The Rag Blog

06/30/07 “ICH” — – Of the Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Mike Gravel is probably the least well recognized. His dark-horse candidacy may be the butt of jokes on the late-night comedy shows, but that doesn’t faze former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg: “Here is a senator who was not afraid to look foolish. That is the fear that keeps people in line all their lives.”

The famed whistle-blower joined Gravel this past weekend on a panel commemorating the 35th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the Beacon Press, a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association. It was this publisher that Gravel turned to in 1971, after dozens of others had turned him down, to publish the 7,000 pages that Ellsberg had delivered to Gravel to put into the public record.

The story of the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times is famous, but how they got published as a book, with Gravel’s face on the jacket, reads like a John Grisham novel.

Ellsberg was a military analyst working for the RAND Corp. in the 1960s when he was asked to join an internal Pentagon group tasked with creating a comprehensive, secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg photocopied thousands of documents and leaked them to The New York Times, which published excerpts in June 1971.

President Richard Nixon immediately got a restraining order, stopping the newspaper from printing more. It was the first time in U.S. history that presses were stopped by federal court order. The Times fought the injunction, and won in the Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States. Following that decision, The Washington Post also began running excerpts. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the Post on the condition that one of its editors, Ben Bagdikian, deliver a copy to Gravel.

Gravel recalled the exchange, which he set up at midnight outside the storied Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.: “I used to work in intelligence; I know how to do these things.” Gravel pulled his car up to Bagdikian’s, the two opened their trunks and Gravel heaved the boxes personally, worried that only he could claim senatorial immunity should they get caught with the leaked documents. His staff aides were posted as lookouts around the block.

Thwarted in his attempt to read the Pentagon Papers into the public record as a filibuster to block the renewal of the draft, Gravel called a late-night meeting of the obscure Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, which he chaired, and began reading the papers aloud there. He broke down crying while reading the details of Vietnamese civilian deaths. Because he had begun the reading, he was legally able to enter all 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, once top-secret, into the public record.

Though ridiculed by the press for his emotional display, Gravel was undaunted. He wanted the Pentagon Papers published as a book so Americans could read what had been done in their name. Only Beacon Press accepted the challenge.

Robert West, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association at the time, approved the publication. With that decision, he said, “We started down a path that led through two and a half years of government intimidation, harassment and threat of criminal punishment.” As Beacon weathered subpoenas, FBI investigations of its bank accounts and other chilling probes, Gravel attempted to extend his senatorial immunity to the publisher. The bid failed in the U.S Supreme Court (the first time that the U.S. Senate appeared before the court), but not without a strongly worded dissent from Justice William O. Douglas: “In light of the command of the First Amendment we have no choice but to rule that here government, not the press, is lawless.”

The environmental movement is on life support. Some would say it is already dead. Even though climate change and Al Gore are fast becoming the conversation du jour around the American dinner table, it also happens to be the rallying cry for do-gooder conservationists and corporations alike.

Call it the eco-economy. Virtually all major corporations now claim they are going “green”. Toyota dealerships cannot keep the hybrid Prius in stock. Apple, after heavy lobbying from Greenpeace and others, declares they are going to make their computers environmentally friendly. Genetically modified corn, which produces ethanol fuel, is being hawked by Monsanto as an alternative to petroleum based gasoline. Ethanol advocates are calling their program “Fuels for Profit”, while they sip McDonald’s organic coffee. The environmental movement has been corporatized.

Big green groups are not helping the situation. Their hands are tied by both the large foundations that pay their rent and the Democratic Party to which they are attached at the hip. They long ago gave up on challenging the system. Most groups today are little more than direct mailing outfits who have embraced a sordid neoliberal approach to saving the natural world. The true causes of planetary destruction are never mentioned. Industrial capitalism is not the problem, individuals are. Not the government’s inability to enforce its weak regulations. Not big oil companies, or coal fired plants. These neoliberal groups argue ordinary people are to blame for the impending environmental catastrophe, not those who profit from the Earth’s destruction.

Meanwhile, on the ground, grassroots environmentalists engaging in arson as a response to unfettered sprawl and our car addicted culture are dubbed terrorists by the Federal government. Despite their extreme and counter-productive methods, the cases are quite informative. In our post-9/11 world young eco-radicals are viewed by the FBI and corporations as if they are as dangerous as bin Laden. All activists, no matter their cause, should take heed. It is the first step in cracking down on radical activism.

Torching SUVs in the middle of the night, unfortunately, will not bring about any massive radical change, except, perhaps, in our “anti-terrorism” legislation. There are militant direct actions that are prevailing, however, from Paul Watson’s crusade to protect the wild creatures of the sea, to the environmentalists who stake out in trees for weeks at a time, to the grandmothers who chain themselves to logging trucks, despite the dangers.

Such actions, coupled with the organization of the working class, could help steer the environmental movement in the right direction. The philosophy of the great wilderness advocate Bob Marshall may prove to be quite prescient in the age of foundation driven conservationism. Marshall believed wilderness was for the regular folks. He believed wilderness was a “minority right” and argued that elitism inside the movement would be inherently corrupt. He’s right. The burdens of a corporatized society are great, not only for our forests and rivers, but to the workers who are consistently exploited and poisoned for profit.

The British sitcom, “Upstairs Downstairs” was a comedy of manners, of the rich and their servants, which is come to think of it, how the Federal Reserve and Wall Street’s stylized dialogue on inflation will appear to historians, in retrospect.

