disconnect

A lot of people have said that the war in Iraq was about oil. To me this is like saying that the Civil War was about slavery - accurate in a broad sense but missing all the other reasons that the war happened. The problem though with Iraq is that all the other reasons for war were really no good to start with. It started out being about weapons of mass destruction, only there were none. And if we had a policy of attacking countries that we "knew" had WMD, where are the war plans against North Korea? Then it was a war to free the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator. Again, North Korea? Or what about Cuba or any other number of countries with dictators we don't like? Oh, I forgot, this was a front of the War on Terror. Except Saddam didn't get along with al Qaeda. And if we wanted to attack countries that we know have lots of terrorists in them, Saudi Arabia would probably top the list.

Of course the problem is that North Korea doesn't sit on a motherlode of crude oil. Nor does Cuba. Saudi Arabia does, but they already sell it to us. So quite obviously this had to factor into our decision.

One question I have is, what's happening to all that oil? According to this table, Iraqi oil production is humming along at approximately pre-war levels now. At two million barrels a day, that's bringing in $80 million/day at current oil prices, or $2.4 billion a month. I guess my question really is what's happening to all that money? Since there's no official Iraqi government I would assume that that money has to be going to us. So when Paul Wolfowitz goes in front of Congress and says we need $50 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan, is that without the billions we're taking in in oil revenue? Did we already spend that money or what? And who gets it after June 30? This is a pretty massive amount of money that, to my knowledge at least, is unaccounted for. Are stories going to pop up on 60 Minutes three years from now about things like this, talking about how all this oil money was actually shuffled off to Bush cronies?

Kurt Vonnegut is probably my favorite author, and he's written a fantastic commentary on the general state of the country and world and humankind which you ought to read. Go now. Thanks to Chuck for pointing me in its general direction.

(Alternate link if the one above doesn't work)

I thought I would give a little history lesson on the history of this site (www.disconnect.net) for those of you who haven't been here before or don't remember, spurred by my finally deleting today the old psfacsimile@disconnect.net email account after it had accumulated 3000+ spams in the past three months.

I registered this domain in July of 1998 and had many sites up here which aren't here anymore and a couple that are. The Underground Online was one of the first two to go up; "The Underground" being the underground newspaper that I had published my senior year in high school. That site is still up there today. The other site was The Perfect Song Facsimile, which was a site featuring mp3s (and later vqfs) of rare and live Radiohead songs. That one was relatively popular and got mentioned in a few websites like spin.com and British magazines like Melody Maker. Its email address was the one I deleted today when another 15 MB of spam flooded into it. There was also a fairly infamous homepage of mine and various other sites by people I know. I've planned for a while to have some sort of Disconnect Museum up where people can view these old sites (since I still have all the files for them) alongside the Elephant Man's bones, Rush Limbaugh's soul and other long-forgotten relics.

Upon deleting the email account and doing some other spring cleaning of the site, I found out that myhosting.com (the host of the site) finally has a Linux option, where you can run PHP and Perl and other goodies you couldn't previously. They've always been a Microsoft site and I haven't cared to learn and/or purchase their Frontpage stuff or any other gobbledygook. So I could potentially do some neat stuff with that and play around. Except being such an old-timer, I have a "legacy" account, and need to upgrade it before I can get the linux thing (which would be free). As far as I can tell it wouldn't really change anything and I would get an extra 50 MB of storage space, but I would have a 5 GB limit on data transfer bandwidth. My current account has no limits (that I know of), being created in the heady days of the dot-com boom, where bandwidth flowed like wine and digital.altavista.com was king. So I'm figuring I will probably upgrade to the 21st century to get the new stuff, but lose my (in theory) unmetered bandwidth.

Oh, and let me know if you have a burning desire to view some sort of disconnect.net museum and if there's enough interest I might actually take the time to put something up.

