Respect Success. posted by lenin

Oliur Rahman has won the St Dunstan's and Stepney Green ward by-election with the following votes:

Oliur Rahman, Respect - 878
Jalal Uddin, Liberal Democrats - 754
Shah Habibur Rahman, Labour - 578
Alexander Patrick Story, Conservative - 445
Lynda Miller, National Front - 172

Poor old NF. If I don't miss my guess, that Lynda Miller is the same repulsive bag of shit that was once in the Ku Klux Klan. She has never received any particularly impressive votes, probably on account of having a personality as radiant and attractive as road-kill, a mind as stable as the Argentinian peso, and murderous politics to boot.

Good on Respect for fronting the anti-war, anti-racist, radical left vote.

John Kerry: Killing Them Softly. posted by lenin

Boredom as Policy

Nothing could more adequately sum up the cowardice and opportunism of contemporary American politics than the ruminations of Kirsty Wark on BBC Newsnight last night. She noted that although polls showed that 95% of Democrat conventioneers were opposed to the war, Kerry could probably not endorse such a stance even if he were inclined to because South Dakota voters (for that, read the maligned "Mid-West") supported the President as a matter of instinct, principle and pride. Tom Carver even conducted several interviews appearing to confirm this assessment. America's "heartland" (the goddamned "Mid-West" again) would never accept a political message that was so darned impolite about the President.

Now, recent polls indicate that most voters would prefer troops based in Iraq to come home sooner rather than later. 40% believe that they should return in less than one year; 30% within 1-2 years. So I think we can put the myth that Americans would not be receptive to withdrawing troops from Iraq straight to bed with no supper. But why is that the only consideration? Presumably there is such a thing as political leadership - granted, as the Prime Minister will tell you, that will only take you so far. But if this were an election based on differences of principle, and not merely of comportment, then one would expect the Democrats to nominate a candidate that represents their foreign policy goals, and let the right-wingers have their war-mongering fruit-basket. Why give them the option of a more sensible war-monger? Failing that, if they cannot nominate a principled candidate whose policies they actually agree with and would like to see implemented, how about choosing another party or another candidate? Ralph Nader would be an excellent choice, and he could definitely use the support. The Anyone-But-Bush movement is based on the one consistent reflex of Democrat party activists - cowardly submission. Terrified to do anything that might in fact make a difference "because then the Right will react against us", they would sooner spend an evening listening to a windy fatso like Clinton pretending he didn't piss on every decent principle and dream of the Left while in office.

And it isn't as if trying to cream off the support of other parties (while desperately slandering more radical opponents) has proven a worthwhile strategy in the past. It didn't exactly work in 2000, it didn't work in the California recall, it didn't work in 2002, and it won't work now. By concentrating on the slender and ever-diminishing 'middle-ground', one sort of forgets the base. Two examples. First :

"So far, all we have heard from you are politically-calibrated platitudes about staying the course" in Iraq, actors Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover, both long-time Democrats, and the group United for Peace and Justice wrote to Kerry.


"Tell the people of this country the war was wrong, the occupation is a disaster, and that we can have no future as a colonial power," they wrote. "Speak up for what's right, right now."

And :

"Kerry has one other hurdle with vets: Some are fervently antiwar, and they're ticked off that Kerry refuses to withdraw the troops from Iraq on a timetable. They're trying not to hassle Kerry about that, because the buzz phrase at this confab is that Democrats are united. But occasionally they're boiling over. Consider, for example, vet Frank Corchran, a teacher who lives in Lansdowne, the Philadelphia suburb: 'Kerry voted yes to send those kids off to die, and he won't talk about pulling them out? There are times when I despise the man, and a lot of other antiwar vets here are saying, 'We can't vote for him, we feel betrayed.' But I'll try to get a grip, because when I look at Bush and Cheney – well, those guys are just dangerous.'"

Republicans have always known how to energise their base, while Democrats only seem to know how to put theirs to sleep.

"Change in Style"

So, back to Newsnight. Kirsty Wark asks Gary Hart to explain to British viewers what makes Kerry different from Bush? Will there be a withdrawal from Iraq? Will he attack the President's war record? Good heavens, no! That would be dashed unsporting. It isn't the way one behaves and, certainly, Republicans haven't been known to criticise a sitting President just because he's a Democrat. The difference will be in that Kerry will dispense with all this talk of pre-emption. He will restore America's traditional foreign policy of seeking to implicate others in America's crimes, so that the blame can be spread around. Unfortunately, the good former Senator was talking jive. Kerry is still for pre-emption , opposing only its more extreme manifestations. Hart was himself against the war in his time, so one can only assume that he has succumbed to Anyone But Bush fever himself.

Much talk as there has been over the "charismatic" Southern populist John Edwards, I have yet to note any genuine charisma (he's handsome and that's with botox and surgery), much less any authentic populism. Further, as Stephen Zunes notes, he is even more hardline on foreign affairs than Kerry. Edwards was a fervent cheerleader for the war, going out of his way to defend Bush when the sceptical voices were elevating in number and volume. He and Kerry both support Ariel Sharon's annexations of parts of the West Bank, defended Israel when it faced criticism for directing military operations in civilian areas and even criticised President Bush when he called for Israel to desist from some of its operations in the West Bank.

Kerry's foreign policy page promises to continue apace in Iraq while Latin America enjoys the honour of having a North American Security Perimeter "to coordinate customs, immigration and law enforcement policies to better protect the region from terrorist threats". He claims in the same piece that he will "lift-up Hispanic families", presumably by making sure they never have to live with the likelihood of seeing any of their relatives from back home in the near future. As Johann Hari notes in his Indie column from a few days back, Kerry's other policies toward Latin America are less than savoury:

[M]any of us imagine that the day after Kerry's inauguration, the world will be able to lean back, release a long sigh, and dismiss the Bush years as a one-term, one-moron nightmare.

We are deluding ourselves. When it comes to one of the most poisonous planks of US foreign policy today - the destabilisation of developing countries and the attack on poor farmers, all in the name of the "War on Drugs" - Kerry may, incredibly, be even worse than Bush.

Kerry made his name as a Drug War hawk. He dedicated an entire senatorial inquiry in 1989 to denouncing the Reagan administration's softness on international drug suppliers. His principal advisor on the subject today - and the man tipped by some commentators to become his Secretary of State - is Rand Beers, who defected last year from his role as Bush's counter-terrorism advisor. Throughout the 1990s, Beers was the primary architect of the US policy of "taking the fight to the drug-growers" - launching massive chemical attacks on farmers in foreign countries in an attempt to prevent their crops ever reaching America's shores.

...

Sean Donohue, a US journalist who works with the Colombia Support Network, has documented the human cost. "In January 2001, I visited a government-funded yucca co-operative that was intended to help farmers find an alternative to growing coca," he explains. "The co-operative had been fumigated and the entire yucca crop [which is, of course, totally legal] had been destroyed. One woman explained she had invested everything she had in the co-op and now had no way to feed her children."

A study by Ecuador's Pontificia University discovered that people living near the sprayed areas have shown symptoms of chronic poisoning and temporary blindness since the aerial poisoning began. "There have been cases of babies born with deformities... The impact of glyphosate will be lasting, because not all of its effects are seen one day to the next," it found.

So What's New?

The one thing that will change as a result of an election, you can be sure, is that millions of deluded but well-meaning people will find deplorable US policies that much more tolerable - as they did when Clinton was in power. Robin Cook's performance on Newsnight certainly invites such a conclusion. Indeed, the real issue of this election is one's manner, one's inclusiveness, one's willingness to bend somewhat to the rest of the world's "concerns" while essentially staying the course. This message could not have been more open, or more obvious. Kerry will communicate with European powers without Bush's condescending smirk; he will reject Kyoto/ICC etc firmly but politely, but additionally seek to win over his "European allies" with some sweet talk.

But hold on a minute! Isn't this exactly what neoconservatives were calling for not so long ago? Didn't Robert Kagan write an article for Foreign Policy bemoaning the President's image, and the unnecessary way in which he pissed off allies? Didn't Oliver Kamm, the liberal imperialist for Axa investments, announce this is his only dissatisfaction with Bush? Kerry is the neocon dream. Pro-war, pro-Israel, pro-Plan Colombia. And also, not to miss the finer points, loaded.

Exam Results. posted by lenin

After bragging so forcefully upon completion of my exams, I suppose I'm duty bound to back it up with something, however nugatory. Hence, for the two units I took last year, my results:

Magic, Science and Religion: Conceptions of Rationality: 75%

Introduction to Philosophy: 67%

Nothing supererogatory about such a performance, and I'm sorry to disabuse anyone who had justly reached the conclusion that I was some sort of genius-wizard. But they'll do. For now. Just one more step on the road to World Domination!


"I Haff Out-Vitted You All!"

Marxism and the Philosophy of Science. posted by lenin

Credulous Where It's Due

Orwell quotes George Bernard Shaw as saying (in the Preface to Saint Joan) that citizens of the 20th Century are the most credulous creatures ever to have existed. He exaggerated somewhat, but Orwell was aptly able to demonstrate its essential truth. Simply trying to explain why one believes the world was round proves to be a difficult task for a non-scientist and most of our common explanations are quite unavailing against counter-explanations, unless we really know our cosmology. Imagine, Orwell said, attempting to explain why one accepted an even more complicated 'fact' of nature. Indeed, most of us would be poorly situated to explain why it is that we think there is a hole in the o-zone layer, GM crops are dangerous or the human genome is a load of twaddle. Science seems somehow to have got too big for us. We still believe what we believe nonetheless.

During and following the scientific revolution, there was great popular enthusiasm for science and the new scientific methods. Boyle's new experimental equipment (most of it invented by Robert Hooke) was manufactured and sold relatively cheaply to a comparatively large number of people. Newton's more difficult texts were distilled to their essentials and popularised in pamphlets and lecture tours by senior scientists from the Royal Academy. In the 21st Century, we still read popularising books and watch documentaries - but are none the wiser in many ways. For example, who could pick up a scientific paper and pull apart its conclusions, deconstruct its methodology, even understand what the bloody hell it is on about?

The Missing Red Ink

This is of considerable importance. Shaw's remark on the gullibility of the modern citizen, although similar to Chesteron's complacent remark on belief in the absence of God, at least had the virtue of satirical acuity. The fact that he would later fall on his own sword by naively espousing Lysenkoism is testament to that. We need, desperately, a way to make science comprehensible without making accounts of it so simplistic that we gain nothing by it. The obvious way to achieve this is to increase the importance of science in education. Another way is to theorise science properly, so that we can have some idea when we are being conned, misled or simply misinformed. And this is where Marxism has been a theoretical failure. I don't mean to imply that Marxism has contributed nothing to the understanding of science - certainly JD Bernal's The Social Function of Science is a classic in the literature, disfigured though it is by his sympathy toward the Soviet Union. However, Bernal's science was more influenced by De Rerum Naturae than Anti-Duhring, which is just as well. (Yes, Bernal drew valuable sustenance from Engels' overall outlook in formulating his view of what science did, in what context it operated, but I fail to see how it helped him formulate his scientific conclusions). And it seems to me that the best Marxist work on science has been written by non-Marxists. One of my most pointlessly revered possessions is a book from Christopher Hill's library called Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton by Sir G N Clark - as a rebuke to Boris Hessen's strident economic determinism, it is a rewarding book for any Marxist interested in science, granting an autonomy to ideology and the intellect while not denying the centrality of production and social context. Between Cold War idealists like Koyre, Hall and Kuhn and Cold War determinists like Hessen, Clark proved in spite of himself that suppleness of theory, rigour of analysis and carefully weighed conclusions were compatible with Marxism. I B Cohen is another example - a historian of scientist without any detectible political yearnings, he leaned toward the materialistic without being deterministic. The same goes for R Hooykas, Joseph Ben David and countless others.

It doesn't do to generalise so crudely without offering some countervailing examples. Benjamin Farrington's account of ancient science is a perfectly respectable Marxist intervention; ditto George Novack's On the Origins of Materialism; Stephen Jay Gould was a fine leftist author on science who was influenced by Marxism; Richard Lewtontin and Steven Rose have written innumerable fine books on science which places the activity in its institutional and social context; Edgar Zilsel was a fine theorist in his field; J B S Haldane and Joseph Needham contributed a great deal; even Hessen's work was not without merit, at least emphasising factors in the development of scientific thought that are usually ignored by sociologists and historians of science who tend, like Robert Merton, to emphasise the intellectual, as if the only parent of ideas were other ideas. Nevertheless, I maintain that the philosophy of science has thus far proven infertile ground for Marxists, while idealism and Weberian sociological tendencies have predominated. We have to confront this as a problem.

Anticapitalism, Marxism and Science

Marxism should provide vital insights into the modern practise of science - "Big Science" as Bernal called it. The issues around biotechnology, the human genome, GM crops, environmental degradation and perhaps even animal testing are obviously of some urgency for the future of the human race and the planet. A synthesizing, explanatory work is called for; something which will help readers to understand the institutional and social framework within which society is conducted. It goes without saying that the current university-corporate complex merits analysis. And the nature of scientific authority, the peer reviews and government reports which tell us what kind of science is trustworthy today and which is not need critical scrutiny. Finally, what kind of science is being practised that produces such execrable unnatural phenomena as the 'terminator gene'? Why should it be that a US firm called RiceTech may be allowed to sue Indian farmers over an intellectual property right the former claim to have over a kind of basmati rice grown in India for centuries? That last thought returns me to my original - perhaps we really are living in the most credulous age since before the Renaissance. While most of the world is objecting to biopiracy , intellectual property rights invoked to justify spurious claims which wreak havoc in agrarian economies, most of Britain has been discussing genetic modification of plants in terms of consumer safety, responsible production etc. What mugs.

Cheap as chips! posted by lenin

The Early Days of "Bargain Hunt". Trotsky's Hat Goes for £20.

War and Resistance. posted by lenin

Iraq is a disaster area again today, and I'd like to thank those who made it all possible. After all, this obviously means that the situation can clearly get no worse and we're bound to see some of the fruits of 'humanitarian intervention' soon. As per usual, when acts of extreme and disturbing violence are wreaked, the tendency is to foreclose thought and seek out the condemnation stick. Not that I don't condemn these wicked attacks on civilian lives (yes, yes, I know, they're aimed at police stations and such, but it isn't as if noone ever walks past a cop shop is it?), it's just that the rush away from analysis typically enjoined by extreme moral outrage is either dangerous or futile. I therefore offer you a couple of links to pursue if you feel like stepping back from the fire.

Daniel Brett has an excellent post on Sudan which I urge everyone to read. As per usual, the media tropes are mercilessly torn asunder; Brett carefully inserts what has been reduced to simply a stark humanitarian situation (which, of course, it is) back into its context of local political rivalries, imperial pretensions and interlocking interests:

What I find most galling is the attitude of the West. The Darfur insurgency has been going on for over a year now, but few Westerners had bothered to notice it until now. The issue has been recently adopted by Christian missionaries and the media has adopted their agenda without questioning it. The history of the Darfur conflict is thus bleached to reflect a Christian colour. It is now simply portrayed as Arab Muslims oppressing innocent black Africans and Darfur is a cause celebre for the Christian Right, a conflict with good and evil.

The fact that Chad's President Idriss Deby has been manipulating and arming the ethnic Zaghawa in Sudan, which has helped destablise Darfur, is not mentioned. Deby is a Zaghawa, a tribe which inhabits Darfur and eastern Chad. The Zaghawa of Sudan gave him sanctuary during his Libyan-backed insurgency against the regime of Hissein Habre in the late 1980s. He relies on the support of this ethnic group to maintain his hold on power and to balance the power of the northern oligarchs of the Gorane tribe and repress political opposition - since 1990, his regime has been responsible for the killing of 25,000. According to the US State Department's human rights report on Chad, Deby has established a "culture of impunity for a ruling minority". The SLA is part of his power play to defeat rival tribes, consolidate his hold over Chad and diminish the influence of the Gorane tribe.

The American Christian right-wing - which represents the majority of Americans - is advocating military intervention in Darfur, similar to the "humanitarian" invasion of Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has followd this line, with reports that he has drawn up plans to use the army to "protect" refugee camps in Chad and creating "safe zones" inside Sudan.

Unilateralism will make matters worse

The proposals are reminiscent of the NATO invasion of the Serbian province of Kosovo. Such an intervention would require Deby's support, which risks upsetting Sudan's Al-Bashir regime. Any action that does not have the explicit consent of both Chad and Sudan would plunge the US and its allies into a complex and violent conflict that will sink them financially and politically.

If such an armed venture was carried out, the White Nile would run red with Sudanese blood. It would be reminiscent of the Congo, with a tribal and religious conflict spreading beyond Sudan's borders into Chad and other countries in the ecologically precarious Sahel region.

Even a modest number of Western troops stationed in the border areas where refugees are located would upset the delicate situation in the region, prompting violent clash between an emboldened Zaghawa-dominated government and the well-armed Gorane. This might threaten the stability of the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), where in March 2003 a Chad-backed military coup removed the elected but widely discredited government of Ange-Felix Patasse. Instability in northern CAR could quickly spread to other parts of the country in the event of shifting regional alliances and power dynamics and an influx of refugees.

Sudan's peace process would collapse, with the SPLA taking advantage of the Khartoum government's weakening control. It could possibly gain the support of Uganda, the rebel group's traditional ally, to break the country up along confessional and tribal lines. North-eastern Sudan would witness Eritrean and Ethiopian opportunism and military adventurism as both countries vye for territorial influence and control. In Chad itself, the tensions between an emboldened and American-backed Zaghawa tribe and the Gorane oligarchs would explode into civil war.

Although it is tempting to rush troops into Sudan and Chad to stop the ethnic cleansing and hunger, the impact of an intervention in Sudan is full of dangerous uncertainties. Is it worth taking these risks? Will resorting to unilateral military action really solve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur or create a regional war and famine on an unprecedented scale?

And while I'm at it, you could be persuaded to have a look at Scott Ritter's latest , in which he argues that the Iraqi Resistance will win - indeed, has already done so:

Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi's government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the United States props up Allawi, the more discredited he will become in the eyes of the Iraqi people - all of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to exploit.

We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.

The calculus is quite simple: the sooner we bring our forces home, the weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: the longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this byproduct of Bush's elective war on Iraq will be.

There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.

Finally, and amazingly, Johann Hari has yet another excellent article in the Independent today. I assume it will soon be available on his website , but if you're eager you could always click on the Indie link and pay their exorbitant log-in charges. Incidentally, Hari's website contains two acts of his new and apparently well-received play (at least, I think there are more acts to come). Looks kind of modern and New Labour to me, but you might like it.

Hilarious. posted by lenin

Let it be known that the National Centre for Public Policy Research is concerned:

The National Center for Public Policy Research has posted online an e-mail received from a soldier, Spc. Joe Roche of the 1st Armored Division, who says Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 is "making the rounds" among soldiers at U.S. military bases overseas and is "shocking and crushing soldiers, making them feel ashamed" of their service in Iraq. The letter has been published online by The National Center without abridgment ... Some excerpts:

"Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, is making the rounds here at U.S. bases in Kuwait. Some soldiers have received it already and are passing is around. The impact is devastating. Here we are, soldiers of the 1st Armored Division, just days from finally returning home after over a year serving in Iraq, and Moore's film is shocking and crushing soldiers, making them feel ashamed. Moore has abused the First Amendment and is hurting us worse than the enemy has. There are the young and impressionable soldiers, like those who joined the Army right out of high school. They aren't familiar w/ the college-type political debate environment, and they haven't been schooled in the full range of issues involved. They are vulnerable to being hurt by a vicious film like Moore's."

"Specialist Janecek, who is feeling depressed because a close family member is nearing the end of her life, just saw the film today. I saw him in the DFAC. He is devastated. 'I feel shitty, ashamed, like this was all a lie.' Not only is he looking at going straight to a funeral when he returns home, but now whatever pride he felt for serving here has been crushed by Moore's film. Specialist Everett earlier after seeing the film: 'You'll be mad at shit for ever having come here.' And there are others. Mostly the comments are absolute shock at the close connections Moore makes between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. 'Bush looks really really REALLY corrupt in this film. I just don't know what to think anymore,' is a common comment to hear. Some of these soldiers are darn right ashamed tonight to be American soldiers, to have been apart of this whole mission in Iraq, and are angry over all that Moore has presented in his film."

"Right now, just days away from what should be a proud and happy return from 15 months of duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom, your U.S. soldiers are coming back ashamed and hurt because of Moore's work."

"I sometimes want to be mad at my fellow soldiers for being susceptible to Moore's distortions, but I can't really blame them. These are good Americans, who have volunteered to serve our country. Nothing says they all have to be experts in Middle Eastern issues and history and politics to serve. That would be silly. ...But this is, of course, the vulnerability that Moore has exploited."

"I wonder how damaging and shocking a Moore project would have been in the 1940s making such a video of Franklin Roosevelt."

So, US soldiers are surrounded by death and chaos every day, face Iraqis as a hostile enemy, can't leave the base without some serious firepower, as a result of which some of them are prone to abuse of prisoners, cowboy tactics, fatal shootings etc ... and it requires a film by Michael Moore to shake them up? That's testament to the unique genius of the film itself, surely?

Intellectuals? You Should Give a Shit! posted by lenin

Charlotte Street is onto something with his latest post. Following up on this post on Lenin:

"The intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact they're not its brains, they're its shit."

(Lenin, Letter to Gorky, Sptember 15th, 1919.)

Just to be clear, I do regard Lenin's comment as having intellectual - and not merely scatalogical - content. The point, presumably, is that intellectuals entertain the illusion that they are in the engine room of society (and that ideas precede and determine social organisation). The truth is that they are (more often) a kind of inessential by-product, spontaneously secreted, as it were, by the social machinery, but misrecognising themselves as the very fuel by which it runs.

Charlotte Street adds some new ruminations on the nature of commofity fetishism, and suggests that

When, for example, some investment banker writes a verbose blog rationalizing the profit system he is, in a very precise sense, talking shit.

Who could he be referring to?

Poetic Justice posted by lenin

Within a few days of Tony Cliff's death, Julie Burchill had proclaimed him a self-hating Jew. Paul Foot appeared to have got off scot-free until the calumnious Mr Kamm decided to puncture the warmth with his customary vitriol. I suggested some days ago that Paul was appreciative of the interface between politics and culture, between poetry and revolution , insisting, like Christopher Hill or even Christopher Hitchens (see particularly his brilliant collection of essays, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere ), on the transformative power of the written word. It is precisely this aspect of Paul's output, among others, that comes under scrutiny from the Kammster. I shall be concerned mostly with these, since anyone unfamiliar either with Paul Foot, or the romantic poets he so loved, could be led astray by Kamm's tendentious adumbrations.

Wordsworth vs Oliver Letwin

I want first of all to note that before today's obituary, (just published in time for the funeral, with perhaps the hope of burying the reputation with the body), Kamm had taken issue with a column by Paul Foot in The Guardian, accusing him of "affectations" for having used a verse from Wordsworth's Prelude to make a point against Oliver Letwin's illiberal asylum policy. Here is the relevent passage from Foot:

[Oliver Letwin's] fatuous speech about schools coincided with his call to dump asylum seekers on a faraway island, he knows not where. Where did he get that idea? It is unlikely that a hypocritical snob such as Mr Letwin has read any Wordsworth, so, in an attempt to bring him down to earth, I offer this valuable advice from Wordsworth's poem on the French Revolution:

Not in utopia -

subterranean fields -

Or some secreted island,

heaven knows where!

But in the very world,

which is the world

Of all of us -

the place where in the end

We find our happiness -

or not at all.

