Born Suspect. posted by lenin

Babar Ahmad and Haroon Aswat are to be extradited to the United States, and thence to the protective custody of Guantanamo guards if I'm not mistaken. Babar Ahmad, whose terrifying arrest left him with horrible bruises on his face, arms, legs, feet and back and barely able to walk, has had no charges brought against him in a British court. He was instead released without charge, and the IPCC had forwarded his case of mistreatment to the Crown Prosecution Service when the Americans filed their extradition request.

The basis of America's claims are pathetic, and I've written about them before:

One of the claims the affidavit makes is that Ahmad sought to purchase 5000 tonnes of "sulfur / phosphate based fertilizers" from Pakistan, and it is alleged that he was trying to funnel this stuff to groups in Chechnya and Afghanistan. This is what the US generally calls free trade, but I bet one or two hairs are already standing up. Fertilizer equals explosives, right? Nope: ammonium nitrate based fertilizer equals explosives, sometimes. Sulphur or phosphate based fetiilizers equals vegetables. Further, to get 5000 tonnes of any substance at all into Afghanistan and Chechnya would require some considerable resources and logistical clout - which would be a great deal of effort just to grow pretty flowers in Kabul or Grozny. Ahmad was also accused of being in the possession of a "a several page tourist brochure of the Empire State Building" which, although dating back to 1973 when Ahmad's father visited the building, could entail a fiendish plan to detonate a major public building. The affidavit promises a specific reference to Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan in some of Babar Ahmad's 1997/8 correspondence, but never delivers it. What it does say is that someone asked a company to contact Ahmad in connection with the export of "mangoes" (scare quotes in original). Now, what various things can a Muslim man mean by "mangoes"? Presumably US intelligence imagines that there is some Quranic code in which "mangoes" is deciphered as "lots of weapons".

Ahmad is accused of mon-military support for mujahideen in Afghanistan or Chechnya during the late 1990s, but even if it is true, this was not illegal.

Haroon Rashid Aswat's case is even more strange. This man, alleged by two former American intelligence officials to have been an MI6 asset, is also blamed in the papers by unnamed "counterterrorism officials" of having been instrumental in the 7/7 attacks. He is said to have been to Afghanistan, trained in camps, and met bin Laden before being deported from Zambia to the United Kingdom in August last year. He is accused of having scoped out a potential terrorist training base in Oregon, the same surveillance operation attributed to unnamed Egyptian operatives under the instruction of Abu Hamza (Aswat was born in Yorkshire and is of Indian origin).

If there is evidence against these two individuals, then it would cause no difficulty at all to try them in the UK. Even supposing the two men are treated to a New York court rather than an offshore gulag, one assumes they will have stun belts to prevent any unfortunate outbursts.

"Routine" posted by lenin

"The Palestinian sources say that the youth, Shadi Naif, was with several dozen youths who were hurling rocks at soldiers conducting a routine operation in the village."

They're spoiling it. posted by lenin

The latest rhetorical turn from Washington is that their occupation would be going perfectly fine, thank you, if the Iraqis would stop ruining it. "We all want them to succeed," Democratic Senator Evan Bayuh comaplained. "We all want them to be able to stabilize their country with the assistance that we've provided them." But "too often they seem unable or unwilling to do that." Senator Linsdey Graham, a Republican, reckons that "the Iraqis are incapable of solving their own problems through the political process and will resort to violence". And Carl Levin, who has always opposed the Iraq adventure and is on the liberal end of the Democrat party says "We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves." "Our commitment, while great, is not unending". Further: It's all Sadr's fault.

This is the mainstream critique of the war. The insistence of Bush that he will persist until "the mission is complete" and the recent hints that the British army will keep their troops in Iraq until 2016 reflects the fact that there is an interest and a strategy at stake that the occupiers can't afford to give up without a fight. They know that withdrawal will be seen as a massive defeat with global reverberations. A large part of the US political class which supported the war has decided that there will have to be a carefully managed extrication, and the pedictable line is therefore that Iraqis weren't up to the lofty goals that America had crafted for them. It conserves the empire, which will have many more battles ahead of it, offering a way out of the quagmire without conceding any important ideological claims.

The European ruling classes, meanwhile, are dragging their feet about supporting the Bush-Blair axis any further. They certainly don't want Afghanistan to fall to insurgents, but nor are they happy with continuing to throw cash and military capacity into operations run by a political alliance they no longer trust. They presumably want the Democrats to take the executive and mount a more cautious strategy to achieve essentially the same goals.

The Discrete Charm of the American Bourgeoisie. posted by lenin

The point about the pro-war left is that it doesn't drive anything. It is one expression, and a very muddled one at that, of a more general phenomenon, which is the ascent of the US ruling class in relation to the rest of the world, and its gravitational pull. I am forced by the limits of my knowledge to describe this in Anglophone terms, but it is global. Capitalist classes and their penumbra in the professions (including media professions) became evangelically pro-US throughout the 1990s, implementing savage attacks on the domestic working class and minorities in the name of 'globalisation'. Neoliberalism as originally conceived was a counter-revolutionary doctrine, a part of the fight against the left. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the speedy and rapid triumph of the US in destroying the former Soviet economies, and the capitulation of even militant working class movements in South Africa and Latin America, but also for instance the mainstream labour movement in the UK whose main political party was effortlessly taken over by a clique of neoliberals, and the absorption of the American left into Clintonian capitalism, it became a doctrine of full spectrum dominance.

The capitalist class on its own would not be able to so completely hegemonise the ideological scene, even with the collapse of the USSR. Its main allies have been segments of the middle class, which in every country is the largest social base for neoliberalism. Enthusiastically supportive of the essential co-ordinates of the neoliberal roadmap, but disappointed by the mainstream right and its insistence on polarising the working class, these segments swung sometimes decisively behind Third Way-style candidates in the 1990s. The conservative parties still tended to talk in the language of national sovereignty, whereas they were persuaded of the need for straightforward American tutelage (even if their strategy for neoliberalism involved appeals to European monetary union as an 'alternative' to America). Without the empire and with the labour movement defeated, the appeal to petit-bourgeois nationalism was seen as comical. And in a period of relative capitalist recovery (what was variously and fatuously referred to as the 'goldilocks economy' or the 'new economic paradigm'), they could even afford some concessions. The price paid by Third Way parties for accepting the fair weather support of this social class was the internal erosion of their base, something New Labour leaders in particular were perfectly complacent about. This has meant a recomposition in the passive and active support for those parties, which have become disproportionately male, white, middle class and professional. They have come to embody a new set of interests, a process underway long before Rupert Murdoch offered his endorsement.

This particular neoliberal 'left' was already fully signed up to American dominance and a thousand year reich of liberal capitalism. There would be no more putches, since there wasn't a combative working class to suppress - indeed, many members of this class seem to have persuaded themselves that the working class no longer existed, even as they had to pay their cleaners a new minimum wage. Instead, the United States would democratise - prudently, of course, but without hesitation. They would overthrow authoritarian populists and ideological relics of the Cold War and intervene in crisis situations. They would help strengthen government capacities and enable states to negotiate their way through this 'globalisation' business. They might be a little selfish and hypocritical, perhaps even downright bounders from time to time - but have you seen the alternative?

That class was solidly behind the attacks on Yugoslavia, applauded "British steel" in Sierra Leone, and were even uneasily supportive of the bombing of Afghanistan. They entered into passive compact with that section of the working class that tends to reflexively support the military. That compact broke down over Iraq: the disgusting legacy of sanctions reminded people of America's grotesque indifference to Iraqis; because of 9/11, real questions about US power were being asked; the Israeli incursions into Palestine became an issue of real significance, perhaps for the first time, and so Zionism - usually a means by which people have moved to the right - was deligitimised; and it was far from easy to raise militarist hysteria over such a humdrum 'challenge' as Iraq. Some of the most pro-American commentators across the world were unconvinced by the case for attacking Iraq, and as a result were forced to reconcile what was happening with their idolatry of the stars and stripes (hence the Bush demonology, almost as popular in some conservative quarters as in the liberal papers). Many of those who supported the war later recanted. Perfectly content with neoliberalism and the Clintonite imperial strategies they saw as being congruent with that, a large part of this class was appalled by Bush's polarising rhetoric and failure to see the world in the many shades of grey that they perceived. The middle class neoliberals had split: one segment pushed to the left, and another pushed into coalitions with the hard right.

For if 9/11 appeared to raise the stakes and force concentration on hitherto neglected issues, it and various attacks since, also raised a massive wave of racism, which parties of the right have benefited from. At the start of this year, 26 OECD countries were governed by parties of the right. The remainder of the pro-war left has one answer to this, given its fanatical insistence on staying the course: capitulate. Whether bandying more or less explicit endorsements of fascism by Sam Harris, complaining about the 'neglect' of the white working class (as per Margaret Hodge), or moaning about an alleged threat to free speech and Enlightenment values from 'Muslim leaders' (who are held responsible for separating Muslim voters from their natural political allegiances, stirring up anger and so on), the only question is to what extent one gives in.

In Britain, the likelihood is that David Cameron's Tories, having adopted the cynosures of the centre-left, will regain a large number of former Blair voters, disillusioned in the Bush-Blair axis but certainly not ready to abandon the macro-economic consensus, even though Cameron himself is careful to stick to strict orthodoxy on Iraq and Israel. They will see off the Liberal Democrats to some extent, but the latter too will mop up disaffected middle-class Blairites. Some will go to the Greens, perhaps a few to Respect, but an even larger bloc will remain unaligned for the time being. The 'pro-war left' will be the husk that remains.

Scavati! posted by lenin

I thought you might fancy a quick look at some snaps from my recent weekend visit to Rome. These are a few from a sample I uploaded quickly. There are more, but not necessarily better, shots. My camera didn't handle the light of Rome very well, I fear. Plus, I stayed at the cheap end of town, near the Termini, where there an inexplicable number of expensive gourmet restaurants lodged sharing space with dogshit, cheap hotels, and graffiti.

This is the colloseum:

Apparently this structure would have been covered by marble and gold-plating and such, but it was stripped by successive Christian rulers for other buildings, which almost makes me wish I'd crossed the Tiber and visited the Vatican. All the Roman authorities have done is built a steel enclosure, put a price tag on and stuck a size-nine halo on top of the edifice. Those little tunnels floored with grass were apparently underground chambers where they would keep animals and things to swipe at the gladiators.

The colleseum arches all present lovely portraits:

However, you can't beat the view from the Palatine, or the early-morning smell (you have to understand that the hills in Rome are covered with herbs and orchards, and that the temperature during November is a moist 20C):

These are some ruins, apparently the gutted innards of some emperor's palace or something. I didn't pay that much attention:

This is the weather-eaten edifice of a court-house with a brass door:

And this is the Roman Senate House, a considerably smaller affair than textbooks and tourist guides would have us believe:

This is the sort of place where Tiberius or some bastard would have given out about the taxes and the peasants. And here is the view from inside the Pantheon:

Originally a temple for all the Gods, it was taken over by Christians and plastered with crosses and that kind of thing. They didn't take well to the mass executions. Directly opposite the Pantheon is a McDonalds, cunningly disguised as a restaurant. If you stand outside it for a while and look touristy, then you will either have something snatched or at least five couples will ask you to take their picture. I personally fucked up quite a few happy memories.

Here are the Spanish steps, which you apparently must see if you're a tourist:

They're crap. A man came with fresh-cut cemetery roses covered in pesticide and told me I was a very very romantic guy. He forced one on the person I was with and then, pleased with his artistry, wondered if we might donate to his funds. He told me once more what a romantic guy I was. Very romantic. I laid some of my much-needed Euros on him, and that's when I realised he wasn't coming on to me.

Here are some government buildings up on the Quirinale - cold, windy, largely empty and frequently swept through by convoys of military men, rather like the politicians who occupy them:

Indeed, as I crossed that rather lonely square, a naval bus almost ran me over impatiently. The navy guys looked at me with pity and contempt as I fumbled onto the pavement. Anyway, there was a great deal of political polarisation evident too. Lots of apparently fascist graffiti, such as this:

And the communists shared public space with Forza Italia (no sign of Ulivo):

Finally, this is a pointless picture of Paddington Station I took when I realised that we were back to 10C temperatures. I like 10C temperatures in November: that's what it's supposed to be. Rome - what did it ever do for anyone?

Thomas Friedman: "reoccupy Iraq". posted by lenin

Friedman, the doyen of populicide, is saying that Iraq's problems a) result from the lack of a will to be a country, b) result from the failure of the US to occupy the country more than once, and c) result from a thirty-sided civil war. When the one thing you can't say is the only thing that would make any sense, this is the kind of pundit-babble one is reduced to.

Tripoli posted by lenin

Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing really can't be recommended highly enough. Some particularly suggestive passages deal with Italy's pitch for colonial status. There had been, in 1911, a convention at the Institute for International Law in Madrid, to discuss the question of whether this new technique of air bombing on population centres should be permitted. The Hague Conventions of 1907 discusses naval bombardment only and forbids solely the bombing of "undefended" cities. What constitutes an "undefended" city is somewhat vague. Some argued that as an aircraft couldn't carry a great deal of explosives, certainly much less than traditional technologies of attack that were permitted, it should be allowed. Others argued that because air bombing was so imprecise, the killing of civilians could not be avoided, and therefore the technique should be banned.

But this was rather the point: noncombatants would be churned up by these bombs. In the same year as the conference, the Italian government embarked on a belated grab for the last Ottoman space in North Africa - a miserly goal compared to the extensive rule of the Romans whom they sought to emulate - and in the process pioneered the bombing of cities from the air. The bombing was not initially of great military significance, and the Arabs were almost able to drive the Italian ground forces back to the sea. The Italians responded, as did all colonial powers to such affronts, with indiscriminate and savage attacks, tearing up babies and the elderly with bayonets and bullets. Those whom they could not reach with rifles were got at with air bombing. It was an act of revenge, and it had what was gleefully announced as a "wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs".

The Ottomans gave over, but the resistance did not, and so the bombing went on. The Maghreb was trebly cursed by African savagery, Arab deviousness and Mohammedan fanaticism, and so bombing was extolled by the nationalist poets (such as Marinetti and D'Annunzio) as an act of hygeine, and of civilisation. The dancing Dervishes and Marabouts were legendary material for the Orientalists. Blood feuds, slave raids, rituals - all of which was impeccably European - become part of the atmosphere which conduced to mass slaughter by ubermensch floating on a thousand-foot column of air. Richard Burton, one of the earliest Orientalists, and presumably a constant inspiration to Thomas Friedman, could say that Egypt longed for "iron-fisted and lion-hearted rule". They do like it up them, you see.

So, Italy's eventual conquest, named "Libya" in 1934 under the leadership of failed novelist, was the laboratory for future wars on backward peoples.

In other news, the US Air Force is demanded an extra $33.4bn to conduct its part of the war on terror. Having waged a secret air war on Iraq from 2002, the USAF has gone on to conduct a fairly secret air war since 2005. Civilisation costs money.

Humanitarian intervention. posted by lenin

This takes some cheek from the French government. As the new revelations about Western intervention into the genocide in Rwanda (ie to assist it) continue to emerge in obscurity, France has struck back by accusing Paul Kagame of assassinating Juvenal Habyarimana, something generally said until now to have been carried out by those who took advantage of his death to launch the genocide. The BBC reports this as a diplomatic crisis brought about by the decision of a French Judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, to try and indict nine of Kagame's deputies: no mention of the recent charges that France assisted the genocidaires. You can be as cynical as you like about Kagame - his soldiers have effectively acted as Western footmen, carrying out their own acts of genocide in the Congo while pilfering the resources - but the idea of the French government indicting anyone for what transpired is sinister and absurd. Almost as absurd as world powers 'trying' Milosevic or Saddam for crimes they had a hand in.

Reparations. posted by lenin

Let's get this straight: Iraq pays KFC 'reparations'; Iraq pays Saudi Arabia 'reparations'; Iraq pays Halliburton 'reparations'.

Of course, the biggest chunk of all reparations goes to Kuwait's state-owned oil industry, but it is, like the Saudi equivalent, a proxy property of Western capital. The deal is, in return for being allowed to shared in the privileges of the Western investors, the British-created Kuwaiti royal family and its narrow penumbra suppress the rest of the population, most of whom are denied citizenship rights. A work force formerly composed to a large of Palestinians who fled to the country in the 1950s, but now migrant workers from nearby states and the Indian subcontinent, continues to build and maintain the economic infrastructure. Only about one fifth of the Kuwaiti workforce are permitted citizenship, and only those who have had citizenship for more than thirty years are allowed to vote (which means the tiny propertied elite is allowed a say in how its loots is managed). Fred Halliday once characterised it, in Arabia Without Sultans, as a new form of slavery: it is one, moreover, entirely at the service of Western investors.

That's a round about way of saying that Iraq is paying reparations to those who have already squeezed it dry. Halliburton!

Sadr City. posted by lenin

The US attacks Sadr City, repeatedly blasts it to smithereens, kills dozens of civilians, and claims to have killed about 50 'insurgents' thus far. This is part of what they are calling Operation Together Forward. Sadr City has repeatedly fought the occupation and refused to be run by its troops, and the occupiers have been unable, despite their best efforts to take it over. A brutal US-imposed blockade was defeated at the beginning of the month. On 23rd November, last week, a series of six parked cars exploded with hundreds of kilos of explosives tore through markets in the city, home to about 2 million people. They managed to kill 202 of them, and wouned hundreds of others. The day after, there was once more intense warfare between the US forces and 'insurgents' there. Mortars have also been landing on the city, apparently courtesy of Sunni 'insurgents', while gunmen have opened fire on the Iraqi Ministry of Health, run by a supporter of Sadr. Over the weekend, mortars from near Sadr City hit a US post, but the Americans are refusing to describe the impact. The Sadrists have also threatened to walk out of the government if Maliki goes ahead with meeting Bush, thus potentially causing it to collapse.

It's now reported that the Mahdi Army are a bit pissed off with the attacks from occupiers and alleged Sunni insurgents, and took over the state-run television station to complain. The US-funded al-Iraqiya station has usually been the receptacle for programmes featuring heroic Special Police Commandos interrogating tortured 'terrorists'. It is reported in this piece that a number of Sadr supporters denounced the occupation, branded Sunnis 'terrorists' and threatened attacks on Sunni neighbourhoods. If true, this would be the first occasion on which the Sadrists had openly threatened sectarian attacks. It is widely reported that Sadr's followers have carried out such attacks, and this includes some lurid stories of Sunni patients being killed in Iraqi hospitals (the Iraqi Ministry of Health is run by a Sadr supporter). However, previous reports have tended to indicate that the Sadrist leadership discourages such actions. As this news item argues, the Mahdi Army is modelling itself on Hezbollah, providing welfare services, clearing up after bombings, and militarily defending its community.

Toby Dodge, the renowned historian of Iraq, calls this "anarchy, a war of all against all". It is better regarded as a "strategy of tension". It is believable that Sunni sectarians attacked Sadr City at exactly the same time as the occupiers were doing so, for their own reasons. Various English language websites claiming to be affiliated to the Iraqi resistance hail the attacks on Sadr City as operations against the Mahdi Army, whom they accuse of assisting the occupiers. On the other hand, of course, it isn't at all implausible that US surrogates planted a series of car bombs to attack the city. However, more importantly, the sectarian political process is being driven by the occupiers, and at the moment the effect is that anti-coalition fighters appear to be busily vanquishing one another rather than uniting against the common enemy.

Robert Walpole "sorry" for Iraq war. posted by lenin

In an article to be published in The Slaverie Chronickle, Sir Robert Walpole is expected to express "deep sorrow" for the British role in the extermination in Messopotaymia. Although it does not go as far as some campaigners are hoping for, Sir Walpole is expected to say:

Tis scandalous that in less than Three Hundred Years, a villeinous crime against humanity will be legal. Tis the appurtenance of vile Frenchies.

I believe the bicentenary offerf uf a chance not juft to say how profoundly fhameful the occupation of Iraq will be - how we condemn its exiftence utterly and praife thofe who fought for its abolition - but also to exprefs our deep sorrow that it could ever happen and rejoice at the better timef we live in today.

The Lord Chancellore also announced new initiatives against the heinous Jacobite insurgencie.

The Royal Britifh Telegramf Companie, MDCCXXXII.

