coluichedubita: April 2008

Aljazeera:
Sadr threatens to end Iraq truce

TUESDAY, APRIL 08, 2008
16:55 MECCA TIME, 13:55 GMT

Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shia leader who has been told to disband his Mahdi army or be barred from politics, has threatened to lift a ceasefire that he put in place last August.

An statement from al-Sadr on Tuesday demanded the Iraqi government protect the public from "the booby traps and American militias" or he would end the truce.

"If it is required to lift the freeze [ceasefire] in order to carry out our goals, objectives, doctrines and religious principles and patriotism, we will do that later and in a separate statement," al-Sadr said on his website.

Despite the ceasefire, al-Sadr's followers have clashed with Iraqi government troops and US forces in the south of the country and Baghdad in recent weeks, leading to Iraq's worst violence since the first half of 2007.

Rally postponed

Al-Sadr also indefinitely postponed an anti-US rally scheduled to mark the fifth anniversary of the US's capture of Baghdad.

The Shia leader said he feared his supporters would be attacked if the protest went ahead.

"I call those beloved Iraqi people who wish to demonstrate against the occupation to postpone their march, out of my fear for them and my concern to spare their blood," he said.

"I fear that Iraqi hands will be lifted against you, although I would be honoured if the Americans were to lift their hands against you."

Al-Sadr had called for a "million-strong" protest to mark the fifth anniversary on Wednesday of the fall of Baghdad.

Ahead of the anniversary, Iraqi authorities on Tuesday imposed travel restrictions into Baghdad to keep men aged between 12 to 35 from entering the city from 6am (0300 GMT) to 6am on April 10.

Show of force

Many analysts saw al-Sadr's planned protest as a show of force against the government, which has threatened to have al-Sadr's followers banned from participating in politics or the provincial elections.

If his movement does compete in elections later this year, al-Sadr stands to make significant gains.

The Shia leader's supporters have said that the Mahdi army will only be dismissed if recommended by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and other Shia religious leaders, who have so far remained silent.

meanwhile, at least four mortars hit the government and diplomatic Green Zone on Tuesday, while a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol near al-Shaab stadium in the east of the capital exploded, wounding two policemen, police sources said.

Later, another roadside bomb hit a US patrol near Sadr City, injuring a number of soldiers, police said.

Sporadic gunfire and explosions were heard across Baghdad's Sadr City district.

Iran condemns attacks

For the first time, Iran's foreign ministry condemned rocket and mortar attacks by the Mahdi army against the Green Zone in Baghdad.

But Mohammad Ali Hosseini, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, also denounced raids by US forces in Sadr City, a Mahdi army stronghold.

"We are hopeful that restraint and prudence of various Iraqi groups will provide security and peace," Hosseini was quoted as saying on the state broadcasting company's website.

Iran has been accused of supplying weapons, money and training to most Iraqi Shia factions, including al-Sadr loyalists.

In other violence on Tuesday, at least six people are reported to have died in a roadside bomb attack on a bus in Bala Druz in Diyala province on Tuesday.

Also in Diyala, armed men killed Sheikh Sami al-Ubaidi, an awakening group leader, and his two sons.

In Washington, General David Petraeus, the highest US commander in Iraq, was due to report to congress on the progress of the US "surge" in Iraq later on Tuesday.

He is expected to call for patience and announce that he will stop plans for troop withdrawals in July.

Source: Al Jazeea and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E2DF23BE-28C7-4756-AF4F-83537DAF2978.htm

AllAfrica:
Economy Grinds to a Halt

By Hector Igbikiowubo, Yemie Adeoye and Tordue Salem
Vanguard (Lagos) NEWS
7 April 2008

FRIDAY'S directive by President Umaru Yar'Adua to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the Department of Petroleum Resources and the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON) to take urgent steps to end the current fuel scarcity in the country does not seem to have any effect yet as the situation degenerated at the weekend.

Many motorists spent their weekend on queues at filling stations to buy fuel. The fuel scarcity is also affecting commercial activities.

Vanguard gathered that the DPR had quarantined 13 vessels at the Lagos ports, insisting they cannot discharge their products because their ethanol content is higher than that of the one prescribed by the DPR.

Speaking on the development, Dr Levi Ajuonuma, Group General Manager in charge of NNPC Public Affairs Department, decried the delay caused by the DPR tests, noting that it runs contrary to a subsisting Presidential directive.

"President Umaru Yar'Adua had earlier given a directive to the DPR to allow vessels carrying products with ethanol content of between 1 and 5 per cent. Ethanol at 5 per cent is an octane booster - technically certified as good for cars on Nigerian roads.

This is part of the E-10 programme. That is Nigeria's renewable fuels programme which is set for launch soon," he said, adding: "We urge the DPR to come alive to its responsibility to the consuming public by ensuring that the product vessels are cleared expeditiously to avoid the seeming artificial scarcity and lengthy queues at the pumps."

The corporation also urged the DPR and security agencies to come down heavily on black market operators who have cashed in on the situation to make profits.

Dr. Ajuonuma said contrary to a newspaper report, it was not true that President Yar'Adua had banned the importation of petroleum products, adding that even if all the refineries in the country were working, they could not in any way meet domestic consumption requirement. "Therefore, there is the need to augment domestic production with imports," he said.

Meanwhile, the scarcity of petroleum products has continued to bite harder across the country. In Lagos, Vanguard gathered that most filling station are under lock for lack of products, while those still having products had their stations besieged by motorists anxious to buy fuel.

Most filling stations on Ikorodu road were seen dispensing fuel on Saturday, but a repeat check on them yesterday showed that they were already out of stock.

On the Apapa-Oshodi expressway, the few stations that were seen dispensing fuel were besieged by touts.

A supervisor in one of the Total filling stations along the highway, who spoke to Vanguard on the condition of anonymity said the station received 22,000 litres of petrol late last Friday and exhausted it on Saturday.

Reps Petroleum Committee intervenes

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives sub-committee on Petroleum Products Price Monitoring Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) has stepped into the fuel scarcity in the country to ensure the problem is sorted out.

Chairman of the Committee, Doris Uboh, said the committee would move to evacuate bad fuel containing high level of ethanol from the petroleum market.

The lawmaker advised "Nigerians to be patient and avoid panic buying as the agencies struggle to solve the problem."

She said in the course of her oversight of the agency, she discovered that some people outside the Federal Capital Territory were responsible for the present crisis, as they were purchasing and storing fuel to retail.

"We should avoid the panic. The long queues in Abuja is being caused by dealers outside the Federal Capital Territory who want to make more money and make people suffer.

"The PPMC has mobilised to evacuate the bad fuel. We will monitor them and ensure that the 13 vessels carrying the bad fuel are returned to their ports of origin and the companies involved monitored so that they don't bring it back to the country in disguise.

"We have not still solved the problem of fuel in the country. That the refineries have started working is not enough. But the capacity at which they are rolling out the products is still not enough.

"Our next problem with the refineries is that they have overstayed their Turn Around Time Maintenance time. We have to tackle and ensure that we do the TAM gradually. Some are as old as 10 years behind in TAM," she said.

The lawmaker also said since the Federal Government discovered that some companies deliberately brought in the bad products, they should not be left to go without heavy sanctions as a deterrent to others.

"Why must we fold our hands and allow such people or companies to take Nigeria for a ride. The agencies involved should not think that we are fools. It is dangerous for us and it is sad that Nigerians wants to use illicit means to make money at the detriment of our lives. That would not continue and we must rally round," she said.

Copyright © 2008 Vanguard. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200804071029.html

AlterNet: Don't Betray Us, General: Admit That
Iraq Keeps Getting Worse, And That The Surge Failed

By Tom Engelhardt, TheNation.com
Posted on April 8, 2008

They came, they saw, they deserted.

That, in short form, is the story of the recent Iraqi government "offensive" in Basra (and Baghdad). It took a few days, but the headlines on stories out of Iraq ("Can Iraq's Soldiers Fight?") now tell a grim tale and the information in them is worse yet. Stephen Farrell and James Glanz of the New York Times estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, or more than 4% of the force sent into Basra, "abandoned their posts" during the fighting, including "dozens of officers" and "at least two senior field commanders."

Other pieces offer even more devastating numbers. For instance, Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londoo of the Washington Post suggest that 30% of government troops had "abandoned the fight before a cease-fire was reached." Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times offers 50% as an estimate for police desertions in the midst of battle in Baghdad's vast Sadr City slum, a stronghold of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

In other words, after years of intensive training by American advisors and an investment of $22 billion dollars, US military spokesmen are once again left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster (from which they were rescued thanks to negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and advisors to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, brokered in Iran by General Qassem Suleimani, a man on the U.S. Treasury Department's terrorist watch list). Think irony. "From what we understand," goes the lame American explanation, "the bulk of these [deserters] were from fairly fresh troops who had only just gotten out of basic training and were probably pushed into the fight too soon."

This week, with surge commander General David Petraeus back from Baghdad's ever redder, ever more dangerous "Green Zone," here are a few realities to keep in mind as he testifies before Congress:

1. The situation in Iraq is getting worse: Don't believe anyone who says otherwise. The surge-ified, "less violent" Iraq the general has presided over so confidently is, in fact, a chaotic, violent tinderbox of city states, proliferating militias armed to the teeth, competing regions armed to the teeth, and competing religious factions armed to the teeth. Worse yet, under Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S. has been the great proliferator. It has armed and funded close to 100,000 Sunnis organized into militias reportedly intent on someday destroying "the Iranians" (i.e. the Maliki government). It has also supported Shiite militias (aka the Iraqi army). In Basra, it took sides in a churning Shiite civil war. As Nir Rosen summed matters up in a typically brilliant piece in the Nation, Baghdad today is but a set of "fiefdoms run by warlords and militiamen," a pattern the rest of the country emulates. "The Bush administration," he adds, "and the U.S. military have stopped talking of Iraq as a grand project of nation-building, and the U.S. media have dutifully done the same." Meanwhile, in the little noticed north, an Arab/Kurdish civil war over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and possibly Mosul as well, is brewing. This, reports Pepe Escobar of Asia Times, could be explosive. Think nightmare.

2. The Bush administration has no learning curve. Its top officials are unable to absorb the realities of Iraq (or the region) and so, like the generals of World War I, simply send their soldiers surging "over the top" again and again, with minor changes in tactics, to the same dismal end. Time.com's Tony Karon, at his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, caught this phenomenon strikingly, writing that Maliki's failed offensive "shared the fate of pretty much every similar initiative by the Bush Administration and its allies and proxies since the onset of the 'war on terror.'"

3. The "success" of the surge was always an expensive illusion, essentially a Ponzi scheme, for which payment will someday come due. To buy time for its war at home, the Bush administration put out IOUs in Iraq to be paid in future chaos and violence. It now hopes to slip out of office before these fully come due.