Kamm smells the blood of a Trotskyist. He hunts. And comes up with this:

The lines Foot quotes (which are from The Prelude) are not 'on the French Revolution', but on 'The French Revolution - As It Appeared To Enthusiasts At Its Commencement' (emphasis added). The difference is important both poetically and historically. Wordsworth, having been an early supporter of the French Revolution reverted quickly to the Burkean critique of it. He even gives in The Prelude (in the 1850, not the 1805, edition) an urgent and remarkably accurate account of Burke's philosophy of society:

"I see him – old, but vigorous in age,
Stand like an oak
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born…."

If Foot – the author of a worthless tract on Shelley - knows this, then he's distorting the historical record in his appropriation of Wordsworth's lines for his own ideological ends. If doesn't know it, then he doesn't know Wordsworth - and he thus might aptly be termed a hypocritical snob.

Might he indeed? The only way that Kamm's rebuke could be convincing would be if Foot were intending to imply that Wordsworth had never resiled from his revolutionary ideals. Failing that elementary condition, all other considerations are moot. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the lines were to be taken not literally, but as ironic reflections on the naivete of his earlier beliefs. That would certainly seem to be implied by the title of the poem. Yet, Wordsworth's political transformation was a prolonged and contradictory affair, and is generally described as spanning the decade 1800-10, whereupon he evinced the staunchest conservatism. The poem, later to be included in Book XI of The Prelude was written in 1804. It was written two years after his visit to France (to see the woman he had earlier knocked up) in which he evoked the sterile misery of Napoleonic France, yet affirmed hope:

And now, sole register that these things were,
Two solitary greetings have I heard,
"Good-morrow, Citizen!" a hollow word,
As if a dead man spake it! Yet despair
Touches me not, though pensive as a bird
Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare. (COMPOSED NEAR CALAIS, ON THE ROAD LEADING TO ARDRES, AUGUST 7, 1802)

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth kept the faith for as long as he could, but soon grew disillusioned with the French revolution, and with revolution in general. The poem including Foot's cited lines reflect a certain amount of longing for the early enthusiasm of revolution, and are illumined with the authentic hope of a not-yet-spurned radicalism. In this sense, the poem's tension lives in Wordsworth's broken, radical heart. It is shot through with pathos; it nurtures a yearning for a fate devoutly to be wished. To reduce it to a simple repudiation of one's past allegiances, is hack criticism at its worst. I mean to say, in the clearest possible terms, that Kamm has both misconceived his point and misconstrued Wordsworth's lines.

I myself prefer Bertrand Russel on Wordsworth's political progress: "In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period he was called a 'bad' man. Then he became 'good', abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry."

Red Shelley, Gold Star

The meat of the matter, however, is the treatment given Foot's Red Shelley. For I wish to suggest here, as adamantly as it can be suggested, that Kamm has not read the book. True, he may have skimmed through a few pages while in the University library some decades ago, but he hasn't read it. Mark his first strike:

Red Shelley may rank as the worst book published on a literary subject since the war. There is a tradition of the man of letters illuminating our understanding of literature through exposition of his own insights (think of Chesterton on Browning and Dickens). Foot's work belongs instead to the tradition of the dilettante determined to wrench his literary enthusiasms to his own image. It emulates the misplaced ingenuity of Churchill's minister Duff Cooper in writing Sergeant Shakespeare, an attempt to prove from internal evidence that Shakespeare must have had extensive military experience. Foot's Shelley is "a man with revolutionary ideas" that by a remarkable coincidence turn out to be Paul Foot's ideas.

It may be "the worst book published on a literary subject since the war", but until Kamm has read every book on a literary subject since the war (why that date?) he won't know, and neither will anyone else. One thing I am fairly certain of, however, is that Kamm doesn't know Foot from shinola. Paul Foot never imputed to Shelley the ideas of revolutionary socialism, much less the Marxist theory of exploitation and the Leninist theory of imperialism. His mission, as he had it, was to rescue Shelley's radicalism, his rootedness in the legacy of the French revolution, from the editors and editrices who produced Works of Shelley which did not include Queen Mab, The Mask of Anarchy or The Revolt of Islam. So, why does Kamm think that Foot is recruiting Shelley for the SWP (we have enough dead people in the party already I would have thought)? Here is the excerpt on which Kamm bases his judgement:

Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to go ringing through each heart and brain, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses.
After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time. That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude.

Note first of all that this excerpt is not from Red Shelley, but from a 1975 article on Shelley. Not a single quotation from Red Shelley appears in the whole of Kamm's argument. Now, let's hear Kamm's refutation:

To say this is a misreading of Shelly is to understate the case. Foot's wider incomprehension is of poetry itself. In his political prose, Shelly explicitly rejected Foot's "ideas of the revolution". He believed in social reform by peaceful means. In his Declaration of Rights he wrote:

No man has a right to disturb the public peace by personally resisting the execution of a law, however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason to promote its repeal.

The "revolution" of which Paul speaks is, of course, not the socialist revolution but the French revolution. The "ideas of the revolution" are those of equality, liberty and human solidarity. They are the ideas of one who hated oppression and exploitation. On the specific question of the rights and wrongs of revolutionary violence, it is peculiar that Kamm should hang his argument this particular stipulation, since Shelley had other thoughts on the merits of revolution - discussed by Foot in Red Shelley, but oddly undiscussed by Kamm. Indeed, in these very passages, Paul Foot notes precisely the contradiction between Shelley's reformism and his increasingly revolutionary conclusions. I quote:

In the way of all the appeals for reform, all the demands for caution, there remained one insurmountable obstacle: the refusal of the people with power and property to give them up - and their willingness, if necessary, to defend them by force. Shelley describes this obstacle in one graphic sentence: "for so dear is power that the tyrants themselves neither then, nor now, nor ever, left or leave a path to freedom but through their own blood." Or, from the other point of view: "the labouring classes, when they cannot get good for their labour, are impelled to take it by force". (Foot, Red Shelly, p 190)

In this resides the contradiction. Shelley understood the danger of revolution, but also the omnipresent obstacles in the way of reform. Later, in Fragments on Reform, Shelley is inclined to blur the edges between the two:

"Call it reform or revolution, as you will, a change must take place; one of the consequences of which will be, the wresting of political power from those who are at present the depositories of it." (Quoted, Ibid, p 194).

Foot devotes several chapters to illuminating this tension at the heart of Shelley's poetics and politics, in fact, and it is hard to see how it could have escaped Kamm's scrutiny. But he continues, anyway:

Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam both stress a moral revolution in concert with a change in the temporal order. Prometheus Unbound expresses a liberal politics of forgiveness, not revolution, and an awareness of the destructiveness of revolt. With these words Prometheus repents of the curse that he had called down on Jupiter:

It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;/ Grief for a while is blind, and so was mine./ I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

Foot's exposition of Shelley's poetical worth is as philistine in its way as the right-wing populism that decries experimental art. The value of poetry lies not in "translating ideas to the masses" but in creating worlds of imaginative experience for the reader and allowing him to explore them. Certainly poetry and other forms of literature have the power to shape our external world and influence our ideas of how that world should be ordered. But literature makes us at home in the world by explicating how things feel - the life of the mind and the emotions - as well as by explaining how the world is.

Socialists of all kinds will be grateful to Kamm for having explained the real virtue of poetry. That has nothing to do with Foot, of course, since Foot never denies it. His interest in the role of culture in creating political hegemony, or at least in irrupting the consensus, is not incompatible with a view of art as essentially to do with creating an imaginary, an alternative experience and, sometimes, simply diversion. Literature, after all, must first revolutionise consciousness before it can revolutionise society.

Nevertheless, although Foot is acutely aware of the reformist inclinations which temper the revolutionary passions of The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound, there is at least the potential that what Kamm has written of the latter is a response to Foot's argument. I don't know if it is, because he makes no reference to it. Foot argues that it is in Prometheus Unbound that Shelley resolves the contradiction in his consciousness between his desire for peace and his desire for revolutionary change.

I'll outline the general argument for curious readers. Demogorgon, the "mighty darkness" ensconced in his throne, hidden in a cave, is the seat of power. Asia and Panthea have sought him out with the aim of rescuing Prometheus, who is tied to a stone, starved and defeated. Demogorgon (literally, "people-monster") may owe its name to the kind of political literature Shelley took in. One paper was called Gorgon, while another was called Medusa, and it is the former which his Tory friend Thomas Peacock may have sent Shelley from England while he was writing Prometheus Unbound. At any rate, it is the people-monster which Asia provokes into action through her cunning and impassioned argument. He explodes, the cave - deep within a mountain - erupts in volcanic fury. Two chariots emerge from the "cloven rocks", one representing violence, civil war, and the possibility of renewed tyranny; the other, democracy, security and peace. Demogorgon races off in the first to confront Jupiter. Jupiter, seeing that he isn't about to win this fight, begs to be judged by an unchained Prometheus. But there is no mercy - Jupiter is doomed, and it isn't because Demogorgon turned up bearing petitions and protest songs. In Act III, Jupiter descends into the void, dragging Demogorgon with him:

JUPITER
Detested prodigy!
Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons
I trample thee! Thou lingerest?
Mercy! mercy!
No pity, no release, no respite! Oh,
That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge,
Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge,
On Caucasus! he would not doom me thus.
Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not
The monarch of the world? What then art thou?
No refuge! no appeal!
Sink with me then,
We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin,
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea! Let hell unlock
Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire,
And whelm on them into the bottomless void
This desolated world, and thee, and me,
The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck
Of that for which they combated!
Ai, Ai!
The elements obey me not. I sink
Dizzily down, ever, forever, down.
And, like a cloud, mine enemy above
Darkens my fall with victory! Ai, Ai!

What remains is peace, security, freedom. The second chariot.

Now, the relevance of the lines Oliver cites (from Act I) is precisely that such an attitude would not have done away with Jupiter, nor have freed Prometheus from his rock. The conclusion of the poem is that the people-monster brings swift, merciless justice to the oppressor, topples him and thus frees Prometheus. In the process, of course, the people-monster ceases to exist - and that is more or less as it should be. As media campaigns have consistently demonstrated, there is indeed a Gorgon, a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair. The alternative explanation for Demogorgon - that he represents necessity, and that necessity finally does for the tyranny and liberates the oppressed - will not rescue Oliver either. Such a reading invites complacent determinism, not liberal tolerance. And the end of it all is still that the people-monster had to rise up: there could be no reform without revolution.

I hope I haven't been obtuse about this. Kamm hasn't read a great deal of Foot's work, least of all that which he is most dismissive of. The rest of his criticisms are shallow, and rely on exegesis of intellectually reputable authors rather than arguments of his own. One could waste a lot of time quibbling about Kamm's judgement of Foot's political writings (which expends even less energy in the way of research than his clumsy and ill-informed poetical meditations), but only the converts are likely to be persuaded by his ruminations. The truth is, Kamm's literary failure is a political failure. It is because he doesn't understand the inconsistencies, the wavering, the undercurrents of Shelley's political outlook that he fails as a literary critic. And it is because he doesn't understand Foot's book, hasn't even read it, that his criticisms so dismally backfire.

And those are inferences and not insults. Foot's reputation remains intact; Kamm's is drenched in blood from head to foot. May it never recover.

Daniel Brett posted by lenin

A few years ago, I had a prolonged and often furious row with the young journalist and political activist, Daniel Brett . Conducted over e-mail, our debate was 'regulated but not constituted' by our polar views on the viability of a two-state solution in Israel. It ended with him politely asking to excuse himself from the debate - quite rightly too, as there was no possibility of agreement or of narrowing the scope of disagreement.

Since then, his fantastic website has evolved to include an articulate and informed weblog. Well-travelled, he is a Third World adept, a crack internationalist exploding the myths by which the West sustains its contradictory and incoherent policies in the world. His reporting is humane and intelligent. It will surprise and educate. I strongly recommend you go have a look see .

"Give Up The Luxury of Criticism". posted by lenin

The Prime Minister misjudges the national mood, and surely also the mood within his own party. His speech to the 'party faithful' (carefully selected apparatchiks with known clapping and sucking skills) was apparently full of confidence, triumphalism even. And, as is becoming increasingly common, it hammered just about every false note you could think of. Here he is, explaining why its New Labour or No Labour:

I know that just occasionally we all wish it didn’t have to be like this. That we could have won as we were, that we could have governed without so many tough choices, that we could win again in a more confined and safe way. Unfortunately it is not true.

This exercise in vagary and vaguery is apparently trying to communicate some deep political reality, with which the Prime Minister regularly communes. Somewhere between the lines, I think there is a message that runs something like, "Hey, I'm on your side, I'd love to redistribute wealth and stuff, but y'know, noone's gonna vote for it, so..." The interesting thing about this persistent canard is that only Labour really believes it.

Every credible piece of social and psephological research shows that the vast majority of the public strongly favour higher taxation and higher overall spending. Even a distinct majority of Tory voters believe the income gap is too large. On the specific issue of redistribution, more people say that wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor than say it shouldn't - but approximately a quarter of the population have not formed a view. This would suggest that a) as no major political party actually advocates such policies at the moment, a large number of people are left wondering what it would precisely entail ("would that raise my taxes or lard me with benefits?") and b) there is scope for expanding the plurality of support for redistributive measures with serious political leadership. But that is not likely to happen under a government and a leadership whose most obvious hallmark is the deepest conservatism. (See this IPPR document for a summary of the findings of the British Social Attitudes Surveys up to 2002 - interestingly, support for redistributive measures peaked in 1994, receding coterminously with Labour's sudden disinclination to argue for such policies). Those who argue that people wouldn't vote for it are missing a rather huge point - more people voted for redistribution of wealth in the 1980s than voted for Margaret Thatcher. The peculiarities of a first-past-the-post elecoral system are an important part of what made the New Right seem so monolithic, (the other aspect being, of course, that the Left was on its knees).

Now, any Labour MP of socialist or even social-democratic principle could make a persuasive argument for undertaking such policies. Labour members could work flat out on policy proposals, amendments and discussion points. But they would get nowhere, not just because Blair stridently and persistently declaims that it is not possible, unrealistic etc., but principally because he and Brown no longer believe such policies would be desirable.

Let it not be said, however, that stridency is somehow unimportant to the Blair Project. Here is his warning to the Left:

"We have to give up the luxury of criticism for the obligation of decision."

Got that? This flat-footed nonsense was adequately trashed by an anonymous Labour MP (now why, I wonder, has he remained anonymous?):

"Stalin could have said that. Who the hell does Blair think he is?"

Whoever you are, brave soul, you may well have already answered your own question.

And Blair invites mockery with his claim that he is not a closet Tory:

Because we've run the economy well, worked with business, are tough on law and order and believe in supporting our armed forces, then I must be a Tory in disguise: i.e., if you believe in economic efficiency and taking action on crime, you must be a Tory. It was never really true, of course.

Deconstructing the PM's lazy euphemisms would be an exercise in futility, but we should recall his attempt to ironically disarm his leftist critics shortly after his election (to the effect of 'we poured cash into the health service, invested in education, reduced child poverty, and still we are accused of betraying socialism'). As Slavoj Zizek argued, this "Life of Brian" tactic should be reversed, so that "yes, we practise Thatcherite economics, cut taxes for business, do deals with Murdoch, attack asylum seekers, join up with reactionaries in pursuit of imperialist wars, and still we are socialists". We no longer have to, because the Prime Minister has done this for us, to infinitely better comic effect.

The final, fatal wound is self-inflicted when Blair announces his historical significance. He will win a third term, he salivates, which is something that "generations of this party have only ever dreamed of". A Populus poll published today and cited by the Sunday Herald shows that only 5% of British people believe he will go down as a great Prime Minister. A couple of voices you would have expected to be supportive also weigh in with criticism:

Professor Bernard Crick, of Edinburgh University, a former adviser to Neil Kinnock, told the Sunday Herald: "I think he’s blown it. The best hope was he could get back on course, tackle the inequities of the tax system [and] carry on in the tradition of moderate Labour rather than virtually abandon the poor and try to woo floating voters and what he cheerfully calls Middle England. I imagine historians will write about his time as Prime Minister in the sense of wasted opportunity."

Novelist Robert Harris, a Blair friend, said: "He hasn’t done much more than continue the policies of Thatcher."

Are these rats fleeing a sinking ship? I think so. When false notes pour from a political leader with such speed and create such a jarring racket, you know he has lost it. And the Prime Minister, for all his reputed skill is misfiring every time. When he aims for the heart, he unfailingly hits one in the stomach. When he aims for the head, he shoots his own foot.

For that, at least, he should lose the next election.

Cohen on Foot. posted by lenin

Believe me - the last thing I expected to see in The Observer today was an article by Nick Cohen that I really wanted to read. I get a certain twinge of the heart when this happens, rather like when Christopher Hitchens betrays something of his old scepticism, fondness for darkly elegant one-liners and penchant for telling political ironies. Cohen has written an elegant homage to Paul Foot, and you can read it here . I know Foot would not have appreciated being labelled Saint Paul, but greatness is one of those things that he both achieved and had thrust upon him.

Anti-fascist and anti-anti-semitic posted by lenin

Oliver Kamm has embarked on one of his periodic tirades against the SWP. Frankly, I'm not interested in his ill-conceived theoretical treatment (he tried his hand at undermining the theory of "state capitalism in Russia" a while back, which was embarrassing, and his latest attempt at understanding democratic centralism is no less so). But he has, as usual, scented blood in a particularly unfortunate interview with Gilad Atzmon in Socialist Worker. Atzmon's views are disgraceful, incoherent and completely at odds with what the SWP stands for.  He did not recite any of his more offensive ideas for the SW interview, but he does have plenty of stomach-churning bullshit on his web-site. It makes me sick to recite, but here's a taster or two:

Zionists complain that Jews continue to be associated with a conspiracy to rule the world via political lobbies, media and money. Is the suggestion of conspiracy really an empty accusation? The following list is presented with pride in several Jewish American websites.

...

Let me assure you, in Clinton's administration the situation was even worse. Even though the Jews only make up 2.9 per cent of the country's population, an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews. A coincidence? I don't think so.
We have to ask ourselves what motivates American Jews to gain such political power. Is it a genuine care for American interests? Soon, following the growing number of American casualties in Iraq, American people will start to ask themselves this very question.
Since America currently enjoys the status of the world's only super power and since all the Jews listed above declare themselves as devoted Zionists, we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously.

Yadda yadda yadda, Jews trying to control the world, where have I heard that one before? The trouble is, of course, that Atzmon was booked to speak at a Marxism meeting on Palestine with Ghada Karmi. Karmi is one of the most distinguished and eloquent voices for Palestine, so it is a real shame she ended up sharing a platform with this crank. Now, Kamm would like his readers to believe that the SWP therefore advocates, encourages, or at least is willing to tolerate anti-Semitism.

Having been involved in the SWP for eight years, having protested against anti-Semites being allowed to visit Britain and having been involved in mobilisations against fascist marches through local working class areas, I find such assertions counter-intuitive (to riot in understatement). Even Harry's Place , commenting on the noise, couldn't quite advocate such a view. Well, turn to James' account at Dead Men Left :

His incoherent statements about politics were by all accounts dire. Meetings at Marxism are generally taped, so I invite Kamm to listen to the contributions to his meeting and hear Atzmon clearly criticised by SWP member after SWP member - prominent members, too, like John Rose.

Once more, an explicit attack by the SWP on a particular view is ignored. Personally, I think it was a mistake to invite Atzmon to speak, simple as that, but I am glad that once there he was given a rough ride.

I share those thoughts entirely. If there is one thing that I have always been proud of about the SWP, it is its uncompromising hostility to racism in every form, even the deceptively 'respectable' kinds that masquerade as liberal critique of religion. The SWP does not tolerate anti-Semitism, never has, and never will. It was a mistake to invite Atzmon to speak at Marxism, and it is a relief to hear that he was roundly denounced and derided for offering such views.

Sudan. posted by lenin

This blog about Sudan insists that the individual has the power to help resist the 'genocide' that is taking place in Darfur. Well, that constantly mis-used expression may not be apt, but you'll find a lot of useful information there to help you form your views - particularly if Sudanese troops withdraw and allow a loose 'coalition' to enter and try to 'pacify' the situation.

Tariq Ali on Latin America. posted by lenin

Slavoj Zizek has long argued that the Left should cease to be obsessed with keeping its hands clean and start to be in favour of victory. To get such a victory, says Tariq Ali , you have to take power - and Venezuela proves it:

Without adequately addressing state power, what alternative to neoliberalism is the Global Social Justice movement offering?

No, they have no alternative! They think that it is an advantage not to have an alternative. But, in my view that’s a sign of political bankruptcy. If you have no alternative, what do you say to the people you mobilize? The MST in Brazil has an alternative, they say "take the land and give it to the poor peasants, let them work it." But the Holloway thesis of the Zapatistas, it’s — if you like — a virtual thesis, it’s a thesis for cyber space: let’s imagine. But we live in the real world, and in the real world this thesis isn’t going to work. Therefore, the model for me of the MST in Brazil is much much more interesting than the model of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Much more interesting.

And furthermore:

The Global Justice Movement is wary of Chávez’ populism, his military background, and what they fear may become a top-down ‘revolution’ that excludes the grassroots. How do you think the GJM and Chávez can be reconciled?

As long as the poor in Venezuela support this government it will survive, when they withdraw their support it will fall. But I think it will be useful if the Global Justice movement—and there are many different strands in it—came and saw what’s going on here. What’s the problem? Go into the shantytowns, see what the lives of the people are, see what their lives were before this regime came into power. And don’t go on the basis of stereotypes. You cannot change the world without taking power, that is the example of Venezuela. Chávez is improving the lives of ordinary people, and that’s why it’s difficult to topple him—otherwise he would be toppled. So it’s something that people in the Global Justice movement have to understand, this is serious politics. It’s pointless just chanting slogans, because for the ordinary people on whose behalf you claim to be fighting getting an education, free medicine, cheap food is much much more important than all the slogans put together.

What do you think of the Venezuelan example of participatory democracy?

I think it needs to be strengthened. I think it’s weak, I think the movement here needs to institutionalize on every level—the level of small pueblos, the level of the towns, the level of different quarters—organizations, which can be very broad: Bolivarian Circles, whatever you want to call them, which meet regularly, which talk with each other, which discuss their problems, which aren’t simply a response to calls from above. It’s very very important, because you know, Chávez is an unusual guy in Latin America—very special—and he is young and long may he live, but he has to create institutions which outlast him for the future of this country.

What is at stake in Venezuela? Whose interests? And can Venezuela survive alone? What does Venezuela mean to the US?

Venezuela is an example which the Americans wish to wipe out. Because if this example exists, and gets stronger and stronger and stronger, then people in Brazil, in Argentina, in Ecuador, in Chile, in Bolivia will say ‘if Venezuelans can do it, we can do it.’ So Venezuela, from that point of view, is a very important example. That’s why they’re so worked up. That’s why the Americans pour in millions of dollars to help this stupid opposition in this counry; an opposition which is incapable of offering any real alternative to the people, except what used to exist before: a corrupt, a servile oligarchy. That’s what Venezuela means, and I think that one weakness, till recently, of the Bolivarian revolution has been that it has not done more towards the rest of Latin America, because it’s been under siege at home. But I think, once Chávez wins the referendum, and then the local elections I hope, and the mayoralty of Caracas in September, I hope then a big offensive is made for the rest of Latin America too. From that point of view, the model of the Cuban doctors is a very good one. I mean, a Venezuelan doctor—in five years Venezuelans will come back [from Cuba] as doctors, they can help both their own country, and they can go to other countries to work in the shantytowns. They are small things, but in the world in which we live they are very big things. Fifty years ago they would have been small, today they are very big. And that’s why we have to preserve and nurture them.

