The Rag Blog

Schivone: In 1969, addressing a community of mostly students during a public forum at the steps of MIT, you said: “This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because, of course, you’re all free to enter this community — in fact, you’re invited and encouraged to enter it. The community of technical intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counterinsurgency experts, and pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement to become associated with. The inducements, in fact, are very real; their rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige and authority are quite significant.” Let’s start off talking about the significance of these inducements, on both a university and societal level. How crucial is it that students understand the function of this highly technocratic social order of the academic community?

CHOMSKY: How important it is, to an individual, depends on what that individual’s goals in life are. If the goals are to enrich yourself, gain privilege, do technically interesting work — in brief, if the goals are self-satisfaction — then these questions are of no particular relevance. If you care about the consequences of your actions, what’s happening in the world, what the future will be like for your grandchildren and so on, then they’re very crucial. So, it’s a question of what choices people make.

What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it’s worth ‘speaking truth’ to the professional scholars?

I’m always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth,” as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.

Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.

What is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which correlate with a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?

There are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that’s kind of elementary, I don’t know how it can be discussed.

And the people who we call ‘intellectuals’ are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom — not a hundred percent, but quite a lot — and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.

From where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes referred to as a ‘bought’ or ‘secular priesthood’?

It really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion — not just in the United States but in Europe, too — of what was then sometimes called ‘a new class’ of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role — and of course they liked that idea.

Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called ‘scientific management’. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a ‘responsible class’ of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world’s problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the ‘vulgar masses’ who might interfere with them. And, it goes right up until the present.

Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it’s a very attractive conception that, ‘We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.’

Actually, as I’ve pointed out in some of the things I’ve written, it’s very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, they’re strikingly similar. In both cases there’s a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the ‘meddlesome and ignorant outsiders’ , namely, the population, who just get in the way.

It’s not an entirely new conception: it’s just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn’t have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.

There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, ‘the best and the brightest.’ The ‘smart guys’ who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.

It’s a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you’re dedicated to it. It’s one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.

Now, that’s the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they’re authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking. So, economists tell you, ‘We know how to run the economy’; the political scientists tell you, ‘We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don’t have special knowledge and training.’

When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It’s not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some justification for the claims. But, what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.

Given the self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?

My feeling is that they’re nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society — or when McNamara wrote about it, or others — there’s a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they’re not going to be in the planning sectors.

So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.

And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this — in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the ‘left commentators’ of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he’s conforming to power interests and that he’s keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily — and correctly — that nobody tells him what to say. He wrote anything he wanted — which is absolutely true. But, if he wasn’t writing the things he did he wouldn’t have a column in the New York Times.

That’s the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive.

People do not want,or often are not able, to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free, and indeed they are, as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That’s as old as history in the modern period. It’s often very explicit.

Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out that the merchants and manufacturers, the economic forces of his day, are the ‘principal architects of policy’, and they make sure that their own interests are ‘most peculiarly attended to’, no matter how grievous the effect on others, including the people in England. And that’s a good principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty much to the present. When you get people with management and decision-making skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual decisions within a framework that’s set within the real concentrations of power. And now it’s not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith’s day, it’s the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on.

But, stray too far beyond their concerns and you won’t be the decision-maker.

It’s not a mechanical phenomenon, but it’s overwhelmingly true that the people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework of the people who fundamentally own and run the society.

That’s why you have a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different ideas.

What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how those in positions of power or authority often view themselves?

You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’

Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who’s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world–and they probably all believe it. I’m not suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array of routine justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it’s for the benefit of everyone.’

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But, what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.

But, we don’t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They’ll give you the same answers. But, we don’t take that seriously because they can know what they’re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that’s their choice. But, it doesn’t change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.

In fact, maybe the most elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because, we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and terrible, and so on.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because, that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.

What about criminal responsibility and intellectuals?

Nuremberg is an interesting precedent.

The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. Of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until today Nuremberg is, I think, the most serious by far. But, nevertheless, it was very seriously flawed. And it was recognized to be. When Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed, and it was so for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be crimes. So, it was ex post facto. ‘We’re now declaring these things you did to be crimes.’ That is already questionable.

Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we didn’t do it.

So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on — those aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that’s the way it ran through. Now, that’s a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that’s the most serious one.

How reporters trumped up a story about Iranians killing Americans in Iraq.

On July 2 and 3, The New York Times and the Associated Press, among other media outlets, came out with sensational stories saying that either Iranians or Iranian agents had played an important role in planning the operation in Karbala, Iraq last January that resulted in the deaths of five American soldiers. Michael R. Gordon and John F. Burns of The New York Times wrote that “agents of Iran” had been identified by the military spokesman as having “helped plan a January raid in the Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants …”

Lee Keath of the Associated Press wrote an even more lurid lead, asserting that U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner had accused “Iran’s elite Quds force” of having “helped militants carry out a January attack in Karbala that killed five Americans.”

The story was a big break for the war-with-Iran faction in Washington. Within hours, Sen. Joe Lieberman issued a press release saying that the Iranian government “has declared war on us.” That set the stage for the unanimous passage the following week of his amendment stating that “the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act of hostility against the United States,” and demanding the government of Iran “take immediate action” to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias and insurgents.

No one questioned the authenticity of the story at the time. But the official source — Brig. Gen. Bergner — offered no real evidence of Iranian involvement in planning the January attack in his press briefing on July 2. Even more remarkably, Bergner never even explicitly claimed such direct Iranian involvement in the planning. Instead, he used carefully ambiguous language that implied but did not state such an Iranian role.

It was not Bergner, in fact, but New York Times military reporter Michael Gordon who articulated the narrative of an Iranian-inspired attack on Americans. Gordon, readers may recall, played a key role, along with Judith Miller, in legitimizing a major theme of the Bush administration’s Iraq propaganda — the infamous aluminum tubes argument — as the White House Iraq Group kicked off its campaign to prepare public opinion for war in September 2002. And in February 2007, Gordon enthusiastically embraced the administration’s charge of official Iranian arms exports to Iraq in his coverage of that issue, despite a notable lack of evidence for the charge.

But at the Bergner press briefing on July 2, Gordon went even further in playing the role of transmission belt for the Bush administration line. The transcript of that briefing, obtained from the U.S. military command press desk in Baghdad, shows that when Bergner failed to claim a direct Iranian involvement — or even through a Hezbollah operative in Iraq — in the planning of the January raid in Karbala, Gordon pushed him to state clearly that the Iranians not only helped plan but actually “directed” the attack on Americans.

What Bergner said in his prepared statement was that both Hezbollah operative Ali Musa Daqduq, who was in liaison with the militia group which carried out the attack, and Kais Khazali, the Iraqi said to have been in charge of the group — both of whom had been captured on March 22 — “state that senior leadership within the Qods Force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack …”

Using such indirect language — “knew of and supported planning” — is a far cry from claiming actual participation or assistance in planning the attack. Bergner gave no indication of when or how the Iranian Qods Force might have learned about the attack plans, for example, or how much they might have known about them. That vagueness implied that the prisoners had not implicated Iran in the planning of the operation.

Bergner also said Daqduq “contends that the Iraqi special groups could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Qods Force.” That statement was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as referring to support and direction of the Karbala operation, but if Bergner meant to flatly state that there was such “direction” of the operation from Iran, why would he have attributed such indirect language to the same prisoner?

These statements seem to be a deliberate tease by Bergner, who provided neither complete transcripts of the interrogations nor quotations from the prisoners.

Although Bergner provided a number of details in the briefing about Hezbollah training of Shiite militia groups in Iran, including the number of sites, their location, and the number of militiamen trained at any given time, he did not claim that the specific group in question had been trained by Hezbollah, either in Iran or anywhere else. And he stated that the attack was authorized not by the Hezbollah cadre or by the Qods Force, but by the group’s Iraqi chief, Kais Khazali.