First it was George Will, questioning the trust he and other conservatives put in the Bush administration. Now it's Thomas Friedman, coming to the realization that the administration can't do anything that's not guided by politics (and they'll deny that carefully scripted words in support of Rumsfeld or giving speeches on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier you flew onto in a fighter plane have anything to do with politics, but if Kerry brings it up the issue of Rumsfeld resigning it's "raw political opportunism"). It seems that more and more, both conservatives and liberals trying to apply an intellectual approach to these problems instead of a politically-driven one are coming to the realization that an administration that will plunge the Middle East into chaos and plunge the federal budget into crippling deficits to score political points and hold onto its power is both stupid and dangerous.

There's a good op-ed article in the New York Times today about why bad news and dissatisfaction with Bush haven't translated into better poll numbers for Kerry. I was wondering about this myself but this article does a good job of explaining that most voters only decide whether or not the challenger is a suitable replacement when they get to know him at the convention and in the debates. Sounds about right.

I started about three different posts on here last night only to stop each time and delete everything. All about the situation in Iraq of course - I really would like to get off the subject, but with billions of dollars and thousands of lives already invested in it, with Iraqis being tortured and Americans being beheaded, it kind of makes topics like the potential difference in your health care coverage under Bush or Kerry kind of fall to the back page at the moment. Hopefully things will cool off over there to the point where I can talk about those other things soon.

Sometimes I wonder if this blog will have any effect on anything at all. I know it's a mostly meaningless venture, I started it with that fully in mind, but I still figured it would be worth it if even one person thought about things differently after reading it. I worry though that the situation in Iraq is turning into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where one side kills some people, and the other side kills more in retaliation, and the first side kills more in retaliation and it never stops. I don't think any debate is possible once that starts in motion, and it pushes all other issues to the side. And I wonder if people are so entrenched in their views that there's already no sense in talking about it.

The whole deal with the American being beheaded is starting up the cycle already. An American was killed, and so his death needs to be avenged. That's one of the calls going up on the Republican side of the aisle, I'm sure. Of course the same thing will happen on the Iraqi side if any innocent people are killed in any sort of retaliation (such as Fallujah) and off we go into the downward spiral of revenge. The other thing I'm hearing, more than calls for revenge really, is that this puts the prisoner abuse into perspective, that this shows us again what kind of enemy we're facing. That's about the stupidest thing I've heard in... 24 hours, that because our enemy beheads people it's OK to torture prisoners. That goes along with Inhofe's comments (I believe they were his, although a lot of people were saying them), that pictures of the prisoner abuse should be put next to pictures of Saddam's mass graves and torture rooms for context. Why, so we can show everyone how much we're getting to be like Saddam? Because in the absence of any weapons of mass destruction being found, let's remember that stopping torture and killing was the main reason for fighting the war in the first place. If we go on and on about how a war to stop those things is just, doesn't that give Iraqis carte blanche to fight us if we're found to be doing those same things?

But you know, you read something like this, and you wonder if these people are ever going to get the message. They act like it's a choice between fighting the war on terror and investigating abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American troops. It's the same fight - a fight against barbarity and utter lack of respect for human life and dignity, and each feeds off the other. If you need more evidence that these are inextricably linked, you have the words of the killers themselves, "So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls." And if you need more, there's the fact that detaining people without due process and ignoring the rule of law is par for the course since 9/11, both in the countries we invade and here, and not only does this carpet-bombing of people's rights just turn more people against us, but even the father of the American decapitated blames this for the death of his son.

Steely Anger

Remember when that American convoy was attacked around Nasiriya in the opening days of the war and 15 or so Americans (including Jessica Lynch, I believe) were taken prisoner? I remembered something about that today and so I called up this old news article on it. Just like the Inhofe quote in the previous post, I love it when old quotes sound really stupid next to present-day realities (emphasis mine):

Shortly after news of the capture came, video footage of what was said to be dead and captured American soldiers was aired on the Arab al Jazeera network and Iraqi state television.

Five of the captured Americans — four men and one woman — appeared on the video with the bodies of other soldiers. They appeared to be wounded and were asked to give their names, home states, and state whether they were Americans.

. . .

President Bush said today that he expected any American POWs to be treated properly. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers saw the footage and reacted with "steely anger" over the treatment of the captured soldiers, saying that videotaping prisoners was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, ABCNEWS' McWethy reported.

