The Anti-Empire Project

Followers of this blog’s Colombia/Venezuela coverage may remember the strange tale of Colombia’s attempt to purchase several dozen tanks for deployment to the Venezuelan border. The Aznar Spanish government had agreed to the sale, then the Zapatero government that replaced Aznar dumped it (after Venezuelan negotiations behind the scenes). A terrorist plot by 130 Colombian paramilitaries was foiled. Then the threatening rhetoric and threatening moves from Colombia dissipated when Uribe visited Chavez in July. But immediately after Venezuela’s August referendum that ratified Chavez in power, there was another raid in the border region and 12 Venezuelans were killed by Colombian paramilitaries. Now, we hear from Venezuelanalysis.com that Colombia is planning to purchase combat aircraft. Reporter Robin Nieto was unable to find out where the planes are to be purchased from (any guesses, anyone?) but we’ll be following the story over the coming days. Don’t expect any amelioration of the global situation anywhere except by very hard struggle.

Below is a piece on the ongoing Falluja massacre I just prepared for ZNet.

In the Spring of 2002, after the US had taken Afghanistan from the Taliban and handed it to the warlords, Israel launched its “Operation Defensive Shield” re-invasion of the West Bank. During the Jenin invasion, whole city blocks of densely populated concrete buildings were destroyed. A disabled man was run over by a tank. The removal of Palestinian corpses in refrigerated trucks was blandly reported in the Israeli media one day, then vehemently denied (1). The Israeli military shot and killed a number of children. In Jenin and elsewhere, the Israelis went house to house. Palestinian men were taken away to “interrogation” and prison. Most of their families eventually found out what happened to them. Not all. In that spring 2002 operation, the Israelis killed around 500 people, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. Over the whole year 2002, Israelis killed over 1000 Palestinians.

I was in Jenin in the summer of 2002, and saw the mountains of rubble the Israelis had left behind (2). Israel presented its invasion as a “counter-terror” operation. It was razing these blocks and slaughtering these people in order to stop terrorist attacks against Israelis, said the military’s spokespeople. The real goal was different.

Israel’s ultimate goal, stated with increasing brazenness by Israeli politicians, right-wing religious leaders, and some of their supporters in the United States, is to remove the Palestinian population from the Occupied Territories and replace the Palestinians with Israeli settlers. It is a nationalist project with potentially genocidal consequences, and the balance of public opinion and the balance of power have long been unfavorable for it. A large segment of Israeli society, perhaps a majority, is against it. The entire world outside of the United States is strongly opposed. Ethnically cleansing the Palestinians would be detrimental to US interests and long-term plans in the region, and it is on the support of the United States that Israel’s military and economy depends. So the plan for rapid ethnic cleansing, using the full military power of Israel against the Palestinian population, remains on the shelf. Operation “Defensive Shield”, however, could be viewed as a test run, an experiment. By invading the territories, assaulting the population, besieging and slowly strangling the towns, and putting out ever more provocative statements about murdering Yasser Arafat, the Israeli regime could discern what the reaction would be in the region, in the world, and in the United States. It could then adjust its strategies for reaching its ultimate goals accordingly.

Israeli observer Tanya Reinhart called the Spring of 2002 Israel’s moral low point, but Israel has gone lower since. By fall 2003, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food was reporting that Israel’s continuous siege of the Gaza Strip (it is called “closures”, but the 1.25 million Palestinians inside the tiny Gaza Strip are surrounded on all sides by electrified fence, controlled by the Israeli army, and attacked at will by that same army) was causing starvation among the Palestinians, and in particular, was having permanent debilitating effects on at least 1/5 of Gaza’s children. In the current round of killing in Gaza, picking up in force in September 2004, the Israelis have killed 274 Palestinians, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (3), and over 800 this year throughout the territories.

America has had more low points than Israel has had, and they have been lower. The genocide of the indigenous, the centuries of slavery, the invasions of Cuba, the Philippines, Haiti, the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, the invasions of Korea, Vietnam, the Latin American interventions, the first Iraq war, were all terrible low points. Vietnam, with its millions killed over many years of torture, destabilization, and destruction of the Southeast Asian region, was the lowest since World War II. But the current Iraq war, less than two years old and already having killed over 100,000 according to recent estimates, with its re-opening of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison in Abu Ghraib, is becoming competitive.

