CANADA'S JOHN MANLEY CLAIMS WE OWE THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN SOMETHING FOR BRAVELY VOTING

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN MANLEY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

More bilge from John Manley.

How does Manley have any idea of turnout to make the statements he makes? We haven't had a single good report, except that it was very low.

We owe nothing to Afghanistan. It has a crooked government, despite seven years of occupation. Drugs flow like water. Women still wear the burka through most of the country.

Credible reports say that the government's handling of the election was atrocious with ballot boxes removed from some areas and ballot boxes stuffed in others.

I heard an expert witness on CBC Radio, a woman AP reporter who has a couple of decades of experience in the area.

Considering she is from an American organization, her testimony takes on extra force.

She spent many days talking to people in the street. Many expressed utter disgust with the government. Others actually expressed the notion that if the Taleban came back, maybe they wouldn't be so extreme.

The tone was overall one of the election really won't change anything, and I am sure that is right.

Just before the election, the president brought back one of the world's most evil blackguards, General Dostum, a mass murderer.

And the good General, among many other ghastly acts, is directly responsible for executing about three thousand prisoners early in the occupation, under American supervision.

3,000 men driven in groups in locked vans out to the desert to be suffocated and buried in mass graves, while American soldiers looked on.

And Dostum is not Taleban, he is one of America's allies of the Northern Alliance.

And of course there is that wonderful piece of legislation passed by the government regarding women's rights in marriage.

Afghanistan is no more a democracy than Cuba.

It is stuck in the 14th century.

Does the pathetic Manley actually believe we have accomplished anything except kill people - according to the expert AP reporter, 50,000 died in Kabul alone - and set up some Potemkin villages for photo-ops?

THE AFGHANISTAN ELECTION NEWS REPRESENTS NO NEWS AT ALL

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Nearly half the votes are counted?

We get almost no reports on the actual turnout of voters, nor do we get much information on what seems to have been very corrupt election management.

I suspect the U.S. is working hard to control the information that tells the real election story.

Fifty percent of, say, a ten-percent turnout, plus heavy corruption, makes an utterly meaningless election.

Afghanistan after more than seven years of occupation and force-fed institutions is no more democratic than Cuba.

HOW NOT TO WRITE A BOOK REVIEW: LAURA PENNY'S INTELLECTUALLY IMPOVERISHED REVIEW OF CHRIS HEDGES' EMPIRE OF ILLUSION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A BOOK REVIEW BY LAURA PENNY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

What an intellectually impoverished effort Laura Penny serves up here.

I've not read Chris Hedges’ book yet, but I have heard him interviewed at length.

He is a thoughtful, intelligent, and educated person with something to say. Ms. Penny’s few, carefully selected quotes do not represent the sense of what Hedges has to say at all.

Like all writers on political and international affairs, he sometimes over-speaks himself, but that does not subtract from the freshness of his voice and the acuity of his intellect.

Sorry, Ms. Penny, but our mainline press almost never deals with the issues over which Hedges is concerned. It does offer large servings of stuff like your tired, mannered, “I’ve seen it all” vacuous comment.

Let’s first take Ms. Penny on her own ground, literacy, sadly a word our public education establishment has rendered close to meaningless.

“This claim is a fairly good litmus test….”

God, why didn’t Ms. Penny toss in “level playing field” or “peace process’ while she was at it? This misuse of the nasty, over-used “litmus test” is a perfect example of the decline of literacy over which Ms. Penny claims to be concerned: “test” is all that is required for such a statement.

“I don't recommend taking it to the beach, lest you pull a Virginia Woolf and seek refuge in the cleansing waters.”

Good God what an awkward remark, and Ms. Penny’s prose is an awkward combination of a pop cliché expression – “pull a [something]” – and a classical, almost-obsolete word - “lest” - a combination which comes off as just silly.

But it isn’t just public-school teacher literacy from which Ms. Penny suffers.

“Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those future-drunk techies who thinks the Internet solves everything and that blogs can replace book learnin' or the old journalism that many sites currently cannibalize. Those techies are just as fervent as Hedges, the optimistic Pollyannas to his outraged Cassandra.”

What an irrelevant comment to insert in a book review on this topic. It’s as though Ms. Penny felt like spouting this notion, and took this opportunity to toss it into the review.

And, please note, the return of clichés – Pollyannas and Casandra – to Ms. Penny’s writing. I might point out the clichés again include the pop and the classical – perhaps indicating Ms. Penny notion of breadth of learning?

But it gets worse, I’m afraid.

“The filthy heart of the beast is the military-industrial complex. Hedges contends that “war is the most dangerous drug of all,” and the United States is well and truly cracked out.”

What an absolutely trivial and pretentious way for Ms. Penny to write about one of the world’s great problems. Ms. Penny offers the tone of a person mainly educated by advertising and marketing and “communications,” the last being Sarah Palin’s major in her six-year, five-college B.A. odyssey. I’d almost bet Ms. Penny sounds like a Valley girl in her accent. What a shabby approach to a deadly serious subject, militarism.

“Most profs are good little careerist lickspittles, or poorly paid part-timers who cannot afford to rabble rouse.”

What a shabby generalization, again having nothing to do with the book’s ideas, and please note the genuine tone of contempt for part-time professors. Why? Ms. Penny is unwittingly revealing her own sad, narrow perspective: a lucky second-rate academic with a university sinecure.

God, we have few enough genuine critics in our society, and few enough of them worth hearing out. Chris Hedges is one of these few.

The truth is that Laura Penny is simply not up to the book she tries to review, and tries covering the fact with a bizarre tone that is both world-weary and flip.

MORE ANTI-MUSLIM PREJUDICE - NOT TO BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY COMING AS IT DOES FROM CHEESY POTBOILER NOVELIST SEBASTIAN FAULKS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS IN THE TELEGRAPH

I really cannot understand the kind of behavior Sebastian Faulks has displayed outside of his suffering from serious anti-Muslim prejudice.

Why pick the religious literature of one faith to attack?

Remember what Mark Twain said of the Bible? That it was full of blood and gore and upwards of a thousand lies?

Of course, it is hard to take Mr Faulks too seriously in any case.

He is a writer of novels packed with clichés, sentimentality, cheap cinema-derived scenes, and inconsistencies, but they do appeal to the mob.

And so does his brand of prejudice.

THERE IS NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP, BUT THAT'S LIKE TELLING A CHILD THERE'S NO FATHER CHRISTMAS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRWIN STELZER IN THE TELEGRAPH

The Special Relationship?

Oh, I believe Irwin Stelzer means by that expression the arrangement whereby Britain waits around to serve as a convenient tool to be picked up or tossed away as need arises.

Britain made it possible for the U.S. to call its international-law breaking murderous effort in Iraq a "coalition" effort.

There is no Special Relationship, but it is hard to communicate that to writers like this, too blind to see.

It's like telling a child there is no Father Christmas.

Blair joined in America's war crimes and demeaned his office in a hundred ways with dishonesty for the sake of the "Special Relationship."

What did Britain get for its disgraceful efforts? Nothing.

It was treated as a mouse squeaking near Uncle Sam's boot. None of Britain's views were even considered on any international issue.

Of course, Blair personally got plenty in return for his dirty work.

He's a wealthy man today with many ill-gotten sinecures from American or American-controlled foundations.

Perhaps Mr Stelzer is hoping to enjoy a bit of the same one day?

AFGHANISTAN'S PROSPECTS - SURELY AN OXYMORON EXPRESSION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

"Afghanistan" and the word "prospects" in the same sentence are pretty much an oxymoron.

This is one of the poorest regions on earth, a vast sprawl of deserts and mountains with few valuable resources.

The U.S. always had the option of dropping dollar bills rather than bombs, but that's just not the American way.

Afghanistan will have "prospects" after decades of economic growth and not before, if that ever comes to pass.

The U.S. went there to kill (something it did plenty of), not to help anyone, but the world's press picked up on all the propaganda and seems to pretend it means something.

The culture and backward ways of the people are the natural adaptations of countless centuries and are, in that sense, normal.

What the U.S. is trying to impose is definitely abnormal, not fitting the land and its people at its stage of their development.

Of course, the stupidity of making the Taleban a bitter enemy was foolish.

No Taleban ever attacked the U.S., a point so easily glided over by the press in the last eight years.

Yes, they housed bin Laden (a Saudi) for a time, but then so did the U.S. for a time.

They offered, eight years ago, to comply with extradition if offered some evidence for the accused, the completely normal behavior of any government, but the U.S. rejected the request and proceeded to attack, as useless and mindless an act of destruction as Israel's assault on the giant refugee camp called Gaza.

To this day, by the way, we have never been given a single piece of evidence that bin Laden himself was responsible for anything. I'm not claiming his innocence, just pointing out how irrational and lawless all this has been.

General McChrystal is a nasty killer, of the type that carried out that shameful Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, a man absolutely without a larger view. What else would he do but ask for more troops?

Well, there's light at the end of the tunnel apparently.

Wait, now, I believe I heard that somewhere else. Was it Vietnam?

Good luck, Obama, you are now being squeezed on all sides by the Military-Industrial Complex.

HOW FAR TO GO IN PROSECUTING THE CIA OVER YEARS OF TORTURE?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Far.

My God, it is only sixty-odd years ago that we declared absolutely that following orders is not an excuse when the orders violated basic laws and rights.

The entire Bush/Cheney era is black hole of abuse of authority, murder, and torture.

No one who made these things happen should feel free. We read of Hitler’s willing helpers, did we not?

