The War On Extremism Begins

It will no longer be enough for Americans to say they Support The Troops or that they Back The War On Iraq. No way.

The way President Bush is talking, you have to devote and pledge 100% unwavering support in everything he says and does and chooses to believe, or you become On Of Them, or part of That Bunch.

No more talk of Waving The White Flag Of Defeat, or of Giving Aid And Comfort To The Enemy simply by suggesting that perhaps "War begets war begets war begets war". No, that won't cut it anymore.

Bush Co. wore out those cliches and insults earlier this year.

They need something new and fresh.

With a growing number of Republicans also saying the War On Iraq Isn't Working, Bush Co. now has to super-spin its way out of emotional gridlock when it comes to all things War.

President Bush made one of his first of a new bunch of major speeches last night stumping for a Republican Senate candidate, and the tone and content of the speech showed just how dirty Bush Co. are going to fight all the way through the mid-term US elections.

There are more than 20 days of Bush speeches to come, naturally cleaving nicely with the fifth anniversary of September 11.

He hasn't forgotten the lessons of September 11. Have you?

Are you with us or are you against us? Do you want America to win the war, or do you want the terrorists to win? Do you think another few hundred billion should be poured into the arms industries of the United States and Israel, or do you want to live in a world where women will have to be surrounded by a thick curtain at all times and you will no longer be allowed to listen to your iPod and fly a kite?

Extreme times call for extreme talk, and extreme fear and loathing. Plus extreme comedy, naturally.

You'd have to be out of your mind on magic mushrooms to think the War On Iraq has been a major success, and even Bush Co won't be trying to sell that line, not this time. But they will try to convince all Americans that things could be much, much worse than they already are. That if they hadn't gone into Iraq, towers could be dropping in American cities everyday. Highways could be filled with exploding cars and shopping malls rolling with fire and burning children. You know, like in Iraq.

Bush Co. have nothing to lose but most of their power. President Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld could hardly be less popular than they already are, so they really have nothing to lose. Except the chance to make sure another $US200 or so billion finds its way into the War Industry over the next five years.

That, after all, is Priority Number One.

Prepare to have your senses, your morals and your sense of patriotism well and truly insulted, and assaulted.

It's election time in the USA.

And there's a War on as well, in case you didn't notice.

The Washington Post explains further :

President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated positions.

With an appearance before the American Legion in Salt Lake City today, Bush will begin a series of speeches over 20 days centered on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he and his top lieutenants have foreshadowed in recent days the thrust of the effort to put Democrats on the defensive with rhetoric that has further inflamed an already emotional debate.

Cheney and Rumsfeld also gave speeches yesterday that talked up the 'New Fascism' of Islamist extremism.

Curiously, there wasn't a lot of talk about 'Terrorists'.

The new key buzz word, along with 'Fascism', is "Extremism' and 'Extremists'.

Terrorists, of course, aim to cause terror through their actions and talk.

But what about Extremists?

We're moving into Thought Crime territory now.

A War On Extremists? Where do you even begin with that one?

And how exactly do you define Extremism?

Or more importantly, how do the lawmakers and law enforces define Extremism?

That's terminology way wide open to multiple interpretation.

Then again, that's probably the whole idea.

THE LAST DAYS OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH


President Bush is likely to remain in the White House until January, 2009, despite the smoke signals rising across American Democrats' heartland that if they gain control of the Senate in the November mid-term elections, impeachment proceedings against the president will begin.

Short of a fatal mountain biking accident, Bush ain't going nowhere anytime soon, but his last 800 plus days left in office promise to be some of the most extraordinary days in American, and world, history.

Which is why we've launched a new blog, The Last Days Of President George W. Bush. This blog will chronicle the final chapters of the most controversial, contentious, religious, funny, terrifying and downright entertaining president the United States has ever seen.

This blog will track current Bush events and also look back over the history of the man already widely dubbed 'The Worst President In The History Of America'.

It is interesting to note that in researching Bush's first year in office for future stories, it was some of the very same fright-right bloggers that now regard him as the saviour of the free world who first crowned him 'Idiot In Chief'. Little Green Footballs, Anne Coulter, Christopher Hitchens and Michelle Malkin, we're looking right at ya.

