Tony Blair during an interview with the Globe and Mail in Washington on Sept. 1, 2010. Photo: Michel Temchine/Globe and Mail. In the interview, the former British prime minister stresses the importance of relationships in wielding influence.

Canada’s place is with America, Tony Blair says
Konrad Yakabuski Globe and Mail Canada September 2, 2010

For all the flak he has taken at home for his perceived kowtowing to the foreign policy agenda of the United States, former British prime minister Tony Blair still thinks there could be no better partner with whom to have a “special relationship.” This is an overarching theme of Mr. Blair’s newly published memoirs, and one he thinks governments in Canada and Britain alike should internalize as they seek to buttress their countries’ influence in a multipolar world.

“Canada has got to decide – in a world that is opening up, [with] power shifting to the East, where America is looking at its own alliances shifting – what its place is,” Mr. Blair confided in a far-ranging interview in Washington, where he is taking part in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. “You want to maximize the strengths of your relationships, so that in the evolving policy decisions that will determine the future – whether in trade, the economy or security – you’ve got a voice and a say that, looking ahead 20 or 30 years, is bigger than your size will permit you on your own.”

It is up to Canada to choose its partners. But Mr. Blair leaves little doubt about his own preference. The North American editions of A Journey: My Political Life begin with an encomium to the United States that, for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with recent history, is purposely absent from the version of the book he intended for domestic consumption. At home, Mr. Blair’s perceived subservience to America – most controversially by thrusting his country into former president George W. Bush’s war in Iraq – continues to weigh on his legacy. But for his Canadian and American readers, Mr. Blair serves up a full confession. “In a strangely different but deeper way than when PM, I have come to love America and what it stands for,” writes the ex-Labour chief who transformed his left-leaning party into a centrist juggernaut to win three consecutive majorities. “America is great for a reason …There is a nobility in the American character … a devotion to the American ideal that at a certain point transcends class, race, religion or upbringing.” ...

The BBC reports Tony Blair's memoirs, based on his time as the prime minister, have broken sales records at home. In its different edition, it is currently the 12th best-seller in the US and 9th in Canada. However, readers in France and Germany are not quite as interested, as the book only ranked 366th and 529th respectively.

Related: Tony Blair interview: On the Iraq war, George W. Bush, his wife
Jonathon Gatehouse Maclean's Canada September 2, 2010


Photos: Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images

Tony blair ranks high on the list of Britain’s most successful prime ministers, having led his Labour Party to three consecutive majorities. But by the time he left office in 2007, after a decade in power and two major wars, he was also among the country’s most divisive. His new memoir, A Journey, published this week by Knopf Canada, charts the ups and downs of a political life.

Q: A few weeks ago you announced your intention to donate the profits from this memoir, and I gather the advance money as well, to the British Legion to help wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Why?
A: I wanted to honour the commitment and show my respect to people who I think have done the most amazing job. Those from my country, the U.K., the U.S. and Canadian armed forces, all of those who have been in the front line of this battle. I wanted to donate to the Royal British Legion in order to try to help, and in particular prepare, those who have been injured to either go back to front-line service or civilian life. It’s a worthy cause, but I had actually decided to give the money to a charity connected to the armed forces before I had even written the book.

Q: It’s a decision that has been lauded by some, and dismissed as a calculating PR move by others. But in the book, you do refer to the emotional toll the deaths and casualties took on you. How has that burden changed you?
A: You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel both a sense of responsibility and a deep sadness for those who have lost their lives. That responsibility stays with me now, and will stay with me for the rest of my life. You know, I came to office as prime minister in 1997, focusing on domestic policy and ended up in four conflicts—Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. And it does change you, and so it should.

Q: The decision that you made to join the war in Iraq is a central part of the book. You still believe you made the right choice. Why?
A: Because I believed then, and still believe, that Saddam was a threat, that the threat had to be dealt with. What I tried to explain in the book is how Sept. 11 changed the calculus of risk for me. ...

Tony Blair memoirs blasted by soldiers families for 'crocodile tears' over Iraq
James Lyons Daily Mirror UK September 1, 2010

Families who lost loved ones in Iraq reactedwith fury last night at Tony Blair's self-professed anguish over thecarnage triggered by the war. In his memoirs, A Journey, the former PM says he regrets "with every fibre of my being" the lives lost since the invasion. He adds that he failed to foresee the "bloody, destructive and chaotic.. nightmare", but stops short of an apology. But Reg Keys, whose son Tom was killed by an Iraqi mob in 2003, blasted the sentiments as "crocodile tears". Tony Blair has revealed the depth of his torment at sending British soldiers into Iraq - saying he regrets "with every fibre of my being" the lives lost in the war. Yet the former Prime Minister's anguished words in his sensational memoirs published today stop short of an outright apology for the bloodshed triggered by the 2003 invasion. He insists backing President George W Bush was the right course to take and says he would still support the US-led conflict - arguing that leaving Saddam Hussein in power would have left Britain in peril and the Iraqis at his mercy. But in A Journey, which he calls "an extended love letter" to the nation, he nevertheless talks about the continuing burden of responsibility he feels to the dead and their families. ...

But the raft of opponents who have blasted his "memoirs of a war criminal" will hold several protests today as they focus mainly on his deeply personal reflections on Iraq and Afghanistan. Relatives of the dead last night sounded their fury in person. Reg Keys, whose Military Policeman son Tom was killed by an Iraqi mob in June 2003, said: "These are just crocodile tears from Blair. To say he regrets the dead is offensive to those who lost loved ones. He has lost nobody and this comes in no way close to admitting his responsibility for what he did. The bottom line is that he lied - because when I told Tom to be careful, he replied, 'We have to go because there is a madman about to drop WMDs on us'. In a way I'm glad Tom died not knowing the truth." Mr Keys added: "When I sat behind Blair at the inquiry, one mother asked him off-camera about the death toll. He just looked at us as cold as a fish and walked out. Now he's flaunting himself with this totally insensitive book." Military Families Against the War's Andrew Burgin added: "To say he regrets the lives lost is completely meaningless. He is still living off their corpses after being given a retainer by JP Morgan, who have taken over the banking system in Iraq." ...

The pernicious Mr. Blair is a text book example of those who create false realities. We believe our only real hope for the future lies in the fact that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence.

Flying the flag, faking the news
John Pilger New Statesman UK September 1, 2010

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the "intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society", and that the manipulators "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country". Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism "public relations".

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women that they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he made cigarettes "torches of freedom". In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit Company's monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a "liberation".

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that "engineering public consent" was for the greater good. This could be achieved by the creation of "false realities" which then became "news events". Here are examples of how it is done these days. ...

Forget the drones: Executive plane now an Afghanistan flying spy
Spencer Ackerman Wired, Danger Room blog USA August 11, 2010


Photo: Spencer Ackerman. Spy plane flights over Afghanistan have nearly tripled in the past year. The increased numbers show how the American military has retooled its most potent technological advantage — dominance of the skies — for the Afghanistan campaign. But so far, at least, the boost in air power doesn’t seem to have shifted the war’s momentum back to the American-led coalition. Visit this page for its embedded links.

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — With its rail-thin interior and the twin propellers flanking its nose cone like Salvador Dali’s mustache, the tiny MC-12 looks like it should be leisurely ferrying well-heeled passengers to the Vineyard. In the United States, this plane’s corporate cousins handle cushy jobs like that every day. But here in Afghanistan, this executive carrier has been turned into an unlikely spy — one of the U.S. forces’ most valuable intelligence assets, airmen say. One of the things that makes it so valuable, and so seemingly unusual: There’s a pilot sitting in the cockpit. Armed Predator and Reaper drones have become the robotic face of the American air war here – able to stay in the air for a day at a time, and blast insurgents with hellfire missiles. The MC-12, on the other hand, has no firepower. It typically flies for a couple of hours at a time. And it’s not supposed to be a competitor to the drones, but rather a more tactical and collaborative supplement.

If the Predator gives ground commanders and intelligence analysts long-term viewing, for instance, the MC-12 gives ground units more and complementary options: a snapshot overview of a rapidly changing battlefield, right at the moment when information needs change, working in collaboration with the unit on the ground. Or, to use the mantra of Lt. Col. Douglas J. Lee, the commander of the Old Crows, the MC-12 squadron for the Bagram-based 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, “flexibility and responsiveness.” Welcome to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance with a human face – or, maybe, welcome back. ... Inside, the MC-12 is too skinny to allow you to fully extend your arms from side to side. It’s a souped-up version of a C-12 Huron, King Air or Beechcraft passenger aircraft, a plane that the military has used since the ’70s. To put it more charitably, when Gates ordered the Air Force to rapidly get more spy planes downrange, the MC-12 was an “off the shelf” option, Briggs notes, procurable with relative ease and capable of getting outfitted with the latest surveillance tech. Suddenly airmen were looking at a familiar plane in new ways. And these MC-12s are way tricked out. The passenger seating is gone, replaced with two stations for the operators of the plane’s intel gear – meaning the MC-12 is crewed by a team of only four people, including the pilot and co-pilot. Each station is outfitted with several monitors and a forest of black cables leading to unfamiliar gizmos. Just how the plane’s spy gear works is classified, as is a lot of basic information about the MC-12, including how high it flies. “We have full-motion video capabilities, as well as SIGINT [signals intelligence] capabilities,” is all Lee will say. ...

Spin war shift: Military now bragging about Afghan air strikes
Spencer Ackerman Wired, Danger Room blog USA September 1, 2010


Photo: Noah Shachtman. Visit this page for its embedded links.

18 months after cutting back on air strikes, NATO is all-but-bragging about killing insurgents from the skies. In a stream of press releases, the military alliance in Afghanistan is boasting about the air-induced demise to 12 insurgents in the past 10 days. It’s the latest move in a spin war with the Taliban about civilian casualties, one that contrasts the air strikes’ “precision” with the insurgents’ “barbarism.” Reporters woke up this morning to an emailed report from the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command (yeah, those guys) about a “successful” air strike in Kandahar. The strike occurred Monday in an “open, unpopulated field” following an intelligence operation to track a supposed Taliban commander named Zulmai. “After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft engaged the insurgents, killing Zulmai and another insurgent, and wounded the other,” the press release reads.

Zulmai has company. The day before, in Helmand Province, Qari Hazrat, whom NATO identifies as a local insurgent commander, died with three colleagues in an air strike “while they were driving down an isolated road.” (Sounds like Task Force ODIN’s eyes in the sky were watching that road.) And the day before that, NATO aircraft followed a motorcycle driven by a man believed to be a leader of the Taliban-aligned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Kunduz Province and took him out. (NATO notably doesn’t claim to have verified the guy’s identity.) The hit occurred “after verifying insurgent activity and ensuring no civilians were present.” Two other strikes — one in the Zormat district of Paktia Province, the other in after an attack on a huge base in Khost — killed five other insurgents. In both cases, NATO assured, “No civilians were wounded or killed.”

But that str8-killa-no-filla message isn’t the only one NATO wants out. The other release reporters received this morning was about a roadside bomb attack in Kandahar that killed an official responsible for coordinating religious pilgrimages. “Criminals continue to attack Afghan civilians and government officials showing a total disregard for human life and the peaceful people of this country,” an IJC officer, Colonel Rafael Torres, said in the release. Torres is big on that “total disregard for human life” formation when describing the insurgency. He’s used permutations of it in seven prepared statements since July 12. That’s shortly after General David Petraeus arrived in Kabul to take over the Afghanistan war. ...

Oh, yeh! As NATO lauds 'precision air strike' locals fume.

NATO kills 10 Afghan election workers, wounds candidate
Jason Ditz Antiwar.com News USA September 2, 2010

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NATO officials today were bragging about a “precision air strike” against a vehicle traveling on “a series of remote roads in Rostaq district” and assured that “no civilians were present” at the time of the attack.

No civilians, it turns out, except for the ones in the car, as Takhar provincial officials quickly confirmed that the vehicle’s passengers were all election campaigners preparing for this month’s parliamentary election. 10 were killed and two others, including a candidate for parliament, were wounded. District governor Malim Hussain chastized NATO for the attack, saying the convoy of election workers was a ridiculous target and that NATO ought to realize that “a Taliban commander does not travel in a 100-vehicle convoy.” NATO has promised to “investigate” the attack but was very clear in the first place about the strike being deliberate, and believing that the target was some sort of Taliban commander. The fact that the intelligence was wrong will likely be little consolation for the victims, particularly as NATO strikes seem to be escalating and killing an increasing number of innocent civilians.

Last weekend a group of militants killed five campaign workers and the world reacted with shock. One must wonder today, when NATO killed twice as many, if it will be shrugged off as just another of many “accidents” in the nine year war.

Afghanistan holds strategic importance for India as New Delhi seeks friendly allies in the neighborhood, and because it is a gateway to energy-rich Central Asian states such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. - Jayshree Bajoria

... cool heads in New Delhi probably will see that India’s rapid move into Afghanistan was based on the wrong but understandable conclusion that Washington meant to defeat its 9/11 attackers. Undone by US-NATO fecklessness, they will also see that what once was a glittering economic and diplomatic opportunity has been transformed into a potentially war-causing question of national honor, willpower and prestige. ... Sadly, few governments in history have ever had the courage to get out of quagmires while the going was good. The US surged in Iraq and Afghanistan and still lost both wars, for example, and Russia is now losing its second war in the North Caucasus. At day’s end, the need of both New Delhi and Islamabad to save face and protect their strategic interests may well lead to the brink of a nuclear disaster over Afghanistan, which, to paraphrase Bismarck, probably isn’t worth the bones of one Indian grenadier. - Michael Scheuer

... there are good reasons for hastening and widening the integrated regional approach to stability called the Dubai Process that Canada supports. Such an approach requires a frank assessment of how Pakistan and Afghanistan (and India) are historically interlinked, how Pakistan has historically been the source of much of the instability in the region, and recognition that the current strategy on Pakistan is not working. - David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy

India-Afghanistan relations
Jayshree Bajoria Council on Foreign Relations USA July 22, 2009

India and Afghanistan historically have shared close cultural and political ties, and the complexity of their diplomatic history reflects this fact. India supported successive governments in Kabul until the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, and was among the first non-Communist states to recognize the government installed by the Soviet Union after its 1989 invasion. But like most countries, India never recognized the Taliban's assumption of power in 1996 (only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates recognized the Taliban regime). Following the 9/11 attacks and the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that resulted, ties between India and Afghanistan grew strong once again. India has restored full diplomatic relations, and has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for Afghanistan's reconstruction and development. But Pakistan views India's growing influence in Afghanistan as a threat to its own interests in the region. Experts fear for Afghanistan's stability as India and Pakistan compete for influence in the war-torn country. ...