There are always excuses for abuse and abusive orders. The CIA is not unique in that. In the mind of every tyrant - from Stalin to Pinochet - there were strong and fearful reasons for their acts.

The only way we can be protected from such people is to hold them accountable in each and every instance that we get the opportunity to do so, which itself is rare enough. So few abusers ever are held accountable in the world at large that it makes almost every ethical and moral lesson we learned as children a pleasant fantasy: the evil do prosper, and bad men regularly step over the bodies of good men.

How easy it is - Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld showed the entire world - to take hold of a society of laws and defined rights and complex international obligations and just ignore them all, paying only lip service while carrying on in the darkness in contempt of every principle of decency.

Many observers in the world, including myself, actually believe the United States has tipped over an edge or threshold into a new equilibrium and cannot reclaim any prestige and honor it had.

The promise of that charming, intelligent man, Obama, already is badly faded. The vast forces around him cannot be easily be changed and, perhaps, cannot be changed at all. This is a test of that reality.

Democratic societies are not exempt from the terrible abuse of democratic values: it is a silly myth to believe so.

The U.S. with high-sounding words on paper went a couple of centuries with human bondage and vast abuse. The Confederacy was a democracy for those with the franchise. South Africa under apartheid remained a democratic state for those with franchise. France, inflicting its horrors in Algeria, was a democratic state. I could go on: there is a long list.

Dedication to human rights and democratic values requires America to root out the people who made these ugly acts possible and punish them.

Otherwise, I genuinely believe American democracy is on the wane and the country well on its way to being Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex, ruling a vast empire with abuse and state terror from an elite establishment of military and intelligence and the driving fists of industry.

Power is power, no matter how granted. And Lord Acton's dictum remains one of the most accurate observations of human society ever uttered.

THE SO-CALLED SUPER-NOTE ONE-HUNDRED DOLLAR COUNTERFEITS AND THE IDEA NORTH KOREA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

The story of North Korea's producing the so-called super-notes, one-hundred dollar notes of near perfect quality, is an old one, but it is not necessarily true, as the author of this piece assumes.

There is another story that says it is the CIA manufacturing these super-notes.

Such an intelligence operation would serve two ends.

One, it is a new source of untraceable funds for the CIA. We know that in the past the CIA has used drugs and armaments as ways to obtain off-the-record funds.

Two, the notes, combined with the story this author repeats, provide one more excuse to beat-up on North Korea.

Just ask yourself whether it is likely that North Korea has the immensely complex technology for producing notes of this quality.

Then ask yourself whether this is the way the United States would behave if indeed it knew North Korea was the source of the bills.

ANSWERS TO SOME ILLOGICAL RESPONSES TO CRITICISMS OF AMERICA AROUND LOCKERBIE RELEASE AND THE CAUSES OF 9/11

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Good God, what a lack of logic we see below.

Saying something was vengeance does not communicate approval, but how rarely we see the word “vengeance” used in all discussions of this matter. Americans prefer to play the innocent victim, and it is an act that has grown tired, unconvincing, and even offensive.

The point is clearly that the constant bellowing about mass murder from America completely ignores America's own blood-soaked record of murder.

Indeed America's record is unquestionably the bloodiest of any state or organization since the death of Stalin. Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and so many other, perhaps lesser, horrors over the last half century.

America has killed millions and millions with its Frankenstein military, almost all of it to no good purpose, and Americans accept that all this carnage is for their defense and thump their chests when anyone questions it.

For the writer who seems not to understand the attack of 9/11, it had several completely obvious causes (and, please, causes are not the same as justifications), all of which, from the perpetrators point of view, represent an aggressive assault on the Muslim world.

What's more, these were all avoidable. They reflect that poisonous cocktail of American arrogance, ignorance of others, bullying, and bombing those they don't like.

First, there was the US moving its troops into territory viewed as sacred by conservative Muslims. Putting women in army fatigues into Saudi Arabia was the rough equivalent of having a naked go-go dancer on the stage at a Baptist revival meeting.

America’s horrific past treatment of Iraq everyone seems to have forgotten.

The first Gulf War was engineered, Hussein having got a wink and a nod about reclaiming the territory of Kuwait, much as Israel’s Six Day War was engineered, and the locals understand that even if our press treats these events differently.

The U.S. assault with B-52s killed a vast number of poor Iraqi conscripts in their pitiful sand castles. The bodies on the desert were in such huge piles they reportedly resembled the discoveries of the first Nazi death camps.

Concerned about public relations, the US hid the facts, bulldozing the bodies into mass graves (much as was done, by the way, when 3,000 prisoners were murdered and buried in Afghanistan by the bloodthirsty General Dostum under U.S. approval and control).

Still, with the end of the brief but bloody war, Iraq's agony was not over.

The heavy restrictions the US heartlessly kept on Iraq killed a vast number of innocents over a decade, thousands and thousands of children. The details were largely suppressed in the Western press, but hardly in the Middle East.

The CIA’s secret war against the Russians in Afghanistan played a major role. All knowledgeable intelligence people use the term “blowback” to describe what happened in 9/11. Local fighters were equipped and given intelligence to the tune of several billion dollars, all the while feeding the conservative Muslim fighters with propaganda that the Russians were infidels invading their lands.

The CIA’s connection with some of these people continued right up until 9/11. That is why the men who destroyed the buildings had legitimate U.S. visa, again something never emphasized in our press. There was a complex, unknown program of training certain of these people in the U.S., and it backfired.

Unquestionably America's one-sided support of Israel and its bloody excesses - Israel behaves as an exact geo-political miniature of the US in the Middle East, having attacked, often more than once, every neighbor it has – contributed to immense anger and frustration.

The horrors of Israel’s big invasion of Lebanon were also downplayed here, but not in the Middle East.

Of course, in the background, there was the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government, a joint American-British project, and the installation of that torturing vampire, the Shah, whose Savak used to pull prisoners’ finger nails out in their basement torture chambers, something we never heard any complaints about from that human-rights loving land of America.

And later, the U.S. actively encouraged the Iran-Iraq War so that Iran would be worn down (they lost a million men), assisting Iraq with weapons and intelligence.

Later, of course, the U.S. invaded a neighbor with a major border with Iran and still occupies it.

The U.S. has never stopped bashing Iran, and today allows Israel to threaten this country that has never in its modern era attacked anyone.

There is a far more complex record than I can summarize here, but any clear-thinking person knows exactly why 9/11 happened.

They also know that the U.S. has taken such savage revenge – killing more than a million people and ignoring all international law and order – that the original crime is fading in significance.

How immensely uninformed, or just plain dishonest, it is for anyone to claim they do not understand what caused 9/11.

THE TIRESOME CHARGE OF ANTI-AMERICANISM OVER CANADIAN RESPONSES TO THE LOCKERBIE RELEASE: JUST A FORM OF REVERSE PREJUDICE AND HATRED

POSTED RESPONSE TO A RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"Typical santimonious [sic] Canadians who hate Americans with a vengeance. Any decision which affronts Americans is applauded. This to the nation that buys 75% of your products. I never touch Canadian products and lose no opportunity to tell others of your hatred."

The logical and emotional confusion exhibited in that post tells the entire story of why Americans earn the dislike of so much of the world.

No, Canadians do not hate Americans, but many do hate the ugly actions and words of Americans.

Indeed, that is the case for the entire planet. Few people have affection for the poisonous cocktail of arrogance, ignorance of others, bullying, and bombing those you disapprove of.

Speaking of mass murderers, how about the captain and crew of the warship, USS Vincennes, which, during its observations of the agonizing Iran-Iraq War (a war US policy worked to prolong), managed to shoot down an Iranian civilian airliner with 300 souls aboard.

There was no mercy, no apology, and no proper compensation - just a cowardly avoidance of responsibility for the atrocity committed.

Lockerbie was clearly vengeance by someone, and no one truly knows who. The man Scotland released was almost certainly fitted up by the CIA in response to the immense political pressure of unthinking people like the author of the quote above.

There are serious issues with American behavior in the world outside its borders, and when Americans stubbornly refuse to recognize that ugly reality, and indeed insist that they are victims of hate and terror, they earn everyone's sound disapproval.

That isn't hate, that's human decency and ethics at work.

THE FBI DIRECTOR SPEAKS OUT ON SCOTLAND'S MERCY TOWARDS THE MAN CONVICTED OF LOCKERBIE AND ONLY ADDS TO THE FBI'S LONG, SHAMEFUL RECORD

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The blubbering of the head of the FBI only adds to America's shame, for the FBI has an immensely long record of being a costly flop in almost every major task it has undertaken, besides functioning as a kind of political police.

From the assassination of John Kennedy to 9/11, the FBI has been a disaster.

Under J Edgar Hoover, the FBI in its early days illegally rounded up and deported migrants that it chose to believe were unreliable.

In Hoover's later days, the agency functioned sometimes as an out-and-out terrorist organization itself.

It conducted thousands of illegal wiretaps. It illegally opened people’s mail. It threatened and intimidated anyone Hoover did not like.

One of its efforts was dedicated to spying on Martin Luther King and shaming him with his family in hopes that he would commit suicide. Imagine, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Its investigation into the crash of Flight 800 off the East Coast of the U.S. was long and its findings simply not to be believed, being contradicted by many witnesses and sound evidence like radar tracks.

It basically covered up the truth, which almost certainly was the mistaken release of an American Navy anti-aircraft missile (much like the Navy’s destruction of the Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard).

