Life in Central America

Ibrahimi Versus Chalabi: The Battle Is Joined

From Dar Al Hayat

Of all the vicious battles being fought in Iraq that between Lakhdar Al Ibrahimi and Ahmad Chalabi could be decisive for the future of the country. The two men are deadly enemies, but theirs is not only a trial of strength between individuals. Powerful forces are ranged behind them, and it would be rash, in today's highly fluid military and political situation, to hazard a guess as to who will emerge the victor.

Chalabi wants to rule Iraq after the transfer of sovereignty at the end of June. Ibrahimi is determined to prevent him from doing so.

A former Algerian foreign minister and UN trouble-shooter in Afghanistan, Ibrahimi is the man of the hour. The U.S. and Britain are relying on him to find a way out of the catastrophic mess in which they find themselves in Iraq. He has been given the task of proposing how and by whom Iraq will be governed in the transition period between 30 June, when the U.S. is due to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis, and nation-wide elections scheduled for January 2005.

Chalabi has had a very different career. A former banker and convicted fraudster, he is the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a body of exiles which lobbied vigorously in Washington for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi and the INC are believed to have fed the American intelligence community with false and fabricated information on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. They are said to be on the Pentagon payroll to the tune of $340,000 a month.

The battle between them is therefore a struggle between two coalitions.

On one side are those, like Ibrahimi himself, who want the United Nations to oversee a genuine transfer of sovereignty to a representative Iraqi government, and who want the final outcome to be acceptable to Iraqi national aspirations, as well as to Arab nationalist sentiment.

On the other side, are American 'neo-conservative' hawks and 'friends of Israel,' who backed Chalabi long before the war. Their dream is to turn Iraq into a U.S. client state, the catalyst for 'democratic' - in other words, pro-Western and pro-Israeli - change throughout the Middle East.

US dollar hegemony has got to go

I warn you in advance: this posting is about economics. This is not an easy subject, as this old brain can testify. but I am becoming more and more convinced of the importance of economics in the world-wide mess we are in.

I know most of you live in a much smaller world, and have scant interest in the Big View, so this may not interest you. However, if you can get through that third big paragraph, I think you will you will get a high out of it. You will know something a lot of people don't want you to know.

Good article by Henry C K Liu in the Asian Times
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This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.

By definition, dollar reserves must be invested in US assets, creating a capital-accounts surplus for the US economy. When oil is denominated in dollars through US state action and the dollar is a fiat currency, the US essentially owns the world's oil for free.

This arrangement, which Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan proudly calls US financial hegemony in congressional testimony, has kept the US economy booming in the face of recurrent financial crises in the rest of the world. It has distorted globalization into a "race to the bottom" process of exploiting the lowest labor costs and the highest environmental abuse worldwide to produce items and produce for export to US markets in a quest for the almighty dollar, which has not been backed by gold since 1971, nor by economic fundamentals for more than a decade. The adverse effect of this type of globalization on the developing economies are obvious. It robs them of the meager fruits of their exports and keeps their domestic economies starved for capital, as all surplus dollars must be reinvested in US treasuries to prevent the collapse of their own domestic currencies.

To save the world from the path of impending disaster, we must promote an awareness among policy makers globally that excessive dependence on exports merely to service dollar debt is self-destructive to any economy.

The starting point is for the major exporting nations each to unilaterally require that all its exports be payable only in its currency, so that the global finance architecture will turn into a multi-currency regime overnight. There would be no need for reserve currencies and exchange rates would reflect market fundamentals of world trade.

Eating flowers

In Costa Rica they are called Flor de Itabo; in El Salvador they are called Flor de Isote, and they are the National Flower. They are the flower of a cactus, and are they are only available for a short while about this time of the year.

I spotted some in a small fruit shop in Cedros, and bought a stalk for Maria. We had it for lunch, in a special sauce she made up lots of veggies and eggs. It’s a little bitter, so it’s an acquired tasted, but it’s a taste I could acquire easily.

I posted this before, but without the photo.