Coming nuclear flashpoint
Michael Scheuer The Diplomat Japan August 30, 2010

If the West has had any success in Afghanistan, it has been in encouraging India to make a massive investment there of economic aid, infrastructure projects and national prestige. New Delhi is the largest regional investor in the country, and ranks second among all donors. With the West’s looming defeat in Afghanistan, however, India’s success will prove Pyrrhic, and may well set the stage for another, perhaps nuclear, confrontation between Pakistan and India. In their usual ahistorical manner, Washington and its NATO allies believed their 2001 occupation of the major Afghan cities signified not only the complete defeat of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but also an erasure of two millennia of Afghan history and religion that afforded an opportunity to start the country anew. In this context, they looked for other countries to share the enormous cost of nation-building, and India stepped up to the task without having to be asked twice.

And what has India been up to? Mostly infrastructure projects, such as a 250-kilometre highway from Zaranj near the Iran-Afghanistan border to the town of Delaram on the road that connects Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. Indian firms and Indian-government funding are also rebuilding the Salma Dam power project in Herat Province; building the new Afghan parliament house in Kabul; and constructing a power line that will use 600 transmission towers to bring electricity from Uzbekistan, over the Hindu Kush, to Pol-i-Khumri, and thence to Kabul. These and other projects now employ up to 4000 Indian nationals in Afghanistan. In addition, Indian firms are investing in Afghan agriculture and mining, and New Delhi is providing student scholarships, medical aid programs and training for Afghan police and civil servants. Clearly, Afghanistan’s battered infrastructure needs this help and much more. Like all foreign aid, however, India’s aid has come with accompaniments the Hamid Karzai regime fully accepts, but which tend to drive Pakistan’s government—and especially its general officers—to distraction and deep strategic worry. New Delhi, for example, has built one of its biggest embassies in the world in Kabul, and with it has built four consulates—some media reports say as many as seven—two of which, in Jalalabad and Kandahar, face Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. In addition, New Delhi has deployed nearly 500 men from the Indian Army’s Border Roads Organization to assist in highway construction, and as many or more paramilitary soldiers from its Indo-Tibetan Police force to guard Indian diplomatic facilities and construction projects. ...

Pakistan's problems now ours
David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy Embassy Magazine Canada September 1, 2010

Pakistan’s problems have become our problems. Canada’s immediate goal should be to help its government. Photo: Amjad Jama/United Nations

... As Pakistan's inability to control internal conflict, environmental degradation and a highly unequal society increase over time, the legitimacy of the government continues to erode and challenges from within increase. This latest disaster only serves to further undermine the current regime's legitimacy, which will be buttressed by an increase in military control since the military is a key provider of humanitarian aid in Pakistan.

Indeed, aid to Pakistan has historically been used to shore up a centralized authority structure, whether it was perceived to be legitimate or not. That reinforced authority structure, a kind of bureaucratic authoritarianism, has been in place since the 1950s. On the other hand, the risks that Pakistan poses to its neighbors have been shaped by its historic rivalry with India. Pakistan's behavior, specifically in reference to Kashmir, was, until it acquired its own nuclear weapons, formed by the need to counterbalance Indian military superiority. Beyond Kashmir, the news does not get any better. In addition to supporting separatist movements and terrorist attacks in India, Pakistan has provided sanctuary, training and arms to other hot beds of conflict throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka, southern Thailand and, of course, to the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the war against Russian occupation. More fundamental analyses suggest that the risks Pakistan poses to its neighbors lay in the need to externalize internal tensions through territorial expansion and conquest—what MIT Professor Myron Weiner called many years ago "The Macedonian Syndrome." ...

'Keep India out of Turkmenistan gas project'
Sify News India September 2, 2010

Pakistan must not let 'sworn enemy' India join the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan gas pipeline project to prevent it benefiting and acquiring more means to 'oppress the Kashmiri people as well as plot against Pakistan', an editorial in a Pakistani newspaper said Thursday. Noting that after a long hiatus, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan had revived the project to supply natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India via Afghanistan, the editorial in the Nawa-i-Waqt said that even during the preliminary talks on the project, it had urged the Pakistani government 'to ensure India is not made a part (of it). In the same way, we had urged that India is kept out of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project. But it was included but later surreptitiously and virtually abandoned the project under American pressure,' it said, adding that there was 'no need' to associate India with the Turkmenistan project. 'Associating India in this project would mean we aid the sworn enemy of our country to benefit and allow it to benefit financially. We allow it more means to tighten its grip on Indian Muslims and the oppressed Kashmiris as well as fund its schemes against our country,' the editorial said. ...

China has major presence in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir: Gilgit activist
Sify News India September 2, 2010

China has massive presence in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, said a US-based activist from Gilgit who added that massive investments were made by Beijing in that frontier region to expand the Karakoram Corridor as a strategic pathway. Washingon-based political activist Senge H. Sering, who was in India for over a year until March 2010 as Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), warned the Indian government about the Chinese presence over the years in Pakistani Kashmir. Sering has spoken about massive investments made by China in the frontier region to expand the Karakoram Corridor as a strategic pathway to the sea lanes linking to West Asia.

Highlighting the multifaceted character of Chinese presence in the Gilgit-Baltistan province, Sering said China-Pakistan cooperation in the corridor includes expansion of the Karakoram Highway (KH), construction of a parallel railway line as well as oil and gas pipelines, which will give China rapid connectivity to Pakistani ports lying in the gateway to the Strait of Hormuz and Suez Canal. The region's close proximity to Afghanistan, Tajikistan and India, in addition to Tibet and Xinjiang, gives China diplomatic, strategic, logistical and political gains, he said. He added that by linking the KH to Pakistani ports like Gwadar and Ormara, China will not just gain a strategic footprint and access to Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf but also could significantly influence the geopolitics and trade in the Indian Ocean Region as well as Central Asia.

Sering stated that the Gwadar-Karakoram Corridor combination endows China with a massive logistical advantage by significantly reducing the original distance of 16,000 km to a mere 2,500 km for the Chinese industrial areas to the Persian Gulf. 'Similarly, Kashgar, which is 3,500 km away from Chinese eastern shores, finds itself at less than 1,500 km from Pakistani ports near the Strait of Hormuz,' he claimed. The activist warned that when linked to the upcoming Urumqi-Beijing rail link, the commute time from central and eastern China to the Pakistani ports will come to a 'mere few hours'. By using the corridor as an alternative supply route, China will be able to embark of huge stockpiling of oil reserves. The KH expansion project, originally conceived by former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, entails the conversion of the highway to a 90-foot-wide expressway. Costing over $6 billion, the corridor will also provide a direct link for China and Pakistan to Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. He observed that Chinese dominance in this strategic Himalayan gateway will be a serious setback to India's strategic interests in this region, including on the Kashmir dispute. ...

Intro: Trading for security
Sheldon Richman The Freeman USA August 27, 2010

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... Oil producers need to sell their oil. They have nothing else to do with it. If they won’t sell it to Americans, they will sell it to someone who will sell it to Americans. That’s true for other commodities as well. Keep the trade channels open, and we have little to fear. We don’t need to be perpetually prepared for war to save the economy. What believer in the efficacy of markets could disagree?

The Great Myth

This point was made recently by Bruce Fein, a conservative lawyer who worked in the Reagan administration and at the Heritage Foundation. Writing in The American Conservative magazine, Fein quotes President Dwight Eisenhower as an exemplar of the view he plans to demolish. Eisenhower said,

From my viewpoint, foreign policy is, or should be, based primarily upon one consideration. That consideration is the need for the U.S. to obtain certain raw materials to sustain its economy and, when possible, to preserve profitable foreign markets for our surpluses. Out of this need grows the necessity for making certain that those areas of the world in which essential raw materials are produced are not only accessible to us, but their populations and governments are willing to trade with us on a friendly basis.

Before getting to Fein’s response, I note that Eisenhower’s position, which faithfully captures the ruling elite’s historic approach to foreign policy, violates the classical-liberal spirit as well as free-market principles, since it inevitably assigns a major economic role to politicians, bureaucrats, and generals in the service of special economic interests. Furthermore, it sullies the freedom philosophy by associating it with a picture of the less-developed world as a mere convenience for the United States, both as supplier of raw materials and as consumer of what American manufacturers can’t sell domestically at desirable prices. In other words, it rhetorically links the free market with empire, although these things have no true relationship whatever. Unsurprisingly the U.S. record on the ground is less free market and more imperialist. This criticism did not originate with Marxist-Leninists but with free-market advocates like Richard Cobden and John Bright. Joseph Schumpeter later elaborated the point.

Fein, author of the newly published American Empire Before the Fall, rejects Eisenhower’s statement completely: “[I]t is founded on a myth. Neither the United States nor any other nation has ever been deprived of essential goods and brought down by economic warfare. Smuggling, bribery, and middlemen eager to make money invariably evade the tightest embargoes.” The economic-security argument for a war-ready global military presence is worse than wrong. It’s dangerous since it is sure to create peril instead of averting it.

Items: Obama expands sanctions against North Korea
Robert Burns Associated Press/MSNBC USA August 30, 2010

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration expanded sanctions against North Korea on Monday by freezing assets of individuals, companies and organizations allegedly linked to support for Pyongyang's nuclear program. ... In announcing the new sanctions, the U.S. Treasury Department said President Barack Obama had issued an executive order authorizing action again four North Korean individuals, three North Korean companies and five North Korean government agencies. The order took effect Monday. ...

China and North Korea deepen ties during Kim Jong Il visit
Barbara Demick Los Angeles Times/Freedom Syndicate USA August 31, 2010

Chinese President Hu Jintao promised North Korean leader Kim Jong Il help in developing the North's economy and Kim spoke of his desire to restart nuclear talks during a summit Friday in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun, the Chinese government said Monday. The belated announcement put an end to a five-day state visit that was bizarrely secretive even by the standards of the 68-year-old Kim, one of the world's most reclusive rulers. Kim slipped across the border into China in his armored train early Thursday, eluding detection by border residents and journalists and giving a very public snub to former President Carter, who was in Pyongyang to successfully win the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American held since January for illegally entering the country. The message from Pyongyang appeared to be that North Korea has given up trying to mend fences with the United States and will concentrate on its relationship with its main patron, China. ... Anticipating criticism that China is coddling one of the world's most criticized dictatorships, the Chinese state press broke days of imposed silence on the Kim visit with a flurry of editorials defending the relationship. "A stable relationship with North Korea does not mean China has to be an enemy of Japan, South Korea or the U.S.," said the Global Times, a daily newspaper with ties to the Communist Party.

China-ASEAN trade surges
United Press International USA August 27, 2010

DANANG, Vietnam, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Trade between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations surged with the opening of a free-trade agreement, a Chinese official said. Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming said trade between China and the members of ASEAN jumped 49.6 percent January through July to $161 billion. The first of the year was the effective start date to the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area, the China Daily reported Friday. ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The agreement has given trade a boost that favors the ASEAN group, China's fourth-largest trading partner, which has come away with a $7.54 billion surplus this year. Chen released the figures at the ninth China-ASEAN economic ministers meeting, held in Danang, Vietnam.

U.S. absence at Southeast Asia trade meeting draws criticism
Daniel Ten Kate Bloomberg News USA August 26, 2010

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... The U.S. didn’t send a trade representative to a meeting in Vietnam this week of Asean economic ministers, where they are holding talks with counterparts from Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Russia. “The gap in U.S. strategy for intensifying its engagement in Southeast Asia is clearly trade,” Ernest Bower, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote in a report yesterday. “Confidence in the United States and its ability to lead and follow through on commitments is based on its economic well-being, and that status is being questioned by friends and competitors alike in Asia.” President Barack Obama, who became the first U.S. leader to meet with the 10-member bloc in November, has aimed to increase trade with Asia to help meet a January pledge to double exports in five years. ASEAN was the fourth-biggest market for U.S. goods last year and fifth-largest trading partner. “It’s a disappointment,” ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, told journalists today at the meeting held in the central Vietnamese city of Danang. “But there are many layers of engagement.” ...

China’s total trade with ASEAN surpassed the U.S. in the past decade, growing to $178 billion last year. China’s share of Southeast Asia’s total commerce has increased to 11.6 percent from 4 percent in that time, whereas the U.S. portion fell to 9.7 percent from 15 percent, ASEAN statistics show. ASEAN is rich in coal, oil and precious metals as well as containing sea lanes vital to world trade. ASEAN aims to form an economic community modeled on the European Union, though without a common currency, by 2015. It has already signed free-trade accords with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Chinese naval exercises beginning today are seen as a response to recent US-South-Korea exercises. Many experts wonder how far Beijing will go to flex its muscles in lieu of choosing the diplomatic route.

China holds naval exercises in Yellow Sea in response to US and South Korea
Asia News Spero News USA September 1, 2010

Beijing – The Beihai Fleet of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy will carry out exercises from Wednesday to Saturday in the Yellow Sea, off China’s coast. Some analysts see them as a response to joint US-South Korea drills held last month off the coast of the Korean Peninsula in the Sea of Japan, which provoked Beijing’s protests. The United States and South Korea have planned additional joint manoeuvres in the Yellow Sea early next month, though no dates have been announced. ... The United States has for some time insisted that the seas off mainland China and the Yellow Sea are international waters and are open to international shipping. China has conversely tried to exert its control over the same maritime space. Washington has also tried to reach a diplomatic solution to the various territorial disputes pitting China against its neighbours over their respective maritime boundaries. Beijing has instead tried to settle the matter by a show of force. In a recent editorial in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, Major General Luo Yua, a frequent outspoken commentator on military matters, said, “If no one harms me, I harm no one, but if someone harms me, I must harm them.” In an unusual step, Beijing has also widely publicised its military exercise on land and sea. ... In the meantime, two Chinese warships have docked at Yangon's Thilawa port on Sunday with great fanfare. They are set to participate in joint exercise with the Myanmar Navy. “The five-day mission is aimed at promoting friendly relationships between the two armed forces of the two countries and exchange between the two navies,” Xinhua news agency reported. China is the best ally Myanmar’s military regime has. It sells weapons to the junta, despite a UN ban, getting oil and precious commodities like teak and gems in exchange.

