Deep Blade Journal

Putin joins Cheney in the vote-for-Bush-or-die chorus

Russian president Vladimir Putin said today that if Bush loses the US election, the “spread of terrorism” around the world will follow.

According to Dick Cheney, the American people ought to know why this Russian hardliner has such enthusiasm for Bush. After all, back in March when John Kerry spoke of foreign support, Cheney said

At the very least, we have a right to know what he is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy. American voters are the ones charged with determining the outcome of this election - not unnamed foreign leaders.

But in this present case, we actually know exactly what the foreign leader named Putin is up to. Russia is headed back to the days of the gulags in a headlong thrust facilitated by internal terror, most recently the Beslan school incident. Worse, there is a whole element of threat to energy security with the Yukos clampdown and other developments in the worlds’s largest oil producer. Here is how a concerned group from the infamous Project for a New American Century put it in a statement released three weeks ago:

We are also worried about the deteriorating conduct of Russia in its foreign relations. President Putin’s foreign policy is increasingly marked by a threatening attitude towards Russia’s neighbors and Europe’s energy security, the return of rhetoric of militarism and empire, and by a refusal to comply with Russia’s international treaty obligations. In all aspects of Russian political life, the instruments of state power appear to be being rebuilt and the dominance of the security services to grow. We believe that this conduct cannot be accepted as the foundation of a true partnership between Russia and the democracies of NATO and the European Union.

What do Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin each see in the other’s soul that mates them so closely in the Terror War?

In reported confidential remarks to supporters, Bush seems to accept reality of the oil peak and projects certitude that along with expansion of nuclear, we can drill our way past it

So it really is not clear to me that President Bush even understood the oil peak concept when a concerned supporter asked him about it, since by definition, we cannot exceed peak oil by drilling and pumping more. But here is the stunning moment journalist and author Ron Suskind reveals in Without a Doubt, an article published today in the New York Times Magazine (emphasis added to oil remarks):

“I’m going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry’s throat”, George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd — at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.

The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.

He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that “Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis … then we’re in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil“.

He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.

“Won’t that be amazing”? said Peter Stent, a rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. “Can you imagine? Four appointments”!

After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what he’s going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to peak.

BUSH SAID: “I’m going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting”. He mentions energy from “processing corn”.

“I’m going to bring all this up in the debate, and I’m going to push it”, he said, and then tried out a line. “Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport”?

The questions came from many directions — respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he’d “spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq”, that “homeland security cost more than I originally thought.”

In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that “hands down”, he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany. “You know, I’m sitting there with Schroder one day with Colin and Condi. And I’m thinking: What’s Schroder thinking?! He’s sitting here with two blacks and one’s a woman”.

But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind: his second term.

“I’m going to come out strong after my swearing in”, Bush said, “with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.” The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us “two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I’ll be quacking like a duck”.

Many of these exchanges are truly freightening. I now fear a second Bush term more than ever. We won’t recognize our country, or our world if the chimperor is allowed four more years of blind destruction while his gut gives him surety that he is doing the right thing. Let’s hope he’s quacking inside a month. The whole article is well worth the read.

An excellent blog called not watching television has paid Deep Blade Journal a huge compliment. Thank you, cs!

At nwt, cs has an Action Alert concerning a Republican attempt to squash development of the Nantucket Sound Wind Farm, off the coast at Cape Cod, Massachusetts — where Senator John Warner (R-VA) has a vacation home! Oh, the aesthetics! Some people do hate the thought of turbines in their backyards, apparently including Ted Kennedy.

To me, wind machines would be more beautiful than the natural-gas-fired generating station that is my neighbor down the road a piece. Talk about view! We get to see the steam clouds coming out of that thing all through the cold months.

In comments to nwt’s alert, I see that this language, snuck into a larger bill, has been removed. Glory hallelujah!

Now I feel a responsibility to post on renewable energy, a topic I have covered very little in Deep Blade Journal, except to say on a few occasions that there is no renewable source that is even going to come close to replacing liquid petrol products, especially for transportation fuels. David Goodstein makes this argument in Out of Gas. Likewise, Matthew Simmons says frequently in talks that “there is no Plan B” to replace conventional oil.

Electrical generation is another matter. Natural gas much more so than oil is now the Achilles heel of our electric energy supply. Here, wind does have the potential to replace a lot of megawatts. This table on US wind energy potential and utilization comes from Roger A. Hinrichs and Merlin Kleinbach, Energy: Its Use and the Environment, third edition (Brooks/Cole, 2002), a book I assign to my physics students:

As you can see, there could be a great deal of wind energy development in the US. It won’t happen with Cheney in office. President Kerry will be much, much better on this front, though I wonder what he thinks of the Nantucket Sound project…anyone know?

I’ll post again on the limitations of renewable energy. It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s just that life in currently developed countries will be very, very different in a few decades as the energy picture changes.

