"Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror" by Mahmood Mamdani

In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during WWII, saying that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

Like the Middle East, parts of Africa have been engulfed in conflict for much of the post-colonial period. While the media coverage in both cases is perfunctory, in the case of Africa it is also sporadic. To the extent that there is coverage, the emphasis is on the dramatic or the grotesque. When the subject is not war, it is usually famine, disease or poverty — sometimes all together, always free of context. The wars are between “tribes” led by “warlords,” that take place in “failed states” ruled by “corrupt dictators.” Driven by primal motives, they rarely involve discernible issues. The gallery of rogues gives way only to a tableau of victims, inevitably in need of White saviors. A headline like “Can Bono save Africa?” is as illustrative of Western attitudes towards the continent as the comments of Richard Littlejohn, Britain’s highest-paid columnist, who wrote at the peak of the Rwandan genocide “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.”

Darfur is the conspicuous exception to this trend, though Rwanda did enter Western vocabulary after the 1994 genocide. This, Mamdani argues, is primarily due to the efforts of one organization — the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) — whose advocacy has been central to turning this into the biggest mass movement in the United States since the anti-Vietnam mobilization, bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. While the mobilization did have the salutary effect of raising awareness about an issue otherwise unknown to the majority of US citizens, its privileging of acting over knowing renders this less meaningful. Indeed, the campaign’s shunning of complexity, its substituting of moral certainty for knowledge, and its preference for military solutions, precludes the very end that it purports to strive for. Invoking what it claims are lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, it combines slogans such as “never again” with the battle cries of a new “good war”, such as “boots on the ground”, and “out of Iraq and into Darfur”. Mamdani contends that SDC is not a peace movement, it is a war movement.

The SDC was established in July 2004 through the combined efforts of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. It has since been joined by a broad spectrum of political and religious organizations, a gaggle of celebrities and prominent intellectuals. It has spawned student chapters all across the country that range from the high school to university levels. Led by an advertising executive, it is the only organization capable of bringing together such unlikely partners as the Reverend Al Sharpton and author Elie Wiesel, actor George Clooney and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. If the signature activity of the anti-Vietnam war movement was the teach-in, for the SDC it is the advertising campaign. The expert has been replaced by the celebrity, the campaigner by the advertising agent. With an annual budget of $14 million the SDC employs the DC-based PR firm M+R Strategic Services (M&R) for its publicity. While M&R boasts a clientele comprising mainly green and humanitarian non-profits, in 2002 it was exposed by PR Watch for using its progressive credentials to greenwash DuPont, one of the world’s leading polluters. The centrality of propaganda to the SDC’s success was underscored by the fact that in the period between Spring 2007 and January 2008, the president of M&R Bill Wasserman also served as Save Darfur’s executive director.

The apparent diversity of the SDC’s affiliates also obscures the fact that its agenda is mainly driven by Zionist organizations and the Christian Right. However, Mamdani pays scant attention to the composition of the SDC even though he devotes a whole chapter to its politics and methods. As The Jerusalem Post reported ahead of the SDC’s rally in Washington on 30 April 2006, it is “[l]ittle known … that the coalition, which has presented itself as ‘an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations’ was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.” It noted that even in 2006 that coalition was “heavily weighted” with a “diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups.” The Washington Post reported the same day that “[k]eeping the peace within the diverse Save Darfur Coalition has not been easy” due to tensions, in particular, between evangelical Christians and the mostly Muslim Darfuri immigrants. The Sudanese immigrants also objected to the lineup of speakers which, according to the paper, included “eight Western Christians, seven Jews, four politicians and assorted celebrities — but no Muslims and no one from Darfur” (two were eventually added at the last minute). Ned Goldstein has suggested in his investigation of the Zionist interests behind the SDC that Darfur is being deployed as a strategic distraction from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (most recently at the UN anti-racism conference). The salient feature of the SDC propaganda is to paint the conflict as war between “Arabs” and “Africans” and to label the violence “genocide.”

The genocide debate hinges on two factors: numbers and identity. For mass violence to qualify as genocide the killing has to be on a large enough scale, and the intent to eliminate a discrete racial, ethnic, or religious group has to be established. Mamdani argues that in order to sustain its claim of genocide, the SDC has inflated casualty figures and racialized the conflict.

The mortality figure of 400,000 has become a staple of SDC propaganda even though it has been repeatedly discredited. In 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority chided the SDC (and the Aegis Trust) for breaching “standards of truthfulness” in its use of the figure for its UK advertising campaign. The number had already been challenged when a panel convened by the US Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences concluded that of the six estimates they studied, the figures presented by the SDC were the least reliable. The most reliable estimate was the study carried out by the World Heath Organization-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) that had recorded 131,000 excess deaths at the peak of the conflict of which only 30 percent were due to violence. The violence had dropped sharply after January 2005; this, Mamdani avers, was due mainly to the intervention of African Union peacekeepers. By 2008, the total deaths for the whole year had dropped to 1,500. These numbers are far lower than what constitutes an emergency according to the UN, let alone genocide.

The conflict began as a civil war in 1987-89, driven less by race or ethnic rivalries than by a struggle for land and resources — it pitted the mostly nomadic landless Arabs against the mostly sedentary Fur peasants. Compounded by Khartoum’s botched attempt at land reform during the 1990s, turning it into a party to the civil war, the simmering conflict erupted into a full-scale insurgency in 2003. This eventually led to the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign where it turned to nomadic tribes from Darfur and Chad to serve as proxies.

Mamdani identifies three causes as having contributed to the conflict. First, is the history of colonial rule wherein the British went about a project of retribalizing Darfur through a system of native administration which created tribal homelands and introduced a principle of discrimination that privileged “natives” over “settlers.” This led to the dispossession of nomadic tribes, especially the camel nomads of the north. The tribal identities were further solidified through a census that required each registrant to choose a “race”; a written history that presented Arabs as “settlers” from the Middle East; and laws that gave preferential treatment to whoever was deemed a “native”. This narrative also allowed the British colonizers to present themselves as merely following the precedent of an earlier Arab colonization.

Drought and desertification was the second contributing factor. The Sahara’s southern rim expanded by 100 kilometers, forcing nomadic tribes further south and eventually to encroach on the lands of the sedentary Fur tribes.

Finally, the civil war in neighboring Chad where opposition groups armed by Cold War rivals — the US, France and Israel on one side, and Libya and the Soviet Union on the other — had frequently taken refuge in Darfur, leading to a proliferation of weapons and militias. Mamdani explains that the Western powers were involved in the conflict long before the Sudanese government was; and Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime wasn’t even in power at the time.

The Arab-versus-African narrative obscures the fact that since at least the British colonial era, Arabs have been Darfur’s most deprived constituency. “If Darfur was marginal in Sudan,” writes Mamdani, “the Arabs of Darfur were marginal in Darfur.” Contrary to the British historiography — whose assumptions have since been reproduced in 20th century nationalist writings — most Arabs arrived in Sudan as refugees fleeing persecution in Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, the diffusion of Arab culture was more a consequence of commerce than of conquest. Mamdani demonstrates that “Arab” is not a racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. It is an assumed political identity that is more a reflection of preference and power than of genealogy. For example, former slaves once freed would become Fur in Darfur, and Arab in Funj, the Sultanate in riverine Sudan where Arabs dominated. To be an Arab in Darfur therefore signifies nothing so much as weakness. The conflict in Darfur today is as much between Arabs (the Abbala camel nomads against the Baggara cattle nomads) as it is against the relatively privileged Fur and Massalit, and the less privileged Zaghawa. The SDC however emphasizes the north-south axis of the conflict that pits Arab against Fur and ignores the south-south Axis which pits Arab against Arab.

The Darfuri rebels likewise defy easy classification. When the insurgency began in 2003, there were two major groups — the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) — they have now split into 26. JEM, which is the largest rebel organization, has an Islamist orientation and draws its inspiration from Hassan al-Turabi, the influential Sudanese Islamist and one time ally of Omar al-Bashir. In contrast, the SLA is secular-Africanist with ties to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the South (led by the late John Garang). Before the split between the Islamists in Khartoum, the government had employed Darfuri Islamists led by future JEM founder Khalil Ibrahim for its counterinsurgency in the south. (Ibrahim opposed the power-sharing agreement that ended the war in the south.) However, according to Sudan scholar Alex de Waal, both organizations learned “to characterize their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the south: they were the ‘African’ victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.” The government’s response to the insurgency was at first a half-hearted attempt at reconciliation, followed by the arming of a proxy force comprising nomadic militias, many of them from Chad, who have come to be known as the Janjawid. The consequences were devastating, with large-scale bloodletting and the displacement of 2.5 million people.

Khartoum’s use of proxies to quell an insurgency and the resulting death and displacement parallel US policies in Iraq, where ethnic-sectarian militias have been deployed against the mostly-Sunni insurgency. Yet, unlike Iraq, where in excess of a million have died according to the lates ORB poll, and five million displaced, the violence in Darfur has been labeled a genocide. Darfur has also spawned domestic mobilization in the US on a scale for which there is no parallel in the case of Iraq. Mamdani argues that this is due to the fact that Iraq requires Americans to act as citizens, with all the responsibility and complicated political choices it entails, whereas Darfur only requires them to act as humans where they choose to take responsibility out of a sense of philanthropy. He notes that “In Darfur, Americans can feel themselves to be what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors.” As the Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala observed, “It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption.” In adopting the language of good and evil, Mamdani observes, the SDC has acted as “the great depoliticizer” in precluding political reconciliation in favor of a moral (read military) solution.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mamdani emphasizes regional over international solutions. Western modes of conflict resolution in Africa resemble nothing so much as the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs: “Those who made decisions did not have to live with their consequences, nor pay for them.” The Western emphasis on the humanitarian crisis in lieu of a political solution merely prolongs the conflict. By contrast, the AU’s approach is both humanitarian and political. The African Union’s (AU) intervention in Darfur had been largely successful in reducing the violence, yet its operation was undermined by Western powers that failed to deliver the support they had pledged when the AU brokered the N’DJamena ceasefire agreement in April 2004. It was also vilified in SDC propaganda. Mamdani asserts that much of the foot-dragging was to discredit the AU so that the notion of an African solution for an African problem could be discredited. The aim was to “blue hat” the AU forces and bring them under Western command. In a Washington Post op-ed pointedly titled “Stop Trying To ‘Save’ Africa,” Iweala asked, “How is it that a former mid-level US diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?”

The recent International Criminal Court case has further entrenched the Khartoum government in its defiant stance. Criminal prosecutions during an ongoing conflict merely exacerbate matters, Mamdani argues. More so when the adjudicating body has a demonstrable record of bias. The model for justice must be the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than Nuremberg — survivors’ justice rather than victors’ justice. The well-being of surviving multitudes must not be subordinated to the imperative of punishing individual perpetrators. Mamdani offers a trenchant critique of what he calls the “New Humanitarian Order,” which has supplanted traditional colonialism and turned human rights into the new pretext for intervention. The “international community”, which Mamdani argues is nothing more than a “post-Cold War nom de guerre for the Western powers”, has created “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East” reducing citizens to wards in “an open-ended international rescue operation”.

