As seen from Just Above Sunset

Wednesday, 7 April 2004

Topic: Photos

Richelieu in the White House

Sidney Blumenthal has an item on Condoleezza Rice in tomorrow's Guardian that gives the sorry history of how, put in charge brokering the "Roadmap to Peace" with Israel and the Palestinians, she kind of made a hash of things.

If that topic still interests you, you might give it a read. But the last paragraph is a killer.

See Some more questions for Condoleezza
Bush's national security adviser sabotaged the road map to peace
Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian (UK), Thursday April 8, 2004

Note this, paying attention to where the semicolons fall:

The story of the Middle East debacle, like that of the pre-9/11 terrorism fiasco, reveals the inner workings of Bush's White House: the president -aggressive and manipulated, ignorant of his own policies and their consequences, negligent; the secretary of state - proud, instinctively subordinate, constantly in retreat; the vice-president - as Richelieu, conniving, at the head of a neoconservative cabal, the power behind the throne; the national security adviser - seemingly open, even vulnerable, posing as the honest broker, but deceitful and derelict, an underhanded lightweight.

Cheney as Richelieu? An amusing notion.

Let's see. Richelieu ordering the siege and finally the occupation Les Baux en Provence, finally getting rid of the protestant rebels holed up there, way back when. Can't have religious fanatics holding a fortress and being a potential threat. Richelieu - the power behind the throne making such decisions. The king was useless. Cheney ordering the siege and finally the occupation of Iraq, getting rid of the troublesome terror-master holed up there - can't have religious fanatics holding a fortress and being a potential threat. Cheney - the power behind the throne making such decisions. The king was useless. Works for me. Except the Hussein Baathist folks were a secular crowd. But whatever....

Also on Condoleezza Rice -

Kevin Drum, over at The Washington Monthly discusses Condoleezza Rice's first book, written in 1984 - The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance. He points out that this tome was met with immediate skepticism from at least one scholar of Czechoslovakian history who seemed to think that she had an unfortunate tendency to formulate opinions without regard for the actual facts on the ground.

He covers what Joseph Kalvoda, a history professor at St. Joseph College, had to say about it in American Historical Review. Joe thought she was full of crap.

You can investigate this through the link here, and Drum's links.

Drum's comment?

"Let's review: Problems distinguishing facts from propaganda. Too quick to pass judgment without adequate knowledge. Failure to properly assess sources who have an obvious axe to grind. Ignorance of regional history.

"Does any of this sound familiar?"

Well, we shall see when the woman testifies tomorrow to the commission with its one key question - "So, National Security Advisor Rice, what were YOU THINKING?"

It'll be fun.

__

Bonus -

From my trove of odd pictures of places I have visited, the old mountaintop fortress at Les Baux en Provence, some miles south of St-R?my and an hour's drive north of Arles.

Cocteau filmed Orph?e here - well, in the rocky valley below, actually. That would be the Val d'Enfer (The Valley of Hell?) of course.

In 1632, Richelieu razed the feudal citadel to the ground and fined the population into penury for their disobedience. From that date until the nineteenth century, both citadel and village were inhabited almost exclusively by bats and crows. The discovery in the neighboring hills of the mineral bauxite (whose name derives from "Les Baux") brought back some life to the village. It's quite the tourist attraction now. Today the population stays steady at around four hundred, while the number of visitors exceeds one and a half million each year.

Posted by Alan at 19:57 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 7 April 2004 20:02 PDT home

Topic: Local Issues

Last night I dreamed I saw Joe Hill.... No, not really.
Class warfare is in the air.

Many months ago in Just Above Sunset Magazine I had the occasion to make some comments on Wal-Mart. See September 1, 2003 Odds and Ends where you will find this:

The recall here has started a new trend of using petitions for all sorts of things. Take the case of small city here called Inglewood, surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, the little city where the Lakers used to play. You fly right over it just as you're landing at Los Angeles International.

This from the Los Angeles Times

Wal-Mart Stores is seeking to bypass a hostile Inglewood City Council and take its plans for a giant new store directly to voters.

