Note: I wasn’t at this meeting, but I got a first-hand summary from someone who was.  I’m also friends with several of the attendees and am therefore not fully objective:

In today’s Brattleboro Reformer, there’s a piece by Howard Weiss-Tisman:

A public forum that was scheduled to answer questions about a proposed homeless shelter for downtown Bellows Falls brought out a large group of supporters for the project.

About 35 people attended the meeting, which was held at Our Place Drop-In Center.

And while there were some concerns about the funding and location of the shelter, most of those who spoke said they thought the village needed to have a place for people to spend the night during the winter.

A group made up of church and business leaders, social service workers and local residents wants to open the shelter at 33 Canal St. If the plan moves ahead, the shelter will be open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and will have up to 15 people spending the night.

The main village of Bellows Falls is one stretch of road– it encompasses a movie theater, a sporting goods store, an American Legion post.  On either end there are some gas stations.  There used to be other businesses on that stretch.  Sover.net got bought out and is no longer housed there.  Oona’s, a great location for music venues, burnt down a few years ago.  The hardware store is still there.  There’s a bookstore and a bank.

The proposed location for the shelter is right off of main street, on Canal street, which starts across from the movie theater and goes up along the canal, running opposite from the train station.

This is a very small stretch of land, and there are several homeless people whom you can see out in the area pretty much any day of the week.  Some of these homeless people are veterans who came back damaged enough that they just couldn’t make things work.  Some of them are just ordinary people who either took or got taken on a wrong turn somewhere.

There were a few people at that meeting last night who objected to that shelter, because of fears about what the homeless would do and whether or not they presented a danger.

The thing is, these aren’t people who are in Bellows Falls because of its amazing opportunities and potential for growth.  They’re there because after being ground up and beaten down, it’s just where life spit them out.  They’re in the town already, and winter in Vermont is pretty damned cold.  So we have choices.  We find a way to help them survive the cold and give them a chance to live another year, or we simply say that our fears are more important than that, that it’s worth it to let someone else die because we’re worried about what the nearby shelter might do to our sales revenue.

I’m probably being a little unfair here, so I should be clear: I don’t think anyone who argued against this shelter is a bad person.  I just think they’re blinded by their own fears and prejudices.

But I should also be clear about something: there are a lot of places where good people have room to disagree about something of consequence and that everyone has a good and valid point.  

This is not that case.

This shelter needs to be built.  

President Said Repeatedly During ’08 Campaign That Bush’s War in Iraq Was a Distraction From the ‘Real War on Terror’ in Afghanistan and Is Shifting U.S. Resources Accordingly — But He Risks Alienating His Hard-Core Anti-War Supporters Who Voted for Him Amid Sharp Divisions in Public Sentiment on Whether to Send In More Troops

President Obama speaks to members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III (to the president’s left) and Vice President Joe Biden (back to camera) take notes during a recent meeting at the White House Situation Room. After weeks of deliberations with his military chiefs and national security advisers, the president is scheduled to deliver his first prime-time televised address to the nation tomorrow night (Tuesday), during which he will announce a significant increase in the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. While the number of troops to be deployed is reported to be fewer than the 40,000 requested by General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander there, the buildup comes amid declining public support for the war effort. (Photo: Pete Souza/The White House)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Monday, November 30, 2009)

(Updated 11:30 a.m. EST Monday, November 30, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama said repeatedly that President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was a distraction from “the real war on terror” in Afghanistan. “We took our eye off Afghanistan and fought the wrong war in Iraq,” Obama said at every opportunity on the stump.

Now, more than six-and-a-half years after Bush sent nearly a quarter-million United States troops to Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and nearly a year into his own presidency, Obama is about make good on his campaign promise to shift America’s focus back to Afghanistan.

After weeks of meetings and deliberations with his top military officers and national security advisers, the president is scheduled to deliver his first prime-time televised address to the nation tomorrow night (Tuesday) to announce a significant increase in the number of American forces in Afghanistan.

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The commander-in-chief will deliver his address before an assembly of Army cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. The president said last week that, more than eight years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, “it is still in America’s vital national interest to dismantle and destroy” al-Qaida and its extremist allies.

For Obama, tomorrow night’s speech is a “moment of truth”  that — like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and both George Bushes, father and son, before him — will ultimately make or break his presidency.

Obama won last year’s election in large part because millions of Americans who had grown tired of the Iraq War voted for Obama on the strength of his outspoken opposition to that conflict. Now he risks incurring the wrath of many of his supporters who thought they voted in a president who would end both wars and bring U.S. troops home.