The Obama Administration already appears to be making a break with its predecessor’s approach and has ordered a review of its Sudan policy. Scott Gration, the new envoy, has already visited Khartoum and Darfur, as has John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the case of the Bush Administration, the SDC was able to mobilize Congress against the State Department that was seeking a political resolution modeled on the power-sharing agreement that ended the longstanding conflict in the south. It remains to be seen how much the Obama Administration is able to resist the formidable lobbying power of the SDC. While Mamdani maintains that the aim of the SDC is to induce the US government to intervene militarily in Sudan, it appears that the real interest of its core organizations is to perpetuate the conflict so as to continue using the image of the Arab as the perpetrator to distract from the regional reality of the Arab as the victim.

* A shorter version of this first appeared on the Electronic Intifada.

United States Middle East policy has been defined since World War II by the tension between two competing concerns: the strategic interests which require good relations with Arab-Muslim states, and domestic political imperatives which demand unquestioning allegiance to Israel. That the US interest in the region’s energy resources has remained consistent, as well as its support for Israel, leads some to conclude that somehow the two are complementary. They aren’t. US President Harry S. Truman recognized the state of Israel the day of its founding over the strenuous objections of his State Department in order to court the Jewish vote and, more significantly, Jewish money for his re-election campaign. Every president since – with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, who saw no cause to feign balance – has sought to address this tension with attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All these efforts have so far failed. A study of US policy in the region over the decades, then, is inevitably a study of the causes of these failures. While nowhere in his invaluable diplomatic history of eight presidencies, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East, does Patrick E. Tyler use the phrase “the Israel lobby,” it nevertheless looms largest among the reasons why all these efforts have foundered. With the US Congress long since claimed by the lobby, the executive branch is where most of these battles have played out.

The coherence and continuity imputed to US policy in the region by analysts owes more to broad-brush theorizing than to a careful appraisal of the contingent realities that have shaped it. The structural determinism of these accounts overlooks the ad hoc nature of the policies and brushes over the discernible personal stamps of key individuals. Tyler’s indispensable corrective begins with Dwight D. Eisenhower, among whose priorities the Middle East never ranked high until the Suez crisis in 1956. Like Truman he resented Zionist influence on the US government, but whereas the former had opted for a politically expedient accommodation, Eisenhower refused to compromise. Both Eisenhower and his CIA Director Allan Dulles liked Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who they saw as an anti-communist modernizer. They aided his consolidation of power. The Israeli government resented this and even resorted to terrorism at one point to wean away the US.

But where violence failed, influence proved decisive. The Israel lobby, along with the anti-China and cotton lobbies, blocked promised funding for the Aswan Dam, and the administration’s subsequent refusal to sell arms to Egypt led Nasser to turn to the Soviets for assistance. Nevertheless when Israel, Britain and France launched their invasion in 1956, Eisenhower considered intervening militarily to defend Egypt. He feared this unilateral act of aggression would render irrelevant the new UN-led world order which the US was promulgating. When his proposal to discipline Israel met with resistance in Congress he took the case directly to the American public, thereby neutralizing the lobby’s pressure.

There was a marked change in US policy with the ascension of Lyndon Johnson who ushered in a pronounced pro-Israel tilt. A convert to Zionism out of political expedience, Johnson was quick to revoke the restrictions Kennedy had been trying to impose on Israel’s nuclear program. Kennedy had kept Israel at a wary distance and opted for conciliation with Arabs. In contrast, writes Tyler, Johnson “had put himself in the service of Israel like no other previous president,” deferring judgment on key occasions to his coterie of informal Jewish advisers which included among others a former member of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun. Unlike Eisenhower, Johnson would accept Israel’s conquests during the 1967 war, ignoring the judgment of his own cabinet, and would thereby permanently undermine the UN charter.

It was not until Richard Nixon’s presidency however that the US emphatically committed itself to arming Israel. It was as much a cynical ploy on Nixon’s part to deflect pressure from the Watergate investigations as it was a result of his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s machinations which on occasion bordered on the treasonous. Kissinger had advanced his career by undercutting a nascent peace plan by Secretary of State William Rogers who, like Nixon, worried that Israeli intransigence was undermining US oil security. During the 1973 war when Nixon and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger argued that the US should only be obliged to defend Israel, not its conquests, Kissinger dismissed the distinction as irrelevant “fine tuning” and went on to do things which, as Tyler euphemistically puts it, raise “constitutional questions.” First, Kissinger whose commitment to the Zionist cause formed “the bedrock of [his] view of the Middle East,” raised a false alarm that other Arab armies were about to join the war against Israel. He then fomented a confrontation with the Soviets in order to buy Israel more time; he contravened Nixon’s orders for engaging the Soviets in a joint ceasefire proposal; he travelled to Israel and encouraged the Israelis to resist Nixon’s pressure and breach the ceasefire in order to finish off Egypt’s encircled Third Army; finally, he lied to Nixon about Soviet intentions and about the extent of domestic pressure in order to secure arms shipments to Israel as a response to this “Russian treachery.” Tyler concludes that Kissinger maneuvered “as if he were a partisan for Israel’s war aims” and “his actions throughout the crisis added up to a focused advocacy more for Israel’s strategic goals than for those of the United States.”

Tyler skips over the Ford administration which was uneventful except for the proposal to “reassess” the US relationship with Israel. Ford climbed down after receiving a letter drafted by the Israeli lobby group AIPAC to which 76 senators had signed their names. Jimmy Carter was likewise challenged by the lobby when he became the first US president to broach the idea of a Palestinian “homeland.” However, he proved a more formidable adversary. Though he occasionally ceded ground, through sheer tenacity he also managed to extract concessions from the Israelis. The conviction with which Carter threatened to cut funding in response to Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon led Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to exclaim “It’s over” before ordering a withdrawal. In stormy sessions with Begin, according to Moshe Dayan, Carter delivered his indictments which “could not have been expressed in a more hostile form.” (So “disgusted” was Carter with Begin’s tactics that he said he would have asked Begin to “get the hell out” had he not been a guest.) It was this same tenacity that would eventually allow him to force Israel to withdraw from the occupied Egyptian Sinai peninsula, despite Begin’s reluctance and the opposition of the lobby. Carter’s wish for a comprehensive Middle East peace would not come to fruition as a result of his failure to win re-election in 1980.

Ronald Reagan began his presidency on a firmly pro-Israel footing, but he found his attempts at strategic cooperation with Israel repeatedly frustrated by an intransigent Begin who he felt always ignored the US national interest. This tension was exploited by Reagan’s secretary of state Alexander Haig who would frequently leverage Israeli power in his bureaucratic struggle against the president and the administration Realists (Vice President George H.W. Bush, Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and National Security Advisor William Clark). Haig blocked Weinberger and Bush’s attempts to penalize Israel for its attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. He also gave the green light to Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon for his plan to reshape the Middle East by invading Lebanon. Reagan ignored the Realists’ advice to sanction Israel and sided with the neoconservatives who argued that the invasion benefited the US by sending a message to the “Soviet-backed radical Arab front.” The Realists on the other hand maintained that “Israeli militarism with American arms … was hurting America’s image in the Middle East” making it harder “to build a strong anti-Soviet alliance.”

The US engagement in Lebanon ended in carnage with the retaliatory bombings of its embassy and Marines barracks in Beirut after its forces openly joined the conflict on the rightist Phalange’s side. To the neocons’ great consternation, Reagan decided to withdraw against their advice. The administration also became the site of contest for the two regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Israel, both vying for the status of “strategic asset,” which culminated in the bizarre Iran-Contra affair.

The relationship between the US and Israel reached its nadir under the George H.W. Bush administration, whose secretary of state James Baker riled many of its supporters by telling them bluntly to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel.” On another occasion, he threatened to expel the Israeli ambassador. In the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, Bush and Baker initiated a peace process in Madrid which would end prematurely with Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. Bush’s withholding of loan guarantees in order to force Israel to freeze settlement construction and his decision to appeal directly to the people in the face of lobby pressure would prove to be his epitaph. After claiming credit for a largely Norwegian effort at peacemaking in order to burnish his credentials as a statesman, Clinton did little to hold Israel to its promises. Indeed, he allowed himself to be pushed around by both Israeli prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak (with the former at one point trying to involve Clinton in an assassination conspiracy against Palestinian resistance leaders). His advisers were former lobbyists for Israel who, according to one member of his negotiating team, all too often served as “Israel’s lawyers.” He only returned to the issue with some conviction in the waning days of his administration, and when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat refused the unreasonable Israeli offer that he was trying to impose on him, he would join the Israelis in blaming Arafat. Worse, he made a point to poison the Palestinian well with the incoming George W. Bush administration by blaming all on Arafat, who he called a “goddamn liar.” Before leaving office, Clinton also allowed himself to be what Tyler calls “duped and bribed” by people who were “closely connected to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad” to grant a pardon to the fugitive financier and Mossad asset Marc Rich (Barak intervened personally with Clinton on Richs’s behalf).

While much of the book benefits from extensive primary-source research including declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, there is a discernible decline in quality in the chapter dealing with the George W. Bush presidency. The only interesting new information that Tyler provides, based on eyewitness testimonies, are in the prologue. These include CIA Director George Tenet’s drunken tirade, while swimming in Saudi prince Bandar bin-Sultan’s pool, against the “assholes” in the Pentagon and the “crazies” in the Vice President’s office. “[T]he Jews,” he complained, referring to the administration neoconservatives, were scapegoating him for the war. In another scene we have Bush personally authorizing the torture of detainees by ordering the CIA to “Stick something up their ass!” The rest is a rather unremarkable account of the events leading up to war.

Despite its occasional flaws (mostly to do with Middle East history, which is not the book’s focus), A World of Trouble is the most important contribution to the debate over US foreign policy since professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and Jimmy Carter’s respective interventions. Painstaking research, intelligent analysis, incidental detail and a novelist’s eye for irony and narrative make it immensely readable despite its considerable length and grim subject matter. No student of US foreign policy or Middle East conflicts can afford to ignore the wealth of new information Tyler presents. The book is likely to prove an invaluable resource for those seeking to steer US policy in a less destructive direction. Unfortunately, many putative supporters of the Palestinian people have accepted the dubious proposition that Israel serves as a “strategic asset” for the US, or, as it were, its “aircraft carrier.” Tyler’s greatest contribution is to debunk this myth with copious evidence that proves this claim to be a minority view in the US establishment (propagated mostly by Likudniks such as Kissinger, Kirkpatrick and Haig). Indeed, policy makers have long seen the US Sixth Fleet as Israel’s “ultimate security guarantor.” Israel is a liability, and to continue to insist otherwise – whether it is out of the fear of the lobby’s reprisals, or to sustain materialist dogma – is to do the Palestinians a great disservice. Fortunately, as Tyler’s evidence if not his conclusions confirm, the political-strategic case for breaking with Israel is just as compelling as the moral one.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.¹ Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits from Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land — and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity — and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism — absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.

The Power of Nightmares

In October 2001 it was revealed that the Pentagon was consulting Hollywood writers and producers specializing in spy thrillers and disaster flicks to imagine future attacks in order to best prepare for them. Developments such as the colour-coded threat alerts that change hue at the Department of Homeland Security’s caprice have alarmed even cold war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski enough to lament this ‘culture of fear’:

Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue… Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum.