Bergner’s failure to refer explicitly to an Iranian or Hezbollah role in the actual planning of the attack prompted Gordon to help formulate the story for the spokesman. “What’s new here, as I understand it,” said Gordon during the briefing, “is that you’re asserting the Qods Force and the Iranians had specific knowledge of this attack in advance and helped guide and support it, not merely train the force.” He then prodded Bergner to say that the purpose of Iranians was to try to “capture these American soldiers in the hope of trading them for the detained Iraqi officials.”

Bergner refrained from addressing Gordon’s restatement of the story as Iranian help and guidance of the January attack. Instead he responded to Gordon’s thesis about the objective of the Karbala operation, saying, “The specific motivations behind these operations that I described, we’re still learning more about that.”

Frustrated by Bergner’s unwillingness to be specific, Gordon pushed him once again. “But you’re asserting essentially that the Qods Force directed and helped plan this attack in Karbala,” he insisted.

Bergner responded, “That is what we learned from [K]ais Khazali,” and said nothing more on the subject. If Bergner’s earlier failure to use such precise language had been due merely to incompetence, one might have expected him to take advantage of Gordon’s prompting to state the story more forcefully and even elaborate on it. But his use of the indefinite “that” and his failure to volunteer anything further indicate that Bergner was not prepared to be quoted as making an explicit allegation of direct Iranian — or Hezbollah — involvement in planning the Karbala raid – even though he did not discourage reporters from writing the story that way.

Another indication that the command had no evidence of Iranian involvement in the attack was the statements of the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, on the issue in an April 26 press briefing. Petraeus had referred to a 22-page memorandum captured with the Shiite prisoners that he said “detailed the planning, preparation, approval process and conduct of the operation that resulted in five of our soldiers being killed in Karbala.” But he did not claim that either the document or the interrogation of Khazali had suggested any Iranian or Hezbollah participation in, much less direction of the planning of the Karbala assault.

Later in that briefing, a reporter asked whether Petraeus was “saying that there was evidence of Iranian involvement in that [Karbala] operation?” Petraeus responded, “No. No. No. That — first of all, that was the operation that you mentioned, and we do not have a direct link to Iranian involvement in that particular case.”

At the time Petraeus made this statement, Khazali, the chief of the militia group that had carried out the attack, had been in U.S. custody for more than a month. Despite nearly five weeks of intensive interrogation of Khazali, Petraeus’s comments would indicate that U.S. officials had not learned anything that implicated Iran or Hezbollah in the planning or execution of the Karbala attack

The raid on the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center on Jan. 20 was a serious embarrassment for the Bush administration. Some 30 gunmen traveled in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows, just like those driven by top U.S. military officials, wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military. By flashing fake identification cards, they gained access to the compound through three different checkpoints without a security screening.

Soon after the attack, U.S. officials speculated that it had been carried out by Iranians or “Iranian-trained operatives,” arguing that it was “beyond what we have seen militias or foreign fighters do.” Officials suggested that the raid — coming a little over a week after Iranian officials had been seized by U.S. forces in Iraq — was aimed at exchanging American prisoners for those Iranians. But it was also reported that some officials had concluded that it was an “inside job,” which could not have been undertaken without help from someone working within the camp.

The revival of the charge of Iranian involvement in the Karbala attack, despite the earlier Petraeus denial, has the all the hallmarks of a White House decision. The alleged Iranian export of arms to Iraqi Shiites, on which the U.S. command briefed the media in Baghdad in February, reflected the administration’s decisions in the preceding months to hold Iran responsible for the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq with armor-piercing explosives. After the replacement of the top commander in Iraq with a general who had pledged to carry out the surge strategy chosen by the White House, and the June arrival of a new U.S. command spokesman in Baghdad — Gen. Bergner — who had been special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq, the command’s briefings were tied more closely to the White House propaganda machine than ever before.

I’ve been locking myself down writing my new book. (Two chapters almost finished!) But I couldn’t help noticing the reports (e.g. here) about the (mainly Sunni) Iraqi Accord Front having now left Iraq’s Potemkin Government.

‘Potemkin’, because it doesn’t actually do anything that governments by definition do, such as provide solid basic services to the citizenry– especially public security. This body is, however, occasionally pulled out of hiding to “appear” to be doing something. For example, we were told on NPR today that President Bush had a lengthy discussion with “Prime Minister” Maliki by videolink, in which they discussed affairs of state together.

