There’s an old adage – boys will be boys. There’s another old adage – we are products of our environment.

Take for example a recent incident in Gilbert, Arizona. A local parent reported that her son’s yearbook contained bomb threats, one signed by a boy named David and the other by an Iraqi-American boy named Mustafa Abdul Razzaq. After the parent notified authorities, the school was evacuated and the Gilbert police telephoned the Razzaq residence to determine if Mustafa was there, which he was. It being a half day, he had decided not to attend.

In reality, what had occurred was that the comment in the yearbook in question was never written, nor signed, by Mustafa. It had been penned by two other boys who later admitted to it and were taken into custody. The threat was, of course, not real, and the two youths, one 13 and one 14, had charges filed against them.

From the local paper, The Tribune…

“Mustafa, his mother and police discussed the incident in interviews with the Tribune.

The teen and his family call it a religious bias incident that was one of many over the years that have targeted the boy because he is a Muslim. Police say it was just a prank that had unfortunate consequences.”

[…]

“Since the deadly attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they say this is just one of many times that Mustafa’s classmates have labeled him a terrorist. He says kids have told him to “go hijack a plane and run into a building” verbally and on notes they’ve left on his desk.

Sometimes he’d retaliate and get suspended. Sometimes, he’d ignore them.

But because the whole school was evacuated last week, he’s afraid to return there. He says he’s been getting phone calls and text messages from kids asking if he is guilty even though he’s been cleared by police.

Mustafa is upset with the school.

“Some of the teachers in the junior high don’t care,” Mustafa says of the discriminatory teasing he’s endured. “They don’t want to get into this kind of stuff. That’s why I don’t like Mesquite Junior High School that much.”

Mohammed AbuHannoud, the civil rights director for the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says his organization hears these types of complaints all the time.

“I think Mustafa is an example of what’s going on here after Sept. 11 with a lot of Muslim families,” AbuHannoud says. “I get so many calls, for example, from other parents and they complain, ‘My son is called Saddam, or a classmate called my son Hussein or Saddam Hussein.’ The schools do not do anything serious against that.”

Gilbert police spokesman Sgt. Andrew Duncan says the department is “sympathetic to the serious psychological effects of bias-motivated crimes,” but in this instance, police found the two students meant it as a joke.

Even so, the department took the hoax seriously and submitted juvenile referrals for each boy on charges of interfering with an educational institution, threatening and intimidating, and threatening to damage the school.

On Wednesday night, no one answered the phone at the home of the boy who wrote about Mustafa in the yearbook.

Dianne Bowers, a spokeswoman for the Gilbert Unified School District, says Mustafa’s mother had not contacted the school to report race- or religion-related bias incidents.

However, Bowers tried to address these concerns Wednesday by arranging an appointment for Abdulghafoor to meet with the school’s diversity officer. She also said the school strives to promote tolerance through its Character Counts program, which encourages trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness and citizenship.

Abdulghafoor says she has been in touch with school officials and is disappointed with the lack of response.

She said the first religious bias incident occurred in 2001. Mustafa was in second grade, and one day, her husband got a call from FBI agents. They told him the school had called the bureau after a teacher overheard Mustafa call himself Osama bin Laden. Later, his mother said he told them that kids at school had been calling him by the terrorist’s name.

The FBI could not immediately verify the 2001 incident, but the bureau’s Arizona spokeswoman, Deborah Mc-Carley, says the family’s story sounds plausible. After Sept. 11, any complaints referring to terrorism had to be assessed and taken seriously.

Another incident occurred last year, Mustafa says. He was made fun of when he came to school dressed in traditional Saudi Arabian garb for a class assignment - each student was to come to school representing a different country.

“They tell him again, ‘You are Osama bin Laden,” his mother remembered. “You are a terrorist. Your mom is a terrorist. Your dad is a terrorist. You have to go back to your country.”

His mother learned of the incident after a teacher called the family’s home to report it.”

