Letter From Bahrain

2004-08-19T08:58:00.000+03:00

When Republicans hold a National Convention in New York City in late August to exploit the scene of the Twin Tower attacks just blocks away, there will be much to celebrate about the U.S. Supreme Court appointed Bush presidency:

The Patriot Act
The colonization of Afghanistan and Iraq
The intelligence failure in support of war with Iraq
The Enron scandal
The Halliburton logistical support overcharge scandal
Bush’s creation of a global network of extra-legal and secret U.S. prisons
The Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal
Phony Code Orange alerts
The escalating price of oil
The growing National deficit
The U.S. atrocity in Najaf
The Coalition of the Unwilling
More instability in the Middle East than ever before
A hands-off policy on the terrorist state of Israel
No discernable foreign policy
No discernable domestic policy

Ted Rall, a journalist with Common Dreams says it best:

"Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Mayberry. However, delegates to this month's Republican National Convention shouldn't expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names. They will not be greeted as liberators.

Well aware that it is barren soil for their party's anti-urban, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, overtly racist ideology, Republican leaders have wisely avoided New York City as a convention site for the past 150 years. Even as the rest of America turns red, we New Yorkers remain as liberal as the people's republic of San Francisco: fewer than 18 percent of the citizens of New York's five boroughs (which include relatively conservative places like Staten Island) cast ballots for Bush/Cheney in 2000. But White House strategist Karl Rove sees the continued exploitation of 9/11 for partisan political gain as Bush's key to victory in November. That means bringing the big bash three miles north of the hole where the Twin Towers used to stand, where most of the victims of 9/11 were burned, suffocated, impaled and pulverized.

Making hay of the dead is also the point of this confab's timing. The 2004 Republican National Convention is being held a full month later than normal, from August 30 to September 2. The original plan was to have Bush shuttle between Madison Square Garden and Ground Zero for photo ops to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Bush's visits to the Trade Center site were quietly canceled a few months back after 9/11 survivors expressed revulsion at the idea. But it was too late to change the date.

Anti-Republican sentiment is rising to a fever pitch here as the dog days tick down to the dreaded affair. Polls cited by the local ABC affiliate shows 83 percent of New Yorkers don’t want their city to host the RNC. And many of them are planning to do something about it.

Rejecting ex-mayor Ed Koch's call to "make nice" with the party that used the deaths of 2,801 New Yorkers - most of them Democrats - for everything from tax cuts for the rich to building concentration camps at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to invading Iraq to enrich Dick Cheney and his fellow Halliburton execs, some groups are encouraging liberal-minded New Yorkers to volunteer for the city's squad of official greeters. Creatively altered maps of streets and subways will be handed out to button-clad stupid white men. Other saboteurs wearing fake RNC T-shirts will direct them to parts of town where Bush's policies have hit hardest. Rumor has it that prostitutes suffering from sexually transmitted diseases will discourage the use of condoms with Republican customers.

Anywhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 anti-Bush demonstrators are expected to hit the streets of Manhattan, but the city and protest organizers can't agree on where to put them. Activists say they'll direct marchers to Central Park, their preferred site; city officials are threatening mass arrests if they do. Adding to the already combustible Chicago '68 vibe is a possible wildcat strike by city cops and firefighters. And now, as if everyone concerned wasn't already tweaky, FBI agents are traveling around the United States, to harass members of leftist groups planning to protest the New York RNC.

Strikebreaking policemen and private security personnel may be able to keep the protesters away from the convention hall. But Republicans who venture outside the Garden deserve the abuse ordinary New Yorkers will likely inflict upon them.

True, the Administration eventually coughed up the $20 billion aid package Bush promised the city after 9/11. But that sum--equal to the cost of occupying Iraq for four months--barely made up for such disaster-related expenses as police overtime, debris removal and rebuilding damaged subway stations and tunnels. New York's economy hasn't even begun to recover. As the nation's official unemployment rate hovers at six percent, the city's runs around eight. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican, opposes virtually every Bush Administration decision concerning New York City.

Even viler than Bush's urban neglect is his failure to avenge the World Trade Center victims as he pledged to do on 9/14, dusty fire-fighter helpfully posing under his arm on The Pile. After 9/11, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were in Pakistan. They and the Taliban received funding from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The 19 hijackers, organized by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, were Egyptian and Saudi. But Bush didn't attack Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Egypt. He went after Afghanistan and Iraq instead, nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 but offered business opportunities for GOP-connected oil concerns. Incredibly, he siphoned more money and arms to the Egyptians, Saudis and Pakistanis.

Not only did Bush let the terrorists get away, he raised their allowance.

If today's GOP retained a shred of the dignity and patriotism that it once possessed as the Party of Lincoln, it would have dumped Bush in favor of a candidate more interested in defending America than his wealthy contributors. Republicans are neofascists now, and that's why New Yorkers good and true will be yelling at them to go back home."

2004-08-17T05:36:00.000+03:00

At age 82, American writer Kurt Vonnegut has lost none of his verve. He still has an eloquent command of his views advocating human dignity and peace.

“I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolph Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?”

2004-08-14T03:07:00.000+03:00

Beth Henry, an American writer from the Texas Gulf Coast, raises some interesting points in the following article. She is an Axis of Logic Founding Member and Contributing Editor. Allegedly, Henry does not hate neo-conservatives; she just feels better when they’re not in charge. She may be contacted at: beth@axisoflogic.com

Here’s what Beth Henry has to say:

"Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone most accurately described the presidential elections as “…a bunch of rich people talking to each other in front of the help.”

For awhile, they had generally kept their napkins folded and their manners intact. Snippiness, yeah, and the usual casual mendacity, but nothing truly visceral or tasteless.

We knew it couldn’t last.

A food fight has broken out amongst them now, and the view from under the table is far more interesting than the fracas above it.

This week, a Vietnam veteran who served at the same time, and in the same capacity as Kerry, released a book about him that can only be described as character assassination. Not wanting to give the book or its author any more hits on Google than he has already, I won’t name them.

The media has been all abuzz with the story, and Kerry’s wannabe nemesis has been making the rounds pumping it up for fun and royalties, all in the name of standing up for the “truth”.

So now, it’s all about who was a good soldier and patriot, and who was not, in a war, a seemingly endless atrocity that claimed over a million lives, launched on a lie.

The spectacle surrounding this skirmish obscures its true uses, however. The very point of contention serves to reframe the real debate, and to divert attention from the increasingly obvious fact that we, the people, do not really have a dog in this fight.

Given the deep divide in opinion in our country concerning the invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. presence there, it seems that the debate before potential voters would be whether or not to continue our occupation of that country.

As the “war on terror” becomes the rationale for unprecedented attacks on our civil liberties and for an open raid on the Treasury to support it, it would seem appropriate to bring into question the very idea of such a costly, open-ended, and bloody future for our country.

In the media brouhaha over Vietnam veterans’ war stories, however, such questions concerning U.S. imperialist policies have been answered before they were asked.

Continued occupation of Iraq, as well as a strategy in the Middle East that includes continued support of Israel’s genocidal aggression, is espoused by both candidates.

Those policies, though deeply controversial among voters, are part of the “platforms” either formal or informal, of our only two political parties. In the cases of both candidates, those planks could easily have been lifted from the website of the Project for the New American Century.

The peoples’ consent has certainly been “manufactured” in the case of the “war on terror”. Terror alerts and evocations of mushroom clouds and biological attacks have been used to squeeze every drop of political leverage out of the horror and trauma of September 11, 2001. The rationale for ongoing, budget-breaking, murderous wars is never actually laid out, only the gut-level evocation of the true terror and confusion that gripped our country immediately following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The continuation of endless war is a given, according to both presidential candidates. The price it exacts both domestically and abroad, paid only by the working people of this country and others, is assumed to be a fair one by those who will never receive the bill.

The debate, the contest, now, is not about whether the United States should build a global empire on the bodies of our children and of millions of other human beings all over the world.

The debate is now over which man will accomplish that task the best.

Which man can serve a lie with the most integrity?

Which man can best serve that lie even knowing his hands are awash with blood with each decision he makes sustaining it?

These are apparently our choices at the polls in November. All other debate, all other qualifications, are lost, and rendered moot in the din of diversionary food fights among our ruling oligarchs as they compete for our validation of their unique packaging of the same vile product."

2004-08-13T12:52:00.000+03:00

Today in Bahrain, there are planned demonstrations for early afternoon which will likely culminate at – or near – the U.S. Embassy. It’s been a while since people have taken to the streets here to rant against the American government. The weather is hot these days, but this is also Friday, and during prayers various local imam will extol the significance of the ongoing Shi’a uprising in Najaf.

There are Arab media reports that Moqtada al-Sadr, the rebel Iraqi Shi’a cleric, has sustained three wounds from shelling, while holed up in Najaf’s sacred compound housing the Imam Ali shrine – named for the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali, assassinated in 661.

Ashura, the great annual Shi’a passion play, commemorates the martyrdom of not only Ali, but his sons, Hasa and Husayn, who were also killed later. Allegedly, Husayn was the Prophet Muhammad's favorite grandson.

Needless to say, the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf is powerfully significant to Shi’as.

Meanwhile, the bellicose and imperious buffoon impersonating an elected U.S. president is still trying to sell the American public that Iraq is now a sovereign state governed by Iraqis. This is a grotesque fiction, just like much of Bush’s resume.

The former cocaine-sniffing, Texas National Guard deserter tells us the stench of the dead in Iraq is justified. We are, after all, liberators – introducing democracy to a country that we have gone to war against twice since 1991 – and tried to destroy by sanctions in between the two Gulf Wars.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the U.S. - Shi'a Muslim with military and CIA connections, is trying to crush the violence plaguing Iraq. At the same time, he’s trying to persuade everyone of the legitimacy of his unelected government. This is difficult when, in the days leading up to his appointment by the Americans, Dr. Allawi shot dead six handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners.

According to Australian correspondent Paul McGeough, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Allawi did this in front of numerous witnesses at the al-Amariyah security center in Baghdad.

Yesterday thousands of demonstrators in Baghdad, Basra and Nassiriya protested against the American-led offensive to crush the Shi’a uprising in Najaf. The rag-tag Jaish al-Mahdi militia of Moqtada al-Sadr has been fighting the Americans for over a week in the holy city. Shi’a leaders in southern Iraq yesterday called for a breakaway movement from the central government in Baghdad to protest the crimes committed against Iraqis by Prime Minister Allawi’s unelected government and the American and British occupation forces.

Next up is a civil war in Iraq.

Americans should be sympathetic to the Shi’a leaders in the southern Iraqi governorates. We also have an unelected leader who perpetrates crimes against our country. In just one more fresh example, the Bush Administration made certain an appallingly expensive oil services contract was awarded to Halliburton without a single competitive bid.

According to the Guardian, Pentagon auditors have now concluded that Halliburton has failed to properly account for $1.8bn in charges billed to the U.S. government. That’s almost $2 bn in over charges at a time when the federal budget deficit, projected at $455 billion, is an emerging fiscal catastrophe, oil is at a record high and the dollar is steadily weaker against major world currencies.

The Pentagon findings, laid out in a 60-page report, threaten to put fresh political pressure on Halliburton's former chief, vice president Dick Cheney. The company has stumbled from one scandal to another, providing serious ammunition for Democrats in the run-up to November's presidential elections.

In Iraq’s case, the Allawi government has no legitimacy and will fall apart in 24 hours without the American masters. In the American case, citizens – swindled of significant votes in Florida, have had to endure a leader straight out of George Orwell's 1984. The irony is - Bush, who has a talent for mental hairballs when he meets the press – probably hasn’t read this book anymore than he’s read the 9/11 Commission Report.

Perhaps Bush is hopeful his father and the usual family cronies will help him make the bad news about Iraq go away, and disappear quickly. He needs to rig another election, and fast.

Just eight months ago, Ahmad Chalabi sat in a place of honor behind First Lady Laura Bush during the president’s State of the Union address to Congress. It was really a celebration speech; Bush was touting the success of America’s “pre-emptive” war against Iraq – a country that threatened our national security with weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda. Chalabi, despite being a fugitive from Jordan for a conviction in absentia on bank fraud charges, had the neoconservative hard-liners in both the Pentagon and the White House eating out of his hands. Bush, more than anyone, cheerfully bought Chalabi’s advice.

The controversial Iraqi exile should earn a special Academy Award for his performance as a spectacular liar. As everyone knows, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or any ties to al-Qaeda. Oh, well .... there’s always the world’s second largest supply of oil.

Now the Bush administration's top Iraq advisor has been indicted for counterfeiting; his nephew, for murder. Chalabi is just the fall guy, but it hasn’t helped that as his star has fallen in Washington, D.C., it has risen substantially in Tehran. The CIA has suggested that Chalabi tipped off Tehran that the U.S. had broken its codes and was eavesdropping on communications.

To deflect the American media from Vietnam Redux [Iraq National Army – the South Vietnamese; the Shi'a insurgents - the Viet Cong], there is the sudden preoccupation with the Darfur crisis in Sudan – as if this genocide just started last month.

And, as New York Observer reporter Joe Conasan points out, exactly one week after the President accepts his party's nomination in New York on Sept. 2, two days before the anniversary of 9/11 and seven weeks before Election Day, the Secretary of Homeland Security plans to hold a Washington press conference to announce that September will be "National Preparedness Month."

The government's "partners" in this month-long, well-meaning public-awareness campaign will include many national groups, including the American Red Cross, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Advertising Council. Newspapers and airwaves will be saturated with messages urging worried citizens to learn how to cope with "emergencies."

Presumably the September campaign will improve considerably on Secretary Tom Ridge's earlier advice, such as wrapping windows in cellophane secured with masking tape to thwart poison gas. How could anyone criticize the idea of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts helping their neighbors prepare to escape a terror attack?

Unfortunately, the news that has emerged about the administration's bungling of its latest orange alert suggests otherwise. Their first mistake came when Mr. Ridge misled the press about the information that prompted him to elevate the threat level on the Sunday after the Democratic convention. The alert was based on information that was at least three years old. His remarks obfuscated that truth.

Administration officials quickly explained they had acted on the basis of current intelligence that amplified the alarm raised by the old computer files. But Mr. Ridge's British counterpart, Home Secretary David Blunkett, soon denounced the entire exercise.

Writing in a London newspaper on Aug. 7, the British counterterror chief asked acidly: "Is that really the job of a senior cabinet minister in charge of counter-terrorism? To feed the media? To increase concern? Of course not. This is arrant nonsense."

People just don’t understand George Bush. He is altruistic. This Homeland Security focus on terrorists poised to strike America has nothing to do with Bush trying to provoke fear in voters just seven weeks before the November election.

2004-08-03T12:43:00.000+03:00

If you play the waiting game to see whether you remain in a country, or move onto another destination, there’s an abundance of free time. Now is the perfect chance to finally read the literary heavyweights like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, perhaps even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August, 1914 – books either assigned in college courses 35 years ago, or deemed chic by some pretentious English Literature majors who once influenced me.