Over the past decade we’ve had Wall Street wagging its tail to the Fed’s “growth recession”, “low” inflation, we’ve had “worries about higher inflation”. Meanwhile, Americans in the vast majority are noticeably poorer.

It is not just the pocket book: it is also quality of life. The growth economy based on suburban sprawl–now flat on its face–has been a nation killer, sold like tobacco or sugar as ‘what the market wants’.

But, always, the bottom line is the pocketbook. And there, the incredibly narrow bandwidth on government propaganda on inflation, and the timidity of most economists, Americans for the most part have meekly bought into the rosy scenarios.

Americans on fixed incomes, though, may wonder indeed if they have been inflicted with an unreported kind of disease–because inflation to them has been real and rampant.

“Thanks to 20 years of inflation, $1 million today has just 54% of the purchasing power of $1 million in 1987.” (from The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Clements, June 27, 2007)

Bingo.

Countless Americans responded to the pressure of inflation, emptied of meaning and relevance by government statistics, by investing far more in housing than historical precedent or reason would prudently allocate.

When a significant percentage of the nation’s homeowners are investing 40 to 50 percent of disposable income on housing, and home values have fallen 30 percent off purchase prices (as they are, in the nation’s most overheated areas), who needs an exogenous shock to threaten the economy?

Until 2005, real and unreported inflation was matched by consumers of mortgages in housing, matching inflation with inflation, sucking up many purchasers of subprime mortgages, but also, hard working middle and upper middle class.

As paper value of individual investments in housing went up, up, up, the real value of mortgages packaged and sliced into financial derivatives disappeared into pension funds, insurance pools, and hedge funds providing leverage for even more speculative investments.

Today there is a slow motion earthquake trembling through markets for financial derivatives, whose cumulative float is approximately ten times the value of stocks traded on public exchanges in the US.

Bush said in a speech on Thursday that he hopes Iraq will be like Israel, a democracy that faces terrorist violence but manages to retain its democratic character:

‘ In Israel, Bush said, “terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.” ‘

These words may be the stupidest ones ever uttered by a US president. Given their likely impact on the US war effort in the Middle East, they are downright criminal.

The US political elite just doesn’t get it. Israel is not popular in the Middle East, and it isn’t because Middle Easterners are bigots. It is because Israel is coded as the last European colonial presence in the region, an heir to French Algeria, British Egypt, and Dutch Indonesia– and because the Israelis pugnaciously continue to try to colonize neighboring bits of territory. (This enmity is not inevitable or eternal; in 2002 the Arab League offered full recognition of Israel in return for its going back to 1967 borders, but the Israeli government turned down the offer.) But for the purposes of this analysis it does not really matter why Israel is unpopular. Let us just stipulate that it is. Why would you associate American Iraq with such an unpopular project, if you were trying to do public diplomacy in the region? Bush had just announced a new push to get the American message out to the Muslim world, the day before.

Let’s just take the analogy seriously for a moment. Israel proper is a democracy of sorts, though its 1 million Arab citizens are in a second class position. But it rules over several million stateless Palestinians who lack even the pretence of self-rule. It is hard to characterize a country as a democracy when it has millions of disenfranchised subjects. Bush manages to only think about Jewish Israelis in the above analogy, wiping out millions of other residents of geographical Palestine who don’t get to participate in ‘democracy’ or exercise popular sovereignty.

It is true that the Israelis managed to blunt the terror attacks of Islamic Jihad, the Qassam Brigades, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades over the years after the eruption of the 2nd Intifada. But there are still attacks, including by rocket. The reason for those attacks is that the Palestinians had mostly been driven from their homes and off their land, and were militarily, politically and economically subjected to the Israelis. The Israelis reduced the terror attacks by essentially imprisoning millions of stateless Palestinians in the territories, further restricting their movements, destroying their trade and livelihoods. The Israeli government continues to grab Palestinian land and put more colonists on it, even as we speak.

Israel-Palestine is among the world’s hottest trouble spots, and the conflict has poisoned politics throughout the Middle East. It was among the motives for Bin Laden’s attack on the US on September 11, so it has spilled over on America, too. A second one of those would be a good thing?

So who would play the Palestinians in Bush’s analogy? Obviously, it would be the Sunni Arabs, who apparently are meant to be cordoned off from the rest of Iraqis and put behind massive walls and barbed wire, and deprived of political power. That is not a desirable outcome and is not politically or militarily tenable in the long run.

And, let’s just stop and think. Even if it were true that an Israel-Palestine sort of denouement were in Bush’s mind for Iraq, was it wise for him to make it public?

That sort of scenario is precisely the propaganda message broadcast by the Jihadi websites in Iraq and the Arab world! They say that the US military occupation of Iraq, in alliance with Shiites, has turned the Sunni Arabs into Palestinians! Bush could not have handed the guerrillas a better rhetorical gift. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that DVD’s of Bush’s comments will be spread around as a recruiting tool for jihadis, and that US troops will certainly be killed as a result of this speech. You could say that the US military presence is already pretty unpopular in the Sunni Arab areas. But what of the progress in al-Anbar Province? Will Bush’s speech help or hurt Sunni Arabs who want to ally with the US against the foreign Salafi Jihadis? Hurt, obviously.

If Bush had said something like that in 2002, you could have written it off as inexperience and lack of knowledge of the Middle East. But he has been the sitting president for so many years, and has had so much to do with the Middle East that this faux pas is just inexcusable. I don’t know the man and can’t judge if he is just not very bright. I can confirm that he says things that are not very bright. And, worse, he says things that are guaranteed to put more US troops into the grave in Diyala, Baghdad, Salahuddin and al-Anbar Provinces.

