The Rag Blog

Donald Kerr, the second in command at the Director of National Intelligence office, gave a public speech in October saying that anonymity is gone and that privacy is best understood as what rules and oversight restrict what the government can do with information about you, as the AP reported this weekend.

Essentially, he’s arguing that if you are willing to go online – thus sharing some information with at least your ISP, you should be fine with the intelligence community watching what you do, because the government has privacy boards and ISPs do not.

The AP story on that statement (.pdf) has created a media stir, given that Kerr is the number two official in the intelligence community– which is supposed to spy on foreigners, not Americans. But this is a post-9/11 spy bureaucracy that willingly targeted Americans for surveillance without getting court approval as the law requires.

It’s also a pretty clear statement of how the administration and the heads of the intelligence community think government surveillance of Americans should work.

[I]n our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Anonymity results from a lack of identifying features. Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I’m just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment.

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured.

When Congress passed the so-called Protect America Act this summer, it gave the government the power to order all ISPs, email providers, VOIP phone companies and instant messaging services to turn over all communications that involve at least one person thought to be outside the United States to the government.

The intelligence community also seems to think that it can look at Americans’ phone records and the To and From lines in emails to mine for terrorists, without implicating privacy rights.

In the Q&A after his Oct 23, 2007 speech at the GOE-INT Symposium, Kerr questions why it is that individuals are okay with having their emails handled by an ISP – with the threat of an insider looking at the e-mails, with having the federal government – with strong privacy rules

I was taken by a thing that happened to me at the FBI, where I also had electronic surveillance as part of my responsibility. And people were very concerned that the ability to intercept emails was coming into play. And they were saying, well, we just can’t have federal employees able to touch our message traffic. And the fact that, for that federal employee, it was a felony to misuse the data – it was punishable by five years in jail and a $100,000 fine, which I don’t believe has ever happened – but they were perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an ISP who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data. It struck me as an anomalous situation.

Hmm. Suppose there was a rogue employee at your ISP who got access to your internet traffic. The worst case scenario I can think of for most people is that that person might try to blackmail you. As for stealing your credit card, its far more likely this would happen at a restaurant or a retail store.

What can’t your ISP do that an intelligence service can?

* Arrange to have you sent to a country like Syria to have you tortured like the government did to Maher Arar. Though the Canadians have since apologized and paid him $10 million for being tortured for almost a year, the U.S. government hides its culpability using the “state secrets privilege”

* Put you on a government watch list

* Find a tenuous connection between you and suspected bad guys in order to justify further surveillance

* Find a way to nail you for material support to terrorism

* Build secret files on Americans’ First Amendment-protected political activities

* Use those files to round up dissidents in the event of an “emergency”

In other words, this Administration – of which Kerr is only a small player – believes that the nation’s spooks microphones and data-mining robots should be inserted deep into the nation’s telephone and internet infrastructure. They don’t want court oversight, they don’t want Congress asking questions, they don’t want inspectors general crawling through their program logs. They think that they should have this power because they promise not to abuse it and there are laws prohibiting some of the things on that list.

They believe that they, unlike the Nixon Administration, won’t be tempted to create an domestic enemies list. That they won’t start adding groups like Food, Not Bombs and Quakers to terror data bases (only the Pentagon could be so stupid). That they won’t make mistakes and transpose phone digits when doing phone surveillance (only the FBI could be so careless.) That they won’t confuse Tuttle for Buttle, or Senator Ted Stevens’ wife Catherine for notorious terrorist Cat Stevens.

I’m not saying that the Administration is creating an enemies list. Or that they are using their extraordinary surveillance powers for anything other than good-faith anti-terrorism work.

Take a Look at Professor Roubini’s Crystal Ball.

Reality has finally caught up to the stock market. The American consumer is underwater, the banks are buried in debt, and the housing market is in terminal distress. The Dow is now below its 200-Day Moving Average — the first big “sell” signal. Anything below 12,500 could trigger program-trading and crash the market. The increased volatility suggests that we are watching a “real time” meltdown.

International Business editor for the UK Telegraph, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, summed up yesterday’s action in the Asian markets:

“The global credit crisis has hit Asia with a vengeance for the first time, triggering a massive flight to safety as investors across the region pull out of risky assets. Yields on three-month deposits in China and Korea have plummeted to near 1pc in a spectacular fall over recent days, caused by panic withdrawals from money market funds and credit derivatives.

“‘This’ is a severe warning sign,’ said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas. ‘Asia ignored the credit crunch in August but now we’re seeing the poison beginning to paralyze the whole global economy.'” (Credit ‘Heart attack’ engulfs China and Korea” Ambrose Evans Pritchard,UK Telegraph,)

The credit storm that began in the United States with subprime mortgages has spread to markets across the globe. In fact, the train has already crashed. What we’re seeing now is the boxcars piling up on top of each other.

On Tuesday Chinese government officials ordered a complete halt to bank lending to slow the speculative frenzy that has created an enormous equity bubble in the stock market. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Chinese authorities are slamming the brakes on bank lending, in their latest attempt to curb the runaway investment threatening to overheat what is soon to be the world’s third-largest economy. In recent weeks, regulators have quietly ordered China’s commercial banks to freeze lending through the end of the year, according to bankers in several cities. The bankers say that to comply, they are canceling loans and credit lines with businesses and individuals.” (“China freezes lending to Curb Investing Frenzy” Wall Street Journal)

The move illustrates how concerned the Chinese are that a slowdown in US consumer spending will trigger a crash on the Shanghai stock market. It also shows that the Chinese are having difficulty dealing with the inflation generated by the hundreds of billions of US dollars absorbed via the trade imbalance with the US. China is awash in USDs and that surplus is causing a steady rise in food and energy costs. This could be mitigated by allowing their currency to “float” freely. But a sudden, steep increase in the Chinese yuan’s value could also send the world headlong into a global recession. For now, the lending freeze and price fixing appear to be the way out.

Another sign that the markets have reached a “tipping point” appeared in a Reuters article on Wednesday; “Interbank Covered Bond Trading Halted on Volatility”:

“Renewed credit turmoil and volatility led the European Covered Bond Council (ECBC) on Wednesday to suspend inter-bank market-making in covered bonds until Monday, Nov. 26.

The move is a sign of the stress in the covered bond market, which is dominated by German institutions that have almost a trillion euros of covered bonds outstanding.

Covered bonds — backed by pools of assets that remain on the borrower’s balance sheet — are usually highly liquid and typically rated triple-A by ratings agencies. The ECBC’s recommendation is aimed at relieving the pressure on market makers who are forced to quote prices at a fixed bid-offer spread.

“In light of the current market situation and in order to avoid undue over-acceleration in the widening of spreads, the 8-to-8 Market-Makers & Issuers Committee recommends that inter-bank market-making be suspended,” the ECBC said in a release.”

Note: This isn’t mortgage-backed junk that’s being sold, but highly liquid bonds that are usually easy to cash in. The ECBC’s action is a sign of pure desperation and indicates that credit paralysis has infected the entire euro banking system.

Reuters: “Due to general market conditions and the specific mechanics of the inter-dealer market making it even seems possible that inter-dealer market making will not be resumed this year.”

That’s bad. The mechanism for converting covered bonds into cash has broken down.

The dollar took another pasting on Wednesday, sliding to $1.49 on the euro; another new record. Gold shot up to $814 per ounce. Oil continues to flirt with the $100 per barrel mark, and the yen rose to 107 per dollar forcing a sell-off of hedge fund assets levered through the carry trade.

Jon Basile, economist at Credit Suisse, summed it up like this: “There’s a heck of a lot of bad news out there.” Indeed.

In California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined with four mortgage lenders to freeze adjustable interest rates (ARMs) for some of the state’s highest-risk borrowers; another unprecedented move. The Governor hopes to avoid a collapse of the California real estate market which has gone into a tailspin. Home sales have plummeted more than 40 per cent for the last two months. Prices have dropped sharply—roughly 12 per cent statewide. New construction has slowed to a crawl. Layoffs are steadily rising. Jumbo loans (mortgages over $417,000) have been put on the “Endangered Species” list. Even qualified borrowers can’t get mortgages. Nothing is selling. California housing is “off the cliff”.

Schwarzenegger’s plan to keep over-extended subprime mortgage-holders in their homes faces an uncertain future. What incentive is there for homeowners to continue paying exorbitant monthly rates when their payments are not applied to the principle? The homeowners would be better off bailing out, accepting foreclosure, and starting over with a clean slate.

It’s unrealistic to thinks that Schwarzenegger can stop the tidal wave of foreclosures that are sweeping across the state. An estimated 3 million homeowners will lose their homes nationwide.

If you want to blame someone; blame Alan Greenspan. He’s the one who created this mess. According to the economist Mike Shedlock:

“The Fed caused the credit crunch by slashing interest rates to 1 per cent to bail out its banking buddies in the wake of a dotcom bubble collapse. All the Fed did was create a bigger bubble. This bubble is so big in fact that it cannot even be bailed out. It’s the end of the line for a serially bubble blowing Fed.

“So not only was this the biggest credit bubble in history, this was also the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the already enormously wealthy. That is the real travesty of justice regardless of whether or not the price tag is $1 trillion, $2 trillion, or $10 trillion.” (Mike Shedlock, “Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis”)

The problem has gotten so serious that even Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, is putting up red flags. Last week, Paulson ignited a sell-off on Wall Street when he made this statement:

“The nature of the problem will be significantly bigger next year because 2006 [mortgages] had lower underwriting standards, no amortization, and no down payments….We’re never going to be able to process the number of workouts and modifications (to mortgages) that are going to be necessary doing it just sort of one-off. I’ve talked to enough people now to know that there’s no way that’s going to work.”

The desperation is palpable. Like Schwarzenegger, Paulson is trying to get mortgage-lenders to provide a safety net for struggling borrowers who are defaulting on their loans.

Paulson is calling for emergency legislation that will allow the Federal Housing Administration to play a greater role in the relief effort. The FHA has already expanded its traditional role by taking on hundreds of billions in extra debt just to keep a few “private” mortgage lenders and banks from going bankrupt. Of course, when Paulson’s plan goes kaput and the debts pile up; it’ll be the taxpayer that foots the bill.

“Paulson also called the Senate’s failure to pass legislation overhauling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac frustrating,” saying that the two government-sponsored entities need to be playing a bigger role in the housing market.

“If we ever need them it’s during times like today, and they’re most valuable when there is distress in the mortgage market,” he said. “I’d like to see them playing an even bigger role.”(Wall Street Journal)

Fannie and Freddie, have already posted enormous quarterly losses and don’t have the capital reserves to put millions of subprime mortgage-holders under their “government-sponsored” umbrella. Paulson is just grabbing at straws.

Similar troubles are brewing in the broader market where late-payments and defaults have spread to credit card debt and new car loans. Every area of “securitized” debt has suddenly veered off the road and into the ditch. Last week the Fed injected more credit into the teetering banking system than anytime since 9-11.

