Ebb Tide VI: Does Gwynne Dyer Have A Crystal Ball?

Another time, another planet: Years ago and miles away, I used to read Gwynne Dyer as much as possible. He wasn't always easy to find, but I did my best. That was before Dyer spoke his mind about 9/11.

Now a local weekly in my area carries his column, and they give it away for free! But it's worth the price, so I don't usually read any of it.

I made an exception recently, though, having caught a glimpse of Dyer's headline on the way to the recycling box. For some reason, I couldn't avoid peeking at what he had to say about "Obama and Iraq".

Here's the column in its entirety; my comments follow.

Obama and Iraq | by Gwynne Dyer | February 23, 2008

I knew the US presidential race was over last week when my son preemptively announced that he had lost his bet with me: Hillary Clinton was not going to be the Democratic candidate. The question of whether Barack Obama can beat John McCain is still open, according to the opinion polls, but it probably won't stay open long once the two men go head to head. McCain has many attractive qualities, but he is 71 and Obama is 46.

McCain is also a Republican in a year when the US is heading into a recession after eight years of a Republican administration. Even more importantly, he is committed to continuing a war in Iraq that most Americans just want to leave behind. Curiously, this means that the two men with the greatest potential influence on McCain's political future are Osama bin Laden and Moqtada al-Sadr.

The one thing that could swing the 2008 election in favour of the Republicans is another large-scale terrorist attack on the United States. If al-Qaeda has any ability to provide that attack, it will certainly do so, for Osama bin Laden is well aware that his greatest recruiting tool in the Arab world is the American military presence in Iraq. But it is unlikely that al-Qaeda has any significant presence within the United States.

Moqtada al-Sadr is a more interesting case. He is the leader of the Mahdi army, the biggest Shia militia in Iraq, and he has just extended his unilateral ceasefire against American troops and rival militias for another six months. His two main objectives in life are to evict the US from Iraq and to gain control of the Iraqi government, and the first is a necessary preliminary to the second.

So long as the US presidential election promises to result in an administration pledged to withdraw from Iraq, he doesn't have to lift a finger. But if by August it looks like McCain has a chance of winning, then Moqtada al-Sadr has every incentive to end his ceasefire and launch a mini-Tet offensive against US troops. The point would not be to win. It would be to remind American voters that Iraq is a quagmire that they should leave really soon.

So one way or another, Barack Obama is almost certain to be the president of the United States by January of next year. He has hedged his commitment to withdraw American troops from Iraq in various ways from time to time, but there is little doubt in most people's minds that he really intends to do it. What will the Middle East look like after the Americans are gone?

Not just gone from Iraq, either. There are currently US military bases of one sort or another in almost every country along the south-western (Arab) side of the Gulf, but with Iran emerging as the new great power of the region, many of the host countries will soon be asking the Americans to leave. They don't fear invasion by Iran; they fear internal destabilisation if Iran incites their own Shia minorities against them. So keep Tehran happy by sending the Americans home.

Iraq, contrary to all the predictions of disaster, will probably be all right after the withdrawal of US troops. It will never again be the secular, female-friendly society of the past, and it will take at least a decade to recover from the economic devastation of the embargo, the invasion and the occupation, but it won't break up.

Most of the smaller ethnic and religious minorities have fled from Iraq or been killed, and the larger groups -- Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds -- have mostly retreated into homogeneous districts and neighbourhoods, so there's not much left to fight about except along the boundary between Arab Iraq and Kurdistan. It's even possible that the more or less democratic system imposed by the US occupation will survive the departure of the Americans.

Iran will indeed emerge as the new paramount power of the Gulf, but its actual influence even over predominantly Shia Iraq will be quite limited. Farther afield, the notion of a dangerously radical "Shia crescent" running through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon is sheer nonsense: Shias are a minority in Lebanon, and a very small minority in Syria. It is mainly the US State Department that promotes this fantasy, with the aim of scaring Sunni Arab states into a new, US-dominated alliance against Iran.

The real fall-out from the US invasion of Iraq is the greatly heightened prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world. Whether this will ever result in a successful Islamist revolution in a major Arab country remains to be seen -- they have been trying and failing for thirty years now -- but the odds have probably shifted somewhat in that direction.

And the big loser of this decade's events is Israel, which must now deal with a strengthened Iran, a Gaza Strip under Islamist control, and a United States in retreat from the Middle East. It still faces no serious military threat from its neighbours, but its political options are significantly narrower than they were.

