The Anti-Empire Project

I am often several months behind the curve. For example, I watched “The Fog of War” on video just last night, despite its release half a year ago. I watched it because several friends who I respect told me it was very revealing (I will be skeptical of their judgement from now on). It is Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, talking to the camera, interspersed with a little footage here and there.

McNamara looks into the camera and lies. Or maybe he didn’t know: most are lies of omission. But he lies about the Tonkin Gulf resolution; he lies about the US terrorism against Cuba. He presents false dichotomies: did ‘we’ have to firebomb Japanese cities and kill hundreds of thousands? He says, the alternative was having our troops invade Japan and die in the hundreds of thousands. Oh really? Did anyone look into the possibility of not invading Japan? He says, I can’t remember if I ordered the use of Agent Orange. Certainly it was used when I was secretary of defense. We don’t have any laws against the uses of particular chemicals. I certainly wouldn’t have ordered the use of anything illegal.

Basically, the movie was filthy lies and apologetics for the genocidal campaign against the Vietnamese. He actually went to Vietnam and berated the Vietnamese, asking them: “Was it worth it, making us kill 3.4 million of you?” As if it was the Vietnamese who chose to be slaughtered. He presents Castro as if he was insane because of his behaviour during the Cuban missile crisis, as if McNamara himself and Kennedy were not the aggressors. He forgets the missiles in Turkey pointed at the USSR that made the USSR want to answer with missiles in Cuba.

If the Nazis had won world war II, if one of the Nazis in the bureaucracy at the time had sat down 40 years later with a sympathetic director and talked about all the close shaves that he had lived through in his life, you would have something like this film. I wouldn’t recommend it. Neither do the various leftists who reviewed it at the time, like Alex Cockburn.

The NewStandard is trying a novel approach to trying to get the US Army to provide some details on a torture case their paper is following. They want readers to contact the US Army directly and pressure them to provide the information they are refusing to provide. You can find out how to help them here.

First, I was alerted to an interesting piece by Uri Avnery by Samer Elatrash who wrote a similar piece. Both pieces treat the myth of the ‘generous offer’ that Israel gave the Palestinians. I find Tanya Reinhart’s book, Israel/Palestine, to be the best antidote to this myth, but the new pieces treat an admission by a senior Israeli official to the same effect.

A friend in Nablus who did some blogging a few months back sent some Ha’aretz articles of interest around as well. One discusses opposition in Palestinian militant groups to the plan to have Egypt take over the occupation of Gaza. Another is a ‘field guide to the new right’ in Israel.

As scary as it is to read about the right, sometimes it’s scarier to hear about the public. The last article was about public opinion in Israel, where 64% of the Jewish public supports encouraging Israeli Arabs to leave; 55% of whom believe Israeli Arabs endanger national security, 45% of whom want to revoke Arabs’ right to vote or hold political office, 72% of whom support entry restrictions on foreign workers, and about a quarter of whom would support an ultra-right wing nationalist party in elections.

If this is the state of public opinion in Israel, Palestinians might start to feel like there is no partner for peace.

The young fellow and I have completely different approaches to almost everything — some might say, charitably, that they are complementary approaches. But the truth is we have a lot in common as well. And I have a lot of respect for him, which is why I’ve been helping him out in whatever small ways I’ve been able to — mostly with (what I think is reasonable) advice which he may or may not take. Perhaps because our approaches are so different I didn’t think to promote his reports here, in spite of the fact that I am working with him on his project. But an email from a mutual friend convinced me otherwise. For the rest, I will let him speak with his own words.

My friend Tarek Loubani is in Iraq right now. This is his blog. Take a look.

I was just reading the various pieces that ZNet republished from New Politics on the US elections. I would in particular recommend Steve Shalom’s piece. Steve has a way of summarizing all the arguments on all sides in a sympathetic way, and then presenting the last word on the topic, that is really impressive. Years ago when I was confused about drugs, his piece on the subject clarified things for me in a similar way.

