Author: Justin Podur

Canadians (and those thinking of coming to Canada around November 30, whether that’s to stay or just to help us with our imperial visit) can check this site for regular updates on the emergency anti-Bush demonstration we’re trying to pull together. So far it’s just a call-out, but there will be more there soon. Any Canadians working on this who have info they want on the site, write me please.

The Globe and Mail story sets the date for November 30. It will “mark a thaw in bilateral relations, though his policies remain highly unpopular with Canadians.” He may even speak at Parliament, which “raises the spectre of protests. Polls show that many Canadians were against his re-election, oppose his invasion of Iraq and disapprove of his plan to create a missile defence system. Mr. Bush has not indicated whether he will accept the invitation to speak.”

Continue reading “Bush is coming to Canada – Nov 30. Will we be ready?”

The fabulous magazine Left Turn invited me to update my September essay on Sudan, so I totally revamped it in light of the recent peace accords. Below is an early draft. For the final version, get Left Turn!

The crisis in Sudan provides an extraordinary study in hypocrisy.

On November 16, 2004, for example, a story by Alex Kipotrich of the East African Standard, based in Nairobi, reported a claim by Amnesty International’s Arms and Security Director that France, China, the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States were all breaking the arms embargo on Sudan and supplying the Sudanese regime with weapons (1). Amnesty International’s press conference exposes the hypocrisy of the very United Nations parties that have so strongly condemned the Sudanese regime’s violations of human rights in Darfur helping to supply weapons to fuel the conflict. Amnesty International itself has a bit of a hypocrisy problem – in 1991, for example, it picked up the phony story about Iraqis murdering Kuwaiti babies in incubators, helping the propaganda machine of the first US devastation of Iraq. Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, released a report arguing that the UN needs to take urgent action to safeguard those who were displaced by government-sponsored violence as they try to return to their homes (2). Human Rights Watch, like Amnesty International, is an organization that does incredibly important work, of which this latest report is a part. And yet, like AI, HRW has helped some very un-human-rights-friendly interests, notably recently in Venezuela, where its reports have featured exaggerated and inflammatory rhetoric has helped the US campaign against the democratic and popular government of that country.

But AI and HRW are organizations of decent people genuinely concerned about human rights, and their mistakes are very mild hypocrisy compared to others. The United Kingdom, for example, is proposing a 10,000 member force for Sudan. Chris Mullin, Foreign Office Minister for Africa, said publicly on November 16 to the Sudanese government: “We are saying that if you (the Sudanese government) get your act together, to get a stable state and live together then this is what we can contribute – a major peacekeeping operation by the UN, humanitarian relief, law and order, help with infrastructure and establishing the rule of law and democratic structures.” (3) This generous offer to help the beleaguered and battered civilians of Darfur comes from the same United Kingdom whose military engaged in international aggression, invading Iraq in March 2003 – defined as the supreme war crime by the Nuremberg tribunal – and more recently relieved US Marines in Iraq so that they could engage in a variety of war crimes in Fallujah, from defining all men over 15 as combatants to destroying hospitals and mosques to using anti-armor munitions against civilians.

And all of this hypocrisy is minor compared to the remarkable depths reached before the Sudanese government and the rebels signed a peace agreement on November 10, 2004, in Abuja, Nigeria. In that agreement, the Sudanese government agreed to stop military flights over Darfur and to disarm the paramilitaries that used massacres to displace 1.45 million within Sudan and force another 200,000 to flee to Chad, and cause the deaths of some 70,000 over the past year. The government also allowed aid workers free access to Darfur. Prior to the agreement, the United Nations was treated to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin (who was fresh from sending Canadian troops to help oust democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti and install a regime of paramilitary murderers) exhorting the world to stop “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”, though only those by Sudan, not by Canada’s friends like the United States and Israel. The world was treated to the likes of (now former) US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Republican Senator Bill Frist, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, all enthusiastic Iraq invaders, expressing remarkably selective indignation over the situation in Darfur.

Now that an agreement has been reached, there are still very grave concerns. There are many reports of local violations of the ceasefire, particularly by Sudanese police. The day before the agreement, UN Special Representative Jan Pronk expressed worries that both parties were losing control of the situation: “The government does not control its own forces fully. It co-opted paramilitary forces and now it cannot count on their obedience. . . The border lines between the military, the paramilitary and the police are being blurred.” Meanwhile the rebels are in “a leadership crisis…There are splits. Some commanders provoke their adversaries by stealing, hijacking and killing; some seem to have begun acting for their own private gain.” Pronk worried that “they may turn to preying on the civilians in areas they control by force -and we may soon find Darfur is ruled by warlords.” (4)

Should the accords hold, however, it is important to note that it will not have been because of intervention or bluster by imperial powers, but primarily because of pressure and diplomacy by the African Union. Now it should be noted that the AU consists of regimes that have hypocrisy problems of their own (Nigeria – where the accords were signed – has a regime that knows something about hypocrisy (5)). But in the most difficult, and even horrific of circumstances, Africans have managed to at least begin to resolve conflicts that the imperial powers helped to create and to aggravate.

