The Guardian has a look at the near-invisible slate of anti-war movies dealing with the Iraq war (via Idleworm)

Brian De Palma, Nick Broomfield and Paul Haggis have been called traitors and villains, their films branded 'Bin Laden cinema'. They are desperate to tell the truth about what is going on in Iraq. But there seems little appetite for war films right now.

It's 2006, and Brian De Palma can't believe his luck. Dotcom billionaire and aspiring film producer Mark Cuban offers him $5m to make a movie. About anything. The only proviso is that it has to be shot in hi-definition. Of course, De Palma jumps at the chance. He tells Cuban he'd like to make a film about the war in Iraq, Cuban hands over the $5m, deal done, everybody is happy.

Fast-forward two years: Redacted has won the prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, websites such as BoycottRedacted.com are encouraging people not to see it and De Palma has been labelled a traitor. Oh, and De Palma and Cuban have fallen out, the film-maker accusing his producer of censorship.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. After all, De Palma has spent much of the past 40 years inflaming public opinion. He has always loved to play Contrary Mary, and seems to take pleasure in offending. He has been called a misogynist (feminists were infuriated by 1980's Dressed To Kill and its conflation of stilettos, sluts and slashing) and a plagiarist (for borrowing from, or paying homage to, heroes such as Hitchcock). He has even been called a traitor before - his 1989 film Casualties Of War also showed soldiers raping and murdering, back in Vietnam. But this time it's different. In a less liberal America, his fellow countrymen seem to have had enough of him. Scan the internet and lap up the bile. One blogger writes: "This guy should be held accountable for each American death after the release of this filth. He is a treasonist, and should be stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from this country as penniless as he came into it in birth." Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly called De Palma "a true villain in our country" and wished that "FDR was president so De Palma could be imprisoned for treason... Even if you disagree with the Iraq war, even if you dislike President Bush, no loyal American should support an enterprise that incites hatred against America." Meanwhile, US critic Michael Medved focused his criticism on the film. "It could be the worst movie I've ever seen," he said.

The true surprise is that America has not simply turned its back on De Palma's war film, it has turned its back on all Iraq war films. Not even Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie or Robert Redford can entice Americans into the cinema to explore Iraq. What has changed? After all, war movies have been a Hollywood staple. Even hugely unpopular wars, such as Vietnam, have produced hugely popular films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, all of them Oscar winners. Yet look at the figures for the latest batch, and it seems that all you need to do is shout Iraq to have the public running in droves from the cinema.

Redacted is based on the gang rape, murder and burning of 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, by US soldiers in March 2006. The soldiers also killed her parents and younger sister. Redacted means edited or revised to make suitable for publication - De Palma's point is that the authorities have not allowed us to see what we have done to the people of Iraq. Access has been limited, images have been censored, and the few that have been seen have often contradicted the official version of events. De Palma was determined to tell a story that showed the full horror of the Iraq war.

Rather than watching a movie, we seem to be eavesdropping on the very worst of humanity, as his semi-deranged squaddies cross into the heart of darkness. His soldiers refer to the Iraqis as "sand niggers"; they say killing them, or "lighting them up", is like stamping out cockroaches; they mock the suggestion that they might feel guilty for pumping a pregnant woman full of lead. "You can't afford remorse - you have remorse, you get weak; you get weak, you die. Simple as that," one character says.

The film is shot in segments. There is a squaddy's version of events (the character Angel Salazar is recording the action in Iraq, and hoping his video diary Tell Me No Lies will get him into film school when he returns); a documentary in French about routine searches at checkpoints; and blogs from soldiers and their families. All three elements are fiction, created by De Palma, coming together, bit by fractured bit, to tell the appalling story. This is a very modern form of cinéma vérité, a dramatic reconstruction that does not allow for the traditional comforts of cinema - narrative drive, beauty, recognisable stars, redemption. Redacted is cinema at its most grimy and unforgiving.

The film was fictionalised for legal reasons. But barely - instead of being 14, the raped girl in the film is 15. Early on in Redacted, one of the squad is blown up by an improvised explosive device and another is kidnapped and beheaded by fundamentalists. Their distraught buddies lose their senses and exact a grotesque revenge. De Palma's camera does not turn away from the atrocity. He has never been one for subtlety or suggestion. His critics say that he glories in the explicit depiction of depravity.

I meet the film-maker in Paris, where he once lived. He is in his late 60s and as combative as ever. He is a hard man to like. Grumpy, growly and impatient, he's not the most obvious choice as a spokesman for humanity.

De Palma asks the same question again and again - where are the pictures? "As an American taxpayer I am financing a war that I totally don't believe in; and if we're going to finance the bombing and destruction of a country, I'd like to see the pictures from it. Where are the pictures?"

Have there been fewer pictures from this war than previous wars? "Oh, of course. Of course." How come, when everyone is out there making their own home movies? "They never make their way into the mainstream media because the mainstream media is a big corporation now, and they've got stockholders, and they don't like to put unpleasant pictures up on the air because you can't sell advertising and you're showing a depressing view of the war." In Vietnam, he says, at least sufficient images found their way home to enable people to make an informed decision on the war. But that was the lesson the US government learned from Vietnam - if you're going to fight an unpopular war, make sure photographs of scorched girls running for their lives don't reach the public. ...

He says the mistake that his detractors make is to see this film as simply an attack on the US military. It's an easy mistake to make - their behaviour is unforgivable. Yes, says, De Palma, but that's not the point. "When you have a terrible crime, you want to know how these boys were brought to do this, and that's what the movie shows." And what did bring them to do it? "They are very young. They are taken to a place that they have no idea of or experience of, a very hostile environment, it's very hot, they're carrying 120 pounds of gear on their back, they don't know why they're there because the reasons they are given could be false. They are surrounded by a mysterious and hostile populace. The only logic they can make of why they're doing what they're doing is protecting themselves and their buddies, and then their buddy gets blown up or assassinated, and they turn all their frustration on that populace out there."

Everything about this war, he says, is futile and relentless. Even the landscape in Iraq is hopeless: rubble and wasteland. "In Vietnam there were beaches, tropics; this is a gritty environment."

War and rape are recurrent themes in De Palma's work. "It's a metaphor for my feeling of what America did to Vietnam and what we're doing to Iraq. We come in, we destroy, we rape, we kill and then we leave. The girl represents the innocent country." But it's more than a metaphor, isn't it? "If you're going to rape a country, why not rape its women at the same time," he says baldly. De Palma believes that the consequences of an unjust war are felt for generations, and he quotes one of his characters. "McCoy says you have to have a very good reason to go out and kill people. Because if you don't, it twists you all up inside, and we will be suffering the repercussions of those soldiers that will never be able to deal with the experience of killing women and children for generations."

He is happy to see his film as a form of counter-propaganda. "I want people to try to understand a little better how and why this terrible crime was committed, and how it tells us a lot about our whole occupation and invasion of Iraq."

