The Rag Blog

The United Nations should pull out of the Quartet of Middle East mediators unless the group starts taking Palestinian human rights seriously, a UN envoy said on Monday.

John Dugard, the UN special rapporteur on human rights for the Palestinian territories, told the BBC the world body “does itself little good” by remaining in the Quartet group of the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

“In my most recent report to the General Assembly…I will suggest that the secretary general withdraw the UN from the Quartet, if the Quartet fails to have regard to the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories,” Dugard said.

Dugard, who is due to present the report next month, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The South African, who has served in the independent post since 2001, said Israel Defense Forces checkpoints in the occupied West Bank were meant to divide the territory into “cantons” and “make the life of Palestinians as miserable as possible”.

The IDF says its network of West Bank checkpoints, which Palestinians call collective punishment, are necessary to stop suicide bombers.

Dugard’s comments echoed searing allegations from a former UN Middle East envoy who said in June after leaving the post that UN policy in the region had failed because it was subservient to U.S. and Israeli interests.

Alvaro de Soto upbraided the Quartet for failing the Palestinians and also urged the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to “seriously reconsider” continued UN membership in the group.

Dugard said the Quartet was “heavily influenced” by the United States, and criticized Western powers for backing Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction while maintaining a crippling boycott of Islamist group Hamas.

“The international community has given its support almost completely to one faction, the Fatah faction,” he said. “That’s not the role the UN should take.”

Dugard was skeptical that the U.S.-sponsored peace conference set to take place in Maryland next month would succeed in bridging Israeli and Palestinian differences on creating a Palestinian state.

He warned of “serious consequences” if expectations are not met, raising the possibility of a third Palestinian uprising, or intifada, against Israel.

They can’t help themselves. They want to confess.

How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The second “secret opinion” was issued as Congress moved to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment (not that such acts weren’t already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly “declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard”; and, the Times assured us, “the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.”

All of these memorandums, in turn, were written years after John Yoo’s infamous “torture memo” of August 2002 and a host of other grim documents on detention, torture, and interrogation had already been leaked to the public, along with graphic FBI emailed observations of torture and abuse at Guantanamo, those “screen savers” from Abu Ghraib, and so much other incriminating evidence. In other words, in early 2005 when that endorsement of “the harshest interrogation techniques” was being written, its authors could hardly have avoided knowing that it, too, would someday become part of the public record.

But, it seems, they couldn’t help themselves. Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled “legal” justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials — from the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense on down — just couldn’t resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we’re dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly irrational in its intensity, that’s gripped this administration. None of the predictable we’re shocked! we’re shocked! editorial responses to the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.

Torture as the Royal Road to Commander-in-Chief Power

So let’s back up a moment and consider the nature of the torture controversy in these last years. In a sense, the Bush administration has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive administration in our history.

Let’s recall that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration’s top officials had an overpowering urge to “take the gloves off” (instructions sent from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s office directly to the Afghan battlefield), to “unshackle” the CIA. They were in a rush to release a commander-in-chief “unitary executive,” untrammeled by the restrictions they associated with the fall of President Richard Nixon and with the Watergate era. They wanted to abrogate the Geneva Conventions (parts of which Alberto Gonzales, then White House Council and companion-in-arms to the President, declared “quaint” and “obsolete” in 2002). They were eager to develop their own categories of imprisonment that freed them from all legal constraints, as well as their own secret, offshore prison system in which their power would be total. All of this went to the heart of their sense of entitlement, their belief that such powers were their political birthright. The last thing they wanted to do was have this all happen in secret and with full deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.

That prison complex was to be the public face of their right to do anything. Perched on an American base in Cuba just beyond the reach of The Law — American-leased but not court-overseen soil — the new prison was to be the proud symbol of their expansive power. It was also to be the public face of a new, secret regime of punishment that would quickly spread around the world — into the torture chambers of despotic regimes in places like Egypt and Syria, onto American bases like the island fastness of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, onto U.S. Navy and other ships floating in who knew which waters, into the former prisons of the old Soviet Empire, and into a growing network of American detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, when those first shots of prisoners, in orange jumpsuits, manacled and blindfolded, entering Guantanamo were released, no one officially howled (though the grim, leaked shots of those prisoners being transported to Guantanamo were another matter). After all, they wanted the world to know just how powerful this administration was — powerful enough to redefine the terms of detention, imprisonment, and interrogation to the point of committing acts that traditionally were abhorred and ruled illegal by humanity and by U.S. law (even if sometimes committed anyway).

Though certain administration officials undoubtedly believed that “harsh interrogation techniques” would produce reliable information, this can’t account for the absolute fascination with torture that gripped them, as well as assorted pundits and talking heads (and then, through “24” and other TV shows and movies, Americans in general). In search of a world where they could do anything, they reached instinctively for torture as a symbol. After all, was there any more striking way to remove those “gloves” or “unshackle” a presidency? If you could stake a claim the right to torture, then you could stake a claim to do just about anything.

Think of it this way: If Freud believed that dreams were the royal road to the individual unconscious, then the top officials of the Bush administration believed torture to be the royal road to their ultimate dream of unconstrained power, what John Yoo in his “torture memo” referred to as “the Commander-in-Chief Power.”

It was via Guantanamo that they meant to announce the arrival of this power on planet Earth. They were proud of it. And that prison complex was to function as their bragging rights. Their message was clear enough: In this world of ours, democracy would indeed run rampant and a vote of one would, in every case, be considered a majority.

The Crimes Are in the Definitions

This, then, was one form of confession — a much desired one. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their subordinates (with few exceptions) wished to affirm their position as directors of the planet’s “sole superpower,” intent as they were on creating a Pentagon-led Pax Americana abroad and a Rovian Pax Republicana at home. But there was another, seldom noted form of confession at work.

As if to fit their expansive sense of their own potential powers, it seems that these officials, and the corps of lawyers that accompanied them, had expansive, gnawing fears. Given this cast of characters, you can’t talk about a collective “guilty conscience,” but there was certainly an ongoing awareness that what they were doing contravened normal American and global standards of legality; that their acts, when it came to detention and torture, might be judged illegal; and that those who committed — or ordered — such acts might someday, somehow, actually be brought before a court of law to account for them. These fears, by the way, were usually pinned on low-level operatives and interrogators, who were indeed fearful of the obvious: that they had no legal leg to stand on when it came to kidnapping terror suspects, disappearing them, and subjecting them to a remarkably wide range of acts of torture and abuse, often in deadly combination over long periods of time.

Perhaps Bush’s men (and women) feared that even a triumphantly successful commander-in-chief presidency might — à la the Pinochet regime in Chile — have its limits in time. Perhaps they simply sensed an essential contradiction that lay at the very heart of their position: The urge to take pride in their “accomplishments,” to assert their powers, and to claim bragging rights for redefining what was legal could also be seen as the urge to confess (if matters took a wrong turn as, in the case of the Bush administration, they always have). And so, along with the pride, along with the kidnappings, the new-style imprisonment, the acts of torture (and, in some cases, murder), the pretzled documents began to pour out of the administration — each a tortured extremity of bizarre legalisms (as with Yoo’s August 2002 document, which essentially managed to reposition torture as something that existed mainly in the mind of, and could only be defined by, the torturer himself); each was but another example of legalisms following upon and directed by desire. (Yoo himself was reportedly known by Attorney General John Ashcroft as Dr. Yes, “for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired.”) Each, in the end, might also be read as a confession of wrongdoing.

What made all this so strange was not just the “tortured” nature of the “torture memo” (just rejected by the new attorney general nominee as “worse than a sin, it was a mistake”), but the repetitious nature of these dismantling documents which, with the help of an army of leakers inside the government, have been making their way into public view for years. Or how about the strange situation of an American president, who has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to being deeply involved in the issues of detainment and torture — as, for instance, in a February 7, 2002 memorandum to his top officials in which he signed off on his power to “suspend [the] Geneva [Conventions] as between the United States and Afghanistan” (which he then declined to do “at this time”) and his right to wipe out the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That document began with the following: “Our recent extensive discussions regarding the status of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm…”

“Our recent extensive discussions…” You won’t find that often in previous presidential documents about the abrogation of international and domestic law. It wasn’t, of course, that the U.S. had never imprisoned anyone abroad and certainly not that the U.S. had never used torture abroad. Water-boarding, for instance, was first employed by U.S. soldiers in the Philippine Insurrection at the dawn of the previous century; torture was widely used and taught by CIA and other American operatives in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and elsewhere. But American presidents didn’t then see the bragging rights in such acts, any more than a previous American president would have sent his vice president to Capitol Hill to lobby openly for torture (however labeled). Past presidents held on to the considerable benefits of deniability (and perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing too much themselves). They didn’t regularly and repeatedly commit to paper their “extensive discussions” on distasteful and illegal subjects.

