Why al Qaida need not come here
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are given to a frequent mantra that if we don’t fight them “over there” in Iraq, the Islamic terrorists will come to America and fight us here. There are at least a dozen logic flaws, misunderstandings of history, culture and geography and several cruel ironies bundled into this statement. But none of them is the real reason why this is a flawed foundation for the initial action in Iraq.
The simple fact is that - except for an occasional terrorist plot in the U.S. for PR purposes - al Qaida doesn’t need to bring the fight to our shores, for the same reason that if I worked in a supermarket, I would not choose to walk across town to buy milk at a 7-11.
Iraq and Afghanistan are the supermarkets of terrorism – the latter courtesy of the Taliban and the former courtesy of the Wolfowitzian neocons. Working in those local terrorism supermarkets, al Qaida can not only recruit more boxboys among the regional population and readily attack US and NATO forces sent to the region, but they have access to the Achilles heel of the West: cheap oil.
By accelerating civil disorder and economic conflagration in Iraq and soon in Saudi Arabia, al Qaida is setting the stage to disrupt oil supplies and drive up the price of crude in dramatic measure.
We saw the world price of crude oil double in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War OPEC Oil Embargo. On October 19, 1973, the official price of Saudi Light was roughly $5 a barrel; within a few weeks it jumped to $12 a barrel. It rose dramatically again following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 from about $15 a barrel to nearly $40 a barrel ($70 in 2006 prices) at the height of the Iraq-Iran War in 1981.
World oil was about $25 a barrel on September 11, 2001. Today it fluctuates between $60 and $80. Doubling, tripling, as a consequence of four planes crashing.
Following an eventual withdrawal of US Forces from Iraq, should the region explode as predicted, the disruption could easily double or triple the price of oil again, this time to $160 or even $250 a barrel. At that point no Western economy can absorb the increase without massive economic and social disruption. Daily life as we know it will change drastically. The resultant depression will do to the US, European and Japanese economies what 9/11 did not: bring them to their knees.
However incidental or complicit al Qaida’s role in this, its initial aims will have been realized. There will be celebration in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And no al Qaida member need have crossed the US-Mexican border to achieve it.
Labels: al Qaida, Bush, Cheney, Iraq, oil, Saudi Arabia
R.I.P. Kitty Carlisle Hart
“With a soupçon of courage and a dash of self-discipline, one can make a small talent go a long way.” Kitty Carlisle Hart, died today. As described by Marilyn Berger in the New York Times, "a doyenne of New York culture and society and a perennial entertainer who appeared on Broadway and in films and was still singing on the stage as recently as last fall, well into her 10th decade, died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96."
The playwright Norman Krasna wanted to marry her, George Gershwin proposed to her and the financier Bernard Baruch wanted to leave his wife for her, she said.
She refused everyone, however, until she met Mr. Hart, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who, with George S. Kaufman, wrote “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “You Can’t Take It With You” and who directed “My Fair Lady.”
As described by Ms. Berger: Mr. Hart, a man of sparkle and wit, largely directed their lives as well, organizing their homes and their dinner parties, even choosing his wife’s wardrobe.
When Mr. Hart died of a heart attack in 1961, Miss Carlisle was devastated, she wrote, but she went on to live by his precept that “you can’t escape from life, you escape into it.”
“I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic, and I have more energy than ever before,” she said just after her 79th birthday. Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do. “You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do,” she said.
Labels: Kitty Carlisle Hart
Bi-czar failure
The Bush-Cheney White House is seeking a “war czar” to take control of their ill-conceived, incompetently executed, out-of-control Mid-east fiasco.
“Czar” and its spelling variants are a contraction of the word Caesar, referring to emperors, dictators and supreme leaders, especially in Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia. In the US, it most recently refers to an expert in charge of implementing policy, e.g. the drug czar.
American czars have a sad history of failure. A series of Presidential drug wars, led by drug czars, have produced an exploding prison population (as befits dictatorial epochs) and little else. Meanwhile, our leaders can focus on fund-raising and PR, having delegated responsibility for real issues to some czar.
Three top retired generals have passed on the “war czar” job, including Army General Jack Keane, who, last December, promoted the idea of a U.S. military surge. Bush bought the Keane’s PR idea of a surge – which is, in fact, a mere escalation of “stay the course”. Now Keane wants no part of running his surge. His Marine counterpart, retired four-star General John Sheehan also rebuffed the White House job offer, telling the Washington Post, “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going. So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks.’”
Bush’s failures of competence are reaching critical mass. The administration is imploding. Having failed to deliver a competent Commander in Chief, the Bushies now seek a surrogate.
Why do we need a “war czar” anyway? Isn’t that the job of the Commander in Chief? We need a competent Commander in Chief.
Labels: Bush, czar, failure, Iraq, Keane, Sheehan, war
It's bad. It's very bad.
I yield the floor to Tim Dickenson writing in Rolling Stone (rollingstone.com), March 22, 2007. A panel of experts tells writer Tim Dickinson the war is lost, surge or no surge. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again." How awful can it get? The panel's three scenarios:
BEST CASE -- Civil war in Iraq and a stronger al-Qaida: "The best we can hope for is an Iraq that is politically passive but hostile toward America," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser.
"It's complete anarchy now," says Nir Rosen, author of "In the Belly of the Beast." "Americans are still killing Iraqi civilians left and right. There's no government in Iraq; it doesn't exist outside of the Green Zone. We deliberately created a weak government so that we would have final authority over everything in Iraq. ... The best you can hope for is that doesn't spill into the neighboring countries."
MOST LIKELY -- Years of ethnic cleansing and war with Iran: Rosen says our Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia are pushing the United States to switch sides and support the minority Sunnis in Iraq. "The whole buildup to a new war against Iran, which sounds so much like the buildup in 2002, is part of that," he says.
Bob Graham, ex-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, adds: "This administration seems to be getting ready to make -- at a much more significant, escalated level -- the same mistake in Iran that we made in Iraq. If Iraq has been a disaster, this would be multiple times Iraq. The extent to which this could be the horror of the 21st century is hard to exaggerate."
Brzezinski says, "If the war continues without any American willingness to accommodate regionally and to pull out, the Iraq war will be extended to Iran."
WORST CASE -- World War III: "Israel sees that it's threatened by these developments," says McPeak. "Once the Israelis get involved, then everybody piles on. And you've got nuclear events going off in the Middle East."
He concludes: "Our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment . If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference."
Labels: blunder, Bush, fiasco, Iran, Iraq