I also enjoyed the harshness of Michael Hirsch’s piece on ‘Left Posturing’. Some quotes from it:

“Any politics has to start from an analysis of social forces. Social movements are weak, but not because their leaders failed to resist the siren call of access to the White House or the governor’s mansion. Idle chatter about “the class” or “the youth” or “the labor bureaucracy” and its misleaders only reinforces the left’s alienation from its own base because it substitutes assertions for analysis.”

…

“What is the left putting out — even that left that believes in realigning the Democratic Party? “U.S. Troops Out of Iraq,” or “Support Gay Marriages,” or “Defend Abortion Rights” are reactive programs that do not get to the heart of the American empire, harm the war makers where they live or deliver a body blow to sexual fundamentalists.”

“There is no left national agenda to guide any elected officials, though municipalities from Santa Monica and San Francisco to New York are better served and activists clearer about housing, health care, wages and other local needs.”

…

“Holding to a “socialist politics” without putting any forward means acting like émigrés in your own country, when the truth is there is no socialist politics, principled or otherwise, unless you make it so.”

I think these rebukes are well taken. Shalom’s piece is not as harsh, but the message is similar. He also thoughtfully addresses the “worse the better” claim that Bush may be the lesser evil because he is overstretching the empire. Both pieces are of value because they start from where we actually are, and deal with the actual balance of forces that we are facing in North America, without sacrificing principles.

Some more loathsome and fearful news on the Canadian elections. Harper’s conservatives were leading in the polls but now, apparently, the Liberals and Conservatives are ‘neck and neck’ in a ‘nail biting tug of war’.

The Conservatives tried to exploit a brutal murder of a child in Toronto by claiming the Liberals are soft on child pornography (the murderer said he was motivated to rape and kill the child because of child pornography). My own reaction is to think the Conservatives are defiling the child’s memory by exploiting her brutal murder for electoral ends. But ‘conservatives’ like these are adept at making such vile acts work for them.

Michael Moore told Canadians not to vote for Harper, saying as so many of us have been saying that it would be a tragedy for Canada to move in that direction as the rest of the world is trying to move away from that direction. I don’t share Michael Moore’s rosy view of Canada, but I have traveled enough in both countries and have had enough American friends visit me here to understand how he can feel a difference he doesn’t want to lose.

Moore’s analysis of the Canadian political situation isn’t far off though. Witness the fear of the Conservatives:

“I hope this doesn’t happen. Bush is going to throw a party (after the Canadian election). He’s going to be a happy man. (Harper) has a big pair of scissors in his hand. He wants to snip away at your social safety net. He’d like this to be the 51st State.”

And the loathing of the Liberals:

“They moved to the right (under Martin), which then validated the right.”

He wants his film (coming out on the 25th) to influence the election (on the 28th)

“Moore said the distributors here originally thought of delaying the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 until after the Canadian federal election, to avoid influencing the outcome — even though the film makes almost no mention of Canada.”

“And I said, no, no, no. Even if it’s just four days before the election, you’ve got to get something out there to inspire people to do the right thing here.

“This movie should say to Canadians, you want to join the Coalition of the Willing? Get ready to send your kids over to die for nothing, so that Bush’s buddies can line their pockets.””

There was a period a few months ago when there were many alternative and decent journalists in Iraq: Dahr Jamail (who is still there), Rahul Mahajan, Andrea Schmidt, Naomi Klein, and others. This coincided with the US invasion of Fallujah and a tremendous amount of news coverage of Iraq everywhere. Today though, there isn’t as much coverage of what’s going on. Alternative media (notably Dahr) are still there, there are still reports coming out on Iraq, but somehow, it isn’t dominating the news. And yet it seems like there is as much happening there as ever. The body count has certainly not abated, as the insurgents mount bombing attacks and the US forces continue to slaughter their way through civilian areas, including Fallujah.