The FBI conducted a relentless effort to destroy Dr Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist, of espionage for China. They used papers like the New York Times to leak false leads and ruined his career, but Wen Ho Lee was a completely innocent man and they never found credible evidence to the contrary.

The thugs at the FBI spend their time on garbage like looking up what people have been reading in the public libraries.

It was widely known that in bars in Chicago or Boston or New York, the hat was passed regularly for supporting the IRA's terror.

I'm sure the bulk of the IRA's funding came from the U.S.

It reflected sentimental Irish attitudes combined with powerful anti-British attitudes, something still easy to discover in the U.S. despite Blair's pathetic efforts to win American approval through joining in their war crimes.

I've never read a single expression of shame or sorrow over that dark history.

And certainly the FBI never lifted a finger.

WALRUS BULLS BELLOWING ON A BEACH

August 22, 2009

WALRUS BULLS BELLOWING ON A BEACH

John Chuckman

I am disappointed with the view of some knowledgeable commentators over Scotland’s release of the dying man who was convicted of the Lockerbie-airline bombing.

From a purely power-politics point of view, of course, they are right: judging by the ugly noises echoing across the oceans from America, Scotland has done itself no favor.

But if all affairs are to be carried on in every country from that point of view, it seems to me that it is acceptance of America's right to dictate every matter over the planet, including such intimate matters as how individual countries interpret justice and the government of laws.

This is the acceptance of a de facto aristocracy running the world since American voters - and only about half of eligible Americans bother to vote - represent only a percent or so of the planet’s population. It is remarkable how many Americans do not understand the basic point that not everything a democracy does is democratic or decent or even acceptable, especially things done outside its borders.

Democracies abuse power just as surely as any other form of government, and a democracy with the immense military power of the United States – a power virtually cancerous to genuine democratic values - provides a case study in the inexorable workings of Lord Acton’s dictum.

It would also represent a repression of all the better motives from which individuals and societies act now and then, surprising us and raising the standard of human behavior from the violent-chimpanzee standard that tends to hold for much of humanity and is especially notable in America’s international affairs.

That is unacceptable to most people who are not Americans or who are not dedicated flatterers of America seeking leftovers being dropped from its groaning table.

You only have to ask yourself how Americans themselves would react to others telling them how they should run their court system. The sound would be deafening, like the bellowing of walrus bulls on a stony beach in mating season, which is actually pretty close to the sound of some of America’s professional-victim families today.

Mercy is never misplaced, and I think Scottish justice has reached an admirable decision despite the bellowing of the unthinking American families we have heard from for years.

Apart from that, and a very important consideration, it is almost certain that al-Megrahi is innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence desperate for a scapegoat with the relentless political pressure of the walrus-bull families.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time. It is an American mantra, emphasizing the special and precious nature of American lives over all others, at least, that is, the lives of upper middle-class Americans.

Rarely do we read an accurate perspective on the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy stupidly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War, a devastation America had an important hand in extending.

Those 300 innocent men, women, and children received no mercy, and their horrible deaths certainly never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was even offered by Americans, a disgusting set of behaviors, entirely.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge, but no one knows who actually committed
the act of revenge.

I might offer the observation, too, that it is the same bellowing Americans always ready to use capital punishment or torture and assassinate opponents or, indeed, to invade the lands of those with whom they disagree, bombing and killing countless innocents – three million just in Vietnam, another million or so in the Cambodia they de-stabilized, and another million or so in Iraq.

The whole pattern of the two acts of wanton destruction explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror. It is simply America's saying, “I can do to you, but you can't do to me.”

ON A RIDICULOUS COLUMN ABOUT CANADA AND AFGHANISTAN: HOW WE WILL LOSE ALL THE THINGS WE GAINED IF WE LEAVE ON SCHEDULE IN 2111

SERIES OF POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY STEPHEN SAIDEMAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Stephen Saideman has given us a disgusting piece of analysis which I can only describe as a foreign-policy version of gutter literature.

The quality of thinking here is stunningly impoverished and utterly lacking in ethics.

This makes you wonder just how some of our universities grant such sinecures.

But then I remember the baffling case of Margaret Somerville, perhaps Canada's most tedious and irrelevant academic.

And then I consider the case of the ghastly Michael Ignatieff, a man who blubbered stuff about human rights at the same time he advocated torture and NAZI-like invasion of another country.

Clearly, holding a position as a professor at a major university today is no guarantee of original thought, nor even of clear thought.

_________________________

"Canadians don't appreciate or understand what we have here in our country, we just see the cost, not the rewards of helping others."

A ridiculous observation.

The author is blinded by his immediate experience and lack of broader knowledge.

The fact is that the world is full of backward abuse. Take your pick.

In rural India they still burn brides, and forty million widows in India live in misery because of the way the culture treats widows.

And many of those forty million are teenagers or not much older, having been child brides married off at 12 or 14 for financial considerations of a family, often to a much older man who dies a few years later.

These women cannot even eat certain food, cannot remarry, must wear only certain colors, and are left alone to eventually die in poverty.

Shall I go on about rural areas of South America? Or Pakistan? Or Bangladesh?

God, American propaganda has been so effective, it is still quoted as a reason for squandering billions and killing the citizens of a country where we do not belong.

Women are abused throughout the poor and backward world, and that includes several billion people.

America did not go to Afghanistan to free women or any other Don Quixote nonsense.

It went there to kill, something which it has done a great deal of, including killing children.

_________________________


The behavior of other NATO countries is the sharpest argument about this pointless war.

No one will commit troops and equipment in any significant numbers.

Do they not understand what a terrible place Afghanistan is? Of course, they do, but they also know the West has no real strategic interests there.

And they know too that the "mission" cannot succeed, except in killing people and creating Potemkin village projects.

They make only token commitments to give the Pentagon a fig leaf of "coalition forces" and to keep Washington from taking reprisals.

You cannot remake a society with an army. Indeed you cannot remake a society at all.

The best we can ever do is give well-thought-out assistance, monetary and technical, and offer trade concessions.

A backward place must outgrow its backwardness. And B-52s sure do not help.

America went to Afghanistan for vengeance, and then realized it didn't know what to do beyond terrorizing the local population.

We can only hope Obama is able to reach some kind of theatrical arrangement that covers his inevitable backing out, soon.

____________________________

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, 1933

TORONTO PUBLIC SCHOOLS' QUALITY OF EDUCATION AND RATINGS

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIOAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Board should be required to post on an Internet site detailed stats of performance in each school for which it is responsible.

This is something we are slowly approaching in parts of medical care, but it is an essential tool for the future of all publicly supported institutions. The people being served and paying the bills have a right to know.

We do not need a study to tell us our public schools are a mess. There is all kind of evidence, easily discovered.

The basic problem is a system in which no one is responsible for anything. Literally no one.

Once a teacher is hired, no one ever examines his/her work.

And the principals of our schools are just teachers, in many cases people tired of teaching.

And the Board Superintendents are generally, too, just old teachers.

Teacher education is almost a joke: the details of classes at our teachers' colleges would not stand public scrutiny. It is that intellectually poor.

Students today are subjected to a ridiculously complicated curriculum while important skills are ignored. The schools are full of kids in grade five who do not know their times tables. And we have kids in grade eight who cannot read. School libraries are, many of them, a mess and outdated.

We have ongoing frauds like the “literacy test,” something with which I am quite familiar having served as the “home-stay” for a very bright Chinese student now studying a branch of applied mathematics at University College.

That test tests nothing, and those failing it only have to attend a bird course with a bored teacher next term to get a pass. The teachers write and mark the silly thing, and may easily make results rise, giving an empty blowhard like McGuinty something to talk about in speeches.

We seriously need new blood and new ways of doing things if our schools are to improve.

ROGER EBERT AND THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Roger Ebert is absolutely right about the dumbing-down of America, but he is moaning over what I believe is unavoidable.

Perpetual childhood has become perhaps the key aspect of American culture.

It explains not only why Hollywood only makes amusement-ride movies but also why older Americans pour out the cash for rock concerts by former stars in their sixties who resemble bad jobs of embalming.

The Protestant notion of eternal life in a childish paradise has fused with the financial ability of a large number of Americans to pay for costly skin cosmetics, regular plastic surgery, and a great many other reality-avoiding activities.

It is precisely the childish-fantasy nature of American culture which makes it a nation so unsuited to play the deciding role in world affairs.

It has the resources to destroy the world combined with a people who enjoy navel-gazing and display impatience over a late pizza delivery.

The national government only has to blubber some silly lines about good old Americanism and democratic values to have the population support the most horrible bloody excesses, the invasion of Iraq and the Vietnam holocaust (3 million Vietnamese killed justifies the word) being outstanding examples.

The media comply by not showing the real effects of what is done – the dismembered children, the charred remains - although television pictures of distant explosions are popular on America’s couches, eliciting excited hoots and roars between mouthfuls of buttered popcorn.

DYING "LOCKERBIE BOMBER" IS NOT RELEASED OWING TO AMERICAN PRESSURE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

This is a shame because al-Megrahi is likely innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence who were desperate for a scapegoat.

This shows what money can do. The affluent American families carry a lot of weight through the American government.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time.

Rarely do we read the accurate perspective of the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy carelessly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War.

Those 300 never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was offered by Americans.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge.

The whole pattern of the two events explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror: America's saying, 'I can do to you, but you can't do to me.'

NEWT GINGRICH AND SARAH PALIN AND THE EMPTINESS OF AMERICA'S RIGHT

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Newt Gingrich's comments show how devoid of any content the American Right is.