For activists, the key will be what it has been: to avoid falling into false debates about whether we need to “support” imperial interventions in order to help the oppressed victims of regimes that, for whatever reason, happen to be on the imperial target list rather than the imperial client list. Imperial interventions are destructive, leave the world worse off, and need to be challenged and stopped. Our “support” for such adventures can only result in discrediting ourselves and forcing us to join the long list of hypocrites. The alternative challenge is best posed by Egyptian activists Khalid Fishawy and Ahmed Zaki of alternative media site kefaya.org:

“Could we imagine building a front for the potentials of peoples and democratic movements in Sudan, hurt and disaffected by war, with the solidarity of the global antiwar movement, to impose democratic mechanisms caring for the interests of oppressed Sudanese communities, races, cultures and classes, against the rapacity of the interests of US and Western European Imperialists? Could this aim be possible? Is it promising for the global justice and peace movement to regain its momentum, instead of supporting undemocratic authoritarian and fundamentalist forces, this time in Sudan, under the title of allying with whomever is against the American Empire?” (6)

Notes

(1) Republished at allafrica.com http://allafrica.com/stories/200411160782.html
(2) Reported by the United Nations and republished at allafrica.com http://allafrica.com/stories/200411160250.html The HRW report itself is http://hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/darfur1104/
(3) From Paul Redfern in the East African, Nairobi, November 15, 2004. Republished in allafrica.com http://allafrica.com/stories/200411160718.html
(4) The source, again, is allafrica.com http://allafrica.com/stories/200411090732.html
(5) See the work of Ike Naijaman on ZNet’s Africa Watch for some colorful examples http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/africawatch.htm
(6) Fishawy and Zaki, “Sudan: Can We Learn?” ZNet August 26, 2004. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=6114

So, the Marines shot an injured prisoner inside a mosque while razing Fallujah.

Some dialogue:

“Did you shoot them?” the lieutenant asked.
“Roger that, sir,” the second Marine replied.
“Were they armed?” the lieutenant asked.
The second Marine shrugged in reply.

And the incident itself:

Continue reading “Did you shoot them?”

I can’t quote the specific scripture, but you know the one where Jesus admonishes someone for looking at the mote in another person’s eye instead of the beam in one’s own?

So according to Desmond Butler and Pauline Jelinek of the Associated Press, we have congressional investigators Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn) looking into Saddam’s abuses of the oil-for-food program. “That humanitarian program was corrupted and exploited . . . for the most horrible and aggressive purpose”, said the latter.

Continue reading “A Christian Parable for the Associated Press”

Yesterday I attended an action by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, which is a community antipoverty organization based in Toronto. OCAP does advocacy work, “direct action casework” to help poor people access their rights to welfare, immigration, housing, or workplace compensation. It also does mass mobilizations to try to open housing and, importantly, build political pressure for more systemic solutions to the problem of homelessness and poverty in the city of Toronto.

Continue reading “Community antipoverty work”

Subcomandante Marcos from the Zapatistas made a comment years ago when the government announced its “new military strategy” for the Chiapas conflict. He said: they have announced a new strategy, but it isn’t new, nor is it a strategy, it is the same stupid pounding we have suffered for 500 years.

Sound familiar?

I am working on a piece on the ‘strategy’ the US is pursuing in this war in Iraq and the likely consequences. It seems to me that the way the US is fighting this war, the war is taking on a logic of its own, changing Iraq in irreversible ways, and creating the conditions for a holocaust like that the US inflicted on Vietnam. In particular I was struck by two things: 1) at least half of Fallujah’s inhabitants (150,000 people) are now refugees in their own country, and 2) the US says openly that this assault is only the beginning. If the US goes around and does this in every city where there is resistance, we will be talking about millions of internally displaced refugees in a country with an already devastated infrastructure and a continuous inflicting of firepower by the US.

Below is a work in progress: comments are welcome. The final piece will probably just become a ZNet Sustainer Commentary.

Guerrilla wars are fought by parties that have no hope of matching the other side’s size or power. If guerrillas know what they are doing, they don’t stand and fight when the stronger side masses its forces. The United States military is immeasurably more powerful than the Iraqi resistance or any other force in the world. But Iraqi guerrillas don’t stand and fight. So the United States did what the larger, more powerful army could be expected to do: try to trap the insurgents in an area and destroy them. This forces them to stand and fight, removes their advantages as guerrillas, and allows the US to bring its firepower to bear to destroy them.