Civil society as repression and expropriation. posted by lenin

George Caffenztis, a historian of the 'civilisation' of Scotland, made the point that should be axiomatic: that 'civilisation' emerged in the form of the forceful spread of capitalist social-property forms, as a kind of repression and expropriation. Liberal nostrums which are today so hegemonic usually have their origins in repression, and are usually sustained by the same. For Nietzche, even Kant's categorical imperative had a whiff of the torture chamber about it. But take this business about civil society: many of the more right-wing marxists operating in the field of International Relations, such as Mary Kaldor, tried to salvage this concept for the left as an oppositional movement to imperialism ('International Civil Society'), as a potentially antisystemic movement. They did this precisely at the time that 'civil society' was the chief liberal buzz-word with reference to the developing insurgencies in the Warsaw Pact states and Soviet Union, which was slowly collapsing.

For the 'anti-totalitarian' movement, the idea of developing a strong civil society rooted in rights discourse in opposition to the centralised state and big business, was crucial. Civil society would be a space for different publics to compete and collaborate, and would develop a network of institutions capable of exerting democratic pressures against potentially tyrannical powers. People would be protected from the worst of market society by a strong welfare state. Civil society would overcome the atomisation essential to 'totalitarian' state control. This was the rallying cry of people like Ralph Dahrendorf (himself a student of Karl Popper) and Timothy Garton Ash, at the same time as most of the institutions of the public life that represented democratic pressures (trade unions, liberal academia, the health service, welfare, local authorities) were under attack in the West under the rubric of neoliberalism. Social atomisation and the diminution of democratic counter-pressures was one indubitable result. Still, the collapse of the Stalinist states, it was hoped, would lead to the embedding of precisely this arrangement of affairs in all those societies.

But although the shedding of 'communism' was not a popular call for the introduction of capitalism (note here that when I talk about capitalism, I refer specifically to the usual version in which the capitalist class is formally independent of the state), particularly not in its neoliberal version, Jeffrey Sachs and the other pioneers of "shock therapy" were bullish: Sachs specifically rebuked Dahrendorf for endorsing open experimentation rather than capitalism, and proceeded with a process of social engineering whose ideology and subsequent materialisation merits some examination. Peter Gowan has performed this task admirably on numerous occasions, but you have to pay for those.

While people like Dahrendorf endorsed a kind of Millian liberalism, in which an economic system could be elaborated out of the free interplay of actors in a liberal society, Michael Ignatieff was quite explicit that 'civil society' had triumphed already and capitalist social relations had to be enforced through the power of the magistrate. Indeed, for Ignatieff, the principal use of the concept of civil society was as a counter to a potential "authoritarian populism". For this reason, while strong states were to be encouraged, the West should fund 'independent media' (he missed the contradiction there) and maintain ties with the opposition and every branch of the state, in order to encourage "the refusal to privilege public goals over private ones" as well as "the insistence that liberty can only have a negative rather than a positive content". In other words, this student of Isaiah Berlin would insist that states should be uncompromisingly authoritarian in suppressing popular tendencies to seek "positive" liberties, such as the right to eat nutritious food and drink safe water.

Sachs didn't see the need for such crude measures direct bribery and so on. He instead argued that "There is real truth in the marxist label for liberal democracy: 'bourgeois democracy'." A bourgeoisie had to be engineered. Similarly, Western policy had to be so designed that the highly weakened states of the CIS and Eastern Europe would embrace the development of robust capitalist institutions. For this purpose, the Comecon region had to be broken up, and the development of a new capitalist legal structure was to be made the condition for normalising relations with Western states, using economic incentives and sympathetic governments to force these changes through. There was to be fully open trade, full currency convertibility, corporate ownership as the dominant organisational form, and membership of key global institutions such as GATT, the IMF and the World Bank. The West had tremendous bargaining power in all this: "the capacity to open or close their markets to East European products; to decide on debt, on grant aid, on loans, and on the terms for loans for political as well as economic purposes, on technology transfers, on currency support and so on; to decide on entry or exclusion from international institutions; to allow Eastern workers to flow westwards." The beauty of this formula was that the more states accepted such goals as a result of the exertion of Western power, the more the power of Western states over them was augmented.

This involved Western states in alliances with segments of the new elites (often remnants of the old nomenklatura) in order to suppress popular pressures. In Poland, for instance, the worker-based syndicalist element of Solidarnosc demanded the strengthening of self-management arrangements over state enterprises, rather than their being handed over to corporations. The neoliberals in government instead pursued the centralisation of power in the hands of state agencies, and imposed tough wage controls on the public sector, which were not imposed on the private sector, thus producing a demand among workers for privatisation. This is how people like Sachs do it: by the arrangement of legal structures with appropriate incentives and penalties to engineer the desired outcomes. One of his more notable arguments for opposing workers' control was that international investors wouldn't trust them, itself an appeal to the automatic wielding of power by the owners of capital, rather than legal repression. On the other hand, this had to involve the suppression of any form popular resistance, even in the diffused form of the Russian parliament's reversal of its approval for shock therapy. The Economist called for Yeltsin to overthrow the new constitutional state in which he had been able to be elected, and this he did some five months later, to general applause.

The results? Well, on 2nd January 1992, ‘shock therapy’ in Russia began in earnest. The shock came in two ways – first, the price explosion (food suddenly cost four times what it used to), and second, the massive public expenditure cut-backs. Inflation did drop – from almost 250% in January 1992 to approximately 30% in December 1992. Progress indeed. By 1995, it was estimated that 80% of Russians had suffered a serious decline in their income. Income from work for families had dropped from being about half of all income at the start of the 1990s to just 39% in 2000. From a mortality rate of 11 per thousand in 1990, the death rate soared to 15 per thousand in 2000, peaking in 1994 at almost 16 per thousand. In fact, in this “unprecedented peace time mortality”, we find an alarming underlying truth about Russian society. Between 1990 and 1999, there were 3,353,000 excess deaths in the whole Russian territory. Male life expectancy fell from 63.5 years in 1991 to 57.6 years in 1994. Female life expectancy fell from 74.3 years in 1991 to 71.2 years in 1994. (Michael Haynes and Rumy Hasan, A Century of State Murder? Death and Policy in Twentieth Century Russia, Pluto Press, 2003).

The creation of 'civil society' did not democratise the state or allow for free and open experimentation. Rather, it ended up enriching those who were best placed to benefit, usually ex-nomenklatura, and institutionalised a form of private tyranny underwritten by the state. This is what civil society is in essence: in Adam Ferguson's formulation, it is a "commercial state", in which alternative forms of social life, such as the commons and communal life are suppressed.

Curiouser and curiouser. posted by lenin

We're still on the theme of films, I'm afraid. I didn't want to contribute to the still churning tidal wave of ordure about Borat, but a glance at the Genocide Tribune brought this curious complaint from the right-wing film critic Joe Queenan to my attention:

Baron Cohen is just another English public school boy who hates Americans. It is fine to hate Americans; it is one of Europe's oldest traditions. But the men who flew the bombing raids over Berlin and the men who died at Omaha Beach and the women who built the Flying Fortresses and Sherman tanks that helped defeat Hitler are the very same people that Baron Cohen pisses all over in Borat. A lot of folks named Cohen would not even be here making anti-American movies if it were not for the hayseeds he despises. [Emphasis added]

The poster is Gene, who got it from Norman Geras - both, mind you, ordinarily rather quick to condemn criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Never mind the "we yanks saved you guys during WWII" shtick. That part of the criticism merely complements some of the sniffy neoconservative whinges from Hitchens and the rest, which are basically to the effect that Americans come off rather beautifully despite the efforts of the satirist (because they were polite in front of the cameras). Queenan adds the claim that the Americans liberated the concentration camps, which is no more deluded than the usual. But the last sentence communicates outrage that a Jew, of all people, would be so outrageous as to satirise Americans. Ingrate! How dare he? As it happens, the Soviet Union, of which Kazakhstan was once a part, played a far more significant role in the liberation of concentration camps than the You Ess of Aiii, but Queenan has no problem with the genuinely crude and racist depiction of that country and those people, and the smearing of Kazakhs as antisemites (without, by the way, even being so courteous as to interview anyone and elicit such sentiments). Queenan's slap-down to this Jew merely means that he agrees with Borat: they should be sanctimoniously squashed if they dare criticise Glorious Nation. In fact, he agrees that Glorious Nation should "sue this Jew". Gene and Geras appear to agree.

So, Mister Bond... posted by lenin

Holy fucking Christ. Someone induced me to go see this in exchange for a free ticket and a bag of sweets. I have always hated Bond films: I found them embarrassing and stupid when I was five, and even the hot flushes of adolescence couldn't get me interested in Roger Moore trying not to be a fat girdle-wearing fuck, or Sean Connery issuing dumbass sadistic one-liners after knocking someone off. Fuck all that in the ear. So, anyway, here's the synopsis: the new Bond movie lasts for about nine hours. It spent the first three hours sending me gently to sleep on a soundtrack of meaningless explosions and soaring orchestrals. For the next three hours, it reached its hand into my trousers and pulled me off. Yoink yoink yoink. And for the remainder I endured what can only be described as the most inept plucking at the heart-strings since Princess Diana kicked the bucket.

The plot is slightly less sophisticated and consistent than your average episode of Bill and Ben. I intend to reveal salient details in what follows, but the concept of a 'spoiler' doesn't apply to this film. Basically, some nebulous, ever-scowling African 'freedom fighters', procure the services of a French money-launderer and investor (whose name is 'Le Shifty' or something like that) who in turn secures the contracts of mercenaries to blow up an airplane. Quite why he makes his money this way is mysterious. Of course, Le Shifty is quite ugly (unlike Danny Craig, with the cornflower-blue eyes), and - get this - he weeps blood. Ooooh, ickeeeeee. He's horrible, Daddy, I don't like him! The freedom fighters have no cause, beyond that of blowing things up. They sneer. They scowl. They kill with a gruelling determination. And they are, of course, utterly styleless (unlike you-know-who). Their inscrutable leader asks the French guy if he believed in God (out of nowhere, as you do), and Le Shifty coldly says "no, I believe in a healthy rate of return!" (Odd how in films like this, the values of capitalism are made illicit, criminalised - none of your actual run of the mill capitalists are so crude as to make a profit, or run sweatshops, or sell expensive goods, or deal with unscrupulous people). So, Le Shifty has bet against the market in short-selling airline shares (this is drawn directly from what happened on 9/11, as it happens), because he fully expects the airplane to be blown up. Problem: Bond foils it through the usual array of yawn-inducing stunts. So, now Le Shifty has to get the money back for the freedom fighters or they're going to kill his ass. He goes to play a card game, and Bond is sent along to play against him using squillions of treasury bills.

"You do realise", Eva Green tells Danny flirtatiously (she's always flirtatious, since the role of every woman in the film is to be a potential fuckbuddy for Bond), "that if you lose, the British government will have funded terrorism?" Well, that would be a fucking novelty, wouldn't it? A look of horror passes over Danny's face. Anyway, it turns out we needn't worry because Danny has some miraculous poker skills (turns out there are these things called "tells"), and he is able to kick Le Shifty's ass at long length, despite the fact that the dastards poison Bond and force him to retreat to his sports car and pull a defibrillator (yes, a fucking defibrillator) out of the glove compartment, whereupon he administers surgery to himself. Anyway, he wins and falls in love with Eva, who is in love with him, but then at the end it turns out she isn't really, but then she is again and then she dies (this while drowning in a lift that's floating through the debris of a recently collapsed house in Venice). And then Bond gets all Hulkamania, and goes after the bad guy and, having shot him in the leg, stands over him in a perfectly tailored tux with a well-hard rifle saying "I'm Craig, Danny Craig". Fade to black, cue titles. At some point in the middle of all this, Bond has been tortured and cracked a few dark witticisms (tee hee, torture is cool), and also shot dead some inconsequential affiliate of the freedom fighters in the middle of the embassy of some country that they never deign to name, and he is unfairly maligned in the press as having killed an unarmed prisoner (that's our spies, for you - always being slandered by the liberal media class).

Danny Boy: "Does my cock look big in this?"

Judi Dench does her usual thing in these films as a flimsy, indulgent matriarch, full of biting witticisms about arse-covering parliamentary bureaucrats who would stop her brave boys from killing whoever they want to. She's the intelligence chief with the heart of gold, constantly outraged by Bond's indiscretions, but secretly adoring him. Mads Mikkelsen is gripping as Le Shifty, and I look forward to his next role as a Serbian communofascist. Jeffrey Wright, a brilliant actor, was utterly wasted as "the brother from Langley". A number of female actresses are introduced to swelling orchestrals as classical Bond Babes. Various unknown actors die competently. Aside from phallic pistols, lots of gadgets are ostentatiously wielded, but I have a sense that writers are getting sick of this: nothing they show us is particularly stunning. There is a curious sense of awe about the cunning use of text messaging and DVDs, despite the fact that Roger Moore and Sean Connery both had to deal with gargantuan laser beams and moon-walkers. SMS fetishism is a miserable excuse for the usual technophilic glee that these films exhibit.

And of course, the film consciously reaffirms the literary cliche that spies are sexually charismatic, unusually intelligent and sadistic, charming their way into the lives and beds of enemies, before wasting them with a one-liner as dry as a shaken Martini. Decisive, effectual, calculating and ultimately superior in every way to the anonymous henchmen they send to their graves every day, they are the modern equivalent of those awesome and thrilling heroes, the aristocrats of early modern Europe. From Percy Blakeney to James Bond, the fixtures of clandestine political subversion have been the same.

I have always been stunned by the popularity of Bond movies, and especially by people who think it's 'only' a bit of entertainment. Bond movies are the most political films you usually get to see from the Hollywood mainstream, and the message isn't exactly shrouded in subtlety. I am also stunned that the audience is so willing to be mind-fucked in public - have some dignity. If you're going to laugh at yet another dull witticism from a cold, unappealling sociopath, then take it home and watch the DVD, for fuck's sake. The only heartening moment was when I realised that someone behind me was listening to their walkman, a lonely and short-lived protest. If the producers are looking for audience feedback, may I suggest a cold shower and an anti-perspirant? Because you fucking stink.

Conspiro! posted by lenin

Conspiracy is suddenly all the rage on the front pages of UK newspapers. Of course, it is a little difficult to resist the possibility that Alexander Litvinenko was radioactively poisoned by Russian intelligence given that they are said to have legalised the killing of people overseas. And given that Litvinenko, having previously worked for the FSB, had previously dished a lot of dirt, perhaps reliable and perhaps not, suggesting that the FSB had been involved in orchestrating terrorist attacks in Mosvow, and that he was reportedly trying to uncovered information about the alleged assassination of the great Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya - well, okay, it has a passing plausibility about it.

I raise it, in part, because no one questions it. There isn't the slightest eyebrow raised, not even a hint of real scepticism except for some slightly eccentric pro-Russians (the anti-conspiracy theorists are the eccentrics now). I also raise it because it strikes me that conspiracy theory has been a part of official ideology for the last century at least. From Reds under every bed to semites in every closet, all the the way to the Yellow Peril and the ocotopoid threat of various Arabs or Muslims (Saddam's gonna invade Saudi Arabia - the Muslim Brothers are gonna conquer Europe), conspiracy theory in the sense of potent, occult operations affecting global politics, has been the official story.

I remember my lecturer on Politics and the Middle East last year explaining (as a good anti-Orientalist liberal) how he had been obliged to explain to some Arab that the conspiracy theories he had learned in the Middle East might work in Cairo, but this is London (he literally phrased it like this). He thought it was quite funny, and he urged us students to resist the temptation to see things in terms of conspiracies. As a general piece of advice, incidentally, this isn't useless. However, the claim that there are conspiracy theories in the Middle East and nowhere else is patently ludicrous and false. Western states, especially European states, have provided the script. What is more, movies love conspiracy. Television loves conspiracy. The Daily Express, with its endless tittilating nuggets of gossip about Diana's death, loves conspiracy.

I think it's worth distinguishing between a few different things when we talk about conspiracy theories, then: there is that which precedes political analysis, that starts from the proposition that the world works through the secretive actions of a nameable few, which is a kind of magical thinking (Robin Ramsay wonders why interest in conspiracies often goes along with an interest in the occult, and this may be why); there is that which is sensationalist, and which haphazardly picks up on topics where there is some salacious interest and where it is politically harmless; and there is that which is strictly historical and provisional, rooted in a deeper and broader political analysis, (for instance, that provided by Daniele Ganser).

Still, as a genre, conspiracy theories emerge directly from the ruling class, whose irrationalism (not irrationality, not inattentiveness to their own interests) is boundless, and it is a mistake for us to accept it as a genre even if only to reverse the value significations (as in, "you're the conspiracy Unca Sammy, whaaaa!"). Is it altogether surprising that people like Alex Jones can take classical Cold War anticommunist, Christian, pro-gun, 'libertarian' politics and now offer it as a form of dissent (in which the Federal government are now the communists)? The genre is tainted at source. This is not to say that you shouldn't dream of considering the possibility that Nato left stay behind terrorist armies in Europe (there is no doubt that they did, and it has senior admission behind it) or that the US organises death squads in Iraq (ditto) or anything else that could plausibly be considered as a secretive operation by powerful ruling class interests. This happens to be one of the ways in which politics is conducted. But let's not forget the politics and the cultural output that has encouraged people to map their whole understanding of the world in this fashion, to make conspiracy the master-signifier. And let's bear in mind that there is usually little we can do about any putative conspiracy beyond strengthening our class and making sure it is capable of minimising the effects of such activities.

Absolute Muppets posted by lenin

Something for Friday night.

Deathly and toxic. posted by lenin

Dominic Fox's new blog Necrotic Toxicity is a laugh, despite the fact that he personally cuts an unfairly dashing and romantic figure in real life. I think he's started the new blog as a refuge from the over-scrutinised blog that he maintains elsewhere. Why not spoil it for him by visiting? Tell him I sent you, and he'll give you a free kick in the face.

Genocide and war is good for business. posted by lenin

It's true - ask the Swiss banks. Of course, on the theme of confessions, it was rather important for the US business class to prove through its senatorial subsidiaries that an antiwar politician, and not capitalist multinationals, was responsible for utilising the vicious blockade on Iraq to secure billions of dollars (I'm not sure if 'blockade' is a better euphemism than 'sanctions', since it really boils down to Western imperialist control of the Iraqi treasury, and therefore the securing of a dependent Iraqi populace, not only needful of the miserly provisions from the Ba'athist regime but also 'liberation' from the West). Hence, drag George Galloway in front of a committee that has already decided his guilt and declared the verdict, in order to see if a confession can be induced: the spectacle doesn't always go the way of the ruling class, however.

On the matter of the creaming off of billions of Iraqi cash, there is an uncharacteristically interesting post at Crooked Timber courtesy of it's gnarled Australian branch. The Australian Wheat Board, which is a privatised monopoly - that is, it is legally guaranteed by the state, but floated on the stock market, rather like the arms industry - took about $100 million from the Iraqi people through the oil-for-food programme. Iraq is a big wheat importer, and US and Australian agribusiness have competed for its markets for years. Earlier this year, AWB Ltd once again beat the Americans for the contracts. Well, the latest revelations suggest that AWB Ltd had an inside track on the plans for war, this as a result of it being still effectively a state enterprise (but one in which the costs are covered by taxpayers and profits accrue to the private capitalist class), and of its chief Trevor Flugge being told by the Australian ambassador to the UN in February 2002 that the war was on. I'm less interested in the Downing Street Memo aspect of this - we already knew that the war was on for months if not years before it began - than what it tells us about the imbrication of the state and 'private' enterprise, particularly when it comes to imperial adventures.

It's an old Leninist insight that when it comes to imperialism, the largest sectors of capital meld with the state to procure investment opportunities (ie to mop up surplus capital), which becomes especially aggressive when domestic growth opportunities are limited. The neoliberal model involves simply a global system of tutelage and bribery in which well behaved statesmen accept 'loans' for themselves, their governments and their families provided they open up the economy to Western capital. Meanwhile, domestically the US capitalist class seeks to neoliberalise all the remaining welfare institutions (what are usually called 'middle class entitlements' for some stupid reason), and have so far failed to do so, even during a state of permanent declared war. At the same time, there remain states that are either sufficiently secure and economically strong as to have a measure of independence or that embody some kind of democratisation and popular will (respectively, you might say, Iran and Venezuela). And so, they are ideal targets of war and blockade, both of which are excellent business opportunities, but also are forms of class war, the attempt to reduce the risk of democracy to the health of capitalism.

