SolidarityEconomy.net » Anti-War Movement

Libya: It’s More to It Than Following the Money, It’s About Grabbing It

Editors — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:53:28 +0000

Financial Heist of the Century:

Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds

By Manlio Dinucci

Solidarity Economy.net via Il Manifesto

April 22, 2011 - The objective of the war against Libya is not just its oil reserves (now estimated at 60 billion barrels), which are the greatest in Africa and whose extraction costs are among the lowest in the world, nor the natural gas reserves of which are estimated at about 1,500 billion cubic meters.

In the crosshairs of "willing" of the operation “Unified Protector” there are sovereign wealth funds, capital that the Libyan state has invested abroad.

The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) manages sovereign wealth funds estimated at about $70 billion U.S., rising to more than $150 billion if you include foreign investments of the Central Bank and other bodies. But it might be more. Even if they are lower than those of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, Libyan sovereign wealth funds have been characterized by their rapid growth. When LIA was established in 2006, it had $40 billion at its disposal. In just five years, LIA has invested over one hundred companies in North Africa, Asia, Europe, the U.S. and South America: holding, banking, real estate, industries, oil companies and others.

In Italy, the main Libyan investments are those in UniCredit Bank (of which LIA and the Libyan Central Bank hold 7.5 percent), Finmeccanica (2 percent) and ENI (1 percent), these and other investments (including 7.5 percent of the Juventus Football Club) have a significance not as much economically (they amount to some $5.4 billion) as politically.

Libya, after Washington removed it from the blacklist of “rogue states,” has sought to carve out a space at the international level focusing on "diplomacy of sovereign wealth funds." Once the U.S. and the EU lifted the embargo in 2004 and the big oil companies returned to the country, Tripoli was able to maintain a trade surplus of about $30 billion per year which was used largely to make foreign investments. The management of sovereign funds has however created a new mechanism of power and corruption in the hands of ministers and senior officials, which probably in part escaped the control of the Gadhafi himself: This is confirmed by the fact that, in 2009, he proposed that the 30 billion in oil revenues go "directly to the Libyan people." This aggravated the fractures within the Libyan government.

U.S. and European ruling circles focused on these funds, so that before carrying out a military attack on Libya to get their hands on its energy wealth, they took over the Libyan sovereign wealth funds. Facilitating this operation is the representative of the Libyan Investment Authority, Mohamed Layas himself: as revealed in a cable published by WikiLeaks. On January 20 Layas informed the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli that LIA had deposited $32 billion in U.S. banks. Five weeks later, on February 28, the U.S. Treasury “froze” these accounts. According to official statements, this is "the largest sum ever blocked in the United States," which Washington held "in trust for the future of Libya." It will in fact serve as an injection of capital into the U.S. economy, which is more and more in debt. A few days later, the EU "froze" around 45 billion Euros of Libyan funds.

The assault on the Libyan sovereign wealth funds will have a particularly strong impact in Africa. There, the Libyan Arab African Investment Company had invested in over 25 countries, 22 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and was planning to increase the investments over the next five years, especially in mining, manufacturing, tourism and telecommunications. The Libyan investments have been crucial in the implementation of the first telecommunications satellite Rascom (Regional African Satellite Communications Organization), which entered into orbit in August 2010, allowing African countries to begin to become independent from the U.S. and European satellite networks, with an annual savings of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even more important were the Libyan investment in the implementation of three financial institutions launched by the African Union: the African Investment Bank, based in Tripoli, the African Monetary Fund, based in Yaoundé (Cameroon), the African Central Bank, with Based in Abuja (Nigeria). The development of these bodies would enable African countries to escape the control of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, tools of neo-colonial domination, and would mark the end of the CFA franc, the currency that 14 former French colonies are forced to use. Freezing Libyan funds deals a strong blow to the entire project. The weapons used by "the willing" are not only those in the military action called “Unified Protector.”

Il Manifesto, April 22, 2011

Translated from Italian by John Catalinotto

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Libya Bombing: The Rotten Deal Under the Perfumed Package

Editors — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 11:02:46 +0000

Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya deal

By Pepe Escobar
SolidarityEconomy.net
via Asia Times Online: April 2, 2011

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed. One of the diplomats said, "This is the reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent manner."

As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to "seduce" three other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his CV with Washington with an eye to become the next Egyptian President.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-revolution.

Profiteers rejoice Humanitarian imperialists will spin en masse this is a "conspiracy", as they have been spinning the bombing of Libya prevented a hypothetical massacre in Benghazi. They will be defending the House of Saud - saying it acted to squash Iranian subversion in the Gulf; obviously R2P - "responsibility to protect" does not apply to people in Bahrain. They will be heavily promoting post-Gaddafi Libya as a new - oily - human rights Mecca, complete with US intelligence assets, black ops, special forces and dodgy contractors.

Whatever they say won't alter the facts on the ground - the graphic results of the US-Saudi dirty dancing. Asia Times Online has already reported on who profits from the foreign intervention in Libya (see There's no business like war business, March 30). Players include the Pentagon (via Africom), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Saudi Arabia, the Arab League's Moussa, and Qatar. Add to the list the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, assorted weapons contractors, and the usual neo-liberal suspects eager to privatize everything in sight in the new Libya - even the water. And we're not even talking about the Western vultures hovering over the Libyan oil and gas industry.

Exposed, above all, is the astonishing hypocrisy of the Obama administration, selling a crass geopolitical coup involving northern Africa and the Persian Gulf as a humanitarian operation. As for the fact of another US war on a Muslim nation, that's just a "kinetic military action".

There's been wide speculation in both the US and across the Middle East that considering the military stalemate - and short of the "coalition of the willing" bombing the Gaddafi family to oblivion - Washington, London and Paris might settle for the control of eastern Libya; a northern African version of an oil-rich Gulf Emirate. Gaddafi would be left with a starving North Korea-style Tripolitania.

But considering the latest high-value defections from the regime, plus the desired endgame ("Gaddafi must go", in President Obama's own words), Washington, London, Paris and Riyadh won't settle for nothing but the whole kebab. Including a strategic base for both Africom and NATO.

Round up the unusual suspects One of the side effects of the dirty US-Saudi deal is that the White House is doing all it can to make sure the Bahrain drama is buried by US media. BBC America news anchor Katty Kay at least had the decency to stress, "they would like that one [Bahrain] to go away because there's no real upside for them in supporting the rebellion by the Shi'ites."

For his part the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, showed up on al-Jazeera and said that action was needed because the Libyan people were attacked by Gaddafi. The otherwise excellent al-Jazeera journalists could have politely asked the emir whether he would send his Mirages to protect the people of Palestine from Israel, or his neighbors in Bahrain from Saudi Arabia.

The al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain is essentially a bunch of Sunni settlers who took over 230 years ago. For a great deal of the 20th century they were obliging slaves of the British empire. Modern Bahrain does not live under the specter of a push from Iran; that's an al-Khalifa (and House of Saud) myth.

Bahrainis, historically, have always rejected being part of a sort of Shi'ite nation led by Iran. The protests come a long way, and are part of a true national movement - way beyond sectarianism. No wonder the slogan in the iconic Pearl roundabout - smashed by the fearful al-Khalifa police state - was "neither Sunni nor Shi'ite; Bahraini".

What the protesters wanted was essentially a constitutional monarchy; a legitimate parliament; free and fair elections; and no more corruption. What they got instead was "bullet-friendly Bahrain" replacing "business-friendly Bahrain", and an invasion sponsored by the House of Saud.

And the repression goes on - invisible to US corporate media. Tweeters scream that everybody and his neighbor are being arrested. According to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, over 400 people are either missing or in custody, some of them "arrested at checkpoints controlled by thugs brought in from other Arab and Asian countries - they wear black masks in the streets." Even blogger Mahmood Al Yousif was arrested at 3 am, leading to fears that the same will happen to any Bahraini who has blogged, tweeted, or posted Facebook messages in favor of reform.