Here is a woman who could not finish one term as governor of one of the smallest-population states in America, and yet she is spoken of in the same sentence with the presidency?

Palin's real reason for quitting as governor may never be known, but the two most likely explanations are a scandal-prosecution suppressed by a secret promise to resign or her recognition she just could not handle the pressures of the job.

In either case, she is about as qualified to run for president as Bozo the Clown.

HARPER'S SHABBY GOVERNMENT AND THE TERRIBLE ORDEAL OF SUAAD HAGI MOHAMUD

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Events around Suaad Hagi Mohamud's ordeal seem to me the most shameful episode of Mr. Harper's often shabby record in government.

Her lawyer is receiving calls from Ottawa officials asking questions about "her file," a file which he is not permitted to see.

There is a clear implication here that an effort is underway to attack the victim, Suaad Hagi Mohamud, rather than set the record straight, much the way the RCMP tried to blacken the name of the man they needlessly killed in the Vancouver airport by snooping into his background in Poland and suggesting he was a drunk and other things.

This kind of activity is not the Canada I know and love: It sounds like something alien and deeply unpleasant. I do not understand why there is not a public outcry over what representatives of Harper's government did to this woman.

Her problem started with a Kenyan border official, almost certainly fishing for a bribe by telling her that her lips did not resemble her valid passport picture. Such corruption is common there and in other places.

What is most hurtful is the response of Canada's High Commission there when this Canadian citizen sought the help to which she is entitled.

Her valid passport was voided, and the Canadian High Commission in Kenya notified the local government that she was an imposter. Thus her ghastly treatment.

Clearly, this was pure incompetence, if not vicious behavior based on racial attitudes.

Those responsible at the High Commission should be dismissed immediately. Harper should apologize.

This woman's ordeal threatens every Canadian who travels abroad and indeed threatens the meaning of Canadian citizenship.

Harper’s public statement that Canada doesn’t control events in places like Kenya is unacceptable, and even cowardly. Kenya wasn’t the problem: Canada’s High Commission very much was.

IQALUIT'S MEAN STREETS: A REPORT ON SOME SAD CONDITIONS OF NORTHERN YOUNG PEOPLE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Many of us might be reduced to such hopelessness if we lived the way these people live.

There are no good prospects for jobs.

There is little opportunity for education.

There are limited opportunities for recreation.

There is isolation.

There is rapid population growth, quickly reducing the housing stock to utter inadequacy.

Canada desperately needs an enlightened policy to encourage and assist remote young people to leave the reserves for an opportunity at real life.

Only a relatively small population can be sustained by hunting and fishing, and only a relatively small population is even interested in it.

___________________

Poor parenting only contributes greatly to the problems.

I'm not blaming the parents but just stating an unpleasant fact.

Parents who already are demoralized and hopeless cannot possibly provide sound parenting.

Even in places like Toronto we see the effects of this. Our buck-passing teaching establishment constantly plays the nasty game of stressing the parents' responsibility, Instead of rolling up their own sleeves to make sure kids are better than their poor parents.

But the ugly truth is many people are parents only by accident and themselves have no skills, no education, and no great hope. The kids may have been conceived in drunkenness, and there may be a number of fathers, each of whom takes no responsibility.

This certainly describes the root problem of Toronto's poor urban areas experiencing mindless violence, areas like Jane and Finch.

For all the chest-thumping stuff we've heard recently about residential schools - and there were ugly abuses - we miss the fact that likely most of the people involved meant genuinely to help, and likely did in many cases. The idea behind the schools had merit, but the execution was flawed and poorly overseen.

We need a 21st century, enlightened program to offer hope and progress. There really is no other logical answer.

No country can afford to equip hundreds of remote communities with all the modern advantages, communities moreover where the facilities will be outgrown in one generation with explosive population growth.

WOO CHINA WARILY: ANTI-CHINESE RUBBISH WITH NO PERSPECTIVE ON TODAY'S ECONOMIC REALITIES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JAMES MANICOM AND ANDREW O'NEIL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is pure anti-Chinese rubbish.

Look at our glorious relationship with the United States.

They deport our citizens to dark places for torture.

They never honor their business agreements when it is to their advantage not to do so: as we see in everything from softwood lumber to pork.

They launch savage, illegal wars like that in Iraq or Vietnam, and then accuse us of not being good neighbors when we don't join them in the bloodshed.

They persist in dangerous ignorance about us, as only shown recently by both the Secretary for Homeland Security and Senator John McCain claiming the 9/11 crew or some of it came through Canada.

They now fill the border with rude, ignorant people, destroying a once-civil relationship.

They refuse to recognize our Northern border, sending ships as they please and even leaving their official maps altered, constituting in fact the greatest single threat to sovereignty there.

They pressure us like a bully on almost every trivial issue they care about.

Their various ambassadors talk down to us like missionaries teaching savages about the Truth.

Unfortunately, we have a shabby government that swallows it all and just smiles, doing their bidding on matters like foreign investment dutifully - including importantly, keeping out Chinese investment that could greatly help our economy.

THE MATCHLESS FOLLY OF MARGARET WENTE ON COMPARISONS OF ISRAEL WITH APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

RESPONSE SENT TO MARGARET WENTE ON A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL WHERE COMMENTS WERE NOT PERMITTED

If you truly believe what you say, then you should be open to public comment.

It is actually, in this day, rather pathetic to write a piece like yours and hide from comments.

Apart from what the overwhelming majority of humane people feel at seeing and hearing regularly Israel's ghastly behavior, we have the words of two men of shining credentials in the matter, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who have said on more than one occasion that Israel has re-created apartheid.

That excellent man, Jimmy Carter, has said much the same. Of course, he was instantly labeled an anti-Semite, a favorite shabby trick of the apologists for Israel's ugly behavior.

About three thousand souls - including 400 children and a fine Canadian doing his UN duty - have been murdered in the last couple of years in Lebanon and Gaza by Israel. Gaza is treated like a Middle Ages city under siege, not even being allowed the products to rebuild Israel's destruction.

People who have had homes and farms for centuries in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have their families destroyed regularly as their property is seized by people born in New York or Toronto or London, and the behavior is simply called "facts on the ground."

Walls are built on the land of others, water is diverted, people living in their own place are abused endlessly by numberless checkpoints and humiliations.

The reasons many people focus on Israel's behavior are simple.

One, we cannot avoid hearing and seeing it constantly while we do not see what goes on in rural India or parts of South America. We hear of every election, every cabinet change, and every violent act. This is not the case with a place like Ecuador, a country of roughly the same population.

Two, Israel constantly represents itself as a modern democratic state, but its behavior towards its neighbors is that of a ghastly third-world country. We all expect more of modern states than we do places like Ecuador.

Three, Israel's behavior seriously threatens peace in the world, having as it does its own illegal nuclear weapons and the thermonuclear support of the United States. There is no other way to look at Israel's many calls for Iraq to be invaded (answered by Bush), Syria to be attacked and Iran to be attacked.

Checkpoints, walls, computerized machine-gun towers, invasions, sieges, mass arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassination, abuse of power over regulations in building and utilities, and constant threats - there is no rational defense of all that ugliness.

All Israel has to do is accept its borders and respect its neighbors to have genuine peace, but it does neither of these things. Its borders expand like ooze over the land of others, and it treats its every neighbor with contempt.

You simply defend what is indefensible.

CANADA WILL NOT ABANDON AFGHANISTAN DECLARES OUR OWN COLONEL BLIMP FROM HIS MEN'S CLUB ARMCHAIR

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"Canada will not abandon Afghanistan!"

Sounds like some Colonel Blimp sitting over a large gin fizz in one of the leather armchairs of his men's club.

Lewis MacKenzie was a failed general, and we have no reason to put any credibility in his words.
________________

"we love freedom, but we're afraid to risk our lives for it? we love freedom, but we don't want anyone else to experience it? why are canadians so selfish?"

What planet is the author of those laughable words living on?

Afghanistan is NOT about freedom. Full stop.

It is run by a crook, placed there by American invaders, and the real powers, the regional governors, are a bunch of thug warlords no different to the Taleban.

Afghanistan is, and was, about American paranoia. Americans don't, and never did, give a damn about "freedoms" elsewhere, especially in a backward place where they have never existed.

You cannot hurl a vast nation from the Middle Ages to modernity. It cannot be done.

That's like saying you could go to 14th century Spain and tell them they should live like 21st century North Americans.

Ridiculous, and you would soon find yourself burned at the stake.

Of the 200 or so countries in the world, many of them with backward economies, poverty, and ignorant superstition, Afghanistan was about the least likely ever to have caught Canadians hopes or imagination.

We are there only to please the Pentagon, America's having undergone a form of national insanity over the last eight years.

It has killed more than a million people over a criminal act in which all the 19 perpetrators died.

CANADA'S RCMP WATCHDOG ON POLICE INVESTIGATING THEMSELVES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Watchdog?

The man is rather a toothless pup whimpering.

But what would you expect of a Harper appointee?

Just the case of the four thugs at Vancouver Airport screams at Canadians that the RCMP is out of control.

Four men who cannot peacefully arrest a distraught man? Who kill him by misusing both the Taser and a choke-hold position? Who failed in their human duty to seek fast emergency help?

Who then did everything they could - aided by the rest of the force - to delay and impede investigation? And who clearly lied on the witness stand?

I feel sure most Canadians would rather take their chances with a distraught man like poor Mr. Dziekanski rather than police like that.

