Chomsky on AlJazeera

I'm out of the country for a week, so in the meantime, enjoy this great interview with Noam Chomksy on AlJazeera's "Inside USA". Chomsky talks about the US election, Barak Obama, the current state of Iraq, and the legacy of the Bush administration.

Iraq: the permanent occupation

Here's Tom Engelhardt, talking about a topic the mainstream media constantly overlook, and whose absence from discussion renders our understanding of the invasion of Iraq pretty much hollow: America's construction of permanent military bases in the country.




Tom's website has long been one of the very best around for intelligent, informed and in-depth analysis on US imperialism in the Bush era. In fact, I'd say that if I could recommend just one site on the political internet, Tomdispatch would probably be it (that or Noam Chomsky's). The essays there are quite simply essential reading. So visit soon, and often.

Winter Soldier: US atrocities then and now

Winter Soldier, a documentary comprising veteran's accounts of US conduct in the Vietnam war, has just been released in the UK, 33 years after the last American troops were finally driven from Saigon. The film's relevance to our own era of American warfare is stark and direct. From the Guardian:

"His testimony was shocking, yet he still believed in the war. The year was 1971 and Scott Camil, a marine just back from 20 months in Vietnam, wanted to talk about what he had seen and done there: "My testimony involves burning of villages with civilians in them, the cutting off of ears, cutting off of heads, torturing of prisoners, calling in of artillery on villages for games, corpsmen killing wounded prisoners ... ""

"In agonising, often sickening detail, Camil talked about these things for a long time. David Grubin, whose camera was filming the marine, was stunned. Grubin had come to Detroit, Michigan, to film three days of testimony by soldiers, marines and airmen who had recently returned from south-east Asia and were anxious to speak publicly about war crimes and atrocities they had both witnessed and committed."

"The shattering testimony continued: beheadings, heads on pikes, ears traded for beers, disembowelment, mass rapes, the murder of children for throwing stones at troops, of the elderly, of anyone in the so-called "free-fire zones"."

"Such chastening material proved hard to exhibit, even in those molten times. The event itself snagged a total of three minutes' coverage on the three big networks. The movie couldn't find a major distributor, and the networks refused even to show excerpts. "I remember going to CBS to show them the movie," says Grubin. "I was in the room when they said, 'We can never show this.'"

"After a few arthouse showings in 1972, Winter Soldier simply disappeared. When the movie was rereleased in the US in 2005 - partly in response to attempts, in the 2004 election, to smear John Kerry over his war record - a special screening was held, with the crew and the vets. "We didn't realise that the theatre was also filled with Afghanistan and Iraq vets," says Kopple. "The Iraq guys got up and spoke with the Vietnam vets, and their stories were so similar, the cadences of their voices were exactly the same. It was remarkable.""

"In March this year, Winter Soldier: Afghanistan and Iraq was convened in Silver Spring, Maryland. Much of the testimony, from 200 veterans, offered a chilling echo of its Vietnam forerunner. It was filmed by David Zeiger - who directed Sir! No Sir!, an extraordinary history of insubordination, mutinies and troop rebellions in Vietnam - so it should be in good hands. The only mainstream news outlet that bothered to show up was the Washington Post."

Here are a couple of the Winter Soldier 2008 testimonies; one from a former US marine and one from an Iraqi civilian. You can click here to see more.

2nd worst President ever?

A recent poll of 109 US historians showed 61 per cent viewing George Bush as the worst President ever, and a practically unanimous 98 per cent describing his administration as a failure.

Said one:

"No individual president can compare to the second Bush. Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large"

Its tempting in light of this to view the post-Bush era as offering the prospect of some form of redemption for the United States government, least implausibly under the Presidency of Barack Obama. But as Clive Crook implies, this is not a good election to win, precisely because of this expectation that the end of Bush will be the end of the problems he created. In fact, the end of Bush will be the start of a hard process of paying the costs of his presidency; both for imperialists and for the victims of imperialism.

For example, it is highly unlikely that any Democratic President will raise taxes on America's wealthy to anything like the extent required to offset (a) the estimated trillions lost on the Iraq war and (b) the credit binge of the last 8 years. Probably much of the fiscal belt-tightening will be borne by the middle and lower classes, who will also be suffering from the US mortgage crisis and from the recession more generally. The next President will either have to continue Bush's fiscal recklessness or - and this is far more probable - be the person who makes the US public pay the consequences of that recklessness. Having to choose between being an idiot and being the bad guy is not a good position to be in.

The other main reason this is not a good election to win is Iraq. The "surge" of extra US troops into Iraq was supposed to reap political benefits for the US project. Without those having materialised, the escalation has served only to press the pause button on (the very worst of) a conflict which, as we've seen in Basra and Baghdad recently and as we will probably see in Kirkuk sooner rather than later, is a long way from being over. Much bloodletting will take place on the next President's watch, and their ability to blame it on Bush will diminish rapidly as time passes.

