by Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
The Iraq War – now ending its fifth bloody year – represents not only a human tragedy of enormous consequence and possibly the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history but also a systemic failure of American political and journalistic institutions.
Instead of checking George W. Bush’s imperial impulse for the good of the Republic, the Congress – including Sen. Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats – and the national press corps tended to their careers and their political viability.
In recognition of this tragedy – and in honor of the thousands of American dead and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead – we are publishing the first of two excerpts from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush [1]:
Iraq’s “Day of Liberation” – as George W. Bush called it – was supposed to begin with a bombardment consisting of 3,000 U.S. missiles delivered over 48 hours, 10 times the number of bombs dropped during the first two days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Officials, who were briefed on the plans, said the goal was to so stun the Iraqis that they would simply submit to the overwhelming force demonstrated by the U.S. military. Administration officials dubbed the strategy “shock and awe.”
In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush had addressed the “brave and oppressed people of Iraq” with the reassuring message that “your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country.”
Bush promised that the day that Saddam Hussein and his regime “are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.”
But never before in history had a dominant world power planned to strike a much weaker nation in a preemptive war with such ferocity. It would be liberation through devastation.
Many projections expected the deaths of thousands of Iraqi non-combatants, no matter how targeted or precise the U.S. weapons. For those civilians, their end would come in the dark terror of crushing concrete or in the blinding flash of high explosives.
In the prelude to the invasion, the United Nations predicted possibly more than 500,000 civilians injured or killed during the war and its aftermath and nearly one million displaced from their homes.
The International Study Team, a Canadian non-governmental organization, raised similar alarms. The invasion of Iraq would cause a “grave humanitarian disaster,” with potential casualties among children in “the tens of thousands, and possibly in the hundreds of thousands,” the group said.
Assuming U.S. forces succeeded in eliminating Saddam Hussein and his army with relative speed, the post-war period still promised to be complicated and dangerous. The Bush administration outlined plans to occupy Iraq for at least 18 months, installing a military governor in the style of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II.
But it was not clear how the United States would police a population that was certain to include anti-American militants ready to employ suicide bombings and other irregular tactics against an occupying force.
Bin Laden’s Message
There was the risk, too, that the U.S. invasion would play into the hands of Osama bin Laden, who circulated a message portraying himself as the defender of the Arab people.
“Anyone who tries to destroy our villages and cities, then we are going to destroy their villages and cities,” the al-Qaeda leader said. “Anyone who steals our fortunes, then we must destroy their economy. Anyone who kills our civilians, then we are going to kill their civilians.”
Some U.S. military strategists saw Bush’s war plan as the worst sort of wishful thinking.
What if the Iraqi army – instead of making itself an easy target for the U.S. missiles – melted into urban centers and began coordinating with an armed civilian population to resist a foreign invasion of their homeland? What if the Iraqi people chose to fight the American invaders, rather than shower them with rose petals?
Already, Saddam Hussein had begun concentrating his troops in urban centers and passing out AK-47s to Iraqis, young and old, men and women.
But Bush’s biggest gamble was whether the “shock and awe” bombardment from the air and the stunning American firepower during the ground invasion would intimidate the Iraqis into surrendering.
The relatively light invading force of a couple hundred thousand troops would be enough to take Baghdad, most military analysts believed, but significant resistance during the invasion would be an early sign that the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, was right when he told Congress that the occupation could require “several hundred thousand troops.”
After that alarming estimate, Shinseki was pushed into early retirement and drew a public rebuke from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who called Shinseki “wildly off the mark.”
A similar dispute erupted over the expected cost of the war. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay had estimated a figure as high as one or two percent of the gross national product or about $100 billion to $200 billion.
To head off American worries about this high cost, Bush’s budget director Mitch Daniels slapped down Lindsay’s estimate as “very, very high,” pegging it instead at between $50 billion and $60 billion. As for reconstruction costs, Wolfowitz and other administration officials suggested that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for nearly all of that.
Lindsay was soon headed for the door, fired in December 2002 along with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, an even more outspoken Iraq War critic.
Lost Objectivity
There is the old clich̩ about war, that its first casualty is truth. But Рas U.S. forces began the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, still the evening of March 19 in Washington Рan even more immediate casualty was the journalistic principle of objectivity.
Many U.S. news outlets dropped even the pretense of trying to stay neutral and just report the facts. TV anchors were soon opining about what strategies “we” should follow in prosecuting the Iraq War.
“One of the things that we don’t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we’re going to own that country,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw explained as he sat among a panel of retired generals on the opening night of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
There was little sensitivity to the sensibilities of the region. U.S. networks used large floor maps of Iraq so American analysts could stride across the country to point out troop movements. They looked like giants towering over the Middle East.
When American troops faced resistance from Iraqi paramilitary fighters, Fox termed them “Saddam’s goons.” When Iraqi forces surrendered, they were paraded before U.S. cameras as “proof” that Iraqi resistance was crumbling.
Some of the scenes showed Iraqi POWs forced at gunpoint to kneel down with their hands behind their heads as they were patted down by U.S. soldiers. Network executives apparently felt no sense of irony when they ran these images over the words, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the title for the coverage and the code name for the invasion.
Showing these degrading images of captured Iraqi soldiers generated not even the mildest concern. Neither the Bush administration nor a single U.S. reporter covering the war for the news networks observed that these scenes might violate the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war.
But several days into the invasion, five American soldiers were captured in the southern city of Nasiriyah. When their images were broadcast on Iraqi TV, Bush administration officials immediately denounced the brief televised interviews as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, a charge that was repeated over and over by outraged U.S. television networks.
“It’s illegal to do things to POWs that are humiliating to those prisoners,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In their collective outrage over Iraq’s alleged violation of international law, the U.S. networks seemed to forget the earlier scenes of the Iraqi POWs. They also left out how President Bush had stripped POWs captured in Afghanistan of their rights under the Geneva Conventions.
Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shaved bald and forced to kneel down with their eyes, ears and mouths covered to deprive them of their senses. Their humiliation was broadcast widely for the world to see.
There also had been leaks to the news media that terrorist suspects were being subjected to “stress and duress” tactics, which in some cases could be considered forms of torture. U.S. officials admitted to the use of sleep deprivation in their interrogations of prisoners.
But senior U.S. officials defended these tactics, with one official telling The Washington Post, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”
Virtually confirming the new U.S. policy of using forms of torture, Cofer Black, former head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, told a joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees that there was a new “operational flexibility” in dealing with suspected terrorists.
“There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.”
This background left many in the world shaking their heads over the U.S. outrage when Iraqi TV broadcast the videotapes of American POWs. The Bush administration – and the major American media – seemed to prefer their international law a la carte, picking and choosing when the rules should apply and when they shouldn’t.
Patriotism Sweepstakes
As the invasion – or “liberation” – proceeded, Fox News and MSNBC competed in the sweepstakes to be the network that demonstrated the greatest pro-war patriotism.
Both Fox and MSNBC broadcast Madison Avenue-style montages of heroic American soldiers at war, amid thankful Iraqis and stirring background music. Fox News used a harmonica soundtrack of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
MSNBC brought even higher production values to its images of U.S. troops moving through Iraq. One segment ended with an American boy surrounded by yellow ribbons for his father at war, and the concluding slogan, “Home of the Brave.”
Another MSNBC montage showed happy Iraqis welcoming U.S. troops as liberators over the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring.”
Left out of these “news” montages – and much of the American news coverage – were images of death and destruction.
Rather than troubling Americans with gruesome pictures of mangled and dismembered Iraqi bodies, including many children, the cable networks, in particular, edited the war in ways that helped avoid negativity, boost ratings and give advertisers the feel-good content that plays best around their products.
Fox News may have pioneered the concept of casting the war in the gauzy light of heroic imagery, but the other U.S. networks weren’t far behind.
Not to be completely out-foxed, CNN offered startlingly different war coverage to Americans on domestic CNN than what other viewers saw on CNN International.
While domestic CNN focused on happy stories of American courage and appreciative Iraqis, CNNI carried more scenes of wounded civilians overflowing Iraqi hospitals.
“During the Gulf War in 1991, [CNN] presented a uniform global feed that showed the war largely through American eyes,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Since then, CNN has developed several overseas networks that increasingly cater their programming to regional audiences and advertisers.”
Left unsaid by the Journal’s formulation of how CNN’s overseas affiliates “cater” to foreign audiences was the flip side of that coin, that domestic CNN was freer to shape a version of the news that was more satisfying to Americans.