No one has predicted the downward-spiral in the market more accurately than Nouriel Roubini. Roubini is a Professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. His analysis appears regularly on his blogsite, Global EconoMonitor. Last week’s prediction was particularly dire and is worth reprinting here:

“It is increasingly clear by now that a severe U.S. recession is inevitable in next few months…I now see the risk of a severe and worsening liquidity and credit crunch leading to a generalized meltdown of the financial system of a severity and magnitude like we have never observed before. In this extreme scenario whose likelihood is increasing we could see a generalized run on some banks; and runs on a couple of weaker (non-bank) broker dealers that may go bankrupt with severe and systemic ripple effects on a mass of highly leveraged derivative instruments that will lead to a seizure of the derivatives markets… massive losses on money market funds with a run on both those sponsored by banks and those not sponsored by banks; ..ever growing defaults and losses ($500 billion plus) in subprime, near prime and prime mortgages with severe knock-on effect on the RMBS and CDOs market; massive losses in consumer credit (auto loans, credit cards); severe problems and losses in commercial real estate…; the drying up of liquidity and credit in a variety of asset backed securities putting the entire model of securitization at risk; runs on hedge funds and other financial institutions that do not have access to the Fed’s lender of last resort support; a sharp increase in corporate defaults and credit spreads; and a massive process of re-intermediation into the banking system of activities that were until now altogether securitized.” (Nouriel Roubini’s Global EconoMonitor)

“A generalized meltdown of the financial system”.

Looks like Chicken Little might have gotten it right this time; “The sky IS falling.”

11/24/07 “ICH” — — – I wish I had a nickel for every time a conservative told a lie in order to sell an ideology that would otherwise be hopelessly unappealing.

But, then, what the hell would I do with ten kazillion, trillion, dollars? I wouldn’t know how to spend that much loot.

These lies are legend, and they’re endlessly retold. Everything from the one about the liberal bias in the media, or the one about Ronald Reagan ending the Cold War, to the one about how the private sector is so much more efficient than the government. And how about Saddam’s arsenal of WMD, eh? Or the tax cuts that weren’t going to drive the federal government into deficit? Or remember when George Bush told us that the war in Iraq was over, before it had even really started? Or the bit about how global warming is just a great big conspiracy among those noted well-known cabalists, er … climatology scientists?

I’m only just getting started here, but you get the point. If you’re a conservative you basically have two choices – lie or lose. ‘Cause if you tell the truth, no one in his or her right mind would buy the garbage you’re peddling.

The list of lies is endless, but my personal favorite is the one about how conservatism is the ideology of freedom, and specifically freedom from an overweening, intrusive, liberty-stealing, nanny-state government.

Sometimes when I hear that howler, I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not off in some virtual reality world (like ‘Liberty’ University, or the Republican national convention) somewhere. Because, clearly, between me and the well-programmed fool mouthing these hopeless inanities, one of us is, that’s for sure.

But I’ll tell you what, if conservatism is the ideology of freedom – then I’m the Queen of England. And, one thing you can be sure of is that I’m not the Queen of England. I don’t even have the right parts and pieces, and the only crown I’ve ever worn was given to me forty years ago by some pimply-faced teenager working the cash register at Burger King. Somehow, I don’t think that counts.

Meanwhile, here’s what I’d like to know:

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who fought against the American Revolution?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to take that freedom away from us, especially women and minorities? Why did they fight against the effort to end slavery, or to give women and minorities the vote, or to protect them from discrimination? Why are they still supporting efforts to disenfranchise minorities?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who bitterly opposed the New Deal at a time when Americans were ravaged by the Great Depression and the only freedom they were desperately seeking was from unemployment, starvation, humiliation and death? We should give thanks for their efforts ever since then, though, as they’ve been kind enough to keep trying to liberate seniors from the hell of receiving their Social Security benefits, bravely volunteering Wall Street to carry that burden instead.

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always propping up foreign dictators, like Saddam, Musharraf, Mubarak, Marcos, Pinochet, the Shah, Batista, the House of Saud and apartheid South Africa? Why did they, in some of these cases, secretly topple democratically elected governments to install repressive regimes, which they then assisted in the torturing of their own citizens? Exactly which definition of ‘freedom’ does that fall under?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to control other people’s sexuality? Why are conservatives always telling us whom we can sleep with and what we can do in bed, even including whether we can use birth control?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to make sure that the state takes control of women’s bodies, denying them reproductive choice and freedom?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to tell us who we can marry? How come they believe that the state – which they always seem to hate, except when it is at war – should be able to make that most personal decision for us?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always blocking the environmental regulations which are the only hope to keep our bodies free from carcinogens and other harmful effects?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who refuse to allow us to use medical marijuana when we are suffering the effects of chemotherapy, and even perhaps at risk of dying from the wasting it causes?

Indeed, if conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are limiting the freedom of individuals to use drugs of any sort? If people want to use these substances and can do so without harming others, why do conservatives insist on restricting that freedom?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who refuse to allow us to die with dignity when we have a terminal disease, instead thrusting the state into the most personal and private decision a human being can make?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who passed an act of Congress intervening in the personal family tragedy of Terri Schiavo, with the president of the United States – the same one who couldn’t be bothered to come off vacation to deal with the 9/11 threat or the Katrina disaster – flying across the country to sign it?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are denying many of us the freedom to live by forbidding the stem-cell research that would likely produce cures to all manner of diseases now killing of millions of us every year?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are loading up our children with mountains of debt that the federal government has borrowed under the stewardship of such notorious liberals as Ronald Reagan (who quadrupled the national debt) and George W. Bush (who borrowed more money from foreign governments than all 42 of his predecessors, combined)? Right now, every eighteen year-old just starting a payroll job owes $60,000, and rising, plus interest, as their share of the nine trillion dollars conservatives have been especially instrumental in running up as national debt. What kind of freedom, exactly, does that represent? Assuming (quite ‘conservatively’) that that number rises to $100,000 before it is paid off, and that our young friend earns ten bucks an hour, it is the freedom to work five solid years, bringing home zero dollars after taxes, to do nothing whatsoever but paying off his share of the conservative binge.

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who have taken the very lives of four thousand of our soldiers for a war based completely on lies? This same war has left tens of thousands of Americans gravely wounded, likely more than a million Iraqi civilians dead, and well over four million more Iraqis as refugees from the violence. What kind of freedom is this? The freedom from having to be alive and well? The freedom to serve three and four rotations of extended tours in the hell of Iraq, keeping our military personnel safe from their nagging mothers-in-law at home?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are so anxious to take away our civil liberties, the most important of American freedoms, as enshrined in one of the greatest statements of freedom ever, the Bill of Rights? What happened to habeas corpus – a freedom dating back almost a thousand years – or the right to an attorney, or to have a trial, or to be protected from search and seizure without a judicially-issued warrant based on probable cause, or protection from torture? What happened to all those freedoms? What happened is that conservatives came to town and erased them.

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always trying to have the government jam their religion down our throats, in direct opposition to the intentions of the Founders? The United States Constitution makes precisely the same number of references to the Christian god as it does to the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Zoroastrian. That would be none. What kind of freedom is it for everyone’s tax dollars to support one group’s religion, or for our government to impose a single religion on all of us?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are always telling me I should leave the country if I don’t approve the latest war for lies they’ve cooked up? How exactly does ’shut-up or leave’ qualify as freedom of speech?

If conservatism is the ideology of freedom, how come they’re the ones who are constantly attempting to turn the executive branch of the federal government into a monarchy? By using signing statements, endless claims of executive privilege, lack of congressional oversight when they controlled Congress, thwarted oversight when they didn’t, and unprecedented levels of secrecy, they have shredded the fundamental doctrine of separated powers checking and balancing against each other. Since those ideas – the most basic concept of the Constitution – are intended to keep us safe from governments that would steal our liberties, just how is it that conservatism is the ideology of freedom?

Any one of these inconvenient truths, let alone the sum of all of them, demonstrate the absurdity of this claim. Not only is it ridiculous to call a conservatism that at every turn seeks to limit you – in what you can say, what you can ingest, who you can sleep with, marry, and even when you can end your own life – the ideology of freedom, but the only real conclusion that one can honestly come to on the basis of this historical record is of course just the opposite: Conservatism is, and has almost always been, the ideology of oppression – the very opposite of freedom.

When Americans wanted liberty from the British crown, conservative Tories not only in Britain but here as well fought to block that freedom. When ‘radicals’ sought to emancipate the slaves, conservatives fought to keep them in chains. When progressives later sought equality for women and blacks, it was conservatives who stood in the doorways blocking entrance. And, today, as we seek justice and fairness for all people regardless of their sexual orientation, it is – wait for it, now – the conservative movement which not only resists that effort at every turn, but in fact shamefully turns their homophobia into a tool used to win elections, just as they have been doing with racism for forty years now.

Indeed, you have to be more or less deaf, dumb and blind – or perhaps simply watching Fox every night for your ‘news’ (which produces the same result) – to buy into this rhetoric from the theater of the absurd. Let me reiterate: If you think these monsters who are depriving you of your liberties at every opportunity represent freedom, then you need to bow, scrape and walk backwards in my presence, as a sign of respect for the British crown. I’ll take a bunch of your money, too. Palaces aren’t cheap to maintain, buddy.

Yeah, sure, it’s true that conservatives will be right there for you if you want the freedom to buy guns and ammo, including ‘cop-killer’ bullets, assault rifles (to nail those most obstinate of pheasants, of course), or a fifty caliber rifle capable of bringing down a jumbo jet, and advertised as such in its sales literature. Of course, along with the freedom to buy these weapons (and how come, if the Second Amendment protects the bearing of “arms”, not ‘guns’, I can’t also legally buy cannons, napalm and tactical nuclear warheads – just in case the neighborhood gets a little rowdy?), also comes the lovely ‘freedom’ to join the 35,000 or so Americans every year who become very stiff corpses as a result of the massive proliferation of weapons in which America uniquely specializes. Perhaps you’d rather live in Europe, eh, enjoying being alive? Well, for the rest of you non-sissies out there, conservatives have made sure that you have the freedom to take your bullet along with you when you’re buried. What cheese-eating Frenchman ever had that freedom?

Conservatives are also busy making sure that there is plenty of freedom for corporations to pollute the land, water and air we depend on for survival. Regulation is bad, you see. Very bad. It’s much better to have freedom – including your freedom to get sick, or to live in a world careering toward global disaster – than it would be to impede on the freedom of the super-rich to make themselves super-duper-rich.

No need to worry too much about the health implications of global warming, arsenic or radioactive waste, though. Chances are you won’t live long enough to get killed this way, or to be shot by somebody whose freedom to own a gun has been well protected by nice right-wing people. That’s because conservatives are also on the front-lines in the lonely battle fighting to make sure that you have the opportunity to join the more than 47 million Americans free from having healthcare coverage, or the many tens of millions more whose policies are insufficient to keep them alive. Don’t you feel good knowing you’re free from the evils of ’socialized’ medicine? Isn’t profit-driven corporate non-care so much better? Forget about “Give me liberty or give me death”. Now you can have both!

One thing you can’t argue about, however, is that it is conservatives who will keep your taxes down. Right? Well, yeah, if you mean this year. And if you mean nickels and dimes. But then, by applying the same logic, making your house payment on a credit card would be defined as keeping your monthly expenses down. (Of course, since you’re about to lose your house anyhow, as a result of conservative economics, that may be a moot point.) But there’s just these two little problems. One is that the nice people who loan you money invariably want to be paid back. And, two, they want interest on the loans as well. I don’t know who middle-class Americans dreamed would be paying for their meager tax cuts, which – along with massively increased government spending by those paragons of fiscal responsibility, you guessed it, conservatives – were funded by charging it all on the federal plastic, but you can bet America’s creditors know all our addresses. They’ll find us when the bill comes due.

