Archive for February, 2007
Iraq: Troops out now!
Tony Iltis
24 February 2007
The invasion and occupation of Iraq has never been popular. With more than 650,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, having been killed since the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion, it is not surprising that three quarters of Iraqis want the US and other foreign troops out, with 61% supporting armed attacks on US troops. The war is also opposed by a majority in the West, including those countries that are involved in the US-led occupation.
On the weekend of February 14-16, 2003, a month before the invasion, millions of people took to the streets around the world. At least 1 million Australians marched.
In the US and Britain, anti-war actions have continued to draw large numbers. Half a million people marched in Washington on January 27.
In Australia, the majority of people continue to oppose the war. However, numbers at Australian rallies have declined, reflecting the small size of the Australian occupation contingent — some 550 troops in Iraq and another 900 in neighbouring countries — and consequent low number of casualties.
While only one soldier serving with the Australian forces in Iraq has died, apparently of self-inflicted injuries, more than 3000 US soldiers have been killed. However, with an ever decreasing number of countries willing to be part of the occupation, the continued Australian presence is important for the US-led occupation force to maintain the facade of being “multinational”.
The tenacious Iraqi resistance to the occupation and the domestic unpopularity of the war in the US and Australia is reflected in leading opposition politicians, such as Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barak Obama and ALP leader Kevin Rudd, projecting an anti-war stance. Both are now calling for a staged withdrawal of their country’s troops from Iraq.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced on February 21 that Britain would be withdrawing 1600 of its 7100 troops, with the possibility of all British troops being out of Iraq sometime in 2008 if they no longer “have a job to do”. Despite projecting themselves as anti-war candidates, both Obama and Rudd have put forward similar timescales and caveats.
While these developments should be welcomed by anti-war activists, it is not acceptable for troops to remain in Iraq for another year, or for their withdrawal to be dependent on their “job” being completed.
For one thing, their “job description” has been continually changed by the politicians directing the war. Initially, it was to destroy dictator Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The fact that Hussein had no such weapons meant that this job was quickly forgotten once the occupation began. Removing a dictator and installing “democracy” then became the occupiers’ “job”.
Formally, this job has already been done. The occupiers not only overthrew Hussein (who, ironically, came to power in the first place with CIA assistance) and organised the election of a new government.
While Washington’s puppet régime in Baghdad’s “Green Zone” might not be everyone’s idea of a democracy, Bush, Blair and Howard never tire of declaring that it is.
Since the December 2005 parliamentary elections, the most common justification for the continued occupation of Iraq has been that it is necessary to stop the country descending into a civil war between the different Muslim communities.
Superficially, this appears to be a genuine concern, with sectarian-motivated attacks on civilians, bombings of mosques, assassinations and kidnappings having become commonplace. However, this violence is a new feature of Iraqi society, that did not exist before the invasion.
Furthermore, despite the occupation forces predicting sectarian violence from the moment they invaded, it only really took off over the past year — after the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra.
While this bombing was blamed on “Sunni insurgents”, the fact that the mosque is a place of worship for Sunni and Shiite Muslims makes this extremely unlikely.
US officials alleged that the bombers were wearing Iraqi police commando uniforms as a disguise. There is a more likely explanation for their attire — they were members of the US-created Iraqi police commando force. Residents of the vicinity of the mosque also reported US troops sealing off the area just before the bombing.
Much of the violence that is apparently sectarian in nature has been carried out by death squads attached to the US-run interior ministry’s police commando units. Many of these units’ officers were recruited from Hussein’s security apparatus while others were drawn from the Badr Brigade, the militia of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) in Iraq, a Shiite religious party that has proved to the closest Iraqi political ally of the US.
Regardless of their origin, the police commandos have been trained by US Special Forces “advisers”, many of whom are veterans of Washington’s dirty war in El Salvador in the 1980s, in which death squads attached to the security forces were a key US tactic.
Like their predecessors in El Salvador, these death squads abduct, torture and kill anyone they suspect may be a threat to the US-backed regime. The victims may be actual resistance fighters, but are just as likely to be political activists, trade unionists, journalists or academics.
Furthermore, as in El Salvador in the 1980s, the death squads are also responsible for random killings to instill terror in the population. The puppet security forces are also responsible for apolitical criminal violence, such as kidnapping for ransom.
Terrorist-style bombings in both Sunni and Shiite neighbourhoods and on mosques serves to create a cycle of sectarian violence that divides Iraqis, weakening resistance to the occupiers.
