When I heard that Obama’s Justice Department was going to try at least five of the alleged 9-11 suspects in New York City I couldn’t help but think of Coover’s novel. In the same way that the Rosenberg execution was a piece of political theatre designed to insure the US public that Washington had the over-hyped communist threat under control, this trial serves the purpose of convincing that same public that the terrorist threat is also being taken care of. During the trial and aftermath of the Rosenbergs, the US military was fighting a war in Korea and occupying a good portion of the world. Involvement in Vietnam on the side of the French was increasing and the ultra-right was relishing the publicity it had obtained thanks to Joe McCarthy and other anti-communist demagogues. Nowadays, the US military is fighting a war in Afghanistan, occupying Iraq and maintaining military bases around the world. The ultra-right is up to its usual publicity-seeking inanities and the economy is stumbling. It’s time for a unifying event. Since (thankfully) attacks on the US homeland don’t happen very often, the next best thing to rally the masses might very well be this trial.

Currently, there is a sideshow being whipped up by the rightwing that insists that the defendants should all be tried in military courts. Most of those not among that political minority disagree. The right has nothing to fear, however. Despite all the backslapping statements calling Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision a triumph for the American way of justice, justice is not really the issue in these upcoming trials. No, what’s at stake here for the empire reaches deeper than that. As far as the empire’s guardians are concerned, these trials are about the very nature of the American future. Convictions (and most likely executions of the condemned) are essential to the continuation of the project. Doubt must be purged. Naysayers must be silenced. The attorneys that end up defending these men will be vilified. If the defendants are, by some fluke, acquitted, the jury will live in fear of their own countrymen for a long time. The court itself will be an armed camp reminiscent of the prison in Guantanamo where the defendants were held for years without trial. The effects of any torture endured by the defendants will lurk underneath every accusation and piece of evidence presented.

Given that New York is still one of the top media capitals in the world, don’t look for a change of venue for these trials. The message here is not in the courtroom proceedings, but in the presentation of those proceedings. The Lady Justitia will be present, but the real force in this courtroom will be Nemesis, the god of vengeance. He has already made a difference, through the fact of the torture used by interrogators on the defendants. Getting the message that confuses justice with vengeance across will be the task of the media circus certain to ensue. The prosecution and their cohorts on the bench are depending on it.

From the trials in Salem to the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs; from the deportations of the anarchists and other radicals during the Palmer Raids of the early twentieth century to the trials of antiwar and black liberation activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of the United States is full of these rituals of cleansing. It doesn’t matter if there are any truly guilty among the prosecuted and persecuted. It only matters that the national soul is cleansed and thereby able to begin its mission again–the mission referred to by everyone from John Winthrop in his discourses written on the passage to the new world to every president that ended his addresses with the words God Bless America. The city on the hill is still being built–now on a planetary platform. First, however, we must rid ourselves of those who don’t share our vision of that city but would tear it down. More importantly, we must get rid of the self-doubt among those citizens who think the cost is too high. Vengeance under the cover of justice is just the prescription demanded by Uncle Sam and his saints.

The debate has revealed a deep division over the causes and remedies, with Anglo-Franco American (AFA) politicians, columnists and economists on one side and their Asian-German (AG) counterparts on the other. In general terms the AFA spokespeople put the blame for the crises on external factors, or more specifically they point their finger at the positive trade surpluses, dynamic export sectors and high investment rates in productive sectors and low levels of consumption in the AG countries as the cause of ”unbalances” or “disequilibrium” in the world economy.¹

In contrast, the AG countries reject this argument which speaks to prejudicial external practices. They emphasize the internal “imbalances” within the AFA countries, which has weakened their international, commercial and financial position.

In this paper, I am going to argue that both internal economic policies and external empire building strategies of the AFA countries have been the driving force for global imbalances. The structural differences between the two regions and the differences in class structure and economic configurations in each bloc precludes any easy or immediate solution. On the contrary, for the foreseeable future, the conflict between dynamic emerging export powers and the declining western bloc is likely to intensify, leading to greater trade conflicts and possible military confrontations.

The AFA charges against China’s commercial ‘imbalances’ conflates trade with the West with Beijing’s relations with the rest of the world. China has balanced trade or even trade deficits with Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. Moreover, the AFA countries have trade imbalances with other regions including the Middle East and Germany. Even if the AFA countries curtailed imports from China, it is most likely that other Asian countries would replace them, including Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh and India. The resulting trade deficits of the AFA would remain about the same.

The AFA countries blame China’s “undervalued” currency, and claim that Beijing authorities manipulate the exchange rate to under price exports and beat out competitors (namely producers within the AFA). Yet China’s currency has been revalued steadily upward over 20% the past five years, and yet the AFA still run a deficit, suggesting that their domestic producers have still not been able to compete with Chinese manufacturers.² More recently AFA writers have complained about low interest rates set by the Chinese government as a “subsidy” to its exporters. Yet AFA interest rates are at zero percent or even negative, to no avail. Moreover, the AFA have provided over 1.5 trillion in bailout funds and over 1.3 billion in stimulus spending – a subsidy five times greater than China’s stimulus package, without improving their trade balance. What is telling, given the sectoral allocations, of each regime’s bailout – subsidy – stimulus packages, China has fully recovered and is growing at 8% by mid 2009, while the AFA continue to wallow in negative territory and continue running up trade deficits. This points to the centrality of internal factors, namely, the economic sectors which receive the state subsidies and how they invest it and as a result how their decisions affect trade balances.

The AFA charge that China’s low cost labor, its exploitation of workers accounts for trade imbalances. Yet an increasing percentage of China’s exports are based on technological advances, not cheap labor. This is because low labor cost competitors are emerging in Asia.

The AFA complain that China over emphasizes its ‘export’ strategy at the expense of producing for the domestic market. Yet nearly half of China’s exports to the US are made by US owned multi-nationals who have invested, subcontracted and co-produced with Chinese counterparts. In other words, US internal policy, the deregulation of capital flows, has facilitated the movement of US manufactures abroad resulting in a decline of local production, an increase in imports and greater trade deficits.

Internal Causes of Trade Deficits (and Unbalanced World Economy)

The most obvious and striking correlation with the growth of AFA trade imbalances is the growth and dominance of the financial sector.³ The financialization of the AFA economies and Wall Street’s CEOs dominant role in the strategic economic positions of the state is transparent to the mass of the people and has even been acknowledged by most private economists and academics. Trade deficits increased in direct proportion to the growing political and economic power of the financial sector. In large part, this was due to the transfer of capital from manufacturing to financial services, leading to the decline of the manufacturing sector’s investments in innovations and competitive management strategies. The financial sector’s, high salaries, bonuses and quick returns attracted most of self-styled “best and the brightest”. MBA graduates multiplied while advanced engineering school graduates diminished. Advanced skilled worker training programs disappeared while low skill retail sales recruitment grew.

The problem was that financial services did not, could not replace the overseas earnings which formerly accrued to the country through manufacturing sales. Least of all in the highly regulated financial markets of China, Japan, India and the rest of Asia, where banking was subordinated to the expansion of manufacturing — namely financing industries targeted by state officials. The dominance of finance capital and the related sectors of real estate and insurance, led to a highly polarized class structure: in which billionaire and millionaire investment bankers presided at the top and an army of low paid service workers (retail employees, cleaners and sweepers, etc.) immigrant and non-union workers occupied the bottom. Presently income inequalities in the US exceed those of any other “advanced” capitalist country. The inequalities in Manhattan exceed those of Guatemala. The growing concentration of wealth is accompanied by decline of median wages over the past three decades. As a result the purchasing power of US workers is declining, thus reducing the demand for locally produced quality goods. The purchase of imported cheap textiles, shoes and other accessories results. The result was a decline in local saving and domestic investment in manufacturing leading to a decline in competitiveness. Moreover, the competition among financial lenders furthered consumer spending and greater individual indebtedness at a time when manufacturing exports were declining, starved of investments.

Most manufacturing firms transformed themselves into financial corporations, channeling investment funds in sectors not earning foreign exchange. Worst of all in pursuit of higher profits, manufacturers turned into commercial vendors, closing down plants and sub-contracting production to China and other Asian countries and importing final products into the US creating the trade imbalances. The large scale relocation of US multi-nationals abroad further exacerbated the trade imbalances.

The key role of the state in creating domestic imbalances leading to global disequilibrium is a result of the financial sector’s takeover of the state,and the deregulation of financial markets. The result was the long term promotion of an economic policy, in which the central bank (the Federal Reserve) and Treasury encouraged the growth of finance ,real estate and insurance sectors over manufacturing. The finance based strategy was justified by a large army of academics and publicists who spoke of a “post industrial”, or “service” or “information” economy as a “higher stage”, rather than a perversely unbalanced, unsustainable and unjust economy.

Financial supremacy coincided with the growing militarization of US foreign policy. Throughout the last thirty years, US overseas economic expansion was gradually eclipsed by the growing reliance on military intervention, and the build-up of military bases in hundreds of sites. As financialization weakened the productive capacity of US manufacturing exporters’ efforts to capture markets, US policymakers increased their reliance on the supremacy of military power. The channeling of billions into military spending drained resources from efforts to upgrade the competitiveness of US civilian industry and was a major factor-in its declining share of export markets. The end result of militarization was a loss of export earnings and the growth of trade deficits.

If we combine the three great internal imbalances in the AFA economics, but especially in the US, the financialization of the economy, the militarization of foreign policy and the concentration of wealth at the top, we can best understand why the US has such a huge and growing trade deficit.

China Export Driven Strategy

China’s emphasis on an export driven strategy and the resultant growing class inequalities is largely a result of the class composition of the state and its social structure. In other words internal factors are the driving force of its pursuit of trade surpluses. What is ironic is that some of the AFA critics, who rightly point to the internal ‘imbalances’ in China, overlook similar problems in the West. Namely, no mention is made of the absence of a national health plan in the US, the growth of inequalities and declining mass purchasing power – even as they point to these deficiencies in China. What Western advocates of greater social welfare in China do not discuss, is the capitalist class power, privilege and profits which hinder greater mass consumption. Least of all do they discuss the motor force for lifting working class and peasant living conditions, namely the class struggle. Instead they rely on technocratic appeals to Chinese elites for greater social spending.

The Chinese state has evolved into a powerful machine for manufacturing goods and billionaires. Today China has the highest growth, the highest rate of exploitation and the greatest class inequalities in Asia. Increasing wages to stimulate local consumption means reducing profits, anathema to all capitalists including Chinese. Increasing public spending on universal health coverage especially for the 700 million uninsured peasants and rural workers means higher taxes on the rich, including the families and colleagues of the governing elite. In contrast, producing for export markets does not require increasing domestic consumer power, on the contrary it requires lower wages.

A shift from an export-driven to a domestic market driven strategy, requires not only a ‘change in policy’ but a deep shift in class power, from the current capitalist class and its state backers to the workers and peasants. To realize large scale, long term commitments of public revenues to social services for the rural poor and higher wages for exploited workers requires sustained popular mobilizations, uprisings, strikes to secure the independent trade unions and peasant associations necessary to secure a shift in state allocations toward domestic consumption.

China’s “imbalances” are largely internal, social and political. An imbalance of social power between an all powerful capitalist state and a repressed powerless mass of workers and peasants; an imbalance in income between a super-rich banking, real estate, manufacturing export elite and a low paid working class and subsistence peasantry;an imbalance between a highly organized state linked by family, ideology and economic interests to the capitalist class and a dispersed, fragmented and isolated mass of working people.

China’s ruling class, its outward billion dollar investments in western capitalist enterprises via its sovereign wealth funds, its billion dollar investments in overseas extractive enterprises, is driven by the mass of capital accumulated that is extracted via intense levels of labor exploitation and the elimination of state funded pensions, health plans and education. China’s role as an emerging imperial power is rooted in the imbalance between global power and social welfare decay.

The fact that western capitalist writers, policymakers and their academic camp followers point to the same social imbalances in China as its domestic working class critics should not obscure a basic point. The Wall Street critics are defending the AFA financial elite against China’s export industrialists’ greater productivity; while the domestic working class critics are criticizing the capitalists and the state for their high rates of exploitation and concentration of wealth.

The key to reducing imbalances in world trade is reducing socio-economic inequalities within each region. The US requires a profound shift from a finance dominated economy to a manufacturing economy, where finance, high tech and higher education is directed to creating a competitive, productive economy based on skilled labor. The link at the top between Wall Street and the Pentagon must be replaced by a link from below between the industrial working class, low paid service workers and public sector employees and professionals.

The structural transformation of the US economy is necessary but not sufficient. If US efforts to pursue a military driven empire persist, this will divert resources away from domestic and overseas economic priorities. Military driven empires alienate trading partners, have high costs and low returns, isolate economic investors and traders from productive partnerships and are destructive of domestic and overseas civilian productive facilities.

The way out of the massive imbalances is for the US to engage in a large scale, long term domestic structural transformations – namely de-financialization and de-militarization. But the political and economic forces benefiting from the current configuration are deeply entrenched, in control of both major parties and dominate the mass media and its message. Yet, despite their profound institutional power they suffer several fatal flaws. In the first instance they have created unsustainable global imbalances, which will sooner or later lead to a collapse of the dollar and renewed and more virulent and costly financial bubbles. Secondly, the free market which is the main ideological prop of the deregulated financial power elite is totally discredited as evidenced by the single digit support and trust of Wall Street. Thirdly, military driven empire building has run its course: after nine years of war in Afghanistan the vast majority of the US public has sent a message to the political elite of both parties, the White House and Congress, that its time to shift from funding failed overseas adventures to solving the problem of 20% under and unemployed Americans (30 million), the 100 million or 33% of Americans with no or costly and inadequate health coverage. No amount of media and political pundit scapegoating of China for our own self-induced “imbalances” can divert American opinion from their direct experiences with our own internal inequalities and policy failures.

1. Martin Wolf, “Why China must do more to rebalance its economy” Financial Times, September 23, 2009, p 11. See also Financial Times, October 3, 4, 2009. p 3 and Financial Times, September 21, 2009 p 9.
2. Financial Times, October 9, 2009 p 1.
3. Gerald Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press 2009).

But NATO (aka the United States) can take satisfaction in the fact that the Germans have put their silly pacifism aside and acted like real men, trained military killers; although prior to this incident the Germans had engaged in some aerial and ground combat, there hadn’t been such a dramatic and publicized taking of civilian lives. Deutschland now has more than 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the third largest contingent in the country after the US and Britain, and at home they’ve just finished building a monument to fallen members of the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces), founded in 1955; 38 members (so far) have surrendered their young lives in Afghanistan.

In January 2007 I wrote in this report about how the US was pushing Germany in this direction; that circumstances at that time indicated that Washington might be losing patience with the pace of Germany’s submission to the empire’s needs. Germany declined to send troops to Iraq and sent only non-combat forces to Afghanistan, not quite good enough for the Pentagon warriors and their NATO allies. Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, reported the following:

At a meeting in Washington, Bush administration officials, speaking in the context of Afghanistan, berated Karsten Voigt, German government representative for German-American relations: “You concentrate on rebuilding and peacekeeping, but the unpleasant things you leave to us.” … “The Germans have to learn to kill.”

A German officer at NATO headquarters was told by a British officer: “Every weekend we send home two metal coffins, while you Germans distribute crayons and woollen blankets.” Bruce George, the head of the British Defence Committee, said “some drink tea and beer and others risk their lives.”

A NATO colleague from Canada remarked that it was about time that “the Germans left their sleeping quarters and learned how to kill the Taliban.”

And in Quebec, a Canadian official told a German official: “We have the dead, you drink beer.”¹

Ironically, in many other contexts since the end of World War II the Germans have been unable to disassociate themselves from the image of Nazi murderers and monsters.

Will there come the day when the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents will be mocked by “the Free World” for living in peace?

The United States has also engaged in a decades-long effort to wean Japan away from its post-WW2 pacifist constitution and foreign policy and set it back on the righteous path of again being a military power, only this time acting in coordination with US foreign policy needs.

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. — Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, 1947, words long cherished by a large majority of the Japanese people.

In the triumphalism of the end of the Second World War, the American occupation of Japan, in the person of General Douglas MacArthur, played a major role in the creation of this constitution. But after the communists came to power in China in 1949, the United States opted for a strong Japan safely ensconced in the anti-communist camp. It’s been all downhill since then. Step by step … MacArthur himself ordered the creation of a “national police reserve”, which became the embryo of the future Japanese military … Visiting Tokyo in 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Japanese officials: “In the past, Japan had demonstrated her superiority over the Russians and over China. It was time for Japan to think again of being and acting like a Great Power.”² … various US-Japanese security and defense cooperation treaties, which, for example, called on Japan to integrate its military technology with that of the US and NATO … the US supplying new sophisticated military aircraft and destroyers … all manner of Japanese logistical assistance to the US in its frequent military operations in Asia … repeated US pressure on Japan to increase its military budget and the size of its armed forces … more than a hundred US military bases in Japan, protected by Japanese armed forces … US-Japanese joint military exercises and joint research on a missile defense system … the US Ambassador to Japan, 2001: “I think the reality of circumstances in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9.”³ … under pressure from Washington, Japan sent several naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to refuel US and British warships as part of the Afghanistan campaign in 2002, then sent non-combat forces to Iraq to assist the American war as well as to East Timor, another made-in-America war scenario … Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2004: “If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light.”⁴ …

One outcome or symptom of all this can perhaps be seen in the 2005 case of Kimiko Nezu, a 54-year-old Japanese teacher, who was punished by being transferred from school to school, by suspensions, salary cuts, and threats of dismissal because of her refusal to stand during the playing of the national anthem, a World War II song chosen as the anthem in 1999. She opposed the song because it was the same one sung as the Imperial Army set forth from Japan calling for an “eternal reign” of the emperor. At graduation ceremonies in 2004, 198 teachers refused to stand for the song. After a series of fines and disciplinary actions, Nezu and nine other teachers were the only protesters the following year. Nezu was then allowed to teach only when another teacher was present.⁵

Which brings us to Italy, the remaining member of the World War Two Tripartite, or Axis. Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution says in part: “Italy rejects war as a means for settling international controversies and as an instrument of aggression against the freedoms of others peoples.”⁶

But Washington laid claim early to Italy’s post-war soul. In 1948 the United States all but took over the Italian election campaign to insure the Christian Democrats (CD) defeat of the Communist-Socialist candidate. (And the US remained an electoral force in Italy for the next three decades maintaining the CD in power. The Christian Democrats, in turn, were loyal Cold-War partners.)⁷ In 1949, the US saw to it that Italy became a founding member of NATO. This was not seen as a threat to Article 11 because NATO has always painted itself as a “defensive” organization, even in 1999 when it carried out a 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia as both Italy and Germany supplied military aircraft and a NATO air base at Aviano, Italy served as the main hub for the daily bombing runs. For decades, Italy has been the home of US military bases and airfields used by Washington in one military adventure after another from Europe to Asia.

