***Dave Does the Blog

Dedicated to Harold Pinter, who’s been kind enough to bless us (or the Guardian) with his poetic wisdom, here is a poem inspired by his own latest work.

Here they go again,
The Euroliterati in their sackcloth parade
Chanting their ballads of doom
As they bleat across the big world
Damning whatever America’s doing at the moment.
The gutters are clogged with the dead from the regimes they support:
The Bosnians in Yugoslavia
The Kurds in Iraq
The women in Afghanistan
The dissenters in Cuba
The students in China
The citizens of North Korea
The prisoners in the gulags
The ones who worked in the wrong office buildings on the wrong day in New York.
The has-been poets use words to try and cut.
Their heads are full of sand
Their ideas a pile of dirt
Their idols stained and dusty
Their bright lights have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of their dead theories
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of their impotent fury.

Thank you. I’ll be here all week …

(via Volokh and Andrea)

Realing that the UN inspectors in country are having difficulties finding enough material breaches on their own, Iraq is forming their own teams of inspectors to help out with things.

It said Iraq had handed more documents to inspectors, was clarifying others and was forming its own teams to search for suspicious items. U.N. inspectors discovered empty chemical warheads last week which Iraq had failed to report to the United Nations; Iraq said it had forgotten about them.

Iraqi officials went on to say that they would do a much better job of hiding all remaining chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the future.

The statement said Iraq would also encourage inspections of “private sites” — an apparent reference to places like the homes of leading scientists — and to “private interviews” — referring to talks between U.N. inspectors and Iraqi technical experts without the presence of Iraqi government minders.

“Just let us check out their houses first, to make sure things are tidy, that’s all we ask.”

Saddam thanks anti-war demonstrators.

I’ll bet he does.

To be fair, a lot of folks against war in Iraq are certainly not fans of the Baghdad regime. That they think it can be dealt with through Flower Power, further negotiation (over what?), or good vibes is simply an implementation detail, as a senior program analyst I used to know would say.

Of course, Saddam betrayed some of his unintentional irony in his comments.

“They are supporting you because they know that evildoers target Iraq to silence any dissenting voice to their evil and destructive policies,” Saddam told senior military officers and his son Qusay, the commander of the elite Republican Guards.

If that were the case, I’d think that the French and Germans would be more worried.

“Iraq’s cause has become clear…it simply is that Iraqis are in their country while others cross the seas to reach them and tell them ‘we want to share with you your country or we want to be the masters and you the followers’,” Saddam said.

Sort of like Kuwait?

“When a people believe in the justice of its cause, it can stand fast in the face of evil, no matter what equipment or technology it has. This is the lesson that you are teaching the world now,” Saddam said.

Actually, I think he’s right there. Unfortunately, I think he’s got the “face of evil” on the wrong party here.

(via Andrea)

Lots of anti-war protests over the weekend. How many folks were in attendance at places is subject to lots of debate — official numbers are always low, participant numbers are always high, journalist numbers are always whatever will make the best story. Everyone’s self-interest in under- or over-estimating numbers tends to drive the debate.

For example, in San Francisco, the official number was about 50k. Nuh-uh, say some. The Man has it all wrong! It was about 350k! And we have the pictures to prove it!

Uh-huh. Fuzzy, shaky, zoomy videos of a lot of people. Frankly, if you told me that was 20k, I’d believe it. If you told me it was 400k, I’d believe it. I don’t have the tools or visual judgment to decide it one way or the other, to be honest. Nor, I suspect, do most folks.

But while we’re on the subject of marches, what about the group that spearheaded this weekend’s festivities, ANSWER? ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism!) was prominent in the demonstrations, provided much of the organization, a lot of the banners, and by and large ran the show.

But who is ANSWER? The answer, so to speak, is not quite so pretty. ANSWER was created, post-9/11, by the International Action Center, which is run by the Workers World Party. Who, then, are those fine people?

Well, it would be cliche to simply say that they’re an international communist organization, since that sounds almost positively quaint. Let’s just say that they support the Chinese government’s actions at Tienanmen in 1989 …

What would have been the effect had the student demonstrations contributed to fracturing China’s socialist government, which had already gone through decades of internal struggle over what road to take? At the time, only speculation was possible.
Now, you have only to look at the collapsed Soviet Union for a measure of the human destruction such a counter-revolution would wreak. In China, a developing country with over a billion people, the devastation would have been magnified 10-fold.

