April 2006

Solving the Iranian Riddle

Iran's building a nuclear bomb. No, this isn't a corroborated news story. It is that obvious, though. They've been getting pinged by the IAEA for several years over enrichment concerns and for having multiple nuclear development programs. They're cheating on the NPT and they're building a bomb.

They may already have bought bombs on the black market, let's not forget that. WIth unsecured Russian materials and close access, it's much easier for a government to buy nukes than a terrorist group. Leave that bit at speculation, though.

Let us say, though, that Iran comes up with a nuclear explosive and tests it - entering the nuclear club beyond a shadow of a doubt. Their ruler seems to be less rational than George Bush, so it looks like a hot time in the old town tonight, right?

Well, maybe not.

Let's go back to when the People's Republic of China went nuclear. The USSR didn't want Mao's boys to have nukes, but to have them forever remain junior partners in the brotherhood of Commie dictatorships. Mao wasn't having any of that and began stressing the need for his nation, and any other nation, to build nuclear weapons.

China make nukes and tested them. KABOOOM!

After the KABOOOM!, the Chinese looked over their test results and changed the song they were singing. Yes, it was right for China to have weapons. No, it was not right for anyone else to have them. They were scary. Very, very scary. For whatever it's worth, China's actually now working with North Korea to do something about their nuclear situation.

Granted, China seems to be enabling Iran to go nuclear, but it has to - they need the gas. And, perhaps, they're thinking once Iran sees results from its KABOOOM!, it'll question whether or not it's a good idea to get into a situation where one of those could land on Iran. Israel's got nukes, you know. They'd use them, too, in a Tel Aviv minute.

So maybe Iran gets nukes. Their bosses are no crazier than Mao's crew, and perhaps the nuclear weapon can bring a level of sobriety to Iran's administration not previously seen. After all, Iran has a lot to lose.

What's scariest is the prospect of someone with nothing to lose getting a nuke. Those guys don't look over test results and get nightmares about what happens if they're at ground zero of one of those mamas. Terrorists instead think about how best to get one of their fellows to pull the ripcord at ground zero in the heart of enemy territory.

Iran may take care of itself, but it's much more important to support non-proliferation activities of all types, something the Bush administration has been very lax on.

Leave Them Kids Behind

Once upon a time, kids could drop out of school. When it no longer served their needs as an institution, they could walk right out of the doors and never return. They were the high school dropouts, doomed forever to pump gas and say "would you like fries with that" at the end of every business transaction, or so the legends went. Actually, a good number of them wound up in jails because they didn't have good enough jobs to afford the kinds of lawyers that keep criminals out of jails.

Meanwhile, the kids who stayed in school got to enjoy a much better educational experience once the dropouts dropped out. No longer were their classes clogged with disruptive types who were held in classes against their wills. There were one or two, but a teacher could handle those ruffians and deliver some quality teaching to the rest of the bunch.

Enter egalitarianist reform.

Shocked and horrified by the numbers of crimes committed by high school dropouts, people with no clue about education decided to pass laws to keep those guys in school and to make sure they graduated, or the teachers and administrators of those districts would catch all hell, because, of course, it was all their fault for some kids being either too lazy or too stupid to master the skills necessary to graduate high school.

Now, we got kids who used to drop out forced into the system again. I don't know about the number of crimes committed by high school dropouts, but I know the number of crimes committed by high school <em>students</em> on campus is spiking in districts in and around where I teach. Worse, there's pressure to make sure <em>everyone</em> passes the courses and state tests necessary to graduate. If we get too many kids in a minority subpopulation who fail to go the distance, our entire school gets labeled as "non-performing", no matter how many National Merit scholars we produce.

Our school was "non-performing" for a few months several years ago due to an accounting error that labeled one dropout as hispanic. That put our school 0.5 hispanics over the dropout limit. Fortunately, we were able to prove he was really some other subpopulation, so we were 0.5 under the limit for hispanic dropouts after that. In the meantime, we had some outstanding performance in lots of other areas. AP tests were good, the band and orchestras did great, the choirs and theater kids were outstanding... we even started to have a winning football team again! Never mind any of that, though, if the school is 0.5 hispanic dropouts over the limit. It's obviously a failed institution.

That's only part of the ludicrousness of state and federal mandates that don't take into account local issues and needs. They rule like a blind mole, completely ignorant of conditions on the surface.

Thank goodness they don't look too hard at Arabic or Southeast Asian subpopulations. Arabs frequently get lumped in with "whites" and SE Asians with all the other "Asian/Pacific Islanders". We've got some issues with those kids, mostly new immigrants, but if they can be masked by other high-performing subpop groups, we don't have to get them to work harder. Classify either of them as hispanic, and we're all over their cases like a duck on a junebug. We're on the knife edge with that subpop. We really wish we had more hispanics, so one or two deciding to hit the bricks wouldn't skew our percentages so badly.

The petty criminals stay in school, too. Theft is way up on campus. I even have staplers get stolen out from under me. Staplers! They're only five bucks at an office supply store, but I gotta keep mine locked down, or I'm out that five bucks plus the gas for the trip on over. And never mind the occasional crude language directed at me - we got loads of kids with guns in our nation's schools.

Don't talk to me about metal detectors or searches. They are easily defeated within one week (often earlier) of their installation. These kids aren't in lockdown and have access to the outside in ways folks at San Quentin can only dream of. The guns are in every school and it's a miracle the body count in our schools is as low as it is.

