People Before Profit blog

'Now we have so many butchers in Iraq': Interview with Faik Batti

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 14:25:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Faik Batti has been a member of the central committee of the Iraqi Communist Party since 1993. He was a journalist and historian of the leftist press in Iraq. After an exile of 25 years, Batti returned to Iraq in 2003.

PA: The last time you and I met was in 2003. There was a lot of optimism about the possibility of building a democratic society after the collapse of the regime. Do you still feel the same optimism or have moods changed?

FB: first of all, who will build democracy in Iraq? Not the Americans. We have a long history of struggle for peace and democracy in Iraq, since 1935. Some of the parties that are building Iraq now have a very decent, a very national history like the Iraqi Communist Party, like the Kurdish parties. How to build a democratic Iraq? I think our president yesterday (July 24) said one thing that was good. He asked all democratic groups and parties to unite in a front to make peace and build democracy in Iraq. So this is a good sign that President Talabani as the leader of the Kurdish Patriotic Union asking all democrats to unite. This is a good sign that you cannot build democracy without the leading role of the democratic forces in Iraq.

We are now cooperating with the Islamic parties, we used to cooperate with them ten years before the collapse of Saddam Hussein. We started cooperating and working together with the Islamic movement in Iraq in 1991. We know that we have an ideological conflict with the Islamic movement, but before the collapse, when we were struggling against Saddam Hussein, we, as communists, cooperated with them to put down Saddam Hussein by revolt or revolution, or by an uprising as happened in 1991. During the uprising in March 1991, 14 provinces were liberated by the people. But who put down that uprising? It was the Americans and Saudi Arabia. They were afraid that this uprising would bring a regime that would not be good for Saudi Arabia or the Americans. Since 1991, the so-called liberation of Kuwait, occupied by the Americans, America started to gather some of the groups, parties, elements inside Iraq.

We have our own policy. We know what we need. So we work as groups – Islamic groups, communists, Kurdish parties. We were against the blockade. Our main policy and slogan was to lift the blockade on the Iraqi people and to bring down Saddam Hussein. These two together were our main slogans, and we worked for that with the Islamic movement, and we convinced the Kurdish movement to unite together to put an end to the regime.

So when the Americans started to talk about weapons of mass destruction and this and that in Iraq, we knew that this is an excuse, because the Americans and the West, and the Germans, they gave Saddam all of these arms. So they knew how much he had, where it was and if he could use it or not. We knew that it was an excuse.

We stood against the war. We were the first party in Iraq that said no to the war. Other groups and parties were helping the Americans to go for war to put down Saddam Hussein and end the dictatorship. We stood against that. Now we stand also against occupation. We started to struggle in Kurdistan with the armed partisans, we fought with them since 1980. We were in the mountains in Kurdistan fighting the Saddam Hussein regime. From that time until now, we had three main aims, for which we have struggled: against the blockade, against the war, and now against the occupation.

When war started and the Americans entered Iraq and the regime collapsed and Iraq was occupied, we as a party said no to occupation. But then it happened, and they started making arrangements for a new government and new groupings. And Bremer came and started a conversation with all of the leaders in the Iraqi community and the parties. We were one of the parties that Bremer met. We cannot be away from the political developments happening in Iraq. As communists we cannot be away or to only watch what’s going on. No. We had to participate in these changes. Because we’re communists, to participate in the changes, to push democratic changes in Iraq, we have to be part of it, but not to be under what Bremer commands or under American policy or to even agree with what the Americans are doing.

Who’s responsible for the sectarianism going on here? From the beginning when the Saddam Hussein regime collapsed, we stood against sectarianism and against hatreds between the Kurds and the Arabs. We have always stood against this. When we got slated in the elections and we agreed to participate with a communist minister in the government, our policy to now, and this is what we have written in our organ, Tareeq Al-Shaab, was against sectarianism. We are against the sharing of posts in government and parliament on the basis of sectarianism. We are doing our best to put an end to all of this, to build real democracy there.

When the Shia and the Sunni started to fight each other, where was the American army? They have 150,000 soldiers. Can’t they stop what’s going on now in Iraq, put an end to it? They say, we cannot. But in some areas Iraqi army and police are putting an end to these conflicts. The Iraqis are dependent on the American army. They are in this or that city, while the Americans are looking and killing people, but they are doing nothing. Who benefits from what’s happening in Iraq now?

Occupation is one of the main reasons that this unstable situation in Iraq is going on, as our Party has analyzed. That is why we are asking now to put out a schedule for a withdrawal of all foreign armies from Iraq. We believe that democracy will not be done under occupation, by Americans killing people, bombing cities, bombing innocent people. We believe that democracy will be built by the Iraqi people and its parties. The Americans should withdraw, today or tomorrow. They have to withdraw from Iraq. We are living in a situation where there is no way that occupation will be as safe as it used to be before.

As to the resistance in Iraq, do you think there are only Shia and Sunni Muslims? There are nationalists in Iraq struggling against occupation, hitting American tanks, bombing American stations. This is not an internal conflict between Iraqis. This is against occupation in Iraq. One of the ways and methods is to fight Americans. We believe this is not the way to end the occupation for the time being. We should use all the methods, particularly political methods, and convince all of our allies in Iraq that the only way to put an end to this mess in Iraq is to put a schedule for withdrawal, stand against the sharing of government posts and political power on the basis of sectarianism and basis of religion, or on the basis of Kurds and Arabs. If you are elected, you are elected to represent the Iraqi people, whether you are a communist, Kurdish, or an Islamic believer. We should convince all of these groups and parties that we must reach the solution. We have a parliament that represents all the groups in Iraq. We should practice this unity. This should be our first step toward democracy.

PA: Recently, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, described the US occupation as a 'butchery' and demanded US withdrawal. And Human Rights Watch also published last week a report on torture and prisoner abuse of Iraqis held in US prison camps in Iraq. What is the Communist Party’s view of these happenings?

FB: It isn’t only Mashhadani or us saying this about what’s going on in Iraq. The American newspapers are writing about the Americans killing at Haditha, in Fallujah, and now in Baquba. The Americans aren’t only harming prisoners. They are killing innocent people. They are raping girls and killing the families. I saw this in the New York Times. So who is saying this – American newspapers. They are saying the US army is doing this and that, which is all true. The Americans brought down Saddam Hussein to bring all of these crimes? We Iraqis we don’t accept this.

As communists, we are demanding respect for human rights in Iraq – whether it’s the Americans, the government, or the Islamic movement. We are asking to respect human rights in Iraq. We are against the massacres that are happening in the streets of Baghdad and the other provinces. We are against the rampant outlaw gangs that come to kill our people. We are against the bombing of innocent people in the markets, in their houses, in the streets, car bombs.

PA: On the issue of sectarianism, we are hearing stories about groups like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). I guess it is headed by the Ayatollah al-Sistani…

FB: Hakim.

PA: What’s its relationship to Sistani.

FB: Sistani is the biggest clergy man in Iraq for Shi’ites. All of them respect Sistani. They listen to Sistani, even in the Sunni movement. He is a very respected person. We all respect him.

PA: What’s his relationship to the SCIRI?

FB: He has no relationship. He is the head of Shias in Iraq, but he has no relationship with the SCIRI or any party. As a religious man he should not interfere in politics. This is what we see now in Iraq. To have peace in Iraq, to put down all of this conflict and these massacres, Sistani should not interfere in politics. He should be a clergyman a leader of the Shia, asking them as he did, he asked all the Muslims in Iraq to stop killing each other. This is a very good sign now.

PA: So it’s misleading for the US media to describe him as being affiliated with a particular political organization?

FB: Exactly. This is one of the mistakes of the American media.

PA: The SCIRI has militia groups affiliated with them?

FB: Yes, they are called Badr. This is a militia for the SCIRI. Al Dawa has a militia, as does Moktada Al-Sadr. As a party we stand against the militias. We should get the militia disarmed. We should accept the Iraqi army and the police.

PA: There are two things we are hearing about Badr: one is that they receive funds from Iran and, two, they sometimes operate as part of the Iraqi police force. Can you speak about this?

FB: Let’s be clear. After the regime collapsed, I was there when Iraq was empty of police or the army. You couldn’t see police anywhere, even traffic police. Everything collapsed. We had no government, no army, no police, no ministers, nothing. Who was responsible for that? The American army inside Iraq. When Bremer started to reorganize the police, the army, and the national guard, he opened the door for volunteers. Who got news of this? The Ba’athist elements, the Islamic groups – some of which are related to and backed by Iran and some are backed by Syria. The combination of all these elements inside the army and the police made it difficult for any government from the collapse until now to have a strong and organized force, because you have an army with so many different elements. Some of the volunteers were put inside to play that role. That is what happened when you have a police backed by Iran or backed by Syria or backed by Ba’athists. So they organized these crimes. They are sharing in these crimes. You have so many examples that so many elements were kicked out but not before they committed so many crimes.

Now, when you have such a situation, Iran has played a very bad role in Iraq. They are backing groups, sending fighters, and sending money and arms. Some of these were captured by the Iraqi army. Basra, which is the second largest city in Iraq, has been monopolized by so many of these elements. They are not just the Islamic movement. They are helped and pushed by Iran. Iran there has played a very bad role. We have asked them through many channels to stop backing these elements, stop sending arms, and stop everything.

Syria is doing the same thing, backing the Ba’athists who fled to Syria and to Jordan. They’re backing elements linked with Al Qaeda elements and with Musab Al-Zarqawai. They were financing all these criminals. They were sending suicide bombers form Syria. We arrested so many of them in many areas.

Iran has played role. Syria has played a bad role. Saudi Arabia also is playing a very bad role in financing some Sunni groups, especially the Wahhabists. Some many countries are playing such a bad role in Iraq. The main excuse for all of these groups for functioning now is that they are fighting the American occupation.

Believe me, when I came to Baghdad after the collapse of Saddam Hussein, I came from Kurdistan, and before I reached Baghdad, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Huge American tanks were among the cars. Iraqi arms were burned. I cried. After 25 years in exile, I come to Baghdad and see American tanks in our streets. I couldn’t help it. I cried. We didn’t ask for this. We stood against the war. Now we stand against occupation. We are looking for democracy in Iraq. We are against the crimes in Iraq. We want real democracy to be built by Iraqis. We want the foreign armies to withdraw from Iraq, at least schedule the withdrawal. So we can work. So we can put an end to this violence. Everyday now between 80 and 100 Iraqis are killed – everyday! Bodies in the streets. In Lebanon tens and twenties are killed by the bombs of Israel. Everyday hundreds are killed in Iraq. Massacres.

PA: The Bush administration says that setting a timetable will only increase the violence and foreign intervention. How do you respond to this?

FB: This is a very silly excuse from Bush. What did he say, 'We came to liberate Iraq and to put down Saddam Hussein.' Well now we have entered the fourth year. The situation now is much worse than what Iraqis suffered under Saddam Hussein. In the fourth year, if he doesn’t want to schedule the withdrawal of his own troops, then he can’t put an end to what is going on now in Iraq – massacres – which are increasing now. They cannot put an end to that. That cannot give democracy to Iraq. They cannot provide services like electricity. To get petrol you have to wait six hours for your turn. Prices are going up. This is under the occupation. Saddam Hussein was a dictator, criminal, a butcher of Iraq, but now we have so many butchers in Iraq. I would ask Bush one thing. Who is responsible for what’s going on in Iraq after the collapse of Saddam Hussein? Was his goal to get rid of Saddam Hussein and to bring the American troops to Iraq and to say we liberated you, goodbye? Of course not. America’s strategic map, which they are implementing now – they started with Afghanistan, Iraq, then Palestine, now Lebanon – the Americans are looking for their interests. They want a new Middle East map. What does this mean? It means the Americans gaining control in this area, the oil, first of all, and then to save their interests in this area.

PA: You mentioned Lebanon and the Israeli invasion. What is the ICP’s position on what’s going on in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon?

FB: We stand with the Palestinians against the Israeli regime. We stand now with the Lebanese against the Israeli operation, which is backed so strongly by the American administration. They are not ashamed to say they are backing the Israelis. They are saying the Israelis are doing good. The Lebanese are paying – the destruction of their country, killing innocent women and children. Is this a war against Hezbollah? It is a war against Lebanon. We’re not backing Hezbollah or backing Hamas. We’re backing the Palestinians and the Lebanese against aggression backed by America. Israel’s criminal armies are doing what they are doing in Gaza and Beirut backed by America. We support the people, and we’re against war. America should not back Israel in this aggression.

PA: Again the administration is saying that Israel is attacking Lebanon for Lebanon’s own good, because the forces Israel is fighting are the same as the forces in Iraq, Iran, the terrorists, etc.

FB: It’s a big lie.

PA: How does the ICP view that kind of logic?

FB: Do you think that the Bush administration has logic?

PA: Can you talk about the situation of Iraqi workers and the labor movement?

FB: The main trade union now is the one we organized after the collapse of Saddam Hussein, which we as communists are playing a leading role in the executive committee with other groups. We have had many delegations to many countries. We have good relations with the British trade unions and other European unions. Everything collapsed, so were trying to rebuild our unions in some main government enterprises and private enterprises. We have a very strong movement now. Some other parties are trying to make a kind of trade union, but workers aren’t following this. Trade unions in Iraq are strong. The leadership is comprised of communists, democrats, nationalists, and others. We are asking all the unions to rebuild themselves first and then to become part of the national federation. I think we are taking good steps toward that.

PA: Can you talk about conditions of life in Iraq?

FB: One of the big problems that we are facing, which is also one of the factors related to the massacres that are happening in Iraq, is unemployment. We are analyzing that and are writing articles on it. Unemployment is a big problem aside from what I have already told you. So when you have all these things together, what do you expect from people? They have no peace, no security, no jobs, no electricity. Everything in the streets has collapsed. Everything is bad. So what do you expect from this situation when you have around 58% unemployment? I don’t want to compare it to Saddam Hussein when we had around 6 or 7 percent unemployment. What country have the Americans built? What kind of democracy? What kind of situation have they created after 3 and a half years after war and occupation? This is one of the reasons the occupation should end. How can you put an end to unemployment when no factories and no companies can rebuild there because of this bad situation? How can you put an end to unemployment? You have to have a peaceful situation and security, so that the foreigners, the Iraqis and the Arabs will come and rebuild the structure. To put an end to the unemployment, put an end to the reasons for instability. We are looking for the reasons for instability.

PA: What is the ICP’s role in organizing other sectors of Iraqi society such as women and youth?

FB: I can assure you one thing aside from what have already I told you about the role of the communists in the trade unions, we have democratic organizations for students, youth and women. When we started reorganizing these democratic groups, so many members were abroad in exile. We started to reorganize this, and we started to bring all of these people back. Restarting these unions after 25 years is not easy. It’s not very easy to have a good women’s league or a strong democratic organization for students. Over the last three years, however, they have had their conferences and have elected new committees and have played a good role in the universities and secondary schools. They have played a good role in Basra, for example. When some Islamic elements attacked a picnic of students, our comrades played a good role in putting an end to that. The women’s league has good international relations with other groups outside of Iraq. We are looking to strengthen these, and we need time and patience.

PA: What are the next steps the Party envisions taking in strengthening the unity of the people and the government? And what are the next steps in ending the occupation?

FB: We working toward our 8th national convention this year. We have prepared three main reports. I think we can send you our program in Arabic of course at the end of August. I can give an example of the strength and influence of our party. We are the second newspaper in Iraq now (Tariq Al-Shaab). The largest paper is a government paper financed by the Americans. We distribute between 18,000 and 20,000 copies everyday. If you take the elections, now we can’t give a good estimate of our support from them, but before we received 69,000 votes. We had two communists elected on the Iraqi Patriotic ticket, and two Kurdish communists elected to the Kurdish parliament. Altogether there are 25 secular, democratic members of the Iraqi parliament, including four women. But we haven’t succeeded yet in unifying these movements into a strong democratic front. I am sure that we’ll succeed. And this is the only solution for Iraq – to work for ending the occupation in Iraq, to stand against the Islamic movement, which is backed by Iran. Sectarianism should be put to an end. Killing should be put to an end, and for that we need a strong army and police force. It should stand against interference of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and America – all of these foreign powers in Iraq. This is the only solution.

PA: Earlier you talked about the importance of broad national unity in rebuilding the country. How does that idea fit in with the concept of the democratic front against the Islamic movement? It seems tricky. Where does the transition between these two concepts take place?

FB: The Hussein dictatorship has collapsed and some of our allies from the time period of our united struggle against the dictatorship are in power. And when you get in power you look for your own interests first. The Islamic movement is looking for its own interest first. Even the Kurdish movement is. So the alliance is not as strong as it was before the dictatorship collapsed. Every party is trying to get their interest. Not all of them are against the occupation. Some of the Islamic movement want the occupation to stay on the very silly excuse that if the Americans leave Iraq there will be a civil war. Well, we’re having a civil war now. It is secret; it isn’t open. So what is the difference if they withdraw? We’ll not have a civil war in Iraq for sure. Because some of the groups fighting and killing each other are cards in some hands.

Where Were You When They Took Your Rights Away?