NEW POLLS FIND PUBLIC OPINION SHARPLY DIVIDED ON AFGHAN WAR, TROOP BUILDUP

And the president is about the announce his decision amid sharply conflicting sentiment on the war effort among the American public overall. A November 17 Washington Post/ABC News Poll found that the percentage of Americans in favor of maintaining the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan fell to  44 percent, with 52 percent saying that the effort there wasn’t worth it.

However, a USA Today/Gallup Poll released last week found that, even as public support for the war has fallen dramatically, Americans nonetheless remain sharply divided on whether to send in more troops or to start bringing them home.

The poll found a slight uptick in the percentage of Americans supporting an increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, with 47 percent in favor of adding troops and 39 percent preferring a cutback. Just two weeks ago, the USA Today/Gallup Poll found the public almost evenly split, with 37 percent favoring an increase, while the percentage favoring a reduction remained unchanged at 39 percent.

DEMOCRATS BALK, REPUBLICANS BACK OBAMA ON WAR; INDEPENDENTS SPLIT

With Obama expected to announce that anywhere from 30,000 to 35,000 more U.S. troops will be deployed to Afghanistan — fewer than the 40,000 that General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of American forces, had asked for — he is likely to face a reversal of political fortune: Even as Democrats rebel against him, the president is drawing support from the opposition Republicans.

The new USA Today/Gallup Poll found that a solid 57 percent of Democrats favor a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, while only 29 percent favor a buildup. In sharp contrast, an overwhelming 72 percent of Republicans favor a troop increase, while only 17 percent favor a pullout.

Independents — those mostly moderate-to-conservative voters who are absolutely vital to the Democrats keeping control of Congress in 2010 and to the president winning a second term in 2012 — were almost evenly split, with 46 percent supporting a troop increase and 45 percent favoring a cutback.

“Republicans agree that a strategic review of the current situation in Afghanistan is warranted, and we will work to ensure that our commanders on the ground have all the additional troops they have requested,” said Representative John Boehner (R -Ohio), the House minority leader.

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), Obama’s opponent in last year’s election, has been pressing the president for months for a buildup in American forces in Afghanistan. Attending a international security forum in Canada on November 20, McCain told reporters that a hike in the number of U.S. troops to Afghanistan would bring on a more successful outcome of the war effort there, similar to Bush’s highly controversial “surge” of troops in Iraq.

“I even am bold enough to predict that within a year or 18 months, you will see success if the effort is sufficiently resourced and there is a commitment to get the job done before setting a date to leave the region,” McCain said.

AN EERIE ECHO OF VIETNAM: NIXON’S 1970 SPEECH ON CAMBODIA

For the millions of anti-war voters who cast their ballots for Obama in the belief that he would be an anti-war president and bring all American troops home from both Iraq and Afghanistan, the president’s televised address on Tuesday night is likely to be seen by many of them as a betrayal  — and a repeat of history.

On April 30, 1970, then-President Richard Nixon, in a televised Oval Office address to the nation, announced an incursion of U.S. troops into Cambodia during the Vietnam War to disrupt what Nixon called North Vietnamese “sanctuaries.”

This led to massive protests by as many as four million young people on college campuses and even high schools across the nation, many of whom felt Nixon had betrayed them — and at the same time were openly fearful that they would end up on the battlefield, as military service back then was compulsory for able-bodied American men aged 18 to 26.

Forty years before Obama’s historic run for the White House, Nixon had campaigned for the presidency in 1968 on a  promise to bring  “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,”  declaring that “Never has so much power been used so ineffectively as in Vietnam” — a direct slap at his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson.

Congress abolished the draft in 1973, just as Nixon began withdrawing American forces from Vietnam. However, all American males aged 18 to 25 are still required to register with the Selective Service System — even though there’s been no real political will in Congress to reinstate the draft since the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 with the passage in 1971 of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution.

EXPERTS WARN OF TROUBLE FOR DEMS IN 2010 IF THEY REJECT OBAMA STRATEGY

Political analysts inside and outside Washington warn that if Obama can’t convince his party to support a troop increase, the consequences could prove hazardous for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.

“I think it threatens his domestic agenda pretty substantially, unless he takes the people along with him,”  Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas, told Politico.com. “That’s what a lot of other Democrats like [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi are worried about right now…..He risks alienating large chunks of the Democratic Party.”

Already, Obama has lost the support of anti-war firebrand Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who denounced the planned buildup as an “indefensible” escalation of the war, in defense of a “corrupt” government in Afghanistan. “We can’t afford this war,” Kucinich insisted. “We’ve  got to start focusing of things that matter to people here [in America] and what matters to people in the United States is not expanding the war in Afghanistan.