In Britain each of the New Labour government’s political missteps has been accompanied by similar fear-mongering. While a terrorist threat does exist, its magnitude is wildly exaggerated. The European Police Office (Europol) released its first report on terrorism last year which listed 498 terrorist attacks for Europe in 2006; only one was attributed to Muslims. The majority — 136 — were carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA; only one of them deadly. When it came to the arrests on terrorism related charges, however, a good half were Muslims.²

It began with the ‘Ricin plot’: the highly publicized arrests, national hysteria and front page headlines. There was no Ricin, or a plot. It wouldn’t be until 2005, well after Colin Powell had used it in his case to sell the Iraq war to the UN, that the ban on reporting on the case was finally lifted and the public apprised of the truth. The February 2003 ‘terror alert’ had Blair scrambling tanks to Heathrow, timed conveniently to coincide with the large scale demonstrations against the coming war. Notable support in the media came from BBC propagandist Fred Gardner, long suspected of ties to the intelligence services,³ themselves busy fanning the fire. Simon Jenkins, the conservative columnist noted, “In 2002-03, before the Iraq war, the security service supplied the Cabinet Office with a weekly catalogue of ‘terror fears’ — anthrax, smallpox, sarin, dirty nuclear devices and a Christmas bombing campaign — to soften public opinion for the war.”

In June 2006, 250 heavily armed police men acting on ‘specific intelligence’ raided a home in Forest Gate arresting two young Muslims, shooting one in the process. The chemical weapons that they were alleged to have possessed were never found. Both were acquitted without charge. The police apologized. On August 10th, 2006, a day after then Home Secretary John Reid had hinted that new anti-terror measures were in order, the Deputy Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Paul Stephenson, announced that the police had foiled a plot to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Officials were soon conceding that the immediacy and scale of the threat may have been “exaggerated”; however, the scare succeeded in deflecting attention from Blair’s widely-denounced manoeuvres preventing a ceasefire in Lebanon. From Beirut, an outraged Robert Fisk wrote:

Stephenson’s job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened … I’m all for arresting criminals… But I don’t think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice.

In November 2006, the MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller warned of a violent threat from 1,600 suspects in 200 groups that could last “more than a generation”. Although she identified government policy towards Iraq as the main factor contributing to the rising radicalism, Blair endorsed the statement. He continued his scapegoating of Muslims with the periodic reiterations of the ‘Islamic threat’ to rationalize the fear, repression, lies and resentment brought in on the heels of the Iraq war. When Blair announced that “the rule of the game have changed”, no one took it more seriously than the tabloid press; they demonstrated just how toxic things could get when gloves come off with government sanction. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian confessed: “I try to imagine how I would feel if this rainstorm of headlines substituted the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’ — I wouldn’t just feel frightened. I would be looking for my passport.”

One can’t miss the Islamophobic nature of much of the hysteria when one compares the difference in the treatment of the cases of Robert Cottage and David Bolus Jackson of the BNP with that of Mohammed Atif Siddique. The case of the former two, arrested for the possession of rocket launchers, a “record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs”, extremist literature, and bomb-making information, barely got covered in national media; the latter, a 20 year old, received front page attention and eight years in prison for merely downloading extremist literature, and his attorney Aamer Anwer, got charged with ‘contempt of court’ for calling the trial a “tragedy for justice”.

The new MI5 chief, Jonathan Evan, raised the fear factor a year on with the warning that 15-year-olds were being “groomed” for terror and that there were up to 2,000 people involved in “terrorist-related activity”. Recalling Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknown’s”, the man appointed by John Reid with Tony Blair’s approval, bizarrely added “there are as many again that we don’t yet know of”. Described variously as “lurid”, “inflammatory”, “highly ideological”, “playing Halloween”, it came on the eve of the Queen’s address calling for yet another terror bill. The institutional imperative of self-preservation may also have been at play: MI5 has already expanded by 50% with eight new regional offices, and will have doubled in size by 2011. Eyebrows have been raised at these very public interventions by the heads of a clandestine service. Simon Jenkins noted that chiefs of the secret service have long feared that the absence of a public profile may diminish funding appropriation. “The answer of both MI5’s Evans and MI6’s John Scarlett is to join the fear factory.”

Taking Liberties

The assault on constitutional rights that started in the US with Clinton’s Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty law of 1996 was replicated in Britain with the Terrorism Act 2000. Section 41 of the Act granted police the right to detain terror suspects for up to one week without charge (criminal law on the other hand requires that suspects be charged within the first 24 hours of arrest, or be released). Section 44 granted police stop and search rights all across Britain (it has since been used against: Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinto for protesting outside Europe’s biggest arms fair in London, the 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang for heckling Jack Straw at the Labour Conference, Sally Cameron for walking on a cycle-path in Dundee, the 80-year-old John Catt for being caught on CCTV passing a demonstration in Brighton;, the 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft for accompanying her parents to an anti-nuclear protest, and a cricketer on his way to a match over his possession of a bat).

In the United States, September 11 occasioned the most robust assault yet on civil liberties in the form of Bush’s ‘USA Patriot Act’ leading eminent constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson to describe Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi legal authority, as “the true éminence grise of the Bush administration” to the extent that the Administration (advised by Dick Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington) espoused a view of presidential authority “that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer”.⁴ The respected lawyer Gareth Peirce noted equally worrying tendencies in the UK:

Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security.⁵

The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 succeeded in ramming through measures that had been rejected in the 2000 Act. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 doubled the period of detention without charge to 14 days. Although the government suffered a significant setback when the Law Lords swept aside the indefinite detention ruling since it broke European human rights legislation (described by the Law Lords as “draconian” and “anathema” to the rule of law, it was seen by Lord Hoffmann as a bigger threat to the nation than terrorism). Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, immediately made clear his intention to undermine it. The government obliged by subsequently passing the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 which gave the Home Secretary the right to use Control Orders and opt out of human rights laws.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, the government upped the ante with the Terrorism Act 2006, which doubled — yet again — the detention period to 28 days, a period far longer than any other state in the western world. The bill marked the first parliamentary defeat for Tony Blair, whose original proposal was for 90 days detention without charge.

Blair’s determination to deflect attention from the failures of his scandal-ridden government by turning the war on terror into a permanent undeclared state of emergency seemed to have come up against a wall. However, despite a noticeably prudent start, Brown’s multiplying political problems soon had him reaching for Blairite nostrums. He renewed the case for doubling the period of detention without charge subsequently settling for an arbitrary 42 days which the supine parliament duly passed.⁶ This despite the fact that the newly appointed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had conceded that circumstances had not yet arisen where it had been necessary “to go beyond 28 days”. Seumas Milne reported in The Guardian that “it’s widely acknowledged in Westminster that a key motivation for this latest assault on long-established rights and freedoms is Brown’s determination to wrong-foot the Tories tactically and portray them as soft on terror”.

The deleterious effects of a creeping surveillance state cannot be discounted. While the public may have little enthusiasm for an ID card scheme after discs containing personal details of 25 million individuals were lost by the government, Brown remains adamant. Given the government’s record for handling personal data, proposals for a universal register of citizen’s DNA samples is very worrying. So are Tony Blair’s remarks about identifying problem children who may grow up to pose a menace to society by intervening before they were born. A new plan under the government’s e-borders scheme would require each person entering or leaving UK to answer 53 questions including “credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights”. Taken when a ticket is bought, the information, it was reported, “will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place.” When popular shows bear names like Big Brother, the appurtenances of mass surveillance society, such as the 4.2 million CCTV cameras, become an acceptable, even desired, part of the scenery. While the terrorist threat today has nowhere near the intensity of the IRA campaign, police are using military aircraft such as the Britten-Norman Islander used previously only in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Reaper robot drones of the type being used in Afghanistan will also be in operation during the Olympics.

Reign of the Terrorologist

Riding the back of the raft of anti-terror legislations are the terrorologists and the “security” entrepreneurs; and they have found green pastures in Fortress Britain. With governments unwilling to address political causes, the trend is increasingly one of framing the subject in cultural terms: ‘they hate our way of life’, ‘they hate our freedoms’, etc. This clears the way for the terrorologist to step in and sell a toxic brew of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology packaged in pseudo-academic jargon as expertise. In his study of the trade, James Petras detects the following “eerily predictable patterns”:

They use a common language to describe their subjects and their environment; they are extremely ideological under a thin veneer of scientific jargon; they possess a keen sense of selective observation; they always pretend to possess a psychological understanding though few if any have dealt close up with their subjects in any clinical sense except perhaps under conditions of incarceration and interrogation.

Their style… slippery with euphemisms when it comes to dealing with the violence of their partisan states… Psychobabble provides a ‘legitimate’ sounding channel for… assuming a state of civilized superiority in the face of their dehumanized subjects. Indeed, the dehumanization process is central to the whole terrorist-political-academic enterprise…

One consequence of earning an elevated place in official demonology is that the bar for those passing judgement drops radically. When it comes to Islam, Muslims and their alleged links to terrorism, any shoddy indictment passes muster. Doom-laden sensationalism makes for good copy; it makes no demands on rigour and scepticism, and a stable of ‘experts’ is readily at hand to amplify fear. The degree to which this has penetrated public discourse was demonstrated by the Big Issue — a publication generally about as provocative as a phonebook — with a front page story on ‘cyber terror’ and ‘online vigilantes’. Trotting out a stable of ‘terror experts’ the story served as a platform for several tendentious claims (”There are no longer clear boundaries between real-world cells and ‘amateurs’ assisting terror plots via their computers”; “al-Qaeda is equal in the media war”). Rather than question why a dubious source such as Evan Kohlmann — the man used as a ‘expert witness’ in the Atif Siddique trial who, according to sociologist David Miller, “has no expertise beyond an undergraduate law degree and an internship at a dubious think-tank” — should be consulted by the Scotland Yard, the story served as a puff piece for three Israel lobby hacks with an ideological axe to grind. Rita Katz has served in the Israeli military; Aaron Weisburd runs Internet Haganah (Hebrew name for the paramilitary that later became the IDF) a project of the Society for Internet Research that works with the Mossad-linked Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; and both Katz and Kohlmann are protégés of Steve Emerson whose own expertise includes having seen “the hallmarks of Middle Eastern terror” in the Oklahoma bombing (actually carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a decorated white Christian war-hero).

The trade of the terrorologist is not new: incubated in the Reagan administration’s earlier ‘war on terror’, its proponents had been exposed and elegantly debunked by Edward Herman. September 11 ushered in a new breed – ubiquitous, ideological, and relentless. Some, such as Rohan Gunaratna of the St. Andrews-based Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), reinvented themselves over night as ‘experts on al-Qaeda’. Gunaratna’s book Inside Al Qaeda became an instant best-seller, even though before the date his expertise was limited to South Asian groups, such as the Tamil Tigers. In the book he claimed he was the “principal investigator of the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch”. However, after a Sunday Age investigation, he admitted that no such position existed. Intelligence services have been generally dismissive of his claims. However, despite all this, he keeps making appearances as an ‘expert witness’ at various UK prosecutions and in media reports.