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:31:00 +0000

7-28-06, 9:01 am

Can you name the one country on earth where the government can steal elections, strip away basic rights, spy on citizens, and launch wars based on lies, but where the people do not take over the nation's capital in protest? If you said the United States, you'll be wrong on September fifth when Camp Democracy begins on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. http://www.campdemocracy.org At long last, Americans are preparing to say 'Enough is enough,' and to do what Ukrainians, Mexicans, or any other people not drugged into acquiescence would do when things got this bad: occupy the capital city to demand peace, justice, and accountability. The goal of the many organizations and individuals working to prepare for Camp Democracy is to provide a space for everyone who is fed up with lies and criminality to come and demand change. In fact, at the suggestion of Cindy Sheehan who will come to Camp Democracy following Camp Casey (Aug. 16 – Sept. 2 in Crawford, Texas), we're calling it Camp Democracy at Fort Fed Up. Our demands will not be for anarchy or disorder, but for a restoration of the rule of law. This is a tough-on-crime movement. We just have a different notion of who the criminals are. And when we get tough, we use nonviolence. Camp Democracy will offer training in nonviolent protest, as well as in media production, activism, and PR. There will be workshops provided by top scholars and activists on a variety of issues – all of them connected by the democracy deficit, the shifting of resources against our will to war and away from useful endeavors. A schedule of events is posted on the right side of the website http://www.campdemocracy.org and we'll be building toward the International Day of Peace on September 21, when the Declaration of Peace has pledged to begin civil disobedience. http://www.declarationofpeace.org While we are working hard to provide tents, bathrooms, stages, and necessary equipment, to arrange for places to stay and food to eat, and to schedule a rich array of educational and inspirational activities, Camp Democracy will become whatever the people who take part choose to make it. The effort is nonpartisan and will seek to hold Congress Members accountable as well as Bush, Cheney, and gang. But one focus of the camp will be impeachment. Speakers leading workshops on the subject will include Howard Zinn, Marcus Raskin, John Nichols, Dave Lindorff, Barbara Olshansky, and many more. This morning I was a guest lecturer at a college course on modern history. We spent two hours discussing impeachment, impeachable offenses, and where the Bush Administration's actions fit in history. This is where I think they fit: as a significant threat to end the oldest democracy on the planet. Never before has an American president offered anything close to this wide-ranging assault on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the powers of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Here's a sampling: * Illegal spying in violation of FISA and the Fourth Amendment, openly confessed to, openly promoted in signing statements, known to involve phone calls, phone records, internet use, bank records, and observation of legal nonviolent activities. * Illegal detentions in violation of the Fourth Amendment, International law, U.S. Law, and a recent Supreme Court ruling. * Rounding up of thousands of citizens and legal residents for detention or deportation. * Torture, maintenance of secret camps, and extraordinary rendition, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, International Law, US Law, and openly promoted in signing statement and administration policy papers. * Illegal war – launched illegally under international law, launched in violation of the U.S. Constitution which requires that the Congress declare war, and launched on the basis of feloniously misleading Congress and the American public. * Use of a variety of illegal weapons. * Illegal targeting of civilians, journalists, and hospitals. * Illegal seizure of another nation's resources. * Illegal use of funds in Iraq that had been appropriated for Afghanistan. * Leaking of classified information in order to mislead the Congress and the public, and in order to punish truth tellers. * Leaking of identity of an undercover agent. * Retribution against whistleblowers. * Use of signing statements to reverse 750 laws passed by Congress. * Production of phony news reports at home and abroad. * Dereliction of duty in neglecting global warming, hurricanes, hunger, AIDS, and warnings of 9-11 attacks. * Facilitating Israel's attacks on Lebanon. * Obstruction of investigations by Congress, the 9-11 Commission, and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. * Stealing elections. When is it enough? When does it become clear that history will view us as those who let it all go to waste, as those who sat by as they came for the Muslims and then they came for the immigrants and then they came for the next group on the list, as those who saw the nation sliding into fascism and let it slide… or as those who rose up and resisted and restored what was most worth saving in a system of government based on the rule of law? The time is now. On the Camp Democracy website you can arrange to share cars, vans, busses, trains, or planes, as well as tents or rooms. Please plan to join us, and please contribute what you can to help cover expenses. Together we can turn everything around. Other people in other nations have done so. It's much easier than you think. http://campdemocracy.org/sponsor From

Backpedaling at the IRS

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:26:00 +0000

7-28-06, 8:48 am

The New York Times reported this week that the Bush administration is eliminating almost half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit the tax returns of the wealthiest Americans. These lawyers specialize in auditing the returns of those who are subject to gift and estate taxes. Since taking office in 2001 President Bush has consistently lobbied Congress to repeal the estate tax, but he hasn’t been able to get Congress to go along with him. Instead, the Bush administration has now decided to force the IRS to backpedal and circumvent the tax laws. The IRS will cut 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers and 17 of the support staff personnel assigned to them. Six of the IRS lawyers who are likely to be laid off acknowledged that the cuts were simply the latest moves behind the scenes at the IRS to protect people with political connections and complex tax-avoidance schemes from detailed audits. Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner, says the agency is auditing enough returns to catch cheaters. But during the Clinton administration, the IRS stated that cheating by affluent Americans was one of its biggest problems. In April 2000 the IRS released the results of a study on gift tax evasion. When an individual gives gifts exceeding $675,000 in their lifetime, a tax must be paid on each additional gift worth more than $10,000 per person per year. The study determined that more than 80 percent of the 1999 gift tax returns in excess of $1 million that were audited reported an inaccurate value of the gift. On average, the gifts were undervalued by $303,000, depriving the treasury of an additional $167,000. This evasion cost the government $275 million in 1999. The study also found that IRS lawyers, owing to staffing shortages, only spent about 31 minutes auditing each gift tax return, which typically consisted of dozens of pages. John Dalrymple, then director of IRS operations, admitted that the agency lacked the resources to identify those who were falsifying the value of their gifts, or failing to file their returns. Consequently, the IRS announced that it was hiring three additional lawyers to audit gift tax returns. Yet now the IRS says it has too many of these lawyers. While auditing fewer gift tax returns will certainly help those of Mr. Bush’s affluent ilk, auditing fewer fraudulent estate tax returns will be the real bonus from the IRS layoffs. Currently, only couples with an estate valued at more than $4 million are subject to the estate tax, and the first $4 million they pass on to their heirs is completely tax-free. Mr. Bush has lobbied Congress for the last four years to spare the 0.5 percent of Americans who are subject to the tax by repealing it. But since the Republican-led Congress, surprisingly enough, hasn’t been willing to go along with him, the administration will now simply layoff estate tax lawyers. After all, Deputy IRS Commissioner Brown says additional audits aren’t worthwhile. But the agency had a very different opinion under President Clinton. In December 2000 the IRS announced that a study found that cheating on estate taxes was more common than cheating on individual income taxes. And the biggest cheaters were the very rich, those who left $20 million or more to their heirs. The study determined that the actual value of the taxable estates audited was on average 13 percent higher than what was reported on tax returns. Consequently, the government was being shorted $1.5 billion in taxes annually. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt is almost certainly pleased that there will soon be fewer IRS estate lawyers. He recently admitted that his family has received millions of dollars in tax deductions through a so-called charitable organization it founded. Mr. Leavitt’s parents created the charity, worth $8 million, in 2000. But in 2002 and 2003 the charity donated only $100,000, a mere one percent of its total value. Yet Secretary Leavitt has claimed $1.2 million in tax deductions from the charity. And the charity loaned more than $300,000 to the family’s own real estate investment firm, which gave an interest-free loan to Secretary Leavitt in 2002 worth at least $250,000. Since President Bush has failed to coerce Congress to abolish the estate tax, his administration is doing the next best thing. It’s forcing the IRS to layoff the very lawyers responsible for catching affluent Americans who cheat. But according to the IRS’ own studies six years ago, this is a widespread problem. Perhaps never before in American history have we had a government so completely of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Alienating the Beating Heart of Middle East

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:23:00 +0000

7-28-06, 8:45 am

The United States is seeking a “new Middle East” by alienating the Syrian beating heart of the strategic region. Washington wants Syria to cooperate as near as in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon and as far as in Iran but is sending her messages and messengers all around the region except to Damascus. This Wednesday the U.S. sponsored in Rome an international conference on Syria’s next door war-ravaged Lebanese neighbour to which were invited regional countries that have no common borders with Lebanon and nations as far as Russia, but not Syria the most burnt and threatened by the Lebanese raging fire. While confirming this week that the “time has come for the new Middle East,” the United States seemed to shoot herself in the legs when it bypassed Damascus as the right address to any credible approach to the Syrian heartland of the region, leaving observers with the conclusion that Syria is not cooperating and accordingly it has to be forced into cooperation. And while carrying this mission herself in the eastern Iraqi front, the U.S. delegated the job in the western front to her Israeli regional proxy, which occupies a strategic part of Syria. True the war decision-making is made in Israel, but Syria holds the key to the regional peace-making as well as to any sustainable regional re-mapping in the immediate vicinity of major U.S. strategic concerns, namely the security of oil and Israel. The relative stability the region enjoyed during the past three decades and the twin Jordanian and Egyptian peace treaties with Israel were only made possible thanks to the Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian troika of which Syria constituted a cornerstone. Several factors, mostly U.S.-linked, have placed this Syrian cornerstone in jeopardy. The most decisive factor was and is the U.S. determined campaign to change the regional political regimes, starting from the immediate neighbours of Syria in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, explicitly indicating that the end target is changing the Syrian regime itself, as a prerequisite for heralding the “New Middle East.’ President George W. Bush has sent his invading troops into Iraq, gave a green light for the Israeli war machine to bombard the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, spearheaded a regional propaganda campaign to adopt the Iraqi-model of the U.S.-sponsored democracy towards Syria, and put his Secretary of State on a shuttle plane to send a message to Damascus: Make the choice and subscribe to our “New Middle East.” But why didn’t Bush send his message and messengers direct to the Syrian capital? Is Bush naïve not to? Absolutely he is not. Bush is very well aware that Syria had received the U.S. message early and long enough to loose trust in it and to conclude from a bitter experience that Washington was not serious to be even-handed and remained biased in the Arab – Israeli conflict, that its promises to bring about peace were phoney and hollow, and that it was only interested in reinforcing the U.S. – Israeli hegemony in the region. The U.S. message was sent to Damascus thirty-six years ago, received positively, led to a lengthy honey moon in the bilateral ties, and could have lasted longer had not Washington had second thoughts when it led the invasion of Iraq early in March 2002, sowing deeper doubts in the U.S. real intentions and complicating further an already complicated regional situation. Unleashing the regional Israeli war machine against democratically elected grassroots anti-occupation movements in Palestine and Lebanon, the geopolitical allies of Syria, confirmed the Syrian doubts about the U.S. regional plans. The US-led invasion of Iraq, the Israeli US-backed periodical invasions of Lebanon and the Israeli 39-year old occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights have all focused Syria in the eye of the Middle East storm and are stretching Syrian strict adherence to the peace option, international law, United Nations legitimacy and diplomatic norms to a breaking point. However the United States and Israel are unmercifully and persistently mounting pressure on the country in a deliberate effort to break it down and up, unless Damascus completely and unconditionally subscribes to their re-mapping of the Middle East, following the “good example” of Libya. “We are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one (and) the Syrians have to make a choice … Are they going to be a part of what is clearly a consensus of the major Arab states in the region?” Secretary Condoleezza Rice said on Friday. Syria did make the “choice” when late President Hafez Assad assumed power in 1970-71, joined the “Arab consensus,” subscribed to peace as a strategic option and officially adopted the U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, risking internal rift in the ruling Baath party. Assad’s strategic choice led Syria into Lebanon backed by the Arab consensus, the U.S. backing and a grudgingly Israeli green light, which positioned him into a bloody collision course with the Lebanese pan-Arab and leftist allies of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was then condemned by the U.S. and Israel as “the” international “terrorist” organization, at a time when Osama bin Laden was a U.S. ally and Hizbollah and Hamas were not yet born. Assad’s choice also indulged Syria into a diplomatic honey moon with the U.S. at a time of a bipolar world system, when the former Soviet Union (USSR) was at the helm of the other side of the cold war divide, paved the way for Syrian – Israeli peace talks, and even led Syria to join the U.S.-led military coalition that drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991, where Syrian and U.S. soldiers fought shoulder-to-shoulder. However it was a one way U.S. ticket that brought Syria neither closer to peace nor security. More than thirty years were lost for nothing on betting on the U.S. “good will” and “good offices” that were not forthcoming. The Syrian Golan Heights remained occupied by Israel. The Syrian regime remained targeted for change by U.S. ruling neoconservatives. Syria remained sanctioned as a state sponsoring “terrorism.” U.S. remained weighing in heavily on Syria to succumb to the dictates of the Israeli occupying power for peace as well as the U.S.-Israeli re-mapping plans for the Middle East. That is the “status quo ante” that Secretary Condoleezza Rice failed to grasp when she refused to “freeze” the status quo ante on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Syria also has repeatedly warned against preserving the status quo ante. How could any Syrian leadership sit idle watching the geo-military and geo-political bases of its national security undermined to bring the Israeli hostile occupying power to the doorsteps of its metropolitan? How could any country tolerate such an existential threat! The United States and Israel are contemplating a NATO-led international force at Syria’s doorsteps, and to bring about a pro-U.S. or a puppet regime in Beirut. Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is driving hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee the atrocities of the Israeli midwife of the “new” sovereign and democratic Lebanon from the west into Syria, which is hardly coping with the ongoing flow of thousands of Iraqi refugees fleeing the birth horrors of another democratic regime that was midwifed by the US-led invasion of its eastern neighbour, in addition to slightly less than half a million Palestinian refugees the country is hosting since the creation of the state of Israel forced them out in 1948. Syria, however, is strongly holding on to its strategic option of peace and negotiations. The Syrian – Israeli front has for decades remained the only “silent” front, more silent than even both fronts of Jordan and Egypt, the only Arab countries to sign peace treaties with Israel. On Sunday Syria said it was willing to engage in direct talks with the U.S. to help end the fighting in Lebanon within the framework of a broader peace initiative that would include a return of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, swiftly dismissed any talks with Syria, which “doesn't need dialogue to know what they need to do,” he told Fox News Sunday, adding: “Syria, along with Iran, is really part of the problem.” “American officials are very good at vernacular descriptions, but lousy at history and political reality in the Middle East,” Lebanese journalist Rami G. Khouri wrote in The Daily Star on Monday. The Bush administration's approach to the “New Middle East” is doomed to failure because it rules out addressing Syrian national strategic concerns and Syria as a regional key player, irrespective of who rules in Damascus.

--Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank. He is the editor of the English language Web site of the Palestine Media Centre (PMC).

The Middle East in Crisis

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 04:53:00 +0000

7-27-06, 12:15 am

As I write, Israeli troops are invading Lebanon on its southern border. No doubt this escalation will heighten the danger of a wider war, one that could involve other state and non-state actors in that region and draw millions of people into the fighting.

Israel’s generals, of course, would dismiss such a possibility, but in so doing they ignore the fact that armed conflicts cannot always be neatly orchestrated from command centers. History teaches us that war has a logic of its own that can easily confound the cleverest policymakers — politicians and generals alike. Nevertheless, the war goes on with the full-throttled support of Bush and Rice, despite a growing world outcry.

This deadly and destructive war has killed hundreds, wounded thousands, and uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. The destruction of infrastructure from houses to hospitals, to transportation and communications systems, to power grids has been massive.

The lion’s share of death and destruction is occurring, of course, in Lebanon. Earlier this week, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said that the bombing sets back Lebanon 50 years.

The routines of life have been shattered in this small country that not that long ago was ravaged by civil war and an 18-year occupation by the Israeli army. Families are again grieving. Heartache and anger are everywhere. The dead are being buried. The normal rhythms of life will be slow to return to this devastated country. It will be an even longer time before images of this unnecessary bloodletting fade from collective memory of the Lebanese people.

The Israeli people are also burying their dead and tending to their wounded. But as precious as every life — Arab and Jewish — is, there is no equivalency in terms of the effects of this war on the two countries. How could there be? Hezbollah doesn’t hold a candle to Israel’s military might.

Copying Bush administration policies

In prosecuting this murderous assault on Lebanon, the Israelis are not only copying the reckless policy and punitive methods of the Bush administration: unilateralism, use of overwhelming force, collective punishment of innocent people, and hostility toward diplomacy, multilateralism, and international institutions and law.

They are also bringing to the current battle the most sophisticated and powerful military weapons and technologies that have turned Israel’s armed forces into one of the most formidable military machines in the world, complete with everything, including nuclear weapons, something that no other country in the Middle East possesses.

Moreover, all this is steeped in the most outrageous forms of racism and great power arrogance.

Imperative steps

Given these dangers, what is imperative is an immediate cessation of hostilities on all sides, an emergency humanitarian relief for all the victims of war — in Lebanon, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Israel — and the introduction of an international peacekeeping force under the auspices of the United Nations. This is in the interests of all the peoples of that region — Israeli, Arab, Kurd, Persian and others— and people of various faiths — including Shiite, Sunni, Christian and Jewish. A cease-fire, which our own government has shamelessly prevented so far, would allow the outstanding differences that sparked this confrontation to be addressed, as they should be, diplomatically and politically.

Bush and Rice claim that an early cease-fire would work to the advantage of Hezbollah, but I don’t agree with this claim. No one, including the Israeli people, will find peace and security in a protracted and escalating conflict. Indeed, every day that the war goes on will only inflame passions on all sides, delay a positive resolution of the immediate issues of contention, and indefinitely crush any hope of a durable and just peace in the Middle East. Again, a cease-fire, humanitarian relief, and an international peacekeeping force are the only sane course of action.

It is essential to distinguish between triggering mechanisms and underlying causes of this conflict. If we listen to U.S. and Israeli officials — and the major media — we are asked to believe that the war is simply reducible to the actions of Hezbollah.