In September 2005, the Basra police detained two undercover British SAS operatives, who were discovered trying to plant a car bomb in the middle of the city during the Karbala Festival, which draws as many as 3 million Shiite pilgrims to the southern Iraqi city. Their apparent intention was to have a car-bomb attack on pilgrims blamed on the Mahdi Army, the militia of anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr.
While Sunni communities and resistance fighters have born the brunt of the occupying forces’ aggression for the past year, US President George Bush planned “troop surge” offensive appears to be aimed at Sadr’s armed supporters. US officials have blamed Sadr for death-squad activity against Sunnis.
In fact, not only are Sadr’s supporters not connected with the interior ministry’s police commando death squads, Sadr has consistently called for cross-communal unity against the occupation. This has included fighting side by side with Sunni resistance forces in 2004 and organising protests following the Golden Dome mosque bombing calling for Sunni-Shiite unity. Sadr blamed the bombing on the occupiers and their puppet government, not “Sunni insurgents”. Members of both communities were killed when the death squads attacked these protests.
The idea that the occupation is necessary to prevent Iraq from descending into violent anarchy and sectarian civil war is a sick joke. The occupation is deliberately creating such an outcome.
Furthermore, to retain troops in neighbouring countries to train the US-controlled Iraqi security forces, an idea being promoted by Rudd, would mean continuing to train the death squads.
A complete disengagement by Western forces is needed if Iraq is to have any hope of returning to any kind of normalcy.
Another problem with Rudd and Obama’s anti-war credentials is that neither supports bringing Western troops out of Afghanistan. Indeed, the ALP has continually called for an increased Australian military presence in Afghanistan. This is despite the fact that the US-led invaders overthrew the Taliban regime to replace it with a regime dominated by warlords equally contemptuous of human rights.
These warlords have the same religious fundamentalist ideology as the Taliban, the main difference being that their constant in-fighting, along with the high-tech brutality of the occupation forces, makes the level of violence and insecurity worse than it was under the Taliban’s grim rule.
The US-led foreign occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are not the solution to the death and destruction that is wracking these countries, they are the chief cause. The real solution is to end the occupation of these countries, immediately and unconditionally.<|>
US threats to Venezuela
Noam Chomsky
21 October 2006
At an October 6 public meeting in Boston, US dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky gave the following remarks on the threat posed to the radical governments of Venezuela and Bolivia by Washington in response to an audience member’s question.
We know that the US did support a military coup, which briefly overthrew [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez [in 2002] and the US had to back down when he was restored quickly, and also had to back down in the face of a very angry reaction in Latin America. In almost all of Latin America, there was a very angry reaction. They take democracy there more seriously then we do here.
Right after trying to overthrow the government by force, the US immediately turned to subversion, supporting anti-Chavez groups. That’s described in the press, the way it’s described is, the US is supporting pro-democracy groups, which are opposed to President Chavez.
Notice it’s true by definition that if you oppose the president, you are pro-democracy. It’s completely irrelevant that according to the best polls (Latin America has very good polling agencies which take regular polls on these issues around the continent) support for democracy has been declining — not for democracy but for the democratic governments — has been declining through Latin America, for a pretty good reason: the governments have been associated with neoliberal programs which undermine democracy — IMF [International Monetary Fund], treasury department programs … There are exceptions, and the major exception by far is Venezuela.
Since 1998, when Chavez was elected, support for the elected government has been rising very fast. It’s now by far the highest in Latin America. He has won several elections that have been recognised to be free and fair, he has won numerous referendums, but he is a “dictator”, a tin-pot dictator, which is proven by the fact that our Dear Leader said so. And, since we are voluntary North Koreans, when the Dear Leader says it, it’s true. So therefore, he’s a dictator, and if you carry out subversion to overthrow him, that’s pro-democracy by definition …
We might ask ourselves how we would react if Iran, say, had just supported a military coup that overthrew the government in the United States and when they have to back off from that, immediately turned to supporting pro-democracy groups in the United States that are opposed to the government. Would we give them ice cream and candy?
Well in dictatorial Venezuela, they let them keep functioning. In fact, [they] even let the newspapers [that supported] the coup keep functioning …
[T]he US has had two major weapons for controlling Latin America for a long time. One of them is economic controls, the other is military force. They have both been used continually. Both of them are weakening and it’s a very serious problem for US planners.
The economic — for the first time in its history since the Spanish colonisation — Latin America is beginning to get its act together. It’s moving towards some degree of independence, even some degree of integration.