It's not much of a headline: "Small, Nasty War in Iraq Ends; Middle East Largely Unaffected." But then, history often works like that. The equivalent headline in 1975 would have read: "US Defeated in Vietnam; No Wider Consequences."

Small, nasty war? No wider consequences? History often works like that? Is it just me .. or is this utterly beyond refutation? I don't mean "irrefutable"; I mean "worthless".

In order to take this analysis seriously, you would have to believe that the Democratic nomination brawl is over. Nobody else thinks that, as far as I can tell. The only two things that are certain, to my knowledge, are that it's too soon to tell, and that Hillary Clinton will fight tooth and nail, way down and very dirty, for as long as the outcome is in doubt. But Gwynne Dyer knows what will happen, because his son said so -- a month ago. One sure sign of a great journalist is reliable sources.

You'd have to believe that the American voters will actually choose the next president. We're 0 for 2 since 2000. What makes you think this time will be any different?

You'd also have to believe that Barack Obama, who couldn't even muster the cojones to deflect a stupid smear attack against his pastor, could withstand the barrage of slime that would come at him if he actually pulled all the American troops out of Iraq -- and you'd have to believe that he would react to the barrage by withdrawing all the rest of the American troops from all the rest of the Middle East!

Welcome to Gwynne Dyer's fantasy world ... in which Iraq -- with more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and under a ceaseless cancerous and mutagenic attack from countless tons of depleted uranium -- is not regarded as "the big loser". That honor goes to Israel, even though Dyer freely admits that even if every American GI left the Middle East tomorrow, Israel would not face any serious military challenges -- but its "political options" would be "narrower". Well, what's a million dead bodies, and four million refugees, compared to narrower political options?

Everyone has his or her own opinion. In my opinion, to even imagine a headline like "Small, Nasty War in Iraq Ends; Middle East Largely Unaffected", you would have to be grossly misinformed and/or deliberately spinning. I'm not putting my money on the former.

Nominations for the "Stupidest Or Most Deceitful Political Analysis Of The Year" award are still open, but the competition is getting awfully stiff.

Speaking of stiff, I wonder what Gwynne Dyer's been drinking, and whether I should try some.

Probably not.

Gwynne Dyer: World Fisheries Headed For Collapse

If anyone needs more things to worry about -- things that are clearly bigger than any of us, and possibly bigger than all of us -- here's a good one for you, from Gwynne Dyer in the Japan Times:

A major human food source — the principal source of protein for one-fifth of the human race — is going to collapse in the next generation unless drastic measures are taken.

Another sad fact that's been lost amid the GWOT, the war in Iraq, the looting of the American treasury, the shredding of our Constitution, and all the other things we tend to discuss here: we're well along the path to collapse already.

According to a report last year in "Nature," the scientific journal, 90 percent of the really big fish — tuna, marlin, swordfish and the like — are already gone, and the middle-size fish are following.

The codfish are gone on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, once the richest fishery in the world, and show little sign of recovery despite an absolute ban on cod-fishing for the past 15 years. They are declining rapidly in the North Sea, too. In the 1980s the annual catch was about 300,000 tons. The European Union quota for codfish was cut to 80,000 tons in 2005 — and EU fishermen only managed to catch two-thirds of that quota. Nevertheless, they will probably keep on fishing, with gradually reducing quotas, until the stock is completely eliminated.

It's not just a problem for the Canadians and the Europeans.

The problem is global. As human numbers have soared and fishing technologies have been industrialized, fishing has been mutated from the maritime equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture to a process more like strip-mining. The schools of fish are located electronically, few individuals escape the huge nets, and no area of the ocean is left alone long enough for the stocks to recover.

"At this point, 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed; that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent," explained professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University late last year. "It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating." If the trend continues, he predicted, all fish and seafood species that are fished commercially will collapse by 2048.

What has to be done? What can and will be done? According to Dyer:

The world's fishing fleet needs to be reduced by at least two-thirds, bottom-trawling must be banned outright, and widespread fishing moratoriums for endangered species and even for whole areas need to be imposed for periods of five or even 10 years.

Unfortunately, the minimum measures needed to prevent ecocide in the oceans would cause major short-term disruption and throw millions out of work, so they probably won't be taken. It will be much easier politically to ignore what is happening now and let the collapse happen later, on somebody else's watch.

Once again I find myself nodding in agreement, because that's what most of us tend to do when we run difficulty: make it somebody else's problem.

I don't always agree with Gwynne Dyer, but he usually makes a lot of sense. You can read more of his work here.

