Climate Chaos; Bush's Climate Of Fear  

Calvin at the "Climate Change Action" blog points to a recent BBC documentary on global warming politics in the US - part of the BBC's 'Climate Chaos' series on Panorama (video - Real Audio).

As part of the BBC's 'Climate Chaos' series Panorama--the UK's premier news documentary show--has investigated what has been described as the Republican War on Science and what is more accurately called the most destructive campaign of mis-information that the American people have ever been exposed to.

I`m not saying everyone in the US believed the propaganda I`m just saying that many did, and many more where caused to doubt the science.The whole debate was successfully shifted from 'what can we do' to 'should we do something' of if you watch Fox News to 'are we sure this climate change thing isn't just some plot being concocted by anti American environmentalists and liberals'.

"An Inconvenient Truth" opens here at the Sydney Film Festival on the weekend, with Al Gore getting some publicity in the local paper today.

Thanks to An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about Gore's crusade against global warming, the former vice-president has, for the first time in years, been the centre of attention. There have been rumours of political resurrection, appearances at the Cannes Film Festival.

But before the rise, there had to be a fall, and that's what intrigued the director Davis Guggenheim: Gore small and sad, Gore as tragic figure. The epiphany came early one evening late in the filming process, after Guggenheim realised he hadn't interviewed Gore about the 2000 presidential campaign. He summoned a sound crew to a Los Angeles hotel suite, sat in a room with Gore for hours and talked around the subject as the room grew dark. Finally, in pitch black, he asked about the race, the extended fight over ballots, the concession speech.

Gore was silent for a while, Guggenheim recalls. Then he began to speak, with palpable pain. "That was a hard blow," he said. "But what do you do? You make the best of it."

"You think about what it must have been, to be in his shoes," Guggenheim says. "The amazing thing about him - which I think is true with all great characters in any movie … he's a character who makes a heroic choice. And I don't think I'm overstating it."

"He goes from city to city, rolling his bag through airports," Guggenheim says. "And if a civic club, or a Republican group, invites him, he will go and give a slide show, for free. That's what he's decided to do with his life … That's as compelling a character as I can imagine."

The SMH reports that BHP is going deep into Gulf oil

BHP Billiton has given the go-ahead for one of the largest projects in its corporate history, approving the development of the $US4.4 billion ($5.9 billion) Shenzi oil and gas field in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yesterday's nod for the project - along with the recent appointment of Houston-based president of the energy division, Mike Yeager - cemented BHP's strategy of attempting to reverse declining petroleum production by developing huge offshore US projects.

"Shenzi joins the development of the Neptune field as a BHP Billiton operated project and, together with our interests in Atlantis and Mad Dog, significantly expands our production base in the region."

As the Shenzi project operator and 44 per cent shareholder, BHP will be responsible for $US1.94 billion of the development costs, up from a $US1.8 billion estimate released with its half-year results in February. The remainder will be shared by its joint venture partners, BP and New York oil trading company, Hess Corp.

"There's been significant market movement for services since the time of the previous estimate," said BHP spokeswoman Samantha Evans, explaining the cost increase.

The Shenzi oil and gas field was first discovered in 2002 and is 193 kilometres offshore from Louisiana - and 14 kilometres from Atlantis - in about 1300 metres of water.

A stand-alone tension leg platform is expected to begin production by the middle of 2009, with maximum capacity of 100,000 barrels of oil and 50 million cubic feet of gas a day. In total, the field is believed to contain 350 million to 400 million barrels of oil equivalent, compared to 635 million BOE at Atlantis. The higher costs at Shenzi are partly attributed to the need to build an oil export pipeline.

BHP suffered a setback in its petroleum production last year when Hurricane Rita struck the Gulf and ripped its Typhoon tension leg platform from its moorings. The $US250 million platform was deemed unsalvageable by project operator Chevron, which later decided to sink the platform and make it an artificial reef.

Perhaps BHP management should spend some time at The Oil Drum, pondering Hurricanes and Sand Storms, some thoughts on the coming months and When the Hurricanes Come.







Refocus magazine has an article on the major economic opportunity presented by renewable energy for the US.

Using green power to meet 20% of U.S. electricity demand would create one-quarter of a million jobs by 2020, according to a report from a university in Dallas.