4. A second hidden surge, not likely to be discussed in the hearings this week, is now under way. U.S. air reinforcements, sent into Iraq over the last year, are increasingly being brought to bear. There will be hell to pay for this, too, in the future.

5. A reasonably undertaken but speedy total withdrawal from Iraq is the only way out of this morass (and, at this late date, it won't be pretty); yet such a proposal isn't even on the table in Washington. In fact, as McClatchy's Warren Strobel and Nancy Youssef report, disaster in Basra has "silenced talk at the Pentagon of further U.S. troop withdrawals any time soon."

Since April 2003, each administration misstep in Iraq has only led to worse missteps. Unfortunately, little of this will be apparent in this week's shadowboxing among Washington's "best and brightest," who will again plunge into a "debate" filled with coded words, peppered with absurd fantasies, and rife with American symbolism that only an expert like professor of religion Ira Chernus is likely to decipher. "It's time," he writes, while considering the upcoming Petraeus testimony, "to insist that war should be seen not through the lens of myth and symbol, but as the brutal, self-defeating reality it is."

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

© 2008 TheNation.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/81572/

Asia Times:
Iraqi rogues and a false proxy war

By Gareth Porter
Apr 9, 2008

WASHINGTON - A key objective of the Congressional testimony by General David Petraeus this week will be to defend the George W Bush administration's strategic political line that it is fighting an Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq.

Based on preliminary indications of his spin on the surprisingly effective armed resistance to the joint United States-Iraqi "Operation Knights Assault" in the Shi'ite-dominated southern city of Basra, Petraeus will testify that it was caused by Iran through a group of rogue militiamen who had split from Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and came under Iranian control.

But the US military's contention that "rogue elements" have been carrying out the resistance to coalition forces was refuted by Muqtada himself in an interview with al-Jazeera aired on March 29 in which he called for the release from US detention of the individual previously identified by Petraeus as the head of the alleged breakaway faction.

The idea of Iranian-backed "rogue" Shi'ite militia groups undermining Muqtada's efforts to pursue a more moderate course was introduced by the US military command in early 2007. These alleged Iranian proxies were called "special groups" - a term that came not from Iran or the Shi'ites themselves but from the Bush administration.

In April, after US forces captured a former spokesman for Muqtada, Qais al-Khazali, Petraeus himself announced that they had detained "the head of the secret cell network, the extremist secret cells". Petraeus referred to it as "the Khazali network".

US military spokesman Brigadier General Kevin Bergner asserted in early July that Khazali's network was a "special group" which was financed, armed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)and in some instances was even "directed" by it. He said Iran was using a Hezbollah operative to organize such groups to do its bidding in Iran.

The identification of Khazali as head of a "rogue" faction was highly suspect, however. One of Muqtada's most trusted aides, Khazali had played a key role in recruitment for the Mahdi Army in its formative stage in 2003. He went underground in late 2004, just after heavy fighting in which the Mahdi Army suffered heavy casualties and just as Muqtada was entering into a long period of retreat from military operations.

In a March 30, 2007, press briefing, Major General Michael Barbero of the US Joint Staff said both Khazali and his brother were linked with the "Sadr organization".

A pro-war military blogger named Bill Roggio, who maintains close relations with the US command in Baghdad, revealed in February 2007 that the real purpose of the line about Iranian-controlled "special groups" was to facilitate Petraeus's strategy of dividing the Mahdi Army. "The 'rogue element' narrative provides Mahdi Army fighters and commanders an 'out'," wrote Roggio. A Mahdi Army unit commander could either "choose to oppose the government and be targeted", he observed, "or step aside and join the political process".

On this note, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at the weekend said that Muqtada must disband the Mahdi Army in order to participate in provincial elections scheduled for October.

At the same time, battles between rival Shi'ite groups have spread from Basra to Baquba in the north. Clashes between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization militia of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) have been reported in the predominantly Shi'ite district of Hwaider in Baquba, the capital city of Diyala province located 40 kilometers northeast of Baghdad.

US ambassador Ryan Crocker's first comment on the armed resistance in Basra in a March 26 interview emphatically denied that the forces resisting the Iraqi-US operation represented Muqtada's Mahdi Army.

"What you're seeing there is not a rising by Jaish al-Mahdi [Mahdi Army]," Crocker insisted. It was "a subset of Jaish al-Mahdi, the so called 'special groups' that really are basically just criminal militias that are the difficulty here," according to Crocker.

An article by neo-conservative military historian Kimberly Kagan in the Wall Street Journal on April 3 suggests, however, that Petraeus has slightly reformulated the proxy war line in light of the obvious role played by the Mahdi Army itself in limiting the advance of the US-Iraqi operation.

Kagan is married to Fred Kagan, one of the main author's of Bush's "surge" policy, and is a full member of the administration's team for conveying its political-military thinking to the elite public. Her article evidently reflects conversations with Petraeus and other officials in Baghdad during the previous week.

Kagan, unlike Crocker on March 26, makes no effort to deny that the Mahdi Army itself was fully involved in the armed resistance in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere. But she claims that it was "special groups" - not the Sadrists - who "coordinated the unrest and attacks of the regular Mahdi Army in the capital and provinces".

Furthermore, Kagan describes the Mahdi Army as "a reserve from which the special groups can and will draw in crisis". And Muqtada himself is dismissed as ultimately a figurehead. "For all of his nationalist rhetoric," writes Kagan, "Mr Sadr is evidently not in control of his movement ..."

The new version of the proxy war narrative still attributes ultimate control over the most powerful Shi'ite political-military force in the country to the shadowy "special groups".

But in an interview with al-Jazeera taped just before the Basra operation was launched and broadcast on March 29, Muqtada demanded the release of Khazali, whom Petraeus had identified as the head of the alleged "special group" that had broken away from Muqtada, from US custody.

That confirms the earlier indications that Khazali was never involved in a breakaway faction, and that what the US command refers to as "Iranian-backed special groups" never existed.

The March 30 story by McClatchy's Leila Fadel on the ending of the Basra crisis shows that Iran's real strategy in Iraq bears no resemblance to the one portrayed in the US proxy war narrative. Fadel reported that Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds (Jerusalem) brigades of the IRGC, brokered a ceasefire with Muqtada after representatives of the Shi'ite parties now supporting the Maliki government traveled secretly to Qom, Iran on March 29-30, to ask for his intervention.

Suleimani's role in reducing the violence in Basra underlines the reality that Iranian power in Shi'ite Iraq is based on its having worked with and provided assistance to all the Shi'ite parties and factions. Iran's determination to stay on good terms with all the Shi'ite factions has made it the primary arbiter of conflicts among them.

Iran has no reason to look for a small splinter group to advance its interests when it already enjoys a relationship of strategic cooperation with the government itself.

The Mahdi Army has received training in both Lebanon and in Iran and has undoubtedly used financial assistance from Iran to procure weapons. But Muqtada revealed in his al-Jazeera interview that he had told Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on a trip to Iran that he did not agree with the "political and military interests" that Tehran had pursued in Iran. That was an apparent reference to Iran's pronounced tilt toward Muqtada's Shi'ite rivals, who remain in power with joint US-Iranian support.

Ironically, when Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad visited Iraq in early March, both Maliki and SIIC chief Abdul Aziz al-Hakim publicly dissociated themselves from the US "proxy war" line, insisting that Iran was restraining Muqtada rather than egging him on.

The interest of the Bush administration in keeping the proxy war line alive has nothing to do with Iraqi realities, however. As a strategic weapon for justifying the administration's policies toward both Iraq and Iran, the theme of Iranian interference through "special groups" is bound to be a central thread in the testimony by both Petraeus and Crocker.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD09Ak03.html

Guardian:
Petraeus calls for 45-day halt on troop withdrawals

Ewen MacAskill and Daniel Nasaw in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday April 8 2008

General David Petraeus today told the Senate he wants a 45-day freeze on further withdrawals from Iraq to provide a chance to assess the impact of their removal on security.

The most senior US commander in Iraq told the Senate armed services committee he wanted to keep in place two of the five brigades of additional troops deployed during last year's troop surge.

Petraeus told the hearing he wanted a 45-day "period of consolidation and evaluation" once the extra combat forces that President Bush ordered to Iraq last year have completed their pullout in July. He did not commit to a timetable for resuming troop reductions after the 45-day pause.

"At the end of that period, we will commence a process of assessment to examine the conditions on the ground and, over time, determine when we can make recommendations for further reductions," Petraeus said.

Earlier John McCain, the Republican contender for the White House, offered his most optimistic assessment yet of Iraq today during his Senate showdown with his two Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

McCain and Clinton are members of the Senate armed services committee which is questioning Petraeus and the ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker. Obama is a member of the Senate foreign affairs committee which will question the two men this afternoon.

Each of the White House hopefuls is trying to exploit the hearings to establish their credentials to be the next commander in chief.

In spite of an increase in violence last week and a setback for the US-backed Iraqi forces in Basra, McCain claimed "success is within reach". He said that road ahead would be hard but US had to stay until security is established.

Obama has pledged to remove all US combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2009 while Clinton said she will begin withdrawal as soon as possible after becoming president.

The Senate hearings are a high-profile event in the US and the opening statements were marked by demonstrations in the public gallery that forced the committee chairman, Carl Levin, to call for order.

Levin, opening the hearing, challenged President George Bush's claim that his increase in US forces in Iraq by 30,000 last year had been a success.

In interviews before the hearing began, Clinton told ABC's Good Morning America, that she planned to highlight her view that President George Bush's 'surge' policy that saw an extra 30,000 troops sent to Iraq had failed to help the Iraqi government.

Obama told NBC's Today show, "The most important issue is still the one that was asked in September," when Petraeus testified before Congress, "which is how has this war made us safer and at what point do we know that there is success so we can start bringing our troops home."

Asked that question by Republican senator John Warner this morning, Petraeus said that ultimately only history will be able to make that judgement. But he added that "There is no longer a ruthless dictator in Iraq," and that the "seeds of democracy" have been planted there.

Petraeus acknowledged that "Iraq has entailed huge costs", but added, "The more important question at this point is how best to achieve our important interests in Iraq," he said.

Warner pressed the question again, if the fight has yielded greater security in the US homeland. Petraeus replied, "I do believe it is worth it… I do believe that the interests there are of enormous importance to our country, not just to the people of Iraq."

Crocker then interjected that Al Qaida in Iraq has suffered a "degradation" of its abilities, and "I do believe that makes America safer." He added, "Iraq remains a work in progress."

Petraeus said that there had been improvements in security since he reported to Congress last September. But he admitted that there has been an increase in violence over the last fortnight as a result of the clash between US-backed Iraqi government forces against Shia militia in Basra and Baghdad.

He blamed Iran for the violence in Iraq and said Tehran's influence on militias in Iraq remains the longest term threat to the country.

