Chronicle of a War foretold


What made the Cuacasus explode? Many have shown surprise at the
conflict between Georgia and Russia. But others will tell you there were
plenty of signs that the conflict was approaching.[ Der Spiegel ]

+ Georgians want Saakashvili to pay the piper [ opendemocracy ]

Young, Female and Israeli


"At an age when social, sexual, and educational explorations are at their highest point, the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli girl is interrupted. She is plucked from her home surroundings and placed in a rigorous institution where her individuality is temporarily forced aside in the name of nationalism. During the next two years, immersed in a regimented and masculine environment, she will be transformed from a girl to a woman, within the framework of an army that is engaged in daily war and conflict." [ Rachel Papo ]

+ Is there an attempt to cover up the rate of female suicides in US army? [ TruthDig ]





+ The One-Stop Election data page [ perspctv ]
+ "No Way, No How, No McCain": Hillary's moment [ Huff ]
ONE TO WATCH: Who will keep Obama honest? Naomi Klein [ RNN on TruthDig ]
+ Beyond the DNS crisis: BGP, the Internet's other biggest hole [ wired ]
+ Russia threatens to cut off Nato's supply line to Afghanistan [ times ]
+ Brand warfare: target Al Quaeda [ guardian ]
+ A million customer data sets were on £35 eBay computer [ telegraph ]
+ ... and the most sung about body parts are the eyes ... [ wired ]

ONE TO WATCH: The 5-Ring Circus: How have things moved on since Nixon's visit to China, asks Bill Moyers [ ONE & TWO ]

Slouching Towards the
Next Big Thing ...

Joe Biden (is) "... a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out “Biden” in a nano-second ..." [ Alexander Cockburn ]
Joe Biden (is) "an exceptionally strong, experienced leader and devoted public servant. Senator Biden will be a purposeful and dynamic vice president who will help Senator Obama both win the presidency and govern this great country." [ Hillary Clinton ]
"I am a Zionist" - Joe Biden [ Shalom TV via ICH ]
+ Biden Jr worked for credit card company while Biden Snr pushed its bankruptcy reform bill [ via Harper's ]
Joe Biden (is) "In sum ... a reliable supporter of virtually every prevailing bit of conventional wisdom within the American elite political consensus, which is why his selection has been widely praised by the establishment, whose principal concern is that their fiefdom not be disrupted and that their consensus not be challenged." [ Glenn Greenwald ]


The Peace Symbol: From Goya to Tiffany


The British artist Gerald Holtom, creator of the CND sign, penned a solemn note to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, before its first public outing on a London peace march in 1958. "I was in despair," he wrote, explaining how the symbol came about. "Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it." Holtom died in 1985. If he had been alive to see this month's Vogue or Tatler, he might have been surprised to see an advertisement for Tiffany & Co in which Lily Cole wears a platinum and diamond peace sign pendant. Half a century after its creation, this potent ideological symbol has become one of the world's most recognisable designs - and one of its most commercialised too. With 4.8 carats of round-cut diamonds set into platinum, the Tiffany pendant has a price tag of £2,550. [ guardian ]

+ 2011: Bush gives McCain a pull-out date [ w post ]
+ ... every sign Russia will have left Georgia by then [ guardian ]
+ There are no "undecideds". Voters have already made up their minds, say doctors [ wired ]
+ Do White People really come from the Caucasus? [ Slate ]
+ What price Israel? Why nationalism has always trumped humanitarianism [ Alfred M. Lilienthal, ich ]

In praise of melancholia
"Why are most (insert your nationality here) so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?" [ chronicle of higher ed via DD]

McCain's mansions ...

Obama "talks" passion but does he feel it?
"Memories of John Kerry in 2004 came flooding back, of how he tended to describe his feelings rather than experience them, of how he suddenly —and unconvincingly — started to say he was "angry" about this or that when his consultants told him that Howard Dean's anger about the war in Iraq was hitting home with voters. And then, in the general election, Kerry kept repeating the word strength rather than demonstrating it. Clearly, Obama's consultants have given him similar advice, that he was on the short end of a passion gap — that it was time for emo. A day earlier, he had said wage disparities between genders made his "blood boil."One of the great strengths of the Obama candidacy has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn't boil, who carefully considers the options before he reacts—and that his reaction is always measured and rational. But that's also a weakness: sometimes the most rational response is to rip your opponent's lungs out. [ Joe Klein, Time ]

+ Loserville: How Obama Blew It [ Dave Lindorff, CounterPunch ]
+ From Cheney to Romney? [ Time ]


Missiles, suicide pacts and cheap counter-measures
Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country ... Why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I'll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn't work ... US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work. To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do.[ George Monbiot ]

SADDLE-SORE

BloggingHeads' pro lefty Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus "facsimile"
Ann Althouse discuss the Saddleback debate.