Global warming may represent a major opportunity for investment and job growth in the United States but any such potential is endangered if the general public and politicians remain mired in panic or a sense of resignation about climate change, says Lloyd Jeff Dumas in ‘Seeds of Opportunity - Climate Change: Between Complacency and Panic.’ Dumas is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the report examines the potential economic opportunities associated with mitigating global warming, with a focus on five policy approaches.

“It has been said that within every problem lie the seeds of opportunity,” it explains. “Global warming is no exception to that rule.”

Global warming threatens to result in huge economic dislocations, powerful storms, diseases, catastrophic droughts, dwindling food supplies, unprecedented floods and vanishing coastal areas, but the threat also presents an opportunity for private sector companies and government to find cost-effective ways to mitigate the damage likely to be caused by climate change. “There is the potential for earning substantial profits and creating large numbers of productive jobs by focusing on climate change solutions,” it adds.

Refocus also reports that wind power integration poses no technical barriers for the electricity grid (contrary to the ridiculous claims made by some coal and nuclear lobbyists).

The U.S. power grid can accommodate more electricity from windfarms, but “understanding and quantifying the impacts of wind plants on utility systems is a critical first step in identifying and solving problems.”

“In just five years from 2000-2005, wind energy has become a significant resource on many electric utility systems, with over 50,000 MW of nameplate capacity installed worldwide at the end of 2005,” explains the Utility Wind Integration Group in its assessment, ‘Utility Wind Integration State of the Art.’ “Wind energy is now ‘utility scale’ and can affect utility system planning and operations for both generation and transmission. The utility industry in general, and transmission system operators in particular, are beginning to take note.”

A number of steps can be taken to improve the ability to integrate increasing amounts of wind capacity on power systems, including improvements in turbine and windfarm models, improvements in windfarm operating characteristics, evaluation of wind-integration operating impacts, incorporating windfarm forecasting into utility control-room operations, making better use of physically (in contrast with contractually) available transmission capacity, upgrading and expanding transmission systems, developing well-functioning hour-ahead and day-ahead markets, adopting market rules and tariff provisions that are more appropriate to weather-driven resources, and consolidating balancing areas into larger entities or accessing a larger resource base through the use of dynamic scheduling.

“This document is a summary of the best information available from around the world on what we currently know about integrating wind power plants into electric utility systems,” says Charlie Smith of UWIG. “The message is very positive; we do not see any fundamental technical barriers at the present time to wind penetrations of up to 20% of system peak demand, which is far beyond where we are today.”

Following on from my theme of yesterday - the holy grail for solving the world's problems - carbon taxes - Energy Bulletin has an excellent little round up of articles on "Gasoline tax and energy quotas". The best is this piece from Jeffrey J. Brown at GraphOilogy.

Some have argued that the suburbs are dead; the suburbanites just don't know it yet. It's probably more accurate to say that the suburban commutes are dead; the suburban commuters just don't know it yet.

We recommend that the United States abolish the payroll tax (Social Security + Medicare tax) and replace it with either a liquid transportation (petroleum) fuel tax or an overall (nonrenewable) energy tax.

The majority of American households pay more in the payroll tax than in the income tax. This would be a tax cut for most households and it would a massive tax increase on those who are profligate in their use of energy. No matter where one lives, the cost of goods would go up, but if you lived close to where you work, your effective tax rate would go down. Of course, those who persisted in long commutes would pay the price.

There would of course be very powerful forces opposed to this idea--the housing industry; auto industry; airlines; trucking--the list goes on. But the fates of these industries are sealed. It's not a question of if they will contract; it's just a question of when. The sooner it happens, and the sooner these industries start emphasizing energy efficiency, the better off we all will be.

A high gasoline tax does not necessarily equate to a lower standard of living. Norway, with the highest gasoline tax in the world, has the highest standard of living in the world, perhaps partly because their car ownership per 1,000 people is about half of what it is in the US.

There would be some other benefits. As we turned to walking, biking and mass transit, our health would improve. There is pretty much a linear correlation between obesity rates and total miles driven (here in the US, we are the world champs in both categories). In addition, since this is in effect a consumption tax, everyone who now avoids paying Social Security taxes would no longer be able to avoid paying them.

However, the primary reason for implementing the proposal is that it would cause an immediate and massive across the board push for greater energy efficiency and it would unleash enormous free market forces against profligate energy use.