“We’ve got to get out of there,” Kucinich said.

Kucinich was one of only a handful of Democrats who in October voted against a must-pass $680 billion defense authorization bill — which included $130 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — despite the attachment of a measure long sought after by gay rights advocates to expand the federal hate crimes law to includes cases of bias-motivated crimes against gays.

“Every thinking person wants to take a stand against hate crimes, but isn’t war the most offensive of hate crimes?” asked Kucinich. “To have people have to make a choice, or contemplate the hierarchy of hate crimes, is cynical. I don’t vote to fund wars, period. If you are opposed to war, you don’t vote to authorize or appropriate money for it.”

AFGHANISTAN ‘SURGE’ FRAUGHT WITH RISKS

But in a commentary published by the World Politics Review in September, Thomas Barnett, a contributing editor and online columnist for Esquire magazine, warned that the U.S. was making a big mistake in failing to take into account the fact that the war in Afghanistan is an international effort.

“What’s especially odd about this debate is its stunningly self-centered tone,” Barnett wrote. “What are America’s national interests? How long can America last? How much will America be forced to spend in blood and treasure? What will happen to America’s standing if we withdraw? The whole conversation feels like a neurotic superpower talking to its therapist.

“We continue to debate our involvement as though this is ‘America’s war’ alone,” Barnett continued, “when it is nothing of the sort and never has been, even if its triggering tragedy — the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — is.”

About 55,000 NATO troops are in Afghanistan now, about half of whom are Americans. The president’s decision will enlarge the total U.S. force by more than 50 percent.

Then there is the warning issued on Veterans Day by Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, in which he wrote in is a series of diplomatic cables to Washington that sending in more troops would be unwise because of “rampant corruption” in the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the envoy said is undermining its legitimacy.

Eikenberry, a retired Army general and former commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan under Bush, wrote that it would be “unwise” to send in more troops at a time when the domestic political situation in Afghanistan in the face of a still-disputed presidential election remained unsettled, despite Karzai’s apparent re-election victory.

For their part, Afghan officials insist the training of local security forces needs to be given top priority, so that their own troops can lead the fight against Taliban and other anti-government insurgents. But Western military advisers remain skeptical that this can be achieved anytime soon.

MORE TROOPS MEANS MORE CASUALTIES, EXPERT WARNS

Regardless of the war’s ultimate outcome, one thing is clear: Any increase in the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is sure to raise the specter of  increased American casualties, according to John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State University.

“If [Obama’s] going to be more aggressive militarily, it means more Americans are going to die and that’s the thing that moves public opinion more than anything else,” Mueller told Politico.com, adding that with public opinion already on the brink of turning against the war, the president risks facing the same political fate with Afghanistan that befell Johnson and Nixon over Vietnam and Bush over Iraq.

“Once people are turned off on a war they tend to stay turned off,” Mueller said. “Even when it became clear that the war was decidedly going better, the numbers of people who supported it didn’t move much.”

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

(Promoting, with a reminder to candidates that GMD will front page messages such as this to the community. – promoted by odum)

Hello GMD Readers,

Sincerely,

Susan

As I travel the state and talk with Vermonters, I’m not surprised when I’m asked about the budget and what is the next year or two going to be like. Like every state, Vermont is struggling to maintain the services all Vermonters expect, as well as for Vermonters in need, in a time of global financial problems.

Here, in very simple terms and numbers, is what the state is facing for the next two years. It is important to remember that many states are in far worse shape than Vermont, but that doesn’t make the reduction in services any easier for Vermonters. More after the jump

The part of the state budget that we pay most attention to is the General Fund. That is the part of the budget that pays for most of the services that we associate with government: law enforcement, human services, corrections, health care, the judiciary, keeping the environment clean, economic development, labor and industry, permits of most kinds, state parks, higher education all those types of services. It does not include the education fund or transportation.

The General Fund in this past year was $1.2 billion dollars. It’s important to remember that many of those General Fund dollars can be matched with federal dollars, so that $1.2 billion represents a great deal more in spending ability.

The next budget, which we call the 2011 budget, is a fiscal year that begins on July 1, 2010. We need to reduce our General Fund spending by $85 million.

The following year, 2012, we need to further reduce our General Fund spending on that lower base number by $75 million. Once we have achieved that, we project we will have our spending of General Fund dollars in line with our projected revenues.

That means that our revenues will be at the same level for 2013 as they were in 2006, and our spending must be at that same level, too.