The Latin American countries have been very separate from one another through their histories, they have a huge gap between the very rich and the huge massive poor, so when we are talking about the countries, we are talking about the rich elites. The rich elites have been oriented towards Europe and North America, not their own citizens, not each other. So that capital flight goes to Zurich, or London, or New York — the second home is in the Riviera, the children study in Cambridge or something like that. That’s the way it’s been, with very little interaction, and it’s changing.
First of all there are major popular movements, like in Bolivia. They had a democratic election of the kind we can’t even dream of. I mean if there was any honest newspaper coverage in this country, we would be ashamed at the comparison between their election and ours.
I won’t go through it, but with a little thought you can quickly figure it out, because there is mass popular participation, and the people know what they are voting for, and they pick somebody from their own ranks and their major issues and so on. It’s unimaginable here, where elections are about at the level of marketing toothpaste on television, literally.
There are mass popular movements all over and they have begun to integrate to some extent for the first time.
The military weapon has been weakened. The last effort of the US had to back off very quickly, in 2002 in Venezuela. The kinds of governments the US is now supporting [in other Latin American countries] — forced to support — are the kinds it would have been trying to overthrow not very long ago, because of this shift.
The economic weapon is weakening enormously. They are throwing out the IMF. The IMF means the US Treasury Department. Argentina, it was the poster boy of the IMF, you know, following all the rules and so on. It went into a hideous economic crash. They managed to get out of it, but only by radically violating IMF rules, and they are now, as the president put it, “ridding themselves of the IMF” and paying off their debt with the help of Venezuela. Venezuela bought up a lot of their debt. The same is happening in Brazil. The same is going to happen in Bolivia.
In general, the economic measures are weakening, the military measures are no longer what they were. The US is deeply concerned about it, undoubtedly. We shouldn’t think that the US has abandoned the military effort. On the contrary, the number of US personnel — military personnel — in Latin America is probably as high as it’s ever been.
The number of the Latin American officers being trained by the US is going up very sharply. By now, for the first time (it never happened during the Cold War) US military aid is higher than the sum of economic and social aid from key federal agencies — that’s a shift. There are more air bases all over the place.
Keep your eyes on Ecuador, there’s an election coming up in about a week, the likely winner, [Rafael] Correa, is an interesting person. He was recently asked what he would do with the big Manta US airbase in Ecuador and his answer was, well he’d allow it to stay if the United States agreed to have an Ecuadorian airbase in Miami.
But these are the things that are going on. There’s a call for an Indian Nation for the first time. The indigenous — in some states like Bolivia — majority is actually entering the political arena for the first time in 500 years, electing its own candidates. These are major changes, but the US is certainly not giving up on it.
The military training has been shifted. Its official focus now is on what’s called radical populism and street gangs. Well, you know what radical populism means, like the priests organising peasants or anyone who gets out of line. So yeah, it’s serious. What will they do?
Governments have what are called security interests; they have to protect the national security. If any of you have ever spent any time reading declassified documents, you know what that means. I’ve spent a lot of time reading them and it’s true, there is defence of the government against its enemy, that prime enemy.
Its prime enemy is the domestic population. That’s true of every government I know. So if you read the declassified documents, you find that most of them are protecting the government from its own population. Not much has to do with anything you might call security interests … So we don’t know what they are planning because we have to be protected from knowing what the government is planning. So we have to speculate.
If you want my speculation, based on no information except what I would be doing if I was sitting in the Pentagon planning office and told to figure out a way to overthrow the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Iran, in fact. The idea that immediately comes to mind, so I assume they are working on it, is to support secessionist movements, which is conceivable if you look at the geography and the places where the oil is …
In Venezuela, the oil is in Zulia province, which is where the opposition candidate [in the presidential election] is coming from, right on the border of Colombia (one of the only states [in Latin America] where the US has a firm military presence). It’s a rich province, pretty anti-Chavez, and it happens to be where most of the oil is, and in fact there is rumour of a Zulia independence movement, which, if they can carry it off, the US could then intervene to protect against the “dictator”. That’s Venezuela.
In Bolivia, the major gas resources are in the lowlands, the eastern lowlands, which is a mostly European, not indigenous, opposed to the government, rich area, near Paraguay (one of the other countries where the US has military bases), so you can imagine the same project going on …
[Abridged from Venezuelanalysis.com. Transcribed by Michael Fox.]
From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #688 25 October 2006.