Of course, this is only the beginning. What the tax cuts were really about was shifting the burden of funding government from the wealthy to the middle class, and from today’s generation to tomorrow’s. So, not only will middle class Americans, or their kids, have to pay back everything borrowed these last six years to fund their piddly little tax cuts, plus interest accrued, but they will also be paying for the massive tax cuts that were given to the massively wealthy.

Which, of course, is really what the whole elaborate kabuki dance of conservative ‘freedom’ was ever all about, from the beginning. As one of the greatest political marketing ploys of all time, it used pathetic middle class tax cuts plus supremely ironic restrictions on social and personal liberties to sell a bunch of frightened naifs on the notion that conservatism is the ideology of freedom, all so that the ubër-class could realize their dream kleptocracy in place of a government actually devoted to public service. And, remarkably, it worked – at least for a time.

Don’t you feel better now that you’re free after decades of Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, Cheney, DeLay and Scalia? You’re free to shut up with your unpopular ideas. You’re free from having to make difficult decisions when you’re pregnant. You’re free to be arrested for smoking a joint to keep from vomiting while you’re doing chemotherapy. You’re free from having to worry about which sex you’re going to sleep with or marry. You’re free from protection against guns or from long life in a healthy environment. And when you do get shot or sick, you’re free from adequate medical care. Moreover, should you find yourself stuck with a painful and terminal illness, you’re also free from either stem-cell remedies or your own choice to end your suffering and die with dignity.

You’re also free to fall through the tattered safety net of government programs during a recession or a depression, and you’ll likely be free from making those pesky house payments very much further into the future either. You’re free from wondering whether the rest of the world hates you and your country because it’s been undermining democracies, propping up dictators, and invading oil-rich countries on the basis of completely fabricated war rationales. You’re free from having to pay your taxes today. But you’ll also be free from buying those things you wanted tomorrow, as you’ll instead be paying today’s taxes, interest on those taxes, tomorrow’s taxes, plus the share that the wealthy used to pay.

So whattaya think? Ain’t conservative freedom great?

Next time you hear a conservative ranting about the wonder and joys of freedom, tell them: “Yeah, no kidding, freedom is a really good thing. You’d like it even better if you actually tried it out some time”.

“Suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq’s a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can’t have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world.”

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: ElBaradei, is the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated quite definitively there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. The recent resolution—the Kyle-Lieberman amendment—and the recent U.S. sanctions against Iran, which one of the charges is that Iran has been helping what they call insurgents in Iraq. There’s practically no evidence of that either. Based on what we know as evidence, there’s not a lot of reasons for U.S. policy to be as aggressive right now towards Iran as it is, certainly not for the stated reason. What really does motivate U.S. policy towards Iran?

NOAM CHOMSKY, PROFESSOR OF LINGUISTICS, MIT: Well, if I can make a comment about the stated reasons, the very fact that we’re discussing them tells us a lot about the sort of intellectual culture and moral culture in the United States. I mean, suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq’s a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can’t have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world. So if we invade and occupy another country, then it’s a criminal act for anyone to interfere with it. What about the nuclear weapons? I mean, are there countries with nuclear weapons in the region? Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. The United States gives more support to it than any other country in the world. The Bush administration is trying very hard to push through an agreement that not only authorizes India’s illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons but assists it. That’s what the U.S.-Indo Nuclear Pact is about. And, furthermore, there happens to be an obligation of the states in the Security Council and elsewhere to move towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. Now that would include Iran and Israel and any U.S. forces deployed there. That’s part of Resolution 687. Now to your question. The real reasons for the attack on Iran, the sanctions, and so on go back into history. I mean, we like to forget the history; Iranians don’t. In 1953, the United States and Britain overthrew the parliamentary government and installed a brutal dictator, the Shah, who ruled until 1979. And during his rule, incidentally, the United States was strongly supporting the same programs they’re objecting to today. In 1979, the population overthrew the dictator, and since then the United States has been essentially torturing Iran. First it tried a military coup. Then it supported Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s invasion of Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Then, after that was over, the United States started imposing harsh sanctions on Iran. And now it’s escalating that. The point is: Iran is out of control. You know, it’s supposed to be a U.S.-client state, as it was under the Shah, and it’s refusing to play that role.

JAY: The sanctions that were just issued recently [are] the beginnings of a kind of act of war, this ratcheting up of the rhetoric right at a time when the IAEA is saying, in fact, Iran’s cooperating in the process. But it’s all coming down to this question of does Iran even have its right to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear, which in fact it has, under the non-proliferation treaty. But Bush in his last press conference, where he had his famous World War III warning, has said even the knowledge of having nuclear weapons we won’t permit, never mind a civilian program. This puts U.S. policy on a collision course with the IAEA, with international law.

CHOMSKY: Just a couple of years ago, from 2004 through 2006, Iran did agree to suspend all uranium enrichment, halt even what everyone agrees they’re legally entitled to. That was an agreement with the European Union. They agreed to suspend all uranium enrichment. And in return, the European Union was to provide what were called full guarantees on security issues—that means getting the United States to call off its threats to attack and destroy Iran. Well, the European Union didn’t live up to its obligation, [as] they couldn’t get the U.S. to stop it. So the Iranians then also pulled out and began to return to uranium enrichment. The way that’s described here is– the Iranians broke the agreement.

JAY: The experts are saying, including ElBaradei and others, that if you can enrich uranium to something just under 5%, which is apparently what’s needed for civilian purposes, you’re most of the way there towards the technology of having a bomb, that once you have that enrichment technology, you’re not that much further towards a bomb.

CHOMSKY: Yeah, but that’s true of every developed country in the world. Why pick out Iran? It’s true of Japan, it’s true of Brazil, it’s true of Egypt. And in fact, one could say—here I tend to agree with the Bush administration. In the non-proliferation treaty, there’s an article, Article 4, which says that countries signing the NPT are allowed to develop nuclear energy. Well, okay, that made some sense in 1970, but by now technology has developed enough so that it has reached the point that you describe. When you’ve developed nuclear energy, you’re not that far from nuclear weapons. So, yeah, I think something should be done about that. But that has nothing special to do with Iran. In fact, it’s a much more serious problem for those nuclear weapons states who are obligated under that same treaty to make good faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. And, in fact, there are some solutions to that. ElBaradei had proposed a couple of years ago that no states should develop weapons-grade materials: all high enrichment should be done by an international agency, maybe the IAEA or something else, and then countries should apply to it. If they want enriched uranium for nuclear energy, the international agency should determine whether they’re doing it for peaceful means. As far as I’m aware, there’s only one country that formally agreed to ElBaradei’s proposal. That was Iran. And there’s more. I mean, there’s an international treaty, called the Fissban, to ban production of fissile materials except under international control. The United States has been strongly opposed to that, to a verifiable treaty. Nevertheless, it did come to the General Assembly, the U.N. Disarmament Commission in the General Assembly, which overwhelmingly voted in favour of it. The disarmament commission vote was, I think, 147 to 1, the United States being the 1. Unless a verifiable fissile materials treaty is passed and implemented, the world very well may move towards nuclear disaster.

JAY: Do you think we’re actually moving towards a military confrontation? Or are we seeing a game of brinksmanship?

CHOMSKY: Well, whether purposely or not, yes, we’re moving towards a military confrontation.

Some stories, as horrific as they are, need to be read by everyone. This is one of them.

11/24/07 “SMH” — — Ombeni is late. School starts in 20 minutes and she still has to get her son Daniel’s books sorted, make his lunch and do a few odd jobs around the house. Her home is a two-room mud shack, in a honeycombed complex of corrugated iron and twisted branches dug into the hills surrounding Bukavu, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

It’s a half hour’s walk from her front door to Daniel’s school, where she fixes his collar and kisses him goodbye. He gives a quick look around to make sure none of his classmates is looking, and returns her affection. Ombeni continues her journey another kilometre down the road, to her own classroom. This is her first year back at school, and her headmaster says she is a model pupil: “If only everyone was like her.”

By rights, Ombeni should be nearing the end of her university life, perhaps fending off marriage requests or applying for teaching posts in the city. But her schooling, and her life’s journey, were brutally interrupted almost five years earlier.

Back then she was a typical 15-year-old with dreams of university and a better life. Her home was a village in the countryside, where, when she wasn’t studying, she helped in the fields. It was while out working one evening that rebel forces captured her carefree innocence. For months she became their slave, both sexual and physical, as they lived in various wooded compounds along the Rwandan border. Heavily pregnant, and near death from lack of food, the rebels returned her to her village so her parents could watch her die.

But she didn’t, and now, five years on, she is picking up the pieces of a fragmented life.

It hasn’t been easy. Locals are wary of her son, thinking he will grow up and assume the same characteristics as his father. Ombeni says she can feel suspicious eyes on her every time they step outside, and unless she can get Daniel away from the village, she fears for his safety.

Daniel is oblivious, as any four-year-old should be. He likes school and gets on well with everyone in the playground. Next year his mother will start training to be a teacher. Two years after that, she hopes to have enough money to leave the village and get a house somewhere safe. A fresh start. Despite everything, she considers herself fortunate. For an increasing population of silent victims though, life in DRC has become a hellish pattern of sexual and physical torment. Along the eastern border region, a daily horror show is playing itself out, bolstered by the ambivalence of the world and the political vacuum created by decades of regional conflict.

The perpetrators include the Interahamwe, the Hutu fighters who fled neighbouring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a random assortment of armed civilians; even United Nations peacekeepers, and increasingly, local civilians.

Christine Schuler Deschryver, who works for a German aid organisation and has been a staunch and stubborn advocate for victims, says the perpetrators are difficult to identify. “All of them are raping women,” she says, “It is a country sport. Any person in uniform is an enemy to women.”

The problems have their roots in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when thousands of victims and perpetrators fled across the border. Upwards of 10,000 Rwandan rebel forces remained, living in forested areas and terrorising local populations at their will. Rwanda doesn’t want them back, and even if they did, many refuse to return. The Congolese Army, it seems, has neither the collective heart nor the political will to forcibly remove them, and with many soldiers not receiving pay for months on end, they too are guilty of looting and pillaging. So the forces remain, intent on the sexual and social destruction of the local population.

So far they are succeeding on a spectacular scale. For those who are apprehended, there is little impunity, thanks to antiquated gender laws. The attacks grow more numerous and sadistic by the day and the normalisation of sexual violence continues largely unabated.

“Darfur is nothing compared to what’s going on in the Congo,” says Schuler Deschryver, who despite constant death threats, continues to raise the plight of Congolese women. “My father was the founder of the National Park in Rwanda, which is home to rare silver back gorillas. During the war here, just one silver back was killed. And when it happened, within 48 hours millions in funding was sent to ensure the rest of the gorilla population was protected. Why isn’t the same done with our women? I’ll tell you why, because in the eyes of the international community animals have more value than humans in this part of the world.”

Schuler Deschryver’s anger is also felt a few kilometres away, on the outskirts of Bukavu, where Dr Denis Mukwege, an obstetrician for more than 20 years, tries to deal with the aftermath of sexual violence. He runs Panzi Hospital, set up in 1999 in response to the emergency crisis after the so-called African war; it houses more than 350 patients. Each day, 10 new cases are admitted, some as young as nine, so badly damaged that reconstructive surgery is often required. The victims sit on benches, lining urine-soaked corridors, alone and frightened. On eye contact, there is nothing. No expression, no acknowledgement, no smiles – just a fleeting confirmation that behind their eyes, a pained suffering lies deep.