Take the opening move, for example: occupying and shutting down a hospital. Why? Empire Notes (4) quotes the New York Times saying that “outrage” over civilian casualties forced the Americans to withdraw from the first Falluja massacre without finishing it. “American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed. The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties. ‘It’s a center of propaganda,’ a senior American officer said Sunday.” An invading army shutting down a hospital claiming it is a “center of propaganda” about civilian casualties caused by that invading army’s killing is a moral low point. That it comes with praying, the wrapping of artillery guns in rosaries, and saying publicly that the “face” of the fighters in Falluja is the “face of Satan” (5) does not help. But in addition to saying something about the moral values of the country, it says something about the kinds of enemies America is fighting in Iraq. It is the clearest admission that this is not a battle, but a massacre, being carefully planned in advance to have no witnesses. It is a clear admission that what the US is afraid of in Iraq isn’t the military power of the Iraqi resistance — any more than Israel fears the military power of the Palestinians – but just the truth of its crimes getting out.

US goals in Iraq are different from Israel’s goals in Palestine. The US is not trying to displace the Iraqi people and replace them. The war aims are what they were when the war started: to establish a compliant regime backed by a substantial US military presence, secure control over Iraq’s oil resources, and demonstrate the ‘credibility’ of US power. That last is particularly important since Iraqi resistance and the US’s own ineptitude and arrogance has made it impossible for the US, in spite of all its power, to control the country (a blow to ‘credibility’ that the US is trying to rectify with the current slaughter). But like Israel’s spring 2002 invasion of the West Bank, the assault on Falluja is also a test run.

After the election, US planners feel that the American people are behind them, and are trying to find out how far that will allow them to go even if Iraqis and world opinion repudiate the assault. That explains the dual strategy: shut down hospitals to prevent casualty numbers and information from getting out to the world, and simultaneously hold obscene celebrations of the massacre for public consumption in the United States. When they called the first Falluja massacre off in April 2004 (6), it was because of a perception that their control of Iraq, their hold on American public opinion, and their international credibility was too tenuous to risk on a major massacre. This time they believe they are in a stronger position. They won’t stop – they won’t ever stop – unless they are wrong.

Notes

1)See Tanya Reinhart’s “Israel/Palestine”, which followed this coverage and reported on this, by Seven Stories Press.
2) Some photos can be found here
3) A table of figures is available here
4) Empire Notes
5) See Under the Same Sun
6) In fact the first Falluja massacre of this war was in April of the previous year (2003), when the US military fired on an unarmed protest, killing 14 people. Until that massacre, Falluja was not a center of resistance at all.

From al jazeera.

Many of Falluja’s 300,000 inhabitants are thought to have already fled to makeshift camps to the west or sought refuge in Baghdad, while US planes have been dropping leaflets urging those few remaining to leave.

Many of Falluja’s 300,000 citizens are thought to have fled

Continue reading “Delivering the massacre the American people voted for”

The world didn’t get to vote in the US elections. And of course, as much as the election was a referendum on Bush-ism, the election was not a referendum on the occupation of Iraq or imperialism or capitalist globalization or support for Israel or paramilitaries in Colombia or destabilization in Venezuela or ecological devastation and climate change… since those are priorities that transcend anything anybody gets to vote for in the US or for the US.

I wrote a piece with some obvious stuff in it a couple of days ago and got some interesting hate mail, some bizarre reactions from outlets ranging from the Socialist Worker to the Globe and Mail. There is a whole lot more to say about the United States, its political culture, and the possibilities (or lack thereof). But this blog is mostly about the world outside of the United States, and there are things going on in that world that need to be reported on.

For example, if you want an analysis of an important election, take a look at Jonah Gindin’s article at venezuelanalysis.com that analyzes the very interesting and positive results of local elections in Venezuela. As usual, the world is flipped upside down in Venezuela, where popular movements have surged from one victory to another. The local victories put the Bolivarian movement in a much stronger position to put forward its reforms, particularly land reforms, and gives local activists fewer headaches about repression at the local level.