Dyer: Chagos Islanders May Go Home At Last

Gwynne Dyer's been in top form lately, but you have to be nimble to catch him. His column in the May 26th issue of Canada's Hamilton Spectator is beautifully written, and it shows Dyer doing what he does best, in my opinion: looking at an issue that's been mostly ignored, and breathing a bit of life into it -- with "counter-spin"!

This time he's got a great opening line, too:

One should never underestimate the cunning and treachery of the British government.

Beautiful, no? Dyer continues:

Even the French, no slouches in this domain themselves, quite rightly refer to "perfidious Albion." But the British courts are another matter and for once it looks like the government has lost.

The Chagos Islanders (or "Ilois," as they call themselves) are finally going home after 40 years of enforced exile. Unless the British government appeals the court ruling yet again, of course.

Can you imagine? Forty years of enforced exile? And counting??

It was all deliberate, too, and of course it was done in the name of "freedom".

"We must surely be very tough about this," wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the Foreign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos Islanders from their homes took shape in 1966. "The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours ... There will be no indigenous population except seagulls."

Yikes! 1966? What??

Most of the people I know don't know anything about this. Do you?

It was the depths of the Cold War and the U.S. wanted an air and naval base in the Indian Ocean.

Britain, ever the loyal sidekick, offered Diego Garcia, the largest of the 65 coral atolls that make up the Chagos Archipelago.

It separated the isolated islands from Mauritius, which was about to gain independence, and declared them the British Indian Ocean Territory.

But the United States didn't want a "population problem" at its new base, so the Foreign Office got to work on removing the population.

"Removing the population"!

Chagossians were encouraged to visit Mauritius or other Indian Ocean islands (many people had relatives elsewhere) and then not allowed back. As American troops moved in, they were drawn into the campaign to intimidate the islanders into leaving. At one point, American soldiers rounded up their dogs and gassed them.

In the end, islanders who still stubbornly clung to their homes were simply loaded on ships without most of their possessions (one bag per person) and dumped on the waterfront of Port Louis in Mauritius, where most of them have subsisted in abject poverty ever since.

You should know more about this. We all should.

John Pilger's "Stealing a Nation" is a powerful video documentary of this shameful episode.

In Pilger's words:

There are times when one tragedy, one crime, tells us how our whole system works, behind its democratic facade, and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful, and how governments often justify their actions with lies.

And the shameful episode is by no means over! As Dyer writes:

After that crushing legal rebuke to the government, the Chagossians probably would have gone home in due course -- except for 9/11.

Suddenly, Diego Garcia stopped being a military backwater and became a key base for U.S. aircraft bombing Afghanistan, bombing Iraq or just flying prisoners untraceably around the planet.

In the post-2001 mania for "security," the U.S. and British governments started insisting it would not be safe to have the original inhabitants return even to islands 100 kilometres from Diego Garcia.

If the islands were inhabited, people might launch raids on Diego Garcia from them or observe the movements of American warplanes.

Utter nonsense, of course, and the British Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, felt so sorry for the Chagossians that he arranged to grant them British citizenship. But once Cook had resigned in protest against the plan to invade Iraq, the Blair government moved swiftly, issuing an order in council in 2004 to block the islanders' return on security grounds.

Of course, despite all the utter nonsense surrounding it, the GWOT rots on, so the American base is still there, and no matter who's "going home", you can bet it's not the troops!

You can find more from Gwynne Dyer on this story at The Spectator, and more from Dyer in general at this link.

Gwynne Dyer: We Live In A Time Of Peace And Prosperity

From Canada's University of Western Ontario comes this report by Dave Ward in the UWO Gazette: Gwynne Dyer visits Wave, talks climate change

“People who are really worried about climate change are not worried about rising sea levels in 2020, but about famine in 2040,” Dyer said.
...
According to Dyer, the world is already straining to meet food production demands for its population. Predicted rising global temperature would significantly cut current production, he added.

Dyer said this forecast is causing some governments to move toward protecting themselves from moving populations of famine refugees.

“That is why Britain is getting a new generation of nuclear weapons,” he said, adding they’re sending the message they won’t be letting starving people onto “lifeboat Britain.”

Is that so? Is Britain really developing new nuclear weapons in order to stem the anticipated tide of climate-change refugees? What are they planning to do? Nuke the boat people?

According to Dyer, we are living in an unprecedented golden age of peace and prosperity.

“No great power is preparing for war with another power,” he said.