More broadly, Bush is passing to his successor a strategic catch-22 where failure appears to be the only option for the American Empire. I am assuming that, whoever wins the election, the central assumption that the US has the divinly-ordained right to run the world (provide "leadership" as its called) will continue to define US policy, albeit with some tactical modification. In that case, the bind the next President will be in is this: leave Iraq and you abandon a key square on the oil and gas chessboard to (at least) one of your bitterest rivals (Iran definitely, plus Russia and China in all likelihood); stay, and you continue to lose an unwinnable war, and continue to pay the fiscal consequences of doing so in a time of economic calamity.

In short, there is real scope for the next Presidency to end up being one that is seen as a very serious failure, and not entirely through fault of its own. A variety of disastrous consequences from the administration of Bush the Worst will be reaped by (in descending order of tragedy from high to zero) the people of Iraq, the people of the United States and the imperial project of the US governing class. Bottom line: this will not all be over come January 2007.

Mission Accomplished

"Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.

Despite limited improvements in security in some areas, armed violence is still having a disastrous impact. Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.

Many families include people who have been forced by the conflict to flee their homes, leaving those left behind with the daily struggle of trying to make ends meet. A sustained economic crisis marked by high unemployment further aggravates their plight."

Iraq: No Let Up In The Humanitarian Crisis - International Committee of the Red Cross

Did the US aim to make Iraq a democracy?

The following is an email to Helen Boaden, director of BBC News, and "Newsnight" diplomatic editor Mark Urban. It discusses Urban's saying on "Newsnight" that the US invasion was in part about spreading democracy in the Middle East, for which Urban has drawn criticism from some in the anti-war movement. The point I wanted to make below was that, yes, Washington planners probably did, in their own minds, take the view that they were "democratising" Iraq, but the reality of US policies meant that in practise they were doing the opposite. Bottom line: the Iraqis were being made subjects to a new master, not being liberated to act as free agents.

**********************

Dear Helen and Mark

I've followed with interest your recent correspondence with viewers regarding the question of whether or not the US aimed to export democracy to Iraq. In my view its a shame that the debate has been reduced to a question of either/or since that tends to obscure the important issues at stake here. I think the real point is that one needs to acknowledge the problematic nature of the US claims, and some of the nuances involved, rather than saying the claims were either utterly true or utterly false.

You're right to acknowledge that the US planned to leave in place an Iraqi government that was legitimised by some form of electoral system. But the bottom line was that this government should be friendly to US strategic interests. The US therefore set about engineering a "democracy" that would lead to this outcome. Of course you don't need me to point out that there's a dissonance between this and the idea of democracy that you and I have; i.e. where the population governs its affairs according to its own wishes, without the manipulations of a foreign power.

Mark in particular will be aware that, shortly after the 2003 invasion, forms of local government, often democratic, began springing up all over Iraq, and that these were systematically stamped out by the CPA, which was alarmed to see Iraqi self-rule evolving under indigenous control in a way that might not suit US interests. Michael Knights and Ed Williams touched on this briefly in their report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy entitled "The Calm Before The Storm"[pdf].(see pg 12).

Many gains for genuine democracy and popular sovereignty were actually prised from Washington's hands by the Iraqis themselves. For example, it was Sistani - backed by huge demonstrations in January 2004 - who insisted that any permanent Iraqi constitution should be written by people elected to do so, and that all future Iraqi governments should be elected on the basis of one-person one-vote. The US had been planning all sorts of stage-managed wheezes - like caucuses hand-picked by the CPA - to ensure that the process of "democracy-building" could be as US-managed as possible. Bush was apparently furious about having to give in to Sistani's demands, but faced with popular anger in Iraq he was left with no choice.

Consider also that under US plans, Iraq's principle source of revenue would be tied up in production-sharing agreements with Western oil firms, and that its army would be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US military, which would retain massive permanent bases around the country. Then there's the fact that the US is building the largest embassy in the world - nearly as big as Vatican City - in the heart of Baghdad. You have to ask whether Iraq can be truly sovereign under these circumstances, how much less sovereign it would have been if Washington had kept its grip on the political process, and whether a country that - at the behest of a foreign power - is only allowed the formal trappings of sovereignty can be called "democratic" in any meaningful sense of the term.

I have no doubt that Washington planners sincerely believed that what they had planned for Iraq could accurately be described as "democracy". But clearly that judgement - that conception of democracy - was a highly questionable and unfamiliar one. It seems that no one in Washington contemplated an Iraq that was 100 per cent owned by the Iraqi population and completely free to make its own choices irrespective of how these may impact upon US interests. Washington's plans were to make the new Iraq a subject nation; not a free one. That much is plain.

