Wednesday, 20. December 2006, 01:24:40
I haven't been able to blog lately because of health issues stemming to my time in Vietnam.
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.
In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant," released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk -- taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture." The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation." Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.
He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another "enemy combatant," Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA's foreign oubliettes.
That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its "war on terror" can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions," and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.
The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were "commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep" while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, "in black hoods or spray-painted goggles."
Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation." The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position -- maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.
Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.
But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation -- a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.
At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22-and-a half hours a day, then released into an "exercise yard" for "recreation." The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.
The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far -- in Texas and Washington state -- both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.
From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds -- physical or mental -- produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.
President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilized nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.
Wednesday, 18. October 2006, 07:19:59
This is the sort of thing that gives evolutionary psychology a bad name:
Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.
People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.
Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people. [BBC]
Curry forecasts a golden age circa the year 3000 when the women are strong, the men are well-endowed, and all the children are above average. After which, humanity will gradually diverge into two species: the tall, smart, good looking one, and the short, stupid, ugly one.
Curry is a research associate at the London School of Economics and teaches political theory at New York University. He undertook the study for the TV network Bravo.
Curry, who doesn't appear to have any formal credentials in biology, also predicts that "human chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food." Either the BBC reporter got it wrong, or Curry owes as much to Lamarck as he does to Darwin.
It's depressing that journalists are treating Curry's quasi-eugenic fantasy as a work of popular science. None of the media accounts that I've read bother to describe the evidence for Curry's bold predictions, or even the stated rationales for these projections.
The stories leave a number of questions unresolved. For example haven't seen dramatic genetic changes in the human species over the last thousand years. People have gotten taller and sturdier over the years, thanks to better nutrition. Still, there's no evidence that humans today are dramatically genetically and morphologically different from people 1000 years ago. Furthermore, even if Curry could show that there have been substantial genetic changes, he would still have to establish that these differences were the result of differential reproductive success. So, why does Curry think that the next thousand years will produce a willowy super-race and a permanent goblin underclass?
Class stratification existed a thousand years ago and it continues today. What is it about the next thousand years that is supposed to bring about such rapid morphological changes in human beings? Yes there's increasing inequality in our world today, but who can say what the next 1000 years will bring in terms of equality and integration, let alone the next 100,000 years (Curry's ETA for speciation)?
No one seems to have asked the obvious question, namely whether Curry believes that the early signs of the genetic divisions that will one day split the human species in two are already evident.
I'm not a reflexive ev-psych basher, but I think Curry is doing a grave disservice to his field by popularizing this caricature of human evolution.
Thanks to Linsey of
Magikthise
Saturday, 14. October 2006, 00:34:07
Haven't had much time to blog lately.
obsidianwings has some very good comments on the issues with NK.
~So North Korea might have tested a nuclear device. Great. All over the conservative blogs, people are saying things like this:
"Prediction: The Democrats will come out tomorrow morning and place the blame for NoKo's test squarely at the feet of President Bush in an attempt to capitalize politically on this turn of events."
And this:
"I haven't looked for the commentary that attributes fault to the Bush administration or characterize North Korea's conduct as Karl Rove's October surprise, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere."
And this:
"The Left quickly attempted the shopworn tactic of pinning the blame on the Bush administration’s rhetoric or unwillingness to bribe Kim Jong-il."
Those ridiculous knee-jerk Democrats. Why on earth would they think that the person who has had complete control over America's foreign policy for the last six years should be blamed in any way for a foreign policy disaster of enormous proportions? Who could imagine that there could possibly be anything wrong with our policy towards North Korea?
This is one of the things that has always puzzled me about some right-wing bloggers: for them, the discovery that someone has some motive that might have induced them to lie or exaggerate implies that everything that person says can be dismissed in its entirety, without requiring any investigation into whether or not it is, you know, true. If someone has ever contributed money to any Democratic candidate, or written a book, or given a talk before any one of the many organizations that have at one point or another gotten a small grant from George Soros, then that fact suffices to make any consideration of what they say superfluous. In reaction to the Foley scandal, they have taken this to its logical conclusion: the fact that some event or claim helps the Democrats is taken to show that it's the result of a Democratic dirty trick, in the absence of any actual evidence that Democrats had anything to do with it. The result? It's impossible that anything could ever happen that they would regard as a reason to criticize Bush.
Since I still cling to quaint, antiquated notions like personal responsibility, I do want to know who is responsible for the fact that North Korea probably has nuclear weapons.Obviously, the person primarily, responsible is Kim Jong Il. Since (I hope) we did not actually give him nuclear weapons, our foreign policy can only help or hinder him in his pursuit of them. That said, however, our policy towards North Korea has been a complete and unmitigated disaster.~
Read the rest
here:TR.
Sunday, 8. October 2006, 09:16:20
Arab media is now extra cautious when covering war zones
Since the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, journalists employed by government-run media in Arab countries have come under increased censorship.
Arab media, especially which is state-sponsored, has traditionally enforced tight curbs on how Arab governments and their policies are portrayed.
But now, many journalists in the region have reported increasing pressure not to comment on US foreign policy, further limiting their ability to report on events in the Middle East.
Official Arab media is now required to be cautious when covering war zones where the US army is engaged. Reporting or writing in a way that is seen as taking the side of the enemies of the US army is a red line that many dare not cross.
Ali Kinana, a Qatar-based Iraqi columnist, says: "In the past, journalists knew they could not come near the government, so they poured their passion into covering peoples' struggles against colonialism and occupation.
"Now, they have even lost that. Many Arab governments do not want to annoy the US embassy in their countries, since those embassies are rather intelligence arms whose duty is to ensure the implementation of US instructions. They interfere in the media on a daily basis. How is that all right?"
Resistance or insurgency?
Official Arab media outlets have stopped referring to the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as an occupation, and replaced the word resistance fighters with insurgents to describe fighters opposed to the US presence in those two countries. Many in the Arab and Muslim world do not share that interpretation of US actions.
A Jordanian journalist at one of Jordan's leading newspapers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "We are banned from contacting those who oppose the US-sponsored political process in Iraq.
"Iraqi resistance is a red line in our editorial policy, just like any US paper, but that does not mean the journalists in Jordan are with the US. On the contrary, they felt outraged by the US presence in Iraq and would like to shout that it is an occupation not an invitation."
When I contacted several journalists to speak about the topic but they declined fearing it would affect their jobs.
Hezbollah Americana
Ahmed Salim, a journalist from the United Arab Emirates and former deputy information minister for the UAE, said: "After the attacks on New York and Washington, the Americans have utilised their mainstream media to distort the difference between terrorism and resistance.
"After the occupation of Iraq, media around the world have dedicated themselves to putting those who fight the US army in Iraq in the same bag as al-Qaeda, in order to label them as terrorists.
He explained that in an ironic twist, Hezbollah, referred to as a terrorist organisation by the US, adopted the American approach to the media and labelled any Lebanese and/or Arab who opposed it as a traitor.
"We can see that instead of spreading free speech, the US's short-sighted policies have consolidated controlled media."
However, there has been more room for the Arab media to express the true feelings of Arab thinkers and authors in regard to the occupied Palestinian territories.
Satisfying the masses
Usama Saraya, the chief editor of al-Ahram newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Egyptian government, said the difference in language used in covering the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Afghanistan has nothing to do with state censorship.
"Everybody is agreed that Israel is occupying Palestinian land, but not everybody sees the same thing happening in Iraq. Due to the general sentiment and public opinion, it is not possible to satisfy everybody when it comes to Israel.
