Author: R J Adams

“Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.” ~ William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

Those readers who remember Sparrow Chat when it was with “Blogger” may recollect a number of articles written two or three years ago, suggesting that Tony Blair would one day be rewarded by George Bush for his faithfulness in dragging Britain into the Iraq quagmire alongside the US. The offer from Bush of a plum job would save poor Tony dragging himself to the Unemployment Office every week to collect his benefits, when the role of British Prime Minister passed into other hands.

At the time, UN Secretary-General seemed a possibility, but that office has now been filled. But, what better position for Mister Blair than the one offered to him this week by the American president – a position with the grand title of “Middle East Special Envoy”.

It’s ideal for Tony Blair, though sadly not for the residents of the Middle East, given that Blair has spent almost his whole period in office bragging of his determination to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and bring peace to the region.

Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Blair’s greatest asset is his mouth. In fact, it is his only resource. Ten years on, Blair has had ample opportunity to “put his money where his mouth is”, but the conflict over a Palestinian state remains unresolved and has, in fact, deteriorated drastically since 1997, when Arafat was under increasing pressure from the West and Israel to toe the line and cave in to a “peace process” that would have left the Palestinians with virtually nothing.

Today, the West and Israel have succeeded in splitting the Palestinian factions into warring tribes by backing the weak and corrupt Fatah against the democratically elected Hamas. Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas has recently disbanded the Hamas government and appointed Salam Fayyad as prime minister – a man who won only 2% of the votes in the same election that swept Hamas to victory. Of course, he’s supported by the West and Israel, so it seems irrelevant that his own people have no faith in him whatever.

That the present chaos has been engineered, is without doubt. The government of Hamas, chosen by the Palestinians in free and fair elections, should have received the backing of the West, if not Israel, given George Bush’s crusade to “spread democracy”. Unfortunately, the “democracy” of George W Bush is not true democracy, but American power, and Hamas would be no party to that. Hamas had to go, and the easiest and quickest way was to starve them out. The US, Israel, and the EU conspired to bring down the Hamas government. They had a willing partner in Mahmoud Abbas, who in another era would have been branded a quisling. Abbas and his cronies, like Bush and his, are happy to sell their people down the river just so long as they can cling onto the reins of power.

The plan, it would seem, is a simple one. The weaker and more compliant the Palestinian Authority, the greater the control of Israel. Olmert and Bush need puppets in the Middle East; Abbas and Blair will nicely fit the role.

The overall plot is to subdue the Middle East once and for all. It was this that took the US into Iraq. Eventual subjugation of that country, should it ever happen, would place Iran and Syria in an untenable position, surrounded by US military bases on every side. Iran’s Ahmadinejad is fully aware of the threat, hence the push for nuclear weapons. With only conventional weaponry, Iran has no chance against the mighty forces of the United States, but an atomic bomb would be a certain deterrent.

Preventing Iran achieving that objective is high on the West’s list of priorities. Cheney, the US vice president, is known to be in favor of a military strike. American public opinion is presently making that difficult. It had been expected that Iraq would by now be a US satellite, compliant to American demands. That hasn’t happened, which has set back the neo-con plans and created the need for Bush’s “surge”, an attempt to apply enough military pressure to crush the opposition once and for all. So far, it hasn’t worked.

Will it ever succeed? Unlikely. The original plan, when first conceived by those behind the Project for the New American Century, suffered from a gaping flaw. No-one took account of the Arab mentality. Americans are a mix of many races and cultures, but their nation is barely three hundred years old, and still suffering from an overabundance of patriotism, and homage to dead “heroes”. To understand the Arab, America has to be around another two or three thousand years, for that’s how long the Arab has been fighting for his lands and his existence against almost every conceivable adversary on the face of the planet. Unlike the American, as T.E. Lawrence noted, “death is no grief to the Arab” and his only patriotism is to himself.

Tony Blair will make the perfect mouthpiece for George W Bush and his US backers as their “Special Envoy”, but he will make not one iota of difference to the outcome of this latest conflagration to hit these ancient lands. America believes it has only to use all of its brutish force for no man to stand against it.

It was just such simplistic ideology that eventually doomed the German Third Reich.

Filed under: Power struggles

Any fleeting thought that, somehow, America could have changed in the ten days I was away, was laid to rest by the first news broadcast viewed after my return. Two items stood out as typical of this nation’s inanity; of it’s apparent desire to prove to the rest of the world just how utterly crazy and immature America can be, and how such crassness impacts its innocent citizens. For it is not, generally, ordinary Americans who lack responsibility (though their strangely somnolent disinterest in the workings of those they elect could be considered lax) but the officials one might expect to display a modicum of humanity and commonsense, namely the local state legislators and those holding official, governmental positions.

Take the case of Elisa Kelly from Charlottesville, Virginia, who is just beginning a two and a quarter year sentence in the county jail. She’s one of the lucky ones. After a lengthy appeals process her sentence was cut from the EIGHT YEARS originally imposed.

Elisa Kelly’s crime was to serve beer in her own home, to the sixteen year old guests at her son’s birthday party.

Was she foolish?

Probably.

Is she a criminal?

No.

Does she deserve to be incarcerated for one day, let alone twenty-seven months?

Not in a million years.

