The Rag Blog

A psychologist blames assaults on civilians in the 1990s on soldiers’ bad training, boredom and poor supervision

A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country’s soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.

The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’

In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’

Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. ‘We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason – he didn’t throw a stone, did nothing – bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,’ he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. ‘With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.’

Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.

The disclosure of the report in the Israeli media has occasioned a remarkable response. In letters responding to the recollections, writers have focused on both the present and past experience of Israeli soldiers to ask troubling questions that have probed the legitimacy of the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.

The study and the reactions to it have marked a sharp change in the way Israelis regard their period of military service – particularly in the occupied territories – which has been reflected in the increasing levels of conscientious objection and draft-dodging.

The debate has contrasted sharply with an Israeli army where new recruits are taught that they are joining ‘the most ethical army in the world’ – a refrain that is echoed throughout Israeli society. In its doctrine, published on its website, the Israeli army emphasises human dignity. ‘The Israeli army and its soldiers are obligated to protect human dignity. Every human being is of value regardless of his or her origin, religion, nationality, gender, status or position.’

However, the Israeli army, like other armies, has found it difficult to maintain these values beyond the classroom. The first intifada, which began in 1987, before the wave of suicide bombings, was markedly different to the violence of the second intifada, and its main events were popular demonstrations with stone-throwing.

Yishai-Karin, in an interview with Haaretz, described how her research came out of her own experience as a soldier at an army base in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. She interviewed 18 ordinary soldiers and three officers whom she had served with in Gaza. The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: ‘After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived… So we do a first patrol with him. It’s 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn’t so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers.

‘He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock…

‘The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”

Yishai-Karin concluded that the main reason for the soldiers’ violence was a lack of training. She found that the soldiers did not know what was expected of them and therefore were free to develop their own way of behaviour. The longer a unit was left in the field, the more violent it became. The Israeli soldiers, she concluded, had a level of violence which is universal across all nations and cultures. If they are allowed to operate in difficult circumstances, such as in Gaza and the West Bank, without training and proper supervision, the violence is bound to come out.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said that, if a soldier deviates from the army’s norms, they could be investigated by the military police or face criminal investigation.

The case against expanding surveillance powers for a White House that’s already out of control.

“I’ve got nothing to hide, so electronic surveillance doesn’t bother me. To the contrary, I’m delighted that the Bush Administration is monitoring calls and electronic traffic on a massive scale, because catching terrorists is far more important that worrying about the government’s listening to my phone calls, or reading my emails.” So the argument goes. It is a powerful one that has seduced too many people.

Millions of Americans buy this logic, and in accepting it, believe they are doing the right thing for themselves, their family, and their friends, neighbors, community and country. They are sadly wrong. If you accept this argument, you have been badly fooled.

This contention is being bantered about once again, so there is no better time than the present to set thinking people straight. Bush and Cheney want to make permanent unchecked Executive powers to electronically eavesdrop on anyone whom any president feels to be of interest. In August, before the summer recess, Congress enacted the Protect America Act, which provided only temporary approval for the expanding Executive powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). These temporary powers expire in February 2008, so Congress is once again addressing the subject.

The FISA amendments: the administration is seeking immunity for miscreants

Because of the way electronic traffic is directed from foreign countries through the United States, the FISA Court had previously rejected requests to intercept certain foreign-person- to-foreign-person communications in the United States. It was a technical problem, arising from the fact that FISA was written before modern data routing had been designed, and FISA thus needed fixing. On this, everyone agreed.

However, when the Bush Administration asked for the necessary fix to FISA, it also requested much more, including immunity under the existing laws for all the telecommunications companies that have been assisting the government in its illegal warrantless surveillance. Significantly, this practice — justified by reference to the “war on terror” — apparently started well before 9/11 under the Bush Administration.

Ironically, in requesting this immunity, the Bush White House has refused to disclose exactly what type of activities Congress would be retroactively immunizing. Preliminary congressional inquiry has revealed that a massive amount of electronic surveillance of Americans has gone on under the Bush/Cheney Administration. For example, one of the telecom giants, Verizon, reported that between January 2005 and September 2007 they provided information on 94,000 occasions. These numbers suggest that Verizon was operating as merely another (and a secret) extension of the federal intelligence establishment.

Many of the companies appear to be violating a number of federal criminal statutes — such as 18 U.S.C. 2511, which requires a warrant for such surveillance and 18 U.S.C. 2702, which prohibits any “entity providing an electronic communication service to the public” from knowingly divulging “to any person or entity the contents of a communication” without a court order.

Currently, the telecoms are not likely to be particularly worried about being prosecuted by the very same government that instructed them to violate the law, and is leading the way in doing so itself.

But what about under the next Administration? The five-year statute of limitations will make them potentially criminally liable after Bush is gone — at least, unless the Bush Administration gains for them retroactive and future immunity. In a new Administration, the telecoms may be viewed not as cooperative patriots, but rather as criminal co-conspirators.

Civil liability appears to be driving the immunity request

Meanwhile, civil liability for these companies is also a realistic prospect. For example, in a San Francisco federal court, AT&T customers are seeking to protect their privacy with actions under laws like 18 U.S.C. 2520, which provides a civil remedy and hefty damages — ranging up to $10,000 per day per violation. Since it is possible that, over five-plus years, there have been tens upon tens of thousands of such violations, the, if liable telecoms could be looking at hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars of damages.