Nor did they get up in public, against all news, all reason (but based on the fantastic redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a presidential desire to use “harsh interrogation techniques”) to deny repeatedly that their administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange on the subject from Bush’s most recent press conference:

“Q What’s your definition of the word ‘torture’?

“THE PRESIDENT: Of what?

“Q The word ‘torture.’ What’s your definition?

“THE PRESIDENT: That’s defined in U.S. law, and we don’t torture.

“Q Can you give me your version of it, sir?

“THE PRESIDENT: Whatever the law says.”

After a while, this, too, becomes a form of confession -– that, among other things, the President has never rejected John Yoo’s definition of torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that with the admission of “extensive discussions” on detention matters and, minimally, you have a President, who has proven himself deeply engaged in such subjects. A President who makes such no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim to be in the dark on the subject. In other words, you’re already moving from the Clintonesque parsing of definitions (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is'”) into unfathomable realms of presidential definitional darkness.

On the Record

Of course, plumbing the psychology of a single individual while in office — of a President or a Vice President — is a nearly impossible task. Plumbing the psychology of an administration? Who can do it? And yet, sometimes officials may essentially do it for you. They may leave bureaucratic clues everywhere and then, as if seized by an impulsion, return again and again to what can only be termed the scene of the crime. Documents they just couldn’t not write. Acts they just couldn’t not take. Think of these as the Freudian slips of officials under pressure. Think of them as small, repeated confessions granted under the interrogation of reality and history, under the fearful pressure of the future, and granted in the best way possible: willingly, without opposition, and not under torture.

Sometimes, it’s just a matter of refocusing to see the documents, the statements, the acts for what they are. Such is the case with the torture memos that continue to emerge. Never has an administration — and hardly has a torturing regime anywhere — had so many of its secret documents aired while it was still in the act. Seldom has a ruling group made such an open case for its own crimes.

We’re talking, of course, about the most secretive administration in American history — so secretive, in fact, that Congressional representatives considering classified portions of an intelligence bill, have to go to “a secret, secure room in the Capitol, turn in their Blackberrys and cellphones, and read the document without help from any staff members.” Such briefings are given to Congressional representatives, but under ground rules in which “participants are prohibited from future discussions of the information — even if it is subsequently revealed in the media…” So representatives who are briefed are also effectively prohibited from discussing what they have learned in Congress.

And yet, none of this mattered when it came to the administration establishing its own record of illegality — and exhibiting its own outsized fears of future prosecution. Let’s just take one labor intensive — and exceedingly strange, if now largely forgotten — example of these fears in action. In 2002, a new tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), was established in the Hague to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. “[T]hen-Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton nullified the U.S. signature on the International Criminal Court treaty one month into President Bush’s first term” and Congress subsequently passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act which prohibited “certain types of military aid to countries that have signed on to the International Criminal Court but have not signed a separate accord with the United States, called an Article 98 agreement.” The Bush administration, opposed to international “fora” of all sorts, then proceeded to go individually, repeatedly, and over years, to more than 100 countries, demanding that the representatives of each sign such an agreement “not to surrender American citizens to the international court without the consent of officials in Washington.”

In other words, they put the sort of effort that might normally have gone into establishing an international agreement into threatening weak countries with the loss of U.S. aid in order to give themselves — and of course those lower-level soldiers and operatives on whom so much is blamed — a free pass for crimes yet to be committed (but which they obviously felt they would commit). We’re talking here about small, impoverished lands like Cambodia, still attempting to bring its own war criminals of the Pol Pot era to justice.

In the process of twisting arms, the administration suspended over $47 million in military aid “to 35 countries that ha[d] not signed deals to grant American soldiers immunity from prosecution for war crimes.” In this attempt to get every country on the planet aboard the American no-war-crimes-prosecution train before it left the station, you can sense once again the administration’s obsessional intensity on this subject (especially since experts agreed that the realistic possibility of the ICC bringing Americans up on war crimes was essentially nil).

The Bush administration regularly reached for its dictionaries to redefine reality, even before it reached for its guns. It not only wrote its own rules and its own “law,” but when problems nonetheless emerged from its secret world of detention and pain and wouldn’t go away — at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere — it proceeded to investigate itself with the expectable results. For Bush’s officials, this should have seemed like a perfect way to maintain a no-fault system that would never reach up any chain of command. Indeed, as Mark Danner has commented, such practices plunged us into an age of “frozen scandals” in which, as with the latest torture memos, the shocked-shocked effect repeats itself but nothing follows. As he has written: “One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed — and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.”

How true. And yet, looked at another way, the administration — with outsized help from outraged government officials who knew crimes when they saw them and were willing to take chances to reveal them — has already created a remarkable record of its own criminal activity, which can now be purchased in any bookstore in the land.

Back in the early fall of 2004, when the first collection of such documents arrived in the bookstores, Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth, America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, it was already more than 600 pages long. In early 2005, when Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, and Josh Dratel, the civilian defense attorney for Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, released their monumental The Torture Papers, The Road to Abu Ghraib, another collection of secret memoranda, official investigations of Abu Ghraib, and the like, it was already an oversized book of more than 1,200 pages — a doorstopper large enough to keep a massive prison gate open. And, of course, even it couldn’t hold all the documents. A later Greenberg book, The Torture Debate in America, for instance, has military documents not included in the first volume.

Then, there were the two-years worth of FBI memos and emails about Guantanamo that the ACLU pried loose from the government and released on line, also in 2005. This material was damning indeed, including direct reports from FBI agents witnessing — and protesting as well as pointing fingers at — military interrogators at the prison, as in an August 2, 2004 report that said: “On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water…Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more.” Or a Jan. 21, 2004 email in which an FBI agent complained that the technique of a military interrogator impersonating an FBI agent “and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the DepSecDef,” a reference to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Other paperback volumes have also been published that include selections from these and other documents like Crimes of War: Iraq by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton and In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith. If all of these documents, including the latest ones evidently in the hands of the New York Times, were collected, you would have a little library of volumes — all functionally confessional — for a future prosecutor. (And there are undoubtedly scads more documents where these came from, including perhaps a John Yoo “torture memo,” rumored to exist, that preceded the August 2002 one.)

What an archive, then, is already available in our world. It’s as if, to offer a Vietnam comparison, the contents of The Pentagon Papers had simply slipped out into the light of day, one by one, without a Daniel Ellsberg in sight, without anyone quite realizing it had happened.

The urge of any criminal regime — to ditch, burn, or destroy incriminating documents, or erase emails — has, in a sense, already been obviated. So much of the Bush/Cheney “record” is on the record. As Karen J. Greenberg wrote, back in December 2006, “What more could a prosecutor want than a trail of implicit confessions, consistent with one another, increasingly brazen over time, and leading right into the Oval Office?”

Looking back on these last years, it turns out that the President, Vice President, their aides, and the other top officials of this administration were always in the confessional booth. There’s no exit now.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

I’m very excited and pleased to introduce today’s guest poster, Danny Postel, who comes to us with some absolutely chilling revelations about the bad faith of the neoconservatives’ supposed dedication to “freedom” (I know, I know: you’re shocked). Danny is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism and is co-coordinator of the Committee for Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the International Society for Iranian Studies.

By Danny Postel

During the week of October 22-26, an official announcement effuses, “The nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.” Ringmastered by David Horowitz, this circus will be performing under the tent of something called the “Terrorism Awareness Project.”

The purpose of this ballyhoolooza, we are told, is to confront the “Big Lies” of the Left regarding terrorism and militant Islam. Worthy subjects, to be sure. Indeed I would like to help the sponsors of the “wake-up call” promote awareness of them. Toward this end, let’s consider the American Right’s “special relationship” with one group of terrorists.

The U.S. State Department officially considers the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) a Foreign Terrorist Organization. While those honors date back to 1994, they’ve been renewed during the Bush years. Indeed in 2003 Foggy Bottom went further, including the National Council of Resistance of Iran — an MEK alias — under the terrorist designation. (The MEK is also known as the People’s Mujahedeen.)

To make a long and bizarre story short, the MEK got its start in early 1960s Iran, helped overthrow the Shah in 1979, but quickly turned on the revolutionary government it helped bring to power. Employing an ideological blend of Stalinism and Islamism, the tactics of a paramilitary guerilla faction, and the organizational structure of a cult, the group went into exile, eventually making their home in Iraq in the mid-1980s. Not only did Saddam give the organization cover: he armed, funded, and utilized them for a variety of ends over two decades.