GraphOilogy also has a post on What Can We Learn From The Oil Field Size Distribution? which contains one of their patented graphs which should be required reading for anyone who doesn't get the concept of peak oil (we're using up the big fields - and thus we have to exploit increasing numbers of smaller fields to make up for depletion - and this isn't a trend which can go on forever).



Lloyds of London is warning members that climate change could destroy insurers.

Lloyd's of London, the oldest insurance market in the world, yesterday urged its members to start taking global warming more seriously, by increasing prices to avoid being "swept away" in a sea of future financial claims.

Premiums will have to rise and some risks might even be classed as uninsurable due to greenhouse gases and rising sea levels, warned Lloyd's in a report entitled Climate Change, Adapt or Bust.

"Although it's almost two decades since the UN recognised that climate change was a catastrophic threat to the Earth, it's clear that the insurance industry has not taken catastrophe trends seriously enough. Climate change is today's problem not tomorrow's. If we don't take action now to understand the changing nature of our planet we will face extinction," said Lloyd's director, Rolf Tolle.

Recent natural disasters revealed the inadequacy of capital and pricing methods and there was a need for catastrophe estimates to be constantly updated in line with scientific evidence, he said. Insurers should cease to base risk premiums on historical data and do more to look ahead and factor in scenarios connected with climate change, says the report.

TOD UK has a post on peak oil and climate change.

In his opening comments Porritt described climate change and peak oil as “two riders of the apocalypse” yet also made clear that rather than crushing any vestige of optimism left over after Al Gore’s previous speech on climate change he would try and focus on the more positive things that might happen.

Spending little time on outlining climate change Porritt suggested that amongst this audience at least there can be little remaining doubt either of the urgency or severity of the climate change challenge. Tipping his hat to the recent statements from Sir David Attenborough on the subject, he noted that “The ranks of those still trying to tell us this is not serious is thinning, diminishing, all the time”.

Porritt outlined four key points on what the science is actually telling us about climate change:

* Everything is moving a great deal faster than they thought it was moving, even two years ago. When you talk to scientists in the science community they will tell you the last two years have been deeply shocking, in terms of the volume and the authority of the data that has come forward on a number of different climate phenomenon.

* We shouldn’t think about climate change as a gradually unfolding set of phenomena, all gradually increasing within our midst. The climate record tells us very clearly this is as much about sharp discontinuities in patterns of climate as gently rising changes.

* We should be thinking about systems not symptoms. We still focus on individual symptoms, we focus on the permafrost, disappearing sea-ice, melting glaciers or increased intensity of hurricanes. We keep looking at these individual phenomena, epiphenomena, and what we’re not looking at is the big systems stuff.

* This means nothing less than a radical break in the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today. I still hear people talk about climate change as something which can be managed in the dominant orthodox economic paradigm. I don’t believe them, I just don’t believe that is the case, I don’t see how we’re going to be able to manipulate those conventional aspects of growth bound consumer driven economy and cope with climate change in the way that we actually need to.

It turns out Billmon wasn't still on holidays after all - he was just resting up and writing his memoirs. Of course, the frenzy of Zarqawi pontification in the media (even tonight's ABC news was unbelievably gushing on the importance of the final chapter of the Zarqawi show) - Billmon describes the history of this media spectacle in "Entertainment News Tonight".

I always think the Pentagon's spokesman during the intial phases of Operation Iraqi Liberation, General Mark Kimmitt, summed it up best - "the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date" - although it wasn't a performance that is likely to gather too many Academy Awards.

The Pentagon Channel today announced the cancellation of its long-running reality TV series, The Abu Zarqawi Hour, saying tonight's special-effects extravaganza, in which Keifer Sutherland and a team of secret agents trail the terrorist mastermind to his hideout and call in a massive airstrike, would be the show's last.

The show originally piloted in 2003, and found a regular place in the Pentagon Channel's prime-time lineup in February 2004, replacing the widely panned sitcom Mission Accomplished, now in syndicated reruns on Fox News.

The Abu Zarqawi Hour debuted to generally favorable reviews, with New York Times critic Dexter Filkins praising the show for its "imaginative" storytelling and "gritty" realism. However, ratings declined sharply in 2005, with many viewers complaining that the show's episodes, which frequently featured the death and/or capture of Zarqawi's closest lieutenants, had become repetitive and unimaginative.

Critics reacted particularly negatively to this year's four-hour special, in which Zarqawi had obvious difficulty staying in character, and was unable to properly reload and fire his Kalishnikov rifle.