Globocop is on a roll Odyssey Dawn is now over. Enter Unified Protector - led by Canadian Charles Bouchard. Translation: the Pentagon (as in Africom) transfers the "kinetic military action " to itself (as in NATO, which is nothing but the Pentagon ruling over Europe). Africom and NATO are now one.

The NATO show will include air and cruise missile strikes; a naval blockade of Libyia; and shady, unspecified ground operations to help the "rebels". Hardcore helicopter gunship raids a la AfPak - with attached "collateral damage" - should be expected.

A curious development is already visible. NATO is deliberately allowing Gaddafi forces to advance along the Mediterranean coast and repel the "rebels". There have been no surgical air strikes for quite a while.

The objective is possibly to extract political and economic concessions from the defector and Libyan exile-infested Interim National Council (INC) - a dodgy cast of characters including former Justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, US-educated former secretary of planning Mahmoud Jibril, and former Virginia resident, new "military commander" and CIA asset Khalifa Hifter. The laudable, indigenous February 17 Youth movement - which was in the forefront of the Benghazi uprising - has been completely sidelined.

This is NATO's first African war, as Afghanistan is NATO's first Central/South Asian war. Now firmly configured as the UN's weaponized arm, Globocop NATO is on a roll implementing its "strategic concept" approved at the Lisbon summit last November (see Welcome to NATOstan, Asia Times Online, November 20, 2010).

Gaddafi's Libya must be taken out so the Mediterranean - the mare nostrum of ancient Rome - becomes a NATO lake. Libya is the only nation in northern Africa not subordinated to Africom or Centcom or any one of the myriad NATO "partnerships". The other non-NATO-related African nations are Eritrea, Sawahiri Arab Democratic Republic, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Moreover, two members of NATO's "Istanbul Cooperation Initiative" - Qatar and the United Arab Emirates - are now fighting alongside Africom/NATO for the fist time. Translation: NATO and Persian Gulf partners are fighting a war in Africa. Europe? That's too provincial. Globocop is the way to go.

According to the Obama administration's own official doublespeak, dictators who are eligible for "US outreach" - such as in Bahrain and Yemen - may relax, and get away with virtually anything. As for those eligible for "regime alteration", from Africa to the Middle East and Asia, watch out. Globocop NATO is coming to get you. With or without dirty deals.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

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Knight of the Living Dead

Slavoj Zizek — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 06:00:53 +0000

By Slavoj Zizek, London Since the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammedâ€™s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other â€œenhanced interrogation techniquesâ€? If there was one surprising aspect to this situation it has less to do with the confessions themselves than with the fact that for the first time in a great many years, torture was normalized â€” presented as something acceptable. The ethical consequences of it should worry us all. While the scope of Mr. Mohammedâ€™s crimes is clear and horrifying, it is worth noting that the United States seems incapable of treating him even as it would the hardest criminal â€” in the civilized Western world, even the most depraved child murderer gets judged and punished. But any legal trial and punishment of Mr. Mohammed is now impossible â€” no court that operates within the frames of Western legal systems can deal with illegal detentions, confessions obtained by torture and the like. (And this conforms, perversely, to Mr. Mohammedâ€™s desire to be treated as an enemy rather than a criminal.) It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also the fight against them, now has to proceed in a gray zone of legality. We thus have de facto â€œlegalâ€ and â€œillegalâ€ criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers and the like), and those who are outside legality, subject to military tribunals or seemingly endless incarceration. Mr. Mohammed has become what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls â€œhomo sacerâ€: a creature legally dead while biologically still alive. And heâ€™s not the only one living in an in-between world. The American authorities who deal with detainees have become a sort of counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of law. Some donâ€™t find this troubling. The realistic counterargument goes: The war on terrorism is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands may depend on information we can get from our prisoners, and one must take extreme steps. As Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School puts it: â€œIâ€™m not in favor of torture, but if youâ€™re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.â€ Well, if this is â€œhonesty,â€ I think Iâ€™ll stick with hypocrisy. Yes, most of us can imagine a singular situation in which we might resort to torture â€” to save a loved one from immediate, unspeakable harm perhaps. I can. In such a case, however, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. In the unavoidable brutal urgency of the moment, I should simply do it. But it cannot become an acceptable standard; I must retain the proper sense of the horror of what I did. And when torture becomes just another in the list of counterterrorism techniques, all sense of horror is lost. When, in the fifth season of the TV show â€œ24,â€ it became clear that the mastermind behind the terrorist plot was none other than the president himself, many of us were eagerly waiting to see whether Jack Bauer would apply to the â€œleader of the free worldâ€ his standard technique in dealing with terrorists who do not want to divulge a secret that may save thousands. Will he torture the president? Reality has now surpassed TV. What â€œ24â€ still had the decency to present as Jack Bauerâ€™s disturbing and desperate choice is now rendered business as usual. In a way, those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It thrives only if it is sustained by what Hegel called â€œobjective spirit,â€ the set of unwritten rules that form the background of every individualâ€™s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, a clear sign of progress in Western society is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is â€œdogmaticallyâ€ clear to everyone that rape is wrong. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, he would appear so ridiculous as to disqualify himself from any further consideration. And the same should hold for torture. Are we aware what lies at the end of the road opened up by the normalization of torture? A significant detail of Mr. Mohammedâ€™s confession gives a hint. It was reported that the interrogators submitted to waterboarding and were able to endure it for less than 15 seconds on average before being ready to confess anything and everything. Mr. Mohammed, however, gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes. Are we aware that the last time such things were part of public discourse was back in the late Middle Ages, when torture was still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured enemy who might gain the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really want to return to this kind of primitive warrior ethics? This is why, in the end, the greatest victims of torture-as-usual are the rest of us, the informed public. A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilizationâ€™s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity. Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of â€œThe Parallax View.â€ Originally printed in the NY Times on March 24, 2007

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Storming the Pentagon

Mitchel Cohen — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 06:00:14 +0000