Maybe it's because a lot of these guys are also coming to school stoned. If they're too mellow to open fire, that's a good thing. Don't let them drink alcohol - that's a nasty mix with handguns - but maybe we could look the other way on the pot if we're forced to keep the violent guys in school. Maybe if we had methadone in the school clinic, we could cut waaaaaay back on fights in the halls. That way, we could keep kids in school and maintain a secure environment. I'm thinking something along the lines of the opium dens the British and French used in Asia back under colonialism.

But will they learn? Nope. Not that it's different from what they're doing now. They don't want to be in school, and preaching polemics about the glories of edumacashun is not going to change any of their minds. I was once told to never try to teach a pig to dance, as it would frustrate me and annoy the pig. Someone should change that proverb to be a little more direct so the geniuses in the legislatures will figure out that trying to teach someone who doesn't want to learn what I'm teaching will frustrate me and annoy the student.

There are days where my heart leaps within me when I notice certain students aren't in my classroom. Even better is when one of these lambs is in alternative educational placement - the modern school equivalent of spending a night in jail. You may have once known it as in-school suspension. That didn't have enough syllables, though, so it needed changing to sound more confusing. I think it should be shortened to "school jail", so the proper stigma is associated with the sentence.

But, yeah, my heart leaps... if I know a troublemaker is gone for three days, I know I can cover a lot more ground in that class than usual. I can have great discussions, meaningful conversations, and happier students. Then, when ol' Sunshine returns and asks "Hey, didja miss me?", we return to the same old power struggle grind between a guy who doesn't want to be in my class and me, the guy who doesn't want to force him to be there.

I fail to see the societal benefit of keeping the louts in the schools. They should be turned loose after 6th grade, really. That would make junior high so much more pleasant. And believe me, it needs all the help it can get. I do not fail to see the societal plague of "No Child Left Behind". NCLB results in worse classroom environments, dumber classes, and more miserable educations for the good kids.

I'm serious. They break out into applause when the hoodlums withdraw from school. Imagine how much happier they'd be if those same hoodlums were gone much, much earlier.

And for goodness' sake, quit holding teachers responsible for dumb and/or lazy kids. I've got a teenager, myself. I want her to be responsible for her actions. I don't blame teachers when she exercises poor judgment. Bless her heart, but it's her fault when she does something wrong. She can fix it up and get better at not screwing up, and that's what we want in our adults, right?

But it gets to a point where it's not the parents' fault anymore. It's not the teachers' fault. It's the damn kid who's taking advantage of the system as much as possible. If the exploiter has to be forced into staying in school, he's going to force everyone else to be as miserable as he is. Let him go, and he'll stop being a pill.

What to do with the little potential criminal? If he can't hold down a job, don't give out any benefits from the state. That only rewards irresponsibility. Either let him realize he's got to get his act together and get back into school the right way, or let him live a hard luck life. Maybe he could take one of those legendary jobs Americans supposedly don't want to take.

But these are teenagers we're dealing with. Human free will is one hellacious statistical variable, and these guys are just loaded with it! How can anyone reasonably hold anyone else responsible for what a teenager does?

I know I've got some extremist ideas about schools. But getting rid of NCLB would be one step towards making public education that much less of a failure in America. We're a nation built on ideals of free choice, personal responsibility, and work ethics, so why should we have a government system built on command economics, shifted blame, and screwball statistics?

Leave 'em behind if they can't appreciate the system. Maybe all they really need is a different road from what the rest of the nation is traveling on.

The Good, the Bad, and the WTF: The Neo-Con International Landscape

On 29 January 2002, President Bush delivered his famous "Axis of Evil" speech. He thrust an accusing finger in the faces of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He also said the US was "working with Russia and China... in ways we never have before, to achieve peace and prosperity." Back on the list of enemies, Bush had this to say, "Our enemies send other people's children on missions of suicide and murder.... We choose freedom and the dignity of every life."

I won't go into whether or not Bush is sending other people's children on missions of suicide and murder, nor will I consider if Bush's last statement there was a backhanded anti-abortion statement. I'll take his words at face value. I like the bit about freedom and dignity of every life. I agree with that. And if he's against guys who force children into their armies, I'm right there with him. Something should be done about the butchers of children around the world.

But, ah! Has President Bush committed an error of Wilsonian proportions? When Woodrow Wilson went out on an ideological limb at Versailles, he pushed for freedom for all oppressed peoples, then found out there were oppressed peoples he'd never heard of. Worse, quite a few of the oppressed peoples were in the empires of America's erstwhile allies, France and Britain. Wilson retreated from his earlier push, but he'd already put the idea into radical heads around the world. Arabs were particularly excited at the time, having been promised freedom from the Ottomans and a state of their own in exchange for helping the British defeat the Turks. They were as yet unaware of Britain and France's agreement to take the dismembered Turkish provinces for themselves.

Frustrated, the Arabs began resisting foreign rule. Their resistance included acts of terror. Jewish settlers in Palestine also began carrying out acts of terror against the British. The very sort of ethnic terror that caused the first world war started over anew. Arabs weren't the only ones with a beef. There were resistance movements elsewhere in Africa and Asia, all determined to get rid of their colonial masters. All resistance movements engaged in acts of terror against the governments determined to be their oppressors.