Darfur Again. posted by lenin

The liberal press are getting a touch excited by the noises coming from the government that they may just bomb or sent troops to Sudan.  I've already outlined my own view on the wrongs of such a venture, but I just wanted to recap:

One of the reasons why there are so many refugees and displaced people in Darfur and neighbouring Chad is that the Sudanese government is bombing from a great height. Why should it be any better if 'we' do it? (Yes, yes, yes, our planes are so much more accurate than theirs - that's why thousands were killed in even the relatively limited and brief air campaign against Serbia). Prefer a ground invasion? That'll be even more dead bodies, thank you! Tank shells and village to village combat won't make Darfur a liveable place for refugees and victims currently frightened out of their lives. There are other consequences too. Western intervention, particularly into Muslim countries, has tended to inflate support for radical Islamist forces and therefore places 'us' in greater danger.

There are preferable courses of action, and silence is absolutely not an option. Here is one reason why :

"Five to six men would rape us, one after the other, for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this, he disowned me." (Sudanese refugee woman being interviewed by Amnesty International)

Now, the UK has enormous leverage in this situation as does the US. Until recently, with pressure coming from NGOs, the governments of these two countries have been extremely reluctant even to use such leverage and apply any serious pressure at all. Yes, they want the situation stabilised so that the Greater Nile Oil Project is not endangered. But the press coverage and public pressure has produced a change in the tone of government rhetoric. From congratulating the Sudanese government for signing a deal with rebels, it is now accusing it of being "in denial" about what is being done by the janjawids - although it does not accuse the Sudanese regime of complicity with what is now being incorrectly labelled "genocide".

At the same time, the Sudanese government has offered to withdraw from Darfur if the UK think they can stabilise the area - but have warned that Britain could face "another Iraq" if they do go in. And the signals from Blair suggest to me that Britain is not really ready to commit troops to Sudan. Firstly, because Blair distanced himself from reports suggesting he was going to send troops in, saying they were "premature" and secondly because he said that there was no point in intervening unless he had clear support in the region - which is quite different from what was said about Iraq.

The truth is, although liberal imperialists may kid themselves otherwise, British foreign policy-makers consider the Sudanese government a friendly regime. Such troops as did enter Darfur would probably side against the rebels, and would face attacks (especially if the rebels saw them as proxies of Khartoum). One needn't look as far afield as Iraq, simply take a look at what happened in Somalia. Troops are not very good at "keeping the peace" - they are trained to kill. So my estimation is that a) there will be no military intervention and b) that is probably for the better.

I suggest, instead of war, genuine humanitarian intervention. As I put it before:

Therefore, if we wanted to pressure our government into acting in moral ways, we should take the Hippocratic oath. First, do no harm. Second, do the precise maximum that you can to ameliorate the situation. A few simple enough recommendations for a hypothetically moral British government. 'We' should immediately dispatch tonnes of food and medicine to those regions in need of it, negotiate full and uninhibited access for those who would provide it, provide funds for returning refugees who need to rebuild their homes, and refuse to allow any trade, or privileges to Sudan if it continues to abuse its citizens. British based companies should be told to extricate themselves from any involvement in Sudan as long as the regime continues its present course. We should provide expertise and aid on water. Locals should coordinate these activities themselves, insofar as they are not involved in human rights abuses. That would have an enormous, beneficial impact on the situation in Darfur, it would cost a fraction of what the Iraq war cost, and guess what - no violence is required.

I said before that this is not a repeat of Rwanda. It is a needful situation, but it is not genocide. Humanitarian aid, the presence of monitors not allied to a specific government and more sustained pressure on the Khartoum regime to put an end to the actions of the janjawid militias would be a sufficient start for an 'ethical foreign policy'.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Frightens Republicans posted by lenin

Looks like Michael Moore is kicking some psachyderm arse :

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Republicans initially dismissed "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a cinematic screed that would play mostly to inveterate Bush bashers. Four weeks and $94 million later, the film is still pulling in moviegoers at 2,000 theaters around the country, making Republicans nervous as it settles into the American mainstream.
"I'm not sure if it moves voters," GOP consultant Scott Reed said, "but if it moves 3 or 4 percent it's been a success."

More "Honest Marxists". posted by lenin

Dead Men Left had an article the other week about Nick Cohen's beloved AWL.  I try to steer clear of all that banter on the Tomb, but one egregious bit of deception printed in the Weekly Worker , a publication of the CPGB, and repeated on Harry's Place ought to be addressed.

The following quote appears to be attributed to Antoine Boulange at a meeting on "Islam, Socialism and Secularism" at Marxism 2004:

"Socialists must keep their distance from secularism. Secularism is considered progressive, but it is not. The consequence of secularism is that muslim schools cannot be built. That is what secularism is all about."

The paper then asserts that "Wild applause followed this particular strange contribution from a young member of the SWP’s section in France."

The trouble with making assertions based on hastily scribbled notes and wishful thinking is that Marxism meetings are taped. I have listened to the tape of that meeting four times, and paid particular attention for this statement. Neither Boulange, nor any of the speakers from the platform or the floor made this statement. Nor was any wild applause directed at any such claim.

The WW also confects a quote from Esme Choonara, not repeated in Harry's Place:

"I do not accept that there is such a thing as islamic fundamentalism. Islam is not our enemy."

Now, the latter sentence resembles something Choonara said, but the former is pure invention. In fact, while Choonara noted objections to the language (because the term is a convenient cover for racists), she specifically referred to fundamentalists, particularly those who refused to march with the StWC at the February 15th 2003 demonstration, because they did not believe that Muslims and socialists should march together.

So not only have two quotes apparently been pulled from a black hole, they actually run counter to the tone and timbre of the debate. How could this be?

Jeremy Seabrook on Islamophobia posted by lenin

The Respectable Racism

Jeremy Seabrook has an excellent article in today's Guardian, which I strongly commend to liberals and certain Marxists who have taken a profound atheistic turn these days:

The Islamophobia embraced by the BNP as a surrogate for its formally disavowed racism is by no means confined to the wasted landscapes of former working-class communities. It is deeply rooted and widespread, as was revealed by the success of Ukip (just listen to Robert Kilroy-Silk assert that "Muslims everywhere behave with equal savagery").

Indeed, Islamophobia is the only form of prejudice to which the middle class can readily admit: a religion which is perceived as advocating repression of women and hatred of gays renders acceptable forms of prejudice that would be unthinkable if directed against any other social group.

Officially, all right-thinking people have forsworn racism, now believed to fester principally among the no-hopers on rough estates. But Islamophobia is the half-open door through which it makes its triumphal re-entry into respectable society. In recent articles in the Sunday Telegraph, Will Cummins has urged the Conservative party to espouse a more aggressive stand against Islam. "Do the Tories not sense the enormous popular groundswell against Islam? Charges of 'racism' would inevitably be made, but they would never stick. It is the black heart of Islam, not the black face, to which millions object."

Mary Kenny's Right to Life. posted by lenin

Why The Easter Bunny Needs State-Sponsored Murder

Cops and Robbers. posted by lenin

Deeply concerned with the sumptuary proclivities of the British working class, the media has undertaken a campaign to bore us all into getting drunk.  How?  Endless, wall-to-wall stories about Binge Britain, drunken rage, youths vomiting on the street, policemen condescending pissed members of the public...  On top of this, guns and knives seem to be a real pull for newspapers, especially if it happens to be connected in some way to Yardies or asylum seekers.  The merest hint of a Muslim connection might also come in handy if the paper in question wanted to do a splash headline like "Al Qaeda Chief Claims Asylum, Benefits, and Kills Granny".

And since the government have been working to stoke all this shit up in what must be another of the Prime Minister's headline grabbing "initiatives" , I was planning on digging up all the dreary old facts which reveal the government's fervent crusades as the ineffectual, incoherent drivel that they have always been. Don't have to, though. The Independent has already done that for me. To summarise, since 1995 crime has dropped by 39%. Most of the drop is in property-related crime (burglaries, car theft etc), but there has also been a reported decline in muggings and other forms of violent crime. Now, the trouble with the Independent's article is that it relies on the British Crime Survey (henceforth, BCS). This has typically been regarded as being more reliable than recorded crime statistics, but there are some problems with it.

For one thing, it doesn't deal with murder - because its surveys are based on face to face interview, and you can't interview a dead guy without a ouija board. For another, it does not interview anyone below the age of 16 (common practise in surveys, opinion polls etc). Since there has been a large shift in violent crime toward young people (beating each other up, nicking mobile phones), this means that their statistics are wanting in that single area. Now, the recorded rate of violent crime has gone up year on year since 1991. This is not due to any particular change in the number of policemen on the beat (oddly, even David Davis was acknowledging this today), or to any alterations in punishment schemes. Britain did not become a more "permissive" society during the 1990s, certainly not as far as crime is concerned.

Every reputable study suggests that there is no established empirical connection between the number of policemen on the beat and crime levels. In Britain, for example, the number of policemen sharply rose during the Eighties, and crime rose coterminously. In the Nineties, crime dropped while police numbers dropped at the same time. If one were to infer an empirical connection from these statistics, one would have to conclude that the police are a bloody jinx. They are not, however - they just have no discernible impact on crime rates. It's just a populist measure that politicians can undertake without costing themselves too much in extra taxation. Looks good, makes no difference whatsoever. What does make a difference is targeted, sensible policies which undermine the causes of, and opportunities for, crime. For example, the continued decline in unemployment (however over-stated that may be) has undoubtedly been a key factor in reducing the level of economic crime. The trouble is, when recession hits it will flare up again. So, the first thing that is needed is a vigorous strategy for pursuing full employment and eliminating poverty. The government, accepting the monetarist orthodoxy that there is a natural rate of unemployment which one can only affect through certain supply-side measures aimed at boosting skills, does not have the intellectual resources or the moral courage to tackle this problem. Brown's back-handed, and relatively slight, boosts to low income families are insufficient to cope with this problem (although it has had the wonderful statistical effect of pushing a million kids from just below the poverty line to just above it). In the short run, a genuine social-democratic government could increase taxes on profits, investment and higher incomes, while reducing taxes on lower incomes. More money could be channeled into social benefits and pensions; the government could pledge to introduce a 35 hour working week to relieve an over-worked labour force and maximise employment opportunities for those on the dole; and where businesses fail local communities (by cutting and running when the market turns against them) the government could nationalise the business and keep people in employment. Those measures in themselves would be far from revolutionary, and yet would do a great deal more to reduce crime than any of the government's synthetic recycling of tough-sounding policies.

As for violent crime - since the bulk of the increase is due to the mass availability of mobile phones to young people, supposing they have the cash, and the even bigger demand for them, I suggest certain measures be taken to make it less easy to steal the fuckers. According to the Metropolitan Police, "As many as 10,000 mobile phones are stolen every month. Two thirds of the victims are aged between 13 and 16." 28% of all robberies in 200-01 were mobile phone thefts. The only way to reduce this is to make stolen phone useless. There is a national database being set up to help block phones which have been stolen, and if your mobile gets nicked you can now have it immobilised . And while I'm on the topic of crimes committed by the young on the young, it is worth noting that most young criminals are dabblers and not persistent offenders. They "commit just a few offences and then desist". There are only a small number of young repeat offenders, and most of this can be reduced by reducing motives and opportunities for crime (tackling poverty, making school a place worth going to, funding local amenities). I do not believe that locking up young people in secure units does anything but introduce petty criminals to potentially major criminals - it makes little bastards worse.

Finally, I come to other kinds of violent crime. Sex crimes are apparently down, which is lucky because I have no idea what can be done about this sort of thing, besides tagging rapists cocks. With bricks. There are obvious things you can do about paedophiles, such as not placing them in houses next to schools, and replacing funding for monitoring programmes which were able to reduce re-offending rates to 3%. Murder remains relatively low in the UK, and very little of it is carried out by strangers. The only way to curtail any rise in the murder rate is to keep a tight lid on the implements of slaughter - guns, machetes etc. Domestic violence is often concurrent with child abuse, because violent men hit both wives and kids. It is disproportionately younger women who suffer domestic violence. In this instance, it is only the combined action of a criminal justice system and a welfare system dedicated to tackling the problem seriously that can reduce the problem. Precedence is a good guide, since most people who abuse their wives and kids once go on to repeat the offense. Banning smacking would also be a good step. Finally, there is the marked rise in racially motivated violence. One thing the government could do to stop the rise in racism is to stop participating in it. Every inflammatory statement from that berk, Blunkett, validates another aspect of the BNP's propaganda - Nick Griffin boasted about this to The Guardian. There must be efforts to challenge racism within the police, as well as in local areas. In that regard, the actions of civil society - political parties, the Anti-Nazi League and United Against Fascism - are of far greater import than those of the government.

Remember when you feel yourself sink under the crime wave that the government are pretty useless and the police are almost never there to help.


(Note from the Fringe: Someone is accessing my site now from Cardiff University. Psychology department if I'm not mistaken. I also appear to have a visitor from France, and someone visiting my site from parliament via 4 Glengate. This power is going straight to my underpants.)

Should Blair Resign? posted by lenin

I'd like to make a suggestion to contribute to the solution of a growing problem in the political class of this country.  That problem is trust.  The Guardian yesterday carried a report suggesting that Blair was widely distrusted by the electorate, and that most voters believe he lied over Iraq.

The poll also showed that voters now want Blair to quit his job earlier, while more people want him to resign immediately. In fact, there has been much speculation about whether the Prime Minister will vacate his office any time soon. Much of it has been froth, febrile spin and desperate headline-grabbing.

The trouble is, even if he does resign, it just won't be enough. I find the notion of him subsiding into semi-retirement, doing a few corporate speeches and then penning some awful, self-serving book full of platitudes and verbless drivel loathsome enough to make me vomit my own balls. Look, since the Prime Minister has suggested that he is ready to meet his maker over Iraq, wouldn't now be a good time for him to take that leap?

Bombing Iran. posted by lenin

More fun for the liberal imperialists can't be far away.

According to Juan Cole , it is highly likely that a re-elected Bush administration would attack Iran.  Most of you will recall that only a few days ago, the 9/11 Commission raised a new circle of hell by suggesting that 8 to 10 of the mainly Saudi hi-jackers that wreaked the attacks on the World Trade Centre were allowed to pass through Iran, unharmed.  Further, the commission claimed, Iranian officials knew they were there and issued specific instructions not to obstruct their passage.  As Cole notes, however, the sources are largely of the same caliber that supplied so much false or misleading information to politicians and press in the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq.  And since Al Qaeda detainees, also sourced, are going to be Wahabbis and therefore deeply hostile to Iranian Shi'ism, there is every likelihood that they are fibbing - especially as the Iranian regime supported the Northern Alliance against the Taliban.

Most importantly:

Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin has already admitted that a) the US has known for a long time that al-Qaeda operatives travelled through Iran, and b) that there is no evidence that Iran knew beforehand about the 9/11 plot.

However, Iran is to be blamed for terrorism somehow, and there must be a way ... pause ... got it!  Blame Iran for causing all the trouble in Iraq!  Yes, the Daily Telegraph reports that "Iraq" - by which they mean the puppet government* - is threatening to strike Iran if it continues sending all those goddamn foreigners into the country.  Now, I have no idea whether Iran really is sending its agents into Iraq to foment revolution, but am inclined to doubt it just because the Telegraph are saying it, and their record on publishing bogus stories is as bad as can be expected given that they are a notorious leaking post for British intelligence.  But if it is true, then it is almost completely without consequence.  It isn't as if Iraq would be stable, and the insurgency would not have happened had only Iran kept its hands off.  And if Iran has been involved, it is had no discernible effect on the levels of violence.  For the Shi'ite militias did not make a move until the occupying authorities acted to repress Muqtada al-Sadr's movement; and they have now more or less ceased their campaign for as long as US forces stay out of the cities and towns which they control . 

Still, one expects a growing chorus of calls for war from right-wing and even some liberal commentators.  The latter are still too busy wondering if it would be okay to bomb Darfur at the moment, but rest assured they will get round to it.  The question is, after the last global antiwar movement, would Bush or Blair even have the balls to risk it?  My guess is: no.

I Know You're Out There. posted by lenin

I've got a new toy , and it lets me watch the inflow of traffic onto my website.  I can see what IP address you're coming from, whether it is a university, an internet cafe or a home connection, what time zone you're in, whether you were referred here or came off your own back.

So, for example, it allows me to see that someone is accessing my weblog from a local government secure intranet server.  Someone is accessing the site just down the road from me at the University of Central London.  Someone is accessing from a Banta corporation office in Florida.  Someone in Leicester University is having a look as well.  Oooh, and someone in Birkbeck crystallography department is having a look.  I may just go upstairs and have a word...

Hey, this is pretty cool.  Now I know where you live.

Paul Foot on Shelley. posted by lenin

Those of you who never had a chance to hear Paul Foot speak, or who are simply interested in hearing him again may want to have a listen to this and this . You will need Quicktime to listen - I believe these sound files were recorded at Marxism 1999, and if that's true then you will be able to hear Paul's magnificent rendition of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy.

There is more at Resistance MP3s . I'd like to direct you to some of the finest picks from this literal treasure trove of oration, argument and polemic.

Here, for example, is Terry Eagleton on Marxism and Ethics . Eagleton argues a view which I have long subscribed to - namely that Marx was a classical Aristotelian moralist. Although, as Norman Geras would argue, he did not know that he was.

And here is Gore Vidal on top form, recorded some time in the 1990s.

Here is Michael Parenti in a fantastic discussion of ancient Rome, based on his book The Assassination of Julius Caesar.  Parenti is a Caesarian historian, pitting himself against the tradition of Cicero and 'gentlemen historians' - although, as Neil Faulkner notes in the latest International Socialism, his interpretation involves some skating over the darker side of Caesar's rule.  Never mind that, however - this is a funny, clever and informed 45 minute journey with a man whose voice cannot fail to remind one of Woody Allen.

Finally, here is Mark Steel on the French Revolution.

Enjoy.

Britain, New Labour & Support for Terrorism. posted by lenin

Mendacity, the Media and the Ministry of Defence

There are some things that shouldn't be mentioned in polite society.  Among them are the continuing efforts by the British government to back terror programmes being conducted by Russia, Colombia, Indonesia and Israel, and sordid regimes such as those in Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.  One would no more expect such a discussion to appear on the BBC News at One O' Clock than one would a meditation on the Queen's lavatorial habits.  This could in part be because, as Richard Sambrooke once suggested, the BBC foreign affairs department has too often been little more than a mouthpiece for the Ministry of Defence.  Whatever the reason, the aggregated evidence suggests that UK support for thug regimes and terror states persists unabated.
 
Let's take the case of Colombia.  Britain insists that such aid as it is giving to Colombia is directed at combatting terrorism and reducing drug trafficking.  It so happens that the people who receive this aid  - the Uribe government and its right-wing paramiliary arm - are responsible for most of the terrorism and drug trafficking that takes place in Colombia.  For a government so concerned of late with drug use and violent crime (Tom Watson MP's calls to lock up 'crackheads and junkies'), this would seem a shocking deviation of policy.  But it is not.  As we look at the details it becomes evident that this is part of a consistent UK policy in the world.
 
The Colombian regime has, for some 55 years, been waging a struggle against internal dissent, trade unionists, peasant activists and human rights organisations.  It has used the pretext of suppressing an insurgency mounted by the Farc guerilla outfit.  During this time, there have been nine attempts at a peace process - each time, a guerilla faction has agreed to disband.  Its leaders, agreeing to re-enter civil society, have in every case been assassinated.  In recent years, there has been an upswing in human rights abuses, particularly following the election of Uribe.  Examples include the kidnapping of trade unionists, the assassination of dissidents and the 'disappearances' so familiar on that continent.  Last year, over 70 trade unionists were murdered by the paramilitaries, according to Amnesty International, who also note that "the military and their paramilitary allies have sought to keep the population under control by instilling fear, through massacres, 'disappearances', torture and mass detentions".  7000 people were killed last year in Colombia, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists - again, mostly at the hands of the army and its paramilitary allies (according to War on Want , 86% of human rights violations are carried out by "paramilitary death squads which have links with the official armed forces", a "fact well documented by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and countless others" but which is "not reflected in UK government statements or reports").  On average, 300,000 new refugees are created each year.
 
The security laws imposed by the Uribe government have played an important part in exacerbating these trends.  The Defence and National Security Law, labelled unconstitutional by Colombia's Constitutional Court, was an attempt to give the army special judicial powers, while Decree 2002  - also unconstitutional - was designed to enhance military powers, limit rights in certain areas, and prevent foreign observers from entering particular zones.  As a result, many human rights activists were deported.  The Colombian army and its paramilitary adjuvants have been greatly strengthened by "Plan Colombia", the US-sponsored policy allegedly designed to reduce drug trafficking.  Amnesty notes US military aid as a key factor in the recent waves of violence and state repression, but what is less well known is that Britain has been an active participant in Uribe's terror campaign, and has supported state oppression in Colombia for some time.

UK aid to Colombia is alleged to be aimed at helping pacify Colombia's war and reducing the production of class A drugs, but it is contiguous with an ongoing programme of support for Colombia's military.  As Martin Arostegui reported for UPI and the Washington Post on 23rd October 2003: 

"Instructors from the counter-terrorist wing of Britain's Special Air Service are also reported to be polishing up Colombian commando skills in surveillance, ambush and close-quarter combat."

The SAS have been operating in Colombia since 1989, although their role has rarely been reported so candidly.  The government claims that the human rights situation in Colombia has seen a "vast improvement"  and that this is a result of continued military aid and "engagement".  If anything, however, the situation has gotten markedly worse in the past years.  While some kinds of abuse have declined, there has been a rise in forced "disappearances", targeted killings and human rights violations carried out by the paramilitaries in association with the army.  As the UN Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, Bernard Ramcharan, put it in April 2004:  

"An increase in the number of allegations was received regarding extra-judicial executions, forced disappearances, torture or degrading treatment, arbitrary or illegal detention".  

This, however, doesn't stop the UK government supporting and praising a government and army which has the worst human rights record in the Western hemisphere. 
 

From Britain, With Love...

In 1999, a series of explosions in Moscow killed 246 people, and provided the new President Vladimir Putin with a pretext for re-invading Chechnya.  Grozny was flattened and thousands have since been slaughtered.  According to former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, the bombings were in fact staged by the FSB in order to provide the pretext for the invasion.

Since then, however, the Blair government has stood shoulder to shoulder with the Putin regime, insisting on its right to defend itself.  In justifying a 2000 trip to St Petersburg, the Prime Minister told the press :   

"We have always made clear our concerns over Chechnya and any question of human rights abuses there, though it is important to realise that Chechnya isn't Kosovo.  The Russians have been subjected to really severe terrorist attacks."

Just months afterward, Amnesty International reported that the Russian Federation was continuing a pattern of torture and rape in Chechnya. In 2001, Amnesty International, Memorial, FIDH and Human Rights Watch issued a joint statement suggesting that:

Russian forces are responsible for the overwhelming majority of physical harm and material damage suffered by civilians. Russian and international human rights organizations active in the region continue to document violations of the European Convention on Human Rights by Russian forces, including: the arbitrary detention, torture, extortion, ''disappearance'', and harassment of civilians.

...

Russian forces on sweep (in Russian, zachistka, or "cleansing") operations in towns and villages continue to arbitrarily arrest, loot, and use disproportionate force against civilians. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, by the end of the summer 15,000 people in Chechnya had been detained in relation to the conflict; in fact, this number is likely to be higher. Most are reportedly beaten or subjected to torture; their relatives are almost always extorted for bribes in exchange for their release. Hundreds of others simply "disappear" in custody. Russian forces manning checkpoints throughout Chechnya routinely extort civilians for bribes.