There are now some 3,000 Italian soldiers in Afghanistan performing a variety of services which enables the United States and NATO to engage in their bloody warfare. And 15 Italian soldiers have also lost their lives in that woeful land. The pressure on Italy, as on Germany, to become full-fledged combatants in Afghanistan and elsewhere is unrelenting from their NATO comrades.⁸

The Berlin Wall — Another Cold War Myth

Within a few weeks many of the Western media can be expected to turn on their propaganda machines to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returned to the East in the evening. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. The wall was built primarily for two reasons:

   1. The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.”⁹

   2. During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from terrorism to juvenile delinquency; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more.¹⁰

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.

Let’s not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union and wipe out Bolshevism forever. After the war, the Soviets were determined to close down the highway.

In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.”¹¹

About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

Health care: ignoring the huge red elephant in the room

In the frenzied search of recent months for a better way of delivering health care to the American people, the American media has often discussed health-care systems in other countries, particularly Europe. Usually, little, if anything, is mentioned about Cuba’s system, where everyone is covered, for everything, where pre-existing conditions do not matter, and no patient pays for anything; i.e., nothing at all. The reason the Cuban system is seldom mentioned in the mass media is probably that it’s kind of embarrassing that this otherwise poor country, laboring under the awful yoke of (choke, gasp) socialism, can deliver health care that most Americans can only dream of.

Now we have a new book by T.R. Reid, former correspondent for the Washington Post and commentator for National Public Radio. It’s called “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.” Reid does not avoid giving some credit to the Cuban system, but he makes sure that the reader knows that he’s not taken in by any commie propaganda. He refers to the Cuban government as “a totalitarian Communist fiefdom”, and adds: “In every country (except, perhaps, a police state like Cuba) there is one group of citizens who are not bound by the unified health care system: the rich.”¹² Thus, the fact that Cuba has an egalitarian health care system is made to seem like something negative, something one could expect to find only in a police state.

In discussing the World Health Organization’s giving Cuba high marks for fairness in its system, Reid points out: “Of course, fairness and equal treatment extend only so far; when Fidel Castro himself fell ill in 2007, medical experts were flown in from Europe to treat him.”¹³ Aha! I knew it! Americans, and not just the right-wing crazies, would never accept a medical system where everyone got completely free care for all ailments if the president ever got any kind of special treatment. Would they? We could at least ask them.

Speaking of the right-wing crazies, there was a report in the New York Times which said: “Tomorrow night, getting right into the thick of the battle,” the president will “carry his message to the people in a nationwide television and radio speech” fighting for enactment of his health reform bill, which opponents tagged as “socialized medicine” and “an entering wedge for the takeover of private medicine by the federal government.” The president was John F. Kennedy, the program was Medicare, the Times story was published on May 20, 1962. Despite the speech, the effort failed until passage in 1964.¹⁴

And speaking of the totalitarian communist socialist fascist Cuban police-state dictatorship, Mr. Reid and others might be interested in an article I wrote which demonstrates that during the period of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America.

But how to get past a lifetime of conditioning and reach the American mind with that message? At the recent convention of the AFL-CIO, the country’s leading labor organization, there was a very progressive resolution put forth calling for the right of all Americans to travel to Cuba and for an end to the US embargo against the island nation. But at the end of the resolution the authors reminded us that they’re Americans, calling upon Cuba “to release all political prisoners.”¹⁵

To appreciate what’s wrong with that resolution one must understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the United States Interests Section. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents.

1. Der Spiegel (Germany), November 20, 2006, p.24
2. Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1994
3. Washington Post, July 18, 2001
4. BBC, August 14, 2004
5. Washington Post, August 30, 2005
6. Wikipedia: “Article 11 of Italian Constitution“
7. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapters 2 and 18
8. For further discussion of US opposition to Post-WW2 Axis pacifism, see “Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions“
9. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12
10. See Killing Hope, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion
11. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1
12. p.234 of Reid’s book
13. Ibid., p.150-1
14. Washington Post, September 9, 2009
15. PDF of resolution

       All these nations and city-state societies listed here over the past twenty-five centuries enjoyed obvious hegemonic status or were in direct competition with others that did. They were all in possession of major urban epicenters, a distinctive culture of their own, and–with the exception of Italy during the Renaissance–the military capacity to expand their authority well beyond their borders in order to obtain favorable markets and adequate resources from abroad.  Moreover, as in the case of Rome described by Gibbon, they were all susceptible to decline, and their collapse resulted more from reckless expansionism than the success of their enemies.  In historical terms it can be blamed as much as anything on their bad judgment, their mistaken policies, and, most of all, their obsessive commitment to military and financial aggrandizement.  Again with the exception of renaissance Italy, all of them ceased being hegemonic states when their enlargement could no longer feed on itself.
 
2. American Civilization
 
This brings us to the United States, the latest hegemonic society in the history of Western Civilization.  We became a nation during the Revolutionary War by defeating Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. Before Yorktown, British troops were more than holding their own; afterward they ceased to be much of a military threat.  At the time, however, we were hardly a world power, and in fact our decisive victory at Yorktown was planned, financed, and mostly carried out by the French.  The 1787 Constitution was also largely inspired by the French Enlightenment, and several of our top leadership–Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe, among others–spent a lot of time in France.  Moreover, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase was essentially a gift from Napoleon. In effect our nation was a byproduct of the French effort to defeat England in the New World, thereby contributing to its defeat in Europe.  The French failed in their effort, but the U.S. carried on as a relic of their effort in the western hemisphere.
 
              Our primary collective task over most of the rest of the nineteenth century was the forcible transfer of Indian lands to the possession of settlers from Europe. This effort began as early as King Philip’s War in 1675-76, when most of the Indians in New England were killed, driven away, or sold into slavery.  But it went into high gear during Jackson’s presidency and persisted throughout the nineteenth century.  The Mexican War [more accurately: war against Mexico] was obviously a “grab” of territory from Mexico. The Civil War intervened as a regional war in which slavery provided the excuse for giving northern financial interests dominant economic power at the expense of southern plantations dependent on slave labor. This was followed by the Spanish-American War, which was no less a “grab” than the Mexican War, this time with the capture of the Philippines setting the stage for a more “ambitious” policy with China, Japan, and other Asiatic states.
 
              It was the First World War that first gave our nation its hegemonic advantage on a truly international scale.  The creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913-14 under the ownership of New York banks (and thus of those who owned the banks) effectively centralized our nation’s collective financial wealth, among other things providing the funds sufficient for American allies to conduct massive warfare in Europe during World War I.  It was the belated involvement of U.S. troops starting in 1917 that tipped war’s balance to the allies. As a result of the war, European nations inclusive of Germany became heavily indebted to American banks, giving our nation de facto control of the world’s economy.  This reality was confirmed by negotiations at Bretton Woods in 1944, just before victory in World War II, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created and the dollar became the world’s reserve currency.
 
              Hitler’s most useful discovery during the thirties was the value of military expenditures in helping to buttress aggregate demand sufficient to keep factories running, thereby preventing a full-scale depression. Demand levels had plummeted below productive capacity, so military expenditures were used to augment demand as justified by the supposed threat of enemies abroad.  This so-called military Keynesian expedient also helped the United States during World War II, and it helped carry on what seemed an endless Cold War against the Soviet Union.  The beauty of this strategy was that Russians impoverished by combat with Germany were unable to restore their non-military industries because of the heavy military production needed to match American production committed to the struggle against them.  In effect, the United States was suffering from severe over-production and the Soviet Union from severe under-production, so we doubled our advantage by using relentless military competition to augment our economic growth while hurting theirs. As a result our society thrived, theirs suffered. Two costly “wars of choice” can also be mentioned, in Korea and Vietnam, as well as the U.S. subsidization of the Afghan rebellion against the Soviet Union before its tattered economy finally collapsed in the late eighties because of its inability to match the latest U.S. escalation with a star wars strategy devised under President Reagan.
 
With Russia no longer a military threat, some kind of an alternative was needed to supplant the Cold War in stretching aggregate demand.  The first President Bush rose to the challenge by conducting limited wars of choice against both Panama and Iraq in the Persian Gulf, but these ventures were insufficient to prevent a recession just preceding the 1992 election. Bush’s successor, President Clinton, limited military conflict to relatively modest operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia and Sudan. His principal effort, however, was to sustain our economy by means of economic globalization under the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other such trade organizations that would presumably benefit both advanced and developing nations on a win-win basis.  U.S. corporate profits would increase resulting from the export of production (in effect factories) to such countries as Mexico and China in order to benefit from their reduced labor costs and environmental constraints, and no less profitable would be the opportunity for U.S. investors to extract natural resources in other non-western nations restricted by treaty from imposing heavy taxes and export duties. Meanwhile, non-western nations would benefit from sufficient growth subsidized by western investment to provide “takeoff” into truly competitive economies as had been proposed several decades earlier by the American economist Walt Rostow.
 
 However, it soon became obvious that globalization was far more lucrative for Wall Street investors than for the indigenous population of non-western states, and moreover that the pursuit of economic ties in and of itself was insufficient to prevent a major depression in the near future in the United States. At this point deregulation must have seemed a perfectly reasonable means of augmenting our nation’s GDP.  Burdened with the threat of impeachment, President Clinton cooperated with Republicans and Wall Street in deregulating the financial markets first with the 1999 Financial Services Act and then the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, effectively rescinding the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act for bringing Wall Street financial markets under control.  As a neo-liberal, Clinton was willing to loosen up the markets, but not to the extent that was permitted by this legislation.  If he had more time to study it in depth, he would undoubtedly have tightened its application.
 
              A depression nevertheless began to gather momentum soon after the second (and less talented) President Bush came to office.  As to be expected, he resorted to every possible expedient that might help in diminishing its impact. His effort included going to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq as justified by the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center (one excuse sufficing to justify two wars), along with a sharp reduction in taxation, especially for the wealthiest Americans. This was the very first time in U.S. history that full-scale military Keynesianism and large tax reductions were combined to stimulate our economy.  For good measure, Bush also helped to pump up the economy by letting the housing and oil bubbles supplant the defunct dot-com bubble, and he encouraged the further deregulation of industry, banks, and Wall Street speculation.  Not surprisingly, the 2001 depression soon abated, and an artificial surge of prosperity followed until mid-September, 2008, just two months before the election and four months before Bush’s departure from office. This was when Wall Street imploded and Bush’s desperate economic legerdemain was finally over. Extravagant funding provided by the  federal bailout legislation saved the biggest Wall Street banks and brokerages, leaving the rest of our nation to cope what now amounts to a serious depression whose effects can be expected to persist for at least another couple of years.
 
              Barack Obama was elected president mostly because of the economic crisis, but as far as can be determined at this point, his measures for dealing with this crisis will probably be insufficient as predicted by the Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.  Obama has also retained an essentially conservative staff to deal with both the domestic economy and U.S. military policy in Asia. Unfortunately, too many key figures he has brought into his administration are either what might be described as constituency choices or seasoned experts who had themselves played major roles in creating the problems we now confront.  Apropos of talented but relatively ineffectual constituency choices would be the selection of Kathleen Sebelius instead of Howard Dean as the Secretary of Health and Human Services despite Dean’s superior qualifications as a doctor, author, politician and the former governor of Vermont who led the effort to initiate its successful health care program for children and pregnant women. One suspects the principal reason for Dean’s rejection was his hostile relationship with Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff regarding campaign funding, Dean having emphasized a 50-state strategy as opposed to Emanuel’s effort to target the swing states.  However, if true, this feud is insufficient reason for rejecting Dean’s appointment.  One of Obama’s most appealing promises during his campaign was his intention to bring individuals who aggressively disagree with each other into his inner circle in order to benefit from their dialogue.  Having been deprived of Kennedy in the current health reform struggle, it would be a pity if Obama falls short of his goal in health care reform because of the absence of Dean as well from his inner circle. 
 
                Apropos of the economic crisis, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke` played central roles in events leading up to the September crash, yet they have been put in charge of the current recovery effort.  As in the case of Dean, it seems unfortunate that Obama skipped over both Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman from his inner team for dealing with the current economic crisis, apparently because Summers has taken a dislike to them, especially Stiglitz. The collapse of our nation’s economy has been severe enough that all of these economists should be able and willing to work together in the interactive manner earlier suggested by Obama.

And finally, apropos of the transfer of combat from Iraq to Afghanistan, Henry Gates and the two Generals Petraeus and McChrystal played central roles in the misbegotten occupation of Iraq, yet have been put in charge of operations in Afghanistan. True, they can be identified with the apparently successful “surge,” but it remains to be seen if it was truly a success. What seems most needed in Afghanistan right now is an effective occupation force rather than combat troops, and McChrystal in particular seems a dubious choice for this task.  His leadership of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 featured heavy combat, excessive interrogation techniques, and other such dubious responsibilities that necessarily antagonize the host population under occupation.
 
              It can also be mentioned that Obama has gone along with too many precedents established by Bush.  For example, he has continued Bush’s practice of adding his own “signing statements” to legislation passed by Congress, if not to the same extent, and his first official act as president was to issue an Executive order banning the release of presidential records just as Cheney had done eight years ago to prevent the disclosure of oil corporation executives with whom he had negotiated an energy policy in Iraq.  Obama’s cap and trade legislation also seems as much as anything a capitulation to Republican lobbyists. And why can’t Obama nudge public radio’s Democracy Now into at least balanced reportage if not a liberal bias equivalent to its pro-administration bias during Bush’s term in office.  And why can’t Obama put a stop to the incessant airport orange alerts that blare over the loudspeaker every half hour or so, apparently intended as much as anything to keep air travelers scared, therefore more willing to acquiesce to personal searches. And why is Obama willing to retain too many of Bush’s oppressive policies, especially in homeland security and the imprisonment and mistreatment of prisoners labeled as terrorists into the indefinite future. Despite his election promises, the Guantanamo prison camp continues to hold prisoners who die under suspicious circumstances, for example the individual al-Hashani as reported by Naomi Klein after her recent visit there.  All of this should be stopped.
 
              Admittedly, the multiple tasks that now confront Obama’s administration seem almost insurmountable after the collapse of an economic policy equivalent to the use of steroids for almost seventy years now. Severe deterioration set in well before Obama’s presidency, and he is stuck with cleaning up the mess, so he can and should be given slack in performing his mission.  But when does slack become free rein to abandon most of his campaign promises?  For the current situation requires the best effort from the very best experts and leaders in dealing with it.  It also requires genuine integrity on the part of these individuals rather than the greed and power-hungry gamesmanship that have dominated Washington politics for too many decades now.  Everything is beginning to fall apart, and the question remains whether it is possible to obtain some kind of a “soft landing” least harmful to the American people. 
 
3. The American Economy
 
              Numbers alone are daunting as an indication of our current financial crisis.  Our total Gross Domestic Product (GDP), including all goods and services produced in a single year, is now $14 trillion, almost exactly a quarter of the world’s total GDP.  However, our government’s annual deficit this year will be in the range of $1.75 trillion, having exceeded more than a trillion dollars for the first time; our gross national debt (specifically the total debt of our government alone) is now somewhere between $9 and $12 trillion; and our nation’s total debt including all household, business, financial, and government debt is now in the range of $57 trillion, about a trillion dollars more than the world’s total GDP inclusive of our own. As estimated by our nation’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), $2 trillion is now in the process of being spent to cover the cost of our present economic crisis, and it is estimated that the total cost will eventually amount to $23 trillion.  Incredibly, the total debt of derivatives traded on Wall Street before the September crash was between $600 and $650 trillion dollars–well beyond anybody’s ability to pay.  Moreover, our nation now owes at least a trillion dollars apiece to China and Japan as well as many hundreds of billion dollars to the sovereign wealth funds (SWF) for such nations as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Russia.
 
              Whether intended or not, the dollar has dropped 40 percent of its value compared to the euro over the past five years, effectively reducing our national debt to foreign borrowers by means of inflation just as happened with the collapse of the German mark during the twenties. This likelihood can only be intensified by the Federal Reserve Board having circulated more than a trillion dollars in order to maximize “liquidity” in order to combat depression. The dollar can accordingly be expected to continue its decline, probably setting the stage for its wholesale abandonment as the world’s reserve currency in the relatively near future.  This in turn would result in further and more dramatic losses for our economy as a whole.
 
              Meanwhile, our nation’s unemployment rate is 9.4 percent pushing 10 percent, underemployment is 16 percent, and the country has lost 6.7 million jobs since December, 2007, many of which will probably not be restored by “improved” productivity levels as well as a permanent decline in our nation’s affluence.  Not surprisingly, income disparities have considerably widened between the rich and the poor.  In 2006, two years before the current depression, the top one percent of U.S. households received 22.9 percent of all pre-tax income, more than double the ratio in the 1970s and by far the biggest concentration of wealth among the most prosperous Americans since 1928.  As reported recently by the Wall Street Journal, corporate executives now account for more than one-third of all salary compensation earned in the U.S.  On the other hand, there was only a 24 percent pay increase for the average worker from 2002 to 2007, less than 5 percent per annum, half of the 48 percent increase for highly paid individuals and less than double the official rate of inflation.  In sum, the income gap has steadily widened between the wealthiest Americans and average and poor Americans, and this is not a healthy trend for the nation as a whole. For this kind of plutocracy does not work in the long run.  Such an imbalance is like being fifty pounds overweight with a pulse of 120, a blood pressure of 180-125, a 300 mg/dL cholesterol level, a PSA of 12 going on 15, and a robust 9 on the Gleason cancer scale. These might seem impressive numbers, but they are anything but healthy.
 
