Stop the New Year

French marchers say 'non' to 2007

Hundreds of protesters in France have rung in the New Year by holding a light-hearted march against it.

Parodying the French readiness to say "non", the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!"

The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.
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The protesters began to chant: "No to 2008!"

They vowed to stage a similar protest on 31 December 2007 on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris

This is funny.

Clark Clifford's ghost lives

I just hung Saddam. You think
30,000 men will stop me?

A 'Surge' Faces Trouble In the Senate
Even in GOP, Few Back the President

By Robert D. Novak
Monday, January 1, 2007; Page A13

Sen. John McCain, leading a blue-ribbon congressional delegation to Baghdad before Christmas, collected evidence that a "surge" of more U.S. troops is needed in Iraq. But not all his colleagues who accompanied him were convinced. What's more, he will find himself among a dwindling minority inside the Senate Republican caucus when Congress reconvenes this week.

President Bush and McCain, the front-runner for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, will have trouble finding support from more than 12 of the 49 Republican senators when pressing for a surge of 30,000 troops. "It's Alice in Wonderland," Sen. Chuck Hagel, second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me in describing the proposal. "I'm absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly."

What to do about Iraq poses not only a national policy crisis but profound political problems for the Republican Party. Disenchantment with George W. Bush within the GOP runs deep. Republican leaders around the country, anticipating that the 2006 election disaster would prompt an orderly disengagement from Iraq, are shocked that the president now appears ready to add troops.

The recent McCain congressional delegation was composed of sophisticated lawmakers who have made many previous visits to Iraq. They do not minimize the severity of sectarian civil war. They left their meeting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki doubting any "sense of urgency" after advising him that he must disarm the militias. They recognize that the national police, corrupt and riddled with radicals, constitutes an unmitigated disaster.

McCain has long called for more troops in Iraq. He was supported within the delegation by his ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the only Democrat on the delegation (though he now calls himself an "Independent Democrat" after losing the Democratic nomination in Connecticut and being elected with Republican votes). But Sen. John Thune (S.D.) calls his support for the surge "conditional." Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) returned from Baghdad opposing more troops. Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, the only House member on the trip, is described as skeptical.

How big and how long should a surge be? The 7,000 or 8,000 troops that were first mentioned now have grown to at least 30,000. Congressional advocates talk privately about an infusion of manpower ending about halfway through this year. But retired general Jack Keane, who has become a leading advocate of additional troops, wrote in The Post last week: "Increasing troop levels in Baghdad for three to six months would virtually ensure defeat."

I checked with prominent Republicans around the country and found them confused and disturbed about the surge. They incorrectly assumed that the presence of Republican stalwart James Baker as co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group meant it was Bush-inspired (when it really was a bipartisan creation of Congress). Why, they ask, is the president casting aside the commission's recommendations and calling for more troops?

Baker was supposed to fix this. He didn't, because Bush wiped his ass with the ISG report. People attacked it because it didn't deal with a lot of issues. That wasn't the point. It was to get Bush to accept withdrawal. He won't.

Unlike Atrios, I don't think this lasts until 2009. I think when it's clear you have 70+ votes against you in the Senate, that either you change your plans or you leave. Bush cannot escalate in the face of massive opposition and the reality that the Sadrists control the government. Saddam's hanging was a Mahdi Army special. The Hakim coup is not only dead, but dead and buried, because Sistani refused to back it.So the Sadrists run the show in all but name.

Do these geniuses think that the Iraqi Army will support an attack on the Mahdi Army? I don't think so.

Simple answers to simple questions

David Sirota asks:

Will we be held hostage by the all-too-frequent naysaying among our all-too-cautious-and-comfortable �allies� in Washington�s liberal non-profit/think tank circles � people who have good intentions, but too often lack the intestinal fortitude to make enemies of some people they see on the cocktail party circuit? Will we listen to the liberal-sounding pundits that we all love to read and cheer on, but who primarily look down their noses at actual movement building? Or will we have the guts to build a movement that takes no prisoners, creates enemies, and makes the Beltway Establishment angry as we pursue goals like universal health care, fair trade, better wages, serious environmental protections and real civil liberties?

No. Fuck no. Because they have done nothing for us. Fuck what they think. NARAL anyone?

Selflessness

I just finished reading Alex Kershaw's The Few, which is about the first seven Americans to join the RAF in WWII. In the end, there would be three squadrons of Americans who would risk their citizenship, in the face of US law, to fight on the side of the British.

Of those seven men, six were dead by 1942, one survived the war. Of the three squardons of Americans, many would later become American aces in American planes in the 8th Air Force's 4th Fighter Group.

