The Exile

This blog has just entered the Politics top 50 at Blogtopsites.com. It's at number 45 and I am seriously chuffed about that. Not bad after just over a month's blogging. At the time of writing, 546 blogs are listed under the politics heading.

Do you remember all that axis of evil bollocks? Well, you can probably forget all about it now, as the Americans are sitting down to a nice series of chats with the Iranians. The agenda is likely to involve the Iranians helping the Americans cut and run from Iraq. It seems like only yesterday that Scott Ritter was claiming that the Chimp was going to send his army into Iran, so this is a big sea change in Washington's policy. At the same time, negotiations look set to start with some of the Sunni resistence groups within Iraq. It will be recalled that the Americans used to dismiss the guerrillas as deadenders, who would be quickly mopped up by Uncle Sam's brave boys. How quickly times change.

They have changed because the Iraqis are fighting like tigers and the Americans have realised that subjugating them is not something that they can do with the forces that they have available: and those forces are set to fall next year, anyway. The Shia religious parties look likely to win next month's elections in Iraq, as they won the elections last January. The neocon fantasy of a secular, free-market, Israel recognising Iraq has pretty much gone down the toilet, as indeed have the neocons themselves. Some, such as Count Vulvovitz, jumped ship early and took a cushy number at the World Bank. Others look set to become big boys' boyfriends when the cell doors finally slam shut on them.

So, the idea seems to be to talk to the Iranians, in the hope that they can pressure the Iraqi Shias, and at the same time talk to some of the guerrillas in the hope that they will stop killing Americans. The overall aim seems to be to pursuade enough Iraqis to cool things down so that the Americans can leave without it being quite so obvious that their tails are firmly clamped between their legs. It reminds one a bit of Henry Kissinger's negotiations with the Vietnamese to achieve the same end. Then it was called "peace with honour" and it lasted about two years before the Vietnamese swept down to remove the puppets from whatever power the Americans had allowed them to have. I doubt if the Iraqis will wait that long.

Juan Cole has a take on why the guerrillas should win any post-occupation conflict:

Readers and colleagues often ask me why a Shiite majority and the Kurdish Peshmergas couldn't just take care of the largely Sunni Arab guerrillas. The answer is that the Sunni Arabs were the officer corps and military intelligence, and the more experienced NCOs, and they know how to do things that the Shiites and Kurds don't know how to do. The Sunni Arabs were also the country's elite and have enormous cultural capital and managerial know-how. Sunni Arab advantages will decline over time, but they are there for this generation, and no one should underestimate the guerrilla leadership. If the Americans weren't around, all those 77 Hungarian T-72 tanks that the new Iraqi military now has would be in guerrilla hands so fast it would make your head spin.

This argument ignores the fact that some Shia groups might join the guerrilla army on the principle that backing winners is better than going down to an inglorious defeat for the Americans and their allies. If that happened, then defeat for the Americans' clients would just come all the sooner.

This is good sport, especially since it involves the great Sonic using some some fool as electronic toilet paper.

Basically, an American Wingnut site reproduced an essay which it said was by Christopher Hitchens. The problem is that Sonic, who seems to have read everything that Hitchens has ever written, pointed out to the site's wazzock-in-chief that the piece was actually by one Leo McKinstrey. If someone did that to me I would feel embarrassed that I had made the up fuck, but grateful that some bugger had come along and corrected it for me.

This basic courtesy does not apply as far as wingnuts are concerned, as you can see from this exchange in the comments box, over at Sonic's Hitchens Watch site.

In the meantime, our little wingnut may like to know that Mexicans do not claim that they are hijos de la chingada, and chingada does not mean rape, it means fuck. Yes, I know, some dictionaries claim it means the former, but I suspect that they are being pedantic, because in the old days both rape and sex out of wedlock were seen as synonymous. Both were an insult to the girl's family, and insults like that called for a vendetta. In Mexican culture, if you are a son of la chingada it means that you are a bastard and your mother is a whore.

It is the great insult that gets hurled at someone, just as the tables are kicked away, the bar-girls start running for cover and the pistols come out of the pockets. If any Mexican ever used it about himself he would be doing it in a self-mocking way and only within his circle of very close friends.