Israel seeks all clear for Iran air strike
By Con Coughlin in Tel Aviv
02/24/07 “The Telegraph” — — Israel is negotiating with the United States for permission to fly over Iraq as part of a plan to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
To conduct surgical air strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme, Israeli war planes would need to fly across Iraq. But to do so the Israeli military authorities in Tel Aviv need permission from the Pentagon.
A senior Israeli defence official said negotiations were now underway between the two countries for the US-led coalition in Iraq to provide an “air corridor” in the event of the Israeli government deciding on unilateral military action to prevent Teheran developing nuclear weapons.
“We are planning for every eventuality, and sorting out issues such as these are crucially important,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
“The only way to do this is to fly through US-controlled air space. If we don’t sort these issues out now we could have a situation where American and Israeli war planes start shooting at each other.”
As Iran continues to defy UN demands to stop producing material which could be used to build a nuclear bomb, Israel’s military establishment is moving on to a war footing, with preparations now well under way for the Jewish state to launch air strikes against Teheran if diplomatic efforts fail to resolve the crisis.
The pace of military planning in Israel has accelerated markedly since the start of this year after Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, provided a stark intelligence assessment that Iran, given the current rate of progress being made on its uranium enrichment programme, could have enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead by 2009.
Last week Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, announced that he had persuaded Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad for the past six years and one of Israel’s leading experts on Iran’s nuclear programme, to defer his retirement until at least the end of next year.
Mr Olmert has also given overall control of the military aspects of the Iran issue to Eliezer Shkedi, the head of the Israeli Air Force and a former F-16 fighter pilot.
The international community will increase the pressure on Iran when senior officials from the five permanent of the United Nations Security Council and Germany meet at an emergency summit to be held in London on Monday.
Iran ignored a UN deadline of last Wednesday to halt uranium enrichment. Officials will discuss arms controls and whether to cut back on the $25 billion-worth of export credits which are used by European companies to trade with Iran.
A high-ranking British source said: “There is a debate within the six countries on sanctions and economic measures.”
British officials insist that this “incremental” approach of tightening the pressure on Iran is starting to turn opinion within Iran. One source said: “We are on the right track. There is time for diplomacy to take effect.”
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007.
Superpower and Failed States
|
Khaleej Times, April 5, 2006 |
| The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster and the fact that the government of the world’s leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes.It is important to stress the “government,” because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree. That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that “the American ‘system’ as a whole is in real trouble — that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values (of) equality, liberty and meaningful democracy,” as Gar Alperovitz observes in America Beyond Capitalism.
The “system” is coming to have some of the features of failed states, to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe internal threats (like Haiti). The definition of “failed states” is hardly scientific. But they share some primary characteristics. They are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. They regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious “democratic deficit” that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance. One of the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and among the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror. If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of “failed states” right at home. That recognition of reality should be deeply troubling to those who care about their countries and future generations — “countries,” plural, first because of the enormous reach of U.S. power, but also because the problems are not localised in space or time, though there are important variations, of particular significance for US citizens. The “democratic deficit” was illustrated clearly by the 2004 elections. The results led to exultation in some quarters, despair in others and much concern about a “divided nation.” Colin Powell informed the Press that “President George W. Bush has won a mandate from the American people to continue pursuing his ‘aggressive’ foreign policy.’ That is far from true. It is also very far from what the population believes. After the elections, Gallup asked whether Bush “should emphasise programmes that both parties support,” or whether he “has a mandate to advance the Republican Party’s agenda,” as Powell and others claimed — and 63 per cent chose the former option; 29 per cent the latter. The elections conferred no mandate for anything, in fact, they barely took place, in any serious sense of the term “election.” History provides ample evidence of Washington’s disregard for international laws and norms, reaching new heights today. Granted, there have always been pretexts, but that is true of every state that resorts to force at will. Throughout the Cold War years, the framework of “defence against Communist aggression” was available to mobilise domestic support for countless interventions abroad. Then at last the communist-menace device began to wear thin. By 1979, “the Soviets were influencing only 6 per cent of the world population and 5 per cent of the world GNP” outside its borders, according to the Centre for Defense Information. The basic picture was becoming harder to evade. The government also faced domestic problems, notably the civilizing effects of the activism of the 1960s, which had many consequences, among them less willingness to tolerate the resort to violence. Under President Reagan, the administration sought to deal with the problems by fevered pronouncements about the “evil empire” and its tentacles everywhere about to strangle us. But new devices were needed. The Reaganites declared their worldwide campaign to destroy “the evil scourge of terrorism,” particularly state-backed