Still, CNN – and MSNBC – lagged behind Fox in pulling in the viewers with super-patriotic war coverage, albeit not for lack of trying.
The U.S. networks fell over themselves to tell the glorious story of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was captured during the invasion’s early days. Her rescue was filmed by the U.S. military in the fuzzy green of night-vision equipment and played over and over again.
Only later was it revealed that the Lynch story had been embroidered for propaganda effect. The Iraqi doctors who had cared for Lynch said the rescue was staged, a kind of made-for-TV movie before it was destined to become a made-for-TV movie.
“They made a big show,” said Haitham Gizzy, a doctor who treated Lynch. “It was just a drama” filmed after Iraqi fighters had fled the scene and with only doctors manning the hospital.
Impending Disaster
While Americans were fed a steady diet of cheerleading journalism, the stronger-than-expected resistance from Iraqi forces on the ground in the war’s early days raised warning signs about trouble ahead.
Robert Parry tracked down some of his longtime military and intelligence sources who painted for him a much grimmer picture than was appearing in the major U.S. news media.
With the war less than two weeks old, he described their portents of disaster in a Consortiumnews.com article entitled “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down.” It read:
“Whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has ‘lost’ the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.
“That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that ‘victory’ will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions.
“At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip.
“The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a ‘Black Hawk Down’ reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory.
“But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993. In both those cases, the U.S. government showed the tactical flexibility to extricate itself from military misjudgments without grave strategic damage.
“The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion left a small army of Cuban exiles in the lurch when the rosy predictions of popular uprisings against Fidel Castro failed to materialize. To the nation’s advantage, however, President John Kennedy applied what he learned from the Bay of Pigs – that he shouldn’t blindly trust his military advisers – to navigate the far more dangerous Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
“The botched ‘Black Hawk Down’ raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia.
“Similarly, President Ronald Reagan pulled out U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines who were part of a force that had entered Beirut as peace-keepers but found itself drawn into the middle of a brutal civil war.”
Robert Parry continued: “Few analysts today, however, believe that George W. Bush and his senior advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have the common sense to swallow the short-term bitter medicine of a cease-fire or a U.S. withdrawal.
“Rather than face the political music for admitting to the gross error of ordering an invasion in defiance of the United Nations and then misjudging the enemy, these U.S. leaders are expected to push forward no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be.
“Without doubt, the Bush administration misjudged the biggest question of the war: ‘Would the Iraqis fight?’ Happy visions of rose petals and cheers have given way to a grim reality of ambushes and suicide bombs.
“But the Bush pattern of miscalculation continues unabated. Bush seems to have cut himself off from internal dissent at the CIA and the Pentagon, where intelligence analysts and field generals warned against the wishful thinking that is proving lethal on the Iraqi battlefields. …
“Instead of recognizing their initial errors and rethinking their war strategy, Bush and his team are pressing forward confidently into what looks like a dreamscape of their own propaganda. …
“While the Bush administration once talked about administering Iraq for a couple of years after victory, that timetable was based on the pre-war assumptions that the war would be a ‘cakewalk’ and that the Iraqi population would welcome U.S. troops with open arms.
“After that easy victory, a U.S. proconsul administration would weed out Saddam loyalists and build a ‘representative’ government, apparently meaning that the U.S. would pick leaders from among Iraq’s various ethnic groups and tribes.
“However, now, with civilian casualties rising and a U.S. ‘victory’ possibly requiring a blood bath, the timeline for the post-war ‘reconstruction’ may need lengthening. Instead of a couple of years, the process could prove open-ended with fewer Iraqis willing to collaborate and more Iraqis determined to resist.
“A long occupation would be another grim prospect for American soldiers. Given what’s happened in the past 11 days, U.S. occupation troops and Iraqi collaborators can expect an extended period of scattered fighting that might well involve assassinations and bombings.
“U.S. troops, inexperienced with Iraqi culture and ignorant of the Arabic language, will be put in the predicament of making split-second decisions about whether to shoot some 14-year-old boy with a backpack or some 70-year-old woman in a chador. …
“Once the ‘shock and awe’ bombing failed to crack the regime and Iraqis showed they were willing to fight in southern Iraqi cities – such as Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriyah – where Saddam’s support was considered weak, Bush’s initial war strategy was shown to be a grave mistake.
“The supposedly decisive ‘shock and awe’ bombing in the war’s opening days amounted to TV pyrotechnics that did little more than blow up empty government buildings, including Saddam’s tackily decorated palaces. The U.S. had so telegraphed the punch that the buildings had been evacuated. …
“Unwittingly, Bush may be applying all the wrong lessons from America’s worst military disasters of the past 40-plus years. He’s mixing risky military tactics with a heavy reliance on propaganda and a large dose of wishful thinking.
“Bush also has guessed wrong on the one crucial ingredient that would separate meaningful victory from the political defeat that is now looming. He completely miscalculated the reaction of the Iraqi people to an invasion.
“More and more, Bush appears to be heading toward that ultimate lesson of U.S. military futility. He’s committed himself – and the nation – to destroying Iraq in order to save it.”
Part Two: Stiffer-Than-Expected Resistance
_______
About author
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com [2]. It's also available at Amazon.com [3], as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News[4]
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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
A Bankrupt Superpower The Collapse of American Power By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
In his famous book, The Collapse of British Power (1972), Correlli Barnett reports that in the opening days of World War II Great Britain only had enough gold and foreign exchange to finance war expenditures for a few months. The British turned to the Americans to finance their ability to wage war. Barnett writes that this dependency signaled the end of British power.
From their inception, America's 21st century wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have been red ink wars financed by foreigners, principally the Chinese and Japanese, who purchase the US Treasury bonds that the US government issues to finance its red ink budgets.
The Bush administration forecasts a $410 billion federal budget deficit for this year, an indication that, as the US saving rate is approximately zero, the US is not only dependent on foreigners to finance its wars but also dependent on foreigners to finance part of the US government's domestic expenditures. Foreign borrowing is paying US government salaries--perhaps that of the President himself--or funding the expenditures of the various cabinet departments. Financially, the US is not an independent country.
The Bush administration's $410 billion deficit forecast is based on the unrealistic assumption of 2.7% GDP growth in 2008, whereas in actual fact the US economy has fallen into a recession that could be severe. There will be no 2.7% growth, and the actual deficit will be substantially larger than $410 billion.
Just as the government's budget is in disarray, so is the US dollar which continues to decline in value in relation to other currencies. The dollar is under pressure not only from budget deficits, but also from very large trade deficits and from inflation expectations resulting from the Federal Reserve's effort to stabilize the very troubled financial system with large injections of liquidity.
A troubled currency and financial system and large budget and trade deficits do not present an attractive face to creditors. Yet Washington in its hubris seems to believe that the US can forever rely on the Chinese, Japanese and Saudis to finance America's life beyond its means. Imagine the shock when the day arrives that a US Treasury auction of new debt instruments is not fully subscribed.
The US has squandered $500 billion dollars on a war that serves no American purpose. Moreover, the $500 billion is only the out-of-pocket costs. It does not include the replacement cost of the destroyed equipment, the future costs of care for veterans, the cost of the interests on the loans that have financed the war, or the lost US GDP from diverting scarce resources to war. Experts who are not part of the government's spin machine estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be as much as $3 trillion.
The Republican candidate for President said he would be content to continue the war for 100 years. With what resources? When America's creditors consider our behavior they see total fiscal irresponsibility. They see a deluded country that acts as if it is a privilege for foreigners to lend to it, and a deluded country that believes that foreigners will continue to accumulate US debt until the end of time.
The fact of the matter is that the US is bankrupt. David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the US and head of the Government Accountability Office, in his December 17, 2007, report to the US Congress on the financial statements of the US government noted that "the federal government did not maintain effective internal control over financial reporting (including safeguarding assets) and compliance with significant laws and regulations as of September 30, 2007." In everyday language, the US government cannot pass an audit.
Moreover, the GAO report pointed out that the accrued liabilities of the federal government "totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007." No funds have been set aside against this mind boggling liability.
Just so the reader understands, $53 trillion is $53,000 billion.
Frustrated by speaking to deaf ears, Walker recently resigned as head of the Government Accountability Office.
As of March 17, 2008, one Swiss franc is worth more than $1 dollar. In 1970, the exchange rate was 4.2 Swiss francs to the dollar. In 1970, $1 purchased 360 Japanese yen. Today $1 dollar purchases less than 100 yen.