The Bush Administration clearly wants to help its partners in crime; it also wants to avoid accountability for what it has done and is still doing. If the civil litigation proceeds — and one judge already ruled that the “state secrets” privilege does not prevent the plaintiffs from going forward — the Bush Administration faces the risk of a federal court’s forcing it to disclose its unsavory surveillance activities.

Privacy advocates are horrified at the prospect of Congress’s potentially protecting this activity through immunity legislation. Yet, in sharp contrast, most people could care less. Indeed few people seem to care about their loss of privacy, notwithstanding the fact that, like an invisible pollutant to our air or water, it is increasingly eroding our freedom. Unfortunately, it seems that the invasion of our privacy, like the destruction of our atmosphere, may be tolerated until it is too late to fix it.

One of the leading causes of both problems is ignorance. Privacy is a highly complex issue, so people easily accept the claims of those who assert that, if you are not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to be concerned about government surveillance, and if you are, you have no right to privacy to break the law.

Understanding the misunderstanding about privacy

For several years I have been reading the work of George Washington University Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove, who writes extensively about privacy in the context of contemporary digital technology. The current apathy about government surveillance brought to mind his essay “‘I’ve Got Nothing To Hide’ And Other Misunderstandings of Privacy.”

Professor Solove’s deconstruction of the “I’ve got nothing to hide” position, and related justifications for government surveillance, is the best brief analysis of this issue I have found. These arguments are not easy to zap because, once they are on the table, they can set the terms of the argument. As Solove explains, “the problem with the nothing to hide argument is with its underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things.” He warns, “Agreeing with this assumption concedes far too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide.” Solove’s bottom line is that this argument “myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy.”

In his work, Solove addresses the reality that privacy problems differ: Not all are equal; some are more harmful than others. Most importantly, he writes, “to understand privacy, we must conceptualize it and its value more pluralistically.” Through several years of work, Solove has developed a more nuanced concept of privacy that rebuts the idea that there is a “one-size-fits-all conception of privacy.”

The concept of “privacy” encompasses many ideas relating to the proper and improper use and abuse of information about people within society. Privacy protects information not only because it would cause others to think less of the person at issue, but also simply to give us all breathing room: “Society involves a great deal of friction,” Solove writes, “and we are constantly clashing with each other. Part of what makes a society a good place in which to live is the extent to which it allows people freedom from the intrusiveness of others. A society without privacy protection would be suffocation, and it might not be a place in which most would want to live.”

Never knowing when–or if–you will be released is a cruel form of torture. It allows you to keep hope while filling you with fear.

Now that the U.S. military has “cleared” my notes, I can tell you about my July meeting at Guantánamo with my client Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi.

Al-Ghizzawi was visibly shaken when I entered the meeting room and he immediately told me of his despair over the May death of a fellow inmate, a young Saudi man named Abdel Rahman Al Amri. Al-Ghizzawi knew that Amri had been suffering from Hepatitis B and tuberculosis, the same two conditions from which he himself suffers. Like al-Ghizzawi, Amri had not been treated for his illnesses. Al-Ghizzawi, now so sick he can barely walk, told me that Amri, too, had been ill and then, suddenly, he was dead.

Al-Ghizzawi also mentioned that Amri had engaged in hunger strikes in the past but had stopped a long time ago because of his health. I knew about Amri’s death. I also know our military has called it an “apparent suicide.”

As I sat with al-Ghizzawi I found myself thinking about South African anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko. In his book I Write What I Like, Biko declares that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” There are many ways for the oppressor to force himself into the mind of the oppressed, but one surefire way is through indefinite detention. Never knowing when—or if—you will be released is a cruel form of psychological torture. It allows you to keep hope while simultaneously filling you with fear. South Africa’s apartheid government sharpened this tactic when it passed the Terrorism Act of 1967, which allowed the police to pick up Biko as a “suspect” involved in terrorism (“involvement” under that law was defined as “anything that might endanger the maintenance of law and order”) and detain him for an indefinite period without trial. Biko’s indefinite detention ended after only a month, when he suffered a brutal death at the hands of the South African police. The government claimed that Biko died as the result of a hunger strike. (In U.S. military parlance, that would be an “apparent suicide.”) Autopsy results later showed that Biko died of a head trauma and that his body was badly beaten. Our government officials, clever devils that they are, apparently learned from the “mistake” of South Africa and refuse to release Amri’s autopsy records.

Back in 2005, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained in a speech that Guantánamo is a great training ground for our interrogators because they learn what works and what doesn’t. The Pentagon’s little laboratory gathered speed last December when the military moved several hundred men into Camp 6. Included in the randomly selected group was al-Ghizzawi.

Camp 6 is worse than any of America’s supermax prisons because inmates are given little to occupy their minds as they sit in tiny cells with no natural light or air for at least 22 hours every day. The men are allowed one book per week, but it’s the same old books that have been around year after year. Guards also allow the men two hours of “recreation time” in four-foot-by-four-foot cages. As part of the experiment, the military plays with the “rec” times: Sometimes the guards show up at 3 a.m. for al-Ghizzawi’s recreation time. He is too polite to tell the guards what I would feel compelled to say. Instead he shows his dignity by refusing to stand in the dark. Other times, when the Cuban sun is at its hottest, al-Ghizzawi is offered the opportunity to stand in the metal cage under the blistering sun where there is no shade.