And in case you needed a reminder that not everything is Venezuela. The remarkale Colombian union activist Alex Lopez and member of Congress, who I interviewed over a year ago, has had a threat against his life advertised by paramilitaries. Paramilitaries have killed a lot of unionists, and they are threatening to kill Lopez. Imagine a sitting member of Congress in the United States getting assassinated by killers working with the American Army. Hard to picture? Maybe because there is no one in the US Congress that is the kind of dissident activist that Lopez is. And maybe because life under US controlled domains is different from life in the US itself. The events, as reported by the UK Colombia Solidarity Campaign:

1.On 25 October an envelope arrived with a type written address directed to “CHAMBER OF REPRESENTATIVES Plaza de Bolívar BOGOTA”. In the place of the sender was put “SINTRA EMCALI Calle 18 No. 6-54 B. San Nicolás. CALI received 25 October 2004 at 2:20 p.m.”. This envelope was apparently handed in to the post room in Congress and not sent by any postal service.

2.- On 27 October 2004 RAYMUNDO MENDEZ BECHARA, Private Secretary of the Congress Presidency directed the following communication to Dr ALEXANDER LOPEZ MAYA, with a copy to Colonel JERSON JAIR CASTELLANOS SOTO, Security Liaison Official for Congress: “Respected doctor: Following instructions of the Lady President of the Chamber of Representatives, Doctor Zulema Jattin Corrales, I forward an anonymous letter addressed to you”.

3.- The white envelope with red and blue edging (not often seen having fallen into disuse some years ago) contained a sinister manuscript addressed to Dr. ALEXANDER LOPEZ MAYA that read:

“ALEXANDER LOPEZ MAYA rotten gonorrhea – you are dead – you already smell of formaldehyde, son of a bitch, mother fucker – we are going to kill you for all the misdeeds and wicked things that you have committed against the people of Cali – but before that we are going to torture you- we will pull out your eyes – we will cut off your tongue – we will slit off your ears – we will tear out your nails – we will put a bullet in each of your knees – we will crush your balls with a hammer – we will put a red hot steel bar up your backside and we will open your stomach, we will fill you with stones and throw you in the [river] – we hate you, son of a bitch you are pure shit You already know who we are”

The text ends with a skull.

4.- It is important to point out that doctor ALEXANDER LOPEZ MAYA, was in Quito Ecuador carrying out his parliamentary activities and he only knew of this document on 2 November.

The sinister manuscript arrived last Wednesday to the congress presidency addressed to ALEXANDER LOPEZ.

They are asking for email protests to be done as follows — e-mail to Uribe: login to http://www.presidencia.gov.co and click on ESCRIBALE AL PRESIDENTE at the bottom of the page.

In Palestine, Yasser Arafat is close to death, and that will have major implications. More on that in another post, soon. But don’t expect his death to change Israeli behaviour: the Israeli army is happily shelling and killing in Gaza, two children (8 and 7, Ahmad al-Sameery and his cousin Mohammad al-Sameery), in Khan Younis, along with 5 others shot and 10 homes demolished.

And yes, one more thing seems to have happened. The predicted Fallujah massacre has begun. The assault would probably have happened even if Bush had lost, but since Bush won, it is time again for American politicians to prove how tough they are to the American public by slaughtering large numbers of helpless people. If America really is ‘deeply divided’ and ‘polarized’, that could help the people of Fallujah and Iraq quite a lot. If, on the other hand, the nation works to ‘heal its wounds’, it will be doing its ‘healing’ on the corpses of Iraqis.

I mostly wrote that “morning after” piece of yesterday because I was surfing around the morning after, going to all my usual sites and blogs, and nobody had written anything. So I forced myself to write something, because I thought of all the people like me who would be depressed and wondering if radicals had anything to say.

Continue reading “So, um, what now?”