Of course, its hard to express this in a sentence, as you must when filing your reports. All I ask is that you don't simply say that the US aimed to make Iraq democratic, since obviously that gives the viewer the sense that the US intended to make Iraq a free country, and that is a good deal less than true. There needs to be an acknowledgement of the reality of the US role; of its aim to assume de facto sovereignty over Iraq in pursuit of its geo-strategic interests. That's the essence of the whole Iraq story, as far as the US aims are concerned. And I think its certainly true that the BBC has not reflected this well in its coverage, sad to say.

Thanks to you both for taking the time to read this. I do hope it influences how you approach this story in the future.

Very best wishes

*****

For more on this topic, see my "Iraqi Democracy and the Limits of Western Idealism" from March 2006.

***********

Postscript - 22 January 2008.

Just received a belated response from Helen Boaden. Simply reads "Thank you for this thoughtful email", which is nice. Remains to be seen whether my thoughts will influence future coverage, but one lives in hope.

Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2007

In 2007, the top ten myths about Iraq were as follows:

1. The reduction in violence in Iraq is mostly because of the escalation in the number of US troops, or "surge."

2. Iraq has been "calm" in fall of 2007 and the Iraqi public, despite some grumbling, is not eager for the US to depart.

3. The Iraqi north is relatively quiet and a site of economic growth.

4. The Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," who are on the US payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants.

5. Some progress has been made by the Iraqi government in meeting the "benchmarks" worked out with the Bush administration.

6. The US overthrow of the Baath regime and military occupation of Iraq has helped liberate Iraqi women.

7. Iran was supplying explosively formed projectiles (a deadly form of roadside bomb) to Salafi Jihadi (radical Sunni) guerrilla groups in Iraq.

8. The US troop surge stopped the civil war that had been raging between Sunni Arabs and Shiites in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

9. There have been steps toward religious and political reconciliation in Iraq in 2007.

10. The US public no longer sees Iraq as a central issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

See the indispensible Juan Cole debunk each of these myths in turn at Informed Comment.

British occupation of southern Iraq: the Iraqi verdict

This morning, British troops handed control of Basra province over to the Iraqi authorities.

While you and I might have our own views on the British occupation, clearly the only judgement that really matters is that of the people of southern Iraq themselves. According to poll commissioned by the BBC, only 2 per cent of Basra residents believe the British have had a positive effect on their lives since the invasion of 2003. 86 per cent say the effect has been negative. 66 per cent said that today's handover from British to Iraqi forces would improve security in the short term, 72 per cent said that it would improve security in the long term. 5 per cent in each case said that security would deteriorate when the British pulled out.

83 per cent of Basrawis said they wanted British troops to leave Iraq altogether, with 63 per cent saying they should leave the Middle East entirely. If you think that makes the troop's continued presence illegitimate, the British government will remind you that we are there at the invitation of the democratically elected Iraqi government. The fact that the democratically elected Iraqi government is summarily ignoring the long-standing will of the vast majority of Iraqis on one of the biggest issues facing their country is neither here nor there. This is not a denial of democracy, as it may appear to the untrained eye, but an expression of it. Got that? Good.

For an analysis and review of the British occupation, see my article for Le Monde Diplomatique, "Britiain's Failure in Iraq".

Britain’s failure in Iraq

My article "Britain’s failure in Iraq" is published this month in the English language edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. An excerpt:

"In 2003, Britain promised a post-Saddam Iraq that would be “a stable, united and law-abiding state providing effective representative government to its own people.” That those ambitions have not been realised is now widely acknowledged even within the political establishment. A recent report by Michael Knights and Ed Williams described Iraq’s deep south, the area for which Britain is responsible, as “a kleptocracy” where “well armed political-criminal mafiosi have locked both the central government and the people out of power”. "

"Britain’s official goals have now been significantly downgraded to keeping violence at a manageable level, and leaving local administrators and security services to deal with the situation. Even this is far from being achieved, and Britain faces these problems in near isolation from the international community. British policymakers and analysts will be asking themselves what went wrong for many years to come."

Read the rest here. Alternatively, if you want a hard copy, you can get LMD in English from one of the bigger branches of a major bookstore, e.g. Borders on Oxford Street, London.

The Morality of Power

The New York Review of Books has published a translation of a leaked transcript - originally published in El Pais - of a meeting held in Crawford, Texas on 22 February 2003 between US President George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister José Marìa Aznar. This would probably be the most authoritative translation of that document available so far.The transcript reveals a number of notable aspects of internal planning for the Iraq War and the mentality of George Bush himself at that fateful time.

Firstly, it is explicitly stated that the war will go ahead whichever way the UN Security Council votes on any resolution. UN approval is seen only as a rubber stamp, desirable up to a point since it could dampen public opposition in the European states allied with Washington. Thus the system of international order - set up after World War II with intention of avoiding the horrors of future wars of aggression - is contemptuously relegated to the status of a PR exercise by the new imperialists.