"In my opinion, there is no resistance in Iraq. Some believe there is a resistance in Iraq but, honestly, I do not see that," Saraya says.
Kinana says the US pressure on Arab thinkers and writers has forced them into self-censorship.
Way beyond
"The new rules are not about being a member or financer of a banned group or party, it has gone way beyond that," Kinana says.
"Just expressing feelings, showing sympathy, or expressing a view that does not go along with what the US embassy wants, might get you in trouble.
"The trouble we mean here is something like Guantanamo or a secret prison. In other words, free speech to them is to say what pleases them."
Although Iraq and Afghanistan are no less important than the Palestinian territories to an Arab and Muslims audience, many writers and journalists avoid writing about them and in order to put food in their children's mouth.
TR.
Saturday, 23. September 2006, 09:57:32
The first death known to me, that was precipitated by a Rupert Murdoch headline, occurred in Sydney in March,1964, when a schoolboy committed suicide. More of that later. These days, the casualties resulting from military invasions championed by Murdoch are numbered in the thousands, though he is not the sole agent of destruction. One of his former TV producers in the Middle East, Serene Sabbagh, resigned from Fox recently because of its "bias and racism".
What tipped Sabbagh over the edge was the bombing of Qana. "As a mother of three, watching the images, the raw images of children being pulled out of the rubble and then I switched to Fox News to hear some of their anchors claiming that these little kids that were killed, these innocent victims that were killed, were human shields used by Hezbollah. And one of the anchors went as far as saying they were planted there by Hezbollah to win support in this war. And it was unbelievable. For me, that was the breaking point"
On August 6, Serene Sabbagh and a colleague sent a joint letter of resignation to Fox News: "Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism." A verdict which is widely echoed. "Fox News has had reporters running around northern Israel chronicling every rocket attack and every Israeli mobilization, but has shown little or no interest in anything happening on the other side of the border", noted Andrew Gumbel in the UK's Independent.
News Corp had "walked away from professional journalism and crossed over into dutiful propaganda", wrote another analyst," a dangerous new chapter even for Fox News". The whole organization had shifted beyond warmongering into deep censorship, where it "purposely cordoned off topics of discussion In fact, I could not find a single, authentic, independent expert on Arab politics and history who appeared on Fox News to discuss the roots of the escalating violence. Not one."
In the editorial pages of Murdoch's antipodean flagship, The Australian, the bombing of Beirut is presented as "Israel doing Lebanon a favour" and restive Arabs are described as "Nazis". None of this should be surprising, as Murdoch revealed to the Hollywood Reporter that his media ventures are "not as important to me as spreading my personal political beliefs" (November 23, 2005). And these beliefs are dangerous. Murdoch's influential Weekly Standard advocates the pursuit of "regime change in Syria . and a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"
It does not seem to figure in Murdoch's personal accounting that over half a million civilians are now dead or disfigured as a result of the wars he has already promoted. Instead of reconsidering his politics, like other lapsed neocons, Murdoch is still blazing away with his tools of the trade: hate, lies, fear and censorship.
So here's the nub. In a world facing a series of crises, should an unelected billionaire with a militant agenda and key politicians in the palm of his hand be allowed to preside over a global empire of propaganda? An empire continually expanding, one that gobbles up competitors and is now even blocking free speech on the internet. (See MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship)
On top of this, Murdoch's minions reject the inconvenient facts of climate chaos and attack the greens as "a threat to the prosperity and well-being" of the world (The Australian September 2, 2004). Whereas a real threat to the well-being of the world and its people is Rupert Murdoch, as I first discovered long ago.
These days, Murdoch's war-mongering is compulsive and his disregard for human wreckage is both calculated and global; but in the beginning, what marked his output was a casual (and sometimes fatal) disregard for the frailties of humans.
Murdoch's rise to power took off in Sydney in 1964, when he acquired an afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror. On March 12, the Mirror front paged a report on "promiscuity" among the pupils of a city high school, which was based on the contents of a young girl's diary. The resulting uproar led to the diarist and a fellow student being expelled from school. A job well done.
That's where the story ended as far the Mirror was concerned, though not for those involved. The 13 year old schoolboy named in the diary, Digby Bamford, was found hanging from his backyard clothesline, having committed suicide. This news was "cordoned off" from public consumption. Even rival papers kept the secret, until a disgruntled Murdoch journalist tipped off an independent magazine. The author of the "school sex" diary was examined by a doctor from the Child Welfare Department and found to be a virgin. During an interview years later, I reminded Murdoch of this event and his reaction was sharp: "Don't you ever make mistakes?" Of course I do. Many. After acquiring the News of the World in London in 1971, Rupert discovered another diary, while he was campaigning against a popular BBC TV show, Top of the Pops. His paper accused its stars of "promiscuity" with young dancers in the audience. One of these was Samantha MacAlpine, aged 15, whose "leatherette bound book", according Murdoch's news desk, "could well blow wide open the scandal at the BBC". The day after this report, Samantha MacAlpine committed suicide.
The News of the World tried to cover itself with the headline, THIS GIRL WAS A VICTIM NOW SHE IS DEAD, but the coroner stated that Samantha's diary was "pure fantasy. unconnected with reality", (like much Murdoch journalism). A Scotland Yard officer accused the paper of being "ludicrous and irresponsible". As is the Murdoch style, the evidence from the inquest was kept from the readers. Also suppressed was the statement of the forensic pathologist, that in his opinion, Samantha had died a virgin.
Two weeks ago, when young Australian Jack Thomas appealed his conviction for receiving funds from Al Qaeda and holding a false passport, he was acquitted by the Victorian Court of Appeal.
FURY AFTER JIHAD JACK WALKS FREE, headlined The Australian, although the fury was largely confined to Murdoch's newsroom. A jury had previously acquitted Jack Thomas of two more substantial matters. The Victorian Court quashed his conviction on the lesser charges, because police statements had been taken from the defendant while he was incarcerated in Pakistan without access to a lawyer and subjected to assaults. (A US interrogator told Thomas he would crush his testicles, rape his wife and put her breasts in a vice). When the Appeal judges freed Thomas, as they were obliged to do under Australian law, the Murdoch media called for public outrage and demanded "rapid amendments to ensure that no judge can make the same mistake". One of the first steps in the Third Reich's campaign to win over the hearts and minds of the German people was to attack the judges. Another step was to consolidate the media. A third step was to fan the flames of fear.
In response to criticism of its assault on the judiciary, The Australian hit back: 'what will it take to get Mr Thomas's apologists to take the terror threat seriously? Suicide bombers detonating aboard Melbourne's trams? A USS Cole-style strike on the Manly ferry?" And sure enough, as I write, another Murdoch missile hits the front page. SYDNEY WILL BE ATTACKED.
After interviewing 572 citizens, the Daily Telegraph has decided that "most Australians believe we are locked in a losing war against Islamic terrorists and an attack on our home soil is inevitable". The number who cite Murdoch's compulsive belligerence as a factor in the escalation of terror is not revealed. On the same day, Jack "Jihad" Thomas is arrested on the beach, slapped with a newly introduced "control order" and ordered home, where his movements are to be restricted. Questioning voices are merely a "civil libertarian lobby that believes John Howard is a greater threat to our way of life than bin Laden", according to MurdochWorld. No, the greatest threat is the control of information from the top. "Fascism ought to more properly be called corporatism", said Mussolini, "since it is the merger of state and corporate power." Beware the global Goebbels.
TR.