One day away from the election. This is definitely the moment when everything else is completely drowned out. Do we blame the media or ourselves, for shutting out things like the fact that the UN is overseeing the massacre of Haitians in residential neighbourhoods (if you want to take advantage of this moment to invest in Haiti, there’s a delegation you can go on. I’m sure the Haitians will be thrilled for the opportunity. Don’t forget to bring a sample of things you’d like assembled.) Or the four assassinations in Occupied Palestine today. Or, hell, even the Tel Aviv suicide bombing (I suspect you will hear about that, even tomorrow). Or the planned razing of Fallujah, which will probably start immediately after the elections, regardless of who wins. Is it that the media only cares about the spectacle of these elections, or is it that the rest of us are unable to give the world any attention when there’s something going on in America?

No one can say what is going to happen tomorrow. It is a big black hole, and feels that way. But I can say that it, like the future of the US and therefore of the world, depends on something very specific. It depends on how hard the liberals in the US are willing to fight against the movement against them. Tomorrow the Republicans will cheat. The media will help them. The grassroots fundamentalist constituency of Bush will vote, and then they will start moving to ensure that the person they voted for wins. And they will not back off until they are quite sure they cannot win. If that happens, they will immediately start mobilizing to ensure — with success they have been demonstrating over years — that Kerry dances to their tune, which he probably will. I don’t want to think too much about if Bush gets more electoral votes. What I want to say is that if Kerry wins the election, whether or not he will actually become president depends on the liberal movement against Bush.

Over the past few months, I can’t help but think that we anti-Bush people have missed opportunities for systemic critique, antiwar protest, analysis, creative action on any number of issues. Those who didn’t want to focus on the election found that no one was listening. Those who did focus on the election were making a calculation that defeating Bush was the thing that had to be done, without which all the other things that had to be done would be much more difficult or impossible. Whether that calculation was the right one remains to be seen. The worst shame of all would be if, after sacrificing so much principle to beating Bush, the liberals back down in the face of another electoral coup.

I was away from the major cities of North America, with no internet access, though not quite out of news range. I used some of the time to read Seymour Hersh’s book, “Chain of Command”, though of course bin Laden’s pro-Bush campaigning took over yesterday’s media space. Some thoughts on each.

bin Laden for Bush

bin Laden’s speech surprised me. I took seriously Fisk’s account of his meeting with bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan, when bin Laden was totally excited about seeing an old newspaper and slinked off into the corner to read it all: perhaps a spiritual figure to terrorist organizations, but not an operational leader. I thought that calling him the ‘mastermind’ of the 9/11 attacks was quite a stretch. And yet in his taped press conference, he says that he specifically got the idea for attacking the US after seeing the carnage Israel wreaked on Lebanon in the 1982 invasion (“Peace for Galilee”, I think it was called. The book to read on that invasion is, of course, Chomsky’s “Fateful Triangle”, though Fisk’s book “Pity the Nation” has lots in it, and there is a book by Israeli historian Ze’ev Schiff and someone else I can’t remember that is pretty good too). bin Laden says:

I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.

But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.

And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.

In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

This all probably sounds like evil incarnate to Americans. But to most of the world it probably sounds more like rhetoric, justification for killing innocents, vengeful and cruel talk, something all too familiar from American politicians and spokespeople are are justifying slaughtering some population or another in some part of the world.

The surprising thing for me though is that he says that the idea came from him, and that he discussed it with Mohammad Atta. I had always assumed that bin Laden himself was largely a creation of the US media, which needs personifications of evil, villains with names, to present the “war against terrorism” in simple dramatic “good vs. evil” terms. I certainly think of the current villain, Zarqawi, this way. But it seems that bin Laden really did mastermind the 9/11 attacks, and now he’s doing his best to see Bush re-elected. bin Laden and his people, and the Bush people, really do coordinate their work remarkably well together. A side effect of religious fundamentalism is a near total lack of self-awareness. If the results of this coordinated effort by “Bush” and “bin Laden” weren’t so gruesome, there would be a lot of opportunity for irony and ridicule.

Chain of Command

Seymour Hersh. It’s hard to say something bad about the person who broke the My Lai story and the Abu Ghraib story and did a great deal of important work in between. Hersh’s work is a civilizing influence on American political culture and journalism. He offers an example of a serious journalist, with tremendous mainstream access, who actually finds relevant things to say, is well informed, provides a sense of the big picture, and repeatedly presents facts and information that are very important for the public to know.