That's what a fight for independence involves - fighting. Gandhi's nonviolence was all fine and dandy, but at the same time he was getting people to oppose the Salt Tax, guys like Subhash Chandra Bose and Vinayek Savarkar were actively fighting the British. Bose put together an army that fought alongside the Japanese while Savarkar waged a massive terror campaign in Maharashtra from his base in Mumbai. Bose got discredited as a Nazi sympathizer, while Savarkar fell from historical grace when one of his supporters murdered Gandhi because the nonviolent leader allowed India to be partitioned, which led to war between the nascent India and Pakistan.

Entrenched powers extol the virtues of nonviolent protest. This makes me suspicious. Why would they promote actions that would erode, if not destroy, their power? Turns out, nonviolent protest is a non-starter when the powers that be unleash the hounds and bring down the truncheons. It fizzles further when the government in charge assassinates the leaders of the movement. Martin Luther King? Please. He's dead. Civil rights in the US remain elusive for Africans, Mexicans, and all manner of peoples once seen as the White Man's Burden. Violence, on the other hand...

Tell you what, I'll spot you US civil rights and India if you want to argue in favor of non-violence. I'll then lay out all the successful, violent struggles for independence: China, Vietnam, Israel, Palestine (hey, they got something, although they don't seem to be of the opinion that it's over...), South Africa, Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Texas, Ireland, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Eritrea, Greece, Bulgaria, and Zimbabwe. Not that all of these produced democratic states - they just managed to get rid of the foreign influence in their nations and were able to oppress themselves afterward. To be sure, I can't leave out the one most relevant to President Bush - the United States of America. The US struggle for independence was armed, fiercely fought, and involved extensive acts of piracy and terror directed against those who sympathized with the legitimate government of King George.

Governments can dismiss nonviolent protesters, but must take violent acts directed against it seriously. Nonviolent revisionists will gladly accept jail time and beatings. Violent change-seekers will shoot back. Couched in ideological terms, both sides in the struggle ask for asymmetrical participation in the conflict. This means women and children, traditional noncombatants, become involved so the enemy will not know who will deliver the next strike against his power base. The resistance uses suicide attacks. The government uses informer networks. Either way, innocence is discarded. It is excess baggage on the road to the final struggle. In places like Congo where manpower has become severely depleted, women and children become front-line soldiers as pathetic as those pressed into service by the Russians and Germans in their epic struggle during the early 40s.

Wilson gave fuel to freedom-fighting terror movements everywhere. Those pesky Arabs he inspired have matured and remain in opposition to pro-Western governments, seeing them as extensions of colonial administrations. Given those governments' cozy relations with the US, it's easy to see how they arrive at that connection. Given the oppressive nature of those governments, it's easy to see how they're upset over such coziness.

For the US' part, perhaps Nehru's observation about the British could be adapted to describe the US: "I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the British people for making their moral standards correspond with their material interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial designs." Given the history of US-sponsored coups, it's not difficult at all to juxtapose US domestic moral self-righteousness with US Bismarckian "blood and iron" policies overseas. Regimes all around the world have taken a fall when the US cast a disapproving eye their way. Iraq is the most violent in recent memory, but by no means the only violent regime change effected by US arms.

Back in 1979, the US experimented with destabilizing Afghanistan as a means of destroying the USSR. The US had brought down regimes before to suit its own ends, but this would be the first time one would fall with such high hopes. Then NSC adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski postulated a severe Soviet crackdown would unleash a wave of Islamic revolutionary activity and lead to enough instability in the USSR to render it irrelevant as a major power. When the USSR invaded, the Islamicists appeared, right on schedule. As the Pakistani ISI forged the mujahaddin into a crack heroin-producing outfit with CIA money, other Islamicists arrived in Afghanistan with an agenda of their own.

These Arab Islamicists formed a group called Maktab al-Khadamat, or MAK. The MAK provided training and logistic support for mujahaddin, but did not do much actual fighting. The MAK counted Palestinian resistance figures, Saudi dissidents, and survivors of Nasser and Sadat's purges of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The most prominent of those groups included, respectively, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, Osama Bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Azzam and Bin Laden were originally optimistic about US support, but al-Zawahiri was more philosophical, being aware of how closely the US worked with the Egyptian government to quell the Muslim Brotherhood's resistance there. Nevertheless, they all worked to assist the Afghans in getting rid of the Soviets.

In 1989, the Soviets left Afghanistan and the US cut all support for the mujahaddin. Assassins of unknown affiliation killed Azzam in Peshawar, leaving the MAK without a pro-US counterweight to al-Zawahiri's position. The chaos left in the wake of the US abandonment helped demonstrate the fickle nature of the US' involvement and brought Bin Laden over to al-Zawahiri's point of view.

In 1990, Iraq moved into Kuwait. This ended good relations between the US and Iraq. It also showed how vulnerable Saudi Arabia was. Bin Laden offered the MAK and mujahaddin from Afghanistan to assist in protecting Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis chose instead to invite the US to be their protectors. This proceeded to blow Bin Laden's mind and he placed the Saudi royal family in his crosshairs. To get them, though, he would also have to get the US, as they provided the chief supports for the Saudi monarchy. This would not be an easy thing to do.

Bin Laden's group became known as al-Qaeda and commenced violent resistance against the US-backed hegemony in the Middle East, including attacks outside the region on the US and its allies. The biggest one was the series of attacks on 11 September 2001, which resulted in Mr. Bush making the aforementioned speech.

