Bush sinking in Iraq morass

By Gerry Warner
Staff reporter, The Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Aug. 5, 2005
It's time for Uncle Sam to cry uncle. What other conclusion can you come to after a horrific fortnight of carnage in Iraq that's seen 44 American soldiers killed since July 24 - less than two weeks - in this great fraud of a war to supposedly establish democracy in a land where it's never existed?
And likely never will.
Name a democratic Muslim country in the Middle East. You can't, because there isn't one. Turkey is a democracy, but it's secular and not Muslim. The generals saw to that. Travel through the rest of the Middle East and it's one repressive dictatorship after another. All of them heavily armed. Most of them wanting to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. All of them hating the Great Satan of the West, the United States of America. And George Bush thought he would "improve" this situation by bombing the Middle East into democracy, starting with Iraq. Of course, what he really coveted was the region's oil, but he couldn't say that. So he concocted the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" and threw all the might of the greatest military power on the face of the earth at what essentially was a Third World nation. And surprise, surprise after a few weeks he supposedly "won" the war. "Mission accomplished," he crowed from the safety of a battleship deck while hundreds of marines shouted their approval behind him.
Fast forward two years and those same marines are dropping like flies from roadside ambushes and suicide bombers that even the most powerful military force in the world can't stop. To be sure, the U.S. and its coalition partners won the official Iraq war. That was a no-brainer from the start. But winning the peace is another story altogether. The United States is losing the peace - let me correct that - the United States has lost the peace in Iraq and in the process has created the very terrorist state that they were supposedly out to eradicate. Terrorists armed to the teeth are pouring into Iraq from all over the Middle East and they have one thought paramount in their twisted minds.
Kill an American.
Do that and nothing else matters. They could die the next day and they would die happy because they will be united with Allah and more virgins than they can count. Not to mention their brethren that took down the Twin Towers. So they keep fighting, killing mostly their own people - policemen freshly trained by the Americans are their favourite target - but also Americans when they can, and they're getting increasingly sophisticated at it. It's a zero sum game. The insurgents will never drive the American army out of Iraq - only George Bush can do that - but they can make them pay as long continue to occupy their country.
And pay they are. Associated Press says "at least" (my quote marks) 1,821 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began in March 2003 and the American death toll is now averaging more than two-a-day. How long is Mr. and Mrs. Middle America prepared to tolerate their children dying in a foreign land in an unwinnable started under false pretexts by none other than the United States itself?They toughed it out for close to 10 years in Vietnam, but in the end they caved and in the process they almost tore their own country apart, pitting generation against generation and losing many of their best and brightest to Canada, not to mention the more than 58,000 of them that died in the mud of the Vietnamese quagmire.
Not much mud in Iraq, but a quagmire just the same. Even the Iraqis who were glad to see Saddam Hussein deposed want the Americans out. Uncle Sam has no friends in Iraq and fewer and fewer in the rest of the world for that matter. Mainstream America is starting to turn against this war and the only diehards still trying to justify it are the jingoistic, right-wing radio talk show hosts, Fox TV, Big Oil, Focus 0n the Family and the conniving coterie of White House apparatchiks that feed Bush his lines and do the heavy lifting for him while he's at his Texas ranch.
But wait. There's hope! The noose appears to be closing in on the most sinister Bush apparatchik of all. Not Donald Rumsfeld, not Dick Cheney, but the very one that put Bush in the White House with his sleazy election tactics, his smearing of John Kerry's war record and his backroom wheeling-and-dealing for Bush over the years. I'm talking about the Godfather himself - Karl Rove - who is fighting for his political life now in the affair over his alleged "outing" of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose ambassador husband Joe Wilson had the temerity to criticize the decision to declare war on Iraq. Rove is being fingered as the deep throat that leaked Plame's name to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Publicly identifying a CIA operative is a federal offence and if it's proved that Rove did this it could cost him his career and be a mortal blow to Bush.
Couldn't happen to two more deserving guys.