The "pause" recommendation, which George Bush is expected to endorse on Thursday in a speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, will effectively put the war on hold for the next 10 months. That makes it almost certain some 140,000 US troops will remain in Iraq when the next president takes office in January.

Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama sought to portray Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's recent military foray into Basra to battle Shia militias aligned with Moktada al-Sadr as a sign of political progress.

Petraeus and Crocker seemed ready to agree with that assessment, although the general warned against overstating the military prowess of the federal government troops.

On the political front, Crocker said that political leaders in Iraq "see [Maliki] as taking a strong stand against illegal elements without regard to their sectarian identity. That has had enormous impact" on Sunnis, Kurds and other Shia factions.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/08/johnmccain.petraeus

Internazionale:
La realtà non esiste

I prezzi sembrano impazziti e i mercati offrono lezioni involontarie di filosofia

Tomás Eloy Martínez
Internazionale 738, 3 aprile 2008

Ogni volta che torno in Argentina ho l'impressione che la realtà stia combattendo una guerra infinita con le nostre percezioni. Il primo giorno è già pieno di sorprese.

Mentre l'indice ufficiale sull'inflazione sostiene che i prezzi sono aumentati del quattro per cento negli ultimi quattro mesi, ho l'impressione che i pesos valgano di nuovo come i dollari: quello che prima costava uno, ora costa tre. I prezzi oscillano al ritmo di una bussola impazzita, e i mercati e la strada offrono ogni giorno lezioni involontarie di filosofia.

I funzionari del governo sostengono che i numeri sono un labirinto inestricabile per le persone comuni, e forse hanno ragione: i numeri sono astrazioni e quindi esistono solo nella mente delle persone. Quarant'anni fa al settimanale Primera Plana ci fu un episodio che aiuta a capire quest'enigma.

Un giorno il direttore Victorio Dalle Nogare si accorse che i conti della rivista non tornavano. Secondo i suoi calcoli, i guadagni avrebbero dovuto essere molto più alti di quelli scritti nei registri contabili. Allora non c'erano i computer e i dati erano affidati a metodi più rudimentali.

Dalle Nogare chiamò il contabile del giornale e verificò insieme a lui le voci del bilancio, controllò più volte le spese, esaminò i tabulati delle vendite e rilesse tutte le ricevute. Ma più andava avanti nella revisione del bilancio, più aumentava il suo stupore.

"Legga qui", diceva al contabile ,"per questa pubblicità ci hanno pagato centomila pesos. Ma qui c'è scritto cento". "Se è scritto così, è così", insisteva il contabile. "Non dica fesserie, non me lo sono inventato", s'impuntava Dalle Nogare. "Non sto dicendo che se l'è inventato. Ma se è scritto così, è così". Il direttore perse la pazienza. Prese in mano alcune ricevute e disse in tono risentito: "Non discuta. Questa è la realtà, ce l'ho in mano". Senza scomporsi, il contabile rispose: "La realtà non esiste, signor Dalle Nogare".

In quegli stessi giorni Jorge Luis Borges e Adolfo Bioy Casares sostenevano in una delle migliori cronache di Honorio Bustos Domecq (lo pseudonimo usato dai due scrittori) che la realtà è superflua. È possibile immaginare una realtà parallela a quella che conosciamo e, se qualche autorità la avalla, le persone la considereranno vera.

Nel racconto di Borges e Bioy scomparivano gli stadi e i calciatori, ma le partite si giocavano come sempre e i tifosi le seguivano con la stessa passione. La realtà non esisteva al di fuori delle trasmissioni radio e delle redazioni sportive dei giornali.

All'inizio di questo millennio l'Argentina è rimasta fedele ad alcune negazioni del secolo scorso. A Buenos Aires i contratti d'affitto in scadenza si rinnovano al doppio della cifra precedente, anche se l'Indec assicura che l'aumento è solo del quattro per cento.

Se paragoniamo i prezzi nei supermercati nel dicembre del 2007 a quelli di oggi ci sono alcune oscillazioni inattese nei prezzi delle patate, delle uova, della pasta, del pane e dei legumi. A Tucumán la carne di manzo costa il venti per cento in più di due settimane fa.

Il calcio è meglio immaginarlo che vederlo allo stadio, perché i biglietti per la serie A sono aumentati da quattordici pesos (2,8 euro) a ventiquattro: un prezzo troppo alto per affrontare le piogge di sputi delle tribune in alto, schivare i proiettili ed essere travolto dall'irruenza degli ultrà. La cosa peggiore è che alcuni beni di prima necessità nel New Jersey costano meno che a Olivos (una zona vicino a Buenos Aires), anche se gli stipendi statunitensi sono in media il doppio o il triplo di quelli argentini.

Ho smesso di preoccuparmi per l'inflazione quando il segretario per il commercio interno, Guillermo Moreno, ha dichiarato che la situazione è sotto controllo e che non c'è niente da temere. Mi sono sentito ancora più tranquillo quando il vicepresidente Julio Cobos ha chiarito che mi ero fatto un'idea sbagliata confrontando l'ultimo scontrino di dicembre del supermercato con il primo scontrino di marzo.

La prima volta ho speso poco meno di trecento pesos, mentre tre mesi dopo gli stessi prodotti mi sono costati 390 pesos. Dev'esserci qualcosa di sbagliato in me: forse sto perdendo la lucidità. Oppure, come ha detto il vicepresidente, l'inflazione è solo una sensazione. Sono andato al mercato coreano vicino a casa mia con gli ultimi indici sull'inflazione del segretario Moreno alla mano e, prima di pagare il conto stratosferico, li ho mostrati alla cassiera.

La giovane coreana, che in genere è gentile e disponibile, mi ha guardato stupita, come se fossi un extraterrestre. "Questi numeri non servono a niente", ha detto. "Ma come non servono a niente? Sono i numeri del signor Moreno", ho risposto. "Qui non esiste nessun signor Moreno", ha ribattuto decisa.

Non so perché, ma nella sua voce mi è sembrato di avvertire un'eco remota di quella del contabile di Primera Plana, quarant'anni fa. "La realtà non esiste". Queste cose contraddicono la lezione di Juan Domingo Perón.

Il fondatore del partito al governo stabilì che in Argentina tutto doveva essere prevedibile e che l'unica verità sarebbe stata la realtà. Adesso la realtà è andata a farsi un giro altrove. La storia passa e si trasforma, mentre il peronismo si trasforma ma non passa.

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Jeune Afrique:
De violents affrontements font au moins deux morts

MAURITANIE - 8 avril 2008 - par AFP

Des affrontements entre des combattants islamistes et l'armée mauritanienne lundi soir au nord de Nouakchott ont fait au moins deux morts, dont un jihadiste, et huit blessés, a-t-on appris de sources sécuritaire et hospitalière.

Il s'agit des combats les plus violents de ce genre en Mauritanie, pays charnière entre le Maghreb et l'Afrique subsaharienne, jusqu'à récemment relativement épargné par le terrorisme mais qui a été la cible depuis fin décembre de trois attaques de la mouvance d'Al-Qaïda.

"Un jihadiste a été tué, un autre arrêté. La grande partie des jihadistes est encerclée" et s'est retranchée dans une maison en construction du quartier de Tevregh Zeïna, à la limite nord-ouest de Nouakchott, a indiqué à l'AFP une source sécuritaire

La personne arrêtée "a été criblée de balles. A 80%, nous pensons qu'il s'agit de Sidi Ould Sidna", un des trois tueurs présumés de quatre touristes français en décembre dans le sud de la Mauritanie et qui avait réussi à s'échapper mercredi du Palais de justice, selon cette source. "Il a été évacué à l'hôpital pour des soins intensifs", a précisé cette source sécuritaire.

"La personne ressemble bien au fugitif. Elle a subi une opération d'urgence et est déjà sorti du bloc opératoire", a confirmé une source hospitalière, qui a par ailleurs fait état de "huit blessés parmi les forces de l'ordre dont un a succombé à ses blessures". Les affrontements entre les forces de l'ordre et le groupe de combattants islamistes ont éclaté lundi vers 18H30 (locales et GMT). Des tirs sporadiques se poursuivaient en soirée.

Les jihadistes ont d'abord été "accrochés" par des policiers qui les filaient dans le cadre de l'enquête sur l'évasion de Sidi Ould Sidna. L'accrochage a eu lieu en terrain découvert, au nord d'une "ceinture verte" protégeant la capitale mauritanienne de l'avancée du désert. Mais les combats, avec des tirs à l'arme lourde et à l'arme automatique, se sont ensuite déplacés vers des habitations voisines.

"L'armée a dû intervenir car ces gens sont surarmés et en grand nombre" a précisé à l'AFP cette source sécuritaire. Les affrontements ont débuté vers 18H30 (locales et GMT). Les détonations ont été entendues dans toute la capitale.

Selon des informations proches de l'enquête, Sidi Ould Sidna semble avoir trouvé refuge auprès d'éléments des groupes salafistes liés à Al-Qaida dans les quartiers nord de Nouakchott où il avait été localisé dès jeudi par la police. Mais il avait alors échappé aux policiers.

"Les policiers l'avait rencontré ce jour-là (jeudi). Il se trouvait avec trois de ses amis, à bord d'une petite voiture, au milieu du quartier Ksar où il devait rejoindre son frère alors aux mains de la police dont elle se servait pour l'attirer vers eux", a affirmé à l'AFP une source judiciaire. Selon cette source, le fugitif a très vite remarqué le piège et a fui. Mais les policiers l'ont poursuivi. Un échange de tirs a eu lieu et Ould Sidna a fait usage d'une Kalashnikov.

Les forces de l'ordre, armés de simples pistolets, ont dû rebrousser chemin, laissant Ould Sidna s'enfuir vers les quartiers nord de la capitale, selon cette source. Depuis cette date, les forces de l'ordre ont maintenu la pression sur ces quartiers, multipliant barrages et contrôles et menant des fouilles systématiques d'habitations jugées douteuses.

Lundi, la pression était encore montée d'un cran, le parquet du tribunal de Nouakchott ayant annoncé une récompense de 13.000 euros pour la personne qui aiderait à arrêter Sidi Ould Sidna.

Arrêté le 11 janvier à Bissau, Sidi Ould Sidna avait été inculpé d'"actes de terrorisme" avec deux autres hommes, dont un est toujours en fuite, pour l'attaque d'un groupe de cinq touristes français le 24 décembre 2007 près d'Aleg, dans le sud-ouest de la Mauritanie.