I’ve clocked the first one hundred pages of Tolstoy’s superbly written novel, and I might be close to finish by now if not for the intermittent siestas which overpower me - plus other distractions.

The truth is, I’m still afflicted with the faint twitches of a political junky and so I can’t resist the news on television. In Bahrain, the pickings are slim for an American expatriate. It’s really CNN or nothing – though BBC and Sky News provide some options.

Forty years ago, everyone in the United States gathered around the bonfire of the television to witness the nominating conventions of the two political parties. Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, as reported by the mainstays: Huntley and Brinkley for NBC; Walter Cronkite for CBS; and Howard K. Smith for ABC. It was a civic responsibility to observe history in the making, at least in my household. Afterward, Theodore White produced his The Making of the President chronicle. Despite the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the world still had a veneer of order and hope.

Four years later this changed dramatically, and civic duty had no genuine relevancy any longer. The year began badly with the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam - not unlike the insurgency in Iraq, offering visible proof of America’s inability to impose its will on another foreign country. That spring, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were gunned down. In between, there were student riots and a growing anti-war movement.

The antithesis of democracy in America was never better illustrated in my lifetime than by the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Mayor Richard Daley’s answer to First Amendment Rights was to convulse a crowd by tear gas and beat dissent bloody by police night sticks. This was a time when rock and roll could still earn you a skull-cracking or a jail sentence, before its incendiary potential was extinguished by money, MTV and Marine Corps recruitment ads.

For presidential nominees that year, just two old party hacks – Humphrey and Nixon. And Humphrey proved no match for Nixon’s Machiavellian skills. Of course Theodore White made more good money off his unswerving chronicle in the tradition of Henry Luce’s School of Time Magazine Journalism.

Four years later, the only redeeming feature in another series of leg-lifting dog of conventions was Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Despite Thompson’s enormously wasted gifts in his one-dimensional role as a clownish gonzo journalist, his report of the political process is savage and honest. He is the anti-Theodore White for 1972. Unlike White, nothing was off the record for Thompson. Since he could only go down that road once, Thompson tore the veneer off the charade of the two candidates, Nixon and McGovern, posing as worthy leaders who could unite a deeply divided America. In other words: Help Was On The Way.

Help is always on the way, if you’re a politician trying to persuade an unsophisticated public to give you the only set of keys to the car. I haven’t wasted my time on political conventions in the years that followed.

Except …… last week I awoke early, couldn’t wait to get my hands on Tolstoy, and I was just in time for John Kerry’s acceptance speech – live from Boston. What luck. Kerry has only slightly more charisma than Dick Cheney, a man who seems as cold as a marbled mausoleum. If Kerry is elected, there will be no substantive changes in American governance, but at least he will not appear like that embarrassing language-mangling dink who came by his fortune and his presidency dishonestly.

A glaring flaw in Bush is that his official rebirth in Jesus Christ did not lead him, a former sinner, to compassion but to vindictiveness. A more limited occupant of the Oval Office is hard to recall.

I have no problem admitting my vote for Kerry is strictly motivated as an anti-Bush choice. Kerry has done nothing to distinguish himself during his 20-year senate career. If help is really on the way, as Kerry promised, perhaps he will immediately reimburse taxpayers for the $40 million cost of staging this year’s Democratic Convention.

I’m sure Bush will follow suit, as well – after the pointless Republican Convention in New York City.

The organizers of the Democratic and Republican national conventions have each received checks for $14.5 million from the Federal Election Commission to finance these events. That, combined with an estimated $25 million in security costs, means taxpayers will foot the bill for nearly $40 million for each event.

It is repugnant to know politicians in the millionaire club, like Kerry and Bush, will not get off the welfare wagon.

With the interlude between conventions, now we have the president issuing a massive security response in three major cities, based on pre 9/11 al-Qaeda surveillance information. Fear is the easiest method for the few to control the many. Bush is desperate to cling to power and will do everything possible to deflect the media from John Kerry

Right on cue, CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer continuously intones a Chicken Little style about these serious threats, droning on and on like a big bass drum that has no melody but which trumps every other instrument.

This posturing by Bush and his lackey, Tom Ridge, is just as fraudulent as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, earlier links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, that Iraq is improving, that Iraqis support the "coalition," and that they support their new US-manufactured government.

If pollsters show Kerry pulling ahead of the incumbent days before the presidential election, look for Bush to postpone the event because of more dire al-Qaeda threats to our national security.

Pathological liars carry on lying; it's what they do. Their freak show never leaves town.

2004-07-27T10:09:00.000+03:00

With one eye on the airport and future uncertainty, and the other eye on this plush villa and domestic tranquility, it feels like it’s time for a recitation of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy from the first scene of Act Three. To go or not to go; that is the question.

How many times can you retreat to the swimming pool to escape this suckworthy heat? How many times can you watch Oprah Winfrey fawn over the banality of Sting or Barbra Streisand? How many times can you read in the Gulf Daily News about another Indian expatriate found hanged from a ceiling fan?

Just to bust out of this scene, I went to Seef Mall the other night to see Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. It is a damning portrait of George Bush. Since I’m biased against the Supreme Court-appointed president, I knew the film would only reinforce my views. True to form, insights from Bush are as interesting as the body's passage of dissolution.

The hardest segment to witness is Bush sitting in that Florida classroom, idly thumbing through a children’s book after being told of the greatest foreign attack on U.S. soil in history. He appears like a servile nitwit.

Watching the film in a theatre of a largely Arab audience is mighty weird. Regardless of Moore’s presentation of disclosures about the cozy relationship between the Bush family and Saudi royalty - especially “Bandar” Bush, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. – and the bin Laden family, there is no dispute about the carnage unleashed on Iraq.

War is hell, as American Union General William Sherman said during the Civil War. It’s one of the worst forms of degradation because it is state-sanctioned murder.

There may be significant distinctions between a Bahraini and an Iraqi, but it is far easier to empathize with atrocities that occur in a common cultural sphere then to connect with events halfway across the world. An American can’t possibly fathom what the Iraqi people endure, but a Bahraini can when similarities involve the same language, the same religion, the same architecture, the same customs, and the same values.

Moore is an excellent documentary film maker. He knows how to put it together. Ticket sales of $100 million prove him out. He seems perfectly disarming as the rumpled slob-next-door, exposing hypocrisy and championing the poor, disenfranchised of America. Yet Moore is an extremely rich liberal. He owns a $1.9 million home in New York City, and a $1.2 million home in Michigan. Moore also has no problem charging $30,000 a speech to denounce the wealthy.

Nonetheless, the film is worthy of serious consideration.

2004-07-24T16:52:00.000+03:00

It’s a little more than disconcerting to be on a family vacation in Europe, when you learn your government has made it officially impossible to return to the Middle East, and yet it’s not feasible to continue onto the United States. I’m talking about the mandatory evacuation of American military dependents from Bahrain.

Where is home? Culturally, it’s the United States. In terms of possessions, family heirlooms and equally valuable sentimental items, it’s Bahrain.

Who expects to be evacuated during vacation? This seems like going out for dinner and learning you’ve been evicted from your house.

In my case, I returned to Bahrain after parting company with my family at Heathrow Airport a week ago. My government could not stop me from entering Bahrain on a commercial airline and a valid passport.

How much longer can I remain here? It’s anyone’s guess. A few more days, a week.

The British expatriate community – all civilians, which slightly outnumbers Americans here, has no plans to leave Bahrain at all.

George Bush’s effort to introduce a Middle School textbook version of American democracy to Iraqi citizens has turned Baghdad into Hell on Earth. Saudi religious fanatics and terrorists recently answered the government’s call for surrender on Wednesday with another shoot-out in Riyadh.

Because of this, and much more, the Middle East is not exactly a top tourist destination these days.

There’s no discounting that al-Qaeda sympathizers exist in Bahrain, but most Americans here are more fearful of the Indy 500-driving style of the locals, then beady-eyed terrorists on a mission from Allah.

Despite my pose as a cynic, a prime reason for returning here was to retrieve our two Yorkshire Terriers from a boarding kennel, quickly collect specific valuables, sentimental items and make CDs of important computers files.

The great unknown factor for both Americans and Bahrainis is still the status of the Bahrain School – the land and buildings owned by the Bahrain International School Association (BISA), the facility managed by the U.S. Department of Defense and owner of the entire school inventory.

It follows that if the school is solely for American dependents and there are no dependents, then there is no school. But, of course, it’s not that cut and dry. Nearly 70% of the high school population is tuition-paying non-American dependents – at the rate of $17,000 annually, primarily Bahrainis.

As of now, the American teaching staff does not have emergency essential status. They may return to Bahrain only at their own expense, and the U.S. government will not assume any responsibility.

The Defense Department wants to close the school. The Bahrain International School Association (BISA) wants the U.S. to operate the school at least one more year until a reasonable transition to a private, international school may be achieved. At the same time, BISA is also prepared to immediately staff the school and acquire the inventory in time for the normal beginning of the 2004-05 school year. That's a tall order on such short notice.

This is July 24 and for tuition-paying families, options are virtually hopeless. With an influx of Westerners fleeing eastern Saudi Arabia - the massacre at al-Kohbar in late May was just 30 miles from Bahrain – enrollment at private schools with an English-based curriculum is maxed out. For the upper-class Bahrainis, these schools are what count for a ticket to reputable universities in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Over the past several days, a decision about the school has been forthcoming from the U.S. government – inshallah. It’s a very political issue, with the Bahrain Crown Prince recently in Washington, D.C. to discuss this with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

It’s an unnecessary fiasco.

When we embarked on this phase of our life, we wanted a little excitement and the chance to experience an international lifestyle. As the clichés goes: careful what you wish for.

Have passport, will travel.

2004-06-20T16:16:00.000+03:00

Long ago, when I was young and idealistic, I never intended to be a journalist for more than a month. It is a shabby way to make a living, so my ambition was strictly short-term. Yet the career lasted longer than expected, decades, in fact. Life can be so strange. Even so, I did my best to ignore the sleaziness, manipulation and mediocrity that underlie the facade of polite conversations with public figures. It didn’t take long to discover that social connections and sublime ass kissing attained better results than mere talent and hard work.

One aspect I don't miss is the annual Christmas party. Held at a pretentious country club in a small American town, it is still hosted by the publisher; one of the great bores of all time. He’s always reminded me of a typical Rotary Club member I once saw at McDermott’s bar on Tamm Avenue, during the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration in St. Louis. The guy was shit faced drunk, passed out beneath the urinal. He just lay there on the dirty floor, resplendent in a finely tailored suit. The urinal leaked, yet he appeared unfazed by the whole affair.

Each year, at the start of the party, every guest passes through a mock receiving line with his eminenence, the publisher. Colleagues in the newsroom frequently talked about that awful "smell,” of the local chemical company, but that was nothing compared to the concentrated essence of his unwashed prick.

Perhaps it didn’t help that many of my role models were writers and artists who fell by the wayside. Many were the conspicuous victims of syphilis, while others just suffered, in general, from unruly abandon, poor health, or both. Some, of course, were plainly non compos mentis.

It's well known that in May, 1890 Vincent Van Gogh finally felt strong enough to leave the asylum at Saint-Remy. He settled at Auvers. Yet on July 27 he shot himself and died two days later.

Arthur Rimbaud was so discouraged by the poor public reception of Une Saison En Enfer, he abandoned writing at age 20. Instead he became a vagabond and worked as a gunrunner in Abyssinia. According to legend, he was also involved in the last days of the African slave trade. Rimbaud died at the age of 37 on November 10, 1891, reportedly from the complications of syphilis and cancer.

Guy De Maupassant, a leading member of Zola's Medan Group of Naturalists, was already under sentence of death from syphilis at the height of his literary career. All the same, he led a hectic social life and continually lived up to his reputation for womanizing. Insane by 1891, Maupassant was an inmate of the famous lunatic asylum kept by Dr. Antoine Blanche, where he died on July 6, 1893.

There was also the sad case of poet Paul Verlaine, who abandoned his wife and son in 1872 to live openly with Rimbaud. He was eventually sentenced to prison for two years after he wounded Rimbaud with a revolver, during an emotional breakdown in the summer of 1873. Contrition, prison, abstinence and pious reading produced a return to Roman Catholicism for Verlaine a year later. Nonetheless, he managed to die in a whorehouse on January 6, 1896.

Cora Taylor, the owner of a Florida brothel, accompanied Stephen Crane, who left for Greece to report the Greco-Turkish War in 1897. She sold the "Hotel de Dream," to become a female correspondent and follow Crane across Europe. Crane and Cora settled in England in 1899, where they bled themselves to death financially by entertaining a never-ending procession of guests and spongers on a grand scale. On borrowed money, Cora deposited the dying Crane in a sanitarium in Badenwiler, Germany - where he died on June 5, 1900 of tuberculosis. Crane was only 27-years-old.

Of course in January 1899, Friedreich Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin, Italy. Hopelessly insane, an utter imbecile, he was taken to a madhouse, but was soon released to the care of his family. He never recovered and finally died on August 25 in Weimar.

Paul Gauguin resigned from the Paris Stock Exchange in 1883 to devote his life to painting. A few short years later, when poverty overtook them, Gauguin's wife and their five children left him. The combination of total public indifference, illness and poverty provoked Gauguin to escape to Tahiti in 1891. He died in misery on the island of La Dominique in the Marquesas on May 8, 1903.

In 1892 the Abbe Arthur Mugnier convinced Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of Against Nature, considered by many as the keystone of the Decadent movement, to attend the
Trappist monastery at the lonely Abbey of Notre-Dame-d'Igny as an oblate. There he was received back into the Catholic Church. Huysmans' semi-monastic life, which followed a strict and austere observance of the Benedictine rule in a communal life of prayer and retreat, lasted for two years. His odyssey of escapism ended in atrocious agony when he died from cancer in May 1907.

By October 1910, life at Yasnaya Polyana had become intolerable for Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. He feared that his wife, Sofya Andreyenvna, who he considered insane, was prepared to kill him. Two days later after fleeing from his estate, Tolstoy collapsed in the train station at Astapovo, not far from his home. He passed into a sort of delirium, and is said to have muttered: "Search, always go on searching."

Yet for sheer audacity, there is no one quite like Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. A Harvard graduate, he was from a Socially Registered St. Louis family who professed and wrote about his homosexuality and his addiction to heroin. He had engaged in various criminal activities and was arrested on several occasions. Despite his homosexuality, Burroughs had a common-law wife and they had a son. However, in Mexico City he shot and killed Joan Vollmer Burroughs on September 6, 1951 during a drunken pistol game of William Tell. Burroughs was in his early 40s when he finally began to write about the shambles of his life.

2004-06-19T14:09:00.000+03:00

“God is an imaginary friend for adults.”
- Elmore Leonard
American novelist

It’s nearly time to leave Bahrain for the requisite summer vacation. Later this week we head for Europe, on the red-eye to London. I’ll cross my fingers we won’t be shot down over Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, where a corrupt autocracy is teetering on the brink of collapse.