The world's largest retailer began gathering signatures this week to force a popular vote on a shopping center, planned for a dirt lot next to Hollywood Park, where Wal-Mart wants to build its store.

Commercial developers have rarely used the initiative process to do an end run around local governments, California planning experts said Friday. More commonly, they said, initiatives are used by homeowner groups to block unwanted development.

The Wal-Mart initiative - by a group called the Citizens Committee to Welcome Wal-Mart to Inglewood - calls for building permits for the store to be issued without a public hearing or environmental impact study.

"The reviewing official shall be required to issue the requested permit or permits without the exercise of any discretion and no development standards, criteria, requirements, procedures, mitigations or exactions shall be imposed," the initiative says.

A simple majority of voters could approve the measure. But if it passed, it would require a two-thirds vote to repeal or amend it.

And this is pretty clever on Wal-Mart's part. No hearings, no studies on the impact to the environment or even on traffic. Forbidden by popular petition! Cool.

Well, it can be argued that one way to get the economy growing again is to drop the stranglehold of restrictions on businesses out there, and free businesses to make money and provide jobs.

We don't need government out here I guess, just folks gathering signatures on just about everything you can think of. Consider it California's contribution to democracy, coming your way soon, from the place all the trends start. We don't need "representative government" because we have direct democracy.

Robert McAdam, Wal-Mart vice president for state and local government relations, said, "When people feel they're not getting a fair shake with the legislative process, they take things to a vote of the people. That's what the initiative process is about, having people petition for voter approval. That's fairly consistent with California tradition."

And the "bypass elected government" trend is our gift, from California to you.

___

Well, wonder of wonders, Wal-Mart lost the vote.

See Voters in L.A. Suburb Reject Wal-Mart Supercenter
Dan Whitcomb, Reuters, Wed Apr 7, 2004 06:05 PM ET

The basic facts?

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood on Tuesday rejected by a 2-1 margin a ballot measure that would have allowed Wal-Mart to build a sprawling shopping center in the heart of their town.

In voting down the referendum, residents appeared to have taken their cue from elected officials in working-class Inglewood, who fought bitterly to keep Wal-Mart from building a supercenter there, despite the promise of 1,200 jobs and millions of dollars in sales tax revenue.

"This was a major victory," said Jerome Horton, a state assemblyman representing Inglewood. "This was a test site for Wal-Mart. This would have set a national precedent and developers all over the nation were watching to see whether or not a developer could exempt themselves from complying with local laws. This was a much bigger issue than just jobs."

Well, this doesn't cover all you'd see on the locals news shows.

Yeah, Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters were leading marches in the street. But the locals commented on-air, and it wasn't small business folks talking about the possibility that Wal-Mart would drive them out of business, as one might expect. And it wasn't environmentalists griping about the possibility of Wal-Mart getting voter permission to avoid all environmental impact studies and parking studies and traffic-flow studies, or even, if passed, Wal-Mart being exempt from all building and safety codes.

No, the man-in-the street interviews were mostly about the fact that Wal-Mart is a non-union shop that pays low wages and offers below minimal health benefits. No one much wants to work for them. The words "sweat shop" came up quite a bit.

And today bills were introduced in the state legislature to make Wal-Mart reimburse the state for health services for their employees who had to use services for the indigent - hitting the emergency rooms statewide all the time on California's dime - because their Wal-Mart health plan doesn't cover much of anything. I don't recall what the other bill was. But Wal-Mart issued a press release saying the unions obviously got to the lawmakers and probably bribed them or something, and such legislators must hate successful businesses and all that sort of thing.

Last night I dreamed I saw Joe Hill.... No, not really.

My conservative friend says what's wrong with America is we restrict businesses and the key to getting the economy going again is outlawing unions, and making it illegal for any employee, individually or collectively, to oppose or even to comment on how that employee is being treated. That is, if you don't like your job, or your pay, or your benefits, or you think you workplace is unsafe... just quit. Get another job if you're so damned unhappy.

Well, that's one view.

Class warfare is in the air.

Wal-Mart blanketed Los Angeles with television spots before the election - full of warm fuzzies about happy employees and wonderously low prices on fine merchandise. And they lost.

People are choosing sides.