CSTPV itself bears some scrutiny. Established by an alumni of the RAND Corporation (a US think-tank which played a key role during the Cold War; satirized as the ‘Bland Corporation’ in Dr. Strangelove, it was an enthusiastic supporter of the arms race), the Centre has links to the government and intelligence agencies. Shaping discourse on terrorism through its two influential academic journals, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence, CSTPV emphasises terror directed against states, while mostly ignoring violence by states, excluding however those not allied to the West (‘Hell is other people’, Sartre might say). Reports by the Centre have been used by the government to rationalize permanent anti-terror legislation. The RAND-CSTPV nexus also has stakes in the Iraq conflict through its links to mercenary firms operating in the country. However, despite the conflicts of interest, the Centre’s embedded expertise remains much in demand.⁷

CSTPV’s output may be ideological; but it still retains a degree of sophistication. With the low demands on rigour, joining the fray now are some actors less restrained. In early 2006 it was revealed that authorities at several universities, including this writer’s own, were co-operating with Special Branch as a result of a recently published study by the right wing Social Affairs Unit. Conducted by Anthony Glees, the Director of Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, the study claimed to find evidence of Islamist, animal liberation and British National Party recruitment on UK campuses. The evidence comprised of the fact that people who have been arrested under anti-terrorism legislation attended universities at some point. It castigated Universities for teaching students “theoretical tools for understanding the world”, such as Marxism, which could lead to further radicalization when students moved “from campus to Mosque”. Policy Exchange, another dubious neoconservative outfit, shouldered its way into the debate with an Islamophobic report on extremist literature allegedly being promoted through various Mosques which, to the BBC’s credit, was publicly debunked by a Newsnight investigation. This, however, did not deter Policy Exchange members from using the report to lobby the EU.

Hero and Horse

On November 18, 1822, the Observer reported that nearly “a million bushels of human and inhuman bones” had been imported in the previous year from Europe into the port of Hull. Battlefields swept alike of the “bones of the hero and the horse which he rode” delivered their haul to Yorkshire bone grinders who reduced them to granulary state. “In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.”⁸ Two centuries on, the gap between the ‘support our troops’ rhetoric and reality has yet to be bridged.

An internal report into the state of the British Military obtained by The Independent on May 11 reveals that soldiers are living in such poverty that they can’t even afford food, with many living on emergency food voucher schemes set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). “Commanders are attempting to tackle the problem through ‘Hungry Soldier’ schemes, under which destitute soldiers are given loans to enable them to eat” the paper reported. With its proclivity for market solutions, the tradition of soldiers getting three square meals a day for free has been replaced with a controversial Pay as You Dine (PAYD) regime, which charges soldiers not on active duty for their meals, leading many into debt.

Likewise, slightly more than a year back on March 11, 2007, the Observer had revealed the shocking picture of neglect and poor treatment of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. It reported, for example, that “the youngest British soldier wounded in Iraq, Jamie Cooper, was forced to spend a night lying in his own faeces after staff at Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital allowed his colostomy bag to overflow. On another occasion his medical air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in ‘considerable pain’ overnight despite an alarm going off.” Another complaint alleged that one soldier “suffered more than 14 hours in agony without pain relief because no relevant staff were on duty”. (This, of course, is as much a reflection of the chronic lack of surplus within the health system as it is of the wider militarised draw on public resources.) The MoD has already revealed a serious shortage of medical staff in the armed forces: “There was a 50% shortfall in the number of surgeons required by the army, an 80% shortfall of radiologists and a 46% shortfall of anaesthetists.”

Soldiers in the field haven’t fared any better: for example, both Reg Keys and Rose Gentle lost sons in Iraq due to the lack of proper equipment. Iraq has taken its toll on an overstretched military. Due to “continuing high level of operational commitment” an MoD report has revealed, “more than 1 in 10 soldiers were not getting the rest between operations they needed.” The report also referred to a “continuing difficult environment for army recruitment and retention”. With a high number of officers and other ranks going over voluntarily with another 2,000 awaiting approval of their applications to quit, the armed forces as a whole are nearly 7,000 under strength, the report revealed.

The crisis has caused the military to redouble its recruitment efforts with visits to Scottish schools up by more than 180% in the last three years, The Herald revealed. The news comes only weeks after the National Union of Teachers voted to block future military careers’ presentations “to pupils as young as 14″ in England and Wales. “Despite the outlay of almost £500m, in 2006-07 the field army – the frontline operational part of UK ground forces – missed its ‘gains to strength’ (GTS) recruitment goal by 12%. In 2007-08, it achieved only 63% of its target.” (In the US, the military has been reduced to enlisting former convicts and the mentally ill.) The degree of desperation is also evident in the recent advertising campaign for military recruitment: the military experience is presented as a sanitized adventure, an adrenaline-soaked escape from ennui. High-minded calls of duty and honour have been replaced with ones such as “for the travel, for the action, for the adventure”; “for the fun, for the friendship, for the Friday nights”.

The MoD caused much consternation among the National Union of Teachers when it distributed materials on the Iraq war for use in schools. The ministry was accused of “misleading propaganda” which “unethically” targeted recruitment materials at schools in disadvantaged areas. One worksheet described the purpose of the UK mission in Iraq as “helping the Iraqis to rebuild their country after the conflict and years of neglect”. Touting “achievements” in “security and reconstruction” it failed to mention the US-led invasion, its legality, Iraqi civilian deaths or the absence of WMDs. This is not the MoD’s only advance on the classroom. Another example is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) outreach programme, which sends DSTL scientists to talk to university and school students to encourage them to think about a career at the lab. According to Frances Saunders, the chief executive, DSTL sponsors “year-in-industry students, and are working with the MoD to develop school lesson texts to get people interested in the science behind defence.” Although DSTL already has strong links with universities including Southampton, Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge, Saunders plans to broaden this network.

Not since Suez has the military suffered a greater loss of prestige. RAF airmen in Cambridgeshire were recently advised against wearing uniforms in public in order to avoid being “verbally abused” for their participation in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the demoralizing effect of ill-conceived interventions abroad, the struggle for politicians is then of rehabilitating the myth of the military, rather that the military itself. What interests policy makers is not so much the military, but the cult of military. Plans are also underway to introduce US-style citizenship ceremonies for children and a new public holiday to celebrate ‘Britishness’ by 2012, as part of “wide-ranging proposals to strengthen British citizenship.”

In sharp contrast to the decrepit military stands the fortunes of the private military industry. The preference of recent governments for market solutions has facilitated the transfer of most military R&D to the private sector, with giants like QinetiQ and BAe Systems securing plum deals. When the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (Dera) was split in two in 2001, QinetiQ, a British company with links to the US-based Carlyle Group, absorbed the majority of its activities. Along with a raft of other lucrative PFIs, the private military industry is set to benefit from the largest to date, involving at least £14 billion of taxpayers’ money, for a privatised Military ‘Academy’ at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan to train all-service personnel and private ’security services’. The corporate bonanza in Iraq has had Private Military Contractors — mercenaries — reaping windfalls profits for investors with stakes in the businesses, such as Frederick Forsyth and former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind (of Aegis and ArmorGroup respectively). The lure of salaries, at times reaching as high as £1,000 a day, may be one reason why the military is losing so many of its men to the mercenary business.

While the defence establishment has long complained of funding shortages for the forces, the R&D budget remains secure. The MoD, it was reported, has promised not to raid the R&D budget to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this injunction doesn’t apply in the reverse, as it has been revealed that the Conflict Prevention Fund set aside for clearing landmines and removing arms from conflict zones was being raided to pay BAe Systems to subsidise the £5m-£10m servicing cost of six Tornado jets in Iraq. The measure was needed because the MoD has closed its own state-of-the-art facility for servicing Tornado jets as a way of saving £500m over 10 years.

Sensing opportunity as the war on terror grinds on, its neoconservative architects have swooped in from across the Atlantic to establish their presence in Britain. With ties to the arms industry and the neoconservative wing of the Israel lobby, the Henry Jackson Society seems to be assuming the role that the Committee on Present Danger played in the United States. Its Israel-centric worldview, as exhibited by its roster of speakers, predisposes it towards perpetual conflict. The support for a militarized ethnocracy is not the natural inclination of a liberal-democratic Britain; it can only be sustained in a context where Israel can be seen aligned with Britain in an overarching conflict against a common enemy. So it is that the Israel lobby has contrived to pass its enemies off as those of the ‘West’. HJS appears well placed to sustain this state of conflict should the Tories get in as its supporters include two of David Cameron’s key advisers. There is a dangerous confluence of interests here. Fortress Britain is as much a consequence of ill-conceived alliances as it is a response to the neoliberal order’s need for distraction from its inherent contradictions. While not nearly as unscrupulous as his predecessor, Gordon Brown’s growing travails may lead him to seek the politician’s time-tested remedy: scare the hell out of the population. One only hopes that Fortress Britain is the apogee of what Tony Blair had set in motion with his promise to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with George W. Bush in his so-called ‘war on terror’, because things could always be worse.

1. Might he be the same Amnon Maor of the squad of six Israeli border policemen who back in 1994 were sentenced to six months in prison with one year suspended sentences and a fine of NIS 1,000 each, for brutally assaulting an Arab in a supermarket whose cart had accidentally knocked one. ‘The six also arrested a passerby who witnessed the beating, and had asked them to stop and to show identification’, the Jerusalem Post reported. The Judge castigated them for abuse of authority and violating ‘all norms of acceptable behaviour’. (Jerusalem Post, 8 December 1994)
2. European Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2007; David Miller, ‘The statistical invisibility of Islamist “terrorism” in Europe’, Spinwatch, 23 May 2007.
3. While Gardner admits MI6 tried to recruit him while stationed in Cairo, he insists he turned them down. See David Rowan, ‘Interview: Frank Gardner’, Evening Standard, 15 June 2005.
4. Sanford Levinson, ‘Torture in Iraq & the rule of law in America’, Daedalus, Summer 2004.
5. Gareth Peirce, ‘Was it like this for the Irish?’, London Review of Books, 10 April 2008.
6. Interestingly, this led to the first resignation on principle from the the British parliament in nearly half a century, of David Davies, a Tory former SAS man. By contrast voting for the bill were Labour MPs such as Muhammad Sarwar, the bovine cipher who represents Glasgow with its large Muslim population.
7. J. Burnett and Dave Whyte, ‘Embedded expertise and the “War on Terror”‘, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media, 2005, 1(4): 1-18.
8. Quoted by veteran correspondent Chris Hedges in his incisive study of the social consequences of conflict, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Since the assassination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading Hizbullah operative, a sense of foreboding once again grips Lebanon. The Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah says the bombing foreshadows Israeli aggression and has declared his willingness to wage ‘open war’ should there be another invasion. Fighting words are not uncommon to the region; leaders often compensate for lack of action with bravado. However, no one is ready to discount the significance of Nasrallah’s statement. Why?

As the Israeli Air Force decimated the exposed Egyptian infantry in 1967 Nasser’s propagandists were forecasting success. When the US-UK air armada pummelled the hapless conscripts of the Iraqi army in ‘91, Saddam’s propaganda mill promised imminent victory (which it duly claimed shortly after signing unconditional surrender). Likewise, Saddam’s Minister of Information greeted the US-UK invasion in 2003 with similar fanciful flourishes. An object of frequent ridicule, such mendacity is often adduced by born-again Orientalists as a function of the addled ‘Arab mind’. That is, until one voice emerged that undermined stereotypes and restored dignity and trust.