Secondly, though the PR value of a resolution is not sufficient to stop the war, its value is sufficient for the US to bully and blackmail other nations in order to secure it. Bush says:

"[Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos has to know that the Free Trade Agreement with Chile is pending Senate confirmation, and that a negative attitude on this issue could jeopardize that ratification. Angola is receiving funds from the Millennium Account that could also be compromised if they don't show a positive attitude. And Putin must know that his attitude is jeopardizing the relations of Russia and the United States"

Russia of course can look after itself. But the remarks about Angola give you the measure of a President, and indeed a government, that threatens one of the poorest countries on the planet - where most people live on less than 50p a day - with a cut or cessation of development aid if it fails to obey orders from Washington.

Bush's talk of snatching food from the mouths of the starving "if they don't show a positive attitude" doesn't prevent him, mere moments later, from pontificating about his dreams of spreading freedom to the suffering peoples of the world.

Another revealing passage comes when Aznar says that "the biggest success would be to win the game without firing a single shot while going into Baghdad." Bush replies:

"For me it would be the perfect solution. I don't want the war. I know what wars are like. I know the destruction and the death that comes with them. I am the one who has to comfort the mothers and the widows of the dead. Of course, for us that would be the best solution. Besides, it would save us $50 billion."

What is it about that last remark that exposes the preceding lamentation of the horrors of war as just so many empty words; words that Bush somehow thinks he ought to be saying, while never fully understanding why?

One of the more notable revelations from the transcript is that Saddam had by this stage apparently offered to go into exile*; an offer which if accepted would probably have given Bush exactly what he claimed was "the perfect solution" - "to win the game without firing a single shot while going into Baghdad". Yet Bush of course spurned Saddam's offer in favour of launching a war that by now has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, with no end currently in sight.

In the accompanying comment article in the NYRB, Mark Danner discusses Bush's preference for faith over knowledge: faith in the righteousness of his personal mission over knowledge of what it is that he is doing. Add to that the contradictions I've highlighted above and you get an interesting insight into the workings of human psychology in the context of power.

Faced with so much propaganda and misinformation from governments, those who challenge power often ask, do these people believe what they're saying or are they just barefaced liars? The Crawford transcript indicates that the former is closest to the truth. Bush emerges as a moral bankrupt who is simultaneously able to maintain a passionate sense of his own moral righteousness. No matter how obviously his moral rhetoric is contradicted by his deeply and clearly immoral actions, Bush's belief in the rightness of what he is doing is total. Quite possibly, he would be unable to do his job if he thought otherwise.


*Bush says of this: "[Egyptian President] Mubarak tells us that in those circumstances there are many possibilities that he'll be assassinated". Later Aznar returns to this point. "Is it true that there's a possibility of Saddam Hussein going into exile?", he asks. Bush replies: "Yes, that possibility exists. Even that he gets assassinated."

Does this not read, more than a little, as though assassination is being discussed as an option rather than a possibility, perhaps to be organised by Egypt?

Iraq Casualty Data

Antiwar.com is currently updating its pages giving data on casualties from the Iraq war. The presentation of data, particularly in respect of Iraqi casualties, was unsatisfactory in a number of respects. The site's staff have been conducting a review and are now in the process of making changes.

The pages in question are this one and this one.

I got into conversation with the site's editor, Eric Gariss, and we started talking about the changes he was making. Gariss has asked me, and others, for input on this redesign. He says:

"I want to further improve these pages, so PLEASE tell people to send me any specific suggestions (as opposed to insults and complaints) and I will try to address them."

Gariss' email address is on the site so by all means get in touch if you can suggest anything on the redesign of these pages.

My suggestion was that the info about Iraqi casualties, as opposed to US troop casualties, could be better displayed; something I know others have mentioned as well. I said:

"I would certainly question the prominence of these figures. They appear at the very bottom of the page. US casualties appear at the top, and much more strongly displayed.

This seems quite wrong to me. I realise that the public is seen as focusing more on US casualties, so I understand why you choose to run with those first. But surely this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy? If even those of us who are against the war choose this focus then doesn't that reinforce its validity? I'm sure many wars could be stopped if people in the aggressor nations were reminded of the humanity- the equal humanity - of the victims as often as possible."

If you can think of anything else, email Antiwar.com and let them know.

Wearing speaks Arabic

Except I don't.

But for those few of my readers who do speak Arabic, you can find an Arabic language translation of my recent article "United By A Goal" published in the Arabic edition of Le Monde Diplomatique this month. The article talks about Iraq's heroic victory in the Asian football championships, and uses the popular reaction to that victory to examine the state of nationalism in the country.

You can buy a copy on the newsstands or, if you're prepared to shell out for a subscription, you can read it online here. LMD's an excellent publication, so the subscription fee's a good investment.

For the rest of you, here's the article in English.

The Costs of War

For all the acres of newsprint devoted to the Iraq war, very little has focused on the reality of the war itself, that is to say, the human cost of the vast tidal wave of violence that was unleashed by the US-led invasion; a wave that courses through the towns and cities of Iraq, with ever-growing ferocity, to this day. See for example, the attempt made by Western politicians and media to marginalise or rubbish the most reliable study yet made into Iraqi civilian deaths caused by the invasion - which estimated a total of over 655,000. These too are, to use the current phrase, 'inconvenient truths'.