September 11, Osama Bin Laden and the War On Iraq saved Bush from going down as a one term failure. We'll detail these claims on the blog in the coming weeks.

Go here to check it the first entries.

HEAP OF HEADLINES

AUSTRALIANS SET TO GO BANANAS

A cyclone wiped out most of the supply of Australia's favourite fruit earlier this year, and the shortage sent banana prices north of $14 a kilo. More than a buck-twenty for a decent sized banana. Before Cyclone Larry smashed through Queensland banana plantations, you could pick up a kilo for less than $2.

Australians love bananas so much, even $14 a kilo didn't put most of them off. What did change was that people who would have once tossed bananas that had gone brown and mushy were instead wolfing them down. Too expensive to throw away.

In Bali recently, locals couldn't believe we had ever paid even $2 a kilo, and they were stunned single bananas were going for the equivalent of half a day's salary for low paid Bali farm workers.

$14 would have bought me a truckload of Bali bananas, literally. At the Monkey Forest in Bali's Ubud district, tourists were paying about 30cents for a double handful of bananas that the monkeys then swiped and ate, threw at other monkeys, sat on, or ignored. Australians were banana-deprived, but Balinese monkeys had more than they could play with.

Some Balinese restuarants offered free fruit platters after a $2 Nasi Goreng. Fruit platters piled high with bananas and mangos, they were giving them away. I gorged and loved it.

But now the Australian banana drought is just about over, with bumper crops fattening in the Queensland sunshine. The Sydney Morning Herald has the details here.

A Balinese taxi driver couldn't believe Australia grew the majority of its favourite fruit in one small area of Queensland. We were asking for trouble, he said. If the Balinese grew most of their rice in one area, he pointed out, and that area got wiped by a volcano eruption or tsunami, the people would starve.

"Australia hot, sun-shiney," he said. "You should grow bananas everywhere. Why don't you?"

Good question. Why don't we?


PRESIDENT CHENEY? AAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!!

So who really runs the United States? It sure as hell ain't GW Bush. Vice President Cheney was the man with the 'We Can Rule The World My Style' plan, but he doesn't want to take the credit now due him.

Or the nut roasting in hell that awaiteth him.


THE PHOTOGRAPH AS A WEAPON OF WAR

The photograph, and now the video, are powerful tools of warfare.

This piece from the Washington Post discusses one of the most powerful, and influential, images of World War 2 and the man who captured it.

The history of modern war is also the history of photographic censorship. One of the first major public opinion defeats in the War On Iraq came after it was revealed that President Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had decided they would not allow photographs to be released of the coffins of dead US soldiers being returned home.


US ARMY DESERTERS : COWARDS OR TRULY PATRIOTIC AMERICANS?

They signed up to defend their country, but now they are expected to fight a war against people who never posed any threat to their homeland. They chose not to follow orders they believe will be proven to be illegal or that they morally disagreed with and now these soldiers of conscience are dividing one of the most military-minded nations in the world.

Do American soldiers have the right to choose the wars they are going to fight? Or are their beliefs and moral codes worth less than the costs of their military training?

The Guardian's Gary Younge, in this excellent profile piece, meets the men who have decided GW Bush's fight against the insurgents of Iraq is not a war they want to be a part of.


BARELY MENTIONED, ALMOST FORGOTTEN, BUT THE WAR IN UGANDA IS ALMOST AT AN END

After more than two decades of appalling suffering and loss, the people of Uganda are the closest they've been since the early 1980s of finding peace in their time. Talks are underway, and actress-activist Helen Mirren has an interesting update here.


CHINA AND VENEZEULA : BILLION DOLLAR BUDDIES

Amazing stuff from Bloomberg.com : "Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, has signed at least eight accords with China, including agreements on energy and banking, as it seeks to lessen its dependence on the U.S., President Hugo Chavez said."

The deals are worth a minimum $US11 billion in the coming years.