In some ways, Nick Broomfield's Battle For Haditha is eerily similar to Redacted. Again, it is shot more like a reconstruction than a traditional movie, using no recognisable stars (in this case, mainly non-professional actors), and again it is unremittingly bleak. Both films are based on true stories and have pretty much the same starting and finishing points. In the Iraqi town of Haditha, on November 19 2005, a marine was killed by an insurgent bomb. On the same day, 24 civilians were killed. Initial reports said that 15 had died from the bomb blast and the others in subsequent fighting with US soldiers. But an amateur video, shot by an Iraqi the day after the killings, told a very different story - this had been a massacre. Five men in a taxi had been lined up and shot on the spot, and nearly all the others had been shot in their homes, including seven women and three children, the youngest aged three. Haditha has been called Iraq's My Lai. Four marines faced charges of unpremeditated murder, which were later dropped. Squadron leader Frank Wuterich, who was charged with 12 counts of unpremeditated murder, could still face jail if convicted on charges of voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, dereliction of duty or obstruction of justice.

Broomfield tells the story from three perspectives - that of the marines, the two insurgents who plant the bomb and the Iraqi family living in the vicinity. Although the atrocity is every bit as shocking as that depicted in Redacted, Broomfield's film is more nuanced, more humane. Battle For Haditha starts with a series of talking heads - the marines who go on to slaughter the innocents. "What d'you want to know?" asks one boy-man, who looks as if he has not even started shaving. "I live in a shit barracks. Constant threat. I get shot at any minute through every window. I wake up every morning and do the same patrols every day and basically the only thing I'm fighting for, that I know I'm fighting for, is to make it home every day without being killed, because I don't know why we're here." We sympathise with all three sides. The marine largely responsible for the carnage begged to see a doctor before the incident because he was having nightmares - and was refused permission; the older insurgent was a former Iraqi soldier given negligible compensation when the US disbanded the army; the Iraqi family are warm and loving.

He talks more like a campaigning journalist than a movie-maker. Like De Palma, he feels that while there are so few official images provided of body bags and charred victims, it has become the film-maker's role to act as an official recorder. And because they are so angry that the truth has been withheld from the public, they are all the more determined to make their films hard-core.

If there is such a need to chronicle the war, why are the films struggling for an audience? Broomfield points out that the films from Vietnam were made years after the event, when it was no longer so raw. "The other main difference is there was conscription in Vietnam and middle-class college kids were being killed. Here, it's just the poor and dispossessed being killed in Iraq. Nobody needs to deal with it. The rich don't need to deal with - it's Puerto Ricans and white trash being killed in America." However savage the portrayal of Vietnam in Apocalypse Now, made six years after the end of the war, it is obvious to viewers that this is fiction (indeed, it is based on Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness). At least to that extent, we are let off the hook. ...

In The Valley Of Elah, again based on a true story, makes up a trilogy of Iraq bad-apple movies. Directed by double Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), it is more conventional than the Broomfield and De Palma pictures. It has a conventional narrative (a father determines to find out how his soldier son, just home from Iraq, died), it belongs to a cosier genre (murder mystery) and it has stars (Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron). But at its heart is another unspeakable act committed by the military.

In The Valley Of Elah has also failed commercially. Rightwing groups have labelled it "Bin Laden cinema" and called for it to be boycotted. Haggis's inspiration also came from trawling the web. He was horrified by the blogs soldiers were posting - a shot of a kid with a burned corpse talking to it as if to a buddy, a soldier picking up a dismembered hand and waving it as if it were his own. "I said, 'My God, what is happening?' I know these to be good men and women. These are kids; these are good kids they are sending there."

Since making the film, Haggis has screened it to soldiers and has been shocked by further discoveries. "There is the highest suicide rate in the military in 30 years right now. I was screening this film for some troops and their family members in Washington DC, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, 'Thanks so much, it was a really hard film to watch. My husband was in active duty, and when he came back he hung himself.' Then another woman came up and said, 'Thanks for making the film. It was really hard to watch because I saw my son in it. He was in Iraq, and the first week back he shot himself.' I walked out and another woman came up to me and said, 'My husband was an Iraq war vet. I was really afraid for the first two weeks until he hung himself.' "These are three women who didn't know each other and this is within seven minutes of me walking out of the theatre.

Michael Klare has a new article out at Foreign Policy In Focus - "Iraq and Climate Change".

When our grandchildren and more distant descendants assemble in such classrooms as may be available and ask their teachers, “Why did our ancestors not take effective action to prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change?” one of the answers will surely be, “The war in Iraq.”

Long after this war is over, its legacy will live on in terms of this nation’s abject failure to address the climate change challenge during the early years of the twenty-first century, when it was still possible to avert global warming’s most horrendous effects. When these effects became more widely apparent, in the decades ahead, humanity will no doubt take vigorous action to deal with the problem – but by then it will be too late to prevent some of its most damaging consequences, such as dramatic sea-level rise, widespread drought and desertification, increased severe storm activity, and the collapse of vulnerable societies.

Why is the Iraq War so closely tied to our failure in addressing climate change?

Let’s begin with the obvious: the war is primarily being fought by the United States, the world’s leading producer of climate-altering “greenhouse” gases and the one country whose leadership is required for genuine progress toward solving the climate change problem. But instead of providing such leadership, the United States has been totally embroiled in conducting a losing and debilitating war.

Transformation

Overcoming the global warming problem won’t be easy. In fact, it may prove the most difficult challenge humanity has ever faced. Its successful management will require a total transformation in the way we power and organize our cities, industries, farms, and transportation systems. This, in turn, will require the full attention, imagination, ingenuity, and determination of our leaders, scientists, engineers, farmers, and industrialists.

It’s not something you can successfully attend to in the rare few minutes between briefings on the war, visits to the war zone, consultations with top generals, endless discussion of a new winning strategy to replace all those that have failed, arm-twisting conversations with reluctant members of Congress to convince them to approve additional funds for war, visits to troops going off to battle, visits with troops returning from battle, meetings with the families of soldiers lost in battle, more meetings with generals, more arm-twisting, more strategy sessions, and so on. Yet every account of the Bush presidency since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has indicated that the conduct of the war has occupied almost all of President George W. Bush’s attention – and that of his senior staff – when it was not focused on getting re-elected or satisfying the purely venal interests of Republican insiders.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the White House has devoted little sustained attention to the global warming issue and come up with few meaningful proposals for addressing it.

It’s the Oil

But, of course, this is just the beginning of the problem. What, after all, is the Iraq War all about? Pundits and historians will no doubt argue about this for decades to come, but few in the end will dispute the conclusion of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan that, at root, it was about the control of Middle Eastern petroleum. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he wrote in his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence.

This fact is not unrelated to global warming: In essence, the war is intended to ensure America’s continued access to Middle Eastern oil, and access to Middle Eastern oil is essential to sustain America’s reliance on oil to fuel its economy, and this reliance, in turn, accounts for America’s largest share of greenhouse-gas emissions.

According to the latest Department of Energy figures, petroleum products accounted for 41% of total U.S. energy supplies in 2005, compared to 23% each for coal and natural gas. Even with all the emphasis being placed on the development of renewable sources of energy, oil is expected to remain the dominant source of the nation’s energy in 2030, accounting for an estimated 40% of the total supply. And because oil supplies so much of our energy, it also produces so much of our carbon dioxide emissions – 44% of the national total in 2005, a projected 42% (of a much higher level) in 2030.