Although some critics defended the sequence as a daring experiment in Brechtian alienation technique, most panned the performance, saying it made it extremely hard for the audience to believe that Zarqawi was actually a seasoned terrorist leader, instead of a paid actor pretending to be a terrorist.

Doubts about the show's viability deepened in April, after Washington Post TV critic Tom Ricks questioned whether the supposedly spontaneous reality show was actually being scripted by its producers.

Over the next few weeks, insiders say, Pentagon Channel executives determined that while the Zarqawi show still had a dedicated following of hardcore fans who would swallow any plot device, no matter how ludicrous, the series no longer made commercial or artistic sense. It was also believed that a spectacular and upbeat finale might lure viewers away from Haditha, the controversial docudrama now airing on the rival Reality Network.

Network sources say the Pentagon Channel is weighing a possible sequel to the Abu Zarqawi Hour, featuring an identical plot but a completely different cast. The network and Zarqawi have permanently severed their relationship, these sources added, due to "irreconcilable creative differences."

Pentagon Channel officials declined to respond to questions about a possible sequel, saying only that "all options are under consideration. Things related and not."

Mr. Zarqawi was unavailable for comment.

Over at Lew Rockwell, their media critic Chris Floyd ponders The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi - and, like many other observers, notes the bizarre coincidence in timing of Zarqawi's reitrement with all this fuss about massacres of civilians in Haditha by US Marines and the like (as a side note, Mr Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times, so even if one were to agree with his analysis he could still possibly be considered a non-impartial source - and how the ultra-libertarians at Lew Rockwell came to start reprinting Russian media articles is yet another mystery of the Alice in Wonderland political landscape of the noughties).

Abu Musab Saddam Osama al-Zarqawi, the extremely elusive if not entirely mythical terrorist mastermind responsible for every single insurgent action in Iraq except for the ones caused by the red-tailed devils in Iran or the stripey-tailed devils in Syria, has reportedly been killed in an airstrike in Hibhib, an area north of Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced Thursday.

Zarqawi, the notorious shape-shifter who, according to grainy video evidence, was able to regenerate lost limbs, speak in completely different accents, alter the contours of his bone structure and also suffered an unfortunate binge-and-purge weight problem which caused him to change sizes with almost every appearance, was head of an organization that quite fortuitously dubbed itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" just around the time that the Bush Administration began changing its pretext for the conquest from "eliminating Iraq's [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction" to "fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

The name change of the Zarqawi gang from its cumbersome original – "The Monotheism and Holy War Group" – to the more media-sexy "Qaeda" brand was thus a PR godsend for the Bush Administration, which was then able to associate the widespread native uprising against the Coalition occupation with the cave-dwelling dastards of the bin Laden organization. This proved an invaluable tool for the Pentagon's massive "psy-op" campaign against the American people, which was successful in sufficiently obscuring reality and defusing rising public concerns about what many experts have termed "the full-blown FUBAR" in Iraq until after the 2004 elections.

However, in the last year, even the reputed presence of a big stonking al Qaeda beheader guy roaming at will across the land has not prevented a catastrophic drop in support for President Bush in general and the war in Iraq in particular. Polls show that substantial majorities – even those still psy-oped into believing the conquest has something to do with fighting terrorism – are now saying that the war "is not worth it" and call for American forces to begin withdrawing.

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In yet another amazing coincidence, the announcement of the death of Zarqawi or somebody just like him came just as Prime Minister Maliki was finally submitting his candidates for the long-disputed posts of defense and interior ministers, which then sailed through parliament after months of deadlock. The fortuitous death also came after perhaps the worst week of bad PR the Bush Administration has endured during the entire war, with an outpouring of stories alleging a number of horrific atrocities committed by U.S. troops in recent months.

Oddly enough, Zarqawi first vaulted into the American consciousness just after the public exposure of earlier U.S. atrocities: the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison in the spring of 2004. With story after story of horrible abuse battering the Administration during an election year, Zarqawi, or someone just like him, suddenly appeared with a Grand Guignol production: the beheading of American civilian Nick Berg. This atrocity was instantly seized upon by supporters of the war to justify the "intensive interrogation" of "terrorists" – even though the Red Cross had determined that 70 to 90 percent of American captives at that time had committed no crime whatsoever, much less been involved in terrorism, as the notorious anti-war Wall Street Journal reported. Abu Ghraib largely faded from the public eye – indeed, it was not mentioned by a single speaker at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks later or raised as an issue during the presidential campaign that year.