Staying on the theme of wingnut stupidity, quoting one of the Chimp's pretty boys as evidence that Hugo Chavez Frias has "little claim to legitimate rule" is very silly indeed. Especially when the pretty boy in question got turfed out by the Spanish electorate, and the new government has just signed a massive arms deal with Venezuela. I know that opinions are like arseholes and we all have them, but an opinion is not a fact. Likewise, saying that Chavez Frias is "wearing a little thin" in the rest of Latin-America and then quoting as evidence a Bolivian regime that is on its way out is hand-shandery of the highest order.

Wingnuts, please don't take my criticisms to much to heart. Please keep pulling your plonkers, always remembering not to spurt all over the monitor when you get to the fast wrist movements.

The year was probably 1967 and I would have been 11 years old on the day in question. It must have been that year because that was when Parliament voted to decriminalise homosexuality. Obviously the bill was making its way through when I heard a snatch of conversation between two men as I walked down a street in Manchester with my parents: "There'll be puffs walking around if this gets through," said one to the other.

I was old enough to know what they were talking about, but too young to have an opinion about it. For some reason that sentence has stuck in my mind all these years. That fragment of a conversation, heard almost 40 years ago, forms the basis of what I believe is wrong with socialism today.

Working class people join unions and vote Labour for economic reasons. What they want from the Labour Movement is basically economic. Economic security comes at the top of the list; control over the work process would probably come in at a close second. Nationalisation is certainly on the list, but it is unlikely to be at the top. British working people are a pragmatic bunch and have shown no desire to proceed to full-blown socialism over the past decades. I think that it is fair to say that so long as our people have a long-term job, with a decent wage and a union to ensure that terms and conditions improve every year, most of them will be happy with that.

The middle class types who join the movement tend to be people who are motivated by social or moral issues, rather than economic ones. Often this leads to some confusion in their little minds because they assume that as they have some issue with state policy, and as working class people also have issues outstanding with that same state, then all those issues are the same. Well, that is not the case because working class people tend to be economically radical and socially conservative. Middle class types tend to be the other way around, and the time has come when this circle can no longer be squared.

It could be squared in the 1960s, which is when I heard that bit of conversation. It could be done then because there were plenty of issues that could be traded off to keep everyone more or less happy. The types got some of the social legislation that they wanted, and we got more holidays, stronger unions and more control at work. We could live with their agenda because more of ours was being implemented.

The problem only came to a head in the early 1980s when government attacks on the unions, high levels of unemployment and a Labour Party that seemed more concerned about social issues all came to a head. Labour began to lose votes in election after election because the party seemed to be trying to copy the American Democratic Party, and had become a party of conflicting interest groups. Rights for this group or that, be they women, minorities, homosexuals or whatever, all became the buzz words of the day, as indeed they are now. Labour still had an economic agenda, but it got drowned out by the caterwauling of middle class types, as they pursued their own agendas.

Now, of course the Labour Movement must support increased rights for working women, that goes without saying. However, assuming that all woman share the same values simply because all woman have vaginas is silly. Working women may want a creche at work for their children, more time off after giving birth, more flexible working hours so that they can juggle home and work. Alternatively, they may not even want to work. Why cannot a wife and mother not stay at home to care for the next generation, and be paid a wage for doing that? These are the issues that strike me as sensible for a working class body to be discussing. Instead, talk is taken up with the "glass ceiling," and similar non-issues. In the case of minorities, we are told that only a few Asians are members of the boards of large companies and no blacks at all are to be found. As if anyone in the Labour Party should care.

The point is obvious: the glass ceiling is not a problem for working women; it is a problem for middle class whores. Blacks and Asians who sit on the boards of companies are clearly not a part of labour's tribe and we should not even pretend to be interested in their desires. The Labour Movement should articulate the aspirations of working class people, and should state quite clearly that the only dividing line is that of social class: working class people on one side and two-legged cockroaches on the other.