Gulf Domination

Iraq matters in this calculation not because it (currently) supplies that much of our oil but because it represents the culmination of a 50-year U.S. effort to dominate the Persian Gulf region as way of ensuring that this country will have access to adequate supplies of petroleum to make up for any shortfall in domestic output. At one time the United States was self-sufficient in oil production but, as that fortunate era drew to a close in the years after World War II, American leaders concluded that it was necessary to ensure that the country controlled an alternative, overseas source – and the Persian Gulf (with two-thirds of the world’s known petroleum reserves) was selected for this purpose. Because the Gulf area is inherently unstable for a variety of historical, demographic, and political reasons, it has long been American policy to rely on military force to protect U.S. access to the region’s energy supplies. The Iraq War is only the most recent of a series of U.S. military interventions intended to achieve this objective. ...

CNN Money reports that the US is still waiting to cash in on Iraq's oil. The talk about Iraq being able to produce 4 - 6 million barrels a day (under the right conditions) still understates the reality - fully exploited, Iraqi oil fields would be producing more than Saudi Arabia does today.

Iraqi lawmakers attempted earlier this year to pass a law governing the way oil contracts and revenues are managed. But the law got bogged down in parliament after Kurds objected to the greater control it gave the central government in allotting oil contracts and doling out royalties. The Iraqi public - and many lawmakers - also saw it as giving away the county's oil reserves to foreign firms.

Critics of the proposed oil law said it gave foreign firms control over production on individual fields and did not require them to hire Iraqi workers or share technology. "It really is a dream law for the companies," said Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International. "And privatization is not viewed as a good thing by most Iraqis."

But the law could impose high royalties, such as the 90 percent tax on oil profits in places like Russia and Libya, which would return most of the money to the Iraqi people. Some analysts say passing a national oil law and opening up the country to foreign firms is essential. ... But others say the Iraq national oil company could do the job themselves, given the resources to invest, renewed training overseas, and, of course, a more peaceful environment.

"They don't need investment by big oil companies," said James Placke, a senior associate at Cambridge Energy Research Associates who specializes in the Middle East. "They need to fix the present oil infrastructure." Placke said war, lack of investment, and a shortage of properly trained technicians is leading to production declines of 200,000 barrel per day a year. Under the right conditions, he thinks the national oil company could produce four million barrels a day in five or six years time.

Kurt at Resource Insights has a post noting "None dare say it was for oil". Presumably he means no one in a position of power or influence. I've said it a million times, as have many others.

It must have seemed puzzling to many when the Bush administration put a full court press on former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan recently after the release of his memoir. In it Greenspan wrote that the administration had gone to war in Iraq over oil. That's hardly a blockbuster. The search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had ended in failure. The connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had long since been debunked. And, any hope of establishing a stable democracy in Iraq had already been dashed by the wildly incompetent execution of the war.

WMD, the al Qaeda connection and the introduction of democracy in Iraq had all been at various times justifications for the war. One would think that under such circumstances a competent public relations adviser would have counseled the administration to just let Alan Greenspan's assertion pass. After all, the former central banker would soon be completing his book tour, and then he would fade from the news. Why respond, when doing so would only fan the flames?

But the counterattack came quickly on the Sunday morning talk shows and in the White House press room. Under bombardment from the administration Greenspan quickly "elaborated" on his views in order to deflect the return fire.

All of this could be seen as a relatively minor dustup over what is now broadly believed by the American public to be at least one of the major reasons for going to war. But, the assertion that the military mission in Iraq is primarily a raiding party for oil is more than just an embarrassment to the administration. Naturally, the collapse of the other justifications for the war led to a more widespread acceptance of this assertion. But, even more important, this assertion has implications which, if discussed and properly understood, would thunder through the public mind.

Admitting that the invasion of Iraq was about oil opens the door to a very troubling conversation. If the invasion was about oil, then it must mean that the supply of imported oil was somehow threatened. The supply could be threatened, of course, for two reasons: 1) Someone was threatening it, in this case Saddam Hussein, or 2) something was threatening it, possibly depletion. ...

This is something of a false dichotomy of course - if we aren't at the peak oil point yet (or if Bush and Cheney don't believe we are) then it could be for the same reason we've always invaded Iraq - controlling the oil.

The Atlantic Free Press says the mainstream Democrats (not pointing the finger honest folk like Kucinich) are complicit in the oil grab - "The Treason of the Mainstream Democrats".

The “War on Terror” is a conscious and ingenious masquerade for the geostrategic pursuit and control of Middle Eastern oil and gas resources. The facts place this beyond dispute. Mr. Bush’s claim of “taking the fight directly to the terrorists…and the states that harbor them” was yet one more intentional deception, as subsequent events fully demonstrated. In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorists—Osama bin Laden remains at large—and in Iraq, when we invaded, there were no terrorists at all. But today both “states” are fitted with puppet governments and dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.

Only the Bush Administration continues to natter about a bogus “War on Terror.” Others are more candid:

o Republican Senator Senator Charles Hagel: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.” (Speaking at Catholic University, 9/24/07)

o Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”


o Democratic Senator Jon Tester: “We’re still fighting a war in Iraq and people who are honest about it will admit we’re there over oil.” (Associated Press, 9/24/07)


o General John Abizaid, retired CENTCOM commander: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” (Speaking at Stanford University, 10/13/07)

The criminal fraudulence of the “War on Terror” is fully documented (see http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/63632/ ), but the contemporary press has been derelict in failing to expose the mega-lie and publicize it. The mainstream Democrats are equally derelict in ignoring it. ...

Why can’t the mainstream Democrats speak sublime truth to demonic power? Doing so, they claim, would be too “divisive” and jeopardize the party’s success in next year’s election.

This strategy is politically suicidal. A Democratic sweep in 2008 grows dimmer every day.

The rank-and-file Republicans who continue to believe Mr. Bush’s lies about the “war on terror” will not vote for a Democrat. The rank-and-file Democrats who see through the lies are increasingly enraged by the insipid waffling of their mainstream candidates. And roughly half the American people don’t bother to vote at all, repelled by the tawdry attack ads and negativity of bitterly partisan, superficial, sophomoric, and issue-avoidance politicking.

If the mainstream Democrats do nothing to change this, they will wind up where they’re headed—disappointed and defeated in 2008—and they will deserve it. Only by exposing and acting on the truth about the war can they change any Republican minds, regain the support of disenchanted Democrats, and attract the politically inert, indifferent Americans. A new style of politics needs badly to be engaged, one that is dedicated not merely to winning elections, but to a genuine concern for truth, for justice, for the rule of law, and for integrity in public service.

The most direct and honorable way of invoking such a style is by impeaching George Bush and Richard Cheney. Never in our history have the high crimes and misdemeanors been so flagrant, and the people of our country know it.

Yes, Congressman Kucinich sought with a “member’s privilege” motion to initiate an impeachment proceeding on the floor of the House of Representatives. But Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer moved immediately to kill the initiative, only to be thwarted by a Republican trick. Finally Nancy Pelosi, desperate to avoid a floor debate, managed to have the matter referred to the Judiciary Committee—where Chairman John Conyers has been sitting on the original bill since last April. The giving of aid and comfort to the enemies will, seemingly, continue.

That line about not being there for the figs isn't bad.

"The Walrus" has an article by Linda McQuaig on candidate Kucinich - "Mission Not Yet Accomplished" - and his accurate take on the Iraq war and its oily underpinnings.

There’s a reason I’m chasing Kucinich — and it’s essentially the same reason he’s no more likely to win the Democratic nomination than Miss Saudi Arabia is to be the next Miss Universe. Kucinich has been speaking out about a rather remarkable set of developments going on inside Iraq. Amid all the death and mayhem, the Iraqi government is under intense pressure from Washington to implement a proposed new law that would begin the process of parcelling out Iraq’s vast undeveloped oil reserves.