But many of these votes may be lost

Juan Cole has comments about an interesting election analysis posted today. Cole cites a “truly excellent” Guardian article by Gary Younge, “Under siege since 9/11, Arab voters shift to Kerry”. Younge writes:

By luck rather than design Arab-Americans are a sizeable force in many swing states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. In a third of the states needed to win the electoral college, Arab-Americans make up more than the gaps between the two parties.

What is more they are up for grabs. In 2000 they backed George Bush. This year they are leaning half-heartedly towards his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. In a close race which will be decided in just a few places, Arab-Americans are a rare and precious phenomenon: a swing constituency in several swing states.

Post-911 targeting of the community by the Bush Administration has driven it away from the Republicans. But Kerry/Edwards is locked into the Israel lobby, a point made clear by John Edwards during the veep debate:

GWEN IFILL: Senator Edwards, as we wrap up the foreign policy part of this, I do want to talk to you about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Today, a senior member of Islamic Jihad was killed in Gaza. There have been suicide bombings, targeted assassinations, mortar attacks, all of this continuing at a time when the United States seems absent in the peace-making process.

What would your administration do?

First of all, do you agree that the United States is absent? Maybe you don’t.

But what would your administration do to try to resolve that conflict?

JOHN EDWARDS: Well, first of all, I do agree that we’ve been largely absent, not entirely absent, but largely absent from the peace-making process over the last four years.

And let me just say a couple of preliminary things and then talk about where we are now.

First, the Israeli people not only have the right to defend themselves, they should defend themselves. They have an obligation to defend themselves.

I mean, if I can, just for a moment, tell you a personal story. I was in Jerusalem a couple of years ago, actually three years ago, in August of 2001, staying at the King David Hotel.

We left in the morning, headed to the airport to leave, and later in the day I found out that that same day, not far from where we were staying, the Sbarro Pizzeria was hit by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed. Six children were killed.

What are the Israeli people supposed to do? How can they continue to watch Israeli children killed by suicide bombers, killed by terrorists?

They have not only the right to the obligation to defend themselves.

Now, we know that the prime minister has made a decision, an historic decision, to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza. It’s important for America to participate in helping with that process.

Now, if Gaza’s being used as a platform for attacking the Israeli people, that has to be stopped. And Israel has a right to defend itself. They don’t have a partner for peace right now. They certainly don’t have a partner in Arafat, and they need a legitimate partner for peace.

And I might add, it is very important for America to crack down on the Saudis who have not had a public prosecution for financing terrorism since 9/11.

And it’s important for America to confront the situation in Iran, because Iran is an enormous threat to Israel and to the Israeli people.

Arab-American voters hearing this one-sided, pro-Israel tough talk are in a quandary. Younge quotes one, “People are very anti-Bush but we need to motivate them to go out and vote for Kerry and Edwards and they don’t make it easy.”

Another said, “We don’t expect them to be pro-Palestinian. But they won’t even say ‘We support a just peace in the Middle East’.”

Note to Juan Cole: Thank you for Informed Comment, one of the most valuable websites on the entire internet, and thank you for the link back to Deep Blade Journal.

You can’t miss this. It really rattled the cage.

Major kudos to Naomi Klein. Her recent breathtaking exposé on Year Zero planning for Iraq is essential for understanding our recent history. (Klein interview here.)

See also: Punitive measures on Iraq contracts put Bush in clown suit and Submerging Iraq found here.

Addendum: Definitely re-read Jim Henry’s fine December 2003 examination in Submerging Markets of how James Baker contributed to the debt mess Iraq worked itself into during the 1980s. Now that Naomi Klein reveals, in The Nation story cited above, Baker’s failure to help Iraq out of it as was his charge last December from President Bush, we have a plaintive reply dashing Jim’s hope that this “Baker Plan” be “more successful”.

Imperial atrocities pile up and a major energy crisis brews while candidates jab

Oh, where to begin. As I have posted before, the big losers in the presidential debates are the people of the world on top of whose heads both major candidates are promising to conduct an unrelenting Terror War. The final edition, a domestic policy debate in Arizona Wednesday night was no exception. Here is how John Kerry laid out his promise to kill, and kill, and kill…

I can do a better job of waging a smarter, more effective war on terror and guarantee that we will go after the terrorists. I will hunt them down, and we’ll kill them, we’ll capture them. We’ll do whatever is necessary to be safe.

I added the emphasis to the diplomatic language Kerry used, roughly “any means necessary” is okay in the Terror War. Presumably Bush agrees. Implicit in this is that America will decide on its own what means are necessary, even if large numbers of civilians happen to be in the way. The US will decide for itself if shooting first and asking questions later is what is necessary.

Cases in point: Samarra and Fallujah

While both major candidates issue these promises to prosecute the biggest, meanest Terror War that they can, the bodies in the demonstration project to show US global hegemony, otherwise known as Iraq, are piling up like cordwood. In the Iraqi town of Samarra, US forces gave the city a surprise pounding two weeks ago, killing over 100 people the US called “rebels”. Tactics used by the US in Samarra included stationing snipers to shoot anything that moved. According to the BBC report cited:

Many bodies were strewn in the street. “They are buried in the gardens of their homes,” Ali Abdul-Latif told the Associated Press news agency.