Is that so? Hmmmm ... Iran is not a power? The US is not preparing? Or maybe the thing the US is preparing to unleash on Iran is not war? So ... what, then? Are we looking at another cakewalk here? Perhaps they'll greet us with flowers? Maybe their grandchildren will sing songs about us, too?

But then, paradoxically,

He argued U.S. policy-makers are panicking and have begun forming alliances to encircle China. This includes luring India into a military pact by offering nuclear technology, Dyer said.

Dyer said the average Chinese person isn’t aware of U.S. actions because public opinion is so well controlled in China.

“The paradox is we must allow this to persist,” Dyer said.

Wow! This is stunning!!

"We must allow this to persist", whoever "we" are; in other words have to continue to allow the Chinese government to control public opinion in China! -- not that we could do anything about it anyway -- but we have to allow it because why? Because if the Chinese people ever found out that the USA is trying to encircle them, then what?

He said if the Chinese become aware, they will want the Chinese government to react, resulting in a cold war with the U.S.

This gets better all the time. If we allow the Chinese people to find out what the United States is doing, they would want the Chinese government to try to defend against the threat -- and that would be bad because ...

This cold war would eliminate any chance of a global deal on climate change, Dyer said.

It's difficult not to speculate, at least a little bit. I would venture to guess that by the time Gwynne Dyer reached this point in his address, most of the students at the University of Western Ontario had no idea whether he was making any sense or not.

But they would have been spellbound in any case, for it's safe to say that none of the professors who usually instruct them in such subtleties as the hypothetical future of mankind do so with beer in hand.

Life can get plenty confusing with so much going on, so it's a good thing that no major power is preparing for war with any other power.

A damned good thing, in my estimation... unless you happen to consider the USA a major power and Iran a power of some sort.

Dyer said he’s reasonably optimistic about the future, especially since a new U.S. administration might change course and stop encircling China.

Well that's bloody likely, isn't it, Gwynne?

The current administration's foreign policy is by no means a break from the foreign policy pursued by every previous administration, Democratic or Republican, since the end of the second World War.

The aim may be little or no different, but the reach is considerably more ambitious; Bush, Rove, Cheney and the rest -- enabled by the attacks of 9/11 and the artifially created myth surrounding those attacks -- move in a bolder way than any of their predecessors. Nonetheless, 2004 Democratic "challenger" John Kerry tried to outflank Bush on the pro-war side ("I have a plan. Get more allies involved. Send more troops to Iraq.") and the current flock of Democratic sheep in Congress look like they're trying to outflank him on the "right" on the crucial issue of who can be toughest with Iran. So -- no matter who succeeds the current regime -- US foreign policy is hardly likely to make a U-turn anytime soon.

And speaking of Iran, BINGO! The country the USA is preparing to attack next is ... Iran!

An unprovoked war with Iran would almost certainly engulf the entire Middle East, causing countless unnecessary deaths and poisoning a huge area of the world -- maybe even the entire planet -- forever, ruining the global economy once and for all, and setting up generation after generation of the most frightful blowback ... For what?

Why doesn't Gwynne Dyer know this? Or if he does, why doesn't he want to talk about it?

What has happened to Gwynne Dyer all of a sudden?

Three weeks ago he was talking about what might happen if US generals got an order to attack Iran, and now this!

I can't figure it out ... unless ... unless ...

Maybe he was right about Loose Change after all. Maybe it is rotting his brain.

Or maybe he should just have another beer.

Gwynne Dyer And 9/11 Truth: Never The Twain Shall Meet

I've been waiting five and a half years for Gwynne Dyer to finally say something about 9/11. As it turns out, I shouldn't have bothered. Neither should he.

I'll spare you the details and get right to the conclusions...

On Loose Change:

pure paranoid fantasy and it is rotting people's brains

On MIHOP (the notion that certain key officials Made It Happen On Purpose):

I don't think that Tenet, Rice, Powell et al would have deliberately plotted the deaths of thousands of Americans.

I don't believe even Dick Cheney would have done that.

On the official conspiracy theory: not a word!

On the conspiracy theory presented by Loose Change:

The FBI was in on it, the CIA was in on it, the Air Force was in on it - except those who were killed at the Pentagon - and North American Aerospace Defence Command was in on it.

The security companies guarding the World Trade Centre were in on it, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in on it, the Federal Aviation Administration was in on it, Nasa was in on it, and the Pentagon was in on it. At least 10,000 people were in on it. They had to be, or it couldn't have worked.