Coverage of the violence itself (as opposed to discussion of the politics of the war - which is endless) mostly focuses on the suicide bombings carried out by the Iraqi al Qaeda franchise. But as the abovementioned study pointed out, far more deaths (where there is an identifiable cause) are attributable to coalition violence. Over the last four-years-and-counting we have heard precious little of these deaths - those for which we are most directly responsible - though they take place just the same.

So a new collection of interviews with US veterans of the conflict, published in The Nation, provides a welcome corrective. The Independent comments that:

"It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.

That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews, veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.

The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human rights abuses. "It's not individual atrocity," Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. "It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."

A number of the troops have returned home bearing mental and physical scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents are supported by the population. Many of those interviewed have come to oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell of public opinion across the US that views the war as futile.

Journalists and human rights groups have published numerous reports drawing attention to the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces. The Nation's investigation presents for the first time named military witnesses who back those assertions. Some participated themselves."

Some of these accounts of atrocities will be very difficult to read. But those of us whose governments started the war in which these events took place have little right to the comfort of ignorance. Its hard not to conclude that if everyone in the US and the UK was brought face to face with the reality described by these soldiers then the occupation would end tomorrow.

The testimonies include the following:

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned... [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little two-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs and she has a bullet through her leg... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me... like asking me why. You know, 'Why do I have a bullet in my leg?'... I was just like, 'This is, this is it. This is ridiculous'."
Specialist Michael Harmon, 24, of Brooklyn, 167th Armour Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In Al-Rashidiya on 13-month tour beginning in April 2003

"Here's some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK47, decides he's going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds..."
- Sergeant Patrick Campbell, 29, of Camarillo, California, 256th Infantry Brigade. In Abu Gharth for 11 months beginning November 2004

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'... [Only when we got home] in... meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."
- Specialist Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry. In Baquba for a year beginning February 2004

"[The photo] was very graphic... They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got a spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and smiling."
- Specialist Aidan Delgado, 25, of Sarasota, Florida, 320th Military Police Company. Deployed to Talil air base for one year beginning April 2003

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
- Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. Four-month tour in Baghdad and Mosul beginning December 2004

"I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people. The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with, and everybody else be damned."
- Sergeant Ben Flanders, 28, National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, 172nd Mountain Infantry. In Balad for 11 months beginning March 2004

You can read the full Nation article here.

Whilst the Iraqis are clearly the primary victims, reading the article brings home the inescapable fact that many if not most of the US troops are victims of the war as well, at one level or another. As well as killing and destroying, war also dehumanises, as Sergeant Flanders, quoted above, testifies. Moreover, long after they have gone home, the experiences of these men and women will continue to unpick the seams that would otherwise hold them together emotionally and psychologically. Inevitably these veterans - including those guilty of the worst atrocities - will bear the scars of their experiences for years to come. For many, this will mean the breakdown of their lives, their families, their health and their careers.

And while these multifarious breakdowns occur, the veterans will not necessarily be able to rely on the support of the state that sent them to war in the first place (which is true of British servicepeople as well). This makes rather a grim mockery of the "support the troops" refrain so beloved of politicians whose cynicism appears to extend to using those troops as collatoral for emotional blackmail in order to shut down debate on the wars those men and women have been sent to fight and possibly to die in.

The gory reality of war is not a new revelation. Rather, it is something that those who control the flow of information in our societies would rather we ignored or forgot. But the reality remains, and remains a reality that, via our votes, our taxes and above all our acquiescence, we are ourselves complicit in. With any luck these testimonies will serve not only as a reminder of this, but also as a spur to greater action aimed at ending the status of aggressive war as a favoured foreign policy tool of government.

Iraq: "the oil conspiracy theory"

"...the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it."
Tony Blair, 6 Feb 2003

"The Australian defence minister today triggered a political storm when he suggested that protecting Iraq's huge oil reserves was a reason for the continuing deployment of foreign troops in the war-torn country.

Brendan Nelson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Iraq was "an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world, and Australians ... need to think what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq"."
Oil a factor in Iraq conflict, says Australian defence minister, Guardian Unlimited Website, 5 July 2005

Oops.