by Mitchel Cohen, Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, and co-founder, Red Balloon Collective FORTY YEARS IT'S BEEN. In October 1967, I was an 18-year-old junior at SUNY Stony Brook, organizing students to participate in the first militant demonstration on the East Coast against the Vietnam war. At the Pentagon. Phil Ochs -- my hero -- was scheduled to perform at Stony Brook that night. Many students were saying they weren't going on the march because they wanted to go to Phil's concert instead. SDS wrote letter after letter trying to get him to change the date. No answer. Finally -- oh, how it cut my heart out -- we organized a boycott of his records. Then, of course, his manager (his brother, Michael) was quick to respond. "Go ahead, attack the heavies in the movement if it makes you feel better," he wrote in an open letter to me printed in Statesman, the official student paper. But just as quickly they moved up the date to October 20, the evening before the march. Phil gave an interview over WUSB radio, Kenny Bromberg's show. "Who's this creep Mitchel Cohen who's telling everyone to boycott my records?" Phil raged. My first claim to fame. Somewhere at the station there's a dusty tape of that show. October 21. The huge anti-war demonstration swept past the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and over the bridges into Virginia, wave after wave of young anti-war warriors crashing against the walls of the Pentagon. One-hundred-thousand people -- some carrying signs depicting their town's opposition to the war against Vietnam, their unions, churches, campuses -- Âinched up to the line of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder pointing their rifles at our chests, their unsheathed bayonets glinting like a thousand points of fright in the afternoon sun. I'd saved the shirt I wore that day, that orange-striped pullover with the hole where I'd pressed up as far as I could against one soldier's bayonet. He didn't budge; I backed off. I remember it as vividly as the infamous sunrises over the Bread and Puppet festival in Vermont, or the incredible sunsets in New York City the week following 9-11. The man carrying the hand-made sign: "Lyndon Johnson pull out, like your father should have." The chants, "Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" The young woman who, in a moment of inspired artistry, began dancing up and down the lines of soldiers, as thousands of voices sang "join us," inserting flowers into the rifles. Soon, a dozen people joined her. "Flower Power," East Coast style! Suddenly, around one side of the building -- we cutely called it "the biggest edifice complex in the world" -- hundreds began climbing ropes a-fixed to a parapet overlooking a set of huge doors, just beyond the soldiers' reach. The sit-in blocked the entrance. It lasted three days. Yea, and in high school gym I couldn't climb the ropes to save my life. Oh well. Try anyway. I had managed to drag myself up a few yards when a hand grabbed one of my legs. I panicked, tried to kick it away without losing my grip, but it wouldn't let go. "Uh-oh, this is it, I'm going to get arrested," I thought, my first arrest. Kicked more and more frantically. Finally, in panic, I looked down; my father was yanking me back and my mother was screaming: "Where do you think you're going?" "What are you doing here? How did you find me in this huge crowd? I've gotta join my friends ... sit-in ... all my friends are up there." "No way." Indeed, my friends from Stony Brook SDS were already up on the ledge. Even a professor from Stony Brook, Mike Zweig, was sitting-in. "You have to let me go. I helped organize the buses!" I shouted, as if that compelling point would clinch the argument, the frustrated and embarrassed tears already beginning to spill down my cheeks. "You're exhausted, get down right now." My parents were right about one thing: I was exhausted, racing around on an adrenalin high having not slept in three days. SDS and the Organization for Progressive Thought had been selling bus tickets around the clock door-to-door in the dormitories, cafeterias and TV lounges at Stony Brook. We helped bring seven bus-loads of protesters to the Pentagon -- around 300 people. My younger brother Robert and I were among the handful responsible for selling tickets, making bus arrangements and trying to make sure the drivers would not leave us stranded somewhere en route because they hated our politics, which is what had happened to buses from a number of other campuses. There would be time enough for sleep later. I simply had to be up there! And now my parents (how did they ever find me in that huge crowd?) were yanking me back. My father, who had served in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific in World War 2 and who always spoke out against the Vietnam war, offered an interesting proposal: "We're not going to let you up there. But they're going to need food and blankets (those were in the days before the anti-nuclear movement introduced a structure in which each affinity group selects one support person, who is not to get arrested, to be responsible for the group's logistical needs). Let's start making a collection." We spent the next few hours doing precisely that, collecting dozens of blankets and warm clothing for those sitting in; afterwards, they put me on the bus to Stony Brook and made sure I stayed on it, waving good-bye as it pulled away. I crashed out in someone's (whose?) arms. Vaguely I remember someone kissing me. Forty years ago! Che Guevara had been murdered by the CIA in Bolivia just two weeks before. We had called in an obituary to the NY Times, billing it to the student government without telling them. They were at a loss to account for it when the university administration reviewed the bills. A few weeks later, New York City would be rocked by a police riot, and a few weeks after that I would be one of three Stony Brookers rejecting my draftcard and facing five years in jail. (My parents learned about that from WINS radio news.) In November, thousands of students descended on a dinner for the war makers. Some radicals had gotten jobs in the New York Hilton's kitchen and, when the country's elite lifted the lids of their dishes to dine they found pigs' heads staring back at them from their plates, and waiters and waitresses chanting: "U.S. out of Vietnam!" Outside, all hell was breaking loose. This was the first "street action" anti-war demo on the East Coast. Hundreds of people would begin crossing 6th Avenue at the green light, very very slowly. We'd only be halfway across when the light would turn red. Everyone would link arms, face the traffic, close our eyes and feel the adrenalin take over. Screeeeech! When I dared open my eyes, I found a car had skidded to a stop just inches from my stomach. Then the police moved in, and everyone snakedanced the wrong way down one-way streets, tying up traffic and making it hard for the police cars to chase us. Looking back, it sounds heroic; actually, we were scared shitless. Leaving the dinner, Secretary of State Dean Rusk's car was hit by the first molotov cocktail I'd ever seen. The cops started cracking heads. Willa Kay Weiner grabbed my hand -- Kay, where are you now?! -- tearful, gasping for breath: "Mitchel, let's get out of here!" We raced through Manhattan in search of the bus back to Stony Brook and were amazed to find that most everyone arrived at just about the same time, unscathed. The next month, the anti-war movement erupted everywhere: Anti-draft riots, draftcard burnings, military recruiters chased off campus after campus, "defense" contractors exposed, thousands blocking troop trains and munitions factories! Even Bill Clinton, in the one good thing he ever did -- which he should have sung out proudly during his campaign instead of apologizing for it -- took part in the anti-war actions. And then .. 1968: Paris ... Columbia University ... Czechoslovakia ... Chicago ... Martin Luther King's assassination ... Robert Kennedy's ... Eugene McCarthy's anti-war presidential campaign .. LBJ's abdication ... the world spinning madly out of their control, revolutionary movements being born. The pace of time accelerated. Whole lifetimes crammed into the space of a few months. We lived "emergency lives" filled with meaning, fear, excitement. Who would know it then, forty years ago -- a swatch of time longer than from the end of World War 2 to the height of the anti-war movement of the eighties, hard to believe! -- that the demonstration at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967 would be the start of the anti-imperialist, as opposed to simply the "anti-war," movement, marking the baptism of a new generation -- with great leaps of insight, risk, and imagination -- that would shake the entire world? * * * Stony Brook always had sizable contingents at anti-war demonstrations. We had the largest SDS chapter on the East Coast, after Columbia, a fact curiously omitted from books on the new left. Most of today's authors seem to find import only in what went on at elite Ivy League schools -- just as they did in the old days -- and not a whit for state universities or community colleges. The Independent Caucus of SDS was everywhere at SUNY Stony Brook in 1968. Red Balloon emerged from the caucus the following year, the most politically volatile in Stony Brook's history. I was 20 years old and still a sophomore, after four years in and out of college, coordinating the United Farm Workers grape boycott on Long Island. I'd met Roberta Quance, a recent transfer from Oberlin, in professor Jonah Raskin's English class, and we became constant companions and lovers. Roberta brought an acid-tongued feminist sensibility into our emerging collective, along with a healthy dose of anarchism. And Jack Bookman, the third member of the founding group, was planning to commemorate the opening of the then state-of-the-art computer center with an action against the University's ties to the Department of Defense. That was the initial core. Soon, we grew to fifteen in the collective. At first we helped put out underground papers -- "Introspect," the radical alternative to Statesman (the odious official student paper), and then one issue of "VanÂguard," which we worked on alongside others in SDS; but we finally decided to start our own paper. After two days of going over possible names: "Vanguard" this, "ProleÂtarian" that, "Worker" the other thing, Roberta was ready to give it up. Already, 18, 19 and 20 year olds were jaded by the "old left's" sterility. We didn't want any part of the boring, lecturing style of The Militant (Socialist Workers Party), Challenge (Progressive Labor Party) or other papers sold regularly on the campus. I had just finished a poem, which I read to the 15 people living in the supposedly six-person suite in Kelly Quad. One line went: "The cat leapt out of the tree last night, through the air like a red balloon." Frustrated, Jack said, "Hey, let's just call it 'Red Balloon' for now. We can change it next week if we want." Twenty-Five years later Red Balloon was were still kicking. Our first official action as a collective: The Department of Defense Jamboree, which exposed secret war research on campus. Liberal politician Allard Lowenstein was speaking on campus the afternoon of the Jamboree. As he often did in speeches across the country, Lowenstein targeted the new left. He denounced our attempts to drive military recruiters and war-related research from the campus. Four hundred people in the newly-opened Student Union building hooted, cheered, and generally let their opinions be known. Amid the tumult, Lowenstein got popped by a water balloon. Though it was just a physically-harmless water balloon -- we generally strive to upset the ideological applecarts without physically hurting anyone, in order to expose their hypocrisy -- Lowenstein treated it as though he'd been shot, and red-baited us, exposing his true colors. That act marked our birth on campus and permanently sealed our reputation. It also highlighted our low tolerance for liberal demagogues. Over the years, hundreds of people have at one time or another considered themselves part of our loose-knit Red Balloon collectives. Most of them are still active in fighting for a better world, although not always with the same radical flare or direct action politics. A number of our closest friends and most creative spirits have died, forever young. Chris Delvecchio (a week shy of 24 years old when he was killed in August, 1993), Patty Staib (28), Pat Dalto (33), Kate Berrigan (24), Bob Rosado (in his 30s), Shari Nezami (22). Fred Friedman, Steve Becker, Iris Burlock -- Stony Brook Red Ballooners. The rest of us are still marching to the barricades, as well as tearing down the barricades within. We helped build ACT UP actions, the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts, and organized support for the Haitian people's right to self-deterÂmination. We've created alternative health clinics and continue to fight for women's reproductive rights. We try to break at least one law a day, do guerrilla-art attacks and take part in urban rebellions. We work with political prisoners, struggle against racism and white supremacy and, through efforts like the Earth Day Wall Street Actions, the Save the Audubon Coalition and the Greens, fight against nuclear power, genetic-engineering and the destruction of the environment, exposing the corporate and government connections to just about every horrible occurrence under the sun. Some have called us a "Conspiracy" rather than a Collective. In a sense we were, which is why we named one facet of what we did "The Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy." Hey, every time a corporation's board of directors meets it's a conspiracy to sell us things we don't need and extract as much cheap labor and natural resources as they can get away with! You can find us in marxism classes and in anarchist, green, feminist, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual workshops. Along the way, like so many others, we've had to wrestle with various philosophies of organization, ways of conceptualizing our own purpose. Unlike much of the Left, we did not try to recruit people into our collectives; that would have required us to construct a "program" to sell to people. We believe that the "recruiting mentality" has impaired the left. Instead, we tried and continue to strengthen existing movements, help people to form their own direct action collectives and underground papers, and then link them together. In the course of developing that approach, all sorts of emotional, philosophical and relationship-type challenges have come up, some repeatedly. The Left, however, has generally refused to treat them seriously as part of its political mission, to its detriment. With all the regrouping of the Left going on today, I offer these reflections to help articulate some of the hidden questions the Left could not see, and which the new wave of the Movement still has to face. [Originally published on Counterpunch] Mitchel Cohen can be contacted at mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