A show of force from China appears to have left the United States undeterred in flexing its military muscle in Southeast Asia. As Washington steps up military assistance to Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia to support its "soft power" interests in the region, its pose risks provoking a "hard power" confrontation with a China already on edge over naval maneuvers further afield. Freelance journalist Clifford McCoy looks at the regional initiatives.

US Southeast Asia pose risks China clash
Clifford McCoy Asia Times Online Hong Kong September 1, 2010

SINGAPORE - As the United States strengthens its military-to-military ties in Southeast Asia, the risk is rising that the "soft power" competitive dynamic for regional influence with China could soon return to the "hard power" confrontation of the Cold War. Stepped up US military links through a series of joint exercises and new defense agreements with countries in the region, in tandem with renewed political engagements, are becoming more apparently aimed at containing China's growing influence. With China already on edge over large-scale US-South Korean naval exercises held in the East Sea/Sea of Japan in July and directed at North Korea, state media in Beijing announced that China simultaneously carried out military exercises in the South China Sea, claiming them as the largest of their kind.

Despite that competitive show of force, Washington appears undeterred in reasserting its strategic interests in the region. United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates has committed to attending the inaugural meeting of defense ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Hanoi in October - and the South China Sea is expected to be a hot topic of discussion. The US commander of the Pacific Command, Admiral Robert Willard, told reporters in Manila on August 18 that Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea was causing concern in the region, but the US would work to ensure security and protect important trade lanes. ...

in a move that is ruffling domestic and international feathers, the Philippine president has cancelled his state visits to Vietnam and Indonesia. Aquino's decision was a break from tradition. From the time of Aquino's mother, the chief executive's first foreign visit was always with a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The Philippine president will travel instead to the United States.

White House scrambles to prepare summit with Southeast Asian nations
Josh Rogin Foreign Policy, The Cable blog USA August 31, 2010

Visit this page for its embedded links.

The White House is warning that an upcoming summit between the United States and Southeast Asian countries could be perceived as a failure unless the U.S. business community can produce deals to announce at the event, The Cable has learned. To head off this development, the Obama administration has asked business groups to come up with "deliverables" for the planned summit, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The chamber, which is helping the administration plan for the conference, sent out a note August 26 to its Asia Task Force asking it to search for business deals between American companies and those of member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that could be signed at the conference. The ASEAN region is the fifth-largest market for U.S. exports, and bilateral ASEAN-U.S. trade reached U.S. $176 billion in 2008. Without some "deliverables" of this kind, "the White House says it may be difficult to get the political support needed for the summit," the Chamber's note said, adding that the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council was also asked to hunt for things to announce.

The White House has not yet determined an exact date or location for the summit, which is intended to follow up on issues raised at the first meeting President Obama held with all 10 ASEAN heads of state last November in Singapore. The summit will likely be scheduled for late September or early October, the Chamber said. As for location, that depends. "If there are a significant number of deals that can be signed at the U.S-ASEAN Summit then it may be held in Washington. If not, the summit might be held in New York," the Chamber wrote. Sources confirmed that the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council received the same basic message from the White House. We're also told that there is concern that some heads of state from ASEAN member countries might not attend if the summit is held in New York, feeling the event has more significance if it's held in Washington. Presumably, they believe being in the capital will give them a better chance of scoring meetings with top officials. So, to recap: If there are not enough deliverables to announce, the White House will move the summit to New York. If the summit moves to New York, ASEAN heads of state won't attend. If ASEAN heads of state don't attend, the benefits of holding the summit at all will decrease even further. ...

UPDATE: Bower reports that Wednesday morning the White House announced the details of the summit. "The 2nd US-ASEAN Summit will be held on 24 Sept in New York. An extension of the 1st US-ASEAN Summit in Singapore, 2nd summit is scheduled to last 120 minutes, from 1-3pm. The White House has notified ASEAN leaders and now waiting for feedback," Bower said.

In South Asia, despite Pakistan's worsening internal security, the Chinese government and Chinese companies have shown themselves keen to invest in Pakistan's energy sector, which desperately needs foreign investment.

China backs Karachi refinery
Syed Fazl-e-Haider Asia Times Online Hong Kong September 1, 2010

KARACHI - China is to invest US$535 million to restart a stalled refinery project in Pakistan, which foreign investors and contractors abandoned amid the political turmoil in the country following the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.

The Indus Refinery Ltd (IRL) was a joint venture project between Middle East-based investors with an 86.7% shareholding and local sponsors with 13.3%, proposed in 2004. "The Chinese have been really helpful," The News quoted IRL chairman Sohail Shamsi as saying. "I thought no one would come and invest in the country. We tried to convince several Middle East investors, even the monarchs. But no one was interested." The Chinese will replace the Middle East-based investors, after IRL signed a contract with the government in Beijing for the civil works for the project to be restarted, possibly as early as next month. The China International Project Investment Management Center this month signed an agreement with IRL to establish the refinery, which will be the country's largest in the private sector. China National Chemical Engineering Group Corp is expected to be the contractor starting the physical work on the project. As a result of using the latest production technologies and through economies of scale, it will have a competitive edge over Pakistan's existing refineries. ...

Then there’s the fact that the lunch, during an official Harper visit to New York, was kept secret — until being unearthed recently by Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle. Harper also met twice in early 2009 with [Quebec media mogul Pierre Karl] Peladeau, according to Cheadle. - Linda McQuaig

I wish this story mattered as much as the mainstream media seem to think it does.- Margaret Wente

The tone of political discourse, already shifted sharply right with the advent of Conrad Black's National Post in 1998, is about to take a quantum leap further down that road. - Frances Russell

The CRTC is supposed to have some independence. It is supposed be at arm’s length. But, in this government, arm’s length has a different meaning, as in knuckles’ length. Among those hearing about the pending CRTC shakeup is Ian Morrison of the advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. As he correctly points out, the integrity of the CRTC has to be defended. “You can’t have the Prime Minister handing out radio and TV licences.” - Lawrence Martin reporting

Who’s afraid of right-wing TV?
Margaret Wente Globe and Mail Canada Last updated July 10, 2010

We’re taking on the mainstream media!” Kory Teneycke declared the other day as a dozen people from the mainstream media earnestly scribbled notes. “We’re taking on smug, condescending, often irrelevant journalism. We’re taking on political correctness. We will not be a state broadcaster offering boring news by bureaucrats, for elites, and paid for by taxpayers. We’ll be unapologetically patriotic.”

The combative Mr. Teneycke is big news in media circles these days. As the front man for the new Sun TV News Channel (also known as Fox News North), he styles himself a giant-killer. The giant is us, especially the insufferably liberal CBC (which used to employ Mr. Teneycke as a right-wing commentator, but never mind). The MSM have shut out conservative points of view. We’re out of touch with ordinary Canadians. What the public wants is more straight talk and red meat. At the same time, my leftish friends are in despair. In their view, it’s they who have been shut out. The mainstream media, they argue, are already largely right-wing and vast swaths of it – including talk radio, the Sun newspaper chain, the National Post and Maclean’s magazine (on account of Mark Steyn, I guess) have been hijacked by the forces of darkness. The Globe and Mail’s Rick Salutin, who has been published in the mainstream media for more than 30 years, often talks as if he is the last of the Beothuks. Personally, I’d love it if Sun TV took off. If our brains haven’t rotted out from watching Al Jazeera, we can probably endure Ezra Levant. The trouble is, will we want to? ...

Harper’s Foxy luncheon
Linda McQuaig Toronto Star Ontario Canada August 24, 2010

My guess is it’s pretty easy to arrange lunch with the Prime Minister. No doubt Stephen Harper often lunches with labour leaders and advocates for the homeless. So it should be considered no big deal that, among those the PM has lunched with, is U.S. media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who has probably done more than any single individual in recent years to push American politics sharply to the right. It’s interesting to imagine, however, why our Prime Minister would want to meet with Murdoch, whose Fox News TV channel has poisoned U.S. political debate and nurtured America’s extremist right-wing Tea Party movement. If you subscribe to the notion that Harper has no particular political agenda, his lunch with Murdoch in March 2009 might seem harmless, perhaps a purely social affair. But the evidence suggests they were discussing plans to transform the Canadian political landscape by creating a right-wing, Fox-style TV station in Canada. ... There’s been a tendency in the Canadian media to dismiss the threat of a Fox News transplant, on the grounds Canadians wouldn’t fall for that sort of nasty, right-wing extremism. But that comforting notion may be naive. ...

How Fox North became Harper's priority
Frances Russell rabble.ca Canada August 31, 2010

... [W] have the very real and menacing prospect of a major national media chain being bulldozed into a blatant propaganda tool by and for the party in power. The same national media chain intends to launch a Category One television news channel in addition to its string of newspapers to blare forth its political message 24/7. More ominously, the PMO is prepared, according to credible reports, to walk over any cavilling by the nation's broadcast watchdog, the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Corporation, to grant Sun Media's masters that coveted first-class licence.

Canadian Press reported last June that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had lunch with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York on March 30, 2009. Australian billionaire Murdoch owns Fox News; Ailes, a brass-knuckle Republican stragetist, is its president. Kory Teneckye, Harper's recently-retired communications director, was also present. As columnist Lawrence Martin reported in The Globe and Mail last week, Teneycke has become the point man propelling Quebecor's Pierre-Karl Peledeau's plan to create a right-wing television network modelled on Fox News. "The new network is a high priority for Harper, for whom controlling the message has always been... of paramount importance," Martin wrote Aug. 19.

Teneycke's takeover of Sun Media's political coverage was quick and brutal. Most of its best columnists were fired, including Greg Weston, who broke the story of the G20 "fake lake" embarrassment, and Eric Margolis, who alone among Canadian journalists, never ceased pointing out the folly of the Iraq war and the tragedy of the Afghan conflict. His sin was to continually point out that neither were ever about "democracy" or liberating hapless women and girls being hacked to death daily for going to work or school, but solely about oil and oil pipelines. The new crowd of journalists, all supposedly certified by Teneycke to be politically correct stenographers to Harper power, are proving their obedience daily in blended news/opinion coverage permanently slanted in favour of his government and against all who oppose him. ...

Is Stephen Harper set to move against the CRTC?
Lawrence Martin Globe and Mail Canada August 19, 2010

... It’s not every day that a prime minister sees his one-time spokesperson taking control of a giant media chain’s coverage of his government. What, one wonders, will our journalism schools be telling their students about that? As remarkable as it was, it received scant attention because the focus was on the TV bid. That bid hit a roadblock last month when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission declared that the top-category type of broadcasting licence being sought by Quebecor would not be available – if at all – until Oct. 1, 2011, at the earliest. Observers of Mr. Harper have long noted that he doesn’t take kindly to commissions or agencies or anyone else who tends to get in the way of his wishes. It’s only necessary to look at what happened at, among others, Rights and Democracy, Elections Canada, the Nuclear Safety Commission and Parliament. So the question naturally arises: Do the CRTC board members actually think they can get away with delaying or denying Mr. Harper’s wishes on Fox News North? Do they really believe they have some kind of independent power?

The CRTC chair is Konrad von Finckenstein, and his term doesn’t end until 2012. But insiders report that Mr. Harper now wants him out well before that date and replaced by a rubber stamper. The independently minded Mr. von Finckenstein, who did not respond to queries on the matter, is reportedly being offered judgeships and ambassadorships, one post being Chile. So far, he’s not biting. But the bait might get bigger. In addition, CRTC vice-chair Michel Arpin is being ushered out the door. His term expires at the end of the month; he’d like to stay on, but his request is not being granted. Names being floated as a replacement for either the chair or vice-chair include none other than Mr. Péladeau’s long-time right-hand man, Luc Lavoie. Mr. Lavoie is a competent fellow but, given his Péladeau ties, the idea sounds far-fetched, positively galling. But, then again, when has galling ever stopped Stephen Harper? Replacing the CRTC’s chair and vice-chair would pretty well seal the deal for Mr. Harper and Mr. Péladeau. Mr. Teneycke has said all along that the new station would be up and running by the start of 2011 with a Category 1 licence, meaning cable companies would be required to offer it as part of a package. ...

The American farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything he buys at retail, sells everything he sells at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways. – John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States—January 20, 1961 – November 22, 1963—(assassinated)

Issues in American commodity farming
Wikipedia Last modified June 4, 2010

... America’s largest crop is corn (maize). Corn is a readily available, reliable, storable and versatile commodity. In the average American supermarket, corn derived ingredients can be found in one-forth of everything on the shelves.[2] This includes not only food items, but also cosmetics, toiletries, cleaning products and household goods. Aside from that, corn is also used for the feeding of factory farm animals, for the production of alcohol, and can be used as a fuel source for both heat production and vehicles. On top of being a versatile commodity, corn has been genetically modified in a way that facilitates industrial-agricultural harvesting and large yields. ... America’s number one crop has an undeniably important place in both the economy and in peoples' diets. Versatility, affordability and the promise of large yields makes corn the perfect capitalist commodity crop. While commodity corn farming has important benefits, it can also have negative effects socially, economically and environmentally. ...