Success at this in the early 1960s meant that Smith & Nephew Ltd, could no longer get away with paying the Pakistani workers that they had imported into Nelson, Lancashire, £6-0-0 a week when the white workers were receiving £7-0-0. The unions refused to tolerate it on the basis of class solidarity. That led to the Labour government being pressured into banning that particular management wheeze, which happened as part of the two Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968.

The failure to articulate a clear, class-based ideology has led to the indigenous working class losing faith in Labour as the vehicle for their aspirations. When Labour talks about issues that are only of concern to types, the working man loses interest in a debate that is not about him or his concerns. When councils are perceived as doing favours for one ethnic minority at the expense of the rest, all that happens is that many Labour people cease to believe in the party as a whole. The fact that many of these favours consist of middle class jobs for middle class types only makes the situation worse.

How did this unhappy state of affairs come about? There are obviously many reasons, but the main one to my mind is that types are just better at getting their agenda over than we are. Working people tend to respond to a crisis with strikes and/or demonstrations, but if there is no perceived crisis they tend to get on with their lives rather than go to meetings. Leading on from this is the fact that the people who write for newspapers and work on television tend also to be types. It became a kind of vicious circle as midde class types propounded an agenda in the political parties, an agenda that was taken up by the media and sold back not as the desires of a minority, but as the common sense views of everyone. Working class people responded by switching off from a political process that increasingly ceased to articulate their views.

How to get back the lost millions? Well, for that to even begin to happen, NewLab must first lose, and lose badly. The middle class element that has taken over the party should be discredited by this and then encouraged to go off and seek pastures new. The people who will remain within the party will be its labourite and socialist element who know that people like us have no other home but Labour.

Then, Labour must rally the tribe and that tribe will only rally if the old call goes out for jobs, strong unions to protect those jobs and a programme of nationalisation that can be presented as being about strengthening workers' rights still further. A few social issues can be thrown out as table scraps, just so long as those who propound such issues understand that the days when we took a backseat to them are over. The scraps they can have, but the feast will be ours.

(Click on the cartoon to enlarge the image.)

My jovial prophecy - that the election would be a draw, the Republicans would then cheat and that a new US civil war would break out - inspired around 400 outraged Americans to send me abusive email, most of it along the lines of "you'd be speaking German now if it wasn't for us, you limey asshole".

At this point I still thought it my duty to reply to these emails, so again I politely pointed out that if the US hadn't entered the second world war in December 1941 there would have been no D-Day and no second front, the Red Army would have swept through Nazi Germany and into western Europe and that, in fact, I'd now be speaking Russian. And, incidentally, the US would have lost the cold war in about 1958.

What can you say about the Chimp and his supporters? Where would we be without them?

Support for the Blair regime has now fallen to just 30% according to a Yougov poll. At the same time 64% believe that "the wheels are starting to fall off" the government. It sounds a bit like John Major's time to me. That government got returned and within weeks its members looked like lame ducks. Strange how history repeats itself.

Members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders (British Battalion) can cheer themselves up by playing Battle To Baghdad: The Fight For Freedom, a new board game that has just come out in the USA. Then they can sit around like good little boys and while they play nice they can delude themselves into believing that war really is a cakewalk.

Cheers: Antiwar.com

Here's the deal. You want to promote some aspect of a business that appeals to the male of the species. You hire a couple of girls and a bloke with a sound system that can be heard on the other side of the city. The girls climb onto the bed of a lorry and start dancing to the music. Blokes arrive to admire the talent and have their photographs taken with them. Then you sell them whatever is on offer. In this case its Bardahl oil, as sold by the wife in her care spares' shop.

Mexico has its good points: two of them in this case. . .

This is a gem: the most risible of all the hand shandyists for war has posted an article attacking Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the former dictator of Chile and good friend to the USA. I suppose he wants to try and prove to gullible readers that he really is a socialist.

Well, my lads if any of you are reading this, once the USA has been left battered, broken and bankrupted by the Iraqis, then a full and final reckoning might come about in places like Chile. It is a fairly unique country for Latin-America in that it has a large, parasitic middle class who supported the coup from the beginning. The Americans may have cheered them on, but it was a local event. I am sure that there are quite few Chileans who feel that it's never too late to pay off an old debt.