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Putting Black Faces on Imperial Policies

Glen Ford — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:00:49 +0000

by Glen Ford "Barack Obama is our son and he deserves our support," declared Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., speaking to a gathering of Black Democrats at the party's winter meeting, in Washington, earlier this month. By Jones' logic, Condoleezza Rice deserves automatic African American support as "our daughter," and Colin Powell, her predecessor as George Bush's Secretary of State, was due fealty as "our brother." Jones' embrace of the entire African American family tree must also, therefore, extend to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the most reactionary, anti-Black member of the High Court; and to "our brother" J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State whose consuming mission in 2004 was to deny the franchise to as many fellow Blacks as possible. Although the winter meetings are traditionally showcases for candidates to display their positions on the issues of the day, State Sen. Jones saw no need to present his appeal on Obama's behalf in any packaging other than race. In effect, Jones attempted to relieve Obama of any political obligation to Black people. Under Jones' formula, the relationship between the Black office-seeker and the African American public is reversed: it is the people that owe allegiance to the candidate, who is in turn set free to woo groups and promote interests that may be inimical to those of the Black public. Jones and the larger political current he represents would utterly gut Black politics of all substance, rendering the entire electoral process worthless to the Black masses. Perhaps the greatest irony of Jones' issue-less directive is that it masquerades as a Black empowerment strategy. In a transparent bid to shame Blacks in the Hillary Clinton camp - another political desert - Jones said African Americans don't "owe" anyone. Jones elaborated later, in a conversation with a Chicago Sun-Times reporter. "How long do we have to owe before we have an opportunity to support our son?" he said. In other words, Black people's "debt" to the Clintons - as if such ever existed - has been paid, and now it's time to herd Black voters behind Obama, like so many cattle. Jones' brand of politics holds that Black people don't have interests or political ideals, only obligations to one politician or the other. In Jones' world, African Americans are constantly indebted, but nobody owes them anything - certainly not Obama, "our son." The Emil Jones brand of Black politics is based on the assumption that African American aspirations are limited to a simple desire to see Black faces on display in high places, no matter the public policy content of that representation. It is as if emancipation of the slaves could be achieved by moving Ol' Massa out of the Big House, and installing the Black butler in his place, while the conditions of life and labor in the fields remain unchanged. After all, the butler is one of "ours." The slaves should be happy to experience a vicarious freedom, through their "son." Further, it would be downright unfamily-like to pester our own kin about the need for forty acres and a mule per household. Jones' remarks exemplify an extraordinary vulgarization of African American politics, the product of uncritical, Jim Crow-era reflexes that linger within the Black polity, combined with the growing influence of corporate money in the Black leadership-creation process. The advent of Barack Obama's stealth corporate presidential candidacy could create the conditions for a "perfect storm" that sweeps away what remains of issues-based coherence in Black electoral and institutional politics. Should that occur - and there is much evidence that the unraveling is already well advanced - the collapse of progressive American politics becomes inevitable, a high price to pay for a Black face in the Oval Office. Imperial Obama African Americans will pay a special, historical price if a corporate-molded Black politician becomes the titular leader of an unreconstructed U.S. imperial state - and, make no mistake about it, Barack Obama is an imperialist.Â No one but a deep-fried imperialist could describe U.S. behavior in Iraq as "coddling" the Iraqis, as Obama said to an establishment foreign policy gathering in Chicago, late last year. His Iraq War De-escalation Act, carefully calibrated to make him appear slightly less belligerent than Hillary Clinton, allows the U.S. to wage war until March 31, 2008, at the very least, and to maintain a military presence in the country thereafter. It is a sham measure, more helpful in buying time for Bush than in encouraging effective dissent. At his core, Obama is not opposed to U.S. violations of other nations' sovereignty; he simply opposes "dumb wars" - as he told a reporter for the Chicago Reader - meaning, aggressions executed by less-than-bright American Commanders-in-Chief. U.S.-designated "interests," not adherence to international law, are paramount - the fundamental tenet of imperialism. Of the declared Democratic candidates, only Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich can pass anti-imperialist muster; thus the near-certainty of another imperialist in the White House in 2009. Which brings us to the special price that African Americans will pay if the face of U.S. imperialism, is Black. The Face of Aggression There was a time not that long ago, when the historic struggles of Black Americans for racial equality, decolonization and peace were admired throughout the African Diaspora and beyond. Especially in what was called the Third World, African Americans were perceived as different than the arrogant, racist "ugly Americans" - the whites that strutted around other people's nations as if they owned them. In the early years of the Vietnam War, there were many reports of Viet Cong attempts to spare Black American soldiers' lives, if practical, as an acknowledgment of shared suffering under white rule. When Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in 1979, African Americans were soon released, along with female staffers. It is difficult to imagine such differentiations being made on foreign shores, today. General Colin Powell emerged from Gulf War One as the personification of American military might - and threat. As George Bush's Secretary of State, Powell sacrificed his reputation - and an immeasurable portion of remaining African American planetary good will - in a lie-soaked justification of the impending invasion of Iraq before the United Nations. In her first act as the Black American female face of imperial aggression, in April, 2002, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice could not contain her disappointment at the failure of a U.S.-backed coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. "We do hope that ChÃ¡vez recognizes that the whole world is watching," she sneered, "and that he takes advantage of this opportunity to right his own ship, which has been moving, frankly, in the wrong direction for quite a long time." As Secretary of State, Rice is the reigning imperial drum major. Despite a string of Chavez victories in fair elections and his overwhelming support among the poor and mostly non-white Venezuelan majority, Rice last week loosed another transparent threat against his government. "I believe there is an assault on democracy in Venezuela," she told a congressional committee. "I do believe that the president of Venezuela is really, really destroying his own country, economically, politically." What a spectacle: American imperialism in black-face, threatening a mixed-race president whose government has arguably adopted the most racially progressive and inclusive policies on the South American continent. "Condoleezza Rice is the Black, snarling symbol of U.S. lawlessness." When Rice claimed that the U.S. had been meeting with Venezuelan Catholic leaders who were "under fire" from Chavez's government, the vice-president of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference - no friend of Chavez - called her a "liar." Contrast this with Barack Obama's exchange of pleasantries with Rice before voting to confirm her as chief diplomatic operative of the Bush endless war doctrine. From Beirut to Caracas, Condoleezza Rice is the Black, snarling symbol of U.S. lawlessness - a perception of our African American "daughter" that the NAACP must not have anticipated when it bestowed on her its Image Award, in early 2002. Back then, Rice told the civil rights group's gala affair: "As I travel with President Bush around the world and as we meet with leaders from around the world, I see America through other people's eyes." African Americans, who care so much for image - some, to the exclusion of all else - should contemplate what the ascension of a Black face to the Oval Office will mean to world perceptions of Black Americans as a group. Would Barack Obama be a worse international criminal than Hillary Clinton? My guess is, they'd function identically, as stewards of empire. But a Barack Obama presidency would leave an unindelible impression on the planet: The Blacks of the United States have arrived! They, too, are "ugly Americans." BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com. Original article published on Black Agenda Report