Friday, 22. September 2006, 09:50:53
Posted August 1, 2006
Bush’s view of the Middle East rests on pure fantasy.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 1st August 2006. Reprint with permission.
Of all the curious things which have been written about Israel’s assault on Lebanon, surely the oddest is contained in Paddy Ashdown’s article for the Guardian on Saturday. “There is only one solution to this crisis, and it is the same solution we have to find in Iraq: to go for a wider Middle East settlement and to do it urgently. The US cannot do this. But Europe can.”(1)
The US cannot do this? What on earth does he mean? At first sight his contention seems plain wrong. While Israel intends to sustain its occupation of Palestinian territory, a wider settlement is impossible. It surely follows that the country which has the greatest potential leverage over Israel is the country with the greatest power to broker peace. Israel’s foreign policy and military strategy is dependent on the approval of the United States.
Though Israel ranks 23rd on the global development index – above Greece, Singapore, Portugal and Brunei(2) – it remains the world’s largest recipient of US aid. The US government dispensed $11bn of civil foreign assistance in 2004(3). Of this, Israel received $555m(4). The three poorest nations on earth – Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and Niger – were given a total of $69m(5). More importantly, in 2005 Israel also received $2.2bn of military aid(6).
It does not depend economically on this assistance. Its gross domestic product amounts to $155bn, and its military budget to $9.5bn(7). It manufactures many of its own weapons and buys components from all over the world – including, as the Guardian revealed last week(8) – the United Kingdom. Rather, it depends upon it diplomatically. Most of the money given by the US Foreign Military Financing programme – in common with all US aid disbursements – is spent in the United States. Israel uses it to obtain F15 and F16 jets, Apache, Cobra and Blackhawk helicopters, AGM, AIM and Patriot missiles, M-16 rifles, M-204 grenade launchers and M-2 machine guns(9). As the Prestwick scandal revealed, laser-guided bombs, even now, are being sent to Israel from the United States.
Many of these weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians and are being used in Lebanon today. The US Arms Export Control Act states that “no defense article or defense service shall be sold or leased by the United States Government” unless its provision “will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace”(10). Weapons may be sold “to friendly countries solely for internal security, for legitimate self-defense [or] maintaining or restoring international peace and security”(11).
By giving these weapons to Israel, the US government is, in effect, stating that all its military actions are being pursued in the cause of legitimate self-defence, American interests and world peace. It also becomes morally complicit in Israel’s murder of civilians. The diplomatic cover this provides is indispensable.
Since 1972 the US has used its veto in the UN Security Council on 40 occasions to prevent resolutions from being passed that sought either to defend the rights of the Palestinians or to condemn the excesses of Israel’s government(12). This is a greater number of vetos than all the other permanent members have deployed in the same period(13). The most recent instance was the squashing of a motion on July 13th condemning both the Israeli assault on Gaza and the firing of rockets and abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian groups(14). Over the past few days, the United States, supported by Britain, has blocked all international attempts to introduce an immediate ceasefire, giving Israel the clear impression that it has a mandate to continue its assault on Lebanon.
It is plain to anyone – and this must include Paddy Ashdown – that Israel could not behave as it does without the diplomatic protection of the United States. If the US government announced that it would cease to offer military and diplomatic support if Israel refused to hand back the occupied territories, Israel would have to negotiate. The US government has power over that country. But can it be used?
A paper published in March by the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt documents the extraordinary influence the Israel lobby exercises in Washington(15). The combined forces of evangelical Christian groups and Jewish American organisations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, they argue, ensure that “Israel is virtually immune from criticism” in Congress and “also has significant leverage over the Executive branch”. Politicians who support the Israeli government are showered with funds, while those who contest it are cowed by letter-writing campaigns and vilification in the media. If all else fails, the lobby deploys the “great silencer”: the charge of anti-semitism(16). Those who oppose the policies of the Israeli government are accused of hating Jews.
All this makes an even-handed policy difficult, but not impossible. Standing up to bullies is surely the key test of leadership. A US president in his second term is in a powerful position to demand that Israel pulls back and negotiates.
But if Ashdown meant that it is impossible psychologically and intellectually for the US government to act, he might have a point. At his press conference with Tony Blair on Friday, George Bush laid out his usual fairytale about the conflict in the Middle East. “There’s a lot of suffering in Lebanon”, he explained, “because Hezbollah attacked Israel. There’s a lot of suffering in the Palestinian Territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy. There is suffering in Iraq because terrorists are trying to spread sectarian violence and stop the spread of democracy.”(17) The current conflict in Lebanon “started, out of the blue, with two Israeli soldiers kidnapped and rockets being fired across the border.”
I agree that Hizbollah fired the first shots. But out of the blue? Israel’s earlier occupation of southern Lebanon; its continued occupation of the Golan Heights; its occupation and partial settlement of the West Bank and gradual clearance of Jerusalem; its shelling of civilians, power plants, bridges and pipelines in Gaza; its beating and shooting of children; its imprisonment or assassination of Palestinian political leaders; its bulldozing of homes; its humiliating and often lethal checkpoints are, in Bush’s mind, either fictional or carry no political consequences. The same goes for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the constant threats Bush issues to Syria and Iran. There is only one set of agents at work – the terrorists – and their motivation arises autochthonously from the evil in their hearts.
Israel is not solely to blame for this crisis. The firing of rockets into its cities is an intolerable act of terrorism. But to understand why the people assaulting that country will not put down their arms, the King of Fairyland would be forced to come to terms with the consequences of Israel’s occupation of other people’s lands and of its murder of civilians, of his own invasion of Iraq and of his failure, across the past six years, to treat the Palestinians fairly. And this he seems incapable of doing. Instead, his answers on Friday suggested, he is constructing a millenarian narrative of escalating conflict leading to the final triumph of freedom and democracy.
So I fear that Paddy Ashdown may be right. The US cannot pursue a wider settlement in the Middle East, for it is led by a man who lives in a world of his own.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Paddy Ashdown, 29th July 2006. Europe must lead the search for peace in the Middle East. The Guardian.
2.
http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05_HDI.pdf3. USAID, 2006. US Overseas Loans and Grants: obligations and loan authorizations, July 1 1945 – September 30 2004.
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADF100.pdf4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. Department of Defense Security Assistance Agency, 30th September 2005. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts.
http://www.dsca.mil/programs/biz-ops/2005_facts/2005%20Facts%20Book%20Final.pdf7. Central Intelligence Agency, 2006. The World Factbook: Israel.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/is.html8. Benjamin Joffe-Walt, 29th July 2006. Made in the UK, bringing devastation to Lebanon – the British parts in Israel’s deadly attack helicopters. The Guardian.
9. William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan, 6th May 2002. U.S. Arms Transfers and Security Assistance to Israel. Arms Trade Resource Center.
http://worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/israel050602.html10. Title 22; Chapter 39; Subchapter 1; § 2753. Eligibility for defense services or defense articles.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode22/usc_sec_22_00002751——000-.html11. Title 22; Chapter 39; Subchapter 1; § 2754. Purposes for which military sales or leases by the United States are authorized; report to Congress.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode22/usc_sec_22_00002754——000-.html12. See Donald Neff, May/June 2005. An Updated List of Vetoes Cast by the United States to Shield Israel from Criticism by the U.N. Security Council.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May-June_2005/0505014.html13. UN General Assembly Official Records, cited by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, March 2006.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0040.pdf14. UN Security Council, 13th July 2006. United States Vetoes Security Council Draft Resolution On Events In Gaza; Text Called For Israeli Soldier’s Release, Halt To Military Operations. www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sc8775.doc.htm
15. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, March 2006. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0040.pdf16. ibid.
17. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, 28th July 2006. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair of the United Kingdom Participate in Press Availability.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/07/20060728-1.html
Tuesday, 19. September 2006, 07:41:16
Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?
Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?
Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?
Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.
Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.
In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British
correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that "Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive." Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.
The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy. Cluster bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire last month.
Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel's cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation's entire civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel's war can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.
In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel's will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.
Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state. You can't have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.
In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely directed -- with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon -- toward making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a month's time -- killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.
Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says "the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts." His prediction is that continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy "into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda." If the world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more drastically."
And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?
Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi, writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the "indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in violation of all purported enlightenment values."
Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the "full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a 'threat' identified with a community" -- or, in Israel's case, with all non-Jewish communities.
The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This has always been Israel's natural order of things: in Israel's world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.
In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited. The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski speaks of -- the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the "civilized" West and a backward, enraged East -- has been seen for what it is because of Israel's mad assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations "that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States."
Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.
Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.
Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism," while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, "an historic event" and a "dead entity."
Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a "critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway along with many others -- sees only "war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads."
This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.
Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.
We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.
TR.
Sunday, 10. September 2006, 06:27:59
The USA's massive military campaigns are both strategically ineffective and morally indefensible.
There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.
The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and- awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.
I remember John Hersey's novel, "The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.
The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.
Even the "victories" of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.
The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence -- the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.
Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a "war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.
The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.
This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a "suspected terrorist" is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is "inevitable."
So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in "accidental" events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.
For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by "accident." Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.
If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.
TR.
Monday, 4. September 2006, 23:04:12
Sunday 03 September 2006, 12:24 Makka Time, 9:24 GMT
After four weeks of devastating Israeli air raids across Lebanon, American news network NBC began its Nightly News bulletin with its anchorman, Brian Williams, asking: "Does the US really have any influence in this war?"
Hours earlier on sister network MSNBC, anchorwoman Chris Jansing seemed to be at a similar loss. "Can anything be done to stop the violence?" she asked.
But to an American audience, the thought of a Syrian or Iranian news anchor posing the same questions would be fit for a comedy skit.
After all, the Syrians and Iranians wield an obvious "influence" over the course of the conflict according to the NBC channels, which like CNN, Sky and many other Western new organisations reported relentlessly on claims that Hezbollah’s rocket imports were made possible through the help of its two "rogue" allies.
But where was the parallel analysis of multi-billion dollar weapons shipments bound for Israel from the United States? Most Western broadcasters reported religiously on the number of rockets fired at Israel each day of the month-long conflict, often comparing fresh figures with those of previous days and weeks, even peppering the audit with analysis and commentary.
Absent however was almost any accounting of the daily tonnage of US-manufactured munitions dropped from an unknown fleet of US-manufactured jets levelling an untold number of Lebanese homes and villages.
Sanitised
On American television screens, the US role in this conflict was a relatively sanitised one, pictured as diplomatic rather than military; seen across negotiating tables and in visits to foreign capitals — a far less sinister role than that repeatedly attributed to the Iranians and Syrians over allegations of their financial and logistical support.
In fact, so penetrating was the alleged connection that some channels, such as Bloomberg Television, began referring to Hezbollah on second reference as merely "the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group". But why did Bloomberg not choose to identify Israel, the largest official recipient of US foreign military assistance for decades, as "the US-backed state"?
Whether the decision was deliberate or unconscious, the prevailing notion of non-military US involvement is just one of many underlying assumptions communicated by the US media about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, assumptions that were continually reinforced in comments made by anchors and by hired analysts.
Viewed as part of an overall package, the assumptions appear to reflect US foreign policy, particularly the relationship with Israel, much more than the pursuit of journalistic objectivity.
Of course it would be unfair to generalise by suggesting that the Western media did a poor job of covering this war. On the ground in the midst of air strikes, ground fire and naval attacks, American and European journalists, particularly those reporting from south Lebanon, genuinely risked their lives to tell the story.
Contradictory
The efforts of many Western reporters operating out of towns such as Tyre at a time when the Israeli military vowed to fire on any vehicle that moved were no less valiant than those displayed by their colleagues from the Arab media. However, a clear difference emerged between battlefield reporting and the animated conversations that went on thousands of miles away in air-conditioned studios. At some points it even appeared as if the two were completely contradictory.
Beginning with the war in Iraq, American media outlets developed an obsession with hosting former military personnel as analysts, so much so that it now appears as if large American networks have become a sort of retirement programme for the US military’s top brass. An inherent problem with this formula is a tendency to reflect the views and strategic interests of the US government rather than offer critical analyses that shed light on the complex realities of the battlefield.
Take coverage of the Israeli commando raid on Baalbeck during the third week of the conflict on August 2. The Israeli military had reported that it kidnapped five Hezbollah members, but MSNBC's reporter on the scene quoted local villagers who said those apprehended were "just nobodies".
Hezbollah also claimed that ordinary civilians, not fighters, had been kidnapped. Meanwhile Israeli newspaper Haaertz quoted Lebanese sources as saying that more than a dozen civilians were killed in the attack.
Details may still have been sketchy on the ground in the Bekaa valley but in MSNBC's East Coast studio, the view from its military analyst, Rick Francona, was starkly clear. Francona, a former lieutenant-colonel in the US Air Force, swiftly praised the attack as an "excellent raid" and "well done" on Israel’s part. He then began to postulate confidently about the motives behind the operation, saying "Israel obviously had intelligence of high-profile targets" and naming Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, as a possibility.
Optimism
But even Israel’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, appeared to be playing down the operation, with an article in Haaretz quoting him as saying "the soldiers had not aimed to take any individuals in particular, but rather to demonstrate that the IDF [Israeli military] could reach any part of Lebanon".
Not only does Francona manage to analyse the situation solely from Israel’s point of view, but his optimism even appears to exceed that of the Israelis themselves.
Weeks later, on August 23, the Lebanese press would post pictures of the Baalbeck captives returning home, indicating that all five men had been returned to Lebanon through the International Committee of the Red Cross, which served as a liaison with the Israeli military.
The chief suspect had been Hassan Nasrallah; not the leader of Hezbollah but an elderly village farmer that shared the same first and last name. "They wanted to use us for propaganda about the arrest of Hassan Nasrallah," the former detainee told Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper in a reference to the Hezbollah leader.
Among the other returned captives were relatives and friends of Nasrallah, the farmer that is.
Looking back at the initial coverage, one would wonder why MSNBC and countless others chose to report the claims of the Israeli military machine over those of witnesses on the scene.
Malicious
The Baalbeck incident was by no means isolated. Time and again, the TV generals seemed so confident in Israel's stance that any talk of malicious activity was dismissed regardless of pending investigations.
Another case in point was Israel’s attack on a UN post, killing four observer troops, on July 26. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, quickly condemned the strike as "apparently deliberate", noting "a co-ordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked UN post".
The Irish foreign ministry said one of its officers at the post had made at least six warning calls to the Israelis during their bombardment. Reports also emerged of email correspondence from a Canadian soldier giving warning that the Israelis had been striking near the UN position for "weeks upon weeks", according to the soldier’s wife who was quoted by Canadian TV as calling the Israeli attack "intentional".
Meanwhile UN officials quoted by Reuters said "the firing continued even as rescue operations were under way", while Annan called for a "full investigation" into the "disturbing incident".
But these multiple claims seemed to be of little consequence to the CNN military analysts back home. A retired US Air Force general employed by the station dismissed the controversy outright, saying the Israeli strike was simply "a screw-up, a major screw-up".