…“but in this instance, police found the two students meant it as a joke.” Boys will be boys, after all. Not only that…“On Wednesday night, no one answered the phone at the home of the boy who wrote about Mustafa in the yearbook”…we are products of our environment.

I have never been fond of the term ‘The War On Terror’. The reason? It probably has to do with the fact that those who coined the phrase are the world’s foremost militarists, have aided in the survival or emplacement of a variety of despotic regimes over the last sixty some odd years, have played a significant role in undermining the integrity of the United Nations over the last six years, have scoffed at the Geneva Conventions and international law because they have more planes, ships, rockets and guns than everyone else and yes – even sponsored terrorists.

There are those that will defend such things as necessities of circumstance. I wonder why those same people don’t afford others the same disgusting accommodation.

Sponsor terrorists, you say? You surely jest Mr. Good.

I am, in fact, far from joking. One such terrorist, Luis Posada, was recently set at liberty in the United States, who have refused to consider extradition requests from both Cuba and Venezuela, the latter in which he was legally imprisoned for years before escaping – which in truth was engineered by the Cuban American National Foundation.

Posada was a CIA asset in Latin America in the 1960’s, and perhaps beyond, and has been linked to the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed 73 innocent people. And yet, Posada, one of the principals in Ollie North’s Nicaraguan adventures in the 80’s, is a free man. Meanwhile, hundreds of detainees are still being held captive at Guantanamo Bay beyond their rights under international and human rights laws.

They’re terrorists, though. Why in God’s name should they be afforded rights?

I have argued in the past that the demoralization of our principles with regards to our conduct in War 2.0 has stripped us of the moral high ground, if we ever held it in the first place. Again, there are those that disagree with that sentiment, most of whom don’t have to witness people being tortured. They can, quite comfortably, sit a world away and condone such actions and then, rather stunningly, claim that we should be ever vigilant of terrorist attacks on home soil.

And what, do you suppose, might inspire such attacks?

Certainly not our blatant hypocrisy. After all, we’re fighting monsters bent on global domination, the complete destruction of our way of life and the rest of that idiotic bather.

If you honestly believe that al-Qaeda has the power to undertake, or even influence, a ‘global uprising’ that would see us in chains, you are, no offense intended, delusional. Ironically, it’s not really your fault. Most of us have been so sold on the idea that it has almost become fact.

And God forbid any of us question that.

Turn on the news and the focus on the violence in Iraq is squarely placed on al-Qaeda’s shoulders, as if it represented the majority of the insurgency, as if were the United States to abandon Iraq it would somehow take power there. The truth, of course, is that it constitutes less than 7% of the insurgency, that it is disliked or disregarded by those that comprise its majority and were the United States to abandon Iraq, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia would be one of the first groups to be liquidated by far more predominant power blocks. It’s also important to remember that it didn’t even exist as an entity in Iraq prior to the Anglo-American invasion in 2003.

So where does this power come from? Where does the need to over emphasize their importance come from? In whose best interest is it in to ensure that they remain the focus, an ambiguous global boogey man, a group with which others can associate themselves, even if they have little to no connection with them in reality?

For all we know, when 9/11 was planned, Osama Bin Laden’s participation in the entire thing could have been nothing more than a nod of his head in agreement. Then again, he could have authored thousands of pages on how it was to be done. But the fact remains – who actually knows? Certainly not the likes of the CIA, that’s for certain. If that particular detail were a hard fact then you’d think they’d know enough to actually apprehend the man. Instead, he’s most likely somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, protected by those loyal to him and, in all probability, the Pakistani ISI as well.

We can’t mess with Pakistan though, despite the fact that their intelligence apparatus operates without impunity or oversight, is beyond the control of the government, and despite the fact that its border with Afghanistan is dotted with radical religious schools that teach anything but the truth of Islam. We can’t mess with them because, unlike Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, they actually have the bomb. And that changes everything.

The bomb provides protection, and guess who solidified that reality?

The word terrorism is a façade. It is a façade that allows governments around the world to curtail social rights and freedoms, promote xenophobic attitudes and, above all else – justify militarization.