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They’re Broken Men, So Don’t Let Them Take us to a New War

Henry Porter — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:00:04 +0000

Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad have lost face at home; now others must forge peaceful settlements in the Middle East

by Henry Porter, Observer There is a striking likeness in the expressions of George W Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran as they confront each other over the issues of uranium enrichment and dominance in the Middle East. It falls somewhere between the chastened and defiant playground bully. This is unsurprising: though not political equivalents, the two are really quite similar. Both had little experience of government or international affairs before being carried to power on a tide of populist, religious conservatism. Neither travelled abroad much, but they both had certain views about the world and the destiny of their nations. They had all the answers, yet there was also a dangerous lack of seriousness in them which has now earned them both the scorn of their people and rebuffs from their elders. We think of Bush as being the more unpopular of the two. His approval ratings are at the level of Nixon's just before he left the White House. After an unconvincing performance in the State of the Union Address, his plans for the troop surge in Iraq were rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and may now be voted down by the entire Senate. Senior Republican senators such as Chuck Hagel and John Warner are furious that sensible suggestions contained in the Iraq Study Group Report have been ignored. Although the President looked receptive when the report was delivered to him by James Baker, there has been no progress in policy, no evidence of any kind of deeper thinking in the White House. Nothing except that familiar foggy, narrow-eyed truculence of Bush Junior in a tight spot. This would be a depressing but for similar difficulties experienced by Ahmadinejad over the last few weeks. Just as the senior Republican elders have turned on Bush, so Iran's religious leaders are moving to restrain their President. They criticise his bellicose foreign policy and the exceptionally poor record on promised reforms at home. There is a sense of embarrassment among sophisticated Iranians about their President's pronouncements, which surely rings a bell with Americans. The most important sign-off disenchantment came in Jomhouri Islami, the newspaper owned by Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which said in an editorial: 'Turning the nuclear issue into a propaganda issue gives the impression that to cover up the flaws in government you are exaggerating its importance.' The paper also suggested that the President should speak about the nuclear issue less, stop provoking aggressive powers like the United States and concentrate on the daily needs of the people - 'those who voted for you on your promises'. Two weeks ago, 150 legislators sent a letter to Ahmadinejad openly attacking him for missing his budget deadline and blaming him for inflation and rising unemployment. A loss of confidence in both men at home is important because it offers us a brief opportunity to assert diplomacy over the habits of rhetoric and escalation. Although UN nuclear experts suggest the Iranians are at least five years from developing a bomb and delivery system, the Iranians are due to open a large uranium enrichment plant within a matter of weeks. If this goes ahead, a peaceful solution will be much harder to find; to decommission this new facility will require a loss of face for Ahmadinejad. So the hawks in the West will begin the slow drumbeat for a first strike. Indeed, it has already started. For some weeks, the Daily Telegraph has been running a series of what, in my opinion, are extremely dubious stories all attributed to mysterious 'European defence officials' and 'senior Western military sources'. A front-page story last week suggested that North Korea has offered to help Iran with a nuclear test within the year. Apart from these shadowy spokesmen, it could offer no evidence, which is why the story was only seriously picked up in Israel. In Israel, it is believed that the Iranians may be able to launch a nuclear warhead into its territory within three, not five, years. Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked who will defend the Jews from a genocidal government in Iran if they do not themselves. Israeli historian Benny Morris contributed this chilling thought to the Jerusalem Post. 'One bright morning in five to 10 years, perhaps a regional crisis, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session... and give President Ahmadinejad the go-ahead.' In Iran, 38 nuclear inspectors have been barred from entering the country in retaliation for the UN resolution introducing mild sanctions, and now the Iranians have installed a missile defence system (supplied by the Russians) to defend their nuclear facilities from air attacks. The Americans have responded by moving another aircraft carrier into the region and by offering Patriot missile systems to Iran's uneasy Arab neighbours. Make no mistake: this a much more dangerous situation than Iraq and it is unfolding on the watch of a couple of second-raters. It is true that few nations that have been more estranged over the last quarter of a century, but with the stakes so high, it seems extraordinary that America has no representation in Tehran and almost no contact except through the Swiss embassy. As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times reminded us last week, in 2003, America rebuffed an advance made by the Iranians through the Swiss, which, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, suggested the two countries work together on the capture of terrorists in Iraq, stabilising the country after invasion and coming to an agreement on uranium enrichment as well as the financing of Hizbollah and Hamas. The offer, made almost two years before Ahmadinejad was elected, was layered with insincerity and bluff, but professional diplomats are used to this. At least the two sides would have been talking and Tehran could have been held to account for some of the things that have been going on in Iraq. But the situation is not beyond hope. The West must realise that if a first strike takes place we have lost. Whatever is destroyed in Iran, the Iranians will come back and produce a bomb that they may feel more entitled to use. The clash of civilisations predicted by neocon academics for years will have moved a step closer to dominating the 21st century at the very moment when all civilisation needs to concentrate on the multiple threats presented by climate change. What we must hope for is a collective act of will in Europe, and among wiser heads in Washington DC, which says it doesn't have to be this way. This is not impossible. Only last week, representatives from 30 countries led by America and Saudi Arabia met in Paris to contribute to a Â£5bn fund to prop up Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government in Lebanon. This was a diplomatic action taken by both Middle Eastern and Western powers to defend Lebanon against Iran's proxies in the Hizbollah terrorist organisation, and it is exactly the right way to deal with Iran. What can the British government do about Ahmadinejad? The first thing to is to recognise his failing support at home is an advantage that will be lost if the drumbeat to war is allowed to continue. There is no reason why Tony Blair should not add to the call from the head of UN inspectors, Mohamed ElBaradei, for a time out in which sanctions would be suspended. Blair still has a voice that is heard in the US. He should consider making a speech which insists that Bush initiates direct diplomatic relations with Tehran as well as a renewed effort to create the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. He owes something to the cause of peaceful resolution and, besides, these are hardly controversial views: both have already been expressed by James Baker's Iraq Study Group. henry.porter@observer.co.uk The Observer, Sunday January 28, 2007

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The Profits of Escalation: Why the US is Not Leaving Iraq

