Nexilist Notebook

Well, the clock is running out on UN permission for the US to occupy Iraq. We need a new agreement with the government in Iraq by the 1st of January or we will have to leave.

The Bush gang has been applying a lot of pressure to the Iraqi government to sign some sort of Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

The Iraqis want all of our troops back to their bases by June 2009. And all of our troops out of Iraq completely by 2010. But we got them to accept 2011.

The main sticking point seems to be that the US wants immunity for troops on active duty and the freedom to carry out any attacks anywhere at any time and to arrest anyone.

The Iraqis want the US to ask permission and coordinate military activity. They want to be able to enter the Green Zone at will and examine records and emails.

The discussion was stalemated for months but recently a draft agreement has surfaced.

Iraq has said that it will need to be approved by their parliment. Bush says that it is not a treaty so our Congress does not need to see it.

Bush wants to get something in place that will commit the next president to the situation in Iraq but the Iragis are not so eager. They have their own election coming up and it won’t help their popularity to be seen cooperating with the US.

Al Sistani, the revered Iraqi Shiite cleric had been in favor of an agreement if the Iraqi parliment passed it. However, he recently came out against it.

Muktada Al Sadr put 100,000 followers in the Iraqi street recently to protest the agreement.

Al Hakim, a rival of Sistani for most influential Shiite in Iraq recently issued a Fatwa that it would be against the Koran for Iraq to sign a SOFA with the US.

Now comes the US attack inside Syria. Senior US officials have said that we reserve the right to attack targets in other countries when ever we deem it necessary. And that the Syrian attack was a “warning” to Syria to do more to prevent Al Queda from coming into Iraq. After a furious reaction by Syria, Iraq demanded that a provision be added any SOFA agreement with the US to the effect that if the US EVER attacked another Middle Eastern country from bases in Iraq, the SOFA would be immediatly cancelled.

The CIA organized the Syrian raid to kill a key provider of soldiers, weapons and money to Al Queda in Iraq from Syria. Considering the inevitable reaction by Iraq and Syria to the raid, you have to wonder what the CIA was thinking. Did they really believe that Syria would be intimidated or did they deliberately sabatoge the SOFA negotiations?

And finally, the US just issued an ultimatum that if Iraq does not hurry up and sign the agreement, the US troops would pull back to the US bases in Iraq and stop any assistance as of Jan 1st.

It seems to me that they may just call our bluff. After all, they did want us back in our bases by June 09 and January 09 is just a few months earlier. And, in any case, in a few months there will be a new US president and they might get a better offer than Bush’s.

Aside from the obvious problems with diet and health care, poverty is bad for your health.

Research shows that the greater the disparity between the rich and poor, the greater the disparity between life expectancy when other factors have been taken into account. The belief is that there is a pyschological burden in being very poor when there are very rich people around.

Apparently beauty can be beneficial to health. The rich can afford to surround themselve with beautiful objects but the poor must live in squalor. When they fall ill, their surroundings do not help them recover.

The rich can select their environment and insure that nothing noxious occurs there. The poor find themselves living next to factory smoke stacks, landfills, sewage plants, etc. These are bound to be bad for their health.

With all of this, the poor serve as a breeding ground for illness that may leap to more affluent populations. Without health insurance, they fill emergency rooms, increasing the burdent on an already collapsing health care system in our country.

And finally, when hope is gone and desparation the normal emotion, the poor also become a breeding ground for violence, crime, terrorism and revolution.

It is in the best self interest of us all to do what we can to allievate poverty least it bring down our civilization around our ears.

There is a lot of discussion about the influence that Israel may have on US foreign policy and all the military aid that the US gives Israel.

There is a story from the Bible about Samson who was chained to pillars in the palace of his enemies after being robbed of his legendary strength. When his strength returned, he pulled the temple down killing himself and his tormenters.

When the Jews rebelled against the Romans in 70 AD, Rome destroyed Jerusalem, crushed the Jewish resistance and pursued the remanants to the mesa of Masada. There the Romans lay siege for months until they were able to build a ramp up the side of the mesa. When they finally breached the defenses on top of the mesa, they found that all of the rebels had committed suicide rather than be captured. A rallying cry for the Israeli army is “Never Again” which refers to what happened at Masada.

I am sure that every new US president receives a visit from an Israeli official who says something like “You can support us or leave to our fate but if they come for us and all hope is gone, we will turn the Middle East into a radioactive wasteland until the end of time.”

Since it is generally accepted that Israel has about 200 nulcear bombs and the planes to deliver them, the new president can only reply, “What do you want?”

So much of diplomacy is a game of finding the right words that are acceptable to both sides who might not completely agree. This process sometimes goes astray.

Recently, the Bush administration was trying to find a compromise between their position of never setting a specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and the Iraqi demand for just such a time table. This has been a major sticking point (not the only one) in the drafting of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq to replace the expiring UN mandate for the US presence in Iraq. The Bush administration has been pressing hard for a SOFA by the end of July. The Iraqis have been understanably reluctant to sign any long term agreement with an administration that will be gone in a few months.

Some genius in our state department finally came up with a phrase that was apparently acceptable to both sides, the now famous “time horizon for aspirational goals”. Isn’t that a great bit of polysyllabic garbage! I guess the intent was to craft a linguistuc Rorschach test that would be seen differently by different people. For a day or two, it seemed that the Bush people and the Iraqis were on the same page (even though it was not clear which page that was) but then came the al Malaki interview in the German paper, Der Spiegel.

Al Malaki remarked that he thought that the Obama proposal for a US withdrawal in 16 months was in the right range. He was then careful to say that he did not mean to endorse Obama as a presidential candidate. The next day, the Iraqis released a statement that al Malaki had been mistranslated and misunderstood. The problem with that is that al Malaki’s own translator provided Der Spiegel with the translation. Then the US said that there was not going to be a firm date for withdrawal and that conditions on the ground would determine when we withdrew. In other words, the same position that Bush has always taken. Following that, a senior Iraqi official stated that a firm date was important to the Iraqis. So much for the magic of the State department wordsmith.

I don’t like to be cynical (well, that’s not completely true) but I have to admit that this whole oil price rollercoaster is making me suspicious. If you were in a high government position and you wanted to make a lot of money quickly, is there some way that you could exploit your position? How about this? The oil market is nervous so you make a belligerent public statement about an enemy in the Middle East. The price of oil jumps $8 a barrel. You have used the low margin of $8 a barrel on a futures contract to tie up some oil futures. When the price spikes, you sell and double your money. Then you make a concilliatory statement and the price comes back down. Then your enemy does the same thing. And they double their money. Then someone in the US state department does the same thing and they double their money. Maybe I am just paranoid but I have to wonder…..