'WHAT THE HELL AMERICA??' So Asked Sergeant Wood . . .

Over the years, several Iraq War veterans have explained to me the same story. How, once they get back stateside, they feel an overwhelming urge to go back. Being home, being safe, wasn't, to reduce a hugely complex sensation to simple terms, the right thing to do.

In the stories, which I also heard from a war photographer that readily explained his bout with post traumatic stress disorder and consequential time spent with his shrink, there seems to be equal parts duty and humanity. As for the former, soldiers have left their own to fight a battle without them: could I be there to save . . . As for the latter, how can I be here, of all places, when the war is going on there?

Humanity chooses entirely arbitrary landmarks with which to commemorate events, and today comes another: 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Considering the way the war is disappearing from popular discourse, perhaps it's wise to take any mention possible.

And in its piece (everybody plans the thousand spot), the Times assembles a collection of heart wrenching notes from soldiers. War is hell, it's been said, and it's true. But sometimes these anecdotes hit close to home, whoever you are. Or, actually, to put it bluntly, they indict.

From 22-year-old Sergeant Ryan Wood's Myspace blog in May of 2007, a month before he was killed by an bomb in his Humvee.

WHAT THE HELL AMERICA??

“What the hell happened?” any intelligent American might ask themselves throughout their day. While the ignorant, dragging themselves to thier closed off cubicle, contemplate the simple things in life such as “fast food tonight?” or “I wonder what motivated Brittany Spears to shave her unsightly, mishaped domepiece?”

To the simpleton, this news might appear “devastating.” I assume not everyone thinks this way, but from my little corner of the earth, Iraq, a spot in the world a majority of Americans could’nt point out on the map, it certainly appears so. This little piece of truly, heart-breaking news captured headlines and apparently American imaginations as FOX news did a two hour, truly enlightening piece of breaking news history. American veiwers watched intently, and impatiently as the pretty colors flashed and the media exposed the inner workings of Brittany’s obviously, deep character. I was amazed, truly dumbfounded wondering how we as Americans have sank so low. To all Americans I have but one phrase that helps me throughout my day of constant dangers and ever present death around the corner, “WHO THE [expletive] CARES!” Wow America, we have truly become a nation of self-absorbed retards. ... This world has serious problems and it’s time for America to start addressing them.

This world has serious problems, no doubt about that.

[Image is the cover of the current issue of The Atlantic, founded in 1857, ostensibly aimed at 'thought leaders.']

Obama's Obligatory Speech on Iraq

There's been so much talk lately about substance. Barack Obama's rousing and inspiring oratories about change, change, change, make people ask, change to what? Take Iraq. When pressed recently on 60 Minutes about withdrawing troops by 2009, Obama didn't flinch. "Absolutely," he said, "I think now is precisely the time."

The decision is weighted with more dire facts than any single man or woman can comprehend, yet it is the single most important question facing the country.

Should he keep his word, what follows would be his 7 p.m. television address, the first Monday evening after he takes office.

"My fellow Americans, I talk to you this January evening with both serious concern as well as great hope. Early in my campaign for the presidency, I often said that I would tell you not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. Now that moment has come.

"I promised you that I would begin withdrawing our troops from Iraq, and I will keep that promise. This decision weighs heavily on me, as it does on you, because once we leave, there will be more violence. There is a chance that the entire region, as it is said, could fall into war. Yet, staying any longer, remaining party to the anguished and centuries-old conflicts that ignite such hatreds is no longer our place.

"The state of our finances at home, in Washington, in your state capital, likely even in your local government, is in disarray. As uncertainty in Iraq and the Middle East escalates with our withdrawal, the price of oil will likely rise, only complicating matters further. What I propose might at first sound counterintuitive. I want to keep budgeting for about 70% of the $160 billion we're spending in Iraq each year. Undoubtedly, this will hurt financially. But where that money goes will put this country on track for another century.

"When John F. Kennedy made his bold declaration in 1961, he said, ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ And tonight, I declare that in the next decade we will reduce our consumption of oil—across the board—by one half, with a goal of being free from dependence on any kind of oil by the year 2050.

"This is the only way to extricate ourselves from the fiasco of our own creation, and we will do so with apologies and hope for the Iraqi people. Change is a challenging calling. And one from which we no longer have the option of looking away."

Heavy enough?

If this is what it means, and watching John McCain tour Iraq this week, Obama has decisions to make sooner rather than later, for should his position evolve, the progressives, democrats, the left, whatever this discombobulated party calls itself these days, could again cower and end up facing a convention of Republicans waving footwear in the air.

['Obama and the Citizen Press' from flickr.]

Africa: US, In; China, In; France, Out.

No continent suffers violence today on the level of Africa. Nor is there a land so massive and so poor. In the past few years, superpowers have ramped up strategies to exploit the land's resources and angle for military superiority. China has been building infrastructure in the south, to be paid in future oil deliveries. At the same time, the US has launched AFRICOM, a centralized military command.