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:00:20 +0000

by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh "The military-industrial-complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials." - Dwight D. Eisenhower "There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." - General Smedley D. Butler Neither the Iraq Study Group nor other establishment critics of the Iraq war are calling for the withdrawal of US troops from that country. To the extent that the Study Group or the new Congress purport to inject some "realism" into the Iraq policy, such projected modifications do not seem to amount to more than changing the drivers of the US war machine without changing its destination, or objectives: control of Iraq's political and economic policies. In light of fact that by now almost all of the factions of the ruling circles, including the White House and the neoconservative war-mongerers, acknowledge the failure of the Iraq war, why, then, do they balk at the idea of pulling the troops out of that country? Perhaps the shortest path to a relatively satisfactory answer would be to follow the money. The fact is that not everyone is losing in Iraq. Indeed, while the Bush administration's wars of choice have brought unnecessary death, destruction, and disaster to millions, including many from the Unites States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. At the heart of the reluctance to withdraw from Iraq lies the profiteers' unwillingness to give up further fortunes and spoils of war. Pentagon contractors constitute the overwhelming majority of these profiteers. They include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex maze of over 100,000 service contractors and sub-contractors such as private army or security corporations and "reconstruction" firms.[1] These contractors of both deconstruction and "reconstruction," whose profits come mainly from the US treasury, have handsomely profited from the Bush administration's wars of choice. A time-honored proverb maintains that wars abroad are often continuations of wars at home. Accordingly, recent US wars abroad seem to be largely reflections of domestic fights over national resources, or public finance: opponents of social spending are using the escalating Pentagon budget (in combination with drastic tax cuts for the wealthy) as a cynical and roundabout way of redistributing national income in favor of the wealthy. As this combination of increasing military spending and decreasing tax liabilities of the wealthy creates wide gaps in the Federal budget, it then justifies the slashing of non-military public spending-a subtle and insidious policy of reversing the New Deal reforms, a policy that, incidentally, started under President Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, the American people are sidetracked into a debate over the grim consequences of a "pre-mature" withdrawal of US troops from Iraq: further deterioration of the raging civil war, the unraveling of the "fledgling democracy," the resultant serious blow to the power and prestige of the United States, and the like. Such concerns are secondary to the booming business of war profiteers and, more generally, to the lure or the prospects of controlling Iraq's politics and economics. Powerful beneficiaries of war dividends, who are often indistinguishable from the policy makers who pushed for the invasion of Iraq, have been pocketing hundreds of billions of dollars by virtue of war. More than anything else, it is the pursuit and the safeguarding of those plentiful spoils of war that are keeping US troops in Iraq. (Because the role of oil is discussed extensively by many other researchers and writers, I would focus here on the role of the Pentagon contractors, both as a major driving force to the war on Iraq and a major obstacle in the way of withdrawing from that country.) The rise of the fortunes of the major Pentagon contractors can be measured, in part, by the growth of the Pentagon budget since President George W. Bush arrived in the White House: it has grown by more than 50 percent, from nearly $300 billion in 2001 to almost $455 billion in 2007. (These figures do not include the Homeland Security budget, which is $33 billion for the 2007 fiscal year alone, and the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast approaching $400 billion.) Large Pentagon contractors have been the main beneficiaries of this windfall. For example, a 2004 study by The Center for Public Integrity revealed that, for the 1998Â2003 period, one percent of the biggest contractors won 80 percent of all defense contracting dollars. The top ten got 38 percent of all the money. Lockheed Martin topped the list at $94 billion, Boeing was second with $81 billion, Raytheon was third (just under $40 billion), followed by Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics with nearly $34 billion each.[2] Fantastic returns to these armaments conglomerates have been reflected in the continuing jump in the value of their shares or stocks in the Wall Street: "Shares of U.S. defense companies, which have nearly trebled since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq, show no signs of slowing down. . . . All the defense companies-with very few exceptions-have been doing extremely well with mostly double-digit earnings growth. . . . The feeling that makers of ships, planes and weapons are just getting into their stride has driven shares of leading Pentagon contractors Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp. to all-time highs. . . ."[3] Major beneficiaries of war dividends include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, but also a whole host of other war-induced service contractors that have mushroomed around the Pentagon and the Homeland Security apparatus in order to cash in on the Pentagon's spending bonanza. A highly profitable and fast growing industry that has evolved out of the Pentagon's tendency to shower private contractors with tax-payers' money is based on its increasing practice of the outsourcing of the many of the traditional military services to private businesses. "In 1984, almost two-thirds of [the Pentagon's] contracting budget went for products rather than services. . . . By fiscal year 2003, 56 percent of Defense Department contracts paid for services rather than goods." What is more, these services are not limited to the relatively simple or routine tasks and responsibilities such food and sanitation services or building maintenance. More importantly, they include "contracts for services that are highly sophisticated, strategic in nature, and closely approaching core functions that for good reason the government used to do on its own. The Pentagon has even hired contractors to advise it on hiring contractors."[4] Private security contracting, a lucrative and rapidly growing industry, is a good example of the Pentagon's policy of outsourcing. These contractors operate on the periphery of U.S. foreign policy by training foreign "security forces," or by "fighting terrorism." Often these private military corporations are formed by retired Special Forces personnel seeking to market their military expertise to the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, or foreign governments. For example, MPRI, one of the largest and most active of these firms, which "has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to the Pentagon," was founded by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono and seven other retired generals. The fortunes of these military training contractors, or modern-day mercenary companies, like those of the manufacturers of military hardware, have skyrocketed by virtue of heightened war and militarism under President George W. Bush. For example, "The per share price of stocks in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than doubled."[5] As the Pentagon's manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin make fortunes through the production of the means of death and destruction, they also create profit opportunities for service contractors such as Halliburton that, like vultures, follow the plumes of the smoke of deconstruction and set up shop for "reconstruction." For example, in the same month (October 2006) that the US forces lost a record number of soldiers in Iraq, and the Iraqi citizens lost many more, Halliburton announced that its third quarter revenue had risen by 19 percent to $5.8 billion. This prompted Dave Lesar, the company's chairman, president and CEO, to declare, "This was an exceptional quarter for Halliburton." Jeff Tilley, an analyst who does research for Halliburton, likewise pointed out, "Iraq was better than expected. . . . Overall, there is nothing really to question or be skeptical about. I think the results are very good." This led many critics to point out scornfully that when around the same time Vice President Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that "if you look at the overall situation [in Iraq] they're doing remarkably well," he must have been talking about Halliburton.[6] The service and "rebuilding" contractors are frequently called "reconstruction rackets" not only because they obtain generous and often no-bid contracts from their policy-making accomplices, but also because they habitually shirk on their contracts and skimp on what they promise to do. For example, an investigative on-the-ground report from Iraq, sponsored by the Institute for Southern Studies and titled "New Investigation Reveals Reconstruction Racket," showed that despite "billions of dollars spent, key pieces of Iraq's infrastructure-power plants, telephone exchanges, and sewage and sanitation systems-have either not been repaired, or have been fixed so poorly that they don't function." The report, carried out by Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena and published in the Institutes' Publication Southern Exposure, further revealed that the giant Pentagon contractor Bechtel "has been given tens of millions to repair Iraq's schools. Yet many haven't been touched, and several schools that Bechtel claims to have repaired are in shambles. One 'repaired' school was overflowing with unflushed sewage." The report also showed that out of a $2.2 billion "reconstruction" contract with Halliburton, the company spent only 10 percent on "community needs-the rest being spent on servicing U.S. troops and rebuilding oil pipelines. Halliburton has also spent over $40 million in the unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction."[7] The spoils of war and devastation in Iraq have been so attractive that an an extremely large number of war profiteers have set up shop in that country in order to participate in the booty: "There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield," reported The Washington Post in its 5 December 2006 issue. The report, prepared by Renae Merle, further points out, "In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. . . . MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country."[8] The fact that powerful beneficiaries of war dividends flourish in an atmosphere of war and international convulsion should not come as a surprise to anyone. What is surprising is that, in the context of the recent US wars of choice, these beneficiaries have also acquired the power of promoting wars, often by manufacturing "external threats to our national interest." In other words, profit-driven beneficiaries of war have also evolved as war makers, or contributors to war making.[9] The following is a sample of such unsavory businessÂpolitical relationships, as reported by Walter F. Roche and Ken Silverstein in a 14 July 2004 Los Angeles Times article, titled "Advocates of War Now Profit from Iraq's Reconstruction:" o Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey is a prominent example of the phenomenon, mixing his business interests with what he contends are the country's strategic interests. o Neil Livingstone, a former Senate aide who has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and issued repeated public calls for Hussein's overthrow. He heads a Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions, Inc. that provides contacts and consulting services to companies doing business in Iraq. o Randy Scheunemann, a former Rumsfeld advisor who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 authorizing $98 million in U.S. aid to Iraqi exile groups. He was the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Now he's helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there. o Margaret Bartel, who managed federal money channeled to Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, including funds for its prewar intelligence program on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. She now heads a Washington-area consulting firm helping would-be investors find Iraqi partners. o K. Riva Levinson, a Washington lobbyist and public relations specialist who received federal funds to drum up prewar support for the Iraqi National Congress. She has close ties to Bartel and now helps companies open doors in Iraq, in part through her contacts with the Iraqi National Congress. o Joe M. Allbaugh, who managed President Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Edward Rogers Jr., an aide to the first President Bush, recently helped set up New Bridge Strategies and Diligence, LLC to promote business in postwar Iraq.[10] There are strong indications that these dubious relationships represent more than simple cases of sporadic or unrelated instances of some unscruplulous or rogue elements. Evidence shows that contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq were drawn long before the invasion and deconstruction of that country had started. In a fascinating report for The Nation magazine, titled "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," Naomi Klein describes such long-projected "rebuilding" schemes as follows: "Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate 'post-conflict' plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries 'at the same time,' each lasting 'five to seven years.'"[11] Here we get a glimpse of the real reasons or forces behind the Bush administration's preemptive wars. As Klein puts it, "a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction." Klein also documents how (through Pascual's office) contractors drew "reconstruction" plans in close collaboration with various government agencies and how, at times, contracts were actually pre-approved and paper work completed long before an actual military strike: "In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps 'high risk' countries on a 'watch list' and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to 'mobilize and deploy quickly' after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks-some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have 'pre-completed' contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could 'cut off three to six months in your response time.'" No business model or entrepreneurial paradigm can adequately capture the nature of this kind of scheming and profiteering. Not even illicit businesses based on rent-seeking, corruption or theft can sufficiently describe the kind of nefarious business interests that lurk behind the Bush administration's preemptive wars. Only a calculated imperial or colonial kind of exploitation, albeit a new form of colonialism or imperialism, can capture the essence of the war profiteering associated with the recent US wars of aggression. As Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher put it, "We used to have vulgar colonialism. Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'"[12] Classical colonial or imperial powers roamed on the periphery of the capitalist center, "discovered" new territories, and drained them off of their riches and resources. Today there are no new places in our planet to be "discovered." But there are many vulnerable sovereign countries whose governments can be overthrown, their infrastructures smashed to the ground, and fortunes made as a result (of both destruction and "reconstruction). And herein lies the genius of a parasitically efficient market mechanism, as well as a major driving force behind the Bush administration's unprovoked unilateral wars of choice. Not only does the new form of imperial or colonial aggression, driven largely by the powerful interests that are vested in the armaments industries and other war-based businesses, bring calamity to the vanquished, but it is also detrimental and burdensome to the victor, namely, the imperium and its citizens. Contrary to the external military operations of past empires, which usually brought benefits not only to the imperial ruling classes but also (through "trickle-down" effects) to their citizens, U.S. military expeditions and operations of late are not justifiable even on the grounds of national economic gains. Indeed, escalating US military expansions and aggressions have become ever more wasteful and cost-inefficient as they are hollowing out the public treasury, undermining social spending, and accumulating national debt. Viewed in this light, the new form of imperialism can perhaps be called "parasitic" imperialism. War profiteering is, of course, not new; it has always existed in the course of the history of warfare. What makes war profiteering in the context of the recent US wars of choice unique and extremely dangerous to world peace and stability, however, is the fact that it has become a major driving force behind war and militarism. This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or "difficulty" of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, "There are a lot of contractors making a fortune and we don't want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay."[13] It follows that US troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq as long as antiwar voices are not raised beyond the premises and parameters of the official narrative or justification of the war: terrorism, democracy, civil war, stability, human rights, and the like. Antiwar forces need to extricate themselves from the largely diversionary and constraining debate over these secondary issues, and raise public consciousness of the scandalous economic interests that drive the war. It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, both in Iraq and here in the United States. It is time to make a moral case for restoring Iraqi oil and other assets to the Iraqis. It is also time to make a moral case against the war profiteers' plundering of our treasury, or tax dollars. To paraphrase the late General Smedley D. Butler, most wars could easily be ended-they might not even be started-if profits are taken out of them.[14] Ismael Hossein-zadeh is a professor of economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of the newly published book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism His Web page is http://www.cbpa.drake.edu/hossein-zadeh NOTES: 1. Renae Merle, "Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq," Washington Post (December 5, 2006). 2. The Center for Public Integrity, "Report Finds $362 Billion in No-Bid Contracts at the Pentagon" (September 29, 2004). 3. Bill Rigby, "Defense stocks may jump higher with big profits," Reuter (April 12, 2006), 4. The Center for Public Integrity, "Outsourcing the Pentagon" (September 29, 2004). 5. Esther Schrader, "Companies Capitalize on War on Terror," Los Angeles Times (14 April 2002) 6. Steve Young, "What Is Bad for America Is Good for Halliburton . . . Just Ask the Vice President," OpEdNews.com (23 October 2006), 7. "War Profiteering," by Source Watch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy). 8. Renae Merle, "Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq," Washington Post (December 5, 2006), 9. William D. Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? (New York: Nation Books, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Ismael Hossein-zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York & London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006). 10. "War Profiteering," by Source Watch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy). 11. Naomi Klein, "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," The Nation (May 2, 2005). 12. As quoted in Klein, "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." 13. Josh Mitteldorf, "Why we're not getting out of Iraq," Op Ed News (December 8, 2006). 14. Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1935 [2003]). [Originally published on Counter Punch, January 10, 2007]