Do you see how it works, lads? Defeat for imperialism in Iraq could mean a great wailing and smashing of teeth in Chile, and the removal of that country from capitalism's orbit. As I said, it may not happen, but that is not the point. We will never know unless the Americans are forced back in isolationism, will we?

This message has been brought to you by the Exile, a tolerant soul who seeks to remind mongs all over the globe what socialism is all about.

It is tough being an arse-licker as Tony Blair has already found out. It's even tougher when people in the country you arse-licked start shafting you.

According to Joe Wilson, the former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA agent, little Tony was duped into supporting action against Iraq on the basis that it was all about disarmament via the United Nations, and not a war of aggression to change the government of a sovereign state. Once little Tony had served his purpose, Wilson said he was "double-crossed," and pretty much left with his dick in his hand to sort things out in London as best he could.

If this account is true then Blair is not just a dupe, he is a dupe who hurried to catch up with his master's new line once it became clear to him what it was. It does not seem to have troubled him that Washington was playing him like a violin: all that mattered was that he kept getting pats on the head from his master. What a good little doggie he is!

A faintly ludicrous article was published in The Guardian on Monday. The author, one David Clark a former NewLab spinner, argued that the left is in danger of permanent "schism" between pro and anti imperialist factions, unless something is done quickly. He points to the new Henry Jackson Society that has just been launched in London as evidence of this. Jackson was an American Democrat who was liberal on domestic policy, but very hawkish on foreign affairs. He is one of the father figures of the neoconservative movement in the USA. According to Clark:

It is common outside America to regard neoconservatism as synonymous with the Republican right. In fact, its roots lie mostly on the left. The original neoconservatives - also nicknamed Socialists for Nixon - were anti-communist leftists and liberals who became alienated from the Democratic party when it endorsed the anti-Vietnam war candidate George McGovern for president in 1972. Appalled by what they saw as the refusal of liberals to defend their values and confront totalitarianism in the guise of Soviet power, the neoconservatives drifted to the right, contributing to a broader political realignment that swept Ronald Reagan to power.

So what Clark is saying is that we on the left have to kiss and make up with the warmongers, otherwise said 'mongers will go off as their American cousins did a generation ago into neoconservatism. He concludes by saying that:

Efforts to heal the wounds created by Iraq must be a common responsibility of the liberal left. The coming end of the Blair era, together with the eclipse of the Bush presidency, provides an opportunity to disengage from the occupation and take a new direction in the fight against terrorism around which liberals and progressives can unite. To squander it would be to play into the hands of those who want the next era of British politics to be a Conservative one.

That the left is united in opposition to this aggression against Iraq just happens to be a fact, and facts speak for themselves. Thus there will be no schism or split in socialist ranks because we are more united in opposition to this war than we have been in a long time about any other issue. What has happened is that a small section of the Blairite left has moved away from the rest of us and is already on its way towards neoconservatism. They are so few in number that they can be ignored for all practical purposes. They tend to base themselves around six or so websites, that are read by socialists when they want some free entertainment.

The parents of Sergeant John 'Jonah' Jones, the 98th British soldier to die in Tony Blair's desire to appease a foreign ruler, have spoken out against the war in general and Blair in particular: "Tony Blair should have his kids out there and then he would know how it feels. He is just Bush's lapdog. It was an unjust war to start with. It's going to be like America's Vietnam," said 62 year old Ray Jones, the dead man's father.

As the death toll in Blair's war creeps towards the first one hundred mark, the Stop The War Coalition are preparing to demonstrate in one hundred towns and cities in the UK on the day after this tragic, senseless milestone is reached. On the actual day itself, the Military Families Against The War will mount a protest in Parliament Square.

If you live in the UK your support is needed. The hand shandyists for war must learn that they only speak for a tiny handful of people. They are not the voice of the majority.

When I knew him some people were still calling him Alex, if memory serves me right, but to most of us he was Boris. Where the nickname came from I have no idea, but it seems to have stuck to him. He was an old Etonian who went up to Baliol and he could drink the gang of miners, factory workers and a certain cinema projectionist that made up the junior common room at Ruskin College, Oxford, into the ground. We liked him, and we helped get him elected to the presidency of the Oxford Union. Boris Johnson may have been a toff, but in a strange sort of way he was one of us.

