Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

The Great White North looks at the Map

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Colleague Jeff has supplied a convincing overview of Canada’s difficult role in the Arctic. Canada likes to mythologize its great open spaces in the wild north, creating emblems ranging from lines in the national anthem – “the true north strong and free” – to films like “Nanook of the North” to art like the sandstone sculptures and Baker Lake prints that southerners pay plenty of loonies to own to Stan Roger’s great song “The Northwest Passage” to the Edmonton Eskimos football team. Norm Kwong, one of their legendary players and perhaps the only major (ethnically) Chinese football player in history, recalls once hearing an Edmonton matron in the audience for one of his interviews tell her neighbour, “See I told you they were real Eskimos”.

But what Canada, the world’s second largest country, hasn’t done is provide military support for its mythology, making it vulnerable to the aggressiveness of the first and third largest countries, which face it in the Arctic. Instead it has slugged it out with tiny Denmark (controlling gigantic Greenland) in a farcical struggle over miniscule Hans Island. The excuse for lack of muscle in the Arctic has been strictly economic in the past, but this may be changing because the tide of Canadian public opinion has swung for the Arctic, and that has the politicians’ ears. Almost twenty years ago Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney cancelled Liberal plans for ice breakers for the navy, something which both Norway and Denmark manage to finance, and the US and Russia have both ice breakers and nuclear submarines out on Arctic patrol. In its lead editorial today, the conservative Vancouver Province advised the government to lease ice breakers if they are too cheap to build them, but to get them before it is too late to the newly announced far north military base with deep water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island, and to the beefed-up existing bases. Canadians will soon see whether their government is serious when it says it will provide protection for Canadian values from sea to sea to sea.

Canada Takes on Russia: Cold War II?

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Bob and Doug McKenzie are on assignment in the Arctic, traveling with Prime Minister Harper who visited the Arctic to plant the Maple Leaf to lay claim to its rich mineral deposits for Canada. This trip was in response to Russian President Putin’s sneak attack last week with two miniature submarines planting the Russian flag somewhere beneath the North Pole. These moves are partially in response to global warming which is melting the Arctic ice cap in direct defiance to U.S. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma who claims global warming is a fraudulent tool manufactured by the infidels (e.g. Democrats and non-Christians).

As described in the NY Times, the race for mineral rights in the Arctic looms as a possible Worldwide Cold War as the Danes race to the region to map their own claims that the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range, is attached to the Danish territory of Greenland, making it a geological extension of the Arctic island.

Norway and the U.S. also make claims to rights in the area but the U.S. is apparently banking on winning the Iraq War sometime in the next century and stealing all of their oil to power the next generation of Hummers. Talk of moving Vice President Cheney’s office to the Arctic was squelched by White House sources, as “wishful thinking by the American people”.

The world watches these developments with anxious concern mixed with admiration for the audacity of Canada as it takes on the Russian Bear while the U.S. waits to move in after the dirty work is done.

In other news President George W. Bush refused to add 5 cents to the federal tax on gasoline saying it “would be premature”, and that “ we will cross that bridge when we have the funds to fix it.”

Intelligence Services???

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As Congress rushed toward its August vacation it took the time to pass a far-reaching bill which allows the intelligence services to wiretap at will with no credible oversight. This is disturbing on a number of levels: it effectively ignores our constitutional rights to privacy; it eliminates effective judicial oversight of such operations; and assigns review to Alberto Gonzales, of all people. It is one more step on a slippery slope made dangerously so by the fear mongering of Bush.

But what is simply appalling is the bill’s provision of this kind of power to intelligence organizations that have consistently failed – in almost comic and cosmic ways – to fulfill their mission. Movies and books manage to suggest that our safety as a nation has depended on the brave, smart men and women who have run our agents, tortured enemy agents, analyzed secret messages, etc. Simply not true. The United States intelligence services have a record of almost blinding incompetence. With thanks to Tim Weiner’s book, “Legacy of Ashes” and reviews of same book by Evan Thomas and David Wise of the Washington Post, here is a list of some of the major (and sometimes entertaining) screw-ups of the CIA:

Failed to predict Soviet Union’s atomic bomb in 1949

In the 1950’s the CIA and British intelligence collaboration on Operation Gold, a tunnel into East Berlin that allowed listening to the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin. It was a terrific coup except that the Soviets knew about the tunnel before it was completed via George Blake, a British intelligence officer working for the Soviets.

Also in the fifties, the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected government (named “Operation Success”) to protect the interests of United Fruit. Dictators’ death squads executed an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans in following years.