In the War 2.0 world there is no tank, no plane, no missile, nor any ship that can stop five determined madmen bent on blowing something up and killing people if they are determined to do so, no matter their religion, the colour of their skin, or their ideology. What is of importance in the War 2.0 world is how many planes, missiles, ships, tanks, and guns are we going to manufacture and convince ourselves we need to put into use before we figure that out? Because the truth is that twenty madmen bent on destruction can kill 3,000 people. But one madman with millions at his command can kill much more.

Zealotry knows no definitive boundaries, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise. And to say that any nation that possesses the military power and wherewithal to invade other nations at will based on lies, not to mention the nuclear capability to destroy it several times over, is beyond scrutiny only makes the cause of those who despise it all the more impassioned.

And so five men get together in some dark cave or on the banks of some remote river, and they plot. The question is, of the five, how many of their names do we already know?

Racial profiling is something that we, as Canadians, like to believe hasn’t been on the rise in our country since September 11th. In fact, most of us like to believe that our institutions are now beyond such activities entirely. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as an article by Stefan Christoff in the Montreal Mirror recently pointed out.

According to Christoff’s piece, CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) has been “conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their work places, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques�?.

Because of the increase in CSIS activities regarding the interrogation of Canadian Muslims, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada has shipped literally thousands of copies of a booklet to communities across the country detailing their Charter rights so that they are aware of them in the event that they are confronted by the authorities.

In the article, Christoff quotes a man from Montreal now working in Kuwait who told him during a telephone interview…

“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,�? says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.�?

We live in a world in which Western society has largely held some 1.5 billion people responsible for the act of a handful of madmen. Given the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, are we now to view Korean Canadians as possible mass murderers that, at any moment, might go on a shooting rampage? You will, of course, notice that after Oklahoma City there wasn’t a backlash against Caucasians, nor was CSIS interrogating those who use fertilizer on a daily basis or that commonly rent vans.

The enemy here is ignorance, nothing besides. And for non-Muslim Canadians to stand by and allow racial profiling to occur, racial profiling that is funded by their tax dollars, given CSIS’s budget of some $280 million dollars, is an absolute outrage.

I first want to thank Mona Romeh for forwarding me this video. Mona has been a fan for years, and over that time we have gotten to know one another quite well. While she grew up in Ontario, her family is Egyptian, and Mona has lived and worked in both countries. The following video is an episode of Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days entitled Thirty Days As A Muslim. It is about a man from West Virginia who travels to Michigan to live in one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States as one of them.

Misconceptions about the Muslim faith in North America are vast to say the least. Not unlike the intolerance shown Jews for centuries, in the post 9/11 world much of North America has adopted a completely misguided and propagandized view of the world’s second largest religion. As this video shows, most of those questioned about Muslims immediately responded by claiming that images of terrorists were the first to come to mind.

The roots of Islam stem from the same foundation as that of Judaism and Christianity. Unbeknownst to many North Americans, two of Islam’s most revered prophets include Abraham and Jesus Christ. The teachings of the Qur’an are, at their core, no different than that of most major religions practiced in the West. In it the teachings of God are no less enigmatic or empathetic as those of Christianity or Judaism. Thus, it is indeed a profound irony that the Qur’an and the Torah both proclaim one of the most moving observances penned in a holy text - “If you save one life, you have saved all of humanity; if you take one life, you take all of humanity.�?

Historical context is vastly important with regards to religious condemnation. While we live in a world in which so many label Muslims as being connected to a criminal mindset that the vast majority of them both reject and condemn, we often forget our own transgressions. Christianity is, by far, the greatest producer of religious based death and disparity in human history, and yet the teachings of Christ utterly contradict the violent, and even genocidal, actions committed in his name. That reality is something that we commonly, and conveniently, forget, though it should not be overlooked that Christians today cannot be blamed for those transgressions – just as 1.5 billion Muslims cannot, and must not, be condemned for the actions of a minority of radical zealots in their midst.

