The Draft is Coming Back. posted by lenin

A while ago, I suggested that the draft was on its way back in the United States:

Why is the draft suddenly back on the agenda? Well, apart from the official 143,000 troops "inside Iraqi borders", there are tens of thousands of US troops in surrounding countries. This could elevate the total to perhaps 200,000. The US army is completely over-stretched, with commitments in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and of course Iraq. The Iraqi Resistance cannot be put down by the current troop levels. British forces have admitted that they could not possibly hold Basra if the population enacted a Fallujah-style uprising. US troops are finding themselves frequently on the run . And the loose bands of mercenaries they've got in there for "protection" are presumably not going to be up to the task either.

I would therefore expect there to be a big push to reinstate the draft. The US authorities in Iraq are presently holding out for a political solution, but that is unlikely to happen.

There has been a website devoted to this topic for some time now, the rumour-mill has been grinding, and it looks like the political class has been priming the public for the re-admission of this topic into the mainstream. And now we learn, thanks to John Sutherland at The Guardian that there is now legislation being prepared to bring back the draft. Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that the "war on terror" is nearer the beginning than the end (next stop, Canada!), so they'll be needing a tranch of new recruits. They've already begun work to get enough volunteers for their immediate requirements, mainly by hawking the virtues of a military life in America's schools . According to Congress.org:

Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan [and a permanent state of war on "terrorism"] proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft.

Congress brought twin bills, S. 89 and HR 163 forward this year, http://www.hslda.org/legislation/na...s89/default.asp entitled the Universal National Service Act of 2003, "to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons [age 18--26] in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills currently sit in the committee on armed services.

Forcing human beings at any age into military combat is unacceptable. But at 18 to 26, it is cutting off life at its prime. If America really must have a draft, I recommend they restrict it to 55-65 year old males with an annual income over $150,000. A couple of wars could wipe out the entire ruling class.

UPDATE: A generous reviewer has apprised me of an attempted rebuttal of this story by Urban Legends . With legendary urbanity, the site offers a number of reasons why the draft may not in fact be a viable option for the Bush administration. Unfortunately, and quite characteristically, the site's assessment is partial and rather scrappy. They take no notice whatsoever of the compelling reasons why Bush may need this legislation.

Doug's Place provides a good summary:

"At present, the number of ground troops in the US Army, USMC, Army Reserves and National Guard is 1.434 million. Currently, about 400'000 are deployed worldwide. Because rotation is a three-phase task, (deployment, refit, rest), that means that about 1.2 million are already tied up, leaving 234'000 troops to work with, meaning only about 80'000 American troops can be now deployed with substantial support."

He also offers three good additional reasons why the draft would be considered essential by the Bush administration:

1) The war in Iraq will intensify (this written before it in fact DID intensify).

2) The administration wants to be able to fight on a second front.

3) They are planning to start a second war. (See Rummy's recent warnings that we are closer to the beginning of the 'war on terror' than the end.)

The fact that legislation is even being advanced on this is an indication of just how far we have come. There has been a proliferation of television debates, articles, columns arguing over whether the draft should be reinstated. My belief is that the legislation is being considered because the administration needs it. The public is being primed for it. Alarm bells should be ringing.

Who's Afraid of Islam? posted by lenin

Apparently, every corner of Britain trembles with fear and loathing of our beige-dark citizens - at least according to a new report by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. What is most interesting about this story is that it appears to reflect an insititutionalisation of common prejudice:

More than 35,000 Muslims were stopped and searched last year, with fewer than 50 charged. Three years ago only around 2,000 Muslims were stopped and searched.

Asian peer Lord Ahmed, a leading critic of Muslim extremism, told The Observer he had twice been stopped and searched in recent months at Heathrow airport.'

Statistics also show a sharp rise in the number of Muslims jailed. In 2001 there were 6,095 in UK prisons compared with 731 in 1991. Muslims comprise 9 per cent of the prison population but only 3 per cent of the population as whole.

'Islamophobia in Britain has become institutionalised. If we don't take positive action to embrace the young Muslim men in this country, we are going to have an urgent problem,' Stone said. 'We're going to have real anger and riots with young Muslims pitched against the police.'

Of the factors considered responsible for the rise in Islamophobia, the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 are raised in the report. The report also criticises "the media's treatment of Islam, especially its coverage of Abu Hamza". Indeed, the media treatment of this rather lonely and demented sad-sack has been hyperbolic, to say the least (oh sure, he has about twenty hooded kids clustered around him on a road one morning, and that means he has a following). Unsurprisingly, psyclops leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, made ample use of such media imagery and footage in his election broadcast this Friday. Pictures of Hamza were cunningly spliced with shots of a street filled with brown faces milling around (some real geniuses in that outfit, no question). Griffin has also promised, in the past, to make ample use of the Home Secretary's vicious blundering on race . Blunkett, who is to race relations what Jim Davidson is to comedy, had suggested that it was time for Muslims to start "feeling British". Griffin has made similar capital out of government kow-towing to the right on race before :

"The asylum seeker issue has been great for us. We have had phenomenal growth in membership. It has been quite fun to watch government ministers and the Tories play the race card in far cruder terms than we would ever use, but pretend not to. This issue legitimises us."

In fact, when interviewed by the World At One shortly after Blunkett's "Britishness test" comments, Griffin accused Blunkett of "jumping on the BNP's bandwagon". So, I'd like to thank the government for making Britain a less pleasant place to live in. I'd like to thank them for handing propaganda gift-wrapped on a silver dish to the far right. I'd like to thank them for making a mockery of their promises to tackle Islamophobia by introducing laws that have enabled its institutionalisation. In short, for every black-eye or glassed jaw sustained by a Muslim in this country at the hands of racists, I'd like to thank David Blunkett. May his "hard-man" bluster accompany him to hell.

Dr Who? posted by lenin

The man who is now to be Prime Minister of Iraq is, you will be amazed to learn, an ex-Ba'athist . The coalition has been complaining for some time that there were former Ba'athists seeking power in Iraq, but I would not have expected them to go so far as to prove themselves right. Dr Iyad Allawi, as he styles himself, also has a history of connections to CIA and MI6. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he has also been a prime source of hoax material leaked onto media legs like that of the inestimable Con Coughlin of the Sunday Telegraph .

He is, we learn, responsible for the "45 minute claim". One assumes he has had his fingers in a few other cow-pies as well. And why has he been nominated as Iraq's new Prime Minister. Perhaps it is because of the support he has "on the ground" as they say on high. But, as The Independent reports:

There were few signs that they had any popular support. During an uprising in the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, last year, crowds immediately set fire to the INA office.

Hint - if the people in the country you are seeking to rule burn down your offices, I would go look for a different country. Just a thought.

Abu Ghraib and the American Mind. posted by lenin

Explaining why American soldiers tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib is a tricky business. According to Christopher Hitchens, it was a "Prison Mutiny" , which is certainly compatible with the Bush administration's claim that these actions are the disparate, disorganised outrages of an undisciplined minority . (Rumsfeld, if you pursue the link, also stipulates that what took place in Iraq was "abuse, which is technically different from torture".) The immediate reaction of US military officials was that the soldiers were not properly taught the Geneva Convention rules about how to treat war prisoners , "as if," Slavoj Zizek adds, "one has to be taught not to torture and humiliate prisoners!" Martin Amis once observed in Koba the Dread, a frankly dire book about Communism, that "given total power over another, the human being's thoughts turn to torture". I beg to differ, although I do see a certain bleak authenticity in the statement - Amis is nothing if not alive to the possibilities for human evil. But human nature won't explain it for us either.

Another reaction, which I think no less credible, is to discuss the torture in terms of authority and obedience , pace Stanley Milgram's infamous experiment. True, there is substantial evidence now to suggest that the soldiers were told to do what they did by Military Intelligence . And if Seymour Hersh is right, the orders originated from on high. However, the difference with Milgram's experiment is obvious enough - Milgram did not encourage his subjects to believe that they were engaging in torture, although the horror of that possibility must have crept up on them as they administered what they thought could be fatal jolts. Moreover, the subjects in Milgram's experiment evinced none of the enthusiasm that the US soldiers did when enacting those spectral scenes.

Another good reason to oppose this line of explanation is that it tails with the miserable excuses being offered up by Lynndie England :

"I guess it just goes with stuff that happens during war time … You know, going in and interrogating, and doing what you're told."

Or indeed Ivan "Chip" Fredericks :

"We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things...like rules and regulations. And it just wasn't happening."

A more likely explanation is that the order to torture elicited enthusiastic responses because of the way American soldiers (and, by logical extension, a good number of Americans) perceive Arabs. Take, for example, the book The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai. This book has been promoted as "one of the great classics of cultural studies", and described by Publisher's Weekly as "admirable", "full of insight" and with "an impressive spread of scholarship" . According to Seymour Hersh's article:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

This return to the good old days of Orientalism should not amaze anyone in a culture that worries itself about such questions as For Whom the Bell Curves (it curves for thee). In fact, as Zizek notes, those scenes remind one of the "theatre of cruelty" that already pervades much of American cultural life (indeed, "theatre of cruelty" is a felicitous phrase - Antonin Artaud would have made gruelling work of them). He refers to the rituals of bullying at Army bases and high school campuses. So when a former interrogator told Fox News that the torture was no worse than "frat hazing" , he was right in precisely the sense that he did not intend. There are sides of American life which radiate cruelty triumphant - from the prison system to the poverty and squalor of life outside the steel barricades. In America, it is a crime to be poor . In Iraq, it is a crime worthy of electrode torture to complain .

The joy taken in cruelty in imperial nations is not new. Orwell once remarked that England was, very recently, a country in which a gentleman might boast of having kicked his wife to death. Hardy fellows that they were, they also knew how to kick recalcitrant natives to an early grave if they had to. For a large number of American soldiers, there is an erotic pleasure taken in humiliating and hurting Iraqis. Not for the first time, racism, imperialism, and sadism are a combustible but inseparable mix.

Obituary. posted by lenin

The estimable Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson has died . His work demolished many insidious myths about the foundation of Israel and provided intellectual sustenance for those in Palestine and elsewhere fighting oppression.

Johann Hari on George Galloway. posted by lenin

In a recent review of George Galloway's new book, Johann Hari has resorted to dissembling, distortion and extreme Zionist propaganda to produce an incoherent, childish rant. How come?

There could hardly be a more fair-minded commentator on Harry's Place than Johann Hari. Not to damn him with faint praise, then, I'll also add that he is one of the more intelligent supporters of the war - and, let's be honest, the pro-war camp desperately needs intelligent support. However, having read his venomous review of George Galloway's book I'm Not the Only One, I remember that everyone's political honesty has limits. Wish fulfillment abounds in most political analysis, and you could hardly find a more compelling example of this than in Johann's review. Having peremptorily dismissed 90% of the book's content as "unconvincing", "hazy Lennonist idealism" etc., Hari gets to the business of his review. Galloway is guilty of "Ba'athist propaganda", the extent of which is "staggering":

All those who, in the past, have denied that Galloway has mutated into a Saddamist will simply have to recant when they read this book. For example, Galloway actually refers to the Shi'ites Saddam murdered in the 1980s as "a fifth column" who actively undermined the Iraqi war effort in the interests of their countryís enemy." Nobody outside Saddamís squalid regime used this terminology; it was purely a justification for the mass slaughter of the dictator's enemies. It has been extensively documented that very few Iraqis supported Iran. They were killed because they opposed Saddam, not because they backed Iran, and Galloway must know it.

Now, before I proceed to deconstruct this breathtaking misrepresentation, I'll give you Galloway's quote in full:

"Iraqi society remained remarkably solid during the eight long years of war with Iran. The Shi'ite majority in Iraq proved that they were Arabs and Iraqis first and co-religionists of Khomeini second. But there was a fifth column, Shi'ite elements who actively undermined the Iraqi war effort in the interests of the country's enemy. As in all authoritarian regmes, this fifth column was ruthlessly annihilated wherever it was found." (Page 114).

So, before we're even off the ground, Hari's penultimate sentence is confirmed. Galloway is indeed aware that "very few Iraqis supported Iran" because he specifically says so. And what of the "fifth column"? Galloway nowhere denies that many Iraqis were killed simply for opposing the regime. In fact, he specifically says so:

"Saddam was a ruthless and cruel man who thought little about signing death warrants of even close comrades, and still less about ordering the merciless crushing of potential threats to his regime." (Page 126).

Hari is fully aware of this, since he later (mis)quotes precisely this passage. Nevertheless, in describing those in sympathy with Iran as a "fifth column", you might think Galloway was trying to impugn their motives or imply that they deserved what they got. In fact, Galloway both opposed Saddam's brutal assault on Iran, and supported an Iraqi overthrow of their regime:

"Saddam could have had no legitimate complaint if living by the sword - ruthlessly cutting down any and all opposition - he had died by the sword (or rope) at the hands of the Iraqis." (Page 103).

Galloway is accused, then, of saying something he hasn't said. He has not said that all the Shi'tes Saddam murdered in the 1980s were a fifth column - merely that such a faction existed. And he notes it was a minority. And, given his hostility to the regime and to its war with Iran, he cannot even be accused of opposing this "fifth column". But Hari has more:

How about the passage where Galloway defends Saddam's claim to Kuwait, describing the province as "clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion"?

This is a blatant - and I must conclude intentional - misrepresentation. Here is Galloway's actual quote:

"For Iraqis of all political persuasions, Kuwait had been stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion - Great Britain, the former colonial power." (Page 42).

He does not describe "the province" thus - he describes Iraqis as having that perception. Galloway could be wrong in this assessment, but that is immaterial since he did not say what Hari says he did. In fact, Hari seems to be the one in doubt of Kuwait's legitimacy as a nation, since he is the one who describes it as a "province". (Province: "A territory governed as an administrative or political unit of a country or empire." ) What can Johann mean?

Additionally, Galloway specifically rejects Saddam's right to invade Kuwait:

"In 1990 I was an enemy of the Iraqi regime and had, purposely, never visited the country. The sympathy I had for former colonies undoing the fake boundaries of colonialism could not support the naked aggression committed against Kuwait. That action copied elsewhere in the developing world would be a recipe for endless chaos and bloodshed." (Page 45).

You could make excuses for Hari. Perhaps he didn't see this passage, perhaps he read the book in a hurry, racing toward the salacious Saddamism he hoped to find. But such a conclusion is annihilated by Hari's next move:

For example, he says that in the First Gulf War, "I made my stand with Iraq." No you didn't, George. You stood with Saddam; conscript Iraqis - most in their teens - were being sent to be slaughtered in the name of an invasion they did not support.

That quote is the sentence immediately following the cited passage on Page 45. It is even in the same paragraph. Hari even uses the statement to imply that George Galloway "stood with Saddam" in his invasion of Kuwait while "conscript Iraqis" were being forced to die in an invasion they didn't support. I don't know about you, but I would think that - since it is logically impossible that George both supported and opposed the invasion of Kuwait - he was referring to his opposition to US planes pounding Iraqi cities and killing as many as 200,000 people. Hari continues:

Or how about Galloway's claim that Saddam's mass murder of democrats, Kurds and other anti-Saddam forces in 1991 was a "civil war" that "involved massive violence on both sides"? Again, only Ba'athists have ever used this language or narrative. The reality is very different. In 1991, a vicious tyranny exterminated its enemies. For Galloway to claim that two morally equivalent sides were simply fighting it out is staggering: he is equidistant between a poisoner and the medical crew waving an antidote.

I see no reason to revisit Galloway's position on the ouster of Saddam by Iraqis. Just scroll up if your mind has gone blank all of a sudden. But to describe the 1991 uprising as a "civil war" is no more apologetic than it is to describe the Nepalese uprising as a civil war, or the Kosovar uprising as a civil war. And did the Iraqi uprising not involve "massive violence on both sides"? Of course, describing facts is rarely neutral - context is all. But as I have already indicated, the context in which Galloway is writing is one in which he considers an Iraqi uprising just. Galloway nevertheless stands accused or "relativising" Saddam's crimes:

The most bizarre example of Galloway's moral relativism is when he says, "Saddam was a ruthless and cruel man who thought little of signing the death warrants of even close comrades. In this regard he was little different to the leaders of most regimes: we just don't know it in our own countries yet." As if Tony Blair is about to start gassing the SWP and the Tories. As if George Bush is going to start building mass graves in California.

Do you know, I don't think George Galloway is actually saying that? It may in fact be that Hari has mis-quoted Galloway again:

"In this regard he is little different to the leaders of most regimes; regime survival is the ultimate priority of most systems - we just don't know it in our own countries, yet." (Page 126).

Okay, so Hari has left out a subclause and a comma. No big deal. I'm not saying he is a sloppy reviewer, because the phrase "sloppy reviewer" is a tautology when it comes to the press. However, the misrepresentation is so comically obvious that I merely wish to point it out, then move on - Galloway is saying that most regimes in the world, if threatened with revolution, will react with extreme violence. He is not justifying such actions, but rather broadening the net of his critique to include nations beyond a relatively small corner of the Arab world. Everyone clear? Need I underline it any further?

Galloway dares to criticise Christopher Hitchens as an "apostate", when in fact he has consistently been opposed to Saddam and in favour of getting rid of him.

But that is precisely what Galloway cannot stand. There are even large slabs of praise for Saddam in this rancid book. "Just as Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraqís own Great Leap Forward," he says, and amazingly, this isn't a criticism. "He managed to keep his country together until 1991. Indeed, he is likely to have been the leader in history who came closest to creating a truly Iraqi national identity, and he developed Iraq and the living, health, social and education standards of his own people."

Hari would be well-advised to consult Hitchens' 1991 writings if he thinks the latter has been "consistently" in favour of regime-change. He adamantly, and eloquently, opposed the first Gulf War, and was even vague on the most recent Gulf War until late 2002, telling Salon that he did not support an invasion of Iraq, although he did support a "confrontation". But when Hari claims that Galloway's comparison of Hussein with Stalin "isn't a criticism", I feel bound to inform you that once again he s mangling his quotes. Saddam, says Galloway, resembles Stalin inasmuchas

"Both were determined to industrialize their countries, whatever the cost. Both had chips on ther shoulders. Both built police states believing the ends justified the means. Both ruthlessly suppressed all tendencies toward the break-up of their country, believing in a strong central authority (themselves) ... And, of course, both could be murderous in pursuit of their goals". (Page 111).

The next part of Hari's quote comes on Page 128, where Galloway notes that Saddam:

"[D]eveloped Iraq and the living, health, social and educational standards of his people. But the brutality of his regime and the sheer lack of democracy meant tha he could in the end be isolated and defeated."

Hari, suffice to say, does not include the last sentence. Nor does he note the sentence, "Stalin gave his factional opponents a show-trial and then killed them. Saddam just killed them." (Page 111). What an apologist! Hari proceeds:

Perhaps the most obscene statement of all come when Galloway libels the Arabs he claims to love. "A majority of Arabs and Muslims [believe] the good Saddam did was more important than the many debits."

That's from Page 129. I better add that Galloway's final sentence on that subject is "For them, in the land of the blind the one-eyed mand is king". This is not an unusual judgment. Take this , for example:

Hussein is also one of the few Arab leaders to have been able to stand up to the West on a regular basis, asserting Iraqi and Arab independence from Western interests and power. This, rather than the brutal repression of his own people, has become the point upon which many Arabs and Muslims have focused the most. In a region which has had few powerful leaders to whom people could point with pride, Saddam Hussein has become something of a folk hero. As poor of a hero as he is, the lack of any better candidates has assured him a position of respect and honor for Arabs and Muslims for generations to come.

Or consider the fact that most Arabs told pollsters , before the assault on Iraq, that a US invasion would bring less democracy. I am not endorsing such views, any more than Galloway is, but it is a simple matter of fact that most of the Arab world feels this way.

"Not odd of God, the goyim annoy 'im."

Hari is also incensed at Galloway's attitude to Israel. Unsurprisingly, the views he adduces are not those to be located in the book. For instance:

Galloway is too cowardly to explicitly oppose a two-state solution, but his wild rhetoric suggests he seeks the very opposite of peace - the destruction of Israel itself, an impossible, loathsome aspiration that is condemning both Palestinians and Israelis to eternal war. For example, he describes the whole of Israel - not just the illegal outposts on the Occupied Territories - as "the West's settler-state sentinel"; how could such a state ever be acceptable? How could it ever deserve to exist? He never mentions the ideal of two states in this book - not once.

Galloway won't say he opposes the two-state solution, but he must mean it. And why? Because he describes Israel, accurately, as "the West's settler-state sentinel". He could have done better than this, actually. One propagandist for British imperialism described Israel as "a loyal little Jewish Ulster" . (Coming from Northern Ireland, I can only say that this rings a bell or two.) How could such a state be acceptable? Hari seems oblivious to the fact that most Palestinians also think of Israel in such terms, yet support a two-state solution. Still, since I'm not "cowardly", I'd just like to affirm my opposition to a two-state solution and indicate that Israel is emphatically not acceptable in its present form. And I will just note in passing that Galloway does, in fact, mention "the ideal of two states" in his book (Page 34) - once.

