Author: Sam Koritz

In Backtalk:

Pete Komen’s Law of Politics: Never believe anything until it is officially denied.

Marcia Schneider: Ralph Nader should talk about us.

Peter Yff: We don’t know what really happened in Halabja.

Greg Cunneen asks: If the purpose of “rendition” is not torture, then why are prisoners being sent to torture-friendly non-coalition countries, rather than torture-averse coalition countries?

And more…

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James Howard, of PowerSwitch.org.uk: Just reread your posting from December 12, 2004 [“The Economics of Oil“] where you wrote:

“Curious about the present level of POT’s popularity I checked Google News and found that in the past few days POT has been mentioned in articles on numerous dissident sites, including Axis of Logic, Al-Jazeerah, ProgressiveTrail.org, From the Wilderness, Slashdot, DisInfo.com, CounterPunch, Znet, Common Dreams, AlterNet, Mother Jones, and Washington Dispatch. Two Indian news sites also mentioned POT but no mainstream Western sources did.”

I wonder if the recent Hirsch report to the US Department of Energy, the cover story in Moneyweek, the mentions in Bloomberg news and the recent Deutsche bank study would sway your mind on the matter?

Furthermore, have you read Michael T. Klare’s Resource Wars? Vital reading for anyone antiwar (should be everyone!).

Sam Koritz: My point in the quote above is that antiwar sources are promoting a fringe theory, peak oil theory (“POT”) — the idea that petroleum production is about to peak, or has already peaked. Despite the sources that you cite, I still believe that POT is a pretty fringe idea — but this is a minor point. My main point is that, barring some sudden shock to the system, the price mechanism is perfectly capable of replacing and reducing the use of petroleum, without a serious crisis. To argue otherwise (besides being wrong, in my opinion) is to provide patriotic Americans with a reasonable motivation for US military control of oil-rich regions. To what I’ve already written on the subject I’ll only add a quote from Victor Niederhoffer and Laurel Kenner’s Practical Speculation:

… [Julian Simon’s] discovery arose from his attempt to find out why real commodities prices were constantly decreasing and why predictions of commodity shortages are always wrong. He likened the situation to looking at a tub of water and marking the water level, and then observing people putting water from the tub into buckets and taking it away. But when the tub is examined again, the level is higher than it was at the start. He attributes the constantly increasing water to discoveries of improved methods of production of goods that are in shortage and the development of substitutes. “More people and increased income cause resources to become more scarce in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity and prompt investors to search for solutions. These solutions eventually lead to prices dropping lower than before the scarcity occurred.”

In Backtalk:

Jay Hilgartner: There are lots of reasons to be hopeful about politics in the US today — at least as compared to Germany in the 1930s.

David Bright: Most of Kucinich’s delegates did not vote for Kerry.

Mark E. Moore: MoveOn.org was created by Clinton supporters: of course they refuse to support an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Sam Koritz: Aggressive war is not a humanitarian act.

And more…

Today’s story from Democracy Now, “Arab American Publisher Says Bush Told Him in May 2000 He Planned to ‘Take Out’ Iraq” reminded me of this claim by director David O. Russell (Three Kings, I (Heart) Huckabees, etc.):

“I met George Bush. Terry Semel was running Warner Bros. and had him over in the summer of ’99. He hadn’t even gotten the nomination yet. I was invited to meet him with a small group of people. I told him, ‘I’m editing a movie right now that questions your father’s legacy in Iraq.’ And his face for a moment was like, What the tuck is this? And then he immediately said, ‘Well, then, I guess I’m gonna have to go back and finish the job.’ I guess they had been planning this for a long time, he and his cronies.”

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Speaking of movies… I just saw Downfall, the Academy Award-nominated German film about the last days in Hitler’s bunker. It’s a little slow, being European and all, and you know the ending, but that aside it’s a powerful antiwar film: great acting, historical accuracy, & German dialog, rather than German-accented English — and unlike other antiwar films it doesn’t glamorize war: you can’t wait for the idealistic nihilistic nightmare to end and mundane everyday life to begin.

In Backtalk:

Greg Brownfield: deliberate irrationalism is one of the pillars of fascism — & the Bushies have rejected the “reality-based community.”

Scott Erb, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Maine at Farmington: Democracy or Republic? Democracy does not mean majoritarianism.

Steve Barrett: Just say no to the ASVAB.

Matthew Barganier: And the special skills draft.

David Wilmsen, Contributing Editor, Transnational Broadcasting Studies, Arabic and Translation Studies, The American University in Cairo: Lebanon already IS a democracy.

Scott Horton: And Israel isn’t.

And more…

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World democratic revolution or Pentagonistan?: The CIA is airmailing people to prisons in the world’s worst human rights abusing dictatorships.