Al-Ghizzawi told me in July that he now finds himself talking out loud even though no one is there to talk to. We both know he is in dangerous territory. We talked about ways to help fight the mental deterioration, such as trying to read, exercising his body or focusing on his wife and daughter. Even though his body is already shot to hell with almost six years of physical and psychological abuse and medical neglect, at least he had been maintaining his mind. He was able to put his life in perspective. He had hope, though mingled with fear for the future. But now he can no longer read the books because his eyes too are shot, so he spends his days in tedious boredom. (In September, I requested that military officials provide him reading glasses, but what is the likelihood that they will give him glasses when they will not give him medical treatment?) So al-Ghizzawi spends his days pacing in his cell, washing and rewashing his clothes and preparing for the death he knows is looming.

When I left our September meeting a few days ago, al-Ghizzawi was doubled over in pain and gagging on his own phlegm. Again, I thought about Steven Biko and the young Saudi, Amri. I feared al-Ghizzawi may suffer a cruel, solitary death. I promised him the only things I could: that his death will not go unnoticed and that I will not let him be listed as an apparent suicide. Then I asked al-Ghizzawi to please not let them take his mind.

Until they clear my notes, his response is classified.

When we arrived in Ciudad del Este, we were petrified. After all, we were in the Paraguayan city known in the American press as a “Jungle Hub for World’s Outlaws” (L.A. Times, 8/24/98), and a “hotbed” “teeming with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers” (New York Times, 12/15/02).

The U.S. media’s portrayal of this city, the center of a zone on the frontiers of Argentina and Brazil known as the Tri-Border Area, left us expecting to see cars bombs exploding, terrorists training and American flags burning. We soon realized that picture painted by U.S. media was inaccurate. In the Cold War, Washington and the media used the word “communism” to rally public opinion against political opponents. Now, in the post– September 11 world, there is a new verbal weapon — “terrorism.” Despite a lack of evidence, Washington and the media are asserting links to terrorism in the Tri-Border Area to advance their agenda in a region that is increasingly shifting to the left.

The rumors date back to two anti-Semitic bombings in Buenos Aires in the 1990s—a 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy and a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center. Ciudad del Este, with its large Arab population, made an easy scape-goat. Though the attacks were never proven to be connected to Ciudad del Este, journalists since the bombings have had Washing-ton’s go-ahead to promote the unverified hypothesis that Hez-bollah (or any other Middle Eastern group designated as a terrorist organization) is finding refuge in the Tri-Border Area.

Ciudad del Este has been described (New York Times, 8/24/98) as “a capital of institutionalized smuggling that today flows back and forth to other Latin nations, Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East.” That’s not necessarily inaccurate, as far as it goes—there is a lot of smuggling and organized crime in the Tri-Border Area—but U.S. coverage of Ciudad del Este is marked by a combination of sensationalism and xenophobia.

Mixing orientalism with fears of illegal immigrants, the L.A. Times (8/24/98) called the city a seething “Latin American casbah” with “tens of thousands of small-time smugglers, as brazen and numerous as illegal crossers at the U.S. border.” In “alleys dense with tables of pornographic videos,” New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg (10/21/02) found an “alarming enclave of lawlessness,” a “filthy and disgusting” place where “everything is illegal.” The New York Times (8/24/98) described the “jungle hamlet” as a “slow-motion riot” of “urban mayhem,” with “predatory street kids” and a “trash-strewn downtown.”

Of late, another theme has been creeping into reports on Ciudad del Este: the spectre of terrorism. In the words of the New York Times (8/24/98), the area is not just a “magnet for organized crime” but “a danger to the entire continent.” The Tri-Border, the paper reported, is “a free zone for significant criminal activity, including people who are organized to commit acts of terrorism.” The L.A. Times (8/24/98) put it simply: It is “a prototypical laboratory for developing a base for bad guys.”

Missing evidence

What’s missing from the pieces painting the Tri-Border Area as a hotbed of terrorism is evidence. Paraguayan officials protested accusations that Ciudad del Este was funding Hezbollah. “There’s no proof, only suspicions,” Washington Times journalist Mike Caesar (10/26/01) quoted officials as saying.

Nearly every article reporting on Islamic terrorism in the Tri-Border Area is honeycombed with qualifying language indicating that, despite a lack of clear evidence, U.S. officials say that there are probably links to terrorist organizations in the Tri-Border Area. The New Yorker’s Goldberg perhaps went the farthest in his claims that the Tri-Border region hosts a hard core of terrorists, a community under the influence of extreme Islamic beliefs; Hezbollah runs weekend training camps on farms cut out of the rain forest of the Triple Frontier. In at least one of these camps, in the remote jungle terrain near Foz do Iguaçu, young adults get weapons training and children are indoctrinated in Hezbollah ideology—a mixture of anti-American and anti-Jewish views inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Goldberg’s certainty about these claims—for which he supplied scant evidence—is reminiscent of a later article he wrote as the U.S. government was gearing up for a war in Iraq (New Yorker, 2/2/03), confidently linking Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The article was gratefully cited by the Bush administration to further their argument for war. Veteran muckraker Alexander Cockburn (CounterPunch, 3/28/03), pointing out various inaccuracies in that article, described it as “a servile rendition of Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of intelligence: ‘Build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than the reverse.’”

Though the press reports might not have had much evidence, they ensured that further unverified reports of terrorism in the Tri-Border Area could point to those news accounts as proof of a sort, however hollow. The Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress released an official report (7/03) titled Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America. Using thinly sourced media accounts to gloss over the lack of proof linking the early ’90s bombings to the Tri-Border Area, the report glibly summarized the next 10 years: “Since the1994 attack, Islamic terrorists in the TBA have largely confined their activities to criminal fundraising and other activities in support of their terrorist organizations, including plotting terrorist actions to be carried out in other countries.”