The news is out, so we are sadly aware that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Saudi-based terrorist cell, just killed American hostage Paul M. Johnson, Jr., and posted photographs of his beheaded body on an Islamist website. Johnson was a goner the moment he was abducted earlier this week.

For Westerners, especially Americans, living in-or-near Saudi Arabia, it now feels like a demented game of roulette. Is it time to worry every time we pass a white and red checkered Wahhabi at Seef Mall on the weekends, when those pious Muslims race to Bahrain for a taste of forbidden freedom – like American films at the cinema? Are the Saudis going to start shooting us down in Bahrain, like they do in Riyadh and al-Kohbar?

I’m not an advocate of Operation Iraqi Freedom doublespeak and the phony introduction of democracy. A transfer of power in Iraq cannot be resolved by democratic elections because the very people who most hate America will be elected. The American occupation is a horribly transparent attempt to destabilize the Middle East and colonize the world’s number two oil producer.

Yet why settle for Number Two? George Patton always reminded us that Americans love to win. We should have invaded Saudi Arabia, instead. The country that has played the greatest role in advancing global Islamist militancy has never been listed in Bush's "axis of evil."

The ultimate irony is that Saudi money comes from the West as oil revenues and investment. In the end, it is Americans who are funding both Wahhabi intolerance and al-Qaida terrorism. In the end, it is Americans who are funding Saudi Arabia’s ability to buy and pay for all the White House and Congressional influence it needs.

How much longer can Bahrain hold firm against the fallout from Saudi Arabia? Already the three top private secondary schools here are inundated with desperate requests for student applications for 2004-05. Naturally, the local property owners are already putting the screws to the real estate market, demanding even higher prices from Westerners for wildly overpriced flats and villas.

But the real impact from the growing chaos in Saudi Arabia is how this will affect the disenfranchised Shia community in Bahrain.

After just a brief taste of Western Civilization, it will be hell to return to this part of the world – a place where the children of Abraham continually prove Elmore Leonard is right.

2004-06-12T06:48:00.000+03:00

For ten years, Alzheimer's Disease ruined Ronald Reagan as family and friends watched him fade from the world of the real. His mind collapsed like loose sand behind his ever more vacant eyes.

Now it’s finally over and the 40th American President has been layed to rest. Yet Reagan’s whole weeklong funeral was cheap, utterly distasteful American publicity. The great American media, with so much influence and time and nothing to say, compared Reagan to Lincoln and Hamilton. This is like claiming that the maintenance man wrote the Bill of Rights.

William Rivers Pitt, senior editor and lead writer for t r u t h o u t, provides this viewpoint:

“The veneer of honor and respect painted across the legacy of Ronald Reagan is a myth of biblical proportions. The coverage proffered this past week of the Reagan legacy seldom mentions impropriety until the Iran/Contra scandal appears on the administration timeline. This sin of omission is vast. By the end of his term in office, some 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, indicted or investigated for misconduct and/or criminal activities.

Some of the names on this disgraceful roll-call: Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert C. McFarlane, Michael Deaver, E. Bob Wallach, James Watt, Alan D. Fiers, Clair George, Duane R. Clarridge, Anne Gorscuh Burford, Rita Lavelle, Richard Allen, Richard Beggs, Guy Flake, Louis Glutfrida, Edwin Gray, Max Hugel, Carlos Campbell, John Fedders, Arthur Hayes, J. Lynn Helms, Marjory Mecklenburg, Robert Nimmo, J. William Petro, Thomas C. Reed, Emanuel Savas, Charles Wick. Many of these names are lost to history, but more than a few of them are still with us today, 'rehabilitated' by the administration of George W. Bush.

Ronald Reagan actively supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Names like Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont and Duvalier reek of blood and corruption, yet were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity. The ground of many nations is salted with the bones of those murdered by brutal rulers who called Reagan a friend. Who can forget his support of those in South Africa who believed apartheid was the proper way to run a civilized society?

One dictator in particular looms large across our landscape. Saddam Hussein was a creation of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration supported the Hussein regime despite his incredible record of atrocity. The Reagan administration gave Hussein intelligence information which helped the Iraqi military use their chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran to great effect. The deadly bacterial agents sent to Iraq during the Reagan administration are a laundry list of horrors.

The Reagan administration sent an emissary named Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to shake Saddam Hussein's hand and assure him that, despite public American condemnation of the use of those chemical weapons, the Reagan administration still considered him a welcome friend and ally. This happened while the Reagan administration was selling weapons to Iran, a nation notorious for its support of international terrorism, in secret and in violation of scores of laws.

Another name on Ronald Reagan's roll call is that of Osama bin Laden. The Reagan administration believed it a bully idea to organize an army of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. bin Laden became the spiritual leader of this action. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded and trained by the United States. Reagan helped teach Osama bin Laden the lesson he lives by today, that it is possible to bring a superpower to its knees. bin Laden believes this because he has done it once before, thanks to the dedicated help of Ronald Reagan.

In 1998, two American embassies in Africa were blasted into rubble by Osama bin Laden, who used the Semtex sent to Afghanistan by the Reagan administration to do the job. In 2001, Osama bin Laden thrust a dagger into the heart of the United States, using men who became skilled at the art of terrorism with the help of Ronald Reagan. Today, there are 827 American soldiers and over 10,000 civilians who have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that came to be because Reagan helped manufacture both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

How much of this can be truthfully laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan? It depends on who you ask. Those who worship Reagan see him as the man in charge, the man who defeated Soviet communism, the man whose vision and charisma made Americans feel good about themselves after Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970s. Those who despise Reagan see him as nothing more than a pitch-man for corporate raiders, the man who allowed greed to become a virtue, the man who smiled vapidly while allowing his officials to run the government for him.

In the final analysis, however, the legacy of Ronald Reagan - whether he had an active hand in its formulation, or was merely along for the ride - is beyond dispute. His famous question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer.

We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight years ago, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters, and be damned to the truth.”

2004-06-08T12:04:00.000+03:00

It’s too bad Ronald Reagan’s death cannot be dismissed like the passing of the old Brylcreemed uncle with halitosis who told banal Rotary Club-inspired jokes at family reunions. An amiable dunce is relatively forgettable. Yet Reagan was not always an incompetent and incoherent stooge. The former FBI snitch had a brazen contempt for the ordinary people of the United States that made him the supreme Confidence Artist of modern American politics.

For the past few days, American media has gushed on and on about Reagan, a venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers' wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class.

A broadcaster recently nominated Regan as one of the 20th century’s greatest economists, a man who should have been nominated for the Noble Prize. I wanted to hurl.

Reagan's economic policies were a disaster for working-class Americans. He presided over the worst recession since the 1930s, despite the stimulus of military Keynesian policies, which created massive federal budget deficits and tripled the federal debt.

However, Reagan’s genuine legacy rests more properly on the way he subverted the Constitution over the Iran-Contra scandal involving Nicaragua. This duplicity was far more serious grounds for impeachment than what forced Nixon to resign, or what Clinton endured. Amnesia in America is epidemic. Our culture must lead the world in Attention Deficit Disorder syndrome and Ronald Reagan - from his prime years – could serve as the poster boy.

Christopher Hitchens offers some interesting insights:

“Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.)

Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you."

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible.

Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war.

Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to green light the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused the Democrats of "scuttling."

Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran.

One could go on.

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump.

Reagan could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power.”

2004-06-07T11:39:00.000+03:00

If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.
- Mark Twain, 1884

There is nothing more stirring than The Star Spangled Banner, whether vocalized by a high school student before a basketball game, or played passionately on guitar by Jimi Hendrix. For an American, the national anthem instantly evokes all the accomplishments and aspirations of our culture.

It still seems only natural to champion the ideals advanced by the Enlightenment in the early days of the American Republic, as represented by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

I believe in America's heritage of freedom: individual liberty and personal responsibility, a free-market economy of abundance and prosperity, and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace, and free trade. I’m especially fond of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that allows freedom of speech – especially dissent.

Give me the company of Revolutionary philosopher and writer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) any day. The British-born Paine wrote the pamphlet Common Sense (1776) and argued for America’s complete independence from the United Kingdom. In 1787 he returned to England, where he wrote The Rights of Man (1791-2) in support of the French Revolution.

Give me the company of writer and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) any day. During Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond, he was jailed one night for refusing to pay a poll tax meant to support America's war in Mexico; in 1849 he published an essay on this experience, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, which in its call for passive resistance to unjust laws was to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thomas Carlyle called it the one truly original American contribution to civilization.

Of course life has changed in America, and not for the better.

Too many Americans are content to walk around like penguins, like trained seals, like
docile maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait.

Too many Americans are content to forfeit critical thinking in favor of uninspired and
degrading Hollywood-produced entertainment.

Too many Americans are content to curse, croon, soliloquize, orate, gesticulate, wheedle,
cajole, whimper, and caterwaul about the impotency to change society.

Too many Americans are content to simply lend their voices to the sound of monkey chatter
in the topmost branches of the trees.

Too many Americans are content to join the cult of onanism and pretend nothing is
wrong.

In America, you may dream, if you dream alike. But if you dream something different you are not in America. The moment you have a different thought, you cease to be an American.

I do not reside in the country of my birth, the country of my loyalty – because of my profession, which now has me based in Bahrain.

Regardless where I reside, I have a genuine contempt for life in an "Enron-Pentagon prison," a land of ballooning budget deficits thanks to the growth of a garrison state, tax cuts for the privileged, and the creeping totalitarianism of the Ashcroft justice department.

To redress the current disastrous political situation the American Empire finds itself in, the United States must stop implementing Foreign Aid with the same disastrous effects as domestic welfare programs. The U.S. currently spends approximately $14 billion per year on foreign aid - far less than most people believe, but still a substantial sum.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has spent more than $400 billion on aid to other countries. But there is little evidence that any of these programs has significantly improved the lives of the people in countries receiving this aid. Instead, foreign aid has typically slowed economic development and created dependence.

On foreign affairs, the United States must cease all colonial-styled adventures, especially in the Middle East. Americans need to acknowledge that the road to peace in this region leads through Jerusalem, and not Baghdad. The United States must suspend its support of Israeli terrorism and work aggressively to guarantee an autonomous state for Palestine.

On domestic issues, the United States should end the war on drugs, which is nothing more than a war on minorities and civil liberties. It's time to re-legalize drugs and let people take responsibility for themselves. Drug abuse is a tragedy and a sickness. Criminal laws only drive the problem underground and put money in the pockets of the criminal class.

Secondly, the country should nationalize health care and natural resources. Equally important, voters should abolish the Electoral College, change the Constitution to make America a parliamentary democracy and break the monopoly of the "Property party," with its two wings: Republican and Democrat.

* * *

BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers was killed and security correspondent Frank Gardner seriously injured in a gun attack in Riyadh yesterday.

The shooting happened in the al-Suwaidi district, near the home of a top wanted militant, as the pair filmed a report about increasing fear among workers in Saudi Arabia and is the latest in a series of attacks on Westerners in the kingdom.

Prince Turki al Faisal, the Saudi ambassador in London, said yesterday's attack only demonstrated "the blind illogical viciousness" of the terrorists.

Predictably, the Saudi ambassador vowed to eradicate this wicked group “whose aim is to destabilise our society and our relationships with other countries.”

The House of Saud should be in supreme panic. Each passing week proves that the government can be destabilized.

On Friday, a statement attributed to Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, who is alleged to be al-Qaeda's chief in Saudi Arabia and tops the most-wanted list, hailed the recent spike in oil prices that was partly caused by the attacks in the oil-rich kingdom and took pride in the killing of "all infidel hostages" during the al-Khobar carnage.

Three of the al-Khobar killers escaped, while a fourth was wounded and captured. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal gave credence Sunday to reports that the gunmen were allowed to escape.

* * *

Life In Bahrain:

Who Do You Trust?
A former mosque caretaker convicted of sodomising a 14-year-old boy had his sentence reduced from 10 years to three yesterday.

His sentence was cut by the Supreme Appeal Court, which said it was too severe.

The 10-year sentence would have been applicable had the man been a cleric and therefore in a position of trust, said the court.

Note: Since one cannot trust an adult mosque caretaker in Bahrain, his actions aren’t significant.

Up on the Roof
Five Bahraini teenagers are in custody after allegedly sodomising an eleven-year-old Bahraini boy on the rooftop of a building near his Manama home.

The incident is said to have taken place about two months ago. The youths then allegedly threatened the boy to keep quiet, which he did.

They came back to him on Thursday to attempt to rape him again, but this time he fled and told his uncle about the incident, his father told the Gulf Daily News.

All You Need is Love
A pregnant housemaid was jailed for two weeks yesterday for sneaking a man into her employer's house for sex.

The 26-year-old Indonesian was told at the Lower Criminal Court that the sentence would be suspended if she paid a BD1,000 [$2,700] fine.

She admitted helping the man to enter the house without permission and will be deported after completing her sentence.

A 28-year-old Indian car cleaner appeared in court with her but denied a charge of entering the house without permission.

He was convicted and fined BD50 [$135].

The woman said she later realised she was pregnant and told her sponsor last month what had happened.

He handed her over to the police and the car cleaner was also arrested.

Note: Most maids live on the premises of Arab households and have no life of their own; these women are virtual slaves. This woman was offered a jail sentence of 14 days or a fine the equivalent of $2,700. Either way, she will be deported. The Indian car wash fellow was convicted – whatever that means, and fined the equivalent of $135. Why the discrepancy in justice between a woman and a man in this culture? You know the answer: women count for nothing.

2004-06-05T09:23:00.000+03:00

It’s about time. CIA Director George Tenet finally ran out of friends. In Washington power circles, a resignation based on spending quality time with family is another lame euphemism for being fired and allowed to save face publicly.

Tenent’s resignation was due September 12, 2001. During his watch, the United States experienced two of the worst intelligence failures of the last 50 years. The first failure resulted in a second Pearl Harbor. The second led to a messy war that now has American soldiers deployed to the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

Other notable screw-ups include Tenet's failure to anticipate India's surprise nuclear tests that inspired Pakistan to follow suit in a series of similar explosions. This was way back in May 1998.

According to journalists Ruper Cornwell and Anne Penketht, Tenet also missed the warning signs of al-Qaeida's attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and, when the Clinton administration chose to retaliate against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, it was bad CIA intelligence that led to a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum to be bombed in the mistaken belief that it was a chemical weapons facility.

The following year, more faulty CIA intelligence led to the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Ironically, Tenet’s most shining moment is too little too late and that is being responsible for the fall of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who is now accused of spying for Iran and disclosing to Tehran that U.S. intelligence had broken a key communications code used by Iran.

Slam-dunk Tenent is the fall guy, and everyone knows this.

When thousands of people attended the third annual Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem Thursday, Ultra-Orthodox mayor Uri Lupolianski required protection from body guards. Members of the ultra-Orthodox community were incensed he allowed the Gay Pride parade to go ahead and held two demonstrations in the last week to protest.