I have sought of followed his career over the decades, but I haven't spoken to the man in over 25 years. He is now a Tory MP and the editor of The Spectator. He has also just published what is probably the most defiant call that any journalist has penned in recent memory.

On Monday The Daily Mirror broke the story that the Chimp had planned to bomb the al-Jazeera television station in Doha, the capital of Qatar. He was talked out of this by Tony Blair and a five page memorandum exists of that conversation.

This memo was leaked to a certain Tony Clarke, who was then the NewLab MP for Northampton until the recent election. For some reason this fool gave the document back to the government, and the only good thing that I can say about Tony Clarke is that he is now the ex-MP for Northampton, as he lost his seat back in May. The point is that the story was out. . .

It looks as if The Daily Mirror has managed to get hold of a copy of the actual memorandum, because Tiny Tony has threatened them with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if they publish further details from it. The Daily Mirror has backed down and agreed not to say any more.

This is where Boris Johnson comes in. For Boris has just announce that if anyone will send him the memo, he will publish it in full in The Spectator, and the Blairites can prosecute away.

He could end up doing some bird for this. He knows it, but he thinks that it is worth it. What can we humble British bloggers do to support this stand? I suggest that we post the memorandum on our sites if and when it sees the light of day. The more people who publish it, the less chance there is that anyone will end up as a guest of Her Majesty.

I feel utterly ashamed that it is a Tory MP that has taken this stand. I repeat what I posted earlier: I want my party back!

Update at 2.30am: This article gives more details about the attitude that the Chimp had towards al-Jazeera. The Battle of Fallujah was taking place and the station was running footage of the slaughter.

If you are a warmonger, especially if you are one of those creatures who tries to pretend that he is a socialist, I want you to visit the Today in Iraq site. Scroll down until you get to the 22nd November entries. There you will see a photograph of an Iraqi father holding his dead baby in his arms. The child was murdered by American forces. I can't face posting the photograph here.

When you have done that I would like you to come back here and tell me that the resistence is composed of deadenders, nothing but Baathists, or whatever the latest line is from that shithole of a country that you support. The resistence is Iraq and it is made up of the men who have seen their country occupied and their children killed.

Now, I know that you 'mongers will say that this is what happens in war and that Saddam was far worse, but forget it, because I am not interested. I hope that when Iraq finally gets its act together and drives these aggressors out that all accounts will finally be settled. In the meantime, don't come mithering me about the scum that you support getting blown up on a daily basis.

I remember during the American war against Vietnam, how the USA managed to get some propaganda value out of the TV footage of American POWs being mistreated by their Vietnamese captors. Guess what, lads? I don't think that this will apply in Iraq. I think as far as most of the world is concerned, whatever the Iraqis do to any American they take is fine by us.

The following essay was first published in The Havana Journal in August 2005. The essay criticises one aspect of Cuba, namely the way in which scams are run with, possibly, official blessing. It is an issue that Cuba needs to address as a matter of urgency.

I thought long and hard about posting it here. I am not really too bothered about the views of right-wingers, but I was concerned that the British trendies may use it to make further attacks on Cuba. Then I thought bollocks to 'em.

This is the second essay about Cuba. The first can be found here.

The guide books advise their readers to see that all their luggage is securely locked prior to flying to Cuba. The baggage handlers at Havana airport are notoriously light-fingered and a few pounds spent on padlocks can make all the difference between getting a complete bag off the carousel or receiving one that has been thoroughly and expertly pillaged. Someone had still taken a shot at one of my suitcases – the one that had a combination lock on it instead of the others that had the more traditional keys. The face of the lock had been neatly wrenched off, but it was still sort of intact. The thief may have been disturbed, or he had run out of time, anyway the bag arrived with all its contents intact. Score one for taking a guide book’s advice. Such a pity they don’t talk about the scams that are run by the hotels as such information might have saved a lot of people a lot of grief…

The queue for the Cubana flight to Mexico City was long at Havana’s airport. It was the middle of the night so hardly anyone looked their best, anyway, but one 30-something woman looked paler and more ill at ease than the rest of us. My wife began to chat to the woman’s husband, who also looked a bit green about the gills, and found out what had happened to the couple.