The group’s wicked political brew was on spectacular display on the old MEK flag (see below; since abandoned), with its sickle and Kalashnikov positioned atop of a Koranic verse. (Not — to state the obvious — that the mere presence of a Koranic verse in and of itself implies Islamist political commitments, but in this case the shoe very much fits.)

Here you have virtually everything the Right claims to oppose all rolled into one: Islamism, Marxism, terrorism, and Saddam. Naturally, then, neoconservatives would utterly deplore the MEK and everything it stands for, right? The MEK would in fact make an ideal target for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and Terrorism Awareness efforts, no?

Well, no. At least one of the carnival’s acts, it turns out, is rather fond of the Islamo-Stalinist-terrorist cult group, and has repeatedly argued for the removal of the MEK from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups and indeed urged the U.S. government to embrace it. Daniel Pipes, who will be speaking at Tufts on October 24th as part of the Horowitz high jinks, has made the MEK a recurring theme in his writings going back several years: here, here, and here.

Pipes has also gone to bat for the MEK right in the pages of Horowitz’s house organ.

But Pipes is far from alone on the Right in championing the MEK. He co-authored the first piece linked to above with Patrick Clawson of the right-wing Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Right-wing commentator Max Boot has argued not merely for the removal of the MEK from the terrorist list but for funding and unleashing it to do battle with Iranian forces — this while casually acknowledging that it is a “political cult.” (More on Boot’s disfigured views here.)

In some cases the MEK plays a stealth role in the media machinery of the American Right. What the FOX News Channel tells viewers about Alireza Jafarzadeh when he appears on its airwaves is that he is an “FNC Foreign Affairs Analyst.” What you have to go to the FOX News website to discover, however, is that Jafarzadeh served “for a dozen years as the chief congressional liaison and media spokesman for the U.S. representative office of Iran’s parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.” But it is scarcely known that the sonorous-sounding National Council of Resistance of Iran is in fact a front name for the MEK.

Now, it’s true that Jafarzadeh discontinued his post with the National Council of Resistance of Iran—but only when (and only because) its Washington office was forced to close in 2003 as a result of the State Department decision about it being a front for the MEK. It’s not like he had a change of heart.

If you attend an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” event, you might want to ask the speakers about this terrorist cult and whether they condemn it. Some of them might — not all neoconservatives agree on the MEK. (See here and here for examples of right-wing criticism of the outfit — though the lines of argumentation are sometimes bizarrely convoluted.)

But the fact that several prominent American conservatives have cozied up to an Islamist-Stalinist cult that was on Saddam’s payroll and the State Department considers a terrorist organization — this raises serious questions (to put it mildly) about the Right’s bedfellows and the calculus that determines them.

BANGKOK, Thailand — Women in several countries have begun sending their panties to Myanmar embassies in a culturally insulting gesture of protest against the recent brutal crackdown there, a campaign supporter said Friday.

“It’s an extremely strong message in Burmese and in all Southeast Asian culture,” said Liz Hilton, who supports an activist group that launched the “Panties for Peace” drive earlier this week.

The group, Lanna Action for Burma, says the country’s superstitious generals, especially junta leader Gen. Than Shwe, also believe that contact with women’s underwear saps them of power.

To widespread international condemnation, the military in Myanmar, also known as Burma, crushed mass anti-regime demonstrations recently and continues to hunt down and imprison those who took part.

Hilton said women in Thailand, Australia, Singapore, England and other European countries have started sending or delivering their underwear to Myanmar missions following informal coordination among activist organizations and individuals.

“You can post, deliver or fling your panties at the closest Burmese Embassy any day from today. Send early, send often!” the Lanna Action for Burma Web site urges.

“So far we have had no response from Burmese officials,” Hilton said.

Robert Higgs’s Schlarbaum Award Acceptance Speech, delivered on October 12, 2007, at the Mises Institute’s 25th Anniversary Celebration.

Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” begins:

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls.

10/19/07 “Mises.org” — – Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. The beached skulls are those of our fathers and our sons, our friends and our neighbors, for whom the song proved not only irresistible, but fatal.

The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised — a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.

Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency — war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose.

States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war — not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state’s most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.

They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged “services” and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.

All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies: only a relatively small number of people have substantial effective discretion to make critical decisions about how the state’s power will be brought to bear. Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and military forces that compose its Praetorian Guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a supporting coalition. These groups provide important financial and other support to the oligarchs and look to them for compensating rewards — legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, transfers of financial income and wealth, goods and services in kind, and other booty — channeled to them at the expense of the mass of the people. Thus, the political class in general — that is, the oligarchs, the Praetorian Guards, and the supporting coalition — uses government power (which means ultimately the police and the armed forces) to exploit everyone outside this class by wielding or threatening to wield violence against all who fail to pay the tribute the oligarchs demand or to obey the rules they dictate.

Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative proceedings, disguise this class exploitation and trick the masses into the false belief that the government’s operation yields them net benefits. In the most extreme form of misapprehension, the people at large become convinced that, owing to democracy, they themselves “are the government.”

Individual passages back and forth across the boundary between the political class and the exploited class testify, however, to nothing more than the system’s cunningly contrived flexibility and openness. Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in the determination of which specific individuals will be the shafters and which the shaftees. At the top, a modest degree of “circulation of elites” within the oligarchy also serves to mask the political system’s essential character.

It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it — that is, government without genuine, express, individual consent — a minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest, and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process, while the oligarchs (elected or not, it scarcely matters) preside over the enormous web of criminal organizations we know as the state.

Notwithstanding the ideological enchantment with which official high priests and statist intellectuals have beguiled the plundered class, many members of this class retain a capacity to recognize at least some of their losses, and hence they sometimes resist further incursions on their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, by supporting political challengers who promise to lighten their burdens, by fleeing the country, and, most important, by evading or avoiding taxes and by violating legal prohibitions and regulatory restraints on their actions, as in the so-called underground economy, or “black market.”

These various forms of resistance together compose a force that opposes the government’s constant pressure to expand its domination. These two forces, working one against the other, establish a locus of “equilibrium,” a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, black-market transactions, and other defensive violations of the government’s oppressive rules.

Politics in the largest sense can be viewed as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other. For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government’s dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so?

National emergency — war or a similarly menacing crisis — answers the political class’s crucial question more effectively than anything else, because such a crisis has a uniquely effective capacity to dissipate the forces that otherwise would obstruct or oppose the government’s expansion.

Virtually any war will serve, at least for a while, because in modern nation-states the outbreak of war invariably leads the masses to “rally ’round the flag,” regardless of their previous ideological stance in relation to the government.

Recall the situation in 1941, for example, when public-opinion polls and other evidence indicated that a great majority of the American people (approximately 80 percent as late as autumn) opposed outright engagement in the world war, an engagement that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had been seeking relentlessly by hook and by crook from the very beginning. When news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the public, mass opposition to war dissolved overnight almost completely. No wonder the neocon intriguers, in a September 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, expressed their yearning for “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Although other kinds of great crises may not elicit the same immediate submission to the government’s announced program for the people’s salvation, they may prove equally effective if they are sufficiently menacing and persistent. Thus, the Great Depression, which pushed millions of Americans into economic desperation in the early 1930s, was eventually viewed by almost everybody as, in Justice Brandeis’s words, “an emergency more serious than war.” Other pregnant crises have included nation-wide strikes or widespread labor disturbances, so-called energy crises, such as those of the 1970s, perceived crime waves, great epidemics or health scares, and, lately, even a bogus scare about global warming.

In 2001, the attacks of 9/11 answered to perfection the neocon prayer for “a new Pearl Harbor.” An administration that had been wallowing without a breeze in its sails was suddenly invested with overwhelming public support for aggressive military action abroad. In a Gallup poll taken during September 7–10, 2001, 51 percent of the respondents approved of “the way George W. Bush [was] handling his job as president,” 39 percent disapproved, and 10 percent had no opinion — yielding an “opinion balance” of + 12 percent (= 51–39). A few days later, while the ruins of the World Trade Center’s twin towers were still smoldering, 86 percent approved, 10 percent disapproved, and only 4 percent had no opinion — an opinion balance of + 76 percent, or more than six times greater than it had been just a few days earlier. Although Bush had done absolutely nothing to demonstrate an abruptly improved performance of his job as president, nearly the entire population, many members of which roundly disliked the president, suddenly showered approbation on his performance in office. A week later, the opinion balance had risen even higher, to 84 percent, on the strength of a 90-percent approval response.

