Kurdish Surge Calamity in Irbil

It was pretty apparent following Bush's Jan. 10 speech that this particular White House gang didn't have the slightest clue on how to "turn the war around," seeing as how no one in the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis had a clue on the history of the Mesopotamia region to begin with. The raid on the Iranian consulate in Irbil, carried out simultaneously with the president's speech, proved this. For those of you who are not Kurd-aware, the northern sector of Iraq has functioned as a de facto independent Kurdish republic since mid-way through the Clinton era, and the Kurds have always been our close allies during and after the attack on Saddam. (Of course, the Turkish government worries they will declare an independent state that will rile up Kurds living in Turkey -- who are brutally repressed there -- but that's another story.) The problem for Bush is that the Kurds also have traditionally been close to Iran. U.S. forces invaded the Iranian consulate in Irbil, Iraqi Kurdistan on Jan. 11 (local time) and took six Iranians hostage. This not only enflamed the international community as much as our Monday bombing of Somalia, it also upset our Kurdish allies because they were not consulted. While few online news sources reported the aftermath, NPR's Morning Edition reported that Kurdish troops (our good buddies and allies until today) held U.S. troops under arms this morning and refused to let them go until Army Black Hawk helicopters came to rescue them. And this is the "good diplomacy" our surging troops will be practicing. Former NSA Director William Odom is right, this surge mission in Iraq will only serve to further fuck things up. We are alienating all our friends and heaping disaster on disaster. OUT NOW!

P.S. Raw Story carried this analysis and CNN YouTube clip, featuring John Pike of globalsecurity.org, predicting that the attack on the Iranian consulate was a deliberate U.S. provocation to force Iran into war. Chilling story, chilling video.

Populism=Jackboots

I hate to diss the Democratic urban activists who tend to think that "populism" is a cute word to toss around, but the posts below on Lou Dobbs et. al. should make clear that I equate populism with Juan Peron, if not with the German Nazi Party. It's nice to see that Middle East Report, a fairly lefty quarterly covering the Middle East, thinks so too. Their new Winter issue is a special on Iran that is worth reading cover to cover, particularly Kaveh Ehsani's piece on the inside nature of the Iranian regime. Some U.S. activists think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a pretty cool guy because he hates the U.S. and Israel, and many Iranians treat him as a rock star. He's a populist, dictatorial snake. I still am reserving a small portion of hope for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, since many of his domestic policies are cool, but his international grandstanding is getting tiresome, and has "populist" written all over it. Populism is not cool. It leads to "Sieg Heils" when you least expect it.