If you think about your family budget, let’s say you earned $35,000 this year. Next year you can expect to earn $32,515. The year after that, you expect just $30,336. With the cost of everything going up, how would that affect your spending choices? Now you begin to see the problem that confronts our state.

We have already reduced spending by more than $200 million dollars in the past two sessions. That hasn’t been easy. We have avoided truly terrible reductions because of the federal stimulus money. Both the administration and the legislature used that federal money to balance this year’s budget, and we will continue to use it to help balance the next year’s budget.

Then the federal dollars are gone and the states will need to have their spending in line with their revenues.

Going back to the family budget, this would mean that next year you would get help from your Great-Aunt Pearl to make up the difference in your loss of income. The year after that, you’ll get nothing.

In addition to these budgetary issues for the General Fund, there is wide spread concern about the amount of money we spend on K-12 education. As the number of students on a statewide level shrinks, we spend more and more on education per student. We pay for education with property taxes, a source of constant conversation and concern.

The state doesn’t have any additional money to contribute to the education fund. The changes we need to make to insure a high quality, affordable education for all students is another conversation, for another time.

This is from a Daily Kos diary, discussing the results from the Research 2000 poll they commissioned that has the whole blogosphere talking:

QUESTION: In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?

The results were, to put it mildly, shocking:

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Republican Voters: 81/14

Independent Voters: 65/23

DEMOCRATIC VOTERS: 56/40

Two in five Democratic voters either consider themselves unlikely to vote at this point in time, or have already made the firm decision to remove themselves from the 2010 electorate pool. Indeed, Democrats were three times more likely to say that they will “definitely not vote” in 2010 than are Republicans.

This is big, big trouble. Can you say “progressive demoralization?”

On civil rights, economics, the war, Guantanamo, etc – Obama has done the typical mainstream Democrat thing by letting the right panic him into running away from campaign promises. Sure, there have been reasons to celebrate (such as a halt to the right wing slide of the Supreme Court – a biggie), but we’ve seen backpedaling on the marquee stuff – and are still facing disappointment on health care and likelier disappointment on climate change. The Democratic congress, too, has been unwilling to do its own part when called on, or to meaningfully challenge the Democratic President when he has signaled (both openly and behind the scenes) retreats from campaign promises. Much of this comes back to an unwillingness to play hardball with so-called “moderate” members, though in fairness the House leadership has been more aggressive than the Senate (at least for the moment).

But, we’re told, we have to be pragmatic. The obvious question, then, is where’s the pragmatism in getting our asses kicked and accomplishing nothing?

We often hear that government should be run like a business, however the “experts” applaud innovation in business but consider innovation in policy to not be “pragmatic.” In every other aspect of life, looking at what historically works and what doesn’t work before making an important decision is considered prudent, but in discussing federal policy such as health care, we’re told that’s not “pragmatic.”

And finally, looking at what actually wins elections, as opposed to what “experts” on the teevee and in the professional electioneering world tell us win elections (e.g., always run to the right) is considered dogmatic and loopy, rather than “pragmatic.”

Which just proves once again how many deeply dimwitted, self-congratulatory, bubble people there are who consider themselves elections “experts” and “professionals.” This is in no way to suggest there aren’t dogmatic absolutists on the left who couldn’t get elected in a one-candidate race, but those folks are hardly the ones in the positions of power, working so hard to bring on large-scale electoral catastrophe.

No, that would be the “pragmatists” such as Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid.

And as a further example of that “pragmatic” thinking, don’t be surprised if the “pragmatists” who insist that if everybody would shut up, follow along, be patient and give up their silly lefty dreams still blame self-inflicted defeat on the liberals. A cool, reasoned analysis of cause and effect will always fall before the power of intellectual inertia.

Or to put it more simply, if Obama and the Congressional Dems don’t start coming through, and they all get their collective asses kicked in the 2010 elections, expect the “pragmatists” to blame it all on the liberal base for not seeing the wisdom in being more like them.

The following critique of Peter Galbraith was written by Robin Yassin-Kassab, a colleague of mine from PULSE. Robin is a great guy and he knows his stuff.  This was so well written that it should be posted here. I think we should hear from Arab perspectives of Galbraith’s solution for Iraq. I also recommend checking out Robin’s latest book. It’s called The Road from Damascus.– Christian Avard

Crossposted at PULSE and Qunfuz.

In 2007 I read Peter W. Galbraith’s “The End of Iraq”, which suggests cutting Iraq into three mini-states, and then responded in two parts. The first part criticises Galbraith’s thesis, and the second part criticises the failures of Arabism. Both are merged below. More recently it has been revealed that Galbraith actually stood to gain financially from the dismantlement of Iraq.