Mukwege can’t say for certain if the attacks are on the increase. In general, the hospital estimates it sees just 10 per cent of all sexual violence victims, but certain patterns are developing. Attackers are now identifiable by their manner of attack: one group, after raping the woman or girl, inserts the barrel of a gun into her vagina and shoots, thus destroying her vagina, bladder, rectum and causing massive blood loss. Some force males at gunpoint to rape mothers or sisters, often in front of the whole community. A large percentage of the attackers are HIV-positive and knowingly try to infect their victims.

These aren’t just random acts of grotesque inhumanity; it is the systematic sexual and social destruction of whole populations in eastern Congo. And little, it seems, is being done to stop it.

“I have seen men literally lost,” Mukwege says. “Emotionally ruined and unable to go on after witnessing the destruction of their wives and the resulting destruction of their families. They are permanently haunted by thoughts going through their head – ‘I raped my wife and family and didn’t stop it.’ Some men flee and abandon their families. In cases where the perpetrators don’t kill their victims outright, they kill them slowly and painfully, not just physically, but psychologically and emotionally. It is the destruction of society.”

British and American journalists have passed through Panzi, yet Mukwege says nothing has changed. The hospital still turns away patients and those responsible for the violence are seldom brought to justice. “I have spoken to everyone from the international media who have visited, but still the rapes continue. I have to keep hope otherwise I’d take off my shirt and stop my work.

“I know the situation can be resolved if people really get involved and international political will is behind it. We cannot ignore what’s happening here and portray it as barbaric African culture, as it is sometimes portrayed.”

The sense of exasperation is palpable, and as Mukwege is called away, victims who have queued outside hobble into the room to tell their stories.

Chibalonza Nsinire, 16, was asleep when the Interahamwe came. After tying her hands, they led her to a forest and over three days, took turns raping her and other women. After being raped, the women were forced to prepare meals for the forces, using food pillaged from their own houses.

Mugoli Muhamiri was expecting wedding guests when she answered a knock at her door six months ago. Instead of relatives, a group of men poured in and began a rampage. She was tied up and the men took turns raping her. From the corner of her eye, she saw her husband’s throat being slit, and two of her children being mutilated. They were two years old. She says she counted seven men raping her, before she lost consciousness. Now she clings to her only surviving child, Stephen, who is unaware of the HIV that infects his mother’s body.

“I have been given great medical support here, but I know one day soon I have to die. I cannot keep the medicine for the HIV in my stomach because I have no food. I feel bad for my child who remains, because he will have no mother and no father. That brings great sorrow to my heart.”

Heavily pregnant 15-year-old Furaha Tajiri is from the Ninja province. The forces came for her at night, tied her hands and started beating her and her parents repeatedly. “I then saw them take my parents and kill them,” she says.

“After that they took me with them to the forest. They started raping me there – I counted 17 who attacked me. I stayed in the forest for six months and each day I was raped by two men.”

Furaha gave birth to a boy the day after telling her tale. She was distraught, and needed food. Without a husband or family, she was only too acutely aware that much hardship lies ahead.

Throughout the eastern Congo, the stories were of the same horrific magnitude. There is little hope and little in the way of happy endings. Words such as rehabilitation and justice are no longer part of the daily vocabulary.

One group trying to help is the Irish aid organisation Trocaire, which believes UN troops should patrol the areas particularly prone to attack and protect vulnerable communities, notably women and girls.

The organisation also believes the DRC Government has a responsibility to seek a solution to the conflict in the east, and to do so while respecting human rights.

For many working on the ground the destruction is total and the task often overwhelming. Efforts to deal with the problem are only grazing the surface, in a country rich in resources but poor on relief. Fewer than 50 non-government organisations ply their trade in eastern Congo, in contrast to Rwanda, which is something of an NGO haven.

In the genocide museum in Kigali, the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is quoted as feeling remorseful towards the atrocities committed in 1994, when 1 million Rwandans died on the UN’s watch. The world could have and should have done more, he infers. Yet 17,000 UN troops are stationed in DRC, and within a stone’s throw of their bases the most vulnerable in that society are being routinely destroyed.

Two months ago, the UN humanitarian chief, John Holmes, visited Panzi, was horrified when he heard the stories and saw the conditions. He also met Christine Schuler Deschryver. Normally an articulate and measured advocate, her diplomatic savvy deserted her. “I told him what is happening here is a holocaust. I was very aggressive. I said, ‘You are in the Congo, so what are you doing? You came to the hospital and like everyone you cry. Like everyone you leave. And like everyone, we never hear from you again.’ ”

Rhetoric flowing out of the White House indicates the Bush administration is planning a military attack on Iran. Officials in Saudi Arabia, a close Bush ally, think the handwriting is on the wall. “George Bush’s tone makes us think he has decided what he is going to do,” according to Rihab Massoud, Prince Bandar ben Sultan’s right-hand man. Saudi Social Affairs Minister Abdel Mohsen Hakas told Le Figaro, “We are getting closer and closer to a confrontation.”

As Bush and Cheney try to whip us into a frenzy about the dangers Iran poses, their argument comes up short. They say Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says there is “no evidence” of this. They say Iran is sending deadly weapons into Iraq to kill U.S. troops, but those devices can be manufactured in any Iraqi machine shop. Now the New York Times reports most of the foreign fighters in Iraq come, not from Iran, but from two Bush allies – Saudi Arabia and Libya. An estimated 90 percent of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. And senior U.S. military officials believe the financial support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia comes primarily from Saudi Arabia.

Yet the Bush/Cheney polemics about Iran continue to escalate. In light of the lack of evidence Iran is actually developing nukes, Bush equated Iranian “knowledge” to make nuclear weapons with World War III. “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III,” he said recently, “it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” This substantially lowers the bar for a U.S. attack on Iran.

A few days after Bush warned of World War III, Cheney called Iran “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” adding, “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences . . . We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” These threats are eerily reminiscent of his rants in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In an unprecedented move, the Bush administration labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. It appears the administration applied that label in an effort to trigger language in the 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. That authorization says, “The President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

Like Bush’s invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran would violate international and U.S. law. The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council. Iran, which has not attacked any country for 2,000 years, hasn’t threatened to invade the United States or Israel. Rather than protecting Israel, U.S. or Israeli military force against Iran will endanger Israel, which would invariably suffer a retaliatory attack.

In making its case against Iran, the administration points to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s alleged comment that Israel should be wiped off the map. But this is an erroneous translation of what he said. According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who said the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole said this “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” Journalist Diana Johnstone points out the quote is not aimed at the Israeli people, but at the Zionist “regime” occupying Jerusalem. “Coming from a Muslim religious leader,” Johnstone wrote, “this opinion is doubtless based on objection to Jewish monopoly of a city considered holy by all three of the Abramic monotheisms.”

It seems significant that support for Ahmadinejad may be waning among the real power brokers in Iran, particularly the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Jomhouri Eslami daily in Iran, which has close ties to Khamenei, has denounced Ahmadinejad’s characterization of those opposed to his nuclear program as traitors.

If the United States attacks Iran, the results would be catastrophic. Three Europeans, including former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Yehuda Atai, a member of the Israeli Committee for a Middle East without Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in Libération, “We are being warned about it from all sides: The United States is at the brink of war, ready to bombard Iran. The only thing lacking is the presidential order.” Drawing parallels with the U.S. war in Iraq, they caution, “An attack against Iran, whatever its targets, its methods and its initial scope, will significantly aggravate the situation, achieving similar results, without even talking about the disastrous impact on the global economy.” They add, “It would be still worse if the insane idea of using tactical nuclear weapons – which exist – to prevent Iran from building, in spite of its denials, the nuclear weapons that recent IAEA inspections have found no trace of, were implemented.”

The threats against Iran appear to be politically motivated. Seymour Hersh’s extensive research has convinced him that Bush/Cheney will invade Iran. They likely think embroiling us in Iran will ensure a GOP victory in 2008. It will certainly make it harder for the next President to withdraw from Iraq once we are mired in Iran.

If Hillary Clinton becomes that next President, she will likely continue Bush’s foreign policy. Clinton, who favors leaving a large contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq, says nothing about disbanding the huge U.S. military bases there. Clinton is also rattling the sabers in Iran’s direction. She voted to urge Bush to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and she, too, misquotes Ahmadinejad about Israel.

As we go to the polls in the coming months, it is imperative we scrutinize the candidates’ positions on Iraq and Iran. The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.

We are living in a very dangerous period in which a predatory superpower has embarked on a series of aggressive wars in rapid succession—three on two different continents during the past decade alone. Not only have these wars violated the UN Charter, and constituted what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson declared at Nuremberg to be “the supreme international crime;” not only has it gotten away with its wars, despite their increasingly destructive and murderous nature; but in waging them, the United States has been able to enlist leaders of the “international community” and United Nations in support of its assaults on distant lands.[1] As the world’s preeminent multilateral organization, the central purpose of which was purportedly to save humankind from the scourge of war, and to ensure that armed force not be used except for the common defense, we find the UN’s role here to be troubling indeed.

This superpower’s wars are opposed by a majority of the world’s population, and often even by a majority of the heavily propagandized citizens of its own country.[2] But popular opinion and voter preferences, even when manifested in national elections, as in November 2006, do not determine policy in the United States. Freed at last from any deterrent of the kind the Soviet Union exercised until its demise, and the kind posed for a more abbreviated period by the civil protests that confronted it on its own streets between 1965 and 1974, the U.S. program of “power projection” proceeds apace. Now it sets its sights on Iran, likely to produce a much wider war and one that quite possibly could involve the use of nuclear weapons.

U.S. wars of aggression are certainly not new, nor is its leaders’ brazen disregard for international law. Greece, Guatemala, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama—these do not exhaust the list of U.S. victims since World War II. What is more, the assumption that international law does not apply to the United States is longstanding. The “propriety of the Cuba quarantine is not a legal issue,” former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained in reference to Kennedy’s naval blockade of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. “The power, position and prestige of the United States had been challenged by another state; and law simply does not deal with such questions of ultimate power.”[3] For Acheson, any U.S. action to counter alleged threats trumps international law, and law cannot be allowed to interfere with the exercise of the “pre-eminent power” of this country. The belief that although law should apply to others, it never applies to the United States, was internalized long before Acheson’s day; and it reaches straight through to the present, widely accepted abroad because the scale of U.S. power permits its leaders to ignore the law with complete impunity.

But the aggression pace and scale has been stepped up in recent years, based on a number of factors: The collapse of the containing power, the vested interests in U.S. power projection in the Middle East—the Israeli lobby, oil interests, the military-industrial-complex—and the ideology and politics of a militarized capitalist state.

The aggression process has always involved demonization of the target, with the establishment media regularly carrying out their propaganda service in ways that match anything achievable in a totalitarian state. In the case of the joint U.S-proxy army attack on Guatemala in 1954, the New York Times swallowed and disseminated the lie that the Reds had taken over that country (e.g., Sidney Gruson, “How Communists Won Control of Guatemala,” March 1, 1953), just as the paper swallowed and disseminated the official line in 2002-3 that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Equally important in both cases was the suppressed context: In the case of Guatemala, the vested interests of United Fruit Company in the ouster of the elected government, the ties of high U.S. officials to that company (including Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles), and the fact that Guatemala was virtually unarmed and posed not the slightest threat to the security of the United States or Guatemala’s small neighbors. In the case of Iraq, major suppressions included the facts that the United States had actually supplied Saddam with “weapons of mass destruction” when he was attacking Iran, and that he failed to use such weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War because he recognized that the United States could retaliate in kind with overwhelming force—the disclosure of which would weaken the case that his possession of such weapons in 2002-3 posed any threat to this country or Israel, except that of self-defense.