Hari continues that Galloway "even skirts very close to praising the tactic of suicide bombing". How close? He says that

"Saddam's endless protestations of fidelity to the Palestinian cause were sincere and, as the families of the martyred and wounded know, he put Iraq's money where his mouth was."

How this syllogism is supposed to work, I have no idea. Hari continues:

Galloway pointedly evades the main reasons why the state of Israel was created - or the 800,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries in the years that followed.

Hari combines two outlandish assertions in a single sentence, then. Galloway, in fact, does discuss why Zionists set out to create Israel. On Page 31, he specifically tags European anti-Semitism as the culprit. He also notes that anti-Semites like Arthur Balfour had reasons to do with imperial prerogatives in supporting the existence of a "Jewish Homeland". (Hari presumably wants Galloway to say that the Holocaust is the reason why Israel was created. It may in fact be the reason why Israel gained the support of Jews worldwide, but it is not the reason Israel was created. The movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine was up and running long before the 1930s, and in fact the Zionist Federation of Germany sought to take advantage of Hitler's anti-Semitism, entreating him to help them build the Jewish state outside Europe). The second outlandish assertion is that 800,000 Jews were "ethnically cleansed" from Arab countries after 1948. Only the most ardent Zionists actually proclaim this to be the case. The Sephardic Jews of Arab countries migrated to Israel in waves , doubtless because of Arab repression and discrimination in many cases. (Click here for instance.)

Further, and more importantly, why does this count as "the other side"? Are Palestinians responsible for this? Is Galloway obliged to stipulate, every time he expresses support for the Palestinians or denounces Israel's actions, that he also has enormous sympathy for the plight of Sephardic Jews and the hardships they endured in the Arab world? Could we not take this axiomatic and move on?

Hari issues, suffice to say, a profusion of inaccurate and incredible charges against Galloway. He accuses him of wanting to see global capitalism replaced by "a proliferation of neo-Stalinist dictators". Unsurprisingly, Hari keeps the evidence on that one to himself. He avers:

Lawrence stood with Arab tyrants too, arguing that Arabs were too stupid and culturally backward to govern themselves, and were temperamentally suited to "strong men". So does Galloway.

Strange to relate, Galloway spends much of his book attacking racist notions about the Arabs, arguing that they are perfectly capable of governing themselves without the help of Western bombs, and attacking the Arab regimes, including Saddam Hussein's. But in Hari's world... and the sad thing is, he's not the only one.

Islamism in Theory and Practise, and A Modest Proposal. posted by lenin

Islamism Good, Islamism Bad...

Yesterday I suggested that there were circumstances under which socialists ought to support Islamists - namely when they were fighting against tyranny and oppression. It follows that there are circumstances in which we ought not to, and here are two examples which I believe illustrate the difference.

The Madhi Army is growing in strength and number, a particular surge in recruitment following a particularly bloody clash in Sadr City:

Residents of this vast, impoverished area of over one million saw US troops battle members of the Mehdi Army early yesterday morning. According to Agence FrancePresse, hospitals counted 18 civilians killed in the fighting, but Captain Brian O'Malley of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, operating in the area, said US forces killed 26 Iraqis, all of them militiamen loyal to Muqtada Al-Sadr.



The heavily resisted assault on targets in Sadr City by US forces came less than a day after the US 1st Cavalry Division completed a weapons purchasing program in the district, through which the Army bought assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, mortars and artillery shells, among other weapons, "at or above market prices." The Army boasted. that thousands of weapons were turned over by Sadr City residents, but the real effect of the program was unclear at the end of last yesterday's fighting, which was possibly the fiercest this neighborhood has seen since tensions between US forces and Muqtada Al-Sadr escalated in late March.



As men congregated around the newly rebuilt office of Muqtada Al-Sadr in order to join his militia, Sheikh Hassan Al-Adari, a spokesman for Al-Sadr, claimed that many of the people killed last night were civilians and said such a slaughter will only serve to draw angry Iraqis to the resistance.



"It's normal to see people coming here from all over Baghdad to join us in defending against the occupiers," he said, "especially when the Americans are killing civilians and attacking our holy places."

On the other hand, in Bangladesh,

A 100,000-strong pro-Taliban group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB),
previously known as the Jama'atul Mujahedin is operating a private army that
terrorises locals and Leftists in northern Bangladesh, allegedly at the
behest of local police and politicians.

The Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), previously known as the
Jama'atul Mujahedin, is accused of killing at least five alleged underground
Leftists and injuring many more since it surfaced last month after
reportedly operating underground for six years. The JMJB is said to be the
youth front of the outlawed militant group Harqat-ul-Jihad.

The group claims to target outlawed Leftists known as Sarbaharas, members of
the Purbo Bangla Communist Party. But terrorised villagers accuse the JMJB
of raping women, harassing villagers and flaunting firearms, swords and
other weapons. When local dailies began reporting on the apparently
100,000-strong JMJB, group members reverted to lying low. ("Islamist private army rises in Bangladesh", Hindustan Times, 17th May 2004).

A Modest Proposal...

Meanwhile, this fool will get no sympathy. And it looks like the US are deciding to take seriously an alleged peace offer from Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr has made these offers several times, and it has so far amounted to diddly-squat on account of US intransigence. At the same time, Sadr's own aides are denying that any such offer has been made:

Ahmed Shibani, al-an al-Sadr aide, said there was "no truth" that a final agreement had been struck and that al-Rubaie "is talking on his own."

Well, don't worry, guys. If I were you, I should make the peace deal, see if you can get yourself a slot in the interim government. Then you will have mandatory powers over the British army whom you can then send into combat with the Americans. Beautiful.

Political Islam and it's Discontents (Part Two). posted by lenin

Continuing from where I left off .

Iran’s “Islamic Revolution”.
Political Islam is not quite as ancient, or as Arabian, as it would have us believe. In fact, it synthesises a backward looking appeal to “true Islam” with modern, Western notions of nationalism. The Islamist state would apply the shari’a and unify the umma under a renewed caliphate, drawing on the “sacred-history” of the community-state of Madina in the time of Muhammad. Yet, the assumptions underpinning the nation-state are also evident in most Islamist ideologies. (Sami Zubaida, “Is Iran an Islamic State?”, in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork eds, Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, 1997, p. 104). The existence of Iran captures these contradictions perfectly. For, although Khomeini’s regime maintains the internationalist rhetoric of Islamism, it also practises an Islamised nationalism. As Zubaida explains:

“[T]he Iranian constitution and state practice enshrine Iranian nationality as a condition for full citizenship in the Republic. Article 115 states that the president must be Iranian both by origin and nationality, and have a ‘convinced belief in the … official school of thought in the country’, that is, he must be Shi’i … Iranian Islam, being Shi’i, reinforces Iranian nationalism, confronting as it does a predominantly Sunni Arab world and Turkey.” (Ibid, p. 105)

The origins of the present Islamic state are to be found in the revolutionary ferment in the years leading up to 1979, specifically with the different anti-Shah factions competing for hegemony within the revolution. On the left, the Marxist-Islamist Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Combatants) and the Marxist-Leninist Fedayin-e Khalq (People’s Sacraficers) tried to incite the masses to revolution through demonstrative attacks on the institutions of the state. On the right, Khomeini took advantage of religious processions and memorials to foment insurrectionary feeling. He argued that moral force would win the day, drawing on the Shi’ite themes of martyrdom and self-sacrafice. While the former appealed to the Iranian working class, to the poor and oppressed, Khomeini largely appealed to the disgruntled middle-class, who saw him as a safe bet with their property – but Khomeini also drew substantial support from the urban working class who heard his calls for social justice, and the rural workers who saw him as the man to bring roads, irrigation, and schools. (Dilip Hiro, Islamic Fundamentalism, 1988, pp. 166-8). It is these competing social forces which were to be decisive in shaping the “Islamic Republic” – most importantly, of course, the conservative clerics who out-manoeuvred the radicals and leftists during the revolutionary upheaval and after. It is partially because these forces persisted after the revolution, in various forms, that the regime’s totalitarian tendencies have been frustrated in various ways.

The Iranian Constitution is not the shari’a. The shari’a is taken as a source of legislation, but there is nevertheless “a dualism in the Iranian constitution between the sovereignty of the people (derived from the dominant political discourses of modernity) and the sovereignty of God, through the principle of the vilayet-i faqih. Article 6 of the constitutions states that ‘the affairs of the country must be administered on the basis of public opinion expressed by means of elections.’” (Zubaida, op cit, p. 106). At the same time, every Islamist movement in the world, including in Iran, has argued that the only suitable kind of rule under Islam is that of the Just Faqih - the vilayet-i faqih principle entails precisely the rule of the divine law as interpreted by the Just Faqih. (Dilip Hiro, op cit, 1988, p. 162).

And in practise, as Zubaida notes, the Council of Guardians – which is supposed to scrutinize legislation and prevent any deviation from the ‘tenets of Islam’ has in fact used its powers to veto such policies as land reform, or nationalisation. Measures that interfered with private property were consistently deemed contrary to the shari’a. The interference became so extreme that Khomeini was obliged to make a speech announcing that the Muslim nation may abrogate shari’a principles if it chose to do so. In fact, the shari’a, being as indeterminate as most systems of laws are, is supplemented by other sources of law anyway. The Qur’anic penal code, which allows the state to perform amputations and executions in the case of theft, for instance, has been used – but selectively and usually with a political motive. The ‘revolutionary courts’ set up by the regime are Jacobin courts, punishing those who have committed crimes against the revolution – that is, they are modern institutions of state repression. (The term ‘Islamic Republic’ in fact owes itself to its French forebear). The state, even though heavily Islamised in terms of personnel, is arranged in modern bureaucracies, ministries populated by bland functionaries wearing trousers and jackets. (Zubaida, op cit, pp. 106-9). Modernisation, then, by any other name…


Islamism and Democracy.
In reply to yesterday’s Guardian article by Osama Saeed, a Muslim writes from Birmingham to protest that the point isn’t to vote for one or other party in the election but to challenge the system of “secular democracy”, to work from within to persuade people of its inaptitude for a just society. Indeed, the enemies of “secular democracy” are usually placed on the far religious right, and this might be where you would place this gentleman – although, suffice to add, he would probably consider notions of left and right irrelevant. In fact, however, this scribe is merely repeating the gesture of Orientalist ideology – for him, just as for the Orientalists, there is only one true Islam, historically identical with the caliphate and incompatible with pluralist democracy. Daniel Lerner, an Orientalist intellectual himself, made a similar point when he suggested that the choice for Muslims was between “Mecca or mechanisation”. (Presumably, his choice was between illumination and alliteration.)

There is not, of course, one interpretation of Islam. There is not even one Islamism, as I have already hinted. Islamists are united on the view that Islam is comprehensive, embodying spirit and world, “religion and state”. This is the view of integrationists in Egypt who wish the state to be based on shari’a principles. There are, however, distinctions to be made between the religious and political spheres, and this is reflected in Islamic legal theory (fiqh) and the distinction between ibidat (a person’s relationship with God) and mu’amalat (a person’s relationship with society, economy and family). And of course, the latter is subject to various interpretations. Modern reformers within the Islamist tradition seek to define what is flexible (al-mutaghayyir) in the shari’a as broadly as possible, while conservatives seek to expand the dominion of what is decisively spoke by God (al-thabit). The secularist ‘Abd al-Raziq and the integralist Muslim Brothers agree on one thing – the precise form of governance in any society is to be left to human reason to define.

The issue of sovereignty and power revolves, for the Islamists, around the duality of God and the community of believers (umma). Ultimately, God is the source of all law. The power to interpret and apply that law is, however, in the hands of the community of believers - and each human being is born equal in the eyes of Islam. There is a radicalism inherent in this (which may express itself in right-wing or left-wing ways), because it marks a decisive shift away from the tradition of subordination to a ruler, even an unjust one, and toward the assertion of the will of the community. For contemporary Islamists, tyranny is the main enemy. Even the nominal commitment to the restoration of the caliphate (which has been abandoned by many Islamist sects) is in the hands of the Muslim Brothers, say, not much different to a modern Presidency - while he executes the shari'a on behalf of the community of believers, he has no religious sanction himself. (See, in general, Gudrun Kramer, "Islamist Notions of Democracy" in Political Islam, op cit.)


Liberation Theology.
In their internal organisation, however, Islamist movements have tended to be autocratic. The one regime which has issued from it, (the Islamic Republic) has been an autocracy. (I would argue that this is more because of the success of the conservative elements in hegemonizing the post-revolutionary situation and their need to suppress the desires of the rural poor and the urban working class.) Just as I have insisted that there is nothing automatically reactionary or 'backward' about Political Islam, it is also clear that the forms in which it has persisted have not been able to solve the problems which Islamists have addressed themselves to. Political Islam has not provided a particularly Islamic society to aim for - and it is hard to see how it could. It has, however, successfully filled a gap produced by the collapse of the big battalions of the international secular Left. Socialists do not share their purview, but we should work with them when they oppose tyranny and work against imperialism.

Norman Finkelstein in the "Wilderness"... posted by lenin

Norman Finkelstein has taken to the Canadian "wilderness" to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 20 years to the day Joan Peters published her fraudulent tract From Time Immemorial. It's great stuff, go watch.

Another One Bites the Dust? posted by lenin

John Howard is losing votes faster than he can belch a rude song at his cousin's barbie. Here are the high-lights:

The AC Nielsen Poll published in today's Age and Sydney Morning Herald shows despite a positive reception for the Government's Budget, support for the Coalition has slipped to 39 per cent while the ALP has increased to 43 per cent.

After preferences Labor is 12 points in front at 56 to 44 per cent.

The poll also asked about support for the Iraq conflict.

Sixty-three per cent are against war, up 12 points since the question was asked eight months ago.

...

The also showed support for the Greens had soared to 10 per cent of the vote, compared with just 2 per cent for the Australian Democrats.

This has prompted an astonishing admission from John Howard - the war is hurting the Liberal administration.

Add this to the socialist victory in Spain, the plummeting poll ratings for Bush and Blair, and Berlusconi's difficulties - and on top of that, we had the astounding resurgence of the left in the French polls. I now look forward to Respect winning an astounding five per cent in the polls. One poll even. Just to see what it feels like. Well, we shall see...

Islamo-Socialism posted by lenin

Sometime after 9/11, Mohammed Ali was accosted by an insinuating reporter who asked him, "How does it feel to belong to the same religion as the people who carried out the attacks on America?" He said, "I don't know, how do you feel about belonging to the same religion as Adolf Hitler?"

There is, odd to report, a section of the Left which disapproves of having any organisational or strategic connection with organised Islam in Britain. What has come to be known has the "Axis of Hitchens" is constantly on about this, deriding such affilations as base opportunism, the hapless surrendering of one's principles to the exigencies of struggle, capitulation to what is invariably described as "Islam-fascism". Now, this has always struck me as a sickly compression of a rather complex reality. For one thing, political Islam needn't necessarily be right-wing. The People's Mujahideen in Iran - whatever their failings - was a leftist organisation which founded itself on a particular interpretation of Islam. Modernists and reformists in the Islamic world, following Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, have drawn upon a tradition of itjihad (independent judgment and interpretation of the sacred texts) to argue for a progressive Islam. I've already written about this elsewhere, but somehow feel the need to reiterate as I have the suspicion that most of those who decry "Islamo-fascism" have no idea what the god-bothering fuck they are talking about... I'm kidding. I'm certain that those who deride "Islamicism", "Islamic fundamentalism", "reactionary Islam" and so on have explored all the various complexions of Islam and its relations to political power. Doubtless, they are Islamic adepts, crack theologians ready with citation, quotation and imprecation.

However. Today's Guardian carries a column by the spokesperson for the Muslim Association of Britain, Osama Saeed. Yes, yes, I know. He's got that name. But he also has some interesting things to say about British Muslims and how they may vote come the next election:

Where in the past the community had been defined by its ethnicity - Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Arab - when the most difficult time for Muslims came, this generation has defined itself by its religion. "Generation M" it has been termed, describing those born and brought up here, claiming this society as their own, but not needing to sell out on their faith. For example, many believe the headscarf was imported from abroad. However, my parents' generation did not wear it at all when they migrated here. We have seen the rise of it during the 1990s as Muslims came more to the roots of their faith, ditching the culture from abroad, and practising their religion based on its core principles while being relevant to this society.

This was clearly witnessed during the attempt by the Muslim Association of Britain along with the Stop the War Coalition and CND to stop the foolhardy war in Iraq. The alliance between Muslims and the left in Britain has been a significant phenomenon. Nothing can better illustrate the compatibility of Islam and the west than the diversity of people marching side by side for peace and justice.

This partnership with the left has replaced the Muslim community's traditional association with the Labour party. After the start of the war, the feeling among the Muslim community was that we had demonstrated, we had lobbied, we had boycotted, and now it was time to use our votes. Labour was shattered in September at the Brent East byelection, losing one of its strongholds to the Lib Dems. It was no small coincidence that the constituency houses thousands of Muslims, who saw their alternative not with the pro-war Tories, but with an anti-war candidate.

...

The future may also be more issue-led than party-led. The next stage of Muslim development in Britain could be a strong diffusion among all the parties, depending on current interests and tactical considerations. This can be seen in MAB's voting recommendations for the June 10 elections, where Labour's Ken Livingstone is backed for London mayor and depending where you are in the country, you could be voting Respect, Green or Lib Dem for the European parliament or your local council. In the former, George Galloway will be enjoying major Muslim backing. So will Caroline Lucas of the Greens in the south east, another anti-war campaigner who also performed admirably when the hijab issue arose in France.

Imagine that! An "Islamo-fascist" if you please, lauding the coalition of Islam and socialism, praising the tolerant Greens, bigging it up for diversity. Bangladeshi and Pakistani friends of mine - oh let's be honest, they're acquaintances! Just can't seem to get them down the pub - have always been interested in socialist viewpoints, and don't seem unworldly about gay issues, women's rights etc. That's probably because I don't know any lunatics - but then, you don't generally seek the company of arseholes, do you? I wouldn't sit down to dinner with Pat Roberts either.

Anyway, I'm sick of this whole bullshit argument. I'm tired of hearing about, "George Galloway's against abortion, you must be too if you're in the same party, its religious fundamentalism". I'm tired of hearing, "I picked up a leaflet at this demonstration which clearly cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a reputable text" (yeah, as if that's my fault they came to the demo). It's just giving me the hump. Still, I return to Chris Harman's excellent pamphlet on the matter of Islam and Socialism:

"The left has made two mistakes in relation to the Islamists in the past. The first has been to write them off as fascists, with whom we have nothing in common. The second has been to see them as 'progressives' who must not be criticised. These mistakes have jointly played a part in helping the Islamists to grow at the expense of the left in much of the Middle East. The need is for a different approach that sees Islamism as the product of a deep social crisis which it can do nothing to resolve, and which fights to win some of the young people who support it to a very different, independent, revolutionary socialist perspective." (Chris Harman, The Prophet and the Proletariat, Page 60).

Exploiting Misery. posted by lenin

The Wall Street Journal is known, among other things, for its cartoonish outrage at practically everything the Left gets up to. For instance, in one comment, a slack-jawed hack in their fold complains about Michael Berg's anti-war article in The Guardian:

Here's what the elder Berg says America should have done in response to the Sept. 11 attacks: "I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them."

This is sick stuff, though perhaps partly understandable as an irrational reaction of a man who's lost his son. Shame on the Guardian for exploiting Michael Berg's grief to further its own anti-American agenda. (Via Oliver Kamm

Kamm, incidentally, has his own spin on that issue, which involves a lot of drivel about the Socialist Workers' Party whom he seems to have developed a monomaniacal fixation on - even to the extent of repeating untrue assertions even following correction. Still, I said I wouldn't waste any more time on him and I won't. If you really are interested in the views of the American Tendency (long to reign over us), go ahead and pursue the link.

What I am more interested in is the flavour of this splenetic outrage - it was the same that moved Bill O'Reilly to denounce Jeremy Glick for having appended his name, as a 9/11 relative, to an antiwar advertisement which allegedly accused the United States government of terrorism. O'Reilly notoriously described Glick as having "a warped view of this world and a warped view of this country". He didn't manage to announce that Glick was "sick", but he might have gotten round to it eventually.

It's "sick" to want to listen to North Korea, Iran and Syria, according to the WSJ, but what of the remainder of Berg's recommendations? He continues:

Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state. To stop making up rules by which others must live and then separate rules for ourselves.