Assumptions over Israel’s intentions were not limited to analysts but also to senior journalists, such as Tim Marshall, Sky’s foreign editor, who confidently labelled the attack as "inadvertent" and "an accident waiting to happen" on the same evening as it had occurred. It was almost as if Marshall were pre-empting the Israeli government’s apology and denial of wrongdoing, which would not come until the next day.
'No evidence'
Instead of adopting a cautious approach to a developing story - as any good journalist would - the authoritative voices from CNN and Sky seemed merely to reflect the views of Israel and its allies. Listening to a press statement from the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, it almost seemed as though the press outlets had become a conduit for official statements. "We take them at their word," Bolton said of the Israeli reaction. "There is no evidence to the contrary."
Less than a week after the killing of the UN observers, the headlines shifted to another attack by Israel, this time in Qana where at least 28 civilians, including 16 children, were killed as a result of air attacks. Qana also happens to be the site of an attack by Israel in 1996 that killed more than 100 people - Israel denied responsibility at the time but subsequent UN investigations were inconclusive.
Israeli officials also denied responsibility for the more recent bloodbath, accusing Hezbollah of somehow staging the attack by firing from the area, using the civilians as human shields. Israel's UN ambassador, during a speech at the Security Council, even went so far as to entertain the possibility that Hezbollah "wanted and wished" for the mass killing.
American news outlets began to pick up the claim, despite the absence of ground reporting or any other kind of supporting evidence. As bodies were being carried out of the rubble, a CNN anchorwoman in Atlanta turned to an Arab media analyst and asked if Arab TV channels acknowledged Hezbollah's use of civilians as human shields. The analyst did not refute the claim but merely indicated that Hezbollah criticism was a taboo subject for regional news networks.
Human shields
Later CNN military analysts would describe Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" that breached Geneva Conventions by using human shields. Despite the lack of physical evidence in either direction, it seemed just as easy for the in-studio analysts to assume Israel's innocence as it was for them to assume guilt on the part of Hezbollah, even when the Israeli military did the actual shooting.
Israel’s third "accident" came on August 11 when six innocents were killed as its missiles struck a civilian convoy fleeing the bombardment in South Lebanon.
Three days later, when the smoke began to clear and a shaky ceasefire took hold, the Lebanese death toll had reached 1,100, the vast majority being civilians. On the Israeli side, the majority of deaths were military, 117 soldiers and 40 civilians, according to Reuters. (Hezbollah casualties were quoted as a separate figure with the group claiming no more than 80 and Israel claiming more than 500.)
The vast disparity between Lebanese civilian deaths and those of Israeli civilians remained formulaic throughout the war, but the TV generals seemed to tell a different story, constantly using the adjective "indiscriminate" to describe Hezbollah’s rocket attacks and "very accurate" in describing Israel’s tactics and weaponry.
In fact, on several occasions, Israeli officials interviewed by American broadcasters touted Israel’s policy of restraint and gave warning of the country’s ability to pursue a "scorched earth policy" in Lebanon.
Interviewers often accepted such a response either by ending the interview at that point or moving on to different questions. One can hardly imagine an American interviewer remaining silent if an Arab official spoke of flattening the Jewish state in such genocidal terms.
Unrealistic
Few phrases were repeated more often during this war than that of "Israel’s war against Hezbollah" and "Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets" mainly in South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The examples of this usage on NBC, CNN, Sky and many, many other channels were simply ubiquitous throughout the month of war coverage — the two phrases used many times a day as an introduction to the whole package of reporting, all framed as a war solely on Hezbollah. However, on the ground, there could not have been a more unrealistic assessment of reality.
According to a report released by Oxfam on August 14, the destruction across Lebanon included "7,000 homes, 160 factories, markets, farms and other commercial buildings, 29 water and sewage-treatment plants, electrical plants, dams, ports and airports, 23 petrol stations, 145 bridges and overpasses; 600 kilometres of roads".
The figures do not include damage to television towers, which were attacked in at least four different places across the country, disrupting signals and causing millions of dollars in damage to the Lebanese broadcasting industry.
Where were the TV generals to explain the threat of media coverage to Israel’s war on Hezbollah? Lebanon’s entire transnational road system was incapacitated by Israeli missiles, but when anchors rationalised this by speaking of "Hezbollah supply lines", where were the military men to explain that weapons could easily be smuggled through back roads and mountain passages?
Was it clear that Hezbollah did not have its own discreet transportations routes to begin with?
And when the Lebanese international airport was struck repeatedly, where were the generals to explain that rockets had traditionally been carried into Lebanese territory on flat beds and not commercial airliners?
The battlefield analysts seemed so transfixed on analysing Israel's invasion tactics that they rarely looked at the conflict from the opposite end of the map. So much airtime was devoted to Israeli commanders and military spokesman claiming victory, but Hezbollah representatives seemed to have been boycotted by the American press much as they had been boycotted by the American government.
Basic
In reality, Hezbollah was claiming victories of its own, but at times it seemed as if the American media were too busy reflecting their government’s viewpoint to have noticed.
The TV generals dutifully relayed Israel’s daily claims of destroying rocket launchers and medium-range missiles by shading overhead maps with digital pens. But rarely did they discuss Hezbollah's attacks on scores of Israeli Merkava tanks in what was seen as valiant effort at resisting one of the world's most powerful military machines.
If the shading of military maps proved too complicated for the American public to comprehend, broadcasters and commentators often broke down their assumptions in more basic terms. When Israel, for example, decided to launch a land invasion to claim all Lebanese territory south of the Litani river, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer simply referred to the attack as "what some are calling a new Normandy," and "Israel’s D-Day"; a reference to the Allied powers' invasion of Nazi territory in World War II.
When Blitzer began to discuss that day’s events on the battlefield, he, like dozens of other American broadcasters, spoke of Hezbollah rockets landing in "Israeli neighbourhoods". Israel on the other hand, retaliated by bombing "Hezbollah strongholds".
But in reality, these strongholds were also neighbourhoods and support among their residents for Hezbollah could not have been any less than Israeli citizens' support for their own military. If Hezbollah areas cannot be considered neighbourhoods, then why not refer to Israeli neighbourhoods as "Israeli military strongholds"?
After all, a recent report in the Guardian newspaper in Britain by Jonathan Cook alleged that Israel also built military installations and mortar batteries near residential areas. In any case, the lack of balance is problematic: it conveys humanity on the one side and vague militarism on the other.
Omitted
As another example, Blitzer conducted one of two CNN interviews with the grieving wife of an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hezbollah. But where were the parallel interviews with the families of Lebanese held by the Israelis? How could audiences really identify with the other side if all of its emotive, humanising details were repeatedly omitted?
In a show that aired on MSNBC during the first week of the conflict, Chris Matthews illustrated daily life in Haifa by comparing it with a city in California; "very modern", he explained. Cosmopolitan Beirut, on the other hand, where the nightlife rivals any capital in Western Europe, did not get a mention in the entire show.
Detail from Israel also entered the religious realm during a separate broadcast with Rita Cosby, an anchorwoman who qualified a report of rocket attacks on the city of Nazareth as an attack on the "home town of Jesus".
But where was the mention of Jesus’s wine-making miracle in the Lebanese town of Qana during the mass killings that took place there? And what of the many other biblical references across Lebanon, in Tyre and Sidon when the two cities were subjected to continuous Israeli shelling?