Everyone knows that Canadians live longer and have lower infant mortality rates than Americans. In Sicko, Michael Moore suggests that a Canadian-style medical system would solve this problem. Surprisingly, the evidence indicates that it would not.

A cross-border team of 17 researchers (including high-profile supporters of the Canadian system) examined a variety of medical problems, including cancer, coronary artery disease, chronic illness and surgical procedures. With the single exception of end-stage kidney disease, where Canadian patients fared better, they found no consistent difference in patient outcomes between the two nations.1 As I have argued elsewhere, the United States has the worst health statistics in the industrialized world because it is the most unequal society in the industrialized world.2

Although Canada’s medical system does not produce generally better patient outcomes, it is more equitable and far more economical. In 2003, the average American spent almost twice as much for medical care as the average Canadian. Exorbitant medical bills are a constant worry and a major cause of personal bankruptcy. Profit-taking is responsible for the high cost of American medicine. However, the Canadian system is also subject to market forces.

Contrary to popular belief, Canada does not have a single-payer medical system. Government pays about 70 percent of medical costs, including most hospital and physician care. Individuals and private insurance companies pay the remaining 30 percent for prescription drugs, dental and vision care, ambulance, medical devices, home care and other services.

To contain costs, both the United States and Canada ration medical care, but they do this in different ways. In the U.S., more than 47 million people have no medical insurance at all. The Institute of Medicine estimates that 18,000 people die every year as a result. In Canada, lack of access is more equitably spread across the population in the form of long waits for assessment and treatment. We don’t know how many Canadians die while waiting for treatment, because no one is counting the bodies.3 The Canadian model of rationing is sick, and the American model is sicker because it unfairly discriminates against those who cannot pay. Neither is good enough. Medical care is a human right and should not be rationed at all.

Disgust with the American medical system has built support for HR 676–The United States National Health Insurance Act–a single-payer system where medical care would be publicly financed and privately delivered. Winning HR 676 would be a tremendous victory. However, the Canadian experience shows that private delivery of medical care opens the door to parasitical profit-taking.

The Canadian experience

Until the 1960’s the American and Canadian medical systems were nearly identical. Those with the highest incomes obtained the lion’s share of medical services even though those with the lowest incomes experienced the most illness. The logical solution was a government-run system to provide medical care for all, but doctors and private insurers rejected what they called “state medicine and socialism.”

During the upturn of the 1960s, the pressure grew for universal health care. To contain demand, the federal government launched a Royal Commission to “study” the problem. The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) made its preference clear.

“We favor a system of public health care that will be universal in application and comprehensive in coverage. We favor a system that will present no economic barrier between the service and those who need it. We are opposed to any provision which will require some people to submit themselves to a means test in order to obtain service. We look to a system of health care that will be regarded as a public service and not as an insurance mechanism.”4

The public-service model, where government is both payer and provider, was rejected. Instead, the Medical Care Insurance Act of 1966 established a publicly-financed system that would be administered and delivered by the private sector, “free of government control or domination.”

Step One. Delay. If there is one word that sums up the way to destroy an African-American city after a disaster, that word is DELAY. If you are in doubt about any of the following steps–just remember to delay and you will probably be doing the right thing.

Step Two. When a disaster is coming, do not arrange a public evacuation. Rely only on individual resources. People with cars and money for hotels will leave. The elderly, the disabled and the poor will not be able to leave. Most of those without cars–25% of households of New Orleans, overwhelmingly African-Americans–will not be able to leave. Most of the working poor, overwhelmingly African-American, will not be able to leave. Many will then permanently accuse the victims who were left behind of creating their own human disaster because of their own poor planning. It is critical to start by having people blame the victims for their own problems.

Step Three. When the disaster hits make certain the national response is overseen by someone who has no experience at all handling anything on a large scale, particularly disasters. In fact, you can even inject some humor into the response–have the disaster coordinator be someone whose last job was the head of a dancing horse association.

Step Four. Make sure that the President and national leaders remain aloof and only slightly concerned. This sends an important message to the rest of the country.

Step Five. Make certain the local, state, and national governments do not respond in a coordinated effective way. This will create more chaos on the ground.

Step Six. Do not bring in food or water or communications right away. This will make everyone left behind more frantic and create incredible scenes for the media.

Step Seven. Make certain that the media focus of the disaster is not on the heroic community work of thousands of women, men and young people helping the elderly, the sick and the trapped survive, but mainly on acts of people looting. Also spread and repeat the rumors that people trapped on rooftops are shooting guns not to attract attention and get help, but AT the helicopters. This will reinforce the message that “those people” left behind are different from the rest of us and are beyond help.

Step Eight. Refuse help from other countries. If we accept help, it looks like we cannot or choose not to handle this problem ourselves. This cannot be the message. The message we want to put out over and over is that we have plenty of resources and there is plenty of help. Then if people are not receiving help, it is their own fault. This should be done quietly.

Step Nine. Once the evacuation of those left behind actually starts, make sure people do not know where they are going or have any way to know where the rest of their family has gone. In fact, make sure that African-Americans end up much farther away from home than others.

Step Ten. Make sure that when government assistance finally has to be given out, it is given out in a totally arbitrary way. People will have lost their homes, jobs, churches, doctors, schools, neighbors and friends. Give them a little bit of money, but not too much. Make people dependent. Then cut off the money. Then give it to some and not others. Refuse to assist more than one person in every household. This will create conflicts where more than one generation lived together. Make it impossible for people to get consistent answers to their questions. Long lines and busy phones will discourage people from looking for help.