The aggression process not only depends on the domestic media following the official line, marginalizing dissent, and causing the public to believe in the mythical threat posed by the target, it also requires neutralization of any international response that might protect the prospective victim. In the case of Guatemala, its leaders did appeal to the UN in June 1954 for protection against an already-in-process U.S.-organized attack. But with the U.S.’s (and United Fruit investor and former spokesperson) Henry Cabot Lodge president of the Security Council, and the United States exerting intense pressure on its voting members and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, the Security Council refused to consider Guatemala’s case. Hammarskjold, who felt that the issue was precisely what the UN was formed to deal with, considered the U.S. effort “the most serious blow so far aimed at the Organization.”[4]

The decade-long U.S. effort at “regime change” in Nicaragua during the 1980s involved a boycott, the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, and sponsorship and active support of a terrorist army on its borders, in violation not only of the UN Charter but also the Organization of American States Charter and the Rio Treaty, the latter two quite clear on the illegality of the cross-border use of military force, “directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever” (OAS), and with proper authorization or “self defense” the only bases for an exception (Rio). Nicaragua brought these violations to the UN and World Court, but the United States vetoed a Security Council condemnation and ignored several adverse World Court decisions against its “unlawful use of force.” The Reagan administration could get away with this in part because the establishment media accepted its aggression and violation of international law, encapsulated in the New York Times’s editorial that dismissed the World Court as a “hostile forum” (“America’s Guilt—or Default,” July 1, 1986)—a lie, but demonstrating that the editors’ principles do not extend to universality of application and that they will apologize for blatant illegality and even aggression by their own state.

U.S. Aggression After the Soviet Collapse

The collapse of the Soviet bloc in late 1989 was greeted in the West by the U.S. invasion of Panama, which received the New York Times’s immediate approval—although the Times did acknowledge that it “fueled enduring Latin suspicions about Washington’s selective respect for sovereignty,” and expressed the concern that this kind of precedent might be used by less worthy powers to achieve the same effect (“Why the Invasion Was Justified,” December 21, 1989).

But it is with Iraq (1990-), Yugoslavia (1991-1995; and 1999-), Afghanistan (2001-), and Iraq again (2003-) that we move into the definitive post-Soviet era, when the international community becomes a more active participant in the aggression process, and the global aggressor is either appeased, abetted—or both.

In the case of Yugoslavia, the U.S.-led NATO bombing war of 1999, assaulting Serbia and Kosovo, was preceded four years earlier by gradually escalating bombing attacks in Bosnia to support Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces, all in violation of the spirit of the UN Charter, but approved by UN secretary-generals and the Security Council. Also notable was the Security Council’s 1993 creation of an ad hoc Tribunal supposedly to bring “justice” as well as peace to Yugoslavia, but in reality a political and public relations arm of NATO, that functioned to prevent peace in pursuit of U.S. and NATO aims there.[5] It also provided a legal and public relations cover for NATO’s own crimes, most notoriously in its bringing an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic in May 1999, just as NATO was coming under attack for extending its bombing to Serb civilian facilities. This diversionary PR operation was quickly used by the U.S. Secretary of State and her spokesperson to justify NATO war crimes. It goes almost without saying that the UN Security Council failed to question the U.S.-NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia, although it was in violation of the UN Charter and followed a peace conference in France designed to fail and permit the U.S.-NATO attack to proceed.[6]

The war on Afghanistan was launched by the U.S. and U.K. purportedly as an international police action and a reprisal raid against al-Qaeda targets in the aftermath of 9/11, but it also removed the Taliban regime in Kabul and carried the war to the Taliban’s allies in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world. From the outset, Washington defined Afghanistan as a theater in its new global “War on Terror,” a Cold-War-like framework projected to stretch indefinitely into the future, and useful to the warrior states for disguising their actions in this era of global warlordism.[7] Although the war never received Security Council authorization, it has been prosecuted with UN support from the very start. In the week that preceded this war, the UN joined the cause with a “counter-terrorism” resolution and a hastily organized conference “to fight the scourge of terrorism” (Kofi Annan), with terrorism elevated to a “threat to international peace and security, as well as a crime against humanity” (General Assembly President Han Seung-soo of South Korea).[8] Four days before the war, in clear anticipation of the event, Annan even reappointed Lakhdar Brahimi his Special Representative to Afghanistan; Brahimi’s assignment was to “initiate preparations for the development of plans for the rehabilitation of that shattered country”[9]—not one word warning about the war or taking issue with its illegality. Within the Council itself, a Counter-Terrorism Committee was established; it is now a permanent feature of Council activities. Sentiments to the effect that “armed non-State networks” such as al-Qaeda “pose a universal threat to the membership of the United Nations and the United Nations itself” are now commonplace; and efforts to combat such non-state actors have been placed at the top of the UN’s agenda ever since.[10]

Before the end of 2001, the invading military forces had gotten the United Nations to sponsor the Bonn Agreement through which they installed an Interim Authority in Kabul, with Hamid Karzai as its chairman; now six years later, Karzai is the president, having won elections staged by the UN in October 2004. But as with any country in a state of perpetual war, real power within Afghanistan resides with the 40,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-bloc’s second out-of-area operation in the past decade, the first having been Kosovo. The occupation has failed to dismantle the power of the warlords, with whom the United States collaborated in the initial war effort; it has failed to do any substantial rebuilding of this “shattered country;” and its military focus and civilian-costly methods of warfare have caused substantial losses of life and helped the resurgence of the Taliban. Still, the UN has stood firm as a supporter of the occupation; and as with Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, treats Afghanistan like a laboratory for neocolonial nation-building, helping the occupiers at every turn “to deny the power which they wield and to evade accountability for its exercise.”[11]

The aggression process involving Iraq that began in 1990 was simplified at that time by the fact that Iraq had committed an act of aggression itself in invading and taking over Kuwait in early August of that year. This gave the United States the opportunity to mobilize the UN and international community to oppose an aggression which it disapproved. (Although poor Saddam Hussein might have been misled by the earlier U.S. support of his aggression against Iran, and by U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie’s reassuring him one week before his Kuwait adventure that the United States had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”[12]) But with the actual Iraq aggression the United States quickly got UN and international support for ousting Saddam from Kuwait. Even here, however, there is solid evidence that the United States would not let Saddam escape via a negotiated settlement, but instead forced a war, which means that even in their “legitimate” case this country’s leaders acted in violation of the UN Charter, which calls for all states to “bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes” (Article I). There were also serious law violations in both the slaughter of helpless Iraqi soldiers, the use of illegal weaponry, and the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities, knowing that this would take a heavy civilian toll (and would be in violation of the laws of war).[13]

Following the end of the Persian Gulf War in late February 1991, the UN, under U.S.-U.K. pressure, installed a very severe sanctions regime that greatly limited Iraq’s imports and its export of oil. This prevented or greatly hindered the repair of the damaged water and sanitation facilities as well as its electrical plants and grid, irrigation systems, factories, schools and hospitals. This resulted in huge casualties, mainly from disease, poor nutrition and limited health care, especially among children, whose estimated 500,000 deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction,” was a price in human lives that Madeleine Albright famously declared on national TV in 1996 to have been “worth it.” All of this was done under UN authority, although the U.S. and U.K. were the aggressive sponsors of these genocidal sanctions.

With the Bush administration having decided to “go massive” after the events of 9/11, to “sweep it all up, things related and not” (Donald Rumsfeld),[14] and to invade and occupy Iraq as well as Afghanistan, it faced the small problem that what it intended to do would be a major violation of the UN Charter, as Iraq had neither attacked nor threatened the United States, so any non-risible self-defense justification was out. The U.S. and U.K., while still making extremely implausible claims about an Iraq threat (“mushroom clouds” over American cities, hidden WMD programs, chemical and biological weapons 45-minutes from launch)[15] and providing a stream of false claims about Iraq’s weapons programs, eventually fell back on Iraq’s resistance to UN inspections. An attack on Iraq would be based on and justified by Iraq’s defiance of UN authority! After all, we cannot dispense with the rule of law!

It is well known that the Bush administration only bothered with resort to the UN under British urging and in the interest of giving an aura of legitimacy to an attack already planned and one that had nothing to do with Iraq’s “non-compliance.” The UN cooperated in this make-believe scenario with intensified inspections that found nothing but refused to stop looking, to the great annoyance of U.S. officials, whose 160,000 troops and naval armada were already positioned for an invasion and wanted the inspectors and Security Council to sanction war. When they couldn’t get this, they went to war anyway, once again in violation of the UN Charter. Once again also they were helped along by the establishment U.S. and U.K. media, whose members across the board quickly joined the war bandwagon, passing along WMD claims on a daily basis that were untrue or misleading, essentially blacking out dissident views and facts, mini-demonizing the French for their failure to get on board the bandwagon and Hans Blix and the inspectors for failing to produce evidence that didn’t exist.

Two months before the war, aggression-hawks Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk were given space in the New York Times to lament the UN “inspections trap” that they alleged the Washington regime then found itself “firmly stuck in,” and counseled that, instead of relying on a “futile hunt for a ‘smoking gun’,” the world should simply accept that “Every inspection of an Iraqi site that finds nothing reinforces the misimpression that Iraq has complied.” (“How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap,” January 27, 2003.)[16] The day before the U.S. launched its war, Princeton University’s advocate for U.S. lawlessness Anne-Marie Slaughter invoked the precedent of the 1999 war over Kosovo, also launched without Security Council authorization, and noted that Washington’s imminent war over Iraq “could be called ‘illegal but legitimate’,” just as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo had found with respect to Kosovo. (“Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.,” New York Times, March 18, 2003.) The same day, the Times itself editorialized that, “For Mr. Hussein, getting rid of weapons of mass destruction is no longer an option….Mr. Hussein must be disarmed.” (“War in the Ruins of Diplomacy,” March 18, 2003.) This is war propaganda service that would be hard to surpass.

The UN of course never condemned the United States and Britain for this invasion in violation of the UN Charter, even though it was soon recognized in the mainstream to have been based on lies. Not only was there no condemnation, the UN Security Council quickly voted to validate the occupation and gave the aggressor the Security Council’s approval to stay in Iraq and try to bring stability to the victimized country.[17] The UN even created the Assistance Mission for Iraq to help U.S. management there, resulting in the bombing death of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq, Sergio Viera de Mello, and 22 others, as the Iraqi resistance did not view the UN as a neutral party.[18] Subsequently, the UN has done nothing to condemn or attempt to bring to a conclusion an invasion-occupation that has virtually destroyed Iraq, killed perhaps a million civilians, and driven in excess of 4 million Iraqis from their homes.[19] The contrast with the UN’s treatment of Yugoslavia and the U.S.-NATO targeting there of Serbia, could hardly be more dramatic.