No tolerance for the Axis o' Evil. Cooperation with Russia and China. Dignity of every life. What was it Nehru said?

There are three classifications for nations in the Neo-Con scheme of things: Good, Bad, and WTF? The "good" nations are those that agree to preserve US interests and hegemony in their geopolitically important region. The "bad" nations are those which engage in outright opposition to US policies in geopolitically important ways. The "WTF?" nations are the ones irrelevant to US foreign policy objectives, but whose situations frequently pop up to embarrass the moral crusades the US is attempting to run in places with important strategic resources.

Know a nation where an unelected few repress their people's hope for freedom? Bush used those words to condemn Iran, but what about Azerbaijan, the oil-rich nation just north of Iran? The Azeris recently had a bout of voting so fraudulent, the BBC reports about it referred to it not as an election but as an "election" where the ruling party didn't have a win at the polls - it had a resounding "win" at the polls. No, Azerbaijan is "good". It will likely remain "good" even if it orders a brutal crushing of opposition movements, as happened in Uzbekistan. Why will it remain "good"? It agrees to pump oil in a way the US finds acceptable. Iran won't follow US orders on oil production, so it's "bad".

Now consider another diplomatic basket case, Uganda. There's not only a repressive government in Uganda, they're dealing with crazed whacko Christian rebels based in Congo, bent on violent overthrow of the government. Current US policy on Uganda, however, is a guarded "WTF?" There is no oil in Uganda, so it's irrelevant if its government supports the US or not. If the Lord's Resistance Army forces more women and children into its ranks as the government plants ever more anti-personnel landmines, the US will continue to completely ignore Uganda as it tries to keep the message focused on how "good" Azerbaijan is and how "bad" Iran is.

So what makes a nation "good"? First off, if it has oil and sells it to the US. That is a very good thing to do. Second, if it has military power and will use it on behalf of US interests. That is also a good thing to do.

60% of the oil consumed in the US is imported, roughly 10,000,000 barrels per day. (2004 figures) 16% of the oil bound for the US comes from Canada. Another 16% comes from Mexico. Just behind those two is Saudi Arabia, sending almost 1,500,000 barrels per day, or 15% of the US total imports. Next is Venezuela which, for all President Chavez' bluster, ships 13% of the US' oil imports. Nigeria handles 10%, Iraq 6.5%, Angola 3%, Kuwait 2.4%, the UK 2.4%, and Ecuador 2.3%: that's the top 10. But don't ignore the next five - Algeria, Russia, Norway, Colombia, and Gabon, which each contribute between 1.4% and 2.1% of the US total. All the above supply about 94.7% of the US' imported oil. They are all, therefore, very good nations whenever possible.

Consider, however, the actual governments of those nations. I'll allow Canada and the UK are nice places. Sure, they have problems, but they don't generate Amnesty International pleas for an end to injustices in those lands on a regular basis. Norway, too, is a nice part of the earth where only its lutefisk could be a contender for a WMD. Human rights activists are not going to be agitating for a boycott of Norwegian oil anytime soon, unless they're in cahoots with the Save the Whales crowd. That's about 20% of the US' total oil imports. The other 80% comes from less savory places.

Mexico isn't all that bad when compared to, say, Angola, but it's still got some big problems its lobbyists want to make sure don't get reported on in America. There's the Chiapas revolt, still ongoing, the strange situation around the mayoral race for Mexico City, and a police force shot through with cops in the pay of major drug dealers which at one time reached up to the office of the president. It may not be a completely failed state, but it is a haven for some pretty severe threats to US security in the form of drugs gangs that have supplanted local authority. Nuevo Laredo, for instance, hosted a war between two rival gangs and their police allies in the summer of 2005. The federal army stopped the shooting for a while, but when they left, the local warlords went back to their business. Mexico also grows its own poppies, so I suppose that makes it North America's own Afghanistan. The heroin trade is nascent in Mexico, but within twenty years, with proper nurturing from competent criminals, should be as unstoppable as the trade that now fuels the clans of the Afghan highlands.

Saudi Arabia... ah! Where else can one see a good flogging of a cross-dresser or women forced to burn to death rather than appear unveiled in public? Such a nice place. Saudi Arabia is so nice, in fact, the Bush administration did not allow any of its citizens to be questioned in relation to the 11 September 2001 attacks, in spite of the fact nearly all the terrorists were Saudi nationals. $1.4 billion worth of business has gone from Saudi Arabia to companies like Carlyle Group and Halliburton - that those companies have extremely close ties with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney will be seen as coincidental by only the most naive students of human nature. Saudi Arabia continues to flog cross-dressers alongside democratic dissidents and journalists who fail to follow the dictum from the Koran, "Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble."

Venezuela may sport a Bush-bashing president, but Hugo Chavez has a soft spot for his nation's oil trade. Be that as it may, he did threaten in March 2005 to cut off oil supplies if the US ever hurts his country in any way. That probably means Bush will have to let Chavez say whatever he wants to, which seems to be very unfunny versions of Al Franken's material. The US has officially accused Chavez of trying to create a populist dictatorship and supporting rebels in Colombia. Chavez denies these claims, but he has been keeping a strong hold on Venezuela's government. He'd led a coup to take it over once before, and he is a scrappy fighter. He probably won't go down in any right-wing coup, and the US probably won't invade as long as the oil flows. Venezuela is a nation the US wishes was "good", but has to tolerate its "bad" aspects to allow its oil to continue to flow northward. If Chavez didn't make so much noise, Venezuela would be ignored in the mainstream press.