We are surrounded, that simplifies our problem

Ticos feel inferior

I just realized this this morning, but it is not a clear realization, so please bear with me while I try to feel it out.

I have been depressed lately because I haven’t gone on a trip for awhile, because I am saving up my money for a knee operation. Every so often I have to get out of here. If I don’t, I start getting angry, but I have never understood why. Now I know part of the reason. It’s because Tico’s are disatisfied with themselves in comparison with that great standard, the American Way of Life - whatever that is.

They have fallen in the same trap as many other poor countries have: instead of building their society to suit themselves, they have imitated the US. This is impossible, because they cannot be like the US. Let me repeat that. No country can be like the US, and we must stop thinking that this is necessary. For one thing, we are a poor example for the world to follow.

In Northern Europe they take this for granted, and don’t want to imitate the US. They know they have to do their own thing, they want to do their own thing, and they are busy doing it. They don’t feel inferior to the US, and in some ways they feel superior.

This is not true in Latin America, which has been dominated by the US for so long that they have no concept of independent development, or an authenic national identity. As a result, Ticos have ended up with a caricature of American life, and in some ways they are ashamed of themselves - at an unconscious level. They haven’t done their own thing, which you have to do if you are going to be proud of yourself. Instead, they are ashamed of themselves.
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When I was walking through a typical lower middle class neighborhood this morning, I noticed that most of them seem satisfied with their way of life, which was working for them. It even worked for me when I stopped to buy some fruit at a fruit stall, where the owner recognized me. These people aren’t imitating the US.

San Ramon, which is a upper middle class neighborhood, is trying to be like the US, and the people there are frustrated. No matter how much they get, it is not enough. Just like the US, they are on a treadmill. But their treadmill is next to the American treadmill, which is much bigger.

Losing Hearts and Minds

There is a lot of screaming going on about events in Iraq. There aren't very many people in the middle, but Foreign Affairs magazine is trying to do just that. They represent American business interests, who have to do business in the Gulf, and they can see they whole place going up in flames. Naturally, they are concerned.

This is a postscript to an article Marc Lynch wrote called Taking the Arabs Seriously. Some of my conservative friends got very upset when I talked about this article earlier, saying that we didn't have to pay attention to the Arabs, we only had to make sure they paid attention to us. Things like hearts and minds were not important. I see it differently.

Central to this whole problem is our relationship with Israel, something I have never understood. To put it bluntly, we are supporting a bunch of Nazis, and we seem to be proud of it. And Kerry is supporting this also.
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The president's recent press conference with Ariel Sharon epitomized his administration's failures in dealing with Arab public opinion. Like Bush's description of Sharon as a "man of peace" at the height of the bloody reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002, his public embrace of the Israeli leader last week made news around the world and became an instant symbol of American policy. Not only did Bush fail to coordinate his moves with his Arab allies, but his administration made no real effort to explain itself to Arab audiences or to respond to deeply held, and entirely predictable, Arab concerns.

Instead of demonstrating respect for Arab views or offering a real dialogue about the future of the region, therefore, Bush's intervention signaled little but contempt for Arab opinion. Small wonder that a prominent writer despaired in Al Hayat last week that "Bush has declared war on the forces of moderation in the region."

Somebody wants to kill you

If you are an American, this is true, and not only one somebody wants to kill you, a lot of them do. If you are an Iraqi, those somebodies not only want to kill you, they are killing you.

I am tempted to say more but I won’t. The facts speak for themselves.

Stay tuned for more blood.

Moving drugs to the US

Every country in Central America and the Caribbean is doing this – unofficially, of course. They are also taking huge sums of money not to do it. It’s all a matter of money, and in these poor countries, as elsewhere, money talks, and talks big. The local economies would collapse without drugs.

The drug transport organization is a vast, informal network. And such networks can only be destroyed by parallel networks, of equal size and efficiency. Any intelligence organization knows this, any intelligence organization. You can’t fight it with conventional warfare. The War on Drugs doesn’t make any sense.