              It should also be of major concern, as explained by Kevin Phillips in his 2008 book, Bad Money, published before September’s financial meltdown, that our economy has shifted in emphasis over the past century from agriculture to manufacturing and to the financial sector led by Wall Street.  Farm production has been brought almost entirely under corporate control, and far too many of our factories have been exported to non-western nations in order to minimize both wages and environmental costs.  Just as junk has become the Port of New York’s principal export, debt as wealth owed by one party to another has become our nation’s principal commodity. According to Phillips, the so-called credit market debt roughly quadrupled from nearly $11 trillion to $48 trillion between 1987 and 2007  (p viii).  As a result, financial services amounted to 20 percent of the GDP in 2005, as compared to manufacturing’s 12 percent of the GDP (Phillips, p. 5).  In effect, the two-to-one ratio favorable to manufacturing as our nation’s principal source of income just three decades ago has almost completely reversed itself.  It should therefore be no surprise that our major banks now wield extraordinary influence unprecedented in the previous history of our nation. As Senator Durbin of Illinois recently explained, banks currently “own” Washington, and this is not a healthy development. According to Phillips, this shift in power from manufacturing to the banking sector often sets the stage for the collapse of modern hegemonic powers just as happened for Spain and England when they ceased to play a dominant role (p. 36).
 
              As to be expected, our current depression resulted from a major breakdown on Wall Street.  Virtually all its major investment banks went bankrupt simultaneously last September.  They were only saved by an enormous federal bailout effort that entailed $700 billion in promised loans by the federal government. Of the funds received so far, the top nine of these banks have as yet paid back only $50 billion while awarding their top executives almost $33 billion in bonuses for the year 2009.  It seems they are confident that the crisis has been eliminated and our economy is on the brink of recovery as indicated by several variables. The Index of Leading Indicators, for example, has risen for the third month in a row with seven of the ten leading indicators having risen in June.  Bank and corporate stocks have improved, and the stock market has shot up, surging 725 points or 8.6% in July.  Even the oil bubble is beginning to expand once again, suggesting that oil speculation has resumed on Wall Street.  On August 22 at Jackson Hole Wyoming, Bernanke has boasted, “The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” as demonstrated by a 7.2 percent jump in home sales in July and a stock market leap of 156 points the same day (perhaps in part because of his announcement).  But he conceded that “cautious confidence” is still appropriate, given unexpectedly weak sales last week, increased unemployment claims, and the likelihood that hundreds more American banks would fail in the next year. And indeed there are many additional problems preventing full recovery in the near future.  In fact, it still seems probable that our nation will undergo what has been described as a “double dip” depression (what might also be described as a “W” depression rather than a “V” or “L” depression). 
 
              As explained by Jack Rasmus in his informative article, “Green Shoots or Stinkweeds?” published in the July 2009 issue of Z Magazine, economic dislocations have been too pronounced for anybody to be too hopeful about an economic reversal.  The job market is worse than it has been in decades, and with every possibility that as many as 22 million workers will go jobless before economic recovery fully happens. Even then, however, it seems unemployment could remain high because of improved productivity levels as well as the transfer of labor costs abroad. Similarly, the foreclosure rate on homes can be expected to rise to 8 million and housing prices to fall another 20 percent in the near future. Pension plans have already dropped a third and will continue to fall, and the simmering credit card crisis will expand even further than the $406 billion losses incurred so far in 2009.  Similarly, auto and student loans are likely to crash the same way sub-prime loans did.  Business expenditures can also be expected to drop at least a quarter more in the near future, and global exports that have fallen by 50 percent in early 2009 cannot be expected to recover soon.  Likewise, state and local budgets deprived of adequate revenue sharing in the May omnibus package will also reach crisis proportions. Last but not least, the 27 percent increase in corporate bankruptcies in 2008 can be expected to be exceeded by the end of 2009 by as much as 35 percent.  Many of these statistics can be reversed with a general rise in the economy, but it is difficult to believe that all of them will, and any three or four in combination just might be sufficient to produce the double-dip depression that worries Obama’s chief economists right now.
 
              Nor can much help be expected toward an effective solution from our government in Washington, D.C.  Congressmen, for example, are almost entirely in the pockets of industries opposed to economic reform that might bear a negative impact on their profits. These elected officials are amazingly unprincipled in their acceptance of hefty campaign contributions in exchange for services rendered, and indeed big business, big banks, big agriculture, big labor, and inclusively anything “big” engages in the practice of paying them off. The amount of these contributions might seem large, but it turns out to be nominal compared to the yield, often more than 100-1 in federal subsidies obtained through earmark legislation and comparable services provided by these congressmen. The few Congressmen unwilling to go along with this arrangement quickly disappear from politics because of inadequate campaign funding. When others more willing to depend on corporate donations finally retire, most find the means to transfer their remaining campaign funds to their own bank accounts and often join the ranks of lobbyists who, like themselves, had first learned the ropes as congressmen. The situation is strictly plutocratic verging on klepto-plutocracy when the law is broken to make it happen. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens have little if any influence except to the extent that they belong to issues-related public constituencies represented by their own variety of lobbyists.

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.”¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case.³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.”⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.”⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸ ) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs.⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

   You will not be able to stay home, brother.
   You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
   You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
   Because the revolution will not be televised. …

   There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
   The revolution will not be right back after a message
   The revolution will not go better with Coke
   The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
   The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ‘60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution.¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009.
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992.
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009.
4. ”Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001.
5. Read many further details about the case.
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009.
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009.
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2.
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned.
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009.
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence);²) the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966,³ referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”⁹

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “war on terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports here.

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009
2. Fabian Escalante, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro, (Ocean Press, 2006
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32.
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23.
5. Ibid., chapter 18
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009
9. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (1980), p.8
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007

Meanwhile, top US administration and army officials cautioned Iraqis of their own recklessness. “Biden Warns Iraq About Reverting to Sectarian Violence,” read a New York Times headline. “What will it take to make a good exit from Iraq?” inquired a Kansas City Star analysis. But missing from news headlines and commentary was any indication of direct US responsibility for the genocide that has befallen Iraq.

How can one claim that US ambitions in Iraq have altered if the ongoing legacy in Iraq is being perceived as a strategic mistake, rather than a moral one?

One thing remains the same, for sure: and that is the arrogance that has long permeated US relations with Iraq. “The president and I appreciate that Iraq has traveled a great distance over the past year, but there is a hard road ahead if Iraq is going to find lasting peace and stability,” said Vice President Biden during a visit to Baghdad on July 3rd. Biden’s remarks were saturated with the same hubris that defined the former administration’s attitude towards Iraq for years: ‘we did our share, that of liberating you, and now its your turn to take charge of your own security’, type of rhetoric. “It’s not over yet,” Biden said. Ironically, he is right, since that could only mean the complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the end of foreign meddling in the country’s affairs, and the removal of corrupt politicians that have destroyed the country’s national identity in favor of sectarian camps endlessly fighting for dominance and privilege. Indeed, it’s anything but over.

It’s true that the majority of Americans now accept the once rebuked claim that the Iraq war was predicated on a lie, and readily blame former President Bush for drawing the country into a costly war that should have never happened. President Obama’s arrival has seemingly ushered in a new discourse of honesty and national introspection.

Although one wants to believe that the new administration is sincere in seeking an exit strategy from Iraq, one is hardly sure that the US is ready to divorce itself from the war-scarred country. There is little reason, aside from tactical redeployment, that should compel antiwar sentiments to weaken, or self-respecting commentators to halt their questioning of US intentions.

The terms “exit” and “exit strategy” are now dominating media discourse regarding Iraq. Some attribute this new language to the new administration. The odd fact is that the recent US army redeployment is not the brainchild of the Obama administration, but a provision of a November 2008 agreement signed between the Iraqi government of Nouri Al Maliki and the Bush administration. Talk of exiting Iraq indeed preceded the entrance of Obama. The new US administration simply honored previous commitments. As per official statements, following the June 30 redeployment, the US is expected to reduce its forces by 50,000 troops by August 2010, and then many of those remaining by the end of 2011.

So, 2012 will witness a fully independent Iraq, right? Wrong. “Many studying Iraq believe the US will end up negotiating with Baghdad to establish a couple of permanent military bases,” writes Matt Schofield. “Those could be essential to leaving behind a stable government, a military loyal to the nation and capable of defending it, and a country that has the backing of the people.” Those who wish to decipher such deceptive language should comprehend the permanent US military presence as permanent occupation. Indeed, the US doesn’t have to be present on every Iraqi street corner to officially occupy the country. The sectarian Iraqi army and police — US armed and trained — should be enough to carry out US wishes in Iraq (under the guise of fighting terrorists), while the US will “stand ready, if asked and if helpful, to help in that process,” as explained by Biden.

Iraq headlines will eventually fade away, making space for the new escalation in Afghanistan, also in the name of fighting terror, bringing democracy and all the rest.

The faces of the victims will be hidden so as not to harm our sensibilities, and causality figures will be manipulated, contested and at times blamed on the coward terrorists who hide among civilians. In other words, the US will take the spirit of its Iraq war to Afghanistan, remain in Iraq — as inconspicuous as possible — so as to hold onto its strategic military achievement, and, if necessary, blame both nations for their growing misfortunes.

However, before we take our eyes off Iraq, Americans must remember their own culpability in what transpired there. Antiwar activists and people of conscience must not forget that 130,000 US soldiers remain in the country; that the US has complete control over Iraqi airspace and territorial water; that there is not yet a reason to celebrate and move on. Even if one is trusting enough to believe the administration and army’s own account of its future in Iraq, one should recall comments made by Admiral Mike Mullen last February: “Mr. Obama plans to leave behind a ‘residual force’ of tens of thousands of troops to continue training Iraqi security forces, hunt down terrorist cells and guard American institutions.”

One may be truly eager to see a sovereign, democratic and stable Iraq, but such hopes must not occur at the expense of truth and common sense.

Taking the American side, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Tzipi Livni, was quick to accuse Netanyahu of superfluously creating an impediment in US-Israel relations. In April, we recall, when Netanyahu asked Livni and her party to join his government, she rejected his bid because he had refused to commit to the principle of “two states for two peoples.” She took the position that the border between the states, as agreed to by the Palestinians in their talks with her, would anyhow leave the settlement blocs in Israel’s hands. Yet without commitment to a two-state solution, construction in those blocs would be hard to justify.

Netanyahu understood the message. In his Bar Ilan speech, intended as his answer to Obama, he came out for a Palestinian state. However, he took pains to present certain principles that eliminated any real possibility for its coming into existence: Palestine, he said, must recognize Israel as a Jewish state; it must be demilitarized (this implies not only the lack of an army, but also lack of control over borders and air space, and no possibility of forging alliances); and, finally, the dropping of all demands that the refugees be permitted to return to Israel. He pledged to expropriate no further lands for settlements, but he pointedly omitted any mention of a construction freeze. It is no wonder that the Palestinians rejected these conditions. The Americans, however, tried to make the best of the speech, while continuing to push for an Israeli commitment to stop construction in the settlements.

As expected, Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan speech did not get anything started. On the contrary, Foreign Secretary Avigdor Lieberman, in a press conference with Hillary Clinton, enunciated Israel’s outright refusal to freeze construction. The result followed quickly: a scheduled meeting with America’s special envoy to the region, George Mitchell, was canceled.

After the Israeli Foreign Secretary had burned his bridges with the US (and not only with the US: consider French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recommendation to Netanyahu that he fire Lieberman), Defense Minister Ehud Barak was sent to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. This journey led to negotiations on a temporary freeze. Yet once again, Israeli preconditions torpedo any chance that this will happen. In return for the temporary freeze, according to the local press (Yediyot Aharonot and Haaretz, week of July 2, 2009), Israel demands a commitment by the Arab states to normalize relations; Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state; and the promise that a future Palestinian state will be demilitarized. In short, the Palestinians are to forfeit all their bargaining chips in return for a temporary freeze on Israeli settlement construction, and with no commitment on Israel’s part to withdraw to the 1967 borders or dismantle even one illegal outpost.

For the American administration, an Israeli commitment to a construction freeze in the settlements would enable Washington to jumpstart a political process within the Palestinian Authority (PA), aimed at bolstering the shaky position of its president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The radical elements in the Arab world, and especially Hamas (which has ruled the Gaza Strip since its bloody ejection of Abbas supporters in 2007) see no reason for concessions as long as Israel’s right-wing government abides by its refusal. True, both Arab extremists and moderates welcomed Obama’s Cairo speech, but they raised questions about his ability to influence, saying, in effect, Let’s see you translate words into action.

A commitment to freeze construction in the settlements could result in the breakup of the present Netanyahu government; meanwhile, the PA is already divided, leaving Abbas no authority to reach binding agreements. Recently the reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah, conducted in Cairo under Egyptian mediation, collapsed for the umpteenth time. With American assent, Abbas avoids renewing the negotiations with Israel because of its refusal to stop settlement construction, and at the same time he hardens his positions toward Hamas. For its part, Hamas demands liberty for 800 of its supporters imprisoned by the PA in the West Bank, as a condition for an agreement that will enable new presidential and parliamentary elections in January 2010.

Obama is operating on two fronts. On one he presents Netanyahu with hard choices, and on the other, he exerts enormous pressure on Hamas, demanding that it forgo armed struggle and accept the Oslo agreements. In this context we may understand the green light given by Washington to the establishment of a new Palestinian government under Salam Fayyad, whom it trusts (and whom Hamas detests). Likewise, we can understand why Washington exerts no pressure on Israel to lighten the siege of Gaza.

The intention is clear: America seeks to prevent, at all costs, a (likely) Hamas victory in the next elections. It doesn’t want to repeat the mistake of 2006, when Hamas won – and instead of moderating its positions, used the victory as a springboard for taking over Gaza and strengthening itself in the West Bank. If Hamas desires new elections, it will have to recognize the legal framework on which the PA is based. One plays by the rules or one does not play.

But Obama stands before two leaders who refuse to play by the rules. One refuses to recognize Israel, the other refuses to recognize Palestine. The first is Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas, and the second is Binyamin Netanyahu. Both would endanger their political futures by accepting the American conditions. Thus we find a strange common interest between the two, each using the other’s existence to justify non-entry into a process aimed at ending the conflict.

Obama too has a lot to lose. The Republican opposition is waiting for him to slip. But let us suppose that his plan were to work: Hamas agrees to forgo armed struggle and play by the rules, and Israel freezes construction in the settlements — what then? Now arises the question: what does Obama have in mind when he says “two states”? He has indeed proclaimed his commitment to a Palestinian state, but he is also committed — and this above all – to Israel’s security. If so, then what kind of Palestinian state are we talking about? What kind of sovereignty will it have? Will it enjoy territorial contiguity? What will be done with Jerusalem? What will be the fate of the refugees? Given America’s strategic commitments to Israel — and given Obama’s silence concerning these questions — we cannot but worry that he basically accepts the Israeli version of a Palestinian state, a version that empties it of all content.

Obama’s basic problem when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the same as his problem when it comes to America’s economic issues: he is trying to bring about far-reaching change within a failed framework. His apparent inability to go outside the box — global capitalism on the one hand, and the Oslo agreement on the other — is likely to be his nemesis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a solution within a new strategic framework. Here Israel must no longer be the dominant player, rather one among the nations of the region. It must no longer occupy the land of others, but must gain acceptance on the basis of its readiness to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors, including Palestine.

That’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

But “escalation” isn’t mere jargon. And it doesn’t just refer to what’s happening outside the United States.

“Escalation” is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad — nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper — nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “demonic suction tube,” complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he’s hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren’t already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual — a repetition compulsion of the warfare state — carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he’d decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a “Special National Security Estimate” — a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that “in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on July 7 that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: “There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan.”

Mullen’s comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come “piecemeal” — “with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

That is no longer even remotely the case. Rather fortuitously, at least as regards my current reading of the Post, Robert McNamara died yesterday. The commentary of his passing was universally focused on the war in Vietnam. According to this coverage, his identification with that war turned Mr. McNamara into a tragic figure in the Shakespearean sense of the word. It colored, so they say, his later good deeds with the World Bank’s struggle to alleviate poverty. Furthermore, it eliminated any positive changes he might have made in the Defense Department. Most importantly, the coverage wrote about McNamara’s later halting contrition for his murderous role in the Vietnam war as further proof of his tragic role in affairs of state.

Besides the fact that the World Bank is not actually involved in eliminating poverty as much as it is involved in creating it for certain segments of the world’s population, the nature of these remembrances is enough to make most of us who opposed the war in Vietnam gag. The only tragedy that I can see in McNamara’s supposed soul-searching journey for a resolution to that war that favored DC is that it lasted as long as it did, ultimately killing a couple million people. The only lesson I can see from this tragedy is to not believe well-educated architects of empire when they tell us that a war can be won. Yet, that is exactly what DC and its sycophants in the media and academia have not learned.

The proof of that last statement was found not only in a column on the Post’s editorial page the day after McNamara’s death but also in a lead editorial published by the Post’s editorial staff over the July 4th weekend. The column, written by Jim Hoaglund, talk’s about the rightness of the US war in Vietnam, but blames its ultimate failure on a combination of personal hubris and a uniquely American belief in the sheer strength of military firepower. Hoaglund ends his piece with a convoluted and self-serving statement that says, in essence, that Washington no longer makes these types of mistakes. As proof he offers George Bush’ 2007 escalation of the US war in Iraq known as the “surge.” To further convince his readers of Washington’s changed ways, Hoaglund mentions Obama’s current escalation in Afghanistan. Neither example offers much proof of Hoaglund’s case, but it is apparently enough for the Washington Post.