Nowhere in their narrative is the decades-long occupation and annexation of the West Bank and Gaza or Lebanon. Ignored is the systematic denial of Palestinian rights and the unrelenting campaign to destroy the political and civic institutions and economic infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. Unnoticed is the contemptuous attitude of Israeli officials toward all the political representatives of the Palestinian people — Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Fatah, and Hamas.

Never mentioned is the daily humiliation that the Palestinian people have to endure or Israel’s efforts to frustrate their democratic will. Hidden away from public view are the assassinations of Palestinian and other Arab leaders by the Israeli army and intelligence. Completely missing is a picture of the illegal roundups, torture, and indefinite detention of thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. And rarely said is that the rise of Hamas is largely explained by the intransigence of the Israeli government towards secular and moderate political forces — the PLO in the first place.

We are told to put ourselves in the shoes of the Israel people and we should do so, but we must also put ourselves in Palestinian shoes. If we did, we would not only feel threatened, angry, and fearful as the Israelis do, but we would also experience insults, humiliations, invisibility, economic deprivation, systematic denials of elementary rights, abandonment by the international community, double standards when it comes to enforcement of UN resolutions, and the absence of a territorially defined and legally sanctioned place that the world recognizes as our “home.”

Thus, any resolution of the crisis has to address at the negotiating table — not the battlefield, not unilaterally — the fundamental issue of Palestinian statehood and other longer-term causes as well as the triggering mechanisms that together fuel the tensions, anger, and deadly fighting that rise to the surface of everyday life across the Middle East.

No military solution

Without such an approach, the cycle of violence will continue with pauses of relative quiet periodically punctuated by fierce fighting in which one side may win the chimera of victory, but only until the next round of fighting. If the more than 50 years of violence and counter-violence have taught any lessons, it is that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Of course, reaching such a resolution will not be easy. There are plenty of obstacles on all sides, beginning with the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and elsewhere, the right-wing section of the Israeli ruling class, and right-wing clerical and secular extremists in the Arab and Muslim world.

Much the same could be said about ending the occupation of Iraq, another U.S.-driven war that is causing death and chaos, and exacerbating tensions in the region, and will continue to do so as long as the occupation continues.

Nevertheless, saner forces can prevail; saner forces can win the peace; and saner forces can secure a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and compel the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

New fault lines

The current war against Hezbollah and Lebanon is bringing to the surface new fault lines between the Arab states, between Iran and some of its Arab neighbors, and between Sunni- and Shiite-led countries and peoples. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is trying to exploit these fissures and has been successful to a degree.

The Bush administration, however, makes a mistake if it thinks that these new fault lines will hold up in the face of this relentless offensive of the Israeli military against the people of Lebanon. In fact, with each passing day the opposition will grow in the Middle East and in the world community, including among U.S. allies. Nearly everyone — with the exception of too many members of Congress, Republican and Democrat alike — is distancing themselves now from the callous and calculated policy of Bush and Rice to one degree or another, a policy that in effect continues and sanctions the bloody bombing and devastation of Lebanon.

Were the Israeli army to begin a full-scale ground war in Lebanon, which I think is unlikely, this fraying coalition that so far supports the Israeli military action would badly fracture along many lines.

Of course, the possibility of a full-scale invasion can’t be ruled out altogether. Wiser heads do not always prevail and in this case, there are pressures from the most right-wing circles in Israel and the United States to engage Syria and Iran. Former Republican House leader Newt Gingrich and William Kristol, editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard, are making a case for a broader-scale offensive to radically rearrange the furniture in the Middle East in favor of U.S. imperialism — which only goes to prove that the much-proclaimed democratization of the Middle East is nothing but a cover-up for establishing client states in that region in order to secure control over oil resources and the profits and geopolitical power that come from such control.

There is great disappointment, probably anger, in the ruling circles of the U.S. and Israel with the reaction of the Lebanese government and people. The Bush administration hoped that they would join the Israeli/U.S. front to liquidate the physical and political presence of Hezbollah, even if that might require another civil war on Lebanese soil. If in Vietnam the Nixon administration “bombed the villages in order to save them,” in Lebanon, the Bush administration is ready to “incite a civil war in order to save the country.”

Threat inflation

To rationalize these actions, the Bush administration and the Olmert-Peretz government recycle two ideological devices that were employed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The first is “threat inflation.” In other words, Hezbollah and Hamas are represented as a threat to the very existence of Israel. Once people buy into that notion then a massive and disproportional military response makes perfectly good sense.

But there is no threat to Israel’s existence. It’s true that Hezbollah and Hamas deny in words the right of Israel to exist, and commit murderous acts against innocent Israelis, but neither one has the military wherewithal, given the enormous imbalances in military capacities, to drive the Israeli state into the sea. If an existential threat exists for anyone in the Middle East, it is, first of all, the Palestinian people.

The other ideological device is to conflate the opposition into a single and seamless bloc whose overarching mission is to visit terror on the rest of the world. We are asked to believe that this bloc of states and movements in particular, and Arab and Muslim people in general, have a nearly genetic hatred of and fierce desire to destroy our way of life and freedoms, all of which is outside of history, politics, colliding state and local interests, and longstanding grievances and inequalities.

In so doing the Bush administration strips the people of the Middle East of their humanity and removes the ground for diplomacy, negotiation, and peaceful resolution of outstanding conflicts. It also gives itself a cover to pursue its policy of unrivaled world domination, and gives the green light to its strategic allies, like Israel, to recklessly wield their own military might in the Middle East — not to mention reinforces to the extreme racist stereotypes and racial profiling and the curtailment of democracy in our land. Given the awesome power of new military technologies and weapons — conventional and nuclear — humankind must reject this invented and false vision of the world and impose a new logic of peace, justice, and respect for national sovereignty on the Bush administration and, for that matter, all states and movements in the world.

Marxism and anti-imperialism

The role of Hezbollah (as well as Hamas) warrants criticism and even condemnation. Of course, it should be done in a particular context, but our appreciation of the difference between a colonizing and colonized people, our appreciation of the difference between an occupied and occupying state, and our appreciation of the asymmetry of power and its effects should not make us silent or neutral regarding Hezbollah’s reckless and deadly actions.

Neither Hezbollah (nor Hamas) are national liberation movements as we have come to understand them. Their political kinship is to regimes and movements on the right rather than the left. Neither one speaks about transforming socio-economic structures and establishing a secular democratic state. Nor do we support their tactics in many instances or their internal role in the countries in which they operate.

Do they resist occupation and colonialism? Do they make difficulties for U.S. imperialism? Some say yes.

But to leave it here misses the mark. I can’t imagine that Hezbollah didn’t know full well what the reaction of the Israeli ruling circle and the Bush administration would be to the capturing and imprisoning of Israeli soldiers. While they might have entertained a range of response to their actions, one must (or clearly should) have been, given the ruthlessness of the Israeli ruling class, that Israel would respond militarily and fiercely. In any case, their actions were provocative.

This is not a Marxist approach, but then again neither Hezbollah, Hamas, nor other right-wing clericalist movements can be categorized as Marxists or on the left. In fact, in most countries they are at loggerheads with Marxist parties and movements. In Iraq and Iran, for example, right-wing clericalist organizations assassinate Communists as well as other left, progressive, and democratic forces.

Marxism never considers tactics abstractly. Tactics and their efficacy are determined by concrete circumstances. They are embedded in a particular set of political, economic, and social processes.

They can’t be elaborated independently of a sober and objective estimate of the class and social forces at a national and international level. Marxism doesn’t absolutize any one form of struggle as suitable for all occasions.

Nevertheless, there is a tendency in a section of the left to regard armed struggle as the only valid, legitimate, and militant form of anti-imperialist struggle, regardless of circumstances. It is almost as if picking up a gun ipso facto and irrespective of its tactical appropriateness and its effects is to be applauded.

While oppressed people have a right to bear arms, we don’t advocate this tactic in every circumstance nor are we duty bound to support it when undertaken by others. Under no circumstances do we support the killing of innocent civilians.

Armed struggle is appropriate only if every form of peaceful mass struggle has been exhausted, only if it advances the democratic, class, and anti-imperialist movement, and only if, a majority of a people supports military means of engagement. Every movement — working-class, democratic, anti-imperialist, and revolutionary — must examine tactics from the following point of view: do they advance, do they strengthen, and do they unite the struggle? Do they create a better terrain on which the movement can advance its struggle against imperialism?

If this yardstick is employed, it is hard to conclude that Hezbollah’s actions are anti-imperialist. Has the struggle for Palestinian independence been enhanced? Have the forces of imperialism been put on the defensive? Will this war create better conditions to end the occupation of Iraq? Will it facilitate the development and sovereign status of Lebanon and other states in the Middle East? Does it weaken the forces of reaction in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East? Does it weaken the Bush administration, the main purveyor of violence? Does it make the world a safer place?

To my mind, Hezbollah’s actions have done nothing to advance the struggle against U.S. imperialism or Israeli occupation and expansionism.

Hezbollah threw an easy pitch to the ruling circles in Israel and the U.S. And to no one’s surprise they have jumped on it and ratcheted up their offensive to secure political dominance of that region.

Conditions of struggle have changed in the contemporary world, thus making the ground for armed struggle narrower and narrower.

The main obstacle to peace is the Bush administration and its policies. Directly and indirectly, U.S. imperialism has wreaked death and destruction in the Middle East and around the world. But the left and progressive movement can’t be silent about provocations, no matter where they come from on the political spectrum and no matter how militant and “revolutionary” they sound. The task is not simply to stand up to imperialism, but to defeat it. And that can’t be done by the left alone — it will take strategy and tactics that will move millions and millions of people into struggle against imperialism. A first step is to win millions to impose a cease-fire on all sides, to end the occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, and Iraq, and to secure a just peace that protects the national and security rights of all peoples in the region.

--Sam Webb is the National Chair of the Communist Party, USA.

More to Lebanon War than Meets the Eye

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:37:00 +0000

7-27-06, 12:08 am

At first glance, history seems to repeat itself in Lebanon, where a lengthy cold war is intermittently interrupted by an extreme show of violence as traditional players quickly sprint into action, stacking their support behind one party or the other.

News headlines remind us of past conflicts such as that of 1978 – when Israel illegally occupied parts of Lebanon – and 1982 – when Israel unleashed a full scale invasion and most deadly campaign against its small neighbor to the north, killing tens of thousands, mostly civilians.

But the unreserved significance of the ongoing conflict has more to do with Israel's military ambitions – not necessarily colonial, but rather strategic - than with Hizbollah's ability to strike deep into Israel.

Let's examine the bigger picture, starting well before Hizbollah's daring capture of two Israeli soldiers in cross border fighting, which unfortunately, at least as far the media is concerned, is the solitary provocation that sparked the current conflict. (A San Francisco Chronicle investigative report by Matthew Kalman - Israel Set War Plan More Than a Year Ago, July 21, 2006 – sheds more light on Israel's intent to carry a three-week bombardment of Lebanon as early as 2000.)

For years, Israel's strategic objective has been to break up the Syria-Lebanon front – to isolate Syria and meddle as always in Lebanon's affairs – while diminishing whatever leverage Iran has in Lebanon through its support of Hizbollah.

As I argued in the first chapter of my book: the Second Palestinian Intifada, Israel's military defeat in Lebanon and its army's abrupt exit in May 2000, has espoused what became increasingly known as 'the spirit of resistance' among Palestinians and Lebanese alike. Israel has proved once and for all to have serious military shortcomings, and Hizbollah – an organization that was comprised mostly of the relatives of Israel's victims in the invasion of 1982 and subsequent years- was the single entity that exposed those limitations.

Thus, Israel upgraded its use of violence to unprecedented degrees during the Palestinian uprising of September 2000 – months after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon- to send a clear message that their military travesty in Lebanon will not be repeated elsewhere. Moreover, despite its insistence that it left Lebanon for good, Israel never departed from its original military goal of destroying Hizbollah or meddling in Lebanese affairs.

Then there was the American attack on Iraq in March 2003 - clearly a highly dangerous military adventure – which was lauded by Israeli and pro-Israeli neo-conservative ideologues in Tel Aviv and in Washington as prudent and indispensable involvement, that would further cement Israel's security and the US strategic objectives in the Middle East – thoughtlessly considered one and the same.

The Iraq war was anticipated to be a 'cakewalk', which would be followed – according to various neo-cons documents available on the web – by a regime change in Syria and Iran, respectively. Though both countries have proved unequally vital in the US so-called 'war on terror', Israel views both as imminent and ominous threats, for only these countries, after the collapse of the Iraqi military front, still possess real armies and potential military threats. Of course, such a claim, at least in the Syrian case, is highly questionable.

Bogged down in Iraq in an impossible war, it became clear that the US military is simply incapable of taking on more of Israel's foes. According to Israel's friends in the US Congress and media – and they are plentiful – the mission was not accomplished. This explains the growing neo-con intellectual insurgency against the administration, accusing it of 'mishandling' the Iraq conflict and failing to appreciate the gravity of the Iran threat. While President Bush is relentless in his anti Iran and Syria rhetoric, it's becoming more transparent that a full invasion of Iran, or even Syria are now in the realm of wishful thinking.

With American military ambitions slowly dying out in the dust of the battlefield in Baghdad and Ramadi, Israel is growing utterly frustrated. Why? On one hand, despite the intense pressure on Syria to abandon Lebanon – as it did – Hizbollah's military and political influence hardly faded, as Israel has hoped for an immediate overhaul of the political map of Lebanon and the dismantling of Hizbollah. Even worse, a movement that is parallel to Hizbollah in many ways in Palestinian and Arab psyche, Hamas, was on the rise, this time – ironically - as part of the US advocated democratic reforms campaign in the Middle East.

Hamas’ advent to power in January 2006, was followed by a less decisive Israeli election that brought to power a questionable coalition, whose prime minister and defense minister are known for having no military browses, a major diversion from Israel's traditional politics. In other words, the new Israeli government had a great deal to prove on the battlefield to receive much needed validation at home.

Similar to its political pressure on Lebanon and Syria – using Washington as a conduit- Tel Aviv took on Hamas: a suffocating economic siege, an international smear campaign and a diplomatic blockade – using Washington, but also corrupt ex-Palestinian officials to achieve its goals. That too has failed terribly, which prompted military strikes against Gaza, killing scores and wounding hundreds, mostly civilians. In a rare diversion from its political leadership, the Hamas militant wing responded by capturing an Israeli solider at the border, vowing to only release him if all Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails are set free.

As far as Israel and the US administration – and much of the Western media – are concerned, Hamas provoked the Israeli military wrath that followed, the killing and wounding hundreds of innocent people and destroying what it has spared in past onslaughts. While Arab governments carried on with business as usual, Hizbollah – who must've know that an Israeli military campaign against Lebanon was inevitable any way – decided to take the initiative by opening a war front on Israel's northern border in the least comfortable times for the Israeli military, with the hope to relieve some of the pressure on Palestinians. Whether it miscalculated or not is another story.

Neither Syria nor Iran asked Hizbollah to start a new war on Israel, though I can imagine that both will likely attempt to reap its benefits in case Hizbollah manages to survive the Israeli onslaught, which is, according to US analyst, William Lind, a victory in itself.

Israel doesn't want to occupy Lebanon, but is keenly interested in destroying Hizbollah, thus sending a clear message to Iran that it is next. It also wants to broaden the Middle East conflict to force the US into an uninvited showdown with Iran and Syria. Expectedly, the US is providing 100 percent political, military and financial cover to Israel's adventurism in Lebanon, but will it go further?

Hizbollah cannot lose if it wishes to survive as a formidable political force in Lebanon. If Hizbollah is disarmed, it is feared that Israel will go back to its full scale meddling in Lebanese affairs, isolating Syria even further, and gaining a strategic battle in its looming showdown with Tehran.

Tragically, Israel's military adventurism and the US reprehensible backing of Israel's endless quest for regional domination has so far seen the death and wounding of thousands of innocent Lebanese civilians, and the destruction of a nation that has barely recovered from past Israeli wars, to once again collapse under the rubble of a new one.

--Ramzy Baroud is a US journalist. He is the author of The Second Palestinian Uprising: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle, published by Pluto Press in London, available in the US from the University of Michigan Press, and everywhere from Amazon.com. He is also the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

Tony Blair doesn't talk for us

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:35:00 +0000

7-27-06, 9:56 am

TONY Blair continues to parrot platitudes about deeply regretting 'the loss of innocent life in the Lebanon and Israel' while backing the US-Israeli battle plan.

A ceasefire forms no part of US-Israeli strategy until the Hezbollah resistance organisation is disarmed, disbanded or otherwise pulverised into defeat.

That is why the US agreed to Tel Aviv's request last week to rush a delivery of satellite and laser-guided weapons to the Israeli army to tool up its invasion of Lebanon.

It is why Israel has used artillery-delivered cluster bombs against populated areas of south Lebanon, in breach of international law.

Defence Minister Amir Peretz, who once carried the hopes of the Israeli Labour Party as a force for peace and justice, has committed Israel to building what he calls a 'security strip' in south Lebanon, which will be 'under the control of our forces if there is not a multinational force.'

Presumably, this is because an Israeli-imposed self-styled security zone has been such a striking success in the past.

Neither Israel, the US nor France can look back with pleasure to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, to say nothing of the suffering that was inflicted on the Lebanese people and the Palestinian refugees sheltering there.

Hezbollah destroyed US-French meddling by blowing up a Beirut marine barracks in 1983, killing 241 US service personnel and 58 French paratroopers.

And it led the resistance war of attrition against the Israeli occupation that forced the intruders out in 2000.

No wonder that US allies vaguely support a multinational buffer force in south Lebanon but will not commit their own troops.