Does this seem eminently reasonable only to me? Well, obviously not, otherwise there wouldn't have seen record global anti-war demonstrations last year. Yet, Michael Berg's view is reduced to an "irrational reaction", thus depriving him of responsibility for and ownership of his opinion. That is absolutely disgusting.

The charge that The Guardian was merely "exploiting" Berg's grief to further an "anti-American" agenda is perfectly absurd. Still, there are egregious cases of blatant exploitation of the suffering of victims which apparently evoke no outrage, no vexation among the supporters of the war. Here, for instance, is one well-known political figure following the atrocities in New York and Washington:

I recently received a letter from a 4th-grade girl that seemed to say
it all: "I don't know how to feel," she said, "sad, mad, angry. It has
been different lately. I know the people in New York are scared
because of the World Trade Center and all, but if we're scared, we are
giving the terrorists all the power." In the face of this great
tragedy, Americans are refusing to give terrorists the power.

That may seem innocent enough. Bush, after all, is merely evoking the basic goodness of Americans, especially America's young. But he likes to cite the eloquence of others, (doubtless to atone for his own paucity of it). When Staff Sgt. Daniel Bader, 28, died in Iraq recently, Bush was quick to avail himself of the comments of the dead soldier's wife:

The White House has said in the past the president cannot pick and choose which funerals to attend and to whom to pay tribute without potentially offending other families who do not receive presidential attention.

But Bush used the Bader death to make a political point, quoting the words of the dead soldier's wife from a newspaper account.

"I'm going to wait until she is old enough to realize what has happened, and I will tell her exactly what her daddy did for her," Bush quoted the widow as saying of her daughter. "He died serving his country, so my little girl could grow up free."

Imagine Saddam Hussein invoking the moist-eyed comments of a loyal Iraqi woman whose husband had died for his filthy regime: "Her father died serving her country, to make her people free. Allahu Akhbar!" The stomach would fairly churn.

And remember that as the smoke was clearing in the Pentagon, and the bodies were still being dragged from the rubble, Donald Rumsfeld was making delighted political calculations :

"best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL."

Suffice to recall, the hysteria following 9/11 included, entirely predictably, injunctions against reflection on the role of the American government in the world, (pace O'Reilly's cheap-shots at Glick). In the name of the 'victims' the pro-War commentators of Left and Right have resorted to all manner of baseness and emotional blackmail. No sale.

A Rubbishing of General Theory posted by lenin

Tentatively, I'd like to plug a new blog I've encountered amid the pullulating threads of the e-ther. Someone called "Will" has began a blog entitled A General Theory of Rubbish . I say "tentatively", because I sort of suspect from the links to Harry's Place, Normblog, SIAW, and other cantankerous bastions of the pro-war Left that he will soon degenerate into sour, lumpen attacks on "pseudo-leftists", "Islamo-apologists" and others of impure creed.

I hope not, because much of what I've read so far is entertaining and intelligent. I have deposited a comment beneath a post of his about "Stupidity", thus offering maximum opportunity for an effluviation of bile... In fact, I note already the presence of that empurpled phrase favoured by the Latter Day Imperialists: "pseudo-Leftists" . This in a post in which the following is offered served up (extracted from The Last Superpower) as a piece of wisdom:

"Revolutionaries are historical optimists who stress the inevitability of progress. Pseudo-Leftists are reactionaries who merely denounce how bad things are and actively reinforce the idea that they cannot be changed. But when revolutionaries reject the irrational obscurantism and moralistic posturing of pseudo-Leftists and line up together with the ruling class against them, by asserting that "all that is real is rational", they are also implicitly saying "all that exists deserves to perish" as explained by Engels..."

Oh no. I hope not. We may be doomed if there are still socialists preaching the inevitability of progress. Progress? Inevitable? Have these people ever heard of irradiation? Technological progress has already given the ruling class, with whom the "revolutionaries" are apt to "line up together with", the capacity to put an end to history. I prefer Walter Benjamin's definition of progress to the "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind":

Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, Theses On the Philosophy of History, Illuminations).

Or perhaps, apropos the possibility of thermonuclear extinction:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. (Ibid).

Still, I see the appeal of sunny-side-up, shit-eating-grin, optimism. For one thing, one may support the Last Superpower as the only remaining force with any international muscle (farewell to the proletariat, then; Catalonia was merely a dream), and still maintain one's "revolutionary" stance. For all this, The General Theory will inform and entertain - even as you sigh, roll your eyes, fan your armpits and shake your head.

Please visit .

Notes from the Fringe. posted by lenin

According to the Blogosphere Ecosystem, I am a "Crawly Amphibian" , which is just below "Slithering Reptiles". I suppose a certain amount of humility wouldn't go amiss, then... but is that a fly I see?

(The ratings seem to be based on Sitemeter data and the number of links you have. Fine, if you want to conflate quality with quantity. Hmmph!)

In other, more interesting news, Orientalism is alive and well in the academia.

Gift of the Mugabe. posted by lenin

Robert Mugabe's star has fallen in the UK media firmament ever since he fell out with the British government and directed a starved public's anger at the last remnants of colonial ownership in Zimbabwe. He doesn't help his cause by having about the same control over the colonial language as your average New York Times reader. Note this , for instance:

The Zimbabwean leader also attacked Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush for going to war in Iraq.

"They knew they were wrong by deciding to attack Iraq, they deceived the world with lies, lies of mass deception, by telling them that there were weapons of mass destruction, and they thought the world was going to be cheated for all time," Mugabe said. "And there you are now, the chickens have come back to roost."

So, now Malcolm X has been murdered twice.

Note the tautology in the first sentence, the feeble attempt at punnery. True, we were fed "lies of mass deception". Still, with the torture revelations coming out of Iraq, I would have thought the old scrapper would be eager to get in there and learn some new techniques. Still, feckless as he may be, Mugabe's grandiose torsions of the English language are still to be preferred to Ian Smith's crisp upper-crust mastery :

Smith said he refused to apologise for atrocities committed while he held office. He said he had no regrets about the estimated 30,000 Zimbabweans killed during his rule. 'The more we killed, the happier we were. We were fighting terrorists.'

Ah well, it is simple enough to take joy in killing when your enemies are "terrorists". I suppose a few American soldiers could empathise with that particular sentiment. Nevertheless, Mugabe's plans for the future do raise some concern:

Asked whether he planned to stand in the next presidential election, expected in 2008, Mugabe replied: "I don't think so, I also want to rest and do a bit of writing." [Emphasis added]

God help us.

News On the March! posted by lenin

Eat snacky smores...

Following today's antiwar demo, which had a couple of thousand on it by my estimation (the BBC merely says "hundreds" ), I was accosted by a member of Fight Racism Fight Imperialism who spent the whole time trying to persuade me that the Labour Party was a racist imperialist institution and that Cuba was a haven of socialism. He was perfectly adamant on both counts, as he was on every other theme he touched. (Incidentally, he thought Tony Benn was shit, the march was "opportunist", the anti-war movement was being diverted, the anti-apartheid movement was unwilling to challenge racism, and it was all the fault of the SWP for not allowing forces to the left of them have a say in the running of things). Moreover, touring their website today (I'm not giving them a link), I discovered them referring to the immense poverty of ordinary Cubans, as well as the vast child prostitution industry that pertains in its shadowy hotel-beach complexes as "challenges"... I'm not slagging them off for their views. Noone is ideologically pure, and noone has absolutely everything right. But there is something vaguely terrifying to me about the fact that they are nevertheless assured of their correctness in absolutely everything. This attitude is probably the result of weakness and isolation - greater potency would entrain more openness. Unfortunately, the other clause in this Catch 22 is that in order to gain more influence, such organisations would have to abandon the "beautiful soul" purism that makes them so marginal in the first place.

"Electricity Abuse"

A very interesting story comes from the San Diego Tribune . According to this dazzling star in the media firmament:

While world attention was focused on the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, two Marines were court-martialed May 14 for abusing an Iraqi prisoner with electricity, it was disclosed yesterday.

Five more Marines have been implicated in the same early April incident at a Marine-run detention facility and might face charges, according to Marine officials in Iraq.

...

Sting, Trefney and three other Marines concocted a plan to shock a detainee with 110-volt electricity as he returned to his cell from the bathroom. The prisoner was targeted for punishment because he was loud and had thrown trash out of his cell.

"The Marines attached wires to a power converter and pressed the live wires against the body of the detainee to create a shock," according to the Marine statement.

Excuse me, but when you attach live wires to someone's body, isn't that torture? I don't mean to split hairs or anything, but if a certain Arab leader with a big bushy moustache and dead onyx eyes did that sort of shit, we wouldn't be fucking around with coy expressions like "abuse".

Moving On Up

Richard Reeves has an admirable article in this week's New Statesman about the decline of the meritocracy. His conclusions conduce to a certain amount of complacency, however. For example, he argues that we should be happy if absolute social mobility increases, since in such circumstances you can improve someone's lot without worsening that of others. This would seem to me to miss the point about social justice. If we are against poverty, it isn't simply because some at the bottom layer of society are "excluded" and we feel a pious inclination to help them out of their rut - it is because there is something unjust about inequality, about one person's deprivation being contiguous with another's luxury.

Additionally, he seems to believe that there is a version of meritocracy which would be commensurable with egalitarian ideals. I don't think so. As Reeves notes, it is practically impossible (in capitalist society) to attach reward to desert without some severely authoritarian measures on the part of the state. Aside from that, there is a deeper philosophical problem with the whole idea that Reeves does not specifically grapple with. Namely, what exactly is desert? How does one account for it? You do not "earn" the physical and mental attributes with which you are born any more than you "earn" your early childhood experiences, and yet these can place enormous limits on a human being's potential in the world. Reeve, in fact, renders this point absolutely eloquent with a quote from Michael Young:

"If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get . . . So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves."

And Reeve nails the problem with market-led concepts of desert only to adumbrate an alternative that is equally infelicitous:

The fourth and final challenge is to rescue the concept of "merit" from the market. When meritocrats talk about rewards flowing from merit, the rewarding mechanism is typically assumed to be the market, especially the market for labour. But the market can reward only certain kinds of narrowly defined merit, and in particular, what economists and business people increasingly call "human capital". (The language itself betrays the prevalence of market-generated versions of value: we now also have "social", "intellectual", and even "gender" capital.)

...

But merit of all kinds - artistic, intellectual, social - exists entirely outside of the pricing mechanisms of the market.

There may be "merit" in having artisitic talent, intellectual stringency, or the ability to chat up co-workers, but it is hard to see how these are in any sense "deserved". I adhere firmly to the view that a) meritocracy would be too radical for New Labour to pursue in any serious sense and b) it would be an unattractive state of affairs if actually attained.


Finally, Michael Moore has won the Palme D'Or for his film Fahrenheit 911. Kill 'em, Mikey!

The Rot Spreads... posted by lenin

Juan Cole reports violent demonstrations in Bahrain, of all places, against US actions in Karbala. Why? Cole says:

You wonder whether, when Bush gave the order to get Muqtada "dead or alive", initially to the Spanish and then to the US military, whether he even knew that a majority of the population in Bahrain, where the US has a major naval base, is Shiite or that they would mind if the US army demolished much of the Mukhayyam Mosque in Karbala trying to get at Muqtada's militiamen.

In all probability? No.

Moreover, it's not likely to stop there:

The other shoe? Will the Shiites of al-Hasa in Eastern Arabia, where the oil is and where there are 90,000 Americans at Dhahran, be the next to riot?

Meanwhile, Michael Berg has some gracious words of contempt for the Bush administration, and linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pleads with us to stop using euphemisms like "abuse" when what in fact took place was torture,

not just by the definitions of the Geneva Conventions, but by any ordinary standards of decency. Torture is torture is torture, as Secretary Powell put it - it isn't a place to be drawing fine semantic distinctions.

And it would be a good thing to acknowledge that "torture" is not quite as exotic an activity as the movies make it out to be.

That should suck the fun out of it.

Crockery. posted by lenin

Benjamin Mackie has launched a new blog with a massive scoop - an interview he conducted with George Monbiot. Unfortunately, the interview dates back to 2001, but it still counts as one hell of a debut.

There isn't much else to comment on yet, apart from the layout which seems satisfactory to me. Some of the fonts could be improved - but what am I talking about, when I allow such debased styles as "trebuchet" to appear on my blog.

Knowing Benjamin from our wild and varied intercourse on the MediaLens message board, I expect him to effluviate witticisms and incisive analysis like the Bellagio fountains. Please visit.

The Abu Ghraib Redemption posted by lenin

At the behest of the IGC, Abu Graibh prison has been renamed , Camp Redemption. I shit you not. Hmmm. Where can they have got that idea from?

Could it be a reference to the old regime, which was, after all the Ba'ath (Redemption) Socialist Party of Iraq?

Ahmed Chalabi, Putchist. posted by lenin

Counterpunch has what they call a scoop , and for a muck-raking magazine they have a smasher:

In dawn raids today, American troops surrounded Ahmed Chalabi's headquarters and home in Baghdad, put a gun to his head, arrested two of his aides, and seized documents. Only five months ago, Chalabi was a guest of honor sitting right behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union. What brought about this astonishing fall from grace of the man who helped provide the faked intelligence that justified last year's war?

According to Andrew Cockburn, yer man Chalabi was forming a band of Shi'ites around him to destabilise a Brahimi government. He had told them that Brahimi's government was part of a Sunni conspiracy, and now was the time to resist. He's got the Iraqi Hebollah behind him, a part of the Dawa Party and Ayatollah Mohammed Bahr al Uloom... Apparently, he's looking to take over when Muqtada al-Sadr gets killed:

"Sooner rather than later," the Iraqi observer, a close student of Shia politics, points out, "Moqtada al Sadr is going to be killed. That willl leave tens, hundreds of thousands of his supporters looking for a new leader. If Ahmed plays the role of victim, he can take on that role. His dream has always been to be a sectarian Shia leader."

Given the imminence of the announcement of the post June 30 arrrangement, the stakes are very high for the US. The occupation command in Baghdad well understands that Chalabi has the resources and skills to wreck the all-important arrangements for the official handover of power. "People realise that Ahmed is a gambler, prepared to bring it all down," I was told today, "and this raid may not be at all to his detriment."

US disenchantment with the man who has received $27 million of taxpeyers' money in recent years has been gathering pace in recent months. "You can piss on Chalabi" President Bush remarked to Jordan's King Abdullah some months ago. "Ahmed is on good terms with many people," a senior Iraqi politician told me waspishly, "and on bad terms with a great many more."

Is this the most bizarre fucking thing you've heard all year? Excuse me, but this is one "uprising" I want no part of...

Muqtada Christ, Superstar. posted by lenin

Yeah, he'd probably banish me to the firehole in the ground for calling him that, but Iraqis love him. And, hey, I'm big enough not to resent them for that.

Muqtada al-Sadr now has the support of

68%

of Iraqis. Meanwhile,

88%

of Iraqis consider the US forces to be "occupiers". Johann Hari will be drafting a letter of support for al-Sadr now, as he is ever so eager to strait-jacket himself in the results of Iraqi opinion polls.

Meanwhile, the train drivers and tube workers are taking to the picket lines , for better pensions, pay and benefits. Hopefully, a successful strike will inspire other groups of workers to undertake similar prophylactic action. It cannot be sensible to allow corporate bosses to steamroller changes to pension through, while they award themselves "phone number pay-rises" as Bob Crow put it.

Tony Blair Attacked. posted by lenin

Amid all this media hysteria, I'd just like to say one thing - it should have been sarin. Have a nice day.

Hope in the Shadow of Catastrophe. posted by lenin

A Reply to Explananda

The title of this post deliberately mimics that of an essay by Norman Geras, originally published in the New Left Review and subsequently as one of a collection of essays called The Contract of Mutual Indifference. Some of you will have already gathered that I omitted the word ‘socialist’, since complete mimicry would be a diversion from my main topic. To malinger on the theme somewhat, Geras’ essay is an inspection of exactly what kind of hope socialists are entitled to given what we know about human nature, especially in light of the Nazi holocaust. Brutally summarised, Geras advances a view of human nature that is, he hopes, both realistic and compatible with socialist transformation. Human beings can be bad, they do have these capacities – it is no good reducing it to the evils of the economic and political order, because what systems of power work on precisely are the capacities that already exist within human beings. The fact that the response to the extermination of millions of human beings in the centre of modern Europe could provoke, among other things, active participation or just plain indifference is a fact of no small significance. Human beings are - have been - overwhelmingly available for cooption, tyranny, exploitation and so on.

Since, for Geras, a libertarian political order of the kind envisaged by Marx and his followers would free human beings not just from oppression but from curtailments to their capacity for evil, it would follow that such an order would afford endless opportunity for new abuses. Therefore, he concludes, a socialism that is compatible with human nature would have to express itself in a liberal polity, with all the capacities for policing, imprisonment and coercion that this entails. The socialist transformation which did not result in elated utopia but rather in the basic satisfaction of each human being’s basic needs would still be revolutionary in the face of what persists daily. If I have not missed my guess, this is the source of Geras’ conversion to what he calls “liberal Marxism” . (More here ).

Why start with this? Because Chris Young , who has taken up his sword against me, is something of an admirer of Geras, and I thought it would be a nice touch to introduce the argument thus. To recapitulate, Chris Young differs with me profoundly on the question of whether we should support the Iraqi resistance, and hope for their victory against the US army. His argument is that a victory for the resistance would be disastrous for Iraq, probably leading to a Hobbesian war of all against all, only to be settled by the victory –decisive or otherwise – of one particular faction of the resistance. Tyranny would most probably ensue, thus undermining the only benefit that has so far accrued to Iraqis as a result of this war – that is, the elimination of the worst manifestations of dictatorship and the possibility of stable and democratic future development. As he puts it:

My prediction - which partly underlay my opposition to the war - is based on the fact that Iraq is rich in resources, deeply unstable, and has potentially exploitable ethnic and religious differences (notice I did not say "seething ethnic hatreds"), among other things. I having been hoping that the U.S. could somehow manage to find a process inclusive enough to handle the various tensions here, because I have seen that as the only conceivable way of avoiding a civil war. That doesn't mean that I want the U.S. to achieve all its goals. Rather, I want them to begin such a process, because no one else now can, and then be forced to the sidelines by a healthy process within Iraq that they can't control.

Although Chris sympathises with Iraqis demanding that US troops leave, he broadly supports the process of transition being carried out by the Interim Governing Council.

To Omdurman!

Having tersely summed up two arguments that I disagree with in various ways, I’ll get on with my own argument. The “shadow of catastrophe” in this case, needless to say, is precisely the possibility to which Chris alludes. We don’t have to think very far into the past to get a taste of what this would be like – torture chambers, secret police, executions, rigid fear, the possibility of perpetual war. However, the immediate problem that I have with Chris’ analysis is that the Iraqi masses seem to be entirely passive players, not active participants in a highly mercurial situation. Various sects, under the rubric of the ‘resistance’ fight it out with the Americans, then squabble murderously over the spoils – while the rest of Iraq awaits its fate at the hands of the victor. Either that, or they are so schismatic as to be vulnerable to collapse into ethno-religious rivalry the second troops depart. I don’t think either scenario fits well with the data emerging from Iraq.

The demonstrations of Iraqis chanting “No, no Sunni; No, no Shi’ite; Yes, yes Islam!” is one manifestation of the tendency toward greater Iraqi Arab unity, (the Kurds are another matter altogether). Similarly, the development of a pan-Iraqi anti-occupation party which plans to stand in elections signals the willingness to overlook ethno-religious differences in the effort to oust the occupying forces. Now, Chris accepts all of this, but argues that:

I think Nikolai is absolutely correct that loathing of the U.S. has increased feelings of Arab unity in the Iraq. But I am also convinced that he is just wrong to think that that effect will hold or that we're not looking at a very probable civil war in the next 2 or 3 years.

There are, he says, too many ethno-religious differences susceptible to manipulation by demagogues and opportunists. This is doubtless true. But given that the tendency at the moment is in the opposite direction, what reason does he have for thinking unity will not hold? I'm afraid that what he alludes to is only a possibility among others, and not in my view the most likely one.

Moreover, what are the demands of the resistance groups? Precisely the things that the ‘coalition’ continually promise, yet hopelessly procrastinate over as they spy the nationalist writing on the wall: elections, the withdrawal of troops, a complete handover of power to the elected body, and the future of Iraq to be determined by Iraqis. Instead they are to get a continued military occupation, a secret police trained and run by the CIA and a legislative body (elected or otherwise) which will be beholden to the laws already imposed by the occupying forces. I will stipulate at this point that the ‘resistance’ I am referring to emphatically does not include the Al Qaeda affiliated cells operating in Iraq. Their goal, as they advertise it, is to brew civil war between Sunni and Shi’ite, in the hope of suppressing the growing power of the Shi’ite majority whom their Wahabbi sect considers serpiginous, un-Islamic etc. Their ideology and goals specifically confound the aspirations of the majority of Iraqis, and they should be opposed. That's a beginning to answering Chris' moral consideration of the resistance. I do consider it legitemate for an anti-occupation movement to target the occupiers and their adjuvants, although certain acts (if, in fact, civilians happen to have been the target) merit criticism.