Now for Nigeria. Nowadays, when I hear "Nigeria", I immediately think of the word, "corruption". Not just the nickel and dime cop on the street corruption. I mean the kleptocratic, murderous sort of corruption huge corporations and Supreme Presidents for Life like to get down to. Between 1960 and 1999, the rulers of Nigeria managed to steal $400 billion from their own people and western aid donors. I actually wrote this part, on Nigeria, on the tenth anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who fought to stop the pillaging and polluting of his part of the country, the Niger Delta where his Ogoni tribe lived. He managed to get Shell to leave the delta in 1993, and they haven't returned, but General Sani Abacha ordered Saro-Wiwa executed for treason in 1995. Chevron is currently having trouble with its operations in the Niger River Delta, but is not active in the Ogoni region. No oil company is active in the Ogoni region. Both Shell and Chevron have hired Nigerian police and military forces to kill protesters. Well, maybe not with direct orders to shoot to kill anyone and everyone, but they do kill on behalf of the oil giants. The Nigerian oil is pumped out at gunpoint and brought to the US, where it is sold in nice, clean gas stations, away from the lakes of industrial sludge left behind in Nigeria.

Iraq's situation is a right mess. In the words of The Independent journalist Robert Fisk, "The US wants to leave, the US has to leave [but] the US cannot leave, and that's why there is blood on the sand." The civilian casualties in Iraq continue to mount. We all know President Bush lied about the reasons the US invaded Iraq. It is clear why the US invaded: to physically hold down the oil-producing regions. Americans do not want to believe that, so they continue to sit in delusions, investigating the intelligence situation before the 2003 invasion. It doesn't make a rat's ass worth of difference what the intelligence was. The Neo-cons engineered whatever was needed to get an invasion underway. In history classes, we do not teach that Germany invaded Poland in response to a Polish attack on a radio station inside German territory. Eventually, people will stop talking about weapons of mass destruction and the desire to build democracy in Iraq as reasons for going forth into that heart of darkness. The US is interested in one thing in Iraq: creating a government there which will continue to pump oil to the US, whatever that government may be. Even though the news coming from Iraq looks like a colorized version of Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers", the US forces continue to torture, cover-up, and kill civilians in the name of... what? Just as the French in Algeria, the US fights out of sheer stubbornness and refusal to withdraw. Because of Iraq, what Americans think of the French is what the rest of the world thinks of America - that is, except for those who hate America enough to want to die trying to take it down a peg.

Angola may only provide 3% of the US' imported oil, but it's still got a sordid story to tell. Back in 1975, Chevron hired the MPLA to invade Cabinda, which was under the impression it was a free former colony of Portugal. To this day, the Cabindese continue to fight against the MPLA government and the MPLA continue to supply oil at rates lower than what the Cabindese were willing to offer. I'll make a slight tangent here to bring in Equatorial Guinea, another oil producer. Its leader had a horrendous human rights record, no problem for the US and UK. He starts pushing for a renegotiation of the oil contracts, WHAM! Down he goes in a coup. Same thing happened to Mossadeq in Iran - mention oil contract renegotiation, and your government will fall hard.

Kuwait is not a democracy. For all the people who thought the US liberation of Kuwait would install a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, the sick joke is on you. It's a constitutional monarchy, with only 10% of the population able to vote. But even if you argue Kuwait's half-democratic instead of half-authoritarian, it's only 2.4% of the US' imported oil made nice by such a distinction. Much of its wealth is built on the backs of cheap foreign labor, which makes up over half the population of Kuwait and over 80% of its labor force. It may not be a slave economy, but only by a few degrees of separation.

Ecuador's oil comes out of its Amazon jungle region. The drilling companies have tried to corral the natives into reservations, but not all comply. To assist in those efforts, the oil companies hired Christian missionaries to assist in the work of clearing the land of pesky indigenous tribes. Once brought to Jesus, promised medical care and education is provided on a minimal level for the recent converts, if at all. The natives are paid for their land in corrugated metal sheets, perfect for building flimsy houses. Then the roads come in. The roads are actually dirt tracks with industrial waste - benzene, tolulene, and other toxic chemicals - sprayed directly on the dirt. This lethal sludge oozes into the soil and ground water. The oil companies say there's nothing wrong with it, the government of Ecuador agrees, and the natives are left screwed. Well, almost. They're suing Chevron in Texas and have banded together to resist exploration expeditions. The Ecuadorian government provides military escorts, but this time around the natives are determined to not let another Ogoni-like situation develop.

For the others, Algeria continues to be governed under a state of emergency and its civil war is not entirely over. Russia is, well... Russia. Going into the depths of its kleptocracy is beyond the scope of this article. Moreover, there's evidence to put Russia almost in the "bad" category, so I'll deal with it there, even though it's an important supplier of oil to the US. Colombia remains wracked by a three-way civil war and Gabon...