Using media reports (among them the New Yorker, New York Times and L.A. Times articles cited above) as its conclusive evidence of terrorist groups in the region, the report concluded with a section titled “The TBA as a Haven and Base for Islamic Terrorist Groups.” The bulleted finale stated that “various Islamic terrorist groups, including the Egyptian Al-Jihad (Islamic Jihad) and Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, probably have a presence in the TBA; Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda are probably cooperating in the region, but definitive proof of this collaboration, in the form of a specific document, did not surface in this review.” Indeed, proof that the Shiite Hezbollah was working with the ferociously anti-Shiite Al-Qaeda would be remarkable news.

A new generation of rumors

The Library of Congress report’s release prompted a flurry of new coverage, citing the report as solid evidence of terrorism links in the TBA. The most confident officials declared their conviction that Paraguay’s “illicit activities help finance global terror”: “That is fact, not speculation,” insisted U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. James Hill, without offering any substantiation (Miami Herald, 8/15/03). In the same report, an anonymous Bush administration official was more cautious. “There’s no solid evidence that Al-Qaeda is still present in the region, but ‘we want to do the work of prevention and reduce the flows of money to Hezbollah and Hamas. . . . As terrorists flee the hot spots in the world, we don’t want them to see places like the Tri-Border Area as potential safe havens.’”

The master of hypothesis verification himself, Donald Rumsfeld, took another approach: ignore the topic altogether. When Rumsfeld visited Asunción in August 2005, he talked about using the Paraguayan military to save bordering Bolivia from the leftist influence of Venezuela, but never mentioned terrorism in the Tri-Border Area. At the time, the Washington Post (8/17/05) reported that “Defense officials said [the TBA] might also harbor groups that finance international terrorism. One Defense official . . . said Hezbollah and Hamas, radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, ‘get a lot of funding’ from the Tri-Border Area.”

The issue received steady coverage in 2006. In a June 3, 2006 Associated Press report, Western intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, claimed that if Iran were cornered by the United States, it could use a Hezbollah network based in the TBA to direct terrorist attacks. Again, no evidence was offered, and the Paraguayan government protested the unverified report. On August 3, 2006, Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant treasury secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, practiced his verbal gymnastics when talking about “a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that [U.S. officials] believe are funding Hezbollah and other radical groups.” “I am highly confident that’s the case,” Glaser said (Washington Post, 8/2/06). “We believe there is evidence.”

By the end of the year, the U.S. government was ready to take action in an environment saturated with media coverage, if light on evidence. On December 6, 2006, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury . . . designated nine individuals and two entities [in the Tri-Border Area] that have provided financial and logistical support to the Hezbollah terrorist organization” (paraguay.usembassy.gov, 12/6/06). These claims were rejected by Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. As of August 7, 2007, an article describing the designation was still the top article of the “Latest Headlines from the Americas” section of the U.S. embassy site. The article, titled “Hezbollah Fundraising Network in the Triple Frontier” and dated December 6, 2006, appeared on the front page of the site without a date, misleading readers to believe that it was a current article. Next on the list of news stories was an article dated July 10, 2007.

Seeing for ourselves

To see what was really happening in Ciudad del Este today, we set out into the sunny heat of the city to hear what Paraguayans had to say. The press attaché for the governor of Alto Paraná, the state where the city is located, was shocked to see us: In spite of all the media coverage this city had received in the international media, we were the first two foreign journalists to speak with him. He denied any terrorist activity in the area.

Others were similarly dismissive about claims about terrorist groups. Local vendors and farmers calmly described the mafia activities, drug trafficking and arms smuggling going on in the area, but were quick to point out that there were no links with foreign terrorist groups. A Syrian businessman we spoke with ridiculed the claims, saying Middle Easterners in the area left their home countries to escape violence and war. In a country that ran rampant with rumors, no one seemed to believe the claims of terrorist links for a second.

There are a number of plausible reasons the region has been portrayed as a terrorist stronghold. One is that the current Paraguayan government is one of the Bush administration’s last allies in a region that is increasingly shifting to the left. It is strategically located in the heart of South America, between the politically and economically more powerful countries of Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia. An alliance with the Paraguayan military, justified by an internal threat, can only help expand the Pentagon’s reach in the area.

The Mideastern community in Ciudad del Este makes it potentially easier for Washington to claim a threat of terrorism if the need for a military intervention arises. The area is also rich in natural resources: Bolivia’s vast natural gas reserves are right next door, and the largest fresh water aquifer is under Paraguay’s soil.

Misinformation to militarization

The media misinformation campaign transformed into a military campaign when hundreds of U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay in July 2005. After Washington threatened to cut off millions in aid to Paraguay if its Senate refused the military’s entry, the legislature voted to allow U.S. troops to train Paraguayan military. When the U.S. troops arrived in the country, U.S. funding for counter-terrorism to Paraguay soon doubled, and repression against rural farmer movements subsequently increased.

The media portrayal of Paraguay has facilitated the repression of some of the most powerful protest movements in the country. Small farmers in rural Paraguay are being forced off their land—and in some cases tortured and killed—to make way for the booming soy industry (Upside Down World, 7/17/06). Analysts in Paraguay believe the increased violence against farmers is linked to the presence of U.S. military.

“The U.S. military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups,” Orlando Castillo of Service Peace and Justice, a Latin American human rights organization, explained: They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally. . . . U.S. troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against “terrorism.”