But every one of them chose to fight for what was right without consideration of money, fame or even their own birthright. Sure, some wanted to fly the fast Spitfires over England, but most joined up to stop the Nazis. They knew they were going to where the fight was because the British needed help.

Robert Asahina's Just Americans discusses how Japanese Americans volunteered for the US Army. While some were later drafted, while their families sat in concentration camps, 22 of these men would later win the Medal of Honor. They served a country which denied them basic rights of citizenship for reasons based in greed and paranoia.

The acts of these men were selfless, they placed their values above their lives. When they were asked to oppose evil, they didn't write about it, they went out of their way to confront it at risk to their lives.

The cheap talk and violent blather of the right is just that. They fantasize about Churchill and World War II in ways that best befit a bad novel and not the acts of humans. They want to be heroes without heroism.

The people they claim to admire put action before words, but what we have are a bunch of blowhards, people who talk big and do nothing who want to wrap themselves in the cloak of heroes.

As we discuss the Iraq war and Bush's insane escalation, we need to remember, those cheering the loudest have risked the least.

They would fuck up a hamburger

(AP Photo/Hameed Rasheed)

Bush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned

By JOHN F. BURNS and MARC SANTORA

BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 � With his plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built a legend with his defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.
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The American role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Mr. Hussein home. Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom � and justice � of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that might have assured Mr. Hussein a more dignified passage to his end.

The Americans� concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video recordings made just before Mr. Hussein fell through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet late Saturday, apparently made by a witness with a camera cellphone, underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber.

This continued, on the video, through the actual hanging itself, with a shout of �The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!� as Mr. Hussein hung lifeless, his neck snapped back and his glassy eyes open.

The cacophony from those gathered before the gallows included a shout of �Go to hell!� as the former ruler stood with the noose around his neck in the final moments, and his riposte, barely audible above the bedlam, which included the words �gallows of shame.� It continued despite appeals from an official-sounding voice, possibly Munir Haddad, the judge who presided at the hanging, saying, �Please no! The man is about to die.�

The Shiites who predominated at the hanging began a refrain at one point of �Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!�� the name of a volatile cleric whose private militia has spawned death squads that have made an indiscriminate industry of killing Sunnis � appending it to a Muslim imprecation for blessings on the Prophet Muhammad. �Moktada,� Mr. Hussein replied, smiling contemptuously. �Is this how real men behave?�

American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the execution was Iraq�s to decide.

While privately incensed at the dead-of-night rush to the gallows, the Americans here have been caught in the double bind that has ensnared them over much else about the Maliki government � frustrated at what they call the government�s failure to recognize its destructive behavior, but reluctant to speak out, or sometimes to act, for fear of undermining Mr. Maliki and worsening the situation.

But a narrative assembled from accounts by various American officials, and by Iraqis present at some of the crucial meetings between the two sides, shows that it was the Americans who counseled caution in the way the Iraqis carried out the hanging. The issues uppermost in the Americans� minds, these officials said, were a provision in Iraq�s new Constitution that required the three-man presidency council to approve hangings, and a stipulation in a longstanding Iraqi law that no executions can be carried out during the Id al-Adha holiday, which began for Iraqi Sunnis on Saturday and Shiites on Sunday.
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Mr. Maliki had one major obstacle: the Hussein-era law proscribing executions during the Id holiday. This remained unresolved until late Friday, the Iraqi official said. He said he attended a late-night dinner at the prime minister�s office at which American officers and Mr. Maliki�s officials debated the issue.

One participant described the meeting this way: �The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, �Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?� The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, �This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.� �

To this, the Iraqis added what has often been their trump card in tricky political situations: they telephoned officials of the marjaiya, the supreme religious body in Iraqi Shiism, composed of ayatollahs in the holy city of Najaf. The ayatollahs approved. Mr. Maliki, at a few minutes before midnight on Friday, then signed a letter to the justice minister, �to carry out the hanging until death.�

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None of the Iraqi officials were able to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.

But the explanation may have lain in something that Bassam al-Husseini, a Maliki aide closely involved in arrangements for the hanging, said to the BBC later. Mr. Husseini, who has American citizenship, described the hanging as �an Id gift to the Iraqi people.�

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The leader of Mr. Hussein�s Albu-Nasir tribe, Sheik Ali al-Nida, said that before flying to Baghdad on an American helicopter, he had been so fearful for his safety that he had written a will. Bizarrely, Sheik Nida and others were shown on Iraqi television collecting the coffin from the courtyard in front of Mr. Maliki�s office, where it sat unceremoniously in a police pickup.


At the burial, several mourners threw themselves on the closed casket. One, a young man convulsed with sobs, cried: �He has not died. I can hear him speaking to me.� Another shouted, �Saddam is dead! Instead of weeping for him, think of ways we can take revenge on the Iranian enemy,� Sunni parlance for the Shiites now in power.