Today's news has likewise knocked the new atrocity allegations off the front pages, to be replaced with heartening stories of how, as the New York Times reports, Zarqawi's death "appears to mark a major watershed in the war." Thus in his reputed end as in his reputed beginning, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Iraq has, by remarkable coincidence, done yeoman service for the immediate publicity needs of his deadly enemy, the Bush Administration.

It is not yet known who will now take Zarqawi's place as the new all-purpose, all-powerful bogeyman solely responsible for every bad thing in Iraq. There were recent indications that Maliki himself was being measured for the post, after he publicly denounced American atrocities and the occupiers' propensity for hair-trigger killing of civilians, but he seems to be back with the program now. Administration insiders are reportedly divided over shifting the horns to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's already much-demonized head, or planting them on extremist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, or elevating some hitherto unknown local talent – or maybe just blaming the whole shebang on Fidel Castro, for old times' sake.

On the subject of Nick Berg (whose beheading prompted a huge flurry of theorising in the tinfoil world if I remember correctly), Past Peak has an interesting quote from his father, Michael Berg.

CNN's Soledad O'Brien today interviewed Michael Berg, father of Nick Berg, who's videoed beheading was attributed to al-Zarqawi. Berg's reaction is a model of maturity:

O'BRIEN: Mr. Berg, thank you for talking with us again. It's nice to have an opportunity to talk to you. Of course, I'm curious to know your reaction, as it is now confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man who is widely credited and blamed for killing your son, Nicholas, is dead.

MICHAEL BERG: Well, my reaction is I'm sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that.

I feel doubly bad, though, because Zarqawi is also a political figure, and his death will re-ignite yet another wave of revenge, and revenge is something that I do not follow, that I do want ask for, that I do not wish for against anybody. And it can't end the cycle. As long as people use violence to combat violence, we will always have violence.

O'BRIEN: I have to say, sir, I'm surprised. I know how devastated you and your family were, frankly, when Nick was killed in such a horrible, and brutal and public way.

BERG: Well, you shouldn't be surprised, because I have never indicated anything but forgiveness and peace in any interview on the air.

O'BRIEN: No, no. And we have spoken before, and I'm well aware of that. But at some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, 'I'm glad he's dead, the man who killed my son'?

BERG: No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead? [...]

Now, take someone who in 1991, who maybe had their family killed by an American bomb, their support system whisked away from them, someone who, instead of being 59, as I was when Nick died, was 5-years-old or 10-years-old. And then if I were that person, might I not learn how to fly a plane into a building or strap a bag of bombs to my back?

That's what is happening every time we kill an Iraqi, every time we kill anyone, we are creating a large number of people who are going to want vengeance. And, you know, when are we ever going to learn that that doesn't work? [...]

O'BRIEN: There's a theory that a struggle for democracy, you know...

BERG: Democracy? Come on, you can't really believe that that's a democracy there when the people who are running the elections are holding guns. That's not democracy.

Back to Lew Rockwell, Lew himself is decrying the possibility that a government may have formed in Somalia - "The End of the Salad Days in Somalia" - not because it is comprised of Islamic fundamentalists, and nor because it isn't made up of the CIA funded warlords who opposed them - but simply because it is a government - Somalia being viewed as an example of the goverment free utopia a real red blooded libertarian aspires to apparently (which to a rather less hard core libertarian like me simply demonstrates the problem of taking any ideology to its purest form - it probably isn't the utopia you imagine it would be).

Devotees of rhizome theory might like to study the recent history of Somalia closely and report back - maybe it doesn't deserve the savage reputation it generally has in the mainstream media - closed minded slaves of heirarchical control systems that they are :-)

Fifteen glorious years without a central government in Somalia! It was typically described as a "power vacuum," as if the absence of a taxing, regulating, coercing junta is an unnatural state of affairs, one that cannot and should not last.

Well, now this "vacuum" is being filled, with an Islamic militia claiming to be in control of the capital, Mogadishu.

But US officials may rue the day they hoped for a new government in this country. The dictator Mohammed Siad Barre fell in 1991. US troops went in with the idea that they would restore order, but thank goodness they did not. Bill Clinton's idea fell into shambles after 18 soldiers were killed by warlords. That seems like a low number in light of the Iraq disaster, but to Clinton's credit, he pulled out.