Corn farmers continue to produce an undifferentiated commodity, and the profits are shifting to those who are benefited by overproduction and low crop prices: the companies who process, package and market the final products. The economic troubles faced by corn farmers can help to explain why so many farmers are losing their farms; with decreased profits, and increased production costs many cannot stay in business. These farmers have to move to find work elsewhere. Along with this, the preference for monocultural agriculture in producing commodity crops has contributed to the depopulation of many rural areas across the American farm belt. Farming used to include the cultivation of a diversity of crops and livestock on one plot of land. When agriculture revolutionized into an industry with the responsibility to produce as much of a certain commodity as possible, it became more efficient to move the animals and other crops off of the land and utilize the space to grow commodity crops exclusively. The large supply of corn and other grains that resulted from this change made it more efficient to feed and raise livestock in concentrated animal feeding operations indoors rather than in grass pastures; small scale livestock farmers could not compete with the output produced by factory farms using cheap corn-based feed. ...

They say corn is king
Melanie Redman rabble.ca Canada August 30, 2010

You can view the offical trailer for King Corn from this page.

Like many of us, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, co-producers of the film King Corn, wanted to understand corn. They started off their journey by getting a professional hair analysis. Turns out, the carbon in their bodies originates from corn. It seems most of us these days are made of commodity corn that must be processed before we can eat it. (Fact: An Iowa farmer can no longer feed herself by the corn on her farm.)

Where, oh where, does commodity corn go?

• Feed for animals (about half of all commodity corn)
  
• High fructose corn syrup
  
• Corn protein
  
• Corn starch
  

Ian and Curt not only get an education about corn, but manage to pull together a film that educates the rest of us too. The only sad part is that, like many of us, they had to see that the mass production of commodity corn leads to economies that no longer support smaller farming operations. It also leads to cattle confinement feeding operations that result in a whole lot of sick cows and, eventually, unhealthy people. Pile on the high fructose corn syrup, and it's no wonder we're the first generation that might have shorter life spans than our parents due to our eating habits. ...

The overproduction and low cost of commodity grains encourages the mass production of livestock in concentrated feedlots and has led to large expansions in cattle feedlots, hog factories and broiler productions.

How factory farms make you sick
Russell Mokhiber CounterPunch USA August 30, 2010

Factory farms makes you sick. Let us count the ways. ... The Obama administration, which ran on a platform to confront factory farming, has done little to confront the problem. “They don’t have the stomach to take on the factory farms,” David Kirby, author of the book Animal Factory (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. “They are gun shy. I’m disappointed.”While the Justice Department and the Department of Agriculture are holding hearings on concentration in agribusiness, Kirby see the exercise as a glorified listening tour. He doesn’t anticipate federal intervention to prevent a disaster. But he says what needs to be done is clear – move from factory farms to family farms.

How? Ban non-therapeutic antibiotic use in animals. Bust up the processing cartels. “There are so few processing plants now and they are so centralized and big they want to process only factory farm animals,” Kirby says. Cut the billions in subsidies to agribusiness. “And by the way, why aren’t the tea partiers out there screaming about the billions of dollars we give away every year to these massive farms?” Kirby asks. “And then take some of those subsidies and give them to small independent farmers who can really use it to compete.” He says that the Obama administration ran on a platform to do some of these things. But it refuses to take on big agribusiness. Kirby says it will take a disaster to change the system. ...

Americans to U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Preserve life-saving medicines; reduce antibiotic use in food animal production
The True Food Network USA August 27, 2010

Today a broad coalition of organizations hand-delivered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more than 180,000 letters responding to the agency’s request for comments on rules governing the use of antibiotics on industrial farms. By the tens of thousands, American citizens have sent the FDA a clear message: antibiotics are a vital foundation of public health in the United States; overuse and misuse has created a threatening crisis of antibiotic resistance; and it is time for the federal government to ensure strict veterinary oversight and force the food animal industry to curtail the routine use of antibiotics.

The letters were collected by a coalition of organizations committed to saving antibiotics as pillars of public health in the United States. The groups include: Center for Food Safety; Center for Science in the Public Interest; CREDO Action; FamilyFarmed.org; Farm Aid; Food & Water Watch; Food Democracy Now!; The Humane Society of the United States; Organic Consumers Association; and Union of Concerned Scientists. The correspondence from citizens responded to requests by FDA for comments on two recent actions related to oversight and control of antibiotic use in food animal production. ...

Food recalls – why they could mean the end of real food as we know it
Raine Saunders Agriculture Society USA August 24, 2010

For a long time I believed that with every food recall story in the media, we’d see more and more people start taking notice of what’s going on in the food system – that food produced in factory environments is harming our health because everything is completely backward and geared toward the reign of big food and corporate agriculture – and that sustainable agriculture would start to become the order of the day.

Food recalls are not doing the job they should – they are not waking people up fast enough. The more we continue to support big agriculture’s products by ignoring these problems, the more control will be given to entities (the government) and corporations (Big Pharma and Big Agriculture – companies like Tyson, Smithfield, Swift, and Cargill who control over 80 percent of the food sold in our country) to dictate the future of food growth, production, sales, and health (or lack thereof).

The reality is, nothing will change until major modifications occur in the way we produce food. Stepping up regulations and laws will not change the recall situation or food-borne illnesses problem. ... [I]f we changed our farming practices and methods back to the ways used by traditional farmers through the ages, we would heal the land, the creatures, and our bodies of many of the modern illnesses, problems, and scourges that plague our modern feedlots and factory farm environments. And I won’t pretend things would be perfect; there is no such thing as perfect health. But we would observe a vast improvement in the way things are.

We can use science and technology to our benefit – by taking advantage of modern inventions and discoveries like electricity, cold storage, sanitation, proper storage containment and facilities, and combine it with the best nature has to offer: real food that has not been damaged, processed, heat treated, denatured, deodorized, treated with chemicals, and extruded or otherwise altered by mechanization devices and processes. Just as big pharma has overtaken medical practice in treating symptoms, not causes, with drugs, procedures, and surgery, modern agricultural approaches seek to stop symptoms, not eliminate the issues that cause the problem in the first place. Modern agriculture needs to heal itself by returning to tried-and-true methods used for thousands of years – and eliminate all these modern problems that exist due to the mechanization, standardization, deodorization, heat-treating, processing of foods which contain enzymes, nutrients, co-factors, amino acids, fats, proteins, probiotics (friendly bacteria), and prebiotics which aid in the digestion, assimilation, and nourishment of food in the body. ...

Every government needs to pay attention to what is happening. It is the opportunity for a debate about what is the right way forward and it may well be that if, at this juncture, we choose the wrong food policy, there will be no going back. ... Choosing what to do about it must be part of a democratic process. From now on, scrutiny of government food policy is as essential as using a knife, fork or pair of chopsticks, when it comes to putting food in mouths. - Rose Prince

Why food is costing us the earth
Rose Prince Daily Telegraph UK August 30, 2010

Hardly a morning passes without food making the headlines. This week has brought us the burger that thinks it's a pizza and news that eating asparagus makes you stay slim (fingers crossed it's the type covered in melted butter). And we heard that, if you eat pickled squid guts and single cream together, it tastes like strawberry shortcake. However, this month has also seen news reports on escalating wheat and coffee prices due to bad weather and poor harvests. Then on August 19 came the headline "Australian mining giant launches hostile $40 billion takeover bid for world's largest potash supplier". It is not immediately apparent what we're talking about here, but this is City champagne bar speak for "world runs out of food". This really is news about food that consumers should be fearful of.

The takeover sprung upon Potash Corp of Saskatchewan, Canada, by BHP Billiton of Melbourne, Australia, is a seismic shift in the future of food. Demand for potash, a mineral salt that is mined and used as crop fertiliser, has risen because the world needs to produce more food to feed an increased population, and there is limited land for cultivation. Added to this is the rising wealth of highly populated countries in Asia, with a growing appetite for meat. If you want to produce a lot of meat, you need a lot of grain – 7kg for every 1kg of beef – and the broad view is that to achieve this, you need large quantities of NPK – or fertiliser that combines nitrogen with potassium, the latter found in potash. There is a finite quantity of naturally occurring potash, or potassium carbonate, in the Earth's crust. You can manufacture it by burning down forests of broad leaf trees – let's not go there. Digging it out of the ground is the agri-business-preferred option. Meanwhile, to produce the nitrogen for fertiliser you need to burn an awful lot of – er – crude oil. Yep, the world is going to look like a perforated airflow golf ball by the time we've finished with it. ...

[Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London,] fears that the activities of BHP signify an attempt to control the food supply. I have similar fears about biotech firms. It is not that I believe eating a genetically modified salmon will result in a turnip growing out of the top of my head, but I dislike the idea that one organisation will own the world's soya seed supply. Finding the answer to feeding the world is becoming a battle for control. If Ian Fleming could pick up his pen now, the villain Blofeld would be taking a great interest both in potash and bio-technology. ...

Related: One of the reasons I have decided to run in the upcoming provincial election is because people are telling me so many stories of their struggles – and defeats – in dealing with the endless streams of bureaucratic regulations. - Michael Schmidt


The decline of farming and rural life can be seen along roadsides throughout Ontario, and not just in Bruce Grey Owen Sound riding, although that's where this picture is from. Photo: Michael Schmidt

Raw milk farmer Michael Schmidt on the campaign trail in his local riding: “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
The Bovine Ontario Canada August 30, 2010

Visit this page for its embedded links.

As you may remember, we reported earlier that raw milk farmer and food rights activist Michael Schmidt has decided to seek the Progressive Conservative party nomination in his local riding of Bruce Grey Owen Sound. Since then, Michael has been traveling around meeting people, hearing their stories and sharing his political perspectives. Here are some excerpts from material recently posted on his political blog and website: ...

Michael Schmidt warns against the regulations that are stifling Ontario's small farmers. South of the border, Lynn Barton shares the same concern. Focusing on one particular bill before the US Senate, she urges: "If you want to protect local agriculture, call your senators and insist upon amendments that would specifically exempt small farms and food processors."

Food safety bill would be bad for local farms
Lynn Barton Mail Tribune Southern Oregon, USA August 29, 2010

A national egg recall, local Umpqua milk contamination: When will it end? Isn't it about time the Senate followed the House and passed The Food Modernization and Safety Act (S 510)? When Congress reconvenes in September, the push will intensify to get this done. But Houston, we have a problem.

This bill treats small farmers the same as large industrial operations, requiring mountains of paperwork and outright meddling with farming practices. Think of raw milk producer Mookie Moss, recently featured on Page 1B of this paper. Fed up with interference by the Oregon Department of Agriculture, he renounced his state dairy license, limiting his market rather than fight red tape. S 510 would bring the power of the federal government down on Mookie, damaging and potentially destroying his business altogether. If you like buying locally produced food, if you think that diversified local agriculture is a good thing, if you are a small farmer, then you should be very concerned about this legislation.

Even though all the major food-borne illness outbreaks and recalls have occurred within the large, industrial food system, under S 510 the Food and Drug Administration would regulate everyone from Community Supported Agriculture to the farmers and food processors who sell at the local farmers market. Increased regulations, interference with farm practices, burdensome record-keeping requirements, penalties and fees could drive already struggling small farmers out of the business altogether. ...

The Kashagan offshore field in western Kazakhstan is the world’s biggest oil discovery since 1968. Photo: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters. “Kazakh-gate”, the scandal that inspired the George Clooney film Syriana and became one of the largest US foreign corruption cases in history, is nothing if not colorful.

Oil, bribery and the CIA
Richard Orange The National United Arab Emirates August 29, 2010

In June 2004, the lawyers for James Giffen, the defendant in the “Kazakh-gate” bribery case being heard in the US relating to offences allegedly committed in Kazakhstan in the 1990s, made an application to the presiding Judge William Pauley III: they wanted classified government documents. Lots of them. These, they said, would show that anything Mr Giffen had allegedly done – he was charged with arranging about US$80 million (Dh293.7m) in bribes for Kazakh oil contracts – had been done with the full backing of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). To Mr Giffen’s lawyers, it was a “public authority defence”. To others, it looked like something else. “The practice is referred to as ‘greymail’,” says Scott Horton, an assistant professor of law at Columbia University. “This is an increasingly popular defence because you can put the intelligence community on the defensive and the intelligence community’s instinctive reaction is to say, ‘Let’s get rid of this’.”

In Mr Giffen’s case it worked like a charm: more than six years after the defence team’s request, the CIA had still not provided some of the documents. The original prosecutor has long since given up the case and moved to private practice. And this month, his replacement agreed to let Mr Giffen plead guilty to nothing more than a “misdemeanour tax count”. ...

Related:



Kazakhstan consortium aiming for 2005 production start from Kashagan
PennEnergy USA Volume 61 Issue 8 2001

Kashagan, the giant shallow-water discovery in the northern Caspian, could be developed using artificial islands in place of conventional platforms. Kazakhstan's government aims to finalize the oil export route next year, with first production targeted by end-2005. These were some of the key issues to emerge from IBC's recent Kazakhstan Oil & Gas Conference in London. Progress on Kashagan was outlined mainly by ENI-Agip's Domenico Spada. His company was named operator this February of the North Caspian Sea project, previously known as OKIOC. The other partners in the consortium are BG, BP, Exxon-Mobil, Inpex, Phillips, Shell, Statoil, and TotalFinaElf. Thus far, two successful exploration wells have been drilled from the ice-resistant Sunkar barge, operated by Parker Drilling. The first, Kashagan East-1, was completed in summer 2000. This was followed by Kashagan West-2, 40 km distant, which was spudded last October, and completed this spring following tests. The location was 75 km southwest of Atyrau on the Kazakhstan coast. ... Altogether, the production sharing agreement incorporates 11 offshore blocks covering an area of 5,500 sq km.

Purpose-built icebreakers bring in materials to the seismic vessels and the drilling barge. Spada pointed out that the ice is mobile, which makes it difficult to manage and impossible to walk on. The ice also leads to sedimentary scouring. When it melts, water depths vary from 2 meters to 10 meters, but in the planned location for the third exploratory well, it drops to 1.7 meters. "Sometimes when the wind blows, the water disappears completely in that area," he pointed out. Gale-force winds also extinguished the barge's oil and gas burning flare this April. That led to a 210-liter oil spill in the sea, forcing temporary suspension of tests on Kashagan West-1. Spada claimed that the consortium was operating a zero discharge policy where possible, but the incident underlined the potential hazards for the local eco-system. Spada described this as "the most biologically productive part of the Caspian," being the main breeding grounds for sturgeon and other important fish and birds. The spill will not, however, lead to curtailment of the extensive tests planned for the current appraisal well. ...