In 1953 the CIA and he British worked to remove the Prime Minister of Iran from Office to protect the interests of British and American oil companies. The Shah became the ruler, instituted a new secret police (the SAVAK) and pissed off enough of his countrymen to help produce the Islamic Revolution.

The CIA failed to predict the Islamic Revolution.

The CIA did not predict popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950’s

The CIA did not predict the invasion of S. Korea in 1953

The CIA-run1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was a classic example of incompetence.

The CIA’s ridiculous attempts at executing Castro with the help of the mafia in the early 60’s.

The CIA did not predict installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962

The CIA’s support of a coup by the Baath party in Iraq in 1963, which led to Saddam Hussein coming to power.

The large-scale American escalation in Vietnam facilitated by the intelligence community’s manufacture of evidence of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin attack in 1964.

Richard Helms doing the bidding of Richard Nixon and subsequent presidents in exaggerating the capabilities of the Soviet Union to further the presidents’ political needs.

The CIA did not predict the Arab-Israeli War in 1973

The CIA did not predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979

The CIA did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, largely because it had no credible Russian spies after the CIA mole Aldrich Ames had betrayed them all

In 1994, the Guatemalan military worked with the CIA to bug the bedroom of Marilyn McAfee, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala. She was recorded cooing endearments to “Murphy” and subsequently accused by the CIA station chief of having a lesbian affair with her secretary. Alas, “Murphy” was her pet poodle.

The CIA did not predict India’s explosion of atomic bomb in 1998

The CIA did not predict the attack of 9/11.

George Tenet’s 2003 “slam dunk” on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

These are the people for whom we are giving away our constitutional rights. Where is George Smiley when we need him?

Arms to the Poor: REDUX

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It is possible to believe that the U.S. is no longer selling arms to Iran, but it turns out that would be a belief and not a fact. The AP reports in the Boston Globe today that the General Accounting Office has announced that the Pentagon has sold over 1400 parts for F-14 fighter jets to the public since announcing that they would no longer be sold. Turns out that Iran is the only country still flying that plane and has been desperate for parts to keep them in the air. The fact Iran’s F-14s planes originally came from the U.S. only enriches the irony.

Arms to the Poor: From Krupp to Bush

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The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against is alive and well – even if their products are sometimes shoddy and ineffective. The arms business has become one of America’s great exports as it arms countries like India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. These days it is reminiscent of the Krupp family business which discovered that it was possible to sell arms to just about anyone in the 19th century, leading to their selling arms and defenses to both sides during World War I. And of course the company was instrumental in arming the German armies during WW II, making huge amounts of profit and paying little in labor since the government kindly supplied them with slave labor. I suppose it is something of a come down for the family now to be selling coffee grinders and espresso machines.

But not to worry, there are plenty of companies willing and able to take on the challenge of arming the world. And while it can be argued that everyone does it, the United States remains in first place in maintaining its post WW-II leadership in finding ways to arm countries or selected rebels around the world. The rationale for doing this is not always clear and is usually done for transitory reasons, and not infrequently with mixed consequences.

The U.S. government and arms manufacturers armed Iran under the Shah and of course saw those armaments fall into the hands of the revolution. Adding insult to injury, the Reagan administration provided arms to Iran as part of its Iran-Contra policy/scandal. (The income from these sales of weapons to Iran under Reagan were then used to provide arms to the Contras in Nicaragua). At around the same time the U.S. provided arms to Saddam Hussein in an effort to support its war against Iran. More recently the U.S. provided arms support to the forces of Osama bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. The list goes on and the positive consequences have mostly fallen to the American companies that are heirs to the Krupp value system – and the politicians whose campaigns are funded by the arms manufacturers. In any case the arms provided to Iran, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden have all been used against our national interest at one time or another.

Now we have the latest proposed handout to the arms companies. Having totally screwed up Iraq and most of the Gulf region with Bush’s fiasco, we are searching for ways to cut our losses and one way is to bribe Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain with upwards of $20 billion in sales to this group of gulf states and some $30B of new sales to Israel. All of this is in addition to whatever arms remain in Iraq after a war that is now estimated to cost over a trillion dollars. The hope and the wish seem to be that all these new weapons in the region will keep our Iraq adventure from becoming the beginning of a monstrous disaster in the region. Also that these countries will all work to keep Iran at bay.