If you don’t believe me regarding the Post’s conclusion that Washington has cured itself of the hubris and intellectual arrogance that caused its defeat in Vietnam, let me refer you back to that July 4th weekend editorial. To be honest, I could not believe what I was reading when I first read it. So I read it again. Yes, the Post’s editors did go on record as saying that there should be no limit to the number of US troops sent to Afghanistan. The editorial continued, arguing that for the new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan to work, then the US must be prepared to send as many troops as needed. Indeed, if that number had to reach 100,000, then so be it. Mr. Obama and any other official that might reject this argument should only look at the “surge” in Iraq as to why the Pentagon should not hesitate to send more troops to Afghanistan. It seems to this reader, that if the Post’s editors had a little more sense of history and little less hubris, then they should look further back then Iraq in 2007 for proof of their argument. In fact, why not look back into 1968 in Vietnam?

The classic “outside agitators” can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh’s residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.¹ Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.² The New York Times reported: “An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).”³

In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and “educating” Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnaping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnaping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran’s currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.⁴

“I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs,” said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd.⁵

“Never believe anything until it’s officially denied,” British writer Claud Cockburn famously said.

In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that’s come along in quite a while.

So why the big international fuss over the Iranian election and street protests? There’s only one answer. The obvious one. The announced winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Washington ODE, an Officially Designated Enemy, for not sufficiently respecting the Empire and its Israeli partner-in-crime; indeed, Ahmadinejad is one of the most outspoken critics of US foreign policy in the world.

So ingrained is this ODE response built into Washington’s world view that it appears to matter not at all that Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s main opponent in the election and very much supported by the protesters, while prime minister 1981-89, bore large responsibility for the attacks on the US embassy and military barracks in Beirut in 1983, which took the lives of more than 200 Americans, and the 1988 truck bombing of a US Navy installation in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons. Remarkably, a search of US newspaper and broadcast sources shows no mention of this during the current protests.⁶ However, the Washington Post saw fit to run a story on June 27 that declared: “the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms.”

Can it be that no one in the Obama administration knows of Mousavi’s background? And do none of them know about the violent government repression on June 5 in Peru of the peaceful protests organized in response to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement? A massacre that took the lives of between 20 and 25 indigenous people in the Amazon and wounded another 100.⁷ The Obama administration was silent on the Peruvian massacre because the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, is not an ODE.

And neither is Mousavi, despite his anti-American terrorist deeds, because he’s opposed to Ahmadinejad, who competes with Hugo Chavez to be Washington’s Number One ODE. Time magazine calls Mousavi a “moderate,” and goes on to add: “It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged,” offering as much evidence as the Iranian protestors, i.e., none at all.⁸ It cannot of course be proven that the Iranian election was totally honest, but the arguments given to support the charge of fraud are not very impressive, such as the much-repeated fact that the results were announced very soon after the polls closed. For decades in various countries election results have been condemned for being withheld for many hours or days. Some kind of dishonesty must be going on behind the scenes during the long delay it was argued. So now we’re asked to believe that some kind of dishonesty must be going on because the results were released so quickly. It should be noted that the ballots listed only one electoral contest, with but four candidates.

Phil Wilayto, American peace activist and author of a book on Iran, has observed:

Ahmadinejad, himself born into rural poverty, clearly has the support of the poorer classes, especially in the countryside, where nearly half the population lives. Why? In part because he pays attention to them, makes sure they receive some benefits from the government and treats them and their religious views and traditions with respect. Mousavi, on the other hand, the son of an urban merchant, clearly appeals more to the urban middle classes, especially the college-educated youth. This being so, why would anyone be surprised that Ahmadinejad carried the vote by a clear majority? Are there now more yuppies in Iran than poor people?⁹

All of which is of course not to say that Iran is not a relatively repressive society on social and religious issues, and it’s this underlying reality which likely feeds much of the protest; indeed, many of the protesters may not even have strong views about the election per se, particularly since both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are members of the establishment, neither is any threat to the Islamic theocracy, and the election can be seen as the kind of power struggle you find in virtually every country. But that is not the issue I’m concerned with here. The issue is Washington’s long-standing goal of regime change. If the exact same electoral outcome had taken place in a country that is an ally of the United States, how much of all the accusatory news coverage and speeches would have taken place? In fact, the exact same thing did happen in a country that is an ally of the United States, three years ago when Felipe Calderon appeared to have stolen the presidential election in Mexico and there were daily large protests for more than two months; but the American and international condemnation was virtually non-existent compared to what we see today in regard to Iran.

Iranian leaders undertook a recount of a random ten per cent of ballots and recertified Ahmadinejad as the winner. How honest the recount was I have no idea, but it’s more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004.

By what standard shall we judge Barack Obama?

Many of my readers have been upset with me for my criticisms of President Obama’s policies. Following my last two reports, more than a dozen have asked to be removed from my mailing list. But if you share my view that the numerous atrocities US foreign policy is responsible for constitute the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and happiness, then I think you have to want leaders who are unambiguously opposed to America’s military adventures, because those interventions are unambiguously harmful. There’s nothing good to be said about dropping powerful bombs on crowds of innocent people, invading their land, overthrowing their government, occupying the country, breaking down the doors of the citizens, killing the father, raping the mother, traumatizing the children, torturing those opposed to all this … Barack Obama has no problem with this, if we judge him by his policies and not his rhetoric.

And neither does Al Franken, who’s about to become a Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The former Saturday Night Live comedian would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began, but he’s gone to Iraq four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers’ spirits. Why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? A happier soldier does his job better. And what’s the soldier’s job? All the charming things listed above. Doesn’t Franken know what these guys do? He criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.”¹⁰ What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation?

Franken has been lifting soldiers’ spirits for a long time. This past March he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you’ll want to see. He called his USO experience “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”¹¹ Franken has also spoken at West Point, encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Obama.

Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network:

Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken’s daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush’s version of the war, because that would undermine Air America’s laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry’s version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden’s proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. … Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks we have no choice but to … stay until we crush the insurgents. It’s a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it’s shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.¹²

I know, I know, I’m taking away all your heroes. But such people shouldn’t be your heroes. You can learn to see through the liberal, Democratic Party apologists for the empire. Only a week ago, documents released by the Nixon Library in California revealed that five days before US and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970 — which elicited widespread, angry protests in the US, resulting in the fatal shootings by the National Guard of students at Kent State University in Ohio — President Richard Nixon got approval for the invasion from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis told the president: “I will be with you. … I commend you for what you are doing.”¹³

Long live the Cold War

President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup June 28 because he was about to conduct a non-binding survey of the population, asking the question: “Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?” One of the issues that Zelaya hoped a new constitution would deal with is the limiting of the presidency to one four-year term. He also expressed the need for other constitutional changes to make it possible for him to carry out policies to improve the life of the poor; in countries like Honduras, the law is not generally crafted for that end.

At this writing it’s not clear how matters will turn out in Honduras, but the following should be noted:

The United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military’s plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It’s difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with “a frown.” The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? The response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed. It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional “golpe” bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate.

Following the coup, National Public Radio (NPR) showed once again why progressives refer to it as National Pentagon Radio. The station’s leading news anchor, Robert Siegel, interviewed Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the conservative think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies:

Siegel: “There hasn’t been a coup in Latin America for quite a while.”

Forman: “I think the last one was in 1983.”

Siegel did not correct her.¹⁴

This is ignorance of considerable degree. There was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, a coup in Haiti in 2004 that permanently overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a coup in Panama in 1989 that permanently overthrew Manuel Noriega. Is it because the US was closely involved in all three coups that they have been thrown down the Orwellian Memory Hole?

1. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 9.
2. Associated Press, June 16, 2009.
3. New York Times, June 21, 2009.
4. See Seymour Hersh, New Yorker magazine, June 29, 2008; ABC News, May 22, 2007; and Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch, June 19-21, 2009 for descriptions of some of these and other anti-Iran covert activities.
5. White House press conference, June 23, 2009.
6. The only mention is by Jeff Stein in “CQ Politics” [Congressional Quarterly], online, June 22, 2009, “according to former CIA and military officials.”
7. Center for International Policy (Washington, DC) report, June 16, 2009.
8. Time magazine, June 29, 2009, p.26.
9. AlterNet.org, June 14, 2009; Wilayto is the author of In Defense of Iran: Notes from a U.S. Peace Delegation’s Journey through the Islamic Republic.
10. Washington Post, February 16, 2004.
11. Star Tribune (Minneapolis), March 26, 2009.
12. Huffington Post, sometime in June 2005, but it may no longer be there.
13. Washington Post, June 30, 2009.
14. NPR, All Things Considered, June 29, 2009.

In a power play between President Zelaya who maneuvered (some say illegally) to push a referendum on the constitution, and a congress that sees their jobs possibly go on the line if there is a new constitution, the military played the decisive role and ousted Zelaya in the early hours of the morning on Sunday, June 28, 2009, preempting the national referendum. After producing a forged letter of resignation, supposedly from President Zelaya, president of the congress Roberto Micheletti was sworn in. From exile in Costa Rica, President Zelaya denounced the forgery and maintained that he continued to be the only legitimate president of Honduras. Meanwhile, back at Micheletti’s solemn swearing-in ceremony, the AP reported, “outside of Congress, a group of about 150 people opposed to Zelaya’s ouster stood well back from police lines and shook their fists, chanting ‘Out with the bourgeoisie!’ and ‘Traitors!’”

Venezuelan-based Telesur, however, gave a distinctly different impression of the scene. It reported at least one hundred times that many people (“at least 15,000” — there were other estimates of 20,000) were gathered in a strike and a leader of the Bloque Sindical Popular (Popular Union Block), Ángel Alvarado, was calling for a general strike the following day. On the evening after the coup, Micheletti’s government put the country under curfew enforced by the military, which also enforced a ban on all news of the golpe. Meanwhile, regional leaders and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) met in Nicaragua where Chávez recalled the similarities between what happened to him in Venezuela in April 2002 and the events in Honduras. Chávez ended his tale calling on the “golpistas” (those who carried out the coup) to surrender, while Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa demanded that they be tried for treason.

If possibility for support for the “golpistas” looked slim in Latin America, things didn’t look better up north. Indeed, what was most striking about the coup, if The Wall Street Journal can be believed, is that it appears that the new administration of President Obama was opposed to the coup even in the planning stage. Paul Kiernan and Jose de Cordoba report in The Wall Street Journal that, “the Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated bluntly that, “The action taken against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all.”

For those hoping to see a new US policy in the region, this is indeed reason to be guardedly optimistic, even more so since Zelaya is a close ally to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. This will be among the first military coups in fifty-five years of coups throughout the continent that the U.S. wouldn’t have either perpetrated or backed after the fact — the first one being the four-hour-long coup in Ecuador in January 2000, carried out by center-leftists.

The Wall Street Journal article, however, offered a hardly credible reason for the coup: “Voicing the fears that sparked the military’s action, retired Honduran Gen. Daniel López Carballo justified the move against the president, telling CNN en Español that Mr. Zelaya was a stooge for Mr. Chávez. He said that if the military hadn’t acted, Mr. Chávez would eventually be running Honduras by proxy.”

While it’s true that the most reactionary forces in the region see sinister motives behind Chavez’s generosity and do all they can to demonize the Venezuelan leader, the more obvious reason for the coup was the fact that Zelaya had called a referendum on the constitution, an act which has drawn a similar response from reactionaries in other countries in Latin America. The problems are the same: progressive leaders enter power on a wave of popular support only to find their hands bound by constitutions written by their neoliberal predecessors of the 1990s under the tutelage of Washington. The new leaders then face the choice of playing by the very limited rules of the neoliberal constitution or writing up a new charter. Even the proposal of new rules enrages the local oligarchy which, of course, was behind the neoliberal constitution in the first place, and the opposition to constitutions aimed at democratizing power has grown with each successive process.

President Hugo Chavez was the first progressive president of the region to call for a referendum on a nation’s constitution after his election. The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was written by thousands across the country and passed in popular referendum by nearly 72% of the people in a popular vote, establishing the “Fifth Republic.” Chavez then ran again for president, was re-elected with an even larger margin than before, and he now had the possibility of carrying out reforms that would have been impossible under the old, 1961 constitution of the Fourth Republic.

While the Venezuelan process was peaceful, when Rafael Correa came to power in Ecuador, his call for a constituent assembly to write the new constitution frightened the old congress, almost cost him his job and led to street battles and the cordoning off of the congress. Eventually that crisis passed, with Correa beating the old congress and a winning a new Constitution, the first in the world to guarantee the rights of Mother Earth and nature.

That mini battle in Ecuador between congressmen and police, however, was nothing compared to what nearly became a civil war in Bolivia over the proposed new constitution. The crisis, which left over 100 dead in the department of Pando, and nearly brought about the succession of the “Media Luna” departments from Bolivia, was eventually resolved and in the process set a new precedent for diplomacy in the region. For the first time in modern history a political crisis in Latin America was resolved not by the U.S. dominated OAS but by the newly formed UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) at a meeting held in Santiago, Chile presided over by the center-left President Michelle Bachelet and the notable absence of the United States, whose representatives were not invited. This was the first test of the newly formed UNASUR which had until then existed largely only on paper, and it was viewed everywhere as a great success, proving that the nations of the South American continent could resolve their own problems more effectively among themselves than under the aegis of the imperial eagle of the north. Evo returned to Bolivia with the full backing of UNASUR and nine countries of the region (including the neoliberal governments of Peru and Colombia) and eventually the “Media Luna” had to submit. The new Constitution was passed in the referendum in January of this year.

While it’s impossible to say how the coup in Honduras will play out, the new president sworn in on the day of the coup, Roberto Micheletti, may fare only a little better than the unfortunate Pedro Carmona, President-for-a-day in Venezuela (April 12-13, 2002) when Chavez was briefly overthrown. Micheletti hasn’t a single ally in Latin America, and even the Empire now seems to be resigned to the fact that military coups are a thing of the past and has turned its back on him. Elections and constitutions aimed at the transformation of nations in Latin America from “representative” to “participatory” democracy seem to be the wave of the future that even well-armed militaries will no longer be able to oppose.

The crackdown intensified five days after the June 16 demonstration of up to 2 million people in Tehran protesting the disputed re-election claim of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Offices were shut down as large numbers of workers stayed away from their jobs.

This great outpouring recalled the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran, the hated US-backed dictator. Many protesters revived the anti-Shah chant, “Down with the dictator.” Video and photos of the great mobilization inspired people around the world who support democracy and social justice, and set off alarm bells for despots in the Middle East. While the Iranian protests began over a stolen presidential election, their increasing size and intensity raises the possibility of revolutionary change in Iran and beyond.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared during Friday prayers June 19 that there would be “bloodshed and chaos” if the protests continued. “Street challenge is not acceptable,” he declared.

The basij militias, paramilitary groups that patrol the streets for supposedly un-Islamic behavior, such as immodest dress by women, made good on Khamanei’s threats, attacking supporters of reformist presidential candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi the following day.

One killing captured on video — the shooting of 21-year-old Neda Agha Soltan on June 20 — quickly came to symbolize the human toll of the vicious crackdown. But as with previous attacks, protesters fought back, even though their numbers were smaller than previous protests.

As a university professor wrote of his decision to demonstrate that day, along with students:

“After the Supreme Leader’s fierce speech at the Friday prayers, we knew that today we would be different. We feel so vulnerable, more than ever, but at the same time are aware of our power. No matter how strong it is collectively, it will do little to protect us today. We could only take our bones and flesh to the streets and expose them to batons and bullets. Two different feelings fight inside me without mixing with one another. To live or to just be alive, that’s the question.”

He added:

Here’s a true battleground. And this time, it’s huge. Columns of smoke rise to the sky. You can hardly see the asphalt. Only bricks and stones. Here, people have the upper hand. Three lanes, the middle one separated by opaque fences, under construction for the metro.

The workers have climbed up the fences and show the V [for victory] sign. They start throwing stone and timber to the street to supply the armament. I tell myself, “Look at the poor, the ones Ahmadinejad always speaks of.” But the president’s name is no longer in fashion. This time, the slogans address the leader, something unheard of in the past three decades. It’s a beautiful sunset, with rays of light penetrating evening clouds. We feel safe among people moving back forth with the anti-riot police attacks.

That day, using batons, chains, knives and occasionally bullets, the basij injured and arrested hundreds of people. Security personnel also added to the death toll among protesters, which official reports put at 19 as of June 22.

The overwhelming security presence on the street, along with violent attacks on university dormitories and arrests of prominent opposition figures, made protest increasingly difficult the following days — police even prevented a funeral service for Neda Agha Soltan.

Despite the repression, the mass movement that took shape around Mousavi’s election campaign has already been transformed into a broader fight for democracy. It will not dissipate anytime soon, whatever the intention of the candidate and his handlers.

In Tehran, protesters unable to mount street protests have taken to literally shouting from the rooftops at night to show their continued defiance. The mass demonstrations may have subsided owing to the crackdown, but the movement has not been crushed. The movement may be regrouping, but it has not disappeared.

This pressure has pushed Mousavi, a moderate former prime minister, into the unlikely role of champion for democratic reform.

A Facebook page attributed to Mousavi stated that he is “ready for martyrdom” and called on his supporters to carry out a general strike if he is arrested. And in an open letter to supporters issued June 21, Mousavi declared that, if allowed to stand, Iran’s election fraud would validate criticisms that Islam and democracy were incompatible:

If the high volume of cheating and vote manipulation that has put a fire to the foundations of people’s trust is itself introduced as the proof and evidence of the lack of fraud, the republicanism of the regime will be slaughtered and the idea of incompatibility of Islam and republicanism would be practically proven.

Such statements reflect the enormous pressure that the mass movement has put on the reformist leader. “Poor Mousavi, we took the easel away from his hands and gave him a gun,” one supporter joked to the Financial Times, in a reference to the candidate’s turn to painting while he was out of the public eye for most of the last two decades.

Yet it is far from clear that Mousavi is willing to use the “gun” of wider mobilizations and general strikes to force a recount of the stolen election or a rerun vote, let alone thoroughgoing democratic reforms. As an establishment politician and an integral member of the Iranian ruling class, he will be extremely reluctant to call forth the semi-underground labor movement that has waged intermittent strikes and protests since 2004.