Since that time, Somalia has done quite well for itself, thank you (BBC: "Telecoms Thriving in Lawless Somalia"). But there was one major problem. The CIA couldn't come to terms with it. The US government likes to deal with other governments, whether it is paying them or bombing them or whatever. What makes no sense to central planners in DC is a country without a state.

So the US continued to talk about a "power vacuum" and secretly funneled money to its favorite warlords – a fact which the US officially denies but which has nonetheless been widely reported. Officials who have criticized the policy have been shut up and reassigned.

Aside from the downside that comes with the creation of any government, the continuous effort to fund warlords created a problem: it left open the possibility that at some point someone would cobble together the resources to claim to be a government. The mere prospect kept the Islamic militias worried and on edge. Finally, they prevailed.

As the International Herald Tribune says: "U.S. support for secular warlords, who joined under the banner of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, may have helped to unnerve the Islamic militias and prompted them to launch pre-emptive strikes."

That's hardly surprising. How many times have we seen the US establishment back something to the hilt only to discover that the plot backfires by inspiring opposition?

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The only people who are rejoicing in Somalia today are those who prefer dictatorship to puppet government. But the real victims are average people, who were doing just fine by scraping by. Adding a government to the mix will do nothing but create more trouble for everyone.

So here is a good rule. When a government falls, don't call it a "power vacuum." Call it a zone of liberty and be done with it. If some group claims to be the government, the proper answer should be: "Yeah, and I'm the Duke of Windsor. Get a life."

Also at Lew Rockwell, Paul Craig Roberts continues his ongoing litany of complaint about the behaviour of his fellow Republicans.

America is drowning in the shame of war crimes. One monstrous slaughter of civilians after another, each denied and covered up until brought to light by photos and eyewitnesses. The once proud US Marines, unable to defeat the resistance that is picking them off one by one, is now a frustrated, demoralized force that is getting even by murdering 3-month-old babies and old women.

The Council of Europe has issued its report on the Bush administration’s policy of kidnapping "suspected terrorists" and spiriting them off to tyrannical regimes to be tortured. US State Dept spokesperson, Sean McCormick, whose job it is to justify the criminal conduct of the Bush administration, said that he was "disappointed" in the report. Sean seemed genuinely puzzled that Europe’s oldest political organization would second-guess the sound judgment of the virtuous Bush administration or protest US violations of international law and human rights.

The only reason Americans can look themselves in the mirror is that they are clueless and have little idea of what is being done in their name. One-third of the US population actually believes that Iraq was behind 9/11 and that Bush found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Apparently, a large percentage of the US population believes that Iran has nuclear weapons and that America is in danger of being attacked by Iran. No democracy can work when people take their responsibility as citizen so lightly as to be totally ignorant.

Formerly conservative, now proto-Nazi, publications such as National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, keep pounding the war drums, as does right-wing talk radio and neocon propaganda organs such as the Weekly Standard and Fox "News." The few facts that emerge in the interstices of the war propaganda are quickly spun away.

Slaughter of civilians? Just a few bad apples. We will fix that with seminars for the troops on military ethics and core values.

Troop withdrawals? As soon as the undefined mission is completed.

No weapons of mass destruction? Don’t worry about it. We had to have some excuse to invade Iraq and to "build democracy" so that America would be safe.

World opinion? No opinion counts but ours.

Red ink? No sweat. We can borrow more from China. Our growing indebtedness is proof that our power makes us a preferred debtor.

Bush supporters dismiss anyone who tells them the truth as a traitor. Bush supporters are as dependent on propaganda as substance abusers are on drugs and alcohol. Try weaning Bush supporters from the obvious lies that are the basis of this administration, and they will call you every name in the book. They are proud to be Americans. Lies and war crimes are an American right.

And you had better shut up or those Haliburton-built concentration camps will be your new home.

Combining Zarqawi, violence in Iraq and decentralised organisational structures is the always interesting John Robb (even if he doesn't seem to believe in the propaganada model) - in Zarqawi is dead and the older
Iraq and Foco Insurgency.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that a US air strike had killed Musab al-Zarqawi. The information that led to his death was the result of following the trail of custody on the distribution of his most recent video tape (or it could have been lucky given the number of air strikes that that have been made on reported Zarqawi positions in the past years).

