In the last few days, reports appeared about how the Pulitzer committee awarded their prestigious prize to topics like the luxury bordello scandals involving elected officials, Thomas Jefferson’s various mistresses, and international sex trafficking, among others.
No doubt these subjects are important and sizzle in the public mind, yet something feels missing—a shoe lace untied, a hole worn through a pocket by a house key, or that war lasting more than 7 years now.
The Pulitzer committee grants awards for socially redeeming art, beautiful music, or fine writing that pierces the veil of deception in high places. Plenty of journalists and writers have accomplished this on the subject of Operation Iraqi Freedom, focusing not on the sizzling sex scandals but on the more primitive forms of brutality and rape in the chaos of a destroyed country.
Does this explain why the war topic was passed over this year, the seventh of a long war?
The Pulitzer was founded on values of professional journalism and artistic merit. Has it turned its eyes to new, more important subjects than the U.S. invasion of another country?
If you consider how mainstream media and journalism have botched so many opportunities to pierce the veil of high-power deception, you’ll not be surprised that a prestigious prize for journalism shows a lack of interest in Iraq, war, soldiers and civilians dying. After all, how many newspapers, or congressmen for that matter, risked dissent from the W administration during the wake of the hyped-up, politically exploited, hysterical 9/11 reaction?
Plenty of novels and nonfiction books criticized the war and risked public outrage and the lethal label of “un-American” during the period when the native authority of W and Cheney commanded support for their own cleverly crafted, massive destruction and public deception. In this sense, the Iraq war took place more right here in the U.S. than in the bombing missions and in the Humvees where blood spills out to this day.
Perhaps Americans at home just don’t have the stomach to think of the war anymore—though the war was, and still is, fundamentally right here at home. The battleground is in the American political arena. Now more than ever, this becomes clear as the reports pile up to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the war was planned long before the causus belli –the justification and the opportunity that presented itself in the form of the 9/11 attack.
America’s political system failed—and so did its journalism. Collectively, reflecting our country’s culture, we Americans wanted to find a fast solution to an otherwise complicated situation. Suddenly faced with difficult decisions and questions, we clung tightly to our Bibles, searching for quick answers and whispering curses to the Muslims in a “crusade,” as W often called it. We did not want to analyze the facts before we reacted. We wanted to follow a leader, regardless of how nefarious and duplicitous the power brokers played their hand in a twisted plan.
Ironically, these officials, W and Cheney, were not even elected officials, rather just appointed hastily by a small group of extremists at the Supreme Court. This is why the real battleground has always been right here at home. It began as a struggle for the power to impose an ideological belief on a democracy. By grasping the power to command, the extreme American ideologues overreacted, waged a war of political passion, and thus fulfilled the greatest wishes, plans, and prayers of the likes of Osama bin Laden.
So, a nonfiction book, and especially a novel about the war, might best be situated at home, not in the smoking battlegrounds where the bombs explode. This war is all about political ideology that affects every aspect of American culture and economics. This war is not about WMDs, not about a brutal tryant, not about evil terrorists, and not about the security of our nation.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Soldiers Readapt to Civilian Life, Some Don't
Unlike any war the U.S. has waged, the urban, guerilla combat in Iraq is personal and challenges the soul’s endurance. Except for the Vietnam War, especially the later part, U.S. soldiers are faced with a more personal type of combat. An unidentifiable enemy walks around in public, indistinguishable from the civilians. Except for the Special Forces, U.S. soldiers are trained only for traditional warfare, not terrorism and insurgency.
Insurgent civilians seem like regular people one day, exchanging cigarettes with a soldier like Army Cpl. Jason Pautsch. The next day, the same friendly face can pull an AK47 and spray bullets into a Marine Unit where buddies fall with nightmarish wounds. Like a lightning bolt from nowhere, a roadside bomb can explode, taking life and limb.
Scenes of horror create the post traumatic stress syndrome that U.S. soldiers like Sgt. Stryker have to cope with when they return home after years of patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods filled with paranoia and constant fear for life.
A soldier develops personal relationships with his battle buddies or with friendly civilians--alive one day and torn apart the next.
One day an otherwise friendly civilian might appear out of nowhere working as a suicide bomber, forcing a well-intended Marine to make a split-second decision to shoot in self-defense. Mistakes happen in the strained, continuous, life-threatening situations. The extended missions exacerbate the stress. The Stop-Loss clause in a military service contract can hold a soldier in combat indefinitely.
When the soldier returns home to America after surviving by any and all means, including shielding himself with intensified paranoia and tight nerves, he can’t resolve the gap between his newly regained civilian lifestyle and the adrenaline still racing through his veins. Sometimes he cannot slow down the synaptic overload in his mind and soul. Readjusting to a whole new and alien world seems impossible, a world that used to be familiar, now turned into another planet. He loses his grip and slips into the darkness.
In 2008 suicide rates of U.S. soldiers from Iraq rose beyond the levels during the Vietnam War three decades ago.
In the novel, Mojave Winds, Kris Klug is caught in this tough transition between dangerous and extended missions and finding his way in regular American daily life. As a portrait of the human condition, the novel is best positioned to capture the internal struggle of soldiers, many bearing the burden of deep invisible wounds.
Moving freely anywhere, civilian insurgents can detonate a suicide bomb, shredding humans indiscriminately. In March this year, the New York Times reported how, even as U.S. soldiers begin to leave Iraq, suicide bombings increase, killing more than 33 in a single day. The bloody scenes sear the spirit of anyone witnessing the carnage.
Insurgent civilians seem like regular people one day, exchanging cigarettes with a soldier like Army Cpl. Jason Pautsch. The next day, the same friendly face can pull an AK47 and spray bullets into a Marine Unit where buddies fall with nightmarish wounds. Like a lightning bolt from nowhere, a roadside bomb can explode, taking life and limb.
Scenes of horror create the post traumatic stress syndrome that U.S. soldiers like Sgt. Stryker have to cope with when they return home after years of patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods filled with paranoia and constant fear for life.
A soldier develops personal relationships with his battle buddies or with friendly civilians--alive one day and torn apart the next.
One day an otherwise friendly civilian might appear out of nowhere working as a suicide bomber, forcing a well-intended Marine to make a split-second decision to shoot in self-defense. Mistakes happen in the strained, continuous, life-threatening situations. The extended missions exacerbate the stress. The Stop-Loss clause in a military service contract can hold a soldier in combat indefinitely.
When the soldier returns home to America after surviving by any and all means, including shielding himself with intensified paranoia and tight nerves, he can’t resolve the gap between his newly regained civilian lifestyle and the adrenaline still racing through his veins. Sometimes he cannot slow down the synaptic overload in his mind and soul. Readjusting to a whole new and alien world seems impossible, a world that used to be familiar, now turned into another planet. He loses his grip and slips into the darkness.
In 2008 suicide rates of U.S. soldiers from Iraq rose beyond the levels during the Vietnam War three decades ago.
In the novel, Mojave Winds, Kris Klug is caught in this tough transition between dangerous and extended missions and finding his way in regular American daily life. As a portrait of the human condition, the novel is best positioned to capture the internal struggle of soldiers, many bearing the burden of deep invisible wounds.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Mojave Winds and A Sufi's Ghost Mentioned in The New York Times
Even if it is just a mention on The New York Times's Web site, it's still great to see that my novels are being referenced and noticed in some of the mainstream newspapers.
You can find the discussion thread that brought up my novels in The New York Times's blog.:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/shock-and-awe-a-novel/
Part of my own comments in this thread include the following.
I began writing Mojave Winds in 2002 when the G W Bush administration began preparing the preemptive invasion of Iraq.
Since then, I’ve been tracking the public’s interest in reading about the war and its politics in nonfiction and in fiction as well as in the movies.
By doing this tracking, I’ve discovered that it’s own way to observe how public opinion has changed drastically over the last 7 years, from an almost hysterical reaction to the 9/11 attack to a much broader and deeper understanding of how the W administration had used the invasion for its own previously planned agenda. In a situation like this it has taken a good five years for the facts to move from nonfiction books into the area of public opinion.
As of 2005, many movies had appeared: Rendition, Stop Lose, Valley of Ellah, Jarhead, The Kingdom, among others. Some of these enjoyed box office success. It seems that these movies helped in making the “general public” more aware of the war. Otherwise, it seems that, like Vietnam, the war was not in the forefront of the minds of the “average citizen” who is often concerned about how to pay the mortgage, rent, medical bills, and education.
Fortunately, the American citizen did come around to understand that the right-wing extremists in the White House were taking the country down a bumpy road to the Dark Ages.
One of the points in the previous comments, in the New York Times blog postings, suggests that this war in Iraq is very different from anything the U.S. has engaged before.
I believe that this is true for at least a couple of reasons. As mentioned, the demographics of the soldiers are now different and new in some ways and the politics behind the U.S. wars in the Middle East are motivated by relatively new incentives, although some historians see World Wars I and II as prompted at least partly by the much coveted petroleum (see The Epic Of Oil, Catalyst Of Conflict - New York Times January 1993).
