Author: Justin Podur

I was visiting Under the Same Sun yesterday (a daily routine) and I found a discussion on the options the US has for dealing with its ‘manpower’ problem in Iraq. The manpower problem is rather simple: occupying a country, unlike bombing it or slaughtering its inhabitants with tons of firepower, takes a lot of troops. Since the goal of occupation is permanent and stable control over the country and especially its oil fields and production — targets that are quite difficult to defend — it takes a lot of troops, indeed.

Zeynep’s post suggested two alternatives: one, the draft in the US, and two, the use of mercenaries from poor countries. She concludes that the political costs of enacting the draft in the US are too high for it to occur given the easy option of using contract soldiers from places like El Salvador and Colombia.

I agree that the draft is unlikely for the reasons she mentions, but I think that using Latin Americans to do the job will bring problems of its own.

First, there is a military problem. In real combat situations, irregular troops and private contractors don’t usually do very well. There are problems with coordination, command and control, cohesion, morale, and so on. If US troops, who are highly propagandized from birth and propagandized even more deeply in the military itself, are starting to wonder why they are over there, Latin Americans will be even less keen to risk their necks or do ambitious missions once they are on the ground.

Economically, it is unlikely that the use of these troops will be any cheaper than US troops. They still have to be equipped, fed, clothed, housed, protected, etc. If they are doing it out of a promise that their families will be taken care of by company insurance when they die — it’s true such insurance will be cheaper in a poor country, but it is still a cost if casualties get high. If, on the other hand, the companies or the US tries to save costs after the fact by not paying the insurance claims, there will quickly be fewer people wanting to sign up.

Politically, Latin American regimes don’t win any points with their populations by turning their countries into recruiting pools for US adventures in West Asia. The people have powerful movements to fight with that the governments can’t ignore. Even in Colombia, where the regime is at its most aggressive (Well, Haiti’s actually worse, since February 2004), the government has a very thin hold on power and needs a measure of popular support to survive.

That’s why I suspect (and fear) that instead of relying on the draft or on foreign troops, the US is more likely to resolve its difficulty, if it reaches a crisis point, by a return to massive firepower, with massive Iraqi casualties, and possibly to leave the place a total ruin — if we can’t have their oil, then no one will. Of course, if the US goes that route, there will be terror enough for everyone for a long time. And it’s on movements to try to prevent this outcome.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting the feeling movements have gone on holiday, waiting for the election. Hopefully they’ll come back in a couple of weeks.

I had some problems with comment spam but with the help of Tarek they were cleared up. Folks should be able to comment now, if they’d like. We’ll see how that works, as a test…

What an odd article on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper today. The title: “China set to buy up Canada’s resources“. It’s as if the paper has never heard of the massive control over Canada’s natural resources exercised by the United States. Then you get the story talking about China’s human rights record (oh yeah, China has human rights problems — not like any other country with control over Canada’s resources).

Continue reading “China set to buy up Canada’s resources (from the United States)”

We continue our long-overdue analysis of the right wing movement in the United States. When a friend mentioned that George Bush mentioned the Dred Scott case and the fugitive slave law in the 2nd presidential debate with John Kerry, I thought it odd. The initial suggestion was that this was an incredibly ineffective way of pandering to black voters — by coming out against slavery, 150 years after the fact. In fact, it was yet another example of Bush using code-language to speak to his constituency, as the ahead-of-the-curve (liberal) bloggers figured out immediately. The anti-abortion right’s plan is to use Supreme Court appointments to eventually overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal. They see themselves as abolitionists — just like the Dred Scott decision defined Blacks as non-human, the Roe v. Wade defines foetuses as non-human. Bush was telling his followers in code that he would use his Supreme Court appointments to overturn abortion rights. Katha Pollitt spelled this out in a Nation editorial.

