Today is my best friend’s birthday. Last year, when I was falling apart, his support for me was unwavering at a time when his own life was filled with turmoil. Despite his father’s battle with lung cancer and the ending of his own relationship, he has been there for me night and day, listening to me talk in circles, patiently trying to widen them for me in hopes of producing a straight line. He doesn’t enjoy celebrating his birthday, in fact he goes out of his way not to mention it to most people, including those he interacts with on a daily basis. But it would be remiss of me not to mention that, 39 years ago today, he was born, and I was gifted one the most faithful and standup friends that a man could ever hope to have.

She asked me in passing for details. We hadn’t seen ourselves, as we had once seen ourselves, for a decade or more. She had moved to Los Angeles and I had remained. She looked gaunt, exhausted, juxtaposed to my medicated, weighted persona. Her hair still salt and pepper, her eyes still quick to shutter, her body language still distracted.

I ran a finger up and down my water glass and she pretended not to really see me, to allow it to hit her. She had programmed it out of herself years before maybe, after his death, when she was just a kid and we all stood around mute while they lowered his body into the ground with her propped up like a scarecrow with a bouquet of flowers in her hand, it dangling against her thigh, her head turned off towards the trees. When the coffin stopped she dropped the flowers and walked away in the direction that she’d been looking and I didn’t move, couldn’t move, but should of.

We sat there and she tried a smile and said something off colour about marriage and fame and I did my best to chuckle and she pretended to rummage through her purse while the waitress dropped off our drinks. And as those once familiar hands wrapped around the coffee cup in front of her, she renewed her interest and looked up at me and said,

“So what was she like?�

Pushing back the brim of my ball cap I looked up at the ceiling and then back at her.

“She was my 9/11,� I said.

Obviously it’s been a busy week, which would be why I’ve done little more than cut and paste old Dear San Diego entries. I find myself writer, producer, and primary musician sixteen hours a day of late, so please excuse the lack of entries.

A great deal has occurred over the last week, most notably the official apology and compensation package given Maher Arar by the Canadian government and the idiotic comments of US Ambassador David Wilkins, who actually had the audacity to criticize the Canadian government’s attempts to have Arar removed from American security watch lists.

Things in Iraq remain the same, things in Afghanistan remain the same, tensions between Hamas and Fatah have escalated, Lebanon is heading down the road to civil war, US involvement in Somalia remains underreported, as does the newly approved policy authorizing US forces to take whatever action is deemed necessary against suspected Iranian agents in Iraq if they are considered a threat.

Amidst all of these I would like to use the majority of this entry to focus on a recent statement by the new US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. During his first press conference since assuming office, Gates remarked last Friday…

“It’s pretty clear that a resolution that in effect says that the general going out to take command of the arena shouldn’t have the resources he thinks he needs to be successful certainly emboldens the enemy and our adversaries.�

This was, of course, in response to the suggestion that a Congressional resolution could oppose President Bush’s proposed troop surge, which is ironic considering that troops have already begun to be deployed.

I wanted to draw specific attention to Mr. Gates words for one simple reason, one that has to do with the democratic reality within highly militarized states, such as the United States.

The first article of the Constitution of the United States empowers Congress, not the Presidency, and certainly not the military as commanded by the President. Thus, when the President, Vice President, or Secretary of Defense claim that Congressional resolutions won’t hinder administrational decisions, which all three of have of late, they are, in essence, claiming that the people, by way of their elected representatives, have absolutely no power over use of their own military, which, it should never be forgotten, exists at the behest of the people within any democratic society, not beyond them. Of course, that reality with regards to the United States, is, in and of itself, a subject of some enormity, so I’ll not delve into it here. The basic point though is that key officials have, over the last week, claimed that the power of Congress doesn’t a) matter with regards to the deployment of the military, or b) that ways can be found around Congressional attempts to usurp the authority of the administration with regards to the deployment of the military.

Looking at this, one should immediately be drawn to the democratic rhetoric espoused by this administration with regards to other nations, primarily those in which they are currently militarily engaged. If, in the United States, Congress is so easily disregarded, what sort of message does that send to fledgling democracies, never mind those guerrillas or sectarian groups fighting within them?

The Bush administration’s refusal to acknowledge the power of Congress should not be overlooked, and the damage caused by that position should be carefully weighed with regards to the future of the Presidency itself, no matter who is in office.

I’d write something indepth about tonight’s State of the Union address but it’s really rather pointless.