Iranian reformers — like, for example, former President Mahmoud Khatami — have always oriented to educated and upper-class liberals while pursuing economic policies detrimental to workers and the poor. As a result, Ahmadinejad was able to strike a populist pose to win the 2005 presidential elections — with the help of vote fraud to get into a runoff election, which he won handily against Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric, former president and one of the richest men in Iran.

In office, Ahmadinejad was anything but a friend to the working class. He pursued policies of privatization to enrich his coterie around the national security apparatus and ruthlessly suppressed efforts at organizing independent unions. He tried to maintain popularity through a nationalist stance, defending Iran’s nuclear energy program against pressure from the West.

And in the run-up to the June 12 vote, Ahmadinejad made much-publicized handouts to the poor and bonuses for government employees to boost turnout for the election. He apparently assumed that middle-class liberals, disillusioned by Khatami’s failure to stand up to attacks on pro-democracy activists, would stay home, as they had in 2005.

By 2009, Ahmadinejad faced a challenge from both Mousavi and Rafsanjani. These former rivals (Rafsanjani had ousted Mousavi by abolishing the post of prime minister in 1989) made common cause to stop Ahmadinejad from consolidating power.

The Iranian president, with the backing of Khamenei, had systematically installed figures from the basij and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) into key positions in government and the national oil company, displacing or squeezing the big capitalists around Rafsanjani, who jealously guard that turf. Beyond personnel questions, however, Iranian capitalists are leery of Ahmadinejad’s half-baked “development” projects that used state oil revenues to consolidate his base among the poor, rather than spending the money on strategic investments.

For his part, Mousavi was seen as an ideal candidate for the power brokers around Rafsanjani as well as the reformists. Having stressed the social justice side of Islam while prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war, he can appeal to workers and the poor in a way that Rafsanjani never could. He also has credentials as a hard-liner: as prime minister, he presided over the execution of as many as 5,000 political prisoners.

Nowadays, though, Mousavi portrays himself as a liberal by championing the rights of women and national minorities, an effort that helped revived an interest in politics among Khatami’s voters.

Mousavi’s support, which surged into the streets of Tehran and other cities in the days before the election, forced Ahmadinejad to resort to massive vote fraud to claim victory.

According to a study by the British think tank Chatham House, the number of votes cast in the provinces of Mazandaran and Yazd exceeds the total number of eligible voters. The authors estimate that if Ahmadinejad really won 62 percent of the vote claimed by the authorities, he would have had to won the votes of all new voters, all the votes of his last centrist rival, plus 44 percent of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005. This is so unlikely as to be absurd.

As the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, said on television June 20, “A majority of people are of the opinion that the actual election results are different from what was officially announced,” adding, “Although the Guardian Council is made up of religious individuals, I wish certain members would not side with a certain presidential candidate.”

As popular pressure mounted, the head of the 12-member Guardian Council, the body of clerics that approves election candidates, issued a surprising report June 22 that votes supposedly cast in more than 50 Iranian cities were actually higher than the number of eligible voters.

The Guardian Council’s announcement contradicts the earlier claim by Khamenei that Ahmadinejad had won a “definitive victory,” and marks a retreat from the council’s earlier position that it would only review 10 percent of the ballots.

Now there are even doubts that the council will uphold the election results when it makes its final ruling in the coming days. This vacillation partly reflects the influence of Rafsanjani, one of the most powerful members of the Guardian Council. But if the council reverses course and annuls the election or orders a recall, it will be because the clerics fear a revolutionary upsurge. Having hijacked a workers’ revolution to take power 30 years ago, the clerics understand full well the risks they face.

At the same time, Rafsanjani is rumored to be trying to assemble an emergency meeting of the 86-member Council of Experts, which chooses Iran’s supreme leader. The apparent aim is to remove Khamenei from power, which would decisively weaken Ahmadinejad as well.

Adding fuel to the fire is Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the country’s senior cleric, who endorsed protests to “claim rights.” According to religious criteria, Montazeri should have been the successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding leader of the Islamic Republic in 1979, but was shoved aside and later placed under house arrest for several years.

In short, the competing factions of the Iranian ruling class are hesitating before they make irrevocable choices that could shatter the Islamist regime.

For Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, the question is whether a crackdown would succeed in drowning resistance in blood, or provoke a wider revolutionary challenge to their rule. For Mousavi and Rafsanjani, the choice is whether to accept a humiliating deal that would greatly diminish their power, or encourage the rebellion, and try to ride it to victory.

Meanwhile, the potential for far broader struggle for democracy is apparent. The Tehran bus drivers’ union, which has fought to improve wages and conditions, despite the beatings and arrests of union leaders, issued this statement June 20:

The fact that the demands of the vast majority of Iranian society go far beyond those of unions is obvious to all, and in the previous years, we have emphasized that until the principle of the freedom to organize and to elect is not materialized, any talk of social freedom and labor union rights will be a farce.

Given these facts, the Autobus Workers Union places itself alongside all those who are offering themselves in the struggle to build a free and independent civic society. The union condemns any kind of suppression and threats.

To recognize labor union and social rights in Iran, the international labor organizations have declared the Fifth of Tir (June 26) the international day of support for imprisoned Iranian workers as well as for the institution of unions in Iran. We want that this day be viewed as more than a day for the demands of labor unions to make it a day for human rights in Iran and to ask all our fellow workers to struggle for the trampled rights of the majority of the people of Iran.

With hope for the spread of justice and freedom,
Autobus Workers Union

It’s impossible to predict the next turn of events in Iran. But what is clear is that the struggles of the Iranian working class — not the maneuvers at the top of society — are the key to taking the movement forward.

By covering up the most damaging facts surrounding the incident, the rewritten public version of report succeeded in avoiding media stories on the contradiction between the report and the previous arguments made by the U.S. command.

The declassified “executive summary” of the report on the bombing issued last Friday admitted that mistakes had been made in the use of airpower in that incident. However, it omitted key details which would have revealed the self-serving character of the U.S. command’s previous claims blaming the “Taliban” — the term used for all insurgents fighting U.S. forces — for the civilian deaths from the airstrikes.

The report reasserted the previous claim by the U.S. command that only about 26 civilians had been killed in the U.S. bombing on that day, despite well-documented reports by the government and by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission that between 97 and 147 people were killed.

The report gave no explanation for continuing to assert such a figure, and virtually admitted that it is not a serious claim by also suggesting that the actual number of civilian deaths in the incident “may never be known”.

The report also claimed that “at least 78 Taliban fighters” were killed. The independent human rights organization had said in its May 26 report that at most 25 to 30 insurgents had been killed, though not necessarily in the airstrike.

A closer reading of the paragraph in the report on Taliban casualties reveals, however, that the number does not actually refer to deaths from the airstrike at all. The paragraph refers twice to “the engagement” as well as to “the fighting” and “the firefight”, indicating that the vast majority of the Taliban who died were all killed in ground fighting, not by the U.S. airstrike.

An analysis of the report’s detailed descriptions of the three separate airstrikes also shows that the details in question could not have been omitted except by a deliberate decision to cover up the most damaging facts about the incident.

The “executive summary” states that the decision to call in all three airstrikes in Balabolook district on May 4 was based on two pieces of “intelligence” available to the ground commander, an unidentified commander of a special operations forces unit from the U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC).

One piece of intelligence is said to have been an intercepted statement by a Taliban commander to his fighters to “mass to maneuver and re-attack” the Afghan and U.S. forces on the scene. The other was visual sighting of the movement of groups of adults moving at intervals in the dark away from the scene of the firefight with U.S. forces.

A number of insurgents were said by the report to have been killed in a mosque that was targeted in the first of the three strikes. The “absence of local efforts to attempt to recover bodies from the rubble in a timely manner”, the following morning, according to the report, indicates that the bodies were all insurgent fighters, not civilians.

But the report indicates that the airstrikes referred to as the “second B1-B strike” and the “third B-1B strike” caused virtually all of the civilian deaths. The report’s treatment of those two strikes is notable primarily for what it omits with regard to information on casualties rather than for what it includes.

It indicates that the ground force commander judged the movement of a “second large group” — again at night without clear identification of whether they were military or civilian — indicated that they were “enemy fighters massing and rearming to attack friendly forces” and directed the bombing of a target to which they had moved.

The report reveals that two 500-pound bombs and two 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the target, not only destroying the building being targeted but three other nearby houses as well.

In contrast to the report’s claim regarding the earlier strike, the description of the second airstrike admits that the “destruction may have resulted in civilian casualties”. Even more important, however, it says nothing about any evidence that there were Taliban fighters killed in the strike — thus tacitly admitting that the casualties were in fact civilians.

The third strike is also described as having been prompted by another decision by the ground commander that a third group moving in the dark away from the firefight was “another Taliban element.” A single 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on a building to which the group had been tracked, again heavily damaging a second house nearby.

Again the report offers no evidence suggesting that there were any “Taliban” killed in the strike, in contrast to the first airstrike.

By these signal omissions, aimed at avoiding the most damaging facts in the incident, the report confirms that no insurgent fighters were killed in the airstrikes that killed very large numbers of civilians. The report thus belies a key propaganda line that the U.S. command had maintained from the beginning — that the Taliban had deliberately prevented people from moving from their houses so that civilian casualties would be maximized.

As recently as Jun. 3, the spokesperson for the U.S. command in Afghanistan, Lt. Commander Christine Sidenstricker, was still telling the website Danger Room that “civilians were killed because the Taliban deliberately caused it to happen” and that the “Taliban” had “forced civilians to remain in places they were attacking from.”

The central contradiction between the report and the U.S. military’s “human shields” argument was allowed to pass unnoticed in the extremely low-key news media coverage of the report.

News coverage of the report has focused either on the official estimate of only 26 civilian deaths and the much larger number of Taliban casualties or on the absence of blame on the part of U.S. military personnel found by the investigators.

The Associated Press reported that the United States had “accidentally killed an estimated 26 Afghan civilians last month when a warplane did not strictly adhere to rules for bombing.”

The New York Times led with the fact that the investigation had called for “additional training” of U.S. air crews and ground forces but did hold any personnel “culpable” for failing to follow the existing rules of engagement.

None of the news media reporting on the highly expurgated version of the investigation pointed out that it had confirmed, in effect, the version of the event that had been put forward by residents of the bombed villages.

As reported by The New York Times on May 6, one of the residents interviewed by phone said six houses had been completely destroyed and that the victims of the bombing “were rushing to go to their relative’s houses where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way.”

As if that weren’t enough, I’m reading how some 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed and over 50 injured in three drone attacks within 12 hours in Lataka, South Waziristan.

The first strike killed several suspected Taliban. Later, a second drone fired three missiles into a crowd of funeral mourners.

One of the wounded commented: “If the Taliban are bombing the mosques and America is bombing the funerals, what is the difference between them? We are stuck between Taliban and US attacks and when we are killed, not only no one cries for us, but also we are dubbed militants.”

Since August 2008, over 40 US drone strikes have killed at least 410 people. US troops in neighboring Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy unmanned drones in the region.

The use of armed drones is a particularly cowardly form of warfare. These lethal “assets” are computer-controlled from the comfort and safety of an armchair a hundred miles away and guided by dodgy “intelligence”. Or, if the truth be known, no intelligence at all. The Israelis use them extensively in Gaza to unleash death and destruction on civilian targets by remote control. Engines for Israeli drones are believed to be supplied by a British manufacturer, although the government here pretends not to know the truth of the matter.

This trend in ’sofa slaughter’ has many variations. For example, during the 40-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002 the Israeli Occupation Force set up huge cranes on which were mounted robotic machine guns under video control. Eight defenders, including the bell-ringer, were murdered, some by the robotic guns and some by snipers.

The US and its allies are just as callous in their treatment of civilian prisoners. The British authorities deal with their casual killings by offering £4,500 in compensation, showing how cheaply we value the life of ‘Johnny Foreigner’. And when it comes to prisoner abuse the Israelis, whose every cruel excess the West defends, don’t even spare children, according to various reports.

Something very chilling can take hold of uniformed thugs — I won’t call them soldiers because what many of them do is not proper soldiering — in a war zone; and in the days before high-tech weaponry like drones and robotic machine guns they happily indulged their blood-lust by murdering civilians at close quarters. If you haven’t heard of the My Lai massacre, brace yourself.

In 1968, 150 men of Charlie Company, a US infantry unit, were sent on a ‘search and destroy’ mission into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Four hours later more than 500 civilians — unarmed women, children and old men — were dead. Charlie Company hadn’t encountered a single Viet Cong. Nevertheless the unit, led by Lt. William Calley, rounded up villagers and machine-gunned them until the dead lay five-deep.

When Calley spotted a baby crawling away, he grabbed her, threw her back into the ditch, and opened fire again.

Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, flying over the area, was so sickened by what he saw that he landed his machine to shield villagers from the troops and began rescuing survivors. He ordered his gunner to open up on any American soldiers who continued to shoot civilians.

Some of the dead were mutilated by having “C Company” carved into their chests; some were disemboweled.

Official reports said the My Lai operation was a stunning combat victory, and General Westmoreland congratulated the men on their bravery.

The American people didn’t learn the truth until 18 months later . . . and then only because a Vietnam veteran, after hearing about the incident from friends who had served in Charlie Company, wrote a letter to his congressman and other prominent officials, including President Nixon.

An army photographer produced pictures of the carnage. Then freelance reporter Seymour Hersh managed to interview Calley and splashed the story over the front pages of American newspapers.

26 members of C Company were charged with criminal behavior but not convicted. Calley himself was eventually court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving just three days he was moved to a comfortable apartment under house arrest, on Nixon’s orders. He was paroled three years later.

Hersh said that many in Charlie Company “had given in to an easy pattern of violence” and were totally blind to the humanity of the Vietnamese people. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

My Lai was one of many atrocities committed in Korea and Vietnam. Military training in those days set out to dehumanize not only the enemy but the local civilian population as well. Army culture encouraged its so-called soldiers to think they could treat them like garbage.

Has anything changed? The conduct of the Americans and their close buddies the Israelis is remarkably similar. They are the pacesetters (though not the only practitioners) in savagery and the casual art of killing Johnny Foreigner. It is now done at arm’s length — by remote video control or at the end of a sniper’s scope-sight or by DU tank shell, or from 35,000 feet. No need to personally check the situation on the ground, or look your unarmed victim in the eye, or get your hands dirty. No need to count the bodies afterwards or clear up the shredded and vaporized remains.

Apparently these high-tech killers, their commanders and their political masters have convinced themselves that everyone they don’t like is sub-human.

I’m reminded of a blistering attack by a church minister in Oklahoma after the shock-and-awe onslaught on Iraq, the point at which he discovered that his faith had been hijacked by fundamentalists who claimed to speak for Jesus but whose actions were anything but Christian.

“When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral,” he said.

”When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head, you are doing something immoral.

”When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

”When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral.

“We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

But since you already know that, let’s talk about what we don’t know, or at least what we claim we didn’t. For example, that Obama is pro-war. Because progressives everywhere have their hands over their mouth in shock. We talk of betrayal and defection. Joshua Frank summed up the progressive problem pithily: “These are Obama’s wars now.” The only real problem with this statement is that they have always been Obama’s wars: His opposition to the Iraq war, despite the flowers trailing from it and the flowers we wove onto those, was merely tactical; in his support for the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan he didn’t even bother with flowers — it was so much ‘bring it on.’ As for the broader picture, Obama’s so-called noble rhetoric is of the ‘kinder, gentler imperialism’ strain; nowhere does he fundamentally question the right of the United States to rule the world economy, practice abject self-interestedness, and maintain a global military presence. His “peace” rhetoric is tinkering rhetoric, oiled with calls for diplomacy and schlocky hope-hope-hurrah expressly employed to make us feel good about doing what we have always done.

And the Democratic Party fares even worse. As Lance Selfa reminds us in The Democrats: A Critical History, Democratic presidents and majorities provoked or presided over every war of the 21st century, dropped The Bomb, pushed us to the brink of nuclear holocaust, expanded the defense budget, reinvented intervention, and routinely updated hyper-capitalism to suit the times, all while receiving fast cash and faster demands from the architects of oligarchy. Even their great and ‘progressive’ offerings of the ‘30s and ‘60s were careful concessions to an increasingly militant opposition — confection concessions, candy to stop the revolution. (If you give a mouse a cookie, you’ll probably ask him for some milk. Oh, and he will probably vote for you anyway.) In other words, the Democrats are not just the Hypo-crats, as we in our bravest moments dare to call them. Their abdications are not accidents but necessities performed in the hallowed name of something both parties are happy to agree on: American empire. Their peace postures and bully-pulpit bravado are affectations in the elaborate act of decoy democracy, where The Enemy does its dirty deeds and Our Friends make sure it’s done dirt chic, in the way our consciences prefer it.

But you have heard all this before. And that is why I want to talk about something else — why I won’t bore you further with howling at the liberal moon but will, rather, treat the Democrats’ ‘shocking’ abdication as a metaphor for what is wrong with our political system. You see, I had to give you the same old intro in order to ask the right question: Why are we so surprised?

Because we all are, or pretend we are. Progressive denizens and policy wonks, people who get up at 5am to watch C-Span and pore over the latest bills, are going on television and trotting out the same oh-me-oh-my’s that they trotted out for the Wall Street bailouts, telecom immunity, ‘market-reform’ healthcare and the preservation of the state secrets doctrine. And if you have had the grave misfortune of owning a television in the last fifty years, you have also had the grave misfortune of hearing all this a thousand times per decade. It is as if progressives all got together in the 1950s with an unbelievably bad screenwriter and signed their lives over to movie rights, memorized the script: “Now remember, everybody. Anytime something goes terribly wrong and you are part of it, I will pan in on you. That’s where you wring your hands and say, cloyingly, ‘How could this happen? Here, in the United States of America!”