Afterward, Bush’s job-performance-approval rating followed a long downward trend, interrupted by only brief upticks, until it reached its present range. In the Gallup poll of July 6–8, 2007, the opinion balance was negative 37 percent, and only 29 percent of the respondents rated the president’s performance favorably. (In more recent polls, the balance has stood a few points higher in the president’s favor, but such small differences have little significance.) During the long downhill slide, Bush’s performance-approval rating held up amazingly well among Republicans, but fell lower and lower among both Democrats and independents — an expression of how normal political partisanship reasserted itself as the initial, unifying crisis slipped farther and farther into the background.

Similar movements may be seen in the Gallup polls that asked the respondents whether they viewed George W. Bush himself favorably or unfavorably: here, the opinion balance jumped from + 25 percent in August 2001 to + 76 percent in November 2001 — a three-fold increase — before beginning a long downward trend and becoming increasingly negative after mid-2005.

When the public’s approval of the president’s actions is broken down by specific issues, we see that his greatest 9/11-related jump occurred in the area of — mirabile dictu — foreign affairs. In the Gallup poll taken during July 10–11, 2001, the opinion balance in this area was + 21 percent (54 percent favorable minus 33 percent unfavorable), but in the poll taken during October 5–6, 2001, the opinion balance had jumped to 67 percent, or more than three times higher (81 percent favorable minus 14 percent unfavorable).

The lesson is clear: if the president conducts foreign policy so as to antagonize foreigners and provoke them to launch massively destructive attacks on this country, the American public will respond with an enormous outpouring of approval of his actions, as if to prove that in our political system no failure goes unrewarded.

Bertrand Russell long ago stated the underlying condition for this sort of perverse public reaction when he remarked that “neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” Indeed, the fundamental condition of the entire process by which the government leads people to their own destruction is widespread public fear, which causes people to put aside their normal distrust of the state and to turn to it, especially to its chief, as a child turns to a parent, for security and reassurance that everything will be okay if only people do as they are told.

Not only did the events of September 11, 2001, cause the American public to look more favorably on the president as a person, as a president, and as the principal architect of US foreign policy, but those events also apparently caused the public to express more trust in the federal government in general in its handling of both international and domestic matters.

In the Gallup poll of September 7–10, 2001, 68 percent of the respondents expressed “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust and confidence in the government’s handling of international problems, whereas 31 percent expressed “not very much” or “none at all,” which implied an opinion balance of + 37 percent (= 68–31). A month later, in the poll conducted during October 11–14, this opinion balance had risen to 67 percent (= 83–16), almost doubling. The public’s perversely increased trust in the government had also spilled inexplicably onto its handling of domestic problems, increasing this opinion balance from 22 percent (= 60–39) in the early September poll to 56 percent (= 77–21) in the October poll.

A final measure of public opinion, “trust in Washington to do what is right,” which is normally a fairly stable indicator, also rose in an unusual way owing to 9/11. In the Gallup poll of July 6–9, 2000, 42 percent of the respondents expressed confidence that the government will do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” whereas 58 percent responded “only some of the time” or “never,” which implies an opinion balance of negative 16 percent. When the pollsters next asked this question, in October 5–6, 2001, however, the opinion balance had risen to + 21 percent (= 60–39), indicating a complete turnaround toward greater trust than distrust in government.

At the time of these events, as I considered everything that was going on, I was dismayed by what seemed to me to be a wholly unwarranted public stampede into the protective arms of the federal government — the same government that had been robbing and abusing most of the people in countless ways for as long as they could remember. Hardly anyone asked whether the government’s actions abroad might actually have provoked the 9/11 attacks — of course, most were so ignorant of those actions that they had no inkling of how the government might have created such a provocation. Many people seemed consumed by a combination of fear and rage that manifested itself in a desire to “nuke” someone, anyone, who might have had something to do with the attacks. Standards of proof fell precipitously. People didn’t want careful investigation; they didn’t want to “get to the bottom” of what had happened. Instead, they wanted action, and in particular they wanted the government to “strike back” immediately at any and all plausible targets.

In searching for the cause of this tremendous, rationally unjustified “rallying ’round the flag,” we do not have far to go. Such public reactions are always driven by a combination of fear, ignorance, and uncertainty against a background of intense jingoistic nationalism, a popular culture predisposed toward violence, and a general inability to distinguish between the state and the people at large.

Because the government ceaselessly sings the siren song, relentlessly propagandizing the public to look upon it as their protector — such alleged protection being the principal excuse for its routinely robbing them and violating their natural rights — and because the mass media incessantly magnify and spread the government’s propaganda, we can scarcely be surprised if that propaganda turns out to have entered deeply into many people’s thinking, especially when they are in a state of near-panic. Unable to think clearly in an informed way, most people fall back on a childlike us-against-them style of understanding the perceived threat and what should be done about it.

If any resistance should arise to the rulers’ war-making, the state has a time-tested means of disposing of the resisters. Perhaps the classic description of this tactic was given by the Nazi bigwig Hermann Göring when he was being held in prison during the trials at Nuremberg in 1946. This account comes to us from Gustave M. Gilbert, the German-speaking prison psychologist who had free access to all of the prisoners during the trials and talked to them frequently in private. On the evening of April 18, 1946, Gilbert visited Göring in his cell, and he later described their conversation as follows:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Göring shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. (Nuremberg Diary, pp. 278–79)

Göring was right, and matters have only become worse in this regard during the past sixty years. Under the postwar regime in the United States, of course, Congress never declares war — it has made no such declaration since June 5, 1942, when it declared war on Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary — and the president now wages war solely at his own pleasure and caprice, as if he were Caesar.

“Dragging the people along,” as Göring put it, remains as easy as ever, because, as we have seen, an initial incident, even one the government itself has provoked or trumped up, invariably causes the masses to rally ’round the flag. We have also seen, however, that the ardent enthusiasm and mindless support for the government’s war-making begins to erode soon afterward. When the people increasingly come to their senses, as casualties and other costs accumulate and as bits and pieces of the truth seep out, why does the system not revert to the status quo ante bellum?

The answer is that actions taken during the early days of the crisis, when the government responds practically without opposition to the public’s fear and desire for retribution by vastly expanding its powers (Stage II of the ratchet phenomenon), take the form of political, legal, and institutional changes that set precedents or become so deeply embedded that not all of them are abandoned during the postcrisis stage of incomplete retrenchment (Stage IV of the ratchet phenomenon).

For example, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, the government enacted the First War Powers Act (December 18, 1941) and the Second War Powers Act (March 27, 1942). These sweeping delegations empowered the president to rearrange the executive branch as he pleased, gave him a free hand to contract with munitions suppliers almost as he pleased, and gave him far-reaching control over international financial transactions and censorship power over all communications between the United States and any foreign country; they expanded the government’s powers to seize private property for war purposes, empowered the president to set priorities for deliveries of designated goods and services, and gave the president effectively unrestrained power over resource allocation in the domestic economy, a power he delegated to the War Production Board under his direct oversight. Wielding all this authority, the president and his lieutenants became in effect central planners of a command economy for the duration of the war.

Similarly, just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the government enacted the USA PARTIOT Act, which greatly trenched on civil liberties and long-established rights, effectively demolished the Fourth Amendment, and gave a mighty boost to the US police state. Other measures moving in the same direction followed soon afterward, including nationalization of the airline-security industry and creation of the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Department of Homeland Security, an organization as menacing in its ideological underpinnings as it is feckless and absurd in its day-to-day operations.

Once the government has expanded greatly at the outset of a war or other crisis and then employed its new powers for an extended period, getting rid of all the new weapons in the government’s arsenal of power is virtually impossible even when the emergency ends and people clamor for a return to normal arrangements. Therefore, many of the crisis measures become permanent parts of the government’s apparatus for dominating and robbing those outside the political class.

Wartime organizations may be retained to carry out new functions, as, for example, the War Finance Corporation of World War I was kept going for six years after the war, providing subsidized credit to exporters, agricultural cooperatives, and rural banks. After finally having been discontinued in 1925, it was revived in 1932 as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a huge lender to politically favored railroads, banks, and insurance companies during the Depression, and later the government’s chief agency for financing a variety of military-industrial undertakings during World War II. Retained after 1945, the RFC continued to make subsidized loans to privileged borrowers until it sank in a storm of scandal in 1953, only to be replaced — as a political quid pro quo — by a similarly egregious agency, the Small Business Administration, which has continued its politically driven misallocation of taxpayer money ever since.

Cases such as that of the War Finance Corporation and its direct descendants exemplify how national emergency solidifies so-called iron triangles: alliances of government bureaucrats, congressional overseers, and privileged private-sector beneficiaries. These arrangements are called “iron” because they are so difficult to break. Their beneficiaries have great incentive to fight for the retention and even for the expansion of the triangle’s activities, whereas the general public rarely has much incentive to fight against them, even when it is aware of them, because the public burden per capita is normally too small to justify anyone’s expenditure of much time or effort in the requisite politicking.