More than five years later, not one of them has talked. Nobody has got drunk and spilled their guts. Nobody has told their spouse, who then blabbed.

Not one of these 10,000 accomplices to mass murder has yielded to the temptation for instant fame and great wealth for blowing the whistle on the greatest conspiracy in history.

Oh yeah? Instant fame and great wealth?? How about instant unemployment?

If Gwynne Dyer had done some honest open-minded research, he could have found the answers to many of the questions he doesn't even treat as worthy of being asked.

For instance, there is considerable evidence indicating that the security companies guarding the World Trade Center were in fact in on it. We talked about that not very long ago.

We know how the Air Force was diverted -- with the heaviest concentration of war games ever scheduled. We know how NORAD was confused -- and we marvel at how many times the people who should have been handling the emerging crisis asked, "Is this real-world or an exercise?".

In an environment where following orders is everything, where information is made available on a "need to know" basis, it certainly would be possible to organize an attack on this scale without letting 10,000 people in on the guilty secret. And Gwynne Dyer should know it.

How many people would it take? Let's look at it this way: Spectacular crimes are always easier to pull off with some inside help than without any. We're supposed to believe the crime of the century was committed by 19 or 20 foreigners with no access to any inside help whatsoever. So why would it take 10,000 well-connected insiders to inflict the same damage? It makes no sense at all.

Gwynne Dyer: A Shameful, Childish Lie

Gwynne Dyer's most recent column comes to us from the Hamilton Spectator.

Even Doonesbury plays U.S. blame game

As the people who talked the United States into the Iraq war try to talk their way out of the blame for the mess they made, one dominant theme has emerged:

Blame the Iraqis.

Our intentions were good. We did our best to help. But the Iraqis are vicious, incompetent ingrates who would prefer to kill one another than seize the freedom we brought them.

It's not our fault it turned out so badly.

Somebody must be to blame, and it cannot be us, so it must be those brutal, stupid Iraqis.

This comforting myth started on the right, among those who had been eager supporters of "a war of choice to instill some democracy in the heart of the Middle East," as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman put it in his column four years ago.

So fast is the myth taking root in America, however, that it has now even infected that icon of liberal irony, the Doonesbury comic strip.

The irony here doesn't appear to be intentional.

There was no surprise last November when arch neo-conservative Richard Perle said he had "underestimated the depravity" in Iraq.

He has a lot of blame to shift, so he would say that, wouldn't he?

It was no surprise, either, when right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, once an eager supporter of the war, elaborated on the same theme less than a month ago:

"Thousands of brave American soldiers have died trying to counter, put down and prevent civil strife. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shias kill Shias and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on (America) is simply perverse ... Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war."

But what is one to make of Gary Trudeau peddling the same line in Doonesbury?

The strip runs daily in 1,400 newspapers around the world, and often serves as the vehicle for political or social commentary from a liberal perspective. It never supported the invasion of Iraq, but Monday's strip was a classic exercise in stereotyping and blame-shifting.

Doonesbury, February 26, 2007

Click to enlarge.

Unravelling the message doesn't take a Marshall McLuhan: U.S. troops are carrying the burden of the war while lazy, cowardly Iraqis shun their duty. They don't deserve us.

And guess what? It's part of a series! Here are the next two installments:

Doonesbury, February 27, 2007

Doonesbury, February 28, 2007

The strip the weekend before last was even more blatant in blaming the failure on the Iraqis.

Doonesbury, February 18, 2007

Get the message?

These Ay-rabs are not only lazy, they are so savage that they harbour murderous grudges over six centuries.

Even Americans cannot bring these people to their senses. Let's get the hell out of here. It isn't our fault that it all went wrong.

Getting out of Iraq is the least bad thing the United States can do now, and the sooner the better.

If Americans must manufacture racist fantasies about the victims in order to salve their pride on the way out, then so be it.

But it is a shameful, childish lie.

Apparently Gwynne Dyer reads Garry Trudeau every day so I don't have to.

I'll take Tom Toles, thanks!

Gwynne Dyer: If Bush Gives The Order, Pace Faces A Big Decision

Many people listen to the White House these days and conclude a United States attack on Iran is imminent: "To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again," as Senator John Rockefeller, the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said recently.

But if President Bush gives the order, then General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will face a big decision.

Some senior US soldiers were worried about the strategic wisdom and even the legality of invading Iraq, but nobody resigned over it. It was obvious the US would win the war quickly and cheaply, and almost nobody worried about the aftermath.

But an attack on Iran is different, even though it would not involve American ground troops, because any competent general knows this is a war the US cannot win.

Who says there's a war the US cannot win?

Why, Gwynne Dyer, of course. He's a veteran of two navies and a respected military historian; he knows the difference between slogans and realities. Dyer's most recent column comes to us today from New Zealand.

Air strikes alone cannot win a war, however massive they are, and they probably could not even destroy all of Iran's nuclear facilities, which are numerous, dispersed, and often deeply buried.

Many Iranians would be killed, but what would the US do next? It would have very few options, whereas Iran would have many. Iran could flood Iraq with sophisticated weapons and volunteers to fight against US forces.

It could throw international markets into turmoil by halting its oil exports. It could try to close the entire Gulf to tanker traffic, and throw the world economy into crisis.

And any further US air strikes would simply harden Iranians' resolve.

So ... what to do about it?

How about NOT doing it?

So would General Pace attack Iran if Bush ordered him to? His only alternative would be to resign, but he does have that option.

Senior officers like Pace, while still bound by the code of military discipline, also acquire a political responsibility. Like cabinet ministers, they cannot oppose a government decision while in office, but they have the right and even the duty to resign rather than carry out a decision they believe disastrous.

The resignation of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - and possibly several of the other chiefs as well - would be an immensely powerful gesture. It could stop an attack on Iran dead in its tracks, for the White House would have to find other officers who would carry out its orders.

It would doubtless find them, but such a shocking event might finally enable Congress to find its backbone and refuse support for another illegal and foredoomed war.

But what would it say to the Terrorists?

My guess is both the Joint Chiefs and the White House understand that the option of resignation is on the table. Consider the dance that was done around the question of Iran and "Explosively Formed Penetrators" in the past couple of weeks. (EFPs are glorified shaped-charge weapons that can penetrate armour. Most major armies have had them for several decades.)

On 11 February, US officials claimed the EFPs that have killed some 170 American troops in Iraq since 2004 were Iranian-made, and supplied to Iraqi insurgents by "the highest levels of the Iranian government".

White House spokesman Tony Snow insisted they were being supplied by the Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Familiar stuff from the run-up to the Iraq war - but then something unscripted happened. In Australia, General Peter Pace said Iranian Government involvement was not proven: "We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian Government clearly knows or is complicit." A day later, in Jakarta, he repeated his doubts: "What [the evidence] does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers."

Methinks the General ought to know enough not to undercut his Commander in Chef while he's trying to catapult the propaganda!

There is a civil-military confrontation brewing in the US not seen since President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.

But this time, if the general acts on his convictions, he will be in the right.

There are some people around here looking for a much more serious civil-military confrontation than the president firing a General. And pulling for the military, too, unless I am very much mistaken.

The "thinking" goes: If we can't have gridlock in Congress then maybe we can get some mutiny in the Pentagon. Yesterday I wasn't sure whether that would qualify as thinking or merely wishin' and hopin' and prayin' ... but today, having read Dyer's most recent, I could almost be persuaded that there's hope for us yet.

Slim is always better than None.

Gwynne Dyer: US Attacked Iraq Not Only To Get The Oil But To Control It

Military historian Gwynne Dyer, speaking at a War Crimes Conference in Malaysia on Tuesday, said

the United States of America attacked Iraq not only for its oil, but also to control the flow of the valuable commodity

according to the Malaysian National News Agency. The article goes on to say that Dyer

said the US wanted to extend its control over the world and controlling oil flow from Iraq would help achieve this aim as most of the oil produced by Iraq was not used in the US, but exported to the east, especially to China.

"This we see as a very invisible way of making sure China can be kept in check. By 2040, the US knows China would be equal not only in economic terms but also military might. What a better way to keep the lid on China than controlling its oil," he said.

In my view, it's not all about China. That's only half the story, if that. If the American warmongers want to prevent the oil from flowing east, what direction do they want it going? And where do they want it to end up?

Follow the oil, friends.

"Going to war with Iraq was just a distraction from the actual intention, that is to control the entire supply of oil in the Persian Gulf," Dyer said at a session entitled "The Ultimate War Crime & How to Distract the Media".

"You don't need to invade a country to get oil from them. They are in the business of selling it. [...] The main aim is to get to the heart of the Persian Gulf and control the flow of oil," he added.

I can't argue with any of this.

I also tend to see Dick Cheney as a guy who has played too much RISK. He sees a weak opponent with a handful of cards and he thinks: "Hey if I could just knock that guy out and cash in his cards I would have enough armies to take over the world!"

