Antiwar writings

Eqbal Ahmad and the will to dominate

I did a review of the late Eqbal Ahmad’s latest book, “Between Past and Future”, which I hope is widely read. Along with the book, I reviewed a film on Kashmir, “Crossing the Lines”, which I hope is widely watched. Eqbal Ahmad was a very very sharp commentator and activist. He noted a phenomenon in a previous book of interviews with David Barsamian, “Confronting Empire”, that I think may have changed, thanks to the patient work of the right-wing movement in the US (as described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter with Kansas”). It is a very important phenomenon — a lot hinges on whether it remains true today.

On page 99 of “Confronting Empire”, in an exchange on “terrorism” (one aspect about Ahmad’s work where he is most perceptive), Barsamian quotes someone saying the war on terror will be permanent (we’ve heard that one more recently, haven’t we), Ahmad replies:

Nothing in history has been permanent. Frankly, I don’t think American power is permanent… America is a troubled country, for too many reasons. One is that its economic capabilities do not harmonize with its military capabilities. The second is that its ruling class’s will to dominate is not quite shared by its people’s will to dominate…

The evidence is massive. If the American people had a will to dominate the world, they would have lynched Bill Clinton at the first sign of his hanky-panky in the White House. I’ll tell you why. Britain had a will to dominate in the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain punished for very small crimes its most famous empire builders. Robert Clive was impeached and Warren Hastings was impeached, because an imperial society instinctively knows that it will not command respect on a global scale unless it shows uprightness at home… That’s why imperial countries very often tended to be puritanical societies. The people of America don’t want Clinton to resign because they think he’s been a good president. They can separate his being commander-in-chief from his personal behavior. This is not a people with a will to rule. This is a people with a will to violence, yes, but not a will to dominate.

You can take other examples. A will to dominate means a willingness to sacrifice, to pay the price of it. The American public does not want American boys dying. So, in Somalia, when American Marines were attacked, the United States pulled out and sent in Pakistanis to do their dirty work and clean up the mess. They don’t want to send troops abroad. They don’t want to die in foreign lands. That is, they don’t want to pay the price of power abroad, which they were willing to do during much of the Cold War. This changes after Vietnam. In that sense, George Bush notwithstanding, the “Vietnam syndrome” is very much alive.

Here’s the thing. Clinton’s ‘hanky panky’ did become the focus of a great deal of moral outrage (that the moral outrage is entirely hypocritical, as it is in all puritanical societies, is quite irrelevant). It took a while to get going, but the right still gets tremendous mileage out of it. The Iraq war, and the real possibility that Bush could win the elections in a week, shows that a large segment of US society is willing to risk its own children (well, probably more like other people’s children) in order to dominate other people’s countries and other peoples. 9/11 played a role in all this, of course. But so did, it bears repeating, the power of the right-wing fundamentalist movement in the United States. That movement makes US society unique in various ways. For example, even though Clinton’s ‘hanky panky’ did become the focus of moral outrage, the ‘hanky panky’ of high profile members of the right wing movement and their leaders, and the generally low moral level of the Bush family and their crowd in financial matters, doesn’t seem to deter the right wing grassroots at all.

I think it’s still too early to say whether or not the will to dominate will prevail over “Vietnam syndrome” with this Iraq war. It’s also too early to say whether or not the US will be able to resolve the disconnect between its military and economic power. But I think it’s less clear than when Eqbal Ahmad made the statements in the 1990s.

A blog of blogs

If you look carefully, you will notice some new features in these blogs. First, there is a ‘blog of blogs’, a blog amalgamating all of the znet blogs in one place. Second, we (well, actually it’s Brian Dominick of the NewStandard and UTS) figured out how to allow ZNet Sustainers to post comments. We did this because when the blogs were first set up, they allowed comments, and quickly filled with hate and spam. It would be nice to allow all non-spammers to post comments, but no such spam filter exists… so this will have to do. Still, I hope to see some comments here, maybe we can have some dialogue and such. Email comments are still welcome too, of course, for non-sustainers who have something to say.

Carlos Castano not in Israel?