To be honest, today's embarrassing remarks from the Australian Defence Minister could be safely filed in the "no s**t" category (together with news of the Bear's lavatorial rituals and the chosen religion of Joseph Ratzinger) if the likes of Tony Blair hadn't been repeatedly insulting our intelligence with their shrill denials that Iraq's having probably the second or third largest oil reserves on the planet had anything to do with the...er..mission to "bring democracy" to Iraq. Methinks the laddie doth protest too much. But given that he, and so many others, insist on maintaining this charade, the bleeding obvious will have to be stated and re-stated. So, let me repeat what I said last year:

"At a point in history where extraction of the world’s finite oil reserves may soon peak and fall away, just as the economies of two of the world’s most populous nations – India and China – are growing at breakneck speed, thus putting massive new demands on those dwindling resources, control over energy reserves constitutes “critical leverage” over one’s rivals, in the words of former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, or “veto power” in the words of Cold War era US diplomat George Kennan, and is therefore a prize that Washington cannot afford to lose if it is to fulfil its aim of maintaining permanent global dominance, as set out in its 2002 National Security Strategy. Securing a long-term military presence in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest oil reserves and lies in the centre of the principal energy producing region, constitutes a decisive step towards achieving that goal."

As Noam Chomsky points out, we have no problem recognising these calculations when examining the behaviour of other countries. US Vice President Dick Cheney for example, recently warned that Russia's oil and gas reserves could be used as "tools of intimidation and blackmail". Of course, the very idea of using the energy reserves under US control "as tools of intimidation and blackmail" wouldn't begin to contemplate the merest possibility of crossing Dick Cheney's mind. Cheney's only wish for the Middle East is to see democracy and human rights blossom througho......well, why go on? You know the script.

As Chomsky observes, "it is unacceptable to attribute rational strategic-economic thinking to one’s own state, which must be guided by benign ideals of freedom, justice, peace, and other wonderful things. That leads back again to a very severe crisis in Western intellectual culture, not of course unique in history, but with dangerous portent."

Only in an intellectual culture where fantasies like "democracy-promotion" are taken for reality, and realities like the standard behaviour patters of nation states are derided as conspiracy theories, could the remarks of the Australian defence minister possibly be described as news. But here we are.

For more on this, see my March 2005 piece, "Iraq, Oil and Conspiracy Theories"

Gordon Brown and Iraq

"There's an odd myth about Gordon Brown. His views on the war in Iraq are said to be unknown. Whether the myth is put out by Brownites to hint that change is imminent or by wishful thinkers on both left and right who desperately hope for a new Downing Street line on the Iraq disaster, it has no substance.It is not just that Brown was a member of the cabinet that decided on war. There is plenty of contemporary evidence that he was a wholehearted supporter, rather than a man who acquiesced in silence.

Two days before the House of Commons voted to attack Iraq, Brown endorsed the government case in measured terms on Breakfast With Frost. In cabinet he was more fervent. "Gordon launched a long and passionate statement of support for Tony's strategy," Robin Cook wrote in his memoirs of the last cabinet he attended.

In a dismal hint of his attitude to Europe - Nicolas Sarkozy, please note - Brown joined in the orgy of anti-French rhetoric that Downing Street orchestrated after Jacques Chirac said he was not yet ready to support a UN resolution for war. The then French president's statement saying he would cast a veto "tonight" was distorted into an alleged threat to block such a resolution at any point in the future. "Brown spoke animatedly about what France was saying - no to everything," Clare Short recalled in her memoir of the days leading up to the invasion."

"Brown must seize the day - and break with Bush now", by Jonathan Steele

Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Cheney

Juan Cole right on the money, as is so often the case, describes here two 21st centuries: the actual 21st century and the one in Dick Cheney's mind.

"I caught a clip of Dick Cheney on Sunday saying that "in the 21st century," the US could stay in Iraq and ensure that a stable government was established that could defend itself.

I was struck by his invocation of the 21st century, as though it were automatically on the side of the US, or more especially on the side of American hawks.

The Project for a New American Century was always a project for a new American empire, an empire of the old rickety nineteenth-century sort. Its time passed a long time ago. Peoples of the global south don't have to surrender their independence to European district commissioners anymore. They have enough biopower to forestall that fate. "

read the rest here.

Also today, in the Guardian, Jackie Ashley launches a powerful attack on the rest of the political class for focusing on trivialities like the career of Defence Secretary Des Browne and marginalising discussion of the ongoing carnage in Iraq:

"What matters is the disaster. What matters is the blood dripping into the sand, day after day, week after week. What matters is the obvious thing, the hideous civil war destroying Iraq, and the murders and the bombings, and our complicity in that....We have made this situation, rolled out the pitch on which civil war and terrorism are being played out, and have failed to find any way of binding the wounds we opened. The answers are hard, expensive, and possibly humiliating - they certainly involve dialogue with the Iranians. But that's what the Commons should be debating today, not Des Browne and his stupid inquiry."

I'd make a couple of points on Ashley's article.

Firstly, she praises the elements of the web-based non-mainstream media that have focused on what matters in respect of Iraq and mentions two sites: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count and Iraq Body Count. Of these, she says that the former "confines itself to collating news reports and is therefore, it says itself, undercounting", which is also true of Iraq Body Count, but she neglects to mention that. This is important because she cites the IBC death toll of "between 61,391 and 67,364" whereas the most reliable estimate is probably that published in the Lancet medical journal [pdf] last year which cited a figure of 655,000. The Lancet report, whilst rubbished in public by the government, was privately admitted to have come "close to best practice", using "robust", "tried and tested" methodology which may even have lead to an underestimate according to one adviser.