The U.S. has seldom ventured into preemptive war, and certainly not in any way like its preemptive bombing and invasion of Iraq where substantial evidence and controversy existed before the invasion.
In the U.S. history, there have been false justifications for war, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, Vietnam—all justified by trumped up reasons of some alleged skirmish that riled the patriotic blood. Iraq is similar to these in many ways, but different in its politics of such a clearly defined and pre-documented political agenda as well as its overwhelming military advantage—not to mention an arrogant occupation of a country that so encouraged successful guerilla warfare.
It’s the politics ( and religious ferver) that seem most intriguing in this war with Iraq. Its manipulation was blatant to many. Though the U.S. public opinion was clearly manipulated by a small cabal in the White House who used the 9/11 attack as the pretext for their agenda planned long before. This is what makes Iraq so unique, revealing how the American political system went awry.
This affects how writers approach this war in novels.
As mentioned in previous comments, above, soldiers experiencing the war first hand would probably do best to write memoirs—a genre well suited for first-hand witness, such is the case for Jarhead by Swofford (the Desert Storm invasion) and later for Generation Kill by Wright (the current Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion).
Although Swofford was a sniper (who later went to writing school) and Wright, an embedded journalist, they both depict just how jaded, cynical, and disillusioned the soldiers were for the most part. Unlike most any other war, the soldiers were aware of the crass Realpolitik behind these Iraqi wars, as security operations for the oil fields (especially since, during the same time, the U.S. could have taken leadership in initiating new, innovative industries for alternative energy). As portrayed in these war accounts, the modern U.S. volunteer soldier becomes aware of the crass politics behind their mission.
On the other hand, the novel Catch 22 by Heller, focused more on the incompetency of the military bureaucracy which Heller had seen in the Korean operations after WWII, even though his story was placed in WWII.
Given the political and corporate interests in the Iraq wars, the way novelists approach this subject will most likely be quite different from Hemmingway’s view of WWII, or Heller’s depiction of the Korean (vis à vis European) War. In any case, Jarhead and Generation Kill express very new sentiments about U.S. military adventures.
You can find the discussion thread that brought up my novels in The New York Times's blog.:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/shock-and-awe-a-novel/
Part of my own comments in this thread include the following.
I began writing Mojave Winds in 2002 when the G W Bush administration began preparing the preemptive invasion of Iraq.
Since then, I’ve been tracking the public’s interest in reading about the war and its politics in nonfiction and in fiction as well as in the movies.
By doing this tracking, I’ve discovered that it’s own way to observe how public opinion has changed drastically over the last 7 years, from an almost hysterical reaction to the 9/11 attack to a much broader and deeper understanding of how the W administration had used the invasion for its own previously planned agenda. In a situation like this it has taken a good five years for the facts to move from nonfiction books into the area of public opinion.
As of 2005, many movies had appeared: Rendition, Stop Lose, Valley of Ellah, Jarhead, The Kingdom, among others. Some of these enjoyed box office success. It seems that these movies helped in making the “general public” more aware of the war. Otherwise, it seems that, like Vietnam, the war was not in the forefront of the minds of the “average citizen” who is often concerned about how to pay the mortgage, rent, medical bills, and education.
Fortunately, the American citizen did come around to understand that the right-wing extremists in the White House were taking the country down a bumpy road to the Dark Ages.
One of the points in the previous comments, in the New York Times blog postings, suggests that this war in Iraq is very different from anything the U.S. has engaged before.
I believe that this is true for at least a couple of reasons. As mentioned, the demographics of the soldiers are now different and new in some ways and the politics behind the U.S. wars in the Middle East are motivated by relatively new incentives, although some historians see World Wars I and II as prompted at least partly by the much coveted petroleum (see The Epic Of Oil, Catalyst Of Conflict - New York Times January 1993).
The U.S. has seldom ventured into preemptive war, and certainly not in any way like its preemptive bombing and invasion of Iraq where substantial evidence and controversy existed before the invasion.
In the U.S. history, there have been false justifications for war, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, Vietnam—all justified by trumped up reasons of some alleged skirmish that riled the patriotic blood. Iraq is similar to these in many ways, but different in its politics of such a clearly defined and pre-documented political agenda as well as its overwhelming military advantage—not to mention an arrogant occupation of a country that so encouraged successful guerilla warfare.
It’s the politics ( and religious ferver) that seem most intriguing in this war with Iraq. Its manipulation was blatant to many. Though the U.S. public opinion was clearly manipulated by a small cabal in the White House who used the 9/11 attack as the pretext for their agenda planned long before. This is what makes Iraq so unique, revealing how the American political system went awry.
This affects how writers approach this war in novels.
As mentioned in previous comments, above, soldiers experiencing the war first hand would probably do best to write memoirs—a genre well suited for first-hand witness, such is the case for Jarhead by Swofford (the Desert Storm invasion) and later for Generation Kill by Wright (the current Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion).
Although Swofford was a sniper (who later went to writing school) and Wright, an embedded journalist, they both depict just how jaded, cynical, and disillusioned the soldiers were for the most part. Unlike most any other war, the soldiers were aware of the crass Realpolitik behind these Iraqi wars, as security operations for the oil fields (especially since, during the same time, the U.S. could have taken leadership in initiating new, innovative industries for alternative energy). As portrayed in these war accounts, the modern U.S. volunteer soldier becomes aware of the crass politics behind their mission.
On the other hand, the novel Catch 22 by Heller, focused more on the incompetency of the military bureaucracy which Heller had seen in the Korean operations after WWII, even though his story was placed in WWII.
Given the political and corporate interests in the Iraq wars, the way novelists approach this subject will most likely be quite different from Hemmingway’s view of WWII, or Heller’s depiction of the Korean (vis à vis European) War. In any case, Jarhead and Generation Kill express very new sentiments about U.S. military adventures.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Church of Later Day Neocons
Fighting Guerrilla Warriors with Conventional Tactics All for the Sake of Godly Profits
“War on terror” coins a sacred phrase in the Iraq crusade. Karl Rove, high priest of spin, led the neocons’ faithful choir through the doctrinal hymns, especially regarding Bush’s military mission.
Now the Sanctified Church of Later Day Neocons has anointed John McCain to take the pulpit for the steadfast congregation, a political party on a mission from God, bowing down to corporate avarice at the detriment of public interests. The neocon party promises to maintain stilted, stodgy status quo of old, slogging industries. Though, what we need these days is Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and invention--the heart of American entrepreneurism in government and in business.
Except for Secretary of State Rice, the ex-oil executive automaton, this special cabal of wealthy, white codgers has woven a web of myths so thick that everyone believes the country is divided between the red and the blue: the virtuous, righteous party versus the diabolical, liberal socialists. Behind the neocon marketing hype, the issues draw a real line between rich and the bleeding middle class and the economic policies that shove the poor deeper into debtor’s slavery while the wealthy reap the profits from the uneducated, gullible middle class.
At least twenty percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. As many Americans also believe they pay fewer taxes than Europeans who enjoy high quality public healthcare and education through university level.
I know firsthand by attending a German university. Otherwise, coming from a blue collar background in America, I never would have been able to afford an education. I lived and worked more than twenty years in Germany and France and paid fewer taxes than we do in America. I pursued the American dream where it was available.
Considered an enlightened saint among the neocons, Milton Friedman claimed that unregulated industries operate most efficiently. Contrary to this twaddle, we have witnessed how unbridled Savings and Loan banks imploded under Bush Sr. in the early 90’s. Corporations can and will destroy themselves by greedy feeding frenzies as we watched in the scandals like Enron and Anderson Consulting. Lack of government intervention, a lack of political will and leadership in America generally allows this trend to continue.
Once the Berlin Wall fell, hollow winds blew through the streets of Soviet Union’s communist ideals and gave the captains of American industry free reign to practice arrogant forms of unrestrained and turgid capitalism at the high costs of public interests.
After disastrous Reaganomics were implemented, Bush Sr. became president, campaigning on a promise to reduce taxes which he later increased in a desperate attempt to reduce Reagan’s inflamed deficit, and pushed Friedman policies, voodoo economics, further, allowing certain industries to gorge on consumers’ savings accounts, wolves on meek lambs. Bush Sr. cooled the corporate feeding frenzy that turned into a blood bath by paying over $120 billion in public tax funds to bail out the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1990’s.
So, rather than maintain a Keynesian mixed economy in which government calms corporate passions for predatory profits, the neocon doctrine allows industries to devour gullible consumers until streets flow red with blood. Unimaginative industries, banking, healthcare insurance, and energy, resist innovation and change. The only way left for them to make profits is by praying on consumers' ignorance. Only then does government intervene by giving the status quo industries, which lack any innovation, a transfusion of tax payers’ money.
America’s government has become a mere socialized emergency room for industries that overdose on the crack cocaine of greed. Tax payers now pay industries to cure them of their own addiction to larger and larger profits and executive salaries.