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Missing in Antiwar Action

John McMillian — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:00:34 +0000

by John McMillian Recently I finished teaching a freshman seminar at Harvard called "From Reform to Revolution: Youth Culture in the 1960s." When I built the syllabus, I asked students to ponder a single, overarching question: "How did the youth rebellion of the 1960s happen?" That is, what caused millions of young people to pierce the bland and platitudinous din that characterized the early Cold War years? Why did so many youths -- many of them affluent and college-educated -- suddenly decide that American society needed to be radically overhauled? But as the semester progressed, my students frequently turned the question around: Why is there no rising protest movement among young people today? At the very least, they asked, shouldn't we be seeing more antiwar activity? According to a CNN poll this month, 67 percent of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and more than half would like to see all U.S. troops home by year's end. Given that it was not until August 1968 that a majority of Americans began calling the Vietnam War a "mistake," this is a remarkable statistic. By 1968, of course, antiwar teach-ins, sit-ins and marches were commonplace on many campuses; demonstrators had violently clashed with soldiers on the steps of the Pentagon; and the Democratic National Convention had descended into chaos over the war. Today, grass-roots antiwar activism has not been entirely absent. But one would be hard-pressed to argue that we're on the cusp of a rising protest movement. Why not? First, the civil rights movement exerted a forceful influence on left-wing protesters in the 1960s. When African Americans bravely stood up against attack dogs, cattle prods and fire hoses, they dramatically demonstrated the power of collective action to foster social change. Second, the draft personalized the Vietnam War not just for the hundreds of thousands of young men who were conscripted but also for their loved ones. No matter how strained the U.S. military becomes, our all-volunteer army -- widely regarded as a lethal "third rail" in American politics -- isn't going away anytime soon. As a result, too many of us enjoy the luxury of regarding the Iraq war as an abstraction. Among my 12 students, only two personally knew someone serving in Iraq. One is a medic, the other a chaplain. But my students suggested some other reasons today's youth seem so passive. Although this high-achieving group was hardly representative, many of them spoke plaintively about being pressured from an early age to begin building their credentials for college. "Students are expected to get perfect grades, excel in extracurricular activities, save the world and be home before dinner time," quipped one freshman. These demands seem to be common nationwide. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned this month of the physical and mental health problems that may arise from the competitive and hurried lifestyles of many youths. In such pressure-cooker environments, students are unlikely to become committed organizers. Nor are many students likely to be socialized into antiwar activism. Every campus has its left-wing organizers, but today the gauzy idealism that circulated among teenagers in the 1960s seems almost freakishly anomalous. According to a recent U.S. Census report, 79 percent of college freshmen in 1970 said that "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" was among their goals, whereas only 36 percent said becoming wealthy was a high priority. By contrast, in 2005, 75 percent of incoming students listed "being very well off financially" among their chief aims. Some of my students suggested that they might not even be capable of experiencing the kind of indignation and disillusionment that spurred many baby boomers toward activism. In the Vietnam era, the shameful dissembling of American politicians provoked outrage. But living in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, and weaned on "The Simpsons" and "The Daily Show," today's youth greet the Bush administration's spin and ever-evolving rationale for war with ironic world-weariness and bemused laughter. "The Iraq war turned out to be a hoax from the beginning? Figures!" The students who took my seminar were a particularly serious-minded and delightful bunch. Most of them came to admire the pluck and panache of the New Leftists we studied, and they were quick to recognize how frequently the concerns of Vietnam-era protesters dovetailed with their own complaints against the Iraq war. Some even wistfully remarked that they would like to be part of a generational rebellion. But they doubt that this is likely to happen. "Just like [in] the 1960s, we have an unjust war, a lying president, and dead American soldiers sent home everyday," one student wrote me in an e-mail. "But rather than fight the administration or demand a forum to express our unhappiness, we accept the status quo and focus on our own problems." The writer is a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University. He can be reached at mcmill@fas.harvard.edu. [Originally published by the Washington Post, January 20, 2007]