They know that any such force would be perceived as doing Israel's dirty work for it and would be bound to come into conflict with Lebanese patriotic forces opposed to foreign occupation.

Public opinion throughout the the Middle East rejects Israel's aggression together with the efforts of the Bush administration and our own wretched US colonial dependency that passes for a Labour government to secure through diplomacy what Israeli armed force has not achieved thus far.

Although Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair waffle on about any ceasefire having to be based on 'enduring principles and not on temporary solutions,' neither is prepared to tackle the key issues that create instability in the region.

These are Israel's expansionism and its refusal to negotiate a settlement with those whose land it has occupied and which it plans to annex.

The extent of the US desire for peace stretches only to a guarantee of no attacks on Israel, leaving the zionist state to press on with its criminal deeds and abandoning those living under occupation and those existing for decades as refugees.

Mr Blair's slavish support for US-Israeli war crimes is disgusting growing numbers of people in Britain.

The pressure must be stepped up to show him and the world that people in this country want a peace settlement in the Middle East that guarantees the rights of all peoples rather than those of one regional superpower and its patron.

From Morning Star

Corn-based Ethanol and the Quest to Replace Fossil Fuel

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:30:00 +0000

7-27-06, 9:52 am

Contrary to the usual outcome of Washington’s subsidies to U.S. farmers, recent grants for ethanol producers could actually improve many lives, both at home and abroad. As the Bush administration aggressively encourages the production of ethanol, a renewable, more environmentally friendly biofuel, to replace increasingly pricey gasoline in automobiles, domestic and foreign corn markets will have to undergo some major adjustments. The U.S. hopes to decrease gasoline consumption by augmenting the production of compounds such as E-85 fuel, which is a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, that can replace regular gasoline in almost every vehicle sold today in the U.S. This could make a real dent in U.S. reliance on foreign petroleum as a result of a major shift to a domestic, non-hydrocarbon fuel source.

A Growth Industry

In the U.S., ethanol is made by distilling corn kernels, but for this country to make enough ethanol to keep foreign oil off its highways, half of the nation’s farmland would have to be devoted to growing corn for fuel. Realistically, U.S. farmers cannot grow enough corn to feed all U.S. cars, cows, and humans, as well as Washington’s close trading partners; farmers abroad should see this as a welcomed opportunity to reverse their present status and again see themselves as competitive. Currently, farm subsidies awarded by Congress to U.S. farmers to harvest bounteous corn crops allows for low domestic prices while also guaranteeing U.S. dominance in international corn markets. But as the need for growing ethanol production strains domestic corn supplies, U.S. corn producers may have to consider curbing their exports to Latin American countries in order to meet the increasing demand for domestic U.S. ethanol production. One thing is for certain: the ultimate beneficiaries of heavily subsidized U.S. corn-ethanol will be major agro-industries like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill.

According to the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service’s report on 2006 corn exports, Mexico receives about 15 percent of the U.S. commodity while other Latin American countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Guatemala take in another 15 percent. With U.S. producers accounting for smaller amounts of corn shipments for export and asking for higher prices due to the resulting corn scarcity, corn farmers in these countries, especially those in Mexico, at some point will be able to compete on the world market and gain the revenues recently denied them due to their inability to compete. The extent to which these changes in the marketing of corn will affect Latin America depends on how strong the corn-ethanol demand remains. Although there are some potential threats to corn-ethanol’s much touted future, its general prospects look promising.

Shifting Priorities

The U.S. corn market is already feeling the effects of an expansion in ethanol production, as the newly created industrial demand for this category of corn makes up about 14 percent of this year’s corn harvest, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The department also estimates that the quantity of corn used for ethanol manufacturing will double within the next 10 years, using about a quarter of total U.S. corn output. To satisfy the mounting need for corn, U.S. farmers can increase production by planting more acres and engineering better corn genetics. However, as the USDA has stated, increasing corn output may not be an attractive option because the equipment used to cultivate corn must operate on fossil fuel. More production normally means burning more oil, which contradicts the main reasons for producing ethanol in the first place. Farmers may have to displace soybean fields to plant more acres of “yellow gold,” as a New York Times article called it, because soybeans grow under the same conditions as corn. However, changing crop rotation to favor corn may damage soil quality, impairing corn production in the end.

Since vastly expanding the U.S. corn crop could have such negative consequences, U.S. farmers will probably not be able to increase the acreage devoted to corn in order to supply sufficient output to offset the increased demand. Warren R. Staley of Cargill, a multinational U.S. agricultural giant, expressed concern about corn supplies in a New York Times interview, “Unless we have a huge increase in productivity, we will have a huge problem with food production … and the world will have to make choices.” Corn is normally sold to food industries or exported to foreign countries, but with ethanol manufacturers buying so much of the crop, U.S. corn sellers may have to choose among their buyers and divert sales from traditional commodity purchasers toward those engaged in fuel production.

Corn across Borders

The USDA predicts that U.S corn farmers will continue selling to domestic food industries and cut back on exports in order to supply domestic ethanol producers. The U.S.’s cutback on exports could be a saving grace for Latin American farmers who have been battered by fierce U.S. competition. The U.S. has been dominating foreign corn markets with their heavily subsidized exports that make its crop relatively cheaper, against which disadvantaged Latin American farmers have been unable to compete. In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994 eliminated tariffs on U.S. shipments to Mexico, allowing U.S. farmers to export low-cost subsidized corn, effectively crowding Mexican farmers out of their own market. In 2002, Mexico’s Secretaria del Trabajo y Provision Social published a survey on national employment, where tens of thousands of Mexican corn farmers were forced to leave their land parcels throughout the 1990s as NAFTA took effect. The number of all agricultural producers fell 21 percent, renters and sharecroppers had dropped by 36 percent, and communal farmers by 21 percent. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), both recently enacted, call for similar tariff reductions which would inevitably hurt small farms throughout Latin America. On the other hand, corn farmers who had grievously suffered from free trade agreements are now likely to benefit from Washington’s new ethanol obsession, since U.S. corn shipments will be heading for Midwest ethanol plants, rather than displacing foreign producers in their own local markets.

With less U.S. corn available for exporting, the price of U.S. corn both abroad and at home is bound to rise. Wealthier countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and Canada, where food comprises a small fraction of their foreign purchases, are unlikely to reduce imports on slightly more expensive U.S. corn, but poorer countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Colombia will be inclined to search for a cheaper option. This could give Latin American farmers the business they need since higher U.S. grain prices make cheaper domestic Latin American grain that much more attractive. The USDA expects that as the U.S. cuts back on exports due to domestic demand, corn exports from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil will fill the gaps in the world corn market. For example, corn farmers from the state of Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico have been growing corn comparable to that of the U.S. product in quality, but Sinaloa is located quite far from most corn buyers in Mexico. Because of this, transporting the grain is expensive, and when Sinaloan corn finally reaches the market, buyers find that the price is much higher than U.S.-imported corn. However, if the price for U.S. corn continues to increase, shipping Sinaloan corn may become the cheaper option.

Brazil’s Sweet Advantage

A number of potential barriers exist to the success of corn-based ethanol, which could in turn limit its effects on Latin America. However, subsidies and protective tariffs from Washington and a slough of corn-ethanol investors can be expected to ensure continued growth of the industry.

Brazil’s ethanol program should be an inspiration to up-and-coming U.S. producers who hope to efficiently use ethanol-based fuel in the future; however, Brazil’s sugar-based ethanol can be expected to provide stiff competition to U.S. corn ethanol. Brazil has been developing its sugar-ethanol program since the world’s first oil scare in the 1970s. Since then, the program has facilitated cheap and efficient ethanol manufacturing, resulting in ethanol fueling about half of the country’s automobiles. With access to cheap farm labor and sugar’s high alcohol yield, production costs for Brazil’s ethanol are about 30 percent less than the U.S. corn-based product. Yet the U.S. lacks the surplus of sugar needed to supply a domestic fuel industry, and the Midwest is restricted by the facts of agricultural cultivation to using corn as an alternative source for ethanol.

Power Politics

Despite the fact that the U.S. strongly advocates free trade throughout the Americas, it has maintained restrictions on imported sugar products to protect domestic sugar farmers. Jack Roney of the U.S. Sugar Alliance claims that “when you import subsidized foreign sugar, you export U.S. jobs,” as cheaper Brazilian sugar would displace U.S. producers. Now U.S. corn farmers and ethanol producers share the same concern. With sugar’s relative efficiency and the government’s sugar subsidies, Brazil can provide cheaper and more effective production, and thus, hold its competitive advantage over the U.S. This makes Brazilian ethanol exports to the U.S. a menacing threat to corn-ethanol demand. However, the U.S. currently enforces trade restrictions on all foreign sugar products, which also limits Brazilian ethanol imports that could hurt corn-ethanol producers and the farmers who supply them.

At a recent Senate hearing for energy security in Latin America, Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho from the São Paulo Sugar Cane Agroindustry Union (UNICA), asked the U.S. to lower tariffs to create a more open world market, allowing Brazil to sell more ethanol to the U.S. Knowing that Brazil’s cheap sugar-based ethanol would competitively oust U.S. ethanol, the U.S. refused Brazil’s request, deciding instead to protect U.S. farmers and its own budding ethanol business. Carvalho stated that “the Brazilian private sector does not want to displace the foreign market,” specifically U.S. ethanol producers, but the amount of revenue Brazilian companies expect to receive by exporting to the U.S. shines much light on the true intentions of Brazilian ethanol producers. The U.S. has always been persistent in maintaining that its trade policies protect its farmers; as long as the Sugar Alliance and other farm lobbyists continue making noise in Washington, U.S. corn-based ethanol will carry on thriving domestically, handsomely protected against foreign competition.

Ethanol on the Rise

Technology for corn-based ethanol is still relatively undeveloped: it remains expensive to produce and using corn to distill ethanol is not the most efficient method. The actual cost of corn-based ethanol is higher than the current prices for gasoline, but subsidies from Washington have kept the prices low enough so consumers can pay less for ethanol than gasoline. Corn-based ethanol’s effectiveness in cutting fossil fuel usage is also uncertain, as the USDA estimates that it actually takes more than one gallon of gasoline to fertilize, harvest, transport, process, and distill corn to yield one gallon of ethanol.

A Way Forward

With ethanol plants sprouting up across the country, one can safely expect corn-ethanol production to soar in the next few years. According to the New York Times, around 40 new ethanol plants have been slated for construction across America’s Corn Belt this year. Archer Daniels Midland and other ethanol refining megaliths have been lobbying for Washington to subsidize ethanol, and their efforts have paid off with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. According to the Act, Washington will make certain that the U.S. is consuming at least 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2012. That is 50 percent more ethanol than what the U.S. is currently producing. which means a huge increase in production and corn consumption is preordained in the next six years. The act also finances research to improve ethanol technology to eventually minimize corn-ethanol’s current inefficiency.

Although the economic practicality of corn-based ethanol is still questionable, it remains a hugely popular commodity in the U.S. and in the minds of its potential users because it can reduce dependency on foreign oil. Weaning the U.S. economy off of oil is Washington’s main priority in the near future, and that is why the U.S. Congress will continue to pour money into the ethanol industry to achieve this end. With Washington backing corn-based ethanol with subsidies and trade protections, the industry will continue to increase output, buy more of the Western Hemisphere’s corn, and inadvertently help undo some of the damage U.S. trade policy has done to Latin America in the past.

Stephanie Leland

From Council onHemispheric Affairs

For an Immediate Cease of Fire

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:19:00 +0000

7-27-06, 9:40 am

For An Immediate Cease of Fire

Following the continuous aggression against Lebanon, the international contacts and mediations are, so far, influenced by the Israeli conditions of the releasing the 2 Israeli soldiers and pulling back Hezbollah from south Lebanon. Such conditions are not viable and can only increase the escalation of the situation.

The Lebanese Communist Party's view regarding the way out of the crisis is as follows:

1- Immediate cease of fire and end of the Israeli military operation.

2- The problem of the prisoners and detainees at both sides should be negotiated, through a third channel, in a comprehensive way, since Israel is capturing Lebanese people in its prison..

3- The implementation of UN Resolution 1559 is a matter for national dialogue. Lebanese political and institutional forces shall find a wise road map to deal with it in preserving the national unity and the internal stability, with no foreign interference or dictations.

The party believes that an international pressure for an immediate cease fire is the best expression of solidarity that our people can get in order to stop the bloodshed and massacres.

Lebanese Communist Party, Beirut 7/17/2006

European Parliament Members Travel to Lebanon

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:03:00 +0000

7-27-06, 9:24 am

Press Conference of the European Left Party Subject: EL delegation to Lebanon

Representatives of the parties of the European Left which belong to the Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the party announced at a Press Conference in Athens today the visit of a delegation of the European Left party to Lebanon.

Alecos Alavanos, SYNASPISMOS President, made the following opening statement:

'We are all living dramatic moments. After Baghdad, after Gaza, another Middle East region is turned into a slaughterhouse, into a mass of ruins. This must end. This war must end.

Fifteen days ago in Paris we had a meeting of the European Left parties leaders and a visit to the region was decided. After the latest developments Lebanon and Beirut became a first priority. That’s why a delegation of the European Left party is leaving for Beirut tonight

Here, in brief, are the ten basic points of the European Left party’s position on the issue: Immediate termination of the war, according to international law and the UN principles Release of the prisoners on all sides Withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and Gaza Deployment of a peace keeping UN force for the security and stability in the region, in order to promote a comprehensive solution An international Conference for the Middle East that will focus on the Palestinian issue Immediate termination of arms exports to the region An urgent and generous humanitarian aid programme under the UN aegis Development of the broadest possible anti-war movement A demand to the European Union and to the governments of the member countries to go forward, at last, to a policy free of US hegemony, that will promote a peaceful solution to the Middle East problem based on diplomatic means, on the basis of the UN resolutions.

The delegation will be made up of the following comrades:

Jean Claude Lefort, Member of Parliament for the French Communist Party –PCF, Wolfgang Gerhke, Member of Parliament for Die Linke PDS,Germany Miguel Portas, Member of European Parliament – Left Block -Portugal Alfio Nicotra, National Representative for Peace issues for the Communist Refoundation – Italy, Dino Hadzinicola, Member of Parliament, AKEL, Cyprus Athanassios Leventis, Member of Parliament, SYNASPISMOS, Greece, Panos Trigazis, SYNASPISMOS Political Secretariat member. Aris Moussionis, member of Greek Parliament for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) has asked to be part of this group and he will be joining them.

Athens, 24 July 2006

Failure of the US Economic Model

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:20:00 +0000

7-26-06, 9:42 am

'In the United States, it is possible to work full-time, full-year and still live in poverty,' states the soon-to-be-released book The State of Working America, 2006/2007, the indispensable annual publication of the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Sneak previews of a chapter from this volume reveal that, by comparison to the other 19 richest countries in the world, high productivity and per capita income rates in the US mask higher relative rates of income inequality, higher overall and child poverty rates, and the most expensive but least effective health care system. Additionally, elderly poverty, life expectancy, and infant mortality rank at or near the bottom of the most industrialized countries that make up the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In fact, when measured by these standards, the US economic model – few worker protections, huge subsidies for corporations, and non-existent or weak public services – is relatively less effective than its OECD counterparts in delivering a quality standard of living to its population, according to data provide by the EPI.

The area in which the US compares least favorably with other industrialized countries is health care. According to EPI's data, the US spends 15% of its GDP on health care, but 16% of the population in 2004 went without any health care coverage. By comparison, countries like Austria, Ireland and Finland spent at a relative rate of less than half the US, but covered their respective populations universally. Countries like Switzerland and Germany spent a little over 11% of their GDPs on health care (second and third on the OECD list) and covered their populations entirely as well. In other words, of the OECD countries, the US paid the most for health care and covered the fewest people.

Breaking these numbers down a little more reveals additional problems with the current health system in the US. Of that 15%, less than half (45%) were public dollars, but the programs funded by this spending covered only 25.3% of the population. The 55% of total US health care spending covers just a little more than half of the total population with mostly inadequate or partial health insurance. The private health care sector in the US alone costs relatively more than about half of the OECD countries.

While the other 19 OECD countries have health care systems that are both publicly and privately financed, the overwhelming majority of health care costs are paid for by public money and most of those countries provide complete or near-universal coverage. For example, Canada spends 6.9% of its GDP on public health care programs, which cover 100% of Canadians. In Japan, 84% of that country's health care spending comes from public sources that cover 100% of its population. In France, 99.9% of its population is covered by public services that cost about 7.7% of that country’s GDP.

Th US's ineffective health care system translates into a life expectancy rate tied for last place and an infant mortality rate at the very bottom of the list.

Apart from health care, income inequality and poverty rates in the US are near or at the very bottom of OECD countries. Despite having the second highest per capita income among the OECD countries in 2004, the US provided the worst living standards for low-income workers. Meanwhile, the richest households in the US garnered the largest share of the overall national income of any other OECD country.

Additionally, when adopting the internationally accepted method of measuring a country's poverty rate by counting all of the people who earn less than 50% of the median income as being poor, the US overall poverty rate is 17%, or more than 4 points higher than official US government statistics. This rate is the worst of the OECD countries and is more than twice the poverty rates, using the same method, of 9 other countries.

The child and elderly poverty rates ranked last or near the very bottom. Further analysis shows that the US is the worst at fighting child poverty. Social programs and tax credits aimed at pulling people out of poverty cuts child poverty in half in the other 19 OECD countries. Poorly funded and neglected anti-poverty programs in the US barely make a dent.