As if ambitious to outdo dad, President Bush Jr. drove Milton Friedman’s free wheeling economic policies like a freight train on a downward spiraling track until it finally crashed into the limits of melting consumer credit cards and fraudulent, bloated mortgages. Bush Jr.’s administration will hand out hundreds of billions of tax dollars to subsidize the mismanagement of credit card and mortgage banks while their CEO’s carry their multimillion dollar paychecks to the bank, laughing all the way. Meanwhile middle class workers lose their homes at a neck breaking rate.
In so far as incompetent politicians sell their souls to corporate contributions and voodoo economics and consequently mislead this country into destruction and mayhem, the guerrilla Islamist warriors, like Osama bin Laden, are accurate in assessing the US as corrupt and decadent.
McCain’s campaign promises continue the neoconservative holy crusade for the Iraq War which directly affects the economy. The differences between Obama and MacCain are blatantly clear. Whatever McCain says about the economic fiascos of the mortgage crisis, the credit card crisis, or the Iraq War, Obama has an opposite view and innovative solutions.
The 2008 election is about diametrically opposing views between the Keynesian versus the Friedmaniac policies. In 2008 we also choose between the neocons’ imperial war to impose corporate turgid status quo over a sovereign nation for the sake of its oil reserves versus the innovative solutions in such industries as healthcare, banking, energy, and war.
Corporate Campaign Contributions – Industrial Domination
Tied to the unparalleled power of the Israeli lobby money and to the huge corporate defense and energy contractors, Bush and his chums have been operating only in terms of conventional warfare. Influenced by corporate campaign money, they only think in terms of corporate interests. This involves no bid contracts and the use of expensive, sophisticated weaponry that applies best to the warfare of one sovereign nation against another and not to guerilla warfare.
In other words, the stodgy political church of Bush and McCain is less interested in armor to protect the individual soldiers on the ground, fighting house to house. That sort of activity represents social welfare to individual human beings, brave soldiers. Armor for body and Humvee hardly increases profit margins in comparison to a billion dollar B2 bomber.
Following Bush’s footsteps, McCain embraces this same agenda. If Bush says, “stay the course in Iraq,” McCain says, “stay there a hundred years.” If Bush says timetable to pull out, McCain dittos the Anointed Decider. McSame has developed his economic and war policies from his ties with big business lobbies and not with the interest of the American people. Like Bush, McCain abides by unregulated big business as indoctrinated by Milton Friedman since the Reagan years.
This is the reason why Bush invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation. “It’s just business,” as he would say, “nothin’ pers’nal.” He could have pointed his finger at any piece of fresh meat and the American people were eagerly drooling to revenge the 9/11 attack.
The golden opportunity, the casus belli,a perfect justification for war arrived. The neocons knew exactly which war to wage, the low hanging fruit of the world’s second largest oil reserves. Despite many warnings of the 9/11 attack, W did nothing to restrain the well known Islamist guerrilla warriors, as indicated in his August 6, 2001 Presidential Brief, which he chose to ignore.
According to Ron Suskind's new book, Way of the World, Bush chose to ignore and deny clear intelligence that Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida and no WMDs:
The neocons had long ago planned to knock off Saddam Hussein since the day he nationalized Iraqi oil. They have well documented this fact. Take a look at PNAC. It’s always been about the oil and a drive for global dominance backed by a fanatical Judeo-Christian fundamentalism. We cannot act too surprised when former Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan explained as much in his biography after he left his cushy government job where he practiced the Milton Friedman rituals devoutly in his bathtub, enlightened by flickering candles.
Invading Iraq made great financial and political sense at least for Dubya and his Friedman disciples from Podhoretz to Falwell and Pat Robertson. Defense and petroleum contractors made boat loads of profits, thus fattening the coffers for Bush’s 2004 campaign. Beyond campaign money, the Bush family as well as members of his neocon church, including Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and so on—they own millions of dollars in stocks with defense contractors and petroleum companies such as the Carlyle Group and a long list of others.
Cheney’s stock options at Halliburton skyrocketed, once the company landed those no-bid billion dollar contracts. Unless you’ve read up on this subject, you wouldn’t recognize the names of these companies, except for maybe the ones that advertise regularly on TV like Exxon, Boeing, Lockhead… By paying for multi-million dollar ads, they were able to stifle freedom of media journalism for at least as long as it took to get Neil Cavuto, comedian Bill O’Reilly, and Wolf Blitzer a whoring chance to sway public opinion to wage an imperial, conventional war against a loosely organized network of guerrilla fundamentalists.
Waging Conventional War Is Good for Re-elections
Bush desperately needed to increase his plummeting popularity score after the Supreme Court appointed him to the presidency by overturning the 2001 election. He could only win a second term in office if he initiated a major war against a well defined country. Iraq was a ripe target with an army impoverished by decades of sanctions. US history shows that no president has lost a second term election after declaring a war in the first term. Now the same scenario plays out for opportunist, citizen McCain who playfully sings his own song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”
This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican militaries, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tokin incidenthelped justify the Vietnam War.
This is how the American industrial military complex has operated at least since the Mexican American War (1846). President Eisenhower knew this and warned us about it. However, at the slightest incident, the unschooled masses repeatedly jump on the bandwagon for nationalistic pride, all too willing to take a blind patriotic ride to hell while all the way handing the pillaged profits to the robber barons of war. Is there a cure for the American middle class’s credulity?
Well, everyone could turn off the boob tube and read some books other than the Bible. In France and Germany, they’ve developed a remedy to some extent. It’s called a damn good secular public education system, one that does not muddle science and reason with religious poppycock like creationism, End Days, and all the hooey about holy lands.
Guerrilla Warriors, Not Iraqi Armies
There’s a little problem, though. The groups--groups plural--that perpetrate terrorist activities in the name of Allah are non-conventional warriors. They harbor loyalty to no sovereign nation but to a fundamentalist creed similar to White Supremists or the 700 Club. The US military could never bomb the terrorist groups involved in attacking US and European cities. The US could never invade any one country and expect its leaders to surrender and end the “war on terrorism.”
If attacking any main source of the trouble makers would solve the problem, then they would have to bomb Saudi Arabia because 15 of the 19 terrorists were born, raised, and indoctrinated there. The Devine Decider didn’t invade Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that, unlike Saddam Hussein, the royal family of Saud are long term allies and reliable petroleum suppliers since Franklin Roosevelt made the deal with King Saud in 1945, essentially saying, “We’ll support and protect your tyrannical monarchy so long as you deliver the crude.” It seemed like a good deal at the time, but times change.
The American industrial military complex makes less money in the labor intensive guerrilla wars than they do in wars that require sophisticated, manufactured weaponry. It’s basic business strategy to maintain high profits—to hell with the reasons or the outcomes of the war. Defense contractors earn much smaller profits in guerrilla warfare which requires labor intensive work in urban settings with ears to the ground. In his books, Robert Baer makes this a central argument. Using bombers, sophisticated equipment, missiles,...it's the only thing that makes business sense.
The guerrilla war we face has no one leader, no one country, no standing army. Our enemies in this so-called war on terrorism do not wear uniforms. They are guerrilla warriors who use any means possible to harm their enemies. They use bombs, booby traps, and hijacked airliners because they have neither conventional weapons nor armies. They made this point abundantly clear when they bombed the World Trade Center’s basement in 1993, not to mention earlier bombings of American assets in many places like Tanzania and the Congo.
Any one with a pulse could understand this as early as 1983, when a terrorist cell blew up the US Marine barracks in Lebanon. Likewise most intelligence agents operating in the Middle East knew that a persistent, organized movement of Islamist guerrilla fighters bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In his many books on the subject Robert Baer describes how he tracked militant Islamists. They had been a well known enemy decades before 9/11/2001.
Bush Jr. would have us believe that these guerrilla warriors hate America and its freedom. He never bothers to consider the simple economic situation in which only the small royal families control the opulent oil wealth in most Arab countries and they do not give a fig to diversify their own economies and develop their own people.
Unemployment (over 35% in Saudi Arabia) and poverty enrage Muslims. Fanatical anti-American religious training helps to set an unemployed, hungry, angry, idle man down a path to murder and mayhem, as was the case for Mohammed Atta and others. Most any religious group provides this sort of narrow education. Just watch Pat Robertson on his evangelical TV show, the 700 Club, or visit one of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Universities to witness how the later day church of neocons indoctrinate our own credulous youth.
Among Bush’s many mutating reasons for invading Iraq, he finally claimed that it was America’s moral duty to create a democracy throughout the Middle East. For a year or two around 2003, he had most American yahoos believing this. It is another part of the neocon catechism.
Another one of Friedman’s mind boggling theories is that once a country’s economy begins to operate in a capitalistic fashion, it will inevitably become a democracy. Likewise, so the theory goes, if a country becomes democratic, it naturally seeks to implement a liberal capitalism. Neither has proven true in the real world. As a totalitarian regime, China thrives on capitalism. We buy products from totalitarian capitalist China because their regime encourages, nay, enforces, sweatshop labor. It's why US corporations outsource American jobs; labor is cheaper in authoritarian regimes.
