Bliar's African Legacy

As Bliar swans around Africa on his 'goodbye, good riddance' tour. The ongoing war in Iraq is following a fairly classic pattern of an insurgency, as the guerillas learn and adapt to become better at killing the occupiers. You can see this in the most recent attack;

"Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq ran a sophisticated sting on US troops in Diyala province on Memorial Day, killing 8 GIs. First, they shot down a helicopter with small arms fire. Two servicemen died in the crash. The guerrillas knew that a rescue team would come out to the site. So they planted a roadside bomb that killed the rescuers. And, they knew that yet another rescue team would come out to see what happened to the first. So they planted roadside bombs and destroyed the second team, as well."

So the occupiers take to the air to avoid being killed – using air power to hammer the enemy;

"What we do know is this: Since the major combat phase of the war ended in April 2003, the U.S. military has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of air-delivered cluster bombs in Iraq -- the very type of weapon that Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, "the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use." We also know that, according to expert opinion, rockets and cannon fire from U.S. aircraft may account for most U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths and that the Pentagon has restocked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these weapons in recent years."

Hundreds of millions that would be better spent in Africa, the scar on the conscience of the world on things like clean fresh drinking war or AIDS treatments, but no, its being spent on bombs to drop in an unwinable war. So where does Bliar's visit to Africa link to Iraq? This little gem of information;

"Outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair is to intervene this week to try to prevent 700 South Africans – the equivalent of more than one battalion – being forced to quit the British Army because of a proposed anti-mercenary law...Mr Blair is to raise the issue in talks with Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, during his farewell tour of Africa. The South African parliament passed the Prohibition of Mercenary Activities Bill late last year...The draft legislation is aimed at curbing an estimated 20,000 South Africans hiring themselves out as soldiers of fortune in various Third World conflicts, or volunteering for foreign armies."

Bliar's African legacy – South Africans in the British Army fighting in Iraq. Nice.

Policing Priorities in the War on(of) Terror (TM)

It is often the case that you hear of a disproportionate use of state resources. So the cops in Bath spend thousands stopping a climate camp, the state spends millions trying to jail five peace protesters – and remember we are supposed to be in the grip of a tooth-and-nail fight for survival with Islamic radicals, so why is it that 20 cops have been diverted from other crimes to see if a Scottish socialist (or his wife) might have lied in a trial about who he might not (or might) have been having sex with:

Detectives are investigating whether the wife of Tommy Sheridan, the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, committed perjury during his high-profile libel trial against the News of the World....Yesterday, police confirmed that they have stepped up their inquiry, bringing in 20 officers, whose tasks include combing through statements made by Gail Sheridan in Edinburgh's High Court last August. The News of the World was ordered to pay Mr Sheridan £200,000 after it claimed that he was a serial adulterer who hung out in swingers' clubs and took part in orgies.

20 cops!!! For fucks sake, you've got the rape conviction rate in the dumps, politicians committing war crimes and the state puts 20 cops onto a perjury case? I guess the fact that the guy in question does not believe in the neo-liberal war on terror and won in court against one of Mrdoch's papers is an issue worth 20 cops.

The War on(of) Terror Continues to Unravel

As Bliar starts to pack his things at number 10, his legacy, Iraq and its fall out continues to burn...

In Basra, militants launched an attack on the UK base in response to the killing of their leader:

In apparent retaliation for the killing of their commander, Mahdi Army militiamen launched a fierce 2 and a half-hour assault on a British base in the southern Shiite city of Basra. The British military must have been alarmed by the assault, since they called in an air strike on the militiamen. Basra crowds said that the airstrike killed 8 innocent civilians and held a public funeral procession for them.

In Afghanistan another solider is killed and four injured in clashes:

A British soldier was killed and four others wounded in Afghanistan on Friday night in heavy fighting. The death was the third this week by British forces in the Middle East. Two other deaths have been reported.

In Somalia the violence continues:

At least one person has been killed and four others were wounded when a roadside bomb went off in north of Mogadishu, Somalia capital on Saturday

In Lebanon, the blowback from covert ops starts to get nasty:

As Seymour Hersh first reported, in an article penned back in March, the U.S. has begun to fund various Sunni extremist groups as part of what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East”...This policy appears to have backfired in Lebanon, where a militant Sunni group, Fatah al-Islam, has drawn the Lebanese army into the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Rather than acting as a counter to local Shia bogeyman, Hezbollah, the current backlash has Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Lebanese army colluding in order to crush the intransigent Salafists.

Some legacy.

Iran: From Axis of Evil to Super-Evil

That bastion of liberal democracy, the Guardian, ran a startling story this week on how Iran is the real bogey-man in Iraq. An 'unnamed US official' (dodgy!) stated that Iran is backing everybody in the region against the US. Iran we are supposed to believe is backing the Shia resistance (ok, I can see this, but not every Shia faction is pro-Iran), the Sunni resistance (so now they are backing people who are attacking their allies?) , al-Qaida (they are backing people who consider them to be heretics?) and now the Taliban (who, again, Iran is ideological opposed). I think all this is unlikely. So, ok, the U$ might believe all this, but the article presents no evidence of this at all. So, ok, an 'unnamed US official' might suggest this, but you would expect a journalist to talk to other people, offer counter opinion and so on – nope, it's all there uncontested on the front page.

Meanwhile the 'surge' continues to fail:

Alas, the bad news is that sectarian death squad attacks, which produce bodies in the street every morning, have crept back up. Sudarsan Raghavan of WaPo discovered that more people have been killed that way so far in May than had been in all of January, before the new security plan (the "surge") was implemented.

And fail...

Farmers in southern Iraq have started for the first time to grow opium poppies in their fields, sparking fears that Iraq might become a serious drugs producer along the lines of Afghanistan.

'Hidden' Peak Oil Warning

You can often find very important news 'hidden' away in the business section of the paper. This is not surprising, as in a system based on business (capitalism) the real power is going to be in business and so the real news about what business does! The article is about the Russian's seizing back control of some major gas reserves from BP. What I found interesting is a nod to peak oil that is just rushed past the reader as a simple matter-of-fact statement;

BP, like other energy majors, is struggling to replace its faltering reserves...

Hang on! What this seems to say is all the major oil firms are struggling to find new reserves of oil and so seems to add credibility to reports that peak oil is here.