Afghanistan writings

James Wolcott quotes from a couple of good articles about Afghanistan and what it means to the United States -- and to us, too, of course.
First, a July, 2006 article by Stewart Nusbaumer "Unfinished Business" at the American Conservative magazine:

. . . in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush administration was clueless about the wars it faced, declaring victory before the real wars began. The neocons wrote a silly script that had Afghans and Iraqis pulverized by our hi-tech war machine and quickly capitulating, as if the Vietnam debacle never happened, as if the world's guerrilla fighters never learned how to stymie and slowly bleed the world's premier conventional military.

Then a flashback to what Ted Rall wrote in December, 2001:

'It would take billions of dollars to even begin rebuilding this country,' an American officer who refused to give his name noted while his driver worked on a flat tire. 'Billions of dollars and many, many years. We don't have that kind of attention span. Bombing Iraq will be a lot sexier than teaching Afghans how to read.'
And so we've lost this war, not because they're good or we're not, but because of who we are. The American Empire can't spend the bodies or the time or the cash to fix this crazyass place, because in the final analysis, election-year W. was right—we're not nation builders. Guys who once called themselves Talibs switch to something called the Northern Alliance, and we call this a victory. We know it isn't so, but like Nixon's peace with honor, it'll have to do.
Both the Russians and the English lost everything to Afghanistan, but it doesn't have to end that way for us. After all, the same thing happened to us in Vietnam, our first Afghanistan, but we survived it. True, our economy was never the same. Undeniably, it replaced an American Century with postmodern alienation and ironic detachment. But if those estimates are correct and this war is costing a mere billion bucks a month, we ought to tally our dead, write up our losses, and count ourselves lucky to still be called a superpower.

At the end, Wolcott notes "Five years later, our luck may have run out."

I am Canadian-born

Today's topic is racism.
The CBC is doing it again -- they're educating Canadians about Canada, even the parts of it we don't want to know about. I caught the tail end of a newscast tonight, a story about immigration, I think, and I heard a woman saying something sanctimonious about how "Canada today isn't the Canada I grew up in".
Yes, I thought, and I'm glad its not -- the Canada I grew up in had FLQ bombs blowing up mailboxes in Montreal, and gay people were unmentionable, and abortion was illegal, and women weren't paid equally and . . . but of course this wasn't what she meant.
What this woman meant by the phrase "the Canada I grew up in" was code for "white".
The Canada I grew up in was white, too -- I don't think I knew a single Aboriginal person until I was in my 20s. There were no Aboriginal people living in our neighbourhood, and very few Muslim people, or East Indian people, or Asian.
What a loss that was -- maybe not for them, but for me, and for my neighbourhood, and for Canada.
The Canada I grew up in was the one which initially covered the Air India disaster as though it happened to a bunch of foreigners rather than to Canadians -- I will never forget my shock at Macleans on the week of the disaster, with a tiny little banner at top right saying "Air India disaster" and just a one-page story inside.
The Canada I grew up in was the one that refused to apologize to Japanese Canadians for internment or to Chinese Canadians for the head tax.
The Canada I grew up in took Aboriginal children away from their families and sent them to residential schools.
The Canada I still live in cannot seem to provide decent drinking water to Aboriginal reserves.
The quicker that Canada changes, the better.
But we haven't changed it all yet, and Canadians need to realize this. When I checked out the CBC website to see if I could find more about that news story, I found instead Heather Mallick's recent column, which referred me to Robert Fisk's eye-opening Independent article How Racism Has Invaded Canada.
Fisk was writing about the media coverage of the "terrorist cell" arrest news stories. In particular, he noted the offensive term "brown-skinned" to describe the Muslim suspects:

What is “brown-skinned” supposed to mean — if it is not just a revolting attempt to isolate Muslims as the “other” in Canada’s highly multicultural society? I notice, for example, that when the paper obsequiously refers to Toronto’s police chief and his reportedly brilliant cops, he is not referred to as “white-skinned” (which he most assuredly is).