If anything, the order of atrocity continuing in Chechnya meant that "catalogued objectively, the crimes for which Yeltsin and Putin bear ultimate responsibility mean that when Major and Blair supped with them, they dined with men very like Slobodan Milosevic.", according to James Meeks of The Guardian.  Blair remained instransigent, telling the House of Commons that  although he had "concerns" over Chechnya, “it's also important that we support Russia in her action against terrorism.”
 
The partnership between Blair and Putin has continued with the only let-up being the brief tiff over Iraq.  Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch records the mounting wreck of atrocities as the situation in Chechnya once again deteriorates.  And  Mecidin Sans Frontieres  describes how refugees are being forced back into war zones, out of the reach of international aid, so that the Russian Federation may present an image of growing normality.  In June 2003, Blair invited Putin for a state visit to London, taking the same walk of shame through the Mall that Mugabe, Ceausescu, Mobuto Suharto and Jiang Zemin have taken before, and Blair complimented President Putin for his "anti-terror efforts".  Undoubtedly, one of Blair's chief considerations is the fact that BP and Shell have huge oil exploration contracts in Russia, making the UK the world's largest single investor in Russia.  Alexander Yakovenko, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, recently boasted after a meeting between Jack Straw and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that:
 
"Britain doubled the amount of current investments in Russia in 2003 and they ran at 4,600 million US dollars," Yakovenko said. "The cumulated British investments in the Russian economy amounted to 7,2000 million USD, growing by 43 percent within a year. They may grow still further if the BP and Shell projects are implemented. In that case, Britain will enhance its positions as the main foreign investor in Russia".
 
Jack Straw remarked after the meeting, held in July, that Britain supported Russia's "reform process" and expected them to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation soon.  Whatever the reason, at every step Mr Blair has apologised for, encouraged and supported the terror reign being imposed on the people of Chechnya.  In doing so, he has further undermined any credibility he might have as an opponent of terrorism or terror regimes.

 

Arming The World

We can conclude with a brief summary of other terror regimes with which the UK has been and remains complicit. Indonesia, for instance. It is no secret that New Labour helpfully supplied the Suharto regime with hawk air jets so that it could butcher its internal opponents and the East Timorese. What is less well known is that the UK continues to support Indonesian terror, this time in Aceh. As is customary, the massive increase in the scale of repression has been accompanied by a corresponding rise in the level of arms sales to the regime. Saudi Arabia remains the number one recipient of UK arms . In 2002, Britain broke its own embargo to supply arms to Israel as it pummelled Palestinian homes and conducted assaults on heavily populated, urban areas. In January 2000, the UK government invited the Chinese Foreign Minister, General Chi Haotian, to "explore military cooperation" in defiance of an EU arms embargo. Haotian had been the commander involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres. In 2002, Britain supplied £3 million in aid to the Nepalese government, whose armed forces are responsible for vast numbers of civilian deaths in its war with insurgents.

This is the government which dares to platitudinise about democracy, freedom and human rights, even as it colludes in murder and terror of epic proportions.  It is a government led by a man whose vocabulary is littered with apocalyptic language about good and evil, even as he covers for some of the worst evils being perpetrated under the firmament.  There isn't enough vomit in the world.

Iraqnophobia and the Moral High Ground. posted by lenin

The war on Iraq was "illegal".  It was "a crime".  The hegemony of the law is complete when it comes to be conflated with moral judgments - because what is actually implied by such statements is that it was morally wrong, and not merely that it failed to conform to the letter of the law.
 
Hence, Norman Geras today asks "How Could it Have Been Wrong?" .  The use of legalistic language in opposing the war, Norm says, indicates the "moral failure" of the antiwar Left.  This language is not unfamiliar - Hitchens and Cohen are apt to discuss opposition to the war in precisely that tone.  He cites a quotation from a commentator at "Iraq the Model" : 
 

You cannot tell a man that saving him and his family from torture, humiliation and death was a mistake and it should’ve not been done because it’s illegal. This is almost an insult to Iraqis to hear someone saying that this war was illegal. It means that our suffering for decades meant nothing and that formalities and the stupid rules of the UN (that rarely function) are more important than the lives of 25 million people. 

This merits serious consideration.  Who on earth would waste their time arguing over such issues as legality when there are people being tortured and murdered?  If this was happening in your neighbour's house, wouldn't you break and enter to stop it, regardless of the consequences?  To oppose the war on such a basis does strike one as a moral failure, and also an intellectual one.
 
However, the purely legalistic arguments against the war were roundly rejected by the bulk of antiwar activists, and certainly by the Stop the War Coalition.  That does not mean they have not availed themselves of legal arguments where it was advantageous to do so.  But, as Lindsey German told demonstrators before the war, "we should say no to the war, whatever the UN decides".  That certainly suggests that the case against war reached far beyond the boundaries of international law.
 
Indeed, without bothering to look too far afield, I can come up with a few objections myself:
 
1)  The agents proposing to dispose of the dictatorship have an appalling human rights record themselves, and can therefore not be entrusted with the vital task of emancipating oppressed people.
 
2)  There would be a very real, palpable human cost of the war that would be incurred by the people supposedly being liberated.  The cost that was involved was less than it could have been, and yet almost intolerably high.  The utilitarian point that Saddam would probably have killed more won't do, for reasons I now come to.
 
3)  The evidence that Iraqis would have preferred an invasion over other options is slight.  Iraqis are pleased that Saddam has gone, and that is not to be dismissed.  The possibility of alternatives, however, was rarely discussed by those proposing war in any serious way.  The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, Iraqi Democrats Against the War, the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and others have argued that the overthrow of Saddam could have been achieved in a much less bloody and unfortunate way through international solidarity with the Iraqi resistance.  This doesn't seem unreasonable in the wake of 1989 and all that.  Chomsky's suggestion that lifting sanctions on food and medical supplies would have helped dovetails nicely with this perspective.  Such alternative strategies for a humanitarian Left are not to be dismissed either.
 
4)  The Iraq war was not just about Iraq.  Neoconservatives who proselytised on behalf of the war have been very clear on that, and if anyone had any doubts, PNAC documents and the US National Security Strategy have made it clear.  This war was primarily about US geopolitical strategy in the post-Cold War era.  It seeks to prevent the emergence of a rival hegemon, and the doctrine of "preemptive strike" is part of that.  The war on Iraq was a test run of the "preemptive strike" and it fundamentally changed the rules of the international game, making it permissible for the US to launch strikes on nation-states it disapproves of, whether the regime merits overthrow or not.  It has, in short, made the world potentially much more dangerous, encouraging nuclear proliferation on the part of weak states (none of them are going to accept a sanctions and inspections regime in the near future) and allowing the strongest state near carte blanche on the international scene.
 
5)  One entirely predictable consequence of this war has been the continuing bloodbath in Iraq.  This bears on all previous points.  Since intention and agency can not be separated from consequence without doing some violence to the facts, we are entitled to consider whether the motives behind the attack have caused the occupation to degenerate in the way that it so obviously has.  In the first month or so after the Hussein regime fell, it could have been argued that such instability as did persist was composed of dying remnants of the old regime.  That can no longer be credibly argued.  The escalation in anti-occupation violence and opinion has been coterminous with the growing political failure of the occupiers.  Had the motives been as benign as those often imputed to the Bush administration, it is unlikely that this mess would have ensued.
 
One can add others, even legal arguments, provided they are taken together as part of the same context of dissent.  But those, for me, are the crucial points.  I'd like to make a few other comments on the suggestions which have appeared at Normblog and Iraq the Model.  Although it is sensible to react against any argument which doesn't quite cut the mustard, which smacks of glibness and moral indifference, it behooves those who react in this way to make sure their own case is as rigorous and open to countervailing evidence as it could be.  There are certain discursive practises which persist in the pro-War camp, and which I think we can reasonably hope to despatch.  The most egregious of these is the tendency, exemplified by Norm and Omar, to abstract a situation from the mesh of geopolitical considerations in which it is embedded and reduce it to a stark moral question.  The tone of such commentators certainly suggests that they feel they are entitled to construct the argument in this way, and thus dismiss the antiwar Left tout court as a "moral failure".  Others include the tendency, which also persists in certain antiwar circles, to speak as if one does so on behalf of Iraq (or Kosovo, or Sierra Leone etc).  Hence, Omar can tell us what is "an insult to Iraqis", while adducing carefully selected testimony from BBC Arabic Forum (which he has translated) in order to connote again that he is only saying what "Iraqis" say .  There are more, but ultimately they revolve around the attempt by supporters of the war to claim the moral high ground.  If I were to speculate on the reasons for this determination - and, okay, I will - I would suggest that it is because they have failed to win the popular argument on the matter.
 
Noone has a monopoly on the moral highground, although some forfeit any claim to it.  Those who supported the war on humanitarian grounds are not morally superior or inferior to those who opposed the war on humanitarian grounds.  Indeed, it is not that I think Norm or any of the others supporting the war from that purview are guilty of a "moral failure" - it's just that I think they got it wrong.
 

Paul Foot, 1937-2004. posted by lenin

I was shocked and saddened this morning to read of the death  of Paul Foot, "66 going on 21" as the Guardian had it.  He died of a thoracic aortic aneurysm, having previously been brought down by a heart attack in March 1999.  I had seen Paul speak several times at various meetings, and have read much of his writing and reporting.  His work on such issues as the Lockerbie bombing, the execution of James Hanratty, the Poulson scandal, BP's sanctions-busting in Rhodesia and New Labour's Private Finance Initiative has been indispensable for socialists, as well as for individual campaigners.
 
But I remember him most for his stunning oration, a dying tradition in the feeble era of the 'Westminster village'.  Like the late Tony Cliff, he could rouse an audience with passion and humour - but it is probably fair to say that he had a little more humility than Cliff.  In particular, he managed to keep an audience spellbound at a Marxism 1998 meeting, in which he simply read Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy", thundering the final verse:

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few.’

 
Paul was an admirer of Shelley, and of the romantic poets in general - particularly William Blake (whom he reviewed with caustic wit and affection for the ISJ).  Like one of his favourite historians, Christopher Hill, he was appreciative of the interface between politics and culture, between poetry and revolution.  His book, Red Shelley, makes a lucid, persuasive, and above all elegant case for reading Shelley as a socialist before his time.  It combines his lapidary style with considerable learning and eagerness.
 
Paul will be remembered by those on whose behalf he campaigned.  The BBC story linked above is appended by a lengthy string of comments and tributes, and quite a few of them are from those who benefited directly from his hard work.  In his best work and speeches, he always emphasised the role of ordinary people, insisting on their ability to organise things for themselves.  Workers could resist pay cuts, but they could also - if they wanted - run society for themselves.  As he insisted, quoting the French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins, at the end of one memorable speech:
 
"The great only appear great because we are on our knees.  Let us rise."

Or, as another of Paul's favourites, Oscar Wilde, would have put it, let us rise from our semi-recumbent postures.  It is most indecorous. 

This Bright Spot in the Sun. posted by lenin

If a spiteful buffoon like Louis Farrakhan urged every black person in Britain to move to some corner of Antarctica*, say, in order to escape racist attacks, I hazard a guess there would be hilarity, indifference, (and approval from racists).  But when Ariel Sharon takes up the battle-axes on behalf of Jewish citizens living in France, he gets several brusque, irritated paragraphs from the French foreign minister and disapproving comments from French Jewish leaders.  The difference, of course, is relevance.  Israel has always appointed itself as the vanguard of Jewish interests, and its supporters are all to willing to dismiss its Jewish detractors as "renegades" (Elie Weisel).  But, as usual, there is more to it.
 
Ariel Sharon didn't stop with France:
 

He told a meeting of the American Jewish Association in Jerusalem that Jews around the world should relocate to Israel as early as possible.

 
Yes, Jewish people living in New York are going to take up their shit and move to Haifa where they are confronted by lunatics of every stripe and subject to the possibility of catching part of a suicide bomber in the face - if they're lucky.  Israel can't be a particularly appealing destination even for Jewish citizens of France, where anti-Semitic attacks are indeed on the rise.  And there is, in France, a serious and growing movement against the racists and anti-Semites, reflected in the mass demonstrations mounted in response to the apparent attack of a Jewish woman on a train (it turned out she was neither Jewish, nor attacked, so at least she didn't waste time with any facts.
 
But one finally gets Mr Sharon's real point when one considers this: 
 

He added that France faced a new kind of anti-Semitism based on anti-Israeli feelings and propaganda.
He pointed out that France had a large Muslim community estimated at less than 10% of population, or about five million.

 
One gets the message.  Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and Muslims are its chief progenitors.  There has indeed been a detected increase in anti-Semitic attitudes and attacks in Europe, but there has been an even bigger increase in Islamophobic attitudes and attacks - which we can now thank Mr Sharon for pointing out.  The bulk of anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by young white males, not Muslims.  If one were going to make a racial connection, one could just as plausibly note that there are 6 million Jews in Israel, you know, and...  But Israeli anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is not unfamiliar.  One recalls Ehud Barak's famously learned discourse on how, after all, those Arabs don't have the Judeo-Christian guilt complex that would prevent them from lying.
 
The proper response to racism is not to encourage its victims to flee, much less flee to a country whose history, politics and expansionism makes it a more dangerous place for those who are seeking refuge.  It is to join them in solidarity, to fight beside them, fight for their right to live here unmolested.  Israel's politics are for this reason, doubly reprehensible: in its foundation, it is a racists' solution to the problem of Jewish oppression in Europe; in sharing the racists' purview, it has not found it difficult to oppress others and to legitimise such behaviour with the kind of discourse that once stigmatised them.
 
 
* It's a land without a people...
 

Polishing Granny. posted by lenin

Norm has an interesting theological observation on the significance of house dust:
 

This afternoon I spent some time, in which I could have been doing other things, cleaning two rooms in the house: my study and our bedroom. You know - dusting, wiping, polishing and such. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not as averse to this sort of thing as some. I find it quite relaxing. I put on some music and I get on with it. It doesn't demand high concentration and so you can think about this and that. However, it's an activity that has always reinforced me in my atheism. Never mind pestilence and other such woes. Just think house dust. How can there be a benign providence if there is house dust? This stuff which you keep having to remove, or at least shift about, only for it to return after a while, setting you the task of having to remove it afresh or shift it about again. It's not sensible.

 
I have always thought that the absence of God could illumine one's life at the oddest moments.    As Woody Allen once remarked, "Today I saw a red-and-yellow sunset and thought, How insignificant I am! Of course, I thought that yesterday, too, and it rained."  But I think the phenomenon of household dust offers more esoteric insights than the absence of yer man.  Most dust, as any fule know, is dead human skin.  Imagine millions of motes of you swirling about the planet, disappearing up noses, descending lazily into pints of beer, settling comfortably on the toilet roll.  This is self-perpetuation after death.  This is the ether.  Dust thou art, and dust thou shalt return.


Why do you think they call it "Mormon rain" ?

The Zarqawi Connection. posted by lenin

I have insinuated in previous posts that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a confederate of Osama bin Laden.  Batty  sends me a news item  suggesting that this common assumption may be based on flimsy evidence:
 
 

According to several military analysts working both inside and outside of government, the Bush administration’s oft-repeated claim that militant leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is the direct link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein does not ring true.
Al- Zarqawi, a Jordanian who heads a group that reportedly claimed responsibility Tuesday for killing a Bulgarian worker held captive in Iraq, appears to be one of many leaders within the decentralized, global Islamic extremist movement. The various groups often work in competition with Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network for recruits and funding.
The analysts also suggest that, contrary to other Bush administration assertions, Al-Zarqawi’s religious beliefs, combat tactics and operational goals were never consistent with Hussein’s, nor are they in accord with those of most Iraqis currently fighting against the ongoing US-led military occupation.
Ties to Al-Qaeda Questioned
Speaking Monday in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Bush once again suggested that the rigidly Islamic fundamentalist Al-Qaeda and Saddam’s secular Ba’athist regime had an operational relationship. When asked about the president’s remarks, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan specifically referred to Al-Zarqawi as the link between the two, calling him a "senior al-Qaeda" member in Iraq. Again on Wednesday, the president said Al-Zarqawi "gets instructions from Al-Qaeda."
However, a "high-ranking US military official" anonymously told Agence France-Presse, "Saddam did not have any love for non-Iraqi Arabs... We have found no evidence he cooperated with Zarqawi himself."
Knight Ridder reports that US intelligence officials refer to Al-Zarqawi as more of a distant associate of Al-Qaeda who may share some of its goals, but does not receive orders and funding from bin Laden.
Jason Burke, a British journalist and author of the recent book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, goes further in disputing Bush’s claims.
Citing reports by German intelligence officials, who investigated a terrorist cell organized by Al-Zarqawi there in the late 1990s, Burke argues that Al-Zarqawi is not an Al-Qaeda leader or even a sworn member -- nor was he in any way a compatriot of Saddam.
"Al-Zarqawi is not an Al-Qaeda operative," Burke emphatically wrote in the UK paper The Observer in March. "If there is a link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein he is not it."
Burke acknowledges that Al-Zarqawi, like bin Laden and many other young Muslim men, journeyed to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join the US-funded fight against the Soviet Union’s occupation of that country. But Burke contends that Al-Zarqawi led a group of Jordanian fighters separate from bin Laden’s mujahideen group...

 
Doesn't mean I find myself in agreement with this man's general outlook on life, but I suppose I am no longer entitled to the assumption that al-Zarqawi's letter points to any inter-imbrication of his forces and those of Al Qaeda.

Tony Blair, Beware. posted by lenin

"There is no point in having cocktail-party relationships with a fascist regime." posted by lenin

In Uzbekistan, they boil people to death. Thousands are tortured as a matter of government policy each year. Rape and beatings are so widespread that hundreds of women are treated for self-immolation and attempted suicide in a refuge at Samarkand. The regime in Tashkent is "kleptocratic", and uses "torture as a routine investigation technique". That's why it has British support.

That is why the British Ambassador to Tashkent was smeared by his employers, disciplined and harrassed in ways that ultimately left him seeking psychiatric help. Read his interview with Nick Paton Walsh in The Guardian . And please don't waste my time with that bullshit about 'humanitarian foreign policy' again.

Marxism 2004 on Iraq. posted by lenin

Ibrahim Allawi, of the Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation spoke at this year's Marxism event, and key extracts of his speech are available at their website. Here's a particularly noteworthy passage:

(1) The US occupation has failed, and faces an impasse and can't withdraw without loosing face.

(2)There is a gradual loss of control; city after city is falling to the control of various militias although still nominally under central government control.

(3) Such a situation cannot continue for long because of the loss of security, which hampers the repairs to infrastructure.

The alternative to anarchy and destruction is to:

Setting up national coalition of political parties, which can appoint an interim administration to organise national election. The prospects for this are possible after a certain period of re-alignment of the various political forces and the mass of the people. The favourable factors for this is the widespread rejection of civil war by all sections of society and the direction for national unity, coupled with political realignment of patriotic forces that have seen once powerful parties that accepted the occupation loosing popular support. If this trend continues it will encourage the formation of broad alliance of the anti-occupation organisations. I think we are living at a turning point in the world as Iraq emerged as the fault line of the world balance of power; this is because of its geopolitical position and the oil reserves of the area.

I feel the present international anti-war movement could change the face of the earth where it continuous in its growth and sharpens its focus. This current struggle must not only be waged in the streets of Iraq but by the mass democratic movement in the streets of world capitals. This is an international aggressive war and needs to be confronted by an international solidarity movement.

Wildean Dialectic posted by lenin

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, page 41.

Yer man at Dialectical Confusions explains the title of his blog:

[I]t represents an ironic anticipatory defence of what will no doubt emerge as the inchoate nature of my politics ("no, you see, I'm not contradicting myself, I'm just being dialectical") and a genuine belief in the need to grasp the full, and often paradoxical, complexity of matters rather than any genuine commitment to systematically dialectical thought.

I thought he might be interested in a quote from Saint Oscar, Terry Eagleton's excellent, acerbic little play about the last days of Oscar Wilde (trial, prison, then Paris), which amply summarises the nature of dialectical thought as opposed to the stale, empiricist superstition of the English:

"We are, moreover, a people characterised by what I might venture to call a dialectical habit of thought - the unity of opposites. Unlike the English, we tend to believe that one thing is true, but also its antithesis. It is not that we are illogical, merely economical..." (Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar, 2004, p 28).

Respect is Looking Good. posted by lenin

According to the Respect website, our candidate is in third place in the Hodge Hill polls:

Anti-war party Respect received an unexpected but welcome boost to its electoral campaign in the Hodge Hill by-election yesterday.

For an internal Tory party opinion poll published in yesterday's Birmingham Evening Mail shows Respect running in third place - ahead of the Liberal Democrats.

"Blair's New Labour is more unpopular than ever because of the war in Iraq and the Lib Dems are backing the occupation and dispatch of 3000 more troops, so it's hardly surprising that Respect is gaining ground at the expense of the pro-war and pro-occupation parties," said Respect's Hodge Hill candidate, John Rees.

The poll is not reported on the Birmingham Evening Mail website, but it is on the Birmingham Tory website . *shudder* Linking to the Tories feels dirty...

The reason for this (which involves, as a corrolary, a serious drop in the Labour vote) could be to do with many things, not least of which is New Labour's conversion to gutter politics in Hodge Hill. From smashing teen gangs and banging up crackheads to forcing 'failed' asylum seekers into starvation, it seems there is no debasement of labour movement values to which Liam Byrne, the local candidate, and Tom Watson MP , the campaign manager, will not stoop. They will thoroughly deserve it if they lose this seat.

The Vale of Tralee. posted by lenin

In a short story included in a collection by Irish authors, boys living under the tutelage of the Christian Brothers are beaten, deprived, abused and raped. The final sentence, as one boy bends over to reveal his brown rosette to a waiting bugger, belongs to the buggeree, who simply says: "The Vale of Tralee".

Well, these days the Vale of Tralee is open to internet tourists, and particularly judges. A 70 year old Crown Court judge has been caught with 75 photos of boys, aged between eight and 14 years old , on his laptop. The judge presiding over the case might have sent him down for a few years, but instead he gave him a twelve month community rehabilitation order and £55 costs. The judge's reasoning is curious to say the least:

He said by the standards of many of these cases, the 75 images the former judge held was not a "substantial" number but they had, however, been downloaded on a number of occasions over six weeks.

Mr Workman considered the number of photographs "not insignificant" but was satisfied the material Selwood downloaded was solely for his own use.

Provided one exploits children for one's own use, then, it is nothing to go to jail over. That is the kind of thinking I would expect from the courts today, since the judiciary are the most singularly perverted, criminal class in the country. I am not suggesting that Mr Workman has any personal interest in seeing off tough sentences for judges who violate the integrity of underage boys, but in general I think there is more corruption under those saucy wigs than in any other UK institution, even the Metropolitan Police. It reminds me somewhat of the collusion between cynicism and innocence , in which nescience is the very form that jaded dyspepsia takes. The good judge is "satisfied that" the photos were strictly for the other good judge's masturbatory purposes - and who but a rancorous 'cynic' would have cause to doubt it?

Liberal Interventionism vs "Conservative Pessimism". posted by lenin

I'm going to break my own rule - it's my rule and I'll do what I like with it. Oliver Kamm has written an article which appeared in The Times on Saturday. In it, he makes the liberal case for returning President Bush to the White House this November - on the basis of his foreign policy, rather than his domestic agenda which isn't referred to.

Aside from referring to John Kerry as an "obscurantist reactionary" (as if President Bush were a secular liberal), he offers this assessment:

Liberal internationalism envisages an order founded on constitutional democratic principles. It stands, as Woodrow Wilson declared in 1917, "for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience". It advocates maintaining peace through collective security and non-discriminatory trade.