Syed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of the Lebanese Hizbullah movement, has established a reputation for saying only what he means and promising only what he is able to deliver. Islamic Resistance, the guerrilla wing of Hizbullah, has evolved under his helm from its ragtag origins to the world’s most effective resistance movement, twice defeating the vaunted Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in battle. As a testament to his intelligence and organization skills, Hizbullah has also developed an efficient and extensive social service network — hospitals, educational institutions, a construction company and its own media — that caters to its mostly impoverished Shia constituency. As a result he has emerged as the most popular figure in the Middle East. The Syrian Bashar al-Assad according to Seymour Hersh claims to be in ‘awe of Nasrallah’ and ‘worships at his feet’. Secular MPs in Egypt revere him as an ‘heir to Saladin’. Christian divas in Lebanon have immortalized him in song. The modest Shia cleric is a living legend in the mostly Sunni Middle East.

Despite its regional popularity, Hizbullah remains a largely misunderstood phenomenon in the West where media demonology often conflates Hizbullah with al-Qaeda and Nasrallah with Usama bin Laden. Few in Europe or the US have heard Nasrallah’s voice. This may largely be due to the fact that all his speeches are delivered in Arabic. It is to introduce the Anglophone world to this important voice that Nicholas Noe has collected Nasrallah’s speeches and interviews spanning two decades in Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. With a competent translation by Ellen Khouri, the interviews and speeches elaborate on key events in Lebanon’s recent history. Nasrallah’s pronouncements are invariably thoughtful, nuanced and carefully worded, eloquence rarely giving way to rhetoric. At times fiery, they remain grounded in fact, and adversaries often ignore his promises at their own peril. The book reveals a methodical mind explicating on historical events and developments with an impressive attention to detail. The significance of some of the events may have diminished, however the chronologically ordered interviews offer useful insights into the strategic shifts in the movement’s outlook and the intellectual evolution of its leader.

Born on 31 August 1960 to an impoverished fruit vendor in Karantina, East Beirut, Nasrallah was drawn to religion and intellectual endeavour from an early age. Ninth in a family of ten children, the young Nasrallah would frequent walk to the city centre to purchase second-hand books and unlike his peers would devote all his time to reading. An early influence on Nasrallah’s thinking was the Iranian born Lebanese cleric Imam Musa al-Sadr. In Lebanon’s long history of civil strife, its mostly underprivileged Shia population has remained largely marginal. The confessional balance of the political system based on a 1932 census of dubious merit accords the Shia a subordinate role. It was the Harkat al-Mahrumin (Movement of the Disinherited) of Musa al-Sadr that first empowered the Shia and challenged the entrenched feudal elite lording over it. The movement also evolved an armed wing, Afwaj al-Muqawama Al-Lubnaniyya, better known as Amal.

The civil war of 1975 forced the Nasrallah family to relocate to its ancestral home in Bazouriyeh, South Lebanon, where Nasrallah joined the nascent Amal movement soon after finishing school in Tyre. At age fifteen, the precocious youth was appointed head of the movement for his home town, until then a secular leftist redoubt. Nasrallah founded a library at the local Islamic Centre where young men and women would come and receive education, also imbibing the revolutionary teachings of Musa al-Sadr.

In 1976 Nasrallah headed to Najaf in Iraq to complete his religious education under Baqr al-Sadr (executed in 1980 by Saddam, he was the Father-in-law of Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr). On al-Sadr’s instruction Nasrallah was taken under the wings by another one of his Lebanese disciples, Sheikh Abbas Mussawi with whom Nasrallah would later found Hizbullah. The man who Nasrallah would recall as a ‘friend, brother, mentor and companion’ would assist him through the ascetic seminary life where the new pupil’s hard work would lead him to finish preliminary instruction in two years, rather than the usual five. It was in Najaf that Nasrallah was first introduced to the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini, who departed from the traditional quietist Shia theology in his concept of wilayat al-faqih -– the rule of the jurist-theologian -– which prescribed the supreme authority of the faqih over an Islamic state. To this day Hizbullah remains faithful to this concept, even though it has since abjured its call for the creation of an Islamic state as part of its ‘Lebanonization’ process begun in the 90s.

Nasrallah escaped the Baathist crackdown on Shia seminaries in ‘77 and arrived back in Lebanon in ‘78 to take up his education at an institution set up by Mussawi in Ba’albek. His return coincided with the Israeli invasion and two other events of immeasurable import –- the disappearance of Imam Musa al-Sadr, and the Islamic revolution in Iran -– that led him to resume his political activities. By the late 70s Amal’s power, already circumscribed, was on the wane as a result of political myopia. It was only the mysterious disappearance of al-Sadr in 1978 (presumably assassinated by Libya’s Gaddafi) that revived its fortunes. By the time Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Nasrallah had become the head of Amal for the Bekaa region and member of its Central Committee.

It was around the same time that PLO had decamped to South Lebanon after the events of Black September in 1970. It initially challenged the entrenched elite -– mainly Sunnis and Maronites -– leading many Shia to flock to its ranks. Relations soured over time as the majority Shia population of south Lebanon was caught between the armed and often domineering presence of the PLO and the indiscriminate Israeli attacks from across the border. Amal, which was initially trained by the PLO, soon allied itself with Syria and intervened to thwart a Palestinian victory over Maronite militias in 1976. By the time Israel invaded Lebanon, the local population was so resentful of the PLO presence that many greeted advancing Israelis tanks with perfumed rice and flowers. Nabih Berri, the leader of Amal, sought a modus vivendi with the Israeli occupiers and joined the collaborationist ‘national salvation’ government (It wouldn’t be until 1983 that an Israeli patrol’s attack on an Ashura procession in Nabatiyah would lead Amal to join the resistance).

It was this initial failure of Amal to confront the Israeli occupation that led a faction led by Nasrallah and Mussawi to split and form the core of what would later emerge as Hizbullah. In Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk’s magisterial account of the Lebanon war, the veteran Middle Easter correspondent describes the first Israeli encounter with this new force.

Some of the Shia fighters had torn off pieces of their shirts and wrapped them around their heads as bands of martyrdom… When they set fire to one Israeli armoured vehicle, the gunmen were emboldened to advance further. None of us… realised the critical importance of the events of Khalde that night. The Lebanese Shia were learning the principles of martyrdom and putting them into practice… It was the beginning of a legend which also contained a strong element of the truth. The Shia were now the Lebanese resistance, nationalist no doubt but also inspired by their religion. The party of God –- in Arabic, the Hezbollah –- were on the beaches of Khalde that night.
The improvisations soon gave way to disciplined guerrilla warfare after Ayatollah Khomeini dispatched a contingent of 1,500 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in summer 1982 to train volunteers in the Bekaa Valley. Nasrallah played a key role in recruiting young Shia volunteers, and by 1985 had assumed leadership of Hizbullah in the Bekaa valley.

Deadly attacks were launched in the intervening years by a group calling itself Islamic Jihad allegedly linked to Hizbullah that targeted the US embassy and marine barracks. The latter there purportedly to keep peace had soon joined the conflict on side of the Israeli proxies in Lebanon. French paratroopers suffered a similar fate, leading to the withdrawal of the Multi-national Force. A successful strike on the Israeli head quarters in Lebanon that killed 72 Israeli soldiers also precipitated its retreat to the South where it maintained occupation of a narrow ’security zone’. Continually harried by Hizbullah, it would eventually end its costly occupation in 2000.

It wasn’t until 1985 that Hizbullah emerged as a coherent organization announcing its formal existence in the form of an Open Letter which also served as its manifesto. Established with an avowedly pan-Islamic outlook adhering to Khomeini’s Wilayat al-Faqih doctrine, the movement has since emphasized its distinctly Lebanese nationalist credentials with its ambitions limited to the liberation of occupied Lebanese territory and defence of the realm in the absence of a strong national army. Leading figures in the movement have hinted that the Open Letter belonged to a specific period in time and does not reflect Hizbullah’s present political stance.

Nasrallah, who had since moved to Beirut, first came to prominence when he started giving speeches and interviews after being appointed to the consultative council of Hizbullah in 1987. A year later came the first Israeli assassination attempt. Hizbullah, which, unlike other Lebanese groups, had avoided confessional/sectarian war to focus solely on resisting the occupiers, found itself for the first time embroiled in a turf battle with Amal in Beirut and South Lebanon. These animosities survived well into the 90s and would only be resolved when Hizbullah and Amal would join a coalition against the US-backed forces jockeying for control after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

Although Hizbullah signed on to the Arab League-borkered Taif Accords that ended the Lebanese Civil War in 1989 they refused to relinquish arms. The pragmatist Nasrallah and Mussawi’s decision to participate in Lebanese politics also led to a high-level split when Subhi Tufeili the first Secretary General of Hizbullah chose to part ways rather than participate in the confessional political system. He was replaced by Mussawi as Hizbullah’s new secretary general. Hizbullah emerged with 12 seats in the 1992 parliamentary elections, a mark of the movements growing popular base in the Bekaa valley and the South.

Hizbullah continued its low-intensity war where it was careful to confine its activities to the occupied South. Israel however was less constrained: Mussawi was assassinated along with his family by an Israeli gunship in 1992 leading to Nasrallah being elected as the new Secretary General of Hizbullah. Nasrallah soon moved to modernize the resistance, ushering in a tactical revolution. Journalist Nicholas Blanford writes, that underr Nasrallah’s leadership, ‘the resistance became more compartmentalized, with units specializing in different weapons and tactics. Intelligence-gathering measures were improved and greater autonomy given to field commanders.’

These resulted in a nearly twenty-fold increase in the rate-of- attack on the Israeli occupation forces by the end of the decade, whereas the fatality ratio dropped from an average of five-to-one in 1990 to three-to-two by the end of the decade. Israel responded with several major attacks, beginning with ‘Operation Accountability’ in 1993, and ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’ in 1996 which culminated in the massacre of a hundred refugees at a UN compound in Qana by Israeli artillery (Nasrallah’s own 18-year-old son Hadi was killed in 1997 resisting the Israelis). The operations in 1999 and February 2000 were equally disastrous for Israel. Meanwhile, its proxies in the SLA continued their routine torture and harassment in the occupied South.

Hizbullah’s biggest success came on May 24, 2000 when Israel’s 22 year occupation of South Lebanon collapsed overnight and soldiers retreated behind the border. It was the first victory over Israel of any Arab force, and it was celebrated all over the Middle East. Yet it presented Hizbullah with an existential dilemma. Pressure was growing on Hizbullah to disarm as it had achieved its stated goal of liberating Lebanese occupied territory. In the debate over whether to continue the armed struggle or to shift focus completely to socio-political issues Nasrallah opted for the former. However this required a pretext which was furnished in the form of the Shebaa farms, a narrow strip of the occupied Golan Heights claimed by Lebanon. With Israel’s continued occupation of the farms, Hizbullah had a rationale for resistance.

The years between Israel’s retreat and the commencement of hostilities in 2006 saw very little combat. Israel continued its violation of Lebanese airspace with the occasional kidnapping of Lebanese fishers and farmers while Hizbullah managed to kill 17 more Israeli soldiers. Under the cover of the stabilizing Syrian presence there since the end of the Civil War, Hizbullah was able to avoid the messy parochial politics of Lebanon in favour of continued resistance. However, the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005 came as a major rupture with the past.