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Why did Maliki rush to do this? Because his protector wanted it done. Why else?

The exile

The Not Wanted Signs


By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 1, 2007

I�ve heard the concern expressed dozens of times by New Orleans residents who are poor and black and still living in enforced exile from their wounded city: Maybe they don�t want us back.

You hear it again and again and again, the tone of voice varying from sadness to anger to resignation, but always laced with the unmistakable pain of feeling unwelcome in one�s own home. I�ve come to think of it as the New Orleans lament.

�They are not trying to bring us home,� said Geraldine Craig, who is living in a federally sponsored trailer encampment in Baton Rouge. �Just the opposite. They�re telling us to find housing here.�

�It hurts,� said Mimi Adams, a woman who wore out her welcome with relatives in Houston and Atlanta but has no idea when she might return to New Orleans. �Even if I could find a place, the rents are too high,� she said. �They�ve gone up a lot. I�m told they don�t want us poor folks back, that they�re making it a city for the well-to-do. That�s what I�m hearing.�

Sixteen months have passed since the apocalyptic flood that followed Hurricane Katrina. More than 13,000 residents who were displaced by the storm are still living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Another 100,000 to 200,000 evacuees � most of whom want to return home � are scattered throughout the United States.

The undeniable neglect of this population fuels the suspicion among the poor and the black, who constitute a majority of the evacuees, that the city is being handed over to the well-to-do and the white.

If you talk to public officials, you will hear about billions of dollars in aid being funneled through this program or that. The maze of bureaucratic initiatives is dizzying. But when you talk to the people most in need of help � the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the children � you will find in most cases that the help is not reaching them. There is no massive effort, no master plan, to bring back the people who were driven from the city and left destitute by Katrina.

The easy way

Andy Manis for The New York Times
There are more than 100 drinking establishments
in downtown Madison, home to the main state
university campus. In recent years thousands of
young professionals and retirees have moved to the area.

This Remaking of Downtown Has Downside

By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: January 1, 2007

MADISON, Wis. � This college town received what it wanted when, during the 1980s and 90s, it sought to reverse the decline of its downtown and to create a more vibrant civic center that would draw people at night and on weekends.

Since then, thousands of young professionals, retirees and former suburbanites have moved to glistening condominium buildings in the shadow of the state Capitol�s dome and only a few blocks from the University of Wisconsin�s main campus. And there is hardly a bad night for business near State Street, where university students and tourists pack restaurants and bars to capacity even on freezing weeknights.

But as downtown�s population and revelry have grown, so have overcrowding on the streets, vandalism and, most significantly, the police say, alcohol-related crime. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and other officials find themselves grappling with a problem that is a direct result of Madison�s successful transformation: how to tone down downtown.

As an urban issue, the downsizing of downtowns has little precedent because many cities, particularly in the Midwest, are struggling mightily to bring people back to their cores, not send them away.

Of course, many college towns deal with problems related to drinking. In the Midwest alone, La Crosse, Wis., and East Lansing and Ann Arbor, Mich., are struggling with how to cope with the public mayhem often fueled by inebriated students.

In Madison, two Common Council members, convinced that much of what ails downtown can be traced to the proliferation of bars and restaurants known more for drinking than dining, introduced a plan intended to reduce the number of such establishments, and to restrict the approval of new liquor licenses.

The plan, which has the support of Mayor Cieslewicz (pronounced chess-LEV-ich), is preliminary and does not detail, for example, how many or which places may be closed. A final plan is expected to be ready for a Council vote in the spring.

That area of nearly one square mile � between Lake Mendota, Lake Monona and Blair and Lake Streets � has 120 places that serve only or mostly alcohol. They have a capacity of more than 11,000 people, city officials said.

The proposal has its critics, many of whom call it nothing less than modern-day Prohibition, and an assault on personal freedom and the free market that flies in the face of Madison�s traditional liberalism and Wisconsin�s entrenched drinking culture.

Some Council members say they worry that limiting the number of bars will only increase the number of drinkers who turn to house parties and makeshift taverns, where binge drinking and bad behavior often go together but behind closed doors.

�A lot of the activists on this issue revile alcohol, and their logic is equally fallacious as the original Prohibitionists�,� said Austin King, the president of the Common Council and a member of its Progressive caucus. �From a safety perspective,� Mr. King said, �I would much, much rather have young people drinking in the regulated environment of bars.�

You want a vibrant downtown, you can get it in several ways, increased shopping, a central tourist destination, but bars are the cheapest and the most problemmatic way to do that. You get the crowds, but you get the foolishness which comes with it.