Let me pass on a story I heard in Panama. The American War on Drugs is using AWACS planes to detect drug flights out of Colombia. AWACS stands for Airborne Warning and Control System; they are flying radar stations, big jets that can stay in the air for a long time, and they can see anything in the air – exotic stuff. They are flying out of secret airports in Southern Panama. This secrecy thing is a big joke. Anybody in Panama with the slightest interest in drug trafficking knows exactly where they are, only the American public is in the dark.

This is the case with any radar station. I used to be in this line of work, working on secret radar stations to detect Russian bombers. Heck, a radar station is about as secret as a light house, because it has a similar function, only the electromagnet frequency is much higher. It radiates all kinds of energy that anyone with a radar detector can pick up. In WWII, for example, the German subs had radar, which they turned on as soon as they surfaced, to detect Allied aircraft, their worst enemy. This was a great convience to the Allied aircraft, who just homed in on their radar signals – and sunk them. The Germans were slow to catch on, but eventually they wised up and switched to radar detectors themselves – to detect the radars on the Allied aircraft, who were then at a disadvantage.

But to get back to modern times, and the AWACS planes. Columbia won’t allow these to fly over Colombia itself, and monitor Colombian airspace, which is full of interesting traffic. They have to patrol the Colombian border, inside Panama, just like the Coast Guard ships have to patrol the sea space off of Columbia. Detecting drugs inside Columbia would be much easier, and the US does have plenty of drug informers in Columbia who have a pretty good idea of what is going on. What is going on is total corruption. Everybody in Colombia is in the drug business, especially the rich and powerful, and they don’t want the US to mess up their racket. They don’t hesitate to kill the competition, in this case the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents.

Elsewhere in Central American the DEA agents are at risk, but they don’t usually get killed, because the US would come down hard on them. But Colombia is clever, they know how to use the US. The US spends tons of money on weapons for the Colombian military which are supposed to be used in the War on Drugs - but are used instead to create of reign of terror unequalled in the Western Hemisphere. With our money! The Witness for Peace site always has lots on this, but Americans don’t seem to be interested. After all, they are our terrorists.

The AWACS planes always have a high-ranking member of the Panama military on board. When the plane detects a drug flight, and watches in land in Panama, this guy notifies the Panama military. Then either of two things happens. If the drug flight hasn’t paid off the local warlord, the Panama military sends up a fighter and destroys it. But more commonly, nothing happens, and the AWACS plane has just wasted its time.

Interesting, huh? The local police always get some drugs, and give these raids a lot of publicity. But for the rest, it's just business as normal.

More about the Rapture

From Greg in Nicaragua, who is the kind of Christian I admire, more interested in helping people instead of making themselves more powerful.
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The Rapture is, historically speaking, a fairly recent doctrine in the evangelical church. It became popular in the 19th Century and was brought to the forefront by dispensationalist Christian preachers.

The main scripture verses used to support the "taking up to Heaven" of believers are not from the book of Revelation but rather I Corinthians 15:51, Matthew 24:31 an I Thessalonians 4:16. I want to go on record as saying that not all Christians subscribe to the "Rapture." Having read only the first "Left Behind" book I can say that LaHaye's end-times theology is, as far as I'm is concerned, pretty offbase and, well, pretty wacky. If you look up the verses I cited above you will see that the doctrine of the "Rapture" is founded on pretty cryptic scriptures. I believe it's a mystery of which we are not privy. Unfortunately there are those Christians out there who make eschatology (the study of the last things, i.e., end-times theology) their main focus. We have plenty to do in the here and now (feed the hungry, clothe the poor, comfort the mourning, visit the incarcerated...ad infinitum) than to worry about what's going to happen in the last days.

Henry George on the economy

I am taking a free course on economics on the Internet

During his lifetime, he became the third most famous man in the United States, only surpassed in public acclaim by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain....Leo Tolstoy's appreciation stressed the logic of George's exposition: "The chief weapon against the teaching of Henry George was that which is always used against irrefutable and self-evident truths. This method, which is still being applied in relation to George, was that of hushing up .... People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it."

This is a sample of his writing.
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This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle that the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.