In the end, some broadcasters ditched the metaphors altogether. Tucker Carlson, an MSNBC talk-show host, actually criticised Israel’s tactics in fighting Hezbollah while interviewing an Israeli spokesperson. But he made no qualms with objectivity during his concluding statement. "I hope you succeed," he told the Israeli official. "And I hope you do it quickly."
Can one imagine an American broadcaster ever conveying such enthusiastic support to a Hezbollah official?
Habib Battah is the managing editor of the Journal of Middle East Broadcasters. He can be reached at habib.battah@mebjournal.com
Monday, 28. August 2006, 09:04:17
Think about it for 10 seconds. Who ever won a war of attrition with a volunteer army? In modern history, wars of attrition are won by leaders who unflinchingly send large numbers of young men to their deaths. Think of Ulysses Grant, Stalin, or Ho Chi Min. When you reach the limits of your manpower and are still unable to turn the tide, which appears to be our situation in Iraq, then all those rhetorical flourishes about “stay the course” or “cut and run” or “redeploy our troops” seem utterly beside the point.
Yet I’m still amazed how few pundits and journalists apply some common sense 2 + 2 analysis to our situation there. Where I come from, the business and financial world, an enterprise’s performance and likelihood of success are measured in numbers. It seems to me the numbers foretold the endgame a long time ago. If we look at the situation Iraq – in terms of troop strength, demographics, history, energy and financial resources – the numbers in their brutal honesty suggest that Iraq will become a satellite state of Iran, and that George Bush’s adventures made us 100 times less safe than we were on 9/12.
Here’s my take on the numbers, explained in detail below.
Summarized Findings:
(a) U.S. troop levels cannot be sustained, nor can they restore order, whereas Iran’s military has the manpower and the capability to fill the power vacuum and restore order.
(b) Most Iraqis would welcome Iran’s involvement, given their longstanding historic and religious ties.
(c) U.S. efforts to block Iran’s presence in Iraq, or to isolate Iran, will be ineffectual, because of Iran’s improved standing in global energy markets.
Consequently, Iran’s influence in Iraq will eventually supersede that of the United States or any other major power.
I. Troop Levels
The numbers say:
(a) The U.S. cannot sustain the current level of deployment.
(b) The current U.S. deployment cannot reduce the violence.
(c) Iran’s army may be more effective than ours in terms of shutting down violence in Iraq.
A year ago, when we had 138,000 troops and 17 combat brigades in Iraq, General Barry McCaffrey said, “We will be forced into a draw down and have 10 brigades or less on the ground by next summer [i.e. now]. The Army and the Marines are starting to come apart under this overly aggressive foreign policy.” Eleven months later, when we had 127,000 troops and 14 combat brigades in Iraq, McCaffrey said, “The Army and the Marine Corps cannot sustain this level of deployment. So, politics aside, I think from a military perspective, we’re going to be forced to draw down…[Rumsfeld’s] views are increasingly irrelevant.” Currently, we have 135,000 troops in Iraq.
Did Rumsfeld prove McCaffrey wrong? Others might say we’re asking too much of our troops. A pentagon-commissioned study published last January said that the Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of war "or risk `breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment.
Regardless of anyone's opinion, the fact is we’re left without troops to defend us at home or anywhere else. There is not a single non-deployed Army Brigade Combat Team in the United States that is ready to deploy. Also, more than two-thirds of the Army National Guard's 34 brigades are not combat ready.
And how effectively are coalition forces “standing up” for the Iraqis? About as well as you would expect from troops who don’t speak the language, don’t understand the local cultural signals, and don’t understand their mission. Coalition troops inflict violence on innocent civilians on a daily basis, says Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki, who said soldiers “crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion." Last June, Maliki asked the U.N. to the end immunity from local law for U.S. troops. The current U.N. mandate authorizing coalition forces in Iraq expires December 31, 2006.
And if U.S. troops cannot arrest Iraq’s downward spiral of violence, how could order ever be restored? For most Muslims in the region, the obvious precedent is (pre-June 2006) Lebanon, which suffered through scorched earth sectarian violence until Syria imposed its military occupation.
Power abhors a vacuum, and despite their various political and religious affinities, I suspect the vast majority of Iraqis share the sentiments of Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, who said (in an entirely different context), "You don't have any civil liberties if you're dead."
For reasons set forth below, Iraq’s closest ally in the Middle East is Iran. Compared to the U.S., Iran has many more troops who would be more effective in restoring order. Estimates of Iran's military strength vary wildly. According to The Times in London, Iran has 768,000 active troops and 11,700,000 reserves. Its army is well equipped and disciplined, and it manufactures most of its own weapons.
The Library of Congress, Federal Research Division says the totals are lower, with only 540,000 active personnel in the regular armed forces plus 120,000 in the auxiliary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In addition there is a volunteer paramilitary force, the Popular Mobilization Army, with 300,000 personnel, mainly youths, with an estimated capability to expand to one million.
So, however you look at it, Iran has more bodies to put on the ground. And, most likely, more soldiers fluent in Arabic. Iranian soldiers may be in Iraq already, since the border is porous.
Ultimately, the U.S. can bomb the 68 million people in Iran back into the stone age. But then what?
II. Demographics and History
The numbers say:
(a) For most Iraqis, Iran is linked to their own religious and national identity.
(b) Most Iraqis feel closer to Iran than they do to the rest of the Arab world.
(c) Most Iraqis have good reason to believe that the Sunnis intend to stymie democracy in Iraq.
(d) Most Iraqis associate the United States with a history of betrayal.
"We believe that Iran supports the Iraqi government because most leaders of this government are allies and friends of Iran.”
- Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari (a Kurd), July 6, 2006
Shiites
"Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran and not to the countries they are living in."
- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak April 10, 2006
Mubarak’s claim is highly debatable, yet it reflects the historic prejudices many Arabs hold against the Shiites. Shiites are, and always have been, a small minority (15%) among the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. They are an especially small minority in the Arab speaking world (7% excluding Iraq). Throughout the Arab world, they have faced discrimination and worse. Today in Saudi Arabia, “Shiites face discrimination in all walks of life,” writes Amnesty International. In Kuwait, “The Government discriminates against the Shiite minority…[which] remains] disadvantaged in the provision of mosques, access to Shiite religious education and representation in upper levels of government,” writes the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
So it’s reasonable to make two assumptions about a Shiite in Iraq:
His minority status shaped his political consciousness, and
History matters. (Think of Catholics in Ireland 100 years ago.)
There are only two Arab-speaking countries where the majority of the population is Shiite - tiny Bahrain, which has 700,000 people, and Iraq, where about 16 to 18 million out of 27 million people (60-65%) are Shiite. There are only two other countries where Shiites are the majority population - Iran and Azerbaijan.
This is no accident. The Shiite centre of gravity moved away from Iraq and toward Iran 600 years ago, when Shah Ismail I, founder of the 230-year Safavid dynasty, decreed that Shiite shall be the only lawful religion in his empire, which eventually extended over Persia, Azerbaijan and Iraq. From the time the Ottomans conquered Iraq, up until the defeat of Saddam in 2003, Shiites in Iraq were systematically prevented from asserting any political power.
Nonetheless, through all this time, Iraq remained a centre of Shiite scholarship and culture. Here’s a passage from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Despite the pre-eminence of Iran as a Shiite Islamic republic, Iraq has traditionally been the physical and spiritual centre of Shiism in the Islamic world…In premodern times southern and eastern Iraq formed a cultural and religious meeting place between the Arab and Persian worlds, and religious scholars moved freely between the two regions. Even until relatively recent times, large numbers of notable Iranian scholars could be found studying and teaching in the great madrasahs (religious schools).