Step Eleven. Insist the President suspend federal laws requiring living wages and affirmative action for contractors working on the disaster. While local workers are still displaced, import white workers from outside the city for the high-paying jobs like crane operators and bulldozers. Import Latino workers from outside the city for the low-paying dangerous jobs. Make sure to have elected officials, black and white, blame job problems on the lowest wage immigrant workers. This will create divisions between black and brown workers that can be exploited by those at the top. Because many of the brown workers do not have legal papers, those at the top will not have to worry about paying decent wages, providing health insurance, following safety laws, unemployment compensation, workers compensation, or union organizing. They become essentially disposable workers–use them, then lose them.

Regrettably, there are all too many candidates that qualify as imminent and very serious crises. Several should be high on everyone’s agenda of concern, because they pose literal threats to human survival: the increasing likelihood of a terminal nuclear war, and environmental disaster, which may not be too far removed. However, I would like to focus on narrower issues, those that are of greatest concern in the West right now. I will be speaking primarily of the United States, which I know best, and it is the most important case because of its enormous power. But as far as I can ascertain, Europe is not very different.

The area of greatest concern is the Middle East. There is nothing novel about that. I often have to arrange talks years in advance. If I am asked for a title, I suggest “The Current Crisis in the Middle East.” It has yet to fail. There’s a good reason: the huge energy resources of the region were recognized by Washington sixty years ago as a “stupendous source of strategic power,” the “strategically most important area of the world,” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”1 Control over this stupendous prize has been a primary goal of U.S. policy ever since, and threats to it have naturally aroused enormous concern.

For years it was pretended that the threat was from the Russians, the routine pretext for violence and subversion all over the world. In the case of the Middle East, we do not have to consider this pretext, since it was officially abandoned. When the Berlin Wall fell, the first Bush administration released a new National Security Strategy, explaining that everything would go as before but within a new rhetorical framework. The massive military system is still necessary, but now because of the “technological sophistication of third world powers”—which at least comes closer to the truth—the primary threat, worldwide, has been indigenous nationalism. The official document explained further that the United States would maintain its intervention forces aimed at the Middle East, where “the threat to our interests” that required intervention “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to decades of fabrication.2 As is normal, all of this passed without comment.

The most serious current problem in the minds of the population, by far, is Iraq. And the easy winner in the competition for the country that is the most feared is Iran, not because Iran really poses a severe threat, but because of a drumbeat of government-media propaganda. That is a familiar pattern. The most recent example is Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was virtually announced in September 2002. As we now know, the U.S.-British invasion was already underway in secret. In that month, Washington initiated a huge propaganda campaign, with lurid warnings by Condoleezza Rice and others that the next message from Saddam Hussein would be a mushroom cloud in New York City. Within a few weeks, the government-media propaganda barrage had driven Americans completely off the international spectrum. Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only in the United States that a majority of the population were terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow. Not surprisingly! , support for the war correlated very closely with such fears. That has been achieved before, in amazing ways during the Reagan years, and there is a long and illuminating earlier history. But I will keep to the current monster being crafted by the doctrinal system, after a few words about Iraq.

There is a flood of commentary about Iraq, but very little reporting. Journalists are mostly confined to fortified areas in Baghdad, or embedded within the occupying army. That is not because they are cowards or lazy, but because it is simply too dangerous to be anywhere else. That has not been true in earlier wars. It is an astonishing fact that the United States and Britain have had more trouble running Iraq than the Nazis had in occupied Europe, or the Russians in their East European satellites, where the countries were run by local civilians and security forces, with the iron fist poised if anything went wrong but usually in the background. In contrast, the United States has been unable to establish an obedient client regime in Iraq, under far easier conditions.

Putting aside doctrinal blinders, what should be done in Iraq? Before answering, we should be clear about some basic principles. The major principle is that an invader has no rights, only responsibilities. The first responsibility is to pay reparations. The second responsibility is to follow the will of the victims. There is actually a third responsibility: to bring criminals to trial, but that obligation is so remote from the imperial mentality of Western culture that I will put it aside.

The responsibility to pay reparations to Iraqis goes far beyond the crime of aggression and its terrible aftermath. The United States and Britain have been torturing the population of Iraq for a long time. In recent history, both governments strongly supported Saddam Hussein’s terrorist regime through the period of his worst crimes, and long after the end of the war with Iran. Iran finally capitulated, recognizing that it could not fight the United States, which was, by then, openly participating in Saddam’s aggression—something that Iranians have surely not forgotten, even if Westerners have. Dismissing history is always a convenient stance for those who hold the clubs, but their victims usually prefer to pay attention to the real world. After the Iran-Iraq war, Washington and London continued to provide military equipment to their friend Saddam, including means to develop weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems. Iraqi nuclear engineers were even being brought to t! he United States for instruction in developing nuclear weapons in 1989, long after Saddam’s worst atrocities and Iran’s capitulation.

Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and the United Kingdom returned to their support for Saddam when they effectively authorized him to use heavy military equipment to suppress a Shi’ite uprising that might well have overthrown the tyrant. The reasons were publicly explained. The New York Times reported that there was a “strikingly unanimous view” among the United States and its allies, Britain and Saudi Arabia, that “whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country’s stability than did those who have suffered his repression”; the term “stability” is a code word for “following orders.”3 New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman explained that “the best of all worlds” for Washington would be an “iron-fisted military junta” ruling Iraq just the way Saddam did. But lacking that option, Washington had to settle for second-best: Saddam himself. An unthinkable option—then and now—is that ! Iraqis should rule Iraq independently of the United States.