In the Western media, the proposed law has generally been described as an “oil revenue–sharing law” — that is, a law that sets out how Iraq’s potentially massive oil revenues will be split among its warring ethnic factions, the Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. But the law is actually about much more than that. It’s also about creating a legal framework for foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector, thereby potentially reviving a dominant role for big multinational oil companies — a role they’ve been excluded from since a powerful wave of oil nationalism swept the Middle East in the 1970s and left the region’s bounteous reserves in the hands of national governments. Ultimately at stake is who will end up as chief beneficiaries of the immense treasure trove of black gold stored beneath Iraq’s sand: the country’s 27 million largely destitute citizens, or the owners of the wealthiest corporations on earth, otherwise known as Big Oil.

Dennis Kucinich suspects it’s going to be the latter, and he’s been trying to draw attention to what he calls “one of the biggest heists in the history of the world.” One clue that he may be on to something is the very high priority the Bush administration, with its notoriously close ties to Big Oil, is attaching to the Iraqi oil law. In May 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney made a trip to Baghdad, and, as media reports indicated, his central message was the urgency of passing the oil law.

Yet Kucinich has had no luck stirring up opposition on this front in Washington. Even his efforts to get his fellow Democrats onside against the administration’s apparent attempt to privatize Iraq’s oil has been met with indifference, even hostility. Despite the unpopularity of the war, Democrats have been hugely reluctant to level accusations that hint at a nefarious US motive in connection with Iraq’s oil.

So even as powerful US and British oil companies sit poised to take control of the largest unharvested oil bonanza left on earth — with some 165,000 US troops standing helpfully by — the watchdogs on Capitol Hill and the media seem uninterested. The elephant stands knee deep in oil in the middle of the room, attracting no more attention than Dennis Kucinich in the halls of the Rayburn building. The Bush administration may have botched just about everything it’s touched in connection with its misadventure in Iraq, but it has pulled off one master stroke: it has somehow managed to banish to the margins of public debate any suggestion that it has ever cast a covetous eye on Iraq’s oil.

Reuters reports that the Iraqi parliament is still avoiding handing over the oil.

Iraq's political leaders are in intensive talks to resolve lingering disputes over a draft law that will decide control of the world's third-largest oil reserves, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Sunday. ... Maliki said the bill, which will provide a legal framework for foreign firms to do business in Iraq, had since been sent back to cabinet for more talks to iron out the disputes. The prime minister said there was still disagreement over the exploration of undeveloped fields and production-sharing agreements, as well as contracts that had already been signed with some foreign companies.

Oh yeah - the "undiscovered" oil - I was wondering when they'd get around too quibbling about who decides which bits haven't been "discovered" yet.

The Dallas Morning News points out that Iraq's troubles have pushed oil costs up - the result of "a war gone awry". I guess that's one possible interpretation...

The spike in oil prices shaking the U.S. economy right now is something of a self-inflicted wound stemming from a war gone awry.


An oil drilling rig is installed at the Taq Taq Operating Co. in Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq's oil production has been crippled since the start of the war, amounting to one of the biggest disruptions in world oil supplies since World War II, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Bush administration officials predicted Iraqi oil production would soar after Saddam Hussein was gone, to levels of 6 million barrels a day or more, and that Iraq would be able to rebuild with its own oil revenues. Instead, Iraqi oil production remains in the doldrums – 2.2 million barrels a day, below pre-war levels of 2.7 million barrels – because of a rat's nest of sabotage, theft and mismanagement so stark that oil is paying for insurrection rather than reconstruction. "Our people, we are living on a sea of oil but we're facing a very big crisis in all of Iraq, not only in Kirkuk," said Mayor Abdul Rahman Mustafa. "We have the shortage and the crisis of the fuels."

International economic sanctions, war damage dating to the early 1980s and a failure to invest in the oil industry had made a mess of things well before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But the crippling of Iraq's oil production since the start of the war amounts to one of the biggest disruptions in world oil supplies since World War II, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Without this disaster, oil prices would be much lower today, said David Kirsch, a former State Department energy analyst who now manages oil market intelligence for PFC Energy consultants in Washington. "If not for the war, we'd have cheaper oil, and more of it," he said. ...

Ashti Hawrami, minister of natural resources with the Kurdistan regional government in northern Iraq, estimates oil theft averages 300,000 barrels a day – worth about $8 billion a year. Nearly all of this oil is diverted from the south to organized crime syndicates operating in the Persian Gulf. "We have to cut out the smuggling nonsense," he said. "I am supposed to have 17 percent of that" for the Kurdistan regional government. "How do I get my money?"

Bad management has also played a role.

The gigantic Kirkuk field has produced for 50 years and still holds more than 9 billion barrels of oil. It was damaged under Saddam Hussein's last years in power when he ordered more oil than engineers could deliver without using techniques that robbed years from the productive life of the reservoir. Iraqis pumped thick, greasy fuel into the field to pressure more oil out of the ground, but the remaining crude oil became harder to recover.

Finally, there was widespread alarm among Iraqis and the political left around the world that the war would lead to a carve-up of Iraq's oil among big U.S.- and British-based international oil companies. "There was no recognition that Iraqi notions of sovereignty were tied up with oil, and Iraqis would not want to see wholesale privatization," said Mr. Kirsch.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made news recently by writing in his memoirs, "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows – that the Iraq War is largely about oil."

President Bush and others in his administration have repeatedly denied oil was a motive. But the war came at a time when there was growing concern worldwide about surging demand for gasoline and other fuels in fast-growing nations like China and India, as well as in the United States. The bulk of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of proved reserves (some oil consultants say there is probably twice that amount) were kept out of the market by U.N. economic sanctions. ...

In 2003, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testified before Congress that Iraq had so much oil it could rebuild out of its own pocket. "It has one of the most valuable undeveloped sources of natural resources in the world. And let me emphasize, if we liberate Iraq those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them," he said. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," he added.

Iraq is an OPEC member subject to the cartel's rules about production and prices, but OPEC has left Iraq without a quota for many years because of its economic weakness. In the months before the U.S.-led invasion, there were meetings at the White House and Pentagon to decide how to put Iraq's oil industry back on its feet once Saddam Hussein was gone. The Halliburton Co., Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, was chosen to come in behind U.S. troops to restore production in southern Iraq.

As U.S. forces were nearing Baghdad, Mr. Wolfowitz said, "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 [billion] and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years" – an estimate that suggested oil production of 6 million barrels a day or more.

Links:

* UPI - Iraqi Kurds give oil deals to own oil firm
* Oil Change International - Iraq: Exposing the Corporate Agenda
* New York Times - The Coup at Home
* Globe And Mail - How many billion barrels in Saudi Arabia ?
* George Monbiot - Biofuels Could Kill More People Than the Iraq War. George really doesn't like biofuels - and the Swaziland example really doesn't look very good.
* The Guardian - Iraqi fighters 'grilled for evidence on Iran'
* Youtube - Ron Paul On Face The Nation, Veteran's Day 2007. "I think our policy on Iran is the threat. ... We have 700 military bases in 130 countries - we should bring the troops home".
* Cryptogon - US Official: Privacy Is a Soviet Style Bureaucracy That Knows Everything About You
* Mises.org - Freedoms and Foes.