Imperial states involve often very precarious coalitions between narrow but powerful interests, which operate precisely through the leverage of political and not purely economic power, and which are always massively corruptible and therefore susceptible to the liberal critique that they're not properly capitalist (as per the Crooked claim that AWB Ltd isn't really privatised). Perhaps also, because they have need of a great deal of evangelising zeal to mobilise populations, they are susceptible to the kind of apparently immanent critique in which they don't appear to live up to their 'usual' best (ie, Bush is becoming as bad as Them).

Confessional. posted by lenin

As far as the ruling class is concerned, the world really does reflect how its interests dictate it should be, and its behaviour really is virtuous. This necessarily means that its victims are nothing but chaff, people who lost the cosmic struggle for survival and supremacy. The system really is impeccably sane and meritocratic, and no reasonable person could see it any other way. What is more, any internal antagonism, any failure of the chaff to live up to its role as power house or fertiliser, has to be explained as an exogenous: it's all agitating Reds, a global conspiracy of semites of one kind or another. McCarthy will find them out. Stalin will find them out. When Stalin's henchmen tortured people for confessions, they wanted an admission that what it was doing was right, not merely for the records, not merely for public consumption: after all, they could have simply faked evidence of a confession, or even not bothered with a confession at all. It isn't as if anyone would have known worse or better. The confession has the function of confirming for the ruling class that its system is perfect, and that it is virtuous.

The pursuit of confessions is also a sadistic exertion of power, the forcing of a person to admit that the ruling class determines what is true and what is not. If the Fuhrer wants it, two and two equals five. The persistent use of torture even where it is known full well that no reliable information is to be obtained, say in Bagram or Abu Ghraib can't be explained in strict utilitarian terms, but it can be understood as an attempt to secure submission.

There is also the propagandistic function of course. Years of terrorism and sanctions against Libya, followed by a sudden and rather welcome bribe, produced an utterly phoney confession of guilt as to WMD development and involvement in terrorism. It corroborated the story that there were these Arab states that pursued these two evils, and did so at an important strategic moment. Factually, it was rubbish: I've touched on the preposterousness of the Lockerbie trial before, and again I urge you to consult the late Paul Foot's writing about this, and of course there was even an admission at the time that Libya did not really possess WMDs or even the beginnings of a programme. But it was most welcome, and it proved that the world really does work according to the maxim that "you're either with us or against us".

Finally, there is the straightforward cover for extortion. The occupiers of Afghanistan have, in securing the country, shipped a huge amount of cash to Hazrat Ali's gang. Ali, an old-time warlord who runs approximately 6,000 soldiers in the east of Afghanistan, has an interesting way of raising cash. His gang arrests alleged Taliban supporters, tortures them and gets the family to pay 'compensation' to get the person released. The belief that punishment itself proves guilt is thereby compounded by the family's tacit confession, in the form of compensatory payments.

And now the question is, can the same logic be applied to Syria? The Baker commission may well recommend 'dialogue' with Assad, but can this in practise mean a thorough confession of guilt in various assassinations - not by Assad himself, but perhaps by rogue elements - and a declaration that Syria is with, rather than against, 'us'? Will a combination of threats and bribery result in Syria paying out compensation, as Libya offered to pay the victims of the Lockerbie bombing? Perhaps Syria did actually do it, but it seems to me that the matter of who actually did assassinate Pierre Gemayel is not going to be determined by thorough investigation from the ever-pliable UN. It is going to be determined by power politics. It is, of course, unthinkable to blame Israel or the United States, despite the fact that they are obvious suspects. It is unthinkable because the world doesn't work that way: such an assassination by the US or Israel would, if acknowledge, annihilate the notion that the West only assassinates the bad guys, the chaff (which, of course, it does so openly and celebrates the results). So, as I say, the question is not going to be whether the Syrian government killed the fascist Gemayel, but whether the Syrian government will abandon even the pretense of independent nationalism and corroborate the West's story.

(I omit one other kind of confession, the kind that is offered defiantly and ironically - yes, yes, I am an extremist, I am indeed a witch, also a fanatic, and a terrorist to boot. I am evil. But this kind is no use to the ruling class.)

Theories, theories. posted by lenin

Competing theories about what happened to Pierre Gemayel's brains. Naturally, Maronite sectarians think it was Syria what done it, while "Syrian observers" say it doesn't serve Damascan interests, and so it must have been a US-Israel attack. So, now it's a game of fucking Cluedo, with the mooted possibility of civil war in the balance. The Angry Arab reports that Syrian workers are already being harrassed and beaten. The UN will investigate what it has already called an attack on Lebanon's sovereignty, and will presumably find, given the conclusion it has already drawn, that it was Bashir in the drawing room with the pistol.

Here's a theory: in mid-2006, Israel spent roughly 30 days assassinating civilians by the truck-load (and the ambulance-load). They were caught on camera doing it, and left physical evidence of amazing clarity. Would the UN care to investigate this scandalous assault on Lebanese sovereignty?

"You want some water? Keep running." posted by bat020

From the London Metro:

A video showing US soldiers in Iraq taunting thirsty children with a bottle of water has caused outrage. The footage shows a group of children desperately chasing a truck so they can get a drink.

Today the US Department of Defense confirmed the video showed US soldiers and said the images were 'unfortunate'. The faces of the two men in the vehicle are not revealed but they can be heard saying in American sounding accents: 'You want some water? Keep running.'

The video is here:

All this for a preening fascist. posted by lenin

Pierre Gemayel's assassination has made the March 14th Coalition (largely composed of upper bourgeois pro-American right-wingers and any house staff they could drag along to demonstrations) feel like they've got another shot (I intend no pun). You can see them on the television this morning, all puffed up and radiant. I have never seen such exuberant mourners. This has come at a good time for them: the unrepresentative government was about to face a serious crisis and be forced to take in a new glut of anti-Hariri forces. Now, the UN has already condemned the assassination of Gemayel as an attack on Lebanese sovereignty. Que? That's as good as to accuse Syria of having done it already. No wonder the celebratory mourners are already bearing placards with Assad's face and the slogan 'Shove Your Civil War'. It seems undeniable that the beneficiaries of this killing will be those aligned to the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel, rather than those aligned with Syria and Iran. The irony is that it is the "pro-Syrian" politicians who have done most for unity, and who defended the country when it really was under seige by an aggressive neighbour who wished to foment civil war.

Pierre Amine Gemayel, aside from being one of the Hariri gang pushing brutal neoliberal policies on Lebanon, was inextricably linked with the fascist Phalange. The Phalange have only occasionally been correctly designated in the Western press as fascist, and even less frequently as mass murderers. Among their crimes was the attack on the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in September 1982. I'll quote from Robert Fisk's account:

"What we found inside the Palestinian Chatila camp at ten o'clock on the morning of 18th September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination ... there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into the rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment and empty bottles of whisky ... Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.

"The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old ... On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead ... One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror." (Robert Fisk, Pity The Nation: Lebanon At War, Oxford University Press, 1992).

What had happened was this: the Israelis had formulated a plan with the Phalangists to attack the camp, and had set up observation posts in the surrounding area for that purpose. They bombarded the place with ordnance and then, on the evening of 16th September, two days before Fisk and his colleagues arrived, the Phalanges and a number of SLA fighters entered the camp, with the perimeter sealed by IDF troops, and set about mutilating and destroying every living human being that they could find. The whisky bottles are telling. This was a business that took some time. The killers had only left when Fisk et al arrived, and one of the bodies was still issuing warm blood. There is no sign of there having been any fighting. Rather, witnesses report the sound of laughter from the Phalange - an effortless task, and a pleasurable one.

For all the talk of 'Islamo-fascism', the only fascist party ever to have emerged in the Middle East has been the Phalange, and its genocidal skills were deployed on behalf of Israel and no one else. This is the tradition represented by the deceased Pierre Amine Gemayel.

Al Qaeda is Misunderstood. posted by lenin

Mohammed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou is a fairly conventional liberal, yet he is perhaps the first liberal to attempt a fully secular understanding of Al Qaeda, in Understanding Al Qaeda: The Transformation of War (Pluto Press, 2006). For Al Qaeda has been deliberately misunderstood for reasons that are far from mysterious. We are used to the usual tryptich of reasons given for Al Qaeda's behaviour: Hatred, Envy and Bestiality. Mohamedou is unsatisfied with this baby talk. He suggests that with the refusal to ask the right questions, the United States has become a land where institutionalised racism and, shortly thereafter, secret trials, ghost detainees, secret prisons, censorship, witch hunts and torture was tolerated and implemented. A reassertion of imperialism was the medicine, not a reassessment of policy: non-military approaches have been dogmatically disdained. “Eradication – the preferred approach of French colonial authorities in 1950s Algeria and Algeria’s authoritarian government fighting Islamist militants in the 1990s – is the dominant approach”. This is imbricated with the discourse of evil, which Bush himself evokes as a noun, as an actual force in the world, with repeated emphasis.

Mohamedou therefore sets out, within his discipline of conflict research, to provide a properly materialist and international account of Al Qaeda as a political movement embedded in geopolitical realities. There's a bunch of peeee-yook stuff at the start, a half-hearted sociological critique of American society's fall from a once resplendent democratic grace, which you don't absolutely need to read to understand this book. It's a pre-emptive strike against charges of anti-Americanism, and as such isn't strictly relevant to understanding what he has to say.

Dating the clash-of-civilisations.
Mohamedou first seeks to displace the usual fetishism of that date that we all know so well, by pointing out that Al Qaeda's war with the United States began in 1991. “Contrary to what many believe, the September 2001 attacks did not mark the opening salvo of the contest between the United States and Al Qaeda … that long-coddled conflict had been going on for a while”. It was part of a a war opened by the invasion of Iraq and the placing of US troops on Saudi soil. The US intellectual class had already been initiating the formulations, such as Huntington's 'Clash of Civilisations' thesis, that would legitimise a new wave of imperialism centred on the Middle East, and this was reflected in the media coverage, so that on January 21st 1996, the NYT produced a lead story: “Seeing Green: The Red Menace is Gone. But Here’s Islam.” Concepts such as the West and Islam carry weight and meaning, they “summon loyalty” – but in the US, such cultural references are used to reinforce oft-repeated notions about Islam, which “has ‘a problem’”, is “intolerant and anti-modern”. The issues that mobilised Al Qaeda were power and justice. In a message broadcast by Al Jazeera on 29th October 2004, Osama bin Laden explained that the best way to stop future attacks would be to stop threatening Muslims’ security: this is the casus belli, and it has been repeated every time a message has emerged from Bin Laden or Al-Zawahiri.

It is a cherished theme of pro-war apologists that Al Qaeda was attacking long before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. True, between 1991 and 2001, the US sustained six major assaults by Al Qaeda: 26th February 1993, the first WTC attack; 13th November 1995, the attack on a base in Riyadh; 25th June 1996, the attack on the al Khoar towers near Dhahran (a housing site for crews enforcing no-fly zone); simultaneous bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on 7th August 1998; a kamikaze attack on USS Cole warship in Yemen on 12th October 2000. And then there were two thwarted attacks: one to explode 11 American airliners over the Pacific in January 1995, and a December 2000 plot to detonate a bomb during millennial festivities in Seattle. By the same token, however, according to the US State Department, between 1980 and 1995, the US undertook 17 military operations in the Middle East. During the 1990s, of course, three specific nations came under attack: Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan.

New paradigm of war.
Al Qaeda legitimises its campaign in terms of a response to US aggression which Arab states are neither capable of nor qualified to deal with. This campaign emphasises what Mohamedou thinks is a substantial change in the nature of war. The “grammar of war” has undergone generational changes – from the Middle Ages, the main mode of war was massed manpower; before and during WWI, the focus was on destruction by airpower; from then, especially during WWII, the central tactic has been the destruction of command and control. But all three paradigms have been organised as violence between states, with civilians nominally left out of battle. The definition and codification of international law was inherently exclusionary: didn’t include colonised subjects. The German historian Heinrich Von Treitschke (incidentally the originator of the 'sonderweg' thesis about German history that was taken up by leftish historians in West Germany after the war), said that “international law become phrases if its standards are also applied to barbaric people”. During French rule of Algeria, war became total, with Algerian populations regarded as non-conventional enemies, who could be subjected to collective reprisals, summary execution and mass torture.

This is the classic war paradigm: monopoly (of the means of violence); distinction (between civilian and military); concentration (of forces); brevity (of battle); linearity (of engagement). The last two were framing principles as early as the Lieber Code drafted by Francis Lieber at Lincoln’s request in 1863. Article 29 of the Code says: “the more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief”. You can see the expression of this strategy in Blitzkrieg, and the US strategy of Rapid Dominance (known commonly as 'Shock and Awe'). Mohamedou has it that Al Qaeda represents one aspect of the way in which the traditional war paradigm has broken down, specifically the "Westphalian" system. I think this is mistaken, not simply because the "Westphalian" business is largely mythical, (see Benno Teschke on 'The Myth of 1648'), but because the claims about de-statisation have been drastically exaggerated. Yes, Al Qaeda pursues sub-state warfare - but the twentieth century is littered with the debris of such modes of warfare.

However, if the novelty is a little exaggerated, Mohamedou still draws some useful insights. Al Qaeda is "positioning itself consciously and functionally on different planes of the power continuum, using the full range of kinetic force" to influence its enemy. Disparity of force is no deterrent inasmuch as it no longer functions on a straightforward plane of quantitative advantage. Asymmetry spells a disinclination to prosecute wars swiftly: it is no longer merely a condition of war, but a full-blown strategy in which the non-state group avoids constant exposure to the enemy state, and offsets the state’s calibration of its use of force. By extending the conflict, it enables itself to strike when it is ready, while its enemy is constantly in a protracted state of defensive anticipation. The geographical indeterminacy of its operations has much the same effect.

While traditional ius ad bellum involves states being the sole legitimate actors in warfare, Al Qaeda undertakes to carry out an autonomous domestic and foreign policy, given the paucity of the Arab states. This has a history: the Muslim Brothers were to be a nothing more than a welfare association promoting its version of Islamic reform until the Arab states lost the 1948 war. Only then did they take up arms against domestic states. In an analogous fashion, the defeat in 1967 also led to a flourishing of combat Islamist movements that increasingly took up arms against the state. Similarly, Al Qaeda legitimises war on civilian targets by privatising collective responsibility, holding citizens accountable for the actions of war-making powers. Bin Laden told ABC’s John Miller in May 1998: “Any American who pays taxes to his government is our target because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation”. This is a theme he has gone on to repeat, as has al-Zawahiri, and as did Mohammed Siddique Khan in his video will.

If Mohamedou is right that “the geographical indeterminacy of the group’s action speaks of the dissolution of territorial power”, then he would be correct in his assessment that international law has been fundamentally altered and humanitarian law in particular, based as it is on the state-structured mode of warfare, is threatened. I think he is wrong about this, but let's hear the argument a bit more fully: international law assumes an equality of the parties involved. Recognition is the sole thing makes such standards relevant; and as international law is tautologously state-centred, states are not bound to recognise sub-state movements as equal forces. Again, Mohamedou (drawing on such writers as Mary Kaldor) seems to me to overemphasise 'de-statisation' and its consequences. To be sure, to the extent that the periphery is able to export violence to the centre, this begins to call into question the notion of a centre: but realistically, how far have these power relations altered? With the best will in the world, how could Al Qaeda possibly win as long as it remains a peripheral, subaltern force? Wasn't its most pragmatic move the decision to ally with a movement (the Taliban) that already possessed a state? International humanitarian law is not threatened here: for it is the form in which torture, starvation and mass murder has been imposed. This is reflected in the way that the US responded to the OAS when it demanded to know the status of Guantanamo: the US didn't snub the OAS or put on a swagger, but instead sent amply documented legalistic arguments for its policies.

Killing civilians.
The demands of the Prophet, perpetuated by four different caliphs, would appear to vitiate Al Qaeda's claim to piety: Do not mutilate; Do not kill little children or old men; Do not cut down trees etc etc. I'd say that at the very least Al Qaeda must have cut down a tree or two in one of its blasts. This is what Bin Laden said on 20th October 2001: “They say the killing of innocents is wrong and invalid, and for proof, they say that the Prophet forbade the killing of women and children, and this is true. It is valid and has been laid down by the Prophet in an authentic tradition. However, this prohibition on the killing of children and innocents is not absolute … God’s saying ‘And if you punish your enemy, O you believers in the Oneness of God, then punish them with the like of that with which you were afflicted’ … The men that God helped did not intend to kill babies; they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon that houses the strength and the military intelligence”. Sheikh Nasser Ibn Hamid al Fahd argues that since it is permissible (according to Islamic scholars) to use a catapult to bombard the enemy, and this doesn’t distinguish between men, women and children, this establishes the principle that it is permissible to destroy infidel lands and kill them. We've come a long way from catapults, baby.

This is, however, an argument that would resurface in Iraq when al-Zarqawi, having declared loyalty to bin Laden, was upbraided by his former mentor Abu Mohammed al Maqdissi, who wrote an open letter urging him not to target non-combatants, “even if they are Infidels or Christians”. This did not result in a reduction in the killing of infidels, Christians, or even Muslims, (albeit it is important not to exaggerate the role of the Zarqawists in Iraq), but it did cause Zarqawi to issue statements denying this attack, excusing that one, pointing out that the accidental shedding of Muslim blood was "unavoidable" etc.

But the strategy of targeting civilians remains. Ayman al Zawahiri explained in his pamphlet Knights Under The Prophet’s Banner the rationale for these measures in terms of “the need to inflict the maximum casualties against the opponent, for this is the language understood by the West, no matter how much time and effort such operations take.” This is a tactic understood by Pape as an extreme measure undertaken for national liberation against a perceived aggressor in asymmetrical warfare. It threatens civilians usually in democratic societies from whence some threat from troops is imminent. Since it has been pursued by secular and religious forces alike, Mohamedou suggests we drop the lazy assumption that this has to do with some idiosyncratic psychology of Islam or the Arabs and instead see the theological claims as the circumstantial byproduct of a pragmatic strategy by an elite commando group. That is to say, “Al Qaeda is an industrious, committed and power-wielding versatile organisation exerting an extraordinary amount of influence and waging a political, limited and evasive war of attrition – not a religious, open-ended, apocalyptic one.”

A very brief history.
Al Qaeda is "a political movement with a demonstrated military ability, which has sought to bypass the state while coopting its attributes and channelling its resources". It has concluded that the Arab state system is dying, and incapable of defending the population’s interests. Forging itself as a vanguard, it has separated two tactical fights: the domestic war against failed states, and the international war against the ‘far enemy’: the latter involves husbanding financial and logistical resources with professional cadres and a corps of officers and permanent contacts. For instance, Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian leader of the ‘Arab Afghans’, had set up an office for logistical coordination, the Maktab al Khadamat lil MuJahideen – an international bureau for some 25,000 people. The organisation remained more or less intact after the winding down of the Soviet campaign – before Azzam’s death in November 1989, he put in place the elements of an international army in alliance with Osama bin Laden, who was later Joined by Ayman al Dhawahiri. This entity was initially dubbed ‘Al Qaeda al Askariya’. The new organisation did seek to displace traditional states to some extent: pace bin Laden’s unsuccessful offer to the Saudi government to use his force to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. Initially, the structure was hierarchical – bin Laden, leader, Dhawahiri deputy, and both receiving advice from 31-member Shura, divided into five operational committees. The military committee, headed by Abu Obaida al Banshiri and Mohammad Atef, oversaw activities of local units, including the 300-strong 055 Brigade which was integrated into the Taliban army in its war with the Northern Alliance. It also oversaw growing number of international cells. From 1996, Al Qaeda mostly maintained its training camps while assembling a coalition of operatives and overseeing the preparation of several parallel missions.