Then followed the murderous sanctions regime imposed by the United States and Britain, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, devastated Iraqi civilian society, strengthened the tyrant, and forced the population to rely on him for survival. The sanctions probably saved Saddam from the fate of other vicious tyrants, some quite comparable to him, who were overthrown from within despite strong support from the United States and United Kingdom to the end of their bloody rule: Ceausescu, Suharto, and quite a rogues gallery of others, to which new names are being added regularly. Again, all of this is boring ancient history for those who hold the clubs, but not for their victims, or for people who prefer to understand the world. All of those actions, and much more, call for reparations, on a massive scale, and the responsibility extends to others as well. But the deep moral-intellectual crisis of imperial culture prevents any thought of such topics as these.

The second responsibility is to obey the will of the population. British and U.S. polls provide sufficient evidence about that. The most recent polls find that 87 percent of Iraqis want a “concrete timeline for US withdrawal,” up from 76 percent in 2005.4 If the reports really mean Iraqis, as they say, that would imply that virtually the entire population of Arab Iraq, where the U.S. and British armies are deployed, wants a firm timetable for withdrawal. I doubt that one would have found comparable figures in occupied Europe under the Nazis, or Eastern Europe under Russian rule.

Bush-Blair and associates declare, however, that there can be no timetable for withdrawal. That stand in part reflects the natural hatred for democracy among the powerful, often accompanied by eloquent calls for democracy. The calls for democracy moved to center stage after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so a new motive had to be invented for the invasion. The president announced the doctrine to great acclaim in November 2003, at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. He proclaimed that the real reason for the invasion was not Saddam’s weapons programs, as Washington and London had insistently claimed, but rather Bush’s messianic mission to promote democracy in Iraq, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The media and prominent scholars were deeply impressed, relieved to discover that the “liberation of Iraq” is perhaps the “most noble” war in history, as leading liberal commentators announced—a sentiment echoed even by critics, who objected ! that the “noble goal” may be beyond our means, and those to whom we are offering this wonderful gift may be too backward to accept it. That conclusion was confirmed a few days later by U.S. polls in Baghdad. Asked why the United States invaded Iraq, some agreed with the new doctrine hailed by Western intellectuals: 1 percent agreed that the goal was to promote democracy. Another 5 percent said that the goal was to help Iraqis.5 Most of the rest took for granted that the goals were the obvious ones that are unmentionable in polite society—the strategic-economic goals we readily attribute to enemies, as when Russia invaded Afghanistan or Saddam invaded Kuwait, but are unmentionable when we turn to ourselves.

But rejection of the popular will in Iraq goes far beyond the natural fear of democracy on the part of the powerful. Simply consider the policies that are likely to be pursued by an independent and more or less democratic Iraq. Iraqis may have no love for Iran, but they would doubtlessly prefer friendly relations with their powerful neighbor. The Shi’ite majority already has ties to Iran and has been moving to strengthen them. Furthermore, even limited sovereignty in Iraq has encouraged efforts by the harshly repressed Shi’ite population across the border in Saudi Arabia to gain basic rights and perhaps autonomy. That is where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil happens to be.

Such developments might lead to a loose Shi’ite alliance controlling the world’s major energy resources and independent of Washington, the ultimate nightmare in Washington—except that it might get worse: the alliance might strengthen its economic and possibly even military ties with China. The United States can intimidate Europe: when Washington shakes its fist, leading European business enterprises pull out of Iran. But China has a three-thousand-year history of contempt for the barbarians: they refuse to be intimidated.

That is the basic reason for Washington’s strategic concerns with regard to China: not that it is a military threat, but that it poses the threat of independence. If that threat is unacceptable for small countries like Cuba or Vietnam, it is certainly so for the heartland of the most dynamic economic region in the world, the country that has just surpassed Japan in possession of the world’s major financial reserves and is the world’s fastest growing major economy. China’s economy is already about two-thirds the size of that of the United States, by the correct measures, and if current growth rates persist, it is likely to close that gap in about a decade—in absolute terms, not per capita of course.

China is also the center of the Asian Energy Security Grid and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes the Central Asian countries, and just a few weeks ago, was joined by India, Iran, and Pakistan as observers, soon probably members. India is undertaking significant joint energy projects with China, and it might join the Energy Security Grid. Iran may as well, if it comes to the conclusion that Europe is so intimidated by the United States that it cannot act independently. If Iran turns to the East, it will find willing partners. A major conference on energy last September in Teheran brought together government officials and scholars from Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia, Venezuela, and Germany, planning an extensive pipeline system for the entire region and also more intensive development of energy resources. Bush’s recent trip to India, and his authorization of India’s nuclear weapons program, is part of the jockeying over how ! these major global forces will crystallize. A sovereign and partially democratic Iraq could be another contribution to developments that seriously threaten U.S. global hegemony, so it is not at all surprising that Washington has sought in every way to prevent such an outcome, joined by “the spear carrier for the pax americana,” as Blair’s Britain is described by Michael MccGwire in Britain’s leading journal of international affairs.6

If the United States were compelled to grant some degree of sovereignty to Iraq, and any of these consequences would ensue, Washington planners would be facing the collapse of one of their highest foreign policy objectives since the Second World War, when the United States replaced Britain as the world-dominant power: the need to control “the strategically most important area of the world.” What has been central to planning is control, not access, an important distinction. The United States followed the same policies long before it relied on a drop of Middle East oil, and would continue to do so if it relied on solar energy. Such control gives the United States “veto power” over its industrial rivals, as explained in the early postwar period by influential planners, and reiterated recently with regard to Iraq: a successful conquest of Iraq would give the United States “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals, Europe and Asia, as pointed out by Zbigniew Brzezinski, an i! mportant figure in the planning community. Vice President Dick Cheney made the same point, describing control over petroleum supplies as “tools of intimidation and blackmail”—when used by others.7 He went on to urge the dictatorships of Central Asia, Washington’s models of democracy, to agree to pipeline construction that ensures that the tools remain in Washington’s hands.

