[from the London Tribune]

 

 

Letter from Woodstock,

 

                                               Sleepless Summer Nights

Woodstock, New York

                                                                                                            August 29^th, 2003.

 

           

Unlike most Americans on this Labour Day weekend, President Bush is returning from a month long holiday on his ranch in Crawford Texas – which was uninterrupted by little except a few fund raising events that added fresh millions to a campaign war chest that already exceeded $ 200 million. Meanwhile the rest of us made do with a week off if were lucky or the odd weekend away if we’re not – which is all too often the case. In today’s workplace, “vacation days” have been replaced by “personal leave days” and it’s a rare job in the US where one can accumulate more than ten per year.  So these days when one hears the phrase “I’m taking a break from work,” it’s more often than not a discreet announcement that one’s newly unemployed instead of off to the Caribbean.

Beyond the concern about job losses and the mountain of debt that most American families now carry, we’ve had lots of reasons to “sweat it” this summer. For instance, there was the power blackout that turned off the lights and air conditioning in the Big Apple and across much of the East for several days in mid August. The second major failure of our “Third World power grid” in a quarter century, it cut power to 50 million consumers in the US and Canada, and cost several billions in business losses. It also left tens of thousands of tourists sleeping out in Manhattan’s streets and parks because their hotel door cards didn’t work and the trains and airports were shut down.

So for a weekend at least, New Yorkers got to join the residents of Baghdad in sleeping on their apartment rooftops in an effort to escape the sweltering heat. Unlike Baghdad however, where the power was cut thanks to a well-placed bomb, New York’s power loss was due to the fact that our transmission grid had become the ”economic orphan” of privately owned power companies. Over the past decade the 10 billion dollars needed for its modernization went missing - summoned to more lucrative ports of call. In New York and California we call this kind of capitalist sabotage “market deregulation” to distinguish it from the violent terrorism the Iraqis are subjected too. 

But when the lights went out in Manhattan, Baghdad’s agony wasn’t very far from our minds. Many experienced the thrill that came from the thought that our plunge into darkness was due to some act of foreign terrorism.  Trapped in an elevator or in a subway tunnel lit only by our dying cell phones, it was little comfort to finally learn that we had been trapped by a “market failure” instead.  In the US with its frayed public infrastructure, the uncertainty that “market failures” breed are becoming the norm along with terror alerts. In short, this August brought us many sleepless nights.  

Down in Crawford our President has had reasons of his own for sleepless nights.  This month brought tales of disaster in Iraq that made his bold claim of “Mission Accomplished” seem hollow.  And somehow the media splash around the military style execution of Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, and his fourteen-year-old grandson with two shots to the head each, couldn’t quite drown out the drumbeat of terrible news.

Beginning with strikes against water, power facilities and the Iraq pipelines, Baathist guerrillas carried off massive attacks against the Jordanian Embassy and the UN Headquarters in Baghdad itself.  These added hundreds of dead to the toll of Iraqi civilians that now numbers close to 7,000 since March. They also killed several key players of the UN reconstruction effort beginning with the mission chief, Sergio Vierira de Mello and wounded many members of his staff. Less noticed but just as important were the attacks carried out against foreign NGOs and their personnel that have prompted their evacuation. And this last week saw the car-bomb assassination of the Shia leader, Ayatollah Muhammad Bukral-Hakim that spread the mass killing to the Shiite area around Najaf and increased the chances of sectarian civil war.

American occupied Iraq has become a magnet for violence that draws Jihadi fighters from across the Muslim world – such as the 3000 Saudis who crossed over into Iraq in the past two months. The Al-Queda/Saddam alliance that was only a fiction when we launched our joint invasion has now become a terrible reality that puts the reconstruction of Iraq in doubt. The only Arab state where Islamists terrorists didn’t operate was Baathist Iraq. Now it has emerged as a major theatre for their campaign against the West and all our frat boy President has to say to us is: “No retreat ! Bring‘em on!” But unfortunately the number of American and British servicemen and women killed since the end of “major combat operations” in May now exceeds our losses in the war itself.  No wonder then that Mr. Bush’s poll numbers have gone soft, and that the White House strategy of re-electing him as our “war president” has just suffered a major setback.