Under modern conditions, high wartime taxes always stick to some extent, leaving the amount of the government’s plunder much greater after the war than it was before the war. In the present so-called war on terror, the government has partially concealed this increased seizure of private property by running up the national debt, rather than by jacking up ordinary tax rates or imposing new kinds of taxes, but this financial trick does not alter the raw fact that the government has been using more of the people’s resources for its own purposes, as shown by the rapid run-up of its spending, leaving the public on the hook to pay the increased interest and eventually to repay the principal, or to suffer the consequences if the government should attempt in effect to repudiate its obligations to creditors by inflating the money stock. During the present Bush administration, Treasury debt held by the public has grown from $3.3 trillion (end FY 2001) to an estimated $5.1 trillion (end FY 2007), or by about 53 percent in only six years.

During the Great Depression, governments at every level greatly increased their tax revenues, by imposing new kinds of taxes — state and local sales taxes, for example, and an undistributed-profits tax at the federal level. In fiscal year 1940, with the Depression still lingering, the federal government collected 57 percent more total revenue than it had in the prosperous year 1927. Federal taxes relative to GNP doubled between 1933 and 1940.

Apart from the financial legacies that exacerbate the government’s burden on the public, national emergencies leave institutional legacies of various kinds that enhance government power at the expense of the people’s liberties. The rent controls of World War II, for example, never ended here in New York City. For more than sixty years, they have denied landlords and tenants the liberty to contract on any mutually agreeable terms, and they have created incentives that foster the avoidance of maintenance for rented apartments and discourage the construction of the new structures that would be built if only the housing market were free of these war-borne fetters.

The institutional legacies of the New Deal, of course, are legion even now, nearly seventy years after FDR’s political momentum petered out: a vast system of agribusiness subsidies; intricate regulations of financial markets, union-management relations, and financial intermediaries; federal insurance of bank deposits, home mortgages, and other financial liabilities; direct federal involvement in electricity production and distribution — the list goes on and on.

Perhaps most important, crisis has effects on the dominant ideology that work in favor of long-lasting government power and the permanent reduction of public liberties. During wartime or other crises, governments take many actions that would be more or less unthinkable in a reasonably free society during normal times, because people would not tolerate them. Having tolerated them during a national emergency, however, people may come to regard them not only as permanently tolerable, but even as desirable.

For example, nearly everything the US government did during the Great Depression had an obvious wartime precedent in the Great War. President Herbert Hoover declared, “We used such emergency powers to win the war; we can use them to fight the depression.” Everything from the Depression-era agricultural price controls to the industrial cartelization program, the public housing program, the schemes to control oil and coal prices, the tax hikes, and the promotion of labor unionization had a precedent during 1917–18. Obviously, many of these war-inspired public policies then became permanent after the 1930s, as did, later, the military-industrial complex created from 1940 to 1945. People can get used to almost anything, especially if it has a plausible justification. War and other great crises managed by government soften up formerly free people and habituate them to government controls and abuses that they would resist except for their alleged emergency necessity. In this way, government emergency measures change the very character of once-free people, by breaking down their will to be free and their determination to resist homegrown tyranny.

It is important to appreciate that all the effects on freedom that I have been discussing occur regardless of the rationale for the war or other crisis intervention itself. One may regard a war, for example, as ever so necessary and desirable or not, yet these effects will occur in any event. The logic of a government at war asserts itself in more or less the same fashion regardless of the war’s provocation and purpose, because every major war requires the government to take a much bigger bite out of the people’s resources quickly, and it cannot do so successfully without suppressing many normal liberties and rights, especially those that might be exercised to obstruct the government’s wartime programs and policies or to persuade people to resist the war or to demand its discontinuation or settlement.

Hence, as Göring noted, the government and its supporters vigorously denounce all those who stand in the way as traitors, and the state encourages the masses to act as amateur G-men, identifying “disloyal” citizens, hounding them into buckling under, and reporting them to governmental authorities. Great peacetime initiatives operate similarly. Many historians have noted the parallels between the government’s intimidating public efforts to entice or browbeat people into cooperation with the National Recovery Administration and the Nazi extravaganzas being staged in Germany at the same time.

Nowadays, for example, the government frequently encourages all of us to report any “suspicious” persons or actions to the police or the FBI, ostensibly to prevent terrorism. Needless to say, no free society can exist when everyone in effect has enlisted as a government informant, especially when the character of the threatening persons and actions is so vague that it is bound to give rise to abuses. Not uncommonly now, people are reported for nothing more than looking like an Arab or for speaking a strange language to strange-looking companions. This insidious enlistment of informants, so reminiscent of the atrocious American Protective League during World War I, is turning our once-open society into a sort of East Germany redux. Horror stories abound of perfectly innocent persons taken into custody for interrogation or worse.

While the government promotes mindless support of its war-making and may induce a sort of patriotic hysteria in the most mentally fragile personalities, many citizens swing into action as faux patriots on strictly opportunistic grounds. War contractors, for example, may be able to position themselves to make a killing, so to speak, off of the actual killing; moreover, they may parlay their wartime business as government suppliers into profitable postwar business that long outlives the war itself. The aircraft companies that suddenly profited so greatly during World War II, for example, became permanent, highly successful feeders at the government’s trough, where some of them are feasting lavishly even now, the current administration’s military buildup having proved a godsend for them and a boon to their stockholders. Other people simply want a cushy job in the government’s expanded wartime bureaucracy.

The so-called war on terror has given rise to a huge industry that has emerged almost from scratch during the past few years. According to a 2006 Forbes report, the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor agencies paid private contractors at least $130 billion after 9/11, and other federal agencies have spent a comparable amount. Thus, besides the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), we now have a parallel security-industrial-congressional complex (SICC).

Between 1999 and 2006, the number of federal homeland-security contractors increased from nine companies to 33,890, and a multi-billion-dollar industry selling security-related goods and services has emerged complete with specialized newsletters, magazines, websites, consultants, trade shows, job-placement services, and a veritable army of lobbyists working around the clock to widen the river of money that flows to these opportunists. As Paul Harris wrote, “America is in the grip of a business based on fear.” The last thing these vultures want, of course, is an abatement of the perceived terrorist threat, and we can count on them to hype any signs of an increase in such threats and, of course, to crowd the trough, happily slurping up the taxpayers’ money.

What chance does peace have when millions of well-heeled, politically connected opportunists of all stripes depend on the continuation of a state of war for their personal financial success? For members of Congress, the Department of Homeland Security has quickly become the most magnificent dispenser of pork and patronage to come along in decades. Everyone is happy here, except for the beleaguered ordinary citizens, whose pockets are being picked and whose liberties are being overridden by politicians and private-sector predators with utter contempt for the people’s intelligence and rights. Yet, so long as the people continue to be consumed by fear and to fall for the age-old swindle that the government seeks only to protect them, these abuses will never end.

Along the Gulf Coast during the past two years, a legion of opportunists has similarly rushed onto the scene to take advantage of the unprecedented sums of federal money pouring into the area in the guise of financing recovery from the damage wreaked by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Bank accounts have been stuffed with this loot, to be sure, but little in the way of genuine recovery and reconstruction has sprung from it. Nevermind: in the immortal words of President Bush, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job.” The ridiculous Brownie was subsequently sacked as the head of FEMA, of course, but the “heck of a job” goes on as before, all at taxpayer expense and at great profit for the corporatist cronies, political favorites, and other privileged parties who are appropriating the people’s money after it has been duly laundered through the federal treasury.

Recall Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song,” with which I prefaced my remarks. It begins,

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls.

And the poem ends,

Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

In the present regard, it works every time because the people falsely believe that those who sing it are their protectors, rather than their exploiters. Until people learn to disregard the state’s siren song of beneficence and protection, they will continue to suffer and die as victims of the state’s wars, foreign and domestic. People yearn for security, and they look to the state to provide it, but they are calling upon a wolf to guard the sheep.

The state cannot refrain from crime because it is an inherently criminal enterprise, living by robbery (which it relabels taxation) and retaining its turf by mass murder (which it relabels war). Constantly singing the siren song, it seduces the people by giving back to them a portion of what it has previously extorted from them and by ceaselessly claiming to protect them from all manner of threats to their lives, liberties, property, and even their self-esteem. If it protects them at all, however, it does so only as a shepherd protects his captive flock: not because he recognizes and respects the natural rights of his sheep, but only to keep them unmolested in his sole possession and control until he finds it expedient to shear or slaughter them.