Israel’s ambassador to Colombia, Yair Recanati, said that Castano that the embassy hadn’t heard a word from him about him going to Israel, according to an interview with RCN Television (Colombia’s big television network). This doesn’t exactly mean that he’s not in Israel, although the ‘diplomatic sources’ who told AFP that he was in Israel (from which the Ha’aretz and El Tiempo stories drew) were never named. It seems that those looking for a definitive location for this paramilitary warlord are destined for disappointment… for now…

Repercussions of the ‘bloodbath/massacre’ in Saudi Arabia

First, I’m very pleased to note that it seems Tim Wise is blogging again, as well as UTS.

Today’s hypocrisy. Looking at the headlines of various newspapers today I saw news of a ‘massacre’ and a ‘bloodbath’ in Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda. It was a brutal hostage-taking operation that was done, and certainly it was both a massacre and a bloodbath. I didn’t notice these media outlets calling what Israel did in Rafah a ‘bloodbath’ or what the US is doing in Najaf right now a ‘massacre’.

An interesting article in the Independent speculates about the possible implications for the world economy if the Saudi regime gets into real trouble. The Saudi regime is a real anomaly in the world. It is the definition of an imperial gas station: virtually created to be that. One book on the topic, quite old, is ‘Arabia Without Sultans’, I think by Halliday, and another one called ‘A House Built on Sand’. There’s a novel called ‘Cities of Salt’ that is a classic, by an author who was exiled for writing it and actually passed on recently. Both books are hard to get your hands on, but well worth it. Since neither are recent though, it’s important to note that Saudi Arabia is the swing producer that has the power to make sure world oil markets go the way the US wants them to go. It can bust any quota. No other country comes close in terms of sheer endowment of oil, and that’s why it’s so firmly under the thumb of the US. Some believe that the Iraq invasion was to try to give the US some extra leverage over the Saudis by gaining direct control over another major producer. There’s more…

But oil consumption has increased so much and so continuously that even Saudi Arabia can’t keep up, and if the Iraqi resistance keeps on keeping Iraqi oil from flowing (pipelines are very difficult to defend — all the brutality of the US/Colombian paramilitary regime can’t defend the pipelines from being blown up in that country) then there won’t be capacity enough to keep prices down. Rahul Mahajan blogged a little about this recently.

There is a lot of conservation literature (some of it rather poor science, like Rifkin’s ‘Hydrogen Economy’, which somehow neglects to emphasize that while hydrogen might be a good way to store energy, you have to generate electricity from some other source to create hydrogen; but some of it better than that, like Amory Lovins’s work on ‘soft energy paths’ in the 1970s) that could be brought to bear to avert the numerous catastrophic possibilities of the path we’re on (one is simply running out of oil so that people freeze in the dark; another is climate change). But that would take some rather serious political changes.

Erratum

Doing the rounds and checking Under the same sun I discovered that the authenticity of the story about Rumsfeld banning digital cameras ( which I got via the Newsinsider and which Under the same sun and Empire Notes got from me) has been questioned.

The News Insider pulls stories out of the mainstream, and like me, probably assumes that mainstream media outlets don’t publish lies unless they think they can substantiate them. So, unlike the editor of the Daily Mirror (whose crime was little different from our own: republishing something entirely plausible but difficult to verify because of insufficient checking) I will not be resigning my blogpost.

Peace in Sudan?

A peace accord has been signed in Sudan. For those who know a little bit about the conflict, it seems that the settlement is along the lines of what the Southern rebels have been demanding all along. Because the power-sharing agreement is to last six years, with revenues being split between north and south in the meantime, and at the end of which there is to be a referendum giving southerners the option of independence, there seems to be an incentive for the north to try to undermine the possibility of southern independence and weaken the south as much as possible leading up to the referendum. It is also a kind of ‘power-sharing’ formula between high-level leaders, like John Garang of the SPLA (southern rebel group) who will become vice-president, and the president of Sudan. Sudan has had these kinds of agreements in the past, and they were undermined syatematically — the ‘peace’ agreement just marked a pause, or a break, while preparations for renewed offensives were being made.