And if you want a nice cotton shirt for five dollars made in Sri Lanka by some ten-year-old who works a seventy-hour week for eight cents an hour, well, there is a Wal-Mart over on Crenshaw. Go for it.

But people really are choosing sides.

Posted by Alan at 17:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Tuesday, 6 April 2004

Topic: Iraq

Things looking bad in Iraq over the last three days?
Oh heck, it'll only get worse.
British Pessimism Here!

Robert Fisk writing in The Independent (UK), Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Reaping the Whirlwind
Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy
Reprinted in Counterpunch (US)

Well, this fellow is a Brit so he thinks back many years to how this all went way back when the Brits faced similar problems in the same place. After reporting on our siege of Fallujah he adds this:

The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920. The Americans are achieving it in just under a year.

Anarchy has been a condition of our occupation from the very first days when we let the looters and arsonists destroy Iraq's infrastructure and history. But that lawlessness is now coming back to haunt us. Anarchy is what we are now being plunged into in Iraq, among a people with whom we share no common language, no common religion and no common culture.

Officially, Mr Bremer and his president are standing tall, claiming they will not "tolerate" violence and those who oppose democracy, but occupation officials--in anticipation of a far more violent insurrection--have been privately discussing the legalities of martial law. And although Mr Bremer and President George Bush are publicly insisting that the notional "handover" of Iraq's "sovereignty" will still take place on 30 June, legal experts attached to the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council have also been considering a delay of further months. Many Iraqis are now asking if the Americans want disaster in Iraq.

No, we certainly don't. We seem to be getting it anyway.

We're just hoping for the best and doing what we do - when attacked, counter that attack. Try to restore order, or establish order. Knock some sense into these people.

And all over the press today Bush's team is spreading the word - this is temporary and localized (sort of) and the result of the efforts of one bad man, this Sadr fellow, who we want to arrest for murder anyway. Get him behind bars, or quite dead and show his body to the world press for everyone to photograph, and things will settle down. Remember Saddam's two sons? Remember Saddam himself all scruffy being checked for lice?

So it's simply a matter of removing the one bad guy. And we're told that's the truth of what's happening.

Fisk doesn't agree with Bush and Bremer - and adds this detail -

... Yet they are still not confronting that truth. For the past nine nights, for example, the main US base close to Baghdad airport--and the area around the terminals--has come under mortar fire.

But the occupying powers have kept this secret. "Things are getting very bad and they're going to get worse," a special forces officer said close to the airport yesterday. "But no one is saying that--either because they don't know or because they don't want you to know."

Our government not understanding the situation? Many don't want to believe that. Our government not wanting us to know the situation? Many don't want to believe that either.

Time to chant... It's only one bad guy. It's only one bad guy. It's only one bad guy. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. (Now click your heels to return to Kansas.)

So what about this one bad guy?

As for Sadr, he will, no doubt, try to surround himself with squads of gunmen and supporters in the hope that the Americans will not dare to shoot their way in to him.

Or he will go underground and we'll have another "enemy of democracy" to bestialise in the approach to the American elections. Or--much more serious perhaps--his capture may unleash far more violence from his supporters.

And all this because Mr Bremer decided to ban Sadr's trashy 10,000-circulation weekly newspaper for "inciting violence."

Well, that's not ALL, surely? A trigger perhaps....

And sometimes you have to shut down newspapers - to allow democracy to work. No, that can't be right, can it?

This is beyond the reach of irony.

Posted by Alan at 21:16 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Oddities

Language in the service of snarky irony...

Back in February, Lambert over at the blog Corrente worked up some anagrams for the Bush campaign's 2004 slogan -

"Steady Leadership in a Time of Change."

If you rearrange the letters you get these -

? I'm a hypertense, death-dealing fiasco
? I am a deathless deafening hypocrite
? I am a tone-deaf, highly-paid erectness
? I'm the fanatic, grandiose sleepyhead
? Oafishly indecent pig's ear meathead
? Slimy, cheapish deafening toadeater
? Oedipean cheating defames trashily
? Flag hype, eh? Administration decease
? I feel anger! I say, shitcan the mad dope
? The famed ace is lying, Oedipean trash

You might want to drop by this anagram server and work out some of your own.