Defenders of the US economic model point to relatively higher rates of income per capita, higher productivity, and lower rates of unemployment as evidence of its worth. According to EPI, however, these ideologues and economists never consider issues of inequality, poverty, or health care in compiling their overall estimates of the quality of life produced in the US economy. But even by the standards of its proponents, the US model may not measure up.

Higher rates of per capita income in the US are at least in part caused by the fact that American workers simply work more hours than their OECD counterparts. In many European countries, workers view paid vacation time as central to a high standard of living. This is a factor that just isn't accounted for by proponents of the US economic model. Likewise, productivity rates and unemployment patterns may reflect other factors, such as the long-term impact of the devastation of World War II on OECD economies, rather than any inherent superiority of the US system.

The US economic model is the failed consequence of the rise of the ultra right since Reagan, which has sought primarily to erode the social democratic programs created by the New Deal and the 'war on poverty.' Privatization and elimination of popular public programs like Social Security, Medicare, public schools, public health care, anti-poverty programs, federal regulatory agencies, and the like are high on the right-wing agenda (as well as those 'moderate' voices that gravitate to the right).

Right-wing political movements in some European countries have tried to erode the social democratic model in favor of privatization and implementing some version of the US economic model. To the chagrin of economic elites, working people in countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Greece, France and Italy have vigorously fought these changes. In France, workers’ demonstrations have essentially made its conservative government a lame duck. Italian voters sent right-wing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi packing.

For their part, US workers can stall this right-wing agenda by handing the Republican Party a defeat in the mid-term congressional elections on November 7th.

--Joel Wendland can be reached at

The Two Drafts of the India-US Nuclear Deal

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:58:00 +0000

7-26-06, 9:20 am

After silence for more than a month on the two Bills drafted by the Senate and the House of Representatives Committees on the India US nuclear agreement, Manmohan Singh has finally been forced to respond to rising criticism and has voiced his “concern”. The CPI(M) had pointed out both in July last year and again this year that the deal was designed to force India to abandon its independent foreign policy. It is increasingly clear that it is also heavily loaded against India’s independent and a self-reliant nuclear capability. The CPI(M) had made clear in March this year that an attempt to bind India to the US on foreign policy would not be acceptable to the country and had also cautioned the government on a further shifting of the goal posts while the agreement gets converted into actual laws and measures. Both these have now occurred. The two versions of the Bill as drafted by the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Committee on International Relations that would now be reconciled before being placed for legislation, contain provisions which are not only a clear departure from the understanding contained in the Manmohan Singh-Bush agreement, but also seeks to permanently lock India’s foreign policy to US requirements. While the deal was sold to the public as a great strategic breakthrough, those promoting the deal in the media are now talking about the benefits of nuclear energy. The deal, if they are to be believed, was always and only about civilian energy program and never about anything else. In other words, we should give up the much cheaper option of gas from Iran through Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline for a more expensive and problematic alternative. When and how has the country come to the conclusion that nuclear energy program is vital to our future? Have we worked out the costs of various options for our future energy basket? Or is it that used to the oracular mode of discourse popular in strategic literature, the strategic experts now turned energy experts, forgot that making choices is also about comparative costs. Neither has the Planning Commission nor any other body (except of course Montek Singh Ahluwalia in his private capacity and that too privately) has presented any study on the need to ramp up India’s civilian nuclear program. The Planning Commission’s figures indicate that we would reach a maximum of 10,000 MW of installed capacity by 2015 – a meagre 5 per cent of our electricity capacity – and even this would require a considerably stepped up effort, well beyond what we have managed till date. So from where has this over riding need for nuclear energy arisen? STRATEGIC BENEFITS FOR UNITED STATES It is clear that India’s vote on the Iran issue in IAEA has been conditioned by the terms of the deal. Senator Luger in his opening remarks in the Foreign Relations Committee has approvingly noted “We have already seen strategic benefits from our improving relationship with India. India’s votes at the IAEA on the Iran issue last September and this past February demonstrate that New Delhi is able and willing to adjust its traditional foreign policies and play a constructive role on international issues.” For quite some time, the US has been quite unhappy with the current Non-Proliferation Treaty structure. The non-proliferation compact was simple; all countries that had yet not produced the bomb would give it up in lieu of unfettered access to scientific knowledge, technology and materials for the nuclear energy program. The only agreement that they had to make was that they would not make the bomb. This is the compact that the US and other nuclear weapons states now would like to change. What the US and its allies are now asking is despite their not fulfilling their part of the nuclear bargain that they would negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament, the non nuclear weapon countries should give up their right also to the nuclear fuel cycle. Only a few countries defined as advanced countries should have this right. To quote George Perkovitch, one of the leading US non-proliferation ideologues, “The Non-proliferation Treaty's vague Article IV right 'to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes' should not be interpreted to endorse additional states’ acquiring uranium enrichment or plutonium separation facilities” (Yale Global, March 21, 2005). Bush had stated before his New Delhi visit that India would be recipient of nuclear fuel but not be a part of countries participating in the enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel. SUBVERTING INDIAN ENERGY PROGRAM In this view, India is no different than Iran, however much Manmohan Singh and the strategic fraternity here would like to place it differently. In the view of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House of Representatives International Committee, India would not secure access to full civilian nuclear technology, but only to nuclear fuel and reactors. The fuel cycle and all equipment and technologies for the fuel cycle including various dual use technologies would continue to remain under sanctions. This is certainly a major departure from what the PM had assured the Indian parliament that this deal recognises India as an advanced nuclear power and will allow access to full civilian technologies. So all the high tech embargoes that exist on India would continue to exist. Only difference would be that India would now happily become a market for expensive reactors from the US, despite the US itself not having ordered any new reactor for the last 25 years. Facing a situation where the Indian nuclear establishment has beaten the existing sanctions and built an indigenous nuclear energy program, the US would now like to subvert this and supply – of course at a high price and with stringent other conditions – its own nuclear reactors for which there is still no US domestic market. We get to do a double favour to the US, rescue its moribund nuclear reactor production industry, as well as voluntarily tie ourselves to the US’s apron strings. When they want us to jump, we will, as we have shown so well on the Iran issue. And if we do not, then they can stop all supplies, putting at risk whatever capital we would have invested in US reactors. It is also clear from the provisions of the two Bills that it is not one of a kind concession that India would be needed to make before the US laws are modified after which it would be free to act as it would please. While a number of such provisions are in the nature of non-binding “sense of the house” clauses, nevertheless annual certification and congressional oversight contained in the Draft Bills means that India would have to play ball with the US administration or risk losing its continued cooperation with the US on civilian nuclear matters. TWO OBJECTIVES The deal, after the two House Committees have done with it, makes it amply clear that the US has two objectives through this deal. One is bind India permanently to its strategic interests; the other is to turn the screws on India’s strategic capabilities, while claiming for itself the continued right to use nuclear weapons unilaterally and on any country. The other thrust of the two Bills – and also the US policies outside – is to fast track a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty in Conference on Disarmament. The issue here is not whether we should have a fissile material cut off or not: we should, as nuclear weapons are a permanent danger to the world. The issue is simply that this is the last strategic chip left with the non-nuclear weapon states for forcing the US and other nuclear weapon states to start good faith negotiations on disarmament. Without this, a fissile material cut off would only cement the US desire to disarm the rest of the world. The US would not only retain nuclear weapons but also improving them for “tactical purposes”, such as nuclear bunker-buster bombs strikes to destroy Iran’s Natanz underground facilities. The question here is why should the non nuclear weapon states take on a new obligation when the US and other nuclear weapon states have failed to fulfil theirs? And why should India play the US game on this? LOSING FAR MORE THAN GAINING Apart from the above, there are two other major issues. One is the question of safeguards. Originally, the Indian government had understood the IAEA protocols to be India specific protocols. This is the statement that the PM made to the parliament. Now, the Draft US Bills have made clear that it means the far more intrusive Model Additional Protocols of IAEA and India’s civilian program would come in as a non nuclear weapon state for this purpose. What this will impose is unbridled examination of each and every aspect of India’s nuclear program, compromising its exclusive technical know-how. Separating the military program would not be that simple under this model protocol as IAEA would have the right to go back to the past when the programs were not separate. Additionally, the US has reserved the right under the two Drafts to post its own inspectors and will also require an inventory for each year of all fissile material from the ore stage. In other words, we need to tell Big Brother all about our nuclear program, even if this is a part of the military one. The requirement of certification to the Congress each year by the president would ensure that the ratchet would continue to turn. In any case, the Senate and the Congress would get a second chance to shift the goalpost again, as the current Bills are in the nature of an enabling provisions. The actual Act would be a separate Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (under the US Atomic Energy Act, Section 123 therefore the 123 Agreement), which would give the two Houses another go to change the conditions. Since India would have agreed to the IAEA agreement, there would be very little wiggle room at that time. If we take stock of what is happening, it is obvious India stands to lose far more than it will gain from the deal. The technology embargoes stay, India becomes a junior partner in the US strategic scheme, it becomes a party to the even more discriminatory fuel cycle program of the US, renounces cheap gas from Iran, all for the dubious benefit of choosing an expensive and dependent route for development of nuclear energy, that too of marginal importance in the energy scenario. Self respect demands that India renounces this subservient path of “strategic partnership” with the US and reasserts its independent foreign policy.

From People's Democracy

'The Killing Must Stop Now'

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:53:00 +0000

7-26-06, 9:14 am

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labour today issued a statement expressing their feelings of revulsion at the growing loss of innocent lives due to the escalating violence between Israel and Lebanon.

'We deplore the indiscriminate use of lethal force against civilians, and call for an immediate and unconditional cease fire. The region stands at a crossroads leading either to a deepening spiral of conflict, hatred and death, or to a lasting peace offering the hope of a better future for the working people of all countries.

On the eve of talks in Rome, to be attended by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, there is an urgent need for the international community to commit itself under UN leadership to new diplomatic initiatives to restart the peace process. Achievement of permanent peace must start with an immediate cessation of hostilities, and acceptance by all parties that sovereignty, territorial integrity and security is not only a basic right of other countries but in the interests of their own. No people can be secure with failed states as their neighbours.

The ICFTU and WCL therefore reiterate their call for the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, as well as 1559, and the Road Map for Peace.

The long years of reconstruction of Lebanon from the ravages of its civil war have been wiped out by the disproportionate use of military force which, in addition to the loss of innocent life it has inflicted, has deliberately destroyed the country's infrastructure. The long term challenge to the international community is to help the people of Lebanon rebuild once more in conditions of safety and freedom to determine their own future. The immediate challenge is to provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance to the millions in desperate need of it.

We urge the international community to respond to the UN appeal for aid to the 800,000 people caught up in the conflict.

The ICFTU and WCL remind all parties of their responsibilities under international humanitarian law. By renouncing the use of terror and aggression, by withdrawing to recognized borders, by the early exchange of prisoners, and by committing themselves to dialogue and diplomacy they can open the way to a peace which is within reach.

The harmonious coexistence of secure and sovereign states in Lebanon, Palestine and Israel is what working people in those countries want and need and the ICFTU and WCL express their solidarity with them and their aspirations.

Those millions of families who are instead compelled to flee their homes or to live in shelters under the threat of lethal force, deserve better than further excuses for the violence and destruction visited upon them. The killing must stop now so that the task of building peace can begin.'

Brussels, July 24, 2006

From ICFTU Online

Solidarity with Palestinian and Lebanese people

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:45:00 +0000

7-26-06, 9:07 am

Joint statement by communist and workers' parties

We strongly condemn all aggressive acts by the Israeli army in Gaza and Lebanon with tragically consequences for the live of the Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli people but also for people from other countries.

We reject and condemn the blames and threats by U.S and Israeli government addressed toward Syria and Iran and against other countries of the region. These threats reveal that the real aggressive and expansive force in the region is Israel.

We strongly protest the US policy which encourages the Israeli aggressiveness. We reject the hypocrisy shown by the G8 leaders and the 'equal distance' policy pursued today by certain forces.

We are highly concerned about and warn of the great dangers for a general spread of the crisis in the Middle East, for a new civil war and for a massive imperialist intervention in Lebanon under the pretext of 'peace building measures'.

The bombings against Lebanon follow the fierce offensive in the Gaza Strip, the kidnapping of Palestinian political figures, the attempt to eliminate the Palestinian National Authority, to destroy the infrastructure and to sink the Palestinian society into a state of chaos.

The raids in Gaza and Lebanon constitute new steps of the 'Greater Middle East' US and NATO policy which is directed against the legitimate rights of the peoples, the popular resistance, the progressive and peace loving forces.

The Israeli government, the only military nuclear power in the region, demonstratively ignores UN Security Council resolutions, violates agreements with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, undermines the agreements by the Palestinian organizations regarding the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and rejects the ceasefire proposals. It is also in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, an international law that prohibits collective punishment, 'targeted' assassinations, and destruction of the infrastructure of an occupied territory.

We call upon all peace loving forces to strengthen their solidarity with the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, with the progressive forces fighting for peace in Israel and to intensify the struggle for a political solution based on:

The immediate cessation of the attacks and withdrawal of the Israeli army.

The respect of national sovereignty and territorial integrity against any imperialist intervention under any pretext.

The immediate release of the political prisoners.

The complete dismantling of the settlements and withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967, the establishment of a Palestinian state (Gaza Strip and the West Bank) with its capital in East Jerusalem, alongside Israel. The solution of the refugee question. The return of all Palestinian refugees should be based on the resolution of UN General Assembly No. 194 and according also to the other UN resolutions.

Only pulling out Israeli soldiers from Gaza and Lebanon and a just and viable peace would put an end to the bloodshed and guarantee the security for all peoples of the Middle East.

20 July 2006 Signatory parties: Communist Party of Albania Communist Party of Australia Communist Party of Bangladesh Communist Party of Belarus Workers' Party of Belgium Communist Party of Brazil Communist Party of Britain New Communist Party of Britain Workers' Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina Communist Party of Bulgaria Party of Bulgarian Communists (former Bulgarian Communist Party 'Georgi Dimitrov') Communist Party of Canada Communist Party of Chile Communist Party of Cuba Communist Party of Bohemia & Moravia AKEL, Cyprus Communist Party in Denmark Communist Party of Denmark Communist Party of Equador Communist Party of Egypt Communist Party of Estonia Communist Party of Finland Communist Party of Macedonia Unified Communist Party of Georgia German Communist Party Communist Party of Greece Hungarian Communist Workers' Party Tudeh Party of Iran Communist Party of Ireland Workers' Party of Ireland Communist Party of Israel Jordanian Communist Party Socialist Party of Latvia Lebanese Communist Party Socialist Party of Lithuania Communist Party of Luxembourg Communist Party of Malta Party of the Communists, Mexico Popular Socialist Party of Mexico New Communist Party of the Netherlands Communist Party of Norway Palestinian People's Party Paraguayan Communist Party Phillipine Communist Party (PKP-1930) Communist Party of Poland Portuguese Communist Party Communist Party of Romania Communist Party of the Russian Federation Communist Party of the Soviet Union Russian Communist Working Party Russian Party of Communists New Communist Party of Yugoslavia Communist Party of Slovakia Communist Party of Peoples of Spain Communist Party of Spain Sudanese Communist Party Syrian Communist Party Syrian Communist Party Communist Party of Turkey The Party of Labour, EMEP, Turkey Communist Party of the Ukraine Union of Communists of Ukraine Communist Party, USA Communist Party of Venezuela

Hiroshima Day Stresses on Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:43:00 +0000

7-26-06, 9:04 am

Hiroshima Day will be observed on August 6 throughout the world by the peace loving people expressing anguish, sympathy and concern for those lakhs of victims of US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 61 years ago and also express their anger and hatred for such a heinous act of genocide. This year the GENSUKYO an umbrella Organisation of all peace organization of Japan have initiated a global signature campaign for 'Swift Abolition of Nuclear Weapons'. The growing nuclear proliferation and the unwillingness of the Nuclear weapon Countries to initiate action for Nuclear Disarmament in accordance with the Non-proliferation Treaty of 1968 is creating concern amongst those who desire abolition of Nuclear Weapons. Even after 61 years of the Nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the threat of a Nuclear Annihilation is hanging as a democles sword.

According to a Swiss Scholar Jean Jacques Babel, in the past 5,500 years our planet has had only 292 years of peace. Of the nearly 15,000 wars known to history more than half were fought in Europe. The wars costed the world 3 million deaths in the 17th Century, 5 million in the 18th century, 6 million in the 19th century, 10 million in the First World War and 55 million in the Second World War.

During the Second World War, 773 British Air Craft and 450 American Aircraft dropped 6,30,000 bombs on Dredsen and industrial city in Germany, killing 1,15,000 people. In Hiroshima only one bomb not 6,30,000 bombs killed 1,40,000 people. Many leaders of the world opposed and condemned the use of Nuclear Weapons on Japan. Winston Churchill the then Prime Minister of Britain, Eisenhower, Field Admiral W.D. Leathy, General Douglas Mcarthur and a host of others condemned and expressed their dismay over using of Nuclear Weapons against Japan which was almost surrendering. Winston Churchill was very outspoken in stating that 'It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell'. Dwight Eisenhower expressed that 'I was one of those who felt that there were a number of reasons to question the wisdom of such an act'. According to W.D. Leathy 'The use of this barbaric weapon of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea-blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. General Douglas McArthur was also of the same opinion and said that 'as the end of the Philippines campaign approached (June 1945) plans were considered at my headquarters regarding the future of the War. Captured documents revealed a total degree of exhaustion of Japan's heavy arms industry. My staff was unanimous in believing Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender. I even directed that plans be drawn for a possible peaceful occupation without further military operations.' Bemoaning on the large-scale death and destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gandhiji said that 'I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men and women and children, as the most diabolic use of science'. The leaders in U.S. favoured the use of Atom Bomb on Japan and they were guided by their diabolic vision that the bomb might place US in a position to dictate their own terms at the end of the war.