Things seem to be happening in Afghanistan, a place that never made much news even when it was being invaded by the US and can hardly make news now that it’s only occupied, starving, and has insurgents making moves against the occupiers.

The last non-news item is Israel/Palestine, which is going through one of those periods of ‘calm’ when only Palestinians are being killed. There is a compilation of assassinations of Palestinians by Israel for September to April. The Israelis killed another two people, ‘suspected militants’ as the saying goes, in Nablus in an assassination with a car bomb on June 15. I read somewhere that the Israeli secret service conducted an assassination in Jenin earlier this week as well, though I haven’t been able to track down the source.

Showing their deep concern about armed factions in Haiti Canadians under the US mission in Haiti kicked down another Haitian door, this time of Dany Toussaint, a politician, and recovering some weapons.

Maybe they’ll do something about the heavy weapons the coup makers got in order to overthrow Aristide’s regime a few months back. Oh — wait — where did those weapons come from again? Hmmm… Stan Goff has some ideas.

In other Haitian door kicking news, ZNet’s posted an article by Haiti Action activists on the raid on the mayor of Milo by the UN troops, blogged here previously. Between these and the arrest of Lavalas activist and grandmother Annette Auguste, the UN is compiling an impressive record of raiding.

No doubt Haitians are feeling very safe.

Technicality: the troops conducting the raid on Dany Toussaint were Canadian, and none of the Canadian politicians said anything about it, so this will serve as the Fear and Loathing Report today.

Note 2: I just got a note from Justin Felux, who has written very good stuff on Haiti for ZNet (take a look at it on ZNet’s Haiti Watch) about the victim of this raid. It seems that the UN’s raids on So Anne and Mayor Moise were different from this one…

———-

Justin,

Dany Toussaint is a thug that has probably been an asset of the CIA for a long time. Haiti would be better off if those Canadian troops had shot him. While Toussaint has pretended to be a supporter of Lavalas since the 1991 coup, he has shown his true colors over the past few years.

In the 1980s he received training at the SOA and was a member of the hated Haitian military. When Washington restored Aristide in 1994, they were pushing Toussaint as one of Haiti’s new leaders. They clearly saw him as someone that would be useful to them in the future. The CIA made several overtures toward him in the late 1990s.

Toussaint was behind the murder of journalist Jean Dominique, and his gangs have been stirring up trouble in Port-au-prince for years now. This has all resulted in a lot of chaos and destabilization, as well as a fracturing of Lavalas, which is probably what it was designed to do.

Since then Toussaint has openly aligned himself with the opposition and has a close working relationship with Guy Philippe.

Open up markets or else. This is often the ultimatum governments of developing countries are given as they try to find a way out of severe poverty and economic stagnation. This “development” is anything but and has always come at a very very costly human price: death, displacement and deeper poverty. This is to say nothing of the real agendas motivating the U.S. and other industrialized countries to promote this form of gun-point development.

This week, Ecuador’s congress sent out a message that it will not give in to such outside pressures as it seeks to develop. On June 16, it rejected proposed legislation to open up government-owned oil fields in the Amazon to foreign oil companies. President Lucio Gutierrez, who came to office on a left platform, pushed to open up the oil fields for nearly two years in reaction to an IMF mandate stating that without such “reforms” of the oil sector, the agency would withhold $120 million in “aid.”

Among the international oil companies who pushed hard for the “reforms” were Occidental Petroleum of the U.S., Canada’s EnCana Corp., Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro and Spanish-Argentine giant Repsol – all of which would have gained supremely had the fields been opened up. The dismissal of the legislation came as a shock to foreign investors, who are used to getting their way when it comes to matters of “development.” Any subscription-free links to this fascinating story would be much-appreciated.

One last thought: Perhaps the country’s dealings with the deadly legacy ChevronTexaco left behind prompted the congressional vote this week.