Quatre des Français avaient été tués et le cinquième blessé.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP15318deviostromx0

Lo Straniero:
La montagna elettorale

di Piergiorgio Giacchè

Questo articolo uscirà troppo tardi per sperare di partecipare, nel suo e nel nostro piccolo, alla campagna elettorale. Non mi resta allora che dare l’indicazione di un solo voto: il mio.
La campagna elettorale in Italia come si sa è ininterrotta, eppure paradossalmente si affievolisce proprio quando arriva davanti alla montagna elettorale. Dovremmo cominciare a chiamare così il periodo ufficiale dell’apertura dei comizi e della chiusura delle liste, perché da quel momento in poi “qui non si fa politica” ma ci si assesta e ci si allena al gioco del “padron del monte”, che non è una metafora della presa del potere ma una contesa rituale per la monta e la fertilità della nazione. E c’è chi se la vuole fare in piedi – Rialzati Italia! – e chi com’è sempre stato fra bestie, alla pecorina. Stavolta la montagna elettorale incombe poi in primavera e questo ha aiutato la potatura delle alleanze e la fioritura dei sondaggi, l’aumento delle quote rosa e il ricambio generazionale. E così fra donne e giovani, operai salvati dal fuoco e industriali salvati dalle acque, la sinistra si presenta a gareggiare per la magnifica Parte di Sotto; dall’altra, a destra, dietro l’effige restaurata del Capo (chirurgicamente identica a quella di più di un decennio fa), il seguito dei cortigiani e degli avvocati, imprenditori rampanti e pensionati irredenti, giovani fascisti di ieri e soldati federalisti di domani, ripresenta il corteo ormai storico della nobilissima Parte di Sopra. Inutile dirvi chi si siederà sopra il monte citorio. Ma l’importante è avere già vinto, ovvero partecipare.
Uno spirito olimpico fin troppo pacifico caratterizza questa tornata elettorale, con dispetto dei sacerdoti dell’informazione che vorrebbero almeno un testa a testa e magari qualche testa coda per poter fare più spettacolo. Fin dai primi commenti i giornalisti si sono mostrati impazienti e irritati per un fair play che non fa strisciare la notizia: Berlusconi avrebbe sbagliato ad “accettare il terreno di gioco di Veltroni”, quello del coraggio di presentarsi da soli (dopo opportune fusioni e trasfusioni, com’è ormai legge dello sport). Ma è anche vero che Veltroni lo ha facilitato accettando di vendere la partita (altra abitudine sportiva), accontentandosi della riforma del torneo che si sta avviando verso un bipolarismo quasi perfetto.
Attorno ai due maggiori contendenti, gli altri fanno rumore e danno colore con la loro lotta per la sopravvivenza, superando soglie di sbarramento e cercando interstizi di collocamento. Anche loro però non alzano l’ascolto né l’attenzione: il solito carnevale dei poveri, con vestiti arcobaleno e fiaccole tricolori, segni di croce e rose mistiche, su su fino al mistero buffo del partito della vita – versione alta e “culturale” dei più ruspanti partiti della forchetta di una volta. Dalla commedia all’italiana alla tragedia vaticana, finalmente anche gli embrioni hanno diritto al voto. O almeno all’ex-voto di un consunto consigliere del re che ha deciso di ungersi anche lui promuovendosi al ruolo di cardinal nepote.
E pensare che molti continuano a pensare che Ferrara è un tizio intelligente. Ma come si fa appunto a pensare che i politici italiani – incapaci a risolvere i problemi della vita quotidiana – possano svolgere un tema sulla vita pre-natale? Come si fa a investire degli amministratori che già non si raccapezzano davanti all’economia della borsa con discorsi che riguardano la filosofia della vita?
Per fortuna tutti gli hanno risposto che per certi argomenti vale la libertà di coscienza. E nessuno più dei politici può vantare in effetti una libertà dalla coscienza pressoché totale. Anzi, come si sa, il prerequisito per “candidarsi”, è quello di smacchiarsi il peccato originale del pensiero per poter essere più determinati nell’azione. Tutto il contrario di quello che viene richiesto all’elettore-peccatore: dimenticare per sempre la possibilità di un’azione efficace e farsi venire un accidenti di pensiero qualunque che possa giustificare il proprio voto.

A essere sinceri a me non è mai capitato di votare per chi mi pare. E ancora meno per chi mi piace. Da tempo poi – e questa è la cosa più triste – ho capito che questa situazione non è affatto originale ma generale, e forse l’ultima distinzione sta nel fatto di ammetterlo. Anzi, per essere precisi, sta nella mia ostinazione a votare comunque e in fondo a votare chiunque. Non proprio qualunque parte o partito, visto che non sono mai riuscito a uscire dall’area di sinistra; ma nel frattempo anni di bradisismi e smottamenti hanno cambiato le mappe catastali e le liste elettorali oltre la confusione, fino alla comunione.
Non voglio farla lunga sui partiti tutti uguali e sugli arrivati, sempre gli stessi. Voglio al contrario dire che non è vero che non ci sono novità sotto il sole dell’avvenire: a ogni scadenza elettorale il nuovo avanza fin troppo e troppo velocemente. Non è il nuovo che aspettavo, ma proprio questo rende più autentica e sorprendente la novità di elezioni che, almeno per me, non costituiscono più un’occasione politica ma appena una tentazione apotropaica. In fondo io le aspetto e le uso per fare gli scongiuri: ieri, per fingere di fare il tifo per una squadra che perde; oggi, per fare il malocchio a un campione che non c’è. Sempre, per scommettere sulla sconfitta di qualcuno piuttosto che sulla vittoria di tutti (come invece regolarmente succede). Insomma, anziché fare una croce su una scheda per me è come giocare una schedina, che ha una possibilità su un miliardo di vincere e nessuna di convincermi. È poco, è risibile, è anzi ridicolo, ma tant’è: non riesco ad astenermi. C’è gente che smette di votare e si sente meglio – mi dicono. Anche smettere di fumare è salutare, ma non ce la faccio.
Andrò a votare dunque, ancora una volta, inevitabilmente. E dovrò scegliere come e per chi, o meglio cosa e contro chi. Sogno un futuro con delle elezioni davvero democratiche come quelle del Grande Fratello, in cui si possa finalmente votare non solo per qualcuno ma anche contro qualcun’altro. Scommetto che sarebbero in tanti a scegliere il voto negativo, anziché quello di fiducia o di clientela o di simpatia. Non cambierebbe nulla sul piano del governo ma si abbasserebbe la protervia del potere. Alla fine, fatta la somma algebrica, il partito vincente potrebbe vantare un risultato sotto zero appena migliore dei partiti perdenti. Dovrebbe ammettere che è il meno odiato ma non il più amato degli italiani. Con il vantaggio di diminuire l’arroganza del potere e di aumentare la responsabilità del servizio.
Ma questo all’elettorato non piace. Gli sembrerebbe il giorno del giudizio e non quello dell’“È sempre Natale” e della collettiva identità. In verità, io invidio quelli che ancora giocano la schedina insieme, come facessero un sistema. Il mio “gratta e non vinci” è invece solitario, e nella migliore delle ipotesi si verifica sempre il peggiore dei risultati.

I risultati questa volta si sanno dall’inizio, tanto che Berlusconi li ha ripetuti durante tutta la campagna soltanto per abituarsi e per farsi coraggio. Gli toccherà di governare e – a conti fatti e a cause penali chiuse – la faccenda lo diverte poco o niente. Lui è un televisivo, anzi un televisore che preferisce trasmettere più pubblicità e meno programmi. Il fatto che fin dal primo giorno abbia già venduto il prodotto, ha svuotato la sua azione di propaganda “porta a porta” e spento quasi del tutto la sua eccitazione. Avendo cioè vinto da subito le future elezioni, non c’è gusto né durata nella sua erezione. È una vittoria precox, ma in più non è nemmeno una vittoria conquistata da lui ma sancita da un Elettorato ormai diventato autonomo persino dal suo alto fattore.
Un elettorato per il quale non valgono i sondaggi ma servono i carotaggi, visto che si è solidificato, stratificato e infine identificato con quasi tutto il territorio di questo nostro paese di merda. Mi spiego meglio, l’elettorato prima di dividersi in destra e sinistra, è tutto intero e ormai lo sa. Oggi non ha più bisogno di un radicamento, perché si spalma come un comportamento pervasivo anche senza nessuna idea persuasiva. Non servono più le sezioni e le parrocchie dei vecchi partiti di massa. Oggi è la massa che è un partito, e il voto non va più inseguito, orientato, conquistato. L’elettorato è già convinto ed ha già stravinto: è lui che fa il risultato molto prima che si giochi effettivamente la partita. In altre parole, lui è già dall’altra parte della montagna quando i partiti cominciano appena la loro campagna.
È davvero il caso di dire – ma stavolta a Berlusconi – “ben scavato vecchia talpa!” Ormai la cosiddetta stragrande maggioranza degli elettori sta dalla parte dell’interesse privato contro ogni atto pubblico, dell’egoismo pietoso e dell’altruismo peloso, del malcostume e della maleducazione, della comodità della sudditanza e della vocazione al servilismo, del familismo senza più famiglia (promossa a valore aggiunto) e del clientelismo senza più azienda (riconosciuta come valore primo). L’elettorato in definitiva sta aspettando che i partiti arrivino fino a lui, e se ne frega dei piccoli passi dei loro programmi e delle grandi balle delle loro promesse: sta aspettandoli dove ancora non osano arrivare, al nucleare e alla pena di morte, ai lavori forzati e alla castrazione chimica, alla differenziazione fra i sessi e alla disuguaglianza fra le etnie, alla libertà del profitto e alla selezione per merito, eccetera e ancora eccetera e purtroppo eccetera. Non tutti gli elettori la pensano così, ma sanno di partecipare a un elettorato che tutto intero obbedisce alla dittatura delle maggioranze e funziona con la stessa inerzia e la stessa potenza dell’audience: un corpaccione globale sempre soddisfatto o assuefatto, che manda in onda le commoventi storie di singole miserie e singolari disgrazie, ma manda in orbita soltanto l’immagine plurale e imperiale di sé.
Ebbene, l’elettorato stavolta ha già svoltato prima di votare. Il risultato delle elezioni non possono che confermarlo per quello che è, e soprattutto per quello che non è. Non è più ad esempio sinonimo di Popolo (se non in Lombardia); ancor meno c’entra con la Nazione (dell’ex-alleanza di Fini) ma nemmeno con la nazionale di calcio presa a modello da Forza Italia; infine non ha ovviamente nessun rapporto con lo Stato di cui è il tradizionale anticorpo. Ma la sua vera novità e la sua completa autonomia sta nel fatto che non ha più niente a vedere con la Società. O forse è la società che non si fa vedere da tempo e che l’elettorato non riesce più a surrogare.
Non c’è un sociale riconoscibile, da vivere o appena da bere. Non c’è un tessuto di rapporti solidali o un insieme di attributi identitari a cui, per così dire spontaneamente, si possa o si voglia fare riferimento. Quando i partiti si rinnovano prendendo “prestiti” dalla società civile, ieri ci si chiedeva quando poi glieli rendono, oggi invece dovrebbero spiegarci dove li prendono.
Forse la sola differenza fra un professionista prestato alla politica e un professionista della politica è che il secondo non ha un vero mestiere. Se non dovesse essere eletto, un politico cosa fa? E dove va? Lo sapremo seguendo il destino del povero Mastella, traditore per amore. Ma, per non sparare sulla croce rossa, siamo sicuri che D’Alema potrebbe lavorare all’estero? Che Buttiglione vivrebbe di filosofia? Che Veltroni si metterebbe a fare cinema e Bertinotti la rivoluzione? Forse solo Berlusconi può tornare a fare il finanziere, ma dovrebbe stare all’erta quando passa la finanza… Insomma i politici hanno un mestiere ingrato e – da oggi, forse – vita breve. Possono anche essere presi in prestito dalla società, ma non vi possono più tornare, se è vero che sotto i loro occhi ma anche le loro mani, si è man mano volatilizzata.
Se l’Elettorato non fa rima né si lega con niente altro, vorrà dire che le Elezioni sono quindi e infine una festa: l’unico e ultimo momento dove una popolazione dispersa si finge e si celebra come corpo sociale. Si prende un giorno e mezzo di vacanza dal suo ordinario sfacelo e si ricompone dentro l’urne, mimando una libertà, una uguaglianza e perfino una rissosa fraternità che non ha altri riscontri né conseguenze, nemmeno il giorno dopo. Il giorno dopo il dì di festa, l’elettorato se ne frega dei problemi del paese, in un certo senso si dimentica perfino dei politici che ha votato.
Saranno loro – i politici – ad affacciarsi cinque volte al giorno in televisione per ricordare all’elettore la loro presenza, saranno loro a riempire di gossip la stampa e a litigare come il pubblico finto di uomini & donne, come i tronisti e le veline e i piccoli grandi fratelli. Nella speranza di fare audience, e cioè di titillare e magari resuscitare il fantasma dell’elettorato.