If you were a creditor, would you want to hold debt in a currency that has such a poor record against the currency of a small island country, or against a small landlocked European country that clings to its independence and is not a member of the EU?
Would you want to hold the debt of a country whose imports exceed its industrial production? According to the latest US statistics as reported in the February 28 issue of Manufacturing and Technology News, in 2007 imports were 14 percent of US GDP and US manufacturing comprised 12% of US GDP. A country whose imports exceed its industrial production cannot close its trade deficit by exporting more.
The dollar has even collapsed in value against the euro, the currency of a make-believe country that does not exist: the European Union. France, Germany, Italy, England and the other members of the EU still exist as sovereign nations. England even retains its own currency. Yet the euro hits new highs daily against the dollar.
Noam Chomsky recently wrote that America thinks that it owns the world. That is definitely the view of the neoconized Bush administration. But the fact of the matter is that the US owes the world. The US "superpower" cannot even finance its own domestic operations, much less its gratuitous wars except via the kindness of foreigners to lend it money that cannot be repaid.
The US will never repay the loans. The American economy has been devastated by offshoring, by foreign competition, and by the importation of foreigners on work visas, while it holds to a free trade ideology that benefits corporate fat cats and shareholders at the expense of American labor. The dollar is failing in its role as reserve currency and will soon be abandoned.
When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, the US will no longer be able to pay its bills by borrowing more from foreigners.
I sometimes wonder if the bankrupt "superpower" will be able to scrape together the resources to bring home the troops stationed in its hundreds of bases overseas, or whether they will just be abandoned.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
From their inception, America's 21st century wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have been red ink wars financed by foreigners, principally the Chinese and Japanese, who purchase the US Treasury bonds that the US government issues to finance its red ink budgets.
The Bush administration forecasts a $410 billion federal budget deficit for this year, an indication that, as the US saving rate is approximately zero, the US is not only dependent on foreigners to finance its wars but also dependent on foreigners to finance part of the US government's domestic expenditures. Foreign borrowing is paying US government salaries--perhaps that of the President himself--or funding the expenditures of the various cabinet departments. Financially, the US is not an independent country.
The Bush administration's $410 billion deficit forecast is based on the unrealistic assumption of 2.7% GDP growth in 2008, whereas in actual fact the US economy has fallen into a recession that could be severe. There will be no 2.7% growth, and the actual deficit will be substantially larger than $410 billion.
Just as the government's budget is in disarray, so is the US dollar which continues to decline in value in relation to other currencies. The dollar is under pressure not only from budget deficits, but also from very large trade deficits and from inflation expectations resulting from the Federal Reserve's effort to stabilize the very troubled financial system with large injections of liquidity.
A troubled currency and financial system and large budget and trade deficits do not present an attractive face to creditors. Yet Washington in its hubris seems to believe that the US can forever rely on the Chinese, Japanese and Saudis to finance America's life beyond its means. Imagine the shock when the day arrives that a US Treasury auction of new debt instruments is not fully subscribed.
The US has squandered $500 billion dollars on a war that serves no American purpose. Moreover, the $500 billion is only the out-of-pocket costs. It does not include the replacement cost of the destroyed equipment, the future costs of care for veterans, the cost of the interests on the loans that have financed the war, or the lost US GDP from diverting scarce resources to war. Experts who are not part of the government's spin machine estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be as much as $3 trillion.
The Republican candidate for President said he would be content to continue the war for 100 years. With what resources? When America's creditors consider our behavior they see total fiscal irresponsibility. They see a deluded country that acts as if it is a privilege for foreigners to lend to it, and a deluded country that believes that foreigners will continue to accumulate US debt until the end of time.
The fact of the matter is that the US is bankrupt. David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the US and head of the Government Accountability Office, in his December 17, 2007, report to the US Congress on the financial statements of the US government noted that "the federal government did not maintain effective internal control over financial reporting (including safeguarding assets) and compliance with significant laws and regulations as of September 30, 2007." In everyday language, the US government cannot pass an audit.
Moreover, the GAO report pointed out that the accrued liabilities of the federal government "totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007." No funds have been set aside against this mind boggling liability.
Just so the reader understands, $53 trillion is $53,000 billion.
Frustrated by speaking to deaf ears, Walker recently resigned as head of the Government Accountability Office.
As of March 17, 2008, one Swiss franc is worth more than $1 dollar. In 1970, the exchange rate was 4.2 Swiss francs to the dollar. In 1970, $1 purchased 360 Japanese yen. Today $1 dollar purchases less than 100 yen.
If you were a creditor, would you want to hold debt in a currency that has such a poor record against the currency of a small island country, or against a small landlocked European country that clings to its independence and is not a member of the EU?
Would you want to hold the debt of a country whose imports exceed its industrial production? According to the latest US statistics as reported in the February 28 issue of Manufacturing and Technology News, in 2007 imports were 14 percent of US GDP and US manufacturing comprised 12% of US GDP. A country whose imports exceed its industrial production cannot close its trade deficit by exporting more.
The dollar has even collapsed in value against the euro, the currency of a make-believe country that does not exist: the European Union. France, Germany, Italy, England and the other members of the EU still exist as sovereign nations. England even retains its own currency. Yet the euro hits new highs daily against the dollar.
Noam Chomsky recently wrote that America thinks that it owns the world. That is definitely the view of the neoconized Bush administration. But the fact of the matter is that the US owes the world. The US "superpower" cannot even finance its own domestic operations, much less its gratuitous wars except via the kindness of foreigners to lend it money that cannot be repaid.
The US will never repay the loans. The American economy has been devastated by offshoring, by foreign competition, and by the importation of foreigners on work visas, while it holds to a free trade ideology that benefits corporate fat cats and shareholders at the expense of American labor. The dollar is failing in its role as reserve currency and will soon be abandoned.
When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, the US will no longer be able to pay its bills by borrowing more from foreigners.
I sometimes wonder if the bankrupt "superpower" will be able to scrape together the resources to bring home the troops stationed in its hundreds of bases overseas, or whether they will just be abandoned.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth Of National Lies and Racial America By TIM WISE
For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even
self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even
self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com
The Legacy of Oppression and The Legitimacy of Resistance by Dahlia Wasfi
The following remarks by Dr. Wasfi were given at the March and Rally For Peace held in Kennebunkport, Maine on Saturday, August 25th:
I speak to you today on behalf of relatives on my mother’s side-Ashkenazi Jews who fled their homeland of Austria during Hitler’s Anschluss. It is for them that we say “Never again.” I speak to you today on behalf of relatives on my father’s side who are not living, but dying, under the occupation of this administration’s deadly foray in Iraq. From the lack of security to the lack of basic supplies to the lack of electricity to the lack of potable water to the lack of jobs to the lack of reconstruction to the lack of education to the lack of healthcare to the lack of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they are much worse off now than before we invaded. “Never again” should apply to them, too.
There has been debate recently within the American peace movement on the issue of support for the Iraqi resistance. The argument has been made by some that we don’t support the resistance in Iraq because it’s different than it has been for other countries we’ve invaded. That “what is understood to be ‘the Iraqi resistance’ is a disaggregated and diverse set of largely unconnected factions…There is no unified leadership that can speak for ‘the resistance’…There is no unified program, either of what the fight is against or what it is for…(Bennis, 2007)”
Well - judge not lest we be judged, for this is an offensive display of the arrogance of empire.
We sit here 8000 miles away with our luxuries of electricity and water, while Iraqis suffer in the desert heat with no relief, and we tell them they are disorganized. This is fiddling while Iraq burns. People are dying; the question is moot.
We are not fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq; we are slaughtering people’s children. We went in to liberate Iraqis from a ruthless dictator we imposed upon them who allegedly killed 300,000 during his 30 year reign of terror. We’ve accomplished more than triple that in a fraction of the time.
If ever there were legitimate resistance to illegal occupation, it is in Iraq.
If ever there were a people struggling for democracy and independence, there are Iraqis.
If ever there were a people who have known suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty American imperialism, there are Iraqis.
Through the last 400 years, the European immigrants who landed on these shores have raped and pillaged millions in the name of empire. They followed the call to “Go West, young man,” slaughtering 95% of the indigenous population along the way. In the late 1800’s, sights were set on the Caribbean, and through the last 2 centuries, we have had a hand in creating colonies in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast and Western Asia. After all, what is the Middle East, but the Arab World and America’s colonial outpost Israel, according to their geographic position relative to Western powers?