This is excellent news, but it needs to be put into context (this is a brief for decision makers/analysts/thinkers and not motivation for the rank and file, so don't expect fluff -- as is often said, only the paranoid survive and every good commander I know understands this). Zarqawi is best categorized as [a] violence capitalist, very similar to bin Laden, that supported and incubated guerrilla entrepreneurs of the new open source warfare model. In this role he was [an] instigator of violence and not the leader of a vast hierarchical insurgency.

Here's how Zarqawi's role evolved:

* In the early phases of the guerrilla war in Iraq, Zarqawi was operational as the commander of a small cell. His group was able, through early large scale attacks, to set a plausible promise (an idea that many other groups could rally around) for the Iraqi insurgency. Namely, that it was possible to successfully fight the US occupation.

* During late 2004 and early 2005, his operational value diminished as the number of groups that were engaged in the war proliferated. During that time, he was focused on expanding the target set of the insurgency to include infrastructure, corporations and Iraqi military units. Later in 2005, his operational activities were focused on shifting the plausible promise of the insurgency from ousting the Americans to fighting Shiite domination (sectarian war) through attacks on Shiite civilians and symbols.

* By early 2006, Zarqawi's operational activities were all but over. He had succeeded in seeding the original insurgency and shifting the plausible promise to include sectarian warfare. During this final phase, Zarqawi moved into a role of strategic communicator, much like bin Laden's role today. In this role, he produced videos that were distributed to a global audience through the Internet and global media.

The latest "Peak Oil Passnotes" at Resource Investor notes that "Zarqawi Don't Drive" (not a bad tag line if its paraphrasing the Apocalypse Now quip "Charlie don't surf").

So Zarqawi is dead, oil drops by a buck and a half and suddenly the world seems a great place again. Not.

If ever there was a pointer to the underlying fundamentals of the oil and products market right now it was this one incident. Zarqawi had supposedly been the head of Al-Qaida in Iraq, although the whole idea of Al-Qaida even having a head seems faintly ridiculous to those who have studied the transient grouping.

When he is killed in the US bombing raid the mainstream media, and the various interested politicians, trumpet this as some kind of huge success. Sure he may well have done some very bad things, but he is not the cause of Iraq's collapse. That is something rightfully shared out between Saddam, President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, all of Saddam's previous supporters from France, Russia and China to the USA and all the conniving middle eastern governments you can think of. As well as the self-serving malcontents who make up the laughable attempt at a government now in Baghdad.

Zarqawi was a bit part player who came in at the end with a penchant for self-publicity and bloodshed. Like so many other players in the region. But his death drove down the price of crude landing thousands of miles away in Cushing.

We could not hope to spell it out any clearer than this. It is ridiculous. Geo-politics are the driver of the energy price, they will remain so. They are mixed in with the herd like reaction of the markets. They are mixed in with increased demand, maturing fields (or `peak oil` if you like the contaminated brand name) and daft investment cycles that have culminated in a terrible lack of spare capacity. But do not take it from me, take it from Alan Greenspan.

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Nor is there any respite from high energy costs because the Nigerian oil minister says they are going to add 1.5 million barrels per day of supply in the next fifteen months. Or that Mexico has found the new Cantarell. Or that Saudi Arabia say they can add gazillions of barrels to its reserve estimates, because none of it is true.

The hole Pemex drilled offshore Mexico is not only not the new Cantarell, it is not even the new hole. It seems hard to believe that almost all the mass media were captivated by such a brazen load of rubbish as that day when pre-election Vincente Fox welcomed the `discovery`. These are the games played out in front of our eyes, do not believe them.

We are in a time of high energy costs period. There is one thing and one thing alone that can bring them down and that is a recession. There will be no downward drivers of the oil price from the peace camp, no drivers of the oil price from renewed investment, more wars, superb exploration techniques or better technology. And there will certainly, never again be a man called Al-Zarqawi driving the oil price. That small act we can agree on.

Greg Palast has, as usual, an entirely different take on the Zarqawi Invitation (almost drowned out in the frenzy of self publicity srrounding the launch of his new book "The Armed Madhouse").

They got him -- the big, bad, beheading berserker in Iraq. But, something's gone unreported in all the glee over getting Zarqawi … who invited him into Iraq in the first place?