Kashagan Experimental Programme Synectics UK August 30, 2010

The Kashagan Field in the Caspian Sea is considered the single most important discovery in the past 30 years and is the fifth largest oilfield in the world. The giant field covers an area of 75 km x 45 km and it is currently estimated that the field holds up to 38 billion barrels of oil-in-place of which 9 billion are potentially recoverable. With associated gas re-injection, it is estimated that recoverable reserves could increase to 11bn. The offshore location of the field means that it is subject to harsh conditions, where sea ice is present during the winter months and temperatures can drop to -40oC. Due to such extreme conditions, Synectics has been working closely with Agip KCO, the Operator for the consortium, on the Experimental Programme CCTV solutions to ensure that the CCTV solution provided can operate at such low temperatures. ... The whole project is estimated to cost $136 billion and the Experimental Programme is expected to commence production by 2012.

Should the Senate fund 'enduring' U.S. military bases in Afghanistan?
Robert Naiman Common Dreams USA August 27, 2010

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Much ink has been spilled over the President's pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. The White House insists that the date is firm. But the pace of withdrawal is yet to be determined, and the White House hasn't said a word about when -- if ever -- a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will be complete. There is a signed agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments that says U.S. troops have to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. But there is no such agreement for Afghanistan. Yet the majority of Americans have told pollsters that they think the U.S. should establish a timetable for military withdrawal.

Meanwhile, Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post, the Pentagon is planning for years of U.S. combat in Afghanistan:

"Three $100 million air base expansions in southern and northern Afghanistan illustrate Pentagon plans to continue building multimillion-dollar facilities in that country to support increased U.S. military operations well into the future."

Pincus noted that "…many of the installations being built…have extended time horizons. None of the three projects…is expected to be completed until the latter half of 2011. All of them are for use by U.S. forces rather than by their Afghan counterparts." But Pincus also reported that while the House has approved the money for this "enduring base" construction, the Senate has yet to vote on it. Should there not at least be a debate on this issue in the Senate? ...

Related: Karzai calls for new Afghan war strategy
Jason Ditz Antiwar.com USA August 29, 2010

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At a visit today with German parliament head Norbert Lammert, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called for yet another “new” Afghan War strategy, while insisting that the current strategy isn’t accomplishing its goals. “The experience over the past eight years showed that fighting in Afghan villages has been ineffective and is not achieving anything but killing civilians” Karzai noted, adding that it was necessary to consider a “rethink.”

Of course there have been official “strategy changes” a number of times in the past eight years. Indeed, President Bush announced a strategy in 2008 and President Obama announced two new strategies in 2009 for the war. These changes have amounted, in essence, to massive escalations in funding and the number of troops on the ground. So far the results have been a pretty precipitously steady rise in casualties and rising unpopularity of the war in Western nations. The civilian toll has also been rising, leading to criticism of the Karzai government.

US general warned British commanders that their Afghan strategy was a disaster
Michael Evans Times Online/Freedom Syndicate UK/USA August 30, 2010

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Disclosures by Lieutenant-General Benjamin Freakley, then the most senior US operational commander in southern and eastern Afghanistan, support the findings of an investigation by The Times earlier this year, which found that the British military had signed off on a plan for Helmand that was flawed from the start.

In an exclusive interview. General Freakley recalled that he had been scathing about the British effort in Helmand, which included an inability, in his view, to put sufficient pressure on the Taleban while also implementing reconstruction programmes to keep the insurgents on the back foot. When General Freakley felt that this was not happening, he became so annoyed that he flew to British headquarters in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, to make his point in person. “I made a strong recommendation that they take more offensive action in Helmand because the enemy was building up,” he said. “But I was told by the British that they didn’t believe their forces were ready, so we had all these troops just living in Camp Bastion [the main British base in Helmand].”

Those present at the meeting included Colonel Charlie Knaggs, who was in tactical charge of the British troops in Helmand, Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal, commander of the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment, and Mohammed Daud, then governor of the province. Britain’s most senior commander, Brigadier Ed Butler, who was in charge of all the British military personnel in Afghanistan, did not attend. After what by all accounts was a confrontational encounter, an official from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office took exception to the general’s tone. “He wrote back to London saying I had been scathing about the British effort. That was true. “But I was trying to get them to keep constant pressure on the adversary and to make sure that reconstruction efforts and spreading the governance of the Afghan Government went on simultaneously. “Without simultaneous action you’re just poking your finger at the problem,” General Freakley said.

He said that he admired Colonel Knaggs and enjoyed working with him. He said, however, that it was his impression that there was a difficulty, even friction, over the British chain of command, with Colonel Knaggs in charge of troops in Helmand and Brigadier Butler as the senior overall commander based in Kabul. “I think Brigadier Butler wanted Colonel Knaggs just to be in charge of the British provincial reconstruction team [in Lashkar Gah],” he said. General Freakley also criticised Britain’s tactic of sending small groups of soldiers to defend district centres in far-flung places around the province, such as Musa Qala and Sangin. The “platoon house” strategy led to assaults by the Taleban and heavy casualties among the British. “That tactic proved disastrous,” said General Freakley, who is now commander of US Accessions Command (recruiting and army cadets) at Fort Knox in Kentucky. “They thought of a platoon house as in Northern Ireland but in Afghanistan you have to be mobile against the Taleban. You can’t be in a fixed position because the Taleban will hit you.” At the time General Freakley was receiving messages from President Karzai asking the military to restore the district centres, which had been overrun by the Taleban. “You do that by attacking the enemy, putting in Afghan police and then staying mobile,” he said. Contradicting claims by British commanders in the past, he said: “I don’t believe Governor Daud [then the governor of Helmand] insisted on having the platoon houses.” Despite his criticisms General Freakley underlined his respect for the men of 16 Air Assault Brigade who were in Helmand in 2006. “I have the greatest respect for those men,” he said. “It seems that . . . they thought they were going to be involved in some sort of peacekeeping force but they had to face a very complex environment.”

General Freakley’s comments came as President Karzai said that the overall Nato strategy in Afghanistan needed to be reassessed. “The experience over the past eight years showed that fighting [the Taleban] in Afghan villages has been ineffective and is not achieving anything but killing civilians,” President Karzai said in a statement released after a meeting with Norbert Lammert, the president of the German parliament. Seven US troops died at the weekend in southern and eastern Afghanistan, while officials found the bodies of five kidnapped aides working for a female candidate in the western Herat province. A total of 62 international forces have died in the country this month, including seven British troops.

Noted: Canada’s dead soldiers immortal only in art
Murray Whyte Toronto Star Ontario Canada August 30, 2010

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MOUNT HOPE, ONT.— For a little more than three years, Joanne Tod has been living with war. Since the Canadian military arrived in Afghanistan, 151 soldiers have died; on five-by-six-inch birch panels, Tod has committed to painting the portrait of each of the dead until all troops are safely home. “I feel really strongly that I have to do this,” she says. “It’s gone beyond what I can even comprehend. I feel a real compulsion to say, ‘This is what’s happened, and this is truly the toll.’ ” Tod, a painter of no small renown — her work is in the permanent collection of both the National Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others — finished No. 119, Alexandre Péloquin, last week. The previous 118 are arranged in a taut mosaic, along with a fractured rendering of the Canadian flag, at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum at the Hamilton International Airport. ...

Tod says she hopes it would find its way to a contemporary art venue, such as the National Gallery or the AGO, where she’s shown often in the past. “It’s very frank, I know,” she says. “But it’s also an observation: These people are part of our national identity, like it or not.” Still, invitations from such places aren’t forthcoming. ... Tod has had her supporters. Recently deceased former National Gallery director Shirley Thompson “was a huge advocate,” she says, as is recently retired AGO senior curator Dennis Reid. “I think it’s a remarkable piece,” he says. “Joanne’s work is always absolutely a process, and this is the one that has gone the deepest.” Tod, naturally, has high hopes. “Having as many people see it as possible is a priority,” she says. “I want it to be in the public’s face.” ... At the Warplane Museum, the exhibition remains on view until Nov. 16. “We wanted to keep it for Remembrance Day,” Napier said, the museum’s busiest day of the year. The mosaic, disturbingly sparse, will remain at 118 until its next showing — whenever that may be. “There’s a lot of space left to fill, yes,” says Tod quietly. “Tragic, isn’t it?”

Iraq: A lot of people will be paying for this Bush/Cheney folly for a long time to come.

In defiance of the Constitution, 49,000 troops still deployed in Iraq
Joe Wolverton New American USA August 24, 2010

Left: In this photo taken on Aug. 21, 2010, U.S. Army soldiers from 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment — supposedly the last American combat brigade to serve in Iraq — salute during the casing ceremony at Camp Virginia, Kuwait. Photo: AP Images

Many of the nearly 50,000 combat troops waking up in the same Iraqi bivouacs would be surprised to learn that the “final combat brigade” has left Iraq and that Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended. As the cameras rolled, so did the tracks of the heavy mechanized vehicles carrying the troops of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade. Entering Kuwait, the soldiers would populate tent cities, awaiting their re-deployment home to their stateside headquarters in Fort Lewis, Washington.

As the 4th Brigade boards military transport aircraft for the flight to Germany and then home, many of their comrades are moving into the barracks they quickly abandoned in their zeal to leave behind the less-than-friendly confines of their desert camp. The Army’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a unit in the 25th Infantry Division based in Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, will assume the 4th’s duties, albeit under the less martial designation of “Advise and Assist Brigade.” All the military units remaining in Iraq will undergo similar rebranding. ...



Despite hype, Iraq war not ‘ending’
Jason Ditz Antiwar.com USA August 29, 2010

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It has been a week and a half since the American public was told in no uncertain terms that the “last brigade” had left Iraq, and President Obama took time out of his vacation yesterday to declare his campaign pledge to end the war “a promise kept.” Pointing out that the war hasn’t really ended is of considerable interest to some Americans, notably the families of the 50,000 US troops still fighting it, but nowhere is the reality of the situation more sobering than on the streets of Baghdad where, after seven and a half years of American occupation, the rising violence and the prospect of several more years of occupation and fighting make this supposed “end” a tough line to swallow.

Not that Iraqi media outlets aren’t desperately trying to go along with the “end” terminology, reporting that a sniper shot what would have been, in any other time, called a US combat soldier. But now he is a “US reconstruction team servicemen entrusted with protecting the US reconstruction,” and his being shot must come with two paragraphs about how the US has withdrawn all combat forces. That the withdrawal was a complete fiction, however, is not a closely guarded secret, and in the run-up US officials readily admitted that their plan was to simply rename all their combat troops to something else so they could announce there weren’t any left. This has left the post-announcement reporting centered primarily around stating the obvious or towing the official line.

Related: Iraq a complete failure for the United States
Amitabh Pal The Progressive USA August 27, 2010

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... And then there’s the harshness of daily life, which doesn’t seem to have improved much in seven years of strenuous exertions by U.S. occupation forces. “Many residents still don’t have access to basic services,” states the Economist. “Although American taxpayers have spent more than $700 billion, drinking water is scarce, health care and education are inadequate, electricity is available only for a few hours a day and petrol often runs out. Many say life is harder than ever.” It was all essentially for nought.

Of course, some are using the worsening of conditions to argue that U.S. troops should not leave. But Professor Juan Cole, one of the most perceptive observers of the region, says that this argument is wrongheaded. He asserts that the Obama Administration’s picking sides in the political game in Iraq is actually contributing to the instability. Besides, U.S. forces were not able to prevent the worst of the violence a few years ago. “Washington should stop trying to shoehorn its favorite into office, should stop showing favoritism to some ethnic groups over others, and should show some understanding of the necessity for good relations between Iraq and Iran (which are becoming major trading partners),” he writes in a commentary for CNN. “When it comes to the military and political balance, the U.S. has done enough damage, and can best help Iraqis by allowing them to return to being an independent country.”

Besides, the United States is not actually leaving the country. As Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report (a must-read for understanding the area), points out, there will still be 50,000 troops left behind in an “advisory” capacity. “The essential realities of the Iraq War remain the same: Iraq is oil-rich and strategically located at the head of the Persian Gulf. Its ruling elites are fractious and weak,” Toensing writes. “Our continued troop presence is an insurance policy against disaster for the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi politicians, who would otherwise fear violent overthrow, and the White House, which would otherwise fear Iraq’s takeover by unfriendly elements.” ...

AP IMPACT: Hundreds of projects left abandoned, incomplete as US hands off to Iraqis
Kim Gamel Associated Press/Minneapolis - St. Paul Star Tribune USA August 29, 2010

KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq (AP) - A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets.

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency. That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.

There are success stories. Hundreds of police stations, border forts and government buildings have been built, Iraqi security forces have improved after years of training, and a deep water port at the southern oil hub of Umm Qasr has been restored. Even completed projects for the most part fell far short of original goals, according to an Associated Press review of hundreds of audits and investigations and visits to several sites. And the verdict is still out on whether the program reached its goal of generating Iraqi good will toward the United States instead of the insurgents. Col. Jon Christensen, who took over as commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District this summer, said the federal agency has completed more than 4,800 projects and is rushing to finish 233 more. Some 595 projects have been terminated, mostly for security reasons. ...


A guard tower and fences with barbed wire for a U.S.-funded prison in Khan Bani Saad, Iraq, northeast of Baghdad. Photo: Kim Gamel/AP. Gamel writes:

Iraqis can see one of the most egregious examples of waste as they drive north from Baghdad to Khan Bani Saad. A prison rises from the desert, complete with more than two dozen guardtowers and surrounded by high concrete walls. But the only signs of life during a recent visit were a guard shack on the entry road and two farmers tending a nearby field. In March 2004, the Corps of Engineers awarded a $40 million contract to global construction and engineering firm Parsons Corp. to design and build a prison for 3,600 inmates, along with educational and vocational facilities. Work was set to finish in November 2005. But violence was escalating in the area, home to a volatile mix of Sunni and Shiite extremists. The project started six months late and continued to fall behind schedule, according to a report by the inspector general. The U.S. government pulled the plug on Parsons in June 2006, citing "continued schedule slips and ... massive cost overruns," but later awarded three more contracts to other companies. Pasadena, Calif.-based Parsons said it did its best under difficult and violent circumstances.