They had staying at the beach resort of Varadero and their hotel had been stricken with food poisoning. The husband had escaped with a nasty bout of diarrhoea, but his wife had been taken to hospital. Around three hundred people, including a group of Mexican secondary school children, had also come down with this ailment in varying degrees of severity.

The cynic in me was amused to hear that guests at this hotel had been advised not to eat at the privately owned restaurants because, claimed their hotel, the food was often unsuitable for human consumption. Needless to say, and in the best tradition of Latin-America, the person who had thus advised the holidaymakers had made himself scarce once the dash to the toilets was on and had not been seen since.

To make matter worse the hotel had then denied that anything was out of the ordinary as far as their kitchen facilities were concerned and had blamed the outbreak on their guests’ determination to eat at the private restaurants that dot Cuban cities. The fact that nobody in this group had eaten outside the hotel was dismissed with an indifferent shrug.

Adding insult to injury, while all this was going on several guests found that their rooms had been entered and roughly half their money had been stolen. Note that the thief or thieves did not steal all the cash, so when the police were called in they just refused to believe that anything was amiss: they claimed that the complaint was an attempted scam by the tourists.

Exactly what happened at that hotel will probably never be known, but some informed guesses can be made. At the Hotel Nacional de Cuba where we stayed in Havana the breakfasts were delicious one day and terrible the next. Stale bread and dry fruit were the order of every other day, and all complaints were answered with the weary response that Cuba is a country under blockade and everyone has to make sacrifices.

Yes, well, a hotel security guard who had been suitably lubricated with gifts of clothing, soap and Mexican cigarettes confirmed what was already suspected; namely that the hotel’s employees were making one day’s food last for two and were then selling the surplus on the black market.

The hotel’s chambermaids have a little scam all of their own – at least ours did. She would stock the rooms that are occupied with toilet paper from the recently vacated rooms. The day’s supply of soap, shampoo and other toiletries was only ever half met. This wheeze came to light when our chambermaid took her day off and her replacement clumsily left the room fully stocked. The following day, when our regular maid returned, I ensured that we would not continue to be ripped-off by threatening to go and have a chat with the nice Interior Ministry policeman who was stationed outside the hotel. After that we had no problems, but it left a nasty taste in the mouth.

Screwing the guests seems to be an official policy at the Hotel Nacional: how many five star hotels in the world even charge guests for the bottled water that they leave in the rooms, much less the U.S.$2.50 that the Nacional charges for one litre of the stuff? The safe that most of these hotels have in every room is usually provided as a service to guests: not so at the Nacional; there the charge is U.S.$3.00 a day. Given these official scams, is it any wonder that the hotel’s staff decided to run some unofficial ones of their own?

So what happened at that hotel in Varadero? The best guess is that the staff were making the food last more than one day and something went rotten. This is understandable when you remember that even five star hotels suffer from blackouts that can last for several hours. As for the money stolen from the rooms that also suggests a clever, inside operation to only steal half the cash so that nobody would believe that a robbery had occurred. Or maybe it happens regularly and the police are either in on the deal or are under orders to rubbish all the complaints? We will never know.

To be fair to the Cuban government this writer did come across reports of the police running undercover operations to catch hotel criminals in the act, so they must be aware of the problem. However, and here is the big caveat, even assuming that the government has the will to fully tackle this problem there must be some doubt as to how effective their measures can be. Short of arresting every hotel employee in Cuba the scams are going to continue. That is how entrenched it seems to be.

The best advice that I can give to a visitor is, unfortunately, to treat Cuba as any other Latin-American republic and assume that basic criminality is the order of the day – a least as far as the hotels are concerned. Outside things are different as the streets are fairly safe to walk in and violent crime is almost unheard of. However, and sadly for the country’s image, the chances are that if a tourist is going to fall ill or suffer a robbery it will be because of something that happened in his luxurious, government owned hotel.