One of the clever strategies of the family Krupp was to sell defensive armor to one side and then stronger weapons to the other and then the first side would need even stronger defensive armor, and the cycle would continue. With all of the new weapons around the world it is clear that the U.S. will need to improve its weaponry and defenses and so the Krupp strategy is alive and well and the cycle can continue.

The Emperor and the cuckoo bird

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Now let’s get this straight. A monumentally thuggish North African political regime, that blew up a British passenger plane not long ago and is trusted by nobody, arrests five completely innocent Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, accuses them of infecting 400 children with Aids, who were actually infected by unhygienic hospital conditions, sentences them to death by getting confessions after medieval torturing, throws them in unspeakable jails for eight years, and finally decides it can use them to blackmail the European Union, which reluctantly negotiates an agreement costing 1 Million Dollars per infected child. These depressing negotiations are undertaken by EU officials over the course of a couple of years, and reach fruition during the presidency of Germany. Thus Angela Merkel is ultimately responsible for negotiating the agreement, which leads to the freeing of the six prisoners.

But who is it who shows up in Libya for the photo-op at the liberation of the prisoners? Why it’s none other than Cecilia Sarkozy, newly-crowned first lady of France, who has flown in on her husband’s private jet to revel in the glory at the liberation. Now she has played no role in all this, and neither has her husband or for that matter, France, other than its supposed membership in the EU. France’s former Minister to the EU, Pierre Moscovici, notes: “Sarkozy has taken on the strategy of the cuckoo, the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.”

Ariane Mnouchkine, France’s leading theatre person and the director of the Théatre de soliel, put it this way as she turned down the position offered to her to become the Chaired Professor of Theatre at the College de France, a call that she had received 8 months before, but which needed the approval of the President of France to become valid. When she received Sarkozy’s document, which made it seem like he had annointed her, she wrote the following:
“Nicolas Sarkozy has turned us into collaborators by attempting to curry favour with anyone played up by the media – artists and others. That is unacceptable. Therefore I must turn down the offer of this position, which had pleased me so much…. The whole world saw what happened with the Bulgarian nurses; they tried to make us believe that it was the President of France who had engineered this agreement when every one knows that the diplomats of the European Union had been working at it for years. It’s high time that Sarkozy stops trying to make us believe that he’s the one who makes things happen.”

Oh yes one more thing. On the day after his wife flew to Libya, the President himself showed up there, shared a brotherly kiss with the Libyan leader, and announced that France would supply Libya with a nuclear reactor to be built by French engineers on the coast near Tripoli. It turns out he does make things happen.

Socialism, U.S. Style

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Bill, a friend of this Blog, writes the following after mistakenly turning on the “O’Reilly Factor”:

My Economics Professor at Rutgers once commented that in America, it was “socialism for the rich and the corporations but capitalism for the rest of us”. Nothing has changed; recently Bill O’Reilly was bashing universal healthcare as socialism. Yet when we socialize the cost to general electric for polluting a river, or Halliburton for delivering shoddy work in Iraq, or farmers for not growing crops, or Big Pharma for taking drug designs from the NIH – not a word is spoken. But the Bill O’Reillys of the world continue to pull out the same tired, cheap and shallow arguments. Just amazing that they do it and that people continue to tune them in.

The Campaign: Style Over Substance

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“Democracy is coming

To the USA”- Leonard Cohen

If the summer seems longer and hotter than usual, requiring huge intakes of adult beverages, you may have been following the presidential campaign too closely. The latest example of vacuity pretending to be seriousness is the introduction of YouTube into the debates. This has led to news outlets throughout the country devoting large amounts of airtime and ink to the fact that there are “real people” (as opposed to journalists who apparently are not “real”) with “real questions” in the country and isn’t it wonderful that technology allows them to ask the questions in styles waaaay more interesting than the straight-forward question.

The day after the Democrats answered questions from “real people” including a man disguised as a snowman, PBS’s Lehrer Report devoted ca. 20 minutes to a discussion of how the use of YouTube made for a much more personal relationship between the voters and their would-be Kings or Queen. On this and other TV news programs there is almost no discussion of the issues that could resemble intelligent analysis. The focus remains on style and ephemeral issues like the cost of candidates’ haircuts, the size of one’s war chest, whether a particular religion is good or bad for a candidate, and whether they have crafted their standard responses cleverly enough to avoid being pinned down to a real commitment. For analysis stations go to either the same tired talking heads or in a fit of derring-do go to the tried and true Man in the Street technique in which all sides of an issue are given equal time – Sally Mae discusses why we need to stay in EyeRaq and Doug makes the case for leaving.