But now there is a wedge in this imperial path, driving the American neo-conservative empire to a screeching halt. The Iraqi people - who are, in fact, the Iraqi resistance - are succeeding where we could not. What’s not to love?
We cannot start examining history from September 11th, 2001. Since WWI, Arabs have been lied to, manipulated, and used by the U.S., Great Britain, and other colonial powers. Next year will mark the 60th year of Al Nakba in Palestine-the Catastrophe. Iraqis have now seen that illegal occupation extended to include the Fertile Crescent, their land between two rivers, their Mesopotamia. Iraqis see the close to 6 million Palestinian refugees, illegally denied their right of return. Iraqis see the U.S. Army building walls to make impoverished ghettos, like the Nazis did, and like the Israelis are doing with their apartheid wall. Iraqis see the open-air prison that is Gaza, strangled and starving as we speak because of our political agenda. The crime of these prisoners? They were born Palestinian. Iraqis are living under occupation tactics such as daily house raids, uprooting of trees, looting of property, psy-ops death squads and the use of depleted uranium - all of which they know too well by watching our joint actions with Israel in Palestine.
And do you know what Iraqis are saying? I don’t speak Arabic, but I can translate for you. They’re saying, “Get out!” They’re saying, “NO way - you’re staying for 60 years.” They’re saying, “Get your oil the old-fashioned way - pay for it!” And why are they saying this? Because they have a dignity and self-respect rooted in 7000 years of civilization.
Iraq is the center of Arab nationalism. Actually, this is what my father says, and I would argue that my father is the center of Arab nationalism. Modern-day Iraqis are the descendents of ancients who devised the first system of writing, the 24-hour day, the bases of mathematics, law, science and medicine. Once corrupt American corporations, the U.S. military, and its death squads, prisons, and bombings are out of the picture, true reconstruction by Iraqis can and will begin.
Perhaps we don’t embrace the Iraqi resistance because its fighters are killing American soldiers. What other choice have we given them? From Vietnam to Lebanon to Somalia to Iraq, we have taught our victims around the world that the only way to effect a change in American foreign policy is to spill American blood.
Thousands died in Chile during the CIA led coup on Sept. 11th, 1973. But we only remember 3000 Americans who died on the 28th anniversary of that massacre. Grenadans in 1983 and Panamanians in 1989 were buried in mass graves by the thousands after the U.S. assaults, but the stories of these victims go untold. Between 1,000 and 10,000 Somalis were killed when our humanitarian mission in 1993 turned into military aggression. (We will never know the exact number of our innocent victims, again because of mass graves.) But we left Somalia because 19 Americans fell victim to their system and were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Time and again, it doesn’t matter how many “others” die. The outrage comes when the victims are American.
Martin Luther King Jr. said “silence is betrayal.” In these times, remaining silent on our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal. And in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing violations of the U.N. Charter and international law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation? How dare we condemn anyone else as “violent” or “disorganized?” Our so-called “enemies” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, our other colonies around the world - and our inner cities here at home-are struggling against the oppressive hand of empire, demanding respect for their humanity. They are labeled “insurgents” or “terrorists” for resisting rape and pillage by the white establishment, but they are our brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice.
Last Sunday, my family’s luck ran out, and one of my cousins in Iraq was killed in the violence we have brought upon Iraqis and their children. He leaves behind a wife; a 2 year old son who keeps asking “Where’s Daddy?”; a heart-broken mother and brother; and an entire family devastated by grief for whom life will never be the same. If there are political differences, then whatever they may be, there’s nothing complicated about fighting for Iraqi women and children, who are the majority of the suffering population. And if we respect their humanity, can we not respect their grief as they lose their brothers, fathers, husbands and sons, the same way we mourn with and share the pain of American military families?
I close with the words of a man of peace, El Hajj Malik Al Shabazz, Malcolm X, vilified and ultimately assassinated because he spoke freely. Though condemned as violent, he lived for peace, and for love and brotherhood. I very humbly offer his wisdom.
We declare our right on this earth to be … a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
***
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else...
It’s been an honor to share this time with you.
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is a speaker and activist. Born in the United States to an American Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father, she lived in Iraq as a child, returning to the U.S. at age 5. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Biology in 1993 and earned her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Dr. Wasfi has made two trips to Iraq since the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion to visit her extended family. She returned from a three month stay in Basrah in March 2006. On April 27, 2006, she testified at a Congressional Forum to provide her eyewitness account of life in Iraq. Based on her experiences, Dr. Wasfi is speaking out in support of immediate, unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and the need to end the occupation “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Her website is www.liberatethis.com.
I speak to you today on behalf of relatives on my mother’s side-Ashkenazi Jews who fled their homeland of Austria during Hitler’s Anschluss. It is for them that we say “Never again.” I speak to you today on behalf of relatives on my father’s side who are not living, but dying, under the occupation of this administration’s deadly foray in Iraq. From the lack of security to the lack of basic supplies to the lack of electricity to the lack of potable water to the lack of jobs to the lack of reconstruction to the lack of education to the lack of healthcare to the lack of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they are much worse off now than before we invaded. “Never again” should apply to them, too.
There has been debate recently within the American peace movement on the issue of support for the Iraqi resistance. The argument has been made by some that we don’t support the resistance in Iraq because it’s different than it has been for other countries we’ve invaded. That “what is understood to be ‘the Iraqi resistance’ is a disaggregated and diverse set of largely unconnected factions…There is no unified leadership that can speak for ‘the resistance’…There is no unified program, either of what the fight is against or what it is for…(Bennis, 2007)”
Well - judge not lest we be judged, for this is an offensive display of the arrogance of empire.
We sit here 8000 miles away with our luxuries of electricity and water, while Iraqis suffer in the desert heat with no relief, and we tell them they are disorganized. This is fiddling while Iraq burns. People are dying; the question is moot.
We are not fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq; we are slaughtering people’s children. We went in to liberate Iraqis from a ruthless dictator we imposed upon them who allegedly killed 300,000 during his 30 year reign of terror. We’ve accomplished more than triple that in a fraction of the time.
If ever there were legitimate resistance to illegal occupation, it is in Iraq.
If ever there were a people struggling for democracy and independence, there are Iraqis.
If ever there were a people who have known suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty American imperialism, there are Iraqis.
Through the last 400 years, the European immigrants who landed on these shores have raped and pillaged millions in the name of empire. They followed the call to “Go West, young man,” slaughtering 95% of the indigenous population along the way. In the late 1800’s, sights were set on the Caribbean, and through the last 2 centuries, we have had a hand in creating colonies in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast and Western Asia. After all, what is the Middle East, but the Arab World and America’s colonial outpost Israel, according to their geographic position relative to Western powers?
But now there is a wedge in this imperial path, driving the American neo-conservative empire to a screeching halt. The Iraqi people - who are, in fact, the Iraqi resistance - are succeeding where we could not. What’s not to love?
We cannot start examining history from September 11th, 2001. Since WWI, Arabs have been lied to, manipulated, and used by the U.S., Great Britain, and other colonial powers. Next year will mark the 60th year of Al Nakba in Palestine-the Catastrophe. Iraqis have now seen that illegal occupation extended to include the Fertile Crescent, their land between two rivers, their Mesopotamia. Iraqis see the close to 6 million Palestinian refugees, illegally denied their right of return. Iraqis see the U.S. Army building walls to make impoverished ghettos, like the Nazis did, and like the Israelis are doing with their apartheid wall. Iraqis see the open-air prison that is Gaza, strangled and starving as we speak because of our political agenda. The crime of these prisoners? They were born Palestinian. Iraqis are living under occupation tactics such as daily house raids, uprooting of trees, looting of property, psy-ops death squads and the use of depleted uranium - all of which they know too well by watching our joint actions with Israel in Palestine.
And do you know what Iraqis are saying? I don’t speak Arabic, but I can translate for you. They’re saying, “Get out!” They’re saying, “NO way - you’re staying for 60 years.” They’re saying, “Get your oil the old-fashioned way - pay for it!” And why are they saying this? Because they have a dignity and self-respect rooted in 7000 years of civilization.
Iraq is the center of Arab nationalism. Actually, this is what my father says, and I would argue that my father is the center of Arab nationalism. Modern-day Iraqis are the descendents of ancients who devised the first system of writing, the 24-hour day, the bases of mathematics, law, science and medicine. Once corrupt American corporations, the U.S. military, and its death squads, prisons, and bombings are out of the picture, true reconstruction by Iraqis can and will begin.