The thought is by no means original. At the dawn of the oil age almost ninety years ago, Britain’s first lord of the admiralty Walter Hume Long explained that “if we secure the supplies of oil now available in the world we can do what we like.”8 Woodrow Wilson also understood this crucial point. Wilson expelled the British from Venezuela, which by 1928 had become the world’s leading oil exporter, with U.S. companies then placed in charge. To achieve this goal, Wilson and his successors supported the vicious and corrupt dictator of Venezuela and ensured that he would bar British concessions. Meanwhile the United States continued to demand—and secure—U.S. oil rights in the Middle East, where the British and French were in the lead.

We might note that these events illustrate the actual meaning of the “Wilsonian idealism” admired by Western intellectual culture, and also provide the real meaning of “free trade” and the “open door.” Sometimes that is even officially acknowledged. When the post-Second World War global order was being shaped in Washington, a State Department memorandum on U.S. petroleum policy called for preserving absolute U.S. control of Western hemisphere resources “coupled with insistence upon the Open Door principle of equal opportunity for United States companies in new areas.”9 That is a useful illustration of “really existing free market doctrine”: What we have, we keep, closing the door to others; what we do not yet have, we take, under the principle of the Open Door. All of this illustrates the one really significant theory of international relations, the maxim of Thucydides: the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must.

With regard to Iraq today, talk about exit strategies means very little unless these realities are confronted. How Washington planners will deal with these problems is far from clear. And they face similar problems elsewhere. Intelligence projections for the new millennium were that the United States would control Middle East oil as a matter of course, but would itself rely on more stable Atlantic Basin reserves: West African dictatorships’ and the Western hemisphere’s. But Washington’s postwar control of South America, from Venezuela to Argentina, is seriously eroding. The two major instruments of control have been violence and economic strangulation, but each weapon is losing its efficacy. The latest attempt to sponsor a military coup was in 2002, in Venezuela, but the United States had to back down when the government it helped install was quickly overthrown by popular resistance, and there was turmoil in Latin America, where democracy is taken much more seriously than in! the West and overthrow of a democratically elected government is no longer accepted quietly. Economic controls are also eroding. South American countries are paying off their debts to the IMF—basically an offshoot of the U.S. Treasury department. More frightening yet to Washington, these countries are being aided by Venezuela. The president of Argentina announced that the country would “rid itself of the IMF.” Rigorous adherence to IMF rules had led to economic disaster, from which the country recovered by radically violating the rules. Brazil too had rid itself of the IMF, and Bolivia probably will as well, again aided by Venezuela. U.S. economic controls are seriously weakening.

Washington’s main concern is Venezuela, the leading oil producer in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that its reserves might be greater than Saudi Arabia’s if the price of oil stays high enough for exploitation of its expensive extra-heavy oil to become profitable. Extreme U.S. hostility and subversion has accelerated Venezuela’s interest in diversifying exports and investment, and China is more than willing to accept the opportunity, as it is with other resource-rich Latin American exporters. The largest gas reserves in South America are in Bolivia, which is now following much the same path as Venezuela. Both countries pose a problem for Washington in other respects. They have popularly elected governments. Venezuela leads Latin America in support for the elected government, increasing sharply in the past few years under Chávez. He is bitterly hated in the United States because of his independence and enormous popular support. Bolivia just had! a democratic election of a kind next to inconceivable in the West. There were serious issues that the population understood very well, and there was active participation of the general population, who elected someone from their own ranks, from the indigenous majority. Democracy is always frightening to power centers, particularly when it goes too far beyond mere form and involves actual substance.

Commentary on what is happening reveals the nature of the fears. London’s Financial Times warned that President Evo Morales of Bolivia is becoming increasingly “authoritarian” and “undemocratic.” This is a serious concern to Western powers, who are dedicated to freedom and democracy everywhere. The proof of his authoritarian stance and departure from democratic principles is that he followed the will of 95 percent of the population and nationalized Bolivia’s gas resources, and is also gaining popularity by cutting public salaries and eliminating corruption. Morales’s policies have come to resemble the frightening leader of Venezuela. As if the popularity of Chávez’s elected government was not proof enough that he is an anti-democratic dictator, he is attempting to extend to Bolivia the same programs he is instituting in Venezuela: helping “Bolivia’s drive to stamp out illiteracy and pay[ing] the wages of hundreds of Cuban doctors who have been sent to work there” among the p! oor, to quote the Financial Times’ lament.10

A new breed of struggle is flowering in the Northwest anti-war movement. Its aim: to stop public ports from being used for export of war materials. Activists in Washington state are evolving from demonstrators and lobbyists into direct actors against the war masters, blocking streets and facing arrest as needed.