The two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945, let loose unprecedented destruction and death. On the first day itself 78,150 people in Hiroshima and 23,753 people in Nagasaki were killed. By the end of December, 1945, 1,40,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 people in Nagasaki perished. The thermal radiation of the fireball was felt at a distance of six kilometres from ground Zero. The blast wave demolished buildings. The fire raging in an area of 11.5 sq km in Hiroshima and 9 sq in Nagasaki generated wind with a velocity of upto 55 km an hour which in turn fanned up flames. Crops and trees were set ablaze. People became burning torches. 94 per cent of unprotected people within a distance of 2 km perished straight away. 89.9 per cent of people in Hiroshima and 73.8 per cent and 71.6 per cent of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered flying debris from collapsing buildings. In Hiroshima buildings in an area of 6.7 sq. km were destroyed. Even after 12 days, 34.9 percent of survivors were suffering from radiation sickness, 20.6 per cent from burns and 35.5 from wounds, 65 per cent of those injured required hospitalisation. But in the first 4 months after the attack, between 50 and 90 per cent of the Physicians perished and less than half of the surviving ones were in a condition to perform their duties. Transportation of the wounded and the sick was complicated as the debris had blocked the streets. Crops were heaped and burnt and no attempts were made to identify or even count them. Tramcars full of dead were destroyed.

Even after decades, people are dying. Many children whose parents were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki during the raid were born with genetic defects. The people in there places are still suffering with incurable diseases.

The monopoly of Nuclear Weapons by the United States of America was broken when USSR brought out Atom Bomb in 1949. For gaining superiority over USSR the U.S unleashed a Nuclear arms Race. Atom Bombs, Hydrogen Bombs, Neutron Bombs, Intercontinental Bombers, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles, Multi War Head Missiles were created by both the sides. The present power of a single Nuclear Weapon is equal to more than 2500 Atom bombs of Hiroshima variety. It is estimated that the Nuclear Weapons with various countries are- U.S.10,640, Russia-8,600, U.K.-200, France-350, China-400, Israel-100, India 30 and Pakistan 24to 48.

According to International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), when a Megaton Nuclear Weapon which is equivalent to 80 Hiroshima Type Bombs is detonated on the ground, it impact in the form of loss of human life and destruction of property will be:

Ground `0': The explosion will create a crater of 92 meters deep and 367 meters diameter.

Ground 0 to 1.5 km within one second, the atmosphere ignites into a fireball of more than 1 km in diameter. The surface of the first ball radiates nearly three times of light and heat of comparable area on the surface of the Sun. the fireball rises to a height of six miles or more. All life below will be extinguished in seconds.

Ground 1.5 Km to 5 Km The flash and heat from the explosion radiates outward at the speed of light, causing instantaneous and severe burns. A blast wave of compressed air follows, reaching a distance of 5 mm in about 12 seconds. From the blast wave alone most factories and commercial buildings will collapse and residential houses will be destroyed. Debries carried by winds with speed of 290 mph inflicting lethal injuries in the area. At least 50 per cent of people die immediately.

In 1983 for the first time an unusual term 'NUCLEAR WINTER' gained popularity among the scientists. It relates to the situation in atmosphere aftermath of nuclear explosions. If 10 to 20 per cent of the existing stockpiles of the nuclear weapons are used, it will trigger forest fires in an area of more that one million sq. km. In addition, fires would engulf entire cities industrial centres, gas and oil fields. Huge amounts of dust and soot pollute the atmosphere to reduce the intensity of sunlight reaching the earth's surface. This phenomenon was first described by Paul Crutzen and Jhon Birks of Max Planck Institute of Chemistry of West Germany and of the University of Colorado (USA).

The prolonged darkness, radio contamination and ultra-violet radiation would fatally affect life in the ocean which would cease to be source of food for every living being. According to some American Scientists, within the first few months, extremely cold weather which would set in almost every where on earth irrespective of the time of the year, would cause enormous damage to plant life, especially in the tropics and the medium latitude of the Northern Hemisphere where most of the world population live. A drop in light intensity would sharply reduce photosynthesis and plants would simply cease to grow. Cold weather, the absence of fresh water and an almost total darkness cause death of a large number of animals. Sub-zero temperature, especially in medium latitude continental zones of northern hemisphere would cause shallow bodies of fresh water to freeze. The non-reproduction of phytoplankton would destroy the food source of many species of sea and fresh water fish and animals. The remaining potential sources of food would be so much contaminated by radioactive and chemical substances as to become unfit for consumption.

The scientists have estimated that two to three thousand million people thought the world would die immediately as a result of Nuclear explosions. The onset of the Nuclear Night and Nuclear Winter, lack of sufficient housing and fuel reserves, the radioactive and chemical contamination, fresh water shortage, hunger and lack of medical assistance would increase the number of victims many times over. Public health care, energy supply, transport, communications and other systems would cease to function. Higher forms of animal life, especially in the tropics, would most probably be doomed to extinction. The restoration of organized farming would appear highly doubtful, radioactive contamination would remain and various epidemics would break out.

The danger of a nuclear annihilation can be avoided if the Nuclear Nations and Non-nuclear nations submit themselves to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In the Millennium Declaration adopted by Heads of governments in the Millennium Summit on 6-8 September 2000, they have committed 'to strive for the elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction, particularly nuclear weapons and to keep all options open for achieving this aim, including the possibility of convening an international conferences to identify ways for eliminating nuclear dangers'. This has to become a task to be accomplished if the nuclear danger is to be avoided.

From the weekly New Age, organ of the Communist Party of India.

John Bolton and Collateral Damage

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:39:00 +0000

7-26-06, 9:01 am

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton kicked up quite a stir recently when he suggested that the killing of Lebanese civilians can simply not be compared with the killing of Israeli civilians.

Asked to comment on the Israelis’ killing of eight Canadian citizens, a Montreal pharmacist and his family, he said, 'I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts,' drawing a distinction between the Israeli civilians killed by “malicious terrorist acts” and the ten times as many Lebanese civilians who have died as a result of the “sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense.”

Although Bolton has often been derided as an extremist for his views on the United Nations, in this he was simply articulating the dominant mainstream position. Pundits routinely distinguish between acts where there is supposedly a deliberate intent to kill civilians and those where, although civilians might die in large numbers as an utterly predictable consequence of the act, there is no specific intent to kill civilians. One is condemned as terrorism, something that places the committer of the act completely beyond the pale of civilization, while the other is merely collateral damage, an unfortunate but necessary part of the civilized way of war, engaged in by virtuous people and governments whose righteousness is not even subject to question. In order to truly respect the distinction between civilian and fighter that is at the heart of the laws of war, it’s necessary to eliminate the doctrine of collateral damage.

One obvious flaw of the doctrine is that it provides great cover for actual war crimes. Israel has deliberately targeted airports, ports, bridges, and tunnels. Of the close to 400 Lebanese killed, the vast majority were not fighters, although a very large number are children. Israel has bombed residential areas in south Beirut and throughout southern Lebanon, the only concession to their civilian population being the dropping of leaflets warning residents to evacuate the entire area. Recently, a family fleeing a border village was targeted, with three killed, because they were driving in minivans – among Israel’s rules of engagement is indiscriminate targeting of trucks, minivans, and motorcycles, supposedly because Hezbollah either uses such vehicles often or could use them to carry missiles and launchers. Trucks are also used to carry food and medical supplies, but that, apparently, is just tough luck.

But beyond narrow questions of fact about whether a particular killing really is collateral damage lie deeper flaws with the doctrine. First, in its application it is consistently entangled with racism and an ignorant and blind cultural supremacism. We “know” that Israelis and Americans don’t intend to kill civilians, just as we “know” that Hezbollah does. If nothing else, we point to the fact that Hezbollah’s missiles, with which it has been attacking Haifa and other northern cities, are extremely inaccurate and cannot possibly be used to reliably attack a particular military target.

Of course, when the United States bombed North Vietnam, its weapons were also incredibly inaccurate, yet there we still “knew” that targeting civilians was not the “intent.”

How about the idea that Hezbollah and Hamas would much rather kill soldiers than civilians, they just don’t have much ability to do that (although Hezbollah has fought well against the IDF in southern Lebanon)? If Israel’s bombing of civilian areas, targeting minivans, is justified because it doesn’t want to sustain the casualties that would come with a more discriminating approach, why not justify Hezbollah’s rocket attacks because it doesn’t have the technology to do better? What, other than our intrinsic knowledge that Israelis are like us, thus civilized, and that Hezbollah is a bunch of Arabs, thus uncivilized, prevents us from giving Hezbollah’s excuse more credence than Israel’s?

The other major flaw is the idea that, as Sahr Conway-Lanz documents in his recent book, Collateral Damage, basically you can do anything you want to civilians as long as you claim to have no intent to kill them. Much of the book involves tracing the bit-by-bit evolution of the doctrine in roughly the 10 years after World War 2. In the Korean War, which really put the doctrine firmly on its feet, as he shows, rules of engagement evolved to the point that, in the last half of the war, entire cities were targeted for destruction by virtue of the reasoning that said the cities produced something necessary for the war effort and that they contained roads that troops might travel on. In other words, that they were cities. And yet, even though the American public wanted to retain the idea that targeting civilians was wrong, these decisions never aroused any serious revulsion.

As Conway-Lanz suggests , the sensible criterion by which to judge whether one is targeting civilians is not something totally unmeasurable like supposed absence or presence of intent to kill them, but rather concrete steps taken to minimize or eliminate the possibility of killing civilians. With this criterion, assaults like Israel’s on Lebanon, or the first U.S. attack on Fallujah, where 60% and more of fatalities are civilian, could not possibly make the grade.

It would be an important step toward putting such questions on fairer ground and remedying the extreme bias implicit in our basic framework regarding questions of war. It would also allow for an unbiased definition of terrorism. So, of course, the powers that be will resist it tooth and nail.

From Empire Notes

Latin America: MERCOSUR Summit Concludes with High Hopes

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:36:00 +0000

7-26-06, 8:55 am

All of the Pink Tide’s heaviest hitters were in perfect condition at the 30th Presidential Summit of the Mercado Comun del Sur (MERCOSUR), the South American regional trading bloc, which convened last Thursday and Friday in Córdoba, Argentina. The summit’s primary focus was the smooth integration of Venezuela into the regional trading bloc, which already consists of full members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay and associate members Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Peru. Additionally, the 2-day agenda included discussions of pending trade agreements with external allies, a common customs code, the appointment of members to the Administrative Labor Court, and the establishment of a consistent MERCOSUR bargaining position for the all-but collapsed WTO Doha round negotiations.

Although some might consider the meeting short on big bangs, when it came to nuts and bolts, in fact, it was one of the most successful trade gatherings in years. It would not be too much to say that MERCOSUR has been a major generative force in redefining U.S.-Latin American relations, as well as representing a significant factor in permanently ending U.S. dominance in the region. It most likely will be remembered as the moment of truth for the Bush presidency, when it came to hemispheric relations, for fielding perhaps the worst Latin American policy in U.S. history, and for doing the most to emancipate the region from Washington’s permanent armlock.

The Córdoba meeting achieved its greatest success in bringing together the bloc’s leaders to discuss the prospects of regional political integration and to revitalize the integration process in light of recent bilateral spats between member states. During the meeting, its participants hailed MERCOSUR as an alternative to U.S.-style free trade agreements, with all member states agreeing that the most lucrative trade agreements would exclude Washington in favor of autonomous Latin American unity.

In a relatively rare international appearance, Cuban President Fidel Castro attended the summit as the special guest of the member states, giving more status to the leftist vision of some MERCOSUR members. While few, if any, negotiations were finalized, reports indicate that contributing parties succeeded in articulating an extraordinarily bold future for MERCOSUR: one that is focused decisively on Latin American solidarity and a series of daring new political and economic frontiers.

The Original Dream

Original member states, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, initiated the MERCOSUR trading bloc in 1991 with the signing of the Treaty of Asunción. At this time, the four members agreed, in the compact, to form a common market by allowing for “the free movement of goods, services and factors of production between countries,” through “the elimination of customs duties and non-tariff restrictions on the movement of goods, and any other equivalent measures.” A long-held South American dream has been to use integration to increase regional autonomy while promoting those processes and values essential to the well-being of the area: the eradication of poverty, the protection of the environment and human rights, strengthening regional judicial systems, the pursuit of social and economic equality, sustainable development, and democratic consolidation. The common market was completed in 1995 with the reduction of 85 percent of tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers between member states.

The Political Side of Integration

Although MERCOSUR was originally established as a customs union, integration has predictably progressed to include significant political elements. Even at the outset, the four members acknowledged that the creation of a common market would also necessitate political integration for dispute settlement and increased stable relations among member countries. Furthermore, a stated goal of MERCOSUR is to increase the equality and well-being of all member states’ citizens, an ambition that can only be taken on with some level of political convergence. However, in the fifteen years since the treaty of Asunción was signed, little has been done to either harmonize the foreign policies of MERCOSUR members or integrate the member states socially, and thus the bloc remains primarily a customs union with few effective levels of political integration.

Regarding this stagnation, during last week’s summit, presidents discussed the growing importance of political and social integration in addition to the strengthening of the common market. Particularly notable was the rhetoric employed during the meeting that centered on the future of MERCOSUR as a social, political and economic union. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was most vocal in this point, telling the Associated Press that, “MERCOSUR has to take up the banner of the struggle against social inequalities, against poverty, against misery, against unemployment, the struggle to satisfy the needs of the people.” Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, whose country is an associate member of the trading bloc, added that “MERCOSUR should be a solution for the victims of an economic policy that has never resolved the problems of our families,” clearly alluding to largely failed U.S. development strategies based on the Washington Consensus that have been employed in Latin America since the early 1990s.

Additionally, for the first time in MERCOSUR history, the five member states organized a social summit, bringing together civil society leaders from their constituent states, to take place concurrently alongside the presidential summit. With this meeting, MERCOSUR governments invited civil society to form cross-border relationships and common values, thus encouraging non-traditional political actors to become involved in the integration process. With these negotiations and innovative social and political steps now being entertained by MERCOSUR, the bloc truly begins to bridge the gap between economic and political integration, a fundamental goal that was made abundantly clear by the newest participant of the summit: Hugo Chávez.

The Bolivarian Revolution

The shift toward a wider and more venturesome political discourse may be a direct result of MERCOSUR’s July 4 expansion which added Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela to the bloc. The induction of the man and his overarching vision into MERCOSUR has already altered the economic face of the arrangement. MERCOSUR now represents 75 percent of all South American economic activity– over $1 trillion in combined GDP—as well as 65 percent of the continent’s population. As the fifth largest oil producer in the world and a primary supplier of fuel to the four original MERCOSUR member states, Venezuela is crucial to the economic strength of the union. The original four members are cognizant of Venezuela’s economic potential, and have made it clear that they appreciate the fact that Venezuela’s tremendous oil profits can be put to great use, to the benefit of their populations.

Equally important to Venezuela’s contribution to the future of MERCOSUR are the unknown effects of Chávez’s crusade for South American independence from the complex reach of Washington’s asymmetrical regional predominance, along with his fiery rhetoric and lofty goals. With recent actions, Chávez has made it clear that he views MERCOSUR primarily as an avenue for regional autonomy — a stage upon which its leadership can truly begin to execute the dream for absolute South American unification first espoused by 19th century liberation fighter Simón Bolivar, the namesake of Chávez’s socialist revolution. Immediately prior to joining MERCOSUR, Chávez withdrew from the Andean Community (CAN), which now consists of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, protesting some members’ movements toward bilateral free trade agreements with the United States. Indeed, according to one wire source, Chávez has encouraged fellow leaders to help MERCOSUR become a “common front against U.S. free trade deals.” He further hailed the induction of Venezuela into MERCOSUR as “a victory against Washington’s ‘imperialistic’ plans for the hemisphere.” In considering this, some may perceive MERCOSUR to be taking on a decisively anti-U.S. cast, but this is not necessarily the case. It is MERCOSUR’s conviction that its own course of development parallels, but is not duplicative of, Washington’s. Furthermore, member states realize that Washington’s natural interests are not necessarily coterminous with their own. During last week’s summit, Chávez celebrated the growing independence of MERCOSUR, saying, “We have defeated the ALCA [Spanish initials for the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas].” He further added, “The hegemonic power of the U.S. must cease.” In Chávez’s eyes, there is a regional confrontation — call it competition — between conservative and leftist ideologies that has extended into the region’s trading blocs, with MERCOSUR leaning further away from Washington as the weakened Andean Community gravitates toward it, and with Bolivia being strained by the stretch.

While MERCOSUR’s existing members have made it clear that it is an independent body, not to be steered by narrowly defined U.S. interests, Presidents Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil expressed their desire that Chávez keep anti-U.S. rhetoric out of the integration process. President Kirchner diplomatically explained during the summit, “We must be united with the world but not in any way; we need it to be an equitable integration for all parties, we do not seek an integration that creates…greater dependence.” Respecting these wishes, Chávez delivered a stellar performance: he avoided employing his inflammatory statements in opposition to the Bush Administration and rather focused on the positive aspects of MERCOSUR. Nonetheless, it appears as though, in expressing the increased desire for political integration and economic autonomy, MERCOSUR leaders have accepted that the trading bloc may be on the way to becoming the unique South American response to U.S. hemispheric hegemony.