Of course, the script has been updated for modern viewers. You know the drill. If you are going to criticize Obama, remember to use the word disappointed. If you can, pair it with a comprehensive pronoun-phrase. As in: “All of us here in the progressive movement are shocked and terribly disappointed that Obama . . .” Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Be shocked. Almost personally wounded. Demonstrate a willful amnesia about United States political history, and, more importantly, all of last election season.

But wait! You are about to lose your movement (for this is what you call your rag-tag, internet-fundraising, grassroots-is-the-new-Tammany e-mail list)! Get people’s attention back with homage to the ‘party of the people’ and their great ‘contributions to social justice.’ Pick a Republican, any Republican, and ridicule their backwater view of the world. Forget to mention that they are voting against the war in bigger numbers than Democrats. Say the word neo-con and pause for people to shiver. Pause again for people to congratulate themselves on not being neo-cons (those scheming backwater hicks!).

Now lower the boom. We (the progressives) are not going to get what we want this year. We don’t have the ______. (You will need to improvise on this one; it used to be votes, but you can’t use that anymore. Just don’t say backbone.) Reassure people that they are still the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, what-have-you. And they are powerful. After all, they elected the first Black president, the peace president, the community organizer, the …! (Stop before you faint on national television.)

Regain your composure and give your darling listeners the Greatest Compliment of All. Tell them that they are realistic. Oh, but they are savvy! They know what is possible. Say the phrase “from the inside out” and talk about “pushing the Democratic party to the left.” Perform a mini-monologue on the virtue of incremental gains. Now you have most everybody drooling the same scripted drool. And for those pesky skeptics, a dash of manipulation. Remind them of the Dark Ages of Bush: how bad it was, what an utter departure it surely was from the benevolent policies of yester-empire, how fluke-ish and shockingly-sad-making it all was. Ask them if they want that to happen again. Stare into the camera. Well, do you? Do you?!? Good. Then don’t desert. Don’t leave your party now. And for heaven’s sake, don’t push too hard or you will ruin everything we have ever worked for!!

All that remains now is a brief comparison myth and a rallying cliché. The myth is up to you, but some popular ones include comparing the Obama Epoch to the civil rights era (say it worked and succeeded in whatever way suits your current purpose); FDR (who in the rosy glow of retrospect is a radical); Lincoln (who counsels Obama nightly about Total Altruism and Opposing Injustice as a Crime Against Humanity); or JFK (who’s too good-looking not to bring up!); all culminating in a gushing discussion on Michelle Obama’s wardrobe (which is just lovely and somehow represents a Great Stride Forward in some inexpressible way) and a shining statement about us being so glad to have a president who can speak in full sentences (apparently this is something to gush about). Do not mention Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Eugene Debs, the Wobblies, or Emma Goldman, except to express a vague disdain (the most powerful argument) that makes their supporters look naïve or monstrous. We can’t have The People knowing how history actually works.

You have probably gotten too sentimental, so now is the time to restore your credibility while galvanizing the troops. The promised cliché. Say: “Now we all know Obama isn’t perfect (pause for people to feel a warm rush of self-satisfaction at having realized this), but no one is!” Argue that politicians are not like people and shouldn’t have to be. They can be immoral, ruthless, absurd, cold-blooded, insecure. It is naïve to expect otherwise. It is the people’s job to be moral! And that is why — drum-roll please — “We have to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, to make sure he does the right thing.”

Deliver this metaphor like you are the first person to have ever thought of it. If it helps, put a silent ‘Hey!’ in front of it in your mind, as in ‘Hey! Wow! I just thought of this, guys. We should, like, not rest and stuff and like, hold Obama’s feet to the fire. He-ey! Yeah, that’s it!’ Say it like the stoned guy at the college party who wants everyone to know how profound it is to have, like, a hand. Whoa. Under no circumstances should you stray from the accepted metaphor. It is the Party’s darling, concocted in basement PR laboratories on Capitol Hill, tested on college idealists who are too young and dazzled to know better, rolled out officially at the national convention.

You are done! Done feeding history into the maw of media and myth! Smile frigidly as they thank you and pan out: “That was so-and-so so-and-so of MoveOn.org…”

That is the disturbing aspect of a cultural script. It is the poltergeist haunting a democracy that thinks it has mastered free speech. It asks: How did everyone, every free-to-think person, end up saying the exact same falsehoods? Which leads us back, of course, to the question that gets at the meaning of democracy failure: Why does everyone have such vested interests in acting surprised?

The short answer is this: we are invested in acting surprised because politics is not about truth, but prestige. If that seems a naïve criticism, I am only taking the Parties and high school civics class at their words, and their words have been employed in the colossal effort to establish that politics is a truth project, or at very least an ethics project, in which people get together to battle over what is true and what is right — a project in which somebody can prevail (because, we are promised, they were true or right). The Democrats particularly love to disseminate this notion of politics, especially if they can cast themselves in the underdog role of unveiling that truth and fighting for that right. The entire Bush era is supposed to be a testament to the Democrat’s unflagging love of truth and justice. They stopped at nothing, the story goes, to unveil the misdeeds of the dastardly neo-cons and to get America its reputation back.

Of course, those eight years were loaded with hand wringing and histrionic surprise (here, in America!). Nobody pointed out the obvious: that this surprise and indignation could only exist in an America that had slavishly created a myth of original innocence (America does not torture!) that it could return to, a history of ‘good wars’ fought for the ‘right reasons’ and Camelots interrupted by tragedy. And nobody took that reasoning further and found, at the bottom of it, a two-party system that depends for its very survival on manufacturing domestic polarities — good and bad, truth and falsehood, enemy and friend—so that one party could dutifully assume the former and the other the latter while getting the real business of empire done together.

The Bush years were not years of great oppositional truth seeking, least of all on the part of the Democrats. The Bush years represented the public briefly confronting the culmination of an otherwise unquestioned logic that was we were distracted from by gestures of outrage. The Democrats responded the way they were supposed to: with shock at the excesses of empire merely. They were rewarded for this shock with the Democrats’ ready-made self-remuneration: a feeling of singular intelligence, a deep sense of welling conscience that was better — and this was the important part — than the idiocy of Republicans and the ruthlessness of Republican politics. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It assured both politicians and people that they were free from the impurities that tainted the Other Party. And, since that is the psychological reason the vast majority of people get involved in politics, it served a convenient purpose: it gave people a sense of prestige and respectability that made it infinitely easier for the Democrats to do terrible things without being criticized for them. Indeed, it had become almost impossible to criticize at all. By equating people’s sense of truth and right with a ‘better’ party, and then pairing that again with a sense of intelligence and prestige, the Democrats (and the grateful Republicans) made it so that people could not criticize American empire without impugning their intelligence and prestige. Bingo. In a subtle-simple sleight of hand, democracy became reputation and truth became allegiance.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the media, where liberal bloggers and late-night talk show host had made their fortunes and reputations as dogged detractors of the Bush regime. But when it came to the exact same regime under a new head, the bloggers and comedians cowered. The same organizations who used to send you emails about Evil Bush’s Evil Wars are now writing very different alerts: ‘Help Obama!’ they say. ‘Help Obama end the war in Iraq, push through the public healthcare option.’ No matter that Obama is committed to the war in Iraq and enthusiastically supports market healthcare ‘reform.’ It is as if, somehow, we weren’t looking at the same deaths, the same logic, the same poverty or the same injustice. Or, at least, it is increasingly evident that this was not the issue. If it were, we would be chanting the same chants and writing with the same acid pens. But for the vast majority of politicians and people, it is obvious that justice, so called, is neither the point nor the goal. The goal is myth and a sense of prestige. The goal is to curb the excesses that make us confront our deepest hypocrisies: that our sense of justice is demarcated by our desire for comfort, that we invented a ‘truth project’ to keep us safe from truth, that we mythologize the past to safeguard national solipsism, that political truth is a function of political loyalty and that prestige is more important than ethics.

We are invested in surprise because it allows us to continue believing that what we want is political truth, which we want, in turn, for the sake of political justice. The reality, however, is evidenced by the war funding bill: anti-war Democrats beating the war drum in the name of loyalty to ‘anti-war’ Obama.

So we have come full-circle: an ostensibly anti-war President (a lie) appeals to an ostensibly anti-war party (another lie) to pass a war bill that causes ostensibly anti-war activists to feign shock, which somehow increases the sentiment that the Republicans (who largely voted against the bill) are the sponsor of all political evil. This strangulated logic is our latest and prettiest consequence of believing in parties more than principles. But more than that, it is the consequence of rejecting in the name of realism what we trumpet rhetorically: that politics can be about truth.

I am writing to reject this realism, and refuse to call this rejection naive. I reject it knowing that this is not an issue of Democrats or Republicans — that any party will sacrifice truth for its own preservation. I reject it because believing that it is realistic to believe in amoral politicians and sociopathic self-interest on a public scale while rejecting amorality and sociopathy on an individual scale has bred more blood and disaster than any other philosophy I can think of. To protect this mad logic with the myth that we have prevailed — that justice has been won — makes it even more certain that wars will continue and Congresses will continue to fund them.

Conversely, if we believed that people were the same as politicians — that people were the politicians — if we believed that we could expect and demand that these politicians (us, or other versions of us) act like we would, and for the reasons we would, it would be very difficult to accept a party system where truth was reducible to a loyalty that was itself reducible to the belief that there is a difference between the political and the personal. I believe in this idea, not as something idealistic, but as the beginning of an abiding realism that could actually shake things up.

And if not? Okay, then. But let’s stop with the Theatre of the False Surprise.

The huge demonstrations of the first week reflected lack of confidence in Iran’s electoral system, not merely because the regime can easily fabricate the result, but also because, at base, this system is far from reflecting the will of the people. Political parties are outlawed, so the choice is among personalities. In order to prevent the election of anyone who is anti-regime, every candidate must be approved by the “Committee for Preservation of the Constitution,” whose task is to ensure fidelity to Islamic rule.

Among 475 initial candidates this time (including 42 women), only three men were permitted to challenge the incumbent. Thus anyone who wanted to depose Ahmadinejad had to vote for one of these. As it turned out, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had been prime minister under the Ayatollah Khomeini, garnered support from most of those who were fed up with Ahmadinejad and his patron, the supreme religious authority in Iran, Ali Khamenei.

What caused hundreds of thousands to pour into the streets and risk their lives? How did it happen that the Supreme Authority lost his authority? Iran is an enormous exporter of oil, like several other third-world nations, and its economic situation is no better than theirs. It is no accident that the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, came out in support of Ahmadinejad. Both countries produce oil; both suffer from chronic unemployment, rising inflation and poverty that cries to the heavens. Chavez is the idol of the masses. Ahmadinejad too, by his way of dressing and talking, his anti-imperialist positions and his relentless enmity toward the US and Israel, presents himself as a revolutionary and a friend to the poor.

It seems, however, that many Iranians remain unimpressed by Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric. More than anything, they are troubled by the suppression of human freedoms, the cruel subjugation of women, and the imposition of Islamic fundamentalism as a way of life. If we add the economic backwardness of Iran and the religious bureaucracy’s control of its oil revenues, we get a ticking bomb. When the regime uses terror against the Iranian people, this will only speed the moment of explosion.

For the fact is that thirty years since the ousting of the Shah, the Iranian Islamic Republic has not succeeded in providing its people with a decent life. Ahmadinejad plumes himself with the feathers of the poor, but the location of those who vote for him shows Iran’s failure to propel its society beyond the poverty line. According to the meager information we have, it was the urban population — the focus of economic and cultural power in every modern society — that voted against Ahmadinejad. The poor, living in remote villages throughout the country, may form the electoral majority, but their contribution toward building the society is small. What’s more, where there is no freedom of assembly and the regime is all-powerful, nothing is easier than to buy the loyalty of those who live on charity.

The Iranian protest movement is not a foreign import. Nor does it resemble elitist, reactionary protest movements like the orange revolution in Ukraine. Iran’s green movement reflects an authentic will to change an oppressive regime that has impeded the country’s economic, social and cultural development. But this movement has a problem. It lacks leadership. Mousavi has been a channel, to be sure, for expressing revulsion from the regime, but he cannot encompass the unorganized currents that have now begun to flow. For this reason the regime will succeed, temporarily, in suppressing the demonstrations and imposing its will on the people.

Yet the green movement will prove to be a landmark. The division within the regime between the reformists and the conservatives did not first emerge as a result of the demonstrations: rather, it made them possible. That division has existed ever since the death of Khomeini in 1989. It was expressed in the election of reformist candidate Muhammad Khatami to two terms, from 1997 until 2005. But Khatami disappointed his constituents. Against the determined opposition of the Supreme Authority, Ali Khamenei, he failed to implement the reforms he’d promised: to eliminate corruption and bring more democracy.

Within the religious establishment there is division between Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s wealthiest persons, who is considered an important religious authority. Rafsanjani is influenced by the disappointment of the people, especially the urban middle class. By continuing to alienate them, he knows, Khamenei courts disaster. Rafsanjani holds that the government must express the will of the classes that constitute the society’s economic and cultural base. The conservatives, on the other hand, see any departure from religious law as dangerously corrosive.

All the democratic forces in Iran, including the Communist Party (which is underground), called on the people to support Mousavi in the recent elections. They accurately gauged the mood of the masses: that behind Mousavi a broad movement has gathered, whose strategic aim is to topple the totalitarian regime. This internal division opens a new horizon for the Iranian people after thirty years of arrests and assassinations directed against the leaders and parties that deposed the Shah. Iranians may hope at last to rebuild their parties and trade unions toward the creation of a democratic Iran.

The hesitant support of US President Barack Obama, the cynical pronouncements of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu (who broadcasts his shock at the firing on protesters in far-off Tehran but never in nearby Bil’in), the crocodile tears of the Shah’s son in Washington – need not mislead us. The Iranian people have no wish to sit again on Uncle Sam’s lap, lining up against the Arab world. The Iranian people have no wish to exchange the present dictator for a new Shah. The Iranian opposition knows what colonialism means. It sees what goes on in the occupied Palestinian territories. It sees what globalization has wrought among the peoples of the world. It will not move backward. Its whole will is to bring the Iranians, schooled in struggle and disappointment, as a free people into the family of peoples.

The revolution of 1979 against the Shah was never intended to usher in a Shiite dictatorship, but the Ayatollahs co-opted it. The lesson has been learned, and the new Iranian movement will know how to guard basic rights and freedoms.

There is a direct connection between what is happening in Iran and what is happening in the US. Until recently, who dreamed that Americans would elect an Afro-American president? The Obama Effect reverberates through the Middle East. He has overthrown the Bush policy, which created abysmal hatred against America — a hatred well exploited by the Iranian regime and its allies.

We should bear in mind, though, that Obama was not elected to make peace in our region, rather to rescue America from the worst economic crisis in eighty years. The American people seek liberation from the free-market fundamentalism of the neo-cons, while the Iranian people seek liberation from religious fundamentalism. The concurrence of these two movements is no coincidence. One process feeds the other and is fed in return. George W. Bush used Iran to frighten Americans, while Ahmadinejad used Bush’s America to strengthen his hold on Iranians. Now both societies have exhausted their political-economic systems. Obama’s election expresses the American will for change, and the outcome of the Iranian election brings hundreds of thousands into the streets. In America the crisis is more purely economic. In Iran it is political and economic. Yet these two very different processes, in two very different societies, belong nonetheless to the same historical moment: it is a moment of systemic change, with societies converging toward democracy and social justice.

The events in Iran are not foreign imports, just as the events in America are anchored in deep internal change. The world is going through a process that will alter an entire system, where predatory capitalism has lived in friction with an Islamic fundamentalism bent on correcting “the evils of the West.” It is not just the free-market system that has reached a dead end. The Islamic “resistance” too has exhausted itself, in Lebanon and Palestine as well as Iran. Events in Iran send shock waves through all the Arab regimes that deny basic rights to their citizens. Iranian women are an example for Arab women, and Iranian workers are an example for Arab workers whose right to form unions is denied. This is the real “Iranian bomb.” Israel must fear it, and America too — for Obama is counting on the old alliances with Arab dictators. The development of this “bomb” will take time, no doubt, but Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Tzippi Livni ought to read the writing on the wall: the years of the Occupation are numbered; it will become increasingly anachronistic as Arab masses take to the streets, challenging their regimes in the name of democracy and human rights. Thirty years ago the Iranian revolution changed the face of the Middle East toward fundamentalism. Today, on the streets of Tehran, appear the first glimmers of real democracy.

The past 15 years have produced the cash-for-questions racket, the Hinduja and Ecclestone affairs, the lies and fabrications which led to the invasion of Iraq, the forced abandonment of the BAE corruption probe, the cash-for-honors caper and the cash-for-amendments scandal. By comparison to the outright subversion of the functions of government in some of these cases, the expenses scandal is small beer. Any one of them should have prompted the sweeping political reforms we are now debating. But they didn’t.

The expenses scandal, by contrast, could kill the Labour party. It might also force politicians of all parties to address our unjust voting system, the unelected House of Lords, the excessive power of the executive, the legalized blackmail used by the whips and a score of further anachronisms and injustices. Why is it different?

I believe that the current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less to do with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations. For the past 300 years, the revolutions and reforms experienced by almost all other developed countries have been averted in Britain by foreign remittances.

The social unrest which might have transformed our politics was instead outsourced to our colonies and unwilling trading partners. The rebellions in Ireland, India, China, the Caribbean, Egypt, South Africa, Malaya, Kenya, Iran and other places we subjugated were the price of political peace in Britain. Following decolonization, our plunder of other nations was sustained by the banks. Now, for the first time in three centuries, they can no longer deliver, and we must at last confront our problems.

There will probably never be a full account of the robbery this country organized, but there are a few snapshots. In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, “has not only been a major factor in India’s impoverishment . . . it has also been a very significant factor in the Industrial Revolution in Britain.”(1) As Ralph Davis observes in The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, from the 1760s onwards India’s wealth “bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others . . . leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793.”

In France, by contrast, as Eric Hobsbawn notes in The Age of Revolution, “the financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head.” In 1788, half of France’s national expenditure was used to service its debt: “the American War and its debt broke the back of the monarchy.”