Fisk is right about how offensive this term is. How easily such terminology creeps into our discourse when it is used approvingly by the media.
He notes another term which we should also all be aware of:

. . . a very unpleasant -- albeit initially innocuous -- phrase has now found its way into the papers. The accused 17 -- and, indeed their families and sometimes the country's entire Muslim community -- are now referred to as 'Canadian-born'. Well, yes, they are Canadian-born. But there's a subtle difference between this and being described as a 'Canadian' -- as other citizens of this vast country are in every other context. And the implications are obvious; there are now two types of Canadian citizen: The Canadian-born variety (Muslims) and Canadians (the rest).

He is right. I was born here too. And I always thought of myself as Canadian, not just "Canadian-born".
But if the term "Canadian-born" is to be used to denigrate those terrorist suspects and turn them into second-class citizens then I have no choice -- I'll just have to adopt it for myself, too.
"I am Canadian-born" doesn't have quite the crispness and style needed for a beer commercial, but I suppose we'll get used to it.

Thanks, Dad

Ross over at The Gazetteer has a beautiful Father's Day post:

My old man was a Union man.
And the folks in the Union fought like bastards...and they fought constantly, usually for the tiniest of things in each successive contract...And when I was a kid, especially during that time when I was a barely no-longer-a-teenager-aged kid, I thought the folks from the Union were just a little bit off their nut. . .

And he goes on to describe how he understands now why they fought so hard:

And most of all, I now get the fact that my Dad was, and is, my hero.

His description of his Dad reminded me a bit of my own father, a man who grew up during the Depression and spent his life as a farmer with a Grade 9 education, but who re-invented himself and his family as urban, self-educated, knowledgeable, thoughtful, opinionated, humourous. A lifelong member of the CCF and supporter of the Wheat Board, who lost and made thousands playing the stock market and the futures market, a gambler who played a mean game of bridge and poker -- enough so that when I met one of my dad's old poker buddies years later, he said to me "So you're Art's daughter, are you? I bought your shoes all through high school!" Most of all, he was a man with an utter distain for anything that struck him as BS whether it came from the right or the left -- and there is plenty of that in our society. He and my mother gave me my own progressive outlook and I thank them for it.

Great line of the day

Tristero at Hullabaloo writes about Gore's Moral Imperative and has this to say about the Democratic Kewl Kids Konsultants:

. . . the latest bundle of snoozers packaged into an "agenda" by the Democratic party's utterly inept national political consultants is a major league embarassment. It's almost as if the party consultants concluded that since the world is facing an energy crisis, the Democratic party should set an example and not have any.

Emphasis mine.

A thousand ways to die

Here's the latest news from the Baghdad morgue, which is receiving 1,000 bodies a month, mostly people violently murdered. With so many people dying every day, the individual stories of loss and despair will likely never be told:

Samir Mehdi Matar, a 40-year-old father of four, is a Shi’ite schoolteacher. Married to a Sunni woman . . . Shortly after leaving for work last April he received a phone call. His house had been wrecked by an explosion. His two daughters, Samaa, 16, and Zahraa, 4, were killed by a bomb that had been placed on a windowsill below the room where they slept.

Najda Abdul Razzak makes no apology for wishing to tear out the eyes of the killer of her son Hani, a 31-year-old Sunni professor of engineering at Baghdad University. Najda was in her kitchen preparing breakfast last week when her son answered a ring at the door and died in a hail of gunfire.

“Every day we have to kill a Shi’ite to show them who we are and that we mean business,” he told a Baghdad contact who cannot be named. “Nobody can stop us.” When the contact saw a body that had apparently been left to rot on the street, he asked Abu Muawiya why nobody had moved it. He was told that it was because the body was Shi’ite and anyone who touched it would be killed. A few hours later the contact saw a man shot dead for removing a piece of cardboard hiding the face of a second body and informing the victim’s family. Abu Muawiya showed no remorse. “We do not want their bodies cleared from the streets,” he said. “We leave them there for the dogs to eat, just as they dump Sunni bodies in rubbish heaps to be devoured by animals.”