But the fact that the IAF pulled out of the Potemkin Government at the very same time Sec of State Rice and Sec of Defense Gates have been visiting Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, urging them to give a bit of support to the said “government”, shows the degree of ineffectual chaos into which the US’s Iraq policy has fallen.

It is quite clear that no-one in the Bush administration has the foggiest idea of how to identify and pursue any policy in Iraq that has any chance of “winning”. Actually it is far too late for that now. There is no such policy any more.

But still, the exit from Iraq can be managed with either a greater or lesser degree of intelligence, and therefore of orderliness and predictability for everyone concerned– Americans, Iraqis, and neighbors of Iraq. And the way this administration is lurching around the region these days, it seems less and less likely that they will be able to manage even a drawdown/withdrawal of forces without making major blunders.

I think “lurch” will have to be one of the major ways in which the historians of the future describe the tenor of the Bushites’ whole engagement with Iraq. They lurch like cognitively impaired drunkards from one side to another, with no stable center of understanding, realism, or political principle to steady them or help pull them forward. They arm the Shiites, then they arm the Sunnis. They blame the Iranians, then they blame the Saudis. They publicly scold the Saudis for failures in Iraq– and then within hours of that they say they’ll be relying on them to help give political legitimacy to Maliki’s Potemkin Government.

The one constant through all their lurchings around the Middle East? Their propensity to look at every problem as a military problem, and at every relationship as one that can easily be strengthened or manipulated through arms transfers. Hence, their main legacy in the region thus far is one of distrust, tensions, anti-Americanism– and also, massive arming.

WASHINGTON, 30 Jul (IPS) – Just 25 months after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced 60 years of U.S. support for authoritarian governments in Arab world, she and Pentagon chief Robert Gates are on their way to the Middle East bearing arms and an uncannily familiar strategic vision to the same regimes.

Under former President Ronald Reagan 25 years ago, it was called ‘strategic consensus’ — the notion that you could coax the so-called ‘moderate’ Arab states into a de facto coalition with Israel against the region’s perceived Soviet clients and a revolutionary Iran by plying them with sophisticated weaponry and renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

Under President George W. Bush, the strategic vision has still not been given a specific name, but, apart from the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the basic elements appear to be eerily similar, if not identical.

Heralding her trip and the proposed transfer of some 43 billion dollars in new weaponry for Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, Rice asserted Monday, ‘This effort will bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.’

‘Further modernising the Egyptian and Saudi Arabia Armed Forces and increasing inter-operability will bolster our partners’ resolve in confronting the threat of radicalism and cement their respective roles as regional leaders in the quest for Middle East peace and in ensuring Lebanon’s freedom and independence,’ she added.

The trip follows last week’s announcement by Bush that Rice will chair a regional conference some time this fall as part of a new diplomatic push for an eventual ‘two-state solution’ of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It will take both Gates and Rice to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a particularly critical destination given the growing estrangement between Washington and Riyadh with respect to both Iraq and U.S. efforts to break up a Palestinian unity government forged by King Abdullah.

At that point, Rice will travel to Jerusalem and Ramallah to ‘continue discussions on the development of a political horizon with Israeli and Palestinian officials’, while Gates heads for the smaller Gulf states with which he reportedly intends to seek new access rights to military bases and extend older ones, as well as pursue new arms-sales agreements.

Under the arms-for-allies plan, the U.S. would provide 13 billion dollars in aid over 10 years — roughly the same amount that it has been getting for most of the past decade. While precise figures have not been released, State Department officials said Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will be encouraged to buy some 20 billion dollars in new arms, including satellite-guided bombs, missile defences, and upgrades for its U.S.-made fighter-jets over the same period.

To dampen concerns by Israel and its supporters here, the administration is also proposing a 10-year, 30-billion-dollar package to preserve the Jewish state’s military superiority — or ‘qualitative edge’ — over its Arab neighbours. That would amount to a 25 percent increase in U.S. military assistance to Israel over current levels.