Rabbi David Basri, a prominent kabbalist, said homosexuals were "subhuman" and would be reincarnated as rabbits. This should make Jewish Gays hopping mad.

2004-06-02T05:53:00.000+03:00

Farce and tragedy are in a race to the finish line when the "dead or alive" U.S. President displays the last pistol Saddam Hussein ever touched in a White House trophy room.

Who has time to appreciate the fiction of classic literature when reality is so genuinely weird? For instance, according to CNN, approximately 100 Iraqi policemen whom the Americans had just placed in the holy city of Najaf, after a vague agreement with rebel cleric Muktada al-Sadr, have already deserted their posts and left the city.

Sadly, many Americans still accept at face value the misnamed "War on Terrorism," linking Iraq to 9/11. Sadly, many Americans still accept Bush’s stated motivations of “liberating” the people of Iraq and bestowing upon them a full measure of democracy, freedom and other eternal joys fit for high school history books.

In a world of doublespeak, President Bush has tried for over two years to sell Americans on a war with Iraq by alluding to the possibility of a link between Saddam (evil incarnate) Hussein and al-Qaida. It’s frightening to watch a former prep school football yell leader apply a monomaniacal focus on Iraq when the American economy is sputtering badly. It’s been even more frightening that Americans allowed Bush to thoroughly demonize Saddam Hussein, linking him to 9/11 and building him up into a Hitler who could have threatened the world “with a holocaust.”

Of course the reasons for American imperial schemes really predate 9/11. Oil is the sine qua non of the American Middle East policy, yesterday, today and tomorrow; to be in full control of Iraq's vast reserves, with Saudi oil and Iranian oil waiting next door.

Why be shocked that a Pentagon email has allegedly surfaced indicating that the VP's office "coordinated" a major no-bid "Restore Iraqi Oil" contract that went to Cheney's former company Halliburton on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Conservative Republicans have wanted Saddam’s head for a dozen years. We should be honest and reorganize our oil companies into the American Central Asia Company, much as the British did during the 18th and 19th centuries, when their empire was at its height.

Like some easy platitude from O’Brien in 1984, the axis of evil has now shrunk solely to Iraq. Iran and North Korea have been put aside with the dismissive comment: "Different threats require different strategies." I contend that all roads to al-Qaida lead to Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian country bloated from decadence and corruption.

The recent events in al-Kohbar, just 30 miles from Bahrain, underscores this once again.

Since Bush assumed power in the U.S. Supreme Court-sanctioned coup d'état of 2000, the world has been blessed with an American leader of quite exceptional imbecility. As if to demonstrate his tenuous relationship with reality, Bush once proudly quipped: “The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.” Never mind the record-breaking, worldwide anti-war demonstrations of February 15, 2003. With that bland encomium, the former prep school football yell leader merely appeared as petulant and misguided as Dick Shawn in “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

The functional alcoholic currently domiciled at the White House now makes Ronald Regan seem like a positively refined statesman. Of course that old Borax huckster could easily mask his tabula rasa with glossy recitations from his bygone days with the Hollywood dialogue coaches. However, this once-AWOL Texas Air National Guard pilot seems to simply be improvising from a half-wit’s script, like a man with mismatched dentures.

How did an intellectual pygmy end up in the White House?

2004-05-25T05:54:00.000+03:00

In yesterday’s issue of USA Today, Carl Bernstein raises some important points. Bernstein is co-author, with Bob Woodward, of All the President's Men and The Final Days.

What follows is an excerpt:
“Thirty years ago, a Republican president, facing impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate, was forced to resign because of unprecedented crimes he and his aides committed against the Constitution and people of the United States. Ultimately, Richard Nixon left office voluntarily because courageous leaders of the Republican Party put principle above party and acted with heroism in defense of the Constitution and rule of law.

"What did the president know and when did he know it?" a Republican senator — Howard Baker of Tennessee — famously asked of Nixon 30 springtimes ago.

Today, confronted by the graphic horrors of Abu Ghraib prison, by ginned-up intelligence to justify war, by 652 American deaths since presidential operatives declared "Mission Accomplished," Republican leaders have yet to suggest that George W. Bush be held responsible for the disaster in Iraq and that he, not just Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is ill-suited for his job.

Today, the United States is confronted by another ill-considered war, conceived in ideological zeal and pursued with contempt for truth, disregard of history and an arrogant assertion of American power that has stunned and alienated much of the world, including traditional allies. At a juncture in history when the United States needed a president to intelligently and forcefully lead a real international campaign against terrorism and its causes, Bush decided instead to unilaterally declare war on a totalitarian state that never represented a terrorist threat; to claim exemption from international law regarding the treatment of prisoners; to suspend constitutional guarantees even to non-combatants at home and abroad; and to ignore sound military advice from the only member of his Cabinet — Powell — with the most requisite experience. Instead of using America's moral authority to lead a great global cause, Bush squandered it.”

2004-05-24T06:06:00.000+03:00

Republican National Convention
Madison Square Garden
New York City, New York
August 31-September 2

Day One
6:00 PM Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell
6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance
6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)
6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing
6:46 PM Seminar #1: Iraq Stratergies-Voodoo/DooDoo WMD
6:47 PM First Presidential Beer Bong
7:35 PM Serve Freedom Fries
7:40 PM EPA Address #1: Mercury-It's what's for dinner!
8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next
8:10 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh
8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your Children!!
8:30 PM Round table discussion on reproductive rights (MEN only)
8:50 PM Seminar #2 Corporations: The Government of the Future
9:00 PM Condi Rice sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"
9:05 PM Second Presidential Beer Bong
9:10 PM EPA Address #2 -- Trees: The Real Cause of Forest Fires
9:30 PM Break for secret meetings
10:00 PM Second prayer led by Cal Thomas
10:15 PM Lecture by Karl Rove: Doublespeak made easy
10:30 PM Rumsfeld demonstration of how to squint and talk macho
10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark "deer in headlights" stare
10:40 PM John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory Kevlar chastity belt
10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of black republicans
10:46 PM Third Presidential Beer Bong
10:50 PM Seminar #3 Education: A Drain on our Nation's Economy
11:10 PM Hilary Clinton Pinata
11:20 PM Second Lecture by John Ashcroft: Evolutionists: The Dangerous New Cult
11:30 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again
11:35 PM Blame Clinton
11:40 PM Laura Bush serves milk and cookies
11:50 PM Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself
12:00 PM Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord

2004-05-22T16:11:00.000+03:00

George Bush and the Neo-conservatives were right; there are Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. The WMDs are the digital cameras of the American troops assigned to the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. I don’t think the Neo-con spin doctors can ever peddle out of this public relations fiasco.

Starting Wednesday, Americans have been under tighter security measures in Bahrain. Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy, paid a one-day visit to the base. He is a civilian with an impressive business-world resume. England’s role is to handle budgetary matters before the U.S. Congress. He has no other serious influence. Nonetheless, England was here on the euphemistic “goodwill tour.”

- on Wednesday, Specialist Jeremy Sivits was sentenced to one year in prison and discharged from the army for his role in the abuse of Iraqi detainees. A U.S. special court martial held in Baghdad handed Sivits the maximum possible sentence of one year in prison.

- on Wednesday, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa released 11 Shias from prison – jailed a few weeks ago, accused of petitioning illegally for changes to the Bahrain constitution.

- on Wednesday, 10 died as Israeli tanks fired on a peaceful protest in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah in the occupied Gaza Strip. Among the dead were mostly children.

- on Wednesday, an American military helicopter fired on a wedding party in Mukaradeeb, a remote Iraqi village near the Syrian border, killing more than 40 people, including many children.

Thursday was quiet in Bahrain, yet Americans were placed on restrictions for the evening. This meant no bars, no restaurants and no movie theatres.

By that afternoon, there was virtually no political damage from the astonishing fall from grace of Iraqi National Congress president Ahmad Chalabi, following the raid on his Baghdad home by U.S. backed Iraqi Security Forces.

Allegedly, both Sunni and Shia are indifferent and scornful towards Chalabi. Why not? The long-time Iraqi exile Chalabi is apparently a first-rate con artist. That he was sentenced in 1992 by a Jordanian military tribunal to 22 years in prison for fraud - does not speak in his favor.

Largely because of intelligence provided by Chalabi, the White House built its case against Iraq and planned for massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; a war that would pay for itself; a small post-war stabilization force; and a population ready to welcome American troops as liberators. To say this plan was woefully defective is an understatement.

Now it’s alleged that Iran used the U.S.-funded arm of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to funnel disinformation to provoke the United Sates into getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. had already cut off $340,000 a month funding [payoffs] to Chalabi's political party. The chequered past of the Iraqi National Congress president - he was sentenced in 1992 by a Jordanian military tribunal to 22 years in prison for fraud - does not speak in his favor. No one should be surprised if Chalabi has the same fate as Izz al-din Salim, the council president killed in a car bomb attack on Monday.

By Friday, there were more warnings for Americans in Bahrain to avoid the Seef Round-about where planned demonstrations were set for the afternoon. In Bahrain, if planned demonstrations occur, Friday is the day.

Yesterday there were demonstrations to denounce coalition troops for fighting in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, sacred to Shias. There were also the fresh memories of the wedding massacre in the remote Iraqi village near the Syrian border, the Israeli atrocities in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah. And, like the rest of the Arab world, many local citizens were perhaps upset by the one-year prison sentence for U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Sivits for his role at Abu Ghraib prison.

Allegedly, 4,000 demonstrators turned out for the rally and burned a security force jeep after police clashed with the protesters. According to Reuters News Service, more than 20 people were hurt, including Javad Firouz, a Shi'ite opposition activist and member of Manama city council.

Following the demonstrations, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa fired long-time Interior Minister Shaikh Muhammad bin Khalifa al-Khalifa and replaced him with Major-General Shaikh Rashid bin Abdulla bin Ahmed al-Khalifa. To an American, since everyone has the same last name, this just seems like the Bahraini version of a shaikh-up.

* * *

Since moving to Bahrain two years ago, I’ve distanced myself from many U.S. media. This is natural, I’m an expatriate now. Every day I check some media in the U.S. the United Kingdom and the Arabian Gulf. For balance, I rely on the London-based The Guardian.

My views about Palestine have changed considerably during this period. Two days ago, I noted a U.S. poll that reported 46% of Americans are concerned about the economy, 24% are concerned about the war in Iraq, and only 1% care about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Before moving here, I would place myself comfortably in that same 1% category.

Now I can’t think of a more degraded people in modern times than the Palestinians, and there are so many examples: the Armenian Genocide of 1915; the Rape of Nanking in 1937; the European Jewish extermination by Nazi Germany during World War Two; the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia: 1975-1979; the systematic killing of Tutsis by Hutu extremists in Rwanda: 1994; and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Yet the attempt by Israelis to remove Palestinians from their homeland has been on going since 1947. The West doesn’t care. Israel is a proxy state of the U.S. What is shocking is the paralysis of the Arab world.

With all the wealth of the Gulf States, nothing is done by the chief power brokers to achieve a favorable resolution for the Palestinians. The regional media reports daily about the plight of the Palestinians – yet I’m unaware of how Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE are doing anything meaningful to affect change. The consensus is that Arab countries are too weak to resist the U.S. and the powerful Israeli lobby.

On the surface, the Arab world has all the essential elements to create a power bloc as formidable as the European Union: there is common language, religion, customs and a currency that is easy to align. However, the most important element missing is cooperation.

Will the members who showed up today in Tunis for the delayed annual summit achieve anything? Al- Jazeera describes the atmosphere among dignitaries as gloomy and despondent at their inability to help the Palestinians and end the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Sometimes it seems Arab leaders prefer to maintain Israel as a target of frustration for their people, instead of settling the Palestinian issue and then being forced to solve the internal problems of their respective kingdoms. Right now, the last thing Arab leaders need is a democratic government in their midst. The border Iraq shares with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria is so porous that it is impossible for these neighboring countries to stop disaffected Arab Muslims from crossing into Iraq to help expel an occupation force. And why should they? Democracy frequently pretends to be morally superior, and the American example for the Middle East is already riddled with horrible blemishes. This is too bad, because the ideal is worthy, but not here, not now.

2004-05-21T08:24:00.000+03:00

"Look, if Americans can be convinced that the President of the United States is even barely literate, they can be convinced of anything. You know, the fact that every American isn’t embarrassed by the fact that there’s an imbecile in the White House is already a problem."
- Norman Finkelstein

Keeping pace with events in the Middle East feels like watching a never-ending fire hose of chaos and destruction.

There were two more sickening examples Wednesday. Ten died as Israeli tanks fired
on a peaceful protest in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Among the dead were mostly children. Allegedly, children were blood soaked and men were left with their intestines hanging out.

The Palestinian refugees were demonstrating to demand an end to Israel's military siege of the area. Israel, on the other hand, claims its operations are aimed at routing militant groups and destroying tunnels used to ferry weapons from Egypt into the Gaza Strip

The atrocities in the Rafah refugee camp bring to over 40 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in a two-day period. With the United States abstaining, a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel on Wednesday easily passed 14-to-0.

The next day Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles as troops moved into two areas on the south side of the town of Rafah. Eight more Palestinians were reported killed in Rafah refugee camp, as the victims of Wednesday's violence were buried.

On Wednesday, an American military helicopter fired on a wedding party in Mukaradeeb,
a remote Iraqi village near the Syrian border, killing more than 40 people, including many children. Arab television footage showed a truck carrying the bodies of the dead arriving in Ramadi, the nearest town. Many of the dead were clearly children.

Allegedly, gunfire was fired at the wedding - a tradition in the Arab world as a form of celebration – and this prompted U.S. military retaliation. In July 2002, an American air strike on an Afghan wedding party killed 48 civilians. It is also a tradition in the Central Asian nation to fire gunshots in a show of jubilation.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. military in Iraq, reported Coalition Forces had “intelligence” that there was no wedding taking place in Mukaradeeb at the time.

It’s uncomfortable to admit that Americans are victims who have turned into perpetrators. The terrorist attacks of September 11 claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives and the whole world felt sympathy for Americans as the victims of a horrible atrocity. Then George W. Bush declared war on terrorism, and pursued it first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.

Since then, the war on terror has claimed more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of September 11. This fact is not recognized in the United States because the victims of the war on terror are not Americans.

It’s also time to admit that as European Jews suffered the horrors of hell at the direct hands of Nazi Germany, Israel is now a perpetrator of appalling disrepute. The guilt of a compliant West during the Holocaust – especially American apathy, has been successfully exploited for decades by Israel as a means of justifying the transfer of Arab-Muslims from Palestine. As the government of the Jewish state forces the Palestinians into more ghettos by creating Apartheid walls, history turns in its grave.

Like the terrorists they both profess to despise, the United States and Israel are linked in destruction, crimes and torture affecting innocent people.