It's a sobering thought that, if George W Bush had had his way and Georgia had been a member of Nato, we would now be at war with Russia. [ Iain MacWhirther ]
+ US to take over Nato Afghan mission? [ Times ]

Don't Know Much About History

+ Hezbollah blames "failed Israeli generals" for Georgia defeat [ Haaretz ]
+ Will Poland Split EU Over Russia Policy? [ Spiegel ]
+ It will take $147 billion to rebuild after the quake, says China [ time ]
+ US puts brakes on Israeli plan for Iran strike [ Haaretz ]
+ "This War has been Approved by Your Government" [ CounterPunch ]

"Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon's infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?" [ Seamus Milne ]

+ OUR SCARY, UNILATERALIST POST-IRAQ WORLD [ Juan Cole, Salon ]

One thing is for sure. This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags ... In every crisis the west craves goodies and baddies. The media finds it impossible to report a modern conflict without taking sides. In Yugoslavia, where a similar clash of separatist minorities occurred in the 1990s, coverage was so biased that Kosovo is still "plucky little" and the Serbs can still do no right. [ Simon Jenkins ]


What would Gorbachev say?
What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity ... Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it. Now that the Georgian military assault has been routed, both the Georgian government and its supporters should rethink their position. [ w post ]

+ Dia a cyber-attack preceed the Russua-Georgia war? [ nyt ]

“We’re giving them the knife,” he said. “Will they use it?”

The American military has been training and equipping Georgian troops for years. The first U.S. aid came under the rubric of the Georgia Train and Equip Program (ostensibly to counter alleged Al Qaeda influence in the Pankisi Gorge); then, under the Sustainment and Stability Operations Program. Georgia returned the favor, committing thousands of troops to the multi-national coalition in Iraq. Last fall, the Georgians doubled their contingent, making them the third-largest contributor to the coalition. Not bad for a nation of 4.6 million people. As Sergei Shamba, the foreign affairs minister of Abkhazia, told me in 2006: “The Georgians are euphoric because they have been equipped, trained, that they have gained military experience in Iraq. It feeds this revanchist mood… How can South Ossetia be demilitarized, when all of Georgia is bristling with weaponry, and it’s only an hour’s ride by tank from Tbilisi to Tskhinvali?”One of the U.S. military trainers put it to me a bit more bluntly. “We’re giving them the knife,” he said. “Will they use it?” [ Nathan Hodge, Wired ]

+ US is flying Georgian troops into battle zone [ times ]
+ "Thanks to Israeli training, we're fending off Russia" says Georgian minister [ Haaretz ]
+ Bush warns Russia to back off [ telegraph ] "Butt out" says Putin [ Guardian ]
+ Did Russian jets target key oil pipeline to West? [ daily mail ]
+ Israeli security consultants forced to leave Georgia [ Haaretz ]
+ Palestinians may demand binational state unless Israel withdraws to pre-67 borders [ haaretz ]

+ Some wars we prefer to watch [ Slate ]


RUSSIA/GEORGIA [latest @ bbc ]



Firefights in South Ossetia and the danger of a second front in Abkhazia are the latest flare-ups in an old conflict. First the people in the breakaway regions lost their faith in the Georgian government, then they lost hope of any help from Europe. [ Der Spiegel ]

+ Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili shouldn't expect sympathy from the West [ Observer ]
+ South Ossetia: A timeline guardian


THE NEOCONS LIVE ON: How John Bolton, Bill Kristol and Frank Gaffney are pimping a new war [ Watch anp ]
+ ... by the way, others agree their cunning plan may not be foolproof ... [ w. post ]
+ The Justice Department's "truthiness" problem [ Harper's ]
+ Will Mahdi armi now down guns and switch to social programmes? [ times ]
+ The spy who fingered Mbeki for R30m arms bribe [ m&g ]

Crazy: Beyond a reasonable doubt ... This is Bruce Ivins, the US army microbiologist who apparently spent the week after 9/11 sending lethal anthrax spores through the mail and so helped to embed the will to go to war. He committed suicide last week. After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, officials of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department declared that the case had been solved. Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt." Ivins' attorney said the government was "taking a weird guy and convicting him of mass murder" without real evidence. [ ap | nyt ]