Perhaps we don’t embrace the Iraqi resistance because its fighters are killing American soldiers. What other choice have we given them? From Vietnam to Lebanon to Somalia to Iraq, we have taught our victims around the world that the only way to effect a change in American foreign policy is to spill American blood.
Thousands died in Chile during the CIA led coup on Sept. 11th, 1973. But we only remember 3000 Americans who died on the 28th anniversary of that massacre. Grenadans in 1983 and Panamanians in 1989 were buried in mass graves by the thousands after the U.S. assaults, but the stories of these victims go untold. Between 1,000 and 10,000 Somalis were killed when our humanitarian mission in 1993 turned into military aggression. (We will never know the exact number of our innocent victims, again because of mass graves.) But we left Somalia because 19 Americans fell victim to their system and were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Time and again, it doesn’t matter how many “others” die. The outrage comes when the victims are American.
Martin Luther King Jr. said “silence is betrayal.” In these times, remaining silent on our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal. And in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing violations of the U.N. Charter and international law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation? How dare we condemn anyone else as “violent” or “disorganized?” Our so-called “enemies” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, our other colonies around the world - and our inner cities here at home-are struggling against the oppressive hand of empire, demanding respect for their humanity. They are labeled “insurgents” or “terrorists” for resisting rape and pillage by the white establishment, but they are our brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice.
Last Sunday, my family’s luck ran out, and one of my cousins in Iraq was killed in the violence we have brought upon Iraqis and their children. He leaves behind a wife; a 2 year old son who keeps asking “Where’s Daddy?”; a heart-broken mother and brother; and an entire family devastated by grief for whom life will never be the same. If there are political differences, then whatever they may be, there’s nothing complicated about fighting for Iraqi women and children, who are the majority of the suffering population. And if we respect their humanity, can we not respect their grief as they lose their brothers, fathers, husbands and sons, the same way we mourn with and share the pain of American military families?
I close with the words of a man of peace, El Hajj Malik Al Shabazz, Malcolm X, vilified and ultimately assassinated because he spoke freely. Though condemned as violent, he lived for peace, and for love and brotherhood. I very humbly offer his wisdom.
We declare our right on this earth to be … a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
***
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else...
It’s been an honor to share this time with you.
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is a speaker and activist. Born in the United States to an American Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father, she lived in Iraq as a child, returning to the U.S. at age 5. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Biology in 1993 and earned her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Dr. Wasfi has made two trips to Iraq since the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion to visit her extended family. She returned from a three month stay in Basrah in March 2006. On April 27, 2006, she testified at a Congressional Forum to provide her eyewitness account of life in Iraq. Based on her experiences, Dr. Wasfi is speaking out in support of immediate, unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and the need to end the occupation “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Her website is www.liberatethis.com.
Shocked, awed and left to rot By Pepe Escobar
THE ROVING EYE: IRAQ FIVE YEARS ON
By Pepe Escobar
Future non-biased historians may well regard March 19, 2003, as a crucial mark in the annals of Western imperial arrogance. Five years later, the pre-emptive war celebratory fireworks have turned to dust. For months now Iraq has been an invisible American war. It's seldom on TV. It does not "sell". Thus, it does not exist. US Vice President Dick Cheney, one of its key architects, has just been to a whirlwind Baghdad tour. He said he sensed "phenomenal changes" since his last whirlwind tour 10 months ago. He praised security progress as "dramatic".
The "dramatic" progress was celebrated in style by a Sunni Arab female suicide bomber who managed to detonate her payload under her black abaya near the ultra-protected Imam Hussein shrine in holy Karbala, killing at least 42 Shi'ites and wounding 73.
Cheney did not see the real Baghdad, drowning in sewage, desperate for water and plunged in the dark - lacking 3,000 megawatts of electricity (it may take as many as 10 years before the city gets power 24 hours a day; so much for "reconstruction"). As no US official was suicidal enough to take Cheney, for instance, to a real life suicide bomber-targeted vegetable market in Sadr City - or to Imam Hussein's shrine in Karbala for that matter - these "phenomenal changes" warrant examination.
Cheney seems not to be very fond of the humongous Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 Iraqi documents which proved that there was no link whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In a curiously sedate propaganda effort, the report will not be posted online and will not be e-mailed by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia; any reporter who wants it will have to ask it to be sent via CD in the mail. That's quite a "phenomenal change" with regard to the George W Bush administration's hyped 2002 build up towards war.
British agency Oxford Research Business has recently updated its estimate of "additional deaths" caused by the war to 1.3 million Iraqis - not including the top killing fields, the provinces of al-Anbar (Sunni) and Karbala (Shi'ite). At least 4 million Iraqis have been internally displaced or become refugees, mostly in overburdened Syria and Jordan, now desperately running out of money and resources. As for any Sunni or Shi'ite proud of his historical memory, the US occupation has been regarded as more devastating than the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Talk about a historical "phenomenal change".
Baghdad - following the strategy of counterinsurgency ace General David Petraeus - has been reduced to a rotten, amorphous, bloody and dangerous stockpile of blast-wall ghettos controlled by local warlords and militias. This "strategy" is being financed by US taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars a month.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes, in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, estimate that by 2017, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion. Republican presidential contender John McCain wants this to last indefinitely as millions of Americans finally realize this avalanche of funds could instead provide them with better public schools, better health insurance and better projects to repair crumbling US infrastructure.
Petraeus' "surge" is gone - replaced by a "pause", defined by the general to the Army Times as "sensible" and "prudent". Recently resigned Admiral William Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, was dead set against Petraeus' "pause". He wanted to start drawing down troops - immediately. The Bush administration evicted him.
Up to the US presidential election, for political reasons, many would be led to believe nothing moves on the US front. At least nothing visible. Because in Kuwait, the Pentagon is busy building, in virtual secret, a mammoth permanent command structure to project "full spectrum dominance" not only in Iraq but all over the arc from the Middle East to Southwest Asia. Lieutenant General James J Lovelace minced no words to the Middle East edition of Stars and Stripes. It will be a "permanent presence" - of course compounded with all those extra permanent bases in Qatar, Bahrain the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Be it under pro-withdrawal Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, or pro-"surge" McCain, the "war" in and on Iraq will go on - supported from Kuwait and the Gulf petro-monarchies.
It's alright Ma, I'm only dyin'
Baghdad is not only the 21st century heart of darkness. It is Fear Central - a desert sand nightmare frozen in fear, a direct consequence of the soggy mix of Petraeus' "surge" profiting from the uneasy Shi'ite Mahdi Army truce and the proliferation of the 80,000-strong anti-al-Qaeda movement dominated by Sunnis, Sahwa (Awakening).
As middle class Shi'ite professionals tell Asia Times Online, rape and pillage and widespread killing is down (65 Iraqis killed daily in August 2007, 26 killed daily in February 2008) because most neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is only "safer" - as the current official mantra in Washington goes - if compared to horrific post-February 2006 after the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, during the battle of Baghdad, when as many as 3,000 people were being killed every single month.
The inept Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad knows little of what's really going on - as it drags on in imperial seclusion behind the Green Zone, defended by valiant mercenaries from Georgia, Peru and Uganda. If Maliki and his entourage decide to go for an armored convoy stroll in formerly bustling al-Mansur neighborhood, for instance, the area has to be extensively searched as if this was a US presidential visit.
No matter what Washington decides or spins, it won't alter two major facts on the ground. Of all the major overlapping wars in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance has for all practical purposes stalemated the US occupation to the edge of defeat. And on a sectarian level, the Shi'ites have defeated the Sunnis as a whole - as they now control, allied with the Kurds, the government, Parliament, the army (13 divisions, half of them militias aligned with Iran) and the police.
The anti-al-Qaeda Sahwa, which the Americans dubbed "Concerned Local Citizens" and then "Sons of Iraq", are the same old Sunni Arab guerrillas, many of them former Saddam army officers who former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as "remnants of the old regime" who were killing Americans before they decided to rake some cash ($300 a month, an excellent salary in 70% unemployment Iraq) and do their own version of a "pause".
After all, they could not fight the US Army, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government at the same time and believe they would win it. They are, of course, anti-majority Shi'ite Iraqi government (although the American public relations machine would never let this cat out of the bag). They're still one more militia in a cornucopia of militias - the US Army itself being nothing more than a heavily armed militia.