But this isn't a board game, and he didn't knock the other guy out. So the plan to take over the world is suffering a delay. On the other hand, Cheney's still making millions of dollars a year off the war -- an income stream that would dry up if the war ended. So he probably doesn't mind too much.

Why isn't this a crime? Why aren't they all in prison?

"The reason given for the attack or invasion is of course nonsense. It was a manufactured reasoning. As a journalist, I have friends in the American and British intelligence who can vouch for this," Dyer revealed.

I can go along with Dyer and his intelligence friends on this one.

The real reason for the invasion, he claimed was a "greater power game" to impose American superiority over the world.

"The real target was actually China which is expected to become a major economic player by 2040. The US wants to continue their control...they don't like to be number two or three, they don't like other positions except being number one."

Well, I might disagree with Dyer about China being the "real target". But he could be right. He often is. Think of a country with more than billion people, just starting to make cars...

He said the task of criminalising war and making it illegal was done 52 years ago with the establishment of the United Nations.

"But now the UN has been sidelined. They do not pay heed to the UN...they can go to war but when others do that, then it's a crime and is illegal."

The story of how the USA bullied and swindled the UN Security Council to get the resolution that they say allowed them to invade Iraq is not well known in the USA. But it is fairly common knowledge in Europe, and I can't imagine that Dyer wouldn't be aware of it.

And guess what, USA? It's still a crime. It's still illegal. And the rest of the world has not forgotten.

Simon Jenkins: "Not One Remotely Plausible Game Plan"

Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times:

This is the week, we are told, when George Bush will announce positively the last military assault on insurgency in Iraq before he finally loses patience and quits. The so-called surge will supposedly correct the mistake of last year’s Operation Together Forward. Without law and order in the capital the physical and political reconstruction of Iraq is impossible. But since that order cannot, after all, be assigned to Iraqi forces, the Americans must throw another 20,000-30,000 troops into the conflict instead.

I have not heard one remotely plausible game plan for the “Battle of the Surge”. Leaks have indicated that commanders on the ground are strongly opposed to giving the enemy yet more targets. Pentagon chiefs are equally opposed to the cost in men and money of a transient boost in control on the ground. American public opinion and Congress are overwhelmingly against the plan, which Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator, calls “Alice in Wonderland”.
...
The conflict in Iraq is beyond metaphor. It is the most dangerous, heart-breaking and hopeless that those who have witnessed recent wars can recall. Certainly the risks taken by soldiers on the ground and the terrifying existence endured by ordinary Iraqis are worse than in anything I have witnessed. Independent reporting is near impossible.
...
The idea that such a hellhole can be policed back to normality with an extra 20,000 US troops is absurd. Such a force (which means barely 7,000 on patrol at any one time) would simply disappear into the dust. The insurgency is anyway now entangled with the conflict between Shi’ite and Sunni, claiming hundreds of lives each week and fought by paramilitaries mostly armed by America in a shambles of unaudited theft and fraud.

The only way in which more foreign troops assert any control at present is by “denying the enemy ground” by laying waste to it. In Basra, Britain’s contribution to order has been to flatten the police station. In Anbar province, US counter-insurgency takes the form of wrecking whole settlements from the air, as in Falluja two years ago. According to a Times correspondent who reached Falluja last week, the city is back in the hands of Sunni militias who intend to rename the hospital after Saddam Hussein. What all Iraqis crave is a local policeman they can trust not to kill them. America and Britain have failed to give them even that assurance.

Jenkins, like Gwynne Dyer, like nearly everybody I've been reading lately, is saying this marks the beginning of the end for USA in Iraq.

His piece is called "One last push and that’s you finished in Iraq, Mr President" and he says things like

before he finally loses patience and quits

I don't get it. It just looks like more of the same to me. I don't see this as an endpoint, or even a turning point. Just a blip along the path.

But we shall see. I hope.

Illegal, Unjustified and Deeply, Deeply Stupid

[UPDATED below]

Gwynne Dyer explains why the United States is bent on making a bad situation worse in the Horn of Africa: Washington about to get behind another ugly war

01/01/2007

“THE Ethiopians now are advancing, but that is not the end,” Omar Idris, a senior official of Somalia’s Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), told the BBC on Wednesday

“We know what happened in Iraq, the experience of the Americans... I think this is very, very early to say that the Islamic Court forces were defeated.”