This development isn’t happening in a vacuum. A product of anger over congressional inaction on the war and repulsion at the militarization of U.S. society, it is also inspired by a rising resistance movement among GIs.

A statement from the Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) puts it this way: “The weapons shipments, and the use of our public property to prolong and supply the war in Iraq, have made us complicit in crimes against humanity. We refuse to be complicit any longer.”

The first action took place last year in Olympia, near Fort Lewis. Participants blocked entrance to their port to stop the Army from shipping war materials.

In 2007, activists declared victory when the Army announced it was going elsewhere. The new location turned out to be Tacoma, 30 miles north of Olympia. Students from the nearby University of Puget Sound, military veterans, teachers, a city councilman, and many others quickly sprang into action, aided by organizers of the blockades in Olympia. As Tacoma protester Leah Coakley said, “We will not serve as a pit stop for the war machine.”

A cause catches fire

Campaign stalwart Molly Gibbs offers insight into the shift in thinking of those involved. Gibbs, who works in high schools to counter military recruitment efforts, is no newcomer to politics. On the war, she has emailed, lobbied and written letters to congressional representatives like Adam Smith, she tells the FS, “until I’m blue in the face.”

But this year, Fort Lewis was the scene of the high-profile case involving Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to openly refuse to serve in Iraq. His defiance, amplified by an effective defense effort, inspired many anti-war activists, including Gibbs.

In January, she helped organize a tribunal to publicize his case. She then left for Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress again. When her group tried to meet with U.S. Senator Patty Murray and got the runaround, it was the last straw. “I was so disgusted, so angry,” Gibbs says.

From that experience, she concluded that a different strategy was needed. “I’m done dealing with my congressional representatives,” she says. “It is in our hands. We have to do something.”

Opportunity came in March, when the military moved its port operations to Tacoma. Members of several groups mobilized, including Students for a Democratic Society, United for Peace of Pierce County, and the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace. They held rallies, publicized their actions to the media, and lined the streets to take a stand.

On March 10, police used violence to break their lines, firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. Protesters refused to back down, and Gibbs was among several people arrested for stepping over police lines to deliver a “Citizens’ Injunction to Halt the Shipment of Military Material to Iraq.” When soldiers with the Stryker Brigade rode by one evening, many of them waved and gave the thumbs-up to the anti-war contingent.

On to Aberdeen

The Army ship sailed, but when the dust had cleared, Tacoma had spent $500,000 on police protection. Who would pay — the port or the Pentagon?

While that question lingered, the military moved its shipping operations to Aberdeen, 50 miles from Olympia near the Pacific Coast. PMR quickly spread word and headed west.

Military officials cordoned off neighborhood streets and called in police reinforcements from across the region. The military racked up another huge bill and angered local residents, who resented seeing their town become an armed camp.

Sparked by these examples, similar efforts and solidarity actions are spreading. In March, 100 students occupied a military recruitment office in New York City to express support and, in April, resisters blocked a port in Oakland, California.

Many campaigners have been charged with crimes. In the Northwest, a mistrial was declared on March 29 in the case of the “Oly 22,” who were arrested in 2006. Public support is being mobilized now for those arrested in Tacoma.

Grow the resistance

How strongly this movement will take root is uncertain. Those who are part of it harbor no illusions about the challenges ahead. The Army is operating in greater secrecy, keeping protesters on their toes. There are court battles ahead, and police violence to face. Gibbs mentions the need for more community training, strategy development, and reinforcements.

However, she is motivated by knowing one thing for certain: as long as the war continues, “the death and destruction is only going to get worse.”

As distrustful as I am of polls conducted by the corporate media, I had to take note of the following. “A new Newsweek poll out this weekend exposed ‘gaps’ in America’s knowledge of history and current events,” writes Josh Catone for Raw Story. “Perhaps most alarmingly, 41% of Americans answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?’ That total is actually up 5 points since September 2004.”

I wouldn’t call this lack of knowledge a “gap” but rather a chasm, the result of years of brainwashing—indeed, a process instituted from grade school onward, right up the present as millions of Americans sit idly before the tube with their brains disengaged, absorbing the incessant propaganda dispensed by Fox News and CNN.

Of course, there is no evidence Saddam had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001, and the Bush neocons never bothered to provide any, although several absurd theories, passed off as truth, appeared in the wake of the attack. Hands down, my favorite came from the installed neocon puppet government of Iraq. “Iraq’s coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist,” the Telegraph reported back in December, 2003.

It is safe to assume Nidal worked for Israeli intelligence, an assertion with more validity than the claim nine eleven was the responsibility of Saddam Hussein. “Before dismissing the idea that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency could be so devious as to deliberately help an Arab terrorist group in order to further its own agenda, consider this: when investigators probed the collapse of the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991, they found not only evidence that Mossad was banking with BCCI, but also that payments had been made from the Mossad accounts to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers rebels and the Abu Nidal Organization,” write Ben Vidgen and Ian Wishart for Investigate magazine.

In addition to catering to the elite—Lord Callaghan, Britain’s former Prime Minister, Pakistan’s President Zia, former President Jimmy Carter, current resident George W. Bush, Clark Clifford, an adviser to presidents starting with Harry Truman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the drug dealing Manuel Noriega, all banked with BCCI—the bank “catered to all sorts of clients, ranging from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad to the Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal,” Adam Shore told an Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship Colloquium.

Of course, you’ll never hear such speculation on Fox News or MSNBC. In fact, any such speculation is considered a thought crime in many parts of the world, as it is “antisemitic” and thus illegal to attribute nefarious motives and acts to Mossad or any other Israeli organization.