UNITED STATES INVESTIGATES ISRAEL'S USE OF US MADE CLUSTER BOMBS

TAIWAN OPENS ITS FIRST OFFICIAL BIRD FLU SHELTER

COFFEE NOT TASTY ENOUGH? ADD FUNGI

EYEWITNESS REPORTS : HOW A LEBANESE FARMING VILLAGE HELD OFF ISRAELI TROOPS FOR A MONTH - THE BATTLE OF AL-SHAAB IN DETAIL

EDITOR'S NOTE

By Darryl Mason

Okay, the holiday is over. Time to get back to the business of this blog - detailing our ever changing new reality.

Thanks again to the thousands of regular visitors who've continued to visit these blogs, patiently waiting for updates that were non-existent. Apologies to all, but as I explained in the post below, sometimes you just have to take some proper time off, not just for health and sanity reasons, but also to step out of the constant news streams of our information rich reality and get a little perspective.

We'll post some photos from the holiday in the coming weeks. Most will be from Australia's Northern Territory, but a few will be from Bali.

Before I left Sydney, it was hard not to feel a little nervous about being in Bali at the same time the Bali bombers were scheduled to meet some bullets on a beach at dawn.

Interesting to note that the threat of another bombing in Bali seemed stronger in Sydney than it did in Bali. The executions were cancelled as the Bali bombers (or "militants" as the Jakarta Post curiously describes them) decided that maybe another appeal might be worth a shot. They were pretty keen to get on their way to Allahville, until their scheduled departure date suddenly got a little too close for comfort.

If you do visit Bali, you should go and see the memorial to the first Bali bombing in Kuta, across the road from the weed-choked vacant lot where the Sari Club once stood. It is a sobering and strangely uplifting experience. Sobering for the reality shock of just where this atrocity occured, and strangely uplifting for the location and the sensation of the memorial itself.

When we visited the memorial, there were dozens of people from around the world standing alongside us beneath the names of the more than 200 people that died in the attacks.

Gifts, photos and offerings were lined up beneath the names of the dead, who hailed from more than a dozen countries. The memorial stands on a busy intersection, the streets around it full of vehicles, scooters, people, noise, life. Life moving on. But there is a silence, a tranquility to be found in this special place, there is something uniquely transcendent about what the people of Bali built there for the families and friends of the victims.

All Australians need to give the people of Bali their friendship and their holiday dollars. Bali is not infested with terrorists, or extremists. They want Australians and Americans and Brits and Europeans to enjoy their country and experience their culture and meet their people. But the tourists are still slow to return. The threat of terrorism, however, is no dark cloud in that bluest of blue skies, but a failing economy due to low tourist numbers is a black fog on the horizon.

You couldn't ask to meet nicer people, or to see a more beautiful land. The further you go away from the magnetic tourist zone of Kuta, where the number of visitors seemed strong, the more wonderful your Bali experience will become.

You could close your eyes, drop your finger on a map of the island and just go to that place and no doubt it would prove as special as Ubud and Senur and the Holy Mountain, where we visited and stayed.

Can't wait to go back.

But, for now, it's time to get back to this reality, and back to this meandering catalogue of a world in flux. And it's a most curious and increasingly strange world we live in today.

We seem to be both on the verge of a major new war in the Middle East and at the beginning of a new age of peace in the Middle East at the same time. Israel was soundly defeated by a relatively minor, but well dug in, guerilla force in Lebanon and the defeat has thrown the whole idea of a War On Terror into serious chaos.

How exactly can a War On Terror be won when Hizbullah, one of the most infamous of all West-declared terrorist groups, can win such a victory against one of the most powerful armies in the world today? Israel has now decided it won't demand that Hizbullah be disarmed, simply because it knows this will not happen.

You would have expected 'The Mad Mullahs' of Iran and Syria to use the defeat as a launching pad for the Ultimate Destruction Of Israel, yet they claim they want nothing but peace, short of the removal of the Zionist regime that slaughtered almost a thousand Lebanese civilians and purposely destroyed vital civilian infrastructure.