John Kerry is no inheritor of this tradition. His foreign policy reveals a conservative pessimism about the limits of political action (a stance that will be familiar to Michael Portillo from his service in a Government that declined to confront Serb aggression against Bosnia). Kerry’s distaste for American exceptionalism runs deep. Lawrence Kaplan recently recorded in the American political journal The New Republic that when, in 1997, President Clinton described the United States as the "indispensable nation", Kerry retorted, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?"

President Bush's administration, by contrast, does embody Wilsonian idealism. In fact, I agree with Kamm here - the neoconservative right have adopted the language of liberal internationalism and coupled it with a characteristic realpolitik. Robert Kagan, in Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), argues that "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) I doubt that most Americans are that interested in spreading Wilsonian ideals throughout the world, but the elision is standard. On the other hand, while Kerry may dislike the language of Pax Americana, he has no objection to it in principle.

Kerry's policy adviser Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute (a Clintonite think-tank) described the Kosovo war as "a policy consciously based on a mix of moral values and security interests with the parallel goals of halting a humanitarian tragedy and ensuring NATO's credibility as an effective force for regional stability". Kerry himself recently propounded a profoundly liberal interventionist foreign policy:

"There was a time not so long ago when the might of our alliances was a driving force in the survival and the success of freedom -- in two world wars, in the long years of the Cold War, then from the Gulf War to Bosnia, to Kosovo," he said. "We extended a hand, not a fist."

In the same article, Kerry is reported as saying he would return to multilateralism, and repair relations with key allies and the UN. Indeed, the Democrats were committed to liberal interventionism when the incoming Bush administration was abrogating such policies. David Benjamin, a member of the US National Security Council under Clinton, took Bush to task over his criticisms of "nation-building":

Mr Bush showed a misunderstanding of a major strategic achievement of the Clinton administration ... In particular [he] missed the intrinsic connections between enlargement and the conflict in the Balkans ... NATO enlargement advanced US interetsts in dealing with one of the country's foremost strategic challenges: coping with a post-communist Russia whose trajectory remains in question. (Quoted in Vassilis K. Fouskas, Zones of Conflict: US Foreign Policy in the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, Pluto Press, 2003, p 49).

One of Oliver Kamm's consistent themes has been how the war on Iraq fulfilled both humanitarian and strategic criteria, and he continues this theme in his article:

No more facile remark has been uttered about the Iraq war than John Kerry’s lament that it diverted the focus of the War on Terror. Overthrowing Baathist totalitarianism was a humanitarian cause, but it also buttressed Western security. Recent academic research suggests that — contrary to numerous confident episcopal assertions — the "root cause" of terrorism is not poverty but political repression. Societies where dissent is confined to religious absolutism are incubators of violent anti-Western fanaticism. The authors of one study, the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova of Charles University in Prague, maintain that terrorism, rather than being generated by poverty or lack of education, may be "more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances."

Kamm will be delighted to note that he is in partial agreement with Noam Chomsky on the latter point. Chomsky has consistently argued since September 11th that terrorism has nothing to do with globalisation and only related to poverty at some remove. (See, for example, his 9/11 or the most recent Hegemony or Survival). But what is more important is that he is again more aligned with Kerry than he would like to admit, which I'll explain after a further excerpt from his article:

Postwar American foreign policy has been consistently compromised by tactical alliances with authoritarian regimes. These were a moral failure but also a strategic blunder — in Vietnam, Latin America, or the notorious tilt to Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War. President Bush, by contrast, maintains that the spread of liberty, not the balance of power among states, is the best assurance for Western security. It’s a premise that explains his contempt for the duplicitous autocrat Yassir Arafat while — a fact lost on many of Bush’s European critics — aiming explicitly for a Palestinian state.

Enlightened self-interest, then, is the cri de coeur of the liberal interventionists. The implication would be, presumably, that Bush is intent on "spreading liberty" and thus ending US support for autocratic regimes. But this is not so. Saudi Arabia, notwithstanding the mild chilling of relations in recent years, remains a close strategic ally of the Bush administration, as does the dictatorship in Pakistan. One could also mention the support for far right terrorist groups under the rubric of the Uribe administration in Colombia (which at least accentuates the sole saving grace of the 'war on terror' - namely, that there is no such thing). Meanwhile, John Kerry has criticised Bush

for coddling Saudi Arabia. "To put it simply, we will not do business as usual with Saudi Arabia," Kerry said. "They must take concrete steps to stop their clerics from fueling the fires of Islamic extremism."

And what is more, although it is generally true that political repression contributes to the formation of extremist ideologies among the educated middle class in the Arab world, it is also true that much of the impetus for radical Islamist ideological expansion derives itself from the incursions of Western capital and imperialism. (See, for example, Dilip Hiro, Islamic Fundamentalism, 1988). Hence, the current situation in Iraq. Far from being a simple "failure of postwar planning" as Kamm describes it, the present condition of Iraq is an entirely predictable consequence of the decision to occupy. I am not here making the case against the war with Iraq, merely highlighting the fact that is possible to criticise the war on intelligent grounds within the framework of a liberal internationalist outlook.

In short, Kerry (or even the late Al Gore) would make a far more persuasive Wilsonian progressive than Bush. Although Kamm is critical of the ineptitude of the Bush administration in the implementation of their foreign policy goals (which, including the opposition to the ICC and Kyoto, are considerd by Kamm to be of some merit), he does not draw the obvious conclusion that a Democratic administration would have been able, post-9/11 to have mustered a much more substantial "coalition of the willing" than the Bush administration. If Clinton had met with Chirac's scepticism, he would have offered a self-effacing smirk and glossed over it. If he had thought that the UN were unlikely to approve any military adventure of his, he would simply have circumvented the entire process, as he did over Kosovo. He would have appealed over its head to individual nation-state actors and probably would have done so more effectively than Bush. I don't think this is because of Clinton's unique charisma, but rather because Western European governments are usually open to US foreign policy goals and their uncharacteristic hostiltiy over Iraq has more to do with the extremism of the Bush administration than anything else. Attacking Iraq would not have been so widely objected to, I would argue, had it not been conceived of as part of a new era of "preemptive strikes" - that is, had not the fundamental rules of international engagement been subject to radical change in the process. In that sense, the global sense of relief that would be eventuated by a Kerry victory would reflect a feeling of returning to normality, and would be coupled by a new readiness to cooperate with US strategic priorities.

I am not, in case anyone new to this blog has missed the point, arguing that you should go out and vote for Kerry - and least of all on these grounds. Personally, I wouldn't vote for either of the two charlatans currently vying for control of Pax Americana. But the charge of "conservative pessimism" simply does not fit. Paleoconservatives may find their views adequately caricatured in that turn of phrase, but New Democrats? No, my advice is: if you want more of the same, vote Bush. If you want even more of the same, vote Kerry.

Marxism 2004 posted by lenin

I'd be remiss not to mention that this is happening now.

The Giggling Game. posted by lenin

I haven't had a word to say about yer man Norman Geras for some time now. I've been awaiting his promised series on why it was right to go to war with Iraq - proposed some months ago, it appears to have been put on hold. Nevertheless, we are graced with this rib-tickler :

It isn't my intention to try to catch up with the important news items I've missed, but I cannot forbear to note the verdict of the Senate investigation: that there has been a global intelligence failure. I know I haven't always put it quite so succinctly, but this, essentially, is what I've been arguing on my blog from day one. The world hasn't been very clever during the last 18 months or so. It could have rallied behind the seeing off of a monstrous and criminal regime; or, having failed to do that, at least behind the effort to rebuild a democratic Iraq in the face of a murderous insurgency. But its attention has been strangely deflected, towards just about every other possible concern. Even now, one senses a gearing up towards the re-discussion - in the nth variation - of the statement: 'So, you see, no WMD.' No, really? I hadn't heard that.

Do you see? "Global intelligence failure"? Geddit?

Well, anyway, I'm starting to wonder about the vast gulf between the quality of Norman Geras' more considered written work and that which pertains to his blog. I know we can't always be as thorough and fair as it would behoove us to be when maintaining a daily stream of more or less unfiltered commentary as well as juggling a career and various commitments. But I defy anyone to read The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, or even this and this , compare it to his blog and conclude that it really is the same mind at work.

The quoted passage is glib, enthymematic and wearisome. Suppose it is actually of some importance whether there really really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Not because it impacts very heavily on the 'humanitarian' case for going to war (although most of those who deployed such reasoning chose to buttress it with concerns of this kind, pace Hitchens and Aaronovitch), but because it really matters whether our political leaders told the truth and whether we can trust them with the disposal of such a vital task as the emancipation of an oppressed people? Indeed, if the Prime Minister and President did misrepresent the facts about Iraq, we have reason to question their motives - and since motive cannot be easily dissociated from consequence, we are entitled to wonder if the present disgrace in Iraq has anything to do with their reasons for invading. And what if "the effort to rebuild a democratic Iraq" is precisely what is being thwarted - whether intentionally or not - by the continued presence of "coalition" troops whose record, to be honest, has not been glorious.

Geras can pretend, if he must, that "the world" has not been interested in the fate of Iraq since the war, that it has been fixated only on the issues of WMDs (this, insofar as it has any purchase, has largely been because those who waged the war have been so intransigent and insistent upon their fibs); but surely he, as a mover-on , would not be wasting too much time if he pondered on the possibilities mentioned above. Perhaps the answers will divulge something of what he is moving on to.

The Hitchman posted by lenin

That permanent revolutionary, Christopher Hitchens, enlightens us as to just how many more imperial interventions he expects of the US:

Christopher Hitchens: ... It's very important we find out and get better at response to failed state and rogue state combinations, because we're going to be doing this again. …

Tucker Carlson: Where are we doing this again?

Christopher Hitchens: Who knows? You're telling me this is not going to happen when the Assad family falls in Syria? There's a lot to go wrong in Syria, a great deal to go wrong in Iran, which is found to be cheating with its nukes and is run by the theocracy that has pushed the country into the ground. The ground we're gaining in Iraq, and one reason I support the war, is that the U.S. army is learning fantastically useful lessons in how to do this, as well as rebuilding. (Via Marc Mullholland )

So, its we now is it? After everything that Hitchens has said and done over the last two or three years, I still find myself shocked by this. Christopher Hitchens has seriously swallowed the neoconservative line, seriously accepts and actively promotes the notion of a vanguard America, defending democracy and preventing the rise of Islamist evil. The "fantastically useful lessons" currently accruing to US troops on the ground in Iraq are indeed multiple. One is, don't even think about it. The second is, go home now. The third is, don't ever listen to greasy charlatans filling your mind with head-rotting shite about you being a liberator again.

Less fanatical observers than Hitchens might be interested to know that June was a bloody month, one of the bloodiest so far in Iraq :

BAGHDAD - Nearly 400 Iraqis were killed and many more wounded last month as violence spiked ahead of Iraq regaining sovereignty, according health ministry figures released Thursday.

June saw 388 people killed and 1,680 wounded in attacks, military operations and armed clashes ahead of the June 28 handover of power, the ministry said.

Despite a brief lull in the bloodshed after the transfer, 120 Iraqis have been killed and 354 wounded in the past 10 days.

The Orangeman's Calendar. posted by lenin

...January, February, MARCH MARCH MARCH!!

In my youth, I was occasionally taken to the 12th July parades to watch idiots in sashes beat drums, wail on accordions, gum flutes and twirl silly red, white n' blue batons. You cannot imagine the pride that swelled in my heart to watch this festival of stupidity, and neither can I.


Idiots.

Well, today being the Twelfth, the day of marching and the morning after bonfire night, I thought I'd celebrate the intransigent lunacy of my compatriots, my fellow descendants of Luther, my fellow knee-cappers and taig-haters. The Orange Order is, for the uninitiated, an organisation committed to represent Irish Protestants (although they would politely remind you that they consider themselves British), to promote the Union between the North of Ireland and Britain. It has not always been thus. In its early years, it was exclusively for members of the Church of Ireland. Presbyterians were not admitted until 1834. It was initially opposed to the 1800 Act of Union because the wealthy gentry who had - within 18 months of the Orange Order's foundation in 1795 - taken over the organisation, felt that the abolition of the Irish Parliament threatened their privileges. It appealed to lower class Protestants because of its appeal to defend the "Protestant Ascendancy" against the challenge of Republicanism (itself having given way to Thermidorian reaction in France) and Catholicism. But it was also originally a populist movement against "popery" which was seen as tyranny, and the gentry hi-jacked it to contain it as much as to create "false consciousness".

Although it never saw itself as a sectarian organisation, its foundation in Armagh led to the expulsion of 7,000 Catholics. And when the United Irishmen sought to unite Catholic and Protestant in the pursuit of Republican liberty, and mounted a revolution in 1798, the Orange Order was instrumental in organising the forces of reaction. Since then they have been a force for the deepest conservatism in Irish society, and to this day they insist on wearing fucking bowler hats.

What You Can Get Away With...

Their parades have been accompanied by anti-Catholic violence from the beginning. Nowadays, if you attend a march, you may get the chance to block a road, join a riot, throw a petrol bomb. But it just isn't like the good old days. Time was, you could knock off a few kids if the mood took you. True enough - back in 1998, when Orange Order marches were blockading a road, some of the local residents had the audacity to protest about that. So, some of the marchers set fire to their houses and killed three children who were busily engaging in provocative sleep activity.


"Croppies, Lie Down!".

It is true, however, that the Grand Orange Lodge officially rejects violence. And it could be argued that most of the violence was either spontaneous, or organised by the brutal Loyalist armies that control many of the parades. But ever since the Agreement, the Loyalists have been subsisting on a diet of mere knee-cappings, intimidation, shake-downs, and internecine feuding. It's just not enough, is it? So, now they've decided to embark on a spate of racial violence against Chinese people. There have always been links between the British far right and Ulster Loyalism, and I myself have witnessed Orangemen marching from Victorian Embankment while being cheered on by British fascists (the 'Blood and Honour' badges are always a dead giveaway).

Now, if you're a bigot but not yet a fascist, there is still the venerated tradition of burning papists on bonfire night. Burn a tricolour, an effigy of the pope, or an IRA man - the important thing is to burn something Catholic. You can also do a few Catholics' windows in. How can you tell them? Well, they generally don't have flags out protesting their loyalty to the Crown. And if you find that all this burning and marching doesn't soothe what ails you, why not attack some kids on their way to a Catholic school? The little girls who attended Holy Cross primary school in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast were pelted and abused by Protestant residents who feared that the Catholics were encroaching on their territory. Yeah, that little ugly kid with the packed lunch is apparently an agent of the Vatican. The army had to provide protection to parents taking their kids to school, while fat Loyalist women with fags hanging out of their mouths screamed "Ya fenian bawstards!"


"Eh, part of our culture, like, eh..."

Alas, as ever, it isn't as simple as that. The truth is, Orangeism is dying a slow and convoluted death. Ian Paisley is now the foremost representative of unionism in Northern Ireland, but the irony is that he was elected precisely at a nadir of his popular powers. When he could really stir up shit, he was organising Protestant strikes in order to bring down agreements. He was convoking a secret paramilitary unit called the Third Force. Now, he has become the First Minister and he is incapable of undermining the terms of this particular agreement. The truth is, his sole appeal now lies in the fact that ordinary Protestants feel disenfranchised. They have no money, no security, no educashun, no job, no health, no life - to which Rev Paisley says 'amen' and blames the Catholics. For Northern Ireland remains a society with deep deprivation and unemployment remains higher than elsewhere in the UK (although, typically, Catholic unemployment is about double that of Protestants). It is this, finally, which the resentful slogans and lunacy is directed against - our victimhood. Since they have hegemonised the sob stories for so long, it is time for us to snatch the wet hankies and emote like sick babies - yes, and even throw tantrums.

The only escape from the present deadlock lies in Irish working class solidarity, such as when workers across Ireland went on solid strike action in protest at the murder of Catholic postman Danny McColgan by the UDA. The trade union bureacracy in Northern Ireland is, of course, deeply conservative. But that has been shifting in recent years. Elections in NIPSA, for instance, have seen the radical Left come very close to taking the leadership. Meanwhile, the attitudes of the younger generation are largely secular and wised up. Most young people in Northern Ireland, for instance, disapprove of the harsh treatment of asylum seekers by the government; most exhibit positive attitudes to immigrants and refugees; and most believe the media are unfairly hostile to immigrants. This is not a generation of young reactionaries, then. And I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that the marches and bonfires have been less well attended than ever before.

But that doesn't mean that those attending them are not complete and utter berks.

Fahrenheit 9/11 and its (Dis)contents. posted by lenin

Creating a Radical Imaginary

It is obvious enough, upon seeing this film, why crowds of film-goers in notoriously Republican areas such as Orange County, California, have been heard to loudly chant "Bush Out! Bush Out!". It is the same reason why this film and its maker have been under attack from the first viewing. This film is a simple, yet sophisticated assault on the Bush administration that completely undermines the emotional and psychological appeal of Bush among his own supporters. You thought Bush was a tough guy, taking on the might of global evil? Wrong - he and his family are deeply implicated in this "evil", and would rather have let the bin Laden family leave America without facing the slightest inconvenience of interrogation than allow the truth about the Carlyle Group to emerge. The Bush administration held thousands of foreigners in prison for months at a time purely on the grounds of appeareance, but the bin Ladens are sent off with the blessing of the State Department and the Whitehouse (according to Richard Clarke's public testimony). The Bush administration, and the Bush family itself, was too beholden to the Saudi monarchy to do otherwise. You thought we "smoked 'em out" in Afghanistan? On the contrary, the attack on Afghanistan allowed the bulk of the Taliban to escape, while Al Qaeda burrowed itself in innumerable fox-holes. President Bush sent fewer ground troops to Afghanistan than there are policemen in Manhattan (so a commentator informs us), and thus allowed the Taliban to escape to northern Pakistan - an impeccably conservative objection to Bush's handling of the 'war on terror', and one likely to have impacted voters who approved of that war. Why was the "smoke 'em out" operation so half-hearted? Because the Bush administration was obsessed with Iraq. Wolfowitz, it seems, didn't even want to bomb Afghanistan, preferring to skip breakfast and move straight to the after-dinner pretzel. The thetic relation in which these facts are proposed does not imply that Moore himself supported the bombing of Afghanistan (for he didn't), but rather that, as he later says, the point of the 'war on terror' was that it was never to be won. On this, he goes deeper in his critique than he has before, but I'll come back to the point. Finally, if you thought Bush was going to make sure attacks like 9/11 would never happen on American soil again, Moore makes the excellent point that one of the first things Bush did was try to prevent and independent 9/11 commission from being formed - unprecedented behaviour in the threat of such a catastrophe. Excellent footage shows a panic-stricken Bush attempting to explain to the media how such a commission would reveal to the evil-doers how America gathered its information. When the report emerged, 28 pages were censored, and those pages related to Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks:

"Top U.S. officials believe the Saudi Arabian government not only thwarted their efforts to prevent the rise of al-Qaida and stop terrorist attacks, but also may have given the Saudi-born Sept. 11 hijackers financial and logistical support, according to a congressional report released Thursday. Those suspicions prompted several lawmakers to demand that the Bush administration aggressively investigate Saudi Arabia 's actions before and after Sept. 11, 2001 -- in part by making public large sections of the report that pertain to Riyadh but remain classified. The passages, including an entire 28-page section, discuss in detail whether one of America's most reluctant allies in the war on terrorism was somehow implicated in the attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the full report." Josh Meyer, "Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Hinted at in Report," Houston Chronicle, July 25, 2003.

The Bush administration's ties to the Taliban (inevitably via Halliburton and Unocal) extend right into 2001, when Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi arrived in the United States as special envoy of the Taliban to butter up the Bush administration and make the case for overlooking its support for Osama bin Laden. (The footage of Hashemi insulting a feminist protester evoked some ominous male audience laughter, I have to note). And, since John Ashcroft, the bible-bashing, warbling US security chief later told FBI director Thomas Pickard that he didn't want to hear any more about this Al Qaeda terrorist threat, we might have grounds for thinking that the Taliban overture was successful.

Again and again, the picture emerges of an administration that was too busy salivating over oil and gas prospects to pay attention to serious warnings of a major terrorist attack planned by Al Qaeda, and too caught up in the dense mesh of Saudi capital to do anything about catching the killers afterwards. We also hear of how Bush is more interesting in terrorising peace protesters and implementing budget cuts than he is in thwarting potential terrorist threats. He is more interested in cutting soldiers pay and rolling back benefits than ensuring their safety. Again, all of these, while they are integrated into a much more radical critique of the administration than I might have expected, nevertheless offer centrists and conservatives many reasons to vote Bush out of office.

So what of the critics? I promised myself I wouldn't bother reflecting on the criticisms made until I had seen the film, although Michael Moore has practically made his empirical case in all its essentials available to visitors of his website. Christopher Hitchens has clearly positioned himself as the most vehement opponent of Michael Moore, having taken every available opportunity in recent months to sharpen his pen against the bearded fat guy. Unfortunately for him, he invites himself to be held up to higher standards than Moore. Moore, a political provocateur, can afford to dabble in conspiracy, adumbrate loosely, connote rather than denote etc. Hitchens offers himself as a serious commentator with an ego the size of the nation-state he is now purblindly defending, "against all comers" as he put it a while back. In two notable reviews , he has served up his usual combination of elevated invective and high octane polemic. May I displeasure you with the exceptional third paragraph of his lengthier review?

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

This is from an article entitled, Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore. It would have been better to have entitled it, Michael Moore: Why I Hate the Fat, Greasy, Lying Leftie Fucker, merely to avoid false advertising. One of Hitchens' earliest points about the film (inter an awful lot of alia comparing Moore to Rush Limbaugh and Leni Reifenstahl) is that it is incoherent. Moore offers a variety of points which suggest variously that the Saudis have a profound influence on US policy - but then, did not the Saudi royal family oppose the attack on Afghanistan? Why didn't Bush take their orders then? But this is a dishonest criticism, because Moore does not suggest that the Saudi royal family is in a position to oppose each and every operation of the United States government, only such connections and influence as did persist appears to have had the effect of allowing the bin Ladens to escape unquestioned and perhaps of blunting the administration's pre-9/11 action against terrorism. In this, Moore is right on the money. Hitchens also suggests that although Moore claims that the inclusion of Afghanistan in the "coalition of the willing" was risible on account of Afghanistan having no army of its own, Afghanistan does in fact have its own emerging army. And this is true - the only trouble is that the Afghan army insofar it is not a rag-tag outfit is not in Iraq. Has not contributed a single soldier to the war effort - for the excellent reason that they are already deserting in droves. Hitchens also condemns Moore for sins of omission - he doesn't mention the return of Afghan refugees, the attempt to hold a general election there etc. But then Hitchens doesn't mention the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, the swift resurgence of the Taliban (oweing precisely to the factors Moore describes), the multiple crimes of the United States in its continuing operations there. It doesn't get better either.

Moore claims that the White House approved the escape of the bin Ladens. Hitchens cites an article in which Richard Clarke, who had earlier indicated that the White House and the State Department were involved in the decision to allow the bin Ladens to leave America, now takes "full responsibility":

"It didn’t get any higher than me," he said. "On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI."

If this were even remotely credible, Moore would still not be responsible. After all, it is Richard Clarke's own testimony (on two seperate occasions) that either the State Department or the White House or both came up with the idea or approved the idea of sending the bin Ladens home, with the compliments of the US government. Here are both of the quotations cited by Moore:

"Now, what I recall is that I asked for flight manifests of everyone on board and all of those names need to be directly and individually vetted by the FBI before they were allowed to leave the country. And I also wanted the FBI to sign off even on the concept of Saudis being allowed to leave the country. And as I recall, all of that was done. It is true that members of the Bin Laden family were among those who left. We knew that at the time. I can't say much more in open session, but it was a conscious decision with complete review at the highest levels of the State Department and the FBI and the White House." Testimony of Richard Clarke, Former Counterterrorism Chief, National Security Council, before The Senate Judiciary Committee, September 3, 2003.