Secondly, while Ashley characterises the conflict as a civil war, the Lancet report noted that a large proportion of the deaths, in fact most of those whose cause was identifiable, came as a result of coalition air strikes. Plainly the nature of the conflict has changed over the years, but coalition air power is still very much active today, so the meaningful focus that Ashley calls for would have to look at this element as well.

But credit to Ashley for making two compelling and important points that need to be made far more often in mainstream discourse: firstly, that Iraq is first and foremost a tragedy for the Iraqi population (as opposed to a disaster for Western prestige, Tony Blair's legacy or some such triviality) and secondly, for acknowledging that the US-UK share a large part of the responsibility for the sectarian element of the conflict.

The Iran hostage crisis in context

Now that the UK-Iran hostage crisis has come to a close, it is possible to draw a few conclusions on the meaning of what has taken place over the last fortnight. However, standing in the way of our efforts to do so, we will find a broad cross-section of the Western news media which, since the crisis began, have reliably undertaken their standard task of caricaturing and infantilising the official enemy. Much effort has been spent ascribing to Iran the fanaticism, aggression and various other pathologies that constitute the designated framework within which we are told its actions must be understood. These depictions, implicitly or explicitly, have begged the question of how Britain, as a mature and reasonable nation state, can best deal with the unruly children in Tehran and their latest unprovoked tantrum.

These cartoon-like portrayals of the situation may make us feel warm and fuzzy about Western power, and instil suitable levels of contempt for the barbarians on the periphery, but they are unlikely to give us a realistic or productive sense of what has been happening over the last two weeks. Let us then step out of the standard conceptualisation and instead consider an alternative Iranian viewpoint: not that of the half-crazed spoiler of Anglo-Saxon missionary work in the Middle East, but instead as another reasonably rational (though undoubtedly unpleasant) state actor in a volatile region, which volatility presents it with a number of substantial issues to deal with. Using this alternative paradigm, we may approach the situation with fresh eyes and ask ourselves a couple of pertinent questions: what might Iran’s reasons for arresting the British service-people have been, and how have the various actors involved benefited or lost from crisis? To answer these questions through an understanding of a rational Iranian point of view requires an appreciation of the context within which these events have taken place. A look at the relevant history is therefore required.

The historical context

In the broader context of a Persian history that spans over two millennia, the involvement of Britain and the West is a relatively recent chapter, beginning in the late 19th century as Russia and Britain fought for control over Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil reserves in Iran, and the British navy’s switch from coal to oil, drew London and Tehran closer, particularly during the Second World War when Iran was divided between Russia and Britain for the duration of the conflict. In the early 20th century, Britain moved swiftly to secure the Iranian oil concession on favourable terms, enjoying vast profits through the Anglo-Persian oil company (which later became BP) while much of the Iranian population languished in squalor, seeing practically nothing of their nation’s riches.

Britain’s maintained a steady and decisive level of interference in Iranian politics throughout the first half of the 20th century, with the aim of maintaining its control over Iranian oil reserves. This manipulation peaked with the coup of 1953, effected with the US in the lead, that overthrew the elected Iranian prime minister - Mohammad Mossadegh - and replaced him with a repressive dictatorship. Mossadegh’s crime had been to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, inspired by the radical notion that a country’s resources should benefit its own population, not the ruling elite of a distant power. For Britain and the US, such misbehaviour could not go unpunished. As penance, Iran would spend the next quarter century subjected to a reign of state terror under the Shah and his notorious secret police the Savak which Amnesty International described as “beyond belief” and which was backed to the hilt by the US and the UK.

This regime was brought to an end by the revolution of 1979, which ushered in the era of limited democracy compromised by severely authoritarian clerical rule that continues to this day. The West’s antipathy to this new regime is generally put down to the latter being a repressive theocracy that provides backing for international terrorism. To asses this claim, it will suffice to say that such descriptions are even more true of Saudi Arabia, which continues to enjoy a relationship with London and Washington that is unusually close for any state, let alone one of the most brutal on the face of the planet. It is plain that the objection to Iran’s government is not one of principle. If only Iran were our terrorist-backing tyrannical theocracy, it could be far more repressive and have far closer links to far worse terrorists and suffer no adverse repercussions from the West. The problem for London and Washington since 1979, as in the early 1950s, has been Iran’s independence, not its moral character.

As per imperial traditions that long predate the current era of Western pre-eminence, punishment of independent behaviour must be swift and fierce. The centrepiece of the ensuing attempts to discipline this once-again rebellious nation was the West’s backing for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. This included Iraq’s large scale use of chemical weapons, which the West had helped Iraq to acquire, and escalated throughout the war to the point where the US was all but fighting alongside Iraq, providing active and extensive logistical back-up. The war had a profound effect on Iran, which lost hundreds of thousands of its people on the front and in Iraqi attacks on its population centres. The international communities failure to censure Iraq’s illegal war of aggression (note the contrast with the case of Kuwait in 1990) did not go unnoticed in Iran. Nor indeed did the fact that it had been isolated and systematically pulverised over eight devastating years with the material connivance of world’s powers.