Citing security concerns, the U.S. finally abandoned the project in June 2007 and handed over the unfinished facility to Iraq's Justice Ministry. The ministry refused to "complete, occupy or provide security" for it, according to the report. More than $1.2 million in unused construction material also was abandoned due to fears of violence. The inspector general recommended another use be found for the partially finished buildings inside the dusty compound. But three years later, piles of bricks and barbed wire lie around, and tumbleweed is growing in the caked sand. ...

In a SPIEGEL interview, Ayad Allawi, Iraq's former and possibly future prime minister, discusses the withdrawal of US troops, the power struggle in Baghdad and the "very high possibility" of a new war in the Middle East.

'Every corner in the region is frightened'
Spiegel Online Germany August 29, 2010

Three bodyguards are sitting in front of his hotel suite in Kuwait, their guns bulging from beneath their suits. It's Ramadan and the men are fasting. But Ayad Allawi isn't, and he asks for an espresso. Allawi doesn't even create the impression that he lives according to religious rites. And that's also one reason why, nearly six months after the Iraqi election, he still hasn't become prime minister. He is one of the few representatives of a secular and supra-denominational Iraq.

The son of a Shiite businessman, Allawi became a member of the Baath Party as a student, but fell out with Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and then worked with Western intelligence services in the effort to topple the dictator. In 2004, the United States installed him as the first prime minister in postwar Iraq. After a year of governing as interim prime minister, he failed to win a democratic election to remain in the office. But in March 2010, he led in the parliamentary elections, with a two-seat advantage. Despite almost six months of talks, however, he still hasn't managed to form a government.

Allawi is pessimistic about the region. He says that on the night before his interview with SPIEGEL, he conferred with Arab leaders until 1 a.m. With a growing number of conflicts in the region, he says, the situation has grown more serious than most there have ever experienced. "Early today," he explains, "one of the most experienced of us came in and asked: Has the next catrastrophe in the Middle East broken out yet?"

SPIEGEL: Dr. Allawi, you are a neurologist by profession. How would you describe Iraq's current state in medical terms?

Allawi: Critical. It could go either way. Everything depends on the doctors' management of the patient. If the management is good, Iraq can survive. If not, then God forbid.

...

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven. - Psalms, 107:23-30, (KJV)

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Two posts today that deal with "business in great waters" and the state-policy problems thereof: "Convention on the Law of the Sea: Enabling nuclear proliferation by sea?" and "A venerable conundrum: Contemplatiing corsairs".

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is the primary treaty governing the oceans. It gives every state control of the seas extending twelve miles from its coast, and the water beyond this is considered the “high seas,” or international water. The treaty establishes what is known as flag-state sovereignty. This means that only a state whose flag a ship is flying can interdict that ship in international water. The law of the sea treats a ship on the high seas as if it were part of a state’s physical territory, a sort of floating embassy. Justin Muzinich argues for a reconsideration of flag-state sovereignty.

The nuke in the cargo hold
Justin Muzinich Hoover Institution USA Policy Review No. 162 August 2010

On june 17, 2009, an American destroyer began following the Kang Nam, a North Korean ship suspected of carrying missile components to Myanmar. As the New York Times headline read, “Test Looms as U.S. Tracks North Korean Ship.” Despite United Nations Resolution 1874, adopted five days earlier, which called “on Member States to inspect and destroy all banned cargo [traveling] to and from” North Korea, the U.S. did not stop or board the ship.

In December 2002 the Spanish Navy intercepted a ship carrying scud missiles capable of being armed with nuclear warheads traveling from North Korea to Yemen, a known terrorist haven. When warning shots were fired across the So San’s bow without response, Spanish special forces boarded the ship from a helicopter using fast ropes. Spain discovered the missiles, which were not on the ship’s manifest, hidden by 40,000 bags of cement. Yemen claimed the shipment was for legitimate defensive purposes, but the steps that had been taken to conceal the missiles, North Korea’s involvement, and Yemen’s terrorist links gave the world reason to worry. The So San was allowed to continue to its destination with its missiles.

Since beginning to monitor incidents of nuclear trafficking in 1995, the International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) has documented at least 196 instances of illegal trafficking, including at least 18 that involved weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, the primary fuel of nuclear weapons. Given these statistics, one might have expected international law to become much less hospitable to nuclear traffickers after terrorists made their intentions clear on September 11. Yet the nonproliferation regime in some ways looks very much like it did before the towers fell, providing surprisingly little room to combat the spread of nuclear weapons.

If this sounds counterintuitive, it is for good reason. The UN has often made pronouncements denouncing proliferation, including Resolution 1874 five days before the Kang Nam incident and Resolution 1540 in 2004, declaring that nuclear proliferation “constitutes a threat to international peace and security.” However when it comes to a crucially important component of nonproliferation — physically stopping the transport of prohibited material — international law generally precludes action in international waters. The U.S. and Spain understood this, which explains the treatment of the North Korean ships.

This essay will argue that international efforts to date do not go far enough in preventing proliferation by sea. It will examine the current state of interdiction policy; provide historical and forward-looking justifications for change; explore why change has not occurred; and, finally, advocate a politically realistic path for reform. ...

In the 17th century, handfuls of men using small boats, scaling ladders, and sheer nerve made piracy a profitable line of work. Not unlike the 21st century. What was to become the manual on how to deal with pirates appeared in 1618 under the title Discourse on the Beginnings, Practises and Suppression of Pirates. And therein lies a tale for our times.

True barbarians
Book review by Henrik Bering Hoover Institution USA Policy Review No. 162 August 2010


Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean by Adrian Tinniswood. Published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, London, March 2010. (Since 1987, Jonathan Cape has been an imprint of Random House.)

As career officers will tell you, drive, determination, and a willingness to try something new are the key requirements in a competitive world. This lesson has certainly been taken to heart by the Somali fishermen who, armed with Kalashnikovs and rpgs, have made a career switch to piracy. Starting out modestly around 2005, they are no longer content just to use small craft operating from the coast, but now employ mother ships which range as far from their home waters as the Seychelles.

In 2008, they captured a Ukrainian ship, the MV Faina, loaded with tanks and antiaircraft guns, which brought in a $3.2 million ransom. Soon after came the supertanker, the Sirius Star, which netted them $3 million. And one of President Obama’s early actions in office in April 2009 was to order Navy Seals to kill three pirates who were holding hostage the captain of cargo ship Maersk Alabama in one of its lifeboats. Ironically, the ship was carrying relief supplies for Somalia.

In 2009, there were 217 pirate attacks, resulting in 47 captured ships and 867 captured crewmembers. The ransom business amounts to around $100 million a year.

On shore, a stock exchange operates where investors can put up the money for future operations. Backers abroad help designate what ships to attack, assess the value of the cargo, and supply the pirates’ destination and course. The pirates also have access to sophisticated equipment. To check the genuineness of the air-dropped ransom money, they have counting machines of the same type used by Western banks.

As a result of their activities, insurance premiums have shot up. Many shipping companies avoid the Suez Canal and now send their vessels around the Horn of Africa, which adds to fuel costs. Others hire private security firms to go with their ships. A multinational force patrols the Gulf of Aden. But on several occasions, when patrol ships have captured pirates, they have had to release them again because no one wants to prosecute them, as they are likely to be stuck with them, once they have served their time (Somalia is regarded as too dangerous a place to which to repatriate them). This, in the words of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, “sends the wrong signal.” As a result of American pressure, in the first piracy case to come to trial in Europe, a Dutch court in June sentenced five Somali pirates to five years in jail, which shipping analysts see as unlikely to deter future attacks. Predictably, the pirates have asked for asylum and to have their families sent over upon their release. More sensible efforts to set up regional courts to prosecute captured pirates are ongoing.

As many have pointed out, the long-term solution is on shore. The problem is that the country does not have a responsible government, and it is unlikely to get one anytime soon.

When the historian Adrian Tinniswood was researching a book on an English 17th-century family, he found that one of its members had gone off to become a Barbary Coast pirate; intrigued, he decided to pursue the subject. And to his amazement, he saw history repeating itself: “As I wrote of how a handful of men using small boats, scaling ladders and sheer nerve had managed to hold the world to ransom in the 17th century, I watched on tv as a handful of men using small boats, scaling ladders and sheer nerve were managing to hold the world to ransom in the 21st.”

His vivid Pirates of Barbary is a study of state-sanctioned piracy in the 1600s, a very different phenomenon from the kind of freewheeling, highly individualistic efforts one associates with Caribbean pirates. The economies of the city-states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Sale in Morocco were all built on privateering and slave labor, and all owed allegiance to Istanbul as outposts of the Ottoman Empire. Thus when a Barbary state had declared war on a European nation, the Sultan in Istanbul would publically make sympathetic noises to foreign diplomats complaining about the pirate infestation in the Mediterranean, while being thoroughly pleased with his pirate proxies waging war on the infidels. ...

From the book's jacket copy:

Pirates of Barbary is an extraordinary record of the European renegades and Islamic sea-rovers who terrorised the Mediterranean and beyond throughout the seventeenth century. From the coast of Southern Europe to Morocco and the Ottoman states of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, Christian and Muslim seafarers met in bustling ports to swap religions, to battle and to trade goods and slaves - raiding as far as Iceland and New England in search of their human currency. Studying the origins of these men, their culture and practices - from pirate etiquette to intimidation tactics - Adrian Tinniswood expertly recreates the twilight world of the corsairs in fascinating detail, and uncovers a truly remarkable clash of civilisations. "Pirates of Barbary" draws on an incredible wealth of material, from furious royal proclamations to the private letters of pirates and their victims, as well as recent Islamic accounts to provide a new perspective on the corsairs, both as criminals and as devout warriors engaged in a battle against European incursions. The result is a kaleidoscopic image of a wild and exotic people, place and time, and a fascinating insight into what it meant to sacrifice all you have for a life so violent, so uncertain, and so alien that it set you apart from the rest of mankind.

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Friday, August 27,2010

Commentary
Maybe this is why so many are looking to focus elsewhere

Living
"Mazal tov" to all who cross someone's line

World News
Record rains – but Pakistan is dying for water

Thursday, August 26,2010

National News
Department of Foreign Affairs despairing of Harper government's immature, unsophisticated foreign policy pronouncements

Commentary
Aborignial voices: "There’s no such thing as neutral Inuit in the broader Canadian context. We’re either exotic and mysterious or disgusting and unworthy."

World News
Gypsies and veiled women: Is French president Nicolas Sarkozy pandering to a crude populism, to a racist xenophobia?

Social Ideas
Sex at Dawn: Our promiscuous prehistory

World News
Death of a 21st century spook: Murdered in a Pimlico flat registered to a mysterious company, his body found in a sports bag in the bathroom—Gareth Williams died a spy's death.

Wednesday, August 25,2010

Agriculture
Ignored by multinational corporations and corrupt public policy makers, citizens act to protect the food supply and the planet

Living
Good eggs: A Toronto grocer and a Wisconsin cheesemaker

Commentary
Bad eggs: Jack DeCoster's agribusiness just one example of many corporate rotten eggs that put the lie to government regulatory agencies

Commentary
The Gulf of Mexico crisis is not over

National News
Selling the F-35 purchase and deeper military integration with the US: Pop goes the weasely Harper gov't

Tuesday, August 24,2010

Social Ideas
Jerusalem, an icon of all three monotheistic religons: Deep-rooted Christian tradition has put its mark on British, US policies in Mideast

Monday, August 23,2010

Regional News
Civil rights—incomplete argument from an angry eye on British Columbia: Has he finally 'come undun'? By all rules of decency the Campbell government must resign

National News
Fight for your civil rights: Staying silent is not an option & G20 detainees court appearance

Living
Pharmaceutical phantasises: Drug busts

Sunday, August 22,2010

Commentary
On the surprising moral force of disgust

World News
Iraq: Excuse us? Who won?

Commentary
If neocons can't get Obama to attack Iran, they are creating a narrative so the next Republican president will

William Black: "Unlimited taxpayer bailout" of FDIC coming; FDIC shell game hides the bailout
Mike "Mish" Shedlock Mish's Global Econoomic Trend Analysis USA July 25, 2010

Visit this page for its embedded links.

... The FDIC is now deep in the red and the situation is getting worse every week. The situation would be even worse were it not for widespread "extend and pretend" tactics that keep woefully insolvent banks in business. To address the situation, the FDIC is going to start selling U.S.-guaranteed FDIC senior certificates. However, it has no Congressional authority to do so according to former thrift regulator William Black. ... FDIC is a moral hazard. ... Taxpayers will be the ones to pay the price. ...

FDIC = Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Thank G-d, the only religious oppresseors we have to worry about are Muslim.

‘Sinner’ singer given 39 lashes by rabbis
Jerusalem Post Israel August 27, 2010

A singer who performed in front of a “mixed audience” of men and women was lashed 39 times to make him “repent,” after a ruling by a self-described rabbinic court on Wednesday.

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, founder of the Shofar organization aimed at bringing Jews “back to religion” (hazara betshuva), has made it his recent mission to fight against musical performances for both men and women. His “judicial panel,” with Rabbi Ben Zion Mutsafi and another member, sentenced Erez Yechiel to 39 lashes in order to “rid him of his sins.” In a video clip of the court posted on the Shofar Web site, Ben Zion said that those who make others sin (mahtiei rabim), such as artists who make men and women attend performances or dance together, have no place in the world to come. He displayed a leather strip he said was made by his father from ass and bull skin, with which Yechiel was to have been whipped. Yechiel, who said, “I accept upon myself the lashing for my sins,” was ordered to stand by a wooden poll with his head facing north (“from whence the evil inclination comes”), his hands tied with a azure-colored rope (“a symbol of mercy”), and served his “sentence.”