H.R. 1955 is an absolute attack on the freedom of speech. Not only does it assault my right to question government, it also assaults the right of ardent Marxists to speak their minds. So, I am at a loss at both ends.

You see, I value the ability to speak as much as the ability to read nonsense from those such as the writers and curators over at Marxists.org. Should H.R. 1955 become law, no longer will I be able to read articles like "Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its Theoretical Source" from James P. Cannon, Fourth International, Winter 1954. The logical gymnastics of such articles will be gone from the web. A very sad day indeed.

I do not fear the idiocy of Cannon and his fellow travelers. But I do fear the agenda of those who proudly strut the halls of DC, American flag pin displayed loudly on lapel or blouse.

These folks aren't simply debating historical and epistemological positions, they are conspiring to subvert the remaining vestiges of Liberty and Property. They are not some group of fanatic windbags. No, they are modern day Brownshirts fighting over whose match ignites the Reichstag -- the Constitution.

The freedom of speech is about to be turned on its head. Fight H.R. 1955 as if it's your life. For without Liberty, your life is no longer yours anyway.

Alan Greenspan has made one of his rare public utterances that contain some meaningful scrap of information (must be getting lazy now the financial markets no longer hand on his every word), noting that the Iraq war is "largely" about oil. No kidding.

Graham Paterson, Sunday Times (UK)

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

More on Greenspan's views on energy and the future from the Wall Street Journal:

He devotes chapters to each of the major economic challenges facing the U.S. and the world. On energy, he recommends more use of nuclear power, and he predicts efforts to reduce global warming with carbon caps or taxes will fail. Rising income inequality could undo "the cultural ties that bind our society" and even lead to "large-scale violence." The remedy, he says, is not higher taxes on the rich but improved education, which can be helped by paying math teachers more.

...In coming years, as the globalization process winds down, he predicts inflation will become harder to contain. Recent increases in the price of imports from China and a rise in long-term interest rates suggest "the turn may be upon us sooner rather than later."

Michael Shank and Roscoe Bartlett have an article on the energy bills navigating the US Congress - Pioneers Can Secure Our Future - noting that renewable energy sources and fuel efficiency (particularly for vehicles) are the key aspects to focus on for energy security.

Russia, Canada, and the United States are rushing to the North Pole in a pioneer-like land grab for an estimated 25 percent of the world's unknown oil and gas reserves. One wonders when we will learn. Oil and gas are not forever. We need to change course and save some to ensure a secure energy future.

The National Petroleum Council recently warned, in "Facing the Hard Truths About Energy," that oil and gas supplies are unlikely to meet projected world demand in 2030. Rather than depleting finite fossil fuels upon which future generations will depend, and considering their effects upon our planet's environment, we must invest in efficiency and renewable alternatives.

This month, Congress has an opportunity to show real teeth on this matter as it reconciles Senate and House omnibus energy bills in conference. Since electricity and transportation are the top two sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., at 34 and 26 percent, we think the final bill should contain the following two components:

First, the Conference Report should include a flexible, affordable, achievable national Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) for electricity generation. The Senate version failed to include Sen. Jeff Bingaman's proposal for a 15 percent RPS or Sen. Pete Domenici's 20 percent RPS, but has three times previously approved a 10 percent RPS. The House bill was able to eke in a bipartisan15 percent RPS. It requires only investor-owned utilities to produce 15 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, biomass, and certain other sources by the year 2020 -- with 4 percent achievable through energy efficiency.

REQUIRING SOME but not all utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from certain sources and limiting energy efficiency is controversial. Some regions will have an easier time extracting sun, wind, or biomass than others. For many utilities and states, the renewable infrastructure does not exist, or if it does, it is negligible. So how to reduce the transition cost and gain the support of renewable-light states, utilities, and their customers and the members of Congress who represent them?

Since we depend upon energy and global warming impacts all of us, teamwork is critical. To capture support for a national RPS, changes may be necessary. It should be affordable for low-renewable utilities to purchase energy credits from high-renewable states to meet the 15-percent mark by 2020. We need to prevent driving energy-intensive, high-paying manufacturing jobs overseas. Low-renewable states could be afforded a higher ceiling on energy efficiency, perhaps double or triple the 4-percent limit. Some argue all utilities should be included to level the playing field. Others advocate reducing the goal to 10 percent.

Second, the Conference Report should include stronger vehicle efficiency standards, better known as CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy). Since 1975, Congress has not significantly adjusted CAFE standards. At present, passenger cars are required to get 27.5 miles per gallon while SUVs and light trucks are set at 22.2 mpg. Compare these numbers with the European Union's 2008 standard of 44.2 mpg, Japan's current average vehicle fuel economy of 45 mpg, and China's levels at mid-30s and rising. The Senate bill requires cars, trucks, and sport-utility vehicles to achieve 35 miles per gallon by 2020. The House, however, did not include a CAFE overhaul.

AMERICANS want a cleaner environment and are tired of paying more to drive to work. Lower-emission, higher-mileage vehicles, such as hybrids, are gaining in popularity. That is a key reason Toyota surpassed the U.S. Big Three as the world's top manufacturer. Foreign manufacturers now outsell American makers in the U.S. Incentivizing Detroit to go green will allow Americans to do our wallets and our pride good and make our domestic auto industry more competitive in world markets.

North Pole scavenging will get us little but a brief reprieve in the world's current race to the bottom of the oil barrel. More efficient and cleaner electricity and vehicles, given their combined 60-percent responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, would help the environment and Americans' pocketbooks. Americans need political pioneers, not the glacier flag-planting types, to ensure a secure energy future.

The SMH has an update on plans by local generators to build new coal and gas fired power plants inland - using recycled water from Sydney for cooling as a way of avoiding the drought induced lack of water. Anyone thinking with a timeframe of more than 5 years in mind would probably realise that wind and solar thermal generation will be a lot less financially risky - carbon pricing is inevitable...

TURNING the rivers inland has long been the mantra of those seeking to develop the plains west of the Great Dividing Range. Now, in a modern twist, Delta Electricity has drawn up plans to use recycled water from Sydney's west for its power expansion plans at Lithgow. At an estimated cost of up to $400 million, Delta wants to tap recycled Sydney water for the long-delayed expansion to its Mount Piper power station. Originally planned with four units, only two units were built. With site works already done and work on a coal unloading facility under way, installing extra generation capacity at Mount Piper would be the fastest expansion option for the state's coal-fired power industry.

In his report, Professor Tony Owen argues that the state needs additional baseload power station capacity - power stations that operate day and night - by 2013-14. To meet this deadline means development applications need to be ready to submit by the end of this year, a very tight deadline given that it will take many months yet for the Government to finalise its power privatisation policy.

Delta has been working on plans for two new power generators with capacity of 750Mw at a cost of $2.7 billion, or two 1000Mw units costing $3.4 billion. Central to these plans is tapping recycled water from western Sydney for use in cooling towers. Delta would use "ultra super-critical" pulverised fuel coal technology, which produces far less carbon emissions than existing technology.

Macquarie Generation has also put forward plans for two new 900Mw coal-fired units, Bayswater B, in the Hunter Valley, at a prospective cost of $3.75 billion. Given that Delta has civil works in place for new units at Mount Piper and has its coal supply upgrade under way, it is probably the frontrunner in the coal-fired stakes, although a final decision will hinge on carbon prices.