Dick Cheney seems to be having one of those days. It could be due to all that time spent in the company of the Chimp, in which case stupidity is catching.

Those who advocate a sudden withdraw from Iraq should answer a couple simple questions. Would the United States and other free nations be better off or worse off with Zarqawi, Bin Laden and Zawahiri in control Iraq? Would we be safer or less safe with Iraq ruled by men intent upon the destruction of our country.

A short while later, when speaking of the American backed Iraqi armed forces he said:

People who denigrate their competence and capability are flat wrong. They’re making a mistake. They either don’t understand the situation or they’re trying to confuse it, but the Iraqi security forces are well respected by the Iraqi people. They’re doing a very good job.

Now, am I the only one to spot that something is wrong with this line of argument? Either the puppet forces are great, in which case they would see off bin Laden, or they are not, but you can't have it both ways.

Actually, what is likely to happen is that the nationalist guerrillas, who seem quite happy to let the jihadists do their thing so long as the occupation continues, will roll up the other bunch of foreigners once the Americans have been driven out.

According to a report in today's Independent, Iraq could lose over one hundred billion pounds' worth of oil reserves, if an American plan comes to fruition next year. It seems that the regime that the Americans have installed came under pressure from Washington and London to allow western companies to have a slice of the pie.

I must be honest and say that this bit of the report strikes me as rather silly: you don't pressure puppets. You just give them their orders. They know what will happen to them if they don't toe the line.

Other than that it seems like a classical imperialist grab for resources. Something that we on the left knew was going to happen all along. Only the toy-town leftists ever though that it would be any different.

Divided about almost everything, the Iraqi factions that met in Cairo over the weekend managed to hammer out a final statement in which they accepted that "national resistence is a right of all nations". In other words, even the American sponsored puppets have accepted that sooner or later the occupation will end and they had better start talking to the people who will still be living in Iraq after that happens. Time to cut the strings. . .

The interesting thing is that the comunique also condemed "terrorism" which it defined as attacks on Iraqi civilians and the like. Now this is interesting because it suggests that all Iraqi factions are quite happy to sit around and watch American troops get culled.

Given that yet another Iraqi family has just been butchered by American forces, that should not come as a surprise to anybody.

A book by Cindy Sheehan, Not One More Mother's Child, is to be published on Wednesday. The paperback will contain some of her speeches, letters to politicians and a collection of her articles.

Mrs Sheehan will probably go down in history as the woman who gave voice to the millions of Americans who had always opposed this aggression, and who probably created quite a few new opponents of the war as well. For that reason the warmongers tried to smear her in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the searing image of a mother, grieving for her dead son. The smears failed and probably served to turn more people away from this war.

My feeling is that she will be remembered when all the drunken hand shandyists for war are dead and forgotten about.

As casualties climb, war weariness sets in. That was as true in Korea and Vietnam as it is today in Iraq. The difference is the speed with which the American population are rejecting this war. By June 2004, with the war only a little over a year old, just over half the population thought that the war was a mistake. That 50% mark was not reached in the Vietnam era until August 1968, seven years after the war started.

The Observer carried a report about the maimed and dead who return to America from Iraq. The report should be read in its entirety, especially the section that deals with the way that the Americans massage their casualty figures. Soldiers injured in accidents are not counted as war casualties, unlike their British counterparts.

However, the really interesting thing is the attitude of the pro and anti war demonstrators outside Walder Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. The former only seems capable of hurling abuse at the anti-war crowd and they don't seem capable of answering even simple questions:

On one side of the road stands the anti-war lobby who want the troops home. They are careful to put their case in patriotic terms. 'They're sneaking the wounded in, in the middle of the night', one tells us. 'They don't want people to remember these were real men and women who'd served their country.'

The Bush supporters on the other side of the road jab their fingers towards the opposing group. 'These are a bunch of communists and Marxists. They hate everything about our country, they hate our soldiers,' says one. When I suggest there is no proven link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, another spits 'Moron' at me and stomps away. On this side of the road they are far angrier. That's probably because they are losing the argument.