In the Declaration of War against the United States, on the 23rd August 1996, Al Qaeda noted: “Due to the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces, a suitable means of fighting must be adopted, namely using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy … It is wise in the present circumstances for the armed forces not to be engaged in conventional fighting with the forces of the … enemy … unless a big advantage is likely to be achieved.” Al Qaeda's sophistication grew: its unsuccessful attack on USS The Sullivans off the Yemeni coast was followed by the successful kamikaze attack on the USS Cole. One of their recruits was Ali Mohammad, a serving sergeant in the US army, who trained Al Qaeda recruits in surveillance techniques, cell structures and detailed reconnaissance. Perhaps up to 100,000 were trained in the camps: maybe up to 10,000 remain active and scattered through the world, perhaps even more.

Al Qaeda had expected that when its spectacular organisation in America on - well, I forget the date - was carried out, it would have to mount a retreat. It sacrificed its foothold in a state and fought only brief battles with invading US forces where it thought there was an advantage to be gained. It lost some officers, but easily replaced these. It then sought to proliferate other groups (mini-Al Qaedas) with loose connections to the mother ship. It provides, in its more diffused form, an umbrella for 1) attacks directly commissioned by Al Qaeda through sophisticated urban operators; 2) attacks inspired by more populist associated groups in the periphery. The peripheral branches and central organ operate differently. For instance, ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ beheaded hostages and pursued anti-Shia violence, something bin Laden had not done. In the 1996 declaration, there is the insistence that “there is a duty on the Muslims to ignore the minor differences amongst themselves”. This apparently caused some brief friction between the leadership and Zarqawi himself.

Having reorganised itself, it has intervened in several elections, including the US election in November 2004 (in which Americans were advised to dislodge rulers who would pursue anyone who threatened Muslim security), and in the Spanish elections (in which a North African militia carried out attacks on Madrid trains). Since then, the newly elected Zapatero government withdrew its troops from Iraq, and bin Laden announced that there would be no further attacks on Spain. There followed an attempt to offer a truce to America's European allies, and in early 2006 to America itself. It wasn't the first time Al Qaeda had stressed that its violence would be proportionate with that of the US. In 2002, bin Laden suggested: “Whether America escalates or de-escalates this conflict, we will reply in kind”. Of course, these were rebuffed. The White House Chief of Staff put it thus: “We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business”. At this point, the Toby Keith gene is supposed to kick in and goad you into leaping to your feet and waving an imaginary red, white n blue, in a drooling, saucer-eyed state.

Forever War.
Both the United States and Al Qaeda have reckoned on a long war. Joint Vision 2020 emphasises ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ over ‘adaptive enemies’, which is mirrored by Al Qaeda operative Sayfr al Adl’s seven-phase strategy until 2020. Only a reconsideration of policy by the US could reverse this course, but it is unambiguously opposed to such measures. Rumsfeld told the National Press Club in 2006: “The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war … fading down over a sustained period of time … The only way that terrorists can win this struggle is if we lose our will and surrender our fight”. This perspective was fleshed out in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America in March 2006. Bush's recent statements while in Vietnam ("we can only lose if we quit") sustain the strategy. The 9/11 Commission similarly concluded that Al Qaeda's was “not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it, there is no common ground – not even respect for life – on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated”.

Martin Creveld, almost two decades ago, said that: “If, as seems to be the case, the state cannot defend itself effectively against internal or external low-intensity conflict, then it clearly does not have a future in front of it. If the state does take on such a conflict, then it will have to win quickly and decisively. Alternatively, the process of fighting itself will undermine the state’s foundations”. Most such combats in the 20th Century have been concluded with political settlements, and the settlement with Spain suggests that a de facto agreement (not a literal treaty) is available to the United States. In fact, it is the only thing available if the United States is actually interested in winning the war (which is something Mohamedou does not address).

To keep this perpetual war going, the group’s political goals have been muted by US planners and ideologues, and its impress limited to terrorism, in which only a strict dichomotising and moralising condemnation is permitted. Terrorism, however, is merely one way to employ force, and the blanket condemnation of it as such simply avoids the important political scrutiny and analysis required. Terrorism is valuable as a category only if “beyond all semantic positional warfare” it locates what is specific to “certain economies and strategies of political violence”. Since terrorism is a political tool and a malleable one, it can at any moment be replaced by another one, potentially one that is legitimate in the terms of traditional war-making. Al Qaeda's cells are “no different in their organisation from secret Pentagon battlefield intelligence units”, while its strategic thinking is “akin to the military doctrine developed by the United States Army during the Vietnam War”. In that sense, the US is perfectly placed in terms of morality, and also its strategic position, to chat terms with Al Qaeda. It is not interested in doing so, so long as massive extraneous benefits accrue from the pursuit of the 'war on terror'. For this reason, Al Qaeda is misunderstood.

Pan's Labyrinth posted by lenin

I reviewed the movie Pan's Labyrinth here.

It's monstrous.

Ladies and Gentleman, a toast to the honourable minister for genocide. posted by lenin

La principessa di New York, la Clintonessa, the radiant host with impeccable manners and shoes from the Via Condotti, introduces our esteemed guest, Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman, an eloquent proponent of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and the killing of Arab politicians in Israel, was recently added to the Israeli government. Kadima was encomiastic, praising the new minister for creating a "sane and more stable coalition". Next to Binyamin Netanyahu, who calls for removing Palestinians from that part of Palestine that is legally called Israel, Lieberman is the second favourite politician to become Prime Minister among the Israeli public. He has recently advocated assassinating the Hamas leadership, ignoring the Fatah one and abandon any pretence of pursuing a "peace process". He has said that he would be happy to send the IDF into the West Bank in order to bomb the place and "destroy everything". Arthur Neslen, the Tel Aviv journalist, writes that the problem with Avigdor Lieberman is that his politics are in the Israeli "dead centre", not on some outlying extreme.

The Saban Forum at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy will be "honoured" to welcome Lieberman to chat Middle Eastern politics together. He will, lucky thing, be sandwiched between the Clintons who have both, in their various ways, done so much to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That happens this December 8th in Washington DC, the number one shopping destination of genocidaires today.

And it isn't only among Washington liberals that appeals to genocide excite respect and admiration.

At one time, the Zionists expressed the same political goal as the Nazis: to get all the Jews out of Europe. Many Zionist leaders worked with the Nazis to accomplish this. (The Nazis wanted to put them in Madagascar.) Now, the Zionists want to get all the Palestinians out of Palestine. The Nazis are one with them on that as well: on November 12th, the BNP wrote a news editorial indicating that Palestine was an "imaginary country", that all boundaries in the Middle East are "drawn with the sword" at any rate, and that they were "moderately and prudently more sympathetic to the Israeli side, simply because a) Israelis are not trying to conquer the world and subject it to their religion, b) their adversaries very much are, and c) Israel is a part of Western, if not European, Civilisation, and the Arab world is not."

Having pointed this out, I await more fruitful discussion of whether the far right is penetrating the Palestinian cause.

Lay Off MPAC posted by lenin

The usual scumbags are out in force to attack MPAC over the revelation that Asghar Bukhari once imagined that David Irving was an unfairly impugned anti-Zionist, and sent funds to him on that account. Irving is not, of course, simply an anti-Zionist being targeted by the state. Irving is a man who fabricates history in the service of fascism, and this has been proven in a court of law, in a case that he brought as a plaintiff against Deborah Lipstadt (who correctly referred to him as a Holocaust-denier). The messages sent by Bukhari to Irving were politically stupid. The language used about "the Jews" is preposterous. I don't think Bukhari intended to be antisemitic, in fact. Antisemitism is more than the arrangement of words: in its classical phase it was a structure of oppression promulgated through law and perpetuated through various social arrangements. There is nothing like this today: there is, however, a racist, expansionist state that purports to speak for the Jews. Some people who think they're defending Palestine, and start from that axis of oppression, will be open to language and arguments that reflect classical antisemitism. They will also be open to having those arguments challenged, and the fact that MPAC has repeatedly denounced antisemitism, while Bukhari has denounced Irving's views (which he didn't believe Irving held), demonstrates that this is so.

However, more importantly, The Observer did not make clear in its report that Bukhari's actions were in 2000, a couple of years before MPAC was formed. Hence, a sequence of blog posts (from people like the despicable apologists for Israeli state murder at Harry's Place and the inflatable Oliver Kamm) implying once more that MPAC is an antisemitic organisation. Kamm simply titles his post 'MPAC and David Irving' even though he is not commenting on any alleged relationship between MPAC and David Irving (he would not, of course, deign to check the facts before publishing, despite bloviating about the 'incompetence' of Bukhari).

MPAC is not an antisemitic organisation. I have all sorts of disagreements with MPAC's politics (which are too narrow), and with the cavalier approach to what sort of material may appear on their website (which is too loose), but the organisation is not antisemitic. The Observer allows you to think that MPAC is impugned here by following up its news with discussions about accusations of antisemitism against MPAC, including a disgraceful NUS 'no platform' policy pushed through by Labour Students and their supporters in 2004. And in that way, The Observer's piece is a straightforward smear. An organisation with more funds would probably sue, and win.

The main reason that MPAC is being targeted along with some other organisations is that it challenges the Labourite mosque hierarchy. It does so in the name of challenging oppression - of Palestinians, Iraqis and Muslim women in particular. It also challenges groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Ghurabaa. But Labour is terrified of losing Muslim votes and wishes to chasten any sign of real militancy. The British ruling class has decided that, having so closely affiliated itself to the United States ruling class for fifty years, it's going to continue to support the ruthless destruction of the Middle East. If Muslim countries are the target of that, then Muslims will be the in the frontline of opposition, and so it becomes imperative to stigmatise and deligitimise that dissent. Strategically, the charge of antisemitism works best among liberals: they know this. If you were talking to Sun readers, you'd puff the Mad Mullahs angle. But when you're dealing with Labour activists and Guardian readers who might otherwise be on the antiwar marches, you stigmatise Muslims (yes, all Muslims, not merely MPAC or a few groups) as, barring a few progressive exceptions, the source of reactionary ideology, conservatism, misogyny, antisemitism etc. When MPAC emerged and started to work against Labour candidates who supported Israel (it emerged specifically in response to the assault on Jenin), the people working for the Labour leadership made a simple calculation: MPAC's politics are impeccably liberal, but their anti-Zionism leaves them vulnerable to attack as antisemites. One London newspaper recently referred to MPAC as a "hate" group. We've been here before, of course. During the 1960s, when the FBI was running its Counter Intelligence Programme, black civil rights groups were demonised in the official language as "hate" groups. Those who defend themselves are full of "hate", always and everywhere. And since the oppressed are no more perfect than bilious liberals are, they will be vulnerable to attack on some fronts.

Of course, no blog or newspaper that continues to side with New Labour, particularly in its murderous imperialist campaigns, has any right to talk about anyone else's standards. We know all about their standards: any fanatical bigot, liar and mass murderer will do, so long as he's killing darkies. We know how far Harry's Place will go to legitimise the murder of female civilians, so long as it is Israel that is doing the killing. We also know what pathetic smears the Guardian Media Group will allow Peter Beaumont and Emma Brockes to produce in defense of power, and in slandering the opponents of power. To put it politely, if you're in the business of supporting the murder of civilians so long as Western states do it, and so long as non-Western civilians are targeted, you aren't entitled to appropriate the language of anti-racism. (Nor, if you think it's okay for racist IDF troops to shoot at female civilian protesters, is it your business to talk for all the world as if you were a feminist offended by Islam's allegedly poor treatment of women). So, in the interests of being slightly less vile hypocrites than you already are, lay off MPAC.

Update: Asghar Bukhari replies...

Blair, the 'moral imperialist'. posted by lenin

I missed Margaret Hodge's apparent confession that Blair's biggest mistake was Iraq, and her claim that Blair is a "moral imperialist". If the comments are accurately reported, then it is tiny chick that has come home to roost. Blair has consciously sought the mantle of Gladstone, and he has got it. The analogies abound at his expense, daily.

Today, he's been chatting up the troops in Afghanistan and having tea with the Uzbek elite that the occupiers installed to replace the Pashtun elite with. He tells the troops that the fight against the Taliban will last a generation, and that Al Qaeda has "deep roots" inside Afghanistan: but he rushes to assure them that they certainly won't be in Afghanistan for as long as a generation. His specactle relies upon the assumption that when he address troops, they quite like hearing what he has to say, and with a few quick sentences he fluffs that impression. They don't want to hear about generation-long civilisational struggles if it involves them.

And Blair went on to add the predictable note that aspired to Gladstone: "We believe that Afghanistan, rather than being abused as a haven for terrorists and for the Taleban to oppress people, that Afghanistan and its people deserve the chance to increase their prosperity and to live in a proper democratic state." That's the royal 'we', the 'we' that is the Crown-in-Parliament, with his Royal Prerogative of declaring war and making peace. The formula of "prosperity" and a "proper democratic state" is carefully phrased, but absolutely standard contemporary imperialist discourse. As I mentioned before, imperialists of the capitalist kind cannot publicly appeal to principles of inequality, and so necessarily draw on hegemonic liberal and egalitarian discourses. But, carefully phrased though it is, the subtext of Blair's speech is straightforward to discern. Blair's recipe for Third World statehood is that they should be subsumed into the global network of political tutelage and exploitative market relations. That is what a proper democracy and real prosperity is, for him, or so much you may infer from his actions. Gladstone, whose legendary extortion of the Egyptian coffers was followed by the bombardment and destruction of Alexandria in the name of ideals no less vaporous than that of the "international community", (which, happily, allowed Gladstone to go on extorting the Egyptian treasury), is indeed the right historical figure for the priggish attorney to emulate.

Blair's Gladstonian aspirations amount to a palimpsest of evangelism and moral cowardice. He is the sort of man who likes to suppose that he is driven by the highest principles, no matter what he's doing. I imagine a spot of matutinal masturbation wouldn't pass without Blair convincing himself that it's an innocent sacrifice to the God of the pentateuche. His principles happen to formulate themselves according to the interests and demands of power. It is reasonably well known that Blair goes soft in the knees upon meeting on of Britain's bumpkin-billionaires, and it is reasonably guessed that there could not be a US President who could not induce his knees to fail entirely before an open zip. Blair loved to take orders from Clinton's advisers about what he should say. According to Anthony Seldon's over-friendly biography, he went so far at a dinner with Clinton and his team as to produce real tears in the course of pledging his devotion. Clinton's drop-jawed grin had hardly departed from the White House before Blair was sniffing the hands of a failed Texan oilman. His unstinting admiration for all things American, and all things rich, happens to correlate very smoothly to the interests of the British ruling class, whose children are schooled in New England or Massacheussets, and whose primary form of ownership, the City of London, has mostly been taken over by American firms. He would sacrifice any principle to avoid being deprived of his chance of being accepted into the Anglo-American ruling class. He would sacrifice upwards of half a million Iraqis to avoid that. I had my doubts, some years ago, that he would ever be accepted into that confraternity. Those were dispelled by Iraq. His big blunder secured his future class affiliation. He might not become one of the 'wealth creators' that draw saliva the corners of his mouth, (unlike Gladstone, Blair does not appear to have any financial savvy), although I expect he will have a healthy retirement awaiting him. But he is already accepted, indeed quite admired and loved, by that class.

Enlightened earth. posted by lenin

The things that occur to a person under capitalism are breathtaking. For instance, in 1941, an unassuming and fameless chemist from Harvard was sent by the government to investigate explosions at a DuPont car plant. The most significant thing he discovered was that the liquid divinylacetyline turns into an extremely sticky slime when set on fire. This was his career-break: he reckoned that if you put such a substance in a bomb, it would spread far and wide over a population and they would be almost unable to get it off. It would burn those suckers to death. Ker-ching.

Interviewed about it in Time in 1968, at the height of its use in Vietnam, he not only had no regrets, but had no particular worries if the substance continued to be produced by Dow Chemical and consumed by the state military machine in the killing of Vietnamese people. (I almost wrote "civilians" rather than "people" there, but the implication of making that distinction is barbarous). The guy's name, and he should be named, was Louis Fieser. I suppose you're expecting me to say that he was a good man, and the system misused his science but, take it from me, he was a real sack of shit. No worse than many others of his class, of course: hardly any of those in the US intellectual class opposed the use of the substance during the Vietnam War, in the same way that hardly any of the leading intellectuals in the US oppose war crimes in Iraq today.

Most of them are outspoken 'defenders' of the Enlightenment.

People's Assembly against Islamophobia. posted by lenin

Ssssh. Ssssh. I'm not even here, okay? I'm not supposed to be back until tomorrow at the earliest. But I thought you should watch these videos of this weekend's People's Assembly Against Islamophobia. I'm sorry I wasn't there to do a report for you, but I had an urgent appointment in Rome. Ssssh. You int seen me, roight?

American Torture posted by lenin

A bit of ad hoc torture meted out to an Iranian-American student at UCLA who couldn't show his ID this Tuesday:



The most grotesque part of the video is where the cops are telling him to get up and walk. Having sent 50,000 volts through his body, they know he's been temporarily paralysed and can't walk for shit. Yet, they continue to tell him that if he doesn't get up and stop struggling, he will be tased again. They electrocute him five times, and threaten students who attempt to intervene that they too will get shot with the taser if they get too close.

There have been quite a few recent videos of police brutality, including this unprovoked assault on demonstrators in which a mentally retarded man is beaten up, the repeated beating of LA resident William Cardenas while he lies struggling under a policeman's knee that rests on his neck, this unprovoked beating of a man which continues after they've got him on the ground and handcuffed, this all-out wailing on a guy who had already given up, and this novel technique for arresting a man. Indeed, there's so much of it about that someone has decided to make a compilation and set it to music.

Random strangers with mobile phones and camcorders can surely only capture a tiny fraction of this shit.

Iraq: "last big push". posted by lenin

So much for the change of course signalled by the Democrats' election victory. Pentagon officials have 'advised' the Iraq Study Group that a strategy for success must be elaborated including an increase, rather than a drawdown, of troops. 20,000 new troops are to be sent in an effort to - well, do what? Break the insurgency within six months? Do they really think this is what is going to happen?

One curious thing is that this report states that the US will not, under this Pentagon-directed plan, pursue the sectarian partition of Iraq recommended by mainstream liberal intellectuals and politicians like Senator Biden (although not, to his slight credit, Senator Levin), who thinks that the carve-up of Yugoslavia is a model for peace. It is also reported that the State Department has decided against partition. This is being reported as if it hasn't been official US policy to break up Iraq for a couple of years now. Perhaps there is indeed a real change of policy, and this would explain the recent noises about disarming the militias and installing a 'strongman' like Iyad Allawi. But this would involve an even longer term commitment of troops, since it would cause practically every party and interest in Iraq to take up arms against the occupiers.

Crisis in "realism". posted by lenin

Peter Gowan has an excellent article in the latest New Left Review, which you unfortunately have to have a subscription for in order to read fully. Gowan discusses the growing trend for 'realist' theorists working in IR to take increasingly radical and critical stances about US power. Andrew Bacevich is perhaps the most obvious instance - a moderate conservative who revisited the Beards and William Appleman Williams and found that their analysis of US power was closer to the truth than that of many of his realist confederates (see American Empire, 2002). But of course Mearsheimer and Walt have recently been highly critical of US policy (and even, gasp, Israeli policy), and the topic of Gowan's piece is a new book by Christopher Layne, Peace of Illusions, a paleocon who writes for The American Conservative. Layne, for all the world, sounds like a crude marxist in his analysis, if not his prescriptions.

Realism has a reputation for being right-wing, despite the fame of EH Carr, because it has usually taken an apologetic position on US power during the Cold War. The postwar realists were profoundly influenced by Carl Schmitt and German conservatism more generally. As far as they were concerned, the US was merely engaged in classic 'balance of power' politics, forming strategic alliances and shoring up military power in order to avert the threat of extinction which all states are theoretically vulnerable to (and, in Grotian terms, the killing of states is the most heinous act possible). This thesis, weak though it was, could not survive the collapse of the Russian Empire: the US should, on realist assumptions, have pulled back from its global entanglements. Layne therefore trawls through the diplomatic and historical archives and arrives at the conclusion, shocking for bourgeois doctrinaires but not at all surprising to marxists, that the normal rules of realism don't apply to the US, which has not faced a serious threat of extinction since the 19th Century. Layne uses the material he unearths to show that "Wilson’s 1917 decision to intervene in World War One was motivated neither by security worries nor efforts at ‘off-shore balancing’. Equally, he argues persuasively that the Roosevelt administration was not seriously worried about a German bridgehead being established in Latin America in 1940–41". Rather "Roosevelt’s sole concern was to ensure that the British fleet sailed for Canada in the event of a capitulation. Lend-lease was not the cause of Britain’s failure to do a peace deal with Germany in 1940, but its effect." Moreover: "American strategy was to establish its hegemony over the major industrial powers of Eurasia, once the Second World War had created the conditions there for it to do so. The Cold War was essentially an effect of this American choice to exploit the chaos in Eurasia for a global hegemonic drive." Further: "On the issue of American control over the Middle East, Layne cites a 1944 OSS report arguing that the us would have three vital interests in the region: ‘Oil, Airbases and Future Markets’. The US would therefore have a ‘security problem’ in the region: ‘this means in particular security from our present allies, almost all of whom have fingers in the Moslem pie and who have shown themselves particularly anxious to keep us out.’"