MERCOSUR Ends FTAA Dreams

At the fourth Summit of the Americas last November in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the 34 members of the Organization of American States (OAS) failed to reach a consensus to move ahead with negotiations and progress toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas. Although 29 states voted to continue dialogue, the five dissenting votes, cast by the four MERCOSUR nations and the then-autonomous Venezuela, were sufficient to destroy the already-foundering process. Not long before gaining official entry to MERCOSUR, Chávez took part in an anti-U.S. protest, vowing to “bury U.S. plans to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas.” On Friday, President Lula reiterated that the FTAA is dead: “No one’s talking anymore.” This initiative faced the first in a series of setbacks in a 2004 meeting, when negotiators failed to overcome key fundamental differences regarding agricultural subsidies and intellectual property rights. This left Washington grasping for any alternate opportunity to further its economic connectivity with the continent. There is little chance that a comprehensive hemispheric free trade area is on the horizon, particularly because Chávez has become heavily involved with striving to maximize MERCOSUR’s full potential outside of Washington’s sphere of influence. In order to maintain this treasured autonomy, MERCOSUR leaders have been addressing potential weaknesses in bilateral member relations that have recently called into question the group’s fortitude.

MERCOSUR Member Tensions Played Down in Córdoba

One focus of the MERCOSUR presidential summit was to address the upheavals now taking place within MERCOSUR’s ranks. Upon forming the union, original members appreciated the differences in size and economic development of member states by initially allowing the weaker nations, Paraguay and Uruguay, more leniency in implementing the terms of the new common market. However, the reality has been that the larger members, Brazil and Argentina, with more developed and sophisticated industrial agricultural sectors, have benefited disproportionately compared to the two smaller states, whose fledgling industries have had difficulty competing.

This aforementioned discrepancy has given rise to bilateral problems that have recently threatened the integrity of the trading bloc. Most pertinent of these is a dispute between Uruguay and Argentina concerning Uruguay’s approval of a joint venture by Spain’s Grupo Empresarial ENCE, S.A., and Finland’s Oy Metsa-Botnia AB and Kymmene Corporation to construct two paper mills along the Uruguay River, which forms the a natural border between the two countries. According to BBC news, the mills, costing $1.7 billion, would constitute Uruguay’s largest foreign investment. Argentina, however, has strenuously objected, countering that the new industrial development would destroy the river’s environment and threaten the fishing and tourism industries of the two countries. Similarly, Paraguay has long fostered a dispute with Brazil regarding the smaller country’s fair share of the fruits of the enormous Itaipú Dam and its associated hydroelectric power plant, which they built together on the Paraná River.

In light of such grievances, Uruguay and Paraguay feel their concerns are being systematically overlooked by the group and have started questioning the alleged benefits MERCOSUR provides for the particular needs of their fragile economies. Leaders in both Paraguay and Uruguay have been contemplating withdrawing from the organization in order to pursue bilateral negotiations with the U.S., which would be a violation of MERCOSUR’s protocols on the part of full members. Eduardo Felippo, of the Paraguayan Industry Confederation, explained that their affiliation with MERCOSUR has been a “disgrace” and has affected “no major change” for his country. President Nicanor Duarte Frutos said Paraguay could “apply the principle of euthanasia [to MERCOSUR], and let it go, faced with the impossibility of revitalising (sec) and mending it.” In the just-finished presidential summit, however, Lula pointedly disagreed with rumors of disbanding: “I do not agree that MERCOSUR is undergoing a crisis. In [the past] there was talk about dissolution and I insisted that there was no crisis in the bloc, but rather in the countries that constituted it. Our central objectives remain more valid than ever.” To prevent further fractioning, the governments of MERCOSUR discussed such bilateral disagreements and strategies to resolve them, without weakening the union as a whole. Yet truly significant steps toward relieving the unfair treatment claimed by smaller members remain almost unnamed and unseen. A departure by Paraguay or Uruguay would represent a mortal defeat for MERCOSUR and would weaken efforts to counter any U.S. magnetic pull on the region’s economy. It would also land a devastating blow to MERCOSUR’s forward momentum, derived from Venezuela’s recent accession and prospects that Mexico will soon add itself to the list of associate members. To counter any such deterioration, MERCOSUR member presidents also pushed ahead discussions of what may prove to be crucial developments for the group, which will result in the negotiation of trade agreements, or even potential expansions, between MERCOSUR and key allies, such as Cuba, Bolivia, and Mexico.

Castro’s Pending Trade Agreement

In a surprise move, Cuban President and ancient U.S. adversary, Fidel Castro, attended the summit as a special guest of the five MERCOSUR members. Predictably, Castro’s presence greatly influenced the ideological and political tune of the gathering – a shift that seemed to be welcomed by attending heads of state, in particular Castro’s friend and ally, Hugo Chávez.

During the summit, member states addressed the issue of a pending trade agreement between Cuba and MERCOSUR which will dictate the reduction of tariffs on a number of goods traded between the two entities. While nominally for economic purposes, the trade agreement most significantly demonstrates a high degree of Latin American solidarity against the importing of suspect U.S. attitudes, even at the risk of associating MERCOSUR with Castro’s polarizing anti-Washington sentiments. Castro’s presence at the summit is likely to be interpreted in Washington as a hostile gesture and further solidified MERCOSUR’s increasingly bold pro-Latin American, anti-U.S. stance.

During the summit, Castro made clear his vehement support for Latin American integration. He emphasized the social side of MERCOSUR, challenging the integration process to address problems plaguing Latin America such as illiteracy and poor health care. He also extolled the leaders for taking the challenging step away from U.S. dominance telling them, “I do not see how the Latin American integration will be challenged.”

Bolivia Proposes CAN-MERCOSUR Union

President Evo Morales of Bolivia, now a close friend of Chávez and Castro, attended the MERSOSUR summit as a representative of his associate member nation and proposed linking the Andean Community with MERCOSUR. This possibility will depend largely on the group’s decisions regarding integration with the United States. Presently, the CAN countries are hesitant to join with Washington in a coherent integration plan beyond the preferential tariff rates offered by the U.S. under the terms of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), set to expire on December 31. This preferential treatment accord is unlikely to be extended given Bolivia’s recent nationalization of its energy resources and what Washington perceives as other damaging economic decisions coming from La Paz and Quito. In the absence of the ATPDEA, MERCOSUR might more readily entertain proposals to form a multilateral agreement with CAN. This window of opportunity for these two important South American blocs may be fleeting as U.S. officials hope to wrap up bilateral trade agreements in short order with Columbia and Peru. Nearby Bolivia, still free from binding agreements with the United States, made it clear in Córdoba that it would rather see the group create ties with MERCOSUR, in which heads of state wholeheartedly supported solidarity for a united “Mercoamerica” (Lula).

The Mexican Card

Repeated requests from Mexican officials eager to join MERCOSUR suggest a potential giant step toward hemispheric integration. In Córdoba, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez reaffirmed Mexico’s hope of integrating with the bloc, and proposed that the agreement be finalized before President Fox’s term expires on December 1. A potential sticking point to Mexico’s accession is its present participation in NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), an agreement that has demonstrated the potential dangers, particularly regarding agricultural issues, of Washington-style trade accords. Given the country’s deep-rooted affiliation with the U.S., Mexico would only participate in MERCOSUR as an associate member. This new tie would represent a significant development in pulling a traditionally northward-looking Mexico into Latin America’s most non-Washington-oriented alliance.

MERCOSUR Turning to Europe?

Little discussion of Europe was heard in Córdoba, but previous dialogue has made it clear that MERCOSUR prefers to pursue greater global integration via the European Union (EU) rather than the United States. Although representatives of the two trade bodies have been largely unsuccessful in producing any real progress since their first meeting in 1999, they continue to look for ways to overcome persisting differences. These questions have mainly concerned MERCOSUR’s remaining internal tariffs and the EU’s unyielding agriculture protection measures. Since MERCOSUR’s heavies refuse to continue negotiations toward an FTAA, their persistence with EU negotiations reveals a clear preference for Europe over Washington. Still, greater integration will likely come about first within the hemisphere, especially as ties with Cuba and Mexico came to the forefront last week in Córdoba.

MERCOSUR’s Future

After a short two days in Córdoba, MERCOSUR has clearly emerged as the regional counter-weight to U.S. preeminence in South America’s economic development and trade relations. With the formal inclusion of Venezuela and movements made to dispel rumors that Paraguay and Uruguay are disgruntled with the group to the point of abandonment in favor of U.S. ties, MERCOSUR is poised to foster South American solidarity without acquiescing to Washington’s hopes for a hemispheric FTAA. Indeed, the MERCOSUR leaders spoke of improving internal relations and expanding their ranks with more like-minded partners such as Cuba, Mexico and the Andean Community, as well as integrating non-governmental groups, to address not only economic development, but also to merge the bloc politically — a feat that is indicative of a lasting, deepening and more mature alliance.

From Council on Hemispheric Affairs

August 2006 – Ban All Nuclear Weapons!

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:50:00 +0000

The Legacy of the Cultural Front: an Interview with Alan Wald

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:22:00 +0000

7-25-06, 10:45 am

Editor’s note: Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan and is the author of seven books including, Writing from the Left and Exiles from a Future Time. He is a member of the editorial boards of Science & Society and Against the Current. He also edited The Radical Novel Reconsidered series published by the University of Illinois Press, which includes Burning Valley by Philip Bonosky.

PA: Can you talk about what proletarian and social realist literature is?

ALAN WALD: There are simple and complex definitions of both categories. There has long existed a broad proletarian literature about the lives and experience of working-class people, mostly written by those sympathetic to socialist ideals. However, in the early 1930’s, a more specific proletarian literature movement was fostered by the Communist Party. After the Popular Front began in 1935, the party officially turned in a new direction. Yet writers continued to be attracted to the Communist-led tradition; Philip Bonosky, who published proletarian novels from a Communist perspective during the cold war, is an example.

Social realism is also a term with multiple meanings. It was originally applied to painting and generally referred to art with a social and political content, and a technique that one might call naturalist. In the 1930’s, however, social realism sometimes became linked to socialist realism, then the official Soviet doctrine. When a painting or text is called social realist, one can not always tell whether “social” is being used as a shorthand for the word socialist, as one finds in the phrase “social democracy,” or whether it means simply “social” in the looser sense of socially conscious.

PA: So you make a distinction between the proletarian literature of the early 1930’s and that which came out of the Popular Front period?

AW: Yes, although perhaps more in theory than practice; one of the contradictions to be found when a political party tries to lead a cultural movement is that writers and artists create out of needs beyond immediate policies. I would certainly say that there was more latitude after 1935 on the Communist-led literary left toward popular writing. The vocabulary changes to an advocacy of a people’s literature and a people’s culture. The John Reed Clubs, which focused on working-class writers, some of whom showed an affinity with modernism in their poetry, were abolished. Other kinds of writers become more prominent; for example, the Hollywood humorist Donald Ogden Stewart was the new head of the League of American Writers. Yet the broader trend of working-class literature persisted, and there also continued to be writers who wanted to work in the more specific proletarian school.

PA: Is the “proletarian literature movement” over? Is it a real cultural force now?

AW: I really don’t follow contemporary literature very closely; there are still too many fascinating and forgotten works to be unearthed from the 1930’s-50’s era. But I find that literature about working-class life continues to be produced, as well as some fine radical novels. The specific proletarian literature movement, the one primarily connected with the centrality of the Communist Party in the US left, is over. But I wouldn’t want to see that experience lost from memory or trivialized into a sound-byte. I think any new radical movement is going to have to come to terms with the achievements and weaknesses of Communism and the cultural work associated with it. At the same time, the next radical cultural upsurge must find its own way, and evolve only in a very loose association with organizations and social movements.

PA: Given that you come from a different Marxist tradition than the people you study and given that there is a historical gulf between those traditions, how did you become interested in the Communist-led cultural front?

AW: As a 1960’s radical, I didn’t come out of the Trotskyist tradition. In high school, I was an alienated existentialist; in college, briefly an aspiring beatnik and then a new leftist. I joined SDS in 1965, which was transformative in producing a lifelong opposition to capitalism. When SDS fell apart, I joined the Young Socialist Alliance at Antioch College in 1968, and then the Socialist Workers Party in Berkeley in late 1969. In these groups I received a fabulous political education in classical Marxism, and met extraordinary socialist veterans of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. But it wasn’t Trotskyism that particularly drew me in the first place. What attracted me was radical activism against racism and the Vietnam War, and the ideas of Marxism – something more heterogeneous. In the 1960’s and 1970’s I surely read more Georg Lukacs than Trotsky. I was entranced by the writings of Isaac Deutscher, but this started earlier – I had seen Deutscher’s books on the desk of Carl Oglesby, president of SDS, with whom I took a seminar in college. The Bolshevik leaders could be brilliant, but they could never be the fulcrum for my thinking. What was consistent from my early radicalization until now is that “hard” (sectarian) versions of Trotskyism always revolted me. I imagined that I saw a fresh revolutionary synthesis of old left and new left in the writings of Ernest Mandel and the journal New Left Review; for a few years I was hopeful that the SWP might go in that direction, too. Its creative response to Malcolm X impressed me, and I felt it embodied an organic link to the US working class, as did the Communist Party.

While studying US radicalism, I came to realize that, from the beginning of my intellectual and political awakening, there was a presence of the Communist left, but it wasn’t identified as such. For example, in high school, my teacher gave me Richard Wright to read, and my parents had 1930’s fiction by James T. Farrell on their bookshelf. It was only by reading about Wright that I discovered he had been in the Communist Party. Even when I read Wright’s essay in The God that Failed, which is an attack on the Communist Party, what he wrote about Communism was so intriguing that I wanted to learn more.

In the ferment of the early 1960’s, this literature and culture of the old left was suddenly revived and present in a way that it is not today; I think that’s because the old left was intimately linked to the antiracist and anti-imperialist activism that was attracting the young. I was culturally into jazz and modernism, yet felt more affinity with the old left than with Timothy Leary and the Hippies. At Antioch College I found children of Communists leading the civil rights movement. While in SDS I was drawn to community organizing, and occasionally an old Communist would show up at a meeting and make a lot of sense. Remnants of the old left were just part of the picture if one was in the streets. So it wasn’t hard for me to feel an empathy with the ideals of Communist cultural workers of past decades, even though I was absolutely horrified by everything I learned about the Stalin regime.

We should also note that practically every one of the important writers of the left departed the Communist movement, except for a handful like Walter Lowenfels, Meridel Le Sueur and Thomas McGrath, and of course Philip Bonosky. Most of the writers I interviewed had a critical perspective on the CP experience, and sometimes they were even more critical than myself. They agreed that they had completely misread what had occurred in the USSR. But they were admirable people, perhaps more so because they could admit that they had been wrong.

PA: Can you talk about your upcoming book?

AW: Trinity of Passion: The U.S. Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade is a follow-up to Exiles from a Future Time, which is mostly about poetry and the origins of the Communist tradition. The new book focuses on fiction from the Spanish Civil War through World War II. For example, I treat a number of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, all who were then close to the Communist Party: Milton Wolfe, Alvah Bessie and William Herrick. I also treat several leftists who wrote about military combat during World War II, such as John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Dan Levin, Saul Levitt and Lewis Falstein. There is a section on the Harlem left during the war, focusing on Ann Petry, and a newly-documented chapter about Arthur Miller and the left. And I write about Albert Maltz, whose astonishing World War II novel, The Cross and the Arrow, addressed German resistance in a manner that anticipates contemporary debates about the responsibility of the Germans for Nazism. The book goes through the late 1940’s, and the follow-up volume will be on the cold war.

PA: There have been a number of recent attacks on academics on the left for opposing the Bush administration, for being Marxists, or whatever. Why do you think universities reflect such a sharp point of conflict? What are some ways to protect political freedom on campuses?

AW: You may have seen the recent piece by Ellen Schrecker, “Worse than McCarthy,” where she talks about how, during McCarthyism, professors were fired and blacklisted – which seems much worse than today. But Schrecker then observes that, at present, state legislatures are looking at who is being hired and what’s being taught – something more far-reaching than party affiliation. In that sense, it is not a repeat of McCarthyism. What is going on now is broader. My impression, from reading the charges of people like David Horowitz, who claims to identify the 100 most dangerous professors, is that the ideologists of the right are primarily concerned about gays and lesbians, or else people who are currently attacking US foreign policy, or just people who may have crossed swords with David Horowitz in the past. I see it as part of the general development of a right wing that is looking for ways to discredit liberalism wherever it can find an opening, not narrowly Marxism and Communism.

One reason the universities make a good target is that a segment of scholars in the humanities give the impression of being elitists, even if they imagine that they are the opposite. Part of this is the appearance of indulging in esoteric vocabularies and theories, and a self-righteousness about one’s political correctness. The best way to fight back is to set a good example of actively creating a humane culture at the university, a democratic culture that tolerates a diversity of ideas – including ideas with which we disagree. As a socialist, I favor university intellectuals finding a way to relate to working people, especially rank-and-file labor organizations. At the least, intellectuals might be involved in community organizations – but as learners as much as teachers. When one works along side someone in a common project, trust is built. We should try to talk language that can have some resonance among ordinary people. In these last respects, Communist intellectuals and cultural workers set a good example – yet another reason to study them!

Capitalism's End Times: A Review of Kevin Phillips' AMERICAN THEOCRACY

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:05:00 +0000

7-25-06, 10:45 am

Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century is a stunning political and intellectual achievement. In several respects it is courageous; given that Kevin Phillips almost 35 years ago began his career as a Republican strategist. It is not without flaws, especially in Phillips’ understanding of race, slavery and colonialism in the creation of capitalism and the role they play in its current crises. The classical statements on race, slavery and colonialism and their relationships to the world system, imperialism, exploitation and war are found in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The African Roots of the War, (1915), Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and The World and Africa (1947). In Black Reconstruction in America Du Bois insists that the overturning of Reconstruction after 1877 starts a cycle of restricted democracy, which ended up as democracy essentially for whites. This set the stage for American expansionism and empire. In The World and Africa he asserts that the collapse of the Euro-American world will be an outcome of the collapse of its foundations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, creating a crisis of white supremacist rule worldwide. Some of these matters will be dealt with later in this essay. Put succinctly, however, this book is an examination of late American capitalism.

The basic thesis of the book is that America is in the throes of several converging crises: a crisis of ideology, manifested in the rise of Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish fundamentalism, and their becoming a significant part of the ideology of the state and the Republican Party; a crisis of oil dependency, which is deepened as the world’s supply of oil peaks; and a crisis of debt, manifested in historically unprecedented levels of private, business, government and foreign indebtedness. Phillips argues that the George W. Bush presidency is at the center of these converging crises. It is entangled in oil and debt capitalism and is deeply implicated in the right-wing evangelical ideological movement. Due to these entanglements it can only deepen these crises. Phillips does not suggest that a Hillary Clinton or John Kerry presidency would make a significant difference. He argues that the GOP government in Washington is a Southern-dominated, biblically-driven rogue coalition, like the Southern slavocracy before Lincoln’s election.

Phillips sees the current crises as symptomatic of national decline. They transcend the Bush presidency; they are systemic, meaning they manifest a crisis of American capitalism. These symptoms were present in almost exact form in past capitalist hegemons, i.e. Spain in the 17th century, the Netherlands in the 18th century and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century. Each of these nations were imperial empires. Each, like the US, experienced imperial overreach and imperial hubris.

His examination is at once historical, examining long trajectories of national development and decline; systemic, rooted in economic and political analysis; and ideological, wherein he asserts the active role of ideology, in particular fundamentalist Christianity, in the shaping of the contemporary American state and foreign policy. The focus on systemic crises in American capitalism makes this work, even if unintended, a radical critique of American capitalism. The book is divided into three parts: oil, radical religion and debt. Each is a specific study of an aspect of 21st century American capitalism.

Foreign Oil and American Capitalism

He begins with oil. This beginning is particularly timely as oil per barrel topped $75 with the prospect of its reaching $100 not far off. The narrative starts in the mid-1970’s when US oil reserves peaked, several Middle East oil producers (Iraq, Libya and Iran) nationalized Western oil interests and when OPEC’s size and influence over global oil markets increased. Phillips observes: When we look back on the three subsequent decades, it is now possible to describe a much grander convergence of forces: (1) oil’s ever tightening grip on Washington politics and psychology; (2) the cumulative destabilization of the Middle East; (3) the rise of varying degrees of radical Christianity, Judaism and Islam around the world; (4) the biblical and geopolitical focus on Israel; and (5) the reemergence during the 1990’s of eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Caspian republics (of the former Soviet Union [AM]) as the unstable, but pivotal thirty nation borderlands of the rogue Eurasian ‘heartland. (41)

Since the 1970’s US foreign policy has been disproportionately driven by oil and the overarching need to insure that foreign oil flows uninterruptedly to the US. Connected to an oil driven foreign policy were the aims to block Soviet (perhaps now Chinese) access to the Persian Gulf, maintain the House of Saud in power in Saudi Arabia and insure that OPEC upholds the dollar as the currency through which oil is traded. This last assures the recycling of petrodollars (dollars accumulated in oil producing nations’ central banks) to purchase US Treasury bonds and weapons systems. Iraq and the Hundred Years Oil Wars

Phillips argues that the US has been in a 30 years oil war. The two Iraq wars, 1991 and 2003, are its decisive events. Iraq is strategic in completing three interrelated parts of US 21st century oil policies. They are “rebuilding of Anglo-American oil reserves, transformation of Iraq into an oil protectorate-cum-military base, and reinforcement of the global hegemony of the US dollar. (76)” Iraq’s place was heightened by the 1990’s when it was suspected that Iraq might have more oil reserves left than Saudi Arabia. The Middle East and oil have fuelled a hundred years war, pitting British, German, American, French, Russian, Israeli and Arab interests against one another and in fleeting coalitions against one or another combination of the players. Iraq’s central place in the hundred years struggle to control Middle East oil goes back to the pre-World War I proposal by the Germans to build a Berlin to Baghdad railway as a way to connect Mesopotamian oil fields to German industry and its war machine.

By the 1990’s sharp and it seems enduring conflicts and contradictions over oil had emerged: on the one side American imperialism’s drive to achieve hegemony and on the other the French, Russian, German and Chinese efforts to get access to Iraqi oil. In this mix China has emerged as a critical competitor to the US. For instance, in April 2006 following his visit to Washington President Hu of China flew directly to Saudi Arabia and China and Saudi Arabia signed mutual defense, security and economic cooperation treaties. Hu’s trip came three months after King Abdullah’s visit to China, his first overseas trip as head of state.

On the other hand, in 2001 Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group linked foreign oil needs and national security and the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields. Phillips points out that these policies of containing Iraq in order to control access to its oil fields goes back to the Clinton administration. Clinton signed off on air strikes against Iraq in January and June 1996 and deployment of troops on Iraq’s borders in 1997-98 after Baghdad proposed oil concessions to Russia, China and France. (82) The Bush-Cheney administration continued Clinton’s policies, upping them to include full scale war and an energy forward strategy which was based on hamstringing Iraq with respect to negotiations with China, Russia and France. At the same time the Bush Administration began negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan to accept the construction of an American pipeline from Turkmenistan (a former Soviet Republic) through Kabul to Karachi, Pakistan. As this policy played out, US foreign policy became militarized. Richard Holbrooke, “In the Beginning: A Fresh Look at the Early Years of American Empire” (Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec, 2002), states, “the American military has assumed an unprecedented role in the conduct of foreign policy.” Phillips insists that the US military has become a global oil protection service and the war on terrorism is being conflated with wars for oil. Africa’s Oil and Global Resources Wars

When all the pieces are put together the wars on terrorism and the Iraq wars are what Michael Klare claims are resource wars, where oil is not a mere commodity, but a matter of national security. In this scenario resource wars could extend beyond the Middle East to Russia, China, Africa and Latin America, especially Venezuela. There have, however, been counter moves by China and Russia, a significant example being the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, established to blunt the imperial overreach of the US in South and Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, now five years old, consists of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Observer nations include, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan.

Beijing’s aggressive challenges to American trade hegemony is expressed in what Joshua Cooper Ramo calls the Beijing Consensus (China’s counter to the neoliberal globalist policies of Washington) another global counter move to contain the US militarily and economically. Ramo insists,

The Washington Consensus was a hallmark of end-of-history arrogance; it left a trail of destroyed economies and bad feelings around the globe. China’s new development approach is driven by a desire to have equitable peaceful high-quality growth, critically speaking, it turns traditional ideas like privatization and free trade on their heads. (Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Beijing Consensus,” Foreign Policy Centre, 2004).

Under the cloak of fighting terrorism, talks have begun between Washington and several African nations to build permanent naval and military bases in West Africa, particularly Senegal, Ghana and Mali - a rising oil region. The Wall Street Journal indicates that the key mission for US forces in Africa is to guarantee that Nigerian oilfields, that in the future could account for 25% of all US imports, remain secure. US military officials have visited Gabon and Sao Tome where they are considering building a deepwater port. The US European Command has recently stated its carrier battle groups would spend half their time going down the west coast of Africa. (85). The US oil strategy in Africa has ignited ethnic conflict, corruption, wealth and income disparities and interstate tensions. (Phillips, p86 - 87). Sudan and Chad and the political and ethnic struggles in Nigeria are case studies of these developments.

Right-Wing Christianity: Oil, Race and the State

While the transition is not neat, Phillips moves to right-wing religion as the second stool in the crisis scenario. He perceives America’s deep religious, ideological and cultural divisions as forms of warfare, specifically ideological civil war. These divisions are motor forces of American politics and history. This thesis originates with his book The Cousins Wars (1999). Phillips says the great transformative events in the rise of England and then the United States “were wars - bitter fratricidal wars - accompanied by Puritan and abolitionist sermons and battle hymns and principally fought to change the shape of internal politics, liberty and religion.”(xiii) These cousins wars, where white English speaking people fought one another were the English Civil War 1640 - 1649, the American Revolution, 1775 - 1773, and the US Civil War, 1861 - 1865. I view these as wars to determine the nature of white state power, or of what I have else where called the racialized state. In an essay “Race and the Racialized State: A Du Boisian Interrogation” (http://www.sdonline.org/33/anthony_monteiro), I attempt to place the formation and development of the US state within the framework of dynamic and changing race relationships in the US and worldwide. I see the US state as fundamentally an institution of white racial hegemony and domination. The formation of the US in the context of the slave trade, plantation slavery, Jim Crow, imperial wars and de facto institutional racism are unavoidable in explaining the nature and practices of the US state.

Phillips correctly traces the current religio-ideological conflicts and divisions among white Americans to the Civil War and Reconstruction. The late 20th century rise of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity based in the ideas of biblical inerrancy, the end of time theological mythology, the idea that white Americans are a chosen people, war, including nuclear war, in the Middle East to signify the return of the Messiah, and creationism and intelligent design as a substitute for science, is part of the Southification of the nation and American religion. The national divisions over Christianity are really divisions where race is overarching in determining white Americans understanding of class, gender, war and peace, science and ultimately the shape of 21st century capitalism. Phillips easily acknowledges how religion plays into all of the issues of division; his problem is to account for how race is factored in. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, opposed the civil rights movement, was and is a center of white resentment against Blacks and more recently gays, lesbians and transgendered people. While accurately understanding the religio-ideological form of the divisions among whites, Phillips fails to acknowledge the substance of these divisions in race and racial inequality.

He conceptualizes the South as more than a region; it is, he tells us, a culture and an ideology. In this respect he speaks of a greater South, which reaches, beyond the old Confederacy and its border states. The main institutional mechanism for the Southification of the nation is the Southern Baptist Convention and more recently, the Republican Party. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) became the “nurseries of American fundamentalism” (153). Southern Baptists, during the long period of the cold war, the civil rights and black power movements, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement, defined themselves as representatives of the white majority and of cultural and ideological normativity. Their goal was not to reject society, but to absorb it (158). Under the leadership of the SBC, Baptists linked Christianity to American patriotism and support for all wars and for huge military spending. Normalcy was associated most strikingly with some form of Southern white culture. Ultimately, they viewed themselves as the nation.

New White Ethnic, Religious, and Ideological Identities

Out of the Southification of a large part of the nation new ethno-religio-ideological identities have formed. White fundamentalist evangelical Christianity (Black hangers-on not withstanding) is an identity within the white population. It makes up about 40% of the white population and 60% of the Republican coalition. They view themselves as authentically American and authentically white. They are the political and ideological underpinnings of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would insist, crypto-fascism. This coalition, Phillips observes, is driven by “the South’s haunted history, regional religion and combative temperament” (172). Moreover. “the twenty-first century Greater South commands a much bigger share of the nation’s population and resources then did the ill-fated Confederate States” (173). In politics this produces religious excess, attacks upon science and plans for global war and crusaderism. To stay in power the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan was transformed into a reservoir of fealty to whiteness, manifested as white Southern folk culture and white resentment to Blackness. George Wallace, segregationist governor of Alabama, in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, first demonstrated this combination as a potent national political force.

Phillips believes that one-third to one-half of the exodus to the Republican Party is explained by race. The fact of the matter is that new ethno-religio-ideological identities among whites in the post-civil rights era are necessary in the refashioning of whiteness and white supremacy to meet the new domestic and global situation especially as they relate to the color line. Phillips severely understates the role of race in the Southification of the nation. Yet, if not for race then why organize political and religious life around “Southern values” in the first place? What is the attraction of white Southern culture and religion if not their formation in the cauldrons of slavery and Jim Crow? Moreover, creationism and intelligent design theories (based in so called biblical authority) uphold notions of fixed and permanent race relations based on white supremacy. The young Earth thesis (i.e. the Earth is between 6 and 10 thousand years old) ultimately suggests that the appearance of “white people” in Europe is coterminous with the creation of the planet and of human life. Stated another way, the beginnings of life are the beginning of “white people” as a distinct group in the genetic history of humanity. All of this, of course, denies the two million year history of anatomically modern humans on the African continent, as well as humanity’s civilizational origins in Africa and Asia, at least 5,000 years ago. The end times narrative where the “chosen” and the “righteous” will be saved from Armageddon is coded in ways that suggests that white Southerners will rise again. In the end, the defeated South, in God’s plan will rise in the end days. Tim La Haye’s Left Behind series of novels is the fictionalized version of this fiction. Religio-racism sees Americans, especially Southerners (in the expanded sense) as God’s chosen people, with a manifest destiny to rule the world and use for their benefit its peoples and resources.

Fundamentalist Christianity and State Power

Blind faith and religious excess have signaled and often initiated the decline of former capitalist hegemons (219). Phillips’ concern, and one of the places where his analysis of religious ideology is most poignant, is how religious fundamentalism becomes an organizing ideology of the state and Republican Party. This moves the state and a large part of political debate from the secular realm to religion. While Phillips does not extend his analysis of the state, it can be argued that the configuration of the state on the basis of evangelical Christian ideology reflects both a crisis of the state as well as a crisis of American capitalism itself. As the crises of the system accumulate religious state ideology asserts itself as all knowing, the defender of absolute truths rooted in biblical authority and the defender of those who believe in its truths.

Phillips points to several Southern and Southwestern Republican Party conventions that endorse so called “Christian nation” party platforms (232). These platforms are based on Christian reconstructionist theology, “the tenets of which range from using the Bible as a basis for domestic law, to emphasizing religious schools and women’s subordination to men” (233). The 2004 Texas Republican platform “affirms the US as a ‘Christian nation’, regrets the myth of the separation of Church and state, calls for abstinence instead of sex education and broadly mirrors the reconstructionist demand for the abolition of a large group of federal agencies. (233)” Theological reconstructionists have called for the death penalty for homosexuals and adulterers, prostitutes and drug users; moderate reconstructionists called merely for jail time.

Debt and Capitalist End Times

The last leg in the three cornered stool is debt. Phillips asks, how long can an economic system grow which in 2004 credit market debt reached 304% of gross domestic product, net foreign debt was $3.3 trillion, assets of the financial services sector of the economy were $45.3 trillion, and financial sector profits significantly exceeded those in manufacturing and services? His answer is not long. Phillips calls this the financialization of the American economy where debt and debt services are more important than producing useful commodities. The financial services, broadly construed, have taken over the dominant economic, cultural and political role in the national economy (268). Since that sector of the dominant economic class, which V. I. Lenin, John Hobson and Rudolph Hilferding called finance capitalist, are non-productive and parasitic, they, as Phillips suggests, undermine the economic system. “No presidential clan has been so involved in banking, investment and money market management over so much time,” as the Bush clan (284). Lifetime patrons of George W. Bush are Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Pricewaterhouse Cooper and MBNA, the credit card giant.

Phillips asserts that over the last part of the 20th century the federal government chose finance to be ascendant over manufacturing. America’s productive sector, manufacturing, lost its markets, profits and prime political access (288). Furthermore, between 1995 and 2000, 11,000 bank mergers occurred and new mega financial holding companies were created; all predicated upon bank deregulation. Three US banks, Citigroup (the world’s largest), Bank of America and JP Morgan, became super banks.

It is not coincidental that at the time the leading sector of the economy was assumed by finance and oil (a declining global resource) that right-wing Christianity emerges as a state ideology under Republican rule. Phillips’ point is that an economy that unduly relies upon an outdated, limited and expensive source of energy, substitutes finance and money markets over manufacturing and production, whose foreign policy is defined by imperial overreach and where religious dogma that denies science in the name of biblical inerrancy has the upper hand among a sizable part of the population, these are markers of national crisis leading to national decline.

Judas Capitalism and End Times

Business Week’s William Wolman calls the American economy a “Judas economy” dominated by debt and financiers. He identifies this with late stage capitalism. In an ironic sense evangelical Christianity’s concern with the end times might really reflect its followers sense that American capitalism could be in its end times. The tragedy is that without struggle and programmatic unity among the victims of the Judas economy the “chosen” might only be the super rich. If the meek are to inherent the earth deep and radical social reforms must be fought for. In the course of which Christianity must redefine its essence, much in the way Martin Luther King Jr. proposed in the 1960’s: i.e. spiritual vitality and questioning, anchored in the Christian duty to act on behalf of peace and social justice. The state and the economy must be democratized in ways similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s partially successful Great Society. Education and jobs must be the center of a national youth program. Anti-racism and gender equality along with immigrant rights must be intertwined into all movements for change. Uppermost has to be the struggle against wars and the military industrial complex.

Phillips looks at oil, debt and religion. In the end he is looking at American capitalism.

Some reviewers commented that this is a pessimistic book, even conspiracy theory driven. For ordinary people late stage capitalism, like late stage cancer, is not an optimistic picture. Phillips’ book glimpses the now times of American capitalism.

Human beings will decide the end times.

--Anthony Monteiro teaches in the African American Studies Department at Temple University. He is a scholar/activist. He writes in areas having to do with W.E.B Du Bois Studies, Marxism and race. He lives in Philadelphia where he is active in social, economic and politcal struggles. Send your letters to the editor to