Contrary to Pope Friedman’s crack-pot ideas, once given the vote for a democratic government, several countries have recently voted against democracy in favor of theocracy, Islamist regimes like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or President Gull in Turkey who has an Islamist background. Like the Catholic dominated politics in most of South America, many Islamic countries are theocracies.
Given the theocratic proclivities of President Bush, he too would like to see America governed by some inerrant, one and only Biblical interpretation and not by its Constitution. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," --As quoted in Understanding the President and his God
Guerrilla warfare is messy and much more difficult to win than invading a crumbling nation. For this reason it never benefits individuals like Bush who intend to expand their personal, political, and financial success at the detriment of national security and economic stability.
As we learned in our own War of Independence and, likewise in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare is extremely messy, costly, and bloody. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s infamous statement that “democracy is messy,” it is the insurgency and the guerrilla fighters that clog the wheels of industry. The Russians learned this when they invaded Afghanistan and it cost them the collapse of their already frail economy. And these schmoes would have us believe that Reagan caused the fall of the Soviet Union.
“War on terror” coins a sacred phrase in the Iraq crusade. Karl Rove, high priest of spin, led the neocons’ faithful choir through the doctrinal hymns, especially regarding Bush’s military mission.
Now the Sanctified Church of Later Day Neocons has anointed John McCain to take the pulpit for the steadfast congregation, a political party on a mission from God, bowing down to corporate avarice at the detriment of public interests. The neocon party promises to maintain stilted, stodgy status quo of old, slogging industries. Though, what we need these days is Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and invention--the heart of American entrepreneurism in government and in business.
Except for Secretary of State Rice, the ex-oil executive automaton, this special cabal of wealthy, white codgers has woven a web of myths so thick that everyone believes the country is divided between the red and the blue: the virtuous, righteous party versus the diabolical, liberal socialists. Behind the neocon marketing hype, the issues draw a real line between rich and the bleeding middle class and the economic policies that shove the poor deeper into debtor’s slavery while the wealthy reap the profits from the uneducated, gullible middle class.
At least twenty percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. As many Americans also believe they pay fewer taxes than Europeans who enjoy high quality public healthcare and education through university level.
I know firsthand by attending a German university. Otherwise, coming from a blue collar background in America, I never would have been able to afford an education. I lived and worked more than twenty years in Germany and France and paid fewer taxes than we do in America. I pursued the American dream where it was available.
Considered an enlightened saint among the neocons, Milton Friedman claimed that unregulated industries operate most efficiently. Contrary to this twaddle, we have witnessed how unbridled Savings and Loan banks imploded under Bush Sr. in the early 90’s. Corporations can and will destroy themselves by greedy feeding frenzies as we watched in the scandals like Enron and Anderson Consulting. Lack of government intervention, a lack of political will and leadership in America generally allows this trend to continue.
Once the Berlin Wall fell, hollow winds blew through the streets of Soviet Union’s communist ideals and gave the captains of American industry free reign to practice arrogant forms of unrestrained and turgid capitalism at the high costs of public interests.
After disastrous Reaganomics were implemented, Bush Sr. became president, campaigning on a promise to reduce taxes which he later increased in a desperate attempt to reduce Reagan’s inflamed deficit, and pushed Friedman policies, voodoo economics, further, allowing certain industries to gorge on consumers’ savings accounts, wolves on meek lambs. Bush Sr. cooled the corporate feeding frenzy that turned into a blood bath by paying over $120 billion in public tax funds to bail out the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1990’s.
So, rather than maintain a Keynesian mixed economy in which government calms corporate passions for predatory profits, the neocon doctrine allows industries to devour gullible consumers until streets flow red with blood. Unimaginative industries, banking, healthcare insurance, and energy, resist innovation and change. The only way left for them to make profits is by praying on consumers' ignorance. Only then does government intervene by giving the status quo industries, which lack any innovation, a transfusion of tax payers’ money.
America’s government has become a mere socialized emergency room for industries that overdose on the crack cocaine of greed. Tax payers now pay industries to cure them of their own addiction to larger and larger profits and executive salaries.
As if ambitious to outdo dad, President Bush Jr. drove Milton Friedman’s free wheeling economic policies like a freight train on a downward spiraling track until it finally crashed into the limits of melting consumer credit cards and fraudulent, bloated mortgages. Bush Jr.’s administration will hand out hundreds of billions of tax dollars to subsidize the mismanagement of credit card and mortgage banks while their CEO’s carry their multimillion dollar paychecks to the bank, laughing all the way. Meanwhile middle class workers lose their homes at a neck breaking rate.
In so far as incompetent politicians sell their souls to corporate contributions and voodoo economics and consequently mislead this country into destruction and mayhem, the guerrilla Islamist warriors, like Osama bin Laden, are accurate in assessing the US as corrupt and decadent.
McCain’s campaign promises continue the neoconservative holy crusade for the Iraq War which directly affects the economy. The differences between Obama and MacCain are blatantly clear. Whatever McCain says about the economic fiascos of the mortgage crisis, the credit card crisis, or the Iraq War, Obama has an opposite view and innovative solutions.
The 2008 election is about diametrically opposing views between the Keynesian versus the Friedmaniac policies. In 2008 we also choose between the neocons’ imperial war to impose corporate turgid status quo over a sovereign nation for the sake of its oil reserves versus the innovative solutions in such industries as healthcare, banking, energy, and war.
Corporate Campaign Contributions – Industrial Domination
Tied to the unparalleled power of the Israeli lobby money and to the huge corporate defense and energy contractors, Bush and his chums have been operating only in terms of conventional warfare. Influenced by corporate campaign money, they only think in terms of corporate interests. This involves no bid contracts and the use of expensive, sophisticated weaponry that applies best to the warfare of one sovereign nation against another and not to guerilla warfare.
In other words, the stodgy political church of Bush and McCain is less interested in armor to protect the individual soldiers on the ground, fighting house to house. That sort of activity represents social welfare to individual human beings, brave soldiers. Armor for body and Humvee hardly increases profit margins in comparison to a billion dollar B2 bomber.
Following Bush’s footsteps, McCain embraces this same agenda. If Bush says, “stay the course in Iraq,” McCain says, “stay there a hundred years.” If Bush says timetable to pull out, McCain dittos the Anointed Decider. McSame has developed his economic and war policies from his ties with big business lobbies and not with the interest of the American people. Like Bush, McCain abides by unregulated big business as indoctrinated by Milton Friedman since the Reagan years.
This is the reason why Bush invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation. “It’s just business,” as he would say, “nothin’ pers’nal.” He could have pointed his finger at any piece of fresh meat and the American people were eagerly drooling to revenge the 9/11 attack.
The golden opportunity, the casus belli,a perfect justification for war arrived. The neocons knew exactly which war to wage, the low hanging fruit of the world’s second largest oil reserves. Despite many warnings of the 9/11 attack, W did nothing to restrain the well known Islamist guerrilla warriors, as indicated in his August 6, 2001 Presidential Brief, which he chose to ignore.
According to Ron Suskind's new book, Way of the World, Bush chose to ignore and deny clear intelligence that Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida and no WMDs:
Then, in the fall of 2003, the White House decided that a letter should be fabricated, dated July 2001, from the Iraqi to Saddam Hussein establishing a link to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. "And the letter should as well say that Saddam Hussein has been actively buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al-Qaida," Suskind says.
The neocons had long ago planned to knock off Saddam Hussein since the day he nationalized Iraqi oil. They have well documented this fact. Take a look at PNAC. It’s always been about the oil and a drive for global dominance backed by a fanatical Judeo-Christian fundamentalism. We cannot act too surprised when former Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan explained as much in his biography after he left his cushy government job where he practiced the Milton Friedman rituals devoutly in his bathtub, enlightened by flickering candles.
Invading Iraq made great financial and political sense at least for Dubya and his Friedman disciples from Podhoretz to Falwell and Pat Robertson. Defense and petroleum contractors made boat loads of profits, thus fattening the coffers for Bush’s 2004 campaign. Beyond campaign money, the Bush family as well as members of his neocon church, including Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and so on—they own millions of dollars in stocks with defense contractors and petroleum companies such as the Carlyle Group and a long list of others.
Cheney’s stock options at Halliburton skyrocketed, once the company landed those no-bid billion dollar contracts. Unless you’ve read up on this subject, you wouldn’t recognize the names of these companies, except for maybe the ones that advertise regularly on TV like Exxon, Boeing, Lockhead… By paying for multi-million dollar ads, they were able to stifle freedom of media journalism for at least as long as it took to get Neil Cavuto, comedian Bill O’Reilly, and Wolf Blitzer a whoring chance to sway public opinion to wage an imperial, conventional war against a loosely organized network of guerrilla fundamentalists.