So now we know why the US government did not simply pull back at the end of the Cold War: they weren't engaged in power-balancing. America's empire-building has brought immense costs according to Layne - the usual but not inaccurate mantra of libertarians: "a National Security State with a bloated military–industrial complex; the huge resources devoted to military power could have been better spent on prosperity for the American people. Its expansionist thrust has undermined America’s social institutions, and aided the rise of the imperial presidency and erosion of the powers of Congress. Above all, it has brought involvement in wars which are of little or no importance for the US itself, as a concomitant for taking command of other states’ security interests."

Things become even more interesting when Layne starts to look at the domestic sources of US foreign policy. Even in a realist discourse, in which power is supposedly gazed upon and analysed unsentimentally, this sort of business is usually strictly taboo. Layne asserts that "American elites ‘are the state’. Drawing on Thomas Ferguson’s striking 1984 essay, ‘From Normalcy to New Deal’, on the business coalition that formed around Roosevelt in the 1930s—again, an unusual source, even for a maverick Republican—Layne provides an analysis of the social substance of the American state: ‘at the core . . . were large capital-intensive corporations that looked to overseas markets and outward-looking investment banks’; around this core were assembled ‘the national media, important foundations, the big Wall Street law firms, and organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations’. This capitalist coalition, he argues, has been the driving force of the open-door/global-hegemony strategy for the last six decades and remains in power today." This, Gowan maintains, is an outdated analysis, missing the way in which the capitalist elite has changed with the re-emergence of the rentier class since the 1970s, (see his account in The Global Gamble, 1999). Nevertheless, it comes closer to properly analysing the nature of the modern state than most IR theory does (barring that of some critical marxists). Another crucial point that Layne makes, and Gowan cites, is that America's domestic capitalist regime is extremely fragile. Why should this be so? It is not the hallowed Constitution that is threatened, nor the capitalist class as such - but the very specific mode of rule that they have achieved through anticommunist crusades and the promotion of a robust individualist ideology, one in which the state is primarily a means of servicing the interests of the capitalist class both domestically and globally, a highly dependent relationship at that. A huge segment of the present elite cannot do without the US maintaining the global system on its behalf.

And that's the curious situation we're in: utopians, cosmopolitans, egalitarian theorists and activists - those whom marxists have tended to see as close to their own tradition - are less likely to hit upon the truth about the American Empire than the Hobbesian theorists who have always despised appeals to the brotherhood of man, democratic peace and so on. By the same turn, however, realists are finding it more and more difficult to explain the actions of the American state within the strict terms of their 'balance of power' analysis. The increasing radicalisation of the empire leads them to seek out lobbies - Israel or neocons or secret Trotskyists - but sometimes, like Layne, they notice the existence of the capitalist class.

Public Enemy posted by lenin

The need for fighting unions. posted by lenin

The latest news on the economy is that unemployment is at its highest rate for seven years. Because New Labour has reduced access to benefits, the number of people claiming is still below 1 million, but the number of people actually out of work and seeking employment is over 1.7 million. As usual, there is probably a large amount of hidden unemployment, with people receiving disability benefits despite wishing to work, but face serious difficulties when trying to get it (to point this out is not to endorse New Labour's Work Makes You Free manifesto). The US economy is still in trouble, and a deep recession remains a distinct possibility (it is worth noting that the recent woes of the American working class pushed aspiring Democratic candidates, even 'social conservatives', to adopt economic 'populism', pledging to oppose further 'free trade' deals and increase the minimum wage - possibly, they might even live up to some of their rhetoric). And if the US economy slides, the British economy will go with it, since exports to the US will suffer (and the Eurozone isn't going to pick up the slack). The housing market, which everyone knows is ludicrously overvalued, will collapse as well.

So, how will our political class manage this? By stimulating demand through supplemented incomes (ie higher benefits, more tax credits etc)? By borrowing to invest? By relaxing interest rates? Perhaps a little bit of the last two, but most likely is that New Labour and the Tories will a) talk up the need to curb migration, while carefully managing a sufficient flow of low-cost labour to boost growth, (which both diverts the discussion from an emphasis on class, and benefits the Nazis, whose recent victory in court owed a lot to New Labour's rhetoric about Islam), b) talk up the need to 'reform' the public sector, by cutting pensions bills and other forms of benefits, c) boost the case for a Keynesian military state, with the argument being that to scrap the ludicrous Trident replacement would cost jobs, d) suppress minimum wage increases and implement an unofficial incomes policy across the public sector (thus suppressing wages across the economy as a whole). In short, the political establishment will run things in the interests of capital and ensure that we pay the costs of any crisis. They will, as far as they can manage, take the opportunity to further restructure the economy with fewer protections for workers and more 'flexibility' so that capital can higher us on more advantageous terms to itself.

The only way to counteract this vicious bind, of fascist anti-migrant 'protectionism' on the one hand, and neoliberalism on the other, is to generate a radical left-wing programme for managing the economy in the interests of working people - y'know, the many, not the few. Respect is by no means influential enough yet to be the main vector for such a move, and the Labour left is moribund - McDonnell isn't going to save it and, to be frank, he would be doing well to get more than 10 per cent of the vote, especially if Michael Meacher is also going to run. If there is hope, it rests with the proles (and the Poles too). The unions have elected a wave of radical leaderships and waged sometimes successful defensive and aggressive strikes (mostly defensive) on key issues. The Organising for Fighting Unions conference this weekend sought to point the way to building a radical grassroots movement in the unions and making them capable of acting politically as well as economically, of combatting the new wave of racism and warmongering, while trying to build a political alternative to New Labour. It launched a Workers Charter, calling for a living wage, pay equality, full union recognition rights as well as international solidarity, for example with workers in Venezuela. It also supported the RMT's calls for a Trade Union Freedom Bill. We have to fight on all of these fronts, concurrently. Unless you are prepared to break with New Labour, you won't get the reforms you want. But the capitalist elite won't give an inch either unless workers are organised, united and militant. And to avoid such militancy and unity, they will prefer to exacerbate all manner of divisions that are socially catastrophic for us. To conserve the interests of the Anglo-American ruling class in hegemonising global markets, they will ditch even their pretense at embracing liberalism. It's amusing, for instance, to see the American publication, Investor's Business Daily, foaming at the mouth at the success of the Democrats whom they claim will appease 'Islamic fundamentalism' and all that shit. They know well enough that the Democrats are the second party of imperialism and that they won't fundamentally alter the direction of US foreign policy. Equally, they don't give a shit about 'Islamic fundamentalism', since American investors extract a huge amount of cash from the subaltern Saudi dictatorship. But they need people to be worrying about Muslims and also about migrants fleeing from the Cafta scam that has made the American rentier class so much money.

So, all of that is why we need fighting unions. I thought it was worth a mention.

Have Your Say posted by lenin

You have to laugh at the headlines that tell us about a "new" Iraq "debate", or the demands of 'climate change sceptics' for a proper "debate". We seem to be doomed to endless calls for further debate from people who have already lost the argument, as a means to forestall any real decision. And it isn't merely a rhetorical tactic, it is something embedded in modern political life. There is too much debate. You can't look at a news website or even a service provider front page without some bastard telling you to Have Your Say about something totally inane. There is much cheap television inviting people to 'debate' and have their say about everything from politics to the emotional incontinence of guests on Trisha Godard's show.

In this sort of situation, where refutations are supplied daily, liberal commentators earnestly insist that the endless interchange of opinion is the hallmark of a thriving democracy. The only decision that is permitted here is reflexive rather than determinant: vote to tell us whether you like this, approve of that, would purchase the other. As Badiou points out, this is the parliamentarist answer to the politics of (Leninist) Truth. Truth is automatically univocal, intolerant, exterminationist, and so it is best to stick with opinion and perspective and Having Your Say, while technocrats continue to manage the polity and economy. What is more, one isn't entitled to assess the opinions of others normatively: they not only have the right to their opinion, they have the right to escape censure. There's too much 'debate', and the wrong kind at that.

Have your say in the comments boxes below. Alternatively, vote in our online poll.

Those Special Police Commandos. posted by lenin

Don't kid yourselves that these guys operate independently of the occupiers. The US army brags of its role in forming these commandos and rewards those who lead them:

The Distinguished Service Cross – second only to the Medal of Honor in military decorations – has been awarded to U.S. Army Col. James H. Coffman Jr. for his role in leading Iraqi Special Police Commandos through a 5 ½-hour battle against insurgents trying to overrun an Iraqi police station.

Flanked by the commando unit Coffman fought with, U.S. Army Gen. George Casey, commander of Multi-National Forces–Iraq, pinned the cross and eagle medal on Coffman’s body armor during an Aug. 24 ceremony at Adnon Palace in Baghdad’s International Zone. Iraq’s Minister of Interior, Bayan Jabr, and a number of other high-ranking Iraqi and Coalition leaders also attended the ceremony.

As I've pointed out before, the US hired the former DEA man Steven Casteel to help construct the Iraqi Interior Ministry and to co-found the Special Police Commandos, under the leadership of a former Baathist general. As Casteel explained:

We created the commandos, a higher end police capability, a paramilitary organization and the U.S.'s idea and Gen. Casey's approach to this is let's put our mentors in there, military mentors in there and let's teach this leadership what they need to know.

The most brutal sector of these commandos, the Wolf Brigades, put its unique brutality to work in counterinsurgency operations alongside the American army in Mosul, before going on to present a television series called Terror in the Hands of ustice on the American-run television channel Al Iraqiya.

How can I put this to you - could they have their fingers stuck further up these puppet's arses in order that we might stop pretending that these fuckers are somehow operating as mutinous para-state elements with no backing from the occupiers?

Mass kidnapping at Iraq Ministry. posted by lenin

What's this? Gunmen in army uniforms have kidnapped 100 people in Iraq's Ministry of Education. The BBC mentions that academics have been targeted for assassination in particular (it doesn't mention that these have often been critics of the occupation), but this doesn't look like that kind of attack. This is either the beginning of a coup attempt or a deliberate strike in a civil war. It's believed to have been carried out by members of "Shia Muslim-dominated security forces", which means it's the Badr Corps, one of the most violent sectarian forces operating in Iraq today, and happily integrated into the Ministry of Interior by the CIA.

Keep your eye on this story.

Update: The Guardian says the uniforms these guys were wearing were those of "interior ministry commandos" and wore the blue insignia of the "police commandos". They allegedly had a "list of names" of those to be abducted, and claimed to be on an officially sponsored anti-corruption mission. The Special Police Commandos, as I have repeatedly pointed out, are units led by former Ba'athists created by the CIA in order to conduct 'counterinsurgency' missions.

Homer Simpson versus the Military. posted by lenin

Right-wing pundit very disappointed by half-way decent episode of The Simpsons

Headlines. posted by lenin

Here is the news. The BBC is a public service:

“We get public speaking training,” he (Gen. Rick Hillier) revealed to Profit magazine recently. “When I was in Afghanistan, we had people from the BBC come in to help us create the right perceptions, because perception is reality.”

In other news, we have a free media:

A DETAILED investigation into how the media covered the 2003 war in Iraq has found that commentators who questioned the Coalition line were given little chance to make their point.

The study - led by Dr Piers Robinson from The University of Manchester - also found that Sky News and ITV were most likely to report good news for the Coalition, Channel Four News the least likely with BBC News sitting somewhere in the middle.

The findings on BBC News go against accusations of bias levelled by politicians at the time including the then Home Secretary David Blunkett.

Among newspapers, the Sun gave the most explicit support to Coalition operations. But much newspaper coverage, even that of the anti-war Independent and Mirror, was supportive of the military campaign.

Dr Robinson, from the School of Social Sciences, led the team from Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool Universities which looked at all media briefings from the Coalition as well as news stories from the time.

He said: "Coverage of the war was narrated largely through the voice of the Coalition with much less attention given to other actors.

"This suggests that factors such as reliance upon elite sources, patriotism and news values rooted in episodic coverage continue to be important in shaping war-time coverage.

"Most reports did not discuss WMD at all but of those that did, 54% TV and 61% newspaper made substantial reference to the Weapons of Mass Destruction rationale for war in unproblematic terms, reinforcing the Coalition argument.

"Coverage overwhelmingly reflected the official line on the moral case for war: over 80% of TV and press stories mirrored the government position and less than 12% challenged it.

"Controversial issues such as civilian casualties and anti-war protest accounted for considerably less than 10% of news stories across both TV and newspapers.”

He added: "The Coalition was responsible for over 50% of direct quotations across TV channels and 45% across newspapers, but quotes from the Iraqi regime never amounted to more than 6% of the total.

"And while Iraqi civilians received a substantial degree of media attention as subjects, they were less well represented via direct quotation with figures ranging from 5% for Channel Four to Sky’s 11%, averaging 8% across newspapers.

"Anti-war actors were responsible for 6% of all quotes, fewer in TV coverage, while humanitarian actors never achieved more than 4% across both TV and newspapers."

All About Them. posted by lenin

Angry Arab on Time's account of the Middle East.

"American values" posted by lenin

This sort of racist drivel from the New York Times is supposed to be 'antiwar' criticism. Let's sample: "It is something ordinary Iraqis say with growing intensity, even as they agree on little else. Let there be a strongman, they say, not a relentless killer like Saddam Hussein but somebody who will take the hammer to the insurgents and the death squads and the kidnappers and the criminal gangs who have banished all pretense of civility from their lives. Let him ride roughshod, if he must, they say, over the niceties of due process and human rights, indeed over the panoply of democratic institutions America has tried to implant here, if only he can bring peace." And more: "Of the many hard lessons America may take from its enterprise here, the impracticality of grafting American political values onto a society as different as Iraq’s, by measure of culture, religion and historical experience, will surely be one." And: "America’s 150,000 troops are caught in the middle, hunting killers on both sides, but finding little partnership from the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki." Finally: "The leading candidate for strongman, among secular Iraqis, at least, would be Ayad Allawi, whom the Americans named prime minister in the first post-Hussein government, in 2004."

This hateful stupidity is presumably offered as a substantive critique of the war. The war planners had high and noble ideals, intended to "graft" something called "American values" and a "panoply of democratic institutions" onto Iraq's body politic, but Iraqis are too mired in their culture and religion and history to adequately handle such delicate gifts. America, the innocent, stands between vicious warring parties, mired in the thick of it, finding no support, always amazed by the native capacity for ruthlessness. America, not at all involved with death squads and kidnappers and torturers, not at all promoting political sectarianism. And now that the US finds itself receiving "little partnership" from the man they put in power, they are considering another coup, this time to implant a "strongman" like Allawi. And, conveniently, this is what "ordinary Iraqis" desire "with growing intensity". Iraqis couldn't handle democracy - we tried to give it to them, but they keep voting in these religious weirdos (rather than Allawi whom they overwhelmingly shunned) and now they realise they shouldn't have been trusted to do any such thing, and desire only to be crushed under an iron fist sheathed in the stars n stripes. Iraqis can only aspire to a "pretense of civility", provided by an enlightened "strongman".

Empire, "property rights", and genocide. posted by lenin

Maybe it isn't surprising that one of the chief theorists of rights of sovereignty, Emeric de Vattel, was also a theorist of property rights. Vattel, of course, was an apologist for an expansionist absolutist state. His conception of sovereignty was rooted in the efficacy of the state governing any society: if a state exerted effective control over a territory, it had a right to govern within that territory. His version of property rights was rather similar. Nations, he suggested, are bound by natural law to cultivate the land within their reach, and if they do not, then they surrender their right to the territory. So, while the conquest of Peru and Mexico (of the Incas and Aztecs) was "a notorious usurpation", the peoples of the continent of North America had not so much inhabited those vast land tracts as roamed over them, and so the establishment of colonies was lawful "within just limits". That last qualification was not one that capitalist England was willing to accept, and not only because of the Puritan zeal of its colonists.

England had already begun the process of internal colonisation, that is of transferring property into the hands of the ruling class on the basis of doctrines of rightful appropriation, later formalised by Locke. The creation of value (that is of value realised in market transactions, exchange value) through labour was the basis of newly recognised rights of property. Property rights can occur only in the capitalist mode of production. There could be no question of "just limits" here, since anything that produced less value than English agricultural capitalism was wasteful. The English could no more co-exist with the Indians than capitalism can co-exist in the same borders for any length with hunter-gathering societies. No more than English capitalism could co-exist with Jacobite clansmen in the Scottish Highlands (several notorious and deliberately exemplary massacres were perpetrated in that war, and Dalrymple of Stair wasn't above considering genocide). Precisely because they pursued empire under specifically capitalist imperatives, the English relations with the Indians were genocidal.

This is not to say that the tributary 'encomienda' system set up by the Spanish in Peru, for instance, was all sweetness and light. Their attrition with those they sought to exploit and occupy over long periods was massively genocidal in effect, destroying tens of millions of lives. But the English drive to accumulate under capitalist imperatives became a drive to displace the local population rather than cohabit with them. This was very different to the contiguous French colonisation, which never degenerated to the barbarous depths of the English colonies. And this became part of the official American ideology as it expanded inwardly. "Common property and civilization cannot co-exist," a Commissioner for Indian Affairs explained in 1838. In practise, this meant that Indians were driven into reservations that resembled nothing so much as the concentration camps later used by the American government against Japanese citizens during World War II.

"Property rights" in the capitalist sense, aside from being a chimera, is a synonym for barbarism.

Witness to Evil posted by lenin

A few days ago, Geras invited readers of his blog to sample the lapidary wisdom of Martin Amis, who insisted that Mohammed Atta could best be understood by remembering that killing is "terrific fun", even "arousing". Geras approved, and damned the sociologically inclined left, which refused to acknowledge the impulses toward evil-doing.

Sherene Razack wrote, as America planned war on Iraq:

Contemporary talk of evil merely repeats what Edward Said has described as "the moral epistemology of imperialism" (1993, 18). In the case of Palestine, to which Said applies the phrase, Britain's justification for determining that Palestine should belong to the Zionists (in the famous 1917 Balfour declaration) rested on the notion that the desires of the country's 700,000 Arabs were absolutely irrelevant. Located outside modernity, they simply could not be permitted to stall the march of progress. Like the Africans encountered by peacekeepers, the Palestinians have no personhood to disturb the simple frame of who is good and who is evil.

...

It is perhaps no accident that so many writers of D'Allaire's story compare Rwanda to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1966), and D'Allaire to Marlowe, the novel's narrator, just as the film Apocalypse Now (1979) invites us to consider American brutality in Vietnam as born out of the brutal landscape itself. Journalist Carol Off, for instance, writing of D'Allaire, begins with an epigraph from Conrad. For her, D'Allaire is Marlowe who travels up the river in Congo and who sees the folly of colonial greed in Africa (in D'Allaire's case the folly of the U.N.) as well as the "lusty red-eyed devils" lurking in the jungle (Off 2000, 29). For those caught between "two strains of the truly sinister" (29), as both Marlowe and D'Allaire were, there is only madness, either as trauma, or as violence. In the case of the latter, peacekeepers confronted by evil are sometimes obliged to move beyond civility. The natives are bound to be ungrateful and are unlikely to stop their savagery unless met with brute force. To keep the natives in line, peacekeepers must become violent themselves, as in the rape, torture, and killing of Somalis (particularly youth, children, and women) in which Canadian, Belgian, American and Italian peacekeepers engaged while in Somalia (Razack 2000, 155). When peacekeeping violence happens, we are easily able to forgive it and even to expect it, "understanding" that it is Africa and Africans who push Western men to violence. We are even able to reverse the story, as we did in Black Hawk Down (2001), the popular film showing the heroism of American peacekeepers in Somalia and the dangers they faced there from a vengeful and bloodthirsty Somali mob.

