***Dave Does the Blog

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.

We go to Britain in three weeks. Twenty-one days.

Timing is everything.

I’ve never read any John Le Carre. Too much, as I understood it, darkness, betrayal and death. It wasn’t so much that I thought that being a spy was glamorous and jolly (a read of the actual James Bond books will quite dispel that illusion), it’s just that I really didn’t need to be entertained, or moved, by angst and duplicitousness.

Which is why, in keeping with that theme, Le Carre’s current op-ed piece on how “The United States of America has gone mad” isn’t something that I would have read on my own, save for Andrea’s mentioning of it.

The basic theme is the mantra of the anti-war crowd. Blah, blah, blah, it’s all about oil, blah, blah, Iraq is no worse than other folks, blah, blah, Bush is either an evil greedy bastard genius or else an idiot, or maybe both, blah, blah, blah.

A few items stand out that are worth noting as being indicative of the reasoning that Le Carre uses.

As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded.

Le Carre says this, in different ways, several times. The only actual reasoning or evidence or example that he cites is at the very end.

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

Good Lord. Someone removed a bumper sticker that they didn’t like. Must have been the Bush Secret Police! No, wait, they would have simply disappeared the author’s friend off to the underground gulags beneath DIA. No, it must have been some Horribly Intolerant Private Citizen.

Impolite, certainly. Even cowardly. But hardly a sign of McCarthyism, erosion of legal dissent, or the jack boots of a Mad America.

Of course, the War on Terrorism, and the prospective War on Iraq, ar emerely smoke screens for the Bushies.

Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place …

Get. Over. It. I thought the Supremes were stupid in their decision, and I rooted for Gore until the bitter end. Bottom line, though, Bush won. Simply repeating “Stolen Election!” like a mantra was getting old in January 2001, and it hasn’t aged well in the succeeding two years.

But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

How, and in what ways, the American public is being “browbeaten,” or, given the Internet (and the noble efforts of Mr Le Carre) it is being kept in ignorance is not explained. It’s simply enough to simply bandy about words like neurosis and conspirators, and leave it at that.

In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.

For the record, Le Carre either ignorantly or intentionally makes three people sound here like five, like there’s some vast Bush dynasty (unlike, say, the Kennedys or the Roosevelts in their day). George H.W. is both the ex-CIA director and the ex-Pres. Dubya is the President and ex-Governor of Texas. Jeb is the Florida Governor (God help them). Whether Le Carre doesn’t realize this, or is simply intentionally trying to distort the truth, doesn’t speak well in either case to the rest of his meager “facts.”

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work.

One can certainly question the Bush Administration’s energy policy, or even whether its various members background in the oil industry gives it a distorted view of such matters.

On the other hand, Rice is the National Security Advisor, not the Secretary of Energy. Bush’s experiences with Arbusto (“Shrub”) sound to have been something less than Evil Big Business in nature. And what involvement in the oil industry has to do with the Bushies being any better or less able to do what is right is only sneered at here, not intelligently argued.

I could go on, but basically Le Carre doesn’t like Bush’s policies, is willing to imply any number of malevolent and/or crazy motivations to him, and contributes little to the debate over Iraq (or to the debate over what he calls “poor mad little North Korea,” those darned crazy kids) than a tired, and not terribly coherent screed.

I’m usually not impressed when actors get on their high horses about public policy issues, not because they shouldn’t be free to express their opinions, but because their uninformed opinions are usually not worth listening to. It seems that writers of fiction are not immune to that state, either.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Lileks does a sight finer job on the above article than I do. With statistics.