The Language of Contradiction

In supporting the resistance of Iraqis, what I want to see is Iraqis wrest control of their future from the American and British occupiers. The key to this lies in a fatal contradiction in US policy in Iraq. They wanted to impose their authority on the Middle East as part of a geopolitical strategy for ensuring the future dominance of America in the world. Iraq was attacked as the weak link in a chain of Arab states with hostile or ambivalent regimes, precisely because it did not have the capacity to put up serious resistance. The plan for Iraq included the usual tenets of neo-conservative thought – privatisation privileging US corporations , de-regulation and elections following a suitable period of transition. (Although I have said, and still suspect, that the concern with ‘democracy’ was a PR front in the war, it nevertheless has its own weight in neo-conservative thinking. It is just that democracy can almost be conflated with free markets in their purview.) However, the commitment to some form of democracy was always an ancillary concern to the overall objective of ensuring a regime that was friendly to US prerogatives in the region. Rumsfeld, an old-fashioned American nationalist, prevails in this discussion over neo-conservative ideologues like Wolfowitz.

The result of this contradiction is that Iraqis have been freed, and then entrapped. They have been told they are liberated, then had their newspapers shut down, their media locked in a state-run strangle-hold, their affairs run by an unrepresentative puppet regime, their cities pounded by an unwelcome occupier and surrounded by barbed wire fences. Iraqis are now free enough to take umbrage at their oppression: You Westerners imposed this Saddam monster on us in the first place – now that you get rid of him, for your own sakes, you expect us to gratefully rally round and accept your diktat? This is what is driving the resentment and resistance toward the occupiers. Not political or religious extremism, although these have their role, and certainly not ‘foreign’ agitation.

For all of these reasons, the “catastrophe” scenario is only one among many in my view, and not necessarily the most likely result of a victorious uprising. Similarly, the “benign” scenario is also one among many outcomes of a victory for the United States (although, as it happens, the US has now lost so much that even if it gets its way, it cannot proclaim an undiluted success). I think it likely that a puppet government, or even one whose legitimacy is diffuse, could be beset by perpetual crises – just as the Kirzai government in Afghanistan is. The difference is that, since this is America’s test-case for the “preemptive strike”, it has been necessary to pour vast amounts of money into Iraq to make it a success, thus far without much hope. This has been compounded by an unavailing resort to extreme force in the most heated zones of engagement. An unrepresentative government, or one with only “limited” powers, does not look likely to be any more successful at thwarting these problems.

Coda

What are we entitled to hope for, knowing what we know about the balance of forces within Iraq? Is it reasonable to insist on the full self-determination of Iraqis given the likely result? Is it feasible to believe in the liberatory potential of an Iraqi uprising? Who is to guarantee that the moral character of a post-insurgency regime will be superior to that of the IGC? Who is to say it will not be worse? Is it really necessary to withhold good will from the IGC which, for all its flaws, is struggling to do its best for its country? To be perfectly honest, I know of no ontological guarantee as to the future of Iraq. For one thing, the success of an uprising would completely alter the coordinates within which any future settlement could be worked out. I do believe, however, that the successful transition from an IGC to a nominally representative state with few powers and many puppets will relegate Iraq, for the time being, to a low-rent client state. A subordinate to be used and impoverished through “liberalisation” and “structural adjustment” even more vigorously than those states which are not under any kind of imperial control, (India, Argentina, Zimbabwe). Knowing what I know about those states, I think it is worth the risk. There is one final reason to support the victory of the insurgents. If the United States succeeds, even partially, in imposing its will on Iraq, this will ensure its capacity to wage further wars with even more destructive consequences. Already the sabre is being rattled at Syria, which is, apparently, an “extraordinary” threat to America. Where next for the Empire if it does not meet its match in the sands of Iraq?

A Bug's Life posted by lenin

I've been down with a rather nasty stomach bug for the last two days. I don't know what it is, but it's brought about some interesting reversals. I've been pissing solids and shitting liquids. Take all the pleasure in my suffering that you can, because I'll be back in exactly five minutes to irritate the fuck out of you again...

Two Links. posted by lenin

Chris Young has a problem with my support for the Iraqi Resistance. Specifically, he thinks that the resistance is so schismatic that it will lead to civil war if it succeeds. He is also sceptical that its moral character will exceed that of the IGC. In any ensuing civil war, he thinks, it would be a Hobbesian affair in which the most powerful would simply clobber everyone else then assume despotic control. I have argued against him there, but I will think this over for a day or two then probably post a response here.

Chrisopher Hitchens has made a fool of himself yet again, and this time Ted Barlow was there to catch him out. For my own part, I'd like to comment on this:

So a Sarin-infected device is exploded in Iraq, and across the border in Jordan the authorities say that nerve and gas weapons have been discovered for use against them by the followers of Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad well before the invasion. Where, one idly inquires, did these toys come from? No, it couldn't be. …

No shit? What's with that Sarin? Well :

[A] senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity.

He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

Free, Free Palestine! posted by lenin

Not satisfied with the lousy PR that comes from blowing up an old guy in a wheelchair (yeah, I know, he was an axe of evil), Israel has decided to shoot up a refugee camp .



Just for extra kicks, they managed to nail "two children out hanging washing". Well... clearly some kind of explosive was hidden in that dripping t-shirt. They say they intend to tear down "hundreds of homes" in the near future, having already destroyed 100 in the last week.

And they call this... you ready? They call it...

Operation Rainbow!!! A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

Why didn't they call it Operation Please Blow Up Tel Aviv So We Can Finally Destroy You? Just for the sake of accuracy.

Desperately Seeking Similitude, Part II posted by lenin

According to Crispin Blunt MP , ‘we’ are now the problem in Iraq, and ‘we’ had better extricate ourselves before we are kicked out. You are, Crispin, a credit to your family name. But you are also a Tory, so no cigar. I noted the other day how the fashion for similes with Iraq had produced a number of oddities in print (of particular note, the comparison by a neo-conservative with Cambodia following the re-entry of the Khmer Rouge in the early 1990s). Iraq is like Kenya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria etc. Johann Hari compared it to Serbia and Sierra Leone, which he considers humanitarian interventions. The one comparison I neglected, and the one that Crispin has pointed out (I’m sure he was thinking of me at the time) is with Iraq. Yes. Iraq is like Iraq:

The reason for the failed policy is simple. When the British occupied Iraq following the first world war, they were greeted initially as liberators of Iraqis from the Ottoman empire. But over time the British came to be seen as occupiers. Iraqi experts and historians predicted that, after nine months or so, the American and British forces that came to liberate Iraq from Ba'athist rule would be seen again as foreign occupiers.

I won’t bother rehearsing the Bremner, Bird and Fortune sketches on Britain’s past involvement with Iraq, but you will intuit my reaction. I don’t actually know much whether ‘we’ were welcomed at the time. Let’s see what Niall Ferguson has to say about it… Well! Indeed, there is something of interest here:

"The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, Lawrence argued, not for the privilege of being ruled by the British instead of the Turks. His ambition, he wrote, was

that the Arabs should our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony. Arabs react against you if you try to drive them, and they are as tenacious as Jews; but you can lead them without force anywhere, if nominally arm-in-arm. The future of Mesopotamia is so immense that if it is cordially ours we can swing the whole Middle East with it.

It worked." (Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, 2003, pp. 314-8).

It worked, that is, for a while. The Arabs could be gulled, but only for as long as it took for Britain to make Mesopotamia its "last brown colony".

So, Iraq is like Iraq. But still we are not exhausted. Isabel Hilton writes for Open Democracy that Iraq is like many previous imperial episodes, especially in respect of the latest torture revelations:

The former CIA operative Robert Baer, who joined the CIA in the 1970s, said in a recent interview that when he worked for the agency torture was a sacking offence. He cited the example of two CIA operatives in Guatemala who were dismissed when a Guatemalan colonel they were running was accused of torture.

Yet in Vietnam, thousands of prisoners had already died in US "tiger cages." In Iran under the Shah’s regime, the Savak used methods outlined in CIA training manuals. In Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s torture and disappearance became established practices throughout the continent under military dictatorships that had the support of the United States, whose officers had been trained in the US-run School of the Americas in Panama and whose security policies were coordinated through a network organised and run by US agencies.

Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay tortured wholesale under successive US administrations without suffering any sanctions from Washington ... When Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, a pandemic of torture and extra-judicial murders spread throughout Central America, practiced by military officers who had received US training in "interrogation techniques." If the methods were not publicly approved, the results were applauded.

As if that wasn't enough, Niall Ferguson detects some haunting echoes from Empire Past:

The Battle of Omdurman was the prototype for the kinds of war the US has been fighting since 1990, against Iraq, against Serbia, against the Taliban. Just as the US Air Force bombed Serbia in 1999 in the name of 'human rights', so the Royal Navy conducted raids on the West African coast in the 1840s and even threatened Brazil with war as part of the campaign against the slave trade. And when Mr Blair justifies intervention against 'bad' regimes by promising aid and investment in return, he is unconsciously echoing Gladstonian Liberals, who rationalized their military occupation of Egypt in much the ame way. (Ferguson, op cit, p. 377).

I don't believe Blair's mimicking of Gladstone is in any way unconscious. But how the neo-imperialist would love to return to the days when one could speak of Empire as a matter of duty and honour! As Robert Cooper put it:

The most logical way to deal with chaos, and the one employed most often in the past, is colonisation. But this is unacceptable to postmodern states. Empire and imperialism are words that have become a form of abuse and no colonial powers are willing to take on the job, though the opportunities - perhaps even the need - for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the nineteenth century.

Lousy political correctness! I suppose you'll be against cross-burning next!

But let me see if I have this straight. Iraq is like Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya, Lebanon, Cambodia, the Battle of Omdurman, Serbia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, the 1881 invasion of Egypt and the abolition of slavery. A large family of resemblances by any measure.

For me, however, it's just like when Muhammed Ali knocked George Foreman out in Zaire in 1974.

Rejoice, rejoice. posted by lenin

Looks like Warmongering in an Age of Waiting has decided to pack it in. Perhaps they've been embarrassed into submission by the hammering failure of their last attempt at political humour.

Still, they're determined to cling to the surreal right to the last, hawking a quote from Andre Breton about L'Humanite, the paper of the PCF:

"... childish, declamatory, unnecessarily cretinising, ... clinging to actuality so closely that there is no perspective to be had, shouting into the particular ..."

Could there be a better description for a blog that in its time managed to describe its political opponents as "the pseudo-left" (I think "social-fascists" would have been the cris de coeur if they weren't formerly of some orthodox Trotskyist affiliation), and rewarded rival bloggers with such sobriquets as "pathetic wanker", "fearless proletarian hero" and "semi-literate"?

I'm glad, however, that they acknowledge their miserable failure, even obliquely, noting that "The real world is somewhere else."

No shit.

The Hit List... posted by lenin

No, this is not an advice column for the Iraqi resistance. They can pick their own targets, as they've demonstrated . And no, you won't see any tears on this blog about the death of that particular collaborator. The US now admits it faces an uprising , and in uprisings against occupations, the collaborators generally get their asses kicked too. Good. But admittedly, the resistance could make better use of PR. The US, for example, is busy informing Iraqis that "You have not been mistreated" , while slipping them bundles of cash. Perhaps the Mahdi Army should send a letter to Paul Bremer enclosing a few hundred dinar, informing him that "we are not shooting at your troops".

In fact, you can consider this post a speculative exercise, and I certainly wouldn't want you to consider it a recommendation of any kind. If you choose to make use of the information on this website to attempt illegal acts, then don't expect me to take responsibility. Here's a list :

1. William H Gates III
2. Warren E Buffett
3. Karl & Theo Albrecht
4. Paul G Allen
5. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud
6. Lawrence J Ellison
7. Alice L Walton
8. Helen R Walton
9. Jim C Walton
10. John T Walton

Now, I said "list", not "hit list". The title of this post is merely a vague musical reference which I'll get to later. I'm emphatically not calling for any kind of targetting of these individuals, least of all assassination. But I wonder what could be done if, say, these individuals ceased to exist. You know, just quietly evacuated themselves from the scene and left all their money behind. For these, my friends and esteemed enemies, are the ten richest scurvies on the planet. Their combined wealth totals over $200bn. In 2002, this would have been enough to meet all the UN's millenium health goals (AIDS, malaria, reducing infant mortality and maternal deaths), according to George Monbiot's The Age of Consent, (2003). Now, chew on that for a couple of seconds while I take a whizz... Okay? Thought that one through? Now, think on this. Millions of lives could be saved with that cash - would you rather see ten rich people retain their pampered lifestyles? Of course not.

Again, I'm not recommending assassination. Like yer man Trotsky said, even if your motives are pure it's not going to work. For one thing, their kids will get all the money, and the poor world will get diddly-squat. For another, their kids will hire death squads to hunt you down and have you tortured - either that, or they'll employ the services of the US army; both good. Instead, I recommend you join the global struggle to uproot this vile system, root and branch.

What Rumsfeld Knew... posted by lenin

Seymour Hersh has all the dirt, again, and this time he's dishing it up on Rummy:

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

Meanwhile, American soldiers made videotapes of themselves beating the shit out of prisoners in Afghanistan. I'm sure glad we got to the bottom of those Mirror photographs. Otherwise I'd be inclined to think that something - heaven forfend - unpleasant was being perpetrated by our glorious troops.

Middle Earth and the PM's imminent demise... posted by lenin

The papers are awake with jittery rumour about the possibility of the Prime Minister stepping down relatively soon. Blair insists he cannot go until the Iraqis have their own government, so I look forward to voting against him again in 2012. According to yer man at Harry's Place , the reason Blair is surrounded by rumours of his departure from Number Ten is that he has committed a "heresy". The heresy is defined thus:

He has challenged the dominant assumptions of the liberal-left elite, he has exposed the weaknesses in orthodox left thinking and their unwillingness to deal with the new and uncomfortable realities. He stands accused of being too accomodating to the US government by those who had no problem sharing a platform with Neo-Stalinists and Islamists.

To my knowledge, of course, neither the "neo-Stalinists" nor the Islamists who marched and spoke at the anti-war rallies have actually killed anyone, much less tens of thousands of people - but let that go. Harry' case goes further, and had me stunned for a while. Here he is again:

Because Blair, labelled by his critics with much justification as a conservative, now stands accused of being too radical, too much of a risk-taker, too unwilling to accomodate 'Middle England'. The message is clear: "Just deal with jobs, schools and hospitals and forget all that internationalist stuff."

And he refuses to do so.

They hate him because he is a heretic, that much is obvious. But more than that they despise him because he has revealed so starkly their own conservatism.

They will never forgive him for this.

Just who exactly "Middle England" is has always perplexed me. It is an inexact category to say the least. Just why imperialism should be described as "internationalist" is perfectly obvious, and not more convincing for that. But there is a sense in which I could initially see the pull of this argument, and was obliged to wonder. Isn't there indeed a segment of the Tory Right who dislike Tony Blair precisely for being too "radical" (the scare quotes are deserved, for that word has been milked to death by this government for highly reactionary ends), for dabbling in foreign misadventures, for being unwilling to stand up to the vulgar Americans... Peter Hitchens' argument that the war on Iraq was a "left wing" one, and that Bush is by no means a natural conservative, springs to mind.

However. If Middle England is supposed to refer to those who flooded into Central London from the suburbs and villages on February 15th, it is worth noting that these same people were solidly behind the last "internationalist" venture, the centre-left attack on Yugoslavia. Opinion polls on that war, justified primarily in terms of humanitarian rhetoric as the bombs fell, (then later in terms of Nato's "credibility"), maintained a sold two to one majority in favour of the bombing. The demonstrations were appallingly tiny, and Middle England appeared to be at home, washing its car. It seems unlikely that they simply turned off "all that internationalist stuff". Instead, isn't it the case that 9/11 aroused a greater sense of internationalism, the need to form a less parochial perspective and to be alive to the dangers of the world? One of the immediate results of the attacks on America was a steep rise in the purchase of books about Islam and the Middle East. There was an attempt to understand, because it had become glaringly apparent that all the trouble of the world would not remain extramural. Just because such awareness does not automatically conduce to the cause of the neo-imperialists does not mean it can be explained away by petit-bourgeois insularity.

Predictably, however, I'm afraid that Harry's argument is indicative of a general tendency on the pro-war left to reduce the opposition to Empire to the rantings of some deranged "orthodox Left", the soft-headedness of the liberal elite, and the resentment of the middle class. Witness practically everything Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen have had to say about the anti-war movement. The effluviations about Blair being an "internationalist" who "exposes" the inadequacies of standard leftist thought and is willing to confront uncomfortable realities is also characteristic of the sad decline in liberal critical capacity the second war begins. The Ministry of Defense has good reason to thank saps like these. Noting that "Public support will be vital to the conduct of military interventions", the Ministry of Defense advises that:

We need to be aware of the ways in which public attitudes might shape and constrain military activity. Increasing emotional attachment to the outside world, fuelled by immediate and graphic media coverage, and a public desire to see the UK act as a force for good, is likely to lead to public support, and possibly public demand, for operations prompted by humanitarian motives.

Or, as the Defense Committee approvingly noted following the war on Yugoslavia:

At home, the aim may be to mobilise and sustain support for a particular policy and interpretation of events. In the Kosovo campaign tactical and operational Psyops, including leafleting Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, were mainly undertaken by the USA. The UK's main contribution was in terms of media operations.

This was possible in large part because "Few journalists appear to believe that they were actually lied to by the MoD", (credulous where it's due), and therefore "the campaign directed against home audiences was fairly successful".

Not this time, however. A decade of lies about Iraq and an increasingly aware public made for the largest anti-war movement in history. Hence: "Go now to save Labour, Blair told".

"The Unipolar Predicament." posted by lenin

There is nothing quite as appalling as a civilised discussion between apologists for Empire. Here , Robert Kagan and Niall Ferguson trade perspectives and jokes about the subject of America's awesome dominion - the same dominion, in fact, that led Hubert Vedrine to describe America as a "hyperpower" and which, even today, is in the process of attempting to batter down all walls, Chinese walls included. I've reviewed Kagan's book elsewhere , and won't recount its themes in this sitting. However, I'd just like to note a couple of things:

1) Niall Ferguson quotes the estimable John Lewis Gaddis, on what constitutes an Empire:

"[A] situation in which a single state shapes the behaviour of others, whether directly or indirectly, partially or completely, by means that can range from the outright use of force through intimidation, dependency, inducements, and even inspiration."

"Empire" says Gaddis, as a time-tested means of pursuing the democratisation of the world. And how, retorts Ferguson, is this different from what America does today? Now, since Ferguson is fully prepared to abide the costs of Empire (as he notes in his book on the topic, if we hadn't done it someone else would have, and they'd have been even more beastly), this should be seen more in the light of trying to waken America to its historic duties and opportunities. It is certainly no rebuke.

2) In response, Kagan horses about for a while, then sobers himself for the solemn announcement that:

In the meantime, whether you call us an empire or a banana, the United States finds itself in a unique predicament. It is the predicament of unipolarity. Unipolarity is, of course, the product of America's extraordinary success as a world power, a success that I would argue far exceeds that of the British Empire...

Could all this success be attributed, as John Gaddis has often suggested, to a form of international grand strategy that is, in fact, superior to "empire"? Might it not be precisely the hesitation to rule and subjugate that has been at the core of Americans' success, the tendency rather to enlist cooperation and inspire others to follow American leadership?

Kagan would still like to avoid using the language of imperialism since, as he suggests in his book, "The United States is a behemoth with a conscience... Americans do not argue, even to themselves, that their actions may be justified by raison d'etat... [T]o the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilisation and a liberal world order." (Page 41) However, it is difficult to resist a giggle at the notion of America being hesitant "to rule and subjugate" in this conjuncture. Ferguson's cynical reproach that America just doesn't want to spend the money or invest the political capital in a fully committed Empire seems about right.

Kagan's favoured answer to the "predicament" is "hegemony" . Not only that section of the globe's population that "does not benefit from American dominance", but even those "European allies" who do, will have to be comforted, cajoled and persuaded. This is not to mention the American public, whose history of isolationism is not entirely forgotten, and whose apparent readiness to go to war is always manufactured and always conditional. "Nor are Americans likely to be comfortable consistently acting in ways that much of the world, and especially other like-minded peoples, deem illegitimate." Kagan observes.