Waging Conventional War Is Good for Re-elections
Bush desperately needed to increase his plummeting popularity score after the Supreme Court appointed him to the presidency by overturning the 2001 election. He could only win a second term in office if he initiated a major war against a well defined country. Iraq was a ripe target with an army impoverished by decades of sanctions. US history shows that no president has lost a second term election after declaring a war in the first term. Now the same scenario plays out for opportunist, citizen McCain who playfully sings his own song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”
This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican militaries, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tokin incidenthelped justify the Vietnam War.
This is how the American industrial military complex has operated at least since the Mexican American War (1846). President Eisenhower knew this and warned us about it. However, at the slightest incident, the unschooled masses repeatedly jump on the bandwagon for nationalistic pride, all too willing to take a blind patriotic ride to hell while all the way handing the pillaged profits to the robber barons of war. Is there a cure for the American middle class’s credulity?
Well, everyone could turn off the boob tube and read some books other than the Bible. In France and Germany, they’ve developed a remedy to some extent. It’s called a damn good secular public education system, one that does not muddle science and reason with religious poppycock like creationism, End Days, and all the hooey about holy lands.
Guerrilla Warriors, Not Iraqi Armies
There’s a little problem, though. The groups--groups plural--that perpetrate terrorist activities in the name of Allah are non-conventional warriors. They harbor loyalty to no sovereign nation but to a fundamentalist creed similar to White Supremists or the 700 Club. The US military could never bomb the terrorist groups involved in attacking US and European cities. The US could never invade any one country and expect its leaders to surrender and end the “war on terrorism.”
If attacking any main source of the trouble makers would solve the problem, then they would have to bomb Saudi Arabia because 15 of the 19 terrorists were born, raised, and indoctrinated there. The Devine Decider didn’t invade Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that, unlike Saddam Hussein, the royal family of Saud are long term allies and reliable petroleum suppliers since Franklin Roosevelt made the deal with King Saud in 1945, essentially saying, “We’ll support and protect your tyrannical monarchy so long as you deliver the crude.” It seemed like a good deal at the time, but times change.
The American industrial military complex makes less money in the labor intensive guerrilla wars than they do in wars that require sophisticated, manufactured weaponry. It’s basic business strategy to maintain high profits—to hell with the reasons or the outcomes of the war. Defense contractors earn much smaller profits in guerrilla warfare which requires labor intensive work in urban settings with ears to the ground. In his books, Robert Baer makes this a central argument. Using bombers, sophisticated equipment, missiles,...it's the only thing that makes business sense.
The guerrilla war we face has no one leader, no one country, no standing army. Our enemies in this so-called war on terrorism do not wear uniforms. They are guerrilla warriors who use any means possible to harm their enemies. They use bombs, booby traps, and hijacked airliners because they have neither conventional weapons nor armies. They made this point abundantly clear when they bombed the World Trade Center’s basement in 1993, not to mention earlier bombings of American assets in many places like Tanzania and the Congo.
Any one with a pulse could understand this as early as 1983, when a terrorist cell blew up the US Marine barracks in Lebanon. Likewise most intelligence agents operating in the Middle East knew that a persistent, organized movement of Islamist guerrilla fighters bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In his many books on the subject Robert Baer describes how he tracked militant Islamists. They had been a well known enemy decades before 9/11/2001.
Bush Jr. would have us believe that these guerrilla warriors hate America and its freedom. He never bothers to consider the simple economic situation in which only the small royal families control the opulent oil wealth in most Arab countries and they do not give a fig to diversify their own economies and develop their own people.
Unemployment (over 35% in Saudi Arabia) and poverty enrage Muslims. Fanatical anti-American religious training helps to set an unemployed, hungry, angry, idle man down a path to murder and mayhem, as was the case for Mohammed Atta and others. Most any religious group provides this sort of narrow education. Just watch Pat Robertson on his evangelical TV show, the 700 Club, or visit one of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Universities to witness how the later day church of neocons indoctrinate our own credulous youth.
Among Bush’s many mutating reasons for invading Iraq, he finally claimed that it was America’s moral duty to create a democracy throughout the Middle East. For a year or two around 2003, he had most American yahoos believing this. It is another part of the neocon catechism.
Another one of Friedman’s mind boggling theories is that once a country’s economy begins to operate in a capitalistic fashion, it will inevitably become a democracy. Likewise, so the theory goes, if a country becomes democratic, it naturally seeks to implement a liberal capitalism. Neither has proven true in the real world. As a totalitarian regime, China thrives on capitalism. We buy products from totalitarian capitalist China because their regime encourages, nay, enforces, sweatshop labor. It's why US corporations outsource American jobs; labor is cheaper in authoritarian regimes.
Contrary to Pope Friedman’s crack-pot ideas, once given the vote for a democratic government, several countries have recently voted against democracy in favor of theocracy, Islamist regimes like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or President Gull in Turkey who has an Islamist background. Like the Catholic dominated politics in most of South America, many Islamic countries are theocracies.
Given the theocratic proclivities of President Bush, he too would like to see America governed by some inerrant, one and only Biblical interpretation and not by its Constitution. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," --As quoted in Understanding the President and his God
Guerrilla warfare is messy and much more difficult to win than invading a crumbling nation. For this reason it never benefits individuals like Bush who intend to expand their personal, political, and financial success at the detriment of national security and economic stability.
As we learned in our own War of Independence and, likewise in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare is extremely messy, costly, and bloody. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s infamous statement that “democracy is messy,” it is the insurgency and the guerrilla fighters that clog the wheels of industry. The Russians learned this when they invaded Afghanistan and it cost them the collapse of their already frail economy. And these schmoes would have us believe that Reagan caused the fall of the Soviet Union.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Conspiracy Theories
The media, TV journalists in particular, continue to leave some important questions lying dormant beneath the dusty cover of “conspiracy theory.” Why did W decide to invade Iraq while 15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia? Why is Saudi Arabia a cradle for such terrorists?
Years ago, when W still had some credibility, he and his Roving gang could ridicule anyone who spoke against his actions. Whenever brave souls dared to question the Divine Decider, he and his cronies dismissed the dissenters as nutcase conspiracy theorists. And they continue to do so even after the Iraq War has officially run its miserable course to disastrous guerrilla warfare and our economy whimpers.
UFOs
Back in September 2004, Senator Bob Graham, (Florida Democrat) a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Divine Decider of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Graham made the accusation in his book, Intelligence Matters, and repeated it at news conferences. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and Saudi officials said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.
In his highly informative book, House of Bush, House of Saud, , Craig Unger criticizes the Bush administration for allowing so many Saudis, including the relatives of bin Laden, to leave the country quickly, while all other flights were grounded, without being questioned about the terrorist attacks. Unger cites FBI and Police agents as witnesses.
In his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed, John Bradley, who lived and worked as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, interviews several bin Laden relatives who rode on the very same plans that the FBI and the White House deny ever existed.
These UFO’s, such as the small LearJet 35 from TIA, among others, that flew bin Laden relatives and Saud family members from the USA quickly on 9/14, represent just the tip of an iceberg of cover ups that conceal the special treatment for the Royal family of Saud.
Money Walks
Once upon a time there was a Prince Naif bin Fawwaz Al-Shalaan, with a diplomatic passport and a family Boeing 747, who transported cocaine often from Columbia to France. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) Agent Raffanello says some of the drug profits have been used to fund terrorism. The Prince transported up to two tons of cocaine. In order to shake the charges against him, he threatened French business interests of cancelling huge defense deals in an effort to persuade the authorities to drop the investigation. The Saudi Royal Family united to help their Prince out of the jam. Case closed.
Yes, Saudi Royalty is above the law. They are the law. After all they control trillions in petrol-dollars. Any surprise that they are close friends with Bush Sr. and Jr.? The family dynasties are joined at the wallet in oil interests.
Once upon another time there was a Prince Turki bin Nasser, the Royal Saud family's principal contact with the British defense industry, who allegedly received about $32 million worth of luxury benefits paid for by BAE Systems, the largest British defense contractor. British authorities opened a case of serious fraud against the Prince. To pressure the British into dropping all charges, Saud Royalty threatened to cancel billions of dollars in defense deals for combat aircraft. Case closed.
Many other cases haunt the halls of the Saud family palaces.
In London police arrested a 41-year old Saudi, close friend of Saud Royalty, for sexual assault against an 11-year old girl. London police were forced to release the man who claimed diplomatic immunity. The Royal family of Saud supported his return to Saudi Arabia and complained that the London media was putting him on trial, not the courts. Saudi authorities would not allow police to question the man further. Case closed.
Back in Riyadh, the Saudi government owns the media and uses it to smear any and all opposition.
Justice for All
For the regular guy on the street, apart from soccer matches, the only form of public entertainment is a beheading. If you ever vacation in Saudi Arabia, you’ll learn to recognize this occasional diversion by the way people leave their cars parked chockablock in the streets near a city’s chop-chop square where authorities carry out the executions. Of course, members of Saudi Royalty are virtually exempt from this system.