And in keeping with being behind the curve, I’ll also mention that I watched Jon Stewart take on the clowns at Crossfire on CNN, and enjoyed it. It was still limited by the ridiculous format of the show, and Stewart relied as much on his quick wit and charisma as he did on a structural critique of the media that the poor “partisan hacks” (that’s what Stewart calls them) just couldn’t answer, but it was a very good 13 minutes. You can check it out here, or read the transcript on the CNN site.

It might sound implausible, but surely it is no less plausible than Kerry being to blame for the Haitian resistance? It’s true folks, the coup-installed Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has decided that South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki is using South African territory to help “organize violence” in Haiti. Mbeki, according to Latortue, is “not respecting international law.” This raises some questions.

Continue reading “The Haitian government must massacre Haitians because of South Africa”

A bizarre story from the Haitian occupation, in which a Brazilian general whose military forces are overseeing the massacre of hundreds after ratifying a coup joins the electoral campaign on behalf of the makers of the coup in the name of the massacred.

Was that a mouthful? Let me explain. During the coup, Kerry said one of the few things that distinguished him from Bush. He accused Bush of having an “ideological and theological hatred” of Aristide. He said that “as president he
would have sent American troops to protect Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was ousted from power in February.” (This is a quote from a BBC report).

Brazilian general Augusto Heleno, who is part of the UN mission in Haiti — commanding Brazilian UN troops who are currently overseeing the slaughter of hundreds of Haitians by Haitian police, army, and paramilitary units — didn’t like that comment. He told the Brazilian news agency that “Statements made by a candidate to the presidency of the United States created false hopes among pro-Aristide supporters. His (the candidate’s) statements created the expectation that instability and a change in American policy would contribute to Aristide’s return.”

The problem? Such comments “have offered hope to Aristide’s supporters that should Mr Kerry win the US election in November the former Haitian president might be restored to power. ” And Heleno, who is using his troops to help Haiti’s dictatorship ensure that Lavalas people are dead or terrorized, says that such hopes are “completely unfounded”. He’s making sure that’s the case, too.

What a tragedy for Haitians, to have a general like this in charge of the troops who ought to be protecting their lives. A tragedy for Brazilians, too, to have its army off explicitly killing hope and explicitly siding with the more rabid of the two imperialist factions in the United States, accusing the less rabid faction of the terrible crime of making Haitians feel hope.

Some more background (it’s repetitive, but with a story like this I feel the need to provide context frequently) below.

To repeat what we know so far. There was a coup that ousted Aristide in February 2004. That coup was backed by the US and featured former Haitian military and paramilitaries invading from the Dominican Republic and US marines kidnapping Aristide himself. Following the coup the paramilitaries began to liquidate Aristide’s followers. Thousands have been killed and that process of terror and installation of dictatorship continued under US/Canadian/French occupation, and now it continues under UN-sponsored, primarily Brazilian occupation. (Brazil is, presumably, doing this as angling for a seat at the UN Security Council, where presumably it wants to try to do decent things which will, presumably be vetoed by the US.)

On September 30, 2004, these same police opened fire on a Lavalas (Aristide’s party) demonstration (as they had done in the past with US soldiers watching), killing two people. Then they arrested various public figures and politicians. The most recent arrest was on October 13, of “a Catholic priest, Father Gerard Jean-Juste, [who] the government accused of trafficking in weapons and harboring gunmen in his parish. Human rights organizations and legal experts have condemned the arrest as “arbitrary” and an effort by the authorities to repress political dissent.”

In some slums, notably Bel Air, people began to fire back. The dictatorship circulated a story that these Lavalas people were beheading police officers and calling it “Operation Baghdad”. This is suspicious. According to a Haiti Information Project report: “Two demonstrators were killed on Sept. 30th and the U.S.-backed government claimed that the headless bodies of three policemen were later discovered. The identities of the headless policemen were released at a funeral held for them earlier this week. The bodies of the headless men were reportedly cremated before journalists and human rights groups were given an opportunity to perform an independent examination of the corpses to confirm the government’s claims. ”

A feature of the police repression against poor communities where Lavalas is politically strong (ie., most of the country) is raids, often joint raids in which the UN soldiers establish a cordon and the police enter and raid. On October 15, HIP reported that Bel Air resisted such a raid: “Armed units of the Haitian
National Police (PNH) entered the pro-Ariside slum of Bel Air as thousands of residents took to streets to demand the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Marchers defied a shutdown of the capital by the business community and threats issued by the former military. Heavy gunfire erupted as the police reportedly fired shots to disperse the crowd. The police were then forced to withdraw as unidentified gunmen returned fire from surrounding buildings in a thunderous volley.”