...

The power of the story of good and evil enacted globally, whether in peace-keeping trauma narratives or in President Bush's speeches, should give us pause. For, while it is its very refusal to consider history and context that gives the story its power, its psychic appeal surely comes, paradoxically, from the mythology that informs our history. In 1973 in Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin advised us to remember that the real founding fathers of American mythology are not the politicians who drafted the constitution but rather those who (to paraphrase Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! [1951]) tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness—the rogues, adventurers, and land boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness. Their concerns, their hopes, their terrors, their violence, and their justifications of themselves as expressed in literature, are the foundation stones of the mythology that informs our history (Slotkin 1973, 4).

Ressentiment Sunday. posted by lenin

Yesterday the anniversay of Armistice passed in the usual fashion - with ever larger and more gormless looking 'poppies' adorning ever larger and more gormless looking people. Not a single television presenter has been without this pathetic adornment for weeks. People have been appending oversized 'poppy'-shaped items to their cars and means of transport. People were actually bearing poppy umbrellas yesterday. Lone buglers bugled and RAF aircrafts performed synchronised movements in the air, as if those death-dealing machines might not contribute to the subterranean population of war victims. And today, politicians, who have created desertfuls of eternal silence, will advance mournfully toward the cenotaph, their prey, lay wreaths of these ersatz flowers, and stand for an obligatory two minutes of fart-defying quietude.

This preposterous open air national church brooks no tittering. Oh no. It's crying out for satire, this puffed up crap, this necrophilic carnival. It begs for comic relief. Anyone in their right mind would address this horseshit with a vigorous one-fingered salute. But no. That would be to disrespect the dead, right? Sure. Blair solemnly remembering the evils of war does not disrespect the dead - that obsequious display does not spit on the memory of those sacrificed by past governments. Television presenters droning on with faces of grim orgasm - that doesn't disrespect the dead. Because the dead have already been pressed into the service of the Crown.

And so, a reminder:

Celebration and commemoration are themselves merely a form of necrophagous cannibalism, the homeopathic form of murder by easy stages. This is the work of heirs, whose ressentiment toward the deceased is boundless. Museums, jubilees, festivals, complete works, the publication of the tiniest of unpublished fragments - all this shows that we are entering an active age of ressentiment and repentance.

So if you're wearing one of those stupid poppies, take it off. Take it off this instant, and stop being such a sap. Give over, and get real. Every time you participate in this outrageous ritual, you abandon your senses and lend your body and mind to official absurdity. The poppy of Remembrance Sunday truly is the opium of the masses. If you want to respect the memory of those murdered in imperialist wars, take Blair out in front of that bloody monument and have him shot, him and his war cabinet, during that two minutes of obedient silence.

The Sublime Object of Ideology posted by lenin

"A typical thesis of the propaganda system is that the nation is an agent in international affairs, not special groups within it, and that the nation is guided by certain ideals and principles, all of them noble."

Noam Chomsky, Human Rights and American Foreign Policy, Spokesman Books, Nottingham, 1978.

I, I, I am the continental principality of America.

Pinochet In Palestine posted by bat020

Via Angry Arab this really is a must-read article by Joseph Massad on the situation in Palestine:

The Chilean example is important to keep in mind when one looks at the Palestinian situation today, as it functions as a sort of training video for US-planned anti-democratic coups elsewhere in the world. Not only are the US and Israel financially backing the open preparation for a coup to be staged by the top leadership of Fateh (and in the case of Israel allowing weapons' transfers to Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas's Praetorian Guard), but so are the intelligence services of a number of Israel-and US-friendly Arab countries whose intelligence services have set up shop openly in Ramallah more recently, making their longstanding and major, though understated, involvement in running the Palestinian territories more open and shameless. Indeed the intelligence "delegation" of one such Arab country has rented out a multi-story building in Ramallah to conduct their operations there.

whole thing here

PS Massad's book of essays The Persistence Of The Palestinian Question is highly recommended, btw, for anyone interested in the complex history of Zionism as an ideology and its role in the occupation of Palestine.

Israel's Massacre and PR operation. posted by lenin

A nice chap over at MediaLens supplied the following clip from BBC News about the Israeli massacre of 18 civilians in Gaza:



You noted, if you could stomach all of that hideousness from the Israeli PR woman, the repetitive misdirection, the strident assertions about the difference between Us and Them, the simply incredible claims about this unfortunate accident, tragedy, Israel never ever targets civilians etc etc. Well, now, have a look at this piece about lies you aren't supposed to believe:

So if these lies aren't intended to convince, what are they for?

First, to lay out policy. Bush, for example, did not seriously expect sensible people to believe that there was an "axis of evil". Rather he was announcing intent - explaining the terms, priorities and main targets of US imperialism.

Second, to muddy the waters. Political outrage is endlessly deferred by never ending fact-checking. There have been many sterling pieces researching and undermining Israel's Gaza fairy story, but even they are evidence that Israel has succeeded in setting an agenda. They answer the question, "Did Israel kill the Ghalias?" when the question should be, "What do we do about the fact that Israel killed the Ghalias?"

Read the whole thing.

EM Woods: "Democracy as the Ideology of Empire" posted by lenin

If you can get a copy of Colin Mooers' edition of essays entitled The New Imperialists: Ideologies of Empire, it is worth shelling out if only to have a look at the essay on Michael Ignatieff and Ellen Wood's account of democracy and empire. I offer a few notes on it, because it gets to the heart of what I think unites the pro-war left with the neocons and right-wing clash-of-civlisation theorists. For Wood, the ideology of empire was succinctly expressed by the statement signed by sixty academics after 9/11 "What We're Fighting For: A Letter From America", a title that perhaps consciously mimicked the old 'Why We Fight' series from World War II. Signed by people as diverse as Francis Fukuyama, Michael Walzer and Samuel Huntington, it issues "five fundamental truths" that could have been written by any Euston Manifesto devotee, including the wisdom about all humans being free and equal, naturally seeking rational inquiry, desiring a state that protects and nourishes them, requiring freedom of conscience and ruling out killing in the name of God as the most unGodly act imaginable, a betrayal of the universality of religious faith. The statement asserts that the war on terror is a "just war" because it is not a war of "aggression and aggrandisement" and so on.

It is simple enough to dispute all of the claims made for US imperialism in the statement, but the question is why many people, apparently intelligent people at that, are willing to believe that the empire embraces the values they espouse. For Wood, capitalism is the source of this ideology: in the first instance, because does not depend upon formal inequalities, but rather thrives in formal equality of labour. It can therefore coexist with liberal democracy in a way that class systems based on formal inequalities cannot. Since capitalist ideology cannot invoke inequality as a principle, since its ideological appeal is precisely that it affords various kinds of equality (of rights, opportunities etc), it has to resort to some unique strategies for legitimising domination and aggression. In the first instance, colonial settlement was justified as development (you can still see this ideology in official apologias for Zionism, in which the settlers purportedly made the desert bloom). This can be found in More's Utopia, (see chapter two of Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood's A Trumpet of Sedition for an exposition of this interpretation), and the earliest justifications for English imperialism in Ireland involved the right to sieze even occupied land if it wasn't being utilised fruitfully enough. The Lockean system of property rights formalises their basis in productive and profitable use of property. Thus, in the discourse of rights, the question of domination and rule was sidestepped.

Further, in colonising overseas, one simply applied to the colonial territories the same logic that one applied domestically: the new capitalist principle in which all property claims that were not profit-based were now subordinate to those that were. But this would soon become less useful. In the 20th Century especially, formal colonisation proved to be less apt for capitalist needs than informal networks of domination initiated by political interventions, effected through market transactions but sustained through an unprecedented level of military build-up and violence. The first object of the American capitalist empire is to ensure free access to all markets for capital, (especially American capital), legitimised as "openness" and "free trade". But since the openness and freedom is all one-sided, this does not entail a properly integrated world economy. Quite the contrary: Western economies sustain tarrifs and blockades, regulations on the movement of labour and competition from low-cost economies. It is advantageous to capital to maintain this system, and so it needs "not a global state, but an orderly global system of territorial states" sustained through the principle of 'sovereignty'. Wood suggests that as citizenship in capitalist society "masks" relations of class domination, so sovereign status "masks" imperial domination.

There is nevertheless a real disjuncture between the economic needs of capital, which are globals, and the political force that sustains it, which is localised. And precisely because it falls to local nation-states to manage these procedures, because it does not involve direct territorial expansion and annexation, it requires a military force bigger than any empire in history - but it also needs an ideology to support a series of open-ended "interventions" and objectives. Since, as I mentioned, principles of inequality are unavailable, the ideological resources that can be mobilised in service of such aggression are restricted to democratic and egalitarian ones. This comes at the same time that "behind the scenes, some prominent neoliberals are admitting ... that the future we are looking forward to is one in which 80 percent of the world's population will be more or less superfluous".

The new imperialists therefore appeal to a specifically American conception of democracy (on this, see Wood's Democracy Against Capitalism), one formed during a ruling class fight to prevent the American revolution eroding their privileges, to make democratic citizenship subordinate to a hierarchy of economic interests. In this process, the majority had to be fragmented to prevent it from achieving state power and coalescing into an overwhelming force that might be able to challenge the ruling class power. Popular sovereignty had to be filtered through a representative system that was designed to favour large landowners and merchants, with institutions not subject to direct election (Senate and presidency) and some not subject to election at all. The introduction of a strong presidency was precisely a means of avoiding democratic accountability. "We are well prepared," says Wood, "to view class power as having nothing to do with either class or power. We are educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom." Political rights are passive; citizenship is passive, individual and largely private. It is an extremely useful conception of democracy in which endless strategies can be devised to marginalise and exclude the masses, thwart majorities, and reduce the scope of democracy. The doctrine that such a framework exudes contributes to the conviction that the West, particularly America, is in possession of the answers, the magic formulae, and other societies that do not possess these are inadequate, lacking and, if they get uppity, in need of an ass-kicking and Americanisation to prevent them becoming uppity again. In the past, racism was made as an open appeal, precisely where the incongruity of empire's ideological claims and the means by which it purported to pursue them was most obvious: (ie, yes we're all equal, but those guys are backward and in need of tutelage etc). The anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles of the 20th Century have made it difficult to make such appeals, but they still resurface, even if they are not usually made explicit.

For instance, take Bush's recent claim that if America leaves Iraq then the evil-doers will take control of the oil and use it to blackmail the West into abandoning allies and so on. This bears two implicit claims: that America promotes democracy and peace, and that any government that ensued without American guidance would be undemocratic, lawless, violent, threatening etc; and that because of this, it is in America's gift to decide what must happen to Iraq's human and natural resources. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are simply the price that 'we' must pay (although 'we' do not pay it) for ensuring that these resources remain in our hands. This is the consensus, from Madeleine Albright to Donald Rumsfeld, from Samuel Huntington to Christopher Hitchens.

There are, by the way, some invaluable critical resources on American democracy here.

Ordure. posted by lenin

Nasser Amin victory. posted by lenin

Nasser Amin, whose case I have written about, has won an apology from SOAS for their disgraceful attack on academic freedom. The SOAS statement is here. There's much more detail in this article in the London Student.

Steps blinking into the light. posted by lenin

Wow. The Democrats control the House of Representatives. Everything will be different now. No, but seriously, it is a good thing that the Republicans appear to have been trounced more than I would have expected. You've got your first Muslim in the House of Congress, and he argues for the troops to be withdrawn from Iraq immediately. No doubt he is also a twittish neoliberal, otherwise I doubt the Democrats would have selected him, but still. Bernie Sanders has been sent to the Senate - he's not perfect, in fact, he's nothing like the "socialist" he says he is, but I think to have the very word being proudly uttered by a winning candidate in US elections is some kind of advance. Some nasty right-wing pieces of shit got kicked out, such as Rick Santorum. Katherine Harris didn't get a look-in. The Senate, they say, is "up for grabs". If Palast was right about the missing votes scams, I would expect that means the remaining seats will fall to the Republicans at the last minute. Apparently, there's only 2,000 votes in the Virginia race, and it's leaning towards the Democrats.

On the other hand, the Guuuuhlie man has won again, partly by ditching most of his policies, and Lieberman has comfortable 49-40 lead over Ned Lamont. Lamont went very quickly downhill in the polls after getting the nomination from the Democrats, in part because the DLC more or less shat on him from a very great height, which shows what the US political establishment thinks democracy is about. But also because only about 35% of Connecticut voters are registered Democrats, with about 45% being independents. And because Lamont was successfully depicted as an out-of-touch rookie and an 'extreme liberal', whatever that is. Another aspect of it is that everyone knows Lamont is a yuppy neoliberal who moved extremely fast to reassure Wall Street, while Lieberman managed to present himself as concerned about health care and saving the schools and being nice to the elderly. In sickeningly saccharine adverts, he beamed at the camera and said words like "oooh sure, we've differed over Iraq, but look at these here children playing, isn't that special? Rookie liberals like Ned Lamont would let child rapists out of prison."

The main impact of these elections, I suspect, will be to give a shot in the arm to the left, who needed to see the Republicans get beaten. And everyone knows why they were beaten: the war and the economy. You can't separate those issues, and people know it. They know that the same administration that is plundering the US treasury is also plundering Iraq, to put it as simply as that. So, whatever one thinks of the Democrats, and however little one expects from the American political system as a whole, this is an advance for the left, and an opportunity too. And it is also bad news for this man.

Object Lesson. posted by lenin

"Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran's experience will prevent the rise of other Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders."

New York Times editorial, 6th August 1954.

Jealous. posted by lenin

The scene - Madeleine Albright posing for a photo opportunity at Kigali airport in 1996. An intrepid reporter offers this observation:

I couldn't help wondering to myself what [the Rwandans] were making of this scene, which represented America at its best: the spirit of community, the melting pot, the willingness to help faraway strangers in need, the freedom and opportunity for each indiviudal to work his way to the top and, most important, a concept of citizenship based on allegiance to an idea, not a tribe. As a picture, it represented everything that Rwanda was not. Rwanda had just emerged from an orgy of tribal warfare - Rwandan Hutus against Rwandan Tutsis - in which a million people were killed, some of them brutally hacked to death with machetes. Rwanda was all olive trees and no Lexuses, a country that was all gnarled roots choking one another, and no flowering branches.

Thomas Friedman, closing chapter of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Witch hunt posted by lenin

"A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it. There is no road between."

General Danforth, during the Salem witch trials.

Nicaragua: "They did everything but threaten to invade". posted by lenin

As Ortega looks to have won the Nicaraguan presidential elections, the Houston Chronicle discusses the failure of Bush's campaign to subvert the Nicaraguan elections. There is nothing new here: cut off aid, and threaten an economic blockade if they (the voters) don't follow orders. The US stated beforehand that it would consider any attempt to remove immunity from prosecution for its man Enrique Bolanas and try him for corruption a "coup", and would respond "very, very forcibly". I mentioned back in September that these threats had alienated even opponents of the former leader and Sandinista candidate, Daniel Ortega. Paul Trivelli, the US ambassador to Nicaragua, explained that "we have been trying to speak in a more direct way so that people understand what our decision is." If the pre-election polls are accurate, then the FSLN will have a clear plurality in the National Assembly and control most of the departments in the country, despite US threats. Yet it was always a certainty that Ortega's opponents would cry foul on the result, even though it is not at all close, and they are now doing so, thus providing the excuse for any potential intervention. America rules. America's decision is final - and, potentially, terminal.

The US intervention in Nicaragua during the 1980s was characterised by an underground invasion, using Honduras-based former National Guards in collusion with Argentinian Nazis to recruit Nicaraguan peasants and train them in the methods of terror. CIA-provided intelligence enabled them to target clinics and schools, the kinds of institutions that the Sandinistas had built up to improve health and literacy. They tortured, raped and terrorised their way through Nicaragua, often carrying out terror that would later be laid at the doorstep of the Sandinistas (driving out Miskito Indians and preventing their return, for instance). On top of this strategy, an annually renewed embargo was imposed, which effectively bled Nicaragua dry. After a decade of terror that claimed about 30,000 lives (and it would have been more had the US been in possession of the state, as in El Salvador), elections were held under threat of further annihilation. There had been elections in 1984, in which the Sandinistas easily took over two thirds of the vote, but while credible observers regarded them as fair, Western media outlets followed the United States in describing them as rigged, marked by state terror and so on - this during a massive US-led war on the country. Toward the end of the 1980s, it was that the Contras could not win militarily, and were eager for a peaceful settlement: the US blocked this several times, but finally let up with the proviso that elections could be held and that if the UNO led by Violeta Chammoro did not win, the terror war would resume, and the blockade would continue: if she did win, peace and aid would be forthcoming. Moreover, anyone who queued up to vote for her would receive $40. She won, with slightly less than 55% of the vote. That farce was considered a free election and greeted with the usual howls of approbation. In subsequent elections, the anti-Sandinista parties have repeatedly invoked the terror of the 1980s as a reason not to vote for the FSLN.

At any rate, that era of American terror, which was part of a wave of suppression that engulfed the entirety of Central and much of Southern America, is now routinely referred to as a "US-backed insurgency". This is the standard view. I mentioned Paul Berman's enthusiastic 'anti-totalitarian' backing for the Contras a while ago. I was reading through his New Yorker article from 1996 this morning, partly to remind myself of what I hate his guts, and I was struck by the fact that if you only read his accounts, you would not understand that there was a US-led blockade, that there were free elections in 1984, that the elections in 1990 were grotesquely fixed and staged in the context of national terror and deliberate impoverishment, that the Contras repressed and killed their alleged supporters etc; you would instead come away with the inference that the Contras had developed as a domestic insurgency against a commie government trying to take away the peasants' land and stop them from selling goods in their local market place, that they perhaps had bad leadership and some extremist fringes but were essentially a force for democracy, that the 1990 elections were the first elections to have taken place since the 1979 revolution, that there were no problems with them, and that they demonstrated not the success of US terror but the unpopularity of the Sandinistas. So degraded is this man's probity that he relies, throughout this lengthy piece, on several days of conversations with a former Contra fighter. He is not completely ironic in describing the Sandinistas as "atheist, totalitarian, Cuban, satanic and anti-peasant". But Berman's views more or less reflect those expressed by Washington at the time, not to mention the overwhelming consensus of the media.

And so, if we witness a repeat blockade and another round of putschist terror, we will hear from people like Berman that Ortega is at any rate an old totalitarian who has abandoned his support for abortion rights, cuddles up with the Catholic Church, likes Castro too much and hangs out with Chavez.

The lessons of Iraq 'state-building' posted by lenin

One theme has been constant throughout the past three-and-a-half years - the Iraqi government has always been weak. For this, the US and Britain were largely responsible. They wanted an Iraqi government which was strong towards the insurgents but otherwise compliant to what the White House and Downing Street wanted. All Iraqi governments, unelected and elected, have been tainted and de-legitimised by being dependent on the US. This is as true of the government of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today as it was when sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq under the prime minister Iyad Allawi in June 2004. Real authority had remained in the hands of the US. The result was a government whose ministers could not move outside the Green Zone. They showed great enthusiasm for press conferences abroad where they breathed defiance at the insurgents and agreed with everything said by Mr Bush or Tony Blair.

The government can do nothing because it only came into existence after ministries were divided up between the political parties after prolonged negotiations. Each ministry is a bastion of that party, a source of jobs and money. The government can implement no policy because of these deep divisions. The government cannot turn on the militias because they are too strong. (Patrick Cockburn, quoted here).

The US wanted an Iraqi state that could be tough toward the insurgency (and therefore, increasingly, the Iraqi population), but otherwise dependent and weak: this much is obvious. This is not new: the Iraqi government has always had weak legitimacy, since its foundation as a state, and has therefore appeared as a unidirectional imposition on society. When the power has been dispersed regionally, as it was under the British, it has been especially pliable as well. The authoritarianism and repressiveness of states is historically related to their capacities, their ability to meet some of the demands of the population and generate some legitimacy. Since the occupiers of Iraq have specifically raised the comparison with El Salvador, it is worth noting that the larger scale of state violence in that US client state during the 1980s was in large part due to the state's inability or unwillingness to make reforms that could secure the consent of the rural working class and peasantry to be governed. The US needed the Iraqi state's legitimacy to be weak, and for its accountability to be primarily if not exclusively to Washington, because the reforms they had in mind were going to hurt. The risk of early elections was that the institutions of the state would develop along lines that were answerable to the population, whereas what Bremer and co wanted was for the state to be already developed as an extreme neoliberal entity thoroughly integrated with international (American) capital. They of course wanted to seal up the oil in effective US control, and insulating the basic structures of the regime from the masses was going to be crucial to that. There are good reasons to suppose they wanted the oil prices to spike as well. (There is a precedent for this. During April Glaspie's infamous meeting with Saddam Hussein in 1990, weeks before the invasion of Kuwait, Glaspie told Hussein that there were members of the Bush administration who came from oil states and would appreciate a rise in the price to $25 a barrel. These days the price is closer to $60 a barrel.)