The mass protests in the wake of the assassination demanding an end to the long standing Syrian presence in Lebanon culminated in the ‘cedar revolution’ (a phrase coined by a US State Department official). With US-French backing, the so called March 14 movement, comprising mainly Sunni and Christian Maronite parties, succeeded in getting Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. Conscious that the vacuum left by the Syrian withdrawal may be filled by a US-Isareli hegemony given the pro-US orientation of the March 14 Alliance newly elected to power, Hizbullah forged strategic alliances to protect its interests. It buried the hatchet with Amal to forge an alliance that allowed it to join the government where it held 5 cabinet seats. Nasrallah has since succeeded in negotiating another strategic alliance with anti-Syrian Christian Maronite Free Patriotic Movement of General Michel Aoun.

Contrary to the prevailing media myth, the relationship between Hizbullah and Syria is mostly strategic, and their interests often diverge. Hizbullah sided with the Palestinians against the Syrian-backed Amal during the ‘war of the camps’; In the 1988-89 Hizbullah-Amal conflict Syria once against backed its rival. In ‘87 the al-Asad regime also had 23 Hizbullah men killed. Hizbullah is also aware that any peace agreement between Syria and Israel may come at its expense. The same is also true of US-Iran rapprochement: the Iranian peace offer to the United States in 2003 included a pledge to withdraw support for Hizbullah. The last Iranian Revolutioanrly Guard advisers left Lebanon in 1998. Hizbullah has since emerged as a fully autonomous movement, thoroughly Lebanese in its outlook. Today it is not so much its reliance on Iran and Syria that is of higher import, but the reliance of the two on Hizbullah.

Although Nasrallah had twice negotiated successful prisoner swaps in ‘96 and ‘98 using German intermediaries, in 2004 he scored a major coup when in return for the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and one captured officer, Hizbullah succeed in securing the release of 23 Lebanese and 400 Palestinian prisoners. However several Lebanese prisoners still remained in Israeli custody. In 2006 Nasrallah warned that unless Israel released these prisoners, he would have no choice but to capture more Israelis for another exchange. At 9:04 on the morning of July 12 Hizbullah guerrillas delivered on the promise by capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing eight more in the ensuing firefight. A Merkava tank sent in pursuit was also blown up. This precipitated the heaviest bombing of Lebanon by Israel since its invasion of 1982.

The war saw Israel wreak mass destruction on the Lebanese civilian population, even as on the battlefield its performance remained dismal. Hizbullah withstood the air blitz and with its unrelenting barrage of rockets drew Israel into committing ground troops. The vaunted IDF with all its advanced weaponry soon found itself outclassed by Hizbullah’s iron discipline. With little to show for the mounting losses, Israel was forced to progressively climb down from its earlier maximalist aims, eventually agreeing to a ceasefire that merely restored the status quo ante.

Al-Manar continued its broadcasts uninterrupted through the conflict, and Nasrallah appeared on-air frequently giving reports on the progress of the war in his characteristic understated, factual manner (one such appearance ended with Nasrallah dramatically asking viewers to step outside their homes and look West where they were presented with the sight of a burning Israeli ship off the Lebanese coastline just targeted by a Hizbullah missile). During the war more Israelis tuned in to al-Manar than their own national TV. This time it was the Israelis turn to suffer the indignity of repeated claims of success by their leaders which would be subsequently discredited by events.

By the time Israel retreated back to its border it had left a hundred and twenty soldiers dead, forty of its tanks and armored vehicles destroyed and one helicopter downed. For Israel it was a humiliating defeat, and an end of its deterrence capabilities. Hizbullah emerged stronger and more popular than before. Its immediate and efficient assistance to those who had lost property during the war further added to its popularity.Critics who had accused it of precipitating the war –- including the inimitable Robert Fisk -– would be proven wrong by Israel’s own official inquiry into the war -– the Winograd Committee report –- which confirmed that the war had been planned by Israel more than a year ahead. As the Guardian reported, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s testimony to the commission ‘contradicted the impression at the time that Israel was provoked into a battle for which it was ill-prepared.’

In a country caught between its own factional rivalries and the perennial intervention of foreign powers, principle is often a dispensable commodity. Yet much of Hizbullah’s regional prestige derives from its ability to take difficult decisions in the face of impossible odds. Established as a rejection of the kind of realpolitik embraced by Amal, the existing Shia movement, Hizbullah has not shied away from taking difficult positions, such as its defence of the Palestinians against its Syrian backed Shia rival. Through al-Manar, Hizbullah has continued to present its successful resistance as a model for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at times actively intervening on their behalf. It responded to the March 22, 2004 assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the quadriplegic spiritual leader of Hamas with a barrage of more than 60 rockets at six different Israeli military positions in the Shebaa farms. Similarly in 2006 the timing of its raid was widely seen as intended to relieve pressure on Gaza under brutal assault at the moment (in this instance however it had the contrary effect as under the cover of the Lebanon war, Israel was able to get away with more murder).

In 2007 when the Lebanese military began its assault on the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in order to crush a small band of Sunni militants, Fatah al-Islam, Nasrallah had to tread the fine line yet again. Most of Lebanon seemed indifferent to the plight of the innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire, and even his political ally, the nationalist general Michel Aoun supported unrestrained action. Nasrallah’s qualified statement of support however declared the Palestinian refugees a ‘red line’ as the Lebanese army was a red line. Neither need be crossed. This drew shrill condemnation from the US-backed Lebanese opposition who accused him of insufficient patriotism for not offering unconditional support.

The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate has put a spanner in the neoconservative plan for a new war by confirming that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. However, attempts to curb Iran’s mythical influence have continued apace. Israel’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Hizbullah have led its supporters in the US to back a new ‘redirection’ plan, as reported by the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh. This has included arming hard line Sunni militants to confront Hizbullah (in Iraq US precipitated a civil war by doing the opposite: arming Shias against the Sunni insurgency) and a wider propaganda campaign to sow fears of an emerging ’shia crescent’. In Lebanon this went awry when the militants started showing more interest in fighting Israel than Hizbullah. The Fatah al-Islam episode further sealed its fate.

The Sunni Arab leaders of the Egypt and Jordan (and to a lesser degree Saudi Arabi)have played along. As journalist Patrick Cockburn observes, they ‘were embarrassed by the success of the Shia
Hizbollah in the war in Lebanon… compared to their own supine incompetence.’ In the wake of the 2006 invasion of Lebanon where the Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian leadership tacitly sided with Israel, a poll found Nasrallah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the two most popular leaders in Egypt. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that both are Shia, whereas the leadership of the largely Sunni Egypt has long played on sectarian differences to deflect its own sordid role in sustaining US-Israeli hegemony.

Since 2006 Hizbullah has led the opposition in a non-violent protest against the government demanding fairer representation. Detractors have tried to portray this as a coup against the government, and Nasrallah’s demand for a one-man-one-vote system as somehow outlandish. A deadlock has prevented the appointment of a new President, and the political future remains as yet uncertain. Forces of status quo resent Hizbullah’s assertiveness, but more so its status as a global player where they on the other hand remain perpetually identified with their parochial concerns. The government, backed by its supporters in the West and among the Arab states, has thus far prevented Hizbullah translating its military victory into political gains. While the people of the Middle East idolize Hizbullah, for their leaders the movement presents the threat of a good example. It is not yet confirmed who assassinated Imad Mughniyeh, but Israel is not alone in wishing to see Nasrallah and his movement humbled. Should there be a war, it would be interesting to see how the different forces line up. For now, the only thing that remains certain is that whatever happens in Lebanon, its borders are too small to contain the impact.

Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps.¹

In 1937 George Steer’s report on Guernica in the Times (London) turned what would have otherwise been a footnote in history into a metaphor for naked aggression against a defenceless civilian population. While Guernica was not the worst of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis assisting Franco’s Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the vivid account of the savagery conjured up in Steer’s descriptive reportage brought home for many horrors of a conflict hitherto deemed distant and insular. A comparable role was played by Seymour Hersh in 1969 exposing the massacre and subsequent cover up at My Lai, turning public opinion at home decisively against the war. In 2004, an account of a similar tragedy, albeit on a much larger scale, was dispatched to the Inter Press Service from the ruins of Fallujah by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist of exceptional courage, except no publication in the mainstream picked up the story as nationalist (or perhaps commercial) imperatives trumped journalistic responsibilities. The news however percolated in the farther reaches of cyberspace for a year; meanwhile several other Fallujah-scale catastrophes were inflicted on the people of Iraq with a similar media reaction. Only when a documentary on the Italian RAI TV corroborated the reports of the use of chemical weapons with footage and soldiers’ testimony, could the story no longer be suppressed and newspapers in Britain finally had to publish it.

Fallujah is but one in the stream of episodes recounted in Dahr Jamail’s exceptional new book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Had these reports been published in a timely fashion a very different reaction could have been expected possibly generating a public outcry.

What sets Dahr Jamail apart from numerous other foreign correspondents is that his work exhibits a freshness absent in much of the mainstream, possibly explained by the fact that Jamail wasn’t schooled in the American tradition of journalism. He never conflates objectivity with balance. He reports objectively the traumas suffered by survivors of a family whose home was demolished on top of their heads without feeling any obligation to ‘balance’ the report with the anodyne denials of a Pentagon spokesman. His journalism is infused with empathy for the victims: he is discerning of the injustices perpetrated against them and consequently understands their resentments.

Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan writer, once characterized photographers as of a vertical or horizontal type. The horizontal type displayed empathy for his subject and respected its dignity. In contrast, vertical reporters parachuted into an area, corralled the subjects they needed, took photos, and quickly disappeared from the scene; the subject’s dignity was trampled upon. The same characterization would apply to journalism; and Jamail is a horizontal journalist.

Unlike mainstream journalists, Jamail is not constrained by the ideological parameters within which most operate. For him the war is unjust not only for abrogating international law, but because its inevitable victims are a defenceless civilian population already ravaged for over a decade by two inhuman regimes: Saddam Hussein’s and the genocidal US-UK sanctions.² While for the most part critical journalism at the liberal end of the spectrum has obsessed with US mistakes in Iraq, for Jamail, the US in Iraq is the mistake. It is perhaps this crucial insight that impelled the accomplished Alaskan mountaineer to seek the truth for himself bypassing the filter of mainstream media. In doing so, while most in the mainstream chose the safety of US armour as ‘embedded journalists’, Jamail opted for the comfort of strangers pitted in this involuntary struggle against US imperial aggression.

A People’s History of Occupied Iraq

A naked language that speaks for the naked of the earth. Nothing superfluous in these images, miraculously free of rhetoric, demagogy, belligerence.

A veteran of the antiwar protests, Jamail’s initiation into the Iraqi reality came early, when at the al-Monzer Hotel in Amman, Sabah, an Iraqi university student related the story of an acquaintance having her home broken into by US troops, and her mother shot. Sabah himself ended up in the notorious Abu Ghraib after having been found in the custody of an armed group who had kidnapped him along with the British journalist he for whom he was translating.

Jamail arrived in Baghdad to find it largely intact, with most buildings having escaped the wave of ’shock-and-awe’ destruction. However, despite the billions allocated for reconstruction, he found little sign of it anywhere. His visit to the hospital instead reveals the shocking statistic of a 300% increase in burn victims as in the absence of electricity most have turned to kerosene heating.

