06/21/06 “The Australian” — — THE level of violence in some areas of Iraq is worsening dramatically and US forces may soon be asked to leave by the Iraqi Government.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage has given a gloomy assessment of the situation.

“The British used to make a big deal of walking around in their berets in the south,” he said. “Now they won’t even go to the latrines without their helmets. The south has got much rougher, it’s mainly Shia on Shia violence.”

Mr Armitage said much of the violence came from differences over how the Islamic religion should be interpreted.

And he said he believed the Iraqis would soon ask the US to leave their country.
informationclearinghouse.info

Yeah that’s right. I envision a Monty Python scenario with robed clerics flailing at each other with their Qurans on a football field.

Sadr calls on foreign troops in Iraq to follow Japan out
“The withdrawal of Japanese troops is a good step and I hope that all countries with occupation forces in Iraq would follow suit in a quick and organised way that would not hurt the Iraqi people,” Sadr said at a joint press conference with former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf.

21,000 Troops Notified for Iraq Deployment

Two people killed and eight wounded, including 3 children, when Israel Air Force strike in Khan Younis misses targeted Popular Resistance Committee terrorists, hits family eating dinner in their home
Ali Waked

An Israeli Air Force strike targeting terrorists in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip Wednesday evening killed two people and wounded eight more, members of a family who were eating dinner in their home. In addition, eight people suffered from shock.

Moments after the strike, Defense Minister Amir Peretz took the podium at the Caesarea Conference in Jerusalem, and during his speech he was informed of the tragic incident. Holding his head, Peretz continued his speech but noted, ÒI am in difficult times. Regretfully the report is about innocents paying a heavy price in this difficult conflict,Ó he told the audience.
ynetnews.com

WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs is on a pace to see nearly 20,000 new cases of post-combat stress this year among service members who’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan, more than six times the number of cases that officials had expected.

The latest report on patient visits to VA medical facilities shows that nearly 5,000 service members were initially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder during the first three months of this year, on top of nearly 5,000 new diagnoses that the VA had reported for the last three months of 2005.
pbcs.dll

If such a huge percentage suffer from this ‘disorder’ in what sense can it be understood as a disorder? It is a RESPONSE to an environment the human nervous system cannot tolerate. A bonanza for big Pharma too.

The number of children with certain types of mental health disorders has more than doubled in the past 30 years, with a million experiencing problems at any one time in England, doctors’ leaders warned yesterday. About one in 10 children will experience a clinically recognised mental health disorder between the ages of one and 15, says the report by the British Medical Association’s board of science.

Factors such as the decline of the family, alcohol abuse and diet are cited as potential causes of the rise.
guardian.co.uk

‘Clinically recognized’ aka ‘treated’ with pharmaceuticals, of course. Kids are the canaries in the coal mine.

…A former neighborhood organizer on Chicago’s impoverished South Side, Obama claims fealty to the ideals of Jesus and King. Still, he:

* “refuses to take any options,” including the supremely sinful strategy of preemptive nuclear war, “off the table” in attempting to deter Iran from doing something U.S. global strategy would seem to strongly recommend to that nation: developing nuclear weapons.

* voted to fill the nation’s top diplomatic jobs (of all offices) with a mendacious war-criminal named Condaleeza (“Chevron”) Rice.

* refuses to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from illegally and mass-murderously occupied Iraq, placing more value on maintaining America’s blood-soaked “military credibility” than on recognizing standard world norms of civilized state behavior or on honoring Jesus’ and King’s commitment to nonviolence.

* distanced himself from fellow Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s (D-Illinois) courageous criticism of illegal U.S. torture practices in Guantanamo Bay.

* followed the counsel of the rich men of corporate America by backing a “tort reform” that makes it more difficult for ordinary people to attain just compensation from business that cheat and damage.

* voted to close filibuster proceedings that would have attempted to block the appointment of the reactionary Judge Alito – a known civil and women’s rights enemy.

* voted to re-authorize the Patriot Act, which uses real and imagined foreign threats created by empire to roll back liberty at home.

* fled fellow Senator Russ Feingold’s (D-Wisconsin) motion to officially censure the Bush administration for its monumentally criminal actions at home and abroad.

* applies his campaign finance Midas touch to the reelection efforts of his “mentor,” the de facto Republican Senator Joe Liberman (“D”- Connecticut), a close ally of Bush’s occupation, and a leading architect of the nation’s oppressive and racist “welfare reform,” which slashed basic government assistance for the most disadvantaged members of the industrialized world’s most unequal, wealth-top-heavy society.