What's a Gabon, you ask? It's a tidy little dictatorship in west-central Africa where President Omar Bongo has ruled since 1967. In the last election in 1998, he won nearly 67% of the votes. He plans to stand again for another seven-year term. He's been very fortunate in his politics, having bought off most of his opponents. Gabon politics and society are highly corrupt, which serves its current ruler's needs well enough. He enjoys the blessings of 600-700 French troops propping up his regime. There are rumblings of unrest, however, as more Gabonese demand a bigger share of the nation's oil wealth. President Bongo is responding by packing the army with soldiers from his home province. If, I mean when, Bongo "wins" the 2005 election, he'll likely need that loyal army to keep the palace and oil platforms from burning.

The list of friends with oil, as it were. To paraphrase Bush, they send other people's children on missions of suicide and murder, and they do not choose freedom and the dignity of every life. They're a bunch of rich oilmen riding high on exploiting the mineral wealth of their nations, using oppression and bribes to keep things quiet in the interior.

There are other "good" nations which allow the US to base troops within their borders. Bahrain, Sao Tome and Principe, and Georgia are all happy to host US troops along potential pipeline routes and near strategic waterways. Colombia's got US forces based there, perhaps getting ready to rumble with frisky little Venezuela, should the need arise. Afghanistan's not got much say in hosting US troops. Hamid Karzai would be dead in a Kabul minute if the US troops left Afghanistan, so he's happy to see them place bases all along the pipeline route from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. Out of respect for Karzai's needs, the US announced it would not spray opium crops with pesticides. The 2005 opium harvest in Afghanistan is estimated to be around 8600 tons, almost four times the 2002 harvest.

Pakistan is another "good" nation because of its assistance in US moves in South and Southwest Asia. Never mind what its ISI may be up to. To the folks gathered around their teevee sets to watch the major media news shows, Pakistan is "good". Israel is also "good", in spite of being a rogue nation that's developed nuclear weapons, repeatedly invaded its neighbors in aggressive wars, and perpetrates massive human rights violations against civilians in its occupied territories.

So who's "bad"? France. France is definitely "bad". The French have competing oil interests and oppose the US' empire-building. The US won't go to war with France, but they provide a convenient punching bag for administration officials looking to distract the people of America from analyzing their crapulent foreign policy too closely.

Iran is also a "bad" nation. That's a shame, because Iran's current president has so much in common with George W. Bush. He's an unsophisticated bumpkin being manipulated by his country's wealthy and reactionary religious elites. In spite of their common ground, the two leaders look set to do anything but bridge the potentially violent distance between Iran and the US.

Iran almost went "bad" in 1953 when Mossadeq talked about nationalizing Iran's oil industry, but a timely US-sponsored coup kept Iran "good" until 1979. Iran became a "bad" place when the Islamic Revolution booted out the Shah and created a state hostile to US interests. Iran is obviously building its own nuclear weapons, which the US does not like. Iran doesn't care. Once it acquires nukes, it is immune from US attack and can assume a MAD policy relative to Israel.

Iran is also actively pursuing an expansion of its influence in the Middle East, and the US invasion of Iraq was a godsend to them. Their man in Baghdad, Ahmed Chalabi, sits high up in Iraqi government and freely visits Tehran and Washington. Chalabi also helped con the Neo-Cons into invading Iraq, taking out Saddam Hussein in a way the Iranian army never could have done. The US insists it will create democracy in Iraq, and Iran is ready to assist in any way possible, knowing that the Shi'a majority in Iraq has natural ties with Iran. Once the US throws in the towel and leaves Iraq, Iran will enjoy a friendly neighbor and can apply pressure on other Persian Gulf states to fall into its sphere of influence. It may take a generation of bloodshed, but Iran can wait it out.

North Korea is a "bad" nation that really is bad. Its leaders are insane, their domestic policies a sort of urbanized Khmer Rouge program. If Stalinism ever returns to fashion, North Koreans will be able to brag how they were Stalinist when Stalinism wasn't cool, which has been every day since he died in 1953. The North Koreans definitely have missiles with enough range to hit Japan. They probably have nuclear explosives, although they may not yet be able to deploy them as warheads just yet. Nobody likes the North Koreans, and they don't like anybody right back. They reserve the most hatred for the US, whose bombing campaigns inflicted roughly 1.5 million civilian casualties, or 11% of their population. They might actually do something crazy, but to date they haven't done anything much against the US.

Syria is about to be "bad", but they've cooperated with US torture schemes in the past, so it would take some doing to make them truly "bad". Besides, there's no oil there. What would be the point in invading Syria?

Venezuela will be "bad" if it ever cuts off the US from its oil. Would the US be able to invade, though? It's already overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it's questionable if the US is ready to send another 125,000 troops it doesn't have into a hostile urban jungle - and real jungles, to boot.

Russia, officially, is friendly with the US. It tolerates the US War on Terror so long as the US tolerates the Russian version of the same conflict. We're all adults, after all. We know what's really going on. Both states are using violence to hold together their hegemony. Whatever one must say to justify the violence are so many lies to allow the violence to continue under a cloak of morality.

Underneath the cooperative quid pro quo lies a continuation of the Cold War rivalry. Bush announced the US would construct a missile defense program to handle one-off attacks from rogue nations, but the actual defense system looked set to repel a massive nuclear assault - the sort of thing only Russia could deliver. Putin responded in turn by announcing development of new warheads that would evade anti-missile systems, just in case any rogue nation acquired anti-missile systems. When the US balked, Putin responded that if the US' anti-missile system was no threat to Russia, then the Russian "Crazy Ivan" warheads were no threat to America. And so the arms race continues. But Russia isn't "bad" like the French. they're just "good" enough to be praised as a democracy, sort of.