There is good reason to think that is what is going on here. The atrocities that have been going on in Sudan in recent months are between regime-backed militias and a southern population in Darfur — a conflict that is not touched by this ‘peace’, according to the article: “The peace accords do not take into account a new, related war in western Sudan’s Darfur region, where government-backed Arab militiamen have caused what the UN describes as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”.’

In the UK’s Daily Telegraph, apparently “hands President George W Bush a rare foreign-policy boost in a Muslim country.” That alone is cause to be dubious about the agreement. The last thing the US did for peace in Sudan was launch some cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical plant near Khartoum.

blogging about blogs

I have linked to Zeynep Toufe’s blog, ‘Under the Same Sun’, which promises to have interesting content (being crazy about the colour scheme is not obligatory). I’ve read pretty much everything Toufe has presented, and she strikes me as brilliant, principled, and very independent.

Was also happy to hear that the UTS blog is being revived after a long hiatus due to time constraints on the intrepid editors of the NewStandard, with a hilarious and highly accurate analysis of the likely effect of recent US efforts to make Iraq a safer place and an expose of more ridiculous claims to cover up the wedding atrocity. Don’t leave us thirsty any more, UTS!

US and Quentin Tarantino

I realized yesterday after writing my previous post on the US vs. Holy Matrimony that the inspiration for the wedding party massacres might have come from Hollywood. How many readers have seen Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’? The premise of the movie is that an assassin who has given up the assassin’s life to get married and live peacefully in Texas (Beatrix Kiddo) gets hunted down and killed at her wedding rehearsal by her old boss (Bill) and her assassination squadmates, who kill everyone present with automatic weapons. But she doesn’t actually die — she recovers 4 years later and stalks and kills all of her former teammates and Bill. The opening scene of Kill Bill and Kill Bill 2 is the same gruesome, gory scene of Bill delivering the coup de grace to Beatrix. It is horrific to watch, actually. Maybe ‘Kill Bill’ is providing the doctrine for US military action in Iraq. The whole thing does look like a mafia hit, as the more detailed story in the Guardian shows.

Hearing about my mystification at the Chalabi house raid, a reader was kind enough to point out Andrew Cockburn’s Counterpunch article on the topic.

The US versus Holy Matrimony

With all the sanctimony about marriage being a sacred thing, one would be justified in wondering why the US is so insistent on massacring wedding parties in the countries it occupies. For example, the latest massacre of over 40 people at a wedding party in Iraq, by way of an AC-130 Gunship.

The little detail about the AC-130 in the story is actually key to understanding that it was a cold-blooded slaughter of innocents and not a mistake. I just learned about all this from reading Stan Goff’s ‘Full Spectrum Disorder’ (on which more later), where he describes the weapon. He describes it (I’m paraphrasing) as a gigantic cannon that fires huge depleted uranium rounds that can cut through anything, that essentially flies in a circular arc while maintaining the gun pointed at a target and vaporizing it. That is what was done to this wedding party. The US makes ‘no apologies’. Why? There were two dozen military-age males at the party! And they were close to the border with Syria. And they were in a rural area. Well, that’s enough for death by uranium rain. And no apology.

Remember that about two years ago, the US did another wedding party massacre, in Afghanistan (mentioned in this Fisk article).

The message: don’t get married if your country is occupied by the US. And if you are going to get married, don’t invite military aged males (MAMs, not to be confused with marriage-age males, unfortunately abbreviated the same way).

The US also raided Ahmed Chalabi’s home. Can’t say I understand that one. Chalabi was supposed to be one of their favourites. Perhaps someone in his family was planning to get married.

In related news, Israel has convicted Marwan Barghouti, in a court system famous for its fairness to Palestinians, of terrorism.

books

So I am back, it’s quite late, and having taken a look at my mail I despair of being able to make any sense of it. I have, in other words, lost all track of current events, and will not be able to catch up tonight. There is of course a lot going on — stuff worth commenting on has happened in India, for example; the destruction of Gaza has escalated, if that’s possible; Iraq; I have received quite a few reports on events in Haiti in the days I was away; and more. I can’t cover any of that tonight.

Continue reading “books”