TIMELINE OF THE SCARE [ nyt ]

When Trade Talks Fail? For nine days, the senior representatives of 153 countries attempted in vain to agree on a new set of rules and regulations to govern international trade. The ultimate failure last week of this most recent effort, may mark the end of mankind's dream of a world without borders and customs barriers. Experts fear that, instead of a uniform body of rules and regulations, what will now emerge is a confusing meshwork of bilateral trade agreements -- to the detriment of consumers and the poorest countries of the developing world. Concerns about globalization, it appears, have become greater than the hopes it engenders, even in the industrialized nations and the successful emerging economies. [ Der Spiegel ]

Monday's headline read: "Blairites plot to hasten prime minister's exit." For the second time in just over a year, Britain must contemplate a small political club choosing a new ruler without so much as a passing reference to the electorate. We read of cabals and cliques at Westminster, uttering squeals and burps, for the interpretation of which we rely on an inner priesthood of lobby journalists. We read nothing of elections ...

Mr Fish

Goldilocks and the 3 wars

"When the US and Britain invaded Iraq, they started three wars. The first is the insurgency in the Sunni community against the American occupation; the second the struggle by the Iraqi Shia, sixty per cent of the population, allied to the Kurds, to take control of the Iraqi state, previously controlled by the Sunni; and the third a proxy war between the US and Iran about which of them is to have predominant influence in Iraq." [ Patrick Cockburn | Who's really running Iraq? ]

+ The White House, the CIA, a forged letter and a cunning plan to fake info on WMDs [ Politico ]
+ Iran attack: what comes after "stupid"? [ Chris Hedges ]
+ As empires go, how does the Pentagon rate the U.S.? [ MotherJones | Military advantage through history ]
+ Exxon, a dictator called Teodoro and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [ Harper's ]


ENERGY DETOX PLAN

Renewable energy strategy: A German scenario [ Spiegel ]

The Chameleon from Nantes At police headquarters, he admitted that he was Frédéric Bourdin, and that in the past decade and a half he had invented scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages. His aliases included Benjamin Kent, Jimmy Morins, Alex Dole, Sladjan Raskovic, Arnaud Orions, Giovanni Petrullo, and Michelangelo Martini. News reports claimed that he had even impersonated a tiger tamer and a priest, but, in truth, he had nearly always played a similar character: an abused or abandoned child. He was unusually adept at transforming his appearance -- his facial hair, his weight, his walk, his mannerisms. “I can become whatever I want,” he liked to say. In 2004, when he pretended to be a fourteen-year-old French boy in the town of Grenoble, a doctor who examined him at the request of authorities concluded that he was, indeed, a teen-ager. A police captain in Pau noted, “When he talked in Spanish, he became a Spaniard. When he talked in English, he was an Englishman.” Chadourne said of him, “Of course, he lied, but what an actor!” [ New Yorker ]

+ Is an even bigger wave of mortgage defaults about to break? [ iht ]
+ Surprise: Kurds are holding out for their own special deal [ mcclatchy ] previous

Leave Barack Alone!
"... Watching Barack Obama standing in front of vast crowds in Berlin and acting as if he'd been elected reminded me of another occasion when an American politician got carried far too ahead of the moment. As Obama spoke, it was easy to visualise the unfurling of a massive banner saying: 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED'. [ Armando Iannucci ]
+ "Leave Barack Alone!" [ Slate Video ]

+ Hamas cracks down and Fatah refugees turned back
+ Life at the end of the Rainbow: Mbeki's took £30m sub-bribe, and gave Zuma a tip [ sunday times ]
+ No Vitamin C, no smog in Beijing [ mcclatchy ]
+ Shock! The BBC pimps for govt [ telegraph ]
+ Joe Klein versus the neocons: Chapter 2 [ time ]
+ Watch: Seymour Hersh on how to trigger a war with Iran [ YouTube ]

... AND SO THAT LOBBY DEBATE BEGINS IN EARNEST
"There was a failure within the mainstream, Jewish and non-Jewish, to identify the existence of a particular Jewish neoconservative narrative and then to challenge that narrative as being fundamentally flawed in its reading of both American and Israeli interests. One of the causes of that vacuum was the abuse and cheapening of the term anti-Semitism as it was hurled at many who went after Podhoretz, Perle, Feith, and co. They tried, and sadly rather successfully, built a wall of untouchability. Klein is taking his shofar or trumpet to that wall, as many have done before, but Joe is particularly MSM, and therefore important." [ Daniel Levy, Huff Post ]