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The worst addiction of them all

By GERRY WARNER
Staff Writer, The Cranbrook Daily Townsman
July 29, 2005
Addiction is a terrible thing no matter what the source of the addiction is. Stories are rife in the media these days about a rising tide of people addicted to crystal meth and, of course, we've all heard about the horrors of heroin addiction, cocaine and numerous other deadly substances.
But there is a far worse addiction rampant in Western society today and its tentacles are rapidly spreading around the developed world. From Calgary to London to Shanghai, once people get addicted to this substance they can't live without it. Even when the dealers jack the price up to record levels, as they've done recently, people refuse to give it up. This addiction has led to war and countless deaths yet it's perfectly legal and no one is suggesting changing its status. To be sure, some alternatives are being examined, but it's going to be decades before this deadly addiction is toppled from its mighty throne. This remains the case even though this addiction is poisoning the very air we breathe and is being blamed for changing the climate of the earth at a cost of billions.
Like it or not, we live in what can best be described as an "oilacracy." In Marxian terms, oil is the material base on which the world's economic superstructure resides. It doesn't matter whether you're Western, Eastern, capitalist or communist, oil is king. It's the coin of the realm, much more than gold, silver or any other precious metal ever was. He who controls oil, controls the world. If Alexander the Great was alive today, his soldiers would be in the Middle East just the same as the soldiers of George Bush. Except Alexander would probably be winning the war instead of losing it. Be that as it may, those foolish souls who try to tell you that the war in Iraq is about democracy, religion or regime change are only deluding themselves.
It's about oil, stupid. It always was, always is and always will be until we break our deadly addiction. And that isn't happening anytime soon.
I got to thinking about this on a trip last weekend to Montana. The cheapest gas price I saw was $2.39 an American gallon for unleaded , only marginally cheaper than here. My how times change. The first time I saw gas selling for a toonie-a-gallon in the good ol' Excited States of America was last fall. Now it's pushing $2.50-a-gallon. Can three loonies be far behind?For that matter, when I moved down here from the Yukon eight years ago, I could fill my Aerostar van for under $40. Now it's over $70 and climbing. Two weeks-a-go, I was in Edmonton, 93 cents-a-gallon, the same as here. Remember when Alberta gas prices were so much cheaper than B.C.? Not anymore. And now I will really age myself because I can remember when I first went to Simon Fraser University in the mid-1960's driving a 1952 Pontiac that I bought from my dad my usual gas purchase was $2. No kidding! Those were the days before self-service and I can distinctly remember saying many-a-time, "two dollars worth, please." And that was almost half-a-tank! I could drive a week on that. Those. indeed, were the days.
Now with the world consuming 83 million barrels-a-day of sixty dollar oil, times have changed. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm thinking before I decide to drive now. My family would love to go back to the Yukon where we have many friends. Not a chance! A rough calculation indicates a round trip to Whitehorse would cost almost $700. No can do. It would be cheaper to fly. I've thought about buying a hybrid, but they start at $30,000 and you have to wonder how many miles you'd have to drive before you saved any money. And they have expensive batteries to replace. Ironically, there are several four-cylinder gasoline model cars on the market that sell for as little as $15,000 new and get upwards of 50 miles, yes miles, to the gallon. See what I mean? Our society is still wedded, perhaps welded would be the better term, to the internal combustion engine. And as long as it is, petro-politics is going to be the way of the world. About the only thing that could change this would be the advent of the hydrogen fuel cell battery, but that appears to be some time off yet.
So what does this all mean? For starters, don't waste anytime worrying about Quebec separation because in an economy where oil is king there is a province far closer to us with a lot more muscle to separate. How about that, eh. A passport to cross the Alberta frontier. And if that doesn't happen, Canada is poised to become one of the petro-powers of the world. We already sell more oil to the U.S. than any country except Saudi Arabia and it's predicted we'll pass the Saudis in less than a decade. The geo-politics of this are rather mind-boggling when you consider how the Americans treat us in terms of resources they covet like lumber and cattle. Will a future Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-type regime decide to do a little "regime change" in Ottawa if they can't have their way with us.
I'd like to think that's a joke, but I'm not so sure.
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