Threats and responses

Bringing ourselves up to the present day, Iran has been declared a member of an “axis of evil” by a US government that has unilaterally declared its right to launch “pre-emptive” wars at will, without the approval of the international community or the cover of international law. It has seen this new doctrine put into action by the invasion and occupation by US-led coalitions of two of its major neighbours – Iraq and Afghanistan. Its attempt in 2003 to discuss all outstanding issues with the US with a view to reaching a long term settlement (including over relations with Israel, based on the Arab initiative) was ignored. It is currently being pursued through the Security Council by the West over its alleged nuclear weapons programme, despite a fatwa from the Supreme Leader banning the production of nuclear weapons and no evidence that his ruling is being transgressed. It is informed repeatedly that the US takes “no options off the table” in dealing with this much alleged but still unproven threat. It is also accused repeatedly, and again without serious substantiation, of aiding insurgent attacks on US forces in Iraq.

With global demand for oil sharply increasing just as global production comes close to its projected historical peak, Iran finds itself sitting atop a strategic and material prize – its carbon energy reserves – whose value to the world’s powers has never been greater. Those powers that have most aggressively pursued Iran’s wealth and sought the subjugation of its government are visibly manoeuvring themselves into diplomatic, political and military positions that a rational Tehran could only find threatening in the extreme. Putting the diplomatic and political scenes to one side, on a military level Iran is currently surrounded by US forces and/or allies, in Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states. And as talk of US air strikes against Iran continues, with the strength of the Fifth fleet in the Persian Gulf increasing incrementally and with that fleet conducting “war games” simulating an assault on Iran, only the most reckless Iranian politician could refuse to see war as at least a realistic prospect.

To appreciate the Iranian perspective, we need only imagine that this history were our history, that this regional and political landscape were our own and that our nation were faced with hostile foreign powers whose raw military strength was so out of proportion to that available to us. In such a situation, any government whether liberal or authoritarian would view the fact and nature of the threat in much the same way, and could expect the population to share this view.

How then would a rational state deal with this situation? Its task would be to defend itself, but also to remain conscious of the disparity of forces available to it compared to its antagonists. It could not, unlike either of the superpowers in the Cold War for example, rely on the threat of massive retaliation to preclude any attack. It would therefore need to search for asymmetric methods of deterrence; a way to warn the unwelcome presence on its doorstep that any attempt to forcibly cross the threshold would carry risks sufficient to deter such action. All of the above principles apply both to the military and to the diplomatic scenarios faced by Iran.

In fact, significant asymmetric engagement between Iran and the West has been occurring over several months, perhaps even years. The fact that we have not heard so much of it in the West – let alone the howls of righteous indignation we’ve been treated to the past fortnight – is doubtless because it has been Iran on the receiving end of these efforts and not Britain or the United States. American troops have been detaining Iranians in Iraq in increasing numbers over recent months, including Iranian diplomats present in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government (demonstrating where true power really lies in the Middle East’s newest democracy). In addition, several credible sources report that the West is constantly violating Iran’s territorial integrity. These have been said to include pilotless drone flights, US pursuit of “suspected insurgents” into Iran, and the backing of ethnic separatist terrorist groups within Iran whose activity the West hopes will destabilise the regime.

Losing at chess

In the context set out above, it appears that Iran’s arrest of the British service-people was aimed at drawing a line in the sand. To take similar action with US personnel would have precipitated a crisis that probably could not have been prevented from escalating into armed conflict. In addition, the disputed border in the Shatt al-Arab waterway offered a safety valve whereby the dispute could have been ended by being put down to a simple misunderstanding. Indeed, it was not clear (and, given the disputed nature of the border, could not have been clear, contrary to both London and Tehran’s claims) whether the British service-people were in Iranian or Iraqi territorial waters at the time of their arrest. But what was clear throughout was both Iran’s desire to see its territorial sovereignty respected and its willingness and ability to enforce that sovereignty.

Beyond this, a more important message was being sent by Iran: that it can apply pressure as well as receive it. Britain will now be painfully aware of the vulnerability of its troops should a US-Iran war break out. It will know of Iran’s deep ties with its Shia co-religionists in Iraq, and it will know that any US attack on Iran, even if Britain’s support was only of the diplomatic and political variety, would result in Iranian countermeasures-by-proxy that would see its troops dying or disappearing across Iraq in numbers not seen since 2003. None of this was a secret before, but the point has been well underlined.

But more striking than this for British officials will be manner in which Iran has demonstrated the shallowness of London’s international alliances and the limits of its strength on the world stage vis a vis Iran. This culminated in the rare sight of a visib