The Irish politician Edmund Burke once said - “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.�? His words are applicable to those on both sides of this growing ‘cultural battle’ that exists today, especially with regards to the spread of disinformation. It is for good men and women to ensure that the minority of ignorant voices does not drown out reason, compassion, and the shared bond that exists between all peoples, no matter their faiths. If the essence of a just God is compassion for his creations, then devotion to him must be measured in mankind’s ability to apply that to itself.

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.�?

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.

There are 130,000 US soldiers in Iraq. There are less than 20,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan. It seems to me, though I might be a little cloudy on this, that the objective was to kill or capture those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I get a bit fuzzy-headed, because since that doesn’t seem to be the priority anymore, what exactly is the focus of the War On Terror? To be honest, it’s become a tad bit confusing. I’m just taking a shot in the dark here, but I think it’s become far more about the 2008 US Presidential election than any military or ideological goal.

Canadian Forces continue to play a roll in combat operations in Afghanistan. In fact, they just began taking part in a British led mission in Panjwaii District, west of Kandahar, where a landmine has already injured one Canadian soldier. The CF will also, according ISAF’s Maj.-Gen. Ton Van Loon, continue their work with the Afghan army in an attempt to weed out Taliban hardliners from the civilian population – the usual hearts and minds campaign (when will we learn?).

The operation, named Falcon’s Summit, was launched as a show of strength and a demonstration of NATO’s ability to combat and defeat the Taliban – again, in hopes that Afghans won’t continue to fill the ranks of the Taliban who pay better than the Afghan army, among other things.

One wonders if George Patton was the last field commander to actually open a history book. Like it or not, these same ‘backward’ goat herders successfully staved off the Soviets…on horseback…with little more than Kalashnikov’s and RPG’s.

They had help of course – our help, but the lessons they learned during that conflict, and years of fighting besides, have obviously not been forgotten. The longer that the government in Kabul remains ineffectual and ISAF and CENTCOM continue to run the show, it seems to me that the Taliban and other armed groups are simply going to increase in size. Like Iraq, a can of worms has been opened that was always far too complex to fix in a year by slapping on a band-aid of UPS delivered democracy, supported by the always arrogant presumption that an overwhelming display of highly advanced weaponry would ensure that it arrived on time.

The United States has 130,000 combat troops in Iraq and that number is expected to increase. They invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to remove the Taliban and neutralize al-Qaeda and have accomplished neither. Instead, they invaded Iraq in 2003 and now Canadians are coming home in body bags (not since Korea has the Canadian Armed Forces sustained such losses) because they have been forced to play a greater combat roll in a conflict in which they were initially focusing on humanitarian and security objectives.

It’s obvious that the roll played by the CF in Afghanistan, with the exception of Joint Taskforce 2, began to change after the US invasion of Iraq primarily because of the transfer of a significant number of US personnel from one theater of operation to the other. Thus, a greater onus was placed on the ‘international coalition’ to play a larger roll in something that the United States had initially planned and then, in many ways, abandoned – something that must have just thrilled many within our Defense Ministry and General staff.

But what is the reality of Afghanistan as a front in an ambiguous war, and what level of sacrifice should we be willing to endure to achieve…

…hmmmm, wait a second.

What goals are we planning to achieve? To defeat a group that was supposed to be defeated five years ago, disarm warlords that we’ve used to help us fight the Taliban in exchange for looking the other way with regards to their poppy operations (which we’ll then tell them to shut down causing them to want their guns back), train a military that would require at least a decade’s worth of stability in its officer corps before it can effectively operate against internal groups while patrolling one of the most porous frontiers in the world, end centuries of tribal and religious indoctrination in exchange for the promise of modern Western conveniences, all in a greater ploy to have the populace begin its love affair with what we’ll tell them is democracy but is in reality our very own conduit of internal exploitation allowing Western companies to storm their ramparts and employ Afghans for one fiftieth of what a kid in Arkansas would refuse to make burgers for…

…oh, and defeat terrorism, everywhere and for all time. Or, if we’re going to cut the shit and talk plainly – just those we deem terrorists or the facilitators of terrorism. Islam, of course, will have to go completely. Because let’s face it, all Muslims are terrorists, or have the potential to become terrorists, right?