University of Brasília historian Luiz Moniz Bandeira told the Washington Times (10/25/05), “I wouldn’t dismiss the hypothesis that U.S. agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence.”

The U.S. Embassy in Asunción denied that the U.S. military is linked to the increased repression against farmers. In December 2006, the Paraguayan Senate voted against renewing the legislation granting the U.S. troops freedom to operate in the country.

Upon leaving Ciudad del Este, we saw children playing baseball in a park, couples walking hand in hand, people fishing in a nearby river and Brazilians on vacation snapping photos. It looked like any other sleepy Latin American city on a Sunday. Given the history of U.S. intervention in the region, we have no reason to trust what is being said in most foreign media about this city. For the last hundred years, the U.S. has been accusing Latin Americans of lawlessness and terrorism. It is easy to make those accusations about places that most North Americans are unlikely to go. Our job, as conscientious news readers, is to ask for evidence and be skeptical of the hype.

Academic Freedom is at Risk in America

“Academic colleagues, get used to it,” warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. “Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.”

Kramer’s warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.

This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers, stymied debate and shut down dialogue.

Over the past few years, Israel’s U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free function of which once made American universities the envy of the world.

Outside interference by Israel’s supporters has plunged one U.S. campus after another into crisis. They have introduced crudely political — rather than strictly academic or scholarly — criteria into hiring, promotion and other decisions at a number of universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard and DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel’s most ardent American defenders.

Our campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment. However, the disruption of academic freedom has grave implications beyond campus walls.

When professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay critical of the effect of Israel’s lobbying organizations on U.S. foreign policy, they had to publish it in the London Review of Books because their original American publisher declined to take it on. With the original article expanded into a book that has now been released, their invitation to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was retracted because of outside pressure. “This one is so hot,” they were told. So although Michael Oren, an officer in the Israeli army, was recently allowed to lecture the council about U.S. policy in the Middle East, two distinguished American academics were denied the same privilege.

When President Carter published “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid” last year, he was attacked for having dared to use the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.

As that case made especially clear, the point of most of these attacks is to personally discredit anyone who would criticize Israel — and to taint them with the smear of “controversy” — rather than to engage them in a genuine debate. None of Carter’s critics provided a convincing refutation of his main argument based on facts and evidence. Presumably that’s because, for all the venom directed against the former president, he was right. For example, Israel maintains two different road networks, and even two entirely different legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish settlers and the other for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts were studiously ignored by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused him of a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.

That Israel’s American supporters so often resort to angry outbursts rather than principled arguments — and seem to find emotional blackmail more effective than genuine debate — is ultimately a sign of their weakness rather than their strength. For all the damage it can do in the short term, in the long run such a position is untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché rather than hard facts. The phenomenal success of Carter’s book suggests that more and more Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics that are the only tools available to Israel’s supporters.

But we need to be able to have an open debate about our Middle East policy now — before we needlessly shed more blood and further erode our reputation among people who used to regard us as the champions of freedom, and now worry that we have come to stand for its very opposite.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator on the Middle East.

Hugo Chávez’s Alo Presidente TV program, telecast live from Santa Clara (Cuba), October 14, is an historic turning point in the gathering showdown between the imperialist North and the popular upsurge unfolding across the lands and islands of Abya Yala (“Western” Hemisphere), the infamous U.S. Border Wall and south of the Rio Bravo.

As my 19 year-old granddaughter and I watched Hugo and Fidel, members of Che Guevara’s family, and a range of other leaders of Cuba and Venezuela, my sense of history and actual events told me that something was up. A deeper awareness began to form before me — we indeed were witnessing and participating in something new and vital to our future, and the future of our aggrieved planet.

The Alo Presidente event, coupled with Hugo Chávez’s meeting with Fidel Castro the day before, stands – in my view — as our 21st Century Zimmerwald, a Zimmerwald Plus.

In September 1915 two coach loads of outstanding socialist leaders from the antiwar left wing of Socialist (2nd) International affiliated parties, including two future leaders of the October Soviet Revolution – Lenin and Trotsky — met at Zimmerwald (in neutral Switzerland) to unite those revolutionary socialists prepared to carry out serious and consequent opposition to the imperialist world war. They issued a manifesto calling upon soldiers, workers and oppressed peoples and nationalities of Europe to lay down their arms andrefuse to continue to slaughter one another in the interests of capital; to struggle to defend their own class interests against those who had sent them to the trenches.

In today’s jargon we might say that the group was small enough to meet in a rented Tim Horton’s, but too big to meet in a telephone booth (as do quite a number of ultraleft groups today when they congregate to cross more t’s and dot more i’s on their manifestos denouncing Chávez and Morales as a mealy-mouthed “populists”).

The solid core of the Zimmerwald group, despite its small size, went on to lead the Russian October revolution. Under the impact of Soviet power in the former Tsarist Empire, the capacity of the German and other ruling classes in Europe to continue their carnage and slaughter dissipated. Kings, Kaisers, and Tsars were toppled as the “war to end all wars” collapsed amidst mutinies, rebellions, civil wars, and insurrectionary commotion across the “Old Continent.” The rebellious mood even spread to North America as the Winnipeg General strike of 1919 showed.

From Santa Clara — today’s 21st Century Zimmerwald — tested Cuban and Venezuelan leaderships wielding government power set forth a clear orientation to millions of anti-imperialist, anti colonialist, and anti-capitalist fighters across the continent.