The Iran Aggression Process

The current round of threatening Iran dates back to the summer of 2002, a year that opened with Bush labeling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” Already hot on the trail of the apocryphal Iraqi WMD, and proclaiming its new national security doctrine of “preemption” (i.e., aggression by another name), the White House started floating allegations about a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program, and coupled these with statements of opposition to the “unelected people who are the real rulers of Iran,” a stance that Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami immediately assailed as “ war-mongering” and “open interference” in Iran’s affairs.[20]

The current U.S. preparation for an attack on Iran has many of the characteristics of earlier U.S. aggressions, and the responses of the UN, international community, humanitarian interventionists, and mass media have also been similar. The first striking similarity is the extent to which claims and tactics used earlier but eventually acknowledged to have been based on falsehoods designed to mislead and manipulate have been recycled yet again, with only marginal challenge as to their motive and accuracy. Another is how a double-standard can be applied so effectively that it passes almost without challenge: One standard for the U.S. target (Iran), the Security Council demanding that it surrender its “inalienable” right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes; another standard for the United States and any country that has U.S. approval (the nuclear-weapon states of Israel, India, and Pakistan, for example; Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs in the 1980s, when he was serving U.S. interests; and even Iran’s nuclear energy program in the late 1970s, when controlled by the U.S.-client dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.).

A third notable feature of the aggression process developing in regard to Iran is that another major violation of the UN Charter by the United States, another “supreme international crime,” is not only taken as legally and politically unchallengeable by the UN and international community, but is also sanctioned and even given positive aid. It is true that Secretary-General Kofi Annan did plaintively point out on more than one occasion that the 2003 Iraq invasion was illegal—”not in conformity with the Charter,”[21] in the milquetoast phrase he preferred when dealing with U.S. crimes—but he didn’t suggest doing anything about it. In his first official statement after the start of the war, Annan expressed regret that “if we had persevered a little longer, Iraq could yet have been disarmed peacefully,”[22] thus repeating the disinformation that had been used by the states that launched their war in violation of the Charter under which he served.

Kofi Annan was very accommodating to U.S. demands, but his successor, Ban Ki-moon, is even more cooperative with the Supreme International Criminal. Not only has he failed to say a word about the U.S. threat to attack Iran, but with the United States now between its third (Iraq) and prospective fourth (Iran) supreme international crime, Ki-moon nevertheless has gone out of his way to claim that the “UN and the US have a shared objective of promoting human rights, democracy and freedom and peace and security,” and to call for “a strong partnership between the United Nations and the United States.”[23] Like his predecessor, Ki-moon recognizes who is the boss, and shows no qualms over using his office to help the boss implement his UN Charter violations.

The Security Council also is cooperating with the U.S. process. Mainly it has done this by going along with the U.S. allegation that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to international peace and security,[24] rather than recognizing that in threatening to take military action against Iran if it does not comply with U.S. demands, it is the U.S. that poses the grave threat, not Iran—a threat that would be actionable under Chapter VII of the Charter, were the Security Council able to live up to its legitimate functions and powers. This, too, is a rerun of the Security Council’s effort in late 2002 and early 2003, leading to the invasion of Iraq, when the Council went along with the United States’ alleged concern about Iraq’s noncompliance with the Council’s disarmament resolutions, and patiently voted for an “enhanced inspections regime” instead of calling the supreme international criminal’s bluff and denouncing its plans for the already decided-upon invasion.[25] Going along with these pressures and demands fed into the U.S. war-propaganda in 2002, just as it does the same today in the run-up to the planned attack on Iran.

Also helpful to the U.S. aggression process today is the work of the IAEA and Mohamed ElBaradei, which closely parallels the earlier efforts of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and its chairman, Hans Blix. The mere existence of an inspections program, and the fact that it can be dragged out for years—on-and-off for a total of eight years in Iraq, and since 2002 in Iran—permits the United States to create the impression that there really is a grave threat and to distract attention from the real threats that it poses, including its own contribution to the spread of nuclear weapons. The inspections regimes have provided the United States with platforms to spread false allegations against Iraq and Iran, the two states that it declared its main targets in early 2002. Just as it was impossible for Blix’s UNMOVIC to refute the U.S.-U.K. allegation that Iraq was “in material breach” of its disarmament obligations, so, no matter how many times ElBaradei’s inspectors “verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran,” they will never be able to refute the Alice-in-Wonderland allegation that they still cannot “provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities,”[26] and that a clandestine nuclear weapon program must be hidden somewhere.

In Iraq’s case, the United States made grandiose allegations before the Security Council that were soon thereafter proven false[27]—but with no effect on its status within the UN, or on its right eventually to lead the Multinational Force there,[28] or the believability of its sequel allegations against Iran.. The United States denounces first Blix and now ElBaradei for unwarranted foot-dragging and appeasement of the targeted states. And of course the establishment media cooperate in this process by treating hyperbolic allegations about the targeted states as no different than real news about them, refusing to give context and expose the real U.S. agenda, and failing to note that Iran’s case today is following the same script that in Iraq turned out to be false.

Among the aggression process’s many modalities, which combine the suppression of critical facts with the repetition of falsehoods, we note here the following:

1. That only rarely is mention made of the striking and ominous parallels between the utterly discredited U.S. and U.K. mobilization campaign in 2002-2003 to rid Iraq of its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and the ongoing U.S. and Israeli mobilization campaign from 2002 onward alleging that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

2. That no mention is made that the U.S. and Israeli threats to attack Iran are themselves violations of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the threat or use of force, and that even the UN and the international community are guilty of turning a blind-eye to the illegality of these threats.

3. That no mention is made that the U.S.-led aggressions-occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq mean that Iran is now surrounded on its eastern and western borders by massive and hostile military forces that can launch devastating strikes on Iran at any time. So that to focus at this juncture on any kind of threat—real or counterfactual—to peace and security posed by Iran is simply incongruous with reality.

4. That no mention is made of Iran’s inherent right of self-defense against the very real threats posed by the United States and Israel, both the closest of allies and nuclear weapons powers. As the Israeli military analyst Martin Van Creveld noted, “The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” (“Is Israel planning to attack Iran?” International Herald Tribune, August 24, 2004.) This sentiment appears virtually nowhere in the establishment U.S. media, which also give little credence to the Iranian leadership’s repeated protest that they do not intend to produce nuclear weapons.

5. That no mention is made that Israel was the first state outside the Permanent Five to develop nuclear weapons, a capability that it possesses to this day; and that Israel remains the only state in the Middle East never to have acceded to the NPT and international inspections.

6. That no mention is made that Security Council Resolution 687 (April 3, 1991), which imposed disarmament requirements on Iraq, also recalled the longstanding “objective of the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region of the Middle East;” and that this objective, which enjoys very broad support throughout the region, has been ignored by Israel, the United States, and Security Council.

7. That no mention is made that Iran also has long advocated a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East, as well as extending IAEA safeguards to all states in the region; and that every year the UN General Assembly votes by overwhelming margins to adopt resolutions to this effect, but that at the same time they are rejected by the United States and Israel.

8. That no mention is made that under the NPT, Iran—like every other non-nuclear-weapons-possessing party to the treaty—enjoys the “inalienable right…to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination” (Art. IV.1), and that the IAEA has produced no evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

9. That no mention is made that under the NPT, the United States—like every other nuclear-weapons-possessing party to the treaty—agrees to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race…and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control” (Art. VI). By continuing to improve its nuclear weapons, and to make their design more practicable, it is the United States that stands in serious violation of the NPT.

10. That no mention is made that at the last NPT Review Conference, held in New York City in May 2005, recognition of the urgency to implement this disarmament article figured prominently among the vast majority of participants—but not with the United States.[29] Instead, the conference ended in “the most acute failure in the history of the NPT” (former U.S. weapons negotiator Thomas Graham), unable to produce even a final statement on substantive issues. Led by the U.S. refusal, the conference was unable to admit any topic related to disarmament, “[turning] the world of nuclear proliferation into the Wild West, with complete disrespect for the rule of law” (Abolition 2000 founder Alice Slater).

11. That no challenge is raised in the UN or international community contesting the fact that the United States has taken it upon itself to decide which states may develop nuclear programs, and which may not. Iran could build nuclear power plants under the Shah, Pakistan can develop and keep nuclear weapons under Pervez Musharraf (or a likely successor-client of the U.S.), Egypt can develop nuclear power under Hosni Mubarak, Israel and India can develop and keep nuclear weapons over four decades—but neither the Islamic Republic of Iran, Libya, nor North Korea can. Not only is this unilateralism and politicization of the right of access to nuclear energy not challenged by the UN or the establishment media, it isn’t even noticed.

12. One basis for these politicized choices is the usual demonization process, so that a target like Iran cannot be allowed to come close to developing nuclear energy for any purpose because its leaders are portrayed as religious fanatics who might use a single nuclear device to bring about some mad end even though this would entail national suicide. These fears are not based on an examination of the performance of Iran’s leaders, who in their diplomatic relations with other states and UN representatives clearly behave as realistic geopoliticians. Nor is any comparison ever made with the religious beliefs of “End Times” evangelicals in the United States and their influence on U.S. leaders and policy.

13. That the Iranian target can be accused of other crimes, with minimal evidence and context, like interference in Iraq’s internal affairs by sending aid to the resistance. This allegation is very convenient, as it is impossible for Iran to refute beyond simple denial, the establishment media don’t require hard evidence to report it, and it scapegoats Iran for the failures of the aggression-occupation—so attacking Iran will be part of the effort to “liberate” the Iraqis! Note also that when the United States aids insurgents opposing an occupation, as in the case of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation, no question is raised about the legitimacy of such interference; but then, only the United States has aggression rights. Thus, only the United States can legitimately aid factions in the conflict over Iraq. It aids all of the factions, according to momentary strategic convenience. And it attacks anybody inside Iraq that it wants to attack.

14. That very little attention is given to the fact that the U.S. supports the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK) and related groups such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose members appear to move freely among the Western capitals, despite the U.S. Department of State’s formal designation of these groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations at least since 1997.[30] With U.S. aid and approval since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the MEK has continued its longstanding campaign of cross-border bombings and assassinations against Iran—causing much bloodshed among Iranians.[31]

15. That by highlighting the abuses of dissidents inside Iran, a prospective U.S. attack on Iran is made all-the-more palatable.[32] When the lie about going to war to disarm Iraq no longer could be sustained, the selling-point shifted to the “liberation” of Iraqis from the dictatorship in Baghdad. Similarly, Western intellectuals and human rights organizations have featured the detentions and trials of different Iranian figures, combining cost-free denunciations of Iran’s leadership with public displays of solidarity towards the dissidents. This has been an important mechanism by which a segment of the intellectual community, including the humanitarian interventionists and devotees of “democracy promotion,” serve the imperial state while convincing themselves that they are simply aiding in the global liberation process. It has been noted, however, that this segment seems reluctant to push hard for democracy in states allied with and supported by the empire (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Israel, etc., or in the United States itself). They also spend much more effort in expressing concern over the condition of the dissidents in target countries than they do over the supreme international crimes to which they may be contributing.

Concluding Note

Imagine that Adolf Hitler, having invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia and making clear plans to attack Poland, was able to get France, Britain and the Soviet Union to agree with him that Poland’s buildup of its border forces posed a threat to Germany and should be subject to sanctions till it reduced those forces. A League of Nations Disarmament Commission was formed that focused on Polish weaponry on its border with Germany, expressing “concern” over Poland’s possible secrecy in the placement of some of those weapons. Meanwhile, the head of the League met with Hitler, expressed admiration for his revitalization of Germany, and expressed the hope that the League and Germany could forge a “stronger partnership” for the years ahead. The famed appeasement of Nazi Germany never went this far in the late 1930s, so that it never matched the current scene of UN and international community appeasement plus literal collaboration with the Supreme International Criminal of our day, who is threatening another major cross-border attack despite being bogged down in a quagmire in an aggression begun in 2003.