One would think that the European Union would follow suit. Lest we forget that the most powerful nations in Europe a hundred years ago colonized all of Africa, divided the spoils, and left it in tatters after World War II. However, the EU seems to be turning the other way.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, midway through a trip through the continent has announced sweeping changes in his country's military power in Africa. Lately he's come under fire for France's recent involvement in the Chadian crisis. (Chad is a former French colony.) He said, "Defense agreements must reflect the Africa of today and not yesterday."

France has four bases throughout Africa, some of which are now rumored to be shut down. "It is unthinkable that the French Army should be drawn into domestic conflicts," Sarkozy said.

Western involvement on the continent, even when done with the best intentions, so often seems to be a refashioned colonialism, minus the guns, plus the paternalism. Only, France's move presents the quandary: naming quickly five massive conflicts -- Darfur, Southern Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad, and Kenya -- would the continent fare better left to its own devices?

 

The thought exercise may be a worthy one as France retreats, but neither China, nor the US, are going anywhere anytime soon.

[Image: movie poster for L'Afrance, 2001.]

Report: Annan's Room Bugged, 100 Million Affected by Kenyan Violence

[At right: the Rift Valley in Kenya.]

Until the recently disputed elections and ensuring street violence, Kenya held special status on the African continent. The vital role it played in providing stability is all the more evident now that Nairobi and the Rift Valley are embroiled in violent political conflict.

Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan has so far headed the peace negotiations, but a report from South Africa's Independent Newspapers claims that the ranking diplomat's hotel room has been bugged and the peace talks are now "in tatters." Annan's security aides uncovered the spy device. No word on who might have planted it.

At the same time, a substantial report from IRIN explains that, because of the disruptions in Nairobi, more than 100 million people—that is a third of the population of the entire US—could be affected in Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Considering the thin lifelines staving off conflict in some of these places, that the Rift Valley makes up a 6,000-kilometer fissure in the earth's crust may soon serve as a chilling metaphor.

From the IRIN report:

Southern Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have experienced shortages of fuel and other essential supplies because of insecurity along the Kenyan section of the Northern Corridor, one of the most important transport routes in Africa. It runs from the Kenyan port of Mombasa westwards through Uganda and the Great Lakes.

Among aid agencies, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) faces the greatest challenge, feeding seven million vulnerable people in East Africa and the Great Lakes.

"WFP is extremely concerned because Kenya is not just supplying Kenya. It's supplying much of east and central Africa, both with commercial trade and food and also humanitarian assistance. It's a very worrying problem," WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon told IRIN.

"We need to feed seven million people every month and that includes 250,000 [internally displaced by the post-election violence] in Kenya on top of our normal caseload. We need a continuous supply line.

"If the roads are closed for a week or two weeks, then we get into real problems. We might have to start postponing food distributions. You could see people [going] hungry if the road network is knocked out for weeks," he said.

Covering more than 1,400km, the Northern Corridor is the largest in Africa, used by 4,000 light vehicles, 1,250 trucks and 400 buses per day. It carries more than 10 million tonnes of cargo a year.

WFP moves more than 1,000 tonnes of food out of Mombasa every day of the year, according to Alistair Cook, the logistics co-ordinator. "WFP has to keep the corridor in operation or else we will lose hundreds of thousands of refugees through starvation," he said.

New Budget, New Payouts, Same Profiteers, Same War

[At right: five-year charts, tracking roughly since the launch of the Iraq War, stock prices of major Pentagon contractors; from top to bottom: Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Co., and Northrop Grumman Corp. Charts from Yahoo! Finance.]

Economists discuss the difference between markets and nonmarkets, the latter being a stand-in term for 'government.' Interestingly, both are prone to failure, albeit in different ways.

Markets fail all the time, hence government regulation. The current subprime mortgage crisis and the ensuing radical steps by the Federal Reserve. Governments also fail, but in entirely different ways. One of the main differences is that governments find ways to use up all their money and then justify a budget increase. Case in point: in 2000, George II ran on a conservative platform of smaller government; however, bureaucracy and the billions that fund it have since skyrocketed.

The Pentagon's $515.4 billion request, part of Bush II's $3+ trillion budget for 2009, marks a 30 percent increase in spending for the military since he took office.

This includes neither the $600 billion already spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the spending for those wars over the projected budget year.

The Times claims, "If [the Pentagon's budget] is approved in full, annual military spending, when adjusted for inflation, will have reached its highest level since World War II." Taking the paper at its word, for perspective, it is worth it to mention that military spending in the US, while still an inordinate amount of money that dwarfs combined military budgets of developed nations around the world many times over, is still less than five percent of the country's gross domestic product, one of the lower points since WWII. Compiling the costs of the Iraq war would bump this up, but not to a point, as a share of the country's economy, to rival past highs.

Perhaps, with a glance at the stock prices to the right, this is good for the economy. After all, government spending pumps in money, and high school economics teaches you that the step in an economic cycle that bridges recession with recovery is war.

Barring the claims of varying candidates for whom you voted today, considering that the Iraq War has drawn on almost six years and currently faces no serious chance of ending, how salient is the suggestion that the postmodern, globalized, [insert your own adjective here], transnational form of capitalism governing the planet makes possible the permanent (for the time being, at least) occupation of a dusty country atop massive amounts of oil reserves. The NewsHour continues with its honor roll of US personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan almost every night, yet as a campaign issue, the war has been bumped almost entirely off the stage.

Is the war, then, the cost of doing business?

Kenya News Update: Murder of Politician Sets off Violence

Reports put the total dead in post-election Kenya at nearly 1,000 over the last month.

Most recently, Mugabe Were, a young Kenyan politician for the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), who was organizing a peace march was shot dead, twice in the head, in his driveway today. The murder set off a wave of deadly riots across the country, further increasing violence. Two military helicopters fired rubber bullets into a mob of 600 bearing machetes. (New York Times; Radio Netherlands; Sydney Morning Herald.)

Reports have also been filed of people being burned alive. The brutality and velocity of violence brings to mind the rapidity with which previous large-scale slaughters have come about, namely in Rwanda when ethnic violence gave way to the murder of 800,000 in less than a month. Marie Okabe, the United Nations special adviser on genocide has spoken out, invoking international law.  (ABC News; Reuters.)

Background on the violence: at Wikipedia and the Council on Foreign Relations.

A report from Al-Jazeera English:

AFRICOM: US Going it Alone Again, Naturally

New peace talks aimed at resolving the crisis in Darfur began this weekend in Libya. The prospects don’t look good. Although the Sudanese government agreed to a cease-fire on Saturday, leaders of some of the most potent rebel groups did not even show up.

Congress, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush have all called the situation a genocide. But while the U.S. has given more than $2 billion in aid since 2005, according to Bush, at the same time it’s changed its military position in Africa. You have to ask, is the U.S. repeating its go-it alone style of foreign policy in yet another hotspot?

Since February 2003, when violence broke out in Darfur — an area of the Sudan that is roughly the size of France — more than 200,000 people have been killed, and nearly 3 million have been driven from their homes. Tens of thousands live in refugee camps, sheltered by tattered brown tents. Not only has the situation grown far more complex as rebel groups have splintered, but violence in Chad, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo suggest that Darfur isn’t an isolated issue.

“We all know that Africa cannot fully develop economically, politically or socially where there is violence, the threat of terrorism or fear about the security of legitimate governments and the people they represent,” Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary for African affairs, told Congress in August. Her testimony explained the U.S.’s “new strategic relationship with Africa” by way of Africa Command, or AFRICOM, which will create a permanent U.S. military command on the continent in conjunction with the State Department. To put it simply, the endeavor is an attempt at diplomacy and nation-building backed by military firepower.

The State Department has acknowledged how touchy the notion is, but what may be more worrisome is the idea that, with military might and economic leverage, the U.S. can act alone in this world.

Glancing back at recent history, this has proved to be a dubious strategy at best. Earlier this fall, the climate change talks Bush orchestrated alongside those held by the U.N. turned out to be a disaster. Moreover, flying solo in Iraq has left the U.S. without a friend to help shoulder the burden.

Given the situation in Iraq, and adding the increasingly dire situation in Darfur, can the U.S. really afford to continue to go it alone?

(Originally published in Metro in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Image of Intifada transit refugee camp from USAID.)

Columbia University Student Reaction to Visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad

(Photos by Andrew Bast.)

Iraqi Widows Have Nowhere to Turn, Except Prostitution

You would think the anecdote about coffins in Iraq would top the list of stories about the newfound life there:

Cost of a coffin in Baghdad: $50-75. Cost of a coffin in Saddam Hussein's time, $5-10.

And then there is the prostitution.

According to a number of reports (Al Jazeera, CNN, the Telegraph), Iraqi widows, and there are now many of them, are prostituting themselves to pay for healthcare and food for their children.

Humanitarian groups say that it is a combination of violence, inflation and no federal support that leave the women with little other option.

Worse? Iraqi families are selling their daughters to survive.

Dancing Sudanese Women for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

New York Times UN correspondent Warren Hoge files a report from Juba in southern Sudan where Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon arrived today to a "raucous welcome." He'd come to ensure the lasting peace where, for more than 20 years, Christians had battled the Arab capital of the country, Khartoum.

10,000 UN peacekeepers are currently on the ground there, and Hoge reads into Ban's straightforward statement, "As you know well, this remains an essential--and fragile--cornerstone of peace across the whole of Sudan," a reference to a possible solution in Darfur, the region northwest of Juba where millions have been displaced and hundreds of thousands slaughtered. Genocide continues today.

Ban stepped off the plane and found himself faced with a crowd of dancing women and men in warrior headdresses.

It's clear that Ban is doing a bit of diplomatic dancing, warming up to Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and while he couldn't get Bashir to announce a full-on cease-fire (Bashir claimed security concerns), instead he'll work to "bring about" a cease-fire.

During the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York later this month, Ban will corral regional leaders for a "high-level meeting."

Talking abounds while reports trickle out about open conflict in the refugee camps.