In highlighting these themes, I just want to compare them with the high minded (and often sanctimonious) appeal to universal values at Harry's Place , Normblog and elsewhere. Here we have two arbiters of Empire, noted intellectuals of the Right, rehabilitating the language of imperialism. Moreover, doing so precisely with recourse to the high-minded idealism of liberal discourse - naturally, we do it because we are virtuous. And naturally enough, just as in the last century millions were prepared to accept the benign intent behind Russia's invasion of everywhere from Hungary to Afghanistan, so in this century there are plenty of fellow travellers of the American Empire, ready to append noble ends to the most vile of deeds and extirpate heresy with lexical flashes of bile and invective. Meanwhile, two urbane, articulate members of the intelligentsia trade e-mails and and catty remarks, and Iraqis are left to teach the Americans the lessons of colonialism past: refuse and resist

How to Make Friends and Influence People in Iraq: Kill Americans. posted by lenin

Muqtada al-Sadr is one popular mofo in Iraq right now, and it isn't because of his batty ideology. No, the bearded chubster is winning hearts and minds faster than a speeding bullet because, and only because, he has resisted both Saddam and the Americans. Juan Cole comments :

I am surprised by the high numbers in Basra, where I think the rival al-Fudala branch of Sadrism is more important. The level of support for Muqtada has almost certainly increased greatly since late March when the poll was done.

My own view is that Muqtada has now won politically and morally. He keeps throwing Abu Ghuraib in the faces of the Americans. He had his men take refuge in Najaf and Karbala because he knew only two outcomes were possible. Either the Americans would back off and cease trying to destroy him, out of fear of fighting in the holy cities and alienating the Shiites. Or they would come in after Muqtada and his militia, in which case the Americans would probably turn the Shiites in general against themselves. The latter is now happening.

The Americans will be left with a handful of ambitious collaborators at the top, but the masses won't be with them. And in Iraq, unlike the US, the masses matter.

You are not, then, in blind adoration of the US and all its works, Juan? You must be an evil-doer of some variety.

The message, however, for ambitious Iraqi politicians and demagogues is this: fight the occupation, unrelentingly. The moral high ground is yours. Iraqis will support you. And so, increasingly, will everyone else. You know it makes sense.

Responsibility, Phase II. posted by lenin

Here is what the father of the beheaded Nicholas Berg has to say about his son's death:

"My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This administration did this..."

And he's not effusive in his praise for other aspects of the administration:

Two days after the publication of a video showing the execution of his son by five masked men, Berg attacked the Bush administration for its invasion of Iraq and its sponsorship of the Patriot Act, which gives sweeping powers of surveillance to the federal government.


Berg described the Patriot Act as a "coup d'etat." He added: "It's not the same America I grew up in."


The criticism came amid finger-pointing between Berg's family, U.S. military officials and Iraqi police over the young businessman's imprisonment before his execution.


Michael Berg rejected U.S. government claims that his son had never been held by American authorities in Iraq. The Iraqi police chief in the city of Mosul has also contradicted statements by the U.S.-led coalition concerning the younger Berg's detention.

"I have a written statement from the State Department in Baghdad ... saying that my son was being held by the military," Berg said. "I can also assure you that the FBI came to my house on March 31 and told me that the FBI had him in Mosul in an Iraqi prison."

A government of liars and murders, then.

Warmongering in an Age of Waiting. posted by lenin

The kind folks at SIAW are bitching that this story about al-Sadr possibly disbanding his Mahdi Army didn't get enough press. Harry's Place has taken up the chase. Why, they demand to know, are the media not giving this its due weight. After all:

The fact that this - um - fairly important piece of news has been so resolutely downplayed in the paper and, so far as we can tell, has received no coverage at all on any British television channel’s news bulletins, speaks volumes about the real priorities of the mainstream media. If they cared as much about Iraq as they all piously pretend to, the news that the much-hyped “Shia uprising” is rapidly running out of what little steam it ever had would receive a lot more prominence than the latest twist in the saga about the Mirror’s photos of (alleged) abuse of (alleged) Iraqis by (alleged) British soldiers.

Actually, now I read SIAW's entire article, I see I have made their "enemies list":

But spare a thought - and a laugh or two - for Ken MacLeod, “Lenin” and the other pseudo-left fantasy bloggers. Now that Sadr has decided that he’d really rather not become a martyr just yet, thankyou very much, who will they turn to next in their ceaseless and risible search for the Vo Nguyen Giap of Iraq?

A link would have been nice. Anyway, as I suggested to Harry's Place:

This isn't as new as you think, and perhaps that explains why it is not ubiquitous in the headline news. Example:

"The dissolution of the Mahdi army depends on the religious authorities. If they issue an edict to disband the Mahdi army, we will disband," Mr Sadr said at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf yesterday.

al-Sadr has said this before. Juan Cole quoted a Shi'ite cleric allied Sistani as saying "you didn't ask permission to raise this army, why do you need permission to disband it?"

And what is more :

Fierce clashes have erupted between US forces and Iraqi militants loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr in the holy city of Najaf.
Tanks and troops moved into a cemetery near a holy shrine and traded fire with fighters sheltering among the tombs.

Mr Sadr appeared in nearby Kufa, where he delivered a fiery sermon condemning the US and UK.

"But spare a thought - and a laugh or two..."? Guys, don't make me giggle and fall off my fucking stool! Run off home, you little tikes, before I whip your saggy hides to shreds.

What Bush Knew. posted by lenin

Colin Powell says Bush was told about the Red Cross claims of torture of Iraqi prisoners. That means Bush is a liar. Did you hear that correctly?

So, there's no point in trying to get Rumsfeld fired over this - because they're all guilty as sin. And, at any rate, Iraqis couldn't care less . They just want the Americans out.

The neo-conservative misadventure in Iraq has revived Arab nationalism . And it looks like Zarqawi beheaded Nicholas Berg, so what I said earlier goes double.

And Now For Something Completely Silly... posted by lenin

You don't wanna fuck with the Jesus.

Desperately Seeking Similitude. posted by lenin

What is Iraq like, and what is it not like? The effort to locate suitable analogies to describe what is happening in Iraq is not merely, or necessarily, an attempt at understanding. Transparently, such homology as has been inferred has been adduced as an attempt to confer on Iraq the same emotive values as attended the original. So, for example, it is obvious enough why the anti-war Left in America would be eager to locate something of Vietnam in Iraq. Not merely, or even principally, because Vietnam was an insane and villainous attack on a country that killed millions, but because it involved the dreaded "quagmire". We may get bogged down, and our boys may be stuck there for decades. (Fine by General Myers ). The similarites are compelling for Robert Freeman at Common Dreams. According to William Greider in The Nation, the uprisings in Iraq resemble a "little Tet" . For the Libertarian Justin Raimondo , it is the language and lies of Vietnam that persist today.

What to make of such efforts? Since someone keeps yanking my pisser, demanding I do more stuff on Hitchens, let's have a look at his prefered juxtaposition. First of all, he does not accept a parallel with Vietnam, on the following grounds:

"[...] But I would like to say, will say in fact, that I don't think there is any fair comparison with the war in Vietnam. For one thing, I have been in Abu Ghraib prison myself. They were just finishing digging it out as one of the most revolting, evil excremental pits in the world last July when I saw it. Everyone knows what it was like a year ago. Everyone knows what it would be like if Muqtada al-Sadr was running it. This wasn't really the case with Vietnam. The difference really is, apart from about 100 other comparisons, the difference is in the nature of the enemy [...] what if I didn't know those pictures were from Iraq? If you ask me, well, does it change my opinion about the removal of Saddam Hussein or the need to defeat Jihadist, I would have to say no, and I would have to add that I would suspect anybody who was using pictures in that way, and was exploiting one's natural humanitarianism and revulsion at corruption in the chain of command."

(Christopher Hitchens, BBC Newsnight , 10th May, 2004).

Although this is perfectly eloquent and logical in its exposition, I maintain there is something suspect about this argument. First, because the nature of the enemy is not as different as he may like to pretend. He wonders, and fancies he knows, what would become of Abu Ghraib if al-Sadr got hold of it. The only way he will find out, however, is if full elections are allowed with a complete transfer of power under the dictation of Iraqis. But, at any rate, why does he imagine the post-war Vietnamese government refrained from the use of violence and oppression ? The tactics of the NLF were not quite as vile as those of the South Korean client-state, but they hardly conduced to a sanguine purview on the likely result of a Vietnamese success. The principle was not that one revered the anti-imperialist resistance, but that it was understood that the success of a rapacious imperial power would have incalculably wicked consequences for the region and the world. As it happened, the US loss in Vietnam severely restricted what it was able to get up to in the ensuing years. Here is Hitchens' preferred metaphor:

[...]Nobody should know this better than Lakhdar Brahimi, the current envoy of the United Nations and a lifetime member of the Algerian FLN. A few years ago, his party and his government were challenged by an extreme fundamentalist movement that actually won the first round of a general election but would probably not have permitted any subsequent one. In any event, the Algerian authorities announced that on no account would they surrender the country to the "insurgency" that followed. They showed themselves willing to kill on an unprecedented scale, employing measures that the U.S. Marines would never be permitted. Repulsive though many of the tactics were, I think the FLN was broadly right. Certainly, Algeria today is a far better society for the outcome, and so is the whole of North Africa and therefore Southern Europe. These are the stakes. It is impossible to lose sight of them for a moment and irresponsible to confer the noble title of rebel or revolutionary on those who showed no courage at all when there was a real tyranny in the land.

I have already noted the deviousness of that last sentence. If it refers to Sadr's men, Juan Cole has already pointed out that this particular group was set up under the nose of the Ba'athist tyranny and operated despite the dense network of spies working for Saddam. If it can be taken to mean the entire Resistance, then recall the battles of 1991. There are a good many heroes in Iraq - and, what is more, it is offensive and rather fat-headed to denounce anyone for lacking "courage" when the usual reward for such qualities under Saddam was death or torture. However, the analogy with Algeria merits serious consideration. It is odd that a national liberation force which removed a foreign occupation would be compared to the entry of excentric forces into a sovereign nation. It is rather penurious reasoning too, knowing what we know about the geo-strategic priorities of the United States at this conjuncture.

However, the conservative commentator Andrew Bacevich has a different use for the simile:

In Vietnam, intense fighting was concentrated in the countryside. South Vietnam's mountains and jungles offered communist guerrillas sanctuary, concealment and a base of operations. Major cities saw heavy combat only rarely, as during the famous 1968 Tet offensive.

In Iraq, the situation is the reverse

...

This is where the Algerian parallel becomes instructive. In the Algerian war for independence, which began in 1954 and lasted until 1962, cities also played a central role. Control of Algiers, the capital, was the war's primary bone of contention and, hence, the site of the bitter struggle that pitted Algerian "terrorists" against the French "forces of order."

In their efforts to destroy the National Liberation Front, French authorities found that conventional tactics did not work. To abide by the traditional law of war was to concede to the other side an enormous advantage. So, in their frustration, the French opted to fight a "dirty war," employing systematic torture, extrajudicial killings and their own brand of terrorism.

The effect was dramatic: French forces made impressive tactical gains, temporarily dismantled much of the resistance network and regained control of Algiers - at the cost of mobilizing the Algerian people against any possibility of continued French rule.

In fact, as Bacevich notes, this consideration is not the preserve of intellectuals viewing the battles from afar. It appears to be how many of those operating on the ground see themselves:

This process was brilliantly captured in Gillo Pontecorvo's recently re-released 1967 docudrama, "The Battle of Algiers." Last summer, perhaps to remind itself of the dangers of winning battles in ways that lose wars, the Pentagon screened Pontecorvo's film for Defense Department officials. But one wonders whether the lessons making their way into the field are the right ones.

In one of the film's most famous scenes, reporters question the hard-as-nails French commander, sent to clean up Algiers, about rumors of torture and assassination. We are just doing what you sent us to do, Col. Mathieu replies - quibbling about the methods that must be employed is rank hypocrisy.

[...]Asked about the punishments meted out for the Tigris River incident, an American soldier told the Post, "It's a little like the French colonel in 'The Battle of Algiers.' ... You're all complaining about the tactics I am using to win the war, but that's what I am doing - winning the war."

John Pilger, however, is apt to make comparisons with a whole host of imperial misadventures from the 20th Century. In these articles , he evokes both Vietnam and Kenya:

This is an old story; there have been many Iraqs, or what Blair calls "historic struggles" waged against "insurgents and terrorists". Take Kenya in the 1950s. The approved version is still cherished in the west - first popularised in the press, then in fiction and movies; and like Iraq, it is a lie. "The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilise a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the imperial historian V G Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments." None of this was reported. The "demonic terror" was all one way: black against white. The racist message was unmistakable.

It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Vietnamese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.

Indeed, there is an important sense in which Iraq is comparable to every other imperialist mission - and it is those aspects which John Pilger is emphasising. Self-interest smuggled into the ideological terrain under the veil of idealism, the demonisation of an apparently barbaric enemy, even where the civilised ones kill many more etc. However, if we want to learn anything about Iraq that isn't nose-bleedingly obvious except to the Sun reader, we had better make our analogies a little more specific than that. Bacevich's article is an excellent example of this.

Another helpful affinity is supplied by Charles Glass , the estimable Middle East commentator on the Left:

People cheered when the United States Marines marched into the capital. At last, someone would restore order, remove the thugs and murderers from the streets and force an end to the chaos. Then a new government arrested and tortured dissidents. The U.S. ordered the dissident’s outside backers, Syria and Iran, to stay away. Britain joined the U.S. in policing the streets. With Washington supporting the government and training its army, the opposition strategy meant removing the Americans and the British.

Syria and Iran helped the rebels. American soldiers shot and killed Shiite Muslims. American and British planes bombed their neighborhoods. Soon, the American embassy and the Marine headquarters were rubble. American and British civilians were taken hostage and displayed on television. Then, the American warships sailed away and took the Marines with them. The experiment in nation-building was over.

There is a certain wish-fulfillment in that tale, and it is as well to blunt it with Chomsky's observation that "[t]ypically, military occupations are quite successful, even by the most horrendous conquerors". Yes, the occupation of Iraq may continue to go down in flames. It may, in fact, slowly ameliorate itself, stamp out the opposition, repair the infrastructure and win the reluctant backing of Iraqis. There is good reason for doubting that, but it could happen.

For the neo-conservative Peter Brookes , Iraq is much more like Cambodia:

Building democracy abroad is a key element of American foreign policy - and a necessary tool in the War on Terror. Which is why last week's elections in far-off Cambodia offer a glimmer of hope to the whole world, especially Iraq.

Not that they were exactly pretty: Cambodia's fourth open elections since 1993 saw the same problems that had plagued the first three - including violence, intimidation and vote-buying.

...

Should Americans care about the health of democracy in Cambodia? Absolutely. Democracies bring peace and stability to a region and hope to its people. For instance, in mainland Southeast Asia, there are far too few democracies. (Thailand is the other.) A brutal military junta rules Burma, while repressive Communist regimes control Laos and Vietnam. A successful transition to democracy in Cambodia would serve as a beacon of freedom to its authoritarian neighbors. (Just as Iraq will serve as a democratic linchpin in the Middle East.)

It is only fair, and also instructive, to note that nowhere in his article does Brookes refer to the fact that what the United States actually did in Cambodia was support and successfully work toward the rescuscitation of the Khmer Rouge responsible for "the horrific Cambodian genocide" in which "Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge murdered or starved 2 million Cambodians - one in every four". If Iraq is indeed like Cambodia , we should expect the restoration of Saddam Hussein and his acolytes who will then divide into opposing factions and compete in "democratic elections" (with a little sprinkling of ultra-violence).

What is Iraq like? All of the above, I suppose. The underdetermination of theory by data allows for a surfeit of plausible comparisons and interpretations. It is striking, I suppose, that Christopher Hitchens settled for the least plausible one of the bunch. Myself? I think the situation in Iraq is exactly like when, in the 15th Century, Swiss peasant pikemen kicked the everloving shit out of the Burgundian cavalries called to the aid of the Habsburgs.

Yeeeeeessss!! posted by lenin

Yer out, you fuckers!!! Do ya feel the hate, come on, feel it, feel the fucking hate, you right-wing scumbags! Pow! How the fuck does that feel?

The BJP have lost the elections in India:

India's ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) today conceded defeat in parliamentary elections, according to the party's president, Venkaiah Naidu, in one of the biggest upsets in Indian politics since independence.
The opposition Congress party and its allies claimed victory and declared that party leader Sonia Gandhi would be the next prime minister.

...

During the campaign, Mr Mahajan had called Ms Gandhi's Indian-born children "foreigners" and had stoked the debate - dubbed the "Sonia factor" - over whether a foreign-born citizen should rule India.

Ms Gandhi, who has pushed for a secular India in contrast to the BJP's Hindu nationalist message, is the widow of the former prime minister Rajiv Ghandi. Their two children, Rahul and Priyanka, are also politicians, and Rahul expects to be elected to parliament today.

Outside Mrs Gandhi's residence, supporters were celebrating, beating drums, setting off firecrackers and chanting slogans.

Rati Lal Kala, 35, carrying a huge Congress flag and wearing a scarf in Congress colours, said: "They said she is a foreigner, but people have given them a reply. The BJP has only played with the people's emotions. This should be a lesson for them."

One nil, one nil, one nil...!!

The Language of Condemnation. posted by lenin

Hizbollah has officially condemned the beheading of a US civilian in Iraq. Quite right, too. I don't much care for the calls of Christian leaders in the UK for Muslims to announce - every time a crimes is committed by a bastardised sect pretending to fight for Islam - their shame and disgust at such crimes. I think we can trust that such sentiments are axiomatic.

Nevertheless, the voice of a group known for its successful resistance to Israeli aggression will carry considerable weight in the Middle East. The terms of the condemnation are interesting too:

"Hizbollah condemns this horrible act that has done very great harm to Islam and Muslims by this group that claims affiliation to the religion of mercy, compassion and humane principles...

The timing of this act that overshadowed the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in occupation forces prisons is suspect timing that aims to serve the American administration and occupation forces in Iraq and present excuses and pretexts for their inhumane practices against Iraqi detainees."

Indeed, one doubts that Al Qaeda time their atrocities to meet the aims of the coalition, but it is a fact that their presence and performance in Iraq is extremely harmful both to the resistance and to Muslims worldwide. In seeking to stir up civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites, they have perpetuated some of the most grotesque acts of mass murder and threatened the nascent unity of Sunnis and Shi'ites against their occupiers. The claim by Al Qaeda to represent the authentic anti-imperialist movement in the Arab and Muslim world has always been a transparent absurdity, a cruel hoax, and an appalling distortion of the true aspirations of the people in those countries and regions. Suffice to say, the impact of the growing resistance in Iraq and of the international anti-war movement will have done serious damage to Al Qaeda's claim to hegemonize the anti-imperialist spirit. As good a reason as any to continue this fight against the occupation.

Marxism for Buddha. posted by lenin

I'm not inclined toward religion, and least of all toward theocracy, but when someone described the Dalai Lama the other day as a Gucci sandal wearing feudal theocrat, I felt a little pang of sympathy for the pious one. After all, was it not he who said :

Tibet at that time was very, very backward. The ruling class did not seem to care, and there was much inequality. Marxism talked about an equal and just distribution of wealth. I was very much in favor of this. Then there was the concept of self-creation. Marxism talked about self-reliance, without depending on a creator or a God. That was very attractive. I had tried to do some things for my people, but I did not have enough time. I still think that if a genuine communist movement had come to Tibet, there would have been much benefit to the people.

Instead, the Chinese communists brought Tibet a so-called "liberation." These people were not implementing true Marxist policy. If they had been, national boundaries would not be important to them. They would have worried about helping humanity. Instead, the Chinese communists carried out aggression and suppression in Tibet. Whenever there was opposition, it was simply crushed. They started destroying monasteries and killing and arresting lamas.

Or even:

"Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilisation of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes - that is the majority - as well as with those who are underprivileged and in need; and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For these reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems to be fair... The failure of the regime in the Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason I think of myself as half-Marxist and half-Buddhist." (Quoted in Bertell Ollman, How To Take an Exam... & Remake the World, Black Rose Books, 2001).

But I've always thought that the trouble with Buddhism, aside from its involving religious spiritual beliefs which clash with my religious mechanistic beliefs, is its lack of militancy, specifically in respect of Tibet. Get yer goddam guns and give the Chinese a good fricking whipping! Not much chance of that, unfortunately, if this Buddhist socialist is representative:

In sum, the Buddhist attitude toward the class struggle is of a piece from
start to finish: It means to stand within the no-self that is also the Great Self, to take as one's purpose that one will cherish the propertyless masses and liberate the
deprived classes, using methods that exclude military force and violence, and especially
taking as one's basic principle the resistance that is non-resistance.

"Resistance that is non-resistance". Fan-fuckin-tastic.