All the rhetoric and ninth grade vocabulary in the world doesn’t change the fact that Iraq was illegally invaded, that the United States did so in direct contravention of the UN Charter, that it had nothing to do with 9/11, did not possess WMD’s, and was not home to foreign extremists prior to the 2003 invasion. Nothing Mr. Bush said this evening alters numerous facts, paramount among them that his administration deceived the American people and that that deception has cost the lives of more than 3,000 US service men and women – the very same that he so gallantly praised to standing ovations this evening.

To protect America against evil and deliver it democracy (at the end of a gun), countless Iraqis have been made to pay the price for something they had nothing to do with (and even their deaths have been trivialized by making the war in Iraq sound like some transitional disaster aimed at calling out the likes of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, et all). I’m sorry, this might sound terrible of me, but 3,000 American lives lost on September 11th are not worth the lives of 10,000 Iraqis, let alone 100,000 of them. What sort of ignorance breeds such arrogance? What sort of a people can applaud a man that would, were he not the leader of one of the world’s foremost powers, be immediately labeled a war criminal? What sort of people can applaud a man whose administration has decimated the global respectability of their nation, rendering it thought of as the largest threat to world security by a majority of the planet’s population?

Perhaps the very same people that can allow victims of the worst natural disaster in US history to be treated like second class citizens more than a year and a half after the fact.

In short, tonight’s address was the oversimplification of bullshit after it had been hit by a car and woken up in hospital with amnesia.

Updated: That was quick…

“A US Senate committee has rejected President Bush’s plan to send extra troops to Iraq, passing the measure to the full Senate for a vote next week.”

I wonder how they plan to do that considering that the deployment has already started?

DJ, his mom, and a few friends snuck into town for the weekend to hang out. It was a lot of fun. I hadn’t seen him in probably five years, so it was good to catch up, not to mention a nice get away for him before the season starts. We were at the grocery store yesterday and no one recognized him, something that produced some well deserved weightlessness. This morning they flew back to North Carolina and, being that I’m under the weather, he didn’t bother to wake me up before he left. Given the guy’s profile in his sport, let alone his country, the fact that he crashed on my couch instead of staying at a five star hotel speaks volumes about him. Good people are hard to come by these days, so it was entirely my pleasure to have some around this weekend.

I feel like a beanbag. It’s the drinking and the medication I think. My hands shake. When I hold a telephone it bounces all over my ear, near and far, beeps and whistles. I used to rush to the doctor because of things like that, but not so much anymore. Coughed this morning and something along the top, inside of my leg started to hurt. I stood there for a while and it went away. It’s come and gone a bit today, but.

The sun comes up, the sun goes down. Everyone sits around until 4am and talks art and Nadia sings country songs and we laugh at each other’s bad jokes and the dogs race around and the candles burn out. So everyone moves towards the door and things get hazy and I pop my pills and pull the fan out and turn off the lights and push Casey off my pillow and lay on my side wondering what to wonder. And before I come up with something I fall asleep and dream of murder and love and distances too immense to convey.

Someone emailed me the other day and asked where all the Dear San Diego stuff went. That’s a good question. If anyone out there has it, send it to me and I’ll post it.

I meant to write something today, something about Chavez and the 18 months of rule by decree he was just granted by Venezuela’s national assembly. Something about how Latin American leaders have to exist in permanent states of paranoia thanks to the unending transgressions of Johnny Apple Seed. I’ll get around to it, just not tonight. Tonight an old friend that I did a video with once is coming to town to sleep on my couch.

Harvey Pekar once said that he would sometimes wake up and feel a body next to him like an amputee feels a phantom limb. I have, over the last year, been confronted with that sensation, be it in my own bed, in a hotel room, or in a bunk on a tour bus. I suppose for some it can represent relief, for others sadness, but for me it always just ends up with some lame neo-urban redefinition of accountability punching me in the head.

One tries to do things properly, you understand. You work hard, you make sure that things are taken care of, that the people you love are taken care of, and a lot of the time you don’t really take the time to stop and think if you’re being taken care of – did the person who’s no longer on the other side of that bed take care of you? Through the darkness and the collapse, through the anxiety and vomiting – were they, in truth, there for you?

That’s where I have problems with this new definition of accountability that I’ve been sparring with. At what point do we simply forget the actions of others and attempt to reinstitute our belief that accountability exists? And if we can’t, at what point do we just say ‘fuck it’ and permanently look the other way? I did what I was raised to do. I worked hard, provided safety and security and, looking back on it, asked very little in return. In the end, ironically, very little is precisely what I got.