There are many civilians who would show more courage and compassion under the circumstances than those shabby men.

One can only guess how many of these other cases are comparable in nature, but they were not documented the same way.

The man who was shot in the head during a struggle at an RCMP outpost surely was a case of the same thing.

I think the toothless watchpup should just be quiet and go away. He has no contribution to make, none at all.

MASS MURDER BY BUZZ-CUT THUGS PLAYING COMPUTER GAMES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

America is reduced to brutal savagery, no different to that of any terrorist.
What we have here is the deliberate murder of a family - with no charges, no trial, no defense, no legalities whatsoever.

Indeed, it is worse than that.

This is the work of buzz-cut employees of the Pentagon sitting at computer terminals, over coffee, murdering people on the other side of the planet by joy-stick remote control, as though they were playing a computer game.

I wonder do they go to lunch down in the cafeteria after a morning’s killing?

DO AMERICANS SHARE OBAMA'S DREAM? A QUESTION I REGARD AS NAIVE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JUSTIN WEBB IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

America is a very conservative country. That is why the great journalist William Shirer, covering events in NAZI Germany, asked whether America would not itself become a fascist country by election.

'Right-wing' has characterized its entire history, except for a brief period of the Franklin Roosevelt era.

The nation’s history is characterized by conquest - although its victims were weak compared to those taken on by, say, Germany, including native people, Spanish settlers, and Mexicans - and extreme acquisitiveness. Those are facts largely glossed over in general histories, and few abroad truly appreciate them. They are facts also glossed over in all Fourth of July speeches by local Congressmen and Senators looking for campaign funds.

The higher-sounding words of America’s main founding documents have always been treated the same way most Christians treat the Gospels - that is, they are recited, praised, engraved on monuments, and immediately ignored in day-to-day matters.

And, after all, it is the most superstitiously religious advanced nation on earth, and nothing good comes out of superstition, except fear and killing of every description, killing of devils, killing of communists, killing of Muslims, killing of native people, and killing of any threat perceived by religious paranoia.

And further, the U.S. establishment – really a government within a government, including the CIA, the FBI, the NIA, the Pentagon, and at least a dozen other intelligence agencies not generally known – is not going to permit drastic change. It has things the way it wants them and works daily to keep them so.

The Pentagon alone spends the entire GDP of some countries each year, and it has on many past occasions obstructed presidential policies. The CIA spends a fortune and makes a significant part of its occupation the overthrowing of governments, the interfering in elections abroad (as its doing in places like Iran today), and the getting rid of unwanted foreign leaders. And these powerful institutions are supported by America’s immensely rich Borgia-like families. Does anyone seriously believe such forces will tolerate any real shift in American goals and budgets?

Obama cannot possibly change those circumstances, and without changing those circumstances there is no way he can take significant measures towards creating a more humane and decent America. Kennedy was probably the last president hoping to achieve such huge changes.

Obama has put a pleasant and intelligent face on a government that for eight years was guided by thugs and ignoramuses, and he established a precedent for people of color that gives the U.S. further bragging rights about principles.

Going beyond those modest achievements brings an American leader into highly dangerous territory.

BRITISH FORCES IN AFGHANISTAN "UNDERMINED AT HOME"? SOUNDS LIKE HITLER'S "STAB IN THE BACK"

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALLAN MALLINSON IN THE TELEGRAPH

Allan Mallinson, this is simplistic, uninformed propaganda.

"Undermined at home" smacks of charges of "defeatism" or "stab in the back" or "fifth columnists," and in using it, you demonstrate a lack of clear thought.

Morale always suffers when you send armies to do the wrong thing, and Iraq and Afghanistan were colossal mistakes.

The British public had overwhelmingly shown its opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but Tony Blair managed to abuse the immense power of a modern prime minister by joining in that pointless mass murder.

Afghanistan cannot be "won" because you are fighting a major part of the population itself, and you are attempting to foist institutions and customs on a people mostly not ready for them.

The invasion of Afghanistan was the product of Bush/Cheney/ Rumsfeld paranoia. The fact that major NATO nations refuse to seriously engage there is owing to the simple fact that they do not perceive a threat there. As well, they do not see how anyone can "win."

The Bush administration was the most shamefully ignorant and brutal in memory for any Western society. Blair's having slavishly followed that troika from hell speaks for itself. The man is an ethical nullity.

Given those facts, your words ring oddly uninformed and, indeed, rather dangerous.

SILLY BABBLE ABOUT THE BORING JOHN MANLEY AND HIS NEW SINECURE AT THE CANADIAN CHIEF EXECUTIVES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE MARTIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Lawrence Martin,

This piece is silly babble.

The Canadian Chief Executives is a tiresome organization: a lobbying group for large American corporate interests and a place for political wannabes like Manley to spend some time in expense-paid comfort while schmoozing potential campaign contributors.

Either that last or it serves as a cozy sinecure for has-been or never-were politicians with strong American sympathies to have a title, some press time, and an expense account.

Just look at its last long-term head, an almost silly man who liked to go around in hair resembling Sir John A., absolutely his only point of reference to Canadian interests. Canada's version of Ichabod Crane.

John Manley is, and always has been, a boring man with American wannabe tendencies. He is a reformer of nothing. He actually could put an audience to sleep with one of his speeches.

And on top of it all, he resembles a slightly demented and overweight chipmunk.

Come to think of it, he is in just the right place to hibernate into his decline.

HATE AND STUPIDITY ARE NOT NEW TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MATTHEW NORMAN IN THE INDEPENDENTNow?

Where has Matthew Norman been the last thirty years or so?

The Republican Party has long been a breeding ground for hate and stupidity.

Spiro Agnew's many ridiculous and shabby words at a time he was taking brown paper bags of money in his vice-presidential office?

Phil Gramm and all his dumb talk about what his mama used to say about “gettin' down outta the wagon to he’p push the wagon”?

Nixon and wife Pat's "Republican" cloth coat and their little dog?

Nixon’s filthy, vicious first Congressional campaign won by insulting an honest and capable woman?

Every word ever uttered by that dense chunk of sod, Bush?

Dick Cheney's organized programs of murder, hate, and denial of rights?

Rumsfeld's murder of 3,000 prisoners in Afghanistan?

Dan Quayle and everything he ever said?

The late Senator Roman Hruska and his claim that the Supreme Court should reflect all groups, including mediocrity?

Lamar Alexander and his ridiculous custom-made red lumber-jack shirts and his ideas about having a part-time government?

The absurd former Senator Bob Smith and his claim that Clinton was running a "damned concentration camp" when they rescued that poor Cuban boy Elian from his hateful kidnappers in Miami.

Tom Delay and his name-calling and spitting venom while all the time running a crooked fund-raising scheme?

Pat Robertson's claims that natural disasters were God's vengeance on America for immoral ways plus just about everything else ever uttered by Robertson?

Newt Gingrich and his "family values" crap while divorcing a wife dying of cancer?

AFGANISTAN IS CHRETIEN'S LEGACY? TWISTED LOGIC FROM A MAN WITH LITTLE CREDIBILITY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NORMAN SPECTOR IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is just a shabby hatchet job, Norman Spector.

All thinking Canadians know why Chretien agreed to send some troops to Afghanistan: they hardly require your efforts at twisting the facts.

Chretien was the last worthy Prime Minister we had and, from the looks of things in the national parties, the last we can expect for some while.

He kept us out of the mass murder of Iraq: a million dead, two million refugees, and an economy destroyed for a generation.

He had a fair and balanced view of the Middle East unlike our current Prime Minister, and he would never have done what shabby Harper did, questioning the UN observers in Lebanon during Israel's ugly invasion, brave people doing their duty including a fine Canadian officer, all deliberately targeted by Israel.

Knowing something of your unbalanced views on the Middle East, you likely think the war crimes in Iraq were a worthwhile effort.

And your only public legacy, Norman Spector, is insulting a woman in public. This piece appears to originate from the same nasty little dark place.

Oh, and there’s a few laughably ridiculous statements about events in the Middle East to your credit.

HITLER AND WINTER AND THE INVASION OF RUSSIA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A BOOK REVIEW IN THE TELEGRAPH

Hitler suffered several setbacks to his invasion, including the Greek situation. These were important, and might have made the difference, but there were other essential ingredients to the failure of Operation Barbarossa.

Hitler unquestionably believed that his army would wrap up the campaign in three months, and he might have been right under ideal conditions. After all, his victories in the West had stunned the world, and he genuinely believed the Russians were untermensch, incapable of competing with Germans. And, as it proved, Stalin went into a drunken stupor after the initial success of the Germans, and no Russian general dared make a major move not approved by Stalin.

Hitler started the invasion believing in a fantasy idea of the abilities of Russians, and anyone who undertakes a great destructive task motivated by fantasy usually fails, just as the Crusaders centuries before. But it is important to keep in mind that Hitler’s racial fantasies were perhaps no sillier or less factual than the religious beliefs of many: he was not mad – several psychiatric studies have said so - but he had a foolish, superstitious, and destructive faith.

Germany's taking over the best Russian lands - without their people or with the people reduced to slaves - was unquestionably Hitler's great mission in life. All else was prologue. He believed he was a kind of savior for the German people in achieving their destiny.

Germany’s destiny, as he saw it, was to be able to do what America had done in building a vast empire that ultimately created the kind of economies of scale in its markets to be a great economic force in the world. Hitler understood these principles, and he knew America had had a relatively easy time of it, facing weak opponents like native people and Spanish settlers.