The defeat of Israel in the July-August war will go down as one of the most profoundly shocking military defeats of the past century and will usher in a New Middle East, but certainly not the one that the US, the UK and the Australian governments were dreaming of. The power people of Iran and Syria and Lebanon now seem to be looking to Russia and China to fill the void of influence, and affluence, left vacant by the fading United States.

In the US, there is a stunning silence over the massive drought now destroying vital food stocks, while an economy-hammering housing bust quickly realitises. Arguments roil and boil over whether global warming is to blame, but the enormous problems over what happens next in a country of 300 million running low on vital grain stocks still remains.

The US is almost out of cash, and yet Russia is busily repaying tens of billions of dollars worth of its Soviet-era debt to European nations. The US tries to shrug heavy shoulders weighed down by $8 trillion worth of debt. Yet Russia is almost debt free.

Truly remarkable.

Did you even know Russia had almost become the cash-rich king of the world economy?

The Eagle spirals as the Russian Bear rises in the East.

China, Russia, Venezeula now solidify their trillion dollar business and strategic partnerships, drawing in Iran and India, promising to bring them along. Then there is China's mind-blowing moves into Africa. Sell us your minerals and we will build you great cities. But China is running out of water.

The Arctic is melting and Canada waits for an invasion by the shipping giants of new routes that will cut thousands of miles and weeks of travel and enormous costs from barging goods across the planet. Hundreds of millions of people could be bailing on drought-smashed lands to relocate to the pristine coastlines of Arctic Russia, Greenland, Canada and the US within decades, but the media remains obsessed with celebrity pap and unsolved murders.

Afghanistan is awash with opium and smack, like never before in its history, pummelled by war which the West may not win, at least not enough to claim an outright victory. What then? Pakistan remains curiously silent. They will wait to see who wins, playing both sides of the conflict to their benefit, as much as they can.

Iraq is the deadliest country on the planet, the serial-killer capital of the world. More Iraqis die from terrorism today than when Zarqawi was alive (remember him?). Break it up, divide it into three parts, chant the US 'strategists'.

President Bush doesn't want to give Iraq up, but even his own party faithful are now dumping his dream as they face their own reckoning at the polls before the end of the year. Bush is scheduled to be President until January, 2009, but few will be suprised if he lasts that long. Impeachment will be Bush getting off easy.

Bizarre, broken, swarming with change and chaos, magic and miracles, madness and joy.

This is our world today.

But for all the cries of 'Terror!' and 'Hatred!', the divisions amongst the youth of all nations are few and far between. There has probably never been a time before in the history of our races that so few young people view war as the way to remake the world for the better.

There is another way, a hundred other ways to make it better and a few million info-rich youth-fresh brains are chewing over those ideas into the early hours while you sleep. Before you wake, they will have discussed their ideas online in front of audiences in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The ideas will spread, the good ones will stick, the brilliant ones will change minds and lives and the future, subtle brick by brick, before you even finish breakfast.

Hope then is high, regardless of what the headlines may tell you.

The war pigs of the boomer-plus generations don't seem to understand that the world they knew is drawing to a close. They want bigger armies, they want wider wars, but how do they get such things when the majority of the world's youth simply do not want to fight? When the majority of the world's people are repeatedly asking, "Sorry? You want another hundred billion to buy more weapons? What exactly will that achieve?"

The will to fight isn't gone from the youth. But the drive to fight pointless, blood-soaked wars that solve little, change nothing, destroy everything, that drive is not only gone, but it seems it will now be impossible to motivate it, or reinstate it.

The youth of our world want to fight. They want to fight for their future, but they don't want to fight each other.

At least, they don't want to fight outside of the online world. There are a million battles underway tonight in the gaming worlds of another reality, but the bodies from those wars are not piling up in the streets of our real world, and most of the hatred is short-lived and is disguised admiration for the skill of their online enemies.

This weird and wonderful, strange and beautiful world.

A cure for AIDS is close, a couple of Irishmen claim to have created a viable source of 'free energy'. Spectacular advances in stem cell research seem to herald a day close to hand when medical miracles will flow like rivers. We've lost a planet in Pluto for now, but a revolt of astronomers grows quickly.