The goody-goody, prim and proper, moralistic, hypocritical, inhumane officials of Charlottesville, Virginia, are a bunch of pompous, dim-witted ass-holes more deserving of jail-time than Elisa Kelly.

Much could be written on this matter, but it already has been and by a far more accomplished writer than yours truly. The BBC’s Matt Frei has an article about Elisa Kelly on the BBC website, for all the world to read – and judge American justice. I recommend it as an eye-opener to the narrow-mindedness and duplicity of those responsible for Virginia’s state laws.

The Matt Frei article is available HERE.

Hot on the heels of this report about Virginian barbarity, came the incident of a furniture warehouse fire in Charleston, South Carolina. Nothing unusual, one might think, except that nine, yes NINE, firefighters lost their lives fighting this fire that was described as a “tornado of flame thirty-feet high”.

A sad story and one the media masticated and digested for all it was worth. “Hero” was the most over-used word of the day.

The most under-used phrase of the day was “sprinkler system”.

It takes little imagination to visualize the effects of fire on a furniture superstore stuffed to the gills with sofas, wooden tables, beds, mattresses and a plethora of flammable materials. Yet, according to a quick one-liner from NBC’s reporter on the story, stuffed between emotional “Hero” language and views of sobbing fire chiefs:

“No sprinkler installed, or required.”

Excuse me? Wind back the Tivo so we can hear that again! Yes, that WAS what he said before rapidly rebounding to wring the last emotional drips from the story.

“No sprinkler installed, or required.”

And it seems NO-ONE has questioned that. Nine firefighters died because legislators decided a potential firebomb was not required to have a sprinkler system. Nine firefighters died because – just as in Charlottesville, Virginia – Charleston, South Carolina’s legislators are a bunch of useless, corrupt, hypocrites. The mayor of Charleston called the incident:

“A tragedy of immense proportions”.

Presumably, as mayor, he takes no responsibility for this “tragedy of immense proportions”?

Surely, as mayor, he has a responsibility – along with the fire chiefs and other legislators – to ensure the town has adequate fire prevention laws, forcing every store carrying flammable stock to fit sprinkler systems?

Obviously, Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston, South Carolina, doesn’t believe that to be the case.

If there was one scrap of justice in this god-forsaken apology for a nation, Elisa Kelly would be vacating her prison cell today, allowing Mayor Joseph Riley and his band of renegade legislators to move in, and for a lot longer than twenty-seven months.

More on this story HERE.

Filed under: Who are these people?

In keeping with their policy of always putting the customer last, United Airways and O’Hare Airport Chicago lived up to their reputations and canceled my flight, after keeping me waiting a further two hours in the vain hope it would eventually leave.

I finally managed to jump a late flight to another airport fifty miles from home and eventually made it through my front door in the early hours of Tuesday morning, some twenty hours after leaving Manchester.

It took just eight hours to cross 4,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean and reach O’Hare, but a further twelve hours to travel less than two hundred miles to my home. I can only offer a heartfelt “Thank-you” to both the airport and the airline for once again proving that my opinion of them is one hundred percent accurate.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one affected. Hundreds of commuters suffered a similar fate. Some had no choice but to wait till the next day for a flight out. United Airways offers no recompense for their ineptitude, blaming the cancellations – as they always do – on “the weather”. Few bothered to complain. Most just appeared rather embarrassed that it was American companies turning their lives upside down. After all, had they been in an uncivilized land, like India or even Mexico, such inefficiencies could be expected. Better not make a fuss. It would be so un-American.

Thankfully, I’m British, and much less tolerant when I find myself treated as a piece of dung, or a cow herded to the local abattoir, whether in my own country or elsewhere. Consequently, I complained, and complained, and kept on complaining until eventually it paid off and they found me a flight. I shouldered my carry-on and picked my way through the mass of sleep-deprived Americans, still with that faintly embarrassed smile on their lips while desperately trying to get comfortable for the long night ahead of them.

It may come as a surprise to those from other nations – well-used to US tourists complaining bitterly about the service in their hotel, the lack of air conditioning in their 68 degree rooms, or any number of petty inconveniences most of us would expect when hosted by another culture – but on their home turf the majority of Americans become shy and retiring when faced with the sort of inconvenience heaped on airline passengers as a regular occurrence whenever the names “United Airways” and “O’Hare Airport” are joined in matrimony.

The reason is, I believe, a simple one. It would be construed as unpatriotic to complain about anything American. To many US citizens, the hassles and inconveniences they suffer daily at the hands of shrewd corporates, determined to wring the last cent from them in return for the worst possible service, are minor burdens compared to what they are led to believe is the case in other countries. They have been bred and indoctrinated throughout their lives to accept their nation as the “Best in the World”. Any inconvenience incurred would surely be much, much worse were they in Europe, or Asia, or anywhere other than the “Great America”, wouldn’t it?

For those Americans still clinging to such beliefs, I have only one thing to say:

“Wake up! Open your eyes to what is going on around you and stop playing lame duck to the corporates that are fleecing you. You have a right to complain, complain, and go on complaining until you get satisfaction.”

Believe me, America, the problems you experience are definitely not due to “the WEATHER”.

NOTE: While this article generalizes, the author is well aware that a certain, small, proportion of the American people do not fit the general mold, as described here. It is the author’s contention, however, that his description is accurate for around 80% of the US population.

Filed under: Excuses