During Saddam’s reign, many Iraqis spent years exiled in Iran. They include the previous Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and the current Prime Minister, Nouri al- Maliki. They include refugees from Saddam’s Arabization campaign in the 1970s. They include 100,000 refugees from Saddam’s Shiite massacres in 1991. Here’s how Vali Nasr, Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, described the situation in last July’s Foreign Affairs:
In the dark years of the 1990s, Iran alone gave Iraqi Shiites refuge and support. Since the Iraq war, many of these refugees have returned to Iraq; they can now be found working in schools, police stations, mosques, bazaars, courts, militias, and tribal councils from Baghdad to Basra, as well as in government. The repeated shuttling of Shiites between Iran and Iraq over the years has created numerous, layered connections between the two countries' Shiite communities. As a result, the Iraqi nationalism that the U.S. government hoped would serve as a bulwark against Iran has proved porous to Shiite identity in many ways.
Consequently, we may expect that Iraq’s largest sectarian group would welcome an Iranian military presence, if such were needed, to restore order and safety.
Sunnis
Arab Sunnis probably fear an Iranian presence, but they have no clout to stop it. Arab Sunnis represent about 16-17% of Iraq’s total population. Until Operation Iraq Freedom, Iraq’s ruling class came exclusively from this minority group. Iraq’s other Sunnis, the Kurds, mostly live in the north in a de facto sovereign state, described below. The Kurds are not part of the sectarian violence between the Sunnis and the Shiites. In the relevant part of Iraq, Shiites outnumber Arab Sunnis by about 4 to 1.
Sunni leaders do not appear to be in a conciliatory mood:
“So the Sunni Arabs believe that Iraq today—ruled, as they see it, by the Shi’a and the Kurds, that’s the way they see it—they believe it’s a stolen country. That’s really their conviction, that it’s a stolen country.
“Then the Americans came in and upended this old order. And guess what—they would probably reconcile themselves to the logical thing had they not been surrounded by a large Sunni Arab world around them. So even though they’re a minority in Iraq itself, they’re a majority in the region. And as one of my witnesses in this book of mine I profiled, he said, ‘Though they are a minority, they have the majoritarian mindset.’”
- Professor Fouad Ajami, from Johns Hopkins University, made this comment at The Council on Foreign Relations on July 11, 2006
If Dr. Ajami is accurate, the outlook for Sunni acceptance of the new government is dim.
Still, as with everything in the Middle East, there are several sides to the story. It’s probably unfair to claim that all Sunnis view the Shiites as their permanent underclass. Under Saddam’s secular regime, it was common for Sunnis to pray at Shiite mosques and vice versa. Intermarriage was also common. As everywhere else, people are people. Now, an increasingly large number of Sunnis share an all-too-common experience with Shiites, Israelis and the Lebanese - they suffered the trauma of losing a loved one who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That kind of trauma can lead to an enmity lasting
generations. Finally, one small group of Sunni immigrants affects Iraq disproportionately. Members of Al Qaeda are Sunnis who also belong to the "takfiri" sect which believes all Shiites are heretics.
If the differences between the Shiites and the Arab Sunnis are irreconcilable, Iran may be the only power with the strength and resources to stop the violence.
Kurds
The Kurds’ historical memory is that The League of Nations promised them a homeland in 1920. But in 1923, that presumed homeland was divided among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. A turning point came in 1991, following Saddam’s recriminatory killing of Kurds following the Gulf War. The U.S. and the British established a no-fly zone over which Saddam could not encroach.
In 1992, the Kurds in northern Iraq established their separate homeland, with the trappings of sovereignty that endure to this day. Kurdistan has its own parliamentary government, its own army and its own flag. Kurdish is the official language. No government ministry from Baghdad has an office there. Today, the Iraqi army is banned from going into this Kurdish territory, which covers the provinces of Dahuk, Irbil, and Sulaimaniyah. During the decade prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, life for the Kurds has been largely separate from the rest of the country ruled by Saddam.
Daily life in Kurdistan is still largely unaffected by the sectarian violence consuming Arab Sunnis and Shiites further south. Since the Kurds do not have as strong a stake in the sectarian battles affecting the rest of the country, they may view an Iranian occupation over the rest of Iraq as a pragmatic solution.
Since 1992, Iran’s relationship with the Kurdish government has been similarly pragmatic. Iran extends a hand of friendship so long as Iraq’s Kurds show no support for any effort to expand beyond Iraq’s borders. Consequently, relations have wavered from amicable to hostile, based Iran’s concern about the sanctity of its borders. About 5 million ethnic Kurds live in Iran.
America’s Historic Legacy
You may think that Iraqis feel nothing but gratitude to the United States for liberating them from Saddam. For most Iraqis, and Shiites in particular, America’s record is a mixed bag at best. They remember that, up until the first Gulf War and for the post-war massacre of 100,000 Shiites, the U.S. was Saddam’s enabler.
In 1991, as we forced Saddam’s army into full retreat from Kuwait, the first President Bush urged Iraqis to rise up. "The Iraqi military and the Iraqi people should take matters into their own hands,” he said “to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside." The Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south took Bush’s words to heart, believing that the U.S. would provide some kind of support, or sanctuary, if they tried to overturn Iraq’s government. They were fatally mistaken.
"You had this mantra being repeated in Washington, `We're not going to get involved in Iraq's internal affairs,' recalls Peter Galbraith, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer who visited Iraq in March [1991]. 'This was a clear signal to Saddam that he could kill whoever he needed to kill to stay in power.'
Baghdad quickly deployed helicopter gun ships against the poorly armed rebels -- violating the spirit of a cease-fire agreement -- and Republican Guards slipped out of Basra, under the noses of U.S. forces posted near main highways. As one senior officer puts it: 'We had over watch of the traffic but we didn't interdict it.'
As reports of mass slaughter trickled out of Iraq, Pentagon officials drew up a plan for protecting the Shiites with a "safe haven" similar to the one that later shielded Kurds. But no one acted on it. "It was a non-starter. It ran into an administration which simply wasn't interested," says a Pentagon official familiar with the plan. "The attitude was, `the war's over, Kuwait's secured, let's get the hell out . . .'"
- “Forgotten Rebels: After Heeding Calls To Turn on Saddam, Shiites Feel Betrayed” By Tony Horwitz, The Wall Street Journal December 26, 1991
America’s current failure to provide safety for ordinary Iraqis resonates.
Finally, there is the historic legacy that lies at the core of all Middle East politics for the past 90 years. If you don’t know what it is, rent a DVD of Lawrence of Arabia and pay close attention. After World War I, when the Ottoman Empire lay defeated, the western powers stymied Arab hopes for self determination in favour of European commercial interests. They arbitrarily carved out protectorates with scant regard for the locals. Consequently, Iraq didn’t emerge organically, it was cobbled together to assure British control of all the major oilfields in the area. For generations, many in the Middle East have viewed western intervention as an outgrowth of that post-World War I imperialism.
Iraq/Iran Relations
Last July, Iran hosted a conference on Iraq’s security attended by ministers from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, senior representatives of the U.N., the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Attendees made it clear that George W. Bush is not the decider of the U.S. military presence. The ministers noted:
“the stated intention of the international community… to terminate the presence of multinational forces at the request of the government of Iraq …[The ministers expressed their support for the transfer of all affairs to the elected representatives of Iraqi people, and underlined the need to raise the level of preparedness of Iraqi defence and security forces and the earliest transfer of defence and security responsibilities to them.”