Even as the French were overthrowing the ancien regime, Britain’s landed classes were able to strengthen their economic power, seizing common property from the country’s poor by means of enclosure. Partly as a result of remittances from India and the Caribbean, the economy was booming and the state had the funds to ride out political crises. Later, after smashing India’s own industrial capacity, Britain forced that country to become a major export market for our manufactured goods, sustaining industrial employment here (and avoiding social unrest) long after our products and processes became uncompetitive.

Colonial plunder permitted the British state to balance its resource deficits as well. For some 200 years a river of food flowed into this country from places like Ireland, India and the Caribbean. In The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger reveals that in 1748 Jamaica alone sent 17,400 tons of sugar to Britain; by 1815 this had risen to 73,800 tons. It was all produced by stolen labour.

Just as grain was sucked out of Ireland at the height of its great famine, so Britain continued to drain India of food during its catastrophic hungers. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows that Indian wheat exports to the UK doubled between 1876 and 1877 as subsistence there collapsed. Several million Indians died of starvation. In the North Western provinces the famine was wholly engineered by British policy, as their surplus production was exported to offset poor English harvests in 1876 and 1877.

Britain, in other words, outsourced famine as well as social unrest. There was terrible poverty in this country in the second half of the 19th Century, but not mass starvation. The bad harvest of 1788 helped precipitate the French Revolution, but the British state avoided such hazards. Others died on our behalf.

In the late 19th Century, Davis shows, Britain’s vast deficits with the United States, Germany and its white Dominions were balanced by huge annual surpluses with India and (as a result of the opium trade) China. For a generation “the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries . . . braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily co-exist with its relative industrial decline.”Britain’s trade surpluses with India allowed the City to become the world’s financial capital.

Its role in British colonization was not a passive one. The bankruptcy and subsequent British takeover of Egypt in 1882 was hastened by a loan from Rothschild’s bank whose execution, Newsinger records, amounted to “fraud on a massive scale.” Jardine Matheson, once the biggest narco-trafficking outfit in world history (it dominated the Chinese opium trade), later formed a major investment bank, Jardine Fleming. It was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2000.

We lost our colonies, but the plunder has continued by other means. As Joseph Stiglitz shows in Globalization and its Discontents, the capital liberalization forced on Asian economies by the IMF permitted northern traders to loot hundreds of billions of dollars, precipitating the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Poorer nations have also been strong-armed into a series of amazingly one-sided treaties and commitments, such as Trade Related Investment Measures, bilateral investment agreements and the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements. If you have ever wondered how a small, densely-populated country which produces very little supports itself, I would urge you to study these asymmetric arrangements.

But now, as John Lanchester demonstrates in his fascinating essay in the London Review of Books, the City could be fatally wounded. The nation which relied on financial services may take generations to recover from their collapse. The great British adventure — three centuries spent pillaging the labor, wealth and resources of other countries — is over. We cannot accept this, and seek gleeful revenge on a government which can no longer insulate us from reality.

He had of course declared Iraq a war of choice on the campaign trail. But to do so in this international forum was a little surprising, as it could be read as an implicit acknowledgment that the war was a violation of international law. (What is a war of choice after all but a war crime?) But in Cairo Obama — who declines to investigate Bush era officials for war crimes — merely pronounced some bromides about seeking wisdom along with power from now on and vowed to henceforth be a “partner” of Iraq rather than its “patron.”

Obama’s strongest criticism of the Iraq War during the campaign was that it was a “strategic blunder,” and course it would be rather too much to expect a U.S. president to denounce any U.S. imperialist war in truly heartfelt fashion. But he might in Cairo have returned to a theme he broached in October 2002 during the buildup to the war, in his famous Chicago “antiwar speech”:

“What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99591469

He might have noted that this particular war of choice was largely a war based on lies playing upon anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes disseminated as “intelligence” by neocons like the aforementioned Wolfowitz, Perle, “Scooter” Libby, and Douglas Feith whose “ideological agenda” involved (and continues to involve) “regime change” throughout Muslim Southwest Asia. It was a war to advance the interests of corporate America and the oil companies (although they didn’t necessarily drive it) — and also to create a better security environment for Israel so central to those neocon “ideological agendas.”

The war was justified in part by a false association between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden conjured up by Feith’s “Office of Special Plans.” The very idea that the secular Baathist regime of Saddam would have had a close working relationship with the fanatically Salafist al-Qaeda only made sense to those with highly simplistic views of the Islamic world (or those knowing better but trying to use those with such views). It assumed a readiness to conflate altogether dissimilar Muslims and a racist essentialization of Arabs.

Simply put, the al-Qaeda-Iraq link cynically exploited stereotypes. In that sense it and the entire “war on terror” are indeed anti-Muslim as often charged. Obama can declare as he did in Cairo (to applause), “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” But if he makes no fundamental changes in U.S. policy his words ring hollow.

Those who lied about Iraq-bin Laden links also lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. They provided the disinformation behind the carefully timed references by top officials in the fall of 2002 to a “mushroom cloud over New York City” designed to terrify the American people. (Libby was on the White House Iraq Group that came up with that “let’s hope the smoking gun’s not a mushroom cloud over New York” sales pitch.)

Are there not similarities between that propaganda and the “nuclear Holocaust” propaganda of hysteria currently being circulated by those praying for the U.S. to bomb Iran on behalf of Israel? What is Obama doing to fight the AIPAC crazies working overtime to thwart the U.S. intelligence community’s actual, empirical assessment that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program and to rather impose their hypothesis that it most definitely has one?

And speaking of “negative stereotypes,” what is Obama doing to challenge the preposterous notion that the Iranian leadership is prepared to use nukes on Israel, knowing that that would mean massive retaliation against Iran? The argument is that the mullahs so hate the Jews that they are rushing to produce nukes in order to use one against the Jewish state armed with a couple hundred of its own, consciously inviting the inevitable nuclear response from Israel and/or the U.S., provoking the annihilation of millions of their own people.

They will willingly accept that toll, the argument continues, because the Shiite Islam of the Iranian mullahs, with its peculiar martyrdom complex, makes them indifferent to this apocalyptic result of their planned attack. It’s a nonsensical caricature of a regime that told the Bush administration in 2003 it was prepared to accept the Arab League Peace Initiative to Israel, allows the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel representation in the Majlis, and leads a country that has attacked no other in modern times.

Obama: “Make no mistake . . . No debate . . . Afghanistan a War of Necessity”

In any case, turning in Cairo to the war in Afghanistan, Obama contrasted it with that in Iraq as a war of necessity. It was and is a clear-cut, righteous cause beyond debate. He lectured the Muslim world:

We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet al-Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.

Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.

The lack of creativity here was striking. This could have been written by Bush “Axis-of-Evil” speech writer and Richard Perle associate David Frum in early 2002. This was emphatically not an explanation for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009 but rather an obvious example of obfuscation. In declaring Afghanistan a war of necessity Obama failed to really establish links between the 9-11 attackers and the Taliban. He didn’t show that those engaging in armed struggle against the regimes in power in Afghanistan and Pakistan today are really determined to “kill as many Americans as they possibly can,” or if they have become so determined, where and why. One might say he set up a straw man, a straw jihadi, for GI Joe to attack.

Surely the Taliban nurtured al-Qaeda after 1996; the families of Mullah Omar and bin Laden even established marriage ties. But the Taliban were not bin Laden’s initial hosts in Afghanistan upon his return to the country from Sudan. The Taliban did not set up bin Laden in his camps; these date back to the 1980s when he was working with the CIA. The Taliban was a conservative Pashtun-based xenophobic Sunni Muslim movement rooted in the Pakistani madrassas attended by Afghan refugees. Formed in the early 1990s, it was backed for years by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Saudi Arabia.

There was a time when Zalmay Khalilzad could argue (in a op-ed piece in the Washington Post in 1996), that the Taliban were not anti-American and could be negotiating partners. He himself as a UNOCAL executive was happy to host Taliban officials on his Texas ranch to negotiate about the TAPI natural gas pipeline. Colin Powell was able to negotiate a highly successful opium eradication program with the Taliban in early 2001. The organization’s embrace of an anti-U.S. jihad along al-Qaeda lines is largely a function of the U.S. conflation of the two organizations (the Bushite “you’re either for us or against us” doctrine — in practice a “you’re either for us or against us, especially if you’re Muslim” doctrine). It’s a result of the U.S. attack.

Al-Qaeda is primarily an Arab international jihadi movement with an anti-American ideology born out of the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil in the months prior to the first Gulf War. It has a vision of a revived Caliphate. It’s actually quite different from the Taliban and there was mounting tension between the two from at least 1999 when al-Qaeda’s international terrorist actions began to cost its hosts. This al-Qaeda has in any case largely been driven from Afghanistan, with the exception of some Uzbeks of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan who are based in the north.

The current confrontation in Afghanistan is not about al-Qaeda, or the issues that prompted some renegade Saudis to attack the Twin Towers and Pentagon eight years ago. It’s about Afghan dislike of outside interference, Pashtun nationalism, outrage at U.S. bombing (that has even caused MPs to shut down Parliament in protest on occasion), disillusionment with corruption in the Karzai-warlord regime, a certain comfort level some had with the previous socio-political order. Surely Islam has something to do with it in that the Qur’an calls upon the believer to fight injustices inflicted upon fellow Muslims. But for Obama to say the war in Afghanistan at this point is “necessary” because of 9-11 is disingenuous.

If it’s “necessary,” it may be so because Afghanistan runs between the gas fields of Turkmenistan and the Indian Ocean ports which could carry it to world markets avoiding Iran and Russia. A pipeline deal was signed in 2002 but its provisions can’t be carried out until the country’s stabilized. As a declining superpower competing, among others, with a resurgent Russia flush with oil and gas money, the U.S. experiences geopolitical, capitalist-imperialist necessities. Its energy corporations need to compete for access to that gas oil, and the profits that can be obtained from them, while the Pentagon strategizes about how to control global access to energy in the event of war.

But these necessities have nothing to do with 3000 dead eight years ago. And yes, we can debate the Afghan War, however much Mr. Obama may want to close off discussion with reference to those innocent victims and that painful day.

Holbrooke to Refugees: “Glad the army came in, even though you were driven out of your homes?”

The very same day Obama was speaking, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke was in Pakistan, offering high-level symbolic support for the Pakistani Army’s campaign against what has become a full blown insurgency conducted by the Pakistani Taliban. (This is a Taliban that did not exist before U.S. invaded Afghanistan.) That counter-insurgency effort had involved the strafing of a city of 375,000 and produced 2 million refugees from the Swat Valley which had been taken over by militants. Fighting reportedly continues and the refuges have yet to return.

According to the Washington Post: “In a message he repeated several times, Holbrooke told the Pakistanis here that President Obama and the people of the United States cared about them and were helping their government to aid them. Even as he spoke, he said, Obama was reaching out to Pakistanis and other Muslims around the world in a major address in Cairo.” Holbrooke asked some of the refuges if they were “glad the army came in, even though you were driven out of your homes?” Perhaps he was trying to reassure himself that this was indeed the case.

“We will be happy when there is peace,” one refugee told him. “We want this thing to end so we can go back to our own land,” an elder shouted to him. “We are fed up with living like this.” “America has given a lot of assistance and food,” Holbrooke replied. “But it’s up to the Pakistan army to give you security. That’s not our job.”

Having thus detached the U.S. from responsibility for the crisis, Holbrooke made an ominous response to an AFP reporter’s question in a separate interview. “I don’t want to be alarmist here,” he said, “but I’m predicting some massive influx. There are concerns that there may be some spillover as there was in the past.”

He was referring to an influx of refugees from Afghanistan — the result of the “surge” of 21,000 additional U.S. forces in that country — an admission in passing of one outcome of the toppling of the Taliban due to that “war of necessity” in 2001.

It’s apparent to many Muslims and others around the world that the initial U.S. response to 9-11 has produced many negative ripple effects, including the destabilization of Pakistan, the world’s second most populous Muslim nation. That is to say, what for many Americans is the “good war” foil to the bad blundering war in Iraq is for much of the world part of the same bloody thing: at minimum, a heavy-handed reaction to an attack by rogue Saudis that indiscriminately targeted unrelated Muslim (Afghan and Iraqi) civilians — and for that matter Taliban militants who, whatever the backwardness of their ideology and brutality of their policies, had little to do with the foreigners operating secretly in their midst and planning international terrorist actions.

The U.S. set up a new regime in Afghanistan following the Loya Jirga orchestrated by George Bush and his special envoy Khalilzad, the Afghan-American neocon. It delivered power from the Talibs to the Northern Alliance warlords in the Tajik-Uzbek north and failed to deliver much of a state apparatus at all in Pashtun areas. These areas were inexorably reclaimed by the former rulers, despite the U.S.’s attempt to build an army of 132,000 which (as one U.S. officer wryly put it) a country as poor as Afghanistan “will never be able to afford.”

The administration has taken to referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan together as “Af-Pak,” recognizing that that they constitute a single problem for itself (if not acknowledging that that particular problem was generated by U.S. action). Holbrooke sort of let it slip to AFP that there’d been “spillover” from the 2001 invasion. Now there’s something much more dire happening.

Retired CIA analyst Bruce O. Riedel, who chaired a special interagency committee to develop President Obama’s policies on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the Council on Foreign Relations last month:

“In Pakistan, we face a growing coalescence of jihadist militant groups, not just in the tribal areas, but in the Punjab and in the major cities including Karachi. This is threatening the very survival of the Pakistani state as we have known it. It is not inevitable and it is not imminent, but there is a real possibility of a jihadist state emerging in Pakistan sometime in the future. And that has to be one of the worst nightmares American foreign policy could have to deal with.”

Note the truly grim tone. The survival of the Pakistani state “as we have known it” (as opposed to a Taliban State # 2 Plus Nukes) is a stake. Maybe the subtext is that the Bush administration by taking its “eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and going into the “war of choice” in Iraq miscalculated the Afghan-based Taliban, which is now (given its fundamentally pan-Pashtun character, which the neocons probably didn’t think about) capable of wreaking havoc in Pakistan. (The Taliban is rooted among the Pashtuns who make up 42% of the Afghan population — 14 million — and who also make up 15% of Pakistan’s population — 26 million. They are separated by the Durand Line, the border between the two countries, a line drawn by a British colonial officer’s pen in the 1890s which means nothing to the Pashtun tribes.)

Clinton: “The Existential Threat to the State of Pakistan”

On April 23 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress, “I think we cannot underscore [enough] the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances [of the Taliban],” adding that Pakistan also potentially poses a “mortal threat” to the U.S. and other countries. More recently General David Petraeus, Commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Pakistanis via Fox News that their “very existence” was threatened by Taliban militants and that “clearly, there is going to be a tough fight,” while Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a meeting of defense ministers in Singapore that the Taliban’s emergence in Pakistan is an “existential threat” to the country.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair John Kerry was in Pakistan early in the month contributing to the sense of crisis, telling reporters, “The government has to ratchet up the urgency” in the counterinsurgency. It seems Kerry doesn’t think “that the effort has been resourced the way that it needs to be either in the personnel or the strategy.” (Former Lt. Kerry having won medals fighting Vietnamese freedom fighters apparently considers himself qualified to counsel the Pakistanis about countering insurgents.)

In April 1971 this Kerry as an antiwar activist famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, perhaps the country’s preeminent military historian, has recently noted that Kerry also testified to Congress at that time that he and other soldiers were “probably angriest” about all the lies they’d been told about Vietnam and “the mystical war against communism.”

Bacevich likens “the mystical war on terrorism” with the “mystical war against communism” and says it “prevents us from seeing things as they are.” He says the “jihadist threat” in both Afghanistan and Pakistan “falls well short of being existential.” He also realizes that the war in Afghanistan is precisely what’s generating the Pakistani Taliban. But the consensus in Washington seems to be that the survival of Pakistan is at stake and that the U.S. has to somehow respond by altering its strategy in the region—in the direction of escalation justified my explanations that prevent us from seeing things as they really are. Surely what Barbara Tuchman called the “March of Folly.”

Interestingly enough, on that very same day Hillary Clinton made her “existential” remark the new Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman stated that Israel’s biggest “existential threat” was not Iran (which it had been touting for many months as such) but in fact Pakistan. The Israel Lobby had been using that term “existential” a lot in reference to Iran’s supposed threat to itself — proposing that its nuclear power program constituted a threat to global Jewry unprecedented since Nazism — dangerously ratcheting up the tension between Tehran and Washington. Now Lieberman was holding up the specter of a Talibanized Pakistan (which unlike Iran, actually has nukes) as an even greater threat, while Clinton was impressing on Congress that Pakistan was in deep trouble and U.S. resources were urgently needed in “Af-Pak.”

Since April, the Pakistani Army has indeed taken action against the Pakistani Taliban — to loud expressions of U.S. approval. When Petraeus made his comment about the Taliban threatening Pakistan’s existence he followed up by praising the Pakistan Army for taking “the kind of action, with the size of forces they have in the western part of the country, [which] demonstrates that they understand that there is a more immediate threat to the country” than some other unspecified one.

It may seem odd that the U.S. military is expressing appreciation that the Pakistani military is showing an understanding of the security threat that the Taliban poses to itself on its own home turf. But twice before, in 2005 and 2008, Pakistan’s army has attacked the insurgents only to meet with defeat, cut deals and withdraw over U.S. murmurs of disapproval that this was not helping the effort in Afghanistan. This time the Pentagon hopes the Pakistani military is serious and will not just “pacify” Swat but move on to an engagement with the forces of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan. The Swat operation was a dress rehearsal for this much larger, riskier campaign.

The U.S.-Pakistani Relationship

The U.S. does not exactly enjoy a neocolonial-type relationship with the Pakistani military, which dominates state affairs. Riedel refers to the latter’s enduring resentment of the Pressler Amendment sanctions imposed by the first President Bush, which from 1990 singled out Pakistan for punishment for its nuclear weapons program (itself a response to India’s explosion of a nuclear device in 1974). After a decade of close cooperation with the Pakistani military in the 1980s (in “bleeding the Soviet Union in Afghanistan”), following the end of the Cold War Washington decided it didn’t need Pakistan so much and cut off various forms of aid. (Meanwhile the Najibullah regime finally fell to the Northern Alliance jihadis in 1993, throwing Afghanistan into new bloody paroxysms for which the Pakistanis had to pay while the Gulbuddin’s Hekmatyar’s paymasters quietly left the stage.)