Syria Sanctions posted by lenin

America has decided to place sanctions on Syria . Now, if US soldiers weren't kind of busy torturing Iraqis, I might expect a war to ensue here. Instead, it looks rather like a substitute for war (indicating yet further how emasculated the neoconservative strategists are becoming as their geo-strategies collapse around their ears).

I can't see there being any serious harm to Syria as a result of this, since food and medicine will not be affected. It is hard to tell what this forebodes. However, the cheek of the Bush administration grates more than anything else. Consider:

President George W Bush ... accused Syria of continuing to occupy Lebanon and pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missiles.

Look, there's a very simple solution. Let Hezbollah kick the Syrians out like they did the Israelis, then send Mordechai Vananu in to sort out the nukes...

China: The Perfect Capitalist State? posted by lenin

Since “free markets” are often treated as talismans, which will usher in political liberalisation in thug states, it is instructive to see how economic liberalisation does to the political culture of a dictatorship like the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I’ll begin with a quick tour of the Arabesques described by this process, then move on to its relationship to the political structure in China.

From State Planning to “Market Socialism”
Since 1978, China has been embarking on a reform process in which State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have been gradually privatised. This process first manifested itself through the Contractual Management System, in which SOEs were contracted out under supervisory agencies (state ministries and local councils) with a specified profit quota to be returned to those agencies. Any profits obtained above the set quota could be retained wholly or partially by the SOE. In addition to this, although private enterprises were limited to just 7 employees and under following 1978, larger enterprises began to appear illegally before being given official legitimacy by the 13th Party Congress in 1987. Joint-stock companies and over-the-counter trading was attempted in the mid-1980s, but little progress was made until 1991.

Zhao Ziyang, who became premier in 1981, and General Secretary of the CP in 1987, guided these reforms. Ziyang acted with the specific backing of Deng Xiaoping, the former leader. Economic overheating in 1988 caused Ziyang to be relieved of his job, and Li Peng was placed in charge of putting a temporary halt to the reform process which only re-started after an intervention by Deng Xiaoping, following which the 14th Party Congress resolved to establish “market socialism”. Zhu Rhongji overtook Peng’s post in 1993 with a reform blueprint that has been faithfully pursued up to the present. Where Rhongji differed from Ziyang was in the goal of their reform plans – Ziyang wished to strengthen the public sector and retain it as the most significant sector of the economy, while Rhongji’s plan was to move toward a “socialist market economy” in which the state would remain dominant only through its continued stakes in key or basic industries. Private participation was envisaged in all but military and essential SOEs.

In fact, what emerged was a rapid process of corporatisation under the name of the “modern enterprise system”, in which large to medium SOEs were to be allowed to transform themselves into corporations, either as “limited liability” enterprises with 2-50 shareholders or as shareholder companies with more than 50. In 1994, the new policy was summed up as “take a firm grip of the large, let go of the small”. The state would focus on the largest 1,000 SOEs, while the smaller SOEs would be privatised. Some became “share-based cooperatives” (SBCs), in which the shares may only be sold to employees.

However, since the term “employees” includes management, most of these privatisations have been the result of management buy-outs while workers have been obliged to purchase the less profitable SOEs just to save their jobs. Congruent with the new perspective, the 15th Party Congress redefined the “public economy” to include “the state and collective components of the economy of mixed ownership” - so long as the “competitiveness of the state economy” were not diminished, practically no measure could be considered as reducing the “socialist character” of the state. The private sector in China now outsizes the public sector considerably, even though the government chooses to conceal this elementary fact by speaking of the “state component” in the corporatised SOEs. This language is deceptive because the private sector has been growing much faster than the state sector since the 1980s, and it is private capital that has been making inroads into the public sector rather than the latter retaining a “firm grip” on the former.

(To be continued tomorrow when I've had some sleep. Night.)

Mock Exam posted by lenin

The warniks have a stout opponent in Tex at Unfair Witness . Having casually sliced to shreds a ubiquitous but infantile pro-war argument ("If the Iraqi war was about oil, why are gas prices so high?"), he then puts six questions to the advocates of imperial misadventure. The few of them who visit this site are invited to attempt answers:

If the Iraqi war was about Weapons of Mass Destruction, where are they?


If the Iraqi war was about disarming Saddam, is he?


If the Iraqi war was about democracy, why aren't the Iraqis allowed to vote for anything?


If the Iraqi war was about freedom, why have 43,000 of them been imprisoned with over 10,000 of them still in US military-run prisons?


If the Iraqi war was about liberating Iraqis from oppression, why are Iraqis being tortured in American prisons?

War Unpopular, But Kerry Makes No Inroads. posted by lenin

Now when I described John Kerry as "a man so boring his face has gone to sleep and is slowly slipping off his skull", I didn't expect it to be so true that he is incapable of deriving even the smallest advantage out of the current crisis of the Bush administration. Look, here's what the latest opinion poll in America says:

54% say the war was "not worth it".

58% "disapprove" of Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq.

AND YET:

48% of people still think Bush would handle the situation in Iraq better than Kerry, who gets 45%.

But it isn't all bad for Kerry:

62% of Americans "disapprove" of the way things are going in the United States.

56% "disapprove" of the way Bush is handling the economy.

On the economy, Kerry scores well, with 54% saying he would handle the economy better and 40% supporting Bush.

Further, Kerry has a 5% lead with voters as a whole and with registered voters - but not with those likely to vote. Of those likely to vote, Kerry gets 45% to Bush's 47%. Why? Because he bores the fricking be-jaysus out of them!

Americans! Do your patriotic duty and vote for Ralph Nader. Don't make me come over there...

Responsibility posted by lenin

Hat tip to Tex at Unfair Witness

Capturing Friedman posted by lenin

Look at this face:



I don't know if I want to step on it or throw up on it. It is, of course, the timeless image of Thomas Friedman - the New York Times' invaluable guide to what the Democratic Leadership Council is thinking to itself. In his latest column, reproduced in the International Herald Tribune , Friedman wonders why

too many Arab countries have opted to drill a sand dune for economic growth rather than drilling their own people...

Ah ah! Don't jump to conclusions:

...rather than drilling their own people - men and women - in order to tap their energy, creativity, intellect and entrepreneurship.

Now, Friedman's case is that the Arabs spend too little time trading with one another, and too much time talking about Zionism or finding "dignity in Pyrrhic victories like Fallujah". In this regard, he rails against Saudi Arabia:

A week ago we were treated again to absurd Saudi allegations that "Zionists" were behind the latest bombing in Saudi Arabia, because, said Saudi officials, "Zionists" clearly benefit from these acts. Someone ought to tell the Saudis this: Don't flatter yourselves. The only interest Israelis have in Saudi Arabia is flying over it to get to India and China - countries that actually trade and manufacture things other than hatred of "infidels."

Well, before moving on to the rest of Friedman's screed, let me just ponder on a point of fact. Friedman may be correct that Israel has no reason to bomb Saudi Arabia, but he has the explanans wrong:

"If, despite all our precautions, we are confronted with an Iran already in possession of nuclear installations and in mastery of launching techniques, we would be better off if the explosive charge of the Israeli-Arab conflict is by then already neutralised through signing peace treaties with states located in our vicinity - concretely with Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians. We would also be better off if, until that time, we succeed in fighting Islamic fundamentalism. It would be good for us if all sane states of this region unite to resist the forces of radicalism." (Labor Knesset member, Efraim Sneh, quoted in Yo'av Kaspi, "Hotam", Al Hamishmar, 21 May 1993.)

Saudi Arabia is a stable monarchy which represses Islamic radicalism, while Iran is the touchstone of radicalism in the region.

Allez Friedman!:

The Bush team has made a mess in Iraq, but the pathologies of the Arab world have also contributed - and the sheer delight that some Arab media take in seeing Iraq go up in flames is evidence of that.

It's time for the Arab world to grow up - to stop dancing on burning American jeeps and claiming that this is some victory for Islam.

No, what they ought to do is dance around with big goofy grins on their faces while torturing prisoners. I assume Friedman means the term "pathologies" in the sense of manifesting a disease of some sort. That disease could be called "occupation", no?

As I said, the Bush team has made a mess in Iraq. And I know that Abu Ghraib will be a lasting stain on the Pentagon leadership. But here's what else I know from visiting Iraq: There were a million acts of kindness, generosity and good will also extended by individual U.S. soldiers this past year - acts motivated purely by a desire to give Iraqis the best chance they've ever had at decent government and a better future. There are plenty of Iraqis and Arabs who know that.

Unfortunately, Tom, most Arabs can see the forest and the trees. Certainly, the bulk of Iraqi Arabs are prepared to urge the eviction of the US and its allies. This was true even before the torture scandal . But Friedman thinks "we still have a chance to produce a decent outcome in Iraq, if we get our eye back on the ball", whatever that means. And he is eager to ensure that Arabs take some the blame again:

Yes, we Americans need to look in a mirror and ask why we've become so radioactive. But the Arabs need to look in a mirror too. "They are using our mistakes to avoid their own necessity to change, reform and modernize," says the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen.

This tendency to speak of "the Arabs" as if they were a homogenous bloc, identifiable through certain traits, comes directly from the lexicon of Orientalism. Indeed, the late Edward Said himself had cause to rebuke the "insufferably conceited" Friedman in a telling word or two :

When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs that they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything he says is the slightest tone of self- criticism.

Isn't it telling that, even when pro-war commentators such as Friedman ought to be drowning in shame, he still manages to make a sermon out of it?

"Torture? Too Good For 'Em if You Ask Me!!" posted by lenin

Some bizarre arguments are emerging from the temporarily silenced barkers to explain away the torture of Iraqi prisoners. (Notice how I used the word "torture" instead of "abuse"? Cunning, don't you think?) One American commentator described the torture as nothing worse than a little "frat hazing" . Rush Limbaugh added :

Folks, these torture pictures with the women torturers, I mean Marv Albert looking at those pictures would say, "Hey, that doesn't look so bad." You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean I don't know if it's just me but it looks like anything you'd see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe you can get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean this is something you can see at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City: the Movie. I mean, it's just me.

Rush, I wish it were just you, but there is more to come. Here is what Barbara Amiel had to say about it in The Daily Telegraph :

Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.

We handcuff her - or a white collar criminal such as Michael Milken - because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities. We routinely use measures in normal police matters that, very strictly speaking, violate the Geneva Conventions. Interrogations may use some form of psychological menace. Noise or lighting may deliberately create some sort of sleep deprivation for a short period.

This is not to say we should withdraw from the Geneva Conventions in order to fight drug dealers and child molesters, but only to note that in some circumstances, our police may use such tactics. In Iraq, we are fighting men and women who routinely blow up civilians in a guerrilla war of the most merciless kind. If a 97-year-old woman is handcuffed for a traffic offence, what is the appropriate procedure for murderous guerrillas?

I don't know if it was the fact that Amiel had earlier in the article described something written by Midge Decter as "fascinating" that softened me up for these blows, but when I read the above I literally giggled into my yoghurt. But wait, it gets better .

Mark Jacobson, a former Defense Department official who worked on detainee issues while at the Pentagon, said that at Guantanamo and the Bagram facility in Afghanistan, military interrogators have never used torture or extreme stress techniques. "It's the fear of being tortured that might get someone to talk, not the torture," Jacobson said. "We were so strict." ...

"I actually think we are not aggressive enough [at times in interrogation techniques]," he said. "I think we are too timid."

It should have been electrocution and Madame Guillotine, then?

The most recent news about the torture story, however, is the announcement that it wouldn't have happened had it not been for the resistance .

UPDATE: For some time I've wondered if "Socialism in an Age of Waiting" has any purpose other than to pour ill-conceived bile on, well, socialists. For, strange to relate, every time I take a wee visit to that surreal little number I get some new post exalting the occupation of Iraq and denouncing those who oppose it. In the most recent entry, for example, he/she advises the left to get "a sense of proportion" about the torture in Abu Ghraib:

In any case, others, much better-placed to comment than we are, have made valiant attempts to restore some sense of proportion, notably the Lebanese journalist Rajeh Khuri. In his view, the Middle East as a whole is

“a vast Abu Ghraib prison, where many have died and more are still dying in obscurity ... We are concerned with the detention centres and jails filling the tunnels of regimes in the Arab world, and the shredding of the soul of Arab citizens and their honour, without one official batting an eyelash.”

It’s a pity that in this case “we” cannot be extended to include western liberals and pseudo-leftists. The orgy of rushed judgements and sanctimonious moralising predictably being indulged in as we write confirms what has been sadly obvious for a long time: these hypocrites’ much-vaunted commitment to the notion that human rights are indivisible is no more than hollow rhetoric.

Dear me! We are bitter. But perhaps SIAW's authors would like to explain why the only thing they have had to say about the torture of Iraqi prisoners has been to note that "severe punishment" ought to await the perpetrators, then review the output of the blog-o-sphere on the matter, firing terrible, half-hearted insults at anyone who deviates from their own line that "yes, this is awfully bad, but Saddam was much worse you know". And what, precisely, do the authors of SIAW find objectioble about "moralising", even of a "sanctimonious" kind, on this topic? Why should it be that they are more concerned with diverting our attention to the crimes of official enemies, and exterpating heresies on the left than actually discussing the issues about the torture in Iraq? The level of debate on SIAW reaches glacial heights when they discuss "“Gareth”, a pathetic wanker who, along with that fearless proletarian Marc Mulholland and the semi-literate “Joe Baxter”"... what absolute drivel!

And elsewhere SIAW protests:

Such abuse of human rights still goes largely unphotographed, uninvestigated, unpunished and - except when it suits the domestic agendas of western political activists, or the increasingly slanted and untrustworthy agendas of the high-minded “neutrals” at Amnesty International and elsewhere - it remains largely unremarked in the West.

SIAW isn't the first to complain about this. But the answer is obvious - it's the Tony Blair answer: Just because we can't always act, doesn't mean we shouldn't when we can. I'll finish with this, since SIAW think they hegemonise the venomous side of blogging (they don't, it just happens to account for about 90% of their output): SIAW is singly the most repellent, intellectually neutered, meretricious load of old diseased testicles that I have ever had the displeasure to encounter. Whether they consider themselves on the Left or not, the intellect on display in their trashy blog could easily be outmatched by any passing insect and the arguments therein casually dispatched by Winnie the Pooh.

Johann Hari in an Age of Opinion Polls. posted by lenin

How will Johann Hari manage this? As perhaps the most perfect democrat in the world, Hari has constantly abided by his selection of Iraqi opinion poll results so that he now finds himself aligned with those proposing the end of the occupation of Iraq .

In fact, to digress briefly, this sits well with an emerging pattern of pro-war journos and columnists coming out against the war and the occupation (although Hari remains a fervent defender of the Saddam ouster):

Tony Parsons, one of the most forthright critics of antiwar protesters, now says:

"STOP me if I am missing something here, but if former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic can end up on trial for war crimes committed under his leadership, then why can't Tony Blair?"

Minette Marin of the Sunday Times "had faith in America's plan for Iraq" but now confesses that she:

"was wrong ... Meanwhile, Iraqi support for the coalition appears to be dwindling. According to an opinion poll for the newspaper USA Today (published before last week’s torture photos appeared), 82% of people in Baghdad said they saw the coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators and more than 60% of Arabs across the country, both Sunni and Shia, said the American and British troops should leave immediately. The handover sounds like a dangerous mess and there is talk of partition."

Ah yes, what of that opinion poll? It takes us to the heart of the subject. According to a comprehensive poll of 3,500 Iraqis published in USA Today , 50% say the situation is either "somewhat worse", "much worse" or "about the same" now as it was last year, while U.S.-British military action in Iraq cannot be justified "at all" or "somewhat" according to 52% of Iraqis (26% say it can sometimes, but not other times). Finally, most damningly, 57% of Iraqis say occupying forces should leave "immediately". Yet another poll showed that "a majority of Iraqis said they'd feel safer if the U.S. military withdrew immediately". This poll was taken before the torture scandal, and contains a surprise or two:

For example, while American officials insist that only fringe elements support the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a majority of Iraqis crossed ethnic and sectarian lines to name him the second most-respected man in Iraq, according to the coalition-funded poll.

On top of which, the most recent UK opinion poll shows that 49% of the public now oppose the war , with only 43% in favour. Similarly, according to today's Independent, 55% of the public want a full withdrawal of UK troops from Iraq by June 30th .

Now, since Johann Hari has made a career out of adjusting his view on Iraq according to the latest minutiae of polling data, what can we now expect? Shall he announce that, for example, 47% of him thinks Resistance attacks against the Americans are unjustified while the remaining 53% of him thinks either that it sometimes can, or that it always can? Will he now demand respect for Moqtada al-Sadr, the second most popular mofo in Iraq?

Harry , however, has advised Hari against his fidelity to the Iraqi majority: "My solidarity is not with ‘the Iraqis’ and it never has been. My solidarity is with Iraqi and Kurdish democrats and it is clear at the moment who their main enemy is."

US soldiers? Shurely not! Hari retorts that "If we defy the majority in the name of democracy, what kind of Iraq will the democrats eventually inherit? Won't it be even more radicalised and angry? Won't the democrats - rightly - look out of touch and be deposed swiftly?"

But, after all, Johann, there is a get-out clause which you may adopt. Turn your mind back to his debate with Media Lens :

"Perhaps you don't understand this, but mob rule and democracy are different things. If we determined our policies by who could get the biggest crowd onto the street, we would have the death penalty, deportation of asylum seekers, withdrawal from the EU and god knows what else."

So, Johann could give up tail-coating the opinion polls and make a recommendation based on his view of the actors involved and the likely consequences. It would be unlikely to result in a substantial alteration of his views (which probably reveals something in itself), but it would oblige him to cease this intellectual subterfuge of ducking behind the nearest Iraqi majority. The trouble, of course, with this argument is that he would then be obliged to forget about justifying the war on the post-hoc basis that opinion polls taken after the war showed a majority of Iraqis felt it was worth it. Still, if you want to help Johann reach a failsafe conclusion, you can e-mail him at johann@johannhari.com. As he says "I don't have a fully-formed view on this and I'm eager to hear from everyone." Muck in, chaps!

DoD DoA (Further lessons in media revisionism) posted by lenin

The Road to Surfdom has discovered that:

The Department of Defense mailing list has gone to the trouble of sending around the following message:

Please disregard earlier AFPS story, "Rumsfeld Apologizes to Iraqi Victims of Prison Abuse," datelined May 5, 2004, and issued on this listserv.
Please use the revised text, which follows:


And then follows the full story which you can find here. The link to the previous story is no longer operative, in fact, it takes you to the new story.

The two articles are virtually identical except for the opening and the title. The orginal went like this:

Rumsfeld Apologizes to Iraqi Victims of Prison Abuse
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 5, 2004 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld apologized today to Iraqis abused by American prison guards in Abu Ghraib.

"Any American who sees the photographs that we've seen has to feel apologetic to the Iraqi people who were abused and recognize that that is something that is unacceptable and certainly un-American," Rumsfeld said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

The secretary left open the door that compensation could be paid to the abuse victims.


The updated article reads as follows:

Prison Abuse 'Unacceptable, Un-American', Rumsfeld Says
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 5, 2004 – "Any American who sees the photographs that we've seen has to feel apologetic to the Iraqi people who were abused and recognize that that is something that is unacceptable and certainly un-American," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today.

Rumsfeld discussed the alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison on ABC TV's "Good Morning America." The secretary left open the door that compensation could be paid to the abuse victims.


I guess they really don't want us to get the impression that the Secretary would apologise. So noted.

I apologise for extracting the entire post, but the details are important for what follows. Cursor links to an MSNBC news story which is advertised as follows:

MSNBC reports that acccording to U.S. military officials, unreleased images from Abu Ghraib "showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner and 'acting inappropriately with a dead body.' The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys."

Unfortunately, the story they link to now says something different completely. It no longer contains, for instance, the cited paragraph. Why?

Google has the answer. A search for that paragraph on Google locates the exact article to which Cursor link, with those words highlighted. However, clicking on the link only produces the altered article again. Instead, if you click on "Cached", you get this :

Rumsfeld apologizes to abused Iraqis

Defense secretary warns that worse photos, videos are yet to come

...

Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

Not only have MSNBC removed the terms of apology as requested by the DoD (instead it is the American people who must "feel apologetic to the Iraqi people who were abused and recognize that that is something that is unacceptable and certainly un-American"), but they have also scrubbed out the bulk of the worthy news...

US Against the Free Market. posted by lenin

If you're anxious about the enforced privatisation of Iraq's industry, you might have thought that any exception to this trend would be welcomed. However, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard has bemoaned the fact that the "coalition" have decided to impose a state-controlled media on Iraq:

On March 20, the Coalition issued Decree Number 66, signed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, turning the Iraqi Media Network into the Iraqi Public Service Broadcaster, a government media enterprise equivalent to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Zayer and the al-Sabah staff professed shock that, under the decree, their newspaper would become a state-owned newspaper, with no prospect of the promised privatization.