Hugo Chávez made it clear that they and their allies will not back down in the face of imperialist threats. And they will not stand idly by – Chávez iterated this with utter clarity – and allow imperialist inspired forces to overthrow the Bolivian government and/or assassinate Bolivian President Evo Morales. The great moral authority of el Che accompanied that of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez to add force and depth to the message.

Chávez’s October 13 meeting with Fidel Castro lasted for over four hours. On Alo Presidente the next day he played a ten-minute segment of that meeting. The clip appeared to be an unedited part of their longer chat. It is available on the internet at http://www.aporrea.org/venezuelaexterior/n103013.html.

I am struck by how comfortable and at ease our two leaders are, how much they enjoy each other’s presence and being, and how much they want to learn from each other’s experiences and thinking. This was especially evident in videos of previous encounters during Fidel’s long convalescence, when emotions ran higher because of uncertainty about Fidel’s recovery during that period.

The next day Fidel called into Chávez’s show and remained on line for well over an hour. The back-and-forth with Chávez and his live audience ranged from serious political discussion, announcements about new economic agreements between Venezuela and Cuba, to historical questions about the roots of the Bolivarian movement in the 80-90s. There was enough banter and irony in their exchanges to keep everyone, including them, in suspense as to what might be coming next.

The outdoor audience consisted of a large representation of Cuba’s government and Cuban Communist Party leaderships, as well as local Santa Clara leaders and representatives of grassroots organizations.

The Cuban-Venezuelan commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Che’s capture and murder on October 8-9, 1967 was held on the grounds of the Che Guevara museum and memorial. The Santa Clara event came on the heels of an official Bolivian government commemoration October 8 near the site where Che had waged his last armed battle.

Evo Morales gave a keynote address at that event before a multi-generational crowd from many countries. Prensa Latina reported that our indigenous president affirmed that the Movement Towards Socialism agenda for change is moving forward along a “100% Guevarist and socialist” course. El Che will live on forever, he said. “This struggle will continue, as long as capitalism exists, as long as neoliberalism remains unchanged.”

Guevara’s entire family — his wife Aleida March and his surviving children, attended the Santa Clara commemoration [Hildita, Che’s first daughter with the Peruvian revolutionary Hilda Gadea, died of cancer in Havana, over a decade ago]. Dr. Aleida Guevara, Che’s daughter, spoke and exchanged views with the Venezuelan leader.

Chávez’s TV program is almost always dynamic and participatory. Throughout the five hours he often invited compas (brothers and sisters) in the audience to take the mike and offer their opinions on some matter, usually their appreciation of the significance of the Che anniversary and commemoration.

The latter part of the program took viewers to five or six locations in Venezuela for live interviews with groups of citizens gathered together to discuss proposed amendments to Venezuela’s Bolivarian constitution, and to express their views on the Alo Presidente show they themselves were taking part and watching at the same time.

The political significance of the encounter between Chávez and Fidel, and the Santa Clara Alo Presidente program can be qualified through discussion of a number of key points.

Fidel appears stronger and recovering well. He clearly still plays a big role in key strategic discussions facing Cuba, Venezuela, and the ALBA alliance.

Chávez spoke about a firm alliance of four countries – Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador. He called for a federation of nations, beginning with those four. He interjected fluid ideas about some kind of common, federative government. He distinguished that idea from the longstanding pancontinental dream of “one Latin American country.”

In a federation of nations or countries some common state and semi- autonomous institutions could handle questions delegated to them through agreements among and between member states and governments.

Many indigenous activists and leaders question existing borders and/or the authority of many states in the hemisphere. They will surely appreciate the open-ended nature of the ALBA leader’s tentative proposals on this theme. A genuine confederation along the lines of an expanded ALBA would have to incorporate the essence of indigenous views on this problem, one with deep roots in the history of European political and cultural colonization.

Chávez and Castro discussed what Hugo calls “the rise of two, three many Vietnams” in South and Central America, and the Caribbean Basin. Iraq’s people, they noted, have just inflicted a Vietnam-scale defeat of U.S. imperialism that threatens to revive the Vietnam syndrome with a vengeance.

Chávez explained, however, that his concept of “two, three many Vietnams” is not an armed struggle strategy. He sees the Vietnams erupting up and down the continent as insurrections of “conscience and ideas,” the forging a new morality based on human solidarity, and the escalation of political struggle to a level, scope, and scale capable of delivering major defeats to the empire builders; and above all, capable of scoring major victories for their victims.

We already have 21st Century Vietnams breaking out, or well on their way. That’s mainly because we – the grassroots toilers and workers of society, the dispossessed and damned, are simply but loudly saying “enough!” We are refusing to back down and carry out our role as oppressed and exploited pawns. We want the whole board, and we want it now, in our lifetimes. We want to save our Mother Earth so that our grandchildren and great grandchildren can know her bosom and drink from her springs.

Fidel shares Chávez’s ‘many Vietnams’ concept. When the younger revolutionist asked for his opinion on that, Fidel added something significant to the mix. New Vietnams are blossoming all over the world, not just in our hemisphere, he explained. Hugo was quick to nod agreement on that point.

Chávez repeatedly referred to the dangerous political situation in Bolivia — the threat of a pro-imperialist, right wing coup against the MAS government and “brother Evo Morales.”

“If the Bolivian oligarchy manages to overthrow Evo Morales or assassinate him, you Bolivian oligarchs should know that we Venezuelans will not stand by with our arms crossed,” Chávez warned.