In partnership with the Saud Royalty, Wahhabi fundamentalists run the justice system. The country still applies a strict form of Shariah law, which includes public beheadings for, among other offenses, murder, drug trafficking, apostasy, rape, and adultery—and occasionally thieves’ hands are amputated. More than 50 beheadings take place per year...in a country the size and population of Texas.
The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency reported that crime among young jobless Saudis rose 320 percent between 1990 and 1996 and more than 136 percent by 2005.
Slums such as Kerantina in Jeddah and Al-Suwaidi, a southern district in Riyadh, are two of many homes to prostitutes, drug traffickers, and booze peddlers among the poor and destitute. The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown at least as fast as the population. Unemployment rises above 35 percent.
Terrorist Incubators
As these slums grow, so too the pressure for the young and unemployed to seek retribution for the inequality and hopelessness. The slums, like the provincial countryside of tribal villages, have predictably become fertile breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism and perfect for guerilla warfare.
These slums provide little sources of culture, education or entertainment other than drugs or the fundamentalist Wahhabi schools where young men receive their Islamist indoctrination. Many documented terrorists graduate from hard-line radical schools such as Imam Mohamed Bin Saud University. They learn to hate the West for many reasons, including supporting the tyrannical monarchy which hordes the petro-dollars. Resentment grows naturally against the Saudi government because its inequality, arrogance, and greed is rubbed in the faces of the poor every day. Hatred for the West arises from a natural logic that the Royal family of Saud exercises its abusive power because the West supports them as reliable suppliers of America's most intoxicating drug. Meanwhile Big Oil uses its financial power to maintain status quo, restraining alternative and cleaner sources of energy.
The combination of radical Islamic doctrine, hatred of the West, poverty, and a perceived pro-Western ruling elite has created a schizophrenic monster in the very heart of the country. This combination delivers a powerful recruitment tool that the likes of Al-Qaeda could only pray for.
And for some reason, we were led to believe that 9/11 was only about an irrational religious war.
Years ago, when W still had some credibility, he and his Roving gang could ridicule anyone who spoke against his actions. Whenever brave souls dared to question the Divine Decider, he and his cronies dismissed the dissenters as nutcase conspiracy theorists. And they continue to do so even after the Iraq War has officially run its miserable course to disastrous guerrilla warfare and our economy whimpers.
UFOs
Back in September 2004, Senator Bob Graham, (Florida Democrat) a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Divine Decider of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Graham made the accusation in his book, Intelligence Matters, and repeated it at news conferences. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and Saudi officials said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.
In his highly informative book, House of Bush, House of Saud, , Craig Unger criticizes the Bush administration for allowing so many Saudis, including the relatives of bin Laden, to leave the country quickly, while all other flights were grounded, without being questioned about the terrorist attacks. Unger cites FBI and Police agents as witnesses.
In his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed, John Bradley, who lived and worked as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, interviews several bin Laden relatives who rode on the very same plans that the FBI and the White House deny ever existed.
These UFO’s, such as the small LearJet 35 from TIA, among others, that flew bin Laden relatives and Saud family members from the USA quickly on 9/14, represent just the tip of an iceberg of cover ups that conceal the special treatment for the Royal family of Saud.
Money Walks
Once upon a time there was a Prince Naif bin Fawwaz Al-Shalaan, with a diplomatic passport and a family Boeing 747, who transported cocaine often from Columbia to France. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) Agent Raffanello says some of the drug profits have been used to fund terrorism. The Prince transported up to two tons of cocaine. In order to shake the charges against him, he threatened French business interests of cancelling huge defense deals in an effort to persuade the authorities to drop the investigation. The Saudi Royal Family united to help their Prince out of the jam. Case closed.
Yes, Saudi Royalty is above the law. They are the law. After all they control trillions in petrol-dollars. Any surprise that they are close friends with Bush Sr. and Jr.? The family dynasties are joined at the wallet in oil interests.
Once upon another time there was a Prince Turki bin Nasser, the Royal Saud family's principal contact with the British defense industry, who allegedly received about $32 million worth of luxury benefits paid for by BAE Systems, the largest British defense contractor. British authorities opened a case of serious fraud against the Prince. To pressure the British into dropping all charges, Saud Royalty threatened to cancel billions of dollars in defense deals for combat aircraft. Case closed.
Many other cases haunt the halls of the Saud family palaces.
In London police arrested a 41-year old Saudi, close friend of Saud Royalty, for sexual assault against an 11-year old girl. London police were forced to release the man who claimed diplomatic immunity. The Royal family of Saud supported his return to Saudi Arabia and complained that the London media was putting him on trial, not the courts. Saudi authorities would not allow police to question the man further. Case closed.
Back in Riyadh, the Saudi government owns the media and uses it to smear any and all opposition.
Justice for All
For the regular guy on the street, apart from soccer matches, the only form of public entertainment is a beheading. If you ever vacation in Saudi Arabia, you’ll learn to recognize this occasional diversion by the way people leave their cars parked chockablock in the streets near a city’s chop-chop square where authorities carry out the executions. Of course, members of Saudi Royalty are virtually exempt from this system.
In partnership with the Saud Royalty, Wahhabi fundamentalists run the justice system. The country still applies a strict form of Shariah law, which includes public beheadings for, among other offenses, murder, drug trafficking, apostasy, rape, and adultery—and occasionally thieves’ hands are amputated. More than 50 beheadings take place per year...in a country the size and population of Texas.
The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency reported that crime among young jobless Saudis rose 320 percent between 1990 and 1996 and more than 136 percent by 2005.
Slums such as Kerantina in Jeddah and Al-Suwaidi, a southern district in Riyadh, are two of many homes to prostitutes, drug traffickers, and booze peddlers among the poor and destitute. The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown at least as fast as the population. Unemployment rises above 35 percent.
Terrorist Incubators
As these slums grow, so too the pressure for the young and unemployed to seek retribution for the inequality and hopelessness. The slums, like the provincial countryside of tribal villages, have predictably become fertile breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism and perfect for guerilla warfare.
These slums provide little sources of culture, education or entertainment other than drugs or the fundamentalist Wahhabi schools where young men receive their Islamist indoctrination. Many documented terrorists graduate from hard-line radical schools such as Imam Mohamed Bin Saud University. They learn to hate the West for many reasons, including supporting the tyrannical monarchy which hordes the petro-dollars. Resentment grows naturally against the Saudi government because its inequality, arrogance, and greed is rubbed in the faces of the poor every day. Hatred for the West arises from a natural logic that the Royal family of Saud exercises its abusive power because the West supports them as reliable suppliers of America's most intoxicating drug. Meanwhile Big Oil uses its financial power to maintain status quo, restraining alternative and cleaner sources of energy.
The combination of radical Islamic doctrine, hatred of the West, poverty, and a perceived pro-Western ruling elite has created a schizophrenic monster in the very heart of the country. This combination delivers a powerful recruitment tool that the likes of Al-Qaeda could only pray for.
And for some reason, we were led to believe that 9/11 was only about an irrational religious war.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Publisher's News Wire: Mojave Winds
Publishers News Wire
Mark Biskeborn's New Book Concerns Difficulties Faced by Iraq Veterans
Published: Thu, 21 Feb 2008, 11:57 EDT
By Angela Polchat Staff Writer, Publishers Newswire
IRVINE, Calif. -- Mojave Winds, (ISBN: 978-0-9801383-0-6), a novel by Mark Biskeborn, highlights the growing social impact on Iraq War veterans returning home, and their struggles to reintegrate to the civilian world.
The recent book by author, Mark Biskeborn, "Mojave Winds," has been met with wide acceptance, attracting a great deal of attention with its controversial storyline:
A combat veteran returns from the Iraq War, struggles to readapt to normal life, only to find conflict in the United States as well.
The new Stop-Loss law imposes unprecedented hardships on soldiers now. The prolonged combat missions increase tensions complicating soldiers' return to daily life- post-traumatic-stress, divorce, child custody, financial dread, and unemployment. These and other calamities unravel soldiers' nerves when they finally do get to come home. This book demonstrates the public concern over what happens when trained warriors show up on the streets.
With the flare-ups of domestic terrorism within U.S. borders, this book also reminds readers that the battles have now made their way to the United States as well. Fighting the enemy 'over there,' does not exclude fighting them here.
In the past two weeks, over 20,000 new visitors have flooded the author's website, http://www.markbiskeborn.com. This includes his online blog discussing the issues facing soldiers on extended missions. The impact of these American policies has received a sudden influx of new public attention. Traffic has also spiked from searches relating to the calamities of prolonged military tours of duty and concern for domestic terrorism.
The rapid spread of interest in Mojave Winds has been felt in the publishing world as well. The book was selected as a feature for the Southern California Writers Conference held in San Diego this past weekend. The prestigious International Thriller Writers conference in New York will feature Mojave Winds (thrillerwriters.org). The Writers Digest newsletter also features Mojave Winds (writersdigest.com) as the author will attend the Writers' Digest conference in L.A., 28 May.