“Perché votare” non è più una domanda da porsi. A una festa non si può mancare senza peccare d’orgoglio e di stupidità. Non vale più il dubbio amletico di quel film dove l’astensione o la partecipazione a una festa potevano comportare un’uguale speranza di essere notati. Oggi né l’una né l’altra scelta contano, e l’unica differenza sta semmai nell’essere contati o viceversa nell’essere dati per scontati. L’astensione non è più un atto ma soltanto un fatto. E in tempo di elezioni i fatti non valgono quanto le opinioni.
“Per chi votare” è infine un falso problema. Il vero è sempre stato “contro chi”. Mettendola giù così, si evita di rifare l’elenco degli infingimenti utili e delle precauzioni necessarie, dal naso turato agli occhi chiusi alle mani davanti e soprattutto dietro. Qui non si fa politica e per un bel pezzo non la si farà più. Armati della schedina si può soltanto cercare di scommettere uno contro milioni sulla impossibile sconfitta di Berlusconi. Altri cinque anni di Popolo e di Libertà significherebbero – anzi significheranno, prepariamoci – l’assestamento definitivo di atteggiamenti malsani e di comportamenti odiosi, di valori finti e di norme sbagliate, in una parola di una atmosfera culturale francamente irrespirabile. O peggio, contagiosa.
Il cambiamento sarebbe auspicabile è vero, ma ora si tratta di scongiurare il perfezionamento di una già avvenuta mutazione. Un altro mondo non è possibile, e comunque non è questo il momento di parlarne. Ci si potrà lavorare nei giorni feriali, ma non c’entra nulla nel momento festivo della macabra scadenza elettorale.

http://www.lostraniero.net/

Lo Straniero:
Anestetizzati

di Goffredo Fofi

In Italia, si ha da tempo l’impressione di un intero paese, di un’intera cultura anestetizzati. Dalle anestesie, si sa, ci si può risvegliare molto male – con la possibilità di trovarsi di fronte, per esempio, realtà nuove e terribili, come il “figlio di Iorio” di una rivista di Totò che si ridestava nella Roma dell’occupazione tedesca. Ma capita anche che non ci si risvegli affatto, precipitando direttamente nel nulla della morte o nelle nebbie di un coma profondo, irreversibile. Il “ritorno alla vita” è sempre traumatico, anche quando è quello di Lazzaro: se ci sarà, non sarà semplice e a scontarlo maggiormente saranno proprio gli ignavi che si sono lasciati addormentare (fuor di metafora: che si sono lasciati ammazzare la coscienza, cioè la capacità di ragionare sulla propria condizione, nel quadro dello stato del mondo ).
Ad anestetizzarci sono stati – e lo hanno fatto, bisogna dirlo, con molta abilità – giornalisti politici preti insegnanti intrattenitori (ce ne sono che vengono detti animatori, quando il loro lavoro è di disanimare, distraendo da ciò che conta), e nel caso dei giovani lo hanno semplicemente fatto gli adulti, e i mercanti e pubblicitari che stanno alle loro spalle. I mercanti, soprattutto. Mercanti di tutto, perfino del trascendente e del sacro. Le colpe variano, ma sono colpe e vanno chiamate con il loro nome. Si presume di solito che gli alienati abbiano meno colpe degli alienanti, ma anche questo si può ormai metterlo in discussione: non vediamo all’intorno innocenti, nel presente stato delle cose tutti hanno – tutti abbiamo – le nostre responsabilità.
Ci sono molti tipi di anestetizzati. Ci sono quelli – vecchi – che, venuti dalla povertà, hanno sposato tutti i modelli che vengono loro riservati dai diversi poteri, di una ricchezza raggiungibile solo nelle sue parodie e risibili scopiazzature; ci sono quelli – adulti – che semplicemente non hanno avuto altri orizzonti che le merci e hanno assistito, raramente vivendola direttamente, all’epoca delle ribellioni, e dalla loro sconfitta hanno introiettato un quotidiano cinismo, subendo la scomparsa di un’identità di classe che si riduceva via via alle rivendicazioni corporative e si assuefaceva, ora istericamente ora malinconicamente, alla crisi dello stato assistenziale; e ci sono quelli che – giovani e giovanissimi – sono cresciuti dentro un sistema di “pensiero unico”, dentro un’“unica proposta di vendita” che riserva ai suoi clienti-sudditi solo insignificanti e miserabili varianti.
Sono forse questi i più disastrati dei nostri connazionali, perché non hanno avuto e non hanno termini di paragone, non sanno che sono esistiti altri modi di essere e di affrontare la vita. Ma se si dovesse precisare quale categoria di anestetizzati ci sembra la più tipica di questi anni, ebbene, è quella trasversale che va oltre le distinzioni di età e di ceto e perfino di cultura, quella che riguarda noi stessi e i nostri immediati vicini, le aree politiche ed etiche cui pensiamo di appartenere. È qui che le cattive abitudini cresciute dal fallimento dei movimenti e delle speranze di rinnovamento, alla fine degli anni settanta e dentro gli ottanta, si sono radicate e ramificate e hanno compiuto il disastro. Erano gli anni in cui il terrorismo e il socialismo craxiano hanno creato una diffusa falsa coscienza (ma in moltissimi si trattava di mera ipocrisia e di mero cinismo) che ha allontanato chi credeva nell’intervento pulito nelle situazioni, e nella possibilità di una politica (di un movimento) che desse alla pluralità dei modi dell’intervento un senso collettivo. Né bastava ovviamente a produrre nuova morale la pelosa demagogia di questo e di quello, dai Fo ai Di Pietro ai Grillo non c’è altra abbondanza! I militanti di un tempo e gli insoddisfatti da loro sollecitati si sono trovati da un lato spossessati di questa possibilità dalla piccola borghesia stalinista del terrorismo, per quanto numericamente ristretta, e dall’altro dalla pacificazione amorale proposta da Craxi nel segno del denaro (e dai teorici del pensiero debole, della “fine della Storia”).
Si è reagito – credo i migliori – con il fenomeno breve del volontariato, dell’associazionismo e del terzo settore, ma a dar loro cemento non poteva bastare una morale cattolica con un super-io fiacchissimo, accomodante e accomodantissimo, nei confronti della realtà e del potere. Nel mentre che altre indicazioni erano assenti. Questo fallimento è stato il fallimento di un’ultima reazione possibile venuta dalla base, dalla sensibilità ai bisogni più veri e da un rapporto diretto con la realtà, perché, se i “comunisti” si erano fascistizzati (il terrorismo) o adeguati (il Pci, con tutti i suoi successivi, irrefrenabili, ridicoli cambiamenti di nomi e di stemmi e riverniciatura di facce, oggi centrale quella del più americano dei salvatori della patria che si contrappone al più clownesco emblema degli arricchiti, primaria piaga della nazione) i cattolici non se la passavano meglio, con l’invadenza e l’arroganza degli ultimi papa-divi e dei loro ruini, e i primi maestri d’ipocrisia erano pur sempre i cosiddetti laici, capitanati da facce di tolla alla Agnelli (la struttura cioè la rapina) e alla Scalfari (la sovrastruttura cioè l’imbiancamento dei sepolcri, il paravento per la rapina). Col tempo, si è cementificato in tantissimi, e diciamo pure nei migliori o quantomeno in coloro che amano credersi e presentarsi come i migliori, un modo di essere che sarebbe parso, pochi anni prima, inaccettabile e che invece veniva rivendicato come il giusto modo, la scelta più seria: far bene le proprie cose, una presunta onestà nei comportamenti professionali e privata, il tifo per le rivoluzioni altrui (vere o finte, preferibilmente latinoamericane), e magari l’adesione in qualche eclettica maniera alle iniziative di pace e di carità, alle buone azioni (preferibilmente africane), e finalmente la delega ai politici (ai partiti, magari a quelli più sbraitanti) delle scelte collettive. Convinti che il singolo nulla più può, ma che può sentirsi in pace con la sua coscienza per il “ben fare” di incidenza collettiva zero, e che a volte è servito solo a oliare la macchina, a dare fiacco vigore a meccanismi sgangheratissimi. Ci si accontenta davvero di poco, e sembra una gran fatica anche la ricerca di analisi e idee più serie, quando è così facile avere a portata di mano un mucchio di idee tranquillizzanti, che ci fanno sentire migliori a buonissimo mercato.
È questa l’anestesia peggiore e la più grave, quella di chi ancora pensa di stare nel giusto; è questa la forma di viltà più detestabile, la più ipocrita di tutte. Ne consegue per esempio, tra i tanti danni, che gli anestetizzati non avvertono più i cambiamenti di clima, il crescere delle corruzioni, lo scollamento delle persone e dei gruppi e perfino dei territori da qualsiasi progetto o idea comune che non sia di denaro e di consumo. Nessuno sembra più avvertire la necessità, oggi davvero assoluta, di legare i fatti alle idee, le azioni al pensiero, e di non accontentarsi di quella parodia di salvezza che è l’eterno farsi i fatti propri magari gridando convinzioni radicali... L’anestesia peggiore è quella nostra e dei nostri amici, con la sua accettazione di un quieto vivere sonnambulico e la soggiacente, incancrenita paura di ogni rischio, di ogni possibilità di affidarsi alla propria diretta e personale responsabilità. Mentre la rovina cresce, e i tempi stringono.

http://www.lostraniero.net/

Mail & Guardian:
'Don't wait for dead bodies in Harare'

Susan Njanji | Harare, Zimbabwe
08 April 2008

Zimbabwe's opposition slammed the "deafening silence" on Tuesday of Africa in the aftermath of the country's elections, warning of blood on the streets unless pressure is brought to bear on Robert Mugabe.