In a sense, the old imperial divide and rule tactic has worked - as Sunnis and Shi'ites are more deadly polarized against each other than against the occupiers. But at the same time they all unite on the key issue: occupation out. The answer as to why no Iraqi militia organizes a Tet-style anti-American onslaught is political positioning.
Everyone's got militias - the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Mahdi Army, the Badr Organization, the Sahwa. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army's objective is to conquer political power in the next legislative elections. The Kurdish Peshmerga worry about defending Kirkuk after a referendum that could see it incorporated into the Kurdish north. Badr does not want to lose the government power it already enjoys; Hadi al-Amri, the dreaded leader of Badr, says he will respect the truce with the Mahdi Army. And Sahwa is just waiting to pounce against the Shi'ites. In this lethal cobweb, the Americans are just marginal, puzzled onlookers.
Stuck inside of Baghdad
This country is no more. This is an ex-country. It has gone to meet its maker (the Sumerians, presumably). The "surge" is a public relations-created illusion - as ghostly as those abandoned, burned out Iraqi tanks littering Baghdad's empty, dirty boulevards in April 2003; after all there was no war to speak of, the Iraqi army having preferred to flee.
The Turkish army, for its part, has just proved its point; Ankara can invade Iraqi Kurdistan any time it sees fit - as if it was Gaza. And this is nothing compared to what may happen after the endlessly postponed Kirkuk referendum, when Iraqi Kurds will finally have full control over their oil wealth and rekindle their independentist dreams. If East Timor and Kosovo can do it, why not us?
Muqtada has - literally - vanished, after lamenting an Iraq "characterized by social turmoil". He disappeared just like the 12th Imam, Imam Mahdi - and that's a really huge thing for pious Iraqi Shi'ites, not to mention a masterful political ploy. Muqtada has transferred to the US Marines the task of carrying a pogrom of the Mahdi Army. He's aiming at the polls - he wants the Sadrists to take over the Shi'ite provincial governments in the south in the next election. Sooner or later "anti-American" occult Muqtada will be the lord of what remains of Iraq - and there's nothing Washington can do about it.
As an internal US issue, neither Clinton nor Obama has provided any concrete evidence they want to totally scrap the US "mission" in Iraq - or at least roll back the worldwide empire of military bases still heavily supported by Cheney and an array of corporate/industrial-military interests.
As a global issue, millions of Iraqis lost their homes, their jobs, their families, their dreams and in countless cases their own lives because of a pre-emptive war (or "successful endeavor") built on lies. Shocked, awed and utterly destroyed, their ancestral land beheaded like a stray dog, Iraqis deserve at least the world's respect in their hour of darkness.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
By Pepe Escobar
Future non-biased historians may well regard March 19, 2003, as a crucial mark in the annals of Western imperial arrogance. Five years later, the pre-emptive war celebratory fireworks have turned to dust. For months now Iraq has been an invisible American war. It's seldom on TV. It does not "sell". Thus, it does not exist. US Vice President Dick Cheney, one of its key architects, has just been to a whirlwind Baghdad tour. He said he sensed "phenomenal changes" since his last whirlwind tour 10 months ago. He praised security progress as "dramatic".
The "dramatic" progress was celebrated in style by a Sunni Arab female suicide bomber who managed to detonate her payload under her black abaya near the ultra-protected Imam Hussein shrine in holy Karbala, killing at least 42 Shi'ites and wounding 73.
Cheney did not see the real Baghdad, drowning in sewage, desperate for water and plunged in the dark - lacking 3,000 megawatts of electricity (it may take as many as 10 years before the city gets power 24 hours a day; so much for "reconstruction"). As no US official was suicidal enough to take Cheney, for instance, to a real life suicide bomber-targeted vegetable market in Sadr City - or to Imam Hussein's shrine in Karbala for that matter - these "phenomenal changes" warrant examination.
Cheney seems not to be very fond of the humongous Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 Iraqi documents which proved that there was no link whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In a curiously sedate propaganda effort, the report will not be posted online and will not be e-mailed by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia; any reporter who wants it will have to ask it to be sent via CD in the mail. That's quite a "phenomenal change" with regard to the George W Bush administration's hyped 2002 build up towards war.
British agency Oxford Research Business has recently updated its estimate of "additional deaths" caused by the war to 1.3 million Iraqis - not including the top killing fields, the provinces of al-Anbar (Sunni) and Karbala (Shi'ite). At least 4 million Iraqis have been internally displaced or become refugees, mostly in overburdened Syria and Jordan, now desperately running out of money and resources. As for any Sunni or Shi'ite proud of his historical memory, the US occupation has been regarded as more devastating than the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Talk about a historical "phenomenal change".
Baghdad - following the strategy of counterinsurgency ace General David Petraeus - has been reduced to a rotten, amorphous, bloody and dangerous stockpile of blast-wall ghettos controlled by local warlords and militias. This "strategy" is being financed by US taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars a month.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes, in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, estimate that by 2017, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion. Republican presidential contender John McCain wants this to last indefinitely as millions of Americans finally realize this avalanche of funds could instead provide them with better public schools, better health insurance and better projects to repair crumbling US infrastructure.
Petraeus' "surge" is gone - replaced by a "pause", defined by the general to the Army Times as "sensible" and "prudent". Recently resigned Admiral William Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, was dead set against Petraeus' "pause". He wanted to start drawing down troops - immediately. The Bush administration evicted him.
Up to the US presidential election, for political reasons, many would be led to believe nothing moves on the US front. At least nothing visible. Because in Kuwait, the Pentagon is busy building, in virtual secret, a mammoth permanent command structure to project "full spectrum dominance" not only in Iraq but all over the arc from the Middle East to Southwest Asia. Lieutenant General James J Lovelace minced no words to the Middle East edition of Stars and Stripes. It will be a "permanent presence" - of course compounded with all those extra permanent bases in Qatar, Bahrain the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Be it under pro-withdrawal Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, or pro-"surge" McCain, the "war" in and on Iraq will go on - supported from Kuwait and the Gulf petro-monarchies.
It's alright Ma, I'm only dyin'
Baghdad is not only the 21st century heart of darkness. It is Fear Central - a desert sand nightmare frozen in fear, a direct consequence of the soggy mix of Petraeus' "surge" profiting from the uneasy Shi'ite Mahdi Army truce and the proliferation of the 80,000-strong anti-al-Qaeda movement dominated by Sunnis, Sahwa (Awakening).
As middle class Shi'ite professionals tell Asia Times Online, rape and pillage and widespread killing is down (65 Iraqis killed daily in August 2007, 26 killed daily in February 2008) because most neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is only "safer" - as the current official mantra in Washington goes - if compared to horrific post-February 2006 after the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, during the battle of Baghdad, when as many as 3,000 people were being killed every single month.
The inept Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad knows little of what's really going on - as it drags on in imperial seclusion behind the Green Zone, defended by valiant mercenaries from Georgia, Peru and Uganda. If Maliki and his entourage decide to go for an armored convoy stroll in formerly bustling al-Mansur neighborhood, for instance, the area has to be extensively searched as if this was a US presidential visit.
No matter what Washington decides or spins, it won't alter two major facts on the ground. Of all the major overlapping wars in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance has for all practical purposes stalemated the US occupation to the edge of defeat. And on a sectarian level, the Shi'ites have defeated the Sunnis as a whole - as they now control, allied with the Kurds, the government, Parliament, the army (13 divisions, half of them militias aligned with Iran) and the police.
The anti-al-Qaeda Sahwa, which the Americans dubbed "Concerned Local Citizens" and then "Sons of Iraq", are the same old Sunni Arab guerrillas, many of them former Saddam army officers who former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as "remnants of the old regime" who were killing Americans before they decided to rake some cash ($300 a month, an excellent salary in 70% unemployment Iraq) and do their own version of a "pause".
After all, they could not fight the US Army, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government at the same time and believe they would win it. They are, of course, anti-majority Shi'ite Iraqi government (although the American public relations machine would never let this cat out of the bag). They're still one more militia in a cornucopia of militias - the US Army itself being nothing more than a heavily armed militia.
In a sense, the old imperial divide and rule tactic has worked - as Sunnis and Shi'ites are more deadly polarized against each other than against the occupiers. But at the same time they all unite on the key issue: occupation out. The answer as to why no Iraqi militia organizes a Tet-style anti-American onslaught is political positioning.
