities before a wind project can be permitted....

Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander sponsored the amendment, which was similar to the bill he and Virginia Republican John Warner introduced last month. That bill has been referred to the Senate's Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The 40 Democratic senators and 23 Republicans who voted against the amendment included Massachusetts Democrats John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, even though Kennedy has opposed the Cape Wind project. Neither senator's office could be reached for comment.

Rejoice!

I'll excerpt this one later when I feel like it. See also this Toronto Star article. Craptastic.

flash animation -- "Lie 3" isn't really a lie.

cartoon

dailyshow_tourists_hate_america_050620-02a.jpg -- is a flag sparkler disrespectful to the flag?

Under what conditions would existing flag underwear be considered desecrated? If that passes, we must demand that they grandfather in all flag underwear.

Imagine how much money pastors and preachers of all religions will be able to make blessing flag burning. What a stupid waste of time it would be to prohibit it.

UPDATE: direct link to flag skit thanks to NeMon'ess

Caleeforneeah Hates Arnold -- the turning point was the "girly men" comment. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

New Jersey Democrat's flash animation of the Republican Gubinatorial Primary -- I see white male people.

From DailyKos:

...A US withdrawal could well throw Iraq into civil war. Civil war in Iraq would bring in the Iranians, the Saudis and the Turks. The success of petroleum pipeline sabotage and refinery sabotage in Iraq will suggest it as a tactic to the guerrillas fighting in this Fourth Gulf War.

If Saudi and Iranian petroleum production is sabotaged, gas in this country will go to $20 a gallon and the US will be plunged into the Second Great Depression. The unemployment rate will skyrocket to some 25%. Not only will you and I likely end up unemployed, but the global South will be de-industrialized. Countries making progress like India and Pakistan will be thrown back 30 years.

We already saw petroleum spike to $40 a barrel in the early 80s, in 1980 dollars, which is probably $80 a barrel in our money. Cause? Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. Only a kind of MAD prevented Saddam and Khomeini from destroying each others' oil fields; at that, they were sometimes attacked. Guerrillas do not give a rat's ass about MAD. The oil shock in the 1970s virtually de-industrialized Turkey for a while, and very badly hurt the Caribbean (islands depend on boat transport even for basic foodstuffs). I have seen this kind of scenario. It is not inevitable but it is entirely plausible.

Since the US military seems incapable of winning the guerrilla war in Iraq either militarily or politically, someone else will have to do it if we are to avoid Gulf War III and its consequences. The Europeans cannot do it. They only have a surplus capacity of about 10,000 troops for deployment outside the continent, and they are already in Afghanistan. You could argue that they should reform their militaries so that they did have more troops for external deployment, but that would take time we don't have.

That leaves a United Nations command leading troops from the global South, with perhaps, one or two remaining US divisions. The Southerners are culturally better suited to negotiating an end to the Iraq hostilities anyway, and some of them have excellent militaries. Gulf War III and Very High Oil Prices would hurt them more than it would hurt the US and Europe, so they have every interest in intervening. Moreover, they will be richly rewarded with billions in future Iraq contracts, which they need more than Texas does.

Some are construing this proposal as me having the poor people in the global South suffer for Bush's mistakes. But at $60 a barrel they are already suffering for Bush's mistakes. Do you know how many factories will have to close over this, or will never open in the first place, in Pakistan and India? Factories are very sensitive to energy costs, which have tripled, and could go even higher. Iraq is adding $10 to $15 a barrel to the current price because of uncertainty and speculation, and the removal through sabotage of about 1.5 million barrels a day also contributes to the problem.

I am saying that the UN and the global South can solve the problem, that they have every incentive to solve the problem, and that they will be richly rewarded for solving the problem.

Moreover, this way of proceeding would deeply hurt the whole American nationalist war party. It would be a victory for cosmopolitan multi-lateralism. It would dampen down US militarism by creating an Iraq Complex. It would put two US divisions under a United Nations command, setting a precedent. It would strengthen the United Nations so that the US Right can't just order around or ignore it the way the Bushes do their kitchen help. It is progressive in every way. And it is a perfect reply to the Right's insistence that the US has to remain in control until 'the job is done.' No, it doesn't. This is a job for the world.

In other words, it isn't all about us, in the sense of US. It is about what would be good for the world.

Cheers,
Juan

What do you think about that idea?