Everything in life, even love, must fight to survive, and in doing so lose battles during the course of wars. I am hoping that I find myself waking up to find that my belief in accountability is on the mend. Either that or it’s invested in a boxing glove.

Like a secret river flowing below the headlines, US actions regarding Somalia have garnered little attention since they began. As Eric Margolis reported in a piece on the 16th…

“In a striking irony, F-18 fighter-bombers from the carrier “USS Eisenhower,” deadly AC-130 gunships from the US base at Djibouti, and Special Forces units attacked Somalia from sea, air and land. Other US units and FBI agents deployed on the Kenya-Somalia border. As America’s latest foreign war began with air strikes from the giant carrier that bears this great president’s name, no one seemed to recall President Dwight Eisenhower’s magnificent farewell address in 1961 to Americans in which he warned against foreign entanglements and the growing political influence of the military-industrial complex.

Very few Americans understood their nation had just invaded another in an act worthy of the late, unlamented Chairman Leonid Brezhnev.

Much of Somalia has already been occupied by Ethiopia’s powerful, US-financed army which invaded that defenseless nation, with Washington’s blessing, under cover of the Christmas holiday.

It is an open secret in Washington that the Somalia operation is to be the Bush/Cheney Administration’s new model for war against recalcitrant Muslims. The White House failed to convince India or Pakistan to rent their troops for occupation duty in Iraq, but it has succeeded in using Ethiopia’s army in Somalia. Ethiopia’s repressive regime was only too happy to invade Somalia and received large infusions of aid from Washington. The Administration is duplicating the British Empire’s wide scale use of native troops (”sepoys” in India; “askaris” in East Africa) in colonial wars.

But is Somalia really a “hotbed of terrorism” as Washington claimed? The US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was sparked by last fall’s defeat of corrupt Somali clan warlords. They had recently been armed and financed by the CIA to fight the growing popularity of local Islamists.â€?

[…]

“A handful of African Al-Qaida suspects in the 1998 bombing of US Embassies in East Africa may have been in Somalia, but going to war against a sovereign nation to try to assassinate or capture a handful of suspects is like using a nuclear weapon to kill a gnat and is sure to generate more anti-US violence. Air strikes by carrier-based US F-18’s and AC-130 gunships killed between 50 and 100 Somali civilians but, apparently, no al-Qaida suspects. The real aim of the US air attacks was to destroy remaining fighting units of the Islamic Courts and clear the way for the US-imposed Somali figurehead government.�

There isn’t anything surprising in Margolis’s piece with regards to the funding of suspect governments to act as regional proxies. It’s as old as the crucifixion, really. And the United States certainly isn’t the first world power to employ lateral tactics to assert their influence. They are, though, the only world power to unilaterally invade another country in contravention of the UN Charter of late, not to mention setting a massively dangerous precedent with regards to the declination of human rights standards on a global scale.

In the shadow of The War On Terror, initiatives elsewhere are routinely overlooked and massively propagandized. Colombia, for example, continues to receive considerable US military assistance, aiding in the training of forces that have committed serious human rights abuses.

When Jean-Bertrand Aristide made a bit of a fuss regarding the privatization of Haitian industry, drug lords and thugs from the Dominican Republic dubbed “freedom fightersâ€? were armed and used to help mask the coup d’état that removed him, one in which Canada was wholly complicit.

Likewise, fearing the nationalization of the oil industry and a spark that might engulf Latin American in a new, democratically elected, socialist wave, the United States used a variety of organizations, among them the National Endowment For Democracy and USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives, to help fund the campaign that attempted oust Hugo Chavez by way of a public referendum. It failed, of course, but it’s simply another example of external influencing gone largely unnoticed and unchecked.

Then again, it is somewhat difficult to keep your eye on the ball when, as was the case yesterday, over 230 Iraqis violently lost their lives in what has become the preeminent disaster of this decade and (thus far) millennium.

One waits with bated breath to see how Iran’s piece of the puzzle fits and if, in the end, the natural world itself will actually out strip us all and simply cast us off into the deep like so many rats from a doomed ship.

On January the 10th, 2007, President Bush revealed his new way forward in the White House’s increasingly convoluted and desperate Iraq policy. Replete with underlying contradictions, on the surface it appeared little more than a reaffirmation of his continuing and isolated belief that the war in Iraq serves a greater purpose with regards to US national security. But as Professor Stephen Zunes wrote soon after for Foreign Policy In Focus…

“The broad consensus among strategic analysts, including those in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, is that the struggle engaged by the U.S. armed forces, despite their enormous sacrifices, has compromised efforts to counter international terrorism and has made America less safe. If succeeding in the fight against terrorism was really the administration’s goal, President Bush would call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.â€?