"I was making or coordinating a lot of decisions on 9/11 and the days immediately after. And I would love to be able to tell you who did it, who brought this proposal to me, but I don't know. Since you pressed me, the two possibilities that are most likely are either the Department of State, or the White House Chief of Staff's Office. But I don't know." Testimony of Richard A. Clarke before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.

And here is Clarke's testimony from the same article Hitchens adduces:

"The request came to me, and I refused to approve it," Clarke testified. "I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger manifest and that they approve it or not. I spoke with the — at the time — No. 2 person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The FBI then approved … the flight."

In the new version of the story, the FBI approved the flight. But in the same article, the FBI denies having approved the flight. So, when Hitchens says that "recent developments have not been kind to our Mike" (apparently without irony, since in the immediately preceding sentence he has admitted to having voiced the same concerns himself), he might as well say that recent developments have been unkind to the facts. We don't know who is telling the truth in this instance, although we may guess. What we do know is that Michael Moore can claim to have made this charge in good faith.

Ensuing criticisms range from the fatuous to the merely banal. Here are a few examples:

1) "President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off."

2) "More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse."

There you are. One can't accuse Bush of being a lazy bastard and at the same time call him a ceaseless planner of war. But then, Moore's charge is that Bush spent so much time on vacation before the 'war on terror', and his cited source is dated August 10th, 2001. And Bush needn't be exhaustively involved in the planning of wars to indicate his preferences, need he? On the other hand, if Bush sits reading My Pet Goat when the nation is under attack, is that perhaps better than going to war "on a hectic, crazed impulse"? Probably, but I assume there were other things the President could have done - find out what was going on, confer with intelligence, planners, advisers, take executive action to defend the nation, that sort of thing.

Hitchens suggests that Moore is dissembling when he claims that Iraq has never harmed, or even threatened, any American. Here is Moore's exact wording: "On March 19th, 2003, George W. Bush and the United States military invaded Iraq, which had never attacked or threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen." Here is what Hitchens retorts with: "Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait."

There is more, but suffice it to note that Hitchens is buttressing heavily the only point at which he has a point. The inclusion of the alleged assassination attempt on former President Bush as well as the charges of support for Palestinian terrorism (which may, coincidentally, kill an American civilian) are presumably necessary, otherwise Hitchens would merely say that many Americans were killed in the Gulf War (79, and some of those were friendly fire), and they too count as American citizens. Moore's sourcing for his point is rather shabby (he includes a reference to an article by Stephen Zunes which doesn't quite say what he says, and a quote from a former Australian government minister which says part of what he says, as well as - inexplicably - a quote from Maureen Dowd of the New York Times.

But then, Hitchens makes a few shoddy errors himself: "On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)" The story of Hussein's attempt to get a missile system appears to be accurate , but what isn't accurate is that it was the coalition presence that put an end to the negotiations. The deal was called off before the attack, and the North Koreans, having bagged the $10m, refused to hand it back.

More fatuities await: "From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?)" The difference between ignoring serious warnings and issuing spurious ones ought to be obvious enough, no?

And so he goes on.


As for the leftist critics...

Yes, there is much preaching to the choir, and much ommitted. The Democrats are attacked only one; but this is a film seeking to oust Bush. There is no mention of Israel; a flaw, but I expect that Moore wants pro-Israeli Democrats also to vote against Bush. The final few frames in the film concern themselves with passages from Orwell's 1984, in which the war between Eurasia and Oceana must be sustained - not for the sake of victory abroad, but for the sake of preserving the system at home, keeping the populace in check. That's the war on terror alright - its real target is at home.

The Global Fuck-Up; Or, Why Only Fools Were "Fooled Into War" posted by lenin

One of the most persistent cries from the pro-war lobby in the newspapers and magazines has been that, while there may be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, almost everyone believed there were. The UN, France, Germany, Britain, America, Russia - everyone was convinced that Saddam had some capability about which he was not being entirely honest. William Shawcross wrote indignantly to the Spectator a while back to make exactly this case in response to Stephen Glovers' suggestion that the media apologise for lying about WMDs. The Senate intelligence committee report would appear to buttress those conclusions - depending on whose interpretation you avail yourself of. Republican Senator Pat Roberts says that the war was justified on humanitarian grounds and, anyway, just about every other intelligence agency in the world made the same mistakes the CIA did:

"While we did not specifically address it in our report, it is clear that this group-think also extended to our allies and to the United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe the Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs," Mr Roberts said. "This was a global intelligence failure."

The phrase "groupthink" will probably set Alex Jones on edge, as it happens to be one of his favourites. But the other word for that is "ideology"; although I am fairly confident that much of the hype about Saddam was cynically purveyed by Western political leaders, it is occasionally true that rulers must drink of their own poison. And so, when Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller says of the same report that "we in Congress would not have authorised that war ... if we knew what we know now", you can either take it as a lame excuse for opportunistic Democrats to extricate themselves from their moral clusterfuck with the Bush administration, or as a serious admission that the US political elite was deceived by its own bullshit.

And when Rockefeller says

"The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgements on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly," argued Senator Rockefeller.

you can either see this as a partisan snipe at Bush administration officials or a frank admission that Democrats failed to see what was in fact self-evident. Why does it only occur to Mr Rockefeller now that the CIA were operating under political pressure? Wasn't this self-evident from the prioritization of the Special Operations Command, or the constant sniping at the State Department from neoconservatives anxious to get to war? (Newt Gingrich wrote and under-famed article for Foreign Policy magazine in which he complained that the State Department was undermining Bush by not supporting his dogmatic assertions about Iraq).

It is transparently obvious that this report exculpates the Bush administration, and the cowardice of the Democrats who signed the report even though they now insist they think it should have gone further up the chain of command is so familiar as to be merely banal. As The Guardian reports:

The report found CIA analysts had been right to be sceptical over reports of a link between Baghdad and al-Qaida. That scepticism however, was not reflected in the claims made by senior White House officials, particularly vice-president Dick Cheney.

Examination of that discrepancy, as with everything else dealing with the administration's role, was put off until "phase two".

However, although the report is clearly as dilute in its conclusions as it possibly can be, and although the headline has become "global intelligence failure" (which is a nice strategy for pardoning one's own failings), the net effect of this has been to completely undermine the case for war as put by Bush and Blair.

"Iraqi Democracy" posted by lenin

Iraqi democracy is a bit like that album Axl Rose has been working on, Chinese Democracy: it's taking ages, it's probably going to be shit anyway, and nobody's buying it.

These new anti-democracy laws being brought in by the Allawi regime are not exactly conducive to the process. Consider what's being proposed : martial law; curfews; bans on demonstrations; phone tapping; the opening of mail; and the freezing of bank accounts. Robert Fisk reports:

And, what's more, military leaders might be appointed to rule parts of the nation, while a temporary reinstatement of Saddam's death penalty is also now probable.

Already, therefore, Iraq has begun to look just like any other Arab country.

But the insurgency, which the laws are supposedly intended to break, exploded in gunfire in the very centre of Baghdad just as the new legislation was announced.

Incredibly, the fighting broke out in Haifa Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares next to the Tigris River, as gunmen attacked Iraqi police and troops.

US helicopter gunships, at roof-top level, could be seen firing rockets at a building in the street, which burst into flames.

Bullets hissed across the Tigris and at least three soldiers - all believed to be Iraqis - were killed close to the river bank.

Well, that looks like it will help the situation. You know, the only thing they haven't outlawed is guns? Seriously! True, Iraqis used to own guns under Saddam Hussein, and "coalition" forces were swift to try and disarm Iraqis , whether they were Ba'athists or not. The CPA did in fact retain the old licensing system of Saddam's days intact until its dying days, when it left the new regime a transitional law which prevented the ownership of guns "save for compliance with some sort of licensing regimen" . But unless there are some aspects of this new legislation that have not been published (and believe me, I've looked around), there is no aspect of these otherwise despotic laws that prevents the widespread ownership of guns.

My view? The NRA are behind this shit.

Anyway, if you want to understand the dialectic behind the imposition of draconian legislation in the interests of democracy - recall that practically every rightist coup of this century has been enacted precisely in the name of restoring "normality", "order", even "democracy" (Chile, Turkey etc.). In Bosnia and Kosovo, democracy is suspended precisely in order to defend democracy from its own excesses (or so we're told). And if, as I suspect, this new wave of state violence, buttressed by extraordinary American military power, actually compounds and intensifies the resistance in Iraq, we can expect those provisions bequeathed from Paul Bremer to Iyad Allawi allowing the banning of political parties to be used with maximum stringency. All hail the new Iraq!

Human Rights and International Law. posted by lenin

I know the Spectator is a dubious source in many ways, but there is an interesting article on the likely collapse of the Milosevic trial in the most recent edition. As offensive as I find the implication that Milosevic might be innocent, I think the impotence of the court in this instance might reveal the limits of public trials of ex-statesmen. First of all, they have all the advantages. They know the detail of what they have done and how well they have hidden it. They have been careful to delegate this, and disavow that.

I am not saying that such trials should not occur. But perhaps part of the problem is the hypocrisy of those organising the trials. It reminds me of the way in which certain obvious war crimes were ruled legal at Nuremberg because the Allies were guilty of them too. How can one try Milosevic for, say, knowingly slaughtering civilians when Nato did the same by bombing a television centre they knew to be manned and by shifting to civilian targets after three weeks? There is a clear lesson here - monsters should be tried by their victims, not by imperial interlopers. Unlike the attempted Pinochet trial, this initiative emerged as the result of a Western desire to validate their aggression in the Balkans, not as the result of a grass-roots campaign to bring a murdering bastard to justice. Similarly, Iraqis should run the trial of Saddam. They should flog him and flay him if they so desire. It should not be left to some spurious confection of "international law" (with the US urging on court proceedings, the sovereignty of which it does not even accept).

Another "Right of Return" That Will Not Be Honoured. posted by lenin

"Maintaining the Fiction"

The rightful residents of Chagos are not to be allowed to return. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has decided to legislate against it , despite a clear ruling from the High Court in November 2000 that the Chagossians had a lawful right to return, without conditions. The previous position of the UK government was that the Chagossians could not return without a permit - and even those who were allowed to return were barred from civilian employment . Now, the UK government (in the person of Bill Rammell, Foreign Office minister) claims that, although Chagossians have the right to return, they cannot permit it because "feasibility studies" show that it would not be sustainable for them to return.

Staring blankly at the screen? Yeah, well, the plight of Chagossians cleansed from their land has not exactly been at the top of the news agenda these past thirty-odd years. So, let me fill in the blanks. In 1968, the British turfed the citizens of the Chagos Archipelago (the Foreign Office website says they were "relocated"), among which family of islands resides Diego Garcia, off the land on which they had been working. The plantations on which they had been working were run down, and they were sent to live in Mauritius and Seychelles. The government explains that "The territory was created to provide for the defence needs of both Britain and the United States of America", and indeed Diego Garcia has been a base used for the bombardment of Iraq and Afghanistan. It hosts a large US base, and there is a thriving military economy there. Since this time, the British government has been eager to present it as a move of "contract labourers" back to their country of origin - not a displacement of a settled population. Hence, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart wrote to Wilson in a secret 1969 note that "we could continue to refer to the inhabitants generally as essentially migrant contract labourers and their families" and that it would be helpful "if we can present any move as a change of employment for contract workers…rather than as a population resettlement". They could "deny, if necessary, the competence of the United Nations to concern itself with a territory which has no indigenous population." [Emphasis added]. It was, of course, entirely untrue - hence, a Whitehall document was subtitled "Maintaining the Fiction" . That very paragraph announced that:

"As long as only part of BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory] is evacuated the British Government will have to continue to argue that the local people are only a floating population. This may be easier in the case of the non-Chagos part of BIOT... where most of the people are Seychellois labourers and their families. However, the longer that such a population remains, and perhaps increases, the greater the risk of our being accused of setting up a mini-colony about which we would have to report to the United Nations under Article 73 of the Charter. Therefore strict immigration legislation giving such labourers and their families very restricted rights of residence would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous population."

But since 2000, the British government has been obliged to concede that there was a "settled population", but they still will not be allowed to return. Why?

"Erroneous in every assertion".

Bill Rammell's official explanation in The Guardian today is that:

The feasibility study on resettlement of the islands, highlighting the longer-term difficulties for a resettled population, was produced by independent, expert consultants and not the Foreign Office. We therefore had to make a judgment as to whether repopulation was realistic or feasible. Our judgment was that it is not.

This "feasibility study" included no input from the Chagossians, and is, according to Harvard resettlement expert Jonathan Jeness "erroneous in every assertion". The environment in the Chagos Archipelago is "benign" - there is no history of major floods, there has been only one earthquake, there is little risk of a tsunami. He concludes that it is "fatuous to imagine that the islands cannot be resettled. They were settled, successfully for several generations, before the population was forced to decamp. The Ilois want to return and have a right of return. The Archipelago is in any case already 'successfully settled' by the military and BIOT Administration in Diego Garcia".

What is the more likely reason?

Jeremy Corbyn noted one particular problem with allowing resettlement in a November 2001 parliamentary debate :

There are clearly problems over the right of return to the largest island, Diego Garcia, because the British Government have signed a lease agreement with the United States, which has another 13 years to run. There are serious questions about the legality of that lease arrangement, which may well be challenged in the American courts in the near future.

Bill Rammell, informing the Chagossians solicitor Richard Gifford of his decision, noted that there were crucial "defence interests" involved, "especially in the light of recent developments in the international security climate since the November 2000 judgment". We have too many places to bomb to give up such a vital base right now, it seems. Gifford explains:

"I was obliged to inform the Minister that he was acting irrationally and in all probability illegally, and there would undoubtedly be a legal challenge to the validity of the Order in Council. We are already advised by Queen's Counsel that an Order in Council of the Queen is susceptible to Judicial Review. The Islanders, who have been treated in the most heartless way for a generation are desperate to get back to their homeland. Many of the older folk who were removed are dying, and it is a cynical disregard of their human rights to delay their resettlement
in the hope that those with memories on the islands or ancestors buried there will die before they can go back home.

"There can hardly be a more shameful history of mistreatment of a population in modern times. It is impossible to reconcile the Government's keenness on
applying Human Rights in the Overseas Territories with this cavalier disregard of basic human values."

This would be bad enough in itself, but it has also been suggested - by Tom Brake MP - that Diego Garcia is possibly the site of an interrogation centre known as "Camp Justice" , which he claims to have seen sattelite imagery of. Well, perhaps. But the enduring crime here is that hundreds of human beings were forced from their homes, prevented from entering them, lied to and about for decades. Now that they have legal recognition, the British government arrogantly dismisses its responsibility and enforces legislation which will prevent Chagossians from returning to any of the islands (not just Diego Garcia, the only one presently in US use).

Just one of the many shameful episodes in Britain's disgraceful foreign policy.

The Master's Voice. posted by lenin

A Review of Slavoj Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Verso, 2004.

1.
With the usual barrage of Freudian jokes, nuanced political argument, suggestions destined to give offense to both politically correct Leftists and reactionaries, and philosophical argument that hops from Heidegger to Kant to Laclau, but always returns to Lacan, Zizek is back. He didn't quite go away, of course. Since the last big political intervention, (Revolution at the Gates, a collection of Lenin's writings of 1917 with lengthy pre- and post-faces), we have had another abstruse philosophical work, a collection of interviews and several critical introductions to him published. But Iraq is exactly the kind of juicy, big political topic that you want Zizek to sink his teeth into.

Tough shit. As he warns the reader in the introduction, this is "not a book about Iraq - but then, the Iraq crisis and war were not really about Iraq either". The text is structured into three segments. The last two are vertiginous Lacanian meditations on the possibilities for a renewed radicalism, on ethical violence and democracy, discussed with Zizek's characteristic pedagogic clarity (I am even beginning to understand what those funny little Lacanian symbols mean). The beginning is indeed about the war on Iraq, the 'war on terror', the situation of the international Left, Israel-Palestine and so on. In many ways, it is a collation of thoughts and reactions already known to us from various essays written closer to the time. It does not include Abu Ghraib , apparently because it was written before that episode was revealed. But he does have a few prescient comments to make on the matter of American torture. He begins, however, by comparing the posture of the warring parties with the old Freudian story about the returned kettle that is broken. The borrower offers various excuses: 1) I didn't borrow the kettle, 2) I returned it to you intact, 3) it was broken when you gave it to me. All of which merely confirms that the borrower has returned a broken kettle. Similarly, the warniks insist that: 1) Saddam was a menace to the international community, 2) Saddam was a menace to the countries around him, 3) Well anyway, there are perfectly good reasons for getting rid of a regime like Saddam's etc.

One of the things that Zizek highlights so well is the ideological sleight of hand involved in the "pure humanitarian" apology for war. Yes, yes, war is terrible, but we must stop the suffering... Citing Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman, who both wish dearly to deflect the argument about the war from being a referendum on Bush to being a strict humanitarian concern with the fate of Iraqis, Zizek asks what he calls a "naive" question: "do Ignatieff and Berman seriously believe that the US attack on Iraq was motivated by the desire to 'improve the human rights of 26 million Iraqis'? Even if the improvement of life for Iraqis may be a welcome 'collateral' effect of the overthrow of Saddam's regime, can any serious analysis be allowed to forget the global context of the attack on Iraq, the new international rules of life that were exemplified and imposed by this attack?"

Similarly, on the hunt for WMDs, Zizek repeats a favourite riff of his - isn't this the Iraqi "MacGuffin"? The "empty pretext which just serves to set the story in motion"? Zizek notes how the more these weapons were destroyed, the more omnipresent and omnipotent they appeared to be, as if their dreaded remainder were pointed right at the heart of America (but, of course, constantly being moved about by teams of Iraqis in the middle of the night). The notion of a "preemptive strike" is skewered too. Doesn't the 'Bush Doctrine' rely on the violent assertion of the paranoid logic of control over future threats? Yes, Saddam hasn't attacked us yet - but then, prior to 9/11, Al Qaeda had not successfully attacked us either! The trouble with this logic, Zizek avers, is that it involves treating the future as something that - in a way - has already happened. And the hypocritical concern with war crimes doesn't quite pass muster either - the US was, in 2003, applying pressure on Serbia and Croatia to hand over suspects to the Hague. The infuriated, baffled response was entirely just since the US does not accept the authority of that court itself, and has considered legislation that would allow it to mount an attack on the Hague tribunal should it seek to arrest and detain any American citizen. The worry, of course, is that people could seek to use this court for spurious, 'political' means. Hence, a serious attempt could be made to try Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld or Tony Blair. But, as Zizek himself once said of the Hague - yes yes yes, try Milosevic and Karadzic. But also try Kissinger, or shut up!

2.

One of the most patronising and empty gestures of mainstream liberalism following 9/11 was to make a distinction between "true Islam" and the bestial kind practised by the WTC attackers. Instead of this, one should conceive of the Islamic 'resistance to modernity' as an "open chance", as "undecidable": "this resistance does not necessarily lead to 'Islamo-fascism', it can also be articulated into a socialist project. Precisely because Islam harbours the 'worst' potentials of the Fascist answer to our present predicament, it can also turn out to be the site for the 'best'. In other words, yes, Islam is indeed not a religion like the others, it does involve a stronger social link, does resist integration into the capitalist global order - and the task is to work out how to use this ambiguous fact politically." I have argued this for months, but rarely with such concisions. Religions, being as indeterminate as they are, stand in complex relations to reality and can swing wildly between being reactionary and revolutionary. The history of Protestantism since the Reformation renders the point eloquent.

Zizek insists that there needs to be a fundamental re-think of the Old Left. The 'Third Way', as contemptibly servile toward the capitalist social order as it has been, is not simply the invention of a few fevered egos. It was an authentic response to a real dilemma - what was the alternative, given the circumstances? On the other hand, with the flight from multitudinous cultural identity politics toward collective anticapitalist resistance, Zizek thinks it is perhaps now time to reinvent the final step in that movement - the formation of a revolutionary party. (Partly, however, I suspect he says this to wind up Ernesto Laclau with whom he takes issue in the book). He evokes 'liberated spaces', especially the workers' councils of the 20th Century (which were beloved of many dissidents in the old USSR, who hoped one day to transfer them into the real organisational basis of a democratic society). Through these, he says, we can "practise utopia".

These arguments twist and knot through some abstruse Lacanian analysis which I wouldn't begin to risk detailing. Suffice to say, there are some misses alongside the hits. He wonders why the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't settled when everyone knows the answer. But his 'answer' merely invites the conclusion that everyone does not know, that the apparent consensus is less than skin deep. For instance, he suggests that the obvious solution is for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and for Palestinians to eschew their right of return to Israeli-controlled territory. No. I fail to see why this would be either just or effective. A functioning Palestinian state would be an improvement on the present state of abject degradation forced on the Palestinians, but it would be neither a just settlement nor a guarantee of continuing peace. Israel's expansionist tendencies have exhibited themselves sufficiently for any illusions about the sanctity of these borders to persist. Moreover, the whole point of a settlement based on a partition of the land would be to preserve the ethnic character of the Jewish State, which is currently under threat (if demographic predictions are fulfilled). Instead of this, I would propose a one-state binational solution. But that is another topic - the relevance here is, if Zizek is wrong about the reason for the failure of consensus, the ensuing analysis about the deadlock fulfilling a basic function for both parties to the conflict is likely to be flawed.

That said, this is Zizek at his best. It doesn't contain the sudden, flooring surprise of The Ticklish Subject, say, or the pop-cultural jamming of The Sublime Object of Ideology, but it is in the best tradition of his recent, politically-engaged works like The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? which combine the maximum of clarity and the minimum of effort. It moves with segueing skills that would shame Tom O'Connor from topos to topos without any apparent interruption, and does so with his usual wit and passion. The total result is a book which exhorts us to understand that our present impotence is an opportunity to do something about it; the success of capitalism in overcoming all walls (Chinese Walls included) during the 1990s was in itself a Fukuyaman utopia, a suspension of the reality of engaged political struggle to which we now return; the very inner weakness of capitalism renders it incapable of fulfilling its old ideological commitments to human rights etc (this before Abu Ghraib); the increasing authoritarianism and war-readiness of the state may cause some to despair but Zizek urges us to see it as an opportunity and to treat bourgeois human rights discourse as the rope in the old Marxist wisdom: "A capitalist will even sell you the rope to hang him with".

Apology posted by lenin

Alright so the power went to my head. I found that I could not only delete comments but also edit them. John Singleton and Oliver Moriarty Kamm were the recipients of this feckless graffiti. I promise it won't happen again. On the other hand, if Hayward dispenses any more homophobic drivel, he will be banned for good. This is Leninist intolerance, baby.

Palpably Absurd. posted by lenin

The epitaph: "We are asked now to accept that in the last few years - contrary to all intelligence -Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." (Tony Blair, 18th March 2003).

The Prime Minister has walked into the biggest bear trap since Bob Dylan toured Afghanistan singing Everybody Must Get Stoned. Admitting that WMDs may never be found, he said that Sadddam might have destroyed them - a claim he told us last year was "palpably absurd". He told news reports that Saddam Hussein "may have removed, hidden or even destroyed those weapons - we do not know and we have to wait for the Iraq Survey Group to complete its findings - but what I would not accept is that he was not a threat, and a threat in WMD terms".