In Backtalk:

Steve Vinson: the real Bush plan for the Mideast can be found in “Securing the Realm” — which doesn’t mention democracy.

Tom Harper: no one spit on Vietnam vets.

Leon Hadar: Britain would fail Rice’s “town-square test.”

Cheryl Hutchinson: (Ex-communist) David Horowitz has included Justin Raimondo — & Ayatollah Khomeni — in his Guide to the Political Left. Wrong. (The left/right polarity should be fine-tuned or ignored, not abused.)

Former US ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson, uses the f word.

And more…

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I was in Britain last year and couldn’t believe how unpopular the Iraq invasion/ occupation is there — and unpopular with the old, rural and conservative, not just the usual suspects. No wonder, as Tom Engelhardt describes in “The Emperor’s Potemkin Visits,” when the president goes abroad he brings a courtier bubble. Robert L. Pollock, senior editorial page writer at the WSJ, couldn’t avoid public opinion when he recently visited Turkey, though (“The Sick Man of Europe — Again“):

… Never in an ostensibly friendly country have I had the impression of embassy staff so besieged.

…Turkish parliamentarians themselves have accused the U.S. of “genocide” in Iraq, while Mr. Erdogan (who we once hoped would set for the Muslim world an example of democracy) was among the few world leaders to question the legitimacy of the Iraqi elections. When confronted, Turkish pols claim they can’t risk going against “public opinion.” …

But the only opposition now is a moribund People’s Republican Party, or CHP, once the party of Ataturk. At a recent party congress, its leader accused his main challenger of having been part of a CIA plot against him. That’s not to say there aren’t a few comparatively pro-U.S. officials left in the current government and the state bureaucracies. But they’re afraid to say anything in public. In private, they whine endlessly about trivial things the U.S. “could have done differently.”

Entirely forgotten is that President Bush was among the first world leaders to recognize Prime Minister Erdogan, while Turkey’s own legal system was still weighing whether he was secular enough for the job. Forgotten have been decades of U.S. military assistance. Forgotten have been years of American efforts to secure a pipeline route for Caspian oil that terminates at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Forgotten has been the fact that U.S. administrations continue to fight annual attempts in Congress to pass a resolution condemning modern Turkey for the long-ago Armenian genocide. Forgotten has been America’s persistent lobbying for Turkish membership in the European Union.

Forgotten, above all, has been America’s help against the PKK. Its now-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was expelled from Syria in 1998 after the Turks threatened military action. He was then passed like a hot potato between European governments, who refused to extradite him to Turkey because — gasp! — he might face the death penalty. He was eventually caught — with the help of U.S. intelligence — sheltered in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. "They gave us Ocalan. What could be bigger than that?" says one of a handful of unapologetically pro-U.S. Turks I still know.

And why has the US’s reputation recently plummeted in Turkey (and just about everywhere else)?:

…[A] 50-year special relationship, between longtime NATO allies who fought Soviet expansionism together starting in Korea, has long had to weather the ideological hostility and intellectual decadence of much of Istanbul’s elite. And at the 2002 election, the increasingly corrupt mainstream parties that had championed Turkish-American ties self-destructed, leaving a vacuum that was filled by the subtle yet insidious Islamism of the Justice and Development (AK) Party. It’s this combination of old leftism and new Islamism — much more than any mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq war — that explains the collapse in relations.

“Mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq”? Meaning that the Turks feel pique over their government’s refusal to help the US military invade Iraq?

Even for WSJ‘s editorial page, this analysis is an embarrassment. For the real story see William S. Lind’s “Turkey Imagines the Unimaginable.”

In Backtalk:

Emile Meylan describes visiting his daughter Mariela at the Walter Reed Medical Center.

R.T. Carpenter points out that the last Civil War widow/ pensioner died just last year. The hundreds of billions budgeted for today’s wars are just the down payment.

Gordon Prather explains why the N. Korean nuke mess is still Bush’s fault.

Eric Garris explains how you can e-mail any Web page.

We get an update from the Kevin Benderman Defense Committee.

And more….

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Also…

Speaking of “peak oil,” Brian S. Wesbury (“Greenspan’s Quiver“) says:

Oil valued in dollars is up 20% versus its peak in 2000, but when valued in euros, the price of oil has fallen by 20%. In other words, it is not a shortage of oil that is driving prices up; it is the falling value of the dollar. If there were a true shortage of oil, its price would be up in all currencies.”

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Oh yeah, and:

The Department of Homeland Security has given hundreds of millions of dollars to protect ports since Sept. 11, 2001, without sufficiently directing the money to those that are most vulnerable, a policy that has compromised the nation’s ability to better defend the most critical ports against terrorist attacks, the department’s inspector general has concluded.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been invested in redundant lighting systems and unnecessary technical equipment, the audit found, but “the program has not yet achieved its intended results in the form of actual improvement in port security.”