Go to iraqieconomy.org for a taste of commercial relations between Iraq and Iran. By the way, Iraq’s and Iran’s oil reserves, combined, represent over 20% of the world total.
Energy Resources
The numbers say:
U.S. efforts to isolate Iran will continue to be ineffectual because:
a) The balance of power in world energy is eroding away from the United States and Europe,
b) In favour of Russia and Iran, so that
c) Russia’s sponsorship of Iran enhances Russia’s own strategic power with other countries.
d) Russia and China who want to do business with Iran. Now they have the economic resources to neutralize U.S. diplomatic moves against Iran.
The story of Iran’s newly-gained economic and strategic power takes some explaining. Of course selling oil at $75 a barrel has something to do with it. But the primary driver is a structural shift in global energy markets.
To understand how the world’s energy is produced and consumed, the best place to start is probably the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
Before getting into the global picture, let’s start with a review of the U.S. and oil. First, some basics. Crude oil in the U.S. is used primarily for transportation – gasoline, diesel and jet fuel – with the remainder as feedstock for refineries and petrochemical plants. (Heating oil is only 4% U.S. consumption.) Nuclear, wind and solar power, which are used to generate electricity, have nominal impact on our consumption of oil, despite Dick Cheney’s suggestions otherwise. Natural gas is used primarily for generating electricity and for heating.
Under the leadership of George Bush, America’s addiction to foreign oil got a lot worse, by about 1.8 million barrels a day. In 2000, we imported about 12 million barrels of oil a day; in 2005, we imported about 13.8 million barrels a day, about 2/3 of our total consumption. Our addiction is getting worse, because our consumption keeps going up, by about 2% a year, while domestic production keeps falling.
Oil production in other developed countries is also falling. In 2005 U.S. daily production was 12% lower than it was in 2000. Norway’s was also 12% lower, and in Britain 2005 production was 32% lower than it was in 2000. For these three countries, that’s a drop of 2.1 million barrels a day.
Who made up for the shortfall? In large part it was Russia, which produced 6.5 million barrels a day in 2000 and 9.5 barrels a day in 2005, a 43% increase. In 2005 Russia produced about as much oil as Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar combined. Remember, in 2000, oil sold for about $30 a barrel; in 2005 it sold for about $56 a barrel, and lately it’s been selling for $75 a barrel.
Current oil prices add to Russia’s wealth, but its real strategic power comes from natural gas. Virtually all of Russia’s natural gas is controlled by Gazprom, which is 51% government-owned. Five years ago, relatively little natural gas traded in global markets. But that’s changing fast. Russia holds the world’s largest supply of natural gas reserves, about 27% of the world total. Iran has the second largest reserves, or about 15% of the world total. America’s ally, Qatar, is a close third, with 14% of the world’s total. However, Qatar, on the other side of the Persian Gulf, cannot practicably sell its gas via pipeline. No other country has reserves of comparable size.
A Russia/Iran partnership could control the world market for natural gas. As Valery Yazev, a Russian legislator who heads the Duma’s energy committee, said in Berlin last May, cooperation among the largest producers "may lead to the creation of a gas suppliers' alliance that will be more effective and influential than OPEC."
For perspective, Saudi Arabia has 22% of the world’s oil reserves. Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran combined have 43% of the world’s oil reserves. If Russia teams up with Iran, the two countries would control 42% of the world’s gas supply. That’s a lot.
In that spirit, Gazprom offered to build a pipeline carrying Iran’s gas to Pakistan and India. Here’s how industry publications described the strategic implications of the deal:
“Russia aims to enter the South Asian gas market by giving Iran and Turkmenistan gas to market in Europe, in return for gas transported via the Iran-Pakistan-India and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipelines that Gazprom could sell inside Pakistan and India. The swap would avoid additional competition for Russia in Europe from Iran and Central Asia.”
- International Oil Daily July 31, 2006
“Experts in New Delhi explained that the strategy, if successful, would make Russia an even more dominant supplier of gas to Western Europe, a situation with which some countries, such as Germany, may not be comfortable. Western diplomats pointed out that Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, is aggressively using oil and gas to enhance its grip and profile as a global power.
"’The Russian plan … is a very smart move, both politically and economically,’ one West European ambassador said. ‘This will deepen the Russian influence all across Central Asia to Iran and Pakistan and India.’” Upstream July28, 2006
Washington’s efforts to stop the pipeline seem to be falling on deaf ears. On August 15, 2006, the same day that US diplomat Steven Mann said the US "strongly opposes" the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, the Pakistani Ambassador to Tehran expressed hope that negotiations on the gas pipeline would soon be finalized so the two countries would develop a closer friendship.
Until recently, most natural gas was sold in regional, rather than global markets. The change was brought about, in part, by America’s brand new addiction, imported liquefied natural gas, or LNG. LNG is very expensive to produce. (The gas is liquefied, transported in special high pressure container ships, and then converted back to gas before being shipped on a pipeline.) Still, every expert predicts that the U.S. will not have enough natural gas to keep fuelling its gas-fired electric power plants, so it must import the more expensive LNG. All of a sudden, countries that had no viable market for their gas, because the cost of delivering it to a consuming market was too high, can now sell the gas as LNG.
The other primary catalyst for LNG development is the future demand from fast-growth economies in Asia. So while Iran, India and Pakistan still bicker over the price of gas on the new Gazprom-built pipeline, Iran knows it can walk away from the deal, because its fallback mode of distribution is an LNG plant. An LNG plant requires a huge capital expenditure, but the seller and the consumer need not worry about the risks of piping gas through not-too-friendly countries. Last July, Iran signed a deal with Thailand’s national oil company of to sell 3 million tons of LNG per year. A group headed French oil giant Total will be building an LNG plant in Iran capable of handling 10 million tons of LNG per year.
Another big investor in Iran is China, Iran's third-largest export market for crude oil. China entered into a joint venture to develop Yadavaran, Iran's largest undeveloped oil field. China entered into a 25-year contract to purchase 110 million metric tons of Iranian gas. China and Iran set up a joint-venture to build large LNG tankers. Early in August, China announced that it would invest $2.7 billion to expand one of Iran’s refineries. And by the way, China has been supplying missiles and missile technology to Iran for over 20 years.
All this explains why so many people, outside the U.S. anyway, were predicting that Iran would respond as it has to the U.N. Security Council’s proposal on nuclear development. Iran kept stalling, and eventually came back with a counterproposal to keep on negotiating. Most Security Council members are loath to support military action, or even sanctions, so long as Tehran is willing to talk. The U.S., of course, will insist on greater political and economic sanctions.
Here’s what the Economist Intelligence Unit wrote two months ago:
The difficulty for the U.S. is that this implicit threat [of sanctions] lacks credibility. Russia and China have already made abundantly clear that they do not intend to support UN sanctions on Iran, and the presence of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the recent Shanghai security summit (also attended by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin) reinforced that message, while giving the lie to claims about Tehran's isolation.
The U.S. has said that U.N diplomacy fails, it may act unilaterally. According to press reports, options on the table include military air strikes against Iran. Perhaps. But I’m reminded of something said by Ibrahim Sharif, a left-wing politician in Bahrain. People in Bahrain were becoming nervous about getting caught in the crossfire between the U.S. and Iran, since Bahrain is home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet - an obvious bombing target. "Iran does not need to attack Bahrain,” Sharif remarked. "The weak link of the U.S. presence in the Middle East is Iraq. There are 130,000 men (US soldiers) in Iraq. It's a sitting duck in terms of inflicting damage."
Indeed.
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