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Claiming the Prize: War Escalation Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil

Chris Floyde — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 06:00:37 +0000

by Chris Floyde January 12, 2007 I. The Twin Engines of Bush's War The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand. At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its U.K. lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March. As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion -- indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.org has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil. According to senior Bush minions talking up the plan for what is not a surge but a long-term escalation of urban warfare that the U.S. ground commander in Iraq says will likely last for years, Bush's new "stratergery" includes "benchmarks" that the natives must meet to keep in favor with their colonial master. One of the most prominent of these is the demand that Iraq "finalize a long-delayed measure on the distribution of oil revenue." As we can see by the Independent stories quoted here, that benchmark should be done and dusted within weeks. From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry -- while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits -- more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes. Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" -- i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq -- prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives. The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing." The "surged" troops -- mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty -- are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on -- and it will go on and on -- the Bush Administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" -- as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions. So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse -- as it almost certainly will -- Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" -- a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, then answered his own question. "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere -- witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands." This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits -- and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neocons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla. II. The Win-Win Scenario And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq -- they care about what comes out of the ground. The end -- profit and dominion -- justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles. And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction -- and the elite interests they represent -- has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below. Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation -- indeed, the world -- as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them -- not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases. The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions -- like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh -- have cashed in their insider chips for blood money. The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the U.S. arms industry -- and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses. But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything -- their bases, their contracts, their collaborators -- the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine -- 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military. Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths -- or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street -- both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome. [By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues -- the neocons -- somehow "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined on an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neocons and their bag of tricks -- their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes -- as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.] As I noted earlier this year: Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" -- who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state -- until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen. So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq -- these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is -- and they like it. Chris Floyd is an American journalist. He is the author of the book, Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime. He has been a writer and editor for more than 20 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Â© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/46602/

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Surge Towards Debacle in Iraq and MidEast

Editors — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 06:00:44 +0000

Financial Times George W.â€‰Bushâ€™s new direction in Iraq is certainly not a strategy for victory, whatever that word, which is used ever more desperately by the US president, now means. It may be one last heave. It may be a cover for US withdrawal. But two things are quite clear. Right now, Mr Bush has the support of no more than one in four Americans for this so-called surge of an extra 20,000 or so troops. Very soon, as the already indecipherable ethnic and sectarian patchwork of Iraq is pulled further and even more bloodily to pieces, he will have none. Second, this policy will not succeed in fixing an Iraq traumatised by tyranny and war and then broken by invasion and occupation. But it may end with the US â€œsurgingâ€ into Iran â€“ and taking the Middle East to a new level of mayhem that will spill into nearby regions and western capitals. Mr Bushâ€™s body language in the speech bespoke a chastened man. Yet, caught in a wilfully spun web of delusion and denial, he seems still unable to comprehend the depths of the debacle he has caused in Iraq. Iraq has reached advanced societal breakdown, with ethnic cleansing on a regional, neighbourhood and even street-by-street basis. There has been a mass exodus of its professionals and managers, civil servants and entrepreneurs, a haemorrhage of its future. The time for the occupying authorities to have surged was 2003, after the fall of Baghdad; like everything they have tried since, this is far too little, much too late. The US deployed a similar number of troops last summer to â€œlock downâ€ Baghdad, since when the number of killed in the capital alone has rocketed to more than 100 a day, while on average an attack occurs against Anglo-American forces every 10 minutes, and this in a fight now mainly between the minority Sunni deposed from power and the hitherto dispossessed Shia majority drunk with it. It is hard, even for ardent democrats, to see this Iraq as a young democracy fighting for its life, as Mr Bushâ€™s discourse of good guys against bad guys would have it. The invasion has solidified a system divided into sects and operating on the basis of patronage and intimidation. The composition of parliament is nearly two thirds Islamist. There are no institutions. Ministries are sectarian booty and factional bastions. The one institution that did more or less survive Saddam Hussein, the national army, was disbanded by the occupation and current attempts to reconstitute it have failed to move beyond rebadged militia. The three brigades the Shia-dominated government of Nuri al-Maliki has promised to add to the five extra US brigades are mostly Peshmerga â€“ Kurdish militiamen â€“ adding another account to be settled once the Americans withdraw. What is still, in spite of Mr Bushâ€™s attempts to dress it up, an essentially military strategy is just not credible. The US army is not designed to deal with insurgency and, in any case, does not have the troops to master one on this scale â€“ especially if its own masters are planning to open a new front. It has failed to control the insurgency in the Sunni triangle â€“ a rebellion by a minority of the minority. Now it aims to confront Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia radical, and his 60,000-strong Mahdi army, in a fight that could set fire to east Baghdad and south Iraq, where British troops could easily be enveloped in the flames. The contradiction at the heart of the US approach, however, is this: after casually overturning the Sunni order in Iraq and empowering the Shia in an Arab heartland country for the first time in nearly a millennium, Washington took fright at the way this had enlarged the power of the Shia Islamist regime in Iran. Now, while dependent on Tehran-aligned forces in Baghdad, and unable to dismantle the Sunni Jihadistan it has created in western Iraq, the US is trying to put together an Arab Sunni alliance against Iran. This is a fiasco with the fuel to combust into a region-wide conflagration. The only feasible way forward is the approach of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission â€“ which the new US Congress should embrace and insist on. This would make support for the Iraqi government and army conditional on their real effort to promote national reconciliation, which would in turn, as it progressed, be rewarded with billions of dollars in long-term aid from the US and Iraqâ€™s neighbours. This external support â€“ from Turkey to Saudi Arabia and Iran to Syria â€“ would be built up within a wide-ranging diplomatic offensive in the region that would include Tehran and Damascus. Mr Bush is instead threatening to expand the war. â€œIran is providing material support for attacks on American troopsâ€ he said on Wednesday. â€œWe will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.â€ The Iraq surge is beginning to look like the Vietnam escalation, spilling over into Iran and Syria the way that one did into Cambodia and Laos. Mr Bush is right to argue that defeat in Iraq would be very serious. He is wrong in failing to recognise defeat is what he is staring at â€“ and that this approach will help guarantee it. Published in the Financial Times as an editorial, January 11, 2007

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