Mohammed Saleh al-Duleimi, a 61-year-old Sunni businessman . . . concluded a few weeks ago that it was too dangerous for him and his family to stay in Baghdad. The day before he was due to leave for Turkey, he went to find an electrician who could help to shut down his house. He was found two days later in the morgue with a bullet hole in the back of his head and his hands tied behind his back.

And here's the saddest story -- warning, this will make you ill:

. . . As the doctor talked to his friend, a police pickup truck pulled up with a dozen or more bodies piled in the back. “I could not believe that the dead were brought in such a way,” Siddique said. “They were one on top of the other like animal carcasses.”
When the police found that no porters were available to help, they threw the bodies off the truck. It was then that Siddique noticed the corpses of two boys aged about 12 lying in the pile on the ground.
“Each had a piece of knotted green cloth tied around his neck and I could see they’d been strangled,” the doctor said. He also noticed round holes that were slightly inflamed in several parts of their body, a sign that they had been tortured with electric drills before being killed. “Even their eyes had been drilled and only hollow sockets remained,” he said.
When he pointed out the injuries to his friend, the pathologist shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette, saying this was now routine.
“We have turned into a zoo,” Siddique told me. “What level have we sunk to, to kill people in such a manner and hardly to notice any more?”
The doctor sat with me for a long time, silent and seemingly unable to move. Then he began to give voice to his thoughts.
“Did those children scream in pain? Did the torturers laugh as they drilled? If we ever had a just cause as a country occupied by foreigners, it was lost the moment the resistance started beheading and drilling human beings. No matter how noble their cause when it began, they have now reached a dead end.”

The story also notes that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals are simply leaving, going to Jordan and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Goodbye cruel world, I'm off to join the circus*

What a wonderful story -- Quebec's own Cirque du Soleil is a social movement helping at-risk youth around the world as well as a circus:

. . . the initiative has expanded to 19 countries. 'We don't want a uniform program around the world, but one in sync with the rhythm of the country and its culture,' explains Michel Lafortune, co-ordinator for the Cirque du Soleil's international social circus programs.
The programs' team works with circus-arts instructors to teach troubled youth how to clown around, juggle and do more advanced circus techniques. Kids learn to use their imagination and balance, and to test their own physical limits.
The instructors help them improve self-esteem, develop social skills and gain a sense of humour. They also teach self-control and discipline, and channel risk-taking and adrenaline in a positive way.

*

Oilers!

I know that Carolina is a great team and they probably have as many or maybe even more Canadian players than the Oilers do, including some Alberta players. And I know the Carolina fans are great sports fans. And I know its Southophobic to feel this way. And I know I'm showing my age.
BUT -- there's just something EUHHH about a team from a place without outdoor ice winning the Stanley Cup.
Besides, wasn't that just a great OT goal?

Great line of the day

The Galloping Beaver writes about this Bush trip to Iraq compared to the last one:

There have been no reports of plastic turkeys in any of the hundreds of mess halls. Just the one walking around on two feet with a Secret Service detail surrounding him.

Emphasis mine.

Hello? Anybody home?

So Bush flew all the way to Baghdad to pay a surprise visit to the new Iraq government.
He couldn't tell anyone he was coming, of course, just in case all those loyal allies leaked it to the insurgency to set up a rocket attack.

U.S. President George W. Bush (L) speaks as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (C) and his Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim listen during their meeting in Baghdad June 13, 2006. (REUTERS/Ahmad al-Rubaye/Pool)

And isn't it just so lucky that they were at home? If he had come a day earlier, they would have been out:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L) meets Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi in Tehran June 12, 2006. (Stringer/Reuters)

Are we still in Kansas, Dan?
No, Tony, we're not in Kansas anymore.


And here's what was going on in Iraq during Bush's five-hour visit -- I wonder if his helicopter flew low enough to see any of this?