The book, “Chain of Command”, has a lot of important information: about the war in Afghanistan, about the war in Iraq, about the Bush Administration, about Abu Ghraib and how it happened, about the details of how the US makes foreign policy and military policy, and more.

And yet the tradeoffs Hersh makes (unconsciously I think) to be able to put this information in the New Yorker and maintain his level of access to government sources and insiders are also plain to see. His Epilogue, for example, has the following passage: “There is so much about this presidency that we don’t know, and may never learn. Some of the most important questions are not even being asked… How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?”

The assumptions behind these questions. What are these “long-standing American priorities” that the Iraq war “rearranged”? I don’t believe Iraq war planners were just thinking about the “answer to international terrorism”, but about answers to control of the planet’s resources (Hersh does discuss this a little, talking about China, etc., elsewhere in the book, though also from an American power perspective). Is the press really that hard to “intimidate”, or Congress to “mislead”, or is it possible that the press and Congress actually agreed with the Administration on the “long-standing priorities” that the Iraq war was meant to help further? One would think that Hersh, the reporter who broke the story of the My Lai massacre and a political analyst in his own right, would know more about the political priorities of US governments than that. But he adopts the framework, and so his criticism of Bush, like Kerry’s, is that the Bush people aren’t doing a good job of working on the real “long-standing priorities” of maintaining and extending American power.

Of course, if Hersh did not adopt that framework, he would not be an insider. The insiders would not talk to him, he would not have the many remarkable sources that he has, and he would not be able to get the information out, and no one, including radicals and “outsiders” (ie., ordinary citizens) would have access to the information and would be left speculating about things Hersh provides facts about. But this is a tradeoff, and it’s impossible not to notice. So is Hersh’s use of anonymous sources, something that has eroded journalism tremendously. In his acknowledgements, he says “Those most responsible for this book — the past and present government, intelligence, and military officials who have provided me with an alternative history since September 11th — cannot be named, for obvious reasons. There is honor in their anonymity.”

In fact there is no honor in their anonymity. There is actually shame in their anonymity. The US political system and culture is sliding away from notions of liberalism and democracy that reporters like Hersh treasure because those who really hate freedom — those who try to block the franchise for voters, who attack secularism and science, who oppose women’s rights, who oppose freedom to organize and associate (are you starting to figure out who I’m talking about?) — fight hard and seriously, while the liberal types do not. In two days, if the election is at all close, the Republicans will cheat, and it will be up to the Democrats to decide whether they will allow the cheating or not. If the Democrats do not take the cheating, it will be up to the media and to the Republicans to decide whether they will back off. If the Republicans cheat and then don’t back down, I can virtually guarantee that the Democrats will back down. They will not walk out of Congress or the Senate, they will not encourage civil disobedience, they will not try to mobilize political power, even if the Republicans have blatantly broken the law and shredded the legitimacy of the system. If they were willing to do that sort of thing, there would be a lot more reason to hope for this country and for the world.

The anonymous ‘dissidents’ who provide Hersh with his facts are similar. Obviously, journalists have to be responsible about publishing names of people whose safety could be at risk. But Hersh’s sources are almost never people like the unionists or peasants in Colombia who could be disappeared or killed with their families for speaking out about the dirty war. These are men of power in the US government and corporate system, and they refuse to put their names on their statements because they will suffer career consequences. But there is very little accountability in anonymous sources. Anonymous sources do not catalyze action. And if people did speak openly, there would be more protection for everyone to do so. The reverse is also true: the culture of anonymous sources, even for the best journalists like Hersh, is so pervasive that the consequences for someone who does speak out publicly are so much more devastating.

If the elite decision makers who provide Hersh with facts are, worse than scared to provide their names, finding ‘honor’ in their anonymity, the state of the ‘free speech’ and ‘democracy’ that Kerry (and Hersh) and Bush disagree on how best to protect from ‘terrorists’ and ‘barbarians’ is pretty shabby indeed. If they (and I’m not talking about the Bush people here, but those liberal dissenters from Bush) won’t even put their names on the line to protect those freedoms, but are willing to kill thousands and hundreds of thousands of other people’s children, supposedly to do the same thing, isn’t that, well, cowardly?