If you prefer your fairy tales unsoiled by facts, read no further. If you want the uncomfortable truth, begin with this: A phone call to Baghdad to Saddam's Palace on the night of April 21, 2003. It was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a secure line from Washington to General Jay Garner.

The General had arrives in Baghdad just hours before to take charge of the newly occupied nation. The message from Rumsfeld was not a heartwarming welcome. Rummy told Garner, Don't unpack, Jack -- you're fired.

What had Garner done? The many-starred general had been sent by the President himself to take charge of a deeply dangerous mission. Iraq was tense but relatively peaceful. Garner's job was to keep the peace and bring democracy.

Unfortunately for the general, he took the President at his word. But the general was wrong. "Peace" and "Democracy" were the slogans.

"My preference," Garner told me in his understated manner, "was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections."

But elections were not in The Plan.

The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we'd just conquered. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq's] state assets" -- and Iraq, that's just about everything -- "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries." Especially the oil.

There was more than oil to sell off. The Plan included the sale of Iraq's banks, and weirdly, changing it's copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation's assets. (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements -- copyright and tax code changes -- was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's associate Grover Norquist.)

George Monbiot's latest look at Iraq notes an eternal truth - Occupations Brutalise.

Loach’s hero, Damien, as many Irishmen were, is radicalised by a raid by the Black and Tans, who were members of the constabulary recruited from outside Ireland. As the film shows, they were responsible for much of the police brutality. The historian Robert Kee, who is a fierce critic of the IRA, remarks that while the police were at first slow to retaliate, their vengeance – exercised against innocent people – “further consolidated national feeling in Ireland. It made the Irish people feel more and more in sympathy with fighting men of their own”. The fighter Edward MacLysaght recorded that “what probably drove a peacefully-inclined man like myself into rebellion was the British attitude towards us: the assumption that the whole lot of us were a pack of murdering corner boys”.

There is no question that the IRA also killed ruthlessly – not just police and soldiers but also people they deemed to be informers and collaborators. But Loach shows this too (I have seen the film). The press hates him because he admits that the people who committed these acts were not evil automata, but human beings capable of grief, anger, love and pity. So too, of course, were the British forces, whose humanity is always emphasised by the newspapers. Ken’s crime is to have told the other side of the story.

The other side – whether it concerns Ireland, India, Kenya or Malaya – is always inadmissable. The torture and killing of the colonised is ignored or excused, while their violent responses to occupation are never forgotten. The only aggressors permitted to exist are those who fight back.

Does it matter what people say about a conflict that took place 85 years ago? It does. For the same one-sided story is being told about the occupation of Iraq. The execution of 24 civilians in Haditha allegedly carried out by US Marines in November is being discussed as a disgraceful anomaly: the work of a few “bad apples” or “rogue elements”. Donald Rumsfeld claims “we know that 99.9% of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner”, and most of the press seems to agree. But if it chose to look, it would find evidence of scores of such massacres.

In March Jody Casey, a veteran of the war in Iraq, told Newsnight that when insurgents have let off a bomb, “you just zap any farmer that is close to you … when we first got down there, you could basically kill whoever you wanted, it was that easy.” On Sunday another veteran told the Observer that cold-blooded killings by US forces “are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions.” There is powerful evidence to suggest that US soldiers tied up and executed 11 people – again including small children – in Ishaqi in March. Iraqi officers say that US troops executed two women and a mentally handicapped man in a house in Samarra last month. In 2004, US forces are alleged to have bombed a wedding party at Makr al-Deeb and then shot the survivors, killing 42 people. No one has any idea what happened in Falluja, as the destruction of the city and its remaining inhabitants was so thorough. Even the Iraqi Prime Minister, who depends on coalition troops for his protection, complained last week that their attacks on civilians are a “regular occurrence … They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. But like the Black and Tans the US troops have little fear of investigation or punishment.

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far from home, exercising power over people they don’t understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all “micks” or “gooks” or “hajjis”. Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. If we knew more about Ireland, the invasion of Iraq might never have happened.

And to close, here's a post at Boing Boing on "Amazing "Mad Max" vehicles in Iraq". And the locals aren't driving them...

There's a soldier in Iraq who's been posting some crazy pictures of American SUVs and pickup trucks that have been modified by civilian security contractors for use as gun trucks. They're insane, in a 'Mad Max at the Wal-Mart parking lot' kind of way.