Two days after the President’s affirmation that more troops would be introduced into the Iraqi theatre, newly appointed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was furthering the ambiguities of Bush’s initiative by claiming that no firm timetable exists with regards to judging whether the new strategy is being effective. All of this comes, of course, on the heels of the removal of Gen. John Abizaid as commander of CENTCOM, who has been replaced by Admiral William Fallon, formerly the commander of USPACOM and once a deputy director for operations with Joint Task Force Southwest Asia, whose appointment many believe is a sign that US air action against Iran prior to the next Presidential election is not only likely, but in the works. Gen. George Casey too is to be replaced, most likely with Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, whose pervious assignment was the training of Iraqi security forces. But one need only look at the testimonies of Generals Anthony Zinni, Greg Newbold, John Riggs, John Batiste, Paul Eaton, and Charles Swannack for proof that both the Pentagon and White House have played two contradicting games with regards to the war, one involving the placation of domestic concerns about the loss of life and reassuring the public that what is occurring in Iraq is not as negative as they are being led to believe, and the other consisting of continually claiming that those carrying out the mission are their top priority while repeatedly failing the men and women of the military with regards to some of the most basic provisions while providing contracts that have generated literally billions of dollars for private contracting firms who provide everything from interrogation to food services to security for high ranking personnel.

In a recent article Frida Berrigan commented…

“Even though today the Armed Forces can’t recruit enough soldiers or adequately equip those already in uniform, the Pentagon is committing itself to massive corporate contracts for new high-tech weapons systems slated to come on-line years, even decades, from now, guaranteed only to enrich their makers.

The typical soldier in Iraq carries about half his or her body weight in gear and suffers the resulting back pain. Body armor, weapon(s), ammunition, water, first aid kit — it adds up in the 120 degree heat of Basra or Baghdad.

Ask soldiers in Iraq what they need most and answers may include: well-armored Humvees (many soldiers are jerry-rigging their own homemade Humvee armor); more body armor (an unofficial 2004 Army study found that one in four casualties in Iraq was the result of inadequate protective gear), or even silly string (Marcelle Shriver found out that her son was squirting the goo into a room as he and his squad searched buildings to detect trip wires around bombs).�

It amazes me that military commanders towed the line as long as they did before publicly succumbing to the obvious reality that the plans conceived and put into effect by the Pentagon were not merely militarily inept, but too conveniently open ended. One can only speculate at the true frustration that they, and their subordinates, must have endured because of the partisan nature of the war, one which has not merely seen the placement of Bush loyalists in key positions in Baghdad despite the fact that there are others better qualified, but one that has repeatedly placed the requirements of the war on their shoulders while muting them from publicly commenting on its realities and the decisions made by men such as former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld which were ultimately projected on to them.

The Central Intelligence Agency has also succumbed to internal convolution and partisanship, with Baghdad station chiefs being replaced for having the audacity to write missives, known as aardwolves, that dared to detail the reality of what was occurring in Iraq during the early months of the occupation. The disregard of negative information with regards to numerous agencies pre-dates the invasion of course, but it continued well after it became clear that a variety of groups, some consisting of elements of the Iraqi officer corps and former intelligence apparatus, chose to slip into the countryside and organize a variety of different resistance groups. That what was later termed ‘the insurgency’ showed rapid adaptation with regards to dealing with American tactics and weapons.

There is little doubt that this administration has acted solely on information that coincides with its political objectives, not necessarily with reality, despite claims that have been made regarding a mountain of nonsense including that the requirements of commanders in the field are of the utmost importance. It is the same engine which has allowed the administration to successfully paint a wide variety of guerrilla groups in Iraq with the same brush, one that ultimately produces the likeness of Osama Bin Landen standing somewhere in the background.

I have often wondered how, after placing a group of even semi-intelligent people in a room, they could walk out of it without considering the underlying cultural and religious tensions that have been prevalent throughout the region’s history in the event that the invasion didn’t turn out to be a re-enactment of the liberation of Paris. After the utter failure of America’s last unilateral farce, Vietnam, one would think someone with a respectable amount of gray matter might dare voice a few hard hitting queries, such as: what if this thing doesn’t go as planned?