Coalition Decree Number 65, also issued March 20, for example, had established an Iraqi Communications and Media Commission. This body would regulate all "telecommunications and telecommunications-related information services," including print media, broadcasting, coverage of elections, mobile telephone services, Internet providers, and Internet cafés. The commission, which would issue licenses for all such enterprises, was to be supported by an array of chairmanships, boards, and panels.

In an editorial, al-Sabah described the commission as "bigger and more powerful than Iraq's former Ministry of Information--a state within the state." The newspaper continued, "This
Commission will be lawmaker, prosecutor, and judge, technical engineer and moral guardian of the interests of, for example, children (against too much violence on television) and consumers (against fraudulent advertising)....[I]n order to be prosecutor and judge, this Commission will need considerable staff to monitor television and radio programs and read the newspapers and weeklies."

Coincidental Heroes? posted by lenin

Harry has an answer for Johann Hari's recent doubts on the US occupation:

Who cares what the motives for the US invading Iraq were? As was rightly pointed out it was the coincidence of interests between Iraqi democrats and the US that counted and was the reason why people on the left supported armed liberation and still do.

The issue of motives only comes into play if one no longer believes that the US is interested in creating a democracy in Iraq, if there is no longer a coincidence of interests between Iraqi democrats and the US occupiers. For all the blundering mistakes of the military and political strategists and the criminal behaviour of prison guards, I have yet to see a single scrap of evidence to suggest that the US is not still interested in creating some sort of democracy in Iraq.

The obvious question is this: where have you ever seen a single scrap of evidence - not claim, but evidence - that the US intends democracy in Iraq? The qualifier "some sort of" has its significance, of course... The other question is this: Since when has it been the case that outcomes could be divorced from motive? Could the war between the US and Iraqis now have anything to do with the motives of the US in invading and the consequent way they have conducted the occupation?

Jean-Francois Revel Aboard the Enterprise. posted by lenin

Jean-Francois Revel could once claim to be a socialist of considerable standing. But have a wee look at his latest screed for The American Enterprise Institute . Or, if you can't be bothered doing that, allow me to pick out the highlights and make fun of them for you:

Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism


How to understand this war against globalization...?

What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently hostile to that. But behind this fight lies an older and more fundamental struggle—against economic liberalization, and against the chief representative thereof, which is the United States. Anti-globalism carnivals often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America are impossible to separate.

Mark the conflation - economic liberalisation is, for the New Revel, the same as "economic freedom". This is peculiar, since most anti-capitalist activists would tell you that what they object to about "globalisation" is not necessarily the movement of goods from one end of the earth to the other, and certainly not the movement of peoples from country to country. It is precisely the unfreedom that accrues to those who are excluded by TRIPs, and the lack of power of domestic constituencies over the forces which determine their lives (since economic liberalisation removes control from accountable bodies like parliament to unaccountable corporations) that arouses the hostility of much of the developing world and some of the developed world.

But more crucially, Revel is too sophisticated a person to imagine that "globalisation" is not a contested term. For Revel, it may very well mean freedom of movement for persons and goods. However, this is not the only view. Most anti-capitalists regard the term as a neutral cover for a political project which they prefer to call "neo-liberalism", and which has taken the form of the attempted Multilateral Agreement on Investment, Gats, TRIPs and so on. There is also the additional criticism that the free movement of goods and the free movement of people are strictly not part of the same process. In this regard, Kenan Malik makes the point that:

These days the cost of a Easyjet fare will take you from Budapest to Luton, and it's not much more to fly in from Beijing. Immigration only becomes expensive when it's illegal and you have to pay traffickers to smuggle you across borders. Make all immigration legal and it becomes dirt cheap.

Quite. But the decreasing regulation of trade is directly proportional to the increasing regulation of migration. One aspect of the anti-capitalist movement is addressed precisely to this problem (see, for example, Teresa Hayter's essay in Emma Bircham ed., Anti-Capitalism: A Guide To The Movement ).

Revel continues:

"The simplistic article of Marxist faith that capitalism is absolute evil..."

Would that Marxism had the appeal of a faith, (although it admittedly requires a certain suspension of disbelief - like most political philosophy in my view)! But no Marxist of serious standing actually considers capitalism an absolute evil, and Marx certainly did not. Consider this passage from the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Not unmixed praise, to be sure - but it was part of Marx's strategy to praise capitalism more fervently than the most naive liberal, all the better to bury it. Frederic Jameson once wrote (in The Cultural Turn, I think) that one should develop a sensibility [about post-modernism] like Marx's, in which one was capable of appreciating in a single thought both the demonstrably baleful effects of capitalism and also its dynamic, liberatory potential.

Revel, then, is rioting (revelling?) in a comic book version of Marxism, which is highly suitable for his audience of spear-carriers.

But ultimately it is something even bigger that the anti-globalizers want to destroy: liberal democracy and free-market economics. Or quite simply liberty itself.

We're off into wonder-land now. Iago-like evil lurks behind the anti-capitalist movement, a motiveless malignity that would like to crush nothing less than "liberty itself".

According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority. This is of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century for the industrialized nations of Western Europe and North America. But we all know how history has confirmed that brilliant prophecy.

To extend a little generosity to Revel, this distortion of Marxism is not unknown in economic textbooks (introductions and guides - Marxism rarely features in mainstream macroeconomic text-books). But, of course, neither Marx nor the anti-capitalist movement expect or have expected absolute immiseration to be the rule for either the advanced capitalist core or the increasingly excluded periphery. It is true that there has been a measured increase in absolute poverty in the world over the last thirty years:

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 840 million people are malnourished, the great mass of them living in countries of the Third World. More than half the countries for which statistics are available do not have enough food to provide all their population with the minimum daily requirement of calories. In some regions hunger has become far more general: across Africa the average household now consumes 25 percent less than in the early 1970s.

But while Marx inherited the notion of "absolute immiseration" from Ricardo, and held it as he was writing the Communist Manifesto, his views on writing Das Kapital are considerably altered. He later developed the concept of a "subsistence" wage level, which would be determined by socio-historical factors. Trotsky developed a similar idea on reviewing the Communist Manifesto in 1938.

Nonetheless, Revel has an answer for those who cite Africa as an example of market failure:

This is most obvious in Africa, the only Third World continent to have actually declined. Impoverishment there has political, not economic, causes. It is statism, not the market, and socialism, not capitalism, that has destroyed the African economies. After independence, the African elites who formed the political leadership generally adopted the Soviet and Chinese systems.

This might pass as an argument were it not the case that China is presently booming, that poverty has declined in China from 63.8% of the population living below $1.08 a day in 1981 to 16.6% today. Similarly, the impeccable capitalist states of South Asia have experienced a reduction in poverty - yet, even today, 31.3% of its citizens live on an income below $1.08 per day. This, before anyone starts barking, is not a defense of China. Amartya Sen famously compared India and China on life expectancy, poverty and starvation. Noting that China was well ahead of India on most indicators, he nevertheless noted that China had been fatally prone to famine precisely because of its undemocratic political structure:

"Consider China. Even before the recent economic reforms, China had been much more successful than India in economic development. The average life expectancy, for example, rose in China much more than it did in India. Well before the reforms of 1979, reached something like the high figure --- nearly 70 years at birth --- that is quoted now. China was not able to prevent famine. It is estimated that the Chinese famines of 1958-61 killed close to 30 million people --- 10 times more than the 1943 famine in British India. The so-called "Great Leap Forward" initiated in the late 1950s was a massive failure, but the Chinese government continued to pursue much the same disastrous policies three more years. It is hard to imagine that this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and has an independent press.

"The lack of a free system of news distribution misled even the government itself. It believed its own propaganda and the rosy reports of local party officials. Indeed, there is evidence that just as the famine was moving towards its peak, the Chinese authorities mistakenly believed that they had 100 million more metric tons of grain than they did.

"These issues remain relevant in China today. Since the economic reforms of 1979, official Chinese policies have been based on the acknowledgment of the importance of economic incentives without a similar acknowledgment of the importance of political incentives. When things go reasonably well, the disciplinary role of democracy might not be missed; but when big policy mistakes are made, this lacuna can be disastrous."

However, while India avoided famine (after 1943), it invested far less in rural health care services than China. Hence, approximately every 8 years in India, the number of people who dying from starvation, poor health, malnutrition, and diseases equals to a 1958-60 Chinese famine. (Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action Clarendon Press, 1989). The point is that political democracy and economic democracy are not co-substantial. And what has happened in Africa? Mugabe, whom Revel bizarrely accuses the anti-capitalist movement of "defending", has implemented, since 1989 at least, an impeccable neo-liberal programme. He has slashed taxes on the top income bracket from 60 percent to 45 percent, and corporation taxes from 50 percent to 37 percent. Government revenue has declined as a share of national income by 5%. He has pursued this programme at the behest of the IMF, in fact, enemy number one of anti-capitalists. The official ideology of such Structural Adjustment Programmes is one of assisting growth. However:

"Although there have been a number of studies on the subject over the last decade, one cannot say with certainty whether 'programs' have worked or not.... On the basis of existing studies, one certainly cannot say whether the adoption of programs supported by the Fund led to an improvement in inflation and growth performance. In fact it is often found that programs are associated with a rise in inflation and a fall in growth rate" (Mohsin Kahn, The Macroeconomic Effects of Fund Supported Adjustment Programs, IMF staff papers, vol. 37, no. 2, 1990, pp. 196 and 122, emphasis added). ( IMF tightens the screws on Zimbabwe, Jean Shaoul, 18 August 1999 ).

Revel mistakes simple declarative statements and bald assertions for argument, however:

The anti-globalists are often incoherent. They brought mayhem to Seattle in the name of combating a "savage" globalism that "profits only the rich." Yet which groups met in Seattle? The World Trade Organization (WTO), whose role is precisely to monitor international economic transactions so as to prevent them from being "savage." ...

If you ask the developing countries what they want, they will tell you they want more globalization, not less. What they desire most of all is freer access to the world’s best markets for their products. So when well-heeled young radical protestors try to subvert meetings whose goal is to extend free trade and strengthen poor countries’ ability to export goods, they actually act as enemies of the world’s poor.

One wonders, then, why it should be the case that institutions such as the World Trade Organisation consider it within their various duties to attempt the imposition of schemes such as the MAI, already alluded to, which would have invested corporations with the powers that properly accrue to democratic states? One wonders if Revel has actually attended any of the demonstrations he derides as having been populated by "well-heeled young radical protestors"? Revel, still not satisfied, succumbs to further absurdity:

"Democrats worthy of the name should not forget that power is conferred by ballots, not by bricks hurled through windows. It is disturbing that the Left too often ignores this principle."

Power indeed ought to be conferred through ballots. Until we are allowed a vote on the decisions of the WTO and its confederate organisations, however, bricks hurled through windows remains all too timid a response. And a younger Revel might well have been the one with the make-shift missiles in his hands. Instead, he now writes on behalf of those who have use of real missiles when they don't like what is happening. Maturity, Terry Eagleton once wrote, is a myth that only the young still believe in. He ought to have included those apostates who regard with such miserable condescension the grand ideals of their youth.

Karachi Blast. posted by lenin

Al Qaeda again:

Fourteen people were killed and more than 125 were wounded today in an apparent suicide bombing at a Shia Muslim mosque packed with worshippers in Pakistan, officials said.
The mosque, at the Sindh Madrassah tul Islam, a government-run religious school in the southern port city of Karachi, was packed for Friday afternoon prayers when it was shattered by the fourth, and worst, bomb attack in five days in Pakistan.

The school, which houses students aged between four to 18, has separate mosques for Sunni and Shia Muslim worshippers.
( Source )

Congruent with their extreme sectarian brand of Islam, it looks as if al Qaeda are once more attacking Shi'ite Muslims whom one of their ilk, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has allegedly described as "the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom". Yes, Abu, but do you like them?

This is the same aspect of the Al Qaeda outlook which is causing al-Zarqawi's confederates to attack Shi'ite targets in Iraq in an attempt to cause civil war within Iraq. Of course, they are the worst enemies of the Resistance since the latter both requires and desires Iraqi unity as its first basis for successful action. A resistance movement targets the occupiers, not the occupied.

The House that Saud Built. posted by lenin

Noam Chomsky :

Washington will be happy to establish an 'Arab façade,' to borrow the term of the British during their day in the sun, while US power is firmly implanted at the heart of the world’s major energy-producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but only if it is of the submissive kind accepted in Washington’s 'backyard,' at least if history and current practice are any guide.

CBS :

For there can be no doubt whatsoever that the fall of the House of Saud would be thrust the entire Western world into an energy crisis of unprecedented proportions. Lest there be any doubt about this, as Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation told the Wall Street Journal this week: A disruption of Saudi oil supplies is "one event to which no one has an answer." ...

Editor's note: The author of this series has equity positions in three major international oil companies: ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, and Exxon Mobil.

So, he should know...

Geras vs Hitchens. posted by lenin

The other day, Norman Geras raged at a "revealing" sentence in a Guardian leader:

For me, in any case, the most revealing component in the above passage is the claim that:

"The US and Britain are rightly held up to a higher standard of behaviour..."

Oh really? Why is that, then? Since what we're talking about here is the little matter of respecting the dignity of persons, not abusing them, not violating their bodily or mental integrity, not torturing them, not randomly targeting them outside the context of legitimate means of warfare, and so forth - a matter in which there are universal standards codified in the laws of warfare and in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, amongst other legal instruments - why are the US and Britain not just to be held to the same standard as everybody else, a high one indeed, peremptory, inviolable? What this argument unwittingly reveals in the thinking of the leader writer is the double standard regularly to be found in the pages of the Guardian.

In his latest article (on the torture), Christopher Hitchens gives an answer (though not directed at the Norm):

If anyone wanted to argue that torture is a matter of routine in many of the countries whose official media now express such shock, they would have to argue by way of double standards. This case would collapse at once and of its own weight if the standard was to become a single one, or if one torturer became an excuse for another. This point doesn't completely apply to the media themselves, who have yet to show the video execution of an Italian civilian kidnapped by Iraqi jihadists, or indeed many other lurid atrocities. But there's no hypocrisy in holding self-proclaimed liberators to a higher standard.

If this reveals anything, I don't know what it is. My own view is that perhaps the Norm is right on this one. Clues, anyone?

UPDATE: I finally got round to noticing this on Norman Geras' blog, which is a rebuke to Hitchens' logic. I have to hand the case to him, although it does seem to me that Hitchens' championing the argument at least demonstrates that there is no anti-war sentiment attached to The Guardian line - I'd have thought the opposite, in fact. Moreover, I have to wonder about this:

One might try, I suppose, to give the suggestion an uncontroversial interpretation by taking it to mean simply that we should hold the US and Britain to a higher standard than was actually observed by Saddam Hussein's regime. But such a reading of it backfires horribly. The US and Britain have been operating according to a higher standard than that, but what the Abu Ghraib revelations demonstrate is that the standard hasn't been anywhere near good enough.

The US and Britain have pounded tens of thousands of people to an early grave. If that is a higher standard than was actually observed by Saddam Hussein's regime, it is only because there is nothing supererogatory in it (until recently). It is purely instrumental violence. (I don't accept for a second that it had some virtuous goal attached to it). Also because the scale of "coalition" violence has a long way to go before it matches Saddam's (which most coalition supporters share responsibility for). However, if the best that we can say for the "coalition" is that it is not quite as bad as Saddam, I must say it is a miserable defense and a miserable position for supporters of the "liberation" to be in - as Geras acknowledges.

Bush Arrogance. posted by lenin

Never mind the fact that Bush could not bring himself to say "sorry". Let's face it, for a man who dabbled in cocaine as part of a career in youthful irresponsibility, yet never accepted that excuse from Texan youngsters when he was governor, he's obviously overcome any cognitive dissonance that might result from shameful hypocrisy. And this showed in his address to Arabia last night:

"A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this," he said on al-Arabiya. "A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation" ...

Recounting a conversation he had with Rumsfeld in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, Bush told al-Hurra: "I said, find the truth, and then tell the Iraqi people and the world the truth. We have nothing to hide. We believe in transparency, because we're a free society."

What other national leader could have turned such a disgraceful episode into an excuse for self-congratulation? Blair , that's who:

"[T]he important point is to underline that actions of this kind are in no way condoned by the coalition and this is in contrast with what went before.

"The previous regime under Saddam carried out actions like this as a matter of policy."

posted by lenin

Compare and contrast:

Rumsfeld :

"You know, even to raise the word torture in terms of how the US military would treat someone seems to me is unfortunate. We don't torture people."

Google News :

Army officials said the military had investigated the deaths of 25 prisoners held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and determined that an Army soldier and a CIA contractor murdered two prisoners. Most of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

An official said a soldier was convicted in the U.S. military justice system of killing a prisoner by hitting him with a rock, and was reduced in rank to private and thrown out of the service but did not serve any jail time.

Just Following Orders. posted by lenin

Those torture photos? Military intelligence ordered them to be taken :

The lawyer for one of the soldiers accused of being involved in the events which prompted outrage around the world said orders had been given for the photographs to be taken.

"They were part of the psychological manipulation of the prisoners being interrogated," Guy Womack, attorney for Charles Graner Jr, told NBC television.

"It was being controlled and devised by the military intelligence community and other governmental agencies, including the CIA," he said, adding that the soldiers were simply "following orders".

UPDATE: Tex at Antiwar.com draws my attention to the fact that the BBC has now changed the wording of the story I've linked to. Fortunately, Google News , while linking to the revised article, contains the wording of the original in its introductory summation: "... one of the soldiers accused of being involved in the events which prompted outrage around the world said orders had been given for the photographs to be taken. ... "

Tex comments: "The internet never forgets. Looks like either a soldier has been edited for making unapproved statements or the BBC misquoted him and failed to post a correction."

I shall make enquiries. Watch this space...

UPDATE: I e-mailed the BBC about why they had edited out the two paragraphs in question, and got the following response:

Our reports change many times a day, and as more details emerge it is
very common for us to edit the existing text. This is the case in the
example you quote, and although the precise paragraphs have gone, a
summary of Mr Womack's comments is still included.

If we were to keep all aspects of a story throughout the day, I am
afraid we would be left with a very long page that no-one would read. So
part of our job will always be to edit content to keep each update to a
reasonable length.

I hope this helps to clarify the situation.

Thankyou again for your interest in BBC News Online.

Yours sincerely,

Pete Clifton
Editor, BBC News Interactive


I'm happy to get a response from the BBC, especially the stellar Mr Clifton, but I feel he obfuscated on just one point, and replied, noting that:

I accept the need to revise and update stories. The detail, however, about the photographs being ordered taken as part of the torture [by Military Intelligence] seems to me rather significant. I have quoted the said paragraphs in written work and correspondence - I assume this can be done in good faith?

Presumably, if the BBC is not admitting to be under censure or censor, then I can reproduce these paragraphs at will. I await a reply.

"You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train". posted by lenin

Medicin Sans Frontieres in an age of frontieres

Imagine my surprise to read this:

Sanctions, by contrast, gave rise to exceptional numbers: the figure of 500,000 children dead as a consequence of these measures is advanced without any evidence to support such a horrendous accusation. Journalists and NGOs continue to quote it as a proven fact, yet no study or serious enquiry has evaluated the high mortality the sanctions allegedly provoked.
(Rony Brauman & Pierre Salignon, "Iraq: In Search of a 'Humanitarian Crisis'", in Fabrice Weissman (ed.), In the Shadow of 'Just Wars', Medicins Sans Frontieres, Hurst and Company, London, 2004, pp. 275-6).

It goes without saying that the above is easily refuted. UNICEF carried out the study which evaluated infant and adult mortality in Iraq on the basis of a study incorporating 24,000 households (a larger sample than is needed for statistical validity in Iraq). In that study, they found that the changes in mortality related to the erosion and destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure directly related to sanctions has resulted in 500,000 excess child deaths. There have been numerous studies affirming a similar view . So, why should it be that humanitarians of such rank evince such gross ignorance on an elementary matter of great import? The book from which I am quoting is not a disreputable apologia for Western crimes, and on the whole it provides a more jaundiced view of "humanitarian intervention" than most liberal commentators in the UK or America. It is not a radical critique – it is, however, bracingly honest.

The essay itself is a critique of the way NGOs handled the Iraq war, particularly what they considered to be the "alarmism" of organisations like UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the World Food Programme. In specific, they cite claims that 100,000 children under the age of five could be at risk, that 27 million people (the entire population of Iraq) would have to be fed, and that what was impending was in fact a "humanitarian disaster". Hence: "Those sanctions figures look shady." I quote:

It seemed as if disapproval of America’s Middle East policy found expression through the operational lexicon employed by various organisations, each one drawing the appropriate accusation from its specific vocabulary. (p. 276).