+ Why, Senator? No more objections to offshore drilling? [ McClatchy ]
+ One to Watch: the spread of Walmart [ Flowing Data ]

+ Kurdish oil: La grande bouffe continues [ Mother Jones ]
+ Debt crisis: Which domino will fall next? Pensions? [ CounterPunch ]
+ Bolton and Miers's executive invisibility cloak is running out of juice [ mcclatchy ]
+ Fitness in a pill: Welcome to the "free lunch without the calories" [ iht ]
+ "Bring me his head to Diego Garcia" ... was UK outpost used for U.S. terror interrogations? [ time ]
+ The catalyst that who could turn water into fuel [ wired ]
Dear Senator ... don't forget us, liberals in open letter appeal to Obama [ the nation ]
+ Obama "on the brink"? [ Robert Scheer ]


Gasholes, by Mr Fish

+ Letter from a "peak oil" conference [ Harper's ]
+ ... while Shell, Eni, Repsol, Exxon et al post record profits
+ ... Spain cuts its speed and turns out the lights [ independent ]
+ Holy Contradictions: 40 years on, the struggle over Humanitae Vitae continues [ Catholics for Choice ]
+ Nuclear stand-off: As Iran hangs tough, U.S. reminds Israel all options are still open
+ Rent-a-chopper: UK troops in Afghanistan may need to borrow helicopters [ independent ]
+ As Britons face 35% gas price hike Gazprom signs deal for Caspian motherlode
+ ... and as for Afghanistan, did you know that ... [ Huff ]
+ Pakistan-Taliban: The six questions [ Harper's ]
+ Bibi is quick off the mark as Olmert plans "peace, then resignation" [ haaretz ]


Will Israel's Year of Scandal now end?
"Olmert is the embodiment of what has been, for Israel, the year of scandal: a president accused of rape, a finance minister accused of massive embezzlement, a deputy prime minister found guilty of forcing his tongue into the mouth of a young woman soldier. Olmert, two years after assuming office and promising to make Israel a more "fun" place to live, leaves Israel a nation in shame ... and in failing to defeat Hamas, he has insured the impossibility of a two-state solution for the foreseeable future, leaving us without a political or military option.

"it's amazing to be attacked as an antisemite by extremists who I think are very dangerous ... They pick Ahmadinejad specifically because he's the guy making the wildest antisemitic statements. I think that's being done for political purposes, to scare the shit out of my parents ... Given the level of threats that they've been getting from the United States, and from Israel, it's a logical thing for Iran to want nuclear weapons as a deterrent. I don't think they'd ever actually use it. First of all, they don't actually have it, but if they did have it, they'd contaminate at the very least the third most holy site in Islam, and they'd kill a hell of a lot of Muslims. So I think that they want it as a matter of deterrence and a matter of prestige ... (Iran) certainly isn't an existential threat to us and the consequences of a war would be terrible." [ atlantic ]

+ Little enthusiasm for more liberalisation as "free trade" talks collapse [ iht ]
+ Slouching towards protectionism? [ spiegel ]
+ Use Open DNS [ iht ]
+ What privacy: The DNA register that will not quit [ independent ]

Standing up to the Torturers
We've had a war on terror where the FBI has pretty much taken a backseat or no seat because they don't want to have any part in this thing because they know that they think that some of it's criminal ... People told me, "You can't imagine what it was like inside the White House during this period." There was such an atmosphere of intimidation. And when the lawyers, some of these lawyers tried to stand up to this later, they felt so endangered in some ways that, at one point, two of the top lawyers from the Justice Department developed this system of talking in codes to each other because they thought they might be being wiretapped. And they even felt they might be in physical danger. They were actually scared to stand up to Vice President Cheney ... after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case, which was in 2006, that actually the Geneva Conventions should cover detainees, there was just a chill that went through the top ranks of the government. [ Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, talks to Bill Moyers ]


+ What privacy? Could new revelations lead to Watergate-style probe on Bush White House? [ Salon ]
+ ONE TO WATCH: Obama foreign policy advisor Greg Craig, on that Jerusalem gag & other tour highlights bbc ]
+ The hawks behind the dove: Obama's foreign policy [ Tim Shorrock, The Progressive ]
+ The 25 biggest war profiteers [ Business Pundit ]
+ Spam "king" dead in "murder-suicide" [ wired ]