Posted by Alan at 20:28 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Iraq

Piling on...

You will find, the Rant of the Day over at COUNTERSPIN.

It goes like this:

SOME THOUGHTS ON IRAQ: I want to make something clear. I regard al-Sadr as a thug, and a fascist. I have no sympathy for him, whatsoever.

In fact, the faction he commands is guilty of, among other things, ethnic cleansing.

But, the rise of al-Sadr, or someone just like him, was predictable. The belief that a country as diverse, and psychologically scarred as Iraq could be reconstructed and governed effectively without hundreds of thousands of troops, and a better grasp of the culture and sensitivities of the populace, was just suicidally stupid.

The whole June 30th deadline was an artificial construct from the beginning. Designed, primarily, to give George W. Bush political cover going into the election. So he could show "progress" being made in Iraq.

Even if the hand-over of sovereignty is largely symbolic.

I have made this point before, but I believe it's necessary to state it again.

If you are someone who supported this war, and want to see Iraq brought out of the darkness...you MUST get rid of George W. Bush in November. You have no choice. He's absolutely incapable of fixing the problem. He's not flexible. He's not temperate. He's not PATIENT. He's not humble. He's not willing to admit mistakes, and take responsibility.

It may turn out that John Kerry is no better. But that is a guess at this point. Not a certainty. Bush is a certainty. And we know he's a failure at this. And he will continue to fail. At some point, you must put aside your political goggles, and look at this from a realistic point of view. How best to solve the problem and advance U.S. security and interests.

You may have agreed with Bush's decision to invade Iraq. But it is very clear that he has no idea how to finish the job. Abstract declarations that we will not "cut and run" from Iraq mean NOTHING.

What is the plan? What is the goal? What is the roadmap? Where are we going? How much will this cost in lives and treasure? Has he answered ANY of these essential questions in earnest? Or has he mouthed nothing but soundbites and tough-sounding rhetoric?

I sometimes get the impressions that people are so invested in this war and its aftermath, that they refuse to listen to reason, or accept basic reality and facts.

They are more worried about having to admit a colossal error in judgment...either about the advisability of the war itself, or in their unwavering and sycophantic support of George W. Bush.

But, admitting that you were wrong, and that you want to fix things, is a sign of STRENGTH, not weakness.

And, adhering to the preposterous notion that any criticism of Bush or his incompetent and dishonest handling of this whole policy is somehow lending "aid and comfort" to our enemies is worse than weak. It's evil. It tells us that you are devoid of any moral compass or willingness to argue on the merits. It says that you are conniving, sniveling cowards, unworthy of respect or notice.

It tells us that you would rather doom, this country to a tragedy in Iraq, than admit you are wrong. That is an unpardonable sin. And, in my view, the height of treachery to your nation and your fellow citizens.

So, rather than fighting the enemies of our republic, it is you, not we, who have become their enablers.

Your idiocy, arrogance and obstinacy is the crack cocaine upon which they are addicted.

And it contains hyperlinks to back up any claims.

Curious.

As I said in yesterday's post - now what?

Pull out now? Let them be happy we're gone, then later fight it all out in a giant civil war among themselves - while the Kurds sit up north and laugh their asses off? We'd look bad, and not get the oil.

Bring in the UN? They've already said no, we should get things stabilized first. They lost enough people last year, and one of their best, when we couldn't protect their Baghdad headquarters building. Boom. No thank you.

NATO? They've already said no, as they're close to being overcommitted in Afghanistan, helping us out there. That well is dry. They don't have the warm bodies to lend us.

It doesn't matter. Anyone can suggest anything. Bush has committed us to pacifying Iraq by brute force and turning over the place to someone or other on June 30 of this year. And that man does NOT change his mind. He calls that leadership.

Kerry may win, and he's already said we cannot walk away from this. But he may be able to build an international coalition - a real one this time - to try to figure out what to do now. And he may be a slightly more flexible man, willing to consider all options, willing to listen to others without sneering at them. We'll see. If he wins.

Right now. Buckle up. This will be a rough ride.

Posted by Alan at 09:37 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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