2004-05-15T01:12:00.000+03:00

This is what it’s like to live in Bahrain: if you’re familiar with the Hollywood film, The Sound of Music, then you would have been amused yet charmed by the international cast involved in the recent Bahrain School production. An Egyptian played the role of Captain von Trapp, and an Indian played Maria – the singing Nun. All seven von Trapp children were a mish-mash of ethnic backgrounds. In fact, a black American student played a German Nazi commander.

Watching the performance was a genuine relief from the usual wanton human corruption streaming in from the media about the Middle East.

Besides this week’s soul-curdling beheading of Nick Berg and Rumsfeld’s public relations con in Baghdad, there is also the sell-out of democracy in Bahrain.

Allegedly, the petition committee of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre was dissolved yesterday before a planned demonstration demanding the release of 14 people held in custody for collecting signatures to petition His Majesty King Hamad for constitutional changes.

According to the Gulf Daily News, Al Wefaq Islamic Society president Shaikh Ali Salman asked that the committee be dissolved because he didn’t want the four Bahraini political societies to have a rift with the government.

Seventeen Bahrainis involved in the petition drive were arrested April 30 for “attempting to overthrow the system, distributing falseness and rumour, encouraging hate of the state and using illegal means to try to petition His Majesty.”

In Bahrain, it’s acceptable for an MP - before election - to expose himself to a young woman; it’s acceptable for male teenagers to vandalize cars; it’s acceptable for a gang to destroy a restaurant. However, petitioning for constitutional changes is equal to overthrowing the system.

Of course there is no mention of this petition drive, the detainees and planned demonstrations in The Bahrain Tribune – the island’s only other English newspaper. This is hardly surprising since the Minister of Information allegedly owns the newspaper.

George Orwell’s vision of 1984 is strong as ever.

According to the New York Post, a semi-sleazy Murdoch publication, Lynndie England, the 21-year-old female trailer-park scapegoat, appeared in a degenerate video having sex in front of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and was also depicted on film in graphic sex acts with other U.S. soldiers.

From Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom:
Top 10 Excuses and/or dinosaurs of Lynndie England

10. Pachycephalosaurus

9. "I thought those were corn dogs. And I love corn dogs."

8. "Wait, you said 'secure and detain'? Because it sounded like you said 'put together
a circle jerk, film it, then burn it onto a DVD.'"

7. Carcharodontosaurus

6. "Oh, I see: it's okay to liberate Iraqis, but try liberating a few American nipples and
all of sudden you've committed a crime...?"

5. "I thought those were salamis. And I love salamis."

4. Hylaeosaurus

3. "I know it might seem strange to non-military personnel, but a standard PsyOps
technique is to have an orgy with multiple partners, photograph it, then blame the
'chain of command.' For some reason, that really demoralizes incarcerated
Ba'athists."

2. "Abu Ghraib, grab Abu...it's a common mistake for a dyslexic. Did I mention that I'm
a dyslexic? "

1. (Tie) Tyrannosaurus Rex; "I tripped and fell and accidentally landed on some men with
erections."

2004-05-13T09:55:00.000+03:00

The details and circumstances of Nick Berg’s gruesome death by five masked mujahideen are horrendous.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida allied group has no connection to Islam or any religion of mercy, compassion and humane principles.

Civilized society should be angry and sickened by the barbaric murder and the exploitative way that al-Qaida has linked it to the notorious U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison.

In recent weeks, many scenes from Iraq have been deeply disturbing. Among them were photos of the charred bodies of American civilians hanging from a bridge in Fallujah and photos of U.S. soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners.

This culture of revenge and the pornography of violence robs us all of our dignity and underscores the importance of holding ourselves to the highest standards of humane treatment and international justice.

2004-05-09T06:20:00.000+03:00

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says it best in the following editorial.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign and take his top deputies with him. That includes Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith.

It's not just Mr. Rumsfeld's latest fiasco, the botched handling of the investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld seriously underestimated the number of U.S. troops required for the occupation of Iraq and the potential for American casualties.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld seriously overestimated the threat from weapons of mass destruction.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld ignored the State Department's plans for the occupation and relied on private security forces and private companies with no-bid contracts. It's not just that U.S. policy in Iraq has devolved in dangerous ad hocery, with one day's decision reversed the next day.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld had charged around the world insulting key allies.

It's the accumulation of all these miscalculations, misconceptions and missteps - and an arrogant inability to admit his mistakes - that require him to step down. If the Defense Department were a corporation, its CEO would be long gone.

Whether or not Iraq is like Vietnam, Mr. Rumsfeld's failings are reminiscent of Robert McNamara's. Like the Vietnam-era Pentagon chief, Mr. Rumsfeld took over an omnipotent military and put it in a situation that made it vulnerable. Like Mr. McNamara, Mr. Rumsfeld thought the United States could use force to impose its will on a part of the world he didn't understand and still doesn't. Like Mr. McNamara, Mr. Rumsfeld has deluded himself into thinking that he can manage the unmanageable through the application of a brilliant intellect.

Right now, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress are livid that Mr. Rumsfeld failed to warn them about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he has known about since January. The White House said Wednesday that Mr. Bush also was upset that he hadn't been told about the pictures of abuse.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized that the pictures would inflame opinion and persuaded CBS to delay its broadcast for two weeks. Yet once the news broke, both Gen. Myers and Mr. Rumsfeld claimed they hadn't finished reading the three-month old report. If true, that is a serious dereliction of duty.

Regarding Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld has been more interested in proving his theories of military transformation than in listening to pragmatic advice of experienced military experts. When the Army's departing Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, estimated that 200,000 troops would be needed for the occupation, he was ridiculed as "way off the mark" by Mr. Wolfowitz. Now the Pentagon finds itself having to increase the number of troops, lengthen their stay and provide more heavy armor in response to the deaths of soldiers in light vehicles. Unpardonably, Mr. Wolfowitz didn't even know, during congressional testimony last month, how many Americans had been killed in Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld also dismissed the advice of a State Department task force that had spent months planning for the occupation. He cast the United States' lot with Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraq National Congress, a group of exiles who have proved unpopular and unreliable.

Mr. Chalabi also provided the United States with bum intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld even started his own intelligence office under Mr. Feith, who hyped faulty intelligence to justify the war.

If there ever was a plan for the occupation, it wasn't discernible amid the chaos. Ret. Lt. Gen. Jay Garner was replaced by L. Paul Bremer who is being replaced by John Negroponte. The Iraqi army was disbanded and then reconstituted. The Baathists were excluded and then included. The Marines were ready to take Fallujah and then pulled back. A general in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard was put in charge of Fallujah and then replaced two days later.

This isn't a plan; this is chaos.

Mr. Rumsfeld has consistently been wrong. He has responded to criticism by bullying and sneering at his critics. His arrogant miscalculations have cost American soldiers their lives and continue to put them at grave risk. The Army has been stretched to the breaking point. Billions of dollars of U.S. treasure continue to sink into the sands of Iraq; Wednesday, President George W. Bush asked Congress for $25 billion more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

American prestige has suffered around the world. Saddam Hussein and his nonexistent WMDs have been replaced with a mob of insurgents that poses a greater threat to Americans than Saddam ever did.

For his mistakes and his inability to recognize them, Mr. Rumsfeld must go.

2004-05-08T08:45:00.000+03:00

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
- Pete Townshend

Thanks to the video and digital photography of soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the old American Republic is a shadow of itself. We now find ourselves stretched out in the mud and looking eye to eye with those who we condemned not so long ago.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bears personal responsibility for the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and must resign his cabinet position. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, should also take a fall on this, as well.

Since these abuses have taken place at Abu Ghraib prison where some of the worst abuses of the Saddam Hussein regime took place, the symbolism is devastating. War is society’s heart of darkness and the full circle of its obscenity should be evenly appalling.

While it’s trite to say war is hell, the inevitable suspension of morality invites the glorification of violence. It’s not possible to let loose the animal in man and then expect to be able to cage it up again at a moment's notice. Relative to World War Two, George S. Patton acknowledged that some of his soldiers would likely commit rape after battle. Never concerned with political correctness, Patton was always painfully honest.

Yet the ideal of America is a freedom based on human dignity.

What is disturbing about the 1,000-plus visual images of Iraqis incarcerated at the Abu Ghraib prison is how the infliction of pain is eroticized. The staged image of Army Reserve Pfc. Lynndie England holding a naked Iraqi man like a dog on a lead seems like a bad porno flick.

This is disturbing. It’s all disturbing.

On April 24, two U.S. Navy Sailors and one Coast Guardsmen were killed during coordinated suicide attacks against the Khawr Al Amaya (KAAOT) and Al Basrah (ABOT) oil terminals, located roughly 19 miles from Iraq's main port of Basrah.

The three victims were deployed from the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which makes them connected to the American presence in Bahrain. One of the sailors had his head blown off.

When the Arab world sees images of Iraqis humiliated in prison, they are outraged. When the Arab world sees images of American and British soldiers killed by insurgents, they praise Allah.

Yesterday, a senior aide of the radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr offered worshippers a £100 reward to any Iraqi who captured a female British for use as a sex slave. With a Kalashnikov assault rifle by his side, the aide, Sheik Abdul-Sattar al-Bahadli, made the statement before an estimated 3,000 worshippers at the al-Hawi mosque in Basrah.

What kind of religion advocates the compassion of a God, while spiritual leaders brandish guns and urge followers to kill and degrade people?

This is sickening. It’s all sickening.

Of course what is most appalling is that the U.S. military has no business in Iraq. The current president is one of the dimmest men ever to occupy the White House, and there's a lot of competition for that title.

War is the usual sport of a ruling dictator, and serial warfare is what we have – especially when the American Empire has a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy. The Supreme Court surrendered its moral authority when it bulldozed its way through the Constitution in order to select as its President the loser in the election of that year.

Now America is the "wife beater" who is well respected about town until he thoughtlessly brings his battered spouse to a public gathering. We all knew the dirty secret, but the reality leaves us shaken.

Yet it's puzzling that many Americans are "shocked" by this transparent reality.

Behind the facade of respectability and commitment to human rights the practice of torture has gone on for decades, almost in full view of us. Counterinsurgency and assassination have all become essential parts of maintaining a global system that functions in the interests of American industry.

Right after Richard Nixon resigned as president, no respectable American newspaper said what was articulated by Claude Julien, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in September 1974.

“The elimination of Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal. This is to say that Washington will continue to support General Pinochet in Chile, General Geisel in Brazil, General Stroessner in Paraguay.”

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Since 9/11, the current American president has created a gulag that stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. The nature of such a detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but certain.

According to Sidney Blumenthal, of The Guardian, there are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the Executive Branch deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Under the Bush-Cheney junta, the U.S. now has a system beyond the law to defend the rule of law against terrorism; America now defends democracy by inhibiting democracy. Law is there to constrain "evildoers." Who doubts our love of freedom?

Predictably, both Bush and Rumsfeld are now calling for an independent investigation of the Iraqi prison abuse scandal. As always, this will involve hand-picked loyalists who will conceal the facts and spread the administration's message that they never knew what was going on.

However, Bush cannot claim to be the commander in chief when things are going well for him, and then sidestep responsibility when he is embarrassed. Hopefully, American voters will deny him election again in November and this time the Supreme Court will avoid validating him as a dictator.

2004-05-07T06:48:00.000+03:00

Bahrain cannot jail its way to democracy anymore than the United States cannot torture its way to democracy in Iraq.

According to the Gulf Daily News: Allegedly, five more people were arrested Thursday, bringing to 20 the number detained for petitioning for changes to Bahrain's constitution. More than 100 family members and supporters staged a protest over the arrests outside the Justice Ministry, in the Diplomatic Area of Manama.

Some of those arrested earlier are reportedly staging a hunger strike in their cells.

The latest to be arrested were Sadiq Abdul Redha Al Gawas, Tawfeeq Al Rayash, Jaffer Salman Soail, Abdul Hadi Al Hawaj and Jamil Hassan Al Shuwaikh.

Al Rayash, Soail, and Al Shuwaikh are all members of the Al Wefaq Islamic Society, but no other information is available about the other two detainees.

According to Abdul Hadi Al Khawajeh, vice-chairman of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), some homes of the detainees were also searched by authorities.

Fourteen people were arrested on April 30 and one on Tuesday, and all are allegedly being kept in custody for 45 days for further investigation.

The BCHR expects more arrests, as a large number of people have been collecting signatures for the petitions.

The arrests are the result of petitions launched by four political societies, which call for major changes to Bahrain's constitution.

The societies are the National Democratic Action Society, National Democratic Society, Al Wefaq National Islamic Society and Islamic Action Society.

Since Wednesday evening, the prisoners in custody for 45 days have been on a hunger strike, according to the BCHR.

Al Khawajeh said relatives visiting some of the detainees were informed Wednesday that they would start a hunger strike that evening to campaign for their release.

A campaign for the release of the detainees is also being stepped up by a committee of seven people comprising four relatives of the detainees and three BCHR members.

The committee held a demonstration yesterday outside the Justice Ministry.

More than 100 relatives, friends and members of the public attended the demonstration, which called for the release of the detainees. They have been accused of attempting to overthrow the system, distributing falseness and rumor, encouraging hatred for the state and using illegal means to try to petition His Majesty King Hamad, according to the BCHR.

Committee member Abdulla Al Sabaa, who was at the demonstration, said the allegations were far too serious for simply collecting signatures.

"It's a hard task they are trying to achieve and we are proud of them. We are very disappointed with the system here," he said.

Al Sabaa's brother Hussain, aged 25, and uncle Ali Al Sabaa, aged 40, were among those arrested on April 30.

"We visited my brother and uncle and they seem happy because they feel that what they are doing is right," he said.

"They were only taking signatures to send to the King. We are not dangerous people, we are doing this in a peaceful way to support a democratic society in Bahrain."

Sabaa said he hoped that people from around the world would support their campaign by writing letters, giving speeches and campaigning to the public prosecution.

Committee member Essam Ayyad, of Hamad Town, was also at the protest to help campaign for the release of his brother Mohammed.

"The people are supposed to make the rules in a democratic society, but the government is not letting this happen," said Ayyad.

"Democracy in Bahrain is a big lie. In democracy there are two parts, the government and the people. If they charge them that means they charge democracy."

He said that none of the detainees were guilty, since they were only collecting signatures, which the constitution of Bahrain says is legal.

The government is arresting people as a scare tactic against political societies, said Ayyad.

"In Bahrain we have big publicity for democracy, but it's not what we have, even the government can't decide if it's a democracy,” he said. "If we keep pushing maybe in years to come we will achieve a real democracy."

The committee is holding another demonstration at 4:30 p.m. today, at the Seef roundabout.

2004-05-05T23:22:00.000+03:00

At this stage of life, I love biographies and travel literature. Recently I finished Michael Asher’s: T.E. Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia. Quite good. However, my most sincere recommendation is What Am I Doing Here (1989), by Bruce Chatwin. If you’re unfamiliar with this name, Chatwin was a truly singular voice in British travel writing. He died of AIDS in 1990.