Resistance activity at this point was sporadic — 35 attacks a day according to Gen. Sanchez. However, Jamail detected growing resentment, compounded by the shortages in healthcare supplies, food, water, electricity; the random brutality; and the cultural insensitivity. Jamail invariably found official pronouncements at odds with the reality on ground, but the mainstream western media remained eager, pliant and gullible. His scepticism found confirmation in Samarra where the 54 ‘insurgents’ reported killed by the Pentagon on November 30, 2003 turned out to be 8 civilians felled in a random hail of American bullets. The story was nevertheless reported verbatim in US and UK, and this was merely an early iteration of a pattern of spin that has since become a permanent feature of the war’s coverage. SAIC and the Lincoln Group are merely the better known elements in Pentagon’s massive propaganda enterprise.³

Baghdad in late 2003 was safe enough for journalists to walk openly; it was also safe enough for them to witness the surreal spectacle of a pro-occupation march organized by — the occupation, of course. For real Iraqis on the other hand despair was already settling in. Instead of freedom, there is arbitrary arrest and the ubiquitous checkpoint; instead of prosperity, perennial blackout and the inevitable ration queue; instead of security, there is rampant kidnapping and murder. Incidences of cancer are high from the extensive use of Depleted Uranium; so are birth defects. Malnutrition is rampant, and many children suffer stunted growth. Iraq was delivered from a sanctions regime to a brutal occupation.

The Resistance is Coming

In Andalusia I was once told of a very poor fisherman who went about peddling shellfish in a basket. This poor fisherman refused to sell his shellfish to a young gentleman who wanted all of them… for the simple reason that he took a dislike to the young gentleman. And he simply said to him: ‘I am the master in my hunger.’

Shortly before the turn of the first year of occupation, in a queue at a black market petrol station Jamail is delivered a sobering promise: ‘This is not the resistance. The resistance is coming. You wait!’ The joy at Saddam Hussein’s much celebrated capture — the first in a series of what would be numerous ‘turning points’ — turned out to be short lived. Soon afterwards, Fallujah and the South erupt. The occupation’s heavy-handed response to a peaceful protest by parents demanding US soldiers leave their children’s’ school had already turned a hitherto pacific city against them. The death of four mercenaries — ‘civilian contractors’ in Pentagon-speak – was used by the occupation as pretext for a siege, inadvertently leading to the war’s first real turning point. However, the importance of this incident may be overstated. As Jamail points out, a series of earlier confrontations had already anticipated the ultimate showdown. Frequent use by the occupation of arbitrary indiscriminate violence already had the population seething even as it appeared to endure quietly on suface. In Baghdad, an assault on the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s offices and the shutting down of his paper, al-Hawza, had already pitted the occupation against Sadr’s Mahdi Army. With the indiscriminate assault on Fallujah, which coincided with al-Sadr’s uprising, the levee finally broke unleashing a full fledged insurgency.

Beginning on April 4, 2004 the siege of Fallujah was brutal even by Israeli standards (whose lessons from Jenin US claimed to have put into practice during the siege).⁴ Before the eventual defeat and withdrawal of the US forces on May 1, Fallujah was the site of several war crimes, including indiscriminate bombing; attacks on hospitals; sniping at ambulances; and the use of chemical weapons and cluster munitions on a civilian population. As part of a relief convoy delivering medicine to the besieged city, Jamail witnessed the devastation first hand. The gut-wrenching scenes from the dilapidated hospital; the portrait of shattered lives deprived of limbs and dignity; the image of Ambulances with their windows shot through by snipers; a football stadium turned into ‘Martyr’s Cemetery’ (with women and children comprising more than half the victims) — it all makes for harrowing reading and would be hard to relate to if it were not mitigated somewhat by a portrait of a resilient population unwilling to bow.

April 4 was also the day that the Mahdi Army rose up against the occupation in Baghdad, Najaf and Basra. Fighting soon engulfed most of the south. By the time al-Sadr withdrew his militia from Najaf and Kufa on June 6, in a ceasefire mediated by Ayatullah Ali al-Sistani, American forces may have claimed military victory, but al-Sadr had won the political battle, establishing himself as a force to be reckoned with.

To the occupation’s dismay, the twin assaults had the unanticipated effect of uniting Sunni and Shia; in Fallujah a joint demonstration even broke through US checkpoints chanting, ‘Sunni, Shia — we are united against Americans and fight for our country together!’ May 2004, saw more joint Shia-Sunni marches, this time in Baghdad’s Sunni district of al-Adhamiya, once again united in their opposition to the occupation.

Still licking its wounds from the earlier humiliation, the US prepared for another assault on Fallujah in November 2004. Orders were given soon after Bush’s re-election, and the mainstream media reported in characteristic fashion, with the New York Times putting pictures of bound and tied patients at the Fallujah hospital on its front page.⁵ The devastation left by the second assault was even more extreme that during the first siege of Fallujah with the occupation forces accused of breaches of the Geneva convention on several counts. The occupation had already cut water, food and power, leading two thirds of the city’s population to flee; 36,000 of the city’s 50,000 homes, 60 schools and 65 mosques were left in ruins according to the city’s compensation commissioner. Of the thousands killed, 60-80 percent were women and children. Jamail was the first to report on the use of chemical weapons in Fallujah. Ignored at first (earning the story the number 2 underreported story of the year award by Project Censored), his story was published a year later only when it became big news in the rest of the world.

So how successful was this costly effort in pacification? On 2 January 2005, 30,000 defiant citizens took to the streets demanding US occupiers leave their city.

The Salvador Option

Eyes of a child looking on death, not wanting to see it, unable to look away. Eyes riveted on death, snared by death — death that has come to take those eyes and that child. Chronicle of a crime.

As the woes of the occupation multiplied in 2004, it called in two veterans of the Central American and Vietnam dirty wars: John Negroponte and James Steele. Negroponte’s appointment coincided with the first rumours of a proposed Salvador Option: the use of Shia and Kurdish death squads to neutralize the Sunni insurgency (Sy Hersh had already reported on a similar Israeli program, known as Plan B, which had been operative in the Kurdish region since 2003). Under the tutelage of the SCIRI(now SIIC)-run Ministry of Interior, death squads comprising mostly of the Badr Brigades and some elements of the Mahdi Army embarked on the murder of Sunnis which soon spiralled into a sectarian war as the Sunnis began to retaliate. The sectarian strife organized and instigated by the occupation took a life of its own to the degree that by the time of writing, Jamail identifies death squads as the leading cause of death in Iraq. Hospitals themselves were not exempted by the death squads, where the injured or their relatives could be picked up, tortured, and executed if they bore the wrong name. Checkpoints served a similar function.

The Corporate Bonanza

Sick with the plague of death, this world that eradicates the hungry instead of hunger produces food enough for all of humanity and more. Yet, some die of starvation and others of overeating.

The corporate plunder of Iraq is by this time well known. Jamail’s research uncovers the particularities of the failed reconstruction in damning detail. Making a killing, there is Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton (in which he still holds stock options), along with Bechtel, with the former Secretary of State George Schultz on its board (Shultz also happened to be the Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an organization closely linked to the neocon architects of the war at the Project for the New American Century and American Enterprise Institute, both of which share office space). It is also not by chance that the neocon’s choice for Iraq’s proconsul, Paul Bremer, happens to be a former Bechtel director. However, it soon transpired that in the lawlessness of occupied Iraq, even the excessively generous terms of the cost-plus contracts (meaning a fixed rate of profit above flexible costs) could not dampen the desire for plunder of these predatory corporations. While Halliburton was soon caught overcharging the military for fuel, Jamail’s investigations of Bechtel in Najaf, Hilla and Diwaniyah revealed little progress beyond some freshly painted walls. This did not prevent Bechtel from raking in $2.3 billion worth of contracts by the time they ceased activities in November 2006. Power supply is still limited, with most of the cities receiving no more than a few hours of electricity a day. Potable water is still scarce and with water treatment facilities mostly out of operation, waterborne diseases are widespread. Use of contaminated water has brought with it other diseases, hitherto unheard of in Iraq, such as Hepatitis-E.

As it turns out, only $333m of the $18b allocated for reconstruction had actually been used. $9b simply went missing. There has been little improvement in the situation since.

According to a July 2007 US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report, even though the occupation has spent all of the $21b allocated by the US, and $20b of Iraqi money, Baghdad still receives only 8.1 hours of electricity a day, only one in three homes has water, water still has to be purchased in Basra, raw sewage spills out onto streets in most cities; in Najaf and Basra only half the homes are connected to municipal sewage pipes. Of the 142 primary healthcare facilities included in the reconstruction plans, only 8 are operational. Despite all this, Ed Harriman reports in the London Review of Books, Bechtel’s bills were settled promptly, even though it charged “more than 40 per cent of the contract value as ’support costs’, and claimed $250 million in ‘a large miscellaneous category’ under the heading ‘Other’”.

Not Curtains Yet

Reality speaks a language of symbols. Each part is a metaphor of the whole…These faces that scream without opening their mouths are “other” faces no longer. No longer, for they have ceased being conveniently strange and distant, innocuous excuses for charity that eases guilty consciences.

With more or less a million Iraqis dead, 2 million driven into Syrian-Jordanian refugee camps, 2 million internally displaced; an increasingly brutal occupation, escalating violence, a raging sectarian war; fears of disintegration compounded by the threats of a new war – the fiasco has yet to see its denouement. While initiative may have shifted in favour of the resistance, the narrative is still being shaped by the US and its media surrogates. Complicating the picture is the virtual absence of independent voices reporting from the region. Today, the only ones venturing beyond the fortified walls of the Green Zone are usually riding US Humvees or tanks — their perceptions of the war hence are accordingly tainted. At least 112 journalists have been killed in Iraq, all except seven of them non-embedded (a number far higher than of those killed in the Vietnam war). As the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn points out, the occupation authorities now have the freedom to make any claim, however fantastic, since in order to disprove it one would have to risk certain death. The biggest contribution of Jamail’s book, therefore, is furnishing the evidence for the consistent gap between official pronouncements and facts on the ground. Packed with eyewitness testimonies gathered at considerable personal risk, the book is as much an indictment of the dehumanizing and inhuman reality of the occupation as it is a monument to the ideal of journalism so often talked about but for once put in practice — it is a journalism displaying courage. More than anything, the book is a sad reflection on the state of our society which in its complacent inaction is complicit in the horrors perpetrated abroad. Its feeble protestations, often inspired by a need to relieve guilty conscience, are far outweighed by its willingness to tolerate the most horrific of crimes, so long as they are accompanied by the appropriate high-minded rhetoric. Its capacity to allow civilizational myths, faith in its constitutionally benevolent disposition, to supersede reality inspires both shock and awe. It is also a reflection on the deep-seated malaise that produces the porno-torturers of Abu Ghraib or the moral rot that manifests itself in the butchery at Haditha. The inescapable conclusion here, one summed up a long time back by I. F. Stone in his pithy aphorism, is ‘governments lie’. Let no one be deceived by fatuous oxymora such as ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘benign occupation’ any more.