The early efforts to build a state around the exile clients floundered because of the influence of people like Sistani, who pressed for early elections among other things. The CPA argued against this on the grounds that they would need a full census and that other options, such as ID or ration cards, were impracticable. Ironically, when elections finally occurred, they did involve an electoral roll based on ration cards. There was also a problem with relations with the Kurdish north - the US didn't want to alienate such loyal clients as the leaders of the PUK and KDP, but were unwilling to devise schemes to redress the legacy of 'Arabisation' for fears that it would be divisive and alienate increasingly important allies in the SCIRI leadership. It also risked intensifying the insurgency in the Sunni Arab parts of the north. When their offices for arranging property transfers were attacked, the occupiers swiftly and substantially reduced their scope. The Kurdish leaders were instead allowed to surreptitiously send their peshmerga into parts of the north and begin ethnically cleansing residents. Within the Kurdish Autonomous Region itself, created as a dependency with very limited autonomy in 1970 and subsequently transferred to the tutelary control of the US after the failed 1991 uprising, the two main parties continued to run separate administrations. The division between these two parties, expressed in the civil war of the 1990s, has done the occupiers no harm at all, since it renders both of them dependent on outside help - in the 1990s, for instance, they respectively sought the help of Iran and Saddam Hussein. Moreover, both parties increasingly depend on US-Israeli support as they become more unpopular in their respective zones of control, which is why Massoud Barzani's KDP has allowed itself to repress criticism to the extent of trying to imprison a critic of Barzani for thirty years. The early aim of the occupiers therefore was to loosely unite the Kurdish groups with Iyad Allawi's exile group and invest the state apparatus that they were developing in their hands, along with the cooperating SCIRI movement. This was the attempt from the beginning when they dispelled the Ba'athist army and sacked all Ba'ath party members from the state institutions. It was especially so when Steve Casteel and the CIA were building up the Ministry of the Interior with Badr Brigades and former Ba'ath special forces at its core. Each ministry is populated by US 'advisors', of course, so they are politically subordinate to the expanding US embassy, its money, its army and its intelligence operatives. Incidentally, it should be mentioned in respect of the process of "de-Baathification" that it hasn't been suspended or given up or anything, although many assume it has been dropped as a bad mistake. The Higher National Committee for the Eradication of the Ba'ath Party survives under the chairmanship of Ahmed Chalabi, and exerts its power as an autonomous arm of government, thereby granting enormous political leverage to a crucial ally of the United States. They have been able to weed out political opponents at various levels of the state, and would have had almost two hundred candidates banned from the December 2005 elections had it not been for the decision by the US-appointed Board of Commissioners for elections to simply ignore them. The point is that this, like many components of the new Iraqi state reflects a US strategy of patrimonial control: it can't be understood as some vague commitment to eradicating even humble public servants who were forced to be members of the Ba'ath party to get ahead.

Anyway, the US will undoubtedly have anticipated that their destructive policies would lead to increased combat and growing support for their insurgency, but were only unwilling to allow this to happen where it was inessential to their programme, especially if it involved the risk that a sufficient uprising would occur as to risk their inability to control the country: hence the decision to lift the arrest warrant on Sadr only a few days after having issued it. Since then they have negotiated a modus vivendi with Sadr's men based on the unwillingness of the US to get bogged down in another combat and the military weakness of Sadr's forces. Sadr has since become a seriousl political problem for the occupiers and potentially a military one too, hence the recent crackdowns on Sadr city (broken by a general strike called by Sadr's movement).

Similarly, the didn't expect to have to fight in Fallujah, at least not when they did: their operations were ad hoc responses to the dramatic killing of Western contractors, which could partially explain why they were initially unsuccessful in taking the town and were seen off by cheering crowds. One other reasons was that they had to manage the "handover of power" in mid-2004 before they could properly commit to going in: a transition which was effected by promoting figures from within the same clutch of corrupt exiles that the occupiers had themselves already decided were incapable of "reaching out" to Iraqis. This was a contested decision - Lakhdar Brahimi had wanted to appoint a bunch of technocrats until the elections, but both the US government and IGC opposed this and insisted on recycling the same clique of cronies. From this, one might surmise that the US prefers having a weak, unpopular group of bought men, since however stupid and feckless they are they are easily undermined and disciplined where necessary. Once again, the old motif held firm: the government of Iyad Allawi could not retain consent for long, nor govern effectively, but it was prepared to be brutally authoritarian, promulgating curfews, states of emergency, restrictions on movement, imposing military governors where it saw fit and expropriating and spying on whomever it deemed a potential threat. Allawi's rule was strictly circumscribed by the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) which neither he nor his appointed co-governors were empowered to attenuate or overturn. Allawi was feckless and brutal enough to cause no problems for the US when they drove many of the residents out of Fallujah and began to destroy the city in November 2004.

The elections that the US had committed itself to under pressure from Sistani introduced a new problem for the occupiers, however. The TAL would remain in force well after the elections, until the founding of a new constitution in October 2005. This gave the occupiers a lengthy interval to reach an arrangement with the victors in the election that would see the essential parts of TAL, from the US perspective, embedded in the constitution. They would have time to see if Sadr's new position in the national political elite would domesticate him, perhaps surmising that Sadr is a player more than he is an ideologue. They had ample time before the elections to gauge the likely composition of the new government, to issue bribes and promote their favoured candidate (Allawi) as far as possible. And the post-election "wrangling" among leading parties for influence and posts within the administration was probably not an unexpected breathing space either. At the same time, Bush had to assure the Saudi regime that it didn't have to fear a "Shi'ite Crescent" extending from Iran to eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as a result of the elections. I don't know what he told them, but my guess is that the words "Israel", "Hezbollah" and "Gonna Git Eye-ran" came up.

It is estimated retrospectively that 53% of eligible domestic voters turned out (it had been 58%, but higher registration rates later in 2005 produced a revised estimate). Less than fifty per cent of total eligible voters, including those based overseas, turned out. The turnout was low for a variety of reasons: 1) the occupation had destroyed much of the Sunni part of Iraq so that Fallujah, hammered so mercilessly before the vote, sent only 8,000 votes back from a population of 300,000, a turnout of 3% in what one Marine Colonel cruelly observed was "the safest city in the country" after its annihilation; and 2) the Sunni-based resistance had decided that the elections were part of a process of embedding the occupation rather than removing it, and so boycotted it, some threatening to attack polling stations. This strategy would have worked better if it had been coterminously embraced by the Sadrist movement - as it was, it was a gift to the occupiers, literally dramatising the division between the occupiers and resistance as one between the bearers of democracy and a violent, hostile community that, as every fool thinks he knows, was privileged under Saddam.

And the new political set-up was not a problem for the occupiers: the main Shiite representatives were the SCIRI and al-Dawa, who had played ball from the beginning, the Kurdish leadership and a small rump of Allawi supporters. The Sadrists in the UIA were the only potential problem, but were not strong enough to thwart the neoliberal, federalist constitution that the US and its allied finally settled upon. This constitution removed from central government control all but a small cluster of policymaking powers, and asserted that in all cases of dispute, regional law would automatically have priority. Further, the hydrocarbon revenues would be distributed on the basis, not of need, but of the arrangements of governorates from which the oil came. A mere 1.1% came from the four central governorates where most Sunnis lived. Meanwhile, even as the proposals were being discussed and the vote was being readied, the US was conducting savage campaigns in Sunnia areas, such as in Tal Afar.

The fact that this bill was passed at all was largely due to the use of communalist voting: the US on the supporting parties to sell it to a public that in fact opposed to the substance of what was entailed. They also twisted arms and offered a concession in the form of an amendment allowing for repeal of federalist provisions in order to get the Sunni-based Iraqi Islamic Party on board. The federalist constitution potentially weakens the central government, dividing Iraq among a number of independent governorates who can be patronised and played off against one another. Significantly, of course, the very divisions over federalism would contribute to these centrifugal forces in the form of a developing dynamic of civil war (often promulgated by America's allies with the use of the state machinery). It is not plausible that the occupiers were simply unaware of the potentially dramatic way in which forcing this constitution through would impact on sectarian divisions, or that their subordinates were acting in the ways that they were. Civil war of some kind was not merely acceptable, but helpful to occupation ends.

In the second elections, however, many resistance groups had not only called a ceasefire but protected polling booths. They were contemptuous of the "Iranians", those running the Badr Corps ethnic cleansing operations in Sunni neighbourhoods, and successfully diminished their power within the government by securing 87 seats through the Iraqi Accord Front, a mainly Islamist group, and Salih al-Mutlaq's Sunni Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, a secular group. But, despite the fact that Sadr's nationalist bloc became the largest group within the UIA, and despite the fact that the Sunni groups opposed federalism, the resulting alignments gave electoral expression to a growing sectarian dynamic. The successful nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari as Prime Minister showed that the SCIRI's position had been reduced - but not with the US, who supported the SCIRI's preference for PM, 'Abd al-Mahdi (a SCIRI member and economist who had worked in the interim government and whose father was a minister under the old monarchy). However, the US eventually replaced Jaafari with Nouri al-Maliki, another Dawa party member, because he was seen by Zalmay Khalilzad as being independent of Iran.

Lots of people have got extremely rich, including the allies of the US, such as Chalabi and his business partners. The contracting out system in which the US hires its own biggest companies who in turn keep a large chunk of the money to hire a local Iraqi firm, who in turn hire surrogates who don't in the end build anything, has made segments of American capital very wealthy for practically no cost and no activity of their own. The US-dominated reconstruction institutions have embezzled, mis-spent and stolen billions of dollars. A huge informal economy allows multinational investors to make a fortune out of Iraq's misery, especially as large amounts of oil are secretly and illegally exported out of the country (perhaps up to 60% of all exported oil in 2004). Another aspect of the informal economy is the sex trade, which follows the US military and its auxiliaries wherever they base themselves. The irony is that for all that the repression of women in the new Iraq is seen to be driven by puritanism, religious parties like the SCIRI have actually been issuing licenses to prostitutes so that it is now, for the first time, quite legal: a practical measure to service dollar-rich interlopers and prevent their own moral police from going overboard in their activities. The means by which Iraq is being rearticulated into the global economy seem destined to be those of smuggling and transactions of nebulous legal status. The bombing of the al-Askari shrine coupled with a massive and underreported US air war have made this year in Iraq the bloodiest since the invasion. The US shows no sign of intending to leave, and has sent its paid lackeys such as Talabani and Saleh out to insist that the US must stay for another three years at least (strangely coinciding with a Bush administration announcement that it intends to stay at least until 2010). In such an interval, the already genocidal peaks of violence could wipe out much of the Iraqi population and destroy what infrastructure remains and whatever has been improvised and negotiated in the thick of it. Yet, this year has also seen sustained and intensified resistance to the US, such that American soldiers were unable to retain Anbar, despite everything. The south of Iraq is increasingly insurgent and has registered a trend away from sectarianism among the general population. Segments of the Iraqi state are actively assisting the resistance. Despite the efforts of the US, some of those operating in the weak representative institutions are trying to do some of what they have been elected to do: resist the opening up of the Iraqi market, insist on regulation and keep the state sovereign in relation to the economy. The unions, especially the southern oil unions, have been resisting this too. In its way, if a properly national (and not only nationalist) resistance forms in Iraq, it will be first an anti-colonial movement and second a movement of the Iraqi working class (there really isn't much of a middle class left) against the comprador elite that is grossly enriching itself off the destruction and expropriation of Iraq. It will not be socialist, but it will be anti-sectarian and against neoliberalism. It will be pro-Iraq and pro-survival. Which is about as much as you can ask of any national independence movement.

Cockburn on US elections. posted by lenin

Alex Cockburn:

Pick a topic--the war, the economy, a two million-plus prison population, the environment, the condition of organized labor, the Bill of Rights--and can you recall any Democrat this fall having said anything suggesting that in the event Democrats recapture either the House or the Senate or both anything of consequence might occur?

The week before polling day the New York Times had a story about the Business Lobby's plans to sweep away all irksome laws and regulations passed in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Did anyone cry, "that's just the kind of corporate villainy we need the Democrats to guard us from!" Of course not. It would be as unrealistic as to hope that a Congress controlled in both chambers by Democrats would simply vote to deny Bush the money for the war in Iraq.

It's fuck or walk. posted by lenin

US lurches closer to recession before elections. posted by lenin

The bizarre Nixonian campaign to turn a half-hearted quip about the Bush administration by Kerry into an slander on America's brave boys (who can, if they're so easily offended, go fuck themselves with a chemical light), and therefore an electoral issue, has partially succeeded. I didn't expect that Kerry would be so cowardly as to apologise, but at any rate it will make little difference. There is a last-minute Republican "surge" going on according to at least two polls (ABC/WaPo and Pew). I don't believe for a second that this is because wavering Republicans were really upset by What Kerry Didn't Say. Even wavering Republicans aren't that preposterous. What is more likely is that, as usual, the Republicans are much better at mobilising their base at the last minute. Notice that among likely voters, the Democrat lead is much smaller: few people are enthused about this grey shower of pro-war crooks, and it is hardly surprising. It also has to be said that the Republicans are cutting into what was going to be a "tidal" victory for the Democrats, so they aren't necessarily looking toward a glorious outcome. Moreover, some of the key swings to the GOP are taking place in what have been Republican strongholds and were only recently faced with the prospect of surprise Democratic successes. Furthermore, not all piolls register that shift. Saturday's polling for Angus Reid puts the Democrats 19 points ahead.

The Democrats do not deserve a victory - but elections have little to do with desert. At the moment, a solid defeat for the Republicans would have a heartening effect on the American left, (as would strong votes for Greens, radicals and socialists wherever remotely possible). However, as usual, the Democrats cannot win the election for themselves, because they are completely unwilling to address the issues that make them more popular than the Republicans: the war and the economy. If you watch the Democratic ads, it is so disheartening: they have their candidates pandering to puritanical bigotry. One would-be congressman wonders how he will explain the 'Foley scandal' to his eighteen year old daughter and, get this, he holds up a picture of the sweet little thing so we can all let our lips wobble at the impugning of her purity. If his eighteen year old daughter is so unfamiliar with the ways of the world, then he should be fucking locked up for child abuse, not elected to Congress. Even where they do address the war, it is with cod patriotic plucking on the heart-strings, such as with Tammy Duckworth's campaign (which, unlike her, may have some legs to it). It falls to radical campaigners to raise the issues that they will not, and therefore to focus the public mind as far as possible on the real business of politics rather than on the very professional advertising.

And aside from the war, the next most important issue for American voters in every single poll on the matter is the economy. Fred Magdoff's recent Monthly Review article, The Explosion of Debt and Speculation, addresses some of the structural problems in the US economy - underuse of capital, underemployment, structural imbalances, the very very poor rate of recovery since 2001-2, the housing crisis, the build up of massive private debt, and so on. The latest news is that "Real estate and auto sales woes are feeding recession fears". Recent growth has been slower than expected. The hardest hit by the recent economic woes have been manufacturing workers: 3 million jobs have been lost in that sector since 2000. Even though the US economy is still adding jobs at the moment, it is losing manufacturing jobs at an alarming rate. Last month alone, 39,000 were lost. This is not all because of Bush, by the way: the locust years of late were prepared by the Clinton administration whose policies would perhaps have led to an earlier and harder fall more generally had it not been for Bush's military Keynesianism. Nevertheless, Bush's policies have exacerbated the crisis in manufacturing in a number of ways. State investment in military hardware boosts demand for high technology manufacturing goods, but not necessarily for mass consumer goods, which is where the fall in demand has been greatest. The radical transformation in the tax structure transferred huge amounts of funds to the rich, and the suppression of labour (such as during the New York transit strike), alongside the recession, allowed companies to keep pay raises well below the rate of inflation - thereby in fact cutting the pay rate.

Of course, the US has no formal incomes policy, but it does have a fairly unique administration of economic affairs by the open representatives of Wall Street in the Federal Reserve, whose decisions need no ratification by any branch of government. Its monetary policies send the relevant signals to the owners of capital. And the Fed provides the organic connection between the state and the main actors in the economy through investment banks - bear in mind that investment banks don't merely lend money to companies, since most of their business is in equity, which is to say that they provide investment cash in exchange for a temporally delimited share in ownership of the company. That is not only leverage, but an excellent way to communicate policy. Further, the state sets pay standards in its deals with public sector workers, and through its minimum wage policy. In sum, while capitalists need no permission or encouragement to pay as little as possible for as long as possible, the state has such an enormous coordinating role in the economy (contrary to all this bullshit about laissez-faire) that matters of income are directly political, and not merely issues for labour struggle.

The Democrats wouldn't dream of trying to reverse any of this, although they might consider slowing up the rate of exploitation a tiny bit. It is people like Ralph Nader and the Green Party and so on who have been properly raising these issues, and it would have taken a serious and focused campaign by these groups to redirect the public discourse from piddling 'moral' controversies. Unfortunately, they don't stand much of a chance, and show no signs of even trying. There really needs to be a new radical coalition formed, based on the interests of the American working class, but specifically including attempts to embrace Arab Americans who are especially vulnerable to racist discrimination and who have experienced a massive loss of pay in recent years. It would have to be radical without being characterised by the language of schisms, including marxists but not marxist, including Greens but not Green, including unions but not an outgrowth of union bureaucracy - a broad, radical, left-wing movement representing the unrepresented working class on every front, articulating their interests on the war, Katrina, wages, employment conditions, the economy and so on.

For now, of course, the Republicans need to be given a damn good hiding.

The formation of Lenin. posted by lenin

Among the themes of Christopher Read's interesting biography of Lenin is the extent to which the Russian populists influenced Lenin's outlook. It is highly speculative as perforce it must be, but is useful nonetheless. In standard Cold War history, Lenin is either a wuthering aristocrat hypocratically standing upon his rights as a landowner while bigging up the workers, or the self-effacing son of a progressive educator who was an instinctive marxist revolutionary from the second of his conception (where, embodying Slavonic, Tatonic, Jewish, Muslim and various European lineages, he emerged from the womb a birthday internationalist). Both of these are wrong, and no synthesis is possible. Lenin is, as Read writes, a construct, something that emerged from the youthful Vladimir Ulyanov out of the execution of his brother, Alexander (whereupon Liberals refused to drive his mother to the funeral, for all their hypocritical chatter), and the death of his father, Nikolai, and the death by typhoid of his sister, Olga. Also from his encounter with petit-bourgeois democratic literature such as that of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which advocated revolutionary asceticism, and whose hero sought to emulate the toughness of the sailors of the Volga. Chernyshevsky's book, 'What Is to Be Done?', which Lenin read several times over, continues a tradition of heroic idealisation in which great individuals are moulded in trials by fire, in which torture is an involuntary course of self-help, precisely as in The Count of Monte Cristo and similar literature (right into the late 20th Century when Travis Bickle fancies training himself in this fashion, and into the 21st, when V emerges from scorching flames as a superhuman angel of death).

Read is not reductionist about this: he acknowledges the social conditions which produced Lenin, but these social conditions impact in a very personal fashion. It doesn't get any more personal than executing your brother while you're studying for your law exams. Read's thesis is that Lenin was formed as both a continuation and rejection of Russian populism: Lenin opposed the strategy of individual terrorism, did not trust the peasants as far as the populists did, looked to the working class as the agency of revolutionary change and generally situated himself in the social democratic movement; and yet, he respected the older populist leaders and inherited the techniques of conspiracy and underground cells. He also had a decidedly political slant, opposed to the crude 'economism' of some marxists - surely also a legacy of populism as well as a reaction to the unified power of Church and State. Some superficially argue that his advocacy of a vanguard draws from the populist tradition, but in fact in 'What is to be Done' he was still aping Karl Kautsky, the Amid of European social democracy, while in later incarnations his vanguard was as far from a professionalised elite as you can imagine a party being. Yet the legacy is there, and the tactic of conspiratorial cells was one most suited to the circumstances of Russian autocracy.