On Monday, June 10, 2001, Timothy McVeigh was "calm" as the hour of his death approached, spending his last day on earth in a stark 9-by-14-foot cell, watching TV, enjoying a last meal of ice cream and saying goodbye to his family and his lawyers. McVieigh (a Roman Catholic and a US Army veteran) had been convicted of killing 168 people when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

While the words mazal (or mazel in Yiddish; "luck" or "fortune") and tov ("good") are Hebrew in origin, the phrase is of Yiddish origin, and was later incorporated into Modern Hebrew. The phrase is recorded as entering into English from Yiddish in 1862 as "mazel tov". One day, perhaps, we can all shout "Mazel Tov!" for the cessation of the BS that surrounds us. Oh, wait. What's that English idiom? Right. Fat chance. Kýrie, eléison.

Pakistan: A question of water
Gwynne Dyer Common Dreams USA August 21, 2010

This may not be the most tactful time to bring it up, with much of Pakistan underwater and many millions homeless, but Pakistan's real problem is not too much water. It is too little water - and one day it could cause a war. The current disastrous floods (to which the response of both the Pakistan government and the international community has been far too slow) are due to this year's monsoon being much stronger than usual. But that is just bad weather, in the end: every fifty or one hundred years you can expect the weather to do something really extreme. It comes in various forms - blizzards, floods, hurricanes - but it happens everywhere.

The long-term threat to Pakistan's well-being is that the country is gradually drying out. The Indus river system is the main year-round source of water for both Pakistan and north-western India, but the glaciers up on the Tibetan plateau that feed the system's various tributaries are melting. While they are melting, of course, the amount of water in the system will not fall steeply - but according the Chinese Academy of Sciences, some of the glaciers will be gone in as little as twenty years. Then the river levels will drop permanently, and the real problems will begin. ...

Ten killed in Sindh tribal fighting
Rahmatullah Soomro Dawn Pakistan July 9, 2010


A big police contingent stormed the village late in the evening and brought the situation under control.

SHIKARPUR: Ten people were killed in an armed clash between Magsi and Qambrani tribes in the jurisdiction of Golodaro police station on Thursday evening. According to sources, the gunbattle followed a brawl over irrigation of paddy crops near Kuddan village. The sources said the Qambrani tribe lost seven men while the Magsi tribe lost three. Sanaullah Abbasi, a senior police official, told Dawn five bodies had been recovered. A big police contingent stormed the village late in the evening and brought the situation under control.

India-Pakistan water treaty poised to burst
Graeme Smith Globe and Mail Canada July 27, 2010

Lahore, Pakistan - The last time water issues pushed India and Pakistan to the brink of armed conflict was half a century ago, when Bashir Ahmad Malik was an engineering student. His government asked him to drop his graduate studies and join a team of experts urgently negotiating a way to share water between the rival countries. “Both sides were threatening war,” he said. “India was shutting the canals, starving or flooding us.” The Indus Water Treaty averted disaster when it was signed in 1960. Even when India and Pakistan did eventually go to war over different issues in the following decades, they continued to respect the water treaty.

But the agreement now seems to be unravelling. Dispute-resolution mechanisms, never invoked in the first four decades of the treaty, have been triggered twice in recent years. The latest round of talks broke down earlier this month, as the two sides failed to agree on a neutral umpire to settle a quarrel over India’s plans for the Kishanganga hydroelectric project in northern Kashmir. Even the veteran water expert who assisted with the original negotiations now feels that the treaty was inadequate. “At the time, we felt it would be all right,” Mr. Malik said. “But now, I don't think it was a good treaty for Pakistan.” Loss of faith in the Indus Water Treaty comes at a time when water disputes between the nuclear-armed neighbours have reached unprecedented levels of bombast. ...

Record rains – but Pakistan is dying for water
Omar Waraich in Islamabad The Independent UK August 1, 2010

... Nearly a third of Pakistan's 175 million people lack access to clean drinking water, and water availability per person has fallen from about 5,000 cubic metres in 1947, when the country was founded, to only a fifth as much today. The lack of clean water threatens the lives of its poor and weakens its sagging economy as a rapidly growing population and parched agricultural sector are deprived of crucial supplies for drinking and irrigation. Despite the national and global attention that is given to the country's troubles with terrorism, insurgency and a fragile political order, it may be Pakistan's little-noticed water crisis that costs the greatest number of lives. In the long term, this may prove its most destabilising political issue. According to a recent report, water and sanitation-related diseases cost Pakistan's national economy nearly £1bn a year. Yet critics say that the government has paid scant attention to the problem and has approached it wrong-headedly. ...

Since Pakistan was founded more than 60 years ago, water availability per person in the country has shrunk by 80 per cent. In 1947, sta-tistics suggested each person had 5,000 cubic metres (175,000 cubic feet) per year; today, they have 1,000 cubic metres. Over the past six decades, the population has swollen from 34 million in 1951 to nearly 175 million today, making Pakistan the sixth most populous nation on earth. The population continues to grow at a rate of 1.6 per cent. Water has also featured prominently in Pakistan's long-standing disputes with its arch rival, neighbour and upriver nation India. The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty which set out an equitable distribution of the six rivers that flow from Indian Punjab and Indian-controlled Kashmir into Pakistan is now under severe strain, despite having withstood three wars. ...

Drowning today, parched tomorrow
Steven Solomon New York Times USA August 15, 2010

Hard as it may be to believe when you see the images of the monsoon floods that are now devastating Pakistan, the country is actually on the verge of a critical shortage of fresh water. And water scarcity is not only a worry for Pakistan’s population — it is a threat to America’s national security as well. ...

Pakistan needs to rebuild and overhaul the administration of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network. For decades, Islamabad has spent far too little on basic maintenance, drainage and distribution canals, new water storage and hydropower plants. To some extent, these deficiencies have been masked since the 1970s by farmers drilling hundreds of thousands of little tube wells, which now provide half of the country’s irrigation. But in many of these places the groundwater is running dry and becoming too salty for use. The result is an agricultural crisis of wasted water, inefficient production and incipient crop shortfalls. Like Egypt on the Nile, arid Pakistan is totally reliant on the Indus and its tributaries. Yet the river’s water is already so overdrawn that it no longer reaches the sea, dribbling to a meager end near the Indian Ocean port of Karachi. Its once-fertile delta of rice paddies and fisheries has shriveled up. Chronic water shortages in the southern province of Sindh breed suspicions that politically connected landowners in upriver Punjab are siphoning more than their allotted share. There have been repeated riots over lack of water and electricity in Karachi, and across the country people suffer from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and pollution. The future looks grim. ...

Nunavut /ˈnuːnəvʊt/ (from Inuktitut: ᓄᓇᕗᑦ ) is the largest and newest federal territory of Canada; it was separated officially from the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999, via the Nunavut Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act. The creation of Nunavut – meaning "our land" in Inuktitut – resulted in the first major change to Canada's map since the incorporation of the new province of Newfoundland in 1949. Nunavut comprises a major portion of Northern Canada, and most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, making it the fifth-largest country subdivision in the world. Map: November 5, 2007 (revising map of April 10, 2006)

Harper rallies troops participating in northern military exercise
Canadian Press/Winnipeg Free Press Canada August 25, 2010

RESOLUTE, Nunavut - For navy diver Leading Seaman Dierdre Doiron, water is water. It doesn't make much difference to the Prince Edward Island native whether she's going under outside Halifax or in the waters of Allen Bay in Resolute. But everything else about participating in the military's annual northern exercise is different, and that's why it matters, she said. "It's just to prove that we can actually work up here," Doiron said, minutes after emerging from a dive under the watch of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "Sometimes it is like a forgotten land. We take care of overseas and everything else but you've got to protect your own country as well." ...

About 1,500 personnel, mostly from Canada but also from Denmark and the United States, are engaged in land, sea and air exercises for most of the month of August. "To operate in the North is tougher than operating in Afghanistan from a logistics standpoint, because you are so far away from all the services," said Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk, who was also on the ground for the prime minister's visit. While the soldiers from all three countries are working alongside one another, their governments are engaged in a different kind of work around boardroom tables — negotiating who owns what in the increasingly in-demand Arctic waters. Part of the operation, said Natynczyk, is to show how well Canada has things under control. "We are demonstrating our capacity to exercise sovereignty of our own nation," he said. The Harper government has pledged to significantly boost that capacity, adding new patrol boats and an icebreaker to assist northern operations. "We live in a time of renewed foreign interest in Canada's Arctic," Harper told a few hundred people assembled in an aircraft hangar. "With foreign aircraft probing the skies, vessels plying northern waters and the eyes of the world gazing our way, we must remain vigilant." ...

Harper visits Arctic, Russian bombers too
Michel Comte Agence France-Presse France August 25, 2010

OTTAWA — Canada's prime minister observed military maneuvers in the Arctic on Wednesday while touting sovereignty over the far north, one day after fighter jets chased Russian bombers along its northern frontier. "Our government is committed to protecting and asserting Canada's presence throughout our Arctic," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said. "With other countries becoming more interested in the Arctic and its rich resource potential, and with new trade routes opening up, we must continue to exercise our sovereignty while strengthening the safety and security of Canadians living in our High Arctic." ...

Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States claim overlapping parts of the region believed to be rich in hydrocarbons. With the acceleration of Arctic ice melt, interest in the region has soared. Shrinking ice has opened up sea navigation, and could give oil rigs improved access to the sea floor. So-called Operation Nanook this year involved Canada's air force, navy, coast guard, and 900 ground troops, as well as the Canadian Rangers -- Inuit hunters tasked with keeping an eye on the region -- testing their combat capabilities in the frigid cold. The US Navy 2nd Fleet, the US Coast Guard and the Royal Danish Navy also joined in the war games in an effort to enhance the allies' capabilities to cooperate in Arctic waters. While in Resolute Bay, Harper reportedly reeled out the air line of a navy diver as she dove into the Arctic Ocean, and later observed a simulated oil spill being contained. ... Earlier, the prime minister reaffirmed his government's support for the Canadian Space Agency's mission to launch three new RADARSAT satellites into orbit to watch over Canadian territory. In a statement, Harper said the RADARSAT Constellation will provide the Canadian military with daily coverage of Canada's land mass and ocean approaches "from coast-to-coast-to-coast, especially in the Arctic." ...

We need F-35 jets, the Russians are coming: Feds
Bryn Weese Toronto Sun Ontario Canada August 25, 2010

OTTAWA — The feds are using Tuesday's Russian bomber flights over the Arctic to justify buying 65 F-35 stealth fighter jets for $16 billion. Two Russian bombers were intercepted by Canadian CF-18 fighter jets Tuesday in the Arctic. At one point, while being shadowed by two Canadian CF-18s, the Ruskies flew within 30 nautical miles of Canadian soil but never entered Canadian airspace. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office said Wednesday the "Russian challenge" in the north is one reason why the government is buying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets. "It is the best plane our Government could provide our Forces, and when you are a pilot staring down Russian long range bombers, that's an important fact to remember," reads a statement from Harper's office. ... The defence committee met briefly Wednesday to decide what witnesses they'll hear from at another meeting on Sept. 15 to discuss the F-35 purchase. But Defence Minister Peter MacKay lashed out at the opposition, calling the committee meetings "make-work projects," and again refuted the opposition's claims the purchase is without public competition. ...


Prime Minister Stephen Harper, second from right, talks with Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk, centre, standing on an ice floe in Allen Bay in Resolute, Nunavut, yesterday. Harper paid tribute to efforts of the military in protecting Canadian Arctic sovereignty. Photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters. The professionals inside Foreign Affairs are growing increasingly frustrated at Harper's hostility toward Russia that is manufactured for entirely domestic political purposes.

Sabre-rattling not doing us any favours
John Ivison National Post Canada August 26, 2010

... The Russian presence was a timely opportunity for the Prime Minister's Office to once again subvert diplomacy to the interests of domestic politics. "The CF-18 is an incredible aircraft that enables our Forces to meet the Russian challenges in our North," Mr. Soudas said, an attempt to blunt criticism that its replacement is not suited to the kind of security tasks Canada is likely to undertake in the future. In the short term, raising the spectre of the Russian bear in the air must have seemed like a good idea, since it knocked the committee meeting off the news agenda.

But here's why it was not: The Canadian government's own strategy document says our only territorial disputes in the Far North are with Denmark over Hans Island and the United States over the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea. A dispute with Russia may yet emerge if there are overlapping claims along the Lomonosov Ridge, a mountain range beneath the Arctic Ocean, where a mini-submarine planted a Russian flag in 2007. But co-operating with Russia may yield more benefits than confrontation. Where Canada claims the Northwest Passage as an internal waterway, so Russia claims the Northeast Passage -- both of which are set to become navigable. As Norway's Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, told me when he visited Ottawa in March, the West would benefit from "updating our mental maps, which are frozen in the Cold War" when dealing with Russia.

This is understood only too well by Canada's bureaucrats in the Department of Foreign Affairs, many of whom have been left holding their heads in their hands in despair after the latest intervention by the PMO. Sources inside the department said there is increasing frustration at a hostility toward Russia that is manufactured for entirely domestic political purposes. The relationship between this government and its bureaucracy is showing signs of fraying to breaking point. ...

Related: Prime Minister Stephen Harper took new steps in his campaign to promote sovereignty in the Arctic -- by dancing. In the audience, people took out digital cameras to capture a scene not often seen.

Harper dances with Inuvialuit performers
Bruce Campion-Smith Toronto Star Ontario Canada August 26, 2010

Includes a brief video of Harper dancing with the locals.

INUVIK, N.W.T. – It’s not often the nation sees Prime Minister Stephen Harper unscripted. But thanks to the persuasive powers of the Inuvik Drummers and Dancers, there was Harper taking part in a traditional Inuvialuit dance here Wednesday, thrusting fur-trimmed cowhide gloves high in the air. The prime minister has built his government’s Arctic strategy on costly pledges that include icebreakers, patrol ships and remote research stations. But here Wednesday night, all it took was a few minutes of unscripted hip swaying to win a crowd over and show his alliance to the north.

