Leaves caution behind

I have in the last few days had an exchange of thoughts, impressions and views on the Gaza crisis with a Jewish friend in the UK. We’ve not actually seen each other in the flesh for over five years, so have taken special pains to avoid Read the rest of this entry »

War is horrible: Bodies outside the Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, following an Israeli air strike on 27 December.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, who has written in the Guardian of the effects of Israel’s policies and attacks on Gaza.

“I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.”

“Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.”

“In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photomosaic of Iraq war dead as President Bush, from Michaelmoore.com.

People generally seem to overestimate the rationality of war. It is, for example, a common assumption that the Afghanistan war continues as a consequence of regular, rational assessments of whether it is achieving anything. In the case of Iraq, those arguing in favour of that war frequently assume that the occupation continues for the reasons stated by politicians.

What, it seems to me, is frequently underestimated, are the institutional and social pressures, particularly within US and British society, that enable war:-

• Their populations, still steeped in the heroic mythology of victory in WWII and free of any experience of invasion, have far less of the visceral horror of warfare that pervades other societies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Somebody asked earlier why there should be a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The reasons are simple:

• The occupation is not working to secure peace.
• The occupation is causing horrible and unacceptable numbers of civilian deaths. It is a racist occupation. I do not deploy the word lightly, and before rejecting my description, I ask you to consider how you would react if the UK army, intent on routing out a terrorist in a British village, decided that the deaths of 18 civilians was an acceptable level of “collateral damage”. I think it fair to suggest that you would be outraged and horrified. Yet no-one, least of all the US/UK forces, appears to be very concerned when those who die are not English-speaking soccer mums, but central Asian peasants.

Clearly, then, the US and British forces give very little value to the lives of those – Afghan (and Iraqi) civilians for whom they are supposedly securing peace and democracy.

You might be even more concerned at 18 deaths in a British village if it turned out that they were killed by a remote-controlled drone, and the forces concerned were not even so worried by the possibility of civilian casualties as to take the precaution of deploying a human-piloted aircraft so as to allow for more precise on-the-spot judgements.

I have not selected the number 18 at random: it is the number of people killed in just one incident, in Pakistan actually, by a US Predator drone based in Afghanistan, and piloted remotely from Nevada. See Foreign Policy in Focus for the horrific details.

Of course, many will argue that withdrawal from Afghanistan will leave even greater chaos behind.

I challenge these people to find me just one example from history where a determined guerilla campaign, much less overlapping campaigns, has been defeated by conventional military forces.

There is no such example. These situations are only ever resolved by fully inclusive political settlements that include even the nastiest and least salubrious parties to the conflict. South Africa and Ireland are clear recent examples.

So long as they reject negotiations with insurgents and Talibans, no-one should be fooled into thinking that the US and UK are in Afghanistan or Iraq for the sake of peace or democracy, or even the security of those countries’ people. These occupations serve only very narrow, selfish national interests; the arguments advanced for them publicly are pure spin.

Naomi Klein has just written a book called The Shock Doctrine: The Age of Disaster Capitalism. It charts the latest developments in US capitalism, which seems to thrive most furiously on war, fear, suspicion and hatred, as these three eras of military/security spending suggest:

1. WWII
2. The Cold War
3. The ‘War on Terror’

(Just imagine how marvellous it would be if all this energy and ingenuity were turned towards creating an egalitarian and sustainable society …)

Among Naomi’s revelations:

• The new Homeland Security Agency is a ‘hollow shell’ which outsources most of its functions to a rapidly growing army of private contractors.
• The CIA has outsourced the ‘rendition’ of prisoners to Boeing.
• ‘Security’ lobby firms in Washington, which promise to link security companies with politicians, have grown in number from two in 2001 to over 500.
• Interrogations and torture are now outsourced, by the CIA, to private contractors, who of course have to ‘get results’ in order to hold onto their contracts
• The US pays informants huge amounts of money, creating a huge incentive to lie about others: a US flyer handed out in Afghanistan read: “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams. You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces … This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information, but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

There have been and are debates, of course – about the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, about indefinite detention, about torture and extraordinary rendition – but discussion of what it means to have these functions performed as commercial transactions has been almost completely avoided. What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors – rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatised war built to have no end.

Klein, together with director Alfonso Cuarón, has produced a short video promoting the book, available on YOUTube, which you can convert to something downloadable here.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Muslim hearts are hard to win after years of hypocrisy

The consequences of this have been dire. Two years ago the Pew Research Centre analysed the sources of popular support for terrorism across a sample of six Muslim countries. It found little connection with poverty and a surprisingly small one with Islamic fundamentalism. By far the strongest correlation was with those who felt that America opposed democracy in their country. Contrary to common myth, al-Qaida thrives not because Muslims hate our values, but because we are seen to have been false to them.

The surge: a special report by Patrick Cockburn – Independent Online Edition > Middle East

This excellent report gets well behind the ritual superficialities reported by most papers and the self-deceiving tosh served up by the BBC, and shows how even the reports of the US Iraq study group, for example, demonstrate that there is a vast gulf between rhetoric and reality.

What, besides the troop “surge”, is the US doing to reduce violence in Iraq? Getting rid of weapons, perhaps? Nope, the brilliant strategists and managers at the Pentagon are losing weapons, hundreds of thousands of them, in Iraq:

Pentagon admits 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq

General Wesley Clark is a retired four-star US general. He was the “Supreme Allied Commander” of NATO, when NATO was at war in Kosovo.

On March 2 this year, he gave an interview to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, a radio programme which airs on “over 450 stations in North America”.

He has some very interesting, though no longer surprising, comments to make about the US motivation for making war on Iraq.

About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

I’ve often argued that those who call Bush an idiot and a failure are labouring under the sweet but mistaken illusion that he is trying to honourably serve those who elected him, when in fact he has done a pretty good job of serving the interests of the rich, powerful and dangerous people who bought him the presidency.

Bush Didn’t Bungle Iraq, You Fools – Greg Palast

‘A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi… You know, so what?’ – Independent Online Edition

This article from the UK Independent reports on a investigation in the US publication, the Nation, which reveals what anyone with anyone with imagination and understanding of human nature, military institutions and warfare knew all along: that the war in Iraq has been waged with a monumental contempt for Iraqi life that gives the lie to all claims that the war was intended to establish democracy. Here’s the original piece by The Nation.