[Thanks, SP]
(Incidentally The Agonist is a great site that was a direct inspiration for this one. Bookmark it if you haven’t already.)
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A former American official with the US-led occupation authority in Iraq was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison and forced to forfeit 3.6 million dollars for his role in defrauding the authority.
Robert Stein, 52, pleaded guilty in February 2006 to charges of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy in relation to a plot to defraud the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which took over running Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Stein, who was arrested in the United States in November 2005 in the case, also pleaded guilty to illegal possession of machine guns in the case heard in the US district court in Washington DC.
The case involved a scheme during 2003-2005 involving several US army and reserve officers and Romania-based US businessman Philip Bloom to rig CPA bids worth 8.6 million dollars in Bloom’s favor. Bloom in turn gave the government officials cash, cars, jewelry, computers, airline tickets, liquor and jobs, according to the Department of Justice.
Stein, a CPA comptroller and funding officer for the CPA’s south central region in al-Hillah, Iraq, stole two million dollars in US currency during the scheme to give to Bloom to launder through foreign accounts to pay off the others, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If the U.S. population is 300 million, then that’s just 0.001% of it. Add into this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often have lost their job bases; consider that many of them were under or unemployed as well as undereducated, that they generally come from struggling, low-income, low-skills areas. Given that we have an all-volunteer military (so that not even the threat of a draft touches other young Americans), you could certainly say that the President’s war in Iraq — and its harm — has been disproportionately felt. If you live in a rural area, you are simply far more likely to know a casualty of the war than in most major metropolitan areas of the country.
No wonder it’s been easy for so many Americans to ignore such a catastrophic war until relatively recently. This might, in a sense, be considered part of a long-term White House strategy, finally faltering, of essentially fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the population at home. When, for instance, soon after the 9/11 attacks the President urged Americans to go to Disney World or, in December 2006, to go “shopping more” to help the economy, he meant it. We were to go on with our normal lives, untouched by his war.
Israel May Have Violated Arms Pact, U.S. Says
By DAVID S. CLOUD and GREG MYRE
Published: January 28, 2007WASHINGTON, Jan 27 — The Bush administration will inform Congress on Monday that Israel may have violated agreements with the United States when it fired American-supplied cluster munitions into southern Lebanon during its fight with Hezbollah last summer, the State Department said Saturday.
The finding, though preliminary, has prompted a contentious debate within the administration over whether the United States should penalize Israel for its use of cluster munitions against towns and villages where Hezbollah had placed its rocket launchers.
Square with this:
Israel to purchase U.S.-made smart bomb kits for $100 million
JERUSALEM: The Israeli air force has decided to buy smart munitions kits from the Seattle-based Boeing aerospace company for an estimated $100 million (€77 million), Israeli defense officials said Monday.
Some readers may remember that Oren, who holds Israeli citizenship and has served in the Israeli military, has been the subject of some controversy in US academic circles not only for being pro-Israel but also its vocal defender in the public arena. His previous book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” was lambasted by Norman Finkelstein for its apologetics.
Given the desperate situation in Iraq, whoever runs the CIA’s Baghdad station will need to be an extraordinary manager who can marshal the agency’s forces and work closely with the U.S. armed forces. Unfortunately, several sources have informed me that the man the CIA is preparing to dispatch to fill the position is widely criticized within the agency and seen as ill-fitted to the role. Furthermore, the new station chief is said to be closely identified with detainee abuses, especially those involving “renditions”—the practice by which terrorist suspects are covertly delivered to foreign intelligence agencies to be interrogated.
Read the rest for details.
It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new administration in two years’ time might change direction seems the relevant question.
Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.
The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.
The rest of the article posits a non-interventionist policy I wish could be embraced — and it took the Bush administration to make me realize that.
Later today I will post a hyperlinked version here.
Update: The New Saddam
Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda that puts the U.S. on a path of confrontation with Iran—the latest installment in the haphazard collection of ideological fads that passes as Middle East policy in Washington these days.
Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally the support of what Rice has described as the “moderate mainstream� Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the “GCC + 2,� meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.
I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of the 20th century’s deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them against Iranians, either).
Continue reading Saddam is dead, long live SADDAM