While several lawmakers close to the so-called ‘Israel Lobby’ said this weekend they will try to block the proposed sale to Saudi Arabia, or at least condition it on a number of changes in Saudi policy, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert signaled his approval, noting, in particular, the importance of an Arab-Israeli coalition against Tehran.

‘We understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderates, and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran,’ he said.

The proposed arms sales and aid to the ‘moderate’ Arab states mark yet another step toward its renewed embrace of the Sunni Arab authoritarian regimes that the Bush administration and its neo-conservative backers had tried to distance themselves from in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

‘For 60 years, my country — the United States — pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East,’ Rice declared in June 2005 at the American University in Cairo, in a widely noted speech that encouraged democracy activists across the region. ‘And we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.’

But since the election victory of Hamas in parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories seven months later and, particularly since last year’s Israel-Hezbollah war, which the administration saw as evidence of Iran’s expanding power, Washington has all but abandoned its democracy-promotion rhetoric — at least insofar as it applied to its regional allies — essentially returning to its 60-year-old preference for stability over democracy.

That it should now return to using large arms transfers as a major means of ensuring that stability highlights the degree to which the administration has abandoned its pro-democracy stance, according to critics.

‘These exorbitant arms sales should be read as a last-ditch effort by the Bush administration to keep matters stable for the tyrannies of the region and to reward those who stood with him in his unending wars,’ said As’ad Abukhalil, an expert on Saudi Arabia based at California State University at Stanislaus.

What the administration wants from its Sunni allies, in exchange for these deals, according to Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report, ‘is to build an anti-Iranian alliance [resembling] the early Reagan administration’s attempt to find an anti-Soviet ‘strategic consensus’ among U.S. allied Arab states and Israel. Then, as now, the Arab states’ price is some semblance of pressure on Israel to make a comprehensive peace.’

‘The Bush administration is betting that the Arab states’ fear of Iran is greater than their sensitivities on the Palestine and Iraq questions combined,’ he added. ‘Indeed, the Bush administration, with all its talk of transforming the Middle East, is reverting to usual U.S. form: a patchwork policy of constant crisis management, all in the name of the ‘stability’ the neo-conservatives professed to hate.’

‘The major difference going ahead is that, thanks to the Bush administration, there are now two ‘intractable’ Middle East conflicts to manage instead of one,’ Toensing said.

Indeed, that Washington is now trying to forge a new strategic alliance against Iran in the face of Tehran’s emergence as a major regional threat to U.S. interests — largely because of the administration’s own miscalculations in Iraq — struck analyst Gary Sick as a ‘marvelous example of political jiu jitsu.’

‘Having inadvertently created a set of circumstances that insured an increase in Iranian strength and bargaining power, that seriously frightened U.S. erstwhile Sunni allies in the region, and that undermined U.S. strength and credibility,’ according to Sick, a Columbia University professor who was President Jimmy Carter’s top Iran aide, ‘the U.S. now proposes a new and improved regional political relationship to deal with the problem, and, incidentally, to distract attention from America’s plight in Iraq while reviving America’s position as the ultimate power in the region.’

WASHINGTON, July 31 (UPI) — Iraq’s Oil Ministry has directed all its agencies and departments not to deal with the country’s oil unions.

The unions and Iraq’s government, especially the prime minister and oil minister, have been at odds for months now over working conditions and the draft oil law.

The unions went on strike in early June and are threatening to stop production and exports again if demands are not met. The unions claim the oil law, if approved by Parliament, will give foreign oil companies too much access to the oil. The unions enjoy enormous support, especially in the south of Iraq.

“The Minister has directed the prohibition of cooperation with any member of any union in any of the committees organized under the name of the Union as these unions do not enjoy any legal status to work inside the government sector,” Laith Abd Al Hussein AL Shahir, the ministry’s general director, wrote in a July 18 letter obtained by UPI.

The letter was addressed to the all of the ministry’s companies, such as the state firms in the north and south of the country, as well as research, development and training centers based in Baghdad, Baiji, Basra and Kirkuk.