. . . one of the six coordinated bomb attacks lies on a road in Kirkuk . . . June 13, 2006. (Slahaldeen Rasheed/Reuters)


. . . a car bomb exploded in Kirkuk. . . . .(AFP/Marwan Ibrahim)


Iraqi women mourn as they sit near stains of blood . . . Kirkuk. (AFP/Marwan Ibrahim)


. . . a roadside bomb . . . killed 3 civilians and wounded another 8 near a market in central Samarra. . . . (AP Photo/Hameed Rasheed)


. . . a parked car bomb . . . in the al-Washash market Baghdad . . . killed five people and wounded 13 others (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)


. . . a man who was among those killed from a bomb attack . . . in the holy city of Najaf . . . . REUTERS/Ali Abu Shish


Abbas Ahmed . . . injured when a parked car bomb exploded Monday night in. . . Sadr City. . . killed five people and wounded 41. . . (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)


destroyed house from . . . car bomb attack which killed 10 people and wounded 25 others in a market in western Baghdad . . . . REUTERS/Ali Jasim


A man walks away from . . . one of the six coordinated bomb attacks, which killed at least 14 people in . . . Kirkuk. . . . REUTERS/Slahaldeen Rasheed


Iraqis look at a motorcycle, destroyed during a car bomb attack which killed five people and wounded 26 in Balad . . . . REUTERS/Moqdad Abbas


An Iraqi boy holds blood-stained clothes at . . . car bomb attack which killed five people and wounded nineteen in Baghdad's Sadr city . . . REUTERS/Kareem Raheem


Iraqi men spray water onto the burning car owned by Ahmed Ali al-Yasin, the brother of Asaad Ali al-Yasin the head of Samarra city council, after he was injured with his son Othman Ahmed Ali, by the explosion from a timed-bomb attached to the car . . . (AP Photo/Hameed Rasheed)


Iraqis carry mock coffins with pictures of members of the Mehdi Army fighters who died fighting the U.S. forces in 2004, during the remembrance ceremony in Baghdad's Sadr city . . . REUTERS/Kareem Raheem


A man at the scene holds up the body of a small child said to have died during a U.S.-led raid near Baqouba in Iraq, Monday, June 12, 2006. . . . The U.S. military said coalition forces had killed seven terrorists and two children, whilst local residents accused the Americans of targeting civilians. (AP Photo)

Irish Coffee, anyone?

I'm pleased to report that Irish Coffee is now a health food! IrishHealth.Com is reporting on a new study which says:

Consuming coffee seems to have some protective benefits against alcoholic cirrhosis and the more coffee a person consumes, the less risk they seem to have of being hospitalised or dying of alcoholic cirrhosis.

So drinking coffee WITH booze MUST be good for you, eh?

Great lines of the day

I read this on a blog comment somewhere today but I can't find it now. Anyway, I thought it was funny, so here it is:

Hollywood is high school with money.
Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.

Cat 2; Bear 0

Cat 2 - Bear 0
This is the Jack the Cat from New Jersey who chased a bear up a tree. Twice.
Apparently this cat had been declawed, too -- see, its all in the attitude!
I found the photo at Digby's.

The Office from Hell

What a fun place to work:

a whistleblower at the Newcastle office [of the Rural Payments agency] outlined a series of allegations about his workplace to a local newspaper, which included:
-- Staff leaping naked from filing cabinets, which was caught on closed circuit television (CCTV);
-- A new craze of vomiting in cups and leaving them to fester in cupboards until they are discovered through the horrendous smell;
-- People taking drugs and having sex in the toilets;
-- Swearing and having fun-fights in the reception area; and
-- Staff holding break-dancing competitions during working hours.

Gee, in my office we just have a potluck lunch at Christmas. We really let loose, though, going all out on the Nanaimo bars . . .

Soft in the head

When is a deal not a deal?
When it's a joke!

Good guys or bad guys?

The government says secret evidence, closed-door hearings and indefinite detention are key tools in fighting international terrorism.

Or should that read "in undermining democracy and the rule of law"? Hmmm, I'm not sure.
But I think I'm glad it is our Supreme Court which will decide, not the American version.