Moreover, as additional evidence Israel conducts black ops and attributes the result to its enemies, consider the allegation, confirmed by a British diplomat, that the “state of Israel [by way of Shin Bet] was behind the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976, and cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in staging the affair,” according to Yedioth Internet. “The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO’s standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans.”

It should be noted, according to Wikipedia, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Wadie Haddad, aka Abu Hani, collaborated with “non-PFLP organizations such as the Abu Nidal Organization and the West German Red Army Faction” and “also employed [Haddad’s] PFLP protégé, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (’The Jackal’).”

Of course, a large percentage, if not a majority of Americans know absolutely nothing about such things. In addition, according to Raw Story, most Americans are unable to keep the official fairy tale straight, never mind incessant propaganda, as “a majority of people couldn’t identify Saudi Arabia as the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers, even given the question in multiple choice format. 20% answered Iraq, while 14% believed the hijackers came from Iran.”

As Iraq struggles to define its future, there is one important group that has been largely left out of the process: women.

But they are refusing to be left behind. With little international support or media attention, a network of more than 150 women’s organizations across Iraq is fighting to preserve their rights in the new constitutional revision process.

As part of a campaign to garner international support, the Iraq Women’s Movement sent a letter in May to U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and another to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon expressing concern over the constitutional review process taking place and calling for international support for their effort to preserve women’s rights in Iraqi law.

“As women face escalating violence and exclusion in Iraq, they have been marginalized in reconciliation initiatives and negotiations for government positions,” the letter noted.

“Even with the shy and insignificant pressure exerted by the UN and other international donors/players on the Iraqi government and politicians to fulfill minimum obligations of Security Council Resolution 1325, the action taken has been a sequence of disappointments….”

Passed in 2000, Resolution 1325 emphasizes the importance of women’s participation in conflict resolution and peace-building processes. A second resolution, 1483, applies this conviction specifically to Iraq.

More than three years ago, the United States was instrumental in overturning an amendment to the interim constitution that would have lifted protections for women and children. U.S. and international pressure, and Iraqi women who took to the streets, succeeded in defeating the provision, which was contradictory to many other parts of the constitution.

Following that triumph, women turned out in record numbers for the 2005 election. They secured 33 percent of the seats in the National Assembly but remain woefully absent from other influential branches of the government, according to a 2006 report from the Iraq Legal Development Project.

The effectiveness of previous international pressure has spurred the women’s movement in Iraq to call the world’s attention to this issue once again, but there has been little acknowledgment of their effort so far. The office of the UN secretary-general has released only a very general statement about the review process since the Iraqi Women’s Movement sent their letter on May 21. Pelosi’s office has not yet recognized the letter publicly.

Hanaa Edwar is a leader of the Iraqi Women’s Movement and founder of the Iraqi al-Amal Association, a national civil society group based in Baghdad. She is campaigning against Article 41, a provision buried in the text of the draft constitution that places personal status laws under the influence of religion, sect, or belief. These are the laws that administer marriage, divorce, inheritance, child custody, and how religious courts settle disputes among Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

But “there is no unity across sects or even within sects” on the rules that govern family and women’s status, Edwar noted.

Warning that the current language could “deepen the sectarian issues in this society,” Edwar added: “We feel that this is not a women’s demand, it is a national demand. This is important for national security.”

“National security” is a term that the U.S. Congress knows well, and the Iraqi women appealed to the issues that are keystones of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Their letter to Pelosi asks for “help in preventing Iraq from taking the identity of a religious state,” and includes a reminder that, “any destabilization in the state of law, economy, and security in Iraq can reflect on the security and stability of the whole region.”

Mary Trotochaud, an activist who has worked both on the ground in Iraq and with lawmakers in Washington, told IPS, “This movement originates from three generations of women who had really strong rights.”

Iraq’s progressive women’s rights laws began when the “personal status laws” were included in the 1959 Constitution. In 1970, women were formally guaranteed equal rights and additional laws ensured their right to vote, attend school, run for office, and own property.

Iraq has also ratified a series of international treaties that guarantee equal rights for all, including the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights that protect the pluralistic nature of Iraqi society and offer unprecedented protections to women in an Arab country.

Yet Iraqi women still faced considerable historical obstacles to their political participation, including Ba’ath policies that disenfranchised them and Saddam Hussein’s strengthening of Islamic and tribal traditions in an effort to consolidate power in the 1990s.

“These are human rights issues that we’re talking about that we should be advocating all the time in all countries,” Trotochaud said. “We shouldn’t be shy about saying that.”

The most recent campaign to preserve these rights began in 2003 in the wake of Hussein’s fall and the dissolution of Iraq’s existing legal, political, and economic systems. Women’s groups began springing up around the country and organizing to advocate for their rights and participation in the new constitution and government.

The network of groups held regional and national meetings and met with parliamentarians and officials across sect and party lines. “When the time for constitutional conventions came, women were already organized,” said Trotochaud, who was living in Iraq at the time.

However, the spiraling violence has taken its toll on the campaign. “The sectarian divide has gotten big enough that people who have worked together in the past don’t work together now,” she added.

The constitutional review process has labored on for the past six months with few signs of progress. Debate remains bogged down in issues like the disposition of Kirkuk, an oil-rich city in the northern, Kurdish-dominated region; the distribution of national wealth; and de-Ba’athification.

Article 41, which places family law under religious and tribal traditions, is still in the drafts of the constitution, and women’s rights in the process remain a