Like the League, the United Nations is never more than the cumulative actions of its members. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and Soviet Union itself (1989-1991) was greeted by much optimism at the time: Finally, the UN would live up to its historic mission of protecting the world’s peace and security. But what this rhetoric really meant was that the flourishing Western bloc was freer than ever to use the UN to promote its agenda. This proved true in the 1990s, as the number and scope of Western-inspired UN operations expanded greatly. And when in March 1999, the U.S.-led NATO bloc could not gain Russia’s assent in the Security Council for its war on Yugoslavia, NATO went ahead with its war anyway, and brought in the UN after the fact.

Post-9/11, the United States and its allies have used the UN even more effectively to promote selective campaigns of “counter-terrorism” and “counter-proliferation,” and to push aside aggression and disarmament. At the same time that U.S. wars approach a lethality not seen since Southeast Asia 40 years ago, UN agencies are dispatched with mandates to pick up the pieces caused by their destructiveness, but never to counter them.

At an October 17 news conference, a reporter asked George Bush whether he “definitively believe[s] Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?” “Yeah,” Bush replied, “I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon….So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”[33]

Notice that Bush’s mobilization for World War III is not in response to Iran’s actual use or even acquisition of a nuclear weapon, but simply to prevent Iran from having the knowledge of how to build one—knowledge that can be found in every peaceful use of nuclear energy the world over. Note also the transference of responsibility for the planned war from the serial aggressor onto the target, an Orwellian gambit hardly commented upon in the West. Bush’s extreme position was announced only weeks after an Israeli bombing raid in northern Syria that may have been executed to destroy surface-to-air missile defense systems of the same class that Iran is also known to operate, as well as test the system’s vulnerabilities. And a vote by three-quarters of the U.S. Senate—including 30 of the Senate’s 50 Democrats—expressing its sense that Iran poses a “threat to the security of the region,” and calling on the White House to designate Iran’s military a “foreign terrorist organization,” just eight days before Bush did in fact designate Iran’s military an FTO, adding to the sanctions it already imposes on Iran.[34]

It is always interesting to read the actual text of reports issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran not only because of what they reveal about Iran’s program, but also because of the interestingly partial way various news organizations and governments end up interpreting or representing the report to audiences they are sure will not read the reports themselves.

The IAEA report that just came out regarding Iran was much anticipated because of the agreement on a work plan between the IAEA and Iran regarding a time frame for the resolution of “outstanding issues” that had remained regarding Iran’s past activities. Based on this agreement Iran was expected to cooperate and effectively divulge information that would allow the IAEA to assess whether or not Iran has come clean on its past activities. This process is still ongoing but the November report was expected to give a hint about the extent of Iranian cooperation.

The IAEA and its director Mohammad ElBaradei were heavily criticized by the United States and several European governments for the work plan because of its focus on Iran’s past activities or breaches and the possibility of the resolution of the questions regarding these past activities undercutting the force of the UN sanctions regime that demands suspension of Iran’s enrichment program. As such, the report issued on November 15 had to be, and is, very clear that “contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities.”

The IAEA report also states that “since early 2006 [this is when Iran suspended its voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol due to UN Security Council initiated sanctions against Iran], the Agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As result, the Agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current programme is diminishing.”

On the remaining major issues relevant to the scope and nature of Iran’s nuclear program, however, the report paints a cooperative picture of Iran and states: “The Agency has been able to conclude that answers provided on the declared past P-1 and P-2 centrifuge programmes are consistent with its findings. The Agency will, however, continue to seek corroboration and is continuing to verify the completeness of Iran’s declarations.” This is not a statement of closure of the issue as the Iranian leaders are claiming but is an important steep forward. In fact, the language of Iran providing information that is “consistent with the Agency’s findings” or “information available to the Agency” from other sources is repeated several times in the report regarding a variety of issues.

Also positively reported is Iran’s level of cooperation. The report explicitly states that “Iran has provided sufficient access to individuals and has responded in a timely manner to questions and provided clarifications and amplifications on issues raised in the context of the work plan. However its cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive.” This I take to mean that Iran has responded to questions and cooperated in specific areas when asked but not before. The IAEA clearly wants Iran to engage in “active cooperation and full transparency” in a proactive manner but the report does not state that Iran’s reactive approach has led to lack of cooperation as agreed upon in the work plan.

Finally, the IAEA is also quite explicit that “the Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities.” But, as mentioned above, the Agency wants Iran to implement the Additional Protocol to prevent its “diminishing” knowledge of Iran’s current program (this is by the way something Iran has said, at least in the past, that it will do if Iran’s nuclear dossier returns to the IAEA).

So a close reading of the report suggests that the IAEA is unhappy with Iran’s continuation of enrichment (because it is contrary to the Security Council decisions) and would like Iran to voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol as it did in the past. At the same time, the report suggests good progress on the issue of Iran’s past activities. It also reveals no evidence of diversion to a weapons program despite “a total of seven unannounced inspections” carried out which are beyond Iran’s current NPT obligations (as I understand it, IAEA inspectors have been issued multiple entry visas to enter Iran as they wish).

I lay the report out in detail because I think it is important as a backdrop to the hesitance shown by Russia and China in approving another set of sanctions against Iran before IAEA’s engagement with Iran through the work plan is finished.

But as I said above it is also interesting and quite revealing to see how the report itself is reported. In Iran, the statements about non-diversion and consistency with the Agency’s findings are trumpeted by government officials as an affirmation of Iran’s righteousness. The United States government, on the other hand, has found the report inadequate and in fact has immediately called for a Security Council meeting to discuss a new round of sanctions (a meeting China reportedly initially refused to attend but has now reluctantly agreed to do so after Thanksgiving)

These are expected governmental positions. Perhaps also not too unexpectedly, the American newspapers and news agencies also do seem a bit too willing to tow the U.S. government line. The New York Times, in a piece entitled “Report Raises New Doubts on Iran’s Nuclear Program,” reports that the Agency “said in a report on Thursday that Iran had made new but incomplete disclosures about its past nuclear activities, missing a critical deadline under an agreement with the agency and virtually assuring a new push by the United States to impose stricter international sanctions.” No where in text of this piece, however, there is anything about what these “new doubts” are or where exactly the report has said that a critical deadline has been passed. Also not referred to are the explicit statements about non-diversion of nuclear material and consistency with the Agency’s findings.

The piece goes on to say, “the report made clear that even while providing some answers, Iran has continued to shield many aspects of its nuclear program.” The report says no such thing but the NYT piece takes the report’s reference to Iran’s “reactive rather than proactive” cooperation, mentioned in the paragraph about Iran’s “sufficient” and “timely” cooperation with the work plan, along with the suspension of the Additional Protocol (calling it instead “restrictions Iran has placed on inspectors”) as the reasons for why the “agency’s understanding of the full scope of Iran’s nuclear program is diminishing” and represents this as a “shielding” by Iran.

The Associated Press’ heading is “IAEA: Iran Not Open About Nuke Program,” while the opening of the piece is: “The U.S. called for new sanctions against Iran after a U.N. report Thursday that said the Tehran regime has been generally truthful about key aspects of its past nuclear activities, but is continuing to enrich uranium.”

After several changes in the Internet versions, the Washington Post’s heading ended up slightly less provocative (“U.S. to Seek New Sanctions against Iran: UN Report Faults Tehran’s Input on Nuclear Program”). But the text begins by saying “The Bush administration plans to push for new sanctions against Iran after the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency reported yesterday that Tehran is providing “diminishing” information about its controversial nuclear program, U.S. officials said. In a critically timed assessment, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran provided “timely” and helpful new information on a secret program that became public in 2002, but that it did not fully answer questions or allow full access to Iranian personnel. Iran is even less cooperative on its current program, the IAEA reported.” This reporting is not only flatly wrong regarding what the report said about full access to Iranian personnel but also completely mum, like the reporting from AP and NYT, about the reasons for the “diminishing” information (the suspension of the voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol which was instigated by the Security Council action).

SYDNEY – Centre-left leader Kevin Rudd stormed to victory in Australia’s election Saturday, ending conservative Prime Minister John Howard’s 11-year rule with pledges to change course on climate change and the Iraq war.1124 06

Howard, US President George W. Bush’s closest ally in the Iraq war, conceded defeat in Sydney and admitted it was “very likely” that he also faced the rare humiliation of losing his own electoral seat.

“A few minutes ago I telephoned Mr Rudd and I congratulated him and the Australian Labor Party on a very emphatic victory,” Howard told emotional supporters in a concession speech at a Sydney hotel.

Labor’s stunning victory, in which it was expected to claim as many as 86 of the parliament’s 150 seats, means it now controls the central government and all eight state and territory administrations.

Howard wished the Labor Party leader well and told him that he was inheriting an economy that was the envy of the world.

This month’s U.S. Senate vote to approve Michael Mukasey’s nomination for attorney general essentially sanctioned torture. It is yet another example of Congressional complicity in this Age of Terror with a zealous administration that routinely dismisses Constitutional protections in the name of “national security.” Torture joins other overt breaches of justice including the USA PATRIOT Act, spying on Americans, suspension of habeas corpus for foreign nationals, rendition and lying our country into a war. Professor Rudi Siebert, calls this period of our history one marked by the “disintegration of the bourgeois brain.”

Siebert, 83, teaches, writes and speaks about religion and society as a full-time professor at Western Michigan University. However, his journey to WMU included experience as a member of the Catholic Youth Movement that opposed Hitler, a draftee into the German Army, an 18-kill fighter pilot against Allied forces, an infantry leader of 250 men against General Patton’s tanks and a prisoner of war-all occurring by the time he was 17 years old.

Professor Siebert says that modern Western nations, including the United States as the first constitutional republic, were shaped by the heady 17th and 18th century Enlightenment where “modernism” was born. One of the tenets of modernism is that laws and secular morality are one means of averting violence and war. In the 20th century, international controls like the Geneva Convention, the United Nations, and NATO were designed to foster restraint and discourse as the necessary vehicles to avert war. However, says Siebert, today even these institutions are losing their effectiveness.

Modernism began when the bourgeoisie, comprised of urban middle class merchants, financiers, and intellectuals, emerged as the ruling class and thus superceded the power and authority of the Church and the monarchy. As mercantilism (1600-1800) took hold during the age of exploration and colonialism, society gradually became more secularized and science replaced religion as the primary way of constructing knowledge and reality.

Knowledge and reality could be observed and puzzled out by anyone rather than only by the pronouncements of a king or a priest-just as the Protestant Reformation allowed ordinary, non-clerical people to interpret the Scriptures. Science became the source for Truth rather than belief, superstition, or obedience to an authority. Scientific rationalism provided a systematized decision-making process of critical analysis rather than inspiration or royal decree. These elements made straight the way toward the Industrial Revolution (1750 in England, 1830 in the United States) when the machine became the new hegemon.

Government and economics adopted the scientific method, too, and saw society as a clock, the prevailing image of the Enlightenment: a mechanical device that is measured and constant. Indeed, the framers of the U.S. Constitution were all members of the bourgeoisie, Siebert points out. Contrary to what the Religious Right says, our Founding Fathers used the principles of modernism to create a just society where everyone had an equal chance to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

By the twentieth century, modernism had affected Western society such that some people saw society as fragmented, complex, technological, and economically-oriented. Urban lifestyles overtook rural lifestyles, which impacted values and mindsets. The family also began to disintegrate, communities became more impersonal and transient, and all the values associated with small town life and agriculture were replaced increasingly by a society that resembled the machine with its values of speed, mechanization, mass production, uniformity, atomization, and specialization. The bourgeoisie invented organizations to run this society. These became known as corporations.