… support the peaceful socialist state of North Korea …

The land, factories, homes, hotels, parks, schools, hospitals, offices, museums, buses, subways–everything in the DPRK belongs to the people as a whole. No logos or brand names claim possession over any of it. When people talk about defending their country from the imperialists who would like to carve it up and swallow the pieces, they take for granted that it belongs to them, not to foreign investors or a wealthy elite, as in all the capitalist countries.
Many of the north Koreans who deal with foreigners–translators, guides, political workers–have been abroad and readily acknowledge that the DPRK, which has had to sacrifice so much for its independence, is still struggling to provide many items that people with money enjoy elsewhere, especially in imperialist countries. But they believe they have something much more precious: a people who are united behind their leaders, who share their achievements as well as their shortages, and whose culture and history are not for sale.

… think Iraq shouldn’t even be under sanctions, let alone attacked …

The U.S. delegation joined thousands of protesters chanting “Down, down USA” and “Clinton, Albright, you can’t hide, sanctions equal genocide.” It was at 2 a.m. 10 years ago that U.S. and British forces unleashed rockets and bombs on sleeping Baghdad. Many protesters held torches to illuminate the streets. They also used them to burn U.S. flags.
While life is still difficult for the Iraqi population, the mood of demonstrators was optimistic and combative. In the months leading up to the anniversary, more and more countries had begun individually breaking the ban on flights and other sanctions against Iraq. More than 100 flights have entered Iraq in the last five months.
In addition, the heroic uprising of the Palestinians has mobilized the population of many Arab countries against U.S. imperialism and increased the support for Iraq.

… blames the US government for 9/11 …

This attack not only caused enormous suffering among the people but also put the U.S. government into a militaristic posture. And this plunge towards war by Washington is a threat, not only to the people of the Middle East, but right here at home. If followed through, it will only lead to an escalating cycle of violence.
Indeed, it is the cumulative policy of decades of previous U.S. administrations that has led to the present situation and has put the people of the U.S. in harm’s way. This is what is not being told to the people.
[…] But if, in fact, this attack did come from some forces in the Arab world or from Central Asia that are trying to stop U.S. domination over the peoples of the region, the Bush administration knows full well why. But it won’t tell the people of the U.S.

… supports Slobodan Milosovic …

“With this [Milosovic] trial,” said International Action Center (IAC) representative Bill Doares from Amsterdam, “Washington and its NATO allies hopes to pin the guilt for the 10 years of civil war in the Balkans on the Yugoslav leader. The goal of these big powers is to shift the blame for the war they fomented onto the victims, the Serbian people and all the other peoples of Yugoslavia.”

… defends Cuba’s treatment of gays …

At the outset of the revolution, Cuba was faced with the problem that in a country of 9 million people, several hundred thousand of its adult citizens–people who had worked in the casinos or had been sex workers–were now out of work. A substantial minority of these people were gays and lesbians. Camps were set up with the intention of integrating these people into the new society by providing them with new job skills.
This effort was largely successful except for the camps set aside for gay men. The government later acknowledged and expressed regret over the coercive way these camps were run. And gays and lesbians were also sometimes the targets of police harassment and roundups. Also, in the early 1970s, a resolution was passed at a national educational conference asserting that gays and lesbians should be prevented from becoming teachers. This resolution was later withdrawn after further discussion.
But we argued that to attack Cuba for these missteps in no way helped to overcome them. It just meant further isolation and further hardships for Cuba.

… and defends the brutal activities of Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe.

It is no wonder these war veterans have decided to take matters in their own hands to reclaim the farm land that should be theirs by birthright. By expropriating the land, these former colonized masses are carrying out their own form of Reconstruction or reparations that is long overdue. What is going on in Zimbabwe today is really another stage in the ongoing revolution for winning democratic rights.

So, what does this have to do with the anti-war protests? In theory, nothing. The messenger is not the message. If ANSWER wants to organize anti-war rallies, and people feel morally compelled to attend them because of their own personal beliefs on the Iraq situation, that’s only fair.

But ANSWER’s ideological biases and connections are being ignored or glossed over by the media. If the KKK, for example, were running the rallies, don’t you think some folks would consider that newsworthy?

For more on ANSWER, et al., check here. It would be really funny, if it weren’t so serious.

The Iraqi shell game and the paper trail.