It also said that “The morgue at the General Hospital issued an emergency
call this afternoon stating that there was no longer space for new corpses and it had reached full capacity.”

Corporate Canada has been ’tilting’ towards Israel for a long time, building roads that Palestinians can’t drive on in the territories, for example. (That link goes to the “Canada Highways Infrastructure Corporation”, a company with a contract worth hundreds of millions to build said roads).

Continue reading “Canada’s ‘Tilt’ toward Israel”

I was listening to democracy now the other day, listening to (another) rather demoralizing debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali. Hitchens seems difficult to debate. He’s very smart, he’s careful not to fall into the traps that various conservatives fall into, and he deliberately tells outright lies and makes outrageous statements interspersed with intelligent analysis. It’s very confusing and disconcerting. Tariq’s response seems to be to say what he was going to say anyway, which is not a bad way to go. At any rate, Hitchens’s opening shot was that “the United States is not going to be militarily defeated in Iraq. You can draw whatever conclusions that can be drawn from that and you should. Military superiority is something that has to be seen and felt to be really understood, and the US is not going to be defeated.”

He then inferred from this that since the US isn’t going to be defeated, the insurgency is going to be defeated — forgetting the lesson of the great villain of one of his books, Kissinger, who said “a guerrilla army wins if it doesn’t lose”. He also believes, like all the other tough guys, that the US has to stay until the insurgency is defeated.

Problem is, that word, defeat, like victory, doesn’t mean very much in this war between the US and the population of Iraq. The US can destroy the whole place, or any given place, or population for that matter, but it can’t control it. The insurgenc(ies) can prevent the US from controlling it but any social or political control it wins over any parts of Iraq is subject to physical destruction by the US.

In this context, the refusal of a group of US soldiers in Iraq to follow orders over a dangerous resupply mission is a potentially important development.

US power depends, and has always depended, on its economic power (by which it punished Vietnam for example after withdrawal), its cultural appeal (which meant until recently that everybody in the whole world loved Americans and America despite its foreign policy), and of course its military power. But military power itself rests on support in the society for militarism (of which there is plenty) and the willingness of the military to do what it’s told. In long, costly wars this support can begin to wear down — American planners called it the “Vietnam Syndrome”. The lesson they took from this was that they have to win quickly and easily without many casualties.

As invincible as the US might seem (ask Hitchens) the whole equation of power is more complicated and more delicate than it seems. US militarists will still have tremendous support. But this refusal by the reservists is a crack in that. They will be attacked as traitors who are betraying other soldiers, cowards; they will be smeared on the talk radio shows and television and spit on by the very people who traffic in myths about leftists spitting on Vietnam veterans. But it’s unlikely that they took this decision lightly, and the way they are being treated in the army is already no picnic. A quote from one of them who called home: “We had broken down trucks, non-armored vehicles and, um, we were carrying contaminated fuel. They are holding us against our will. We are now prisoners.”

Repression within the military itself is very tricky business. It was a breakdown in the military more than anything else that led to “defeat” in Vietnam (I don’t like talking about Vietnam as a “defeat” for the US, as people who follow this blog know. The Vietnamese suffered a holocaust to “defeat” the US). If the military does start to break down, it will be amazing how fast liberals stop talking about a “quagmire” that it is very hard to get out of and start talking about withdrawal in earnest, since the US military itself will be at stake and all the “difficulties” and phony concern for Iraqis that are part of the “quagmire” analysis will seem to melt away at that point.