Maxim Gorky's anecdote about Lenin being unable to listen to Beethoven's Appassionata for fear he would be inclined pat the heads of opponents instead of beating them, cited by Read, is appealing, but I don't believe Gorky. Not only because, in the history of the Russian Revolution I think Gorky was one of the most appallingly elitist characters, but rather because it seems contrived. It has the sense of a legend. More likely is that Lenin, a child of a middle class family well-schooled in watercolours and music, got bored with Beethoven and turned off the gramophone one day, with a sardonic explanation. But the anecdote is widely bruited because it fits a certain conception: Lenin, tragically repressing his humanity, forcing himself into the mould of a ruthless revolutionary, sacrificing himself for a greater cause; or Lenin, coldly exterminating that within him that rebelled against his extermination of others.

Lenin was formed, and reformed, through life, and literature, and political struggle. If you choose the heuristic of a 'Volodya' character transforming himself into the 'Lenin' character, then it bears restating a few times that Lenin was never the same person or the same revolutionary; that Lenin insisted above all else that he shouldn't be simply imitated; that non-Russians should not, in one metaphor, speak Russian (or follow his texts as if they were recipe books for insurgency in other words); that he had changed his mind before and would change it again; that he refused his own premature immortalisation, and tried at the last moment to stop the already seriously diminished Bolshevik party falling into the hands of a Russian chauvanist and centraliser named Stalin. Read's post-Cold War revisionist biography does, fortunately, emphasise all of this.

A Mountebank's Progress: how a sardonic critic of New Labour came to embrace torture. posted by lenin

Nick Cohen has set a new low in his slow, fawning creep around the ankles of the Anglo-American ruling class. We have to deport terrorist suspects - whatever their fate, he says today. There is no question of there being an argument: there are anecdotes and faint analogies and quack patriotic history and assurances about what "everyone" says, but beyond that nothing. Cohen's piece is merely another step in his shedding of the liberal chrysalis and his emergence as a puff-faced reactionary ranter, and I use it here as a foil for looking at some of the issues involved.

Take the instance of Magnus Gäfgen, a law student suspected of the kidnapping of Jakob von Metzler, an 11-year-old boy. He knew the whereabouts of the boy, but refused to tell. He was threatened with torture, and only then divulged. Cohen insisted at the time that this should make people reconsider their opposition to torture, but nevertheless still waffled and drew the conclusion that even this apparently stark case hadn't ended all that well (the boy was already dead), and that opponents of torture should be prepared to argue against its use in all circumstances. There was considerable denial in this case at the time: the police chief in question had threatened to inflict pain under medical supervision, but refused to call it torture - the legal establishment agreed, and the conviction which the officer in question received for the threat was both negligible and an embarrassment to the magistrate who laid it on him. The measures threatened would certainly pass under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but the charge against the officer did not mention the word torture. Daschner's subordinates understood that torture was involved, and some had tried to suggest other measures (confronting the suspect with the relatives of the missing boy, for instance), but he was vehement in his insistence on the use of torture. In this way, a precedent was set for torture and denial. Any officer who seriously threatens or in fact carries out torture has been shown that he need expect no worse than a slap on the wrist, an indictment on a misdemeanour offense.

Cohen now believes that "torture will be all over the news in the coming weeks and, as in the Daschner affair, I suspect it is going to be hard to say automatically that what the authorities want to do is wrong". It will be hard for supporters of torture to say this, it is true. Equally, it will be hard for apologists for state power to say this. But why should anyone else find it hard? Because "for the first time in British history, there are asylum seekers who could attack the country which gave them sanctuary." And Cohen plays Cassandra to the liberal chorus: "I don't think people realise how unparalleled this change is." "Everyone" always laments how London became "Londonistan" (do they? did it?), but no one realises that it was the old liberal assumptions about refugees that allowed this state of affairs to come about.

It's so unfair: if MI5 says someone is a "a threat to national security", "he can't be locked up because the law lords have ruled that internment is illegal". Further, "evidence from his native country that he is a member of a banned organisation can't be used against him because it may have been obtained by torture, and he can't be deported because he may be tortured back home." So, having heard hints from the Lib Dem peer Lord Carlile, "independent" reviewer of terrorism legislation and "anything but a New Labour stooge", that the government may drop the ban on deporting suspects to countries where they may be tortured, Cohen reconciles himself to the deportation and torture of asylum seekers on grounds of MI5 say-so.

Carlile is, of course, the man who recommended prolonged control orders, and legislation to bring Britain into line with the USA Patriot Act. "Terrorism" in the definition he supports (that of the Terrorism Act 2000) includes the threat or use of violence against states and not only civilians - so dissident Egyptians, insurgent Kurds, rebels against the Saudi monarchy etc all can and have been targeted under this legislation. Most of those held under internment when it was legal, as Cohen wishes it still was, have not been charged with any offense, and most of those who have were charged with unrelated offenses.

It is worth reviewing briefly the kinds of powers that the government has already arrogated to itself. The Terrorism Act 2000 not only proscribed a number of organisations which pose no threat to the UK, but actually deemed destruction of property a terrorist offense. Rolling in fields of GM crops would therefore be terroristic. During the firefighters' strike in late 2002, it was argued by some right-wing commentators that the activity would qualify as terrorism under the laws. Legal advice at the time supported this contention. The Civil Contingencies Bill, supposedly an anti-terrorist measure, allows people to be imprisoned for any activity "causes or may cause disruption to: (a) the activities of Her Majesty's Government; (b) the performance of public functions; (c) the activities of banks or other financial institutions." Protests, strikes, anything you like could be covered under such a definition. The Immigration, Asylum & Nationality Bill allows the Home Secretary to deprive anyone of citizenship if he feels it is "conducive to the public good". The Terrorism Act 2006 makes it an offense to call for the active defense of Chechnyans and Palestinians under military occupation. On top of the expansive legal powers the government is perpetually awarding itself, there are illegal activities to consider: such as the complicity in CIA torture flights, and, as Craig Murry has revealed, the willingness to rely on evidence obtained by torture.

In short, the government is larded with powers that it does not need if the aim were only to prevent criminal activity, such as attempted terrorist attacks. It would be stupendously simple to legally detain those who pose a threat: produce the evidence, and try them. It won't do to pretend that the government cannot produce the evidence because it may have been obtained by torture, because if the only evidence available is likely to have been obtained by torture, then it really isn't good enough, because evidence obtained through torture is generally horseshit. Secondly, it is totally untrue that the government cannot use evidence from regimes which may have used torture, as we shall see. Yet, producing evidence and trying people is precisely where the government runs into trouble. As the bogus 'ricin plot' showed, it prefers to fabricate evidence and impose control orders in a politically convenient fashion. The alleged plot was used to prove that Saddam Hussein was sending out terrorist poisoners across the world, and four men became patsies for an outrageous government fix-up. The government tried to deport them, of course, without much success as yet. Now, guess what: the information that was used to try them was obtained by the "interrogation" by the brutal Algerian security services of a man named Mohammed Meguerba, someone the Algerian government accuses of terrorist offenses. The "evidence" was terrifying if you believed it, but predictably, his information was utterly implausible.

In order to proceed from being an acerbic liberal critic of New Labour to being one of its most reactionary defenders, you only need to start by persuading yourself that there is something called 'totalitarianism', and that issuing from this sui generis movement is an undifferentiated phenomenon known as 'Islamism' which is irreducibly responsible for genocidal massacres (so that Hassan Hanafi is no different to Osama bin Laden, who in turn is much the same as Ayatollah Khameini, himself a blood-brother of Omar el-Bashir, the latter in secret alliance with Hamas and the MEK...), that it is sending its adherents to kill in the UK for no other reason that They Hate Our Freedoms, and that the government is if anything too liberal and too enfeebled by its democratic outlook, its hostility to torture, its excessive sweetness to immigrants. You have to believe that torture is not only legitimate, but a necessary and effective way of obtaining evidence, that MI5 is a reliable source on 'threats' to the UK, that the government has a useable definition of 'terrorism', that it does not detain whom it in fact does detain, that it cannot use evidence that it in fact does use, that it cannot try whom it in fact does try etc. You have to absolve yourself of the duty to analyse properly and be willing to perceive what is contrary to every indication provided by reality.

Anyway, here is a documentary from Peter Oborne on the ricin plot fabrications:

Borat posted by lenin

What do you care what I think of this piece of shit film? Actually, it's pretty funny, but I'd find that easier to say if the newspapers would stop creaming their pants about it. The one thing that confirmed in my mind that the film was worth some highly guarded praise was that Mark Kermode didn't like it (cuz it's anti-American, innit?). One or two small spoilers follow.

Kazakhstan has nothing to do with Borat or this film - unfortunately, it is simply a placeholder for some "Asiatic savages" in the old imperial lingo. Hardly anyone in Kazakhstan looks anything like Borat, and potassium is not the main export (oil is, hence the presence of huge investment banks like ABN Amro and HSBC). So, the film is casually racist - probably not as much as in the usual Hollywood fare, but still. Actually, what is irritating about it is that the ADL worries that people will go along with the antisemitic sentiments Borat expresses, whereas it is far more likely that people will think, when they're laughing at this cheap racist caricature called 'Kazakhstan', that this kind of racism is harmless fun. However, the bulk of the film exposes American racism and sexism and homophobia and outright insanity. There is an interesting trick in the film: at one point, Borat gets out to meet some Young Black Men whom he describes out of their earshot in the foulest racist language. A menacing soundtrack plays as his little truck moves through the 'ghetto'. But, of course, the guys whom he meets turn out to be the sanest and most approachable people in the whole film, while most other people are either neurotic or racist or obnoxiously misogynistic. Same with the Jewish landlords, but then no one was likely to accept Borat's cartoonish antisemitic thoughts. Interestingly an upper class white Christian family whom he dines with are less offended when he returns from the toilet with a bag containing his shit ("so, where do you want to put?") than when his 'friend', a black prostitute, turns up. It is at that point that they get really fucked off and call the cops. Poo at the dinner table is fine, but impure sex is right out. There is a scattergun approach to the film, however, which ends up affirming some stereotypes (at least for those audience members who wish to affirm them) even as it skewers others.

Still, it is funny. And cruel, and probably unfair. And terribly over-rated. Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't need any more money or ego-massage, so I'd urge you to wait for this film to be shown on freeview.

Oaxaca Uprising posted by lenin

Among the many topics I have neglected lately (including the Climate Change March) is the uprising in Oaxaca. Brownfemipower has been covering it extensively, so I suggest you peruse her front page and archives. Through The Scary Door has also been keeping track of the events. The people of this Mexican city, and increasingly right across the state (which bears the same name), have been practising a radical form of democracy through the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). The uprising began with a teacher's strike in May of this year - these happen fairly regularly, as it seems to be the only way to get a pay rise out of the neoliberal government - but this year it became a political strike against Ulises Ruiz Ortiz after he sent in 3,000 police to attack the teachers with tear gas and batons back in June, causing over a hundred people to be hospitalised. They have been trying to organise the state under popular assemblies comprising delegates from unions, street blocks, social organisations and cooperatives. For months now, the police have engaged in battles with protesters, while attacking independent media. At the end of last month, several protesters were shot dead by unknown armed men, in what the Mexican government described as a "shootout". The Centro de Medias Libres has footage which it says shows that the one of the killers was Pedro Carmona, a paramilitary and former governor of one of the Oaxaca colonias. Many people thought that it was over on October 30th when the police moved in to 'retake' the city, but the protesters have driven the police out after solidarity blockades were erected across the country. Bloomberg is reporting that the beneficiary of the stolen election is trying to concoct some concessions that might pacify both the strikers and the AMLO campaign. I doubt he will succeed in buying off the protesters, but the revolt can only either spread or subside. The popular assemblies are spreading and need to spread further still, right across Mexico, into every town and workplace. The Zapatistas have pledged their support for the rebellion, but this demands an alteration in their strategy, something flagged by the apparent break with the PRD last year. Their fight to build autonomous zones as counter-powers to the state has raised the possibility of revolution in political discourse, and they did win some concessions against the state-driven process of rolling back land reforms, but of course the state can always bide its time and crush these zones when the struggle subsides. They need to build a national movement prepared to challenge and overthrow state power, so that the popular assemblies can become the new power in Mexico. Of course, no yanqui administration is going to allow that to happen without a fight, as it would give people the wrong idea: hence the interference in Mexico's elections recently. The fight against capitalism is at the same time a fight against imperialism, and it is one that we too have to win.

IDF shoots up women outside mosque. posted by lenin

Israel's ongoing seige in Gaza reached a new low today as they shot at a large demonstration by Palestinian women. The Israelis, typically, are saying that they know they shot at some 'gunmen' (those they allege to have been hiding inside a mosque), but can't be sure if they shot at the women or not. I can't decide if this is more or less repellent than their claim that although they fired shells onto a Gaza beach, the family blown up by Israeli rocket-fire were actually killed by a rogue Hamas landmine. You can't be sure. Perhaps this is a tacit admission by the Israelis that they kill civilians so regularly, with such impunity, that they don't even notice when they are doing it.

Of course, it is a matter of policy to kill female civilians now. Aviad Kleinberg reports that the IDF are firing shells deliberately at Palestinian homes, and that former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon has announced that the wives of wanted Palestinian men are fair game. The israelis are purportedly re-colonising the Gazan open air prison in order to deal with Qassam 'rocket fire', but this is preposterous. These 'rockets' are nothing of the kind. They are ineffectual, improvised explosives whose impact is slight. They do not reach their targets most of the time, and have killed in all the time they have been used a maximum of eight people. They are a paltry retalation for Israeli attacks - specifically, these 'rockets' began to be fired by Hamas and other groups following the slaughter of the Ghaliya family on the Gaza beach, thus breaking an eighteen month unilateral ceasefire.

The reality is that the killing of these women is part of a routine policy of gunning down civilian protesters: this one simply made the air waves. I cited some sources before on this, and we need to bear it in mind at all times. Israel specifically and deliberately targets civilians as a matter of routine policy. Never forget this, especially when you are confronted with idiots like Sam Harris or some other oleaginous hack ever-ready to remind you of the difference between Us and Them.

How neoconservative moralism works. posted by lenin

The neoconservative t-shirt parade has the usual range of references to muscularity, virility and cool toughness. It invites a celebration of genocidal violence (see left), while, for instance, indulging the usual hypocritical moral fervour about freedom and the UN's paralysis in the face of genocidal dictatorships. Imperial garb promoting imperious garbage is in itself insignificant, but it points to a real problem with the standard critiques of neoconservatism.

For instance, it is typical of commentators, especially those familiar with IR theory, to posit a spurious and superficial binary opposition of 'idealists' versus 'realists'. In the former camp, inevitably, are the neoconservatives. I can't be sure about dating this, but it is a relatively recent invention, this, perhaps as recent as the war on Iraq. The neoconservative movement has always been a realpolitik movement dedicated to expanding American power at the cost of almost anything: alliances, principles, money, lives, whatever. People like Podhoretz and Rostow were always first concerned with America's relative decline in the world, (which many neoconservatives associated with a moral lapse, a culture of liberality brought about by welfare programmes that led to familial degeneration and atomisation). From Kirkpatrick's embrace of South Africa to Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie's demands that America support Iraq (in 1987) to Midge Decter's recent assurance to television audiences that the US was in Iraq to get the oil for itself and its allies, the stance has always been a positive affirmation of America's right to pursue self-interest: the fact that thisis suffused with moralism is neither here nor there. It isn't a stance adequately summarised as 'idealist' any more than antiwar positions are correctly described as 'realist' (very few antiwar activists are likely to be animated by a bleak Hobbesian account of power, what Bruce Cummings calls 'the Clint Eastwood theory of international affairs).

Similarly, it would be refreshing if people could make up their minds what the problem with neoconservatism really is. The alleged Trotskyist roots of it are exaggerated and misleadingly delineated, as are the putative Straussian roots. But say both are serious intellectual roots of neoconservatism, what is the implication? That neoconservatism is both secretively elitist and manipulative, and possessed of a zealous revolutionary democratic fervour ('exporting democracy' etc); that it is composed of both evil machinations and good intentions liable to go badly wrong. There could hardly be two thinkers more different in politics, style, influence and intellectual lineage than these. Yet they are both to blame for neoconservative effusions. Such incoherence results directly from the reductive attempt to trace an ideological original sin. There is only one thing that neconservatives agree on, which is that American Empire is a good thing, (even if we must avoid calling it that), and that the violent pursuit of 'self-interest' (that of capital accumulation) is no crime. There isn't a manifesto or a programme, and the paucity of all attempts to outline one are indicative of the fact that it is entirely a composite of groups allied to US state and capitalist power. Indeed, given the strategies deployed to legitimise imperialist interventions, the question might be posed as to what the difference is between liberal imperialists and the neo-conservative movement. This guy, a smugly conservative professor of law, makes some important points in this regard: in what sense, he wonders, are the liberal calls for intervention into Sudan with military force actually different from neoconservative calls for the same or for intervention into Iraq? The answer is that there isn't a great deal of difference at the level of ideology, even if one group professes to start from conservative principles and the other from left-wing ones. The material difference is perhaps that neoconservatives function as an afferent conduit, providing policy ideas and ideological formulae to those in power (right-wing nationalists like Donald Rumsfeld, glowingly biographied by Midge Decter recently), while liberal imperialists are an efferent conduit for these ideological formulae to reach those outside power centres.

Stop them before they kill again. posted by lenin

So, the crew that shot Menezes strikes again. Like the shootings of Derek Bennett, Harry Stanley, Dairmuid O'Neill and many others, this will be found to have been a legal shooting quickly, and the gun men will be sent on holiday. Who knows, the police might even be telling the truth when they say the guy they shot was firing at them. The legal scope for police violence has been broadened, and I would be surprised if they hadn't managed to surreptitiously knock off a few more people than usual in the last couple of years. During New Labour's first term in office, the police killed about 300 people, most of them in custody. Between April 2004 and March 2005, about 100 died as a result of police action. Aside from deaths resulting from asphyxiation positions, violent altercations and wilful neglect of those needing treatment, there are a huge number of deaths that result from lawless police driving.

So, the answer would seem to be to take guns out of their hands, take their cars away, stop them from interacting with people as far as possible... house arrest, perhaps.

"Well-behaved women do not make history". posted by lenin

Ali Khan gets uppity.

Where your money is. posted by lenin

I would hazard a guess that most UK readers of this blog are in the bottom 50% of the wealth league. Here's what you get:



About 6% of the wealth divided between about 30 million of us, which would be six grand each. Well done. The top 1 per cent, comprising 600,000 people, doubled their money under the first five years of New Labour, from a collective sum of £355bn to £797bn. Bear in mind that there is probably a huge discrepancy within this top 1 per cent, so that people like Roman Abramovich, the Duke of Westminster, Hans Rausing and his family, Lakshmi Mittal, the Ecclestones, the Carvalhos and the Reubens all rake in billions individually. And that's declared wealth: it is impossible that the Office for National Statistics gets the correct figures on wealth since a huge amount of it is stuck in investments (land, as Lady Bracknell said, has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure), large sums of which must be concealed in offshore trusts to avoid paying taxes. A number of factors expressed in these staggering sums should be drawn out: 1) the trend is for more and more wealth to be transferred to the richest .25 per cent; 2) this trend brings with it immense disparities of power and not only of wealth, since to the extent that huge slices of the national wealth are in private hands, this wealth is obviously not being directed to use according to popular need and demand; 3) such immense concentrations of power obviously vitiate the extent of genuine democracy that exists in any society; 4) but these concentrations are able to emerge precisely because of the successful class war of the rich in recent decades. The working class had been able, through their collective actions, to democratise public life substantially and create standards for public services and a demand for socialised industries that still persist today even among middle class Tory voters. It had made society much more egalitarian, and therefore much less of a squalid and venal place to exist in. The trouble was that the same class of rich kids, playboys, thugs and clapped out aristrocrats stayed in power, even if they were a little less ostentatious and lionised.

This time we need to get them out of power for good.