As party lawyers argued at the High Court for an immediate announcement of the result of the March 29 presidential poll, the Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) number two said its supporters were being provoked into violence as part of a strategy to impose a state of emergency.

In events on the ground, the country's commercial farmers' union said 60 of the last remaining white farmers had now been forced off their land in an echo of the unrest that followed Mugabe's last electoral reverse eight years ago.

While there has been a flurry of behind-the-scenes diplomacy in the 10 days since the country went to the polls, African heads of state have declined to put their name to calls for the presidential results to be announced.

Exasperated by the lack of a diplomatic breakthrough, MDC secretary general Tendai Biti said "the deafening silence by our brothers and sisters" in Africa was symptomatic of the continent's failure to react to crises.

Drawing a parallel to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which about 800 000 people lost their lives, Biti urged institutions such as the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to take a clear stand.

"We [Africa] responded poorly in Rwanda and a million people were killed," Biti told a press conference. "I say, don't wait for dead bodies on the streets of Harare. Intervene now. There's a constitutional and legal crisis in Zimbabwe."

ANC meeting
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who has already declared himself the outright winner over his old rival Mugabe, met senior members of the African National Congress in South Africa on Monday, including its leader, Jacob Zuma.

However, President Thabo Mbeki, who mediated between the MDC and Mugabe's Zanu-PF in the build-up the election, has so far only called for all sides to await the election results and described the situation as "manageable".

Observer missions from the African Union and SADC both gave the elections a largely clean bill of health, even though the outcome is still unknown.

While there has still to be any significant outbreak of violence since polling day, Biti accused the Zimbabwean authorities of deliberately sitting on the results of the presidential election in order to provoke the opposition into violence. "Why do they want us to go in that direction? It's because they want to declare a state of emergency."

The opposition fears that a state of emergency could allow Mugabe, who has ruled since independence in 1980, to suppress the election results and therefore cling on to power by the backdoor.

Zanu-PF has already called for a complete recount of the poll even before the release of results and authorities have arrested seven election officials for allegedly undercounting votes cast for the president.

Simultaneous parliamentary results have been announced in which the MDC wrested control from Zanu-PF for the first time, but Mugabe's ruling party is contesting enough seats to reverse the MDC's victory.

Court bid
In a bid to force an end to the presidential results delay, the MDC has been trying to persuade the High Court to order the electoral commission to release them forthwith.

A High Court judge agreed on Tuesday to consider the MDC's case on an urgent basis, but the hearing was held over until Wednesday after a day of legal arguments from both the opposition and electoral commission lawyers.

While Mugabe has remained largely silent since polling day, his only intervention has served to stoke racial tensions and discredit the opposition as Western puppets who would reverse his land reforms under which thousands of white farmers saw their property seized at the start of the decade.

According to the Commercial Farmers' Union, more than 60 farmers have been forced off their land since the weekend. "They are targeting anyone seen as against the ruling party; it's really sad,." union president Trevor Gifford said.

The first major wave of farm invasions came after Mugabe lost a referendum on presidential powers in 2000.

Many critics have blamed Mugabe's land-reform programme for Zimbabwe's meltdown from regional breadbasket to economic basket case, with inflation now standing at more than 100 000% and unemployment beyond 80%.

Sapa-AFP

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=336556&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

New Statesman:
Zimbabwe goes to the brink

The "Big Man", last of the independence leaders, never seriously contemplated defeat writes Alex Russell. Plus read Stephen Chan's take

Alec Russell
Published 03 April 2008

As starry-eyed supporters of the Zimbabwean opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) queued to vote on Saturday 29 March there were far too many police around for them to dare make their feelings plain. So, instead, a series of irreverent text messages hummed from polling station to polling station across the country.

"Bob 23 verses one to five," started one, a spoof of Psalm 23. "Mugabe is my shepherd I shall not work. He makes me to lie down on park benches. He leads me to be a thief, a prostitute, a liar and an asylum-seeker. He restores my faith in MDC. He guides me in the path of unemployment. Though I walk in the valley of Zim I shall still be hungry!!!"

"Do you know anyone with a pick-up truck?" ran another. "I have a client who I want to move. He is moving this weekend from State House to Kutama [Mugabe's rural retreat]."

For almost 24 hours the same giddy mood prevailed among supporters of the MDC. Few celebrated publicly. Most in Harare walked home from the polls - almost everyone walks in Zimbabwe these days to save the cost of a standard bus fare, Z$40,000 or about US$1, equivalent to a tenth of a standard labourer's monthly wage - keeping their voting preference to themselves and their close friends. But increasingly people dared to dream that, after 28 years in power - and three disputed elections in the past eight years - the "old man" was finally on his way out.

Such optimism reached fever pitch after a pre-dawn press conference on the Sunday morning following voting, when Tendai Biti, the puckish secretary general of the MDC, strode to a podium and informed bleary-eyed diplomats and journalists that his party was comfortably ahead. But, for watchers of state television, it all came to a juddering halt a few minutes before midnight on Sunday night. ZBC was playing an unbelievably bad movie premised on Jim Hawkins running into Long John Silver in the Caribbean 20 years after the Treasure Island escapade and falling in love with his daughter.

Suddenly Long John et al vanished off the screen to be replaced by the expressionless features of a correspondent at the state-appointed Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC).

The presenter quickly introduced Judge George Chiweshe, chairman of the ZEC. He had last been seen that same day as he was chased across the lobby of a Harare hotel by outraged MDC supporters demanding to know why he had not released any results. This time he was on safer ground. He was in the election command centre in central Harare.

People who were complaining about the time it was taking to verify the results should be patient, he told the nation. "It's an involving and laborious process. It takes time for results to filter through." And as for "stakeholders" (read the MDC) who had ventured to release early results: "The commission would like to reiterate that it and it alone is the sole legitimate source of all results."

Innocents in the world of Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu-PF party might have struggled to understand the import of what developed into a 20-minute ramble. To the MDC, however, the message was all too stark. After 24 hours of seemingly being stunned into silence, the authorities had returned to the fray: Mugabe and Zanu-PF were not going to go easily.

Party insiders say that Mugabe was startled by the initial returns from polling stations, which made it clear he was heading for defeat.

For the previous 12 months his senior aides had stacked the odds in his favour. In March last year they gave orders to agricultural equipment companies to have large numbers of rotivators, and rather smaller numbers of tractors, ready for March 2008. These were duly rolled out with great fanfare to small farmers in impoverished rural communities in the weeks leading up to the 29 March vote. Food aid was doled out to party supporters and, according to a dogged Human Rights Watch researcher, Tiseke Kasambala, denied to MDC supporters. The ZBC churned out endless encomia to the president, or the Fist of Empowerment, as he is called on election posters.

Meanwhile, day after day, giant rallies of happy, smiling people greeted him on the campaign trail, presumably reassuring him that the opposition talk of economic implosion had not been accepted by his loyal people.

As the New Statesman went to press it was clear that despite Zanu-PF's advantages it was all but impossible for it to deny the MDC had won and also that insiders in the ruling party were realising there was no way to massage the outcome. A projection by an independent survey group underlined the difficulty the ZEC would have in issuing results giving Mugabe victory. The findings gave Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC 49.4 per cent, with Mugabe 41.8 per cent.

This suggested that the MDC leader was below the 50 per cent-plus-one vote mark he needed to avoid a run-off, but the MDC's results suggested he had enough votes to avoid a run-off. In short, Mugabe had been beaten.

He was not going to go without a fight. On Sunday night he met the "securocrats" of the Joint Operations Command, the body of security, intelligence and military chiefs who in recent years have increasingly dominated policymaking. According to some accounts of the meeting, some dared to take a "dovish" stance and suggest that the veteran autocrat should consider reaching an accommodation with the MDC.

The ultra-hawks urging an immediate declaration of a state of emergency were believed to have been talked out of such a drastic response. But what is widely believed to have been the final decision was hardly conciliatory. It was to stall for time, order the ZEC to dribble out results slowly and see if they could not end up "fixing" the election in the counting process, a senior former Zanu-PF official said. Not long afterwards, the ZBC interrupted Treasure Island 2 or whatever it was and introduced Chiweshe into Zimbabwean living rooms.

The phenomenon of a long-serving independence leader being rejected by his people has been seen before in Southern Africa. Kenneth Kaunda, the veteran Zambian leader with a penchant for waving handkerchiefs, was unceremoniously dumped by the electorate in 1991. Then, in 1994, Hastings Banda, the eccentric Malawian tyrant, suffered a similar ejection from State House. Both ultimately accepted their lot.

In recent weeks both Tsvangirai and Simba Makoni, Mugabe's other challenger, a former finance minister, have tried to tempt Mugabe to bow out gracefully. Both indicated to me in interviews that they would not seek to humiliate the former hero of the independence era if he lost.

Clinging to power

But while Mugabe was unwilling to follow the lead of these regional predecessors - Harare legend has it that he laughed scornfully when he heard that Kaunda had lost power through the ballot box - increasingly, as the days passed after the elections, MDC optimism grew that a deal would be struck with some of the more conciliatory generals loyal to his regime. They would then, the MDC hoped, aided by support from regional leaders, persuade Mugabe to step down.

The smart money among diplomats and regional analysts is betting that even if Mugabe does finagle his way back into power and cheat Tsvangirai of his apparent victory, he cannot hope to last long in office. Makoni's defection, while not backed in public by many senior cadres, reflects an increasingly mutinous sentiment within Zanu-PF. While inflation on paper is a "mere" 100,000 per cent, economists expect it may be 500,000 by the end of this month.

Whatever happens, Mugabe's aura of invincibility has been destroyed by the dramatic events of the past week.

An extension of his rule, even by, say, six months, would be a disaster for Zimbabwe. Yet more desperate people would flee across the southern border to join the between one and three million who have already crossed into South Africa. Infant mortality, illiteracy and all those other statistics that made Zimbabwe in Mugabe's early years in power the envy of sub-Saharan Africa would continue to rise.