Other developments emerged in this new, corporate, technological society. As more and more people streamed into the cities in greater numbers, ideas about tolerance surfaced, minorities and women won their full rights of citizenship, unions worked to provide people a decent living, education became available to all people as a right and the poor and infirm were taken care of by the state. These strides were made possible by the bigger governments of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal-and Hitler’s Third Reich.

Siebert says that the 21st century is now seeing these bourgeois values and structures disintegrate with nothing to replace them. The fundamental categories that we use to describe our lives and understand ourselves are no longer there. There is a lack of consistency, even in the language used. Siebert provides some examples:

· Donald Rumsfeld said that he was taught in school never to attack other countries. But now he says that today is different and he helped plan a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. These are language games learned in the university. Actually, it’s the Constitution that says we cannot conduct a pre-emptive strike, however, the watchmen over our supreme law of the land are not there-the Congress and the Supreme Court should challenge the president as a matter of duty.

· We pray for our heroic soldiers that they will keep out of harm’s way. Yet, they use murderous weapons to kill other people, 90 percent of whom are civilians.

· We have our soldiers bomb civilians to pieces and then pray our enemies don’t bomb us. This will weaken any moral existence!

· People say today: “I trust my president.” Well, people trusted Hitler, too, some until the end of the war, even with rubble all around them.

· We can’t have a war against terrorism because the terrorists are not a state. So we attack a state. The first one was Afghanistan. The second one, Iraq. After that, we plan to attack Iran. Meanwhile, the object of terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, is still at large.

The new world order that George H.W. Bush proclaimed after the fall of communism in the late 1980s has become the “new world dis-order,” according to Siebert. And war with Iraq makes that “dis-order” even more evident as members of bourgeois institutions are even more shaken, split or made impotent.

“Once you break open the system, all the structures fall,” says Siebert. “Bourgeois society is crumbling. There is no opposition party to replace it. Not even a new paradigm can do that. Consequently, in its absence what will we get? In Germany in the 1930s we got fascism.”

What the United States gets remains to be seen but some people already believe that we have inadvertently expanded our national security state so that checks and balances and the separation of powers provided by our Constitution are ignored, the opposition party has been silenced and manipulated, elections are fixed and the Bill of Rights are compromised-all in the name of fighting terrorism. But how did this happen to the most free, most powerful, most diverse nation in the world’s history? Stay tuned.

Proliferation watchers have kept track of A. Q. Khan’s activities for about 30 years. In 1979, the Washington Post named him as the Pakistani engineer who had left his position at the uranium enrichment centrifuge facility at Almelo, Netherlands, four years earlier with “lists of subcontractors and probably blueprints for the plant.” Khan then returned to Pakistan, where he soon became director of the country’s secret uranium enrichment project at Kahuta, near Islamabad, and a key player in its nuclear weapons program.

To evade the existing system of controls on the sale of nuclear weapons-related technology, Pakistan established a complex multinational effort to purchase components for its enrichment plant from European and U.S. companies–something the international community was aware of even in the late 1970s. By 1978, Pakistan’s nuclear program had created international concern. Washington failed to convince Pakistan that it should place the Kahuta facility under international safeguards, and in April 1979, as required by U.S. law, the United States cut off economic and military aid to Pakistan. Khan later claimed that by 1982 Kahuta was producing weapon-grade uranium. Having succeeded in Pakistan, Khan and his network of suppliers then went on to market centrifuge design information, centrifuges, entire enrichment plants, and even a nuclear weapon design to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A. Q. Khan and the Rise of Proliferation Networks, edited by Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and formerly with the U.S. State Department, where he served as deputy assistant secretary of nonproliferation and at the South Asia desk, is an important addition to the literature on Pakistan’s nuclear program and the dynamics of nuclear proliferation.

The report offers a sweeping, well-referenced review of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, with a focus on how it established and managed a system of embassies, front companies, false end users, friendly countries, and Pakistanis living abroad–paying whatever it took to make a deal–to import material and technology. It concludes, “The weakness of export controls and the fatalism of Western suppliers were the strongest factors abetting the network,” and notes, “Many industrialists reasoned, ‘If we do not do it, others will.'” The effort’s scale was significant: Dutch researcher Frank Slijper has reported claims by Henk Slebos, a key Khan supplier and lifelong friend, that he worked with “maybe even 1,000” European companies. (See Project Butter Factory: Henk Slebos and the A. Q. Khan Network, TNI/Campagne tegen Wapenhandel, September 2007)

Nuclear Black Markets also looks at Pakistan’s proliferation of centrifuge technology to other countries. On the question of who was responsible for the network’s activities, it observes, “Khan cannot be characterized strictly as either a government representative or a businessman acting independently. He was in fact both, in varying degrees according to the circumstances.” It faults the Pakistani government, which it argues “should have known what key officials, such as Khan, were up to in an area so fundamental to Pakistan’s national security and international reputation.” It may be that Pakistani leaders simply chose not to ask, allowing them to deny any knowledge if confronted by Washington with evidence of illegal or illicit nuclear activity.

In some detail, the report describes Pakistan’s recent efforts to recover from the Khan network being exposed. With help from Washington, Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, the managers of Pakistan’s nuclear complex, say they have brought people, materials, and weapons under tighter control. But the claims of improved security have not allayed concerns. The debate in Washington about the safety of nuclear weapons and materials in Pakistan has resurfaced following Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s recent imposition of martial law and the subsequent public protests. Assurances by Pakistan’s generals and nuclear managers and appeals to “trust us” are no substitute for a system of checks and balances that include parliamentary oversight of the nuclear program, an independent judiciary, watchdog groups, determined anti-nuclear activists, whistleblowers, and a free press. It has taken all of this and more to expose the continuing problems in the United States and other nations with nuclear weapons.

Pakistan and Khan are only part of the problem. Nuclear Black Markets observes that the larger proliferation challenge is that “tighter controls on state-to-state technology transfers over the past four decades have resulted in the emergence of the private sector as an additional source of nuclear technology and expertise for proliferant states.” It details how these “black and grey markets” in both nuclear technology and knowledge have been tapped by Iraq, Iran, India, North Korea, and Libya, and to lesser degree by Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Israel, and Syria.

The bottom line is clear: “Export controls alone are not likely to stop illicit trade in nuclear material and technology. Where there is a determined demand and the price is high enough, there is likely to be a supply.” And government agencies are “often underfunded, undermanned, and undermotivated” and cannot hope to stem the tide. Capitalism will prevail over the state.

In its concluding chapter, Nuclear Black Markets lays out some policy options to “preclude nuclear black markets.” It offers the standard U.S. nonproliferation fare–for instance, urging states to implement U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, which requires states to prevent non-state actors from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction. But it accepts that the resolution “suffers a credibility problem with third world states who believe that obligations should have been established through treaty negotiations” and not imposed by the Security Council at Washington’s behest.

The report suggests other steps as well: educate and help industry manage its nonproliferation responsibilities; severely punish trafficking in nuclear materials; end production of (and block access to) weapons-useable fissile materials; improve intelligence sharing; and seizure of materials in transit through efforts such as the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative. But it’s hard to see how such “more-of-the-same” proposals resolve the core issues that the report raises about the tension between market forces and governments, the industrialization of developing countries, increasingly rapid innovation and diffusion of technology, the nature of bureaucracy, and the demands of domestic politics.

In a triumph of hope over experience, these proposals also assume that states will hold nonproliferation as a top priority. The history of U.S. efforts to curtail Pakistan’s nuclear program, important details of which are curiously missing in Nuclear Black Markets, teaches otherwise. As noted earlier, Washington imposed sanctions on Pakistan in April 1979. Nine months later, the United States offered to waive the sanctions and provide hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid to Pakistan. This was to grow into two multibillion dollar aid packages and was only part of a much larger U.S. effort that would involve Saudi Arabia, other oil-rich Arab countries, Western Europe, and China.

Why did nonproliferation suddenly lose its value? Washington decided that Khan and the Pakistani Bomb were less important than confronting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It mattered even less that Pakistan was ruled by a military dictator intent on creating an Islamic state. This remained the judgment for 10 years. By then, the damage was done: Pakistan had the Bomb, and a generation had been schooled in radical Islam and jihad. It was only when the Soviets left Afghanistan that Washington rediscovered Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and again imposed sanctions. These and other sanctions on Pakistan were lifted as part of the effort to gain Pakistan’s support for the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in 2001. Billions of dollars of military and economic aid again flowed to Pakistan.

The same logic has long informed U.S. policy toward Israel, and now extends to India. For 30 years, U.S. law and international rules have banned nuclear trade with India (and others outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), because India used material and technology supplied for peaceful purposes to make nuclear weapons. But Washington now wants to build a new strategic relationship with India–to counter China and to improve U.S. access to Indian markets. India has insisted on the right to nuclear trade as the price of cooperation, and Washington has obliged.

In the determination to make a deal with India, there’s no looking around, forward, or back. Washington wants the deal to go ahead even though it will enable India to significantly increase its production of fissile materials for weapons. It has already driven Pakistan to ask for a similar deal (since refused) and to begin expanding its nuclear arsenal. (For more on the U.S.-India nuclear deal see “Fissile Materials in South Asia: The Implications of the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal” [PDF].)

Nor is there any mention now in Washington of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1172, passed unanimously in June 1998 soon after both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. It calls upon India and Pakistan to “immediately stop their nuclear weapon development programs, to refrain from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.” The resolution also “encourages all states to prevent the export of equipment, materials, or technology that could in any way assist programs in India or Pakistan for nuclear weapons.”

Nuclear Black Markets fails to see how U.S. nuclear weapons policy is a driver for proliferation. For instance, consider the fact that Washington maintains a declared policy of being prepared to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict and has repeatedly made clear that it would use nuclear weapons even against countries without them. In 1981, Daniel Ellsberg, who worked on U.S. nuclear war planning in the early 1960s, observed, ” Every president from [Harry S.] Truman to [Ronald] Reagan, with the possible exception of [Gerald] Ford, has felt compelled to consider or direct serious preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing, intense non-nuclear conflict or crisis.” U.S. presidents since have been no different. In Empire and the Bomb, Joseph Gerson documents both the earlier history of U.S nuclear threats and how President George H. W. Bush threatened Iraq with nuclear weapons during the first Gulf War, President Bill Clinton threatened North Korea, and President George W. Bush threatened Iraq and recently Iran. Even presidential candidates now talk of keeping “all options on the table,” as if a willingness to make nuclear threats is proof of being fit for office. It’s hard to imagine a greater incentive for insecure states to seek nuclear weapons. [emphasis added]

Now, sadly, a growing number see nuclear weapons as perhaps the only impediment a state in the developing world can impose to blunt U.S. military power. The logic is clear to Washington. As a Bush administration official put it: “It is a real equalizer if you’re a pissant little country with no hope of matching the U.S. militarily.”

The belief that nuclear weapons level the international playing field is clearly shared by Khan and at least some others in the network. Peter Griffin, a member of the Khan network for more than 25 years, responded to British customs officials who asked him if he knew he was helping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program with the following: “Well, so what? I believe that if everyone’s got a big stick that’s more security for the world than only a couple of people with big sticks.” Similarly, Slijper reports that Slebos believed his business made him rich and served a higher purpose, saying, “I am proud that I have prevented a number of wars . . . I am not proud of an atom bomb as such, but sometimes it can be a necessity that it is there.”