Was the above military analysis sufficiently detached to be worthy of an armchair general on the TV news? Add the human factor. To trap the insurgents in Fallujah, the US sealed the town off. They told everyone to leave. They told everyone that any military-age-male (or MAM, not to be confused with the marriage-aged-males that were so frequently the targets of US massacres in Afghanistan and Iraq earlier in the wars) under 45 years old would be arrested (perhaps for torture at Abu Ghraib?) They then prayed to God, talked about Satan, and invaded the city. First they blew up a hospital. Then they occupied another hospital, stating explicitly that they were doing so because they did not want the hospitals to release figures of how many people they were killing. It worked. According to an Al Jazeera Report “Doctors said people brought in at least 15 dead civilians at the main clinic in Falluja on Monday. By Tuesday, there were no clinics open, residents said, and no way to count casualties.” They blew up minarets of a mosque. What more they are doing is difficult to know, because they are controlling the information.

For example, no one knows how many people there are in Fallujah right now. The population before the invasion was 300,000. The population now could be half that, or 10% of that. In other words, tens of thousands of people have been displaced already. Will they be able to return to their homes? Will their homes be there? 20,000 are gathered at the town of Saqlawiya south of Fallujah. Thousands of elderly women, and children, have had no food or water for days, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Among those who stayed is Muhammad Abbud, who buried his 9-year old child in his garden because they can’t leave their houses because of the American siege. “My son got shrapnel in his stomach when our house was hit at dawn, but we couldn’t take him for treatment,” said Abbud, a teacher. “We buried him in the garden because it was too dangerous to go out. We did not know how long the fighting would last.” (1) The Red Crescent Society, according to a Reuters report, wants to distribute relief supplies in the city. The Americans have refused to allow them to do so. Firdoos al-Ubadi of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society was quoted saying “From a humanitarian point of view it’s a disaster, there’s no other way to describe it. And if we don’t do something about it soon, it’s going to spread to other cities… There’s no medicine, no water, no electricity. They need our help.”

The question in the mainstream media is: did the insurgents slip away before the attack started, or will this battle finish them off? The answer does not matter to the US: the massacre will go on regardless. Indeed, Rumsfeld and the gang have said as much in press conferences: admitting the important insurgents had long since escaped and that this assault was only the beginning.

The beginning, indeed. The Lancet study that estimates that 100,000 Iraqis have already been killed as a result of the occupation, the UN figures of hundreds of thousands of children who died during the sanctions regime from 1991 to the present, all these are just a prelude. The US is fighting this war in a way that is creating massive internal displacement and humanitarian crises. It has long since destroyed the infrastructure that enables a people to cope with such crises. It has destroyed hospitals and mosques, trapped people in their homes, and refuses to allow international aid organizations to operate in areas whose inhabitants it is killing.

In recent wars, when casualties have reached genocidal proportions, it has usually not been because of the firepower deployed, but because of the collapse of infrastructure and security leading to starvation and preventable disease. That is what happened in the Congo war that killed 3 million people between 1998-2001.

Scott Ritter, writing for Al Jazeera, made this prediction: “Falluja is probably the beginning of a very long and bloody phase of the Iraq war, one that pits an American military under orders from a rejuvenated Bush administration to achieve victory at any cost against an Iraqi resistance that is willing to allow Iraq to sink into a quagmire of death and destruction in order to bog down and eventually expel the American occupier. It is a war the United States cannot win, and which the government of Iyad Allawi cannot survive. Unfortunately, since recent polls show that some 70% of the American people support the war in Iraq, it is a war that will rage until the American domestic political dynamic changes, and the tide of public opinion turns against the war.” (2)

The invasion of Fallujah is an attempt by the US to use its firepower to try to change the political reality in Iraq. That political reality is one in which they are seeking stable control of the country and its oil resources, and the resistance, combined with the US’s own arrogance and incompetence, has made it impossible for the US to exercise control. The US is trying to use destruction as a substitute for control. It can’t work. But what it can do is transform the whole situation in horrific ways.

Notes

1)Aljazeera.net
2)Aljazeera.net

Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who revealed Israel’s nuclear program to the world – and then spent 18 years in jail for it – has been re-arrested.

That’s a particularly depraved act, even from a government that was simultaneously killing three and wounding another woman in Gaza.

He has since been placed under house arrest in order to “deter” him.

Continue reading “Vanunu”

We interrupt coverage of the Fallujah massacre for some notes on blowing up the world.