The war is starting in Somalia, but it may end up being fought in Ethiopia and Eritrea, too.

Together, the three countries contain almost a hundred million of the poorest people on the planet.
...
This is a war founded on a misconception and driven by paranoid fantasies.

The misconception was the US Government’s belief that the Islamic Courts, local religious authorities backed by merchants in Mogadishu who wanted someone to curb the warlords, punish thieves, and enforce contracts, were just a cover for al-Qaida.

So the US instead backed the warlords who were making Somalis’ lives a misery.

American support is the kiss of death in Somalia, so the warlords were finally dislodged in Mogadishu last June by an uprising led by the UIC and supported by most of the population.

The warlords fled to an American ship offshore, their clansmen went to ground, and the UIC rapidly took control of most of southern Somalia, bringing order for the first time since 1991.

But the US immediately started plotting its overthrow.

... but not openly, of course? Surely!

Washington’s principal instrument in this enterprise was Ethiopia, Somalia’s giant neighbour to the west.

Ethiopia’s 75 million people outnumber Somalis by seven-to-one — but although the Christians of the highlands have always dominated Ethiopia, almost half of its people are Muslims, like the Somalis.

In Ethiopia’s sparse eastern desert, the Ogaden, most of the people are not only Muslim but ethnically Somali. This is where the paranoid fantasies kick in.

The official American position, stated last week by Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, is that the UIC is now “controlled by al-Qaida cell individuals. The top layer of the Court are extremists. They are terrorists”.

Even US diplomats in the region privately reject this assertion, but it is now an article of faith in Washington.

Still they appear to be trying to bolster their case:

First we had the obligatory chase scene: US Seeks To Block Terrorists From Fleeing In Somalia

and we also had to have the hunt for arms Government in Somalia to seize weapons, which seems to have turned up not very much (see photo courtsey CTV) and now, just in time for the weekend, Al-Qaeda no. 2 accuses Security Council of supporting Ethiopia

Cairo - Ayman al-Zawahri, second-in-command of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, on Friday accused the United Nations Security Council of cooperating with Ethiopia to violate Somalia's territorial integrity.

In a sound recording broadcast on www.alhesbah.org, al-Zawahri said 'the UN Security Council is involved with the Ethiopian crusaders by sending international forces to Somalia and refusing to issue a decree forcing Ethiopia to pull its forces out of Somalia.'

Al-Zawahri called on Muslims across the globe to help their fellow Somali Muslims in all possible ways.

And so on.

The man regarded as right-hand man of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden pointed out that 'the true battle will start with the Islamic campaigns on the Ethiopian forces.'

He further called on the Islamic Courts in Somalia to recompose itself in what he called the new battlefield, the war waged by the US and its anti-Islam allies against Islam and Muslims.

'The United Nations, which divided Palestine and offered a legitimate cover for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, has now offered a new service to the crusader alliance led by the US against the Islamic Somalia,' said al-Zawahri.

He encouraged the Somali people not to be afraid of the US.

'Don't be taken by the US power as you have defeated it before thanks to God's help,' he said. 'Today it is weaker than before.'

Well what do you know?

Zippity doo dah! al-Q'aeda to the rescue!!

Gwynne Dyer's words still stand, in my humble and slightly frozen view:

The Ethiopian invasion is illegal, unjustified and deeply, deeply stupid
...
From the same folks who brought you Iraq.

UPDATE: Now the Voice Of America gets into the act:

Disbanded Militant Youth Group in Somalia Support Al-Qaida Message

In Somalia, an alleged message from Osama bin Laden's deputy urging Somalis to launch an Iraq-style guerrilla war against Ethiopian forces there is being taken seriously by a now mostly-disbanded group of militant Somali youths known as the Shaabab. In an interview with VOA Correspondent Alisha Ryu in Mogadishu, one former Shaabab member warns that he and many of his colleagues are still committed to waging a holy war against Ethiopia.

The audiotaped message, allegedly by al-Qaida's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, appeared Friday on a Web site used by Muslim extremist groups.

The message urged Somalis to use guerrilla tactics, including suicide attacks and roadside bombings, against thousands of Ethiopian troops, backing up interim government forces, in Somalia.

Many Somalis in the capital interviewed by VOA acknowledged that Ethiopia is still considered an enemy and their presence is creating tension.

But they also lamented al-Zawahri's call for violence, saying Somalia, which suffered through more than 15 years of factional fighting, does not need any more instability.

and so on. Pretty soon we got us a genuine ole-fashion' hoe-down.