Peter W. Galbraith’s book ‘The End of Iraq’ argues the initially persuasive thesis that Iraqis have already divided themselves into three separate countries roughly corresponding to the Ottoman provinces of Basra (the Shii Arab south), Baghdad (the Sunni Arab centre) and Mosul (the Kurdish north), and that American attempts to keep the country unified are bound to fail. I agree wholeheartedly with Galbraith’s call for America to withdraw from Iraq – America is incapable of stopping the civil war, and is in fact exacerbating it. (update: I stick by this. The civil war has to some extent calmed because of internal Iraqi dynamics, not because of the US ‘surge’ – the Sunni forces turned on al-Qaida, and also realised that they had lost the battle for Baghdad and national power. Some groups then allied with the US for a variety of reasons to do with self-preservation). The rest of Galbraith’s argument is much more debatable.

For a start, he minimises the extent to which the US occupation has contributed to the disintegration of Iraq. I do not wish to deny the sectarian and ethnic fractures which exist in Iraq and other Arab countries, but it is reasonable to expect that any country, having suffered dictatorship, war, sanctions, and then the overnight collapse of all its institutions, would enter a period of chaos and division. Galbraith accurately records Western support for Saddam Hussain throughout the Iran-Iraq war, when he was gassing Kurds, and the American refusal to intervene when Republican Guards were slaughtering southern Shia in 1991 (the massacres happened under the eyes of American forces occupying the south at the end of the Kuwait war). He describes the criminal failure in 2003 of the occupying forces to stop the looting and burning of every ministry except the oil ministry, of military arsenals and even yellowcake uranium stocks the Americans claimed to be so concerned about in the run-up to the invasion, and of the national museum and national library. (He doesn’t examine claims made at the time by Robert Fisk and others that masked men with Kuwaiti accents were bussed in to certain ministries to set fires professionally.) The attack on Iraq’s – and the world’s – heritage is of course a cultural crime far greater than the despicable Taliban destruction of the Bamyan Buddha statues. Bombing and looting ravaged what was left of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. The Iraqi state was destroyed within the first week of occupation, long before the sectarian killing began.

Galbraith charitably calls incompetence what may more realistically be seen as deliberate divide and rule policies. Certainly arrogance, stupidity and corruption have played a large role – the arrogance and stupidity which allowed Americans to park their tanks on the ruins of Sumerian cities; the corruption which allowed Halliburton to profit by the billion from reconstruction which never happened, and which put Americans in their early twenties, and with no knowledge or experience of Iraq, in charge of entire sectors of the Iraqi economy simply because they were members of the right ‘think tank’ or prayer group. At a certain point, however, it seems naïve to put all the mistakes down to incompetence. From the very beginning it was obvious to me and the people I talk to that a violent assault on an Iraq already crippled by war and sanctions would not result in a prosperous, unified democracy. It was obvious that every ‘mistake’ made would further damage national unity. I and my friends are not geniuses, and unlike the neo-conservative and Zionist architects of the invasion, we aren’t paid to study the Middle East.

The immediate and sweeping dissolution of the Ba’ath Party, the army and security forces made it inevitable that people would look to the nearest militia or criminal gang to provide security and material supplies. Before long each area had its dominant gang, and the country was a free competition zone for Shia, Sunni, takfiri, and Kurdish militias, American and British troops, South African and Latin American mercenaries, imported Wahhabi nihilists, kidnappers and drug traffickers, and so on. John Negroponte, who had made a career setting up fascist death squads to destabilise leftist democracies in Latin America, was brought in to organise Kurdish and Shia militia into ‘police’ to pacify militantly Sunni towns. Meanwhile, Bremer at one stroke abolished Iraqi economic independence, opening every sector of Iraq to privatisation and foreign control.

These supposed ‘mistakes’ give us a much clearer picture of the real purposes of the invasion than all the journalistic psychoanalysis of a traumatised post-September 11th America or of its ignorant president. The war was designed as corporate rape of a resource-rich country and as a further hammer blow to the possibility of any secular Arab state taking on apartheid Israel. Having the Iraqis split into tiny units, each fighting the other and looking for an external sponsor, guarantees that there will be no unified Iraqi force to pose a serious threat to the corporations or their imperial and Zionist facilitators.