1. All quotations from Eduardo Galeano’s introduction to Sebastião Salgado’s An Uncertain Grace.
2. For more on the devastating effects of the sanctions, see the fine collection edited by Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege and Hans von Sponeck’s A Different Kind of War.
3. SAIC played a key role in pushing for war against Iraq from which it has profited extravagantly. There was a major conflict of interest as one of its employees, David Kay, played a key role in ratcheting up the WMD in his capacity as a UN Inspector. The organization which was connected to Paul Wolfowitz through his girlfriend Shaha Riza received no-bid contracts worth $100m even before the war started. In Iraq it was tasked with setting up an Arabic-language propaganda network. Lincoln Group played a similar role for the international media by taking reports of US failures in Iraq and putting a positive spin on them. (For SAIC, see Donald Barlett and James Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow”, Vanity Fair, March 2007; for Lincoln Group, see Andrew Buncombe, “The US Propaganda Machine: Oh, What a Lovely War”, The Independent, 30 March 2006)
4. “Israel Assists U.S. Forces, Shares Lessons-Learned Fighting Terrorists: Fallujah Success Capitalized on IDF Know-How”, JINSA Online, 27 December 2004.
5. In its eagerness to reproduce establishment propaganda, the paper seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that it was publishing evidence of a war crime under International Law (for more on NYT’s disdain for International law, see Howard Friel and Richard Falk’s The Record of the Paper).

The May 2007 elections in Scotland were similarly charged with expectation, even if despair more than hope drove the desire for change. Disillusionment with the status quo was widespread. While the Scottish Left had collapsed under the combined weight of media hostility and its own myopia, the disillusionment only increased the likelihood of a Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) victory. For its opposition to the war, opposition to the Trident boondoggle, calls for subsidized education, and its pro-independence agenda, the party was well placed to rake in the votes from the remnants of the Scottish Left on top of its traditional, more conservative, nationalist constituency. For the first time in British history, the possibility of a party outside the Tory-Labour consensus winning power on the British mainland seemed real. In a democracy as old as Britain one would have expected such plurality to be welcomed. Except it wasn’t, and the electorate showed little of the verve of the Venezuelan voter.

Imagine this scenario: In the upcoming Venezuelan elections polls show the main opposition party with a clear lead; each one of the country’s large circulation newspapers is editorially hostile to the opposition, producing a barrage of propaganda which culminates in alarmist front page stories on election day; newspapers carry explicit instructions on voting for the ruling party; the president personally intervenes in various constituencies to dissuade citizens from voting against his party; the ballot design is confusing, and invariably favours the governing party and seven percent of all votes cast are spoilt as a result; the governing party wins seats no one expected it to, and when in one instance the result is challenged, the recount brings victory for the opposition; the electronic counting machines, it transpires, are provided by a company with links to former leaders of the ruling party. International election monitors declare the electoral process a disgrace.

Were this to transpire in Venezuela — or for that matter any country with policies at odds with Washington and her allies — the international media (read Anglo-American media) would be up in arms. There would be widespread condemnation of the process; rivers of ink would spill forth on the deficiencies of the country’s democratic tradition; expert-commentators would expatiate on the flaws in its citizens’ character.

In the event, none of this came to pass because the country in question was not Venezuela, but Scotland and the protests of a feeble few soon dropped off the column inches and airwaves of Britain’s docile media.

Even by ‘Third World’ standards, the elections were a farce. Preceded by months of tabloid propaganda verging on the defamatory, the establishment resorted to its time tested strategy of wholesale scaremongering. Support for the SNP was gradually eroded through months of hostile coverage exaggerating the costs of independence and the proposed replacement for the hated community charge. However, by election day support for SNP, though diminished, was still widespread enough to lead major tabloids to attempt one final act of sabotage: Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Record — three rags with circulations exceeding those of all the rest combined — synchronized their attacks on their front pages; one depicting the SNP symbol as a noose, another calling party leader Alex Salmond ‘the man who wants to destroy Great Britain’, and the third sporting a sinister image of Salmond.

While it is nearly impossible to find a Scottish voter who publicly professes support for Labour, and while early forecasts had predicted a Labour rout, its curiously narrow defeat understandably surprised many. One could attribute this to New Labour’s successful use of scare tactics — and the ‘money and muscle poured into key seats to fend off the SNP’, as Michel White of the Guardian put it — but the deeply flawed electoral process suggests it may have taken more than scary headlines to diminish the scale of its defeat. Against expert advice the Labour-controlled Scottish executive chose to hold both local council and national elections on the same day. In the ensuing chaos, there were the technical problems of the electronic counting machines, organizational problems of the electoral ballots not delivered on time in sufficient quantities, and the design problems of a ballot with two different voting systems on a single sheet. While it is acknowledged that nearly 140,000 votes — almost seven percent of the total cast — were spoilt, it has yet to be confirmed if there are any discernible trends (other than the fact that the vote rejection invariably disadvantaged smaller parties). As the Guardian reported, in Edinburgh Central, “Labour’s deputy environment minister, Sarah Boyack, held her seat with a majority of 1,193 but there were 1,501 rejected papers. In Glasgow Baillieston, the rejected total of 1,850 was more than 10% of the votes accepted, and most constituencies saw at least 1,000 papers rejected — 10 times the norm.” On the rare occasion where a result was challenged, it once again transpired that the ‘irregularity’ favoured the ruling party, casting further doubts over the transparency of the process. If it weren’t for a timely intervention by an SNP candidate — David Thompson of Highlands and Islands — which led to a recount reversing the result handing the seat to a Labour candidate, Blairites would still be in power. The commission’s excuse for the blunder did little to alleviate concern. The computer file was ‘misread’ by ‘exhausted vote counters’, it claimed. Further questions are raised by the fact that Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, sits as a non-Executive Director on the board of DRS, the firm providing the electronic vote counting machines at the middle of this controversy.

Despite expressing dissatisfaction with the process earlier on, SNP seems to have been sufficiently mollified by its victory to show any discernable vigour in the pursuit of an independent inquiry. While an independent commission was instituted for a review into the electoral fiasco headed by former UN observer Ron Gould, its findings will only become public in August. Given the history of official whitewashes in Britain, it would be wise not to expect much from the process. The time assigned the inquiry itself suggests a lack of urgency. What is remarkable however is the complete absence of media interest in the matter. Taking its cue from the media, the public remains equally indifferent. A greater cause for concern is the absence of any international outcry. Even the NGOs — which have assumed today the role played by Christian missionaries during the period of European colonization — remain completely silent, even though the elections were slammed by international observers. According to the Observer,

Robert Richie, executive director of Fair Vote, who was in Scotland as a guest of the Electoral Reform Society said, ‘It’s totally unacceptable to have so many votes spoiled. There are parallels with the problems in the presidential election in Florida in 2000… We were also very concerned about the lack of uniform standards in judging what votes were rejected and which were deemed to be valid’.

It appears Europe and US hold other nations to standards that they themselves do not feel obliged to abide by. Venezuela has long been the target of myriad ‘democracy promotion’ programs; its opposition funded through various shady NGOs, some with links to the US State Department. With ‘democracy’ in the West being synonymous with the ratification of a ruling elite every four years, Venezuela’s participatory model, however flawed, is deemed a ‘threat of a good example’ (to use an old State Department phrase first used in relation to the Sandanista government in Nicaragua) best kept at bay. So it is with some amusement that one watches representatives from countries where people still get excluded from the democratic process based on race and class (as they frequently are in the US) preach democratic empowerment to citizens of a country where every election has been ratified by respected international monitors, such as the Carter Centre.

In the wake of the Church Commission inquiry in the ‘70s that exposed the CIA’s role in many overthrows and assassinations of democratically elected governments and leaders, the US government instituted a less obtrusive apparatus for destabilizing governments deemed unfriendly to US interests, primarily relying on NGOs funded by the State Department. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, the best known of these, have a long pedigree of subversion in Latin America and in Venezuela they have been funnelling funds to trade unions and other opposition groups in the guise of ‘empowering’ democratic institutions. A Freedom of Information request last year revealed that USAID has siphoned millions of dollars to the Venezuelan opposition through its Office of Transition Initiatives. These included grants of ‘$47,459 for a “democratic leadership campaign”; $37,614 for citizen meetings to discuss a “shared vision” for society; and one of $56,124 to analyse Venezuela’s new constitution.’ What USAID claims is merely an innocuous part of Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’, is referred to by the US think tank Council on Hemispheric Affairs as ‘diplomatic warfare,’ whereas the Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger calls it an attempt at ‘regime change’.

The recent ruckus over the closing down of Venezuela’s RCTV raises many similar questions; the notion of ‘free speech’ was bandied about by many critics. In the West, ‘free speech’, like ‘democracy’, carries a narrow definition which focuses on the particularity of its institutional practice, rather than its universal meaning. It did not matter that the coup that RCTV supported was undermining the free expression of the millions who had voted for Chavez; ‘free speech’ was only invoked when a media institution that had helped suppress the voice of the multitudes by drowning it out in its relentless misleading coverage of the coup had its license not renewed. The defence of free speech in other words is merely the defence of the privileges of a media corporation — including that to lie — even if it impinges on the free expression of the public at large. To be sure, institutions are entitled to free speech just as much as individuals. However, this freedom is not license for them to use their unique powers to subvert public interest. The media should be allowed full leeway to speak truth to power; but should it turn into an instrument of power (a foreign one, no less) undermining democracy, the public must retain the right to impeach. As an accessory to a foreign power in its attempt to overthrow their elected government, Venezuelans are well within their rights to demand RCTV to be discipline. The question then is not of ‘free speech’, but of the level of public support for the government’s action.

For International NGOs — several deriving funds from the most unsavoury of sources — ‘free speech’ figured as the single most important issue in their condemnations with the issue being stripped of its political context. Perhaps understandably, as some of the more vocal ones – Inter American Press Association (IAPA), Reporters Without Borders (RWB), Article 19 — either have a history of association with the CIA (IAPA), or are funded by the State Department and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office through NED and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (RWB, Article 19) — all entities invested in the earlier failed coup. If free speech were really the issue, their energies would be better spent fighting threats to it closer home, such as the muzzling of media on Iraq; the Hutton Inquiry; or the gagging of the press through the Official Secrets Act (as in the case of the Mirror, which was gagged after publishing contents of a memo revealing Bush confiding his wish to bomb Al Jazeera’s offices in Qatar to Tony Blair. Leo O’Connor and David Keogh, the whistleblowers, have been subsequently), so on and so forth.

The bus snakes languidly up the Andean foothills as the first rays of the sun fall on the sleeping valley. As we roll into Mérida the haze clears with the early morning sun highlighting features of the rugged terrain that forms the backdrop to the splendour of the city’s colonial architecture. The monotony of the pastel walls is only broken by the exuberant hues of a mural celebrating the people’s struggle, and another offering solidarity to the people of Lebanon and Palestine resisting the latest Israeli assault. As we settle down for breakfast in the centre of this university town — in clear view of the ubiquitous statue of Simone Bolivar — I notice a frail old man standing in the corner with expectant eyes. Before I can get up, one student has placed money in his hand, and another bought him food. It is a welcome relief from the callousness I had witnessed in some of the more affluent quarters of Caracas, where a Thatcherite worldview still prevails. Individual acts of generosity aside, poverty is still rife and despite the government’s encouragement for the citizens to form their own cooperatives which are then be funded by the state, the bloated bureaucracy still impedes progress. Remnants of the ancien régime while accommodating themselves to the new political reality, are merely biding time, and have little interest in the country’s progress. ‘The problem with the Fifth Republic is that its administration is still reliant on the political apparatus from the fourth republic’, the co-founder of Clase Media Revolucionarios observes. ‘The idea has taken off, but the system has yet to catch up’. Back in Scotland one only hopes ideas would some day catch up with a runaway system.