In the same vein, the Bolivarian president pointedly cautioned those who are trying to squash the democratically elected Bolivian government and Constituent Assembly. He told them they were playing with fire, because if they carry out such plans the result “would hardly be a Vietnam of ideas or a Constituent Assembly process; rather, they would beget, God help us, a Vietnam of submachine guns.” He added, “no consensus is possible with any oligarchy,” because they are only concerned with “hegemony and imposition.”[i]

The ALBA leadership team acts upon its strategy of open discussion with supporters, with the grassroots of their countries and the rest of the globe. They are completely comfortable with that – unlike their imperialist enemies who prefer the basement White House, secret negotiation, hidden agendas, and a dumbed-down public for their “leadership formula.”

The distinction is simple. One approach is based on convincing millions of supporters to undertake a course of action through open discussion and shared information. The contrary method is to impose policy decisions through lies, deception, and fiat – the way the Bush and Blair administrations [Denmark and Australian governments and other First World governments as well. Editor’s Note] dragged their countries into the war against Iraq, imperial occupation, and ultimate catastrophe for victims and aggressors alike.

President Chávez, upon arriving at the Santa Clara airport, made an immediate tour of the town in an open jeep. Cheering crowds lined streets and parks to welcome him to their city where July 26 forces under Che’s command struck a mortal blow against the Batista dictatorship in the historic 1958 Battle of Santa Clara.

The presence of virtually the entire Cuban leadership — and the public and participatory nature of the tribune from which this united, clear defiance was proclaimed — leave no doubt among friend and foe alike that this is an affirmation of strong will and intent to unite in a life-and-death struggle against imperialist war and intervention.

The ALBA alliance is re-invigorating the struggle against imperialist domination, regime-change, and coup making. This is nothing less than subversive, wide-open peace advocacy based on the right to self-determination, on harmonious relations with Mother Nature, and on freedom from imperial oppression, exploitation, and plunder.

The just concluded For the Historic Victory of the Indigenous Peoples of the World Encounter, held in Chimoré, Cochabamba – Bolivia (October 12) also issued an urgent call for the defense of the MAS government and “brother Evo Morales – President of the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala.”

[See: http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2007/10/formal-summons-to-world-states-by.html
Or, for the Spanish orginal go to: http://www.movimientos.org/12octubre/show_text.php3?key=11076 ]

“We commit ourselves to support the historic effort led by bother Evo Morales, President of the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala [the lands and islands of the Western hemisphere], in the construction of a new plurinational state. In the face of any internal or external threat, we remain vigilant over what is happening in Bolivia, and we call on the peoples of the planet to offer support and solidarity to this process that must serve to motivate the Peoples, Nations, and States of the world to take up the same course.”

The appeals from Hugo and Fidel in Havana, and from the continental Indigenous Encounter in Chimoré, Cochabamba, articulate and amplify the voices of a chorus of fighters from a new generation. Some are organized in ALBA; some in a growing and strengthened continental indigenous movement; and some in other networks and campaigns. Many find themselves tuned in to all these harmonious frameworks. An orchestra for our times has assembled to rehearse and then carry off “two, three, many festivals of the oppressed.”

Among them will be two, three, many Che’s.

That’s why Bolivia’s allies can and do affirm, fists raised, that “they will never bring Evo down. He is our president, too, and we will defend him.”

The world will be a better world because it will be a socialist world. Anything less would not be, and could not be a better world. This time the victory is ours, and everyone’s. The planet told me so.

10/20/07 “London Review Of Books” — — Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.

But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.

Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).

And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.

Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’

Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Protests erupted this past week in Turkey and Iraq over Turkey’s decision to authorize an invasion of Iraq in order to fight Kurdish separatists.

In addition to the Kurdish Parties in Turkey, both the Labor Party of Turkey and the Communist Party of Turkey rejected a bill put forward by Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party to authorize an invasion of Iraq to pursue Kurdish separatists affiliated with the Kurdish Workers’ Party or PKK.

Evoking Bush-style demagoguery, Erdogan accused opponents of the bill of supporting terrorism.

In a statement released on Thursday (10-18), the Labor Party said an invasion of Iraq was no solution to the conflict over Kurdistan, and “a new operation into North Iraq will only antagonize the peoples of the same region.”

The statement went on: “Our country and our peoples – both Kurds and Turks – will suffer from the results of this war.”

The Communist Party saw the vote not as a break with the Bush administration’s policies in the Middle East but as a collaboration with US imperialism and Bush administration aims in the Middle East.

The Communists, who held protests on Wednesday of this week in Ankara over the invasion bill, said, “Our country faces security problems but this problem comes from dependency on the USA, the love of the European Union, the NATO membership, the secret agreements with Israel and from sending our troops to death in order to serve the US imperialism in Afghanistan. “

Weighing in on the the issue and describing the likely results of a Turkish invasion of Iraq, northern Iraq International Committee of the Red Crescent spokesperson Flamerz Mohammed said, “Any military conflict in the region will bring about a humanitarian crisis as civilians will be killed or displaced due to shelling and troop incursions.”

In an interview with Al-Jazeerah, Murat Karayilan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, accused the Turkish government of lying about Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq into Turkey. There are enough Kurdish separatists in Turkey to conduct their operations there, he said. PKK members or supporters do not need to cross the border.

Accusing Turkey of using the threat to attack Iraq and subsequent destabilization as a tactic to pressure President Bush to speak out against a US congressional resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, Murat Karayilan added, “Turkey’s aim is to attack Iraqi Kurds” not PKK members.

Many Kurds in both turkey and Iraq seek the formation of an independent Kurdistan whose territory would include portions of present-day Turkey.