Hidden them? Imagine the bugger, scuttling around with WMDs in the back of a couple of lorries, scorching across the desert at 2am to sink them to the bottom of the Euphrates or sell them across the border. Only, almost every face on that infamous deck of "regime change" cards has now been caught up with, and not one of them has offered a clue as to where they might be hidden. At any rate, I don't quite know what kind of weapons you could easily 'hide' in Iraq given that it has been spied on relentlessly, comprehensively and non-stop for twelve years. Everything they thought was a hidden weapons facility or dump turned out to be a useless husk - which doesn't exactly amaze, since these are the same people who told us that an aspirin factory in Khartoum was actually developing chemical weapons.

The Prime Minister is possibly the last person in Britain to believe that Hussein was "a threat in WMD terms". He is sad, and delusional, clinging for dear life to the wafer-thin palimpsest that he so assuredly rode into war on the back of last year. I almost feel sorry for having to vote his ass out next election.

Respect in the Press. posted by lenin

Ultra-Blairite Guardian columnist Michael White expends a few lines on Respect's campaign in Birmingham's Hodge Hill constituency:

...Respect, whose candidate, John Rees, offers a shrewd critique of Hodge Hill's problems.

In a word, it is neglect - by the city council that until recently was Labour, by a Labour government which has helped fund Brum's glamorous city centre makeover.

Mr Rees claims the support of the local Kashmiri People's Justice party, though that is disputed. Naturally, he says Iraq matters (Respect took 26% of the Euro vote in one ward here), though it may matter less to Kashmiris than their dispute with India, Mr Rees's rivals insist.

Has to mean something.

The Invasion of Haiti. posted by lenin

"Haiti, again, is ablaze", Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, writes: "Almost nobody, however, understands that today's chaos was made in Washington - deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out." (Sachs, 'Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti', The Nation, February 28, 2004)

The Humanitarian Coup

The "international community" is often cited as either a bulwark against US imperialism, or as a counter-force to sovereign states which butcher their own people. In Haiti, it managed to be complicit with both.

The invasion of Haiti was the joint production of Presidents Bush and Chirac - together at last. And this tells an interesting kind of story. It is a story about "multilateralism", international law and "humanitarian intervention. Consider: Spain is pulling its troops from Iraq, but is sending troops to Haiti . The EU was broadly against the invasion of Iraq, but will release sanctions on Haiti because its new "interim government" promises elections in 2005. The Carribean Community (Caricom) collectively opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but it now wishes to recognise the government of Gerard Latortue and readmit Haiti to the Community. The French press overwhelmingly opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were happy in 2004 to back their government's joint invasion of Haiti:

Chirac and Villepin had the virtually unanimous backing of the French media, from Le Figaro to Le Monde and L’Humanité, for military intervention in Haiti. Among the most feverish voices has been that of Libération, which held President Aristide—a ‘defrocked priest turned tyrant millionaire’, ‘the Père Ubu of the Caribbean’—personally responsible for the ‘risk of humanitarian catastrophe’ that was claimed to justify the invasion.

"Progressive" Latin American governments opposed the Iraq misadventure, but happily send troops now to support the putschists in Haiti. As Peter Hallward notes in the most recent New Left Review (May/June 2004):

Bush is entitled to take some comfort from the far more successful operation just completed in Haiti. No brusque pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping or splintering coalitions have marred the scene; objections from CARICOM and the African Union have carried no threats of reprisal. In overthrowing the constitutionally elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly have provided a more exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies were consulted, the UN Security Council’s blessing sought and immediately received. The signal sent to Chávez, Castro and other hemispheric opponents was unambiguous—yet it was not a bullying Uncle Sam but France that made the first call for international intervention in Haiti’s domestic affairs.

The context of the invasion was all but lost in the continual updates about the movements of the "rebels" or the latest statement from Aristide. What we did get were boasts from the new dictator, Latortue, that the violent coup leader was "one of the ones who helped bring democracy back to Haiti." He hailed Guy Phillipe, Louis Jodel-Chamblain and Jean Tatoune as "freedom fighters" , and considered reforming the Haitian army which had mounted the coup in 1991, at the putchists' request. Latortue, who had previously been a member of Leslie Malignat's dictatorship in 1988, formed after the overthrow of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, was a long-time opponent of Aristide. He is now a strong supporter of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the IMF. So, those are his qualifications for the job.

How did he get the job?

Well, the standard narrative will begin with Aristide's incompetent economic rule, his increasingly despotic political rule, the alleged rigging of elections etc. and will end with an insurrection (not in anyway convoked by the United States or France) that was the inevitable reaction to that kind of misrule, but which the US and its allies nevertheless stepped in to pacify and curtail its worst aspects. But as those folks at Socialism in an Age of Waiting noted a while back, "reality is somewhere else".

Somewhere Else

The United States has backed every Haitian dictator, every grubby little thug to have emerged from the woodwork to do the bidding of international capitalism. More crucially, domestic landlords and capitalists have always required an iron fist to keep the poor from demanding tacky luxuries like clean water and blankets. The one thing they didn't need was Aristide, with his mass support, deriding capitalism as a mortal sin. So, when he won the elections in 1990, the CIA got in touch with some boys, and in very short order they were working with the FRAPH (according to a 1996 UN Human Rights report). Emmanuel Constant of the FRAPH worked as a paid CIA agent while that notorious group were carrying out some of their worst crimes.

Unsurprisingly, even when Aristide had been returned to power, the United States insisted that the main organisers of the outlandish bloodletting that ripped through Haiti in the early 1990s remained untouched. They freed Emmanuel "Toto" Constant , and when there were attempts to prosecute the worst war criminals, the US orchestrated a stunt in which they stole crucial documentary evidence from the offices of the FRAPH and subsequently refused to allow human rights lawyers to have access to them .

Aristide was unable to implement the programme upon which he had been elected, and consequently lost the support of the working poor of Haiti. As one of the opposition groups, the National Coordination for the Advance of Women's Rights, says, "After coming to power in 1994, the regime did everything to take things out of the hands of the popular masses and decapitate the social movements. From this resulted the terrible war which the regime wages without pity against the population from 2001 onwards." (Quoted, Chris Harman, Socialist Worker ).

As Gary Younge pointed out in The Guardian :

"Before Aristide had even considered fixing the elections, the west had already rigged the markets. Take rice. Forced by the agreement to lower its import tariffs, Haiti suddenly found itself flooded with subsidised rice from the US, which drove Haitian rice growers out of business and the country to import a product that it once produced. When the country fined American rice merchants $1.4m for allegedly evading customs duties, the US responded by withholding $30m in aid." This had been entirely predictable from the legacy of the 'free market reforms' under the World Bank-Marc Bazin junta, namely that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 30 percent (1992-1994).

Even when Aristide tried to recover his popularity and offered some concessions, he found his hands tied. While he had promised to increase the minimum wage, embark on school construction and literacy programs, the hands of the new government were tied. All major decisions regarding the State budget, the management of the public sector, public investment, privatization, trade and monetary policy had already been taken. They were part of the agreement reached with the IMF on November 6, 2000. "In 2003, the IMF imposed the application of a so-called "flexible price system in fuel", which immediately triggered an inflationary spiral. The currency was devalued. Petroleum prices increased by about 130 percent in January-February 2003, which served to fuel popular resentment against the Aristide government, which had supported the implementation of the economic reforms."

Meanwhile, as Hallward notes:

The attempts of Préval’s prime minister, Rosny Smarth, to legislate the unpopular imf programme would permanently fracture the Lavalas coalition, both inside parliament and in the country as a whole. The politicians most in line with Washington’s priorities, and most critical of what they condemned as Aristide’s top-down style, banded together under his rival Gérard Pierre-Charles to form a more ‘moderate’ faction, which eventually called itself the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte. From late 1996, Aristide began organizing a more cohesive party of his own supporters, the Fanmi [family] Lavalas, drawing on his personal authority among the Haitian poor. The split between the opl and the fl soon became irreversible, paralysing the legislature and blocking the appointment of a new prime minister or a full cabinet after Smarth’s resignation in 1997. Préval finally broke the parliamentary deadlock by dissolving the National Assembly in 1999, and after some delay new elections were held in May 2000.

...

The Lavalas government never yielded, however, to us pressure to privatize Haiti’s public utilities. At the same time, and with drastically limited resources, it oversaw the creation of more schools than in all the previous 190 years. It printed millions of literacy booklets and established hundreds of literacy centres, offering classes to more than 300,000 people; between 1990 and 2002 illiteracy fell from 61 to 48 per cent. With Cuban assistance, a new medical school was built and the rate of hiv infection—a legacy from the sex tourism industry of the 1970s and 80s—was frozen, with clinics and training programmes opened as part of a growing public campaign against aids. Significant steps were taken to limit the widespread exploitation of children. Aristide’s government increased tax contributions from the elite, and in 2003 it announced the doubling of a desperately inadequate minimum wage.

That refusal to yield would prove fateful. For although Aristide maintained the overwhelming support of the rural poor, as one BBC commentator acknowledged, he was reviled by the wealthy elite. (Daniel Lak, "Poverty and pride in Port-au-Prince" , BBC Radio 4, 20 March 2004.) Aristide's opponents accused him of rigging the elections in 2000, which he won massively. But, as Hallward notes:

Between June 2000 and February 2004, the CD [Convergence Democratique] rejected each fl offer of new elections right through to the final attempt at a peaceful resolution to the conflict, a caricom-brokered proposal approved by the oas in mid-February 2004, whereby Aristide would accept one of his opponents as his prime minister, hold new legislative elections and serve out the remainder of his term with severely limited powers. Aristide accepted the deal immediately, as did France and the us. The CD refused it just as immediately and then somehow managed to ‘persuade’ its imperial patrons to follow suit, leaving Aristide with a choice between exile or civil war.

Following the elections, the International Coalition of Independent Observers noted:

"[T]he Haitian people have mobilized in large numbers to express their political will through participation in the local and legislative elections of May 21, 2000. We were pleased to observe employees at voter bureaus working with each other to promote a secure environment and privacy for voting. Although late distribution of voting materials in several locations may have discouraged people from voting, we did witness lines of patient voters. It is not yet possible to gauge the number of voters who were unable to find their appropriate bureau, and we will await reports from the countryside. We were greatly encouraged by encountering a diverse group of national observers representing all segments of Haitian society, and we eagerly await reports from their observations."

The irony of this talk of Aristide's corruption and alleged vote-rigging was not missed on Kofi Annan, who cruelly compared the elections to those of the US:

"The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, accused Mr Aristide's dominant political party, Fanmi Lavalas, of violating democracy by refusing to recount the results from the disputed May 2000 parliamentary elections."

The Organisation of American States (OAS) was cited as the source of doubts about electoral irregularities, but the OAS had actually described the May 2000 elections as ‘a great success for the Haitian population, which turned out in large and orderly numbers to choose both their local and national governments. An estimated 60 per cent of registered voters went to the polls’, and ‘very few’ incidents of either violence or fraud were reported. Even the staunchly anti-FL Centre for International Policy agreed that the May 2000 elections were Haiti’s ‘best so far’ Whatever irregularities the OAS claimed to have identified in the electoral procedures subsequently in the November elections, they were jumped on by the Clinton administration :

"Bill Clinton invoked the OAS accusation to justify the crippling economic embargo against Haiti that persists to this day, and which effectively blocks the payment of about $500m in international aid."

Naturally, this has brought near ruin to a country already in the grip of woeful poverty. As Gary Younge notes in The Guardian, "Haitians have a life expecancy of 53, with the highest rate of HIV/Aids infection outside Africa and an estimated 80% of its population living below the poverty line." And in an excellent series of articles on Haiti, Medialens editors David Edwards and David Cromwell point out:

"The United States is Haiti's main commercial 'partner' accounting for about
60% of the flows of exports and imports. Along with the manufacture of
baseballs, textiles, cheap electronics, and toys, Haiti's sugar, bauxite and
sisal are all controlled by American corporations. Disney, for example, has
used Haitian sweatshops to produce Pocahontas pyjamas, among other items, at
the rate of 11 cents per hour. Most Haitians are willing to work for almost
nothing."

So, any discontent that ordinary Haitians had with Aristide imposing the agenda of his opponent in the 1990 elections (who won only 14% of the vote), under pressure from Washington, would have been instantly intensified by that single murderous gesture. And that is the key to the coup and invasion.

The final blow was struck in accord with the wishes of the CD, as Hallward reports:

Economic constraints paralysed the Lavalas administration and political pressure backed it into a corner; but in the end, only old-fashioned military coercion on the Contra model could dislodge it from power. Leading figures in the Convergence Démocratique made no secret of their intentions at the time of Aristide’s reinauguration as president in February 2001; they openly called for another us invasion, ‘this time to get rid of Aristide and rebuild the disbanded Haitian army’. Failing that, they told the Washington Post, ‘the cia should train and equip Haitian officers exiled in the neighbouring Dominican Republic so they could stage a comeback themselves’.

...

In the autumn of 2003 the guerrillas based over the border (led by Louis Jodel Chamblain and Guy Philippe) were strengthened by a new insurgency inside Haiti itself led by Jean Tatoune. Despite his close us connections and a conviction for his role in the Raboteau massacre of 1994, Tatoune managed to swing the Gonaïves-based gang known as the ‘Cannibal Army’ against Lavalas, after making the implausible but widely reported claim that Aristide was behind the murder, in September 2003, of the gang’s former leader, long-standing Lavalas activist Amiot Métayer — who also happened to be an equally long-standing enemy of Tatoune.

There is good evidence that what transpired next was in large measure a French defensive manoeuvre against the perfectly legitimate demands for compensation for the vast sums of money extracted from Haiti by France, following Toussaint L'Ouverture's astonishing victory over the slave-owners. The last payment was made in 1947, and since that time Haiti has had to suffer atrocious regimes which had the connivance and indulgence of the French and American governments. The French government did not react well to the claims, which amounted to a total of $21bn, and dispatched a commission to visit Haiti and investigate their nature. Chirac fumed: "Before bringing up claims of this nature, I cannot stress enough to the authorities of Haiti the need to be very vigilant about — how should I put it — the nature of their actions and their regime". The commission's report accepted that Haiti had indeed paid every cent of the loan shark money to France, but neverthless derided the demand for compensation as "aggressive propaganda". The report also recommended "more affirmative" French engagement which would be contiguous with an American desire to find "an honourable way out of the crisis". Hallward again summarises:

Without such intervention, as the Report acknowledged, the Lavalas government could not have been dislodged. The stumbling block was Aristide’s continuing popularity. The battering of the last fifteen years had taken its toll on his support, but as the most detailed—and by no means uncritical — study of the recent period concludes, there was no doubt that Aristide still enjoyed ‘undisputed and overwhelming popularity’ among the mass of Haitians. The Gallup poll conducted in October 2000 rated the FL as thirteen times more popular than its closest competitor, and over half of those polled identified Aristide as their most trusted leader. According to the latest reliable measure, a further Gallup poll conducted in March 2002, the FL remained four times more popular than all its significant competitors combined.

Hence, the inflow of US and French troops in tandem - Freedom fries and French fries in glorious union. The seven-member "Council of Sages", which is usually referred to as "US-backed" and is "tilted toward the opposition" , anointed Latortue Prime Minister, and Boniface Alexandre President. The new administration began rounding up Lavalas supporters (Michael Christie, ‘Haiti police begin rounding up Aristide associates’, Reuters, 14 March 2004), while Bush forced the return of all Haitian "boat people" to the country even as violent rebels controlled many areas and fighting continued. As Amnesty notes:

Killings and kidnappings of persons belonging to pro-Aristide grassroots organizations are frequent; many have been linked to escaped prisoners who had been jailed previously for rapes and other crimes. Even more troubling, these escaped prisoners have reportedly been working together with the Haitian police and MIF forces to identify people associated with the Lavalas regime.

Not that this violence is of concern to American Bushites. As the Wall Street Journal opined , the real concern is that Aristide may continue to "instruct his killers from offstage in sotto voce". Imagining what evils Aristide and his ebondark associates ("bloodthirsty gangs", the WSJ calls them, in an obvious reflection of more domestic concerns) may wreak in the "new Haiti" chills the Wall Street spine.

Yes, Haiti is a bloody mess. The old elites, led by sweat-shop owner Andy Apaid, have extracted their revenge on Aristide and his supporters, and the armed "rebels" are busying themselves killing more of them. US and French troops are 'pacifying' the situation, while the new administration gets to work on the economic programmes supplied to it by Washington. And it was all done with the sealed approval of the UN. I'd say that's an object lesson in how crime pays, wouldn't you?

A Couple of Good Links. posted by lenin

James at Dead Men Left has a nice piece on the right-ward lurch of New Labour in the Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency.

Al-Ahram has an interesting article on the background to Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, which is

taught at the US Army War College, and its new edition has an introduction written by Colonel Norvell DeAtkine, director of Middle East Studies at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, whose academic specialties are listed as terrorism, urban warfare, and "operations other than war".

Nice Try, Clwyd. posted by lenin

Ann Clwyd is manning the barricades on behalf of the occupation forces again today, puffing up the puppet government and its various quislings. Note first of all that Ann finds the use of the words "puppet" and "quisling" in relation to the new unelected, US-appointed regime of unrepresentative Iraqis offensive:

Having known and worked with the opposition to Saddam for over two decades, I find the description of brave individuals as "puppets" deeply offensive. Allawi was nearly killed in 1978 in the UK when he was attacked by a Ba'athist assassin with an axe. The deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, was imprisoned at the age of 16 for his political activities. The deputy foreign minister, Hamid al-Bayati, was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and had five members of his family killed by Saddam's regime. Eight thousand members of foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari's family clan disappeared in 1983 and have never been seen since.

Every day, these individuals and others face the knowledge that they are targets for assassination. But they continue to work, just as the policemen return to their jobs every day, despite the suicide bombs targeted at them. As one told the Guardian at the beginning of the week: "Our job is to protect the Iraqi people ... There are bombings but we are not scared of these terrorists. These people are cowards who are damaging our country."

Allawi, the former Ba'athist and recent asset to 14 seperate intelligence outfits, including MI6 and the CIA? The man who carried out terrorist atrocities in Iraq through the 1990s, including the blowing up of a schoolbus in which children were killed? Barham Salih, of the PUK, which allowed the Iranian military to enter their controlled section of Northern Iraq and kill Iranian Kurds? What bravery, what democrats! Still, brave or not, that hardly endows the government with any particular democratic legitimacy. Citing recent favourable opinion polls won't help either - as a regular visitor to the Tomb insists, the trouble with citing polls to buttress your argument is that you must also accept those which don't go your way. And previous polls have indicated that Allawi has very little support. But note also the attempted conflation between the resistance and those carrying out suicide bombings - for although Clwyd proffers her argument as a commentary on Seumus Milne's pro-resistance article last week, she forgets or deliberately ignores his distinction between the legitimate resistance and the followers of al-Zarqawi who only wish to create civil war in Iraq. That distinction could not have been more manifest as when Sadr and countless other resistance leaders denounced the wave of suicide attacks as death-dealing both to Iraqis and to the resistance.

Clwyd tries again:

Those who champion the "resistance" as the real voice of Iraq do not offer an alternative political programme, merely an opposition to an existing strategy. They are silent about what they want for Iraq apart from getting the Americans out.

They are opposed by the emerging civil society of Iraq. On June 21, Abdullah Mushin, of the Iraqi Federation of Workers' Trade Unions (IFTU) addressed Unison's national conference. The IFTU had opposed the war. Last December its Baghdad offices were raided by coalition forces. Despite this, he was clear that what was required now was "solidarity" to defeat those who would deny Iraqis democracy.

"It is only a few days before the handover of power on June 30 and IFTU and Iraqis need your support and solidarity to make this happen and stop attempts by terrorists and Saddam's supporters to derail the transfer of power to Iraqis. This is a crucial step forward to end the occupation, regain full sovereignty and enable the Iraqi people to determine their own political future through democratic elections."

One can respect the IFTU's particular anti-occupation stance while noting that it is precisely the resistance - in Fallujah, in Najaf and elsewhere - which has forced American withdrawal. There is no sovereignty or independence in the new interim government - but there is in Fallujah. US troops still bust into houses and shoot up families in most of Iraq. But not in Fallujah. Incidentally, those forces which have wiped out the occupation in Fallujah cannot be conflated with "Saddam's supporters" - for it is they who have only recently prevented a rally by pro-Saddam loyalists, with a show of force. Clwyd does not bother mentioning that even as the IFTU opposes the resistance, they also oppose the occupation, and demand its end as the condition for achieving a real democracy in Iraq. They also opposed the war: "it might have been easy to support the war but I and the majority of Iraqis didn’t because we feared the bloodshed and the destruction of our country that would result". They believed that "Saddam’s dictatorship could have been overthrown, through reliance on the people and their patrioitic forces, and with effective international solidarity, to bring about democratic change." (See link). Ann suggests that those supporting the resistance do not have an alternative strategy for Iraq to the current one being imposed by the US. To which the obvious reply is that if there isn't genuine Iraqi sovereignty with full US troop withdrawal then no alternative strategy could even be considered. At any rate, it would be down to Iraqis to decide what kind of society they wanted to live in. The first condition for allowing that to happen is for US troops to be forced out. And, as Jeremy notes, the resistance does not require a common agenda - the French resistance united forces of various political shades who were united on one goal. Only a genuine apologist like Clwyd would attempt the assertion that those who support the anti-occupation resistance also oppose the emerging civil society in Iraq. It is because that civil society is being repressed by the occupation that we want to see the back of it.

And what kind of regime is it that Clwyd is seeking to defend? Well :

American military police yesterday raided a building belonging to the Iraqi ministry of the interior where prisoners were allegedly being physically abused by Iraqi interrogators.
The raid appeared to be a violation of the country's new sovereignty, leading to angry scenes inside the ministry between Iraqi policemen and US soldiers.

The military police, who had been told of abuse, seized an area known as the Guesthouse just outside the ministry's main building. They disarmed the Iraqi policemen and at one stage threatened to set free prisoners whose handcuffs they removed, according to Iraqi officials.

The arrival of a second group of US military police and a more senior officer led to an argument between the two groups of military policemen over who had command authority for the raid.

Iraqi ministry of interior officials admitted that around 150 prisoners taken during a raid four days before in the Betawain district of Baghdad had been physically abused during their arrest and subsequent questioning.

The men were captured in the first big Iraqi-led anti-crime and anti-terrorism operation, which took place a few days before the transfer of power, with US military police in support and using US satellite images.

Senior Iraqi officers described those captured as "first class murderers, kidnappers and terrorists with links to al-Ansar" - a militant group in the former Kurdish no-fly zone - who had all admitted to "at least 20 crimes while being questioned".

According to an al-Jazeera television crew, who had been filming the prisoners when the US military police conducted their raid, most of the detainees were blindfolded, with their hands cuffed behind their backs. One prisoner was so weak, from dehydration, that the US military policemen fitted an intravenous drip to rehydrate him.

Although none of the American officers involved in the raid would talk to the Guardian, one of the soldiers involved in the raid said that it had been launched after claims that prisoners were being abused.

US military spokesmen would not comment. "We can't confirm that this took place," a spokesman said.

One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses.

A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place.

Nashwan Ali - who said his nickname was Big Man - said: "A US MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence.

"The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn't strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did."

So, the interim government beats its prisoners but doesn't fuck them. This then, is approximately the new division of labour: the coalition fucks Iraq, the interim government beats the shit out of it. Unsurprisingly, the new administration has announced that it may introduce martial law, and they have the support of Bush and Blair . They have also reintroduced the death penalty , and a series of "emergency laws" .

Still, if Ann Clwyd must insist on puffing up the new administration, she could at least have the courtesy to note that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has admitted that resistance attacks on US troops were legitimate . Not that Sadr will reciprocate. He has just called the new interim government "illegitimate" , because as he rightly notes "the occupation has not ended" . Watch those opinion polls swing, baby.