China is a tricky nation to categorize. Although its economy is pumping out goods that bury the US competition, it's also financing a huge chunk of US debt. Should it revise its economy so as not to be so competitive with its exports, it'll also quit buying US debt, which would risk a collapse of the dollar on world markets. This isn't some crazed Cassandra prophecy. Sober heads at journals like the Economist have been fretting over this possibility for some time now. So Bush proceeds carefully with China. The US praises it as a modernizing, more market-friendly nation and China threatens to take the US down if it ever interferes with Taiwan. The US may be an 800-pound gorilla, but China's bulking up pretty quickly, and the US' right hook isn't what it used to be, what with the recent commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be horribly ironic to watch a United States essentially sit by as China took control of Taiwan by force because the US could not commit troops and had to kowtow to China in order to keep the dollar on an even keel.

The rest of the world are either minor allies of the US or nations the US would like to ignore forever more. They don't have anything the US wants or needs all that badly. If they remain out of the spotlight, it means the US can proceed to carry out its foreign policy without looking too hypocritical in its moral stance.

But, every now and then, one of them flies above the international media's radar, and the US gets pressured into doing something, for goodness' sake. The US sent massive forces into Kuwait to restore "freedom" in the wake of the Iraqi invasion. Bush the Elder claimed the operation there had nothing to do with oil. Strictly humanitarian. Then the media found Somalia.

I remember the press conferences over Somalia. Both Bush and Clinton appointees had this WTF? look on their faces, long before those three letters captured the essence of that feeling. They couldn't believe the press were pushing for US involvement in Somalia on the same "humanitarian" grounds as its Kuwait involvement. For heaven's sake, didn't the media know there wasn't anything of value in Somalia outside the khat bushes and Kalashnikovs? Indignant Americans asked why not Somalia if Kuwait was such a noble operation?

So the US went into Somalia with a "There! You happy now?" attitude. The US could be "humanitarian" there, too. Haiti popped up on the radar around that time and got itself a US deployment, lucky them. When the media freaked out over US military casualties in Mogadishu in the wake of a failed kidnapping of Mohammed Aideed, the US had its justification to pull outta there. Somalia went back beneath the radar and the US kept its boys in Kuwait. The US slinked out of Haiti, too, just in time for the next round of violence to begin there.

Clinton wanted to ignore Bosnia, but again media pressure started another US military involvement. He ordered US planes to bomb the hell out of the Serbs, and the press applauded. Then two young men shot their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School and the pressure for the US to "do something" in Bosnia slackened. It was strong enough to get US forces involved in the Kosovo tangle, but nowadays the media ignores anything and everything about the former Yugoslavia, except to somehow punctuate the "good" still being done by the UN/NATO/US occupation forces, even though the Hague trials are a joke and the occupation forces are heavily involved in human trafficking and drug deals.

The Bush administration has been adept at avoiding WTF? deployments. Sudan has been successfully ignored, as has Zimbabwe. Liberia's proved trickier, because of historic US ties to the nation, but the US might pull things off with an election the non-US-backed candidate accuses of being rigged. Haiti doesn't need US troops when a US-friendly ruler is installed in Port-au-Prince. Because Bush and the rest of the G8 leaders threw a few crumbs to the developing world at their latest get-together, they managed to appease the aging British rockers arranged to confront them. So far, so good at keeping the worthless part of the third world at arm's length.

Unfortunately for the Neo-Cons, they failed to keep the US relationship with Uzbekistan on the down-low. Like Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan is a scrappy little tinpot dictatorship with either potential as a supplier of petrochemicals or as a pipeline route. The Uzbeks gleefully allowed US forces into their country, ostensibly to support operations in Afghanistan. Those US troops, however, could also get sucked into fighting off enemies of the Uzbek state, of which there are many. Well, even though news the Uzbek leader Islam Karimov had his opponents boiled to death didn't get the US to confront the Uzbek totalitarians, the massacres in Andijan did. Against its will, the US had to lodge a formal protest and the Uzbeks ordered the US to close its airbase there. The US Senate then voted to not pay Uzbekistan any more money for the base. That'll teach them.

But will Uzbekistan's Karimov face the same fate as Iraq's Hussein? Probably not now. As I mentioned earlier, the US is busy with Iraq and Afghanistan. It has to keep ready to smack Venezuela around, as it's got way more oil than Uzbekistan. Even though Karimov is much the worse dictator than Chavez, he will get away with fading into the background because he doesn't have the petro-wealth Venezuela does.

There is no morality in the Bush Administration's foreign policy. There hasn't been morality in any US foreign policy, even during the Carter years - Carter eventually supported the Khmer Rouges against Vietnam. The US has practiced Realpolitik all its history. It is no more a bastion of democracy and freedom than Vanuatu is. Actually, it's less of one. Vanuatu is the only nation in the world that officially opposes the Indonesian grab of Irian Jaya in 1963, calling for freedom for their brother Melanesians there. Vanuatu can't send an army in, but they can continue to fight Indonesian membership in regional associations of nations. Not much, but they do what they can.