And that’s just Afghanistan, whose desolated masses, let’s face it, we spent a considerable time fretting over prior to September 11th.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, pro-war bloggers have continued to argue that the course taken by the Bush administration was necessary despite the evidence available to them that various members of the administration openly lied about key information. Given the fervent promotion of the democratic ethic by this administration elsewhere in the world, do you feel that the impeachment of certain individuals within the administration is warranted given the necessity that within a democracy elected officials must be held accountable for public coercion? Or do you believe that despite the conduct of the administration, any attempt to impeach the President would be vetoed to protect both the sanctity of his office and America’s global position of strength?

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US armed forces have lost 2,866 service men and women. This month alone there have been 3,709 Iraqi deaths.

In the last 22 days more Iraqi civilians have died than did Americans on September 11th, and have been suffering similarly unacceptable numbers since the occupation began - some at the hands of Anglo-American forces, some due to sectarian violence, and some because of pure lawlessness. There are low estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties and estimates that are considered too ghastly to contemplate, which are viciously challenged in an attempt to spare our superior sense of morality.

No matter the arguments produced in an attempt to justify this spike in civilian deaths (sectarian violence, for example), to discard the realities of cause and effect as context is absurd. Saddam Hussein’s regime was oppressive, committed numerous crimes in both peace time and during its war with Iran, but let us also not forget that until Iraqi tanks rolled across the Kuwaiti frontier the regime of Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States, who provided the Hussein regime with a laundry list of favors, from billions in aid to spy satellite coverage of Iranian troop movements. The hard cold fact remains, like it or not, while in power and in favour with the US, 3,700 civilians a month were not violently dying in Iraq.

I think UN Secretary General Kofi Annan put it best yesterday when he said that the United States is trapped in Iraq. The argument between withdrawal and ‘staying the course’ is defeated by the truth that a hole has been ignorantly dug that has become almost too deep to escape.

Jesse Jackson wrote recently in The Chicago Sun Times that supporters of the war in Iraq must face the music. And that…

“…the neocons are positioning themselves to blame the mess on those left to clean it up. Soon they will be filling the op-ed pages with cries of being betrayed, and with calls for a new military adventure, packaged once more with deceptions and distortions. America will have squandered priceless lives and, in the end, over one trillion dollars on their folly. But the neocons will learn nothing. They will lose nothing. The only question is whether the rest of us will know better the next time.�?

I’m sure there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis who have lost loved ones who would obviously concur. Perhaps that would be why a majority of Iraqis approve of attacks on US forces despite the fact that some 94% of them disapprove of al-Qaeda.

Racial Profiling

I witnessed it first hand in 2002 while boarding a plane in Hawaii. Call me naïve, but I have a feeling that had this been six Catholic priests, nothing would have come of it.

Updated: Watch the video of the girl being interviewed. The Imam with the sunglasses on that she mentioned was blind and therefore did not remove them because it was dark. Hell, sometimes I wear sunglasses on planes when it’s dark because they’re perscription. I also travel with a large group most of the time, and when we fly we’re never all seated together. Ever. Ironically, all of the 9/11 Hijackers were seated in first class and not spread out at all.

Updated: I was actually struck silent today when I watched a YouTube interview conducted by MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson in which he claimed that anti-Islamic behavior is not racism but that anti-Semitism is. Carlson, who agreed that the six Imam’s removed from the flight were unjustly treated, claimed that Muslim groups were taking advantage of the incident, and that Americans as a whole should not be lumped into one category simply because one passenger on one flight was suspicious of the men because they were praying prior to boarding (all devout Muslims pray 5 times daily at specific times during the day). So, as stupefying as it may sound, Carlson was, in essence, claiming that it’s unfair for a minority to claim that it’s being racially profiled by a society because only a single passenger raised concerns about the Imams, and that, in fact, the majority of Americans don’t automatically equate those of the Muslim faith, or those of Middle Eastern descent, with terrorism.