Ths is the first time that I have commented on the American war against Afghanistan. This conflict tends to take a back seat, largely because the war has taken a long time to get going. However, slowly but surely, the Afghans are increasing the number of Americans that they cull every year.

In just over three years of war prior to this one, the Afghans only culled 102 invaders. However, during this year alone they have managed to send 94 home in body bags.

The Americans were hoping to hand off Afghanistan to their British poodles, but this plan looks set to run into trouble. Britain cannot fight Afghanistan alone and needs help from NATO. The Dutch now look set to refuse to send more troops because the country is "too dangerous" for them. (*) This means that either Britain will have to make up the shortfall, or the Americans will have to stay.

Needless to say, if the Afghans increase their run rate next year, then the Americans are going to have to send more troops into the country whether they want to or not. Either that or accept that they cannot fight a war on two fronts for long.

The issue in guerrilla war is not how many enemy troops the guerrilla forces can kill. The issue is can the conventional forces suppress the guerrillas? If they can't then the guerrillas usually win because they have the advantage of time on their side. Eventually, even the most enthusiastic imperialist will get sick of seeing his army being picked off by insurgents, as his tax bill rises to pay for it all. That could take decades, but the Afghans certainly have decades and more to spare: they are going nowwhere because Afghanistan is where they all live.

(*) Readers are reminded that The Times and Sunday Times are scab sheets that are produced by non-union labour. Care should be taken with anything that they print.

British actions in support of the Chimp led to the attacks of the 7th July 2005, according to a new book by Crispin Black, a former intelligence officer.

He argues that the repeated government claim that waging war on Iraq would not place the UK at any greater risk than normal led the police and intelligence services to "take their eye off the ball". In other words, the government was complacent enough to believe its own guff and everybody else took their lead from that.

Leading on from this, and as a direct result of it, one of the main leaders of the groups that planted the bombs was “. . . able to escape from the country a few days later on the Eurostar after walking past his own wanted poster in Waterloo Station".

However, the main charge that Black makes against the Blair regime is that the war, and the way Britain went to war, led directly to the bombings. That the the government “cooked the intelligence books” with its pretexts for aggression just helped Islamic extremism, he said. “It is not just that many people view the war as unjust and illegal, but they believe it was based on a lie. The enabling atmosphere for Islamist terrorism feeds off the way we went to war as well as the perceived nature of the war itself."

Putting these two factors together, Black concludes: “The intelligence scandals could not have been designed better to cause offence, disaffection and alienation among the Muslim community. The irony is that cooking the intelligence books may well be one of the causes of our current difficulties, and one of the most powerful tools we have against terrorism are our intelligence services – compromised by this cavalier approach.”

Cheers: Antiwar.com

A nice pair for a Saturday evening.

The Guardian has an article today written by a former prisoner of the Saddam Hussein regime. The writer asks why the patriotic forces in Iraq are growing in number and reaches the obvious conclusion that "collective punishment, random arrest and killing are the defining features".

He gives examples of all of these and concludes, "The lesson history taught us in Vietnam, that stubborn national resistance can wear down the most powerful armies, is now being learned in Iraq".

When do you suppose the 'mongers will wake up to this simple set of truths?

The Scooter Libby Defence Fund has now opened and is awaiting the contribution of warmongers everywhere. Don't be shy, lads, just remember his sterling service in the cause of 'mongery and get those credit cards out. No contribution is too small, so let's see you shelling out some brass.

The former director of the CIA, Stansfield Turner, has claimed that he is, "embarrassed that the United State has a vice president for torture. I think it is just reprehensible."

You have to love it when thieves fall out. Bill Clinton is on record as saying that the war was "a big mistake," the Congress is stirring and popular support for the Chimp is ebbing away. Even the United Nations is refusing to visit the torture centre at Guantanamo Bay because the Americans are placing too many restrictions on the visit.

My guess is that we will be reading lots more stories like this as people from the American elite try to put distance between themselves, a lost war and a president who has left the USA pretty much isolated in the world.

This front page just says it all, doesn't it? I can almost hear the sphincters clenching in Scumbagland West.