Witnesses in the centre of the city have spoken of American snipers shooting at anyone who appeared on the streets. One ambulance driver said medics have been unable to get to the injured.

Lately, the focus has shifted to Fallujah, where today US warplanes “have launched intense air and ground strikes”, for the ostensible purpose of smoking out the almost mythic figure of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is said to operate there. Five were reported dead so far, but nobody knows the real number.

Very sadly, the politics of these brutal repressions favor Bush. As Patrick Cockburn writes, “The current US military campaign is very much geared to getting President George Bush reelected to the White House in November”.

Rape rooms, Children’s prisons

By all rights, George Bush is naked on these atrocities, preaching hypocrisy of an order my mind simply is unable to process. I have entries here, here, and here that Kerry should have read, clicked through the sources, and used; William Saletan published some time back Rape Rooms: A Chronology What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded — damning indictments.

But again, sadly no. Silence from the challenger. I guess America is not ready to look at the truth about itself during an election season, if ever.

Gathering energy crisis

In the news today:

Crude oil rose to a record $54.76 a barrel in New York after an Energy Department report showed that U.S. supplies of heating oil plunged last week.

So you’d think that by last night the presidential candidates would have had something to say about energy. Almost…nada.

Kerry did manage to blurt out,

This president has taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see. Health-care costs for the average American have gone up 64 percent; tuitions have gone up 35 percent; gasoline prices up 30 percent [emphasis added]; Medicare premiums went up 17 percent a few days ago; prescription drugs are up 12 percent a year.

But guess what, America? The wages of Americans have gone down. The jobs that are being created in Arizona right now are paying about $13,700 less than the jobs that we’re losing.

And the president just walks on by this problem. The fact is that he’s cut job-training money. $1 billion was cut. They only added a little bit back this year because it’s an election year.

This in my opinion was an effective attack from Kerry — mighty true and key to his win in the debate.

But where is the general discussion of energy policy? Again, Bush is naked here with the secret task force, the pork-laden energy bill written by Republican industry reps, and a war!

What I wrote after the veep debate remains distressingly true after this one. Even the G7 ministers saw fit to worry about oil in a public statement two weeks ago. And Bob Schieffer should be ashamed of himself for failing to get the candidates to talk about this major issue, about which both have extensive proposals.

(Read Kerry’s latest quite interesting energy-related speech here.)

If you’re not sick enough over what you’ve heard is happening in Iraq, click here. Oy.

Everything now should be okay with the deepblade.net domain. It turns out that I have set things up a little differently. This blog will open directly from http://journal.deepblade.net. The Deep Blade Archive site will open with http://archive.deepblade.net.

Deep Blade Archive includes the original pre-Iraq-war postings, plus a selection of other writings on war & peace issues going back to the first Gulf War and even the Reagan years. It’s a valuable resource that I hope to keep building, as the more things change the more they stay the same.

Meanwhile http://deepblade.net (or http://www.deepblade.net) now opens a welcome/navigation screen that will appear for 15 seconds. This allows a choice of the Archive or the Blog. After 15 seconds, you forward to the Blog automatically.

Question: Why did Bush lose so big in the first debate?

Answer: Nobody believes he works as hard as he says he does!

After all, the president’s primary response during the summer of 2001 — prior to the airplane attacks of 9/11, but after the CIA director had his “hair on fire” with warnings while Bush was handed the famous top-secret Aug. 6, 2001 presidential intelligence briefing memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US” (referencing aircraft hijackings) — was to take a long vacation.

In that September 30 debate, Bush referred to the “hard work” the Iraq project now requires at least 15 times.

Saturday Night Live noticed this, doing a small riff on it during its October 2 season premier. But do check out a fine send-up of the presidential work ethic by Harry Shearer in Le Show for October 3 (Real media link). An mp3 audio file (4 MB) of Shearer’s “hard work” Bush satire is posted here. (Find the link, right click and “save target as” to save it on your own system.)

Cakewalk?

Of course the more serious duplicity in the president’s “hard work” relates to the before-the-fact notions of his war architects, notably by an insufferable Pentagon mouthpiece called Kenneth Adelman, that Iraq would be an easy go for America. Long before the invasion or the aircraft carrier landing during which Bush declared “mission accomplished”, Adelman scolded early skeptics of the invasion, “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk”.

The rest of the story is of course heartbreaking — tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Americans, thousands of Americans dead and injured, a permanent anti-US insurgency, and probably terror threats — for us and for the people of Iraq, and the wider Middle East/South Asia region, for years to come. The foolish marketing by Bush and Company of liberation and democracy at gunpoint exacts steep costs from both the conquered people and the conquerors.