From US commanders standing around central Baghdad without orders as to what to do once they reached it, to the farcical mission accomplished stunt, to this month’s troop surge, the United States finds itself once again in the position of a blind giant that has taken no time to survey the terrain while expecting nothing less than the quicksilver success of pro-Western democracy and all the perks that the privatization of industry brings with it (oil being the primary indulgence in this case). Tack on to that the estimated fourteen permanent bases being built in Iraq, not to mention the planet’s largest and most heavily fortified embassy (complete with Starbucks and a variety of other chain stores), and you’ve also got a very convenient military footprint in a vital region of the world, one that allows for the greater application of US funding and training of proxies in the region, such as is currently occurring in Ethiopia with regards to events in Somalia.

Four years on, Iraq remains unstable, its civilian infrastructure still in shambles, and its population overwhelmingly in support of American withdrawal and insurgent attacks on occupational forces. It is a nation engulfed in a civil war that no one on this side of the world will admit is really happening in earnest despite the fact that Baghdad’s morgue alone took in an estimated 16,000 unidentified bodies in 2006 and more than a million Iraqis have fled the country.

While visiting a friend in the States over the holiday’s, a friend of his, whose first admission was that he was a conservative, told me that if America wanted to defeat ‘the Iraqis’ that it possessed the military power to do so. That if it committed all of its resources it could decimate Iraq. He made that statement most likely in an attempt to exonerate America’s inability to successfully impress their ideals on a foreign people, reverting back to age-old standard that, in the end, might makes right. I didn’t spend a great deal of energy arguing the point with him. After all, what is one to say to that? That the country that he professes to love was founded on principles that openly detest the sort of blatant militarism now prevalent in American society, not to mention the use of unilateral force? Then again, had 9/11 occurred prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention perhaps things would be different. I suppose if the abandonment of core principles can be so easily embraced then one has to wonder why they are needed in the first place? Perhaps simply to make people feel better when their elected representatives engage in illegal wars and have to go on national television to not merely defend their necessity, but their escalation.

I have, over the years, wondered at how the use of the word terrorism is possible within the context of war. William Tecumseh Sherman once remarked that there is no use trying to reform war, that it is ‘all hell’. And if it is, then how does one even attempt conciliatory definitions? Is it defined by the actions of a handful of radical zealots hijacking planes and flying them into buildings? Is it defined by the deaths of 2,000 Panamanian civilians during the US invasion of that country in 1989 to capture one man who was not only at one point a CIA asset, but a graduate of the School Of The Americas and whose daughter was actually the Goddaughter of the President of the United States at the time? Is it defined by the deaths of an occupied people who are daily made to suffer the arrogance of a world power so that a population a half a world a way can remain safely anaesthetized?

Convolution prevails. While last November’s elections were clearly a referendum on the war, polls still indicate that a majority of Americans believe that the regime of Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11th. Factual information and opinion has become so blurred that the bigotry openly displayed by some of America’s most prevalent right-wing voices is enjoying what one can only term a black hole renaissance - a period in which historical fact and implication is somehow dismissible by way of ones ability to simply believe it irrelevant and employ the simplest of logic to demonize entire religions, cultures, and those who would dare point to substantiation. It brings to mind the ferocity of the Inquisitions with regards to their impact on the degradation of philosophical and scientific development, let alone true spirituality.

In his speech, President Bush accepted responsibility for US failures in Iraq, and was right to do so. And had it not been an admission to curry domestic favor, but one that was genuine, then his statement would not have been one in which a troop surge was announced. Rather, it would have been quite the opposite.

Being that he’s been executed, the Iraqi High Tribunal has dropped all the remaining charges against Saddam Hussein. This, in my opinion, is of vast importance with regards to the human rights abuses committed by his regime. Had Hussein been tried for crimes against humanity at the ICC, as he should have been, then all of the abuses of his regime would have been scrutinized – exposing not only their brutality, but the fact that the West looked the other way while they were occurring. In fact, the United States sold Hussein’s regime the components used to produce the chemical weapons that he used against the Iranians and later the Kurds, as detailed in a recent piece by Robert Fisk.

The United States, of course, opted out of the ICC for fear of Americans being ‘unjustly prosecuted’ for war crimes with regards to the war on terror and the war in Iraq, which only strengthened their insistence that Hussein be tried in an Iraqi court and for a specific crime that could not be at all traced to the involvement of external powers.

Ironically, when it came to the prosecution of, for example, Serbian war criminals, the United States did not object to their referral to the World Court.