Despite the hatreds unleashed by the sectarian war, the number of Arab Iraqis I’ve met who want the disintegration of their country to be formalised is precisely zero. The neat picture ‘The End of Iraq’ presents of three clearcut post-Iraq zones is not realistic. Iraq has splintered into smaller pieces than the three zones Galbraith describes. In the south, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army battle for supremacy. In al-Anbar, the battle is between the tribes, the Ba’ath, and al-Qa’ida. Baghdad, supposedly part of the Sunni zone, has a Shii majority. Mosul is a largely Sunni Arab city with a largely Kurdish hinterland. For these cities and other mixed areas such as Diyala and Babil a formalised partition would lead to greatly intensified ethnic cleansing. The horrific bomb attacks which recently killed 500 Yezidi Kurds happened within the context of a forthcoming referendum on which northern areas will join the Kurdish zone.

And if Iraq is allowed to formally splinter, where does the break-up stop? The Arabs of the Jezira in eastern Syria have more in common ethnically, culturally and tribally with the Arabs of al-Anbar than they do with the urban Levantine Arabs of western Syria. There are almost two million Iraqi refugees in Syria, most in Damascus, very many of them Sunnis who have nowhere to return to if Iraq is not put back together. An ethnic-sectarian Sunni state would also pull at the fabric of Jordan, as artificial a state as they come with its three populations of urban Iraqi Sunnis, Jordanian Beduin, and Palestinian refugees. And in Syria, if the Sunnis were to give their allegiance to a sectarian identity, what would stop the Alawis demanding a state in the north west, or the Druze in the Hauran? Which would bring us back to an early French imperial plan for Syria. I could go on, ad infinitum, to prospects for the division of Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and further afield.

Division is a disaster for all but imperialists and for Israel, the region’s key sectarian state. If the map must be changed, we should aim for fewer state units, not more. Yet Arabism as manifested so far has clearly failed. I’ll examine why in part two.

Part Two

Peter W. Galbraith writes that Iraq is an artificial creation made up of different ethnic groups. This is true, but Iraq is not alone in its artificiality. All states are artificial in that they have been created by historical process and human machination, not by God or nature, and all contain different ethnic groups. More specifically, the centralised nation state in the Middle East (and Africa and much of Asia) is always artificial because the very concept of the nation state is an import from 19th Century Europe. The borders of every Arab state were determined, suddenly, by imperialism, and not by the long processes of war, negotiation and ideological mythmaking that drew borders in Europe. It is this imperialist division of the Arabs which has led to various forms of pan-Arab nationalism.

The definition of ‘Arab’ has expanded over the last hundred and fifty years from describing tribal nomads as opposed to townsmen, to describing the people of the Arabian peninsula, and then to describe all from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf who share the heritage of the Arabic language.

The Ba’ath Party went so far as to find religious significance in ‘Arab,’ as is evident from the slogan ‘One Arab Nation bearing an Eternal Message.’ The ‘risala’ or message is what Arabs would previously have assumed to be the revelation of the Prophet (more often called Messenger in Arabic) Muhammad. The word used for ‘nation’ is ‘umma’ – a word previously used to denote the international Muslim community. In fact, Ba’athism should be seen as one of the twentieth century’s many attempts to compensate for the collapse of traditional religion (Nazism, Zionism, Stalinism, contemporary Wahhabism and hedonist consumerism are others).

In its effort to spiritualise and mythologise Arabism Ba’athism surely takes nationalism to absurd extremes, but it is significant that the Ba’ath Party was founded by a Damascene Christian, and that it appealed in the main to minority communities. Arab nationalism’s potential strength was its inclusive nature, the possibility that Sunni and Shia, Christians and Muslims, urban and rural populations would all identify together as members of the Arab nation. Sadly, it is precisely this inclusiveness that has failed.

If nationalism’s definition of ‘Arab’ had been the widest possible – to engage all those who share the common heritage of the Arabic language in a cooperative enterprise – the Arabs could perhaps have overcome their underdevelopment and imposed borders more easily. They would have had increased political weight for a start, and would not have wasted so much blood and treasure on intra-Arab fighting (or rather, fighting on behalf of the little ruling classes of each state). Given that some Arab countries are blessed with fertile land but not with oil, others with educated people but not with sea ports, an intelligent sharing of resources would have been mutually beneficial.

This cooperation has failed, and there is no Arab state, but the Arab nation exists. The nation, not the state. The nation exists despite the tens of states, and now the attempt to splinter the Arabs further, into yet more mini-states squabbling over sect and ethnic variation, all of them dependent on a corporate-imperial sponsor for survival. It exists in shared language and cultural reference points. Any Arab who travels the great distances of the Arab world will find each corner foreign and also familiar. He will recognise the classic and contemporary music on the radio. He’ll see the same Egyptian films in the cinemas, the same Syrian comedies and historical dramas on the television. He’ll understand the newspaper. He’ll feel welcomed and understood, more than he would, for instance, in a non-Arab Muslim country. Wherever you go in the Arab world the ordinary people want closer economic cooperation between Arab countries, an end to foreign military bases, and justice for the Palestinians. In these times of rising sectarian conflict, it’s important to realise and remember that the Arab nation exists.