So much news, and it's wonderful to find that so much of it is good news.

We'll have to remember to try and detail Your New Reality with as much good news as the bad.

That should be a nice change for all of us and make this gig more interesting, more challenging and far more fun.

The ramble-babble, of the sort you have just waded through, will no doubt remain. The brain is clearer, for now, but it's still wired the same way.

A slew of catch-up headlines and new links and fresh thinks to follow in the next few days.

We welcome you all back and thank you for your patience.

APOLOGIES FROM A RECOVERING NEWS JUNKIE

By Darryl Mason

Many apologies to the thousands of readers from more than 40 countries who regularly visit these blogs for a very long delay between updates.

For the first time in a good decade, I had to see what it was like to completely unplug from the endless news cycles. That meant no internet news, no TV or radio newsbreaks, no current affairs, no newspapers.

Camping without electricity in the Northern Territory made all that much easier than it sounds, and it's probably the healthiest thing I've done for this body, mind and soul since the start of the new century.

As a full-blown, 16 hour a day news junkie, going totally cold turkey for a couple of weeks in the Australian bush was an utterly incredible experience, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the events of the world today.

Might write some more on this experience next week, but for now there is one overwhelming realisation that seems vital to mention : Finding a little inner peace is more important than stressing over the dementoids fight to destroy world peace. And this is a relatively peaceful world we live in today, despite the fights in the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the coasts of Africa.

After more than 14 days away from any news on world events, it seems there is a bigger fight to make the current wars bigger than there is to end them. If that makes sense. Has the world lost its taste for war? Of course it has. One of the biggest war lies of all is that most people want war, or think war is necessary, at any time in our histories.

The majority of people are opposed to war because the majority of people are decent, kind, loving people who respect their friends and neighbours and don't want to start fights with people they don't know. But out of six billion people in the world today, you really only need a few million to ramp up the misery for the rest. It's a remarkable percentile. There's probably less than three or four million people directly responsible for all the big and small wars in the world today, meaning those who are angry, dumb, violent, brutal, savage, haunted, bloodlusting, greedy or just plain money hungry enough to fight for the current wars to continue and for new ones to begin.

Hizbullah Vs the Israeli Defence Force is the best current example of this paradigm. Both wanted the fight they got. And there are enough war pigs on both sides, with hearts full of hate, to try and keep it going for as long as possible. Of course, there are those who directly profit from the use of all those bullets, mines, shells, missiles, rockets and UAVs to consider as well.

Two weeks ago I was convinced we were teetering on the edge of The NeoCon NeoNuclear World War they simply had to have. That didn't break out, of course, and the demented warpigs of Bush Co and Howard Corp. are only a little bit closer to their drool-dream killbot bloodfest Total War With Iran And Syria.

They may still get that dream, but the likelihood of an all-consuming Middle East war seems less likely today than it did when we last posted here on July 28.

Israel's world-class, mega-armed, ultra-tech defence force has basically had its arse kicked by Hizbullah since I last soaked up a few hours of news. To have been away from all news and to come back and see the events of the last two weeks in one hit is to realise that Israel needed the UN resolution passed today (as weak and pathetic as it is) in order for its army to save face.

They got hammered and have barely gained eight kilometres of Lebanon territory in a month of fighting. It's all too obvious that Israel wants the Litani River within the borders of the Israel territory that Olmert wants locked down by 2010.

It'll be nice for Israel to stop the rockets hitting their cities, but one of the biggest sources of fresh water in the entire Middle East is more important for the survival of Israel than destroying Hizbullah, something they simply will never be able to do by military force.

Both Hizbullah and the IDF will hopefully face international war crimes trials for the foul and disgusting way they have smashed each others' civilians as they played with their war toys.

It seems likely the war between Hizbullah and the IDF will soon dissolve, short of an extremely unlikely major strike by Iran or Syria on Iran in the coming weeks. Neither regime would be so stupid, but that doesn't mean they won't get blamed if something big goes boom over there.

We'll get back to five times a week updates in another fortnight or so, with a few more updates between now and then, outside of ramble-babble like this.