international terrorism — which Reagan secretary of state George Shultz called a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself (in a) return to barbarism in the modern age.” The official list of states sponsoring terrorism, initiated in Congress in 1977, was elevated to a prominent place in policy and propaganda. In 1994, President Clinton expanded the category of “terrorist states” to include “rogue states.” A few years later another concept was added to the repertoire: “failed states,” from which we must protect ourselves, and which we must help — sometimes by devastating them. Later came President Bush’s “axis of evil” that we must destroy in self-defence, following the will of the Lord as transmitted to his humble servant — meanwhile escalating the threat of terror and nuclear proliferation. The rhetoric has always raised difficulties, however. The basic problem has been that under any reasonable interpretation of the terms — even official definitions — the categories are unacceptably broad. It takes discipline not to recognise the elements of truth in historian Arno Mayer’s immediate post-9/11 observation that since 1947, “America has been the chief perpetrator of ‘pre-emptive’ state terror” and innumerable other ‘rogue’ actions,” causing immense harm, “always in the name of democracy, liberty and justice.” After Bush took over, mainstream scholarship no longer just reported world opinion, but began to assert as fact that the US “has assumed many of the very features of the ‘rogue nations’ against which it has … done battle” (David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker, Foreign Affairs, 2004). The category of “failed state” was invoked repeatedly by the self-designated “enlightened states” in the 1990s, entitling them to resort to force with the alleged goal of protecting the populations of failed, rogue and terrorist states in a manner that may be “illegal but legitimate” — the phrase used by the Independent Kosovo Commission. As the leading themes of political discourse shifted from “humanitarian intervention” to the re-declared “war on terror” after 9/11, the concept “failed state” was given a broader scope to include states like Iraq that threaten the US with weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. Under this broader usage, “failed states” need not be weak — which makes good sense. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were hardly weak, but by reasonable standards they merit the designation “failed state” as fully as any in history. The concept gains many dimensions, including failure to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions. The concept must surely cover “outlaw states” that dismiss with contempt the rules of international order and its institutions, carefully constructed over many years, initially at U.S. initiative. The government is choosing policies that typify outlaw states, which severely endangers the population at home and abroad and undermines substantive democracy. In crucial respects, Washington’s adoption of the characteristics of failed and outlaw states is proudly proclaimed. There is scarcely any effort to conceal “the tension between a world that still wants a fair and sustainable international legal system, and a single superpower that hardly seems to care (that it) ranks with Burma, China, Iraq and North Korea in terms of its adherence to a 17th century, absolutist conception of sovereignty” for itself, while dismissing as old-fashioned tommyrot the sovereignty of others, Michael Byers observes in War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict. The US is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population, to the accompaniment of impressive rhetorical flourishes about its exceptional dedication to the highest values. That is practically a historical universal, and the reason why sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, or accolades by their followers. One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like them.” Here are a few simple suggestions for the US: 1. Accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2. Sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3. Let the UN take the lead in international crises; 4. Rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting the grave threats of terror; 5. Keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter: The use of force is legitimate only when ordered by the Security Council or when the country is under imminent threat of attack, in accord with Article 51; 6. Give up the Security Council veto, and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree; 7. Cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending: health, education, renewable energy and so on. For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: They appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy; in most cases, to a bipartisan consensus. Another conservative and useful suggestion is that facts, logic and elementary moral principles should matter. Those who take the trouble to adhere to that suggestion will soon be led to abandon a good part of familiar doctrine, though it is surely much easier to repeat self-serving mantras. And there are other simple truths. They do not answer every problem by any means. But they do carry us some distance toward developing more specific and detailed answers, as is constantly done. More important, they open the way to implement them, opportunities that are readily within our grasp if we can free ourselves from the shackles of doctrine and imposed illusion. Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to seek to induce pessimism, hopelessness and despair, reality is different. There has been substantial progress in the unending question for justice and freedom in recent years, leaving a legacy that can easily be carried forward from a higher plane than before. Opportunities for education and organising abound. As in the past, rights are not likely to be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions — attending a few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalised quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as “democratic politics.” As always in the past, the tasks require dedicated day-by-day engagement to create — in part re-create — the basis for a functioning democratic culture. There are many ways to promote democracy at home, carrying it to new dimensions. Opportunities are ample, and failure to grasp them is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world and for future generations. — Excerpts from Failed States by Noam Chomsky 2006 by Harry Chomsky, reprinted by permission of Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co., LLC. |
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