So why then is Galbraith’s thesis – that even a single unit of Arabism like Iraq needs to disintegrate – to some extent persuasive? Because the same homogenising impulse that animates both contemporary Islamism and late capitalism has perverted Arabism. I’ll repeat it: Arabism only had a chance if it recognised the diversity of the Arab world’s peoples. The inheritors of Arab history, culture and language include blue-eyed Syrians and black Africans in the Sudan. Many of the heroes of the Arabist narrative were not ethnically Arab at all. Salahuddeen al-Ayubbi (Saladin) was a Kurd, Ibn Rushd a Spaniard, Ibn Batuta a Berber. In Iraq, where Arabism has failed most spectacularly, ‘Arab’ even began to morph into ‘ethnically-Arab Sunni Muslim,’ but many of the great Arabic-language writers and scientists have been Christians and Jews, Berbers and Persians.

The moral degeneration of Arabism is painfully evident on Layla Anwar’s blog. We must make allowances for the fact that Mrs. Anwar lives, it seems, in Baghdad, in the midst of a savage occupation and civil war. Many of the Iraqis I meet who have recently left Iraq are traumatised in some way or other, and Mrs. Anwar probably is too. But then, she doesn’t make any allowances for the Kurds or Shia who suffered so much under the previous regime. She calls the Kurds turds (ha ha), and denies that any were massacred by Saddam Hussain. I must say here that by now, although I don’t believe that new states can set anybody free, I understand the Kurdish desire for an independent state, at least in Iraqi Kurdistan. Perhaps Iraqi Arabs could have persuaded the Kurds to be part of an Arab state if, from the start, they had treated them as full citizens with full rights to cultural expression. What happened was that they were seen as a non-Arab security problem, and that thousands of their villages were razed, hundreds of thousands of their people subjected to poison gas attacks. True, it was a dictatorship, backed at the time by the West, that committed these crimes, and relations between ordinary Kurds and Arabs often remained good. But if people like Layla Anwar can’t accept that the oppression even happened, we have an insurmountable obstacle to coexistence. Mrs. Anwar declares in one of her postings that the Kurds are guests in Arab Iraq. How shameful that this supposed nationalist is unaware of her own country’s history. Kurds have been present in Mesopotamia for as long as Semites, and for far longer than Sunni Muslims.

Mrs. Anwar regards ALL Shia forces in her country as Persian, and therefore inauthentic. Again, exclusive national-chauvinist extremism has blinded her to her country’s reality. The Shia are of course a majority of Iraq’s people. It is both true and unsurprising that many Shia escaped Saddam’s persecution by crossing the border to Iran, where some founded organisations with Iranian help. Some of these organisations, like al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, returned to Iraq after the regime’s fall, made themselves available to the Americans as death squads, and are now in powerful positions. But other organisations, like Moqtada Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi, are Arab nationalist as well as Shia, and resent the Iranian-supported organisations. Mrs. Anwar rightly complains about the persecution of Sunnis by Shia militias, but is silent on both the sectarian repression practised by the Ba’ath regime which provoked the Shia revival, and the horrific Wahhabi terrorism to which Shia militia crimes have been retaliation.

As for more general Iranian influence in Iraq, which many Sunni Arabs are unable to accept, this is natural. The word itself, Iraq, comes from the Persian ‘Eraagh’, meaning ‘lowlands.’ The Arabs of southern Iraq have been as influenced by the cooking and religious and philosophical ideas of Persia as much as the Arabs of Syria have been influenced by the Turks and Mediterranean cultures. This doesn’t stop them being Arabs.

Nations (as opposed to states) are imaginary structures. Their borders are porous and membership in them is not exclusive. You can feel allegiance to the Arabs and also to Islam, or Africa, or Christianity, or Shi’ism. Variety and diversity should be the strength and richness of the Arabs, but many Arabs are ill with the centralised state disease, the rage for conformity which made Saddam Hussain brutalise the majority of Iraq’s people. When we replace humane, inclusive nationalism with exclusive totalitarian police states, we have lost nationalism as a positive force.

There are still glimmers of light. Important sections of Sunni Iraqi opinion have turned decisively against both Wahhabism and Ba’athism. The vast majority of Shia feel both Iraqi and Arab. But the Iraqis and other Arabs will be unable to work cooperatively until they honestly confront sectarianism and the class oppression which it usually masks, until they are able to sympathise with the history of the other, until they can think beyond the imported nation state.

