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FIDEL FIGHTS ON

HAVANA - Cuban state television Tuesday showed a video of a healthier looking Fidel Castro meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and saying his recovery was “far from a lost battle,” in the first images of the ailing leader shown in three months.

WHAT’S THE STRATEGY OF THE SURGE?
BIG BROTHER AND YOUR COMPUTER
THE IRISH DEBATE ON POLICING NORTHERN IRELAND

I think I may be too hung up on numbers like the rest of the country. I’ve been pointing out that the number of marchers in the surge against the surge were downplayed, or at least the official claim was mostly not reported.

At the same time, the marchers and the war makers have focused more on numbers than what the Pentagon is actually planning to do in and TO Iraq. Anti-war legislators want to stop another 21,ooo soldiers from being sent, but have not all challenged the new “plan.”

Last Sunday, The New York Times devoted the back page of its Week in Review to a graphics dominated exposition of what the headline said were “FOUR STRATEGIES FOR SAVING BAGHDAD.” The headline does NOT say DESIGNED TO SAVE BAGHDAD OR INTENDED TO SAVE BAGHDAD, but instead presents it an affirmative way by showing “the battle terrain of the city and how the military is expected to restore civil order.” This formulation reminded me of a slip of tongue by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley who said famously, and honestly back in 1968 , “The police are here to create disorder”

The Times does tell us that the key tactics are borrowed from the failed French Colonialist campaign to restore order in Algiers through a campaign of violence and torture as illustrated in the movie The Battle of Algiers, shown in the Pentagon as if it was a documentary. “The fighting in Algiers,” reports the newspaper of record, “does stand as forerunner for being called the emerging Battle of Baghdad.” I will leave it to others to comment on how this country, born in an “insurgency” against British Colonialism, is now relying on the vicious and ultimately unsuccessful tactics of French Colonialism. They are drawing on history but avoid its lessons.

THE FOUR EVIL STRATEGIES

There are four components to this so-called plan that no one is really discussing because that discussion is being trumped by the great numbers debate. Here’s how the NY Times sums it up.

l. ESTABLISH SECURITY STATIONS in “bad” neighborhoods, the key component of the “SURGE.” The problem is that this is a joint Iraqi-American effort and the Iraqi military has not exactly distinguished themselves. They were getting their asses kicked in Najav last weekend before the US Calvary arrived and slaughtered hundreds of resistance fighters.

2. ISOLATION. I would rename this the APARTHEID OR WARSAW GHETTO STRATEGY. It involves WALLING OFF Sunni neighborhoods with concrete barriers so people can only leave and enter at checkpoints, ala the Israeli checkpoints at the Palestinian borders. Listen to this admission, ”While the strategy may dampen the violence, it also exacerbates already terrible living conditions which will worsen if the government fails to provide adequate services.” Now, since there are no “adequate services,” this means inflicting more of a toll of abuse, starvation and humiliation on the population behind the walls.

3. INTENSIVE CLEARING—this is a a euphemism to an approach involving house to house searches which will lead to more hatred, more torture, and more ethnic cleansing of the kind US troops went to Bosnia to stop.

4 DEALING WITH SHITE STRONGHOLDS…This is an aggressive strategy certain to intensify ethnic strife and deepen sectarian conflict.

So there you have it, the Surge Strategy which everyone is avoiding a discussion of led by a General who is an expert on why the US lost in Vietnam. It is a prescription for more death and devastation. It envisions no negotiations, no attempt to involve Iraq’s neighbors. We know it will not “work.”

The NY TIMES reports that GOP Senators are trying to stop all debate on the plan, “The new effort is aimed at preventing a potentially embarrassing rejection of the president’s plan to push 20,000 more troops into Iraq. Meanwhile, Baker agrees reluctantly to testify.

Alexander Bolton of the Hill reports:

James A. Baker III, the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, has ended weeks of resistance and testified Congress on the war, avoiding a split with his fellow co-chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.). Sources familiar with the efforts to persuade Baker to testify said he did not want to appear to be lobbying against President Bush at the height of his push for 21,500 additional troops in Iraq.

IRAN COULD BE NEXT

AP: WASHINGTON - Republican and Democratic senators warned Tuesday against a drift toward war with an emboldened Iran and suggested the Bush administration was missing a chance to engage its longtime adversary in potentially helpful talks over next-door Iraq.
Juan Cole: The Danger of Bush’s Anti-Iran Fatwa

The president’s decision to use force against Iranian “agents” inside Iraq could snare innocent pilgrims, and raises the risk of open warfare.

http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/207/52/

The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, From Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush

Audio and Transcript

Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, examines how the United States has meddled in Iraq dating back to the Eisenhower administration. He also looks at how the Reagan and Bush administration helped arm Saddam Hussein at a time when he was committing his deadliest atrocities.

http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/200/57/

WESTERN POLICY PUSHES HEZBOLLAH TOWARD IRAN
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/819620.html

Adds The Nation: “Another one of the many tragic consequences of the Iraq war, as Mohamad Bazzi reports from Beirut, is that blowback from Iraq is now fueling Lebanon’s slide toward civil war as increasingly fearful Lebanese Sunnis are striking back at Shiites, spurred to violence by Iran’s growing regional influence.
http://lists.thenation.com/t?ctl=7F98:4B5DD

ISRAEL EXPANDS THE “SEPARATION (AKA APARTHEID) WALL

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/819633.html

THE WSF’S THREE FACES - ANTHONY BARNETT

After seven years is the World Social Forum any closer to making “another world possible”? A report from Nairobi.

http://venus.opendemocracy.net/t/3770/38637/2726/0/

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CRITICIZED IN NEW YORK

January 30, 2007 — The New York Civil Liberties Union today expressed its shock and sadness at a jury’s decision to impose a death sentence in New York State.

Ronell Wilson was convicted in December of 2006 of murder of two undercover New York Police Department detectives in 2003. This terrible crime took place entirely within New York, but — because New York’s death penalty statute has been ruled unconstitutional — the federal government chose to prosecute. This is one of many cases in which the federal government has prosecuted a local murder in an end-run around state law that does not permit capital punishment.

The NYCLU will support legal efforts to reverse the death sentence. Were the death sentence not successfully reversed, Wilson could become the first individual to be executed in New York State since 1963 and the first to be executed in a federal death penalty case in New York State since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed
in 1953.