Check out this piece by academic Michael Schwartz in Asia Times Online for a so-ironic-it-hurts analysis of the ways that America’s recent adventures in Iraq have benefited its old enemy, Iran. Schwartz gives us a succinct rundown of the various political factions in post-war Iraq and explains how many of the key players are fans of — or avidly working with — Tehran’s authoritarian government. (It’s a point that Middle East scholar Juan Cole has also made repeatedly: The real victor of the Iraq War? Iran.)

Back when the Bush administration was trying to sell its invasion of Iraq, the war cry among the more rabid hawks was “first Iraq, then Iran.” (As one administration official put it: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”) Then the insurgency rapidly sapped the strength of the military and the will of the public for more war. Things have gone swimmingly for Iran ever since, Schwartz says. Iranian-backed candidates have won office in the new republic, Iraqi businessmen have built up a bustling cross-border trade, and the grateful Iraqis have, in return, promised not to allow their country to be used as a staging ground for (U.S.) attacks on Iran.

Schwartz also sorts out some of the curious connections between Iraq, Iran, and — of all American bugbears — China. Ousting Saddam, he argues, inadvertently brought oil-hungry China (a former customer of Saddam’s) into the arms of the ayatollah. Since then, China has shown itself ready to block any American moves against Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the United Nations. It has also helped Iran establish ties with other countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — an alliance of central Asian nations, Russia among them, which have increasingly spoken out against U.S. military intervention in the Middle East (as seen most dramatically last month when one of those allies, Uzbekistan, gave the U.S. military six months to leave the Karshi-Khanabad air base, which has been used for staging operations in Afghanistan).

Now that Iran seems intent on building a nuclear power plant (and maybe a bomb or two), the hard-liners in power should thank the Bush administration for giving them all the political cover they could have asked for. With enemies like the United States, who needs friends?

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, has a piece in The Boston Globe blasting the idea — peddled by President Bush last week — that “intelligent design” should be taught alongside evolution in America’s classrooms. Not all political conservatives, she notes, are willing to “make science classrooms a platform for pseudoscience whose sole intent is to counter ‘godless’ natural selection.” Take, for example, columnist Charles Krauthammer or blogger Glenn Reynolds — or even the White House’s own science czar, John H. Marburger III (director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy), who stated earlier this year that “intelligent design is not a scientific theory.”

It’s puzzling why certain religious groups find the theory of evolution so threatening. Yes, it doesn’t bode too well for the sanctity of your convictions if you believe every word in an ancient book to be literally true. But even if you recognize the validity of evolution, there is still plenty of space for thinking what you want about the existence, or non-existence, of God. As Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, points out, the idea behind “intelligent design” — that a higher power had a hand in the development of species on earth — is “not even a scientifically answerable question.”

The theory of evolution doesn’t deny the existence of God. In fact, we expect too much of science if we insist that it can disprove, or prove, the presence of the sacred. So why bother at all with teaching pseudoscience? Let’s teach what we actually know — and let kids decide for themselves if they see God in evolution, or just the ordinary magic of the cosmos.

On this point, it seems, many conservatives and liberals would agree.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

“… For the moment at least, your guilt is taken as proven.”

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “It’s a mistake. How can a person be guilty at all? Surely we are all human beings here, one like the other.”

“That is right,” said the priest, “but that is the way the guilty are wont to talk.”

—Franz Kafka, The Trial

You may have already heard that two senior prosecutors in the Guantánamo war crimes trials requested transfers after they complained that the process was “rigged” and pursuing convictions of low-level defendants. Now it turns out that a third military prosecutor shared their concerns and also asked to be redeployed. Captain Carrie Wolf left the Office of Military Commissions last year because of similar concerns about the unfairness of the trials, according to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday. (David Hicks, an Australian captured in Afghanistan, is one of the four men at Guantánamo being tried for war crimes, and the Australian media is following the case closely.)

Emails from Major Robert Preston, a highly decorated judge advocate, and Captain John Carr, now a major working on the legal staff of General John Abizaid, show that the two did not consider the proceedings against the Guantánamo four to be fair or worthy of the extraordinary measures being taken. “I lie awake worrying about this every night … After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don’t really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you call yourself an officer and lawyer,” Preston wrote in an email to a senior officer in the prosecutor’s office. Pressing ahead with such “marginal” cases would amount to “a fraud on the American people,” he said. (For more excerpts from the emails, click here.)

In the second email, Carr reminded Colonel Frederick L. Borch that the chief prosecutor himself had guaranteed convictions. “You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only need to worry about building a record for the review panel,” he wrote. Carr also complained of withheld and missing evidence that could be of use to the defense.

Borsch responded to the discontented prosecutors in an email that affirmed his great respect and admiration for them — then called their charges “monstrous lies.” (Well, as they say when grading papers, always start out with a positive.) A two-month military investigation found no evidence of criminal misconduct, ethical violations, or “tampered with, falsified or hidden” evidence.