A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously, to keep them under its control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection, and like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state’s siren song.

When the Israelites had fled from their captivity in Egypt, they made do for centuries with only judges, yet they were not satisfied, and eventually they demanded a king, crying out:

we will have a king over us; That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles. (1 Samuel 8:19–20)

Well, they got a king all right, just as we Americans have embraced one of our own, though we call ours a president. The Israelites, as the prophet Samuel had warned, were no better off for having a king, however: King Saul only led them from one slaughter to another (1 Samuel 14: 47–48). Likewise, our rulers have led us from one unnecessary slaughter to the next; and, to make matters worse, they have exploited each such occasion to fasten their chains around us more tightly. Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans shall never have real, lasting peace so long as we give our allegiance to a king — that is, in our case, to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state.

10/19/07 “CS” — — “Putin’s Hostile Course,” the lead editorial in The Washington Times of Oct. 18, began thus:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Moscow is just the latest sign that, more than 16 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, Moscow is gravitating toward Cold War behavior. The old Soviet obsession – fighting American imperialism – remains undiluted. …

“(A)t virtually every turn, Mr. Putin and the Russian leadership appear to be doing their best in ways large and small to marginalize and embarrass the United States and undercut U.S. foreign policy interests.”

The Times pointed to Putin’s snub of Robert Gates and Condi Rice by having them cool their heels for 40 minutes before a meeting. Then came a press briefing where Putin implied Russia may renounce the Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty, which removed all U.S. and Soviet medium-range missiles from Europe, and threatened to pull out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, whereby Russia moved its tanks and troops far from the borders of Eastern Europe.

On and on the Times indictment went. Russia was blocking new sanctions on Iran. Russia was selling anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. Russia was selling weapons to Syria that found their way to Hezbollah and Hamas. Russia and Iran were talking up an OPEC-style natural gas cartel. All this, said the Times, calls to mind “Soviet-era behavior.”

Missing from the prosecution’s case, however, was the motive. Why has Putin’s Russia turned hostile? Why is Putin mending fences with China, Iran and Syria? Why is Putin sending Bear bombers to the edge of American airspace? Why has Russia turned against America? For Putin’s approval rating is three times that of George Bush. Who restarted the Cold War?

To answer that question, let us go back those 16 years.

What happened in 1991 and 1992?

Well, Russia let the Berlin Wall be torn down and its satellite states be voted or thrown out of power across Eastern Europe. Russia agreed to pull the Red Army all the way back inside its border. Russia agreed to let the Soviet Union dissolve into 15 nations. The Communist Party agreed to share power and let itself be voted out. Russia embraced freedom and American-style capitalism, and invited Americans in to show them how it was done.

Russia did not use its veto in the Security Council to block the U.S. war to drive Saddam Hussein, an ally, out of Kuwait. When 9-11 struck, Putin gave his blessing to U.S. troops using former republics as bases for the U.S. invasion.

What was Moscow’s reward for its pro-America policy?

The United States began moving NATO into Eastern Europe and then into former Soviet republics. Six ex-Warsaw Pact nations are now NATO allies, as are three ex-republics of the Soviet Union. NATO expansionists have not given up on bringing Ukraine, united to Russia for centuries, or Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, into NATO.

In 1999, the United States bombed Serbia, which has long looked to Mother Russia for protection, for 78 days, though the Serbs’ sole crime was to fight to hold their cradle province of Kosovo, as President Lincoln fought to hold onto the American South. Now America is supporting the severing of Kosovo from Serbia and creation of a new Islamic state in the Balkans, over Moscow’s protest.

While Moscow removed its military bases from Cuba and all over the Third World, we have sought permanent military bases in Russia’s backyard of Central Asia.

We dissolved the Nixon-Brezhnev ABM treaty and announced we would put a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Under presidents Clinton and Bush, the United States financed a pipeline for Caspian Sea oil to transit Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Black Sea and Turkey, cutting Russia out of the action.

With the end of the Cold War, the KGB was abolished and the Comintern disappeared. But the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and other Cold War agencies, funded with tens of millions in tax-exempt and tax dollars, engineered the ouster of pro-Russian regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, and sought the ouster of the regime in Minsk.

At the Cold War’s end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, historic or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred.

We blew it.

We moved NATO onto Russia’s front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our “indispensable-nation” arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles.

Who restarted the Cold War? Bush and the braying hegemonists he brought with him to power. Great empires and tiny minds go ill together.

When the Pentagon rolled out its new Iraq product line-the re-minted counterinsurgency doctrine of winning “hearts and minds” that had been shelved after Vietnam-branded it “the surge” and anointed Gen. David Petraeus as chief product spokesperson in early 2007, the main question was: who would buy?

Clearly not the Iraqis. The past year has included two of the bloodiest months of the Iraq war, a government in complete chaos and a persistent Darwinian nightmare for average Iraqi’s attest to the lack of Iraqi consumers for the new product. It may as well have been a cyanide-soaked toy from China.

But there is one market that has proven receptive-the U.S. Congress and especially centrist Republicans and Democrats like Brian Baird (D-Wa) who came back from a recent Pentagon-hosted trip to Iraq declaring a conversion worthy of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Formerly a war critic–Baird had voted against authorizing the Iraq War and still believes that the invasion of Iraq “may be one of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation”-he now claims he has seen the light and firmly opposes withdrawal from Iraq. In a feverish media blitz, with appearances on CNN, NPR and MSNBC among others, Baird declared that evidence from his recent trips to Iraq convinced him that “the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better” and “our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.”

Baird’s conversion to Brand Petraeus and the Pentagon’s new counterinsurgency strategy must be seen as symptomatic of the broader consumption of the new product-line by many Congressional Republicans and Democrats. The media spectacle surrounding Gen. Patraeus’ and Ambassador Crocker’s highly anticipated visit to Washington DC last month was all whimper and no bang. Even though the overwhelming empirical evidence demonstrated the abject failure of the “surge” in Iraq, once Petraeus boarded the return jet to Iraq, the Democrats dropped their once fiery rhetoric about ending the war, fired off a few ineffectual resolutions and conceded the battle-space to Bush’s plans for a decades-long occupation of Iraq along the lines of what Bush fondly refers to as the “Korea model.”

Mission accomplished.

The Petraeus visit and the subsequent Democratic cave-in reveals that the real target of the newly minted counterinsurgency strategy was never the Iraqi people but rather the American public. The widely publicized adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and the marketing of Patreaus as its guru is pure information war. It was concocted to simulate the appearance of a new strategy in Iraq and thereby create a new narrative of hope and progress in order to sell an endless Iraq occupation to the American public.

One doesn’t need to read the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard on simulated realities to catch the drift of how politics is played in the age of Bush. In an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article, the journalist Ron Suskind quoted an unnamed aide to President Bush:

“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actorsand you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But one should take a quick look at The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual rushed into print this summer by University of Chicago Press with a forward by Gen. Patreaus to understand how our Empire is simulating “new realities” as part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed against the American public.

According to the Field Manual, classic counterinsurgency doctrine maintains that conventional military force will never defeat an insurgency because the primary goal of an insurgency, as classically stated by Mao, is political-to win over a population against a government or a foreign occupation. Hence, the heavy application of military force against an insurgency will be counter-productive by creating new grievances that help it gain popular support. Therefore, the first rule of counterinsurgency is to drive a wedge between insurgents and the broader population by winning their “hearts and minds” through addressing popular grievances and winning the war of ideas through better propaganda.

The Bush administration was never truly serious about employing this strategy in Iraq-to do so would require assuaging Iraqi demands for a US troop withdrawal and foreswearing permanent military bases and control over Iraq’s oil. Instead, the Bush administration has employed classic counterinsurgency doctrine to quell the only insurgency it has a chance to defeat: the overwhelming American popular support for withdrawal from Iraq that was given a Congressional mandate in the November 2006 elections. Having learned its own lessons from Vietnam, the Bush administration knows that a primary threat to its permanent war in Iraq is a Congressional cut-off of the funds that are its lifeblood.

So in response to this threat, and in line with classic counterinsurgency doctrine, the Bush administration devised a marketing campaign to simulate a new strategy and promote the Brand Petraeus “surge” in Iraq in order to drive a wedge between the insurgency that mattered (growing Congressional support for withdrawal) and the will of the American people. The means were simple. Create a cult figure out of Patraeus, flood the media with stories of progress on the ground, and carefully nurture Congressional fence-sitters to prevent a majority for withdrawal emerging as a viable force within Congress.