For gas, TruEnergy - controlled by Hong Kong's China Light and Power - is building a 400Mw power plant in Wollongong and plans to double this to 800Mw. This would put it in a strong position to move quickly to install new gas capacity, depending on the fallout from the Owen report. Among state-owned entities, Delta is finalising plans for gas-fired plants near Nowra and in Marulan, and also in Munmorah on the Central Coast. Macquarie Generation is waiting for approvals to proceed with a gas-fired plant in the Hunter Valley. Retailer EnergyAustralia plans a 400Mw power station, also in Marulan, and is talking to International Power about a joint operating arrangement.

Meanwhile the state government has announced permanent water restrictions for NSW. How about this for an idea - use the recycled water for water supplies and don't build water hungry coal fired power stations that pump out carbon dioxide that further intensifies our never ending drought which makes water less available ? I know politicians don't understand simple concepts like feedback loops but surely someone behind the scenes must understand these decisions make no sense at all...

The NSW Government has announced permanent water restrictions for Sydney in a bid to deal with climate change. Called Long-term Water Saving Rules, they will remain in effect regardless of dam levels or downgrades of the current water restrictions scheme. The rules include restrictions on watering between 10am and 4pm (AEST), the fitting of trigger nozzles on hoses and no hosing of hard surfaces.

Premier Morris Iemma today said the permanent restrictions reflected the Government's commitment to conserving water in the long term. "The lessons that have been learnt about managing water are now going to become part of the way we will manage water in the future," he told reporters in Sydney. "We know that climate change is real, it's here and the changes brought by climate change are going to change the way we use water." He said Sydneysiders would not notice any immediate changes because existing level three water restrictions are more severe than the long-term ones.

Mr Iemma said the measures would secure water usage over the next 30 years, with experts predicting lower rainfalls, hotter days and higher evaporation rates. "It means we have to be smarter about the way we use water," he said.

Smart about using water. Right.

Links:

* TreeHugger - Corporate Climate Response Conference: In Chicago. I can think of a good corporate climate response - no more political donations to any candidate or party that refuses to implement a carbon tax within 3 years.
* SMH - Green housing catches on
* SMH - Mudgee Coal Mine fuels the fire as we dig deeper into debt
* SMH - Power Hungry
* STCWA - Carmakers switching to electric motors
* STCWA - Canada Drops speeds to 100 km/h
* STCWA - New Australian book on peak oil
* Global Public Media - ASPO's Stuart McCarthy on peak oil hitting the Australian mainstream
* Net Oil Exports - Net Oil Exports blog. Tracking news about oil export volumes.
* Biopact - Japan launches 'Green Cool Asia' plan: boosting food security through biofuels
* News And Policy - Dennis Kucinich Blasts Democratic Party Establishment, Claims the Party is Scheming to Silence Him
* Seattle Times - Presidential hopeful Ron Paul sees crises ahead for country
* Cryptogon - Northern Rock Shares Crash as Customers Queue. An old fashioned bank run ?
* Cryptogon - Alan Greenspan Claims Iraq War Was Really for Oil. Limited hang out ?

Michael Weiss at Slate has a roundup of articles on the now doomed Iraq oil law - "Oil Over but the Shoutin'". Looks like they aren't going to hand over the oil quietly - I guess the next move is put the pressure on to break up the country into 3 more easily intimidated pieces or start "persuading" some of the legislators out of hours...

Cyberspace judges the all-but-kaput Iraqi oil law as the final indicator that political reconciliation in Iraq is impossible.

Oil Over but the Shoutin': Once cited as a major benchmark for political compromise, Iraq's drafted "oil law," which would have controlled the management of the nation's oil fields and determined revenue-sharing, appears doomed. Problems arose between Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani and the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has already begun selling oil exploration contracts to Western companies.

Kyle E. Moore at lefty blog Comments From Left Field says the not-so-invisible hand of U.S. privatization is behind the stalled legislation: "In truth, this is a classic example of setting the Iraqis up for failure. At a time when political reconciliation is absolutely, positively the single most important thing in regards to fixing Iraq, we are balancing that reconciliation on a highly divisive bill that undermines our own position by tipping our hand on 'why we're really there.' "

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo sees cronyism leading all the way back to Texas: "The story though connects up with another one … the decision of the Kurdistan regional government to sign an oil exploration deal with Dallas-based Hunt Oil, run by Mr. Ray L. Hunt. …[R]emember, Hunt, ... is also a pal of the president's. Indeed, President Bush has twice appointed Hunt to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. So while the president is striving to get the Iraqis to meet these benchmarks one of his own pals -- and more importantly, political appointees -- is busy helping to tear the whole thing apart."

Lefty "RFK Lives" at Daily Kos cites a much-discussed Paul Krugman editorial, which mentions the Hunt connection and concludes that the marketplace has already decided in favor of Iraq's dissolution: "While I've never worshipped at the altar of the Mighty Market, on this occasion, the markets offer the most accurate reflections of existing reality. It is extraordinarily ironic that a country that largely does worship there remains so ignorant of the fact that the markets have spoken on this literal life and death issue."

Liberal journalist Brian Beutler laments what even the Bushies knew was a major determinant for Iraq's success: "This was in some ways an insight the Bush administration got exactly right. Without some widely agreed upon method of distributing resources (a reconciliation, if you will) the people of Iraq would be left with little choice but to battle with each other over oil wealth. Oil is perhaps the key incentive warring factions have to stop fighting and take an interest in the stabilization of their country. That it wasn't enough says something important."

Something important ? Perhaps that they don't want to hand over "the greatest prize of all" (and the only real economic asset the country possesses) to a bunch of foreigners who have killed or made refugees of a significant percentage of the population. Is that really such a difficult a concept to grasp ?

There are other ways of sharing the oil wealth that don't involve handing it over to big oil and being allowed a small share of the revenues. Here's a very simple one: Iraqi National Oil Co created with ownership of all discoevered and "undiscovered" (cough) oil reserves in Iraq - oil company then privatised with every Iraqi receiving one share in company - hey presto, a free market solution that shares the oil wealth. You'll never see this discussed as an option (or the left wing alternative which doesn't include the privatisation step).

Instead, all the framing I'm seeing (even on "liberal" blogs) is a simple (and false) choice between "pass this US drafted oil law" or "Iraqis don't want national reconciliation - breakup and civil war awaits". What a crock.

From the same post, a look at some of the reactions to Bush's latest incoherent ravings.

Honey, change the channel: President Bush delivered a speech Thursday in which he affirmed that the surge is indeed working and that, as a sign of its success, he's now ready to recall about 21,700 troops from Iraq. Bloggers aren't having it.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Bush is a "humbled" president: "He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading."

Wonkette had better things to do, but read the transcript. Kind of: "Did he mean to say that Iraq's government was 'getting things done' and then list things that they specifically weren't getting done? Like 'oil revenue sharing' and 'not getting blown the fuck up'? The Post lists other examples of Bush's speech contradicting government reports and shit Bush said himself like a week ago."

"The surreal timeline of the Iraq war is littered with moments like these—too many about-faces and nonsensical blunders to keep a firm grip on reason," writes Peter Scheer at lefty site TruthDig. "And now, the one goal supporters of the war seem determined to realize is to achieve some vague, if delusory, sense of victory."

Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine" (which also discussess the proposed Iraqi oil law) is getting lots of attention this weekend, with The Guardian having a huge roundup of excerpts and commentary.

I wish people would distinguish between "free markets" and the worst excesses of neoliberalism and neoconservatism (at the risk of sounding like the libertarian equivalent of some 1950's leftist complaining that Stalin wasn't a real socialist). Free markets are just a way of allocating resources efficiently, and in most cases they are a very good tool for achieving the desired outcome. They shouldn't be made into some form of religion or dogma, and nor should they be used as a convenient strawman to thrash and blame for all the world's evils because some people have used them as a fig leaf for imperialist or neocolonialist adventurism. What is happening in Iraq isn't a "free market" at work, its militant mercantilism. There is a difference.

The Huffington Post has a review of the book and some thoughts on the Republican party as a form of gang. In recent years I've also come to think of the neoconservative elite as a modern day band of brigands - stealing from foreigners with one (usually heavily armed) hand and the local populace (via the treasury) with the other...

You might have read the piece in Salon the other day where John Dean laments the passing of the Republican Party as a positive, or, even, a non-damaging force in American life. The party he has known for forty years, and the party he says that his friends now know, is a hateful, entirely corrupt, and self-interested body composed of those who take revenge and those who fear having revenge taken upon them. Every current candidate for the presidency is "authoritarian" in an extreme and unAmerican way that Dean thinks would have in earlier decades been "corrected" by the political system, but the Republicans, according to Dean, have broken the political system precisely so that it won't correct them. Sounds like the financial markets, doesn't it?

Personally, I would have put things slightly differently. The Republican Party now seems to work like a gang, in which the most valued qualities in members are loyalty to the gang and the leader, obedience to authority, and violence toward outsiders. The gang is constantly having to prove its dominance, and so candidates for leadership vie with one another for the most tyrannical or violent rhetoric, rhetoric which simultaneously demonizes those who don't accept the authority of the gang and the leader and removes all rules and laws for the gang and the leader. No one is exempt from the wrath of the gang. In this case, the Republican party has now separated itself fairly clearly from the general American population, and as Americans support it less, they come to seem to the Republicans to be more and more the enemy. The far away enemy is one thing, in terms of threat (think Al Qaeda, Shiites, Sunnis) but the enemy close at hand is more threatening because their enmity is seen as a "betrayal." ...

John Dean should start reading Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which is being published next week, simultaneously in the US and in Britain. As Karl Marx pointed out, history and politics are not only psychological, they are also material. This week, the Guardian is running not only four excerpts from Klein's book, but also several commentaries both disagreeing and agreeing with her thesis. Her thesis is this (and if I am slightly inaccurate, blame me, not Naomi): In the fifties and sixties in the US, at least two lines of thought converged. One was about how to change people's minds without leaving marks and the other was about what was the best way of organizing a given economy. The first grew out of experiments in psychological torture (whoops, I mean electrocshock therapy) run by Ewen Cameron in the late 1940s. The theory was that patients could be rid of mental illnesses by "regressing" them to an infantile state, attaining a "clean slate" upon which new patterns of behavior and thought would be etched. Cameron used both electroshock and powerful drugs to attain his clean slate, having no actual knowledge of the chemistry of the brain or how it works -- in other words, he was operating in accordance with a metaphor. The result of Cameron's experiments, for the patients, was often considerable loss of short term and even long term memory and a subsequent lifelong feeling of "blankness" on the part of the patients (apparently, later refinements of electroshock techniques have mitigated these effects). In the 1950s, the CIA redirected these techniques toward torture of political opponents, allegedly to find out information, but really to test the techniques themselves (hello, Jose Padilla!).

At the same time, Milton Friedman was coming up with the idea that if only an economy could be purified of any kind of restraints on the free market (for example labor unions or socialized medicine or history), then the free market would be able to perfectly gauge the value of any type of good or service, and therefore an economy would balance itself, and, most importantly, inflation would be controlled (also, as you can see, a metaphor, or, perhaps, an extended analogy).

According to Klein, it soon became apparent that all powerful shocks to a system had a similar effect, whether the system was a human body or a national body, and this was to temporarily disable the system's defenses. The US government, the CIA, and the free market economists began to act on this insight, to collude in larger experiments. The first of these was the right wing coup, in Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, in 1973. At the time, Chile had a functioning leftish government and economy, and the voters had already rejected Friedman's pure free market troika: privatization of government functions, an end to social spending, and deregulation.The new economy was dependent upon outside investors and highly profitable to them -- let's call that the allure of globalization. Pinochet set about instilling terror in the population (that's the shock therapy) using death squads, exemplary killings, and torture. Taking advantage of this, the economists installed the new free market way of doing things within days of the coup. But Friedman's ideas did not work -- inflation rose. In the eighties, the Chilean government tried again, this time by inducing a profound economic crash -- essentially impoverishing the populace in order to bring them to heel. Ultimately, the Chilean "miracle" (Friedman's term) did nothing for the population, but it did enrich the top ten per cent and put 45% below the poverty line. It turns out that as far as the economists were concerned, this was a good thing.

The Shock Doctrine traces what the US, the CIA, the economists, the Neocons, and the multinational corporations learned from the Chilean experiment and subsequent ones (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Poland, Russia, China, England) and finally makes its way to Iraq (this is a 590 page book, and the print is small). Essentially, they learned that a small economy is easier to "regress" than a large one, that the shock has to be brutal, and that the free market doesn't work as Friedman said it would (automatically assigning appropriate value), but that it sure does make a few people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that these people were Friedman's (and his students') benefactors and paymasters. They also learned to lie lie lie in order to sell what amounts to a program of inhuman greed to voters who have other needs, wishes, and ideas.

For our purposes, the more interesting section of Klein's book is about Iraq, where she traveled in the first year after the invasion, and this section forms part of her series of posts at the Guardian. She believes that the Iraq War was intended to not only steal Iraqi oil, but also to impose a radical free market on an unwilling populace, and that that was what was behind the installation of Bremer as the capo of Iraqi reconstruction. She believes that, thanks to the resistance of the Iraqis and their deep resentment at being used and exploited by the Americans, this effort has failed. However, a parallel effort, to shock the US economy into absolute deregulation, privatization, and an end to social spending, has been and is succeeding. What this amounts to is the fleecing of the American taxpayer in order to enrich the war making industries. The byproduct, as in Chile, is the gutting of the rule of law and the American political system as we have known it. Why did Bush and Cheney go to war? Well, where do they get their fortunes? The Shock Doctrine works perfectly for them. As for that 45% below the poverty line, well, once the globalizing manufacturers exported the well-paying US jobs, then the globalizing financiers moved in and sold the newly impoverished working class a few sub-prime mortgages guaranteed to take whatever else they had. Then the financiers screamed for a bailout, and Bernanke gave it to them.

Simon Jenkins at The Guardian has an article which is part "Power of Nightmares" and part Eisenhower's ominous farewell speech - Oh! What a Lovely War on Terror - it's the number the arms dealers love - asking "I admit it is a grim question for a fine autumn weekend, but is liberty in decline ?". I think its fair to say liberty is facing some determined resistance at the present time but hopefully it will prevail in the not too distant future.