Kevin Drum writes about Jeff Birnbaum's Washington Post article:

The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent.

...."There's unlimited business out there for us," said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and now president of a thriving six-year-old lobbying firm. "Companies need lobbying help."

Attention Republicans: Your core values are all talk and no follow-through. Please look in the mirror and ask yourself, "Do I want to be in the party which has doubled the number of lobbyists and the fees they each take home in only five years? Is that the kind of party I can support?"

I bet ellem that the Downing Street Memos are real and not forgeries or fakes acording to the two-out-of-three judgement of the Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times web sites as of Friday 19 August.

If I win, he has to volunteer for 8 hours at his local food stamp office.

If he wins, I have to volunteer for 16 hours at the nearest country club. I have no idea where that would be.

Facing Facts in Iraq
by H.D.S. Greenway
Boston Globe
June 17, 2005

...A former Pentagon official, journalist, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, a man with considerable political and military knowledge, came back from a fact-finding trip in Iraq talking about the ''gap between those who work there, who were really careful of every word they uttered of prediction or analysis, and the expansive, sometimes, I think, totally unrealistic optimism you hear from people back in Washington."

In a report to the council, Gelb was scathing about America efforts to train an Iraqi army. ''If you ask any Iraqi leader, they will tell you these people can't fight. They just aren't trained. And yet we're cranking them out like rabbits." As for plans to train a 10 division Iraqi army by next year, Gelb was scathing. ''It became very apparent to me that these 10 divisions were to fight some future war against Iran. It had nothing to do, nothing to do," with taking Iraq over from the Americans and fighting the insurgents.

Americans have statistics for everything in Iraq, yet little of it reflects reality. ''The information seeps in, and you wonder" about its reliability," Gelb said. " You wonder if you really know what's going on, because essentially what you have are the statistics. It reminds me so of the Vietnam days."

Okay, I've about had it with the Vietnam analogies. At first they were spooky, and then they were cool, and now they're just annoying.

The US war with Iran has already begun
by Scott Ritter
Aljazeera.net
Sunday 19 June 2005

... It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

Perhaps the adage of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.

But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.

To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran....

Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003....

Having a great Monday yet?

Soldier Sues Over Guantanamo Beating
by David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times
June 18, 2005

A U.S. military policeman who was beaten by fellow MPs during a botched training drill at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison for detainees has sued the Pentagon for $15 million, alleging that the incident violated his constitutional rights.

Spc. Sean D. Baker, 38, was assaulted in January 2003 after he volunteered to wear an orange jumpsuit and portray an uncooperative detainee. Baker said the MPs, who were told that he was an unruly detainee who had assaulted an American sergeant, inflicted a beating that resulted in a traumatic brain injury.

Baker, a Gulf War veteran who reenlisted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was medically retired in April 2004. He said the assault left him with seizures, blackouts, headaches, insomnia and psychological problems....

The Pentagon initially said that Baker's hospitalization following the training incident was not related to the beating. Later, officials conceded that he was treated for injuries suffered when a five-man MP "internal reaction force" choked him, slammed his head several times against a concrete floor and sprayed him with pepper gas.

Baker said he put on the jumpsuit and squeezed under a prison bunk after being told by a lieutenant that he would be portraying an unruly detainee. He said he was assured that MPs conducting the "extraction drill" knew it was a training exercise and that Baker was an American soldier.

As he was being choked and beaten, Baker said, he screamed a code word, "red," and shouted: "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!" He said the beating continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform.

No one has been disciplined or punished for the assault, said Baker's lawyer, T. Bruce Simpson Jr.

Last June, a military spokesman said an internal investigation in February 2003 had concluded that no one was liable for Baker's injuries. He said training procedures at Guantanamo had been reviewed after the incident.

"While it is unfortunate that Spc. Baker was injured, the standards of professionalism we expect of our soldiers mandate that our training be as realistic as possible," the spokesman said....

U.S. Army standards of professionalism: torture resulting in brain injury. The magnitude of the injury is evident in that he still wants to serve.

Due to poor management, the American people are boycotting your bloated, sluggish, stupid, reactionary, mean, illegal, corrupt, and sorry excuse for an Armed Forces. Please replace your management and pull out of enough hotspots to actually do something about genocide, instead of spreading it. Don't be so stubborn that you forget grace, as there is always a way out with handing it over to Europe with the Red Crescent.