And one of the most effective tools in the arsenal has been the brief and tightly controlled codels (short for congressional delegations) who are shown only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration wants them to see, which includes Potemkin village-like displays of security progress and soldiers who plead with them not to let the war have been in vain.

“Spin city” is how Rep. James Moran (D-Va) described his most recent trip to Baghdad as part of a congressional delegation. “The Iraqis and the Americans were all singing from the same song sheet, and it was deliberately manipulated,” he told the Washington Post on August 31. One U.S. soldier, Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell, who was ordered to pay Iraqi shopkeepers to open their stores for these congressional visits, told the Washington Post (Sept. 4) “personally, I think it’s a false representation. But what can I say? I’m just doing my job and don’t ask questions.”

It is precisely on the basis of two such codel’s in the past year that Congressman Brian Baird converted from moderate critic to an evangelical proponent of Patreaus and “the surge.” Baird has insisted that he was completely free to meet with whomever he wanted in Iraq-a bizarre claim if one considers the options for travel in Iraq alone-but his nearly word for word repetition of Bush administration talking points upon his return indicates that he swallowed the entire sales-pitch.

To take just one example, just as the Bush administration was concocting increasingly apocalyptic scenarios about the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq-chaos, mass murder, regional war, terrorist attacks on the US and the like-Baird was offering his own shrill hypotheticals to the editorial board of The Olympian newspaper:

“What happens to you and you and me morally if we withdraw and there’s wholesale slaughter? What happens if a Shi’a theocracy takes over and progressive independent women who are currently in the region are suddenly all forced into burqas and they can’t go to school and ­ and they’re stoned to death for learning to read? What happens if we allow that?”

In another meeting with constituents, Baird speculated that if the US withdrew, Al-Qaida would become empowered and “then begin operations on the United States. Is that worth an American life to try and prevent that? I believe it is.”

Never mind the fact that the odious “burqas” are only worn in Afghanistan and that no Iraqi women have ever been stoned to death for learning to read. That might be true of Saudi Arabia, but Baird is not calling for its invasion.

The fact of the matter is that all these claims are the stuff of fantasy. There will be no genocide or terrorist safe haven in Iraq after the US leaves. Iraq after an American withdrawal will look very much like Iraq today-a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war fought along the seams of its Sunni and Shiite Arab zones, each ruled by rival militias and gangs. Iraq’s Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaida, and in fact, in this Darwinian context al-Qaida would likely be destroyed as local Sunni militias assert their control.

Nevertheless, Brian Baird’s conversion to war supporter and his repetition of the Bush administration’s more outlandish talking points is notable as the purest expression of the counterinsurgency strategy being waged today against the American public and its representatives in Congress. And given the increasing unlikelihood of any Democratic-led effort to truly end the war in the near future, one must consider it a success thus far.

This leads to a few preliminary conclusions.

Certainly war opponents would do well to drop simplistic and moralizing slogans against the war and focus more on dismantling the phony narratives of sophisticated marketing campaigns that tout the successes of counterinsurgency and the dire consequences of an American withdrawal. We are operating in the age of information war and simulated realities, and the Empire knows very well that people support wars on the basis of symbols, emotions, stories and fantasies, all of which have proven to be more powerful than the most rational discourse. Take a look at Baird.

But ultimately, as in any insurgency, war opponents have to re-mobilize the widespread popular support for withdrawal into a broad-based and assertive movement that makes its own realities, and doesn’t rely upon Congressional Democrats but rather gives them no place to hide if they continue to support the Iraq occupation, in any form. Only then, in Mao’s felicitous phrase, will the insurgents–proponents of withdrawal in Congress–be able to “move among the people like a fish in the sea” and turn off the spigot of permanent war.

The occupation in Iraq will begin to end on the day that Democrats — and responsible Republicans — in Congress decide to stop meeting the demands of the Bush-Cheney administration for more money to fund their imperial endeavor along with the massive war-profiteering by administration-linked firms such as Halliburton and Blackwater.

This is a simple reality. But it remains one that most members of Congress, including many Democrats who should know better, fail to recognize.

The essential document in the current Iraq debate is a letter of commitment, now endorsed by 89 members of the House, that says the signers “will only support appropriating additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq during FY08 and beyond for the protection and safe redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq before the end of President Bush’s term in office.”

In an important new letter to President Bush, the 89 representatives — 88 Democrats and Texas Republican Ron Paul — say, “More than 3,800 of our brave soldiers have died in Iraq. More than 28,000 have been seriously wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or injured in the hostilities and more than 4 million have been displaced from their homes. Furthermore, this conflict has degenerated into a sectarian civil war and U.S. taxpayers have paid more than $500 billion, despite assurances that you and your key advisors gave our nation at the time you ordered the invasion in March, 2003 that this military intervention would cost far less and be paid from Iraqi oil revenues.

“We agree with a clear and growing majority of the American people who are opposed to continued, open-ended U.S. military operations in Iraq, and believe it is unwise and unacceptable for you to continue to unilaterally impose these staggering costs and the soaring debt on Americans currently and for generations to come.”

10/17/07 “Washington Times” — — -A defiant Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince said yesterday he will not allow Iraqi authorities to arrest his contractors and try them in Iraq’s faulty justice system.

“We will not let our people be taken by the Iraqis,” Mr. Prince told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. At least 17 of 20 Blackwater guards being investigated for their roles in a Sept. 16 shooting incident are still in a secure compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone and carrying out limited duties.

Two or three others have been allowed by the State Department to leave the country as part of their scheduled rotation out of Iraq and are expected to return.

“In an ideal sense, if there was wrongdoing, there could be a trial brought in the Iraqi court system. But that would imply that there is a valid Iraqi court system where Westerners could get a fair trial. That is not the case right now,” said Mr. Prince.

Mr. Prince also expressed his disappointment that the State Department has not come to the company’s defense, even though it has never lost a State Department client in years of protecting them.

“For the last week and a half, we have heard nothing from the State Department,” said Mr. Prince. “From their senior levels, their PR folks, we’ve heard nothing — radio silence.

“It is disappointing for us. We have performed to the line, letter and verse of their 1,000-page contract,” he said. “Our guys take significant risk for them. They’ve taken a pounding these last three years.”

A number of Blackwater contractors, most of whom come from military and law-enforcement backgrounds, have been killed in action or grievously wounded in Iraq while running more than 16,500 security missions in the past three years.

Iraq’s government, outraged by the Sept. 16 incident in which up to 17 Iraqis were killed as Blackwater staff tried to clear a crowded traffic circle, has accused the U.S. firm of unprovoked and random killings. Blackwater says its men were defending themselves after coming under fire.

The State Department has since ordered that cameras be placed in Blackwater security vehicles and that Diplomatic Security agents accompany Blackwater staff on missions. Mr. Prince said his company had recommended both those steps in 2005 and that the proposals were “buried” by the department.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded yesterday that Blackwater leave Iraq and pay $8 million to the family of each of the 17 victims. Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wijdan Salim said the American guards responsible should stand trial in Iraq, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported.

Mr. Prince, a 38-year-old former Navy SEAL, said if there was any evidence of wrongdoing, his employees could be tried in the United States by a jury of their peers under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

He said the hostility toward Blackwater was partly driven by partisan politics from the Democrat-led Congress and the news media.

“The far left was unsuccessful in attacking [Army Gen. David H.] Petraeus and defunding the war, forcing a pullback of the U.S. troops,” he said. “I think part of the strategy might be to undermine some other part of the support infrastructure, and that would be contractors that are an important part of the supporting package there in Iraq.”

He said the scrutiny by Congress, which Democrats say is aimed at better oversight, may have backfired.

“What has happened in the last six to nine months is we’ve seen the U.S. government, [Department of Defense] in particular, awarding a lot more work to non-U.S. companies … because it is harder to drag those guys before Congress,” Mr. Prince said.

“And there is less oversight, there is less accountability, there is less visibility into those operations.”

Mr. Prince has been caught in a partisan crossfire since shortly after last year’s election, when a trial lawyer targeting Blackwater lobbied then-House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, for hearings on the “extremely Republican” company.

Mr. Prince emphasized that his guards are proven professionals, recruited on the basis of their prior military, special operations and law-enforcement experiences.

“They go through extensive vetting, training, 160 plus hours of security training, psychological evaluations, security clearances, background checks” and cultural training, he said.

BAGHDAD, 17 October 2007 (IRIN) – Barira Mihran, a 36-year-old mother of three, scavenges every day in other people’s dustbins in Baghdad for leftovers on which to feed her children.

Widowed and displaced by sectarian violence, the unemployed mother said she had no other way of providing for her children.