Everyone's got militias - the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Mahdi Army, the Badr Organization, the Sahwa. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army's objective is to conquer political power in the next legislative elections. The Kurdish Peshmerga worry about defending Kirkuk after a referendum that could see it incorporated into the Kurdish north. Badr does not want to lose the government power it already enjoys; Hadi al-Amri, the dreaded leader of Badr, says he will respect the truce with the Mahdi Army. And Sahwa is just waiting to pounce against the Shi'ites. In this lethal cobweb, the Americans are just marginal, puzzled onlookers.
Stuck inside of Baghdad
This country is no more. This is an ex-country. It has gone to meet its maker (the Sumerians, presumably). The "surge" is a public relations-created illusion - as ghostly as those abandoned, burned out Iraqi tanks littering Baghdad's empty, dirty boulevards in April 2003; after all there was no war to speak of, the Iraqi army having preferred to flee.
The Turkish army, for its part, has just proved its point; Ankara can invade Iraqi Kurdistan any time it sees fit - as if it was Gaza. And this is nothing compared to what may happen after the endlessly postponed Kirkuk referendum, when Iraqi Kurds will finally have full control over their oil wealth and rekindle their independentist dreams. If East Timor and Kosovo can do it, why not us?
Muqtada has - literally - vanished, after lamenting an Iraq "characterized by social turmoil". He disappeared just like the 12th Imam, Imam Mahdi - and that's a really huge thing for pious Iraqi Shi'ites, not to mention a masterful political ploy. Muqtada has transferred to the US Marines the task of carrying a pogrom of the Mahdi Army. He's aiming at the polls - he wants the Sadrists to take over the Shi'ite provincial governments in the south in the next election. Sooner or later "anti-American" occult Muqtada will be the lord of what remains of Iraq - and there's nothing Washington can do about it.
As an internal US issue, neither Clinton nor Obama has provided any concrete evidence they want to totally scrap the US "mission" in Iraq - or at least roll back the worldwide empire of military bases still heavily supported by Cheney and an array of corporate/industrial-military interests.
As a global issue, millions of Iraqis lost their homes, their jobs, their families, their dreams and in countless cases their own lives because of a pre-emptive war (or "successful endeavor") built on lies. Shocked, awed and utterly destroyed, their ancestral land beheaded like a stray dog, Iraqis deserve at least the world's respect in their hour of darkness.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn by Robert Fisk
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – "Mission Accomplished" – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism" – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".
Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies" – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.
Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – "Mission Accomplished" – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism" – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".
Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies" – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.
Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.
Israeli Study: Israeli Jews becoming increasingly racist toward Arabs
By Avirama Golan, Haaretz Correspondent
Israel's Jewish community increasingly supports the delegitimization, discrimination and even deportation of Arabs, found a report on racism in Israel, set to be released Wednesday.
The report, to be presented at a press conference in Nazareth by Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, states that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has clearly impacted public opinion, and warns that ideas such as population exchange and racial segregation are gaining ground. It also warns that several Jewish politicians are gaining influence based on a platform of racial hatred.
Mossawa is supported by the Human Rights Program of the European Commission and the United Nations Democracy Foundation.
The report, written by Mossawa director Jafar Farah and others, mainly examines racism against Arabs in Israel, using criteria taken from the anti-Semitism reports in Europe.
The report covers Arabs killed by the security forces and by Jewish citizens, anti-Arab incitement by leading Jewish public figures, workforce discrimination by private Jewish organizations, the barring of Arabs from public
places, and the destruction of Arab property. The report particularly highlights what it calls the government's helplessness in the face of the problem.
The report lists Arab citizens killed by police, soldiers, security guards and Jewish civilians over the past seven years. It notes that only one Jewish citizen, of Ethiopian origin, was killed under similar circumstances during this period. Indictments were issued in only seven cases, the report states. In two cases, the assailants were found not guilty, and the State Prosecutor appealed the verdict in one of these cases. In another case, the indictment was dropped because the shooter was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial.
Most cases of Arab citizens injured by Jews were not fully investigated, and the attackers were not indicted in most cases, according to the report.
However, the report says Arab violence against Jews led to immediate police action, including collective punishment in villages like Jisr al-Zarqa this month.
The report also highlights employment discrimination against Arabs, and accuses the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry of foot-dragging in enforcing the workplace anti-discrimination law.
Citing lawsuits and verdicts of recent years, the report states Arabs are subject to racial profiling at Israel's airports. "Problematic passenger" forms, filled out by security guards and bearing the names of Arab passengers, were found in Israel Airports Authority files. Similar cases occured at train stations and on trains, the report stated.
The report also addresses discriminatory legislation, mentioning no less than 10 bills contravening the Basic Law on the Knesset that were passed by the Knesset presidium over the period the report covers.
A new element of the 2008 report is that it also addresses refugees from Africa, foreign workers, Jews of Ethiopian, Russian and Mizrachi origin, and the ultra-Orthodox.
Israel's Jewish community increasingly supports the delegitimization, discrimination and even deportation of Arabs, found a report on racism in Israel, set to be released Wednesday.
The report, to be presented at a press conference in Nazareth by Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, states that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has clearly impacted public opinion, and warns that ideas such as population exchange and racial segregation are gaining ground. It also warns that several Jewish politicians are gaining influence based on a platform of racial hatred.
Mossawa is supported by the Human Rights Program of the European Commission and the United Nations Democracy Foundation.
The report, written by Mossawa director Jafar Farah and others, mainly examines racism against Arabs in Israel, using criteria taken from the anti-Semitism reports in Europe.
The report covers Arabs killed by the security forces and by Jewish citizens, anti-Arab incitement by leading Jewish public figures, workforce discrimination by private Jewish organizations, the barring of Arabs from public
places, and the destruction of Arab property. The report particularly highlights what it calls the government's helplessness in the face of the problem.
The report lists Arab citizens killed by police, soldiers, security guards and Jewish civilians over the past seven years. It notes that only one Jewish citizen, of Ethiopian origin, was killed under similar circumstances during this period. Indictments were issued in only seven cases, the report states. In two cases, the assailants were found not guilty, and the State Prosecutor appealed the verdict in one of these cases. In another case, the indictment was dropped because the shooter was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial.
Most cases of Arab citizens injured by Jews were not fully investigated, and the attackers were not indicted in most cases, according to the report.
However, the report says Arab violence against Jews led to immediate police action, including collective punishment in villages like Jisr al-Zarqa this month.
The report also highlights employment discrimination against Arabs, and accuses the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry of foot-dragging in enforcing the workplace anti-discrimination law.
Citing lawsuits and verdicts of recent years, the report states Arabs are subject to racial profiling at Israel's airports. "Problematic passenger" forms, filled out by security guards and bearing the names of Arab passengers, were found in Israel Airports Authority files. Similar cases occured at train stations and on trains, the report stated.
The report also addresses discriminatory legislation, mentioning no less than 10 bills contravening the Basic Law on the Knesset that were passed by the Knesset presidium over the period the report covers.
A new element of the 2008 report is that it also addresses refugees from Africa, foreign workers, Jews of Ethiopian, Russian and Mizrachi origin, and the ultra-Orthodox.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Harry Belafonte says that Bush is the ‘greatest terrorist in the world’
The American singer and activist Harry Belafonte called President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world” on Sunday and said millions of Americans support the socialist revolution of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez’s television and radio broadcast Sunday.
“No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution,” Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.
The 78-year-old Belafonte, famous for his calypso-inspired music, including the “Day-O” song, was a close collaborator of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. He also has been outspoken in criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
Chavez said he believes deeply in the struggle for justice by blacks, both in the U.S. and Venezuela.
“Although we may not believe it, there continues to be great discrimination here against black people,” Chavez said, urging his government to redouble its efforts to prevent discrimination.
Harsh words for U.S. media
Belafonte accused U.S. news media of falsely painting Chavez as a “dictator,” when in fact, he said, there is democracy and citizens are “optimistic about their future.”
Dolores Huerta, a pioneer of the United Farm Workers labor union also in the delegation, called the visit a “very deep experience.”
Chavez accuses Bush of trying to overthrow him, pointing to intelligence documents released by the U.S. indicating that the CIA knew beforehand that dissident officers planned a short-lived 2002 coup. The U.S. denies involvement, but Chavez says Venezuela must be on guard.
Belafonte suggested setting up a youth exchange for Venezuelans and Americans. He finished by shouting in Spanish: “Viva la revolucion!”
Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez’s television and radio broadcast Sunday.