The author, Mark Biskeborn, has been a contributing author for several blogs, especially The Smirking Chimp, and has received a swarm of letters and comments from his regular weekly writings. Mark is currently scheduled to appear at the International Thriller Writers Conference and the Maui Writers Conference this year. Amazon Shorts has featured several of his short stories recently.
As a result of Mojave Winds unprecedented sales success and rapidly growing popularity, several mainstream publishing houses are considering author Mark Biskeborn while he works to complete his next novel.
Mojave Winds is now available through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and many other booksellers, as well as the Author's own site.
The current state of affairs and the highly volatile political discussion concerning the legality of the Stop-Loss policy, the calamities that returning U.S. veterans now face, and the concerns over domestic terrorism continue to fuel public interest in the book. While the book is considered fiction, many of the issues discussed in its chapters are anchored in current affairs in the U.S. and world news events.
About Mojave Winds and Mark Biskeborn:
Mojave Winds, a novel by author Mark Biskeborn, depicts the difficulties protagonist Kris Klug faces; a returning Iraq War veteran, he struggles to integrate back into the civilian world. He suffers from flashbacks from his war experience, the drastic difference in civilian life, and the effects of post-traumatic stress. He also is shocked to discover that the war has followed him back home to the U.S., as a series of events puts him in the cross hairs of domestic terrorism. Despite the high-tension stakes, with an Islamist gang at his heels, he meets a classical dancer, Sheila, whom he finds especially intriguing while crossing the Mojave to Las Vegas.
The author is a long time resident of California, and has also lived and worked many years abroad. He has contributed many non-fiction articles, essays, and book reviews to magazine publications and blogs. He also has had several short stories featured recently on Amazon Shorts. He is now completing a sequel novel, Follow the Sufi's Ghost, for release in winter, 2008.
For more information on the book or the author, or to order online, visit http://www.markbiskeborn.com or call 949-293-2016.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Why Iraq and Not Saudi Arabia?
Bush insisted on invading Iraq, trumping up claims about its alleged WMD's, connection to al Qaeda, dictator...although…15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 were Saudis, rebellious against the tyrannical monarchy protected by the US.
“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Literally it means that the Al-Saud family owns the country and its residents are their vassals. The Royal Saud family rules “Saudi Arabia” mostly by force.
Nevertheless its ministry of communications attempts to present the kingdom as a country of peace and harmony. If this were true, how could 15 of the 19 terrorists of the 9/11 attack come from the kingdom?
After World War I, at the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British rewarded Sherif Hussein, naming one of his sons, Faisal, king of Iraq, and another, Abdullah, ruler of modern-day Jordan—both countries, like most in the Middle East, were imperial inventions whose borders were sketched in the sand. The winners of WWI carved up the Ottoman Empire into the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today and they assigned rulers who seemed cooperative.
The British also backed Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers because he seemed most capable to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, especially since he had already regained control of Riyadh after a final power struggle against Al Rashid in 1902. Thus the Saud family gained royal power to rule what became the Saudi Arabia we know today.
In 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to negotiate an important oil deal in which the US would back the Saud dynasty by providing military support in exchange for a reliable supply of crude. It seemed like a good deal at the time.
Shady Partners
To this day, the US continues a similar policy in the Middle East: support a ruler in order to maintain a dependable trading partner, regardless of how that leader rules his country—monarch, tyrant, dictator, or popular nice guy. Few, if any, beloved leaders have yet to arise in the oil rich land of the Levant. Thrust into Iraqi power mainly by the US in the early 1970’s, Saddam Hussein eventually turned his back on his Yankee supporters and nationalized the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company. Well, you know what happened to him—the good’ol boy gone maverick finished at the end of a rope.
Only in the post-9/11 period do we begin to question this sordid history of propping up compliant governments to satisfy our needs for petroleum and its profits. Eventually we, Western oil consumers, will have to admit at least partial blame for the terrorism that now plagues us.
The imperial support we provide to dictators, tyrants, and kings contradicts our own ideals of free trade democracy. Now, as we miserably attempt to reclaim control of Iraq, we find that our own freewheeling democracy comes under question, what with our undeniable oil interests in the country we invaded for all the most ridiculous reasons.
As far as our oil supplying countries go, we only play lip service to democracy as a marketing ploy to justify our on-going neo-colonial holds on reliable oil traders. This has been our implicit policy since 1945.
When Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, this “scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” policy made sense. Back then, the Levant was a tribal frontier and the United States a new born industrial powerhouse. Things changed in the half century since then.
The United States grew into a global empire. Its strongest power brokers became the international petroleum oligarchs we know today; these few companies enjoy the highest levels of profits in all of human history and are fully entrenched in the status quo of oil as our source of energy, albeit an obsolete technology considering Global Warming and the current Petroleum conflicts.
Thus the West became blindly addicted to fossil fuels and never bothered to develop alternative fuels over the decades. This poses a huge pressure on the oil suppliers of the Levant.
In many ways similar to Iran and Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, the Saud Royal family garnered enormous wealth over the decades while all but ignoring the development of the people in their tribal frontiers. This imbalance intensified resentment between the Royalty and the various tribes, the vassals of the kingdom.
Theocratic Tyrants
The Royal family owns the powerful army and Crown Prince Abdullah heads the elite National Guard, made up of young men drawn from the various ranks of the Bedu (Bedouin), tribes, and official Wahhabi establishment. The Wahhabists, the extremely conservative, fundamentalist Islamic sect, owns the moral and judicial power to control the people’s behavior, how they think, dress, eat, drink, and, well, every other detail.
To this day, the Al-Saud family rules in partnership with the direct descendants of Abdul Wahhab, known as the Al-Asheikh family.
“The Al-Saud princes hold all the key government posts. Members of the Al-Asheikh family hold the key positions in the religious establishment and are responsible for enforcing Islamic orthodoxy on the streets by intimidating people by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” says John R. Bradley in his book Saudi Arabia Exposed.
People fear and revile this “religious police” for its Stasi style of wide reaching and nefarious attacks, its members drawn from lower classes who resent the freedoms and ease of the wealthy.
Things that us westerners consider a birthright such as dissent on the issues of religious belief, are out of the question and punishable by public beheading. For this reason, “chop-chop square” in Riyadh is often a busy place.
Like the Al-Rashid, several tribes, their cultures, and their religious variations struggle to survive under the US backed Saudi regime.
Restless Natives
Before the Ottoman Empire fell (WWI), several ancient tribes called the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia) their home. “But the Hijazis in the West, the Asiris in the south, and the Shiites in the east did all suffer massacres, witness their Islamic monuments destroyed, and have their various Islamic beliefs damned as apostacy by the new official ideology: Wahhabism,” says John R. Bradley in his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed.
Although all were eventually cowered into submission, many of these diverse people Ibn Saud finally ruled over were not originally Wahhabis. Indeed, many members of these tribes still resent and resist Wahhabism, while Al-Saud bought or promised or compelled the loyalty of others under threat of beheading. These tribes have always fiercely resisted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny which arose from the central region of Al-Najd.
Shiites make a majority in the Eastern Province on the oil rich Gulf. The Saudi regime has impoverished, often harshly oppressed, and at times massacred them (not unlike Saddam Hussein’s Kurd massacres using gas and helicopters supplied by the US).
The Hijaz is home of the House of Hashem, or the Hashemite tribe, descendants from the Prophet. They enjoyed considerable autonomy and a belief in Sufism, the mystical Islamic belief system based on the idea that love is projection of the essence of God to the universe. This greatly contrasts from the Wahhabi’s strict literalistic and legalistic approach to religion.
The Asir tribes, like the liberal Hijaz and the Shiites, have always been reluctant vassals to the Al-Saud Royalty. Like the many other tribes, the Asir have never fully adopted the Wahhabi doctrine. The Asirs carry out periodic rebellions and low-level struggles to keep their regional identity alive.
The Asirs view the Al-Saud family as outsiders imposing their rule, backed by the West. They call both hypocritical: the Al-Saud Royalty for preaching piety and purity while living in opulence and the West for espousing human rights and democracy while supporting a tyrannical regime that disrespects the rights and customs of others. The hypocrisy fuels hatred for the West and local alienation from Al-Najd, the region of Wahhabism.
The governor of the Asir region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, surprisingly admits to the crisis that the Wahhabi influence has created.
Why Terrorism?
Asir was where the 15 Saudi hijackers lived when the 9/11 attack took place. Several of the hijackers came from the same tribe and bonded there in the late 1990’s. They listened to the same radical Wahhabi sermons at the Seqeley mosque in the region’s capital. Shortly before they left Saudi Arabia for Afghan training camps, they pledged to join jihad.