The philosopher AC Grayling is in no doubt of the answer. He has produced the sort of book that meets Chesterton's test of "forcing a man to change philosophies and religions" through a sharp blow to the head. His weapon is history, presented 18th-century style as a sustained tract - Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty & Rights that Made the Modern West. Grayling argues gloomily that the Whig view of history as a steady progress towards human freedom no longer applies. It reached its climax in the second half of the 20th century with the defeat of fascism and communism. We all cheered and declared that history would die.

No chance, says Grayling. Though much about the world continues to improve - like yesterday's reported fall in child mortality - "we are beginning to descend the far side of Parnassus". Our parents would be amazed that, in peacetime Britain, every public space is monitored by police cameras; private movement is traceable by satellites that follow cars and phones; misbehaving citizens can be imprisoned on the say-so of neighbours; easily readable government ID cards will carry a mass of personal information; suspects are incarcerated indefinitely without trial; and torture has returned to the armoury of the state. They might also find it incredible that 21st-century Britain has revived the 19th-century invasion of distant lands because it dislikes their regimes, or "to spread western values".

Grayling's case is that this swelling infringement of personal liberty is not a minor tweaking of law and order but a loss of freedoms that "cost blood and took centuries" to acquire. They drove Milton to war, Paine to exile and Cobbett to jail. Thousands were slain, burned or tortured to death in their cause. Each retreat from such liberty is defended by home secretaries since "the innocent have nothing to fear". Tell that to the Britons who were held in Guantánamo, none of whom has ever been charged.

The justification for all this is the threat of attack from religious fanatics. Yet, as Grayling points out, this is a criminal menace rather than anything on a par with past strategic threats. While the Islamists may declare their ambition to be a "western caliphate", this is as ludicrously implausible as the dreams of 19th-century anarchists. Modern cities are always vulnerable to explosions, but the west is surely robust enough to withstand any serious threat to the character or constitution of its states. The rantings of Osama bin Laden cannot justify reversing the tide of western liberty. Indeed, while arming against communism helped defeat communism, arming against terrorism only feeds the beast.

The noblest testament to freedom is the American constitution, yet, as Grayling points out, the latest statute passed under its aegis runs contrary to its ethos. The mission of the Patriot Act is "to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes". Montesquieu and Madison would have been appalled at such generalised statism. Nor are the act's powers temporary, wartime ones; they are permanent, as are Britain's myriad terrorism laws. By extending state power to curb civil liberty they do the terrorist's job (such as it is) for him. Never was Franklin's maxim more apt, that he who would put security before liberty deserves neither. Freedom cannot be strengthened by being weakened. That is the sophistry of dictatorship.

Commentators have ascribed the chaotically belligerent aftermath of 9/11 to weak western leaders craving popularity in the glamour of war. Tony Blair said he "believed passionately that we are at mortal risk" from Islamism. It was the sort of threat that the risk theorist Ulrich Beck describes as "always an elixir to an ailing leader".

I think more sinister forces are at work: those on display in the Royal Docks. In 1953 America's last true soldier/president, Eisenhower, warned of a "military/industrial complex" in danger of running amok. Its wealth could bend democracy to its will, using paranoia to seize control of budgets and policies alike. The outcome would be "a tragic waste of resources ... humanity hanging on a cross of iron", with armies seeking war for their employment. Elected leaders, said Eisenhower, fed such a complex at their peril.

The growth of Islamist terror, always described as "al-Qaida linked" (as international crime was always "mafia-linked"), meets Eisenhower's thesis. With the threat of communism gone, the military/industrial complex needs a new cause. Allied to a booming police and intelligence bureaucracy, it has grasped eagerly at terrorism. It has no interest in keeping that threat in proportion, and every interest in exaggerating it. To cover the bungles that led to 9/11, this security/industrial complex portrayed the terrorists as awesome and ubiquitous, capable of building vast bomb-proof bunkers in the Hindu Kush, fake plans of which were dumped on a gullible press. State security agencies dance to the tune of Oh! What a Lovely War. They enslave the language of freedom in the cause of repression.

Seen in the light of history, I do not find Grayling's alarmism out of order. It is simply true that in Britain and America arms dealers, in league with security bureaucrats, have fuelled public debate with extreme paranoia. Those who defend liberty are accused of appeasing an unseen enemy. Those who plead democracy are accused of threatening the state. If the freedom show is to get back on the road, some battles must clearly be fought over and again.

Newsweek has an article on Iraq Veterans Against The War (which has branded the surge a failure) and spokesman Adam Kokesh.

As a week of antiwar activities kicks off in Washington on Saturday, Marine Corps veteran Adam Kokesh will be a familiar face. The 25-year-old former sergeant was in the news earlier this week when he was escorted out of the House Armed Service Committee’s hearing for Gen. David Petraeus. Dressed in a black anti-Iraq War T shirt and a desert camouflage hat, Kokesh unfurled a small sign that said GENERALS LIE, SOLDIERS DIE and was summarily escorted out of the room while House aides struggled to get the general’s microphone working.

Kokesh wasn’t arrested, but if he had been it wouldn’t have been the first time. In the eight months since he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, the telegenic Kokesh has become a fixture on the antiwar scene giving speeches, blogging, staging mock military patrols and being arrested in cities all over country. He was on Larry King's CNN show Thursday night, and Wonkette snarkily reports sightings of Kokesh in cafes around D.C.

Kokesh, who did an eight-month tour in Fallujah in 2004, is one of a growing number of both active and veteran military members who are publicly opposing the continued occupation of Iraq. In January, Appeal for Redress, a group of active-duty, Reserve and National Guard personnel presented a petition of 1,000 signatures to Congress calling for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. And in August, seven active-duty soldiers took the almost unprecedented step of writing an editorial in The New York Times criticizing the military leadership and calling U.S. forces an occupying force that “long ago outlived its welcome.” (Two of those soldiers died in an accident in Iraq this week.) ...

And to close, a Bush joke from Past Peak.

On Labor Day enroute to a summit in Australia, President Bush made an unannounced stop in Anbar province, Iraq, stopping at the Anbar Province Regional Airport. Why Iraq? Why now? Well, as the president explained, "I have come to see with my own eyes the remarkable changes that are taking place in Anbar province." He's not looking with other people's eyes, he's looking with his.

In all, Bush was in Iraq for a total of six hours, all of it within the 17-mile perimeter of the highly-secured Al Asad airbase. His take away? [on screen: Bush saying, "When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like"] — a giant, heavily-armed U.S. military base surrounded by a bloody sectarian free-for-all.

He's a dreamer. — Jon Stewart

Links:

* Professor Smartass - Iraq oil law NOT theft for big oil says Bushie Khalilzad, former big oil consultant
* Index Research - Iraq: New U.S. Base - Wasit
* Democracy Now - Michael Klare on the Internal War For Control of Iraq's Oil
* Lew Rockwell - What the Warfare State Really Costs
* Asia Times - Behind the Anbar myth . "Petraeus, the iPod general - a player of what is fed by his master's voice, the White House".
* Alternet - CentCom Chief Fallon: Petraeus Is "An Ass-Kissing, Little Chickensh*t"
* Past Peak - 1.2 Million Iraqis Killed By The War
* Past Peak - Bush Missing ?
* Huffington Post - War Critics Barack Obama, Ron Paul Get Most Military Donations
* Tom Paine - Failure of Energy Policy. Failure of Foreign Policy