A central thread that joins much of Chatwin's work is his passion for nomadic life. Chatwin claims he suffered from 'Horreur du domicile', and never wished to remain in one spot too long. I understand what it’s like to suffer from wanderlust.

Another travel writer of fine repute is Robert Byron, a distant relative of Lord Byron. In 1933-34, Byron spent ten months traveling around Persia and Afghanistan; The Road to Oxiana is his account of that trip. It’s great stuff.

A contemporary travel writer and essayist is P.J. O’Rourke, an American. Currently, I’m reading Holidays from Hell. The other day, I had the book with me to read during intervals in an athletic meet between an American school and the Rugby Club – a team comprised of students from two private British schools on the island. Several times I nearly fell out of my chair, trying to conceal my laughter from O’Rourke’s book; not very good manners on my part, surrounded by members of the former British Empire.

Although I consider myself educated – a master’s degree, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been introspective and attempted an expression of social principles and civic duties. To be honest, I’m not certain where I stand on abortion rights, school vouchers, a free market economy and other meaningful concerns. All in all, I’m really not the most responsible citizen.

The other day I made my way to a British-based website known as Political Compass: www.politicalcompass.com

A modest survey is offered to determine fixture on a quadrant divided horizontally left-right to the extreme, and vertically authoritarian-libertarian top-to-bottom as the center line. The left is defined as communist [state planned economy], and the right as neo-liberal [an extreme de-regulated economy]. To the extreme, authoritarian is defined as fascist and libertarian is considered liberal socialism or anarchism.

Who knows about the validity of the survey techniques? As for me, I’ve taken the test twice – on separate days, and the results are the same. On economics, I’m seven points left of center, and for a social dimension, I’m about two points below the left-to-right axis.

For labels, I guess this means I’m mildly a leftist libertarian. To be in the same quarter of the political field as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama is a great encouragement compared with many of the alternatives.

I’ve never paid any serious attention to libertarian philosophy, or what the American Libertarian party represents. The great thing about life is there’s always a reason to wake up the next day and learn something new.

2004-05-03T19:20:00.000+03:00

I greatly admire the mind and thinking of Gore Vidal. His essays are nonpareil in postwar American letters. It is always the voice of an artist like Vidal who can inspire the love of truth and freedom. To me, truth and freedom are intertwined. I don't think it’s possible to have one without the other.

In America, we are free to utter all kinds of absurdities, profanities, and obscenities and outright lies. However, there is a problem when we attempt to tell the truth.

Look at how Noam Chomsky is barred from all major media, a most revered voice in American policies and politics and how it affects the citizen. Yet, all stations carry Paul Harvey. As a result, we have become a nation of flag waving nitwits, incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction.

Freedom of speech is the corner stone of our Republic. Yet, Bush, capitalizing on 9-11 continues to trash the constitution. Soon you may be detained for speaking the truth, if that truth happens to disapprove of Bush's activities, such as his illegal war in Iraq. (Homeland, Patriot I and II)

America ceased to be a Republic in 1898. We had promised to give the Filipinos their independence from Spain. Then we changed our mind, killing some 200,000 people in the process of introducing them to American democracy.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war. But Congress surrendered that great power to the President in 1950 for the mad war of imperial vanity—Korea, and has never taken it back. This was followed by an even madder war of imperial vanity —Vietnam.

These two wars were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, even harder to admit is that the American Empire operates as a fascist corporate state.

American historian Charles Beard wrote in 1939:

"The destiny of Europe and Asia has not been committed, under God, to the keeping of the United States; and only conceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust for power, or a desire to escape from our domestic perils and obligations could possibly make us suppose that Providence has appointed us his chosen people for the pacification of the earth.

Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America."

When Americans hold National Elections this November, we should realize that the only regime change that needs concern our spirit is in Washington.

For now, I’m glad to live outside my country. I am an American by birth, and an American in spirit, which to me means being an optimist, like Thomas Jefferson, rather than a pessimist like Thomas Hobbes. In my lifetime, the growing loss of liberties and our government’s decimation of the Bill of Rights is cause to think Hobbes' view of mankind is in the ascent. I like the ideal of America, but not the fact. It’s time to step away for a while. Clarity often comes from distance.

I am not a political pundit. If asked to articulate a position on important social issues, I’m not sure I can offer consistent statements. Sometimes it’s easy enough to settle for one-liners: I’m for this, or I’m against that. Sometimes the liberal label applies, other times I’m a conservative. And there are many times, also, when I can think of no particular label for definition.

Of course producing a journal exposes the writer’s passions and prejudices, contradictions and imperfections. Like everyone, I possess all these traits – plus perhaps more. I’m not interested in being politically correct. I’m not interested in an elegant chronicle of wasted time. I don't wish to be categorized. Every state tries to categorize its citizens in order to assert control of them.

It is very easy to discuss what has gone wrong with humanity. It is not so easy to discuss what should be done to correct what has gone wrong.

Sometimes one must hold a razor to reality, not a mirror.

2004-05-02T10:08:00.000+03:00

As expected, graphic pictures showing the apparent abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British soldiers in Iraq have angered Arabs in the Middle East and people across the world.

Images of smiling U.S. military police humiliating Iraqi prisoners were first broadcast Wednesday by U.S. TV network CBS and then by Al-Arabiya network, based in the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera on Friday. Newspapers across the Arab world ran the photographs of U.S. soldiers humiliating hooded, naked detainees at Abu Ghraib prison on their front pages. Newspapers in Iraq did not carry the photos.

Allegedly, the U.S. military charged six soldiers with criminal offenses for abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, which was infamous under Saddam Hussein's reign.

A year ago, the Americans went to Iraq to rescue the Iraqis, and now stand in need of being rescued.

A truism is that all republics that acquire supremacy over other nations, rule them oppressively. There is no exception to this in either ancient or modern times. Carthage, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Pisa, Holland, and Republican France, the British Empire, all tyrannized over every province and subject state where they gained authority.

During times of war, modern civilized societies attempt to follow a code of ethics for both civilians and prisoners. Yet this is difficult since war is really state-sanctioned murder.

One tactic used by both the Americans and the British in the European Theatre of World War Two was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or napalm, in clusters over a specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire.

In 1945, British Air Marshall Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval city of Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. The population of the city was far greater than the normal 650,000 due to the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Russian Army.

On February 13, 1945, 773 British airplanes bombed Dresden. During the next two days, the U.S. Air Force sent 527 heavy bombers to follow up the Royal Air Force attack. Dresden was virtually destroyed. As a result of the firestorm, it was afterwards impossible to count the number of victims. Research suggests that a minimum 35,000 were killed; yet, some German sources have argued that it was over 100,000.

These examples are always hideous and beyond comprehension. Yet it’s impossible to conduct a humane war, when the activities are based upon an arrogant suspension of morality.

As Greg Weiher eloquently says, America styles herself the City on the Hill, the indispensable nation. But there is nothing here that rises above cliché. Germany celebrated its future as the Thousand Year Reich, too. It boils down to nothing newer than armies marching across the corpses of hapless victims. It recalls nothing so strongly as Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

Weiher reminds us this is such a worn and tawdry story.

Perhaps in response to the outrage over Iraqi prisoners - perhaps simply in response to the banality of evil, Saudi Arabian attackers sprayed gunfire inside an oil contractor's office Saturday, killing six Westerners - including two Americans and two Brits - and wounding 25 people before leading police on a bloody chase through the Red Sea industrial town of Yanbu on the Prophet’s Birthday.

According to London-based The Guardian, the militants stormed an oil refinery co-owned by Exxon Mobil Corp. and Saudi Basic Industries Corp., shooting five dead, fired randomly at a McDonald's restaurant and other Western shops, then tied the body of an American to a car bumper and dragged it past pupils sitting in class, firing into the air to attract their attention.

The militants told the students to go to Iraq and fight Americans.

According to one of the school's teachers they shouted: "God is great! God is great! Come join your brothers in Falluja."

Pointing to the bloodied corpse, his clothes shredded, they screamed in Arabic: "This is the president of America. Look how we are dragging this American. Go and inform the government about what you have just seen."

The Saudi Interior Ministry said its security forces killed three of the gunmen and wounded the other.

Allegedly, Crown Prince Abdullah said on Saudi state-run television that “Zionists” are behind the current terrorist attacks in his country. Abdullah and other Saudi officials have consistently blamed al Qaeda for attacks on Saudi soil, and the terrorist network has claimed responsibility for several.

However, the Crown Prince did not suggest that Israelis or Israel supporters actually plotted or carried out any of the attacks. But he said, “I am 95 percent sure that Zionism is behind the attacks, for I believe that [Zionists] play in the minds of those who are committing the attacks.”

The Crown Prince did not spell out precisely how he believes Zionists influence those launching the acts of terrorism in his kingdom.

Blaming Mossad, Israel's shadowy spy agency, is another convenient scapegoat, but not likely. There’s enough discontent with the corrupt rule of the bloated and degenerate House of Saud to create a mounting revolution.

For Saudis to avoid falling into the hellish circle of violence and extremism, perhaps the ruling elite should go easier on political activist Mohammad Saeed Tayeb. The arrest of Tayeb, along with about a dozen other pro-democracy activists on March 16, has stalled the reform movement in Saudi Arabia.

The reform-minded Prince Abdullah has been silent since these arrests, leading many to suspect that his powerful half-brothers, Interior Minister Prince Nayef and Defense Minister Prince Sultan, engineered the arrests without his approval.

For his troubles, Tayeb has been jailed five times, spent a total of six years behind bars, including 88 days in solitary confinement. While heading one of the country's largest publishing houses, he studied law in his spare time, and got his degree the year he turned 60, hoping to work in human rights when the time was right.

The time is always right for human dignity.

2004-04-30T09:31:00.000+03:00

What will it take before Americans turn this loathsome, self-important fool impersonating a president out of the White House? Members of the American media, especially during the once-a-year press conference, behave like the blinkered, solipsistic, self-congratulating cunts they are.

The Commission on Credulous Stupidity is now meeting in Washington to examine the intelligence failures that led to both the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and an unfounded war to rid Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction. This Commission must really ask Congress and the press why the United States went to war against Iraq with such an air of juvenile excitement.

If Bush insists on changing the world “for the better” by simply invoking faith as a rationale for battling Saddam Hussein and the alleged connection with al Qaeda, he is now America’s version of an ayatollah. Faith may inspire individual religious worship, but it’s not the basis for a national foreign policy.

What good is this faith-based foreign policy when Ted Koppel reads his list of “The Fallen” for the American audience of ABC’s Nightline? What good is this faith-based foreign policy for the survivors of Fallujah?

Let’s hope Ted Koppel and other high profile American broadcasters do not reduce the causality lists to detached sports scores, the way the networks treated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong battlefield dead in the late 1960s. If the figures of enemy dead were accurate during the Vietnam War era, the United States killed the opposition three-times over.

If Bush had led the Children’s Crusade of 1212, this faith-inspired rhetoric would be fitting. Now it’s dangerously irrational. So, while the unelected president insists weapons are still in Iraq, somewhere - in a North Pole of his imagination, the Iraqis are obviously benefiting from the America version of democracy.

This explains why, according to a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll (April 28), only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger.

While the Commission on Credulous Stupidity meets in Washington, when will CIA Director George Tenet finally be fired? Is this a task for Donald Trump? If Tenant had a shred of self-respect, he would have resigned his post on September 12, 2001. At the very least, Bush should have sacked his sorry ass by September 13, 2001. Yet Americans allow the Bush-Cheney Junta to retain Tenet and operate carte blanche. It’s abhorrent.

Just as nauseating are the one-sided reasons of the Junta for this war: America was attacked for no reason; people just don’t like us; and, of course, because these enemies are resentful of our “freedom.”

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court anointed president has been enormously successful in selling this lame line, just as he has been successful in tying the Sept. 11 attack to his reason for starting a war in Iraq.

The Commission on Credulous Stupidity should interrogate the nature of the American posture toward Israel that allows the United States to exercise unfailing support for assassinations of Palestinian leaders and approval of Ariel Sharon's apartheid policies.

If there is a country deserving of the “terrorist-state” label, it’s Israel. This is why Gulf States are right to be wary of American intentions in the region.

2004-04-29T16:15:00.000+03:00

My teenage son will attend the Junior-Senior Prom in about a month. Because he requires a tuxedo for the formality, we decided to acquire a custom-made suit instead of renting the apparel.

In Bahrain this means a trip to a tailor in the souq; the centuries old market area where one may find all manner of goods and shops. No matter the intentions, a visit to the souq requires patience and some tenacity.

The neighborhood is a maze of unmarked narrow streets and barely negotiable pathways. To the uninitiated, it’s quite possible to note a shop’s location and yet never find the vendor again.

Despite the absence of a Western styled network of streets, there is exhilaration from encountering the Family of Man in this dense quarter: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs; Arabs, Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos, British, Americans; merchants hawking cold water, designer knock-off t-shirts, and tacky souvenirs of no value [“excuse me, friend … good price”]; money changers stationed strategically at alley corners – unmolested by thieves and riff-raff, male and female Arab beggars perched on narrow steps, with one hand outstretched, evoking the downtrodden image of another human crushed by too many indignities.

One navigates through this scene while the muezzin of a nearby mosque calls the faithful Muslims to perform the salaah, the fixed ritual of prayer. Yet in this district, most people take heed of only one kind of profit.

To acquire a tailor made suit in the souq is both easy and quite reasonable. Based on recommendation and a fairly accurate hand scrawled map, we located Mohammad Shafi Mahnga, a reputable Pakistani tailor, on Al-Hadrami Road, in what appears as a typical no-name passage of the souq.

This is merely the first step. A few doors away is the Suiting Corner, the fabric store, and this is the true beginning of the ritual. The proprietor, a middle-aged man fluent in both Arabic and English, lavished us with bolts of fine cloth from Great Britain and France; steering us away from the undeniably inferior materials of Southeast Asia. His regard for quality translated into a brief tutorial in the blends of cloths worldwide, and the high standards from Western Europe, as opposed to other less expensive regions.

We left with sufficient material for a tuxedo, including a shirt and a tie.

Then it was back to Mohammad Shafi Mahnga’s shop for proper fittings. A short, older man with the requisite tape measure around his neck, like a permanent necklace, Mohammad took every conceivable measurement of my son.

In perfect free hand, the veteran tailor provided minor illustrations in an old-fashioned ledger of the items he would fashion. The cost for both fabric and a custom-made tuxedo was about $150.

This was agreed upon with a firm handshake and a smile.

There are days when I could live here forever.

2004-04-27T12:02:00.000+03:00

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship....

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from great courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again to bondage."

- Sir Alex Fraser Tyler
(1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian

2004-04-26T09:08:00.000+03:00

“The boundaries of a nation’s empire are marked by the graves of her soldiers.”
- Napoleon

Between the daily carnage in Iraq and the weekly shoot-outs in Riyadh, we are rather blasé about it all. Compared to last year, there are no specific warnings issued to American civilians by the U.S. State Department. It’s business as usual in Bahrain.