That is why he insisted on absolute ruthlessness in the Russian invasion: while he had contempt for Russians as people, he knew the numbers were not on his side.

He knew the invasion would be very bloody, and that is why he used it as a cover for the beginning of the Holocaust. He not only believed that the death camps would be lost in the noise and horror of the greatest battle of all time, but his strange religion caused him to believe that, with young Germans dying in the East, it was somehow right that the Jews’ numbers should be reduced.

Hitler’s underrating of the Russians included military technology, but, while Germany was in many areas more advanced, the Russians produced some very effective weapons, including perhaps most importantly the T-34 tank. Stalin also kept vast armored reserves hidden in the East, reserves of which Hitler was not fully aware. They proved decisive when the Germans had expended their first great energy.

Winter played a role in Hitler’s defeat of course, but the fierce heroism of the Russians stunned the world as well as Hitler.

ISRAEL AND MIDEST PEACE AND IRAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TIMES

Israel has always been the main obstacle to a fair peace, and the reason for that is its desire to absorb the West Bank and Gaza without the people living there, as well as its desire to control events for a thousand miles around.

Israel's idea of negotiations - under every government, left or right - has been that the other side should make every major concession before "talks" can even begin, a rather ridiculous position for any negotiation.

With the threats against Iran, Israel's desire to control events everywhere for a thousand miles around has reached its most dangerous period.

An attack on Iran, a country which has attacked no one in its entire modern history, would be absolutely destabilizing to the world. In constantly threatening this, Israel is beginning to resemble a black hole absorbing everything around it.

It has attacked at one time or another every neighbor it has. It has violated international law and agreements again and again, including building its own threatening nuclear force and, in the past, assisting nuclear proliferation through its arrangements with apartheid South Africa.

It isn't satisfied that Bush destroyed Iraq, in large part for Israel's benefit, it wants a list of other places neutralized or destroyed. Sharon asked for attacks on Iran and Syria too.

A nuclear Iran would actually benefit peace in the region, just as MAD kept peace in Europe through decades of turmoil. Israel would lose its absolute threat over all its neighbors and might even become amenable to a realistic peace.

ART AND SUBSIDY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GILL HORNBY IN THE TELEGRAPH

"The best books and songs and poems and plays do not get written, nor works of art crafted, because of state subsidy."

This is an old and tired argument, especially popular in American right-wing circles.

It is superficially true if you imagine a kind of Monty Python post-office official doling out grants to struggling artists.

But reality is far more complex.

History gives us a much more sophisticated view about the creation of art and subsidy.

Without the patronage of the great dukes and cardinals (the government of the day), the Italian Renaissance would have been a far more sparse artistic period.

Great writers and composers in Britain and Germany benefited from the same kind of sources. Shakespeare had a lordly patron, and both Beethoven and Mozart benefited from patrons and trusts set up by admiring men of influence.

Even in America, we have evidence to the contrary of this proposition. The WPA during the great depression subsidized many artists, and in American cities you can still find some of the very handsome results in public monuments, buildings, and photographic collections.

Simplistic propositions, I'm afraid, always reveal simplistic minds.

REACH FOR THE STARS? APOLLO 11 NONSENSE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY SUMITRA ROJAGOPALAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Reach for the stars? What does that mean?

This piece is a pile of tired newspaper clichés.

Stunning as it was, the landing on the moon was in many ways the least important event of the space age.

I am a great fan of science and exploring space, but the moon landing was a gigantic, unbelievably costly public-relations stunt.

The robot missions Europe and the US have sent to the planets in recent decades have made astounding discoveries, as have the magnificent telescopes and other exotic instruments placed into earth orbit.

We have completely revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with these missions.

Apollo was a one-off dead-end project, immensely impressive like a gigantic fireworks display, but the actual hard science of the Apollo mission(s) was minimal, nothing that robots could not have done far better and far more cheaply.

When I was a boy I loved stories of traveling to planets, but Apollo turned out to be nothing like those stories, and with my adult understanding I realize how immensely more our limited resources can achieve by robot technology and new sophisticated instruments in space.

The notion of sending men to Mars any time in the foreseeable future only makes me think of the early-astronaut expression for flying in earth orbit, spam in a can.

WIND POWER LUNACY INDEED

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMNBY CHRISTOPHER BOOKER IN THE TELEGRAPH

The author makes some very good points.

Here's another very important one he missed.

Wind turbines provide intermittent power, and they are completely incapable of ever replacing what energy analysts call base-load power.

Base-load power comes from nuclear or coal or hydroelectric: it is power that is produced and may be called upon twenty-four hours a day.

Wind turbines operate - like 17th century sailing ships - only when there is sufficient wind. In most locations this is only a fraction of the day.

Another important point: wind-generated power costs about twice as much per unit of energy as some of our conventional sources.

So wind power is both unreliable in the timing of its availability and costly for what you get. Indeed, some research starting to emerge seriously questions the economic rationality of massive wind turbine projects like those in Germany.

IS IT OKAY FOR AMERICA TO MURDER ITS ENEMIES? A DAMNABLE QUESTION TO ASK IN A FREE SOCIETY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GORDON GIBSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, Mr. Gibson, there is no moral debate here.

I find it stunning that anyone living in a free country could even pose this question seriously.

The example of Israel is perfect. Israel has secretly, as well as in public, murdered those it calls enemies for decades.

And where has this taken Israel? Israel has no peace. Israel today has the worst reputation in the advanced world as a place of fairness and decency. And Israel gradually sinks lower and lower into a murky abyss of ghastly ethics and democratic values.

We have the witness of Israeli soldiers as to the horrible Nazi-like words with which they were prodded in advance of the Gaza invasion.

Indeed, it is a legitimate question whether Israel as we know it can long continue. The CIA only recently predicted that it would change in 20 years into something else, with many of American and European dual-nationals returning to the lands of their birth.

There is simply no question about these results. That's why Israel's defenders constantly today lash out at what they call anti-Semitism, calling the critics of human abuse haters.

You cannot have a society of laws and justice when you are unwilling to live by such laws yourself. The US has fallen into this same moral pit with its international torture gulags and its assassinations.

This kind of murder is absolutely no different to some rogue cops secretly executing the people they regard as criminals. It is no different to the ghastly work of death squads in Brazil going through poor areas of cities murdering children at night. And it is no different to the past several juntas in South America who made thousands “disappear” by kidnapping them and dumping them out of planes over the ocean.

God, the most precious thing we have achieved over countless centuries of ghastly murder and conflict is a society of laws and defined rights. How damnable that anyone would even toy with the idea of destroying that.

NEW YORK TIMES' ASSERTION THAT CIA HAD ASSASSINATION PLAN AGAINST AL QAEDA BUT DID NOT IMPLEMENT IT

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

We know perfectly well that America has been using drones and Hellfire missiles to kill many people, without charge or trial or conviction of anything.

Remember, too, Rumsfeld's bloody Nazi-like words about killing or walling away America's al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan.

It wasn't long after that that 3,000 prisoners disappeared.

They are said to have been loaded into trucks and driven out into the desert to suffocate, then being buried in mass graves. This was done by one of the warlord's men while American soldiers watched and picked their noses.

And let's not forget the war crime of the Iraq invasion. A million killed, a couple of million refugees created, a modern society set back for decades. Results no different to having used a few nuclear weapons against a people who did absolutely nothing against America.

So why would there be any hesitation over this? The American establishment has demonstrated a lawless disregard for international law for eight years.

Of course, there wasn't, and I'd bet it was that ghastly Dick Cheney who headed the operation and perhaps the new commander in Afghanistan who managed it.

America has no claim to any kind of ethics or democratic values in light of recent years.

The election of Obama has not changed this position at all, other than offering a friendly smile and a good mind in place of a pathetic lump.

A great deal of effort will be required to restore America's tattered reputation, and I see no efforts indicating that effort is underway.

AMERICA’S STRANGE POLITICAL CULTURE OF GRIEF AND DYING

Note to readers: this was written some years ago, but somehow I missed it when posting older pieces.

AMERICA’S STRANGE POLITICAL CULTURE OF GRIEF AND DYING

John Chuckman

Death in America does not come easily. That is, unless you are homeless or live on an Indian reservation or in one of the nation’s vast urban ghettos or are one of tens of millions of working poor with the kind of health insurance that features exceptions instead of coverage. In all these cases, likely few will note your passing. Losers don’t count in America, except at Fourth-of-July speeches by congressmen in tight races.

Anyone living in the United States must acclimatize to massive public displays of grief. Actually, “public displays of grief” is an inadequate term, for, apart from their Hollywood production values, they seem often to have a starkly political character.

But the subject is complex, and some of its ridiculous aspects reflect a society where beauty contests for five-year-olds in mascara and half-time football shows are cultural events. There is also a business aspect, for grief like everything in America serves the greater “entrepreneurial spirit.”

And there is, amidst all the mess and clutter, a sense of loneliness and anger that comes through, the echoes of life in a society of flourishing Social Darwinism. This last aspect will be the subject of a future essay.

Have you ever noticed the way Americans refer to any event involving death as a “tragedy?” This usage reflects the attitude of people who think they’ve banished death in their child-like enjoyment of measureless entitlements. Death must be really special, and so it is always a “tragedy.”

This word usage also reflects the political correctness that muffles all discussion of serious topics in America with a dense, fluffy coating of euphemism. It’s callous to talk honestly about something like death in America. Such talk may even qualify as being unpatriotic.