Strong military and political ties resumed after 9-11 but only after Islamabad was bludgeoned into obedience. The real “existential threat” to Pakistan loomed right after the attacks, when the U.S. State Department conveyed to President Musharraf the message that Pakistan should “prepare to be bombed, be prepared to go back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t cooperate in this war against the Taliban. Musharraf later, in an interview with BBC, called this a “very rude remark.” (By the way, what Iranian leader has ever made such a threat to any country?) The fact that Musharraf could publicly complain about such nuclear diplomacy may show a measure of independence. But of course at the time he capitulated to U.S. demands, much as they were to cost his country.

The Pentagon has recently reported to Congress that U.S. aid to Pakistan for fighting terrorism has been misused for purchasing combat aircraft among other things for conventional conflict with India. There appear to be deep issues of trust here on both sides. Pakistan is after all a Muslim state, born out of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s dream of a state formed from the Muslim-majority parts of the British Raj in distinction from what became overwhelmingly Hindu India. It was a vision of a secular state, but Islam is likely to be a strong part of any Pakistani military officer’s personal identity. Surely this is apparent U.S. officers (likely to be sincere Christians) having any personal contact with Pakistani counterparts as they collaborate and cooperate on border missions. It may leave some of them secretly wondering whether the Pakistanis can really handle the problem of anti-American Taliban militant activity in their country.

When you look at the biblical packaging of the daily intelligence briefings that circulated high up in the Defense Department in the early months of the Iraq war, or consider that a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Bush spoke in uniform at churches saying the Christian God is “bigger” than the Muslim one (since “his was an idol”), you can imagine that the Pentagon brass might suspect the Pakistanis, and that the Pakistanis might legitimately suspect that the U.S. is involved in a global effort against their religion. You can imagine, that is, a certain mutual wariness in the relationship between the militaries in whatever capacity they cooperate.

Then there is this matter Petraeus alludes to indirectly: “a more immediate threat to the country.” By this he obviously meant India, which the U.S. is cultivating as a regional superpower and ally vis-à-vis China and Russia. This is the India which, like Israel and Pakistan, never signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty but acquired nuclear weapons and was subject to U.S. sanctions as a result (although never as damaging to it as those applied to Pakistan).

The Commander of U.S. Central Command obviously thinks that the Taliban is a more immediate threat to Pakistan than India. He is a representative of a country whose Congress just passed the “123 Agreement” opening India’s vast nuclear industry to investment by U.S. firms. The Indian Parliament is expected to soon pass a Logistics Support Agreement that will allow refueling, maintenance and servicing of U.S. military ships and planes at Indian ports and bases and vice versa. Obviously the official U.S. position is that India is no threat to Pakistan at all.

In this context, as Pakistan copes with the consequences of the Swat crackdown, as the Pentagon urges the Pakistanis to move against Mehsud in South Waziristan — producing many more refugees; and and as State Department and Pentagon officials admit that they have no real plan about how to proceed in Afghanistan as the Taliban consolidate its position there, Obama through Holbrooke assures the Pakistani people and army of his “concern.”

Holbrooke: “I don’t want to be alarmist here, but I’m predicting some massive influx. There are concerns that there may be some spillover as there was in the past.”

In late 2001 the CIA station chief in Islamabad had concluded that the Taliban was a “spent force” even as the Guardian reported its leadership relocating to luxurious villas in Pakistan. Nowadays that “spent force” has regained control of much of the south and east of Afghanistan. Most of the real fighting is along the border with Pakistan. President Hamid Karzai realizes that the insurgency is not going to go away and has repeatedly offered to negotiate with the Taliban, including Mullah Omar. The Taliban-aligned forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami are meanwhile advancing on Kabul, and as AP notes matter-of-factly, summer is “traditional fighting season in Afghanistan” when U.S. combat deaths already at record levels are likely to increase.

One recalls Marx’s observation that world-historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The initial “spillover” to which Holbrooke alluded cost the lives of over 1,100 Pakistani troops and 8000 insurgents, as well as (according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies) 1,765 civilian deaths between October 2008 and March 2009 alone, and culminated in a refugee crisis involving two million people. These were the tragic and probably unintentional consequences of U.S. action in Afghanistan.

But here you have Obama’s special envoy to “Af-Pak” predicting even more refugees, as the consequence of the “surge” of 21,000 more troops next door, while Pakistan copes with the blowback of the U.S. actions to date. Another huge refugee exodus is predicted from South Waziristan as the Army moves in at U.S. urging. U.S. forces are proceeding ahead consciously towards a show-down with the Taliban aware that this may well destroy Pakistan “as we know it.”

“But let us be clear,” says Obama, “al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day.”

So that’s why we’re still in Afghanistan, you see, with more troops on the way, as waves of people stream across Pakistan. What a farce.

Ross and Holbrooke: “Everybody Needs to Worry About Iran”

Now, while over 50,000 U.S. troops alongside the Afghan army-in-training will be confronting local guerrillas (and attacking some across the border in Pakistan too) in order to prevent another 9-11, just imagine what all might be happening in the surrounding world.

Pakistan is not just bordered by Afghanistan but by India, China and Iran. It has generally had good relations with Iran, despite the fact that Iran’s Shiite theocracy opposed Pakistan’s policy of cultivating the fiercely anti-Shiite Taliban in Afghanistan. If the U.S. attacks Iran in the coming year (or if Israel does so) it will surely confirm in the minds of Muslims throughout the world — Pakistanis among those most directly affected — that the U.S. is engaged in a Crusade against them. All of them: Sunni and Shiite, from the more or less secular (Saddam’s Iraq) to the deeply traditional (the Taliban’s Afghanistan).

Holbrooke is, along with Dennis Ross, Hillary Clinton’s top advisor on Iran, the author of a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that ran just nine months ago. Entitled “Everybody Needs to Worry About Iran” it strives to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” to what it terms the Iranian regime’s drive to become “a nuclear state.” (Ross has been Special Advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Hillary Clinton but has left that post for a more powerful White House job.)

Linger on that statement alone for a moment. Here are Holbrooke and Ross writing ten months after the NIE in which the U.S. intelligence community declared with “high confidence” that Iran had no nuclear program that they want to mobilize public opinion to believe the exact opposite. This should make every aware person with an awareness of U.S. history (and the mobilization of public opinion around lies targeting Muslims) sick to their stomach.

Ross is known to favor a policy of “diplomatic engagement” with Iran whereby the Iranians are asked to to stop doing something every NPT signatory nation is legally entitled to do (enrich uranium) and when they decline to do so, attack them or give the green light to Israel to do so on the “existential threat”/”nuclear Holocaust” preemptive war causus belli pretext.

Perhaps Holbrooke does feel some alarm when he imagines how people in Afghanistan and Pakistan might respond to an infidel attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran — maybe in the context of massive refugee spillovers and civil wars all supposedly “necessitated” by the U.S. response to 9-11. Afghanistan is 19%, Pakistan 20% Shiite, and while Shiite belief does not necessitate sympathy with Shiite Iran under imperialist or Zionist attack it is a likely predictor of it.

I don’t want to be an alarmist here, but I will observe that Bush’s vaguely conceived “war on terror” is spilling over into Pakistan, big time. It could hardly be otherwise given the artificiality of the border, and its permeability, a legacy of Islamabad’s (necessarily) gentle hand in dealing with the tribes in the North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. By demanding Islamabad take action against militants on the border Washington has actually forced its Pakistani allies to repeatedly provoke the tribesmen, thus destabilizing a country of 173 million, armed with nukes and with a history of three wars with neighboring India and ongoing conflict over Kashmir.

They say in Pakistan “All Taliban are Pashtuns, but not all Pashtuns are Taliban” and it does seem that support for the Taliban is very limited. But the prospect that Riedel raises — of a “jihadist state” — is disturbing, and the potential for such perhaps exists as an Army deployed to suppress the jihadis repeatedly cuts deals with them, trading peace for the implementation of the sharia. But how could they have done otherwise, given the balance of forces in a country that Washington began to knock off balance in 2001?

As Pakistani opposition figure Imran Khan told the Middle East Institute recently, about 25 percent of the troops involved in recent campaign against the Taliban in the Swat Valley are Pashtuns. “Pakistan is at risk,” he declared. “How long will the government soldiers keep fighting their own people? If ever the Taliban were discredited and the public was behind the military operation, it was during the Swat operation. But the anger against the army is much greater. When the true horrors of the collateral damage are known . . . the Taliban will have won” through new recruits.

Holbrooke was in Pakistan to testify that that Pakistani Army, driving people out of their homes in the Swat Valley, is on the same side as Barack Obama. But he’s no doubt concerned about the prospect that the crackdown on the Pakistani Taliban will produce blowback for the U.S. He’s nervous about the prospects for the anti-Taliban effort retaining “hearts and minds” long-term as homelessness and war continue.

That’s the big picture: U.S. preparations for a dramatic acceleration of the Terror War in “Af-Pak,” still justified by tired references to that tragedy eight years ago, while the U.S. continues to threaten Iran and to make everything much worse still.

This isn’t Bush’s war anymore. It’s Obama’s slightly prettified War on Terror, Part II, Af-Pak Theater. And it’s not about 9-11. It has never been, really; that’s just been the rhetoric addressed to the U.S. masses designed to exploit to the max the recollected pain of that one day, and to the world to justify aggression in the name of national security.

It’s really about empire — endless “surges” on behalf of empire justified by urgent appeals for action against existential threats. It’s a farce with ongoing tragic consequences for people in the region, and pain the American people themselves have only begun to feel. So far the combined U.S. death toll for the Iraq and Afghan aggressions is just a little over 5,000. But lately the casualties in Afghanistan are nearly matching those in Iraq.

Those who’ve hoped or thought Obama would be an anti-war president: please watch his deputies Holbrooke and Ross carefully. They’re not so dissimilar from the neocons they’ve replaced and their visions of regime change may spell more ruin for the world.

Indeed, many Americans and people from other countries knew that domination of a region rich in fossil fuels represented the primary motive for the Iraq incursion and the only reason that Iran is not similarly assaulted is that it has an arsenal, unlike Saddam Hussein, capable of rendering serious damage in retaliation. Besides, the U.S. military is stretched too thin as it is with approximately 1,000 bases worldwide, along with operations occurring on every continent, such as the AFRICOM sorties, which are generally tied to oil company interests as the map in the link shows.

Furthermore, plans to invade Iraq were long in the making, but the problem was finding the grounds, legal or otherwise, to obtain the support of the public for such an outrageous act of violence, which to date has led to the displacement of millions of Iraqis and the slaughter of more than one million individuals, including over 4,300 U.S. troops. In tandem, George W. Bush and Tony Blair knew that the UN inspectors would not find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and were hard pressed to find a reason that could justify the war. So the U.S. President came up with alternatives:

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover.” Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be “brought out” to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed [in a memo written approximately two months prior to America's preemptive attack on Iraq that] even without a second [United Nations] resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was “solidly with the president.”

This in mind, it behooves the public, particularly the American public, to realize that U.S. armed invasions and covert operations, in general, have little to do with protecting Americans from global terrorists and more to do with getting fossil fuels on behalf of the Pentagon and favored companies, whose heads contribute to government officials’ campaign funds and offer other perks like high paying jobs upon the completion of terms in office. As such, it would be more accurate were the directors of the Department of Defense to change its name to the Department of Assault. Doing so would, certainly, better reflect the United States history that has been well chronicled by Bill Blum, who indicates, “From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.”

Blum further reminds that there existed a total of 168 separate invasions of countries around the world by the United States. This information was derived from the revision to the 1969 rendition of the Appendix to a report researched by the Foreign Affairs Division, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1975 and listed as “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945.

Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan summarized, in talks and The Age of Turbulence his displeasure with the Bush administration. “My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending,” Greenspan indicated. “Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency . . . To my mind, Bush’s collaborate-don’t-confront approach was a major mistake.”

It, certainly, was and, in the Obama administration, it still is a major mistake compounded by other factors. These include the bailout funds committed as of December 2008 in the amount of $8.5 trillion, which represents 60% of the GDP and the $1,449 billion, 54% of the federal budget, allocated for military expenditures in 2009. (This is in contrast to $1,210 billion, which represents 46% of the $2,650 billion total intended for the 2009 federal outlay, which is largely comprised of money borrowed from Chinese government controlled institutions).

Out of such a reckless and cavalier setting, the total federal debt, itself, has blossomed to around $100 trillion, according to some researchers, based on the ongoing pattern of spending loaned funds and expecting future taxpayers to foot the ultimate bill in a Ponzi-like scheme, one that makes the USA unarguably the world’s biggest debtor. (While Barack Obama seems to consider spiraling healthcare costs as the primary driver of the public deficit, surely he jests. Based on the tabulations above, it is clear that warfare and preparedness for extended wars is the largest cost that taxpayers subsume.)

Simultaneously, the IMF and WTB directors, in a way, must be beside themselves with glee over the mounting shortfall. Like the personification of Bernie Madoff, Simon Legree and Uncle Scrooge all rolled into one, they draw together in a perfect vision of eager anticipation over the financial killing yet to come.

As Vi Ransel explains about them in two sections of “Manufacturing Poor People“:

The World Bank loans money to a poor country to “help” in its development, to build up a part of its economy. “If”, and almost certainly when (that’s The Plan) the poor country is unable to pay the usurious interest on the loan because of declining exports (again, The Plan), the country has to borrow more money in order to service the debt. Enter the [International Monetary Fund].

The IMF extends more loans, with more of those stainless steel strings more tightly bound around the victim, er, I mean, loan recipient, trussing up the “benefiting” poor nation like a Thanksgiving turkey about to be devoured by the West, The Rich. The country which borrows money… must give tax breaks to Western transnationals. The country must slash wages and refuse to protect local businesses from being ravaged by cheap imports and corporate takeovers.

The country is further strong-armed to sell, at fire sale prices, all its government-owned mines, its railroads, industries and utilities to privately-owned, mostly-foreign corporations. The country must allow its forests to be clearcut and its land to be strip-mined. Money for education, healthcare, food assistance and the transportation infrastructure must be sheared back to service the debt. And the interest on the debt, through the wondrously magical Western miracle of compound interest, keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and on and on and on and on… And all the while, the people of the country are less able to feed themselves, since they are forced to grow cash crops for export to feed that debt service.

Well, U.S. transnationals didn’t intend to ever let that happen again. There would be no more giving a real leg up to potential competitors. And thus we arrived at where we are today. And, in fact, the ruse works so well, that since the Seventies the plutocracy has been using the very same template here at home, – with an increasingly heavy hand. See U.S. auto workers, healthcare, the bank bailout, foreclosed homes, 600,00 jobs a month jettisoned, the murder of California, et al. Who, or what, will be next?

Will it be the entire USA? Perhaps it will be in that the public finances in America are, currently, arranged along this line:

In Fiscal Year 2008, $412 Billion was spent to pay back interest on money owed to holders of the National Debt. It represents the third biggest federal expense and the full amount owed in 2009, due to continued borrowing, will in all likelihood be higher as it equaled $214 Billion by May. Furthermore, educational spending in 2008 received a mere 4.4 percent of the budget while the accumulated estimated total for the interest owed on the National Debt is estimated to be $445,095,000,000, although the sum will, obviously, increase as more money is borrowed.

Meanwhile, the current monthly aggregate for the 2009 interest owed is roughly $42.8 billion per month while monthly federal outlay is approximately $220.8 billion per month with this interest paid back each month representing slightly more than 5.1 % of each tax dollar spent or, posed another way, over nineteen cents for each one expended while the budget deficit, itself, entails loans close to fifty cents on each dollar paid out with an increase in borrowing by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion expected in 2010 according to a White House spokesperson. [10]

In addition, there will, ultimately, be less tax dollars to collect in that presently, America is hemorrhaging jobs at one every thirty seconds according to some analysts. So why not spend money to bail out the families living in their cars and under tarps in tent cities by providing employment and income through a widespread Works Progress Administration (WPA) and extended Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) programs as occurred during the Great Depression?

Wouldn’t such a plan go further than bailouts to financial institutions and the ever present resource wars as a way to jumpstart the American economy, as well as US taxpayers who are watching 73 % of every tax dollar going to military expenditures (54%) and interest payments (19+ %)? (It forces one to wonder from where funds are going to derive for universal public health care, future Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, public education and assorted other programs, such sustainable benign energy provision on a model close to energy independent Denmark’s enviable prototype as described by Thomas L. Friedman in “Flush With Energy.”

Then again, the Pentagon directors probably have concluded that they need their resource wars in that the U.S. military is the single biggest user of oil in the world and it takes lots of oil to get the further oil supplied to American favored oil companies so that it can be returned in large measure and at high expense to the armed forces. In other words, it requires the type of assurance for a continued oil supply that only beaten down countries and puppet governments can render.

On account, open combat and covert operations will be the favored means to obtain fossil fuels. On account, the military will continue to drain away the majority of the U.S. federal budget while the US covert operations budget, by itself, will surpass a staggering $50 billion for 2009.

“‘That’s the largest-ever sum,’ according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total. It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, ‘roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,’ Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.”

All in all, the ongoing U.S. financial mess provides signs that, while China’s rising, the USA will never gain back its former glory days that gave rise to both world dominance and a large middle class. As the country continues to lose jobs at the rate of approximately one every thirty seconds to either offshore company sites or business cutbacks, it has nowhere else to go except to sink down into increased hardship, as well as some degree of destitution, for an increasing number of Americans and the nation as a whole.

The unending act of misappropriating a land’s collective assets year after year has a way of ensuring this final result. As Ethel Grodzins Romm alleges,“What could our worst enemy do to damage this strong and beautiful country? He could do no better than to get us to squander our human and natural resources on dubious missions and then trick us into plugging our ears against the howls of those who object.”