Needlenose

Via All Hat No Cattle:

Original caption: Members of an unknown Amazon Basin tribe and their dwellings are seen during a flight over the Brazilian state of Acre.

ABC News reports from Iraq this afternoon:

Thousands of Iraqis filled the streets of Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood this afternoon to demonstrate against a long-term United States presence in Iraq, the first significant anti-American rally in the massive Shiite slum in more than two years.

As American helicopters hovered overhead, young and old men and even children flowed out of their weekly Friday prayers and began burning American flags and chanting “no, no to America” and “yes, yes to independence.”

The residents carried posters of Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army has fought against U.S. soldiers and who is accused of carrying out much of the violence here. Two days ago Sadr called on supporters to rally against an agreement currently under discussion that could allow the U.S. to build permanent bases in Iraq and grant American citizens in Iraq immunity from prosecution.

. . . Sheikh Mohannad Al-Gazawi, the imam who led Friday prayers during 105-degree heat, told attendees that the agreement “aims at paving the way for a 99-year period of American control of Iraq.”

. . . The protestors carried signs that called the long-term agreement “worse than the occupation itself” and a “war declaration against the Iraqi people.”

. . . “The reasons for the peaceful demonstration were not made obvious,” the U.S. military said in a statement.

Which goes to show that denial isn’t just a river in Egypt — it flows through the Green Zone in Baghdad as well. But it’s not just Sadr and his supporters who are unhappy, as the New York Times notes in a story on their website:

Aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, have also expressed concerns about the negotiations . . . [and] some other Iraqi lawmakers are raising questions about the timing of the deal.

One American official in Baghdad said that the Iraqis appeared to be unwilling to make any concessions before the country’s provincial elections later this year to avoid seeming, to Iraqi voters, — to be too accommodating to the occupying forces. “They are playing hardball right now,” the official said.

The recalcitrant Iraqi politicians include some of our erstwhile closest allies:

Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker, said many Iraqi leaders were being kept in the dark about the security pact, which he thinks should not be completed until after the American presidential elections in November.

. . . Even one of the prime minister’s closest allies, Ali Adeeb, a senior member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party, expressed similar reservations.

“This agreement is between Iraq and the United States president, and the American policy is not clear,” Mr. Adeeb said. “Therefore, we can wait until the American elections to deal with a Democratic or Republican president.”

Get the feeling that maybe they’d prefer to deal with someone sane Barack Obama rather than another Republican president reading from the neocon playbook?

The Washington Post noted this morning that “the war in Iraq has moved back to center stage in the presidential election,” but that “the war is more a wild card than a slam dunk for either side.” That’s even more true if you consider what more Iraqis might do to make their preferences known between now and November.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

News stories about new, unexpected inputs of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as a result of global warming that will lead to more global warming are sadly coming more frequently. In this case, science has had another ‘golly gee’ moment over a study that indicates that there are massive methane deposits trapped beneath the (rapidly melting) polar ice sheets that could be rapidly released into the atmosphere and trigger catastrophic climate change. It seems to have done that earlier in Earth’s history:

An abrupt release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from ice sheets that extended to Earth’s low latitudes some 635 million years ago caused a dramatic shift in climate, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) report in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

What’s going on in this picture?

Since the run-up to the attack on Iraq in ’03, numerous liberal wags have been depicting Shrubya as a lil’ Napoleon. But if you think about it, Napoleon was actually pretty successful, for a time. And wasn’t he really smart? Focused on improving the lot of his countrymen whilst building up his empire?

An historic figure more analogous to President Arbusto is King Philip II of Spain – you know, the guy who launched the massive Armada (30,000 men on 130 warships) against England in a sort of quasi holy war – and got his ass kicked ( about 1/2 the ships destroyed and 2/3rds of the men killed).

In The Voyage of the Armada, David Howarth paints a pretty unflattering description of Shrubya’s soul-mate. King Philip was extremely slow to learn, either from his own experience, or from the much more brilliant men in court. The mixture of mediocrity and power made him immovably self-righteous and obstinate.” Sound familiar?

Philip “loved his children” and “at least one of his wives” but “outside of this little circle he was seldom moved to pity.” Shrubya seems equally devoted to both his spawn and Laura, but if you recall his time as Governor of Texas, he was a man that could execute felons (guilty or otherwise) with impunity.

Even their conception of the Almighty seems similar:

The God that Philip served was all-powerful, all-knowing and unforgiving. He could and did take part by miracles in men’s affairs…He demanded worship absolutely exactly in the forms the Catholic Church proclaimed and not in any other. He also demanded the most cruel and terrible punishments men could devise for anyone who deviated in the least degree.

Shrubya also seems to follow Philip’s economic policies:

Also (the Empire) was bankrupt…Philip had mortgaged all the empire’s revenues for years ahead, mainly to foreign bankers…Trite though it might seem, the designs of God cost an awful lot of money.

Howarth could easy be talking about Shrubya when he sums up Philip’s character:

Reading Philip’s letters in the twentieth century and judging him by twentieth century standards…one has to say he was bigoted, dogmatic, self-righteous, illogical, ruthless and hopelessly confused; but also, he was appallingly sincere.

The causus belli for the Armada invasion seems as confused as that for the invasion of Iraq. It morphed variously from restoring the Catholic faith to an England ruled by Protestant heretics to guaranteeing the rights of Catholics to practice their faith freely, to putting Philip or one of his kids on the English throne.

One eery parallel to the run-up to both wars is the use of both misLeaders on wacky spy masters who used disreputable and biased expatriate sources (English Catholics who were exiled or had to flee from England after being suspected of treason) to build his case for the war and for the reception the Spaniards would receive on the part of the grateful English:

Perhaps no monarch about to launch a war was ever so mistaken about his enemies. Philip was led to believe the Protestants of England were a small minority of oppressors; that the majority were Catholics who would gladly rise in revolt when they sighted his armada; and finally, the most tragic misapprehension of all, that England would welcome him as king or his daughter as queen.

Kinda reminds you of Swopa’s old favorite Iraqi subject, Chalabi, huh?

Another odd parallel is the use of deceitful, no-bid contracts. Some time after setting off, the leader of the Armada discovered that “their huge supplies of food were going rotten” and that the water barrels were “green and slimy and undrinkable” – most likely due to either shoddy workmanship or out-right swindling on the part of the suppliers. Worse, in the decisive sea battle off Calais, the English cannon turned the Spanish ships into swiss cheese, but the English ships emerged virtuously unscathed. No, it wasn’t a miracle – a modern study of the cannonballs used by the Spanish reveals substandard craftsmanship resulting in a “very brittle” shot that “broke into small bits either at the shock of firing or the shock of impact on an enemy hull.” I wonder who was the Halliburton of 1588?

Perhaps the most amazing similarity about Philip and Shrubya is their shared inability to admit to failure, and unwillingness to change policies in defiance of reality. In Philip’s case, you might think that the loss of half his fleet and the deaths of 20,000 men, especially in the face of not a loss of a single English vessel and minimal English casualties might convince him that sending an Armada against England was a really bad idea. But you’d be wrong:

…he dispatched three more (armadas) before he died in 1598. The first of them, for an invasion of Ireland, sailed at his insistence and against the advice of his admirals at the worst possible time of year, November 1596. It was wrecked by a storm before it left Spanish waters. The next, in 1597, was to land Spanish troops at Falmouth and occupy Cornwall. It came nearest of all to success, but was beaten back by a northerly gale a few miles short of its landing.

Afghanistan…Iraq…Iran? Two peas in a pod…