Now, “tragedy” has a very specific meaning, and it has nothing to do with accidents or unhappiness or even tears. It has to do with heroic attempts at something worthy despite the fates having ruled that one must fail. All sense of this powerful word is lost in contemporary America.

When first built, the Vietnam memorial was a remarkably dignified statement of grief, that seemed, with its low profile, simple design, and dark color, to speak to both the shame and loss of a pointless war. It was a miracle that anything so thoughtful came out of those years of insane violence.

But the dignity couldn’t last long. Clumps of statues – including figures carefully representing every identifiable marketing segment of the voter population, always excepting gays and Arabs – are springing up like toadstools after a period of warm rain. And, of course, there has to be an “information center.” Dignity is gradually giving way to the ambiance of a Niagara Falls gift shop.

Endless photographs of people rubbing names onto paper or touching the surface with tremulous fingers or leaving teddy bears, an entire small library of coffee-table books full of such pictures, have almost turned the wall into an official national how-to display center for grief.

The private acts of individuals grieving are, or should be, just that, private. Overly-photographed, overly-televised, overly-written-about acts are not private, they are public – and not the public of solemn ceremony, but the public of performance or advertising. Americans often no longer seem to understand this distinction, or, as with so many things, they want it both ways.

We also have a fake wall that tours the country on a truck, as well as several hundred local mini-walls and fake walls in cities, towns, and states that feature subsets of the names on the wall in Washington. I am sure there are people who imitate what they’ve seen repeated over and over in magazines, movies, and on television when the fake wall pays a visit at the local Wal-Mart parking lot. Tremulous fingers rub names on a plastic wall inside a truck.

To placate veterans of another hideous, pointless war, “the Korean conflict,” yet another wall was built – this one far less subtle or interesting, perhaps reflecting its being a rushed after-thought. This one unfortunately resembles a huge Russian-gangster tombstone with faces etched on dark granite. It comes with an army of life-size aluminum soldiers, “Joes,” (wasn’t that the name used by the cute little Korean lads always asking the generous Americans for chocolate in all the “B” movies about Korea?) grimly trudging along.

Soon we will have the grandest memorial of all – a gigantic pile of rock slabs and flags and men’s and ladies’ rooms honoring World War II. The artist’s renderings suggest a bowling-tournament trophy built on the scale of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. This eyesore is to be assembled after fleets of Sikorsky helicopters drop the required eighteen million pounds of granite dead center of The Mall in Washington.

Support for this one came right from the grass roots, from the sale of t-shirts and baseball caps at Wal-Mart and smoky beer-socials at veterans’ posts. The resulting memorial has everything you’d expect short of beer-bellied figures in baseball caps and XXX t-shirts labeled “Proudly Made in the U.S.A.,” but, who knows, that may come over time.

Building ugly, expensive memorials is not limited to Washington. Nor is their subject matter limited to war. Walls of names at one time threatened to become as commonplace as fried-chicken outlets. Several airline crashes have their own versions.

Now, other conceptions have come into vogue, perhaps inspired by the massive aluminum “Joes” of the Korean-conflict memorial. For example, we have a memorial with scores of concrete posts down in a Florida swamp in memory of an airline crash.

If we were to build something like this for every victim of every crash (about 50,000 Americans die in automobile crashes alone each year), memorials would soon represent a serious pedestrian hazard, with people tripping over them or banging into them while talking on cell-phones.

But the strangeness of America’s public grief goes far beyond strange memorials. We have people who gather, in Busby Berkley re-creations of 1970 flower-child scenes, to throw flowers into the ocean years after the crash of an airliner or to light candles in bottles along miles of shore – not private, spontaneous acts of grieving, but choreographed displays, carefully documented on film to become spots on the evening news or the covers of magazines. Grieving here becomes an avenue to Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Being a victim – or part of the subset, survivor – opens new prospects for even the humblest. Victims are interviewed, photographed, appear on day-time talk shows, travel, have books written about them, and often go on lecture circuits. They may even have agents. It’s pretty heady stuff, and it sure beats what most people do for a living.

Indeed, there is an almost irresistible movement in America to raise being a victim to the status of a profession. It is already an occupation.

Soon one or two dozen of America’s countless weird little colleges – places like the Bull Connor Memorial College for Christian Gentlemen, or the New Jersey Turnpike Drive-Through College for the Performing Arts – will offer courses and even degrees in victimhood and survivorship. Why not? You can get a degree in circus in America. Or a degree in recreational leadership. Or a degree in nothing. Four-year B.V.s just seem too good a business opportunity to be missed.

Most people in the world, following the loss of a loved one, seek peace or solace or some other definite and recognizable state of being. But in America, people seek “closure.” The quest to find an acceptable personal meaning for this undefined, self-help-book term is the starting point for many a career as victim or survivor.

Closure may come quickly or never – it is a very flexible concept, allowing for short, meteoric careers or more sustained, long-term ones. Some captives of the American embassy in Iran went on for more than a decade talking and writing about little more than being on the receiving end of what American armed forces are doing to Al-Qaeda prisoners in Cuba.

For about a year or two, every relative of every person affected by the Oklahoma City bombing was interviewed so many times that every ounce of pathetic remembrance was drained from them. I used to wince as soon as I heard the lead-in for another of these on National Public Radio. There was this awful mental image of reporters squeezing the ragged, pulpy scraps of an exhausted lemon to get a last drop of juice.

Of course, there are Oklahoma City victim support groups and associations of every description plus survivors’ reunions and home-coming events. Grief counselors – another field for combining grief and profit in America -streamed in for weeks, jamming the town’s airport and bus station. And probably upwards of four hundred books were published by and about victims. Victims can spend the rest of their lives just reading about themselves.

Again in Oklahoma City, there is the unavoidable colossal memorial – this time, it consists of a fleet of giant, ugly chairs that look as though no one would ever have wanted to sit on one.

Undoubtedly, the terrorist attack on New York will top all previous grief-events for intensity of as well as endurance. This promises to go on for decades. We already have decals, official logos, baseball caps, t-shirts, shorts, lapel pins, books, videos, electronic games, and framed prints. It is well on its way to spawning a major new industry of survivor-souvenirs and memorabilia. And a stupendous memorial is almost certainly in the works. Perhaps Disney will do a plastic copy to minimize the diversion of tourists to New York.

Now, don’t misunderstand. When the terrorists attacked, America deserved the world’s sympathy and help, and she richly received it. But now, quite apart from its being well past time for a grossly self-indulgent people “to get a life,” the country’s brutal, stupid response – undoubtedly killing more innocent people than died in the attack itself and causing more misery than can be imagined in such a poor land – means she has relinquished further claims to the world’s sympathy.

It’s hard to sympathize with people who insist on the very special, precious, eternal nature of their own loss, while failing even to notice what they do to others. The moral values here closely resemble those of certain survivors or victims in Texas who parade outside the prison during an execution and excitedly talk to newsmen about the closure someone’s death is bringing to their lives.

Closure on this one is going to be right off the scale and probably will take generations. At the heart of the matter, as someone perceptively noted, is that Americans want to be liked and just cannot understand why someone dislikes them so much. They could easily learn why if they only would listen to others, but that will not happen.

Not listening is something of a national characteristic, and there’s almost a sense of pride attached to it. But then, Americans are proud of a lot of loopy things, like the fact that B-2 bombers are such neat-looking, high-tech planes – totally ignoring the fact that each copy costs them about forty top-quality, well-equipped high schools and requires maintenance for every hour’s flying equal to the total annual salaries of several teachers.

Besides, the entire workforce of government and corporate media labor mightily day and night to keep emotions on the boil. CNN stupidly blares from every office and public place much like the tele-screens in 1984 reporting approved details of Oceania’s endless war. Outsiders are certainly not welcome. At all. Unless, of course, they’re sending troops or money.

There is simply no perspective in any of this. Every four or five years, Americans killing Americans generate enough names to fill the Vietnam memorial in Washington. They murder the same number of people who died in the World Trade Center every few months.

Indeed, until a recent, not well-understood decline in American homicides, this figure was enough killings just-over every two years to fill a new wall. Enough killings to equal the carnage of the World Trade Center about every six weeks (just a few years ago, murders ran at 1800 a year for New York city alone). That rate of killing created the equivalent of ten Vietnam walls in the first couple of decades after the war – all filled with names of Americans killed by Americans.

In the same state where tens of millions were spent on the Oklahoma City memorial, there is no memorial to, nor even much memory of, twice as many black Americans slaughtered in Tulsa by insane white mobs and dumped into mass graves during a rampage in the 1920s. Even their property was stolen, just as was the case for Japanese-American internees of concentration camps about twenty years later. Nor is there a memorial in the state of Florida where a similar event occurred.

The colossal brutality of American slavery receives no adequate memorial. The re-creations of slave auctions at colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, actually help soften the image of slavery, but even these silly play-acts by summer students in gingham are quite recent. Slavery at virtually all national historic sites was simply ignored.

Imagine the real auction blocks with slaves stripped naked to display their muscles. Or, in the case of females, to show other assets of interest to isolated plantation owners. Imagine the chained slaves defecating like horses as they are driven to or from the market in gangs. Imagine the stinking holds of ships where they were packed like cord wood, with the substantial numbers who died or got sick in shipment being tossed overboard as they were discovered. America has never come to terms with the immensity of slavery. Where’s the huge and piteous memorial owing here?

Something like two thousand kids a year are killed by child abuse in the United States – that’s another wall full of names since the end of the war in Vietnam – all children. But there is no wall provided.