Meanwhile, the United States pursues a different path. What nations it considers to be good or bad or worthy of ignorance will change to suit the foreign policy interests of the major corporations and plutocrats of the US. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech and declaration of a "War on Terror" are pablums for the masses of US citizens to suck on. America's leaders have decided to play a Hobbesian game in the world. Existence for commoners is reduced to being nasty, brutish, and short. The US moves about as Leviathan, just like other Great Powers. But rather than acquiring other lands for direct administration, the US installs governments friendly to the US, in spite of any hostility to their nation's population. That way, there aren't any messy struggles for independence. Any unrest is a struggle against a legitimate government, which can be put down without guilt for the citizens of the US, provided the stories are told properly, if at all.

The US clothes its operations in the style of freedom and benevolence. This means it must occasionally invade another country not in its best interests to knock over, but it's the poor and middle classes of America who pay for it, not the plutocracy. Not much of a problem for the US, even if people protest its wars.

The real problems begin when other people in the world start to believe what Bush said about freedom and dignity. They take that stuff seriously and, like the nationalities who rose up to challenge empires when Wilson called for national self-determination, they rise up to challenge their dictators when Bush calls for freedom and dignity. When these dictators are US allies, the US is left in the unenviable position of crushing the expectations of the freedom-fighters. That makes the US a fair target for terrorism in their minds, for it is the US that enables their dictators to oppress and murder in the name of state security.

At first, I thought Mr. Bush would do something about getting rid of the butchers of children in the world, but now? It's obvious I'll have to do that work without his help in some cases and his direct opposition in others. Seems as though Bush was too quick to judge the oppressive dictators of the world: some of them are his best friends. Let us revisit Nehru: I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the American people for making their moral standards correspond with their material interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial designs.

Back in the Saddle Again

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is the little mujahedin who could. And by "little", I mean heroin-dealing, murderous, and opportunistic. Back in the early 80's, Ronald Reagan and the Saudis saw fit to channel millions of dollars to Hekmatyar so he could engage in terrorist acts against Soviet soldiers. In order to get a little more spending money, Hekmatyar turned to pushing heroin, with the ISI helping transport the stuff and the CIA keeping the DEA and other law enforcement groups from putting a finger on his organization.

Since the Soviets left and the US' abandonment of Afghanistan, Hekmatyar has come around to biting the US in the ass for a change. He went Taliban and now spends his days plotting how to stick it to The Man, Uncle Sam in particular. His son is even taking up the family business of fighting foreign occupation forces and running drugs.

He was supposed to have been wiped out politically when the US invaded Afghanistan back in 2001. Four and a half years later, he's still in the bush, lobbing RPGs at government and US forces, now with the brashness and ability to carry out direct attacks. Casualties are high for the mujahedin - dare I use that word again? - but there's a lot more of them than there are US troops. They can win a war of attrition.

I mentioned the m-word. I think it's fair to use it. Whether the mujahedin spirit is directed against the USSR or its twin without the "SR" at the end, it's still mujahedin down deep. The same spirit that brought the USSR to quitting Afghanistan, mission failed and nation ruined, is alive and well and accepting cash, probably from Iranian sources this time. If Iran keeps its armies out of Afghanistan, it might just not lose there.

The Long War...

Twenty years, they're predicting down at the Pentagon. The War on Terror is now "The Long War", and the US has got twenty more years to go on it. This would mean an entire generation will grow up with war on its mind.

Constant war.

We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Limits on freedoms and global, eternal war... sounds just like what the Orwell ordered. Mix in a healthy dose of mindless patriotism, and we're good to go at being a nation of slaves, securing the good life for the top percentage point of the population.

And now I read in a BBC article the US wants to reduce its troop levels in the Middle East below 300,000. 300,000? Well, there's, what, 133,000 in Iraq, thereabouts? Afghanistan's not that much... so was that a typo or honesty?

Never mind, we're in it for a Long War. The amount now is irrelevant. It's going to get lots bigger, but spread thinner around the world.

Watch out.

Immigration, Not Iraq

With all the talk about immigration of late, it's interesting to note that the disruption in the Baghdad morgue reporting is not making headlines.

It should be making headlines, because there are a number of refrigerated trailers in the parking lot of the Baghdad morgue to handle the amount of bodies coming into the morgue each day. The Iraqi government has suspended announcing the actual number handled in the morgue each day because of the recent spike in volume which, if it's anything like the volume in the first 8 days after the Samarra mosque bombing, was up over 100 per day, analagous to the actual civilian casualties during the shooting war back in 2003.

If it's gotten that bad, then the level of civilian casualties would point towards not an outbreak of criminal activity, not a breakdown in government authority, but an organizational approach to violence one typically associates with war. Given that the violence is mostly civilian vs. civilian, it would be classifiable as a civil war.

This isn't histrionics on my part. It's not hyperbole. It's looking at what the numbers were like when the US invaded in 2003 and what they were like before the Iraqi government pulled the plug on their reporting. They're similar. They indicate war is happening. "Civil war" is merely the type of war that's going on, since the violence is not entirely directed at government or occupation forces.

So as Americans debate over what sort of jobs Americans aren't willing to do, it's looking more and more like either the Bush administration will either need to accept defeat and get out of a collapsing Iraq, or gird up and send in a bunch more troops into combat. Combat's certainly a job rich Americans don't want to do, so goody for them there are enough poor Americans and willing immigrants to do it for them.

Regardless of troop levels and ferocity of occupation, however, I don't think the US troops will be any more effective than the UN Smurfs unless they pick a side in the conflict and start fighting its wars. Then they'll be much less effective.

Watch out.