I believe that despite reports to the contrary in some media outlets, it's generally believed that once in custody, no further harm was done to the prisoners. I'm not 100% on that though so I'm open for correction. I think it's safe to say that next time that probably won't be the case.

I know everyone's been beaten over the head with the Iraqi prisoner thing for the past two weeks, but it's just an important story and I have more to add to it. I was going to post this anyway when the DNC's blog, "Kicking Ass", beat me to it, kind of. In this post, they quote Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma:

First of all, I regret I wasn't here on Friday. I was unable to be here. But maybe it's better that I wasn't because as I watch this outrage that everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners I have to say and I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.

The idea that these prisoners, they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

This is B.S. in so many ways it's difficult to know where to start. First of all, after WWII, everyone got together and drafted the Geneva Conventions. The idea being that there are some things civilized societies shouldn't be doing. Now I'm not sure if Nazi prisoners of war during WWII were tortured - I'm sure some probably were. Undoubtedly many prisoners held information that put American lives at risk. And these people were unquestionably at war with us. But still, we decided that we would abide by these rules.

Now, from the Bush administration that likes to insist on a black and white interpretation of morality given to President Bush from God himself, we have this moral relativism when it comes to interrogation. "It's OK to torture terrorists for information," the argument goes, "because they are planning to kill, or have already killed Americans and innocent people." So torture is bad, but saving lives is more good than the torture is bad, so we can do it. Also, these people are Evil, and we are Good, so that gives us the authority to extract information from our Enemies in any way necessary. I'm not sure if whoever devised this strategy thought it through and realized that this works both ways. Obviously our enemy thinks that they're good, and we're evil. The Geneva Conventions are there as much to safeguard our troops as they are to protect Evildoers we capture. So that's one of the arguments against torturing people, in case you really needed one. If you're really pro-torture though I doubt this blog is going to change your mind.

Then we have the "everyone in there deserved it" line, because of course no innocent people could have been put in prison. ...In fact, this is so obvious that I don't even think it needs explanation, does it? I mean, why am I having to construct arguments against torture? Oh wait, because a Republican Senator is a dumbass, that's why. And I've heard something similar from Limbaugh and other right-wing commentators too. Most of them think it's relatively OK because the people being tortured must have been evil. Like every one of them was personally involved in 9/11 or something.

Let me close on another note. I brought this up earlier, but I found a statement from Sen. Inhofe that makes me mention it again. Why is this not something to be outraged about, but the Lewinsky scandal was? I would think that if the Lewinsky thing bothered you from a moral standpoint, prisoner torture would too. Or perhaps you don't care about either - that would at least be consistent with apathy. But it turns out that James Inhofe (and I'm sure he's not the only one), who is not concerned about possible violations of the Geneva Convention, was plenty upset about things during the impeachment trial:

Mr. Chief Justice, in the absence of hearing something that I haven't heard or seeing something that is unforeseen up to now, it is my plan to vote for conviction on the two Articles of Impeachment.

I think this is probably the most important vote I will cast during the course of my lifetime. I say it very sincerely.

. . .

Take Paula Jones as just one example. She may not win a popularity poll, but her civil rights have just as much standing as anyone else's, do they not? Is not our country based on the principle that even the least among us is entitled to equal treatment under the law?

. . .

I think we have seen the truth. And I think the final truth is that this President should be held to the very highest of standards.

Sometimes when I am not really sure I am right, I consult my best friend. His name is Jesus. And I asked that question. Now I will quote to you the response that is found in Luke: 'From one who has been entrusted with more, much more will be asked.'

If you want to be offended by Clinton's behavior, that's fine. And if you supported his impeachment, OK. But why is it alright to hold Clinton to these standards, while Bush and Rumsfeld aren't held to any? Why are they given credit for the fall of Saddam Hussein and "Mission Accomplished", but shoulder none of the responsibility of this?

The Stakes

This commentary over on The Daily Brew sums up nicely the point I was trying to make in this post on 4/28, but I feel it's rather important so I ought to go over it again.

