Top American in Iraq goes Bathhist

Sounding every part a founding father of the Iraqi Bathhist party, except for his heavy southern accent of course, General J D Thurman, the senior commander of US occupying forces in Iraq, last week said “We need to get [the Iraqi] people to stop worrying about self and start worrying about Iraq. And that is going to take national unity.”

Indeed it will, which was the raison d’etre of the Bathhist regime that took control of Iraq in the 1950s, with the blessing of tribal, sectarian and business leaders no less than most Western governments’ diplomats, the Americans included. Iraq is an invented country comprised of three disparate administrative zones cobbled together in a cheap expediency by the British government that inherited the region from the collapsed Turkish empire. After years of sectarian violence that kept the country at war with itself, the Bathhist philosophy arose as a viable solution.

The idea was to conscript all young men into the army and transport them for three years to barracks far away from their home, their tribal and religious leaders, and every vestige of their provincial identity. Replace all that with an invented national identity based on myths from the rich ancient history of the region. After a couple of generations, the theory went, everyone would, as the American commander said last week, think more about being Iraqi than about being Basra-ian or Baghdadian, and so on.

As any Canadian school child knows, nothing forges a national identity, and national unity, better than war—World War I is the event that created a real Canada, we all believe. And so it was with the Bathhists of Iraq, soon to be lead by Saddam Hussein. A conscripted army inculcated with Iraqi national myths, and alloyed together in the heat of occasional wars, would finally create a unified Iraq able to hold itself together and get on with industrializing with the proceeds of rich oil sales.

The job was almost complete, but the spectre of a confident, wealthy, technologically advanced Iraqi state taking a leadership role in the region, was anathema to American interests, particularly when it came to who would dictate how much oil Iraq would make available on global markets.

It is ironic to see those Americans, now caught in a death-trap up and down the Mesopotamian, crying out for what is essentially a resumption of the Bathhist program they themselves disrupted. There may even be some American commanders privately talking about restoring the Bathhist regime to power. But surely they wouldn’t be talking about re-installing Saddam in Baghdad, would they?

Gambling expansion fulfils prophecy

Right on schedule, and about exactly to specifications, a crime wave has erupted out of the increased gambling facilities the Government of BC runs or authorizes. A report last week stated police investigations into money laundering and loan sharking are up sharply following the opening of a massive casino in Richmond. One can only imagine the personal and family tragedies that are up sharply too, as a result of increased gambling, but for which we won’t have figures to measure the effect till the victims start showing up in jails and morgues.

The debate around increased gambling, currently alive in East Vancouver as Great Canadian Casinos prepares to install 900 slot machines at the Hastings Race Track, cannot proceed unless proponents concede that casinos spell crime and tragedy. The only argument proponents of gambling can reasonably make is to acknowledge these personal and social costs but to either dismiss them as unimportant, or to chalk them up to consequences of free people acting as they wish in a free economy. Until now, proponents have been able to get away with saying there is no link between casinos and crime and tragedy.

Large social costs, and a spike in personal tragedies, are long-accepted justifications for state intervention in the choices people make in their personal lives. We all accept, for example, that motorcyclists are required by law to wear helmets to protect their own, and nobody else’s, head. If the risk is great enough, if the damage is severe and widespread enough, the new study results offer a good argument to stop increasing gambling opportunities, and even to cut back what is already out there. Certainly there should be no casino allowed in East Vancouver at Hastings Park, and City Council should be ashamed the process has been allowed to go as far as it already has. Out with Great Canadian! In with green space!

Peter MacKay

Utterly classless. God almighty but he gives insufferable, obnoxious frat boys such a bad name.

Corporate Canada loses its way

The lack of leadership and foresight on the part of both big federal parties when it comes to policies about corporate income trusts is depressing to the nation. An income trust is a company that shovels all its profits out the door to shareholders rather than finding any opportunities to re-invest in the company in research, development, or expansion. Shareholders get a heightened return in the near run, always a sure hit in these blindly greedy days. The company avoids paying income tax on those profits by shoveling them out the door before they’re counted. And the value of shares in the company probably increases, for a while anyway, as the prospect of heightened dividends tantalizes the greedy.

But allowing companies to convert their structure to an income trust is tantamount to allowing the current renter of a home to sell off the lumber in the walls and the roof. It is not sustainable, and what is worse, the value built up in companies over decades by management and workers alike should not be allowed to be liquidated so cavalierly. It is a basic human instinct to re-invest in the future, handed down from us by the first farmers, who kept some seeds away from the market for planting next year’s crop. Outlaw income trusts.

Never appease aggressors

Has anyone pointed out that Michael Ignatieff’s comment about Israel’s military action in Lebanon this past summer was probably right? We can’t really say Israel committed war crimes yet, that’s for current investigations at The Hague to determine. But surely an Israeli general’s admission this past week that phosphorous bombs were dropped on civilian areas marks Israel’s actions for severe rebuke, without even getting into the multiple reports of massacres that are already being investigated.

Hezbollah showered rockets into Israeli towns and cities, killing 44 civilians. By contrast, upwards of 1,187 completely innocent Lebanese were killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing of civilian areas, and about 116 Israeli soldiers were killed—most after they crossed the border and invaded Lebanon.

There is broad global consensus that Israel’s reactions to the capture of two soldiers by Hezbollah was out of all accepted concepts of proportionate response, and that alone makes it a war crime. There is no good that comes from appeasement of aggressors, but that’s what the Conservative government, and most if not all of the media in Canada, have essentially called for in castigating Ignatieff for his actually accurate comments about Israel.

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