The group had been entertaining about 300 people at the Midnight Sun complex as they waited for Harper to arrive for a speech, performing elaborate dances that date back thousands of years. With drums beating and voices calling out, each dance tells a story from the native culture. They performed for Harper after he arrived – and then invited him to join in a freestyle dance. “I told them to come up . . . Our tradition is that we invite everyone to join us when it’s time to have a freestyle dance,” said Lillian Elias, a third-generation dancer. “It doesn’t matter whether you are native, non-native. We’ll teach them how to dance,” said Elias, elegantly clad in traditional outfit fashioned from the pelts of wolverine, wolf and beaver. At first the prime minister resisted, gesturing for federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, who was born in Inuvik, to go in his stead. But finally he caved to the entreaties of the dancers, donned the gloves and took his place with them on the floor. ... At the end, Harper high-fived a fellow dancer and later posed for a photo with the group. Harper’s dance wasn’t quite as dramatic a bonding experience as Governor General Michaelle Jean’s famous taste of bloody seal meat. But in a week-long northern visit filled with highly scripted photo ops and staged community visits, the dance was a welcome impromptu gesture. Elias gave Harper full marks for his traditional dance moves, saying “He did very well.” ...

PM shimmies, shouts as he joins Inuit dance group
Canadian Press/CTV News Canada August 26, 2010

... Health Minister Leona Agluuykak, who is from Inuvik, was first to her feet, joining a growing crowd preparing to the gentle beat of a drum. Seconds later, Harper rose. He accepted a pair of traditional cowhide and beaver fur gloves, and as the drumbeats picked up he shyly swayed and bounced. But as the community closed in and their shouts grew louder, Harper grew bolder. He crouched and shimmied, adding his voice to the chorus. At the end, wild applause and a high five from one of the dancers. ...

The spontaneous dance was a stark contrast to the morning of carefully staged and crafted photo opportunities with soldiers participating in Operation Nanook in Resolute, Nunavut. Harper's five-day tour through the north is about promoting Canadian sovereignty, be it through military might or economic development. He has also repeatedly stresses that the people in the north have a major role to play in those goals. "We also support your efforts on sovereignty," said Michael Miltenberger, deputy premier of the Northwest Territories. "To us, the bedrock of sovereignty are the people of the Northwest Territories, in our communities, on the land, our rangers, gatherings like this that demonstrate that the north is fully inhabited and we are fully part of Canada." Harper was to leave Inuvik early Thursday morning to travel to Tuktoyaktuk.

Nunavik. First languages in this area are Inuktitut & Cree but often English is the second language. Most Cree speak French as their second language. Map: Inuit and Cree Radio & TV Community Broadcasters: Nunavik Region, Arctic Quebec Canada


Photo: An inuksuk. Nunavik… mere words can't begin to describe it: the endless silence. Nunavik (Inuktitut: ᓄᓇᕕᒃ) comprises the northern third of the province of Quebec, Canada. Nunavik covers a land area of 443,684.71 km² (171,307.62 sq mi) north of the 55th parallel. Larger than the U.S. state of California, it lies in both the Arctic and subarctic climate zones. All together, about 11,000 people live in Nunavik's communities, and this number may be growing. Nunavik means "place to live" in the local dialect of Inuktitut and the Inuit inhabitants of the region call themselves Nunavimmiut. The region is known for its beautiful landscapes, even though broad-leaved trees are rare. Here, wild tundra or taiga and boreal forests are mainly populated with pine trees, spruce, aspen trees, poplar trees and larch. The territory enjoys many rivers and lakes, providing fishers with diversified species in abundance. The mountains are spectacular, especially the Torngat Mountains. Until 1912, the region was part of the District of Ungava of the Northwest Territories. Negotiations for regional autonomy are underway, and it is possible that Nunavik will become a self-governing region within the province of Quebec, with outstanding land claims resolved, in 2011.

Thoughts on CBC News North
J.C. Grey Avataq Cultural Institute blog Nunavik June 16, 2010

I watched CBC News North for the first time in a long time yesterday. I saw a lot of things that bothered me, not in terms of actual content, like headlines and stories, but things like: the reporters, the people they chose to interview and also the fact that it was all in English. I know! I know! We have CBC News Igalaaq, but that’s entirely in Inuktitut. A lot of Inuit, younger Inuit especially do not speak Inuktitut well enough to really understand the program and it delivers news from a purely inuit point of view –not that there is anything wrong with that, but CBC News North is more rounded in the kinds of stories it tells, it’s like, a more holistic approach to informing northerners. I know, translating CBC News North into Inuktitut would mean having to translate it into other northern indigenous languages.. I am fairly ethnocentric though, I mean.. I can only write from my own perspective right? I’ve only known life as an Inuk. But that’s not the point of the post. Just a little tidbit that I thought should be mentioned. Anyway, back to main points. One of the reporters they have in Iqaluit, says IKALUIT. That, to me, is unacceptable. People say it wrong already, we don’t need the media to be pushing the wrong pronunciation just because it’s easier. Way not cool CBC. Enough people in Canada (and probably within your staff) are able to say it properly, get someone who does. ...

There’s no such thing as neutral Inuit in the broader Canadian context. We’re either exotic and mysterious or disgusting and unworthy. It’s all people want to hear. We’re like the pride and joy of Canada because of our beautiful mysterious cultural differences, but at the same time it’s like, Inuit are still wards of the state and no one will let us forget that. What about regular people? You know, your cousin that works at Quickstop, or your ex-boyfriend’s sister in law with the really cute kid. People can’t comprehend the notion that we are just people, living our lives. I know this seems pretty far removed from the food mail program, but CBC’s interpretation of it ties it all together perfectly. Does Canada want regular Inuit? Or does Canada feed on the age old image of smiling exotic Eskimos? (and what can we do to change that?)....

Minister apologizes to Inuit for forced arctic relocation
Jessica Yee rabble.ca Canada August 25, 2010

Visit this page for its embedded links.

This past week newly appointed Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development John Duncan issued an official apology from the government of Canada to Inuit for the forced high arctic relocation:

On behalf of the Government of Canada and all Canadians, we would like to offer a full and sincere apology to Inuit for the relocation of families from Inukjuak and Pond Inlet to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay during the 1950s.

We would like to express our deepest sorrow for the extreme hardship and suffering caused by the relocation. The families were separated from their home communities and extended families by more than a thousand kilometres. They were not provided with adequate shelter and supplies. They were not properly informed of how far away and how different from Inukjuak their new homes would be, and they were not aware that they would be separated into two communities once they arrived in the High Arctic. Moreover, the Government failed to act on its promise to return anyone that did not wish to stay in the High Arctic to their old homes.

The Government of Canada deeply regrets the mistakes and broken promises of this dark chapter of our history and apologizes for the High Arctic relocation having taken place. ...

... The forced "high arctic relocation" is a horribly little known part of Indigenous apartheid in Canada. So many families I know have relatives who were part of this and have fought for years to seek justice, even just to get the government to admit that it purposely put people there to assert so-called "Canadian sovereignty" (which is insulting even just to type those two words out). Words like "relocation" are also coercive and intentionally polite to deceive people into thinking that Inuit were just fine and happy to be moved -- and of course to defend Canada's imposed right to commodify Indigenous people and make us disappear.

This latest apology is on the heels of a few apologies that have come from governments over the past few years to Indigenous people which again, makes me wonder about the difference in generations of their significance and impact, and how we all deal with healing differently, some with anger, and some with closure. Inuk youth activist Janice Grey and friend of mine from the Nunavik region tells me how she feels about it:

Finally, after half a decade, those who were affected directly and indirectly by the federal government's high arctic relocation have been given an official apology. These Inuit had their entire lives turned upside down by broken promises and a hidden agenda, now almost 60 years later they've built a life for themselves regardless of all the hardship. I completely agree that an apology is necessary, that this needs to be acknowledged and known by all Canadians, but what will it bring to the people other than the opportunity for forgiveness? Will the legacy of this apology resonate as much as the legacy of the actual relocation? The generations to follow will still be reeling from that trauma, but they, unlike their grandparents have an apology to live with. My only question really is, is that enough? Inuk youth activist Janice Grey and friend of mine from the Nunavik region tells me how she feels about it:

Finally, after half a decade, those who were affected directly and indirectly by the federal government's high arctic relocation have been given an official apology. These Inuit had their entire lives turned upside down by broken promises and a hidden agenda, now almost 60 years later they've built a life for themselves regardless of all the hardship. I completely agree that an apology is necessary, that this needs to be acknowledged and known by all Canadians, but what will it bring to the people other than the opportunity for forgiveness? Will the legacy of this apology resonate as much as the legacy of the actual relocation? The generations to follow will still be reeling from that trauma, but they, unlike their grandparents have an apology to live with. My only question really is, is that enough?

...

From our desk dictionary:

crude 3 : marked by the primitive, gross, or elemental or by uncultivated simplicity or vulgarity

France deports hundreds of Roma
Al Jazeera English Qatar August 26, 2010

Right: Nearly 300 more Roma were reportedly being deported on Thursday from France to Romania. France's population of Roma, mostly from Romania and Bulgaria, was estimated at around 15,000 before the expulsions began. Citizens of Romania and Bulgaria, both EU member states, are supposed to benefit from free circulation within the bloc. Photo: AFP

France is deporting hundreds more Roma from the country as part of its bid to crack down on traveller encampments, despite continued criticism of the move. Police escorted four busloads of Roma men, women and children to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the capital, on Thursday, where they boarded planes bound for Romania, the AFP news agency reported. The government said 283 Roma were being deported on Thursday to Bucharest, Romania's capital, from Paris and Lyon airports. Earlier in the day officers raided and dismantled a camp set up under a railway line near the northern city of Lille, taking residents in police vans. The crackdown is part of a plan announced in July by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who has described Roma camps as sources of trafficking, child exploitation and prostitution. But many politicians and human rights groups have accused France of stigmatising an already vulnerable group of people.

The move also appears to have backfired against Sarkozy, drawing criticism from the political right, the Catholic Church and a United Nations anti-racism panel, while also failing to boost his popularity in public opinion polls. Valentin Mocanu, Romania's minister for the Roma community warned on Thursday that the mass expulsions could "degenerate into racism". "Many people in Romania are worried that people can believe that it is possible to resolve the problem by actions that could degenerate into racism and xenophobia," he said. "We do not consider there is an excess of Romanian citizens today in France." Some 600 Roma have been repatriated to Romania and Bulgaria since the crackdown was announced in July, while more than 8,000 have been deported since the beginning of the year.

Archbishop of Paris concerned about Gypsy crackdown as expulsions continue
Angela Doland Canadian Press Canada August 26, 2010

PARIS — The archbishop of Paris added to mounting criticism of France's crackdown on Gypsies, referring to the operation as a "circus" and saying Thursday he would tell the government that there are lines that cannot be crossed. Meanwhile, France expelled more Gypsies, or Roma, on Thursday, putting them on two flights to Romania. A poll showed the French are divided about the expulsion tactic, though slightly more favour it than oppose it. President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative government has linked the Roma minority to crime and is dismantling their illegal squatters' camps and putting many of them on flights back to their homes in Eastern Europe. The policy has attracted widespread criticism from those who say it amounts to racism toward one of the European Union's most impoverished minorities, and that Sarkozy is playing to the far right before the 2012 presidential election. ...

Related: A focus on women's rights is being used to justify intervention in religious and public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. That only a few thousand women wear face coverings in France, a country that has 4-6 million people from Muslim countries in its population, raises the question of why this issue has become the focus of a nationalist campaign.

France's ban on the Islamic veil has little to do with female emancipation
Joan Wallach Scott Guardian UK August 26, 2010


Outlawing the wearing of the veil in public is part of a campaign to protect 'true Frenchness' and capture the xenophobic vote. Photo: Fred De Noyelle/Corbis

If there were any doubt about the motivation for the ban on Islamic face coverings passed by the French national assembly in July, the Sarkozy government's actions in August have laid them to rest. The issue isn't women's emancipation, for all the pious rhetoric we've heard about equality being a "primordial value" of the French nation. It isn't the danger that terrorists and robbers will hide behind burqas in order to blow up buildings or rob banks – the exemptions in the law for motorcycle helmets, fencing and ski masks, and carnival costumes quickly dispel that argument. And it isn't about enforcing openness and transparency as an aspect of French culture. Outlawing what the French call "le voile intégral" is part of a campaign to purify and protect national identity, purging so-called foreign elements – although many of these "foreigners" are actually French citizens – from membership in the nation. It is part of a cynical bid by Sarkozy and his party to capture the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim animus that has brought electoral gains to the rightwing National Front party and to disarm the Socialist opposition, which has so far offered little resistance to the xenophobic campaign.The national assembly's action came on July 13, as the country prepared to celebrate the birth of republican democracy in the revolution of 1789. Banning the burqa on the eve of the Fête Nationale provided a clear affirmation of true Frenchness. It followed a year in which President Sarkozy included a minister of immigration and national identity in his cabinet. The title of the new post conveyed the message that if national identity were in trouble immigrants were the source. The president and his minister called for a countrywide conversation on the meanings of national identity. There were to be contests and town-hall meetings to articulate what it meant to be truly French. When that effort fizzled, they came up with more draconian measures. Sarkozy proposed, this month, to take away the citizenship of foreign-born French citizens if they were convicted of crimes such as threatening the life of a police officer. Children born in France to foreign parents (once presumed to automatically qualify for citizenship) would be denied citizenship if there were any evidence of juvenile delinquency.

This month, too, began the expulsion of the Roma, said to be illegally camped throughout the country and responsible for all manner of crimes. Despite an outcry from those who denounced the expulsions as echoes of Vichy (the government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s), these activities have made "security" a prime focus for politicians and public opinion pollsters. Whether it will deliver another term to Sarkozy in 2012 remains to be seen. The immediate effect is to conjure a fantasy spectre in which foreigners endanger France and are made to take the blame for all its economic, social and political problems. Instead of real solutions to economic stagnation, high unemployment, discrimination against minorities, violence in the banlieue, and a deteriorating educational system, to name a few, the country is offered a nightmare vision of veiled women and their male handlers, an enemy within the borders who must be uncovered and, in this way, disarmed. ...