In short, the spoof Psalm 23 would suddenly seem rather unfunny. At the time of writing it was still possible that Mugabe would try to dig his heels in one last time. But there was a sense that one of the last of Africa's "Big Men" independence leaders was on his way out.

Alec Russell is Southern Africa correspondent of the Financial Times

Zimbabwe in numbers

100,000+% rate of inflation

Z$100,000 = £1.70

Z$6.6m official cost of a loaf of bread

Z$15m black-market cost of a loaf of bread

37 average life expectancy

80% unemployment rate

15.6% of population is infected with HIV/Aids

75% of doctors emigrate after earning medical degree

45% of Zimbabweans are malnourished

5.9m registered voters

9m ballots printed by Electoral Commission

Research by Jax Jacobsen

http://www.newstatesman.com/200804030025

Página/12:
Peor el remedio que la enfermedad

Advierten sobre los riesgos de medicar a niños con “deficit atencional”

Una investigación detectó que “la tasa de mortalidad es mayor” en los niños que son medicados por problemas de “hiperactividad, trastornos bipolares o déficit de atención”. La prescripción de drogas como la ritalina se triplicó en diez años.

Por Pedro Lipcovich
Martes, 08 de Abril de 2008

Una nueva advertencia contra la medicalización del “déficit atencional” en los chicos llega, en este caso, de Gran Bretaña: muerte súbita, mayor riesgo de mortalidad general, problemas cardíacos, aumento desmedido de peso, desórdenes neurológicos, son los peligros más señalados. Esto se da en un contexto en que las recetas de medicamentos para los chicos inquietos se triplicó en diez años. Por lo demás, en general estos fármacos no han pasado por pruebas de seguridad específicas para niños. En la Argentina, “la práctica de medicar a los chicos está salida de cauce y no refleja más que la intolerancia adulta respecto del chico diferente, el ‘molesto’”, afirmó un miembro del Foro de Estudio de la Medicamentación en la Infancia.

La investigación, que será publicada el mes que viene por la revista especializada Pediatrics, consistirá en una revisión de los estudios previos sobre el tema, y fue dirigida por Ian Wong, titular de investigaciones pediátricas en la Escuela de Farmacia de Londres. Ayer, la BBC y el diario The Guardian anticiparon sus lineamientos generales. Según Wong, “la tasa de mortalidad es mayor” entre los chicos que consumen estos medicamentos. David Healy, profesor en la Universidad de Cardiff, precisó que estas drogas pueden causar “problemas cardíacos, circulatorios y respiratorios”, lo cual se debería a “diversas razones: una es que todos los antipsicóticos actúan sobre un neurotrasmisor llamado dopamina, que tiene una función en la regulación cardiovascular. Otros efectos son: importantes aumentos de peso y diskinesia tardía (movimientos incontrolables en la lengua y la cara)”.

Healy agregó que “en Estados Unidos se produjeron muertes súbitas en chicos que habían recibido estimulantes, que también actúan sobre el sistema de la dopamina, tras haber sido diagnosticados con ‘síndrome de déficit atencional’. Si bien las drogas no están específicamente autorizadas para chicos, los médicos pueden prescribirlas bajo su propia responsabilidad, y las principales indicaciones son “hiperactividad y desorden bipolar”.

El investigador británico citó el caso de una nena que “desde que era bebé fue diagnosticada primero con ‘déficit atencional’, después con ‘depresión’ y finalmente con ‘desorden bipolar’. Cuando murió tenía sólo dos años de edad: había pasado las tres cuartas partes de su vida bajo los efectos de esos medicamentos”.

Según un estudio del Departamento de Salud británico, el uso de medicamentos para el llamado déficit atencional se incrementó un 274 por ciento en diez años. Un informe previo encargado por la Cámara de los Lores había establecido que el 90 por ciento de los medicamentos para bebés recién nacidos no ha sido suficientemente testeado, al igual que el 50 por ciento de los destinados a niños en general. “Los chicos no son simplemente adultos en miniatura”, observó una representante de la Cámara de los Lores. La Unión Europea estudia una ley para exigir a las empresas fabricantes que efectúen pruebas específicas antes de comercializar para niños medicamentos destinados a adultos.

León Benasayag, ex profesor de neurología en la UBA, señaló que “desde hace años se vienen describiendo efectos adversos para medicamentos como el metilfenidato, cuyo nombre comercial más conocido es Ritalina, o la atomoxetina; el primero se usa para el ‘déficit atencional’ y el segundo como antidepresivo. A partir de los efectos sobre el sistema cardiovascular, existe preocupación por la posibilidad de que eleven el riesgo de ataques cardíacos y accidentes cerebrales. En Estados Unidos está en curso una investigación sobre gran cantidad de pacientes para verificar esto”.

La posibilidad de efectos adversos está incluida en el prospecto que acompaña al medicamento pero “con letra muy chiquita, difícil de leer”, observó Benasayag, y comentó que “en la Argentina, los vademécum que usan los médicos no incluyen los efectos secundarios de los medicamentos; aclaran que, ‘para más información’, hay que dirigirse al laboratorio, pero la mayoría de los médicos consideran que no tiene tiempo para hacer eso”.

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-102061-2008-04-08.html

The Independent: Hizbollah turns to Iran
for new weapons to wage war on Israel

By Robert Fisk in Teir Dibba, south Lebanon
Tuesday, 8 April 2008

The Shia "martyrs" of this hill village are normally killed in the dangerous, stony landscape of southern Lebanon, in Israeli air raids or invasions or attacks from the sea. The Hizbollah duly honours them. But the body of the latest Shia fighter to be buried here – from the local Hashem family – was flown back to Lebanon last month from Iran.

He was hailed as a martyr in the village Husseiniya mosque but the Hizbollah would say no more. For when a Lebanese is killed in live firing exercises in the Islamic Republic, his death brings almost as many questions as mourners. Yet it is an open secret south of the Litani river that thousands of young men have been leaving their villages for military training in Iran. Up to 300 men are taken to Beirut en route to Tehran each month and the operation has been running since November of 2006; in all, as many as 4,500 Hizbollah members have been sent for three-month sessions of live-fire ammunition and rocket exercises to create a nucleus of Iranian-trained guerrillas for the "next" Israeli-Hizbollah war.

Whether this frightening conflict takes place will depend on President Bush's behaviour. If America – or its proxy, Israel – bombs Iran, the response is likely to be swift and will come from the deep underground bunkers that the Hizbollah has been building in the fields and beside the roadways east and south of Jezzine.

For months, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has been warning Israel that his organisation has a "surprise" new weapon in its armoury and there are few in Lebanon who do not suspect that this is a new Iranian-developed ground-to-air missile – rockets which may at last challenge Israel's air supremacy over Lebanon. For more than 30 years, Israel's fighter-bombers have had the skies to themselves, losing only two aircraft – one to a primitive Palestinian SAM-7 shoulder-fired missile, the other to Syrian anti-aircraft guns – during and after its 1982 invasion.

After its 1980-88 war with Iraq, Iran introduced a new generation of weapons, one of which – a development of a Chinese sea-to-sea missile – almost sank an Israeli corvette in the last Hizbollah-Israeli war in 2006.

Can the Hizbollah shoot Israeli jets out of the sky in the event of another conflict? It is a question much discussed within the 13,000-strong United Nations force in southern Lebanon – essentially a Nato-led army, which contains French, Spanish and Italian troops as well as Chinese, Indian and sundry other contingents – which would find itself sandwiched between the two antagonists.

There are no armed Hizbollah fighters in their area of operations – Nasrallah respects the UN resolution which placed the peacekeepers between the Israeli border and the Litani in 2006 – but the UN mission, along with its soldiers, will be gravely endangered in the event of another war.

If its aircraft could no longer bomb at will over Lebanon without fear of being destroyed, would Israel stage another costly land invasion – highly unlikely after the bloodying its troops took in 2006 – or use its own ground-to-ground missiles on Lebanon? For if the latter option were chosen, it would bring a whole new dimension to Lebanon's repeated wars. Long-range missiles have proved hopelessly inaccurate in Middle East conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war. But whatever political sins they still commit, the Lebanese – despite their current crisis – appear to have rejected any return to civil war. In such a war, no one could repeat the old lies about "pinpoint accuracy".

The government of Fouad Siniora may be trapped in its own "Green Zone" in central Beirut – it even refused to attend the Arab League summit in Damascus – and parliament is suspended after 17 vain sessions to elect a president. A series of prominent Lebanese MPs and journalists have been murdered or attacked since 2005 but Syrian troops have left and the Lebanese army still manages to keep a form of order on the streets. However, the Syrian intelligence presence has been maintained in Lebanon – and Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. This does not mean that war is inevitable.

So the future of Lebanon remains – as it did in 2006 – in the hands of the United States and Iran. Just as the Israelis constantly warn of war, so the Hizbollah still promises revenge for the car-bomb murder of its former intelligence officer Imad Mougnieh in Damascus in February. Regularly, the Israelis warn that they will respond to attacks but that they will "choose the moment and the place and the means".

And sure enough – following the Hizbollah's pattern of using Israel's own words – Nasrallah said on 24 March that the Hizbollah would "choose the moment and the place and the means" to retaliate for Mougnieh's death.

And each month, the Hizballoh improves its new bunkers north of the Litani. Some now sprout aerials but they may be "dummies" for Israel's pilots to attack. Deep underground telephone land-lines have been laid to those which are visible and to those others which are beneath the surface. The Hizbollah learned a lot from the 2006 war. Then its secret bunkers were air-conditioned with beds and kitchens attached. But when Israeli troops discovered a handful of them, they also found copies of their own Israeli air force reconnaissance photographs, complete with Hebrew markings.

The Hizbollah had obviously bribed or blackmailed Israeli border guards for the pictures – from which they could tell at once which bunkers the Israelis had identified and which remained unknown to them.

Which is how, in 2006, its guerrillas sat safely through days of air bombardment in the latter, while allowing the Israelis to blitz the "known" fortresses to their hearts' content. Who knows if the Hizbollah has not since collected a new batch of photographs for the coming months?

©independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/
hizbollah-turns-to-iran-for-new-weapons-to-wage-war-on-israel-805763.html

The New Yorker:
Military Conflict

by Steve Coll
April 14, 2008

General Richard A. Cody graduated from West Point in 1972, flew helicopters, ascended to command the storied 101st Airborne Division, and then, toward the end of his career, settled into management; now, at fifty-seven, he wears four stars as the Army Vice-Chief of Staff. This summer, he will retire from military service.

In 2004, in a little-noted speech, Cody described the Army’s efforts to adapt to its new commitments. (It was attempting to fight terrorism, quell the Taliban, invade and pacify Iraq, and, at the same time, prepare for future strategic challenges, whether in China or Korea or Africa.) The endeavor was, Cody said, like “building an airplane in flight.”