At least 12 of the hijackers came from the impoverished, highly tribal parts of Hijaz and Asir. Like most young Saudis, well educated or not, but almost all unemployed, oppressed, and impoverished, they imbued the anit-West and anti-Saudi sentiment. Like them and other hard-line Islamic dissenters in the past, Osama bin Laden was always a harsh critic of the official Wahhabi religious establishment that joins forces with the Al-Saud Royalty.
The hijackers also shared bin Laden’s tribal roots. Like him, they resented the Saud Royal clan that ruled them while living a double standard and they hated the religious sheiks from the Al-Najd region who legitimatize Al-Saud while “issuing fatwas for money” as the dissident saying goes.
By attacking the US--supporters of Saud--these tribal hard-line Islamist Saudis targeted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny. The Saudi-U.S. alliance motivates the
otherwise powerless, disinherited tribe members to attack their source of disinheritance and resentment.
Since Al-Saud remains a reliable oil partner, unlike Saddam Hussein, need we wonder why the US invaded Iraq instead of the real source of the 9/11 attack?
Main Source for this article: John R. Bradley's Saudi Arabia Exposed.
“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Literally it means that the Al-Saud family owns the country and its residents are their vassals. The Royal Saud family rules “Saudi Arabia” mostly by force.
Nevertheless its ministry of communications attempts to present the kingdom as a country of peace and harmony. If this were true, how could 15 of the 19 terrorists of the 9/11 attack come from the kingdom?
After World War I, at the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British rewarded Sherif Hussein, naming one of his sons, Faisal, king of Iraq, and another, Abdullah, ruler of modern-day Jordan—both countries, like most in the Middle East, were imperial inventions whose borders were sketched in the sand. The winners of WWI carved up the Ottoman Empire into the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today and they assigned rulers who seemed cooperative.
The British also backed Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers because he seemed most capable to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, especially since he had already regained control of Riyadh after a final power struggle against Al Rashid in 1902. Thus the Saud family gained royal power to rule what became the Saudi Arabia we know today.
In 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to negotiate an important oil deal in which the US would back the Saud dynasty by providing military support in exchange for a reliable supply of crude. It seemed like a good deal at the time.
Shady Partners
To this day, the US continues a similar policy in the Middle East: support a ruler in order to maintain a dependable trading partner, regardless of how that leader rules his country—monarch, tyrant, dictator, or popular nice guy. Few, if any, beloved leaders have yet to arise in the oil rich land of the Levant. Thrust into Iraqi power mainly by the US in the early 1970’s, Saddam Hussein eventually turned his back on his Yankee supporters and nationalized the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company. Well, you know what happened to him—the good’ol boy gone maverick finished at the end of a rope.
Only in the post-9/11 period do we begin to question this sordid history of propping up compliant governments to satisfy our needs for petroleum and its profits. Eventually we, Western oil consumers, will have to admit at least partial blame for the terrorism that now plagues us.
The imperial support we provide to dictators, tyrants, and kings contradicts our own ideals of free trade democracy. Now, as we miserably attempt to reclaim control of Iraq, we find that our own freewheeling democracy comes under question, what with our undeniable oil interests in the country we invaded for all the most ridiculous reasons.
As far as our oil supplying countries go, we only play lip service to democracy as a marketing ploy to justify our on-going neo-colonial holds on reliable oil traders. This has been our implicit policy since 1945.
When Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, this “scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” policy made sense. Back then, the Levant was a tribal frontier and the United States a new born industrial powerhouse. Things changed in the half century since then.
The United States grew into a global empire. Its strongest power brokers became the international petroleum oligarchs we know today; these few companies enjoy the highest levels of profits in all of human history and are fully entrenched in the status quo of oil as our source of energy, albeit an obsolete technology considering Global Warming and the current Petroleum conflicts.
Thus the West became blindly addicted to fossil fuels and never bothered to develop alternative fuels over the decades. This poses a huge pressure on the oil suppliers of the Levant.
In many ways similar to Iran and Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, the Saud Royal family garnered enormous wealth over the decades while all but ignoring the development of the people in their tribal frontiers. This imbalance intensified resentment between the Royalty and the various tribes, the vassals of the kingdom.
Theocratic Tyrants
The Royal family owns the powerful army and Crown Prince Abdullah heads the elite National Guard, made up of young men drawn from the various ranks of the Bedu (Bedouin), tribes, and official Wahhabi establishment. The Wahhabists, the extremely conservative, fundamentalist Islamic sect, owns the moral and judicial power to control the people’s behavior, how they think, dress, eat, drink, and, well, every other detail.
To this day, the Al-Saud family rules in partnership with the direct descendants of Abdul Wahhab, known as the Al-Asheikh family.
“The Al-Saud princes hold all the key government posts. Members of the Al-Asheikh family hold the key positions in the religious establishment and are responsible for enforcing Islamic orthodoxy on the streets by intimidating people by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” says John R. Bradley in his book Saudi Arabia Exposed.
People fear and revile this “religious police” for its Stasi style of wide reaching and nefarious attacks, its members drawn from lower classes who resent the freedoms and ease of the wealthy.
Things that us westerners consider a birthright such as dissent on the issues of religious belief, are out of the question and punishable by public beheading. For this reason, “chop-chop square” in Riyadh is often a busy place.
Like the Al-Rashid, several tribes, their cultures, and their religious variations struggle to survive under the US backed Saudi regime.
Restless Natives
Before the Ottoman Empire fell (WWI), several ancient tribes called the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia) their home. “But the Hijazis in the West, the Asiris in the south, and the Shiites in the east did all suffer massacres, witness their Islamic monuments destroyed, and have their various Islamic beliefs damned as apostacy by the new official ideology: Wahhabism,” says John R. Bradley in his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed.
Although all were eventually cowered into submission, many of these diverse people Ibn Saud finally ruled over were not originally Wahhabis. Indeed, many members of these tribes still resent and resist Wahhabism, while Al-Saud bought or promised or compelled the loyalty of others under threat of beheading. These tribes have always fiercely resisted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny which arose from the central region of Al-Najd.
Shiites make a majority in the Eastern Province on the oil rich Gulf. The Saudi regime has impoverished, often harshly oppressed, and at times massacred them (not unlike Saddam Hussein’s Kurd massacres using gas and helicopters supplied by the US).
The Hijaz is home of the House of Hashem, or the Hashemite tribe, descendants from the Prophet. They enjoyed considerable autonomy and a belief in Sufism, the mystical Islamic belief system based on the idea that love is projection of the essence of God to the universe. This greatly contrasts from the Wahhabi’s strict literalistic and legalistic approach to religion.
The Asir tribes, like the liberal Hijaz and the Shiites, have always been reluctant vassals to the Al-Saud Royalty. Like the many other tribes, the Asir have never fully adopted the Wahhabi doctrine. The Asirs carry out periodic rebellions and low-level struggles to keep their regional identity alive.
The Asirs view the Al-Saud family as outsiders imposing their rule, backed by the West. They call both hypocritical: the Al-Saud Royalty for preaching piety and purity while living in opulence and the West for espousing human rights and democracy while supporting a tyrannical regime that disrespects the rights and customs of others. The hypocrisy fuels hatred for the West and local alienation from Al-Najd, the region of Wahhabism.
The governor of the Asir region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, surprisingly admits to the crisis that the Wahhabi influence has created.
Who teaches children in orphanages and schools that Saudi Arabia is not their home, that their only home is Islam? That their future vocation is jihad?...Who convinced Saudi youth that the surest path to Heaven is to blow themselves up and take citizens, foreign residents and security officers with them? Who did this to us?Quoted from John R. Bradley’s Saudi Arabia Exposed.
Why Terrorism?
Asir was where the 15 Saudi hijackers lived when the 9/11 attack took place. Several of the hijackers came from the same tribe and bonded there in the late 1990’s. They listened to the same radical Wahhabi sermons at the Seqeley mosque in the region’s capital. Shortly before they left Saudi Arabia for Afghan training camps, they pledged to join jihad.
At least 12 of the hijackers came from the impoverished, highly tribal parts of Hijaz and Asir. Like most young Saudis, well educated or not, but almost all unemployed, oppressed, and impoverished, they imbued the anit-West and anti-Saudi sentiment. Like them and other hard-line Islamic dissenters in the past, Osama bin Laden was always a harsh critic of the official Wahhabi religious establishment that joins forces with the Al-Saud Royalty.
The hijackers also shared bin Laden’s tribal roots. Like him, they resented the Saud Royal clan that ruled them while living a double standard and they hated the religious sheiks from the Al-Najd region who legitimatize Al-Saud while “issuing fatwas for money” as the dissident saying goes.
By attacking the US--supporters of Saud--these tribal hard-line Islamist Saudis targeted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny. The Saudi-U.S. alliance motivates the
otherwise powerless, disinherited tribe members to attack their source of disinheritance and resentment.
Since Al-Saud remains a reliable oil partner, unlike Saddam Hussein, need we wonder why the US invaded Iraq instead of the real source of the 9/11 attack?
Main Source for this article: John R. Bradley's Saudi Arabia Exposed.
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