If the Bush Administration thinks an invasion of Iraq is the recipe for introducing stability to the Middle East, the results already speak volumes. America is more detested than ever in this part of the world.

So far, we are lucky here and experience no ill regard from the Bahrainis. Money goes a long way in creating political accord, and the U.S. government continuously adds enormous wealth to the Al Khalifa ruling family. This is a very agreeable arrangement, as long as the Shia leaders can be corrupted with appropriate pay-offs.

Events in Saudi Arabia, that incestuous and odious country, are genuinely disturbing. Censorship is usually tight in the KSA, yet reporting is now impossible to squelch completely in the cell phone and Internet era. And, the Saudis visiting Bahrain on weekends act like cell phones are a birthright. Nonetheless, the attacks in Riyadh remind me of the lead-up to the French Revolution.

Allegedly, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., advised Bush to avoid a deadly insurgency in Iraq by buying the loyalty of its former military for about $200 million. That is a bargain compared to the $300 million Bandar’s cousins paid to get Al-Qaeda to leave Saudi Arabia alone - except it didn’t work. The word of an Arab means nothing.

British film director David Lean best captured the nuances of the Arab culture in Lawrence of Arabia. It should be required viewing for non-Muslim expatriates.

Perks of The Job
A Bahraini Member of Parliament (MP) has been accused of repeatedly pestering a woman for sex and making lewd suggestions.

But the prosecution is withdrawing the case, because as an MP he has full immunity.

The offences allegedly took place in 2001 before the 47-year-old company director became an MP in 2002.

A Syrian student at college in Bahrain complained to police that the man fondled himself in front of her, asked her for sex and made other lewd suggestions, on different occasions, the Lower Criminal Court heard.

A letter to the court from the public prosecutor said the accused was an MP and therefore enjoyed immunity from prosecution, so the case should not go ahead.

2004-04-24T10:20:00.000+03:00

Most young boys do not have a serious clue about the future. Yet 12-year-old Mohamed Al Khalifa is different. He knows he will be the prime minister of Bahrain someday.

Mohamed’s father is the Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, and his grandfather is his majesty, the King of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Mohamed’s older brother, Isa, is in immediate line for succession. In Bahrain, the second oldest son always serves as prime minister. Other close male relatives assume further top government roles. That is a way of life in Bahrain: All in the family.

Throughout Manama and other, older established neighborhoods, there are huge, larger-than-life posters of the King and the Crown Prince and Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa – the ruling Al Khalifa family; always watching over Bahrain, like a benevolent Big Brother triumvirate.

In the American-styled classroom, Mohamed Al Khalifa conducts himself as a normal 12-year-old. He demands no special consideration, and his peers treat him like a regular fellow. Mohammed’s academic ability – at least for English – is above average. He could probably do better, yet he’s only 12-years-old; really still a boy. No matter how Mohammed and his brother perform academically – they both will graduate … somehow.

Since there is no relationship between Mohamed and his teachers that resembles the King and I, no one expects to see his father at parent-teacher conferences. Although the Crown prince graduated from the American school, Mohamed’s Irish nanny - Andi, of County Mayo, always stands in as the authority figure.

Once I remember Mohamed lingered briefly to share some good news with me. What was his good news? Mohamed was going to have lunch with both his parents. For him, this was a special occasion. Typically, his parents - especially his father, are constantly on the go, meeting with world leaders.

Prior to this disclosure, a serious reading assignment was due with a required parental signature. Discretely, Mohamed offered that neither parent had been able to comply because they were on a state visit with King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Moreover, his Irish nanny was out of the country. Extenuating circumstances, indeed.

According to Mohamed, two bodyguards always accompany him whenever he’s in public. The sole exceptions are when he attends classes at the American school, and on visits to France. I’m not sure why France is deemed any safer than other parts of the world, yet this is where Mohamed may enjoy a measure of freedom and normalcy.

* * *
And this just in from today’s Gulf Daily News:

A group of Satan worshippers have escaped an attempt by police to arrest them, it was revealed last night. The police had hoped to trap the group when they held their monthly ceremony at an Italian restaurant in Adliya.

But when police arrived, they were shocked to discover the event had been cancelled.

The report said the Satanists hold monthly ceremonies at different restaurants and hotels that they announce the previous week. Admission is by ticket sale to members only.

Allegedly, during one of the group's ceremonies, members watched as boys and girls danced until they were drunk with hysteria.

2004-04-23T08:49:00.000+03:00

Not long after our arrival in Bahrain, we attended a carpet party at the villa of a colleague, and acquired two new rugs, one city carpet - allegedly from Bokhara, Iran; the other a Turkmen tribal carpet - allegedly from Hachloon. Such an extravagance is really unlike me.

In this culture, the customer may take the carpets home and pay for them later.

Esam Saif, of Tehran Handmade Carpets, hosted the event. It felt like he relocated his entire store on Shawarma Alley - a neighborhood featuring numerous Indian sandwich shops - to the villa of a teaching couple. The 21-year-old Esam claimed he travels to Iran frequently and goes to specific villages in search of quality rugs. Supposedly, the carpets are made by villagers and displayed in their homes, until a buyer arrives and makes an attractive offer.

There is not a grain of truth to Esam’s highly entertaining story. Every carpet merchant along Shawarma Alley repeats this same, tiresome monologue for the gullible Americans.

Since Bahrain is across the Arabian Gulf from Iran, there’s a multitude of carpet merchants on this island. Ambitious carpet merchants will even show up at your door – unannounced, selling wares from a little white van. Yet virtually all Oriental carpet store owners in Bahrain acquire their rugs in Dubai and mark up the prices - especially for naive Westerners.

Nonetheless, Easm is a very personable fellow who operates the store for his father, a man with 20 children among four wives in a polygamous, Muslim marriage. The family is from Yemen, and certain old-style Arabic traditions are still relevant today.

Easm has a basic grasp of English; he’s even traveled to the United States - specifically Iowa, and briefly had an American girlfriend. No matter, his fate - as the son of a tribesman from Yemen - is to marry a wife handpicked by his father. By tradition, Easm is not permitted to see his wife until the wedding ceremony. Both the father of the groom and the father of the bride make negotiations in advance. And, it’s incumbent that Easm marries and does so soon, because he’s the oldest child and no sibling in his family may acquire a spouse until he is married. That’s the tradition.

In a Yemen village, once the marriage ceremony is over, bride and groom immediately consummate their new status in a small house filled with guests and well wishers. There is a glaring lack of privacy. If the bride is a virgin, the bed sheets are paraded proudly through the village. If, it turns out, the bride has already bestowed this prized favor, the groom may reject her automatically and her father for bringing shame on the family can put her to death. And, still later, if the bride simply does not please the groom and proves a poor wife, she may be returned to the village - no questions asked. Life could be worse; farther East in India, a disappointing bride is often burned to death.

After an absence of several months, I stopped by Easm’s shop recently at mid-morning. There were no customers. Easm’s right-hand man, Mohammed - a skillful expert from Pakistan, remained in the background administering care to a village carpet. The smell of vegetable dyes from the myriad of Middle East carpets filled the shop, like subtle incense in a Roman Catholic Mass.

Following a brief exchange of greetings, I asked to see Easm’s hands. There on the ring finger of his left-hand was a silver band. So, it was true: young carpet merchant Easm married his 14-year-old, handpicked bride earlier this month at his father’s village in a remote area of Yemen.

According to Easm, he survived a four-day wedding celebration that included meeting his bride for the first time; a wedding ceremony that, by tradition, excludes the bride’s mother and all females from her side of the family; the blood-stained bed sheets of a virgin paraded around the village; the throat of a wailing cow slit right outside the marriage bedroom window for a sacrificial feast; scores of lambs offered by wealthy family friends as gifts for a similar fate; four days of constantly smoking hashish with his father and other male relatives from the village; and firing off guns with the other pistol-packing males of the village [Yemen is an unruly place, not much different than the Wild West of Hollywood films]. The new bride, Samer, never away from Yemen before, now lives with Easm and his family in an 11-bedroom villa here in cosmopolitan Manama. According to Easm: so far, so good.

2004-04-20T15:04:00.000+03:00

One of the many charms of Bahrain is the selection of restaurants. There is an endless variety from every conceivable culture. For instance, one evening – not long after my arrival in Bahrain, the family went to Bennigan’s, the Irish-themed American franchise. Saturday afternoon, we went to the Hash House, a Thai Restaurant, for a late lunch. Later that evening, we joined numerous Americans at the exclusive British Club for a five-course meal. The ambiance was entirely patrician, replete with elegant paintings of the current House of Windsor monarch, her husband and the aging Prince of Wales.

Like all Bahrain, the waiters – that is the servant class, are Indians from the subcontinent. Although the heyday of the British Empire is long over, vestiges of colonial rule remain quite evident. The discourse of the waiters is elegant and clearly enunciated English, very proper, very refined: “would madam care for red wine with her entrée?” “Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”

So far I haven't seen much evidence that the Arabs here do anything more than drive around in expensive American cars, talking on cell phones, going to American-style malls and buying American designer clothes - no doubt complaining of the American influence upon the Muslim culture. The Indians work in the food industry; Pakistanis do the hard physical construction labor; the maids are from Sri Lanka; nannies for the affluent Arab families are usually poor Muslim girls from either Indonesia or the Philippines. There is a lower class of Arab women who work as cashiers in the grocery stores - like Al-Jazira, a popular expatriate spot for the Americans and the Brits.

Which reminds me: in the Muslim culture the call to prayer occurs multiple times daily. The Islamic version of the cantor emits an uninspiring dirge that one might expect to hear from the suffering patient of a proctologist. There is no telling when the “drop, rock and pray” routine will happen. It’s contingent upon the cycle of the sun.

Last evening, as we returned home there was the usual caterwauling from the nearby mosques. We passed numerous little Central Asian men who work as groundskeepers at the school for expatriates. It appears they maintain the grass with fingernail clippers – it’s difficult to grasp just what they do, but they’re always milling around the fauna, probably sleeping in the bushes. Anyway, it was prayer time. Off to the left, there was a man with a prayer rug on the front lawn [he keeps the rug tucked away in a lower tree branch]; he was virtually prostrate with his ass high in the air, muttering to Allah. The little Muslim appeared ready for a visit from his prison boyfriend. How can this culture keep pace with the modern world when the women are cloaked in dark robes like penguins and the men spend a good portion of time groveling on rugs?

2004-04-19T16:36:00.000+03:00

Recent stories from the Gulf Daily News, of Bahrain, with some modified headlines which reflect another dimension of life among the Arabs.

Table for Two
A Sri Lankan housemaid, who claimed she was tied to a table and raped three times in five hours by her Bahraini employer, flew home last night after she withdrew the case.

Fatima Reshana, 25, left the country on a Qatar Airways flight to Colombo to be reunited with her five-year-old daughter.

She has been allowed home following intervention of the Sri Lankan Embassy, in Kuwait.

Her Bahraini employer, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had initially demanded BD300 [$831] for handing over her passport, according to sources close to the case.

Bus Stop
Mean thieves kidnapped and bludgeoned a man waiting for his bus in Jidhafs.

They left him bleeding and bruised in someone's garden after stealing his purse containing a friend's BD130 [$350].

The two Bahrainis even stole his 450 fils [80-cents] bus fare!

He is a helper at Al Hekma Pharmacy in Jidhafs and was waiting for the bus after closing up shop.

"Two fat Bahraini men came in a white car and one of them got out and dragged me into it. I was too shocked to react."

Burning Down the House
A candidate in the municipal council elections arranged for his own house to be torched so he could blame it on one of his competitors, a court heard yesterday.

Mohammed Mansour Na'ma planned to discredit a fellow candidate by accusing him of arson in the climax to the elections, which took place in May 2002.

He got one of his friends to pour kerosene over the back door of his house in Hamad Town.

The friend broke the glass door panel with a hammer to gain entry to the house and also poured kerosene over windows and doors before setting it on fire.

For the Love of God
A Bahraini was stabbed to death for playing his car cassette recorder too loudly near a mosque, which enraged some worshippers.

The Bahraini attacker, named only as AA, aged 20, was jailed for five years for the murder of HA.

Both were workers living in the Sitra area before the tragedy last November 22.

The Higher Criminal and Appeal Court heard that the victim took three hours to bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in his chest.

Room Service
A Bahrain court has jailed both a Bangladeshi man and woman who operated a “home delivery” prostitution service for Asian clients.

The Lower Criminal Court jailed the 43-year-old man for two years and the woman, in her 20s, for six months.

They will each be deported once they have served their sentences.

The man admitted the vice charges but the woman denied prostitution, claiming that she was beaten by the man and forced to have sex with his clients.

They plied their illegal trade amongst Asian workers, charging BD2.5 ($6.75) to BD3 ($8.10) a time for sex with the woman, the court heard.

The man would take bookings from clients and then take the woman to their flats.

Sometimes there would be just one client in the flat, but at other times there would be groups of men living together, who each paid for sex with the woman.

Where’s the Love?
A heartless passer-by stole a hit-and-run victim's wallet as he lay in agony on the roadside.

Newspaper deliveryman Bilal Miah suffered multiple leg and hand fractures after being hit by a car in A'ali.

He was in too much pain to identify the man who snatched his wallet containing cash
and driving license.

Police say the car that smashed into Mr. Miah's motorcycle at 8.30am on Monday was beige colored.

Mr Miah earns BD160 ($432) a month including commission [that’s $5,184 a year] and is his family's sole breadwinner. He has a wife and three children back in his native Bangladesh, who depend on his wages to pay their rent and children's education.

“Yes, Sir! May I Have Another?”
Two Bahraini teenagers stopped a boy of 12 outside a Hamad Town cold store and asked if they could have sex with him, a court was told yesterday.

When the boy said he had no objection, the youths aged 14 and 17 took him to a storeroom inside a house and sexually assaulted him.

The boy's father told Hamad Town police that the youths had threatened to beat his son if he revealed what they had done.

Pimp Daddy
A husband who forced his two wives to operate as prostitutes from Bahrain hotels was jailed for seven years yesterday.

The second wife, whom he had married after operating a “flourishing business” with the first, eventually exposed him as a pimp to vice-squad police.

Police posed as paying customers wanting sex at a Manama hotel before raiding it and arresting all three.

The husband, described as an Arab expatriate aged 29 grew to depend totally on the money earned by the two women aged 23 and 30.

But it all backfired when the second wife decided she hated having sex with strangers and contacted CID officers.

After the police raid, both wives admitted prostitution, but claimed their husband forced them into it.

All My Children
A 14-year-old child bride was caught working as a prostitute in a Bahrain hotel, a court heard.

She was arrested along with another 18-year-old married girl in a sting operation staged by undercover vice squad officers, the Lower Criminal Juvenile Court heard.

The two Syrian girls were arrested after the undercover officers went to the hotel, posing as clients.

Fellow officers swooped after the girls agreed a price for sex and then went to their rooms to wait for the "clients", the court heard.

Their husbands, also Syrian were later arrested in a flat they had rented after traveling to Bahrain from the UAE, said the prosecution.