But first, a note from the Black Commentator’s excellent editorial on the US election. The Black Commentator is less surprised than most about the ‘rise’ of the Christian fundamentalist right in the US:

It is actually a familiar enemy, drawn from the same “stock” that have cut off their economic noses to spite Black faces since the end of the Civil War. They were once the Dixiecrat base, who then became the southern Republican base, and are now tied together with similar white elements throughout the country by interlocking networks of churches and the Republican Party. The corporate media feign surprise and fascination at the emergence of this huge group of whites – a posture that strikes many Blacks as disingenuous, since those of us with southern roots know that crowd all too well. According to the Washington Post’s David Broder, “the exit poll indicated that about 22 percent of [Tuesday’s] voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians, three-quarters of whom went for Bush.” That amounts to about one-third of Bush’s total national vote.

The Bush constituency has deep social, cultural, and political roots in the country. But recognizing that, the Black Commentator goes on to note that the black community remains united against that strand of American political culture as it has always been and has more potential white allies than it ever has. Check it out, since I’m going to move on to “missile defense” now.

An article in this month’s Scientific American by Richard Garwin, who “has worked with the US government since 1950” and was on the “Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States” is a combination of interesting information about the uselessness and wastefulness of this technology and a complete lack of perspective about how dangerous the whole program is.

The “missile defense” program is designed to shoot down the kind of missiles that are fired from rockets, missiles that go up from the earth’s surface, into the atmosphere, and come back down to destroy cities. Garwin identifies three different times when it’s possible to shoot such missiles down: as they go up to space (boost phase), when they are in space (midcourse), and when they are coming down from space (terminal). Using some simple calculations, he shows that trying to shoot missiles as they come down is difficult because they have to be shot down high to prevent damage (if they are shot down near their targets, nuclear warheads can still devastate the targets), and that means there have to be a lot of interceptors, near all potential targets: “unless the Pentagon is prepared to carpet the nation with interceptors, terminal defense is not an appropriate response… Even a perfect defense of many cities would simply lead to the targeting of an undefended city.” Midcourse defense using interceptors in space or fired into space is difficult because it is cheap and easy to make decoys that would confuse the interceptors: “the countermeasures are all too simple. The money and skill needed to implement them are trivial” compared to the cost of the missiles.

What does Garwin conclude from all this? That “boost phase intercept” is the way to go, of course! The problem there is that in order to do “boost phase intercept”, you have to have missiles very close to the countries that you are worried about. So Garwin describes a scenario:

“To down [missiles] launched anywhere in North Korea”, Garwin suggests “boost-phase interceptors based on ships off the country’s coast or in a neighbouring nation”, while “Iran, though, is a much larger country”, so the ships would have to carry faster interceptor missiles. “Boost phase intercept becomes still more difficult when defending against [missiles] launched from Russia or China. These countries are so vast that offshore interceptors could not reach the missiles while they are ascending. The interceptors would have to be placed in orbit, which greatly increases the expense of the system.”

This kind of thinking is emblematic of the dangerous world we live in. Garwin has a fine mind and can explain technical and scientific problems of missile technology with grace. He is honest enough to discuss the system’s technical flaws in a public magazine. But his prescriptions for solving them are suicidal because they are divorced from political – to say nothing of military – reality. First of all, everyone ought to understand that North Korea’s missiles are not pointed at the US via space: they are pointed at South Korea and US ships won’t have time to shoot those down. Nor do Iran, China, or Russia have any urgent desire to commit suicide by launching a nuclear attack on the US. So what is the logic of building this system at all? Why are scientists like Garwin going to such trouble advocating better missile “defense”, tremendously expensive technology which he acknowledges is not going to able to “defend” against any likely threats and will serve as massive provocation to proliferation?

When the red herring scenarios Garwin mentions are dropped, Garwin’s article actually makes it clear: the missile shield’s intentions are aggressive, not defensive. There are no threats to the United States. What there are, however, are a handful of countries that possess a nuclear deterrent against the United States: states that have the ability to retaliate against a first strike by the US. Rather than being a ‘threat’ to US security, these nations impose a limit on the US’s ability to dominate the world. The missile “defense” system seeks to remove that limit and give the US first-strike power by using these “interceptors” to stop any retaliatory strikes.

All that means is that if the US ever succeeds in this dubious venture, those states and groups that are worried about being targeted will seek other means of retaliation and cheap countermeasures that can defeat these billion-dollar schemes. That’s on one side.

On the other side, the technical proficiency of scientists like Garwin, instead of being controlled by wisdom and understanding, is actually merged with the dreams of the American fundamentalists and put at their service.

Anyone feeling safe yet?