The appropriate position, they argue, is one that is neither pro-war nor anti-war. Instead of aid agencies asking, "Who is right in this war?" they ought to ask, "Who needs help as a result of this war?" In that regard, they also make a number of telling points about the use of the term "humanitarian" in American wars. A simple landing of troops and munitions at Umm Qasr is transformed into a "humanitarian operation" simply because they come bearing gifts of bread and water. Nobody, they note, thought to describe Saddam’s distribution of food prior to the war as “humanitarian”. The word, (and here they cite Roland Barthes because they’re French ex-Marxists), is "an indeterminate value of signification in itself empty of meaning and therefore susceptible to receive any meaning", (p 278). In the context of war, used by a combatant nation, such terms are propaganda – the case for studied neutrality is thus strengthened.

However, the backdrop to these arguments is the claim – quite amazing, in fact – that "humanitarian aid is unjustified in countries rich in skills and material resources, which are undergoing physical reconstruction and socio-political change", (p. 282). I assume the use of the term "physical reconstruction" has been carefully selected for the sake of "neutrality". The budget allotted to Iraq for humanitarian aid was disproportionate, they note, to that provided for West and Central Africa, especially as Iraq "had few urgent needs" (p283). One can sympathise with the latter point – relief aid is a limited resource, like oil and gas. It runs out, and once spent it cannot be reproduced. In that circumstance, a humanitarian organisation like MSF must adopt the "language of priorities". Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the aid now pouring into Iraq would see the light of day elsewhere if the situation in Iraq was not so critical for the US government. It is essential for the US to make this intervention a success, and the vast canvassing for relief aid is both a profoundly ideological gesture and also a necessary part of making Iraq a successful example of the liberatory war – the defensive war having taken something of a knock.

Alarming Alarmism Disarming Disarmament

Another criticism that could be made is that for all the talk of "alarmism", the grounds for those concerns expressed were neither unreasonable nor unrealistic. First of all, because no one could determine how long the war would last for; secondly, because "all indicators" were "already red" as the IRCR put it. In addition, the inflation of figures in cases of humanitarian crises is not unfamiliar – one thinks of the terrifying figures distributed during the Balkans war, where the US and its allies estimated that perhaps 100,000 Kosovans had been killed by Serb forces – a fifty-fold exaggeration as it turned out. Milosevic's actions continue to be described as "genocide" by those same journalists, despite their knowledge that a UN-supervised court in Pristina has concluded differently . Indeed, contributors to the same book manage to get the facts wrong over precisely this episode - specifically, they claim that although the deportation of 800,000 Kosovars took place only after the start of the war, German intelligence showed that it would have happened anyway. (David Reiff, "Kosovo: the End of an Era?", Weissman op cit, p. 290). This reference to the infamous "Operation Horseshoe" is unfortunately fictitious - as the Sunday Times reported on April 2nd, 2000, retired Brigadier General Heinz Loquai blew the whistle on that one:

Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe. "The facts to support its existence are at best terribly meagre," he told The Sunday Times. "I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed. The criticism of the war, which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by Operation Horseshoe."

I mention this not to call into question MSF's neutrality as much as to reject the whole notion of any humanitarian/relief agency making judgements outside of the geo-political situation in which it is en-meshed. This has been a growing worry among NGOs and recently for MSF in Iraq . It seems to me that if the problem is one of growing reliance on Western governments for money and the Western military for protection in crisis situations, that isn't going away any time soon. This has had some consequences. Bernard Kouchner, the man behind MSF, has himself proceeded from doctors without borders to bombers without borders, becoming the UN's special envoy to Kosovo after that military intervention. Kouchner had himself written a book in 1987 called Le Devoir d'Ingerence ("The duty to intervene") calling precisely for the West to intervene in humanitarian crises, over-riding sovereignty in order to do so. As the BBC notes: "It was this same doctrine which Nato invoked to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia."

No surprise here. MSF's doctrine has been one of bringing aid to suffering people regardless of physical or geographical barriers. It is a courageous stance, but it can also be terribly misused by powers with their own agenda to hawk. Moreover, it is inadequate to call this stance "neutral". MSF's approach embraces ideological aspects drawn from the Maoist past of many of its founding members. It also rejects an important aspect of that radical Leftism - namely, the idea that anything can be done positively to improve the human condition. It's mission is defined by the need to curtail what we might describe as human evil. There is no rebuke in this, of course. It just means that MSF are part of the same living stuff as the rest of us, and no aspiration to "neutrality" will overcome that. What ought to be overcome, however, is the overwhelming political pessimism that seems to me an inescapable consequence of defining one's programme in this way. The French philosopher Alain Badiou identifies something of the negative character of this type of ideology:

Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death ... Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire seeking global recognition for the order peculiar to our 'Western' position - the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life - or again, that dooms what is to the 'Western' mastery of death.

Instead of ethics, emancipation.

Freedom of the Press. posted by lenin

Boston Globe - May 4, 2004

Head of US-funded newspaper quits
By Lee Keath, Associated Press | May 4, 2004

BAGHDAD -- The head of a US-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and said yesterday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication.

In a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were "celebrating the end of a nightmare we have suffered from for months. . . . We want independence. They [the Americans] refuse."

Al-Sabah was set up by US officials with funding from the Pentagon soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. Since its first issue in July, many Iraqis have considered it the mouthpiece of the US-led coalition, along with the US-funded TV station Al-Iraqiya.

Zayer said that nearly the entire staff left the paper along with him and that they were launching a new paper called Al-Sabah Al-Jedid ("The New Morning"), which would begin publishing today.

Zayer had sought to break Al-Sabah away from the Iraqi Media Network, which groups the paper, Al-Iraqiya, and a number of radio stations, and is run by Harris Inc., a Florida-based communications company that won a $96 million Pentagon contract in January to develop the media.

"We informed [Zayer] that the paper would remain part of the IMN," said Tom Hausman of Harris' corporate communications. "He made the decision to resign." He said Al-Sabah would continue publishing today with a new staff.

Telegraph: isn't it all the bloody same? posted by lenin

The Telegraph never fails to inform and inspire. Here they are commenting on the likely security around the Nato summit following a foiled attack by people universally described as "Islamic terrorists" but perhaps more pertinently described as "Kurds" - just for the purposes of identification:

"Security will be tight for the meeting following a series of bombings in Istanbul last year in which 61 people were killed when British and Jewish targets were hit. The attacks were claimed by al-Qa'eda.

... Police are also reportedly keeping a close eye on anti-war, anti-globalization, and various leftist groups ahead of the summit, fearing they could stage protests or attacks."

Anti-Americans here, anti-Americans there ... they all look the same if you ask me.

And Don't Do It Again! posted by lenin

The BBC reports :

The US military has filed criminal charges against six of its soldiers who are accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners ... Six senior US officers were also reprimanded, the army said earlier.

The spokesman, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, said they had not taken part in the criminal actions, but had been responsible for supervising the others.

Those wouldn't be the same officers who turned a blind eye to some of these atrocities and told their underlings to cover up evidence of wrong-doing, would they?

A stern "reprimand" will certainly put a stop to that malarky, won't it?

Manufacturing Consent. posted by lenin

Those US torture photos? Oh, CBS knew about it for weeks before-hand, and didn't bother reporting it until the photos began to be circulated independently:

"Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes II received an appeal from the Defense Department, and eventually from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast – given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq. 60 Minutes II decided to honor that request, while pressing for the Defense Department to add its perspective to the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison. This week, with the photos beginning to circulate elsewhere, and with other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report."

The United States media - "embedded" at home and abroad. Thank you for watching.

Being Charlie Kaufman. posted by lenin

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

If you know Charlie's films (Being John Malkovitch, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), you don't need me to tell you that this is witty, baroque, uber-intellectual and downright wierd. This time, however, it is moving and passionate. Better still, the title comes from an Alexander Pope poem.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd
(Alexander Pope, Eloise to Abelard).

Go see.

Scratching a Hitch. posted by lenin

Covering the Pachyderm

Back with another enterprise in the absurd, Christopher Hitchens tells Slate readers that we should not allow ourselves to describe Iraqis fighting the occupation as "rebels" or "insurgents". He quotes Jonathan Steele in The Guardian thus:

Deep in the marshes of the Euphrates, the town of 15,000 people was the first to rise against Saddam Hussein in the abortive intifada of 1991. Now it was holding the first genuine election in its history.

The poll was the latest in a series which this overwhelmingly Shia province has held in the past six weeks, and the results have been surprising. Seventeen towns have voted, and in almost every case secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties did better than the Islamists.

His observation?

[T]he article is a model of straight reportage that goes on to record that wives could vote at a time different from their husbands, that proceedings were orderly, and that the religious parties scored well but not that well. You will also notice that the word "intifada," or uprising, is used neutrally. So, which is the more convincing, and more revolutionary—a long line of first-time-ever voters or a few dozen fanatics with Kalashnikovs?

As long as the latter seek to negate the former, the coalition forces are not only right to repress so-called "insurgents" but delinquent if they do not do so.

If Christopher had been a war correspondent, as he wistfully wishes he were, he would have been well aware that it is the religious parties, namely those led by Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr, who have been demanding elections: it is the United States that has been suppressing (or "negating") them. The latter are also "negating" the rights of Iraq's organised working class, in a continuation of Ba'athist policy . And, indeed, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting points out, there is so far no sign that real power is to be transferred to Iraqis:

An article in the conservative London Telegraph (1/4/04) reported that "the Pentagon and CIA have told the White House that the organization will allow America to maintain control over the direction of the country as sovereignty is handed over." As intelligence expert John Pike observed, "if you are in control of the secret police in a country, then you don't really have to worry too much about who the local council appoints to collect the garbage."

The report also quoted former CIA counter-terror chief Vincent Cannis-traro comparing the planned security agency to the Phoenix Program of assassination used by U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. "They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam," he said, referring to the military program that killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese activists, mostly civilians.

Not content with making himself this ridiculous, Hitchens pours on yet more slapstick comedy:

Nobody should know this better than Lakhdar Brahimi, the current envoy of the United Nations and a lifetime member of the Algerian FLN. A few years ago, his party and his government were challenged by an extreme fundamentalist movement that actually won the first round of a general election but would probably not have permitted any subsequent one. In any event, the Algerian authorities announced that on no account would they surrender the country to the "insurgency" that followed. They showed themselves willing to kill on an unprecedented scale, employing measures that the U.S. Marines would never be permitted. Repulsive though many of the tactics were, I think the FLN was broadly right. Certainly, Algeria today is a far better society for the outcome, and so is the whole of North Africa and therefore Southern Europe. These are the stakes. It is impossible to lose sight of them for a moment and irresponsible to confer the noble title of rebel or revolutionary on those who showed no courage at all when there was a real tyranny in the land.

The United States government, then, is the modern moral equivalent to the FLN freedom fighters. Before you pass out from vomiting, cast your eye over that last line again. Savour it, assimilate it, make it yours. Christopher Hitchens is seriously suggesting that the Shi'ites in Iraq "showed no courage at all when there was real tyranny in the land". (The role of our modern day FLN in suppressing a truly courageous Shi'ite uprising is casually forgotten). To borrow a phrase that Hitchens is himself familiar with, I find I can't eat enough to vomit enough.

He ends his piece with a bit of eye-popping silliness:

I continue to be amazed at the way in which so many liberals repeat the discredited mantra of the CIA to the effect that Saddam Hussein's regime was so "secular" that it not only did not collaborate, but axiomatically could not have collaborated with Islamists. If you can imagine a Hitler-Stalin pact (which, admittedly, a lot of American leftists still cannot), you can probably imagine collusion between discrepant factions with common interests.

In any case, the Saddam regime was not as "secular" as all that. The campaign of extermination waged in northern Iraq by Saddam's army was titled "Anfal" after a verse in the Quran that supposedly licenses total war. The words "Allahu Akbar" were placed on the Iraqi flag after the defeat in Kuwait. The Baath Party became the open patron of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine ...

Now comes a document from the files of the Iraqi secret police, or Mukhabarat, dated March 28, 1992, and headed routinely, "In the Name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate." It is a straightforward listing of contacts and "assets," quite unsensational until it comes to the "Saudi front," where we find the name "Osama bin Ladin/he is well-known Saudi businessman, founder of Saudi opposition in Afghanistan, had connection with Syrian division." Of course, this is not a smoking gun.

Hussein pretending to be suddenly very pious must have been very amusing to the leaders of Iran, for example, or better yet to those Muslims inside and outside of Iraq who do believe and have hated his guts for years. And positing a "special relationship" between Hussein and bin Laden would be more impressive if bin Laden hadn't - even as he denounced the war on Iraq - called for Iraqis to overthrow their "socialist" leader. But what of this document? I have to assume it exists, although I can find no reference to it in any news site. And I have to assume, for the moment, that it is a genuine document, even though many of those that have turned up have proven to be false. (In one comedy episode, a Canadian journalist "found" documents linking bin Laden to Iraq in the Mukhabarat's bombed out offices, after "the CIA had already looked over the rubble and left." Astonishing how the world's finest intelligence agency failed to locate some simple documents which a little-known journalist was able to turn up just by digging through some rubble. Unless...) It is, first of all, not quite in line with such evidence as has already emerged. For instance, Osama bin Laden is known to have rebuffed Iraqi attempts at developing a relationship with him in the early nineties. So, if Hitchens is suggesting that the Al Qaeda leader was then an "asset" to Iraq, he is transparently wrong. And if he is suggesting that Iraq has been involved in terrorism against the United States, then he should explain this to the deputy head of the CIA, who told Paul Wolfowitz in 2001, "There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Quite. The shoe is on the other foot: the US is now terrorising Iraq and Christopher Hitchens is its principal cheerleader.

NormBalls

Just a mini session today. Norman Geras offers an uequivocal denunciation of the behaviour of US and UK troops in Iraq:

The pictures of Iraqi prisoners being tormented and humiliated are appalling, as are the incidents (third item) they record. Appalling and inexcusable...

So far, so good:

...They are also a betrayal, by those responsible, of the aims of the Coalition in Iraq.

Ah well. We may as well stop asking questions now, then. Questions? Such as? Well, I was thinking that if the US needs to break the back of Iraqi resistance to their occupation, and this is one way of doing it, and it appears to have enjoyed considerable tolerance from military higher-ups... do you see where I'm going with this?

The Liberated. posted by lenin

I was going to say, Why is everyone so surprised? Torture has been a routine practise of the US in its client regimes across the Western Hemisphere. CIA manuals contain detailed instructions as to how agents may break subjects under interrogation with a range of techniques not dissimilar to those alleged in to be taking place in Guantanamo Bay. Training manuals produced by the School of the Americas (recently renamed "the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation", or Whisc) told future generals and dictators exactly how to inflict dazzling physical and psychological torment on victims – techniques ranging from humiliation to electrocution. To discover that such techniques are being used in "the New Iraq" is disturbing, but hardly a surprise.

Instead, I'm left slightly gob-smacked at the rapidity and detail of allegations and cruel photographs now pouring out of Iraq. It is hard to believe that this isn't ubiquitous:



What is jaw-dropping is the immediate attempts at minimisation deployed by the defenders of the war. Without even a day’s pause for reflection, it seems, they had their answer ready. I heard the line first on The Wright Stuff yesterday, mumbled by an inarticulate member of the public – it vaguely evoked the terrors of Ba'athism past and reminded us that this time last year, such events probably took place as part of official state policy. Only a few hours later, the Evening Standard reported the Prime Minister’s spokesperson as saying, "We fully accept that these things should not happen". But, after all, the abuse was "a clear breach of coalition rules – in contrast to the regime of Saddam Hussein which used torture as a matter of routine". Never mind that Amnesty International report having received numerous statements alleging US torture, just think about that argument – yes, we did it, but the Ba’athist regime did it all the time…
And that’s their defence? The replication of Ba’athist practises under this occupation is the most salient indictment of it. "Liberation" is surely a heroically elastic concept if it can include the possibility of "unofficial" – but apparently widespread – use of torture. And study those photographs again. Male and female American soldiers, grinning gleefully as they inflict sadistic punishment on Iraqi detainees. The anti-Arab racism which must have animated their joy may too be "unofficial", but it is also ubiquitous in American and British culture. That woman pointing her finger in the shape of a gun at an Iraqi’s penis is probably well within the normal psychological range – ditto those grinning soldiers posing beside the "human pyramid". But the people they have come to "liberate" are sufficiently emptied of human content in the military imagination that they can become the subjects of a negative fascination with pain and humiliation.



One has to take the righteous anger and expressions of disgust by military and political higher-ups with a hefty dose of salt. For example, Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of General Staff, said: "If proven, the perpetrators are not fit to wear the Queen's uniform and they have besmirched the Army's good name and conduct."

Could this be the same Mike Jackson who, on January 30th 1972, (then Captain Mike Jackson, and second-in-command to Lieutenant-General Derek Wilford) participated in the killing of 14 innocent civilians in the Bogside of Derry, Northern Ireland? The same who, witness statements suggest, could be seen cheering on the Parachute Regiment with the words "Go, paras, go!"? The same who then went on to contrive a "shot list" to sanitise the shootings (by making it appear that the dead were carrying nail-bombs and so forth), which he later denied having written?

Even more entertaining defenses are entered by members of the public on the BBC's website :

"To bad such outrage wasn't shown when the Twin towers fell and those bodies of construction works were hung on the bridge and their poor dead bodies abused. Let our justice system handle the soldiers who did this to prisoners but those who live in glass houses, should not be the first to throw stones! God Bless our Troops!"
Jean Mair, Morris, Illinois, Untied States of America

And better yet:

Whatever it takes to bring them in line.
Ken Azad, San Diego, Ca

It's just possible that such attitudes are not uncommon in the US army. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence now emerging suggests not condemnation but cover-up:

"One of the officers came down to get him and it was like, a bit of a mini-bollocking, but nothing really. Then it was, 'Get rid of him, I've not seen him. The paperwork gets ripped."

"We got a warning, saying the Military Police had found a video of people throwing prisoners off a bridge. It wasn't 'Don't do it' or 'Stop it'. It was 'Get rid of it.' "

A few questions remain. The Whitehouse and Downing Street are describing this episode as an isolated incident, and certainly against the rules and the grain of the coalition. But, who took those photographs? According to CBS, they were taken by guards. Well, do those soldiers look reticent? Do they look like they expect punishment or censure? No, they look rather like they expect and receive approval. It is possible that they trusted a few lackeys not to go blabbing with their explosive film to senior officers, but it looks more like they didn’t have a care in the world. It looks as if they may not have been worried about Brigadier General Janis Karpinski’s stern reproach. It looks, in short, as if only the trembling, hooded Iraqis had anything to worry about. Last word to the Mirror's anonymous source:

"I can't believe it has taken the Iraqis so long to fight back. If it had been me or my family, I'd have retaliated straightaway.

"They've just got f****d around so much. You can't go in now, and say 'Right, let's forget about what has happened and start again'.

"We're struggling now. There are too many people against us."

Web Kamm: the Sequel. posted by lenin

Regular readers will be aware that Oliver Kamm has been leaking heartily into my comments boxes with corrections, accusations, slanders etc. He made great fist out of the mis-naming of Professor Alan Budd, and what he alleged to be the mangling of a quote of his.

A reader of my blog has sent me the relevant information and a couple of URLs.

Here is what Professor Budd told the BBC's Pandora's Box documentary programme in June 1991:

The nightmare I sometimes have about this whole experience runs as follows: I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. My worry is as follows; that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions, or people behind them, or people behind them, who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did however see that this would be a very good way to raise unemployment. And raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes; if you like, that what was engineered there - in Marxist terms - was a crisis of capitalism which recreated the reserve army of labour and has allowed the Capitalist to make high profits ever since.

He then, apparently, appended the following observation :

Now... I'm not saying I believe that story but [that]... I worry whether that was... really what was going on.

There's nothing about this on the Beeb's own website, so I have no way of checking whether or not that exhausts the quotation. Perhaps he then went on to say: "And that's exactly the sort of thing the anti-semitic and totalitarian Socialist Worker would have you believe! Now let me tell you the real story..." I am inclined to doubt it.

Interestingly enough, while Budd washes his own hands of such sordid exercises, he does offer the tantalising possibility that this is what was happening. We know at any rate that the Thatcher government was intent on breaking the power of the organised working class, a plan formulated in broad-brush terms in the Ridley Report .

Since Kamm has proven himself to be little more than a troll, and since he is obliged to pad out his rather thin and empty critiques with personal insults, smears and irrelevancies, I shall have nothing more to say about him here. Let's get back to some real issues.