In a statement released earlier in the week, the Iraqi Communist Party denounced the Erdogan policy of invading Iraq and the ongoing shelling in mountainous regions in northern Iraq.

“While rejecting and denouncing this escalation,” read an Iraqi Communist Party statement, “we call for putting an immediate end to it, and to stop, fully and once and for all, the use of violent means and military force. The only means to achieve an effective and just resolution of emerging problems is through dialog between the two neighboring countries, and through peaceful negotiations that avoid solving the problems of one side at the expense of the other.”

Under pressure from the Bush administration, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared the PKK a terrorist organization and has offered to allow the Turkish invasion of Kurdistan, including northern Iraq and even to conduct joint operations there.

Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds in Arbil, Iraq, in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, took to the streets on Wednesday to protest Erdogan’s invasion policy.

Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, called for talks between Turkey and his government in order to resolve the conflict peacefully, but also promised to fight any aggression by Turkey, according to the Associated Press.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has resigned. This is a big deal!

The fact that Larijani had threatened to resign several times was an open secret in Iran; a fact that was even acknowledged by the government spokesman, Gholam-hossein Elham, in his announcement of Larijani’s resignation (Al Jazeera has good round up of some of Larijani’s conflicts with Ahmadinejad).

What is surprising is Ayatollah Khamenei’s agreement to this resignation and the reported replacement of Larijani by Saeed Jalili, a deputy foreign minister for European affairs who actually has very little diplomatic experience (Jalili’s experience at the foreign Ministry prior to being assigned as deputy minister by Ahmadinejad was in personnel matters). What Jalili does have is a very close relationship with Ahmadinejad. As such, the move, if it is confirmed, reflects yet another enhancement of Ahmadinejad’s fortunes in Iranian politics.

So far the Iranian system seems to be in a state of shock. Larijani was considered a successful handler of the Iranian nuclear file and his agreement with the IAEA regarding a work plan to resolve the remaining outstanding issues over Iran’s nuclear program an important step forward.

His announced meeting with Europe’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, for next Tuesday makes the timing of the resignation even stranger and suggests the extent to which this move might have been impromptu and really the result of intense personal as well as policy conflicts between Larijani and Ahmadinejad. The straw that broke the camel’s back was probably Larijani’s assertion that Putin had a special message about Iran’s nuclear file and Ahmadinejad’s public rejection of that assertion.

Several important politicians in Iran, including Ahmad Tavkoli, the head of Majles’ Research Center, and Mohsen Rezaie, the Expediency Council’s secretary, have already expressed their concern and unease about Larijani’s resignation as well as his replacement by a novice. The deputy head of Majles’ Foreign Relations Committee has promised an investigation.

The most unsettling aspect of this move from the insiders point of view may be questions raised regarding Ayatollah Khamenei’s control over the nuclear file. Both of the possibilities – that he has either lost control or decided to throw his support for the most radical elements in the Iranian political system – are bound to unsettle the domestic political scene. For him, to be seen as being in one corner with Ahmadinejad against all the other heavyweights of Iranian politics, including Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khatami, Karrubi, Rezaie, Qalibaf, and now Larijani, is a predicament he has tried hard to avoid at least publicly.

LEESBURG, Va. (AP) – The United States and other nations will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.

“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions,” Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies.

He said Iran’s efforts to pursue technology that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon are obvious and that “the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time.”

If Iran continues on its current course, Cheney said the U.S. and other nations are “prepared to impose serious consequences.” The vice president made no specific reference to military action.

“We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Cheney’s words seemed to only escalate the U.S. rhetoric against Iran over the past several days, including President Bush ‘s warning that a nuclear Iran could lead to “World War III.”

Cheney said the ultimate goal of the Iranian leadership is to establish itself as the hegemonic force in the Middle East and undermine a free Shiite-majority Iraq as a rival for influence in the Muslim world.

Iran’s government seeks “to keep Iraq in a state of weakness to ensure Baghdad does not pose a threat to Tehran,” Cheney said.

While he was critical of that government and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, he offered praise and words of solidarity to the Iranian people. Iran “is a place of unlimited potential … and it has the right to be free of tyranny,” Cheney said.

Cheney accused of Iran of having a direct role in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and said the government has “solidified its grip on the country” since coming to power in 1979.

The U.S. and some allies accuse Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and have demanded it halt uranium enrichment, an important step in the production of atomic weapons. Oil-rich Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes including generating electricity.

At a news conference Wednesday, Bush suggested that if Iran obtained nuclear weapons, it could lead to a new world war.

“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 (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Bush said.

Bush’s spokeswoman later said the president was making not making any war plans but rather “a rhetorical point.”

Also, on Thursday, the top officer in the U.S. military said the U.S. has the resources to attack Iran if needed despite the strains of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan .

Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said striking Iran is a last resort, and the focus now on diplomacy to stem Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but “there is more than enough reserve to respond” militarily if need be.

The Bush administration’s intentions toward Iran have been the subject of debate in Congress .

Last month the Senate approved a resolution urging the State Department to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

Sen. Jim Webb , D-Va., said he feared the measure could be interpreted as authorizing a military strike in Iran, calling it Cheney’s “fondest pipe dream.”

Rome – Hundreds of thousands of supporters of Italy’s radical left and communist parties gathered in Rome on Saturday to demonstrate against reform of the country’s pension and social security systems.

Demonstrators also sought to pressure Romano Prodi’s centre-left government to ensure creation of more secure jobs.

Franco Giordana, head of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), said up to 700,000 people had taken part in the march. He stressed however that the demonstration was not against the government.