“In the beginning it was very difficult. I never imagined that one day I was going to be forced by destiny to feed my children from the remains of other people’s food,” Barira said. “We always had good food on our table when my husband was alive but since he was killed in August 2005, my life has gone from bad to worse.”

“My children are under age and so cannot work or beg in the streets,” she said.

“Sometimes you have to fight for a dustbin. Many women know which houses have good leftovers and so they wait for hours near the houses until the leftovers are thrown in the bins outside. Then you can see at least 10 people, women and children, running to get it, and I will be in the middle of the crowd, for sure,” Barira added.

Survey

Barira, an educated woman, has now joined hundreds of other mothers who rummage through rubbish bins for food to feed their children, according to the Baghdad-based Women’s Rights Association (WRA), which conducted a survey of displaced families and people living on the streets in 12 provinces (excluding the Kurdistan region) between January and August 2007.

Mayada Zuhair, a WRA spokeswoman, said the survey showed an increase of 25 percent, since the previous survey in December 2005, in the number of mothers who fed their children either by scavenging in people’s rubbish bins or by becoming sex workers. Of the 3,572 respondents, 72 percent were women (mainly widowed) and of these 9 percent said they had resorted to prostitution and 17 percent said they scavenged for food in dustbins and at rubbish tips. The survey was published and distributed to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local government offices.

WASHINGTON, Oct 17 (Reuters) – The price of an Iraqi life, for purposes of compensation for the families of civilians killed by Americans, can be as low as $500 and as high as $8 million. It depends on who does the assessment.

On the low end, $500 was paid to the brother of a man caught in a firefight outside the gate of his house.

The $8 million is what the Iraqi government is demanding for the families of each of the 17 people it said were killed when private security contractors guarding U.S. diplomats opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square on September 16.

In between those poles, payments are frequently in the $3,000 to $5,000 range. High-profile victims whose death might have an impact on U.S.-Iraqi relations command more.

Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s bodyguard, Raheem Khalif, for example.

He was shot dead last Christmas Eve by a drunken contractor of the U.S. private security company Blackwater, whose men were also involved in the September shooting. The incident raised fresh questions over the use of civilians in roles previously carried out by the U.S. military.

One of the most remarkable quotes from a U.S. official on conditions in Iraq, five years into the war, has come in an email discussing the size of compensation for the bodyguard.

Made available during a Congressional hearing early in October, the email said:

“The…Charge d’Affaires (acting ambassador) was talking some crazy sums at first. Originally, she mentioned $250k and then later on $100K…I think that a sum this high will set a terrible precedent.

“This could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.”

SUICIDE-BY-AMERICAN?

Excuse me? Suicide by provoking an American to shoot you?

Is there so little prospect, so little hope, so little confidence in the future, so few opportunities that the only way to provide long-term for a family’s future is through a U.S. compensation payment for your death?

The email was sent by a Special Agent of the Diplomatic Security Service in Baghdad after he discussed the matter of the dead bodyguard with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command.

The desperation suggested in the notion of suicide-by-American is at odds with the official view of the Bush administration, which has been seeing slow but steady progress towards stability and reasons for Iraqis to hope for a brighter future.

In the case of the bodyguard, the State Department, for whom Blackwater works under a $600 million-plus contract, eventually suggested $15,000 but according to Blackwater’s chief executive, Erik Prince, the company actually paid $20,000.

Now, the widow wants more.

CONDOLENCE AND COMPENSATION

There is no structured procedure for making claims in cases involving armed American civilians.

No court, either in Iraq or in the U.S., has dealt with an Iraqi national seeking compensation for death from a U.S. private security contractor. The companies operate in a legal no-man’s land where they have been virtually immune from prosecution.

The U.S. military, in contrast, have dealt with compensation claims for more than half a century, under a 1942 law, the Foreign Claims Act.

It distinguishes between condolence payments, paid without recognition of fault “as an expression of sympathy and good will” and compensation, which acknowledges military wrongdoing. The $500 for the man shot outside his house was a condolence payment. (Such payments are usually limited to $2,500).

But even for outright compensation, the sums are modest by Western standards, according to documentation on hundreds of cases from Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. Army released to the American Civil Liberties Union recently.

One document lists $5,000 paid for a wrongful death and $5,200 for damage to the vehicle involved in the incident that caused the death. A human life worth less than a car.

“Iraqi blood has become the cheapest thing in Iraq,” noted a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s most respected Shiite religious leader.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants the price of Iraqi blood reviewed. The $8 million per person his government is demanding for the Blackwater victims dwarfs the “crazy sums” the Baghdad diplomat had suggested for settling the bodyguard case.

But the new demand is likely to go through the same process of severe shrinkage as the old.

If not, to follow the logic of the Baghdad email, there might be yet another complication in an already complex and dirty war — soldiers and contractors having to learn to spot Iraqi family fathers wishing to die for U.S. compensation.

Amid the controversy over Blackwater and other private security contractors in Iraq, the media have paid little attention to the role of these contractors in Afghanistan. The Afghan government started what has been reported as a “crackdown” on these contractors last week. AP:

Echoing a growing problem in Iraq, Afghan authorities have started to crack down on lucrative but largely unregulated security firms, some of which are suspected of murder.

Two private Afghan security companies were raided this week, and at least 10 more contractors – including some protecting embassies – will soon be closed, police and Western officials told The Associated Press.

The government is also proposing new rules to tighten control over such companies _ including some Western contractors _ amid concerns they intimidate Afghans, disrespect local security forces and don’t cooperate with authorities, according to a policy draft document obtained by AP.

These contractors attracted attention during the Afghan presidential campaign in October 2004 when one of President Karzai’s DynCorp bodyguards (since replaced by Afghans) slapped Afghanistan’s Minister of Transport in the face (a grave insult) when he approached the President during a campaign photo opportunity in Northern Afghanistan. A CIA contractor was convicted of misdemeanor assault for beating to death an Afghan detainee who turned himself in for questioning voluntarily. A contractor for USPI who shot dead his Afghan translator in 2005 was secretly spirited out of the country and never prosecuted. And these are a few of the incidents reported in the international press.

These incidents are serious enough. But there is an even more serious political issue: private security contractors are corrupting the Afghan police and administration. They have hired, armed, and trained militias that were supposed to be demobilized and disarmed, enabling them to persist and profit as part of the “private sector,” awaiting the spark that will set off another civil war.

In my article Saving Afghanistan, published in Foreign Affairs last December, I reported:

One former mujahideen commander, Din Muhammad Jurat, became a general in the Ministry of the Interior and is widely believed — including by his former mujahideen colleagues — to be a major figure in organized crime and responsible for the murder of a cabinet minister in February 2002. (He also works with U.S. Protection and Investigations, a Texas-based firm that provides international agencies and construction projects with security guards, many of whom are former fighters from Jurat’s militia and current employees at the Ministry of the Interior.)

Since that article was published, Afghanistan’s erratic Attorney-General, Abdul Jabbar Sabet (himself also accused of corruption), issued an arrest warrant for Jurat and attempted to dissolve his security firm. The result was the beating of Sabet by Jurat’s supporters. Jurat, a native of the Panjshir Valley, is a former commander of Ahmad Shah Massoud, while Sabet, a native of Nangarhar in Eastern Afghanistan, was a member of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami while working for Voice of America Pashto service in the 1980s. Afghans interpreted this incident variously as ethnic politics, factional struggles, government attempts to marginalize the mujahidin, the strength of corrupt mafias, and weakness of the state (or perhaps all of the above).

Word on the street about this week’s crackdown is equally complex. As the Afghan “street” now has access to internet and Skype, its rumors travel quickly. Word on the street is that rather than a sincere “crackdown” on private security firms, the government’s actions are more similar to its counter-narcotics actions: use of the government by one criminal group to suppress its competitors. The stories circulating involve beneficiaries of US Department of Defense contracts from favored Afghan families and huge payoffs to Afghan officials. I do not know how true these stories are. But I do know that the complete opaqueness of the contracting process makes it impossible to even try to refute them.

When I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 1, 2007, Senator John Warner (R-Virginia) asked about corruption: wasn’t corruption a part of the culture in Afghanistan? Was the U.S. imposing alien standards? I explained that, while corruption occurred in Afghanistan as in every society, Afghans believed that the unprecedented level of corruption today was largely due to the foreign presence, not their culture. First of all, Afghans do not believe that the international drug problem is caused by greedy Afghan farmers. They think it is due to the global demand for illicit drugs and a policy regime that disproportionately punishes the weakest and poorest parts of the supply chain. Second, they see, if we do not not, the links among US security contractors, Afghan militias, and corrupt officials. They see the armed groups that destroyed their country remobilized and paid by a politically connected “private sector” subsidized by the U.S. government.