It is indeed turning out to be a Long, Hot Summer. Now back to the fridge for some relief.

The Brits bring Culture to the Primitive East

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Ryan Air and its copycats have made it possible, and now its easy for anyone to leave the British Isles and travel to continental Europe for next to nothing to demonstrate to the local bumpkins the state of British culture in the twenty-first century. No sooner have eastern European countries, long neglected under the Soviets , restored their finest urban centres to something approaching the splendour of pre-Soviet days, than British hordes book dirt-cheap flights for their stag parties, descend drunkenly with the hens, as they call their mademoiselles, on the restored centres of cities like Bratislava, Krakau, Riga, or Talinn, and do their best to demolish them. It used to be the British football fans who were the chief hooligans, but recent failures at west European events like last year’s peaceful and heavily-policed football World Cup in Germany have convinced the lads to test lesser security forces to the east.
Spectacular Prague was the first to fall, long since having lost its innocence to what the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls “the locusts from the islands”. Now Prague must close down its famous and beautiful Karlsbrücke for a long time as it tries to repair the damage done to it, which includes heavy-duty vandalism of the centuries-old statues that line the bridge. Prague police have also been confronted with Clockwork-Orange inspired beatings by howling British drunks of Czech beggars. But Prague is already old hat and now the cities being invaded are further east and even more vulnerable since the police are not prepared for such hooliganism.
My brother and I can still clearly remember the British gentlemen who were sent out to bring civilization to the colonies in places like India, Kenya and Canada. They may have seemed a bit eccentric on foreign turf, but they were certainly not loutish, dangerous drunks. This current version of those Colonel Blimps makes the old group seem almost charming.

Murdock’s Outrageous Outage

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Two weeks ago Bill Moyers saved a bit of time on his weekly PBS show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, to blast Rupert Murdock and his proposed take-over of The Wall Street Journal. As Moyers stated,

“[Murdock is] not the first to use journalism to promote his own interests. His worst offense with FOX News is not even its baldly partisan agenda. Far worse is the travesty he’s made of its journalism. FOX News huffs and puffs, pontificates and proclaims, but does little serious original reporting. His tabloids sell babes and breasts, gossip and celebrities. Now he’s about to bring under the same thumb one of the few national newsrooms remaining in the country.”

Well, just this Friday, Rupert Murdock got Moyers back – at least that’s my sneaking suspicion. Moyers’ Journal began normally enough this past Friday. It comes into my home via DirecTV which, like FOX, is owned by Murdock. Less than five minutes into Moyers’ show, my screen went black. Then DirecTV put up an announcement on screen warning viewers not to call DirecTV – that our local station was having technical difficulties.
Now, understand that DirecTV provides great video service. It fails occasionally during a heavy rain or snow storm when the satellite signal may be blocked, but in the 10-12 years I have been a subscriber to DirecTV I cannot remember a time when a single station went dark. I was suspicious immediately because I watched Moyers blast Murdock two weeks ago – and because the subject of Moyers show this night was the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Rupert Murdock is a great supporter of Bush and was one of the loudest supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, claiming that the greatest thing to come out of the war would be “$20 a barrel for oil.”
I immediately thought Murdock’s DirecTV may have dumped Moyers’ show from the air. Luckily I had a tv in the house that used an antenna to pull in signals off the air. With the cause of the blackout, according to DirecTV, local tv station technical difficulties, I wasn’t sure Moyer’s Journal would be viewable on my other tv set but I gave it a try. Lo and behold, I could watch Moyers’ show on my 2nd set – apparently the “local tv signal difficulties” did not extend beyond DirecTV. I learned subsequently that cable subscribers did not lose service either – just Murdock’s DirecTV subscribers like me. That night, on Moyers Journal, Bruce Fein, a conservative Reaganite, and John Nichols of the Nation magazine put forth the argument that impeachment was necessary to pull the country back from the illegalities and excesses of this Administration. It was an excellent show even if you may not agree with the arguments of the two program guests [note that one was conservative and one liberal – for all the criticism, Moyers’ programs are exceptionally balanced].
Bill Moyers has had a lot to contend with just to bring his ideas to tv. First it was Bush appointee Tomlinson and his actions as Chief of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now, it appears Murdock has Moyers in his sights. But this is not just a concern of Bill Moyers – everyone should think long and hard whether someone like Rupert Murdock is good for this country. Can we really afford to have so much media power in the hands of a single individual – particularly a single individual like Rupert Murdock?