Of course, the deaths of children and the documented abuse of literally hundreds of thousands more every year, doesn’t stop “pro-life” folks from weeping over fetuses. Never mind all those real kids in pain and difficulty, never mind all the homeless, never mind all the runaways and child prostitutes, and never mind all the families whose lives are no more than emotional vacuums – they’re murdering fetuses!

The bizarre outer limits of grief culture were reached when dozens of Americans gathered in Washington to weep over stem cells. Most of the mourners likely wouldn’t be able to offer a coherent definition of a stem cell, but that fact didn’t get in the way of their much photographed and televised grief. It wouldn’t surprise me if these people announce a special memorial to stem cells killed in New York labs by the terrorist attack.

Now, the discovery that a few middle-class children accidentally were killed each year by air bags created waves of publicity and demands for change. And change in the regulations came quickly. But the murder of an American child every few hours (until the recent decline, but the number is still shameful), often at the hands of another child in urban ghettos, generated only a flat-line graph on the monitor of national concern.

Executions in the United States elicit sympathy from some, but the death penalty is popular. Candidate Bush saw no political risk in making sophomoric remarks about people waiting to be executed in Texas. And there’s a well-known picture of him smirking during a remark about the upcoming death of a particular inmate.

America is still the only country to have used a genuine “weapon of mass destruction.” Twice. On civilians. Not much grief is ever expressed over that.
Actually, quite the opposite, as we are reminded at every commemoration of Pearl Harbor that the few thousand Americans killed in an attack on a military base more than justified the mass incineration of women and children, hospitals and schools.

One especially sensitive American reader recently wrote to tell me that the entire Middle East should have been reduced to radioactive glass after the attack on the World Trade Center, and that I should just mind my own business about it. Needless to say, such expressions of grief are touching.

Three to four million Southeast Asian people perished in the insane orgy of killing Americans call the Vietnam War, three hundred thousand went missing, and, over the years since, thousands of farmers have been crippled or killed by the mines and unexploded bombs left behind. Not to mention the unholy effects of an ocean of Agent Orange bubbling and gurgling its way through the water tables of Southeast Asia.

And yet, a quarter-century after that holocaust, there were news stories about whether the Vietnamese were being sufficiently cooperative in finding sets of American remains. Remains that by that time and in that place were surely nothing more than dust, buttons, and dental fillings.

This was just one of many demeaning rituals the American establishment put the Vietnamese through because of their intense rage at losing the war. But this absurd ritual of digging for dust and buttons was possible and took meaning precisely because Washington could exploit strange American attitudes towards death – virtually encouraging the pitiful, hopeless belief by a portion of the public in the survival of missing men – to support a vicious policy.

Every three days, cigarettes kill as many Americans as died in the World Trade Center. Does the Congress take serious action to suppress or better control cigarette smoking? Not really. Other countries have been far more imaginative and aggressive.

America’s courageous legislators leave most of the responsibility to the courts with state lawsuits whose very settlements presume continued heavy smoking and whose proceeds often are not even spent on smoking or health.

Now compare the daily, genuine menace of cigarettes with the threat of terrorism.

Despite the World Trade Center, an American’s chances of dying from terror are just about equal to slipping on a banana in the bathtub during a thunderstorm. Almost nonexistent.

Here was one event involving three thousand people out of a population of two hundred and eighty million, one event spread over a period of many decades of America’s controversy-filled dominance in world affairs. And that one event involved a series of unrepeatable favorable circumstances for the perpetrators, circumstances which actually reflect on the same glorious legislators’ unwillingness to attend to business before by mandating such simple measures as locked cabins and more professional inspection staff.

Yet after that one event, the good old boys in Congress instantly passed police-state legislation, negated many Constitutional protections, launched an undeclared war, ignored the Geneva Conventions, and stand ready to spend countless billions more.

It truly does make a remarkable difference who dies and under what circumstances in America.

THE DEATH OF ROBERT MCNAMARA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil.

He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America's penchant for obsessions, its Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it's Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls.

THE LIKELY TRUTH BEHIND PALIN'S RESIGNATION AS GOVERNOR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The latest word is that Palin resigned so abruptly owing to a new, yet-undisclosed scandal brewing.

It is said that an Alaskan building corporation called SBS was given the contract for building the arena in good old Wasilla, and in return it helped to build her rather impressive home.

A separate report indicates that the costly supplies were delivered from SBS while others actually built the home.

It is clear to anyone who has seem pictures of her home that it is beyond the means of this woman's meager achievements and large family and the high costs of building in Alaska.

No one who is thinking clearly believes her bizarre act was a political strategy. It simply is not the way politics are done in the U.S.

Candidates running for nominations virtually always retain their existing offices until the last possible moment.

Palin likely reached a secret deal with a prosecutor behind the scenes. We may never learn the full truth.

But we know from other events that her ethical standards are extremely flexible. The case of her wildly spending two hundred thousand dollars of other peoples' money during her campaign on designer clothes is the clearest example of many.

She was given an account for a modest topping up of her wardrobe, and promptly went on an insane buying spree buying stuff for her entire family.

McCain and establishment Republicans were outraged behind the scenes, but they managed to keep it reasonably quiet. She had to return the clothes and has no friends in that wealthy wing of the party.

THE IDEA THAT PALIN'S QUITTING AS GOVERNOR IS A POLITICAL PLOY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

“If I had to bet right now, I think we just saw the opening statement of the 2012 presidential race.”

Unbelievable, you quit your public post early, and that means you are running for president?

There must be something we do not know that has happened in her private or official life behind this.

It remains stunning that in such a powerful, rich country as the United States this woman would be taken seriously for even five minutes by any group larger than her immediate family.

Every time she opens her mouth a cliché falls out.

“It would be apathetic to just hunker down and go with the flow.”

Go with the flow? I think it’s called doing the job for which you were elected.

And her tiresome whimpering about “the real America.”

Haven't we had enough of the “the real America,” from every huckster and professional rustic in the Republican Party for decades?

"A recent CNN poll had Ms. Palin running neck and neck with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney."

Good God, the late freak Michael Jackson's name inserted into a poll in America would produce comparable results.

Besides, Mitt Romney is a stiff, cold, and unappealing man who spent twenty million dollars of his own money promoting himself and still failed.

“We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction.”

Quoted from the lips of the very Douglas MacArthur who was ready to bomb China with nuclear weapons and whose drive to the border with China - despite many warnings - brought a million Chinese "volunteers" into the war.

Wasn’t eight years of the first certified moron president enough?

________________________________________

Phil Gramm and what his momma used to say about “getting’ down outta” the wagon to help push it?

Deadbeat Bush and his never having read the international section of the newspaper? Lamar Alexander and his rustic lumberjack campaign shirts (custom made)?

Nixon and his wife Pat’s “cloth Republican” coat? Privileged, spoiled flyboy McCain, son and grandson of admirals, and his regular guy look?

Dan Quayle and his “potatoe”?

Former Sen. Roman Hruska and his plea that members of the Supreme Court should reflect all qualities, including mediocrity?

LAWRENCE MARTIN ON THE BIZARRE NOTION WE SHOULD CELEBRATE THE FOURTH OF JULY BECAUSE THERE IS A CANADIAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE MARTIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Lawrence Martin, this piece is a little pathetic.

I like Obama and wish him well, knowing full well no one can seriously alter the course of America's paranoid imperial policies.

After all, the combination of all the vested interests of the FBI, the CIA, the dozen other intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, America's Borgia-like wealthy clans, and its immense corporate interests reduce the voice of the people in an election to a little squib.

It's nice to see that charming smile at the White House, but it hardly compensates for all the things that are terribly wrong.

The Iraq withdrawal has turned into a game of words.

Fighting has intensified in Afghanistan.

America is busy interfering in Iran and lying about it.

Guantanamo continues, as do horrid places like Bagram Air Base.

The ugly laws of the Patriot Act continue.

Some military bureaucrat daily sits down to a control panel somewhere in the US and lines up a Predator Drone to fire Hellfire missiles down at some poor people in Pakistan who are promptly incinerated with no arrest, no trial, not even any proper charges. Then the operator happily goes to lunch, having done his morning’s work.

Israel got away with mass murder in Gaza, and now it continues to block entry even of building materials to help clean up the mess. More than a million tortured people and Obama doesn't say or do anything so far as we can see.

ONTARIO CONSERVATIVE HUDAK'S VERSION OF SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Hudak blubbering about Mike Harris sounds like the Ontario politics version of "Springtime for Hitler."

MORE HOT AIR ON THE WORKINGS OF PARLIAMENT FROM PRESTON MANNING

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY PRESTON MANNING IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Preston Manning is personally responsible for bringing up Harper as his political protégé.

So far as I know, it is the only political act of substance for which Preston Manning can claim any legitimate credit in his entire lamentable career.

And it is precisely Mr. Harper's mean spirit, his divisive political practices, and his selective ethics that have altered our Parliament for the worse.

Now, that good old Preston is endowed with a pseudo-academic, mini-institute of his own - a personal propaganda platform, courtesy of oil money - he can play the philosopher, above the fray.

What a bad joke this man is.

THE GOVERNOR OF BIBLE-BELT SOUTH CAROLINA AND HIS GLANDS

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is just standard stuff in the Bible Belt.

Tiresome, really tiresome.

This idiot actually told us how he went to tell his mistress it was over, accompanied by "a spiritual advisor."

The problem, Dear Governor, is not in your spirit, it's in your glands.