Hole In One
An Indian committed suicide by jumping into a manhole in Riffa yesterday despite a round-the-clock vigil by his friends.

Chothe Khan, 35, had told his friends that he would commit suicide since he had some trouble back home.

Sources said that his roommates were keeping a close watch on him, but Mr. Khan managed to slip out of his accommodation at around 3am yesterday and jumped into the manhole in their compound.

2004-04-17T15:21:00.000+03:00

Yesterday marked that time of week when the local imams invoke politics into the mosque sermons. While the call to prayer occurs five times daily, Friday is the payoff day for Arab Muslims, much like Sunday morning for American Christians. Since there is no separation of Church and State in most Muslim cultures, especially the Arab variety, it’s perfectly acceptable to use a religious forum to incite political viewpoints.

Here are a few things to keep in mind for this part of the Middle East, as the Shia majority in Bahrain take leave of the imams:
1) The US Army’s 1st Armored Division is currently massed just a few miles away
from Najaf, the Iraqi holy city for Shias, where cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is
entrenched with his militia.

2) When George Bush met with Ariel Sharon in the White House earlier this week,
each militarist did his best to confer legitimacy on the other's failed policies of
occupation. Then Bush went further than any previous U.S. president and backed
Sharon’s “disengagement plan,” recognizing Israel's settlements in the West
Bank and countering the claim that millions of Palestinian refugees have the right
of return to their homes in what is now Israel.

3) The U.S. The State Department on Thursday "strongly urged" private U.S.
citizens to leave Saudi Arabia as it announced plans to order some U.S.
diplomats out the country because of security concerns. On Tuesday, after a clash
between Saudi authorities and suspected armed opponents in the capital in which
six people were killed and two explosives-laden cars discovered, the US embassy
in Riyadh warned Americans in Saudi Arabia of the possibility of new attacks.

4) Osama bin Laden’s tape offers to negotiate with European countries if they
withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, while vowing to avenge Israel’s
killing of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Ambush, murder and kidnapping, just another day in "Post-War" Iraq. But there is no insurrection by the Sunni and Shia Muslims, according to the unelected president – just punks and thugs trying to prevent the U.S. Army from protecting Haliburton in the vast oil fields. The moral rot of Vietnam is already so glaring in Iraq that it hardly needs mention

2004-04-14T22:47:00.000+03:00

Bush’s inability to cite any mistakes or failures of his as president during a news conference at the White House Tuesday night has little to do with arrogance. This hardening, reckless attitude to law or purpose is simply characteristic of how pathological liars carry on lying; it's what they do.

Every time this unelected president speaks, the audience must be prepared for a pyramid sale of tall stories.

The American oligarchy will always control the many through manufactured opinion, which bedazzles and confuses the many when it is not just plain dumbing them down into dust with a mediocre, standardized public education instead of insightful critical thinking skills.

While Bush continued his distortions and deceptions, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers visited Bahrain to meet with members of the royal Al Khalifa family and the Defense Ministry. Bahrain is an important ally for the U.S. in the Arabian Gulf, and allows a base for the Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Meanwhile Iraqi militiamen led by Shia cleric Muqtada Al Sadr have pulled back to Najaf. Can anyone imagine contemporary American militiamen led by a Roman Catholic priest taking refuge in the St. Louis Cathedral?

How can Islam be the fastest growing religion in the world?

Of course it’s tough imposing democracy by-the-U.S.-army on a former Muslim dictatorship in Iraq. What's interesting is the U.S. military reflects an example of socialism. Everyone works toward a common goal, everyone is employed, everyone has health care and educational opportunities, and everyone has retirement benefits. That’s more than can be said for many people in the world’s greatest democracy.

2004-04-13T13:50:00.000+03:00

The other day I walked alone through the narrow passages of the Manama souq, like a misguided trekker in the labyrinth. The souq is the traditional Middle Eastern market, an area full of energy, aspirations and opportunism where shopkeepers, middle-class Arabs, budget travelers, food vendors, drowsy security guards, the devious, the down-and-out and the disoriented mingle together.

On the simplest level, what you see is not what you get. Beneath makeshift canopies of tightly stretched tarps, a faint semblance of daylight filters down to the pavement. Perhaps the shifting and haphazard tones of gray perfectly represent the illusions of the Middle East. Perhaps the female Muslim beggar crouching at pavement level, shrouded in a pitch-black abaya with a complete face veil, perfectly symbolizes the inscrutability of this milieu.

The Arab men are graciously insincere. In a comfortably air-conditioned shop, an older man in a crisp white thoub glided toward me, all smiles, exuding false warmth. “My friend, how may I help you?” His gaze met my eyes, but there was nothing to his look; it was entirely vacant. I’m confident that if I had expressed any interest in the pricey merchandise, the Arab would have told me whatever I wanted to hear. “Oh, yes, sir. Delivery tomorrow? Very well, sir.” Yet with no interest on my part, the man gradually receded into the background. He seemed like he could just as easily be addicted to loafing and spending his days endlessly tippling black coffee in a drowsy café.

Perhaps this is a more sophisticated reflection of life here in Bahrain: one day my wife and I left work promptly at the end of the day with intentions of driving home. As we meandered through the nearby neighborhood of Juffair, we impulsively stopped at Khazana, a very classy furniture store. Interior design is not an interest of mine, but I am impressed by furniture constructed of real wood and not that damned particleboard found in American stores.

The store manager, Mohammed Sadiq Khan, quickly engaged us in conversation – yet he had none of those fawning, clutch-the-ankle techniques of the typical American furniture salesman, a parasite who will dog your every step. Mr. Khan, a contemporary, was well dressed in slacks and an oxford cloth shirt, with sandals. From Pakistan, his English enunciation was the product of a proper British colonial background. In other words, he was altogether very charming. Of course his inventory was classy, first-rate …. hand carved pieces from Pakistan and India: jewelry chests, fold-up bars, and exquisite desks.

“For you, sir – very special price.”

As we surveyed the array of choices, Mr. Khan discretely signaled to one of his underlings who soon approached with a tray of two glasses of warm, green mint tea from Kashmir. This allowed Mr. Khan time to display his pile of stunning Persian and Afghan rugs. The experience was utterly charming, and I’m not certain how we disengaged without dropping a penny.

2004-04-12T10:25:00.000+03:00

Yesterday was Easter, that time when Christians properly celebrate both the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and an adult-size rabbit frolicking among little children with colored eggs and tasty chocolates. Both actions are equally plausible.

One must always keep on alert here in Bahrain, where the Sunni monarchy is part of the ruling minority that must delicately keep the Shia majority in place.

It’s impossible to ignore events in Falluja and the growing international hostage crisis. In Iraq, typically, the Sunnis and the Shias are at odds with each other, but like both the Chinese Communists and Nationalists who united in World War Two to drive out the Japanese, this is what is unfolding now.

Bush has no vision and neither West Point nor the Virginia Military Academy have produced any military commanders of my generation on a par with MacArthur and Patton, to name just a few of the World War eras.

If Bush wins his first election to the White House this upcoming November, I will feel no need to return Stateside any time soon.

Quagmire is an excellent way to describe the future of the U.S. military in Iraq – which shares a 900-mile border with the Shia majority of Iran. And, to the southwest are the unpredictable Bedouins of the House of Saud.

2004-04-09T07:54:00.000+03:00

A few days ago my aunt in Phoenix informed me by e-mail that her older brother had just died. He was 83-years-old. Requiescat in pace.

My uncle had been in noticeable decline the past year. Pneumonia finally claimed his life. Knowing he will experience no more suffering, no further indignity softens our loss. He was my favorite uncle, and I always enjoyed his companionship.

The American writer William Faulkner is most often quoted for saying “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The lines refer to how an individual's past continues to resonate and shape both the present and the future.

All people who have affected us in positive ways remain influential, as if they are still our constant companions. To this end, the company of my uncle will never be gone, just undetected to outsiders.

While my uncle died earlier this week, my son traveled to Ireland. He is currently in Dublin for the St Andrew’s International Model United Nations (SAIMUN) conference.

Perhaps the connection between the death of an older family member and a younger family member returning to the ancestral country is a broad church. It does, nonetheless, reinforce Faulkner’s view of how the past is always with us. For me, the connection of our family to Ireland is steady.

Life in Bahrain seems unaffected by the combined Shia and Sunni insurrections in Falluja and surrounding areas of Baghdad. This is becoming George Bush’s Vietnam.

Friday afternoon is always a telling time for political protests in Bahrain. The local imams - Muslim clergy - frequently exhort the faithful to anger over American foreign policy. When this occurs, the young and the disaffected march on the U.S. Embassy, less than a mile from our residence, pelt the Bahrain Defense Forces with rocks and set old tires on fire before dispersed by tear gas shot from helicopters.

Conditions are a little dicey in Bahrain because the monarchy and ruling class are Sunni, while the majority of the country is Shia. For analogy, the Shia are fundamentalists, like the Puritans of Oliver Cromwell’s day, and take their cue from the grandson of Mohammad.

For now, however, it’s safe in Bahrain. The ruling class enjoys all the American money pumped into the economy. Money can turn aside even the strongest ideals.

2004-04-06T10:35:00.000+03:00

Though slightly past the mid-century mark, I am still an incorrigible enthusiast for the nomadic experience and so I retain a gee-whiz impressionability that I have always dignified under the pose of “creative temperament.” When I was 12-years-old, I loved to stand on the St. Louis levee and scrutinize the Mississippi River as it spread out milky-brown and gleaming between the mile-wide shores of Missouri and Illinois. I wanted to be Huck Finn, with a romantic readiness, and head out for the Territory. Later I wanted to be Gatsby’s chronicler, Nick Carraway, the man inclined to reserve all judgments, and head West toward the mesmerizing sunset of the ideal New World. Now I feel like Odysseus, traversing an Arab culture where the beauty of the surface is profoundly deceptive.

When I was a college student in the early 1970s, my education was neither meticulous nor intense, and therefore not particularly fruitful. My true objective was to prolong my adolescence. Early on I knew I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. As William Burroughs sardonically noted, they lounged around Singapore and Bangkok smoking opium in yellow pongee silk suits. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful servant boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Like many aspiring writers I once turned to journalism. I still have a lively interest in the morbid and the abnormal. I also have an appetite for the extreme and the sensational, for the slimy and the unwholesome. I feel at ease among people who are liars, sluts, crooks, morons, cretins, perverts and obsessives. Perhaps it is better than being safe, obedient, sterile and submitting to the smugness and hypocrisy of middle class American life. It's always a little demoralizing to know the government tolerates a certain amount of rat shit in our wedding cakes.

In an ideal world, I earn money from moi lettres les jour: l’epoque de Michel. I write in my oak-paneled library, bookcases filled with the fine morocco bindings of des grands classiques du Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Maupassant. There are also editions by Oscar Wilde, Valdimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, and James Joyce - especially that linguistic extravaganza Ulysses. This collection takes up a good four feet of la librairie, a fiefdom exceeded only by the complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marcel Proust, notably À la recherche du temps perdu.

On the contrary, my present reality is sand. Outside there is an ocean of sand, without beginning or end, motionless, stretching across a harsh, limited horizon. It is stupefying. One can only be dazed by a vision of implacable splendor and horror, dazed by vision itself.

The Persian Gulf is just beyond the walls of our three-story villa on Tubli Bay, an upper-class Sunni neighborhood of mock Roman villas in eastern Manama, the capital of Bahrain. Here there is no escape from the unrelenting elements of sun and wind, which alternately assault and caress the skin. It’s rather easy to conjure up Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the great Victorian explorer, Orientalist, anthropologist, linguist, translator, author, and scholar, who posed as an Afghani physician and entered Mecca disguised as a Muslim hajj. Or T.E Lawrence, who stormed the port of Aqaba by land and helped the Arab guerrilla tribes defeat the Turks in World War One. There is a tremendous allure to the Bedouin culture, scarcely concealed beneath the facade of insipid American fast-food franchises and garish Western pop culture in general.

Still admired from Sophia to Kabul, one legacy of Alexander the Great seems to linger in this region of the Middle East: women are for child-bearing, men are for pleasure. Affluent Arab men dressed in traditional white, floor-length thoubs, replete with gutrah head covers, gather socially in late evenings at posh Western-styled restaurants. Women are largely absent. However, if adult females are present, they are cloaked in black abayas, a symbol of invisibility; they do not really exist and have no social status. These all-male gatherings suggest a decorum found among inverts dating to the 4th century B.C., when Alexander and his Greek warriors swept through this part of the world, on their way to the Khyber Pass and the Indus River.

2004-04-03T09:07:00.000+03:00

There are three of us in this American family: husband, wife and teenage son. Presently we live in Manama, Bahrain. Granted, these days the Middle East is not a major destination for most Western expatriates.

What are we doing in a tiny island kingdom 15 miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia? We are here because our life in Oklahoma was a setting that offered nothing but a future of dead armadillos on country roads.

My wife and I are teachers who finally tired of the degrading salary-level in Oklahoma, a place where educators have little value and some of the best professionals end up walking around like docile maniacs nibbling at the empty bait.

We decided to go international; our assignment: Bahrain, a setting as far removed from the middle-class of the American Midwest as Earth to Jupiter.

Most friends and family think we are non compos mentis for living here. Yet the political situation seems safer than New York City or Washington, D.C.

The ongoing Formula 1 Grand Prix is big news this week. Otherwise, life in Bahrain is somewhat ordinary.

Unofficially, March is National Riot Month. Many students enjoy the camaraderie of demonstrating in tear gas tinged air at the U.S. Embassy, before leaving Bahrain to attend American colleges.

Some Shiites here were upset last week just because the Israeli government fired three rocket missiles at wheel chair bound Sheikh Yassin, the 67-year-old quadriplegic leader of the Palestine terrorist group Hamas.

Some descendants of the Holocaust victims learned a few vile habits from the German Nazi legacy.

Shooting coyotes from a helicopter is considered unsportsmanlike conduct in Montana, but firing one, let alone three missiles at a quadriplegic emerging from a mosque… well, that is rough play.

Perhaps American baseball legend Ty Cobb, who jumped into the stands during a game against New York and stomped a cripple, would give thumbs up to Ariel Sharon.

The only difference between people like Sharon and Yassin, and Bush and bin Laden is the legitimacy of law. These men are all fine examples of terrorists.

Our Supreme Court-appointed president still acts like a 16-year-old on an Egg McMuffin high. Every time he speaks, his discourse stinks of conman - the kind of suckworthy conman who flogs magic tea to old people in nursing homes. Moreover, his vice-president sidekick looks more and more like a plump, gay Bart Simpson.

Events leading up to the White House auction on November 7 are disgraceful. The media should be honest and educate the American public about the empty civics gesture of voting for a replacement member of the ruling oligarchy. Then there would be the loss of all that easy advertising revenue. The idea of white-collar delegates at either political party convention does not seem all that far removed from a blue-collar crowd at a WWF Smack Down.