“In no way is it permitted for them to use the offices, instruments or equipment of the companies as they do not enjoy any legal status to work in the public sector,” the letter stated, giving recipients two weeks to implement the directive.

Saddam Hussein outlawed worker organizing in the public sector; subsequent U.S. occupying powers and now the Iraqi government do not recognize the workers’ rights to organize.

Despite that, workers have come together and leveraged their power. Since 2003 they’ve blocked numerous attempts to privatize management of both oil and other facilities and stopped work over disputes — most recently early last month over the oil law and other unmet demands.

The unions are calling for Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to resign or be fired.

The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.

The Prime Minister’s Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a “bonus” the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.

Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You’re going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. “Resilience thinking,” the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace “efficiency” as the organizing principle of our economy.

Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That’s what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one “best” way of doing something — usually “best” means most profitable over the short run — and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible — things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We’re skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one “best” way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.

Surprise Happens

Too often we understand the natural systems we manipulate incompletely. We treat living systems as if they were simple, static, linear, and predictable when, in reality they are complex, dynamic, and unpredictable. When building our manmade world on top of those natural systems, we regularly fail to account for inevitable natural disturbances and changes. So when the “unexpected inevitable” occurs, we are shocked. Worse, we often find that we have “all our eggs in one basket,” and that the redundancy we eliminated in the name of efficiency limits our options for recovery. This applies to manmade systems, too.

Our efficient energy and food systems are perfect examples of how monolithic and brittle our infrastructure can become. Political turmoil in the Middle East, storms ravaging offshore oil wells, refinery fires, terrorism, and any number of other easily imaginable, even inevitable disruptions send gas prices soaring and suddenly our oil-dependent economy is pitched into a crisis. Because there is no readily available alternative to how we fuel our way of life — no resilience — our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us especially vulnerable to crisis. Our food system is likewise vulnerable, since it is so dependent on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and relies on cheap and consistent supplies of gas for farm machinery and shipping.

Redundancy — alternative energy sources, for example -– would have left us options to fall back on in a time of such crisis. We did not develop those options, however, because they weren’t considered “competitive.” That is, if one energy source is cheaper to produce than others — ignoring, of course, all the associated and unacknowledged environmental and health costs — then that is the predominant energy source we will use to the exclusion of all others. Decades ago, oil and coal were cheap and so we constructed an entire energy infrastructure around those resources alone. (Nuclear squeaked through the door only because it was so heavily subsidized by government.) Solar and wind couldn’t compete according to the rigid market criteria we applied, so those sources hardly exist today. We are still told that we will get them only when they become more competitive.

Our focus on efficiency in building manmade systems has been short-sighted because it fails to anticipate change over the long run. Resiliency is eliminated at each turn by owners, managers, and planners steeped in the cult of efficiency and trained to cut out profit-reducing redundancy whenever it appears. In organizations, this usually works well — at least for a while. But our attempt to maximize the use of natural systems has, in this regard, been an unmitigated disaster.

Most of the technological means we use to overcome nature’s inefficiencies seem clever and beneficial until the long-term drawbacks dawn on us. In the Northwest, for instance, dams seemed like a great way to produce electricity and make rivers navigable until, that is, the salmon began to die and an entire Northwest ecosystem that depended on salmon began to unravel. Until they broke under the power of Hurricane Katrina, the levees in New Orleans seemed to be a neat alternative to those messy coastal wetlands and inconvenient barrier islands we had wiped out for keeping storm surges in check.

Bees Drop Dead

The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological service — pollination — to make it more efficient and the unexpected blowback we are now suffering from that. In this case, there is little resilience in the manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out.

Pollination is a fundamental process that happens many ways — birds do it, bees do it, even butterflies and moths do it. But humans who grow food rely almost exclusively on bees; and not the hundreds of species of wild bees either, but one bee, the European honeybee. Sometimes resilience in nature is the availability of diverse options to fall back on in times of disturbance, but even when there is one choice, like bees for pollinating crops, there are still resilient features, redundancies that we eliminate at our peril. For hundreds of years, numerous dispersed and varied bee populations meant that a scarcity of bees here could be compensated for by an abundance of bees there. Not anymore. We have grabbed this key ecological process to maximize its use and have wrung out what resiliency there was.

Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, like those movies about Ebola virus or asteroid strikes, the situation is both dire and all too real. Bee-tracking experts estimate that, across 26 states, between a half-million and a million of 2.4 million bee colonies have collapsed this year. Because many fruit, vegetable, and seed crops, worth about $12 billion annually, rely on the most affected bee, the European Honeybee, for pollination, bee loss will translate into increased food costs for consumers and a potential loss of food variety as well.

Nobody knows for sure why bee colonies are collapsing. German researchers recently speculated that the rapid growth in cell-phone use might be a cause, that some kind of tipping point had been crossed where bees could no longer navigate and communicate in an electro-magnetic environment saturated with cell-phone signals. This speculation is based upon experiments in which forager bees abandoned hives next to which cell phones had been placed. But bee populations are collapsing across the nation, including in areas with less cell phone ubiquity.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

The suddenness of the collapse is puzzling, but one possibility would be the emergence of some new killer parasite or bee mite — a development that could result in such a precipitous decline. After all, bee pollination is big business. Bees are transported and mixed today in ways never before possible, giving the tiny parasitic critters that bees carry in their guts all sorts of opportunities to find new hosts. But whatever the specific cause of bee colony collapse, the context of this pollinator catastrophe is an old story.

Once upon a time we had lots of small, local farms. Farmers relied on dispersed bee populations to pollinate their crops, enhanced and encouraged by the work of local beekeepers. When monoculture was but a glint in the agricultural eye, when cows, chickens, pigs, and more than one crop was still part of the farming dynamic, a farmer might also keep a hive or two. Before we replaced meadows and prairies with sprawling subdivisions, there was enough habitat for local bee populations to thrive and meet agricultural demands. Not anymore.

Today, when farms are massive and almost invariably dedicated to single crops, there just aren’t enough local bees to do the work required. In addition, the crops we grow need to be pollinated at different times. So, for example, vast crops of almonds in California need to be pollinated in February when there aren’t enough local bees around, so the growers import bees to do the job.

Diesel-Driven Bee Slums

In fact, we ship billions of bees from here to there and back again in tractor-trailer trucks to pollinate our food crops. Like so many other aspects of modern agriculture, bee pollination has become a business that matches the scale of our food-production system. So, out with the inefficient, inflexible, insufficient local bees and in with diesel-driven colonies of commercial bees that arrive in sufficient numbers where and when we want them. The top beekeeping corporation in America can put 70,000 hives on the road at one time.

What happens to bees in such circumstances is probably similar to what happens to all creatures living in crowded and overpopulated environments — illness can spread quickly. A dairy farmer in Vermont told me that, when you have a hundred cows in the milking barn, you can use antibiotics sparingly. But put a thousand cows together and you’re applying antibiotics all the time. Whatever happens in one cow’s blood stream tends to go through the whole herd quickly — and the more cows that are crowded together, the more viruses, parasites, and infections are in play.

The same thing happens to chickens and pigs in factory farms, which is why they get antibiotics routinely. Why would bees be an exception to the vulnerability to illness that comes with agriculture conducted on such a massive scale? You can’t, however, apply antibiotics to bees the way you can to cows because bees are more likely to trade mites than infections, so new miticides are being developed.

Logically enough, bee vulnerability is increased if the immune responses of the bees are low. A friend of mine drove tractor-trailer trucks filled with bees as a summer job in college. He drove by night when the bees were in their hives and quiet. The goal was to get to his destination before dawn and unload the bees onto the targeted crop before they became busy, uncooperative, and agitated. When the trip was rough, when there were breakdowns or bad weather en route, he said, thousands of bees died. If stress kills bees, it is not unreasonable to assume it lowers immune response.

Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring – or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees – Syria and Jordan – have still received “next to nothing from the world community”. Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.

Potential donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq arguing the country has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2bn a week on military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water costing a few cents.

Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.

“At least it is safe here,” says Walid Sha’ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa’adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006.

Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay.