Last week, the General appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and testified that this method of engineering has failed. “Today’s Army is out of balance,” Cody said. He continued:

The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . . Soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed. . . . Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.

In 2006, the Army granted eight thousand three hundred and thirty “moral waivers” to new recruits, meaning that it had accepted that number of volunteers with past criminal charges or convictions. The percentage of high-school graduates willing to serve is falling sharply from year to year; so are the aptitude-exam scores of new enlistees. To persuade soldiers and young officers to reënlist after overlong combat tours, the Army’s spending on retention bonuses increased almost ninefold from 2003 to 2006.

In normal times, when an active four-star general implies in public that the Army is under such strain that it might flounder if an unexpected war broke out, or might require a draft to muster adequate troop levels, he could expect to provoke concern and comment from, say, the President of the United States. Some time ago, however, George W. Bush absolved himself of responsibility for his Iraq policy and its consequences by turning the war over to General David H. Petraeus, Cody’s four-star peer, and the champion of the “surge” policy, who will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week.

Petraeus, too, is a loyal Army man, but he has distinctive views about military doctrine; he has long advocated a change in orientation by the Army, away from preparations for formal warfare between governments and toward the challenges of counter-insurgency and nation building. (“Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife” is the title of a book co-written by one of Petraeus’s advisers, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl.) To buy time in Iraq, Petraeus has lately argued within the Pentagon that the Army must buck up and accommodate his need for heavy troop deployments, despite the strains they are creating, and he has publicly fostered an unedifying debate about how to most accurately assess failure and success in Iraq, as if such an opaque and intractable civil conflict could be measured scientifically, like monetary supply or atmospheric pressure.

There is, of course, empirical evidence of declining violence in Iraq, which has coincided with Petraeus’s command. The additional troops he requested have certainly been a factor, but not even Petraeus can say how much of one. At best, during the past year he has helped to piece together a stalemate of heavily armed, bloodstained, conspiracy-minded, ambiguously motivated Iraqi militias. Nobody knows how long this gridlock will hold.

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”) Last week, it proved necessary for the Bush Administration to claim that an obvious failure—Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s ill-prepared raid on rival Shiite gangs in Basra, which was aborted after mass desertions within Maliki’s own ranks—was actually a success in disguise, because it demonstrated the Iraqi government’s independence of mind.

In this environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that General Cody’s plainspoken, valedictory dissent about the Army’s health attracted little attention. His testimony marked a rare public surfacing of the contentious debates at the Pentagon over the strategic costs of the surge. These debates involve overlapping disagreements about doctrine (particularly the importance of counter-insurgency), global priorities (Iraq versus Afghanistan, for instance), and resources. At their core, however, lies Cody’s essential observation: the Army is running on fumes, but Petraeus and his fellow surge advocates are driving flat out in Iraq, with no destination in sight. It hardly matters whether Petraeus would recommend keeping a hundred and thirty thousand or more combat troops in Iraq for a hundred years, or only ten. Neither scenario is plausible—at least, not without a draft or a radical change in incentives for volunteers.

Flag officers in the Bush Administration’s military have learned that they can be marginalized or retired if they speak out too boldly. The Administration does not romanticize the role of the loyal opposition. Last month, Admiral William J. Fallon, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, announced his early retirement, under pressure from the White House, after he argued privately for a faster drawdown from Iraq, to bolster efforts in Afghanistan and to restore a more balanced global military posture. Publicly, Fallon also described the “drumbeat of conflict” against Iran as “not helpful.”

The suppression of professional military dissent helped to create the disaster in Iraq; now it is depriving American voters of an election-year debate about the defense issues that matter most. These include the nature and the location of the country’s global adversaries and interests, the challenge of a revitalizing Al Qaeda in Pakistan, the conundrum of Iran, the failing health of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and, to address all this, the need for a sustainable strategy that restores the Army’s vitality and makes rational use of America’s finite military resources. To implement such a strategy, it would not be necessary to rashly abandon Iraq to its fate, but it would be essential, at a minimum, to reduce American troop levels to well below a hundred thousand as soon as possible. In the long run, success or failure for the United States in Iraq will not hinge on who wins the argument about the surge; it will depend on whether it proves possible to change the subject.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/04/14/080414taco_talk_coll

ZNet:
Will Capitalism Survive Climate Change?

Global warming is the privatisation of global commons by capital which now involves the expropriation of ecological spaces of the South. Progressive climate strategy must reduce growth and energy use while raising the quality of life of the broad masses of the people.

By Walden Bello
Source: TNI April, 08 2008

There is now a solid consensus in the scientific community that if the change in global mean temperature in the 21st century exceeds 2.4 degrees Celsius, changes in the planet's climate will be large-scale, irreversible and disastrous.

Moreover, the window of opportunity for action that will make a difference is narrow - that is, the next 10 to 15 years.

Throughout the North, however, there is strong resistance to changing the systems of consumption and production that have created the problem in the first place and a preference for "techno-fixes," such as "clean" coal, carbon sequestration and storage, industrial-scale biofuels, and nuclear energy.

Globally, transnational corporations and other private actors resist government-imposed measures such as mandatory caps, preferring to use market mechanisms like the buying and selling of "carbon credits," which critics say simply amounts to a licence for corporate polluters to keep on polluting.

In the South, there is little willingness on the part of the southern elite to depart from the high-growth, high-consumption model inherited from the North, and a self-interested conviction that the North must first adjust and bear the brunt of adjustment before the South takes any serious step towards limiting its greenhouse gas emissions.

Contours of the Challenge

In the climate change discussions, the principle of "common but differentiated responsibility" is recognised by all parties, meaning that the global North must shoulder the brunt of the adjustment to the climate crisis since it is the one whose economic trajectory has brought it about.

It is also recognised that the global response should not compromise the right to develop of the countries of the global South.

The devil, however, is in the details. As Martin Khor of Third World Network has pointed out, the global reduction of 80% in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 that many now recognise as necessary, will have to translate into reductions of at least 150-200% on the part of the global North if the two principles - "common but differentiated responsibility" and recognition of the right to development of the countries of the South - are to be followed.

But are the governments and people of the North prepared to make such commitments?

Psychologically and politically, it is doubtful that the North at this point has what it takes to meet the problem head-on.

The prevailing assumption is that the affluent societies can take on commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but still grow and enjoy their high standards of living if they shift to non-fossil fuel energy sources.

Moreover, how the mandatory cuts agreed multilaterally by governments get implemented within the country must be market-based, that is, on the trading of emission permits.

The subtext is: techno-fixes and the carbon market will make the transition relatively painless and (why not?) profitable, too.

There is, however, a growing realisation that many of these technologies are decades away from viable use and that, in the short and medium term, relying on a shift in energy dependence to non-fossil fuel alternatives will not be able to support current rates of economic growth.

Also, it is increasingly evident that the trade-off for more crop land being devoted to biofuel production is less land to grow food and greater food insecurity globally.

It is rapidly becoming clear that the dominant paradigm of economic growth is one of the most significant obstacles to a serious global effort to deal with climate change.

But this destabilising, fundamentalist growth-consumption paradigm is itself more effect rather than cause.

The central problem, it is becoming increasingly clear, is a mode of production whose main dynamic is the transformation of living nature into dead commodities, creating tremendous waste in the process.

The driver of this process is consumption - or more appropriately overconsumption - and the motivation is profit or capital accumulation: capitalism, in short.

It has been the generalisation of this mode of production in the North and its spread from the North to the South over the last 300 years that has caused the accelerated burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil and rapid deforestation, two of the key man-made processes behind global warming.

The South's Dilemma

One way of viewing global warning is to see it as a key manifestation of the latest stage of a wrenching historical process: the privatisation of the global commons by capital. The climate crisis must thus be seen as the expropriation by the advanced capitalist societies of the ecological space of less developed or marginalised societies.

This leads us to the dilemma of the South: before the full extent of the ecological destabilisation brought about by capitalism, it was expected that the South would simply follow the "stages of growth" of the North.

Now it is impossible to do so without bringing about ecological Armageddon. Already, China is on track to overtake the US as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and yet the elite of China as well as those of India and other rapidly developing countries are intent on reproducing the American-type overconsumption-driven capitalism.

Thus, for the South, the implications of an effective global response to global warming include not just the inclusion of some countries in a regime of mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, although this is critical: in the current round of climate negotiations, for instance, China, can no longer opt out of a mandatory regime on the grounds that it is a developing country.

Nor can the challenge to most of the other developing countries be limited to that of getting the North to transfer technology to mitigate global warming and provide funds to assist them in adapting to it, as many of them appeared to think during the Bali negotiations.

These steps are important, but they should be seen as but the initial steps in a broader, global reorientation of the paradigm for achieving economic well-being.

While the adjustment will need to be much, much greater and faster in the North, the adjustment for the South will essentially be the same: a break with the high-growth, high-consumption model in favour of another model of achieving the common welfare.

In contrast to the Northern elite's strategy of trying to decouple growth from energy use, a progressive comprehensive climate strategy in both the North and the South must be to reduce growth and energy use while raising the quality of life of the broad masses of people.

Among other things, this will mean placing economic justice and equality at the centre of the new paradigm.

The transition must be one not only from a fossil-fuel based economy but also from an overconsumption-driven economy.

The end-goal must be adoption of a low-consumption, low-growth, high-equity development model that results in an improvement in people's welfare, a better quality of life for all, and greater democratic control of production.

It is unlikely that the elite of the North and the South will agree to such a comprehensive response. The farthest they are likely to go is for techno-fixes and a market-based cap-and-trade system. Growth will be sacrosanct, as will the system of global capitalism.

Yet, confronted with the Apocalypse, humanity cannot self-destruct.

It may be a difficult road, but we can be sure that the vast majority will not commit social and ecological suicide to enable the minority to preserve their privileges.

However it is achieved, a thorough reorganisation of production, consumption and distribution will be the end result of humanity's response to the climate emergency and the broader environmental crisis.

Threat and Opportunity

In this regard, climate change is both a threat and an opportunity to bring about the long postponed social and economic reforms that had been derailed or sabotaged in previous eras by the elite seeking to preserve or increase their privileges.

The difference is that today the very existence of humanity and the planet depend on the institutionalisation of economic systems based not on feudal rent extraction or capital accumulation or class exploitation, but on justice and equality.

The question is often asked these days if humanity will be able to get its act together to formulate an effective response to climate change. Though there is no certainty in a world filled with contingency, I am hopeful that it will.

In the social and economic system that will be collectively crafted, I anticipate that there will be room for the market.

However, the more interesting question is: will it have room for capitalism? Will capitalism as a system of production, consumption and distribution survive the challenge of coming up with an effective solution to the climate crisis?

Walden Bello, a fellow of the Transnational Institute, is president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition and senior analyst at Focus on the Global South.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17095

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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

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