“No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution,” Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.
The 78-year-old Belafonte, famous for his calypso-inspired music, including the “Day-O” song, was a close collaborator of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. He also has been outspoken in criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
Chavez said he believes deeply in the struggle for justice by blacks, both in the U.S. and Venezuela.
“Although we may not believe it, there continues to be great discrimination here against black people,” Chavez said, urging his government to redouble its efforts to prevent discrimination.
Harsh words for U.S. media
Belafonte accused U.S. news media of falsely painting Chavez as a “dictator,” when in fact, he said, there is democracy and citizens are “optimistic about their future.”
Dolores Huerta, a pioneer of the United Farm Workers labor union also in the delegation, called the visit a “very deep experience.”
Chavez accuses Bush of trying to overthrow him, pointing to intelligence documents released by the U.S. indicating that the CIA knew beforehand that dissident officers planned a short-lived 2002 coup. The U.S. denies involvement, but Chavez says Venezuela must be on guard.
Belafonte suggested setting up a youth exchange for Venezuelans and Americans. He finished by shouting in Spanish: “Viva la revolucion!”
In Gaza the shoah goes on / Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers! / Israel's shoah business all over the web / Israel threatens HOLOCAUST
In Gaza the shoah goes on / Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers! / Israel's shoah business all over the web / Israel threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians
Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers!
Seasoned zionist watchers will know that hasbara (propaganda) has been elevated to a full blown tenet of the zionist ideology of Israel's supporters. I'm sure all, certainly most, nations have their founding myths, but Israel's are an artform, a science even, whereas other nations tend to settle for folk-lore. But this "shoah" remark by Israel's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, has so sent the hasbara machine into overdrive that it seems to have crashed.
Engage very smartly swept in to demand the resignation of Vilnai for undermining the smear that comparing Israel to the nazis is antisemitic. But there had to be some zionists who would do what zionists do best, denial and projection. Here's Melanie Phillips in the Spectator complaining that to render "shoah" as "holocaust" represents the "Mother of all mistranslations
Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.
But of course, "ha" is simply "the". "Ha-shoah" no matter how it is rendered in Hebrew, is "the holocaust" whereas "shoah" is simply "holocaust". Needless to say, Melanie Phillips didn't give any examples of this more casual, less definite, use of "shoah".
Just as well really, for that we have to turn to the comments of the panic post onEngage or the comments to the rather more skimpy post on the more openly zionist,Simply Jews where a commenter called Noga of the Contentious Centrist blog explains the many many ways in which the word "shoah" is used in Israel:
Shoah means disaster. And it usually comes with its own special verb: "Le-hamit shoah", to bring upon someone or something a disaster. Hebrew speakers use it to describe a nuclear disaster (shoah garinit), among other usages. The Holocaust, when brought up to by Hebrew speakers is always, always, always referred to as "Ha-Shoah", THE Shoah, to differentiate from any other shoah.
Thank goodness Noga has cleared that one up. Israel intends to nuke Gaza, not gas its population. Phew!
// posted by Levi9909 @ 8:44:00 AM Comments (4) | Trackback (0)
Friday, February 29, 2008
Israel's shoah business all over the web
Unlucky little Israel. Yet again a leading Israeli has likened Israel to the nazis, in other words, once again, Israel, by a combination of its structure and its behaviour, has likened itself to the nazis. In know I covered this in my previous post but the person who sent me the story from the Guardian about Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, threatening the Palestinians of Gaza with a holocaust said that he had read the same story in Der Spiegel, but Der Spiegel didn't carry the h-word at all. No surprises there given Germany's post war appeasement of Israel. Then Ellis Sharpposted a comment saying that the BBC has run with the h-word, then dropped it, then picked it up again with an explanation of what the poor misunderstood minister actually meant.
“Speaking on Israel Army Radio, Mr Vilnai said if Palestinians increased rocket fire, they will bring upon themselves what he called a "shoah" - a Hebrew word for catastrophe, and for the Nazi Holocaust. The BBC's Katya Adler in Jerusalem says many of Mr Vilnai's colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay them saying he did not mean genocide.”
I then googled "vilnai shoah" only without the quotes, and the first time, 1,360 sites came up. Maybe two minutes later, 1,370. The top one was the UK's Daily Mirror.
The Mirror article is very similar to the Guardian one except where the Guardian had 32 Palestinians dead in the last two days, the Mirror had 33:
Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days, and Israeli leaders said cross-border rocket fire may leave the Jewish state with little choice but to launch a broader military offensive.
But my main point here, apart from the genocidal nature of the State of Israel and its zionist ideology, is the way the hasbara flock have clearly tried to get at the story and in spite of that, it is all over the web. Of course it's terrifying news, but the good news is that Israel and its apologists can't seem to control the flow of information any more.
There is of course the other little issue that if Israel ever does embark on a final solution type solution to its Palestinian "problem" no one will be able to say that they didn't know.
PS - I just went back to google to get the url for the search "vilnai shoah" and the search now yields 1,440 sites.
// posted by Levi9909 @ 5:29:00 PM Comments (6) | Trackback (0)
Israel threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians
About time too. Israel has been carrying on a creeping, sometimes galloping, genocidal campaign against the Palestinians for many a decade. It has been likened to the nazis by at least one of its own ministers before now. And of course there was the Israel commander who told his troops to learn how the nazis destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto so that they too could learn how to destroy a ghetto. Now, according to the Guardian, we have an Israeli minister threatening to inflict a holocaust on the Gaza population. See this:
"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.
Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.
I was never keen on holocaust uniqueness arguments but the zionists have really blown it this time.
I thought I remembered a letter by Ilan Pappe to the Guardian, saying that the Gaza "disengagement" was a ploy to get Jewish settlers out of the way so that Israel could have a good crack at the native population. I've searched the Guardian site but I can't find it. I also thought that I remembered a bunch of zionists, all of whom (naturally) support, they said, a two state solution, writing to complain that Pappe was exaggerating, scaremongering or some such. I tried google and faired better. See this from Ilan Pappe on the Electronic Intifada site:
The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave few thousands dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign -- the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip -- either in the name of human aid, international intervention or the people's own desire to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be the response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will the Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.
Prophetic and scary stuff written on 2 Sept 2006.
But now can we liken Israel to the nazis? We really are running out of descriptions.
Subject: Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to the New York Times 1948, Protesting the Visit of Menachem Begin
Einstein Letter Warning Of
Zionist Facism In Israel
Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to the New York Times
1948, Protesting the Visit of Menachem Begin
Letters to the Editor
New York Times
December 4, 1948
TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughoutthe world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement. The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants ? 240men, women, and children - and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
Discrepancies Seen
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT
ABRAHAM BRICK
RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO
ALBERT EINSTEIN
HERMAN EISEN, M.D.
HAYIM FINEMAN
M. GALLEN, M.D.
H.H. HARRIS
ZELIG S. HARRIS
SIDNEY HOOK
FRED KARUSH
BRURIA KAUFMAN
IRMA L. LINDHEIM
NACHMAN MAISEL
SEYMOUR MELMAN
MYER D. MENDELSON
M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY
SAMUEL PITLICK
FRITZ ROHRLICH
LOUIS P. ROCKER
RUTH SAGIS
ITZHAK SANKOWSKY
I.J. SHOENBERG
SAMUEL SHUMAN
M. SINGER
IRMA WOLFE
STEFAN WOLF.
New York, Dec. 2, 1948
Zionist Facism In Israel
Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to the New York Times
1948, Protesting the Visit of Menachem Begin
Letters to the Editor
New York Times
December 4, 1948
TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughoutthe world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement. The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants ? 240men, women, and children - and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
Discrepancies Seen
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT
ABRAHAM BRICK
RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO
ALBERT EINSTEIN
HERMAN EISEN, M.D.
HAYIM FINEMAN
M. GALLEN, M.D.
H.H. HARRIS
ZELIG S. HARRIS
SIDNEY HOOK
FRED KARUSH
BRURIA KAUFMAN
IRMA L. LINDHEIM
NACHMAN MAISEL
SEYMOUR MELMAN
MYER D. MENDELSON
M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY
SAMUEL PITLICK
FRITZ ROHRLICH
LOUIS P. ROCKER
RUTH SAGIS
ITZHAK SANKOWSKY
I.J. SHOENBERG
SAMUEL SHUMAN
M. SINGER
IRMA WOLFE
STEFAN WOLF.
New York, Dec. 2, 1948
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