“Sometimes I go to beg,” says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks, his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural scapegoats for any wrong-doing in their vicinity.

Refugees are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on resources. “People here blame us for forcing up rents and the price of food,” said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus after his sister’s leg was fractured by a car bomb.

The refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa’adiyah in west Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between 18 June and 18 July. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had been tortured.

“The majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their house and told them to get out in an hour,” says Rosina Ynzenga, who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp.

Sulaymaniyah municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad.

Mr Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees explaining their grievences.

Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water.

Even so they are adamant that they dare not return to Baghdad. They did not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.

Abla Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially fatal risks to earn a little money.

The uncertainty of the refugees’ lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.

There are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad, a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala, the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious sectarian pogroms.

The nerve center of the nation’s police is not so much a government agency as an 11-story powder keg of factions.

BAGHDAD — The colonel pulls his Mercedes into the parking lot of the drab, 11-story concrete building, scanning the scene for suspicious cars.

Before reaching for the door handle, he studies the people loitering nearby in hopes he will be able to recognize anyone still there later in the day. He grips his pistol, the trigger cocked, wary of an ambush.

He has arrived at his office.

This is Iraq’s Ministry of Interior — the balkanized command center for the nation’s police and mirror of the deadly factions that have caused the government here to grind nearly to a halt.

The very language that Americans use to describe government — ministries, departments, agencies — belies the reality here of militias that kill under cover of police uniform and remain above the law. Until recently, one or two Interior Ministry police officers were assassinated each week while arriving or leaving the building, probably by fellow officers, senior police officials say.

That killing has been reduced, but Western diplomats still describe the Interior Ministry building as a “federation of oligarchs.” Those who work in the building, like the colonel, liken departments to hostile countries. Survival depends on keeping abreast of shifting factional alliances and turf.

On the second floor is Gen. Mahdi Gharrawi, a former national police commander. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops found 1,400 prisoners, mostly Sunnis, at a base he controlled in east Baghdad. Many showed signs of torture. The interior minister blocked an arrest warrant against the general this year, senior Iraqi officials confirmed.

The third- and fifth-floor administrative departments are the domain of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group.

The sixth, home to border enforcement and the major crimes unit, belongs to the Badr Organization militia. Its leader, Deputy Minister Ahmed Khafaji, is lauded by some Western officials as an efficient administrator and suspected by others of running secret prisons.

The seventh floor is intelligence, where the Badr Organization and armed Kurdish groups struggle for control.

The ninth floor is shared by the department’s inspector general and general counsel, religious Shiites. Their offices have been at the center of efforts to purge the department’s remaining Sunni employees. The counsel’s predecessor, a Sunni, was killed a year ago.

“They have some bad things on the ninth,” says the colonel, a Sunni who, like other ministry officials, spoke on condition of anonymity to guard against retaliation.

The ministry’s computer department is on the 10th floor. Two employees were arrested there in February on suspicion of smuggling in explosives, according to police and U.S. military officials. Some Iraqi and U.S. officials say the workers intended to store bombs there. Others say they were plotting to attack the U.S. advisors stationed directly above them on the top floor.

Months after the arrests, it’s unclear whether the detainees are Sunni insurgents or followers of Muqtada Sadr, the anti-U.S. Shiite cleric whose portrait stares down from some office walls in a sign of his spreading influence in the ministry.

Partitions divide the building’s hallways, and gunmen guard the offices of deputy ministers. Senior police officials march up and down stairs rather than risk an elevator. They walk the halls flanked by bodyguards, wary of armed colleagues.

“What is in their hearts? You do not know who they belong to,” a senior officer said.

The factionalization of the ministry began quickly after Saddam Hussein’s fall. As with most Iraqi government departments, deputy ministers were appointed to represent each of the country’s main political parties. Deputies then distributed jobs among party stalwarts.

The initial winners were the Kurdish Democratic Party and the two Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which sponsors the Badr Organization. The Kurdish party is one of two factions that control Iraq’s northern provinces.

Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia started late in the patronage game but has made significant inroads, particularly among the guard force that surrounds the ministry compound.