Michael Schwartz' (TomDispatch, 7/9/09) quote from a New York Times Baghdad report that "much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night" includes the reason for this secrecy having to "take place at night": "Fewer Iraqis are likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total."

To Schwartz, "acting in the dark of night, in fact, seems to catch the nature of American plans for Iraq in a particularly striking way":

Last week, despite the death of Michael Jackson, Iraq made it back into the TV news as Iraqis celebrated a highly publicized American military withdrawal from their cities....

Unfortunately, not just for the Iraqis, but for the American public, it's what's happening in "the dark"--beyond the glare of lights and TV cameras--that counts....

An anonymous senior State Department official described this new "dark of night" policy recently to Christian Science Monitor reporter Jane Arraf this way: "One of the challenges of that new relationship is how the U.S. can continue to wield influence on key decisions without being seen to do so."

Without being seen to do so.... As a result, the crucial thing you can say about the Obama administration's military and civilian planning so far is this: Ignore the headlines, the fireworks and the briefly cheering crowds of Iraqis on your TV screen. Put all that talk of withdrawal aside for a moment and--if you take a closer look, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness.

Schwartz predicts that, "as your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, you begin to identify a deepening effort to ensure that Iraq remains a U.S. client state." In fact, "what seems to be coming into focus shouldn't be too unfamiliar to students of history. Once upon a time, it used to have a name: colonialism." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Catherine Lutz on Iraq Bases" (6/13/08).

Pratap Chatterjee's new TomDispatch essay (5/31/09) explores how Dick Cheney's mercenary corporation Halliburton recently has managed to largely "Stay Out of Sight While Profiting From the War in Iraq" despite what Tom Engelhardt's introduction calls "hatfuls of charges against the company for a laundry list of alleged misdeeds":

There were no protesters outside the [annual Halliburton shareholders] meeting this year, nor the kind of national media stakeouts commonplace when [CEO David] Lesar addressed the same crew at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston in May 2004. Then, dozens of mounted police faced off against 300 protesters in the streets outside, while a San Francisco group that dubbed itself the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane fielded activists in Bush and Cheney masks, offering fake $100 bills to passersby in a mock protest against war profiteering. And don't forget the 25-foot inflatable pig there to mock shareholders. Local TV crews swarmed, a national crew from NBC flew in from New York, and reporters from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal eagerly scribbled notes.

Now the 25-foot pigs are gone and all is quiet on the western front. How did Halliburton, once branded the ugly stepchild of Dick Cheney--the company's former CEO--and a poster child of war profiteering, receive such absolution from anti-war activists and the media?

Naming "a general apathy towards the ongoing but lower-level war in Iraq" as just "part of the answer," Chatterjee urges readers to not, as U.S. media have, "ignore a potentially brilliant financial sleight of hand by Halliburton either. That move played a crucial role in the cleansing of the company." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jason Leopold on Halliburton" (9/3/04).

In his introduction (TomDispatch, 5/12/09) to Pepe Escobar analyzing the current politics of the Aghanistan/Pakistan region, Tom Engelhardt describes how "there, the skies are filled with planes and unmanned aerial drones, and civilians as well as combatants die every day in increasing numbers as ever more frequent attacks and expanding conflicts make daily headlines." But there's more to the story:

Those are, of course, the front-page stories. Energy, especially in the form of oil and natural gas, fuels everything from civilization to its various discontents and means of destruction, and yet it remains largely on the business pages of our papers. Even in a time of relatively depressed oil and gas prices, energy runs like an undercurrent just beneath global headlines. Under the carnage of war, that is, courses what Escobar likes to call the Liquid War, and just how the energy flows and through which territories controlled by whom does turn out to make--quite literally--a world of difference, even if that isn't what captures our attention most of the time.

Of "The Real Afghan War," Escobar writes in his essay: "In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question--why Afghanistan matters--is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten."

Reading Mark Lander's and Elizabeth Bumiller's New York Times "tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: 'President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive,'" Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch, 5/7/09) decides to toss some cold water on "this kind of atmosphere that naturally produces the bureaucratic equivalent of mass hysteria":

Reports indicate that Obama's national security team has been convening regular "crisis" meetings and having "nearly nonstop discussions" at the White House, not to mention issuing alarming and alarmist statements of all sorts about the devolving situation in Pakistan, the dangers to Islamabad, our fears for the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and so on. In fact, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landy of McClatchy news service quote "a senior U.S. intelligence official" (from among the legion of anonymous officials who populate our nation's capital) saying: "The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse, and no one has any idea about how to reverse it. I don't think 'panic' is too strong a word to describe the mood here."...

You know, that offensive in the Lower Dir Valley. That's near the Buner District. You remember, right next to the Swat Valley and, in case you're still not completely keyed in, geographically speaking, close to the Malakand Division. I mean, if the Pakistani government were in crisis over the deteriorating situation in Fargo, North Dakota, we would consider it material for late night jokesters.

Reminding you that "if Pakistan poses a mortal threat to you in New York, Toledo or El Paso," you'll just have to "get in line"--and "it will be a long one and you'll be toward the back"--Engelhardt sees "a certain irony" in that "we essentially know what those crisis meetings will result in. After all, the U.S. government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions--to support Pakistani military dictatorships." Even McClatchy reports on how "that, another senior official acknowledged Wednesday, 'means another coup.'"

Having covered the U.S. war on Afghanistan at his TomDispatch website from the outset, Tom Engelhardt marvels (4/23/09) at how, "almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away" of "so many lives snuffed out so regularly for more than seven years now." But at this point, "unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers." And the context of such news, when it does make those inside pages, is cookie-cutter awful:

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs--so many "insurgents," or "terrorists," or "foreign militants," or "anti-Afghan forces" killed in an airstrike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area hit insists that those dead "terrorists" or "militants" were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral.

Engelhardt writes of this automaton coverage that "it's true that we forget these killings easily--often we don't notice them in the first place--since they don't seem to impinge on our lives." But the irony right now is particularly startling to Engelhardt because "only this week, our media was filled with ceremonies and remembrances centered around the tenth anniversary of the slaughter at Columbine High School. Twelve kids and a teacher blown away in a mad rampage. Who has forgotten? On the other side of the planet, there are weekly Columbines."