In the horrible 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote address that did so much to catapult him into national prominence, Obama set some centrist tone for his subsequent predictable betrayals of cherished principles and leaders. In that instantly celebrated speech, Obama:

* claimed that the U.S. is the ultimate “beacon for freedom and opportunity,” the “only country on earth” where “my story” (a supposedly Horatio-Alger-esque tale of climb from poverty to prominence and now [thanks to some generous book deals] prosperity) “is even possible.” This despite the fact that the U.S. is actually the most rigidly hierarchical nation in the industrialized world, home to a stultifying corporate plutocracy, massive persistent and highly racialized poverty, astonishing incarceration rates (also quite racially disparate) and low mobility from lower to upper segments in its steep socioeconomic pyramid.

* said that “every child in America” should “have a decent shot at life,” not that every kid deserves a full and decent life now and thereafter

* expected Americans to be ecstatic over the “miracle” (!) that they don’t live under the iron heel of open state repression (he made not exceptions for the nation’s 2 million prisoners, nearly half black), as if democracy is just the absence of a police state and not the power of the people to run their own society in an egalitarian fashion (talk about low expectations for freedom).

* praised a Marine enlisted in the racist and imperialist oil occupation of Iraq for (of all things) “defending the United States of America” and (supposedly) expressing “absolute faith in the country and its leaders.” Now there’s a nice democratic sentiment: such chilling “faith” is the stuff of the very police state whose absence in the U.S. Obama called a “miracle.”

* scaled new heights of cringing, pseudo-patriotic nausea-inducement by making disturbing “hope” parallels between: “the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs:” “the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta;” and the “hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him.”
axisoflogic.com

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, the Louisiana state legislature voted to take over most of New Orleans’ public schools and effectively fire the 7,500 teachers and employees who work in them. The city schools are now part of the state-run recovery school district and control of many of schools is being given to private charter organizations. We speak with a member of the United Teachers of New Orleans.
democracynow.org

Thousands of New Orleans Public Housing Units to be Destroyed as 200,000+ Low-Income Residents Remain Displaced
…Last week, Federal housing officials announced that more than 5,000 public housing units for the poor were to be demolished even though tens of thousands of low-income residents remain displaced. On Saturday, public housing residents and advocates protested the decision by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and vowed to use any means necessary to stop the bulldozing of their apartments.

Like Iraq, New Orelans is envisioned as a show-place for the glories of privatization. It’s like a fantasy-land for the economic ‘shock therapists’: the public infrastructure is already smashed, so they can move right on in.

The left’s big victory a few weeks ago in the south western Indian state of Kerala has yielded swift fruit this week in the form of yet another vigorous rebuff to Coca-Cola. For several years the vast company’s Indian subsidiary has been trying to reopen its bottling plant in Plachimada, in Kerala. Locals in Plachimada initially shut it down in 2002, after seeing their wells run dry, as described here by Alexander Cockburn, after he visited Plachimada last year.

The Plachimada fight has become a rousing symbol of resistance across India to Coca Cola, a company welcomed in by India’s neoliberals, who see ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ in the sordid business of privatizing a publicly owned asset (water), adding syrup to it and then selling it back to original users of the water at an extortionate price. Coca-Cola had been confident that its clout would soon bring the Plachimada protesters to heel, but resistance has been spirited and determined, in a decade when public consciousness of a world water crisis has been growing swiftly.
counterpunch.org

Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was on the board of technology giant ABB when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants.

Weapons experts say waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called ‘dirty bombs’.

The Swiss-based ABB on Friday told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang.

The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Korea’s east coast.

Rumsfeld ? who is one of the Bush administration’s most strident ‘hardliners’ on North Korea, was a member of ABB’s board between 1990 and February 2001, when he left to take up his current post.
swissinfo.org

2002: US grants N Korea nuclear funds
The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country’s own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework an international consortium is building two proliferation-proof nuclear reactors and providing fuel oil for North Korea while the reactors are being built.

In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework’s requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors.

President Bush argued that the decision was “vital to the national security interests of the United States”.

…A week spent in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province west of Baghdad, reveals that residents are suffering from lack of water, electricity, cooking gas and medical supplies for the hospitals. The streets are eerily empty, and it appears that many people have now left the city, although possibly as many as 150,000 still remain in their homes, either because they are too afraid to leave or they have nowhere to go.

“We will survive anyway,” Um Qassim, a middle-aged housewife with six children, told IPS. “It is Allah who gives life and he is the only one able to take it away.”

Despite the horrible conditions here, with armed resistance groups controlling vast swathes of the city, and other areas subject to frequent shooting from U.S. snipers on the rooftops of houses, she said that people should be grateful to their god whatever happens to them, adding, “Those Americans will leave.”
ipsnews.net

She is right: sooner or later, they will leave.

LONDON, June 20 (Reuters) – Republican Sen. John McCain warned the White House on Tuesday against being overly optimistic the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will turn the tide in Iraq and said he believed more U.S. troops were needed.

“I think that some of their optimism is understandable, but I hope that it doesn’t turn into irrational exuberance because … it is still very long, very hard, very tough,” McCain told the Financial Times in an interview.
alertnet.org

I’ll try to tone down my exuberance.