From the Associated Press, courtesy of the Concord (NH) Monitor’s website: “FairPoint Hires Two Ad Firms in Bankruptcy.”

FairPoint Communications, struggling to emerge from bankruptcy, has hired two Maine firms to beef up marketing and communications.

The phone company has hired Portland-based Garrand and the VIA Group to help get the word out about its services.

Okay, I acknowledge that every business has to publicize itself, and that this is most likely a legitimate expenditure. (It’s certainly a legitimate type of expenditure; I’m not willing to concede that this particular expenditure is legitimate because of FairPoint’s record of, ahem, business savvy.) But FairPoint has no one to blame but themselves for the massive outbreak of teeth-grinding this story will evoke among its benighted customers, and for the inevitable jokes the story will inspire.  To wit…  

I assume the PR firms are getting paid up front.

Suggested tagline for a new ad campaign: Bullwinkle T. Moose saying “This time, for sure!”

One more from me. A brief visit to the VIA Group website reveals this motto:

The difficult we do immediately.

The impossible will be done by Thursday.

So, by Friday, everybody will be happy in FairPointLand?  

I train for this meal all year.

Thumbnails above, full frames below the fold.  

These guys showed up in the spring – good thing for them we’re a duck family.

(Good stuff in here – promoted by JulieWaters)

Ever so quietly in a Thanksgiving Day news story Vermont State gives notice of an out of court settlement and payout in a taser related incident from 2006. The $40,000 settlement is called “frankly, a business decision” to avoid risk of trial.

The Vermont Attorney General’s Office has paid $40,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a man who claims he was Tasered in 2006 by state police as he was having a seizure that was mistaken as an attempt to resist arrest.

State police deny wrongdoing, state assistant attorney general J.J. Tyzbir told the Valley News. He said he agreed to the settlement to avoid the risk of trial, where a jury could have awarded more money.

“We still believe Mr. Fairbrother was not actually in the throes of a seizure,” Tyzbir said. “We believe Mr. Fairbrother was actually trying to evade the officers and was resisting them and was noncompliant. But whenever you go to trial, you risk not getting a favorable outcome. This was, frankly, a business decision.”

A wise business decision might include continued review of  the Taser policy as local police continue to equip themselves with the Tasers. This October the Taser Company issued a training bulletin warning that 50,000 volt tasering could cause an “adverse cardiac event” when shot in the chest. Avoiding the chest, face and neck is now strongly advised. Suggested shot placements currently include back, abdomen and thighs.

The Vermont AG Taser policy report of 2008 in its conclusion suggests room for further review of their safety.

There remain questions about the safety of the taser’s use in certain situations and on certain categories of subjects. These questions are particularly important in situations when multiple tases or extended continuous tasings of a subject are inflicted and when subjects are manifesting a condition called “excited delirium”. Continued study of the safety and health effects of tasers is warranted.

http://nhbr.com/news/statenewe…

The 2009 cost of a Thanksgiving meal for ten according to the American Farm Bureau agribusiness trade group is $42.91.

This is down slightly from last years average $44.61.

Maybe that tells only part of the cost as  lobbyists in Thanksgiving related industries work hard all year to ensure  there’s a butterball on every American’s table .We  should be thankful for the  clear eyed and  heroic efforts lobbyists put in on behalf of our Thanksgiving.

“We don’t want to even create an appearance that we’re mixing our members’ government affairs business with the business of making sure Americans enjoy their holiday.” said Joel Brandenberger, president of the National Turkey Federation.

Should we be thankful for the clear eyed and heroic efforts these lobbyists put in on behalf of our Thanksgiving? Where would we be without armies of industry lobbyists?

The National Turkey Federation spent $240,000 in lobbying this year .Keeping an eye on agriculture appropriations bills, avian influenza and climate change legislation.

There must have been little pending legislation that could have affected potatoes this year as the National Potato Council only forked over $30,000 in lobbying this year.

2008 was the United Nations International Year of the Potato so a quiet year may have been in the cards .

The cranberry lobby proved more active than potato interests in 2009 .The Cape Cod Cranberry Association and the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association managed to gain $1.25 million in federal research funds in an agricultural bill. The powerful Ocean Spray company spent $300,000 lobbying free trade and federal dietary guidelines that mention the benefits of cranberry juice.  

http://www.fb.org/index.php?fu…

http://legaltimes.typepad.com/…

http://www.opensecrets.org/lob…