July 15, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GROPER IS NO ACTION HERO

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is showing his Republican colors again these days. The Groper was sounding more progressive for a while, talking about doing something serious about global climate change and other issues, but now he's more into Republican fund raisers. This article by Evan Halper is at www.latimes.com:

The state budget is overdue. California's crisis-plagued prison system is on the brink of a federal takeover. The agency charged with putting tough new global warming regulations into effect is in turmoil.

Nonetheless, last week closed with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attention thousands of miles east as he ventured to Florida for a turn before the cameras and a $25,000-per-table Republican party fundraiser.

To Capitol insiders, the trip was the latest troubling evidence that despite the many big issues before him, the governor's interest in the nuts and bolts of governing has ebbed. Splashy announcements remain his trademark, but after the cameras pack up, Schwarzenegger has often not followed through. As a result, key parts of his agenda are foundering.

T. E. LAWRENCE ON THE MIDDLE EAST

T. E. Lawrence, hero of the movie Lawrence of Arabia, lived, worked, and fought with Arabs against the Turks early in the twentieth century. Lawrence was an astute observer of Arab culture and his observations ring true today. This article by Robert Fisk is at www.commondreams.org:

Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for “Guerrilla” in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read - and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage, for sending me TE’s remarkable article - because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): “… suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour…”

How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, the Turks “would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available.”