This is What Democracy Looks Like? posted by lenin

Pro-war liberals who prefer a rosy view of the occupation (like Johann Hari, who is under the strange misapprehension that Iraq now has "free trade unions" ) ought to read the papers more often. Here's the view from the Boston Globe :

BAGHDAD -- American soldiers stormed into Sajid Kadhum Bouri al-Bawi's house three hours after midnight on May 17, breaking two doors and rousing the dozen children who live there.

An hour later, family members recalled, the soldiers led a hooded man from the house and told the family they were arresting Bawi. Only after the soldiers left with what appeared to be a prisoner did Bawi's brother find his bloodied body, shot five times and stuffed behind a refrigerator underneath a pile of mattresses.

The US Army is investigating the shooting, and admits that Bawi was shot and killed by an American when, according to the soldiers involved, he tried to seize a soldier's weapon.

Bawi's slaying during the kind of routine night raid that is the military's bread-and-butter counterinsurgency tactic raises questions about the control and supervision of soldiers on those raids, and the reliability of the local informants whose tips are often behind the arrest lists.

The events described by family members are chilling: They say Bawi was killed in his mother's bedroom during an interrogation, while soldiers banged on metal doors to dull the sound of the shots.

The soldiers then pretended they were detaining Bawi, according to several members of the family who were present, parading another man in a dishdasha, or robe, through the darkened house to trick the family into thinking that the head of the household was still alive...

Of course, the family is probably making it all up.

Pride. posted by lenin

Just had a wee wander through the Gay Pride parade , which is still sallying by the window as I type. Sure, my girlfriend's away for the weekend, so I saw nothing wrong with having a look. There's a rally over at Trafalgar Square and then there'll be something happening at Finsbury Park - so if you're sitting at home, scouring the internet for conspiracy theories, you could always drop in on the Proudest Place in the World. Unlike the football, there won't be any sadistic violence - in fact, your chances of being involuntarily buggered are considerably lower than if you attended a Millwall match. I can tell you that from experience.

If anyone thought the Gay movement was a clapped out corporatised sponsor-fest which glorifies narcissistic tossers in fake tan, then you need to look beyond the flurry of feathers and look global. Only four countries worldwide currently offer constitutional protection to their homosexual citizens, and Britain ain't among them. (They are Ecuador, South Africa, Fiji and Canada). Many apparently more repressive societies are actually more civilised than many European countries. Why is it, for instance, that Portugal bans homosexuals from certain occupations, including the military, but Rwanda has no such practises? Why is it that Montenegro allows 14 year olds to have sex with any gender they like, with no other restrictions applying, while Britain and America prefer to keep them waiting? Why should it be that Japan bans "open homosexuals" from its military, while Jordan's penal code makes no distinction whatsoever between gays and heterosexuals? Just because the police now have their own Pink Brigade doesn't mean that homophobia has disappeared in Britain. And it isn't merely a problem with the legislation, or with institutions. The 2002 British Social Attitudes Survey suggested that 23% of under-30s thought homosexuality was "always wrong" while 60% of over people aged 60+ thought the same. There is still a hard-core of homophobic nutballs out there who should be irritated and wound up at every fucking opportunity. That's why we need Gay Pride.

Gay Pride has thrust the dirty sport right in the homophobe's face, and as a result, more people are now willing to admit to being gay, or having had gay sex, then ever before . And it should be globalised - that is, integrated with the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.. There is, inevitably, a huge number of African, Arab and Latin American states with deeply repressive sodomy legislation. In Saudi Arabia, they can kill you for it. In Nigeria, they can beat you for it, or kill you. In Jamaica, the cops are allowed to smack you around, and you have no legal protection. But there is a movement. The Gays are on the rise in Nicaragua, facing down a colonial heritage of homophobic bigotry, according to NACLA's most recent Report on the Americas (May/June 2004). The UN are pressuring Latin American governments to protect gay rights, Catholic bishops complain , but that will have nothing like the impact of a mass, militant campaign. And international solidarity is the first essential in that process. Without it, there will be no gay rights in Karachi, in Kingston, or in any of those 13 US States which still consider sodomy illegal.

Finally, one last reason why the gay rights movement should ally itself with the anticapitalist movement - we really must prevent Colin Powell from ever attempting to join a "Village People" hoe-down again.

#...They got guns, we got guns, all God's chillun got guns...# posted by lenin

Hey kids! Want to make the world more dangerous? Want to reduce your chances of living to a ripe old age like grandpa? Well, fret not! According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade , Britain continues to beef up some of the biggest bullies and warmongers in the world. And luckily, they're making a hobby out of supplying both sides of many conflicts:

The Government's Annual Report on the UK's Strategic Export Controls in 2003, published today, reveals that, yet again, the UK arms the world's trouble spots.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office's strategy paper predicts that for the next ten years: "Serious flashpoints are likely to remain and may intensify between India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait". But the Annual Report shows that these destinations are important clients of the UK arms industry. In 2003 licences were issued for the export of £86.5 million of UK military equipment to India; £29.5 million to Pakistan (almost double that for 2002); £47 million to South Korea; and £24 million to Taiwan. The Middle East remains a major destination for UK arms exports - in 2003 equipment worth £189.33 million was shipped to Saudi Arabia; £42.37 million to Turkey and around £25 million each to the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Indonesia is still being supplied with components and spares for equipment it has used in the war in Aceh and for human rights abuses in the past. In its recent report the parliamentary Quadripartite Committee said that the UK Government does not seriously monitor the use of UK equipment by the Indonesian military.

You can read the government's report here.

Strangely enough, the CAAT doesn't make as much of the numbers of small arms and weapons being sent to the Middle East as it might (by far the largest recipient of these weapons is the Saudi oligarchy). As Stephen Zunes points out in his book, Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, (2003), the super-arming of Arab nations is one of the many things contributing to their destabilisation. First, because it is an immensely costly enterprise for Arab states, depriving them of resources with which to meet the needs of the population increasingly exposed to joblessness and ever deteriorating education and health facilities. Second, because it involves the usual positive feedback loop - every time these guys get more weapons, we have to get some; but now that we've got some, they've gone and got more, etc. To quote him directly:

The significance of U.S. arms transfers to the region becomes apparent in looking at the figures: For Fiscal Year 2003, 72% of U.S. foreign aid allotted to the Middle East was military as opposed to just 28% for economic development. The $3.8 billion in military aid is well over 90% of what the United States gives the entire world. Even more startling is that, on top of this aid, there is the far larger sum of arms purchases, totaling $6.1 billion in 2001, over half of the world's total. The United States gave or sold more arms to the Middle East than all other arms exporters combined, totaling more than $90 billion since the Gulf War. Weapons and their delivery systems are America's number one export to the Middle East, totaling nearly one-third of all exports to the region

...

Al-Qaeda believes that the Saudi regime is corrupt and evil in large part because the royal family has squandered its wealth for personal consumption and exotic weaponry while most Arabs suffer in poverty. They are further angered by the regime's tendency to persecute those who advocate for more ethical priorities. They are angry with the United States, therefore, for propping up such a regime. The U.S.-Saudi alliance, in Al-Qaeda's view, further illustrates the depravity of the Saudi rulers in their decision to allow American troops on what they see as sacred Saudi soil in order to keep the regime in power. Such a regime is anti-lslamic, from their perspective, and therefore needs to be overthrown.
Unfortunately for these Islamic radicals, the United States has dedicated itself for more than a half century to perpetuate the Saud family's hold on power. In 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abel-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Arabian kingdom that now bears his family's name, and forged the alliance that remains to this day: in return for open access to Saudi oil, the United States would protect the royal family from its enemies, both external and internal. So, the first challenge, in the eyes of Al-Qaeda, is to oust the United States from the region since it is the U.S. military that is keeping the corrupt Saudi regime in power. Given that AI-Qaeda is no match for the United States militarily, they therefore rationalize for the use of terrorism.
As a result, even putting aside moral arguments against backing such regimes as Saudi Arabia, there are serious questions as to whether the large-scale arms transfers and ongoing U.S. military presence in the Gulf really enhances American security interests. Rather than protecting the United States from its enemies, these policies appear to be creating enemies. (Zunes, pages 41 & 44, op cit).

That "special relationship" is fucking the entire world.

Excuses, excuses... posted by lenin

Here is a very funny letter to The Guardian today:

So Saddam's defence is: "I was only giving orders."
Ian Joyce
Milton Keynes

You know, I can't be the only one who's sick to death of fallen despots being "defiant". Pinochet is defiant, Milosevic is defiant, Saddam is bloody defiant. Knock it off. Can't we just once have an ex-dictator who says:

"Okay, let's face it, I did it. I'm a cunt. I made a big mistake, and I'm very, very sorry. Honestly, whatever it is you're going to do to me, I deserve it. Here, let me help you with that electrode... where, on the testicles? Okay... and you want me to drink litres and litres of soapy water, stuff a towel in my mouth, then allow soldiers to jump up and down on my belly til I vomit through my nose?* Righto!"

Just once, you know what I mean?

*This was an actual method of torture used by French paratroopers in Algeria while being commanded by Lieutenant Jean Marie Le Pen. ( Jim Wolfreys, "'The centre cannot hold': fascism, the left and the crisis of French politics", International Socialism Journal, Summer 2002 ).

From Baghdad to Darfur: No, We Shouldn't Bomb Darfur Either. posted by lenin

David Clark argues in today's Guardian that the "international community" ought to threaten the use of force against the Sudanese government if it fails to curtail the human rights abuses currently taking place in the south-west of the country. He maintains that both Blair and the Left have been unwholesomely silent over the atrocities - in Blair's case on account of his bruising experience of leading the country into war with Iraq; in the Left's case because they are "morally disarmed" by the presumption that any intervention by the West must be automatically wrong. He argues that once upon a time, Blair knew what to do with outlaw regimes (like Milosevic's, for instance), but now he doesn't because of the wild goose chase in Iraq.

It isn't difficult to see the ideological pull of the argument. It appeals because it evinces subtlety, equidistance between two extreme Bad Positions, and moral passion. And indeed, the situation in Darfur is dire. The raw data being compiled by human rights organisations like MSF speaks eloquently of this gruesome reality. Government soldiers and janjawid militias go on a killing spree, and then malaria, starvation and inadequate water supplies do the rest. As Human Rights Watch notes, Thousands have been slain, tens of thousands raped and brutalized, 1.2 million displaced from their homes, and at least 120,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad as refugees. Unfortunately, I don't think there is much else to the argument. First of all, if bombing (or threatening to bomb) Darfur is an appropriate response to human rights violations, then why not Baghdad? Did not Saddam ratchet up atrocities of Darfur proportions in his time? It is true that when the bombing occurred, human rights violations were said to be decreasing steadily in Iraq. Perhaps one could argue that this is because the regime was weakening, but that doesn't sit well with the evidence. Sanctions appear to have strengthened the regime, and the decline in state violence is more likely to be due to the decline in the level of popular resistance. (Although it didn't go away entirely - Sadr's men were operating in Baghdad since 1999). So, if it is appropriate to expect Western states, which are fundamentally amoral institutions, to produce moral outcomes by being allowed to exert its military power in Darfur, why not Baghdad?

Aside from the inconsistency, I don't think Clark can have thought through the human consequences of bombing. One of the reasons why there are so many refugees and displaced people in Darfur and neighbouring Chad is that the Sudanese government is bombing from a great height. Why should it be any better if 'we' do it? (Yes, yes, yes, our planes are so much more accurate than theirs - that's why thousands were killed in even the relatively limited and brief air campaign against Serbia). Prefer a ground invasion? That'll be even more dead bodies, thank you! Tank shells and village to village combat won't make Darfur a liveable place for refugees and victims currently frightened out of their lives. There are other consequences too. Western intervention, particularly into Muslim countries, has tended to inflate support for radical Islamist forces and therefore places 'us' in greater danger.

So, what should "the international community" do? First of all, since there is no such thing as "the international community", it is very difficult to conceive of it doing anything. Second, since Clark's analysis does not stray beyond the 'human rights' framework, he misses a few facts of vital significance - Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, doesn't actually have any words of condemnation for Sudan. An official statement released by Straw and Hilary Benn "congratulates" the Sudanese government for signing a deal with the Southern rebels, but is only "deeply troubled" by the serious situation in Darfur. They urge "all parties" to stay their hands. Part of the reason for this may be that the Greater Nile Oil project , of which BP Amoco is a major shareholder (via PetroChina), is working closely with the government to maintain that 16,000 mile stretch of oil pipeline that takes oil from the South to Port Sudan. Too much attention to the little Darfur crisis could destabilise the wider peace, and threaten those supplies. The US government was worried enough to send Colin Powell, who has said that the Khartoum administration should "rein in" the janjawid militias and, happily enough, the government has acquiesced . This is perhaps because in recent years, the US government has been cosying up to the Khartoum administration. Why were they cosying up to the administration? Oil? Nah,

Another problem with Clark's analysis is that he accepts the characterisation of the conflict as "ethnic", and he compares it to the Rwandan genocide. Well, the trouble with the latter comparison is that we have no understanding yet that there is any direct complicity between the US, Britain or France in the unfolding violence in Darfur (see Linda Melvern's Conspiracy to Murder, Verso Press, 2004); and of course, what is happening in Darfur is not genocide. Nor is it specifically ethnic in motivation. It is an increasingly familiar effort at counter-insurgency. As Mercedes Taty, the Deputy Emergency Director for MSF has argued :

I don’t think that we should be using the word "genocide" to describe this conflict. Not at all. This can be a semantic discussion, but nevertheless, there is no systematic target — targeting one ethnic group or another one.

It doesn’t mean either that the situation in Sudan isn’t extremely serious by itself. But, I think it’s important not to mix things and not to standardize our words. So, I would say no, I can not speak about genocide.

The situation is not, therefore, a Rwanda in the offing. It is, however, an extremely needful one. As Taty again testifies:

In fact,I can only [call] it a huge, huge emergency. In the sense of the population figures, when I speak about figures, I am talking about people, persons, population — they are huge, huge numbers.

We are talking about displaced people living in miserable conditions, displaced from their homes, just regrouped in the middle of nowhere and absolutely dependent on any assistance that can be provided to them.

They’ve left their villages of origin, due to violence and burning of these villages. So now they are gathering at some crossroad points and they are absolutely dependent on any assistance that can be provided.

So, if no drinkable water, no drug supply and healthcare, no food is provided, these people have very little chance of surviving.

Just to give an example, but in other situations, when we speak about 5,000 people, we estimate that is already an emergency. Right now I am talking about almost 300,000 people that have been seen by Doctors Without Borders teams.

Therefore, if we wanted to pressure our government into acting in moral ways, we should take the Hippocratic oath. First, do no harm. Second, do the precise maximum that you can to ameliorate the situation. A few simple enough recommendations for a hypothetically moral British government. 'We' should immediately dispatch tonnes of food and medicine to those regions in need of it, negotiate full and uninhibited access for those who would provide it, provide funds for returning refugees who need to rebuild their homes, and refuse to allow any trade, or privileges to Sudan if it continues to abuse its citizens. British based companies should be told to extricate themselves from any involvement in Sudan as long as the regime continues its present course. We should provide expertise and aid on water. Locals should coordinate these activities themselves, insofar as they are not involved in human rights abuses. That would have an enormous, beneficial impact on the situation in Darfur, it would cost a fraction of what the Iraq war cost, and guess what - no violence is required.

Unfortunately, previous experience dictates that no such action will occur. Britain would rather flood Africa with arms and mercenaries than rain down food and medicine on those in need. They would rather inflame the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo than forgive African debt. I therefore repeat, for David Clark and anyone else in doubt: States are amoral, self-serving centres of power. They are not to be trusted, or relied upon. Least of all should we cheer-lead a military assault on an already terrified, bloody and starving country.

The Next Stop the War Protest Should Demand a Real Trial, and a Withdrawal of Troops as the First Condition for Fulfilling that Demand. posted by lenin

The trial of Saddam Hussein ought to have been a simple enough matter. The troops should have handed the old bastard over to the Iraqis and withdrawn, leaving them to do with him as they would. It should have been open to the public, open to all cameras, with every bestial response to every bloody charge available to the world, and especially to Iraqis. Then they should have either hung him, or tossed him in the slammer for the rest of his days. Personally? I'd be tempted to have him stoned by his victims - on the other hand, I don't think that's the kind of society Iraq wants to become. But it doesn't matter because it's none of my business what Iraqis choose to do with their long-time tormentor.

However, since this trial is manifestly being staged by the coalition military, it is my business how this trial is run. First of all, why was the video evidence being censored (Robert Fisk, "In the Dock", The Independent, 02/07/04)? Why were only US journalists allowed in, and only one Arabic television crew (according to John Simpson, BBC News, 01/07/04)? Why, when video evidence was released to CNN did it appear with the logo "Cleared by the US Military", (Fisk, op cit)? Why is it that the only Iraqi journalists present were told to leave before the proceedings began? Were the Americans that worried that Hussein would say "And tell Rumsfeld I know he pinched the silver-ware"?

This trial is a sham before it starts. Even a summary execution on live television (perhaps a beheading) would have been superior to this farcical performance. Withdraw the troops, let the Iraqis elect their own government, and let the trial commence for real.

Lies on The Record posted by lenin

Those of you seeking to establish what leading members of the Bush administration lied about in reference to the war on Iraq now owe a huge debt of gratitude to Representative Henry Waxman, who has compiled the most comprehensive list to date of misleading statements and outright falsehoods uttered by such Republican superstars as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and of course, President Bush. The report finds 237 examples of misleading or false statements from 125 public appearances, statements or speeches. President Bush made 55 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq; Cheny made 51; Rumsfeld made 52; Powell made 50; and Condoleeza Rice made 29. The most direct falsehoods were found in Condoleeza Rice's statements, of which 8 were completely untrue. These false statements "included several categorical assertions that noone in the White House knew of the intelligence community's doubts about the President's assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Africa".

So, there you go.

Does Anyone Dig Digby? posted by lenin

Here's Digby Jones responding to Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson's Guardian article from yesterday:

The irony of seeing Derek Simpson of Amicus and Tony Woodley of the T&G making such an ill-timed call for more union powers will not be lost on millions of Londoners who yesterday faced an indefensible tube strike (We can't back a yes vote, June 30). But their article on the EU constitution was also another example of unions marching valiantly to the redundant ideology of the 1970s as they seek to get through Europe what they cannot achieve through this country's democratic process.
Woodley and Simpson seem oblivious to the idea that the people of Britain, with an eye to succeeding in a globalised economy, banned secondary picketing 20 years ago and no responsible government will want to reverse the situation.

They also seem oblivious to the way the global economy now works. They have spent most of this year worrying about outsourcing to India, which alongside China is creating jobs hand over fist. Yet they only want to compare this county's labour market with France and Germany, where the type of regulation they espouse is keeping millions of people out of work. Gentlemen, come into the 21st century, where your members understand the threats this country faces in the competitive world, even if you do not.
Digby Jones
Director-general, CBI

So, "the people of Britain" banned secondary picketing, not Margaret Thatcher? And Digby knows more about what the members of Amicus want than the leader of that union? Perhaps the red-faced lard-arse of the CBI would care to explain his views to Amicus members who have been buffeting the leadership from the left for a decisive repudiation of the free market and its current political defenders.

Getting Back to Russia. posted by lenin

Well, oul' Harry Hatchet's swing is as errant as ever. Today, he's after Seumus Milne for something he wrote in The Guardian , which I'll quote:

Yesterday saw another handover that never was, when Saddam Hussein was transferred to Iraqi jurisdiction - while remaining in US custody. No doubt the occupation forces and their Iraqi frontmen hope that a show trial of the former dictator will provide a theatrical distraction for Iraqis from the misery around them. By recalling the crimes of the Saddam regime, perhaps they imagine they can retrieve some retrospective justification for last year's unprovoked invasion. It is surely too late for that.

And, Harry is shocked, shocked! Why? Well:

Retrospective justification? Show trial? Theatrical distraction? How patronising, no, how insulting, to the Iraqi victims of fascism can you get?

I get the feeling that Harry must be lexically challenged, because "insulting" cannot have been the word he was looking for. For such a charge to be convincing, it would have to be the case that a) the trial is likely to be conducted in an honest and serious way, b) it really was being conducted by "the Iraqi victims of fascism" and not by a puppet government whose leadership includes one of the former exponents of "fascism", and c) the coalition forces could not reasonably be charged with using the Saddam trial as a spectacle to distract from the disintegrating, terrifying situation in Iraq. Oddly, Harry makes no attempt to argue any of those points, although they are in fact crucial.

He continues:

His articles is sub-titled The resistance campaign is Iraq's real war of liberation and again, forgive me, but it really is tempting to wonder how the likes of Milne would feel about 'resistance' if they were a little closer to it - if they had to consider living under the rule of Islamist or Ba'athist thugs. Because, you know, some people do face that threat.

Harry surely cannot be referring to the famed chubster Muqtada al-Sadr, who has the support of 67% of Iraqis precisely because of his acts of resistance. 81% of Iraqis polled say that their opinion of Sadr has improved as a result of the last few months. (According to MSNBC/Newsweek ). Odd that the people who "do face that threat" are in diametric opposition to their erstwhile liberator, Harry 'Hatchet' Saunders. Anyway, Harry doesn't go far enough in his bluster. He ought to have also added some oafish commentary on this:

What is not in doubt is that the resistance has decisively changed the balance of power in Iraq and beyond. The anti-occupation guerrillas are routinely damned as terrorists, Ba'athist remnants, Islamist fanatics or mindless insurgents without a political programme. In a recantation of his support for the war this week, the liberal writer Michael Ignatieff called them "hateful". But it has become ever clearer that they are in fact a classic resistance movement with widespread support waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies. Their tactics are overwhelmingly in line with those of resistance campaigns throughout modern history, targeting both the occupiers themselves and the local police and military working for them. Where that has not been the case - for example, in atrocities against civilians, such as the Karbala bombing in March - the attacks have been associated with the al-Qaida-linked group around the Jordanian Zarqawi, whose real role is the subject of much speculation among Iraqis.

I have been arguing this distinction for months, and noone has yet undone it (because it just happens to be accurate). Harry does, however, ruminate for a bit on the possibilities of "victors' justice" in Iraq, in which he does his best to conflate the Iraqi people with the coalition and the Allawi regime. Not even worth commenting on. However, when he says, as he does in his tirade, that many in the European Left had once been blind to the horrors of Stalinism, a moment of historical awareness would mantle his cheeks with a blush of shame. During the 1980s, a militarily superpower launched a war on an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and was met with a resistance movement suffused with Islam but centred on evicting the occupiers. They denounced the resistance as "reactionary" and defended their mission in the same Capitalised Abstractions that America today uses to defend its actions in the world. Doubtless, hordes of Pravda serviles worked up the courage to denounce the resistance, and note their opposition to womens' liberation, their 'brutality' and their reactionary base. In Britain, however, we don't need Pravda. We just need a few liberals who are credulous in the face of power, but seething with contempt for its opponents.

The bad news for Harry is that, overall, Iraq is worse off than it was before the war.

A Few Quick Links. posted by lenin

I promise you, this is not in lieu of a post. I just thought you might find the following links interesting:

Critical Montages has some interesting information on the political progress of the US Green Party, particularly in the wake of their spectacular failure to "seize the Walter Cronkite moment" and back Nader.

Tariq Ali says nothing has changed in Iraq on account of the "handover".

Michael Berg says his anti-war views were censored by US television. But of course, that sort of thing never happens in a free country.

Miscellany recounts my experience in Warwick , and in the pub .

And just one other, a good post from Jeremy about "Why I support the Iraqi Resistance" . Presumably because his thinking isn't larded with that liberal condescension toward victims of US/UK aggression that is so ubiquitous these days.