Word on the street is that Tony Blair might be out as Prime Minister before election time here in November. That would mean that Bush would basically be the last leader of the "coalition" countries still in power, not to mention the one most responsible for the situation in Iraq. To reelect him would really be tantamount to the nation expressing its approval for everything going on in Iraq and elsewhere. So it's not enough to say you want to vote for Bush because you think the economy is finally coming around. It's not enough to say you want to vote for Bush because God hates abortions, and it's not enough to say you want to vote for Bush because you think he's a pious, moral man. You can want to vote for him for those reasons if you want, but you'd better be aware that you're signing on to everything else as well. You're saying yes to the wars, past, present and future. You're saying, "Screw multilateralism, we should do what we want, when we want, to whomever we want because we can!" even if our allies are telling us the things we're doing are a mistake because they really are mistakes. You're saying that systemic abuse and torture of prisoners bothers you, but not enough to the point where you might actually fire anyone in a position of ultimate responsibility - and you're saying that one loud and clear since you have the chance to fire Bush right then and there, for the prisoner abuse, "lies" (if you want to call them that) about WMD, and other problems (also perhaps keeping in mind what your stance on firing Bill Clinton was when he was found to have lied about having an affair).

You might not even care about all those things you're implicitly saying "Yes" to, you might only care about not electing a guy who you think will raise your taxes, but I guarantee you that the rest of the world cares about those things and doesn't give a damn about your taxes. So maybe the next time America gets attacked by terrorists (and it doesn't appear that we'll be facing a shortage of angry people who hate the United States anytime soon), the rest of the world won't be so quick to stand by our side. Maybe they won't be so quick to offer their assistance, or help track down cells in their country, thinking simply that we got what was coming to us when we checked the box for "George W. Bush and Richard Cheney". One of the things that 9/11 should have taught us is that it matters what the rest of the world thinks about us and that, even if you couldn't care less about foreign relations and only care about what effects you, the possible changes in your tax returns if John Kerry is elected are not going to effect you as much as the reaction by the rest of the world when they see that the American people fully endorse Bush and his policies.

That's all I have to say about this (for now), but I'm going to reprint the Daily Brew article here that I linked to earlier in case the page changes later on.

The Daily Brew
© May 8, 2004
We Are All Wearing The Blue Dress Now

Whether Republicans like it or not, if George Bush is elected in the fall, the entire world will view the election as American approval of the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. It might not be fair, it might not be reasonable, but it is nevertheless reality. Apologies, prosecutions, firings and courts martial will not be enough to expunge the stain this scandal has placed on the honor of the United States. The pictures are simply too graphic. The abuses are simply too horrible. If George Bush is elected President, the entire world will view the election, at a minimum, as tacit approval of these events.

This election will thus no longer merely determine the Presidency. This election is now much larger than the office. The United State’s place in the family of nations is now on the ballot. This election will determine whether the United States will ever again have any standing or moral authority in the rest of the world. The United States cannot simultaneously stand against depraved sexual torture and the wanton abuse of human rights, while electing the commander in chief upon whose watch these events occurred. The seven hundred thousand or so viewers of Fox News may be able to rationalize such cognitive dissonance; the six billion people who make up the remainder of the world will not.

The stakes are thus immeasurable. For better or for worse, a strong, just and moral United States is not simply a luxury. Instead, it has become a precondition for human progress. For better or for worse, the United States has become the indispensable nation. Our economic, technological, and military position in the world insures that we will remain as such for the foreseeable future. The only question that remains, therefore, is whether the United States will have a moral authority on par with our economic and military dominance. That question will be answered in the fall. The election will determine whether America can ever again be seen as a shining city on a hill, a beacon of hope and freedom the illuminates the entire globe. Sadly, the election of George Bush will mean that the United States will instead be viewed as a rat hole prison in Iraq, where nude prisoners were bound together, tortured with hot chemicals, and beaten to death.

Vote carefully, my fellow Americans.

What A Dick... Cheney

"Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had," Mr. Cheney said through a spokesman. "People ought to let him do his job."

I don't know what's scarier, that he could say B.S. like this simply for the propaganda value in the hopes that people will believe it, or the fact that he could actually believe that Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense ever.

The Vice-President then added, "Also, we have always been at war with Eurasia. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And these pictures never existed."