Instahoglets 14th Mar. 06

Instahoglets - some links, some snark and thee.

Hey Condi, look behind you! While you are leading the charge, with George and Don not far behind, to villify Iran and call it the single nation that most threatens the US...North Korea has gone and reminded us all that it is still officially at war with America. "The DPRK, too, has the right to preempt an attack as the most effective and positive act for self-defense," said a spokesman for the North's Korea People's Army. Yep, you read that right. They are talking about a pre-emptive nuking of Seoul, Tokyo, Honolulu and Anchorage! They have the nukes, they have the missiles, they have the nutcase with his finger on the button. Now tell us again about no-nukes-yet Iran...

Not all of the UN Security Council's members seem convinced that no-nukes-yet Iran is the greatest clear and present danger to world peace either. Personally, I am betting that China and Russia's caution about jumping on the warwagon is justified. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot be President after 2013 in any case - which is about the time most experts think Iran will have a nuke if it is really trying to get one - and the chances are good a far more moderate President will be next in office. But it looks very like he may not last even that long. A moderate President will change the equation greatly.

UN Special Envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen is pessimistic about peace in the Middle East. He says that, other than Lebanon, "the situation in the broader Middle East is more complex, fragile and dangerous today than it has been for a long time...Several of the multiple conflicts in the region are reaching a boiling point." Does anyone want to argue that this "boiling point" hasn't been created in the main by American foreign policy and the invasion of Iraq? Nice work, George.

Next for the "boiling point" treatment appears to be the Subcontinent, where Dubya has been merrily arming old enemies Pakistan and India and creating the conditions for a nuclear arms race. The Bonehead Compendium has the facts and a great analysis as they follow the money.

Let's talk some more about Pakistan. The ally in the War on Terror. The ally where Bush couldn't bring himself to talk about democracy as he sat down to sell arms to a dictator who secretly developed nukes and sold them to the world. The ally that supports Islamist terrorism and is only pretending to try to catch Osama. The ally where 70 to 90% of all women are victims of domestic violence. Where 50 percent of women who do report rape are jailed for having extramarital sex. The ally where thousands of refugees from the ongoing violence in Afghanistan are being turfed out of their refugee camps - men, women and children all together - while winter still grips the mountains. Where Pakistani troops indiscriminately shell Pakistani villages with heavy artillery.

Could someone please explain why this atrocious regime is our ally but Iran is our enemy? I honestly don't get it.

Paul Pillar, the CIA whistleblower, has an ominous prediction - Iraq is likely to be looking for weapons of mass destruction within the next five to 10 years.

Pillar said Iraqis live in "a dangerous neighborhood," with rival countries pursuing weapons of mass destruction. So the CIA had warned that a future Iraqi government would likely want the very weapons Hussein was (wrongly) suspected of hiding, including nuclear weapons, he said.

"Iraq may turn once again to ... a WMD program," Pillar, who is retired from the CIA, said Thursday. "And wouldn't that be ironic?"

As long as they promise to buy American and British tanks and guns, like Israel did and now India and Pakistan, it shouldn't be a problem, eh? We'll even give them the plutonium!

Britain's Guardian newspaper wonders why ex Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's warnings about an American dictatorship weren't more widely reported. I'm wondering the same about the American Bar Association's resolution condemming Bush's warrantless wiretappings. And AntiWar.com is wondering why U.S. Marines are practising urban assault tactics on office blocks in Toledo, Ohio. You can join the dots youself or you could let the (liberal) Girl Next Door join the dots for you.

Even before Paul Bemer arrived in Baghdad, the UK's Special Envoy was warning Tony Blair that the country was "an unbelievable mess". I wonder what he would say now, with death squads at government ministries, scores of executed Iraqis turning up daily and the whole nation in danger of balkanization and civil war? Murdoch's London Times has a good guess with it's comment on Bush's latest speech - the only good news is that Bush may have finally figured out how bad the news is. The really bad news, says the Times' Foreign Editor:

Before, the US was fighting Sunni militants. Now, Sunnis and Shias are fighting each other, with the US watching impotently...The greater fear, as coalition officials acknowledge, is that the US has equipped the Shias in what may become a civil war.

Civil war in Iraq doesn't seem to bother the neocons, however. They are beginning to actively promote sectarian carnage as the next step in U.S. policy...and it may have been their intention all along. It's interesting, in this light, that the new primary argument in neocon/Bushevik thought right now appears to be "Given that the only good Moslem is a dead Moslem, how many do we want to kill?"