It may just be me, but I find it a little worrisome when the prosecution starts complaining about having it too easy. I’m also skeptical any time that a branch of government decides to investigate itself — and, shockingly, finds no wrongdoing. (Anyone heard of Watergate?) Our friends overseas aren’t so easily persuaded of the U.S. government’s good intentions, either. “What farce,” says Michael Costello of The Australian. “As if [the Defense Department’s inspector general] could come to any other conclusion. If this is the standard we are to apply, we should ask Hicks to investigate the allegations against himself. He will no doubt say they were all the result of a misunderstanding and declare himself innocent.”

It seems like a no-brainer: If the U.S. government wants to preserve its credibility overseas — much less uphold justice, the American Way, and all that jazz — shouldn’t it give full and fair trials to those it detains/imprisons/involuntarily vacations in sunny Guantánamo? If the cases against these men are so ironclad, why the fear of fairness? As things are going now, the government seems like it’s headed straight for the secretive, bureaucratic lunacy of The Trial, Franz Kafka’s novel of a legal system run amok. There, too, you have prosecutors with no serious counterweight, evidence out of the reach of defendants, and panels of judges convinced of the defendant’s guilt before the proceedings have even begun. Not to mention defendants waiting in uncertainty for months or years, not knowing when they will be tried or even what crimes they are charged with — on that score, the Guantánamo four are to be envied.

In the bubble of these secretive, one-sided military tribunals, I worry that the well-intentioned men and women pursuing justice will find themselves digging a grave for it. This passage from The Trial is worth pondering:

At this point the disadvantage of a judiciary system which, from the very beginning, sanctioned secrecy made itself felt. The officials were out of touch with the public, they were well enough equipped to deal with the ordinary run-of-the-mill type of case, for this kind of case would proceed almost under its own momentum and only needed an occasional push. But when faced with quite simple cases or especially difficult ones, they were often at a total loss, because they were continuously, day and night, hamstrung by their legal system and lacked a proper feeling for human relations. And in such cases that feeling was all but indispensable.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

If you happen to be one of those doe-eyed, trusting readers who thought there was no need for alternative media (but why would you be, if you’re reading such a cutting-edge, avant-garde magazine like ITF?) you ought to pay attention to the juicy details coming out of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigation into the “pay-for-play” shenanigans that are rife in Radioland. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, emails unearthed from the inboxes of Sony BMG Music Entertainment execs reveal that the record company shelled out airplane tickets, vacation packages, TV sets, DVD players, laptop computers, cash — even, God fordbid, blackjack games with Celine Dion — to radio station managers who spun the “right” songs.

Willing to play J-Lo’s “This Is Me … Then” until your listeners’ eardrums bleed? Help yourself to a 32-inch plasma TV. Wouldn’t mind spinning Celine Dion’s “I Drove All Night” a couple thousand times a day? Enjoy the travel package to Vegas. (But first, sign right here with your fictitious name and fictitious Social Security number for our fictitious listener contest.)

One station manager boiled it down in an email: “I’m a whore this week. What can I say?”

The folks at a mammoth record company like Sony BMG were not averse to begging and whining like a bunch of teenage groupies to get their songs on the radio. “What do I have to do to get Audioslave on WKSS this week?!!?” wrote one employee who was trying to hawk Audioslave “Like a Stone” to a Clear Channel station in 2003. “Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen!!!” (Which makes you wonder: How many exclamation points do you need to sell a Britney Spears song?)

But the most bizarre email has to be the one sent by an Epic promotions employee to the person in charge of the record label’s call-in campaign. What, you may ask, is a “call-in campaign”? It seems that Epic would make its interns bombard radio stations with calls, posing as listeners and requesting their favorite songs — which happened to be the ones that the label was trying to promote. “You need to rotate your people,” the promoter complained to the intern wrangler. “My guys on the inside say that it’s the same couple of girls calling in every week and that they are not inspired enough to be put on the air. They’ve got to be excited. They need to be going out, or getting drunk, or going in the hot [tub], or going clubbing … You get the idea.”

It takes two to play, of course. If the record companies were giving out bribes, it seems that some radio stations were more than happy to take — and then some. In some of the emails released this week, senior staff members at Sony BMG’s Columbia Records expressed their fears that Clear Channel, the country’s largest radio station conglomerate, would boycott their label’s songs unless they ponied up more cash and gifts.

With the secret now out, will the music industry clean up its act? Judging from the amount of damage they’re taking so far, I wouldn’t hold my breath. (In response to the allegations, Sony BMG has sacked an executive at one of its labels and paid a $10 million settlement, an amount roughly equivalent to Gwen Stefani’s weekly dry cleaning bill.) That said, Spitzer’s office is now sniffing into the inboxes of the country’s other mega-sized radio and record companies, and perhaps more heads will roll. In the meantime, I think I’ll stick to free streaming audio. Try WFUV.org or Novaplanet.com — the former is listener-supported public radio, the latter is French but plays mostly American tunes (added benefit: you won’t understand the ads).

Now I’ll go enjoy the plasma TV I got for telling you that.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen