"Good
News," Iraq and Beyond
February 16, 2008
By Noam Chomsky
Not long ago, it was taken
for granted that the Iraq
war would be the central issue in the presidential campaign, as it was in the
mid-term election of 2006. But it has virtually disappeared, eliciting some
puzzlement. There should be none.
Iraq
remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a matter of little
moment in a modern democracy. The important work of the world is the domain of
the "responsible men," who must "live free of the trampling and the roar of a
bewildered herd," the general public, "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" whose
"function" is to be "spectators," not "participants." And spectators are not
supposed to bother their heads with issues. The Wall Street Journal came close
to the point in a major front-page article on super-Tuesday, under the heading
"Issues Recede in '08 Contest As Voters Focus on Character." To put it more
accurately, issues recede as candidates, party managers, and their PR agencies
focus on character (qualities, etc.). As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart
from the irrelevance of the population, they can be dangerous. The participants
in action are surely aware that on a host of major issues, both political
parties are well to the right of the general population, and that their
positions that are quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in a useful
study by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Divide; the same
is true on domestic policy (see my Failed States, on both domains). It is
important, then, for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere.
The quoted admonitions,
taken from highly regarded essays by the leading public intellectual of the 20th
century (Walter Lippmann), capture well the perceptions of progressive
intellectual opinion, largely shared across the narrow elite spectrum. The
common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words, though some,
like Lippmann, do articulate it: President Wilson, for example, who held that an
elite of gentlemen with "elevated ideals" must be empowered to preserve
"stability and righteousness," essentially the perspective of the Founding
Fathers. In more recent years the gentlemen are transmuted into the
"technocratic elite" and "action intellectuals" of Camelot, "Straussian" neocons,
or other configurations. But throughout, one or another variant of Leninist
doctrine prevails.
For the vanguard who uphold
the elevated ideals and are charged with managing the society and the world, the
reasons for Iraq's
drift off the radar screen should not be obscure. They were cogently explained
by the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, articulating the position of
the doves 40 years ago when the US
invasion of South Vietnam was
in its fourth year and Washington was preparing
to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already tearing
South Vietnam to shreds. By then the invasion
launched by Kennedy was facing difficulties and imposing difficult costs on the
United States, so Schlesinger and other Kennedy
liberals were reluctantly beginning to shift from hawks to doves. That even
included Robert Kennedy, who a year earlier, after the vast intensification of
the bombing and combat operations in the South and the first regular bombing of
the North, had condemned withdrawal as "a repudiation of commitments undertaken
and confirmed by three administrations" which would "gravely -- perhaps
irreparably -- weaken the democratic position in Asia." But by the time that
Schlesinger was writing in 1966, RFK and other Camelot hawks began to call for a
negotiated settlement -- though not withdrawal, never an option, just as
withdrawal without victory was never an option for JFK, contrary to many
illusions.
Schlesinger wrote that of
course "we all pray" that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of the
day will be able to "suppress the resistance," and if it does, "we may all be
saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government" in winning
victory while leaving "the tragic country gutted and devastated by bombs, burned
by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical defoliation, a land of ruin and
wreck," with its "political and institutional fabric" pulverized. But
escalation probably won't succeed, and will prove to be too costly for
ourselves, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.
Attitudes towards the war
at the liberal extreme were well illustrated by the concerns of the
Massachusetts branch of Americans for Democratic Action, in
Cambridge, the liberal stronghold. In late 1967, the
ADA
leadership undertook considerable (and quite comical) efforts to prevent
applications for membership from people they feared would speak in favor of an
anti-war resolution sponsored by a local chapter that had fallen out of control
(Howard Zinn and I were the terrifying applicants). A few months later came the
Tet offensive, leading the business world to turn against the war because of its
costs to us, while the more perceptive were coming to realize that
Washington
had already achieved its major war aims. It soon turned out that everyone had
always been a strong opponent of the war (in deep silence). The Kennedy
memoirists revised their accounts to fit the new requirement that JFK was a
secret dove, consigning the rich documentary record (including their own version
of events at the time) to the dustbin of history, where the wrong facts wither
away. Others preferred silence, assuming correctly that the truth would
disappear. The preferred version soon took hold: the radical and self-indulgent
anti-war movement had disrupted the sober efforts of the responsible "early
opponents of the war" to bring it to an end.
At the war's end, in 1975,
the position of the extreme doves was expressed by Anthony Lewis, the most
critical voice in the New York Times. He observed that the war began with
"blundering efforts to do good" - which is close to tautology within the
doctrinal system -- though by 1969 it had become "clear to most of the world --
and most Americans -- that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake." The
argument against the war, Lewis explained, "was that the
United States had misunderstood the cultural and political
forces at work in Indochina -- that it was in a
position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to
itself."
By 1969, "most Americans"
had a radically different view. Some 70% regarded the war as "fundamentally
wrong and immoral," not "a mistake." But they are just "ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders," whose voices can be dismissed - or on the rare occasions when they
are noticed, explained away without evidence by attributing to them self-serving
motives lacking any moral basis.
Elite reasoning, and the
accompanying attitudes, carry over with little change to critical commentary on
the US invasion of
Iraq today. And although criticism of the
Iraq war is far greater and far-reaching than in the case
of Vietnam
at any comparable stage, nevertheless the principles that Schlesinger
articulated remain in force in media and commentary.
It is of some interest that
Schlesinger himself took a very different position on the
Iraq invasion, virtually alone in his circles.
When the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, he wrote
that Bush's policies are "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial
Japan employed at Pearl Harbor,
on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in
infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live
in infamy." It would be instructive to determine how Schlesinger's principled
objection to US war crimes fared in the tributes to him that appeared when he
died, and in the many reviews of his journals (which do not mention Vietnam
until the Johnson years, consistent with the early version of his memoirs of
Camelot).
That
Iraq
is "a land of ruin and wreck" is not in question.. There is no need to review
the facts in any detail. The British polling agency Oxford Research Bureau
recently updated its estimate of extra deaths resulting from the war to 1.3
million - that's excluding Karbala
and Anbar provinces, two of the worst regions. Whether that is correct, or the
true numbers are much lower as some claim, there is no doubt that the toll is
horrendous. There are several million internally deplaced. Thanks to the
generosity of Jordan and
Syria, the millions of refugees fleeing the wreckage of
Iraq, including most of the professional
classes, have not been simply wiped out. But that welcome is fading, for one
reason because Jordan and
Syria receive no meaningful support from the perpetrators
of the crimes in Washington and
London; the idea that they might admit these victims,
beyond a trickle, is too outlandish to consider. Sectarian warfare has
devastated the country.
Baghdad and other areas have been subjected to
brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias, the
primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy developed by General
Petraeus, who won his fame by pacifying
Mosul, now the scene of some of the most extreme
violence.
One of the most dedicated
and informed journalists who has been immersed in the shocking tragedy, Nir
Rosen, recently published an epitaph entitled "The Death of Iraq," in Current
History. He writes that "Iraq
has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more
disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked
Baghdad
in the thirteenth century" - a common perception of Iraqis as well. "Only fools
talk of `solutions' now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps
the damage can be contained."
Though the wreckage of Iraq
today is too visible to try to conceal, the assault of the new barbarians is
carefully circumscribed in the doctrinal system so as to exclude the horrendous
effects of the Clinton sanctions - including their crucial role in preventing
the threat that Iraqis would send Saddam to the same fate as Ceasescu, Marcos,
Suharto, Chun, and many other monsters supported by the US and UK until they
could no longer be maintained. Information about the effect of the sanctions is
hardly lacking, in particular about the humanitarian phase of the sanctions
regime, the oil-for-peace program initiated when the early impact became so
shocking that US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright had to mumble on TV
that the price was right whatever the parents of hundreds of thousands of dead
Iraqi children might think. The humanitarian program, which graciously
permitted Iraq
to use some of its oil revenues for the devastated population, was administered
by highly respected and experienced UN diplomats, who had teams of investigators
all over the country and surely knew more about the situation in
Iraq
than any other Westerners. The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest
because the policies were "genocidal." His successor, Hans von Sponeck, resigned
two years later when he concluded that the sanctions violated the Genocide
Convention. The Clinton
administration barred him from providing information about the impact to the
Security Council, which was technically responsible. As Albright's spokesperson
James Rubin explained, "this man in
Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak."
Von Sponeck does, however,
speak; in extensive detail in his muted but horrifying book A Different Kind of
War. But the State Department ruling prevails. One will have to search
diligently to find even a mention of these revelations or what they imply.
Knowing too much, Halliday and von Sponeck were also barred from the media
during the build-up to the invasion of
Iraq.
It is true, however, that
Iraq
is now a marginal issue in the presidential campaign. That is natural, given
the spectrum of hawk-dove elite opinion. The liberal doves adhere to their
traditional reasoning and attitudes, praying that the hawks will be right and
that the US will win a
victory in the land of ruin and wreck, establishing "stability," a code word for
subordination to Washington's
will. By and large hawks are encouraged, and doves silenced, by the good news
about Iraq.
And there is good news. The
US occupying army in
Iraq
(euphemistically called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out regular
studies of popular attitudes, a crucial component of population control
measures. In December 2007, it released a study of focus groups, which was
uncharacteristically upbeat. The survey "provides very strong evidence" that
national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to prevailing
voices of hopelessness and despair. The survey found that a sense of
"optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups . . . and far more
commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of
Iraqis." This discovery of "shared beliefs" among Iraqis throughout the country
is "good news, according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young
reported in the Washington Post (Dec. 19).
The "shared beliefs" were
identified in the report. To quote de Young, "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic
groups believe that the U.S.
military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and
see the departure of `occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation."
So according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the
invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave
Iraq to Iraqis.
The conclusions are
credible, consistent with earlier polls, and also with the apparent reduction in
violence when the British finally withdrew from Basra a few months ago, having
"decisively lost the south - which produces over 90 per cent of government
revenues and 70 per cent of Iraq's proven oil reserves" by 2005, according to
Anthony Cordesman, the most prominent US specialist on military affairs in the
Middle East.
The December 2007 report did not mention other good news: Iraqis appear to
accept the highest values of Americans, which should be highly gratifying.
Specifically, they accept the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal that
sentenced Nazi war criminals to hanging for such crimes as supporting aggression
and preemptive war - the main charge against Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop,
whose position in the Nazi regime corresponded to that of Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice. The Tribunal defined aggression clearly enough: "invasion of
its armed forces" by one state "of the territory of another state." The invasion
of Iraq and
Afghanistan
are textbook examples, if words have meaning. The Tribunal went on to define
aggression as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole": in
the case of Iraq, the murderous sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, the
destruction of the national culture and the irreplaceable treasures of the
origins of Western civilization under the eyes of "stuff happens" Rumsfeld and
his associates, and every other crime and atrocity as the inheritors of the
Mongols have followed the path of imperial Japan.
Since Iraqis attribute the
accumulated evil of the whole primarily to the invasion, it follows that they
accept the core principle of Nuremberg.
Presumably, they were not asked whether their acceptance of American values
extended to the conclusion of the chief prosecutor for the United States, US
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who forcefully insisted that the Tribunal
would be mere farce if we do not apply its principles to ourselves.
Needless to say,
US elite opinion, shared with the West generally, flatly
rejects the lofty American values professed at
Nuremberg, indeed regards them as bordering on obscene.
All of this provides an instructive illustration of some of the reality that
lies behind the famous "clash of civilizations."
A January poll by World
Learning/Aspen Institute found that "75 percent of Americans believe U.S.
foreign policy is driving dissatisfaction with America abroad and more than 60
percent believe that dislike of American values (39 percent) and of the American
people (26 percent) is also to blame." The perception is inaccurate, fed by
propaganda. There is little dislike of Americans, and dissatisfaction abroad
does not derive from "dislike of American values," but rather from acceptance of
these values, and recognition that they are rejected by the
US government and elite opinion.
Other "good news" had been reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan
Crocker during the extravaganza staged on 9/11. Perhaps we should call the
commander "Lord Petraeus," in the light of the reverence displayed by the media
and commentators on this occasion. Parenthetically, only a cynic might imagine
that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links
between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing the "supreme
international crime" they were defending the world against terror - which
increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to an analysis by
terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using data of the
government-linked Rand corporation.
Petraeus and Crocker
provided figures to show that the Iraqi government had greatly accelerated
spending on reconstruction, reaching a quarter of the funding set aside for that
purpose. Good news indeed -- until it was investigated by the Government
Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth what
Petraeus and Crocker reported, a 50 percent decline from the preceding year.
More good news is the
decline in sectarian violence, attributable in part to the success of the ethnic
cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion; there are simply fewer people to
kill in the cleansed areas. But it is also attributable to
Washington's decision to support the tribal groups that
had organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to
the decision of the Mahdi army to stand down and consolidate its gains - what
the press calls "halting aggression." By definition, only Iraqis can commit
aggression in Iraq
(or Iranians, of course).
It is not impossible that
Petraeus's strategy might approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya,
where fighting is now "limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a
building boom" after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack, C.J.
Chivers reports in the New York Times, also on September 11. Perhaps some day
Baghdad
and Falluja too will enjoy "electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new
businesses opening and the city's main streets repaved," as in booming
Grozny. Possible, but dubious, in the light of the
likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even
greater sectarian violence, adding to the "accumulated evil" of the aggression.
If Russians rise to the
moral level of liberal intellectuals in the West, they must be saluting Putin's
"wisdom and statesmanship" for his achievements in
Chechnya.
A few weeks after the
Pentagon's "good news" from Iraq,
New York Times military-Iraq expert Michael Gordon wrote a reasoned and
comprehensive review of the options on
Iraq
policy facing the candidates for the presidential election. One voice is
missing: Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected. Rather, it is not worthy of
mention. And it seems that there was no notice of the fact. That makes sense
on the usual tacit assumption of almost all discourse on international affairs:
we own the world, so what does it matter what others think? They are
"unpeople," to borrow the term used by British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis
in his work on Britain's
crimes of empire - very illuminating work, therefore deeply hidden. Routinely,
Americans join Iraqis in un-peoplehood. Their preferences too provide no
options.
To cite another instructive
example, consider Gerald Seib's reflections in the Wall Street Journal on "Time
to Look Ahead in Iraq."
Seib is impressed that debate over
Iraq
is finally beginning to go beyond the "cartoon-like characteristics" of what has
come before and is now beginning to confront "the right issue," the "more
profound questions":
The more profound questions
are the long-term ones. Regardless of how things evolve in a new president's
first year, the U.S. needs to
decide what its lasting role should be in
Iraq. Is Iraq to be a permanent American
military outpost, and will American troops need to be on hand in some fashion to
help defend Iraq's borders for a decade or more, as some Iraqi officials
themselves have suggested? Will the U.S.
see Iraq more broadly as a
base for exerting American political and diplomatic influence in the broader
Middle East, or is that a mistake? Is it better to have American
troops just over the horizon, in Kuwait
or ships in the Persian Gulf? Driving these
military considerations is the political question of what kind of government the
U.S. can accept in
Iraq….
No soft-headed nonsense
here about Iraqis having a voice on the lasting role of the
US in
Iraq or on the kind of government they would
prefer.
Seib should not be confused
with the columnists in the Journal's "opinion pages." He is a rational centrist
analyst, who could easily be writing in the liberal media or journals of the
Democratic Party like The New Republic. And he grasps quite accurately the
fundamental principles guiding the political class.
Such reflections of the
imperial mentality are deeply rooted. To pick examples almost at random, in
December 2007 Panama declared a Day of Mourning to commemorate the US invasion
of 1989, which killed thousands of poor people, so Panamanian human rights
groups concluded, when Bush I bombed the El Chorillo slums and other civilian
targets. The Day of Mourning of the unpeople scarcely merited a flicker of an
eyelid here. It is also of no interest that Bush's invasion of
Panama, another textbook example of aggression, appears to
have been more deadly than Saddam's invasion of
Kuwait
a few months later. An unfair comparison of course; after all, we own the
world, and he didn't. It is also of no interest that
Washington's greatest fear was that Saddam would imitate its
behavior in Panama,
installing a client government and then leaving, the main reason why
Washington
blocked diplomacy with almost complete media cooperation; the sole serious
exception I know of was Knut Royce in Long Island Newsday. Though the December
Day of Mourning passed with little notice, there was a lead story when the
Panamanian National Assembly was opened by president Pedro Gonzalez, who is
charged by Washington with killing American soldiers during a protest against
President Bush's visit two years after his invasion, charges dismissed by
Panamanian courts but still upheld by the owner of the world.
To take another
illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times
correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's
intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the
rest of the world to curtail Tehran's
nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority
of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses
Iran's right to enrich Uranium, in accord with
the Non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since
they do not reflexively accept US orders.
We might tarry for a moment
to ask whether there is any solution to the US-Iran confrontation over nuclear
weapons. Here is one idea: (1)
Iran
should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with
the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region,
including Iran,
Israel, and US forces deployed there. (3) The
US should accept the NPT. (4) The
US should end threats against
Iran, and turn to diplomacy.
The proposals are not
original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans,
and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans
and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph
Cirincione, senior vice president for National Security and International Policy
at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed "the common sense of
both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise
above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some
of the most crucial questions" facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic,
diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the
US and
Iran were functioning democratic societies,
this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.
The opinions of Americans
on this issue too are not regarded as worthy of consideration; they are not
options for candidates or commentators. They were apparently not even reported,
perhaps considered too dangerous because of what they reveal about the
"democratic deficit" in the
United States, and about the extremism of the
political class across the spectrum. If public opinion were to be mentioned as
an option, it would be ridiculed as "politically impossible"; or perhaps offered
as another reason why "The public must be put in its place," as Lippmann sternly
admonished.
There is more to say about
the preference of Americans on
Iran. Point (1) above, as noted, happens to
accord with the stand of the large majority of the world. With regard to point
(2), the US
and its allies have accepted it, formally at least. UN Security Council
Resolution 687 commits them to "the goal of establishing in the Middle East a
zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery
and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons" (Article 14). The US and
UK have a particularly strong commitment to this principle, since it was this
Resolution that they appealed to in their efforts to provide a thin legal cover
for their invasion of Iraq, claiming that Iraq had not lived up to the
conditions in 687 on disarmament. As for point (3), 80 percent of Americans
feel that Washington should live up to its commitment under the NPT to undertake
"good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely, a legal commitment
as the World Court determined, explictly rejected by the Bush administration.
Turning to point (4), Americans are calling on the government to adhere to
international law, under which the threats of violence that are voiced by all
current candidates are a crime, in violation of the UN Charter. The call for
negotiations and diplomacy on the part of the American unpeople extends to
Cuba, and has for decades, but is again
dismissed by both political parties.
The likelihood that
functioning democracy might alleviate severe dangers is regularly illustrated.
To take another current example, of great importance, there is now justified
concern about Russian reactions to
US aggressive militarism. That includes the
extension of NATO to the East by Clinton
in violation of solemn pledges to Gorbachev, but particularly the vast expansion
of offensive military capacity under Bush, and more recently, the plans to place
"missile defense" installations in Eastern Europe.
Putin is ridiculed for claiming that they are a threat to
Russia. But US strategic analysts recognize
that he has a point. The programs are designed in a way that Russian planners
would have to regard as a threat to the Russian deterrent, hence calling for
more advanced and lethal offensive military capacity to neutralize them (see
George Lewis and Theodore Postol, "European Missile Defense: The Technological
Basis of Russian Concerns," Arms Control Today, Oct. 2007). A new arms race is
feared.
Recent polls under the
direction of strategic analysts John Steinbrunner and Nancy Gallagher "reveal a
striking disparity between what U.S. and Russian leaders are doing and what
their publics desire," and again indicate that if these countries were
functioning democracies, in which the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders had a
voice, the increasingly fragile US-Russian strategic relationship could be
repaired, a matter of species survival in this case.
In a free press, all of
these matters, and many more like them, would merit regular prominent headlines
and in-depth analysis.
Having brought up
Iran, we might as well turn briefly to the third member of
the famous Axis of Evil,
North Korea. The official story right now is
that after having been forced to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear
weapons facilities, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its
usual devious way - "good news" for superhawks like John Bolton, who have held
all along that they understand only the mailed fist and will exploit
negotiations only to trick us. A New York Times headline reads: "U.S. Sees
Stalling by North Korea
on Nuclear Pact" (January 19); the article by Helene Cooper details the
charges. In the last paragraph we discover that the
US has not fulfilled its pledges.
North Korea has received only 15% of the fuel that was
promised by the US and
others, and the US
has not undertaken steps to improve diplomatic relations, as promised. Several
weeks later (Feb. 6), in the McClatchey press Kevin Hall reported that the chief
US negotiator with North Korea, Christopher Hill, confirmed in Senate Hearings
that "North Korea has slowed the dismantling of its nuclear reactor because it
hasn't received the amount of fuel oil it was promised."
As we learn from the
specialist literature, and asides here and there, this is a consistent pattern.
North Korea
may have the worst government in the world, but they have been pursuing a
pragmatic tit-for-tat policy on negotiations with the
United States. When the
US takes an aggressive and threatening stance,
they react accordingly. When the
US moves towards some form of accommodation, so
do they. When Bush came into office, both North
Korea and the
US
were bound by the Framework Agreement of 1994. Neither was fully in accord with
its commitments, but the agreement was largely being observed.
North Korea
had stopped testing long-range missiles. It had perhaps 1-2 bombs worth of
plutonium, and was verifiably not making more. After 7 Bush years of
confrontation, North Korea
has 8-10 bombs and long-range missiles, and it is developing plutonium. The
Clinton administration, Korea specialist Bruce Cumings reports, "had also worked
out a plan to buy out, indirectly, the North's medium and long-range missiles;
it was ready to be signed in 2000 but Bush let it fall by the wayside and today
the North retains all its formidable missile capability."
The reasons for Bush's
achievements are well understood. The Axis of Evil speech, a serious blow to
Iranian democrats and reformers as they have stressed, also put
North Korea on notice that the
US is returning to its threatening stance.
Washington
released intelligence reports about North Korean clandestine program; these were
conceded to be dubious or baseless when the latest negotiations began in 2007,
probably, commentators speculated, because it was feared that weapons inspectors
might enter North Korea and
the Iraq
story would be repeated.
North Korea responded by ratcheting up missile
and weapons development.
In September 2005, under
international pressure Washington
agreed to turn to negotiations, within the six-power framework. They achieved
substantial success. North Korea
agreed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs" and allow
international inspections, in return for international aid and a non-aggression
pledge from the U.S.,
with an agreement that the two sides would "respect each other's sovereignty,
exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations." The ink was
barely dry on the agreement when the Bush administration renewed the threat of
force, also freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks and disbanding the
consortium that was to provide
North Korea
with a light-water reactor consortium. Cumings alleges that "the sanctions were
specifically designed to destroy the September pledges [and] to head off an
accommodation between Washington and
Pyongyang."
After
Washington scuttled the promising September 2005 agreements,
North Korea
returned to weapons and missile development and carried out a test of a nuclear
weapon. Again under international pressure, and with its foreign policy in
tatters, Washington
returned to negotiations, leading to an agreement, though it is now dragging its
feet on fulfilling its commitments.
Writing in Le Monde
diplomatique last October, Cumings concludes that "Bush had presided over the
most asinine Korea
policy in history. These last years, relations between
Washington and Seoul
have deteriorated drastically. By commission and omission, Bush trampled on the
norms of the historic US
relationship with Seoul while creating a
dangerous situation with Pyongyang."
Charges against
North Korea escalated in September 2007, when
Israel bombed an obscure site in northern
Syria, an "act of war," as at least one
American correspondent recognized (Seymour Hersh). Charges at once surfaced
that Israel attacked a
nuclear installation being developed with the help of
North Korea, an attack compared with
Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor in
Iraq
in 1981 - which, according to available evidence, convinced Saddam Hussein to
initiate his nuclear weapons program. The September 2007 charges are dubious.
Hersh's tentative conclusion after detailed investigation is that the Israeli
actions may have been intended as another threat against
Iran: the US-Israel have you in their
bombsights. However this may be, there is some important background that should
be recalled.
In 1993,
Israel and North Korea
were on the verge of an agreement: Israel
would recognize North Korea,
and in return, North Korea
would end any weapons-related involvement in the Middle
East. The significance for Israeli security is clear.
Clinton ordered the deal terminated, and
Israel
had no choice but to obey. Ever since its fateful decision in 1971 and the
years that followed to reject peace and security in favor of expansion,
Israel has been compelled to rely on the
US for protection, hence to obey
Washington's commands.
Whether or not there is any
truth to current charges about North Korea
and Syria, it appears that
the threat to the security of
Israel, and the region, could have been avoided
by peaceful means, had security been a high priority.
Let us return to first
member of Axis of Evil, Iraq.
Washington's expectations are outlined in a Declaration of
Principles between the US
and the US-backed Iraqi government last November. The Declaration allows US
forces to remain indefinitely to "deter foreign aggression" and for internal
security. The only aggression in sight is from the
United States, but that is not aggression, by
definition. And only the most naïve will entertain the thought that the
US would sustain the government by force if it moved
towards independence, going too far in strengthening relations with
Iran, for example. The Declaration also
committed Iraq to facilitate
and encourage "the flow of foreign investments to
Iraq, especially American investments."
The unusually brazen
expression of imperial will was underscored when Bush quietly issued yet another
signing statement, declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of
congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that
forbids spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base
for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed
Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise United States control of the oil resources of
Iraq." Shortly before, the New York Times had reported that Washington "insists
that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct
combat operations," a demand that "faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from
Iraq, with its…deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state." More
third world irrationality.
In brief,
Iraq must agree to allow permanent
US military installations (called "enduring" in the
preferred Orwellism), grant the US
the right to conduct combat operations freely, and ensure US control over oil
resources of Iraq
while privileging US investors. It is of some interest that these reports did
not influence discussion about the reasons for the
US invasion of
Iraq. These were never obscure, but any effort
to spell them out was dismissed with falsification and ridicule. Now the
reasons are openly conceded, eliciting no retraction or even reflection.
Iraqis are not alone in
believing that national reconciliation is possible. A Canadian-run poll found
that Afghans are hopeful about the future and favor the presence of Canadian and
other foreign troops - the "good news," that made the headlines. The small
print suggests some qualifications. Only 20% "think the Taliban will prevail
once foreign troops leave." Three-fourths support negotiations between the
US-backed Karzai government and the Taliban, and more than half favor a
coalition government. The great majority therefore strongly disagree with
US-Canadian stance, and believe that peace is possible with a turn towards
peaceful means.
Though the question was not
asked, it is reasonable to surmise that the foreign presence is favored for aid
and reconstruction. More evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by
reports about the progress of reconstruction in
Afghanistan six years after the
US invasion. Six percent of the population now
have electricity, AP reports, primarily in
Kabul, which is artificially wealthy because of the huge
foreign presence. There, "the rich, powerful, and well connected" have
electricity, but few others, in contrast to the 1980s under Russian occupation,
when "the city had plentiful power" - and women in Kabul were relatively free
under the occupation and the Russian-backed Najibullah government that followed,
probably more so than now, though they did have to worry about attacks from
Reagan's favorites, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who got his kicks from throwing
acid in the faces of young women he thought were improperly dressed.
These matters were
discussed at the time by Rasil Basu, UN Development Program senior advisor to
the Afghan government for women's development (1986-88). She reported "enormous
strides" for women under the Russian occupation: "illiteracy declined from 98%
to 75%, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law, and in the
Constitution... Unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace
and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs. But the
strides [women] took in education and employment were very impressive....In
Kabul
I saw great advances in women's education and employment. Women were in
evidence in industry, factories, government offices, professions and the media.
With large numbers of men killed or disabled, women shouldered the
responsibility of both family and country. I met a woman who specialized in war
medicine which dealt with trauma and reconstructive surgery for the
war-wounded. This represented empowerment to her. Another woman was a road
engineer. Roads represented freedom - an escape from the oppressive patriarchal
structures."
By 1988, however, Basu
"could see the early warning signs" as Russian troops departed and the
fundamentalist Islamist extremists favored by the Reagan administration took
over, brushing aside the more moderate mujahideen groups. "Saudi Arabian and
American arms and ammunition gave the fundamentalists a vital edge over the
moderates," providing them with military hardware used, "according to Amnesty
International, to target unarmed civilians, most of them women and children."
Then followed much worse horrors as the US-Saudi favorites overthrew the
Najibullah government. The suffering of the population was so extreme that the
Taliban were welcomed when they drove out Reagan's freedom fighters. Another
chapter in the triumph of Reaganite reactionary ultra-nationalism, worshipped
today by those dedicated to defaming the honorable term "conservative."
Basu is a distinguished
advocate for women's rights, including a long career with the UN during which
she drafted the World Plan of Action for Women and the draft Programme for the
Women's Decade, 1975-85, adopted at the Mexico City Conference (1975) and
Copenhagen Conference (1980). But her words were not welcome in the
US. Her 1988 report was submitted to the
Washington Post, New York Times, and Ms. magazine. But rejected. Also rejected
were Basu's recommendation of practical steps that the West, particularly the
US, could take to protect women's rights.
Highly relevant in this
connection are the important investigations by Nikolai Lanine, a former soldier
in the Russian army in
Afghanistan, bringing out the striking
comparisons between Russian commentary during the occupation and that of their
NATO successors today.
These and further
considerations suggest that Afghans really would welcome a foreign presence
devoted to aid and reconstruction, as we can read between the lines in the
polls.
There are, of course,
numerous questions about polls in countries under foreign military occupation,
particularly in places like southern
Afghanistan. But the results of the
Iraq and Afghan studies conform to earlier
ones, and should not be dismissed.
Recent polls in
Pakistan also provide "good news" for
Washington. Fully 5% favor allowing US or other foreign
troops to enter Pakistan
"to pursue or capture al Qaeda fighters." 9% favor allowing US forces "to pursue
and capture Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from
Afghanistan." Almost half favor allowing
Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little over 80% regard the
US military presence in Asia and
Afghanistan as a threat to
Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the
US is trying to harm the Islamic world.
The good news is that these
results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll
found that "Eighty-three percent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the
Taliban, with a mere 3 percent expressing support for the United States," while
over 80 percent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and 6 percent a
terrorist.
Events elsewhere in early
2008 might also turn out to be "good news" for
Washington. In January, in a remarkable act of
courageous civil disobedience, tens of thousands of the tortured people of
Gaza
broke out of the prison to which they had been confined by the US-Israel
alliance, with the usual timid European support, as punishment for the crime of
voting the wrong way in a free election in January 2006. It was instructive to
see the front-pages with stories reporting the brutal US response to a genuinely
free election alongside others lauding the Bush administration for its noble
dedication to "democracy promotion," or sometimes gently chiding it because it
was going too far in its idealism, failing to recognize that the unpeople of the
Middle East are too backward to appreciate democracy - another principle that
traces back to "Wilsonian idealism."
This glaring illustration
of elite hatred and contempt for democracy is routinely reported, apparently
with no awareness of what it signifies. To pick an illustration almost at
random, Cam Simpson reports in the Wall St Journal (Feb. 8) that despite the
harsh US-Israeli punishment of Gaza, and "flooding the West Bank's
Western-backed Fatah-led government with diplomatic and economic support [to]
persuade Palestinians in both territories to embrace Fatah and isolate Hamas,"
the opposite is happening: Hamas's popularity is increasing in the West Bank.
As Simpson casually explains, "Hamas won Palestinian elections in January 2006,
prompting the Israeli government and the Bush administration to lead a
world-wide boycott of the Palestinian Authority," along with much more severe
measures. The goal, unconcealed, is to punish the miscreants who fail to grasp
the essential principle of democracy: "Do what we say, or else."
The US-backed
Israel
punishment increased through early 2006, and escalated sharply after the capture
of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in June. That act was bitterly denounced
in the West. Israel's
vicious response was regarded as understandable if perhaps excessive. These
thoughts were untroubled by the dramatic demonstration that they were sheer
hypocrisy. The day before the capture of Corporal Shalit on the front lines of
the army attacking Gaza, Israeli forces entered Gaza City and kidnapped two
civilians, the Muammar brothers, taking them to Israel (in violation of the
Geneva Conventions), where they disappeared into Israel's prison population,
including almost 1000 held without charge, often for long periods. The
kidnapping, a far more serious crime than the capture of Shalit, received a few
scattered lines of comment, but no noticeable criticism. That is perhaps
understandable, because it is not news. US-backed Israeli forces have been
engaged in such practices, and far more brutal ones, for decades. And in any
event, as a client state
Israel inherits the right of criminality from
its master.
The US-Israel attempted to
organize a military coup to install their favored faction. That was also
reported frankly, considered entirely legitimate, if not praiseworthy. The coup
was preempted by Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip. Israeli savagery
reached new heights, while in the West Bank, US-backed Israeli operations
carried forrward the steady process of taking over valuable territory and
resources, breaking up the fragments remaining to Palestinians by settlements
and huge infrastructure projects, imprisoning the whole by takeover of the
Jordan Valley, and expanding settlement and development in Jerusalem in
violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years to ensure that there
will be no more than a token Palestinian presence in the historic center of
Palestinian cultural, commercial, and social life. Non-violent reactions by
Palestinians and solidarity groups are viciously crushed with rare exceptions.
And scarcely any notice. Even when Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire was
shot and gassed by Israeli troops while participating in a vigil protesting the
Separation Wall - now better termed an annexation wall - there was apparently
not a word in the English-language press, outside of
Ireland.
Israel's
settlement and development programs on the West Bank, including occupied
East Jerusalem, are flagrantly illegal, in violation of numerous
Security Council resolutions and the authoritative jugment by the International
Court of Justice on the Separation Wall, with the agreement of US Justice
Buergenthal in a separate declaration.
Criminal actions by
Palestinians, such as Qassam rockets fired from
Gaza, are angrily condemned in the West. The far more
violent and destructive Israeli actions sometimes elicit polite clucking of
tongues if they exceed approved levels of state terror. Invariably
Israel's actions - for which of course the
US
shares direct responsibility - are portrayed as retaliation, perhaps excessive.
Another way of looking at the cycle of violence is that Qassam rockets are
retaliation for Israel's
unceasing crimes in the West Bank, which is not separable from
Gaza except by US-Israeli fiat. But standard
racist-ultranationalist assumptions exclude that interpretation.
International humanitarian
law is quite explicit on these matters. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention of 1950 states that "No protected person may be punished for an
offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and
likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited…Reprisals
against protected persons and their property are prohibited." Gazans are
unambigously "protected persons" under Israeli military occupation. The Hague
Convention of 1907 also declares that "No general penalty, pecuniary or
otherwise, can be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of
individuals for which it cannot be regarded as collectively responsible"
(Article 50). Furthermore, High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention
are bound to "respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all
circumstances," including of course the Israel
and the US,
which is obligated to prevent, or to punish, the serious breaches of the
Convention by its own leaders and its client. When the media report, as they
regularly do, that "Israel hopes [reducing supplies of fuel and electricity to
the Gaza Strip] will create popular pressure to force the Hamas rulers of Gaza
and other militant groups to stop the rocket fire" (Stephen Erlanger, NYT, Jan.
31), they are calmly informing us that Israel is in grave breach of
international humanitarian law, as is the US for not ensuring respect for law on
the part of its client. When the Israeli High Court grants legitimacy to these
measures, as it has, it is adding another page to its ugly record of
subordination to state power. Israel's
leading legal journalist, Moshe Negbi, knew what he was doing when he entitled
his despairing review of the record of the courts We were like
Sodom (Kisdom
Hayyinu).
International law cannot be
enforced against powerful states, except by their own populations. That is
always a difficult task, particularly so when articulate opinion and the Courts
declare crime to be legitimate.
In January, the Hamas-led
prison break allowed Gazans for the first time in years to go shopping in nearby
Egyptian towns, plainly a serious criminal act because it slightly undermines
US-Israeli strangulation of these unpeople. But the powerful quickly recognized
that these events too could turn into "good news." Israeli deputy defense
minister Matan Vilnai "said openly what some senior Israeli officials would only
say anonymously," Stephen Erlanger reported in the New York Times: the
prison-break might allow Israel to rid itself of any responsibility for Gaza
after having reduced it to devastation and misery in 40 years of brutal
occupation, keeping it only for target practice, and of course under full
military occupation, its borders sealed by Israeli forces on land, sea and air,
apart from an opening to Egypt (in the unlikely event that Egypt would agree).
That appealing prospect
would complement Israel's
ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank,
carefully designed along the lines already outlined to ensure that there will be
no viable future for Palestinians there. At the same time
Israel
can turn to solving its internal "demographic problem," the presence of non-Jews
in a Jewish state. The ultra-nationalist Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman was
harshly condemned as a racist in Israel
when he advanced the idea of forcing Arab citizens of
Israel
into a derisory "Palestinian state," presenting this to the world as a "land
swap." His proposal is slowly being incorporated into the mainstream. Israel
National News reported in April that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of the
governing party Kadima, "considered to be one of the people closest and most
loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," proposed a plan that "appears very similar
to one touted by Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman," though Schneller
says his plan would be "more gradual," and the Arabs affected "will remain
citizens of Israel even though their territory will belong to the [Palestinian
Authority and] they will not be allowed to resettle in other areas of Israel."
Of course the unpeople are not consulted.
In December, Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni, the last hope of many Israeli doves, adopted the same
position. An eventual Palestinian state, she suggested, would "be the national
answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different
refugee camps or in Israel."
With Israeli Arabs dispatched to their natural place, Israel would then achieve
the long-sought goal of freeing itself from the Arab taint, a stand that is
familiar enough in US history, for example in Thomas Jefferson's hope, never
achieved, that the rising empire of liberty would be free of "blot or mixture,"
red or black.
For
Israel, this is no small matter. Despite
heroic efforts by its apologists, it is not easy to conceal the fact that a
"democratic Jewish state" is no more acceptable to liberal opinion than a
"democratic Christian state" or a "democratic white state," as long as the blot
or mixture is not removed. Such notions could be tolerated if the
religious/ethnic identification were mostly symbolic, like selecting an official
day of rest. But in the case of
Israel, it goes far beyond that. The most
extreme departure from minimal democratic principles is the complex array of
laws and bureaucratic arrangements designed to vest control of over 90 percent
of the land in the hands of the Jewish National Fund, an organization committed
to using charitable funds in ways that are "directly or indirectly beneficial to
persons of Jewish religion, race or origin," so its documents explain: "a public
institution recognized by the Government of Israel and the World Zionist
Organization as the exclusive instrument for the development of Israel's lands,"
restricted to Jewish use, in perpetuity (with marginal exceptions), and barred
to non-Jewish labor (though the principle is often ignored for imported cheap
labor). This radical violation of elementary civil rights, funded by all
American citizens thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF, finally reached
Israel's High Court in 2000, in a case brought by an Arab
couple who had been barred from the town of
Katzir. The Court ruled in their favor, in a narrow
decision, which seems to have been barely implemented. Seven years later, a
young Arab couple was barred from the town of
Rakefet, on state land, on grounds of "social
incompatibility" (Scott Peterson, Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2007), a very rare
report. Again, none of this is unfamiliar in the
US. After all, it took a century before the
14th amendment was even formally recognized by the courts, and it still is far
from implemented.
For Palestinians, there are
now two options. One is that the US and Israel will abandon their unilateral
rejectionism of the past 30 years and accept the international consensus on a
two-state settlement, in accord with international law - and, incidentally, in
accord with the wishes of a large majority of Americans. That is not
impossible, though the two rejectionist states are working hard to render it
so. A settlement along these lines came close in negotiations in Taba
Egypt
in January 2001, and might have been reached, participants reported, had Israeli
Prime Minister Barak not called off the negotiations prematurely. The framework
for these negotiations was Clinton's "parameters"
of December 2000, issued after he recognized that the Camp
David proposals earlier that year were unacceptable. It is commonly
claimed that Arafat rejected the parameters. However, as
Clinton
made clear and explicit, both sides had accepted the parameters, in both caes
with reservations, which they sought to reconcile in Taba a few weeks later, and
apparently almost succeeded. There have been unofficial negotiations since that
have produced similar proposals. Though possibilities diminish as US-Israeli
settlement and infrastructure programs proceed, they have not been eliminated.
By now the international consensus is near universal, supported by the Arab
League, Iran, Hamas, in fact every relevant actor apart from the US and Israel.
A second possibility is the
one that the US-Israel are actually implementing, along the lines just
described. Palestinians will then be consigned to their
Gaza prison and to West Bank
cantons, perhaps joined by Israeli Arab citizens as well if the
Lieberman-Schneller-Livni plans are implemented. For the occupied territories,
that will realize the intentions expressed by Moshe Dayan to his Labor Party
cabinet colleagues in the early years of the occupation:
Israel
should tell the Palestinian refugees in the territories that "we have no
solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave,
and we will see where this process leads." The general conception was
articulated by Labor Party leader Haim Herzog, later President, in 1972: "I do
not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter...But
certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a
land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of
years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."
A third possibility would
be a binational state. That was a feasible option in the early years of the
occupation, perhaps a federal arrangement leading to eventual closer integration
as circumstances permit. There was even some support for similar ideas within
Israeli military intelligence, but the grant of any political rights to
Palestinians was shot down by the governing Labor Party. Proposals to that
effect were made (by me in particular), but elicited only hysteria. The
opportunity was lost by the mid-1970s, when Palestinian national rights reached
the international agenda, and the two-state consensus took shape. The first US
veto of a two-state resolution at the Security Council, advanced by the major
Arab states, was in 1976. Washingon's rejectionist stance continues to the
present, with the exception of Clinton's
last month in office. Some form of unitary state remains a distant possibility
through agreement among the parties, as a later stage in a process that begins
with a two-state settlement. There is no other form of advocacy of such an
outcome, if we understand advocacy to include a process leading from here to
there; mere proposal, in contrast, is free for the asking.
It is of some interest,
perhaps, that when advocacy of a unitary binational state perhaps had some
prospects, it was anathema, while today, when it is completely unfeasible, it is
greeted with respect and is advocated in leading journals. The reason, perhaps,
is that it serves to undermine the prospect of a two-state settlement.
Advocates of a binational
(one-state) settlement argue that on its present course, Israel will become a
pariah state like apartheid South Africa, with a large Palestinian population
deprived of rights, laying the basis for an civil rights struggle leading to a
unitary democratic state There is no reason to believe that the US, Israel, or
any other Western state would allow anything like that to happen. Rather, they
will proceed exactly as they are now doing in the territories today, taking no
responsibility for Palestinians who are left to rot in the various prisons and
cantons that may dot the landscape, far from the eyes of Israelis travelling on
their segregated superhighways to their well-subsidized West Bank towns and
suburbs, controlling the crucial water resources of the region, and benefiting
from their ties with US and other international corporations that are evidently
pleased to see a loyal military power at the periphery of the crucial Middle
East region, with an advanced high tech economy and close links to Washington.
Turning elsewhere, major
polls are not such good news for conventional Western doctrine. Few theses are
upheld with such passion and unanimity as the doctrine that Hugo Chavez is a
tyrant bent on destroying freedom and democracy in
Venezuela, and beyond. The annual polls on
Latin American opinion by the respected Chilean polling agency Latinobarometro
therefore are "bad news." The most recent (November 2007) had the same
irritating results as before. Venezuela
ranks second, close behind first-place
Uruguay, in satisfaction with democracy, and
third in satisfaction with leaders. It ranks first in assessment of the current
and future economic situation, equality and justice, and education standards.
True, it ranks only 11th in favoring a market economy, but even with this flaw,
overall it ranks highest in Latin America on matters of democracy, justice, and
optimism, far above US
favorites Colombia,
Peru, Mexico
and Chile.
Latin America
analyst Mark Turner writes that he "found an almost total English speaking
blackout about the results of this important snapshot of [Latin American] views
and opinions." That has also been true in the past. Turner also found the usual
exception: there were reports of the finding that Chavez is about as unpopular
as Bush in Latin America, something that will come as little surprise to those
who have seen some of the bitterly hostile coverage to which Chavez is
subjected, in the Venezuelan press as well, an oddity in this looming
dictatorship. Editorial offices have been well aware of the polls, but
evidently understand what may pass through doctrinal filters.
Also receiving scant notice
was a declaration of President Chavez on Dec. 31, 2007, granting amnesty to
leaders of the U.S.-backed military coup that kidnapped the president, disbanded
parliament and the Supreme Court and all other democratic institutions, but was
soon overturned by a popular uprising. That the West would have followed
Chavez's model in a comparable case is, to put it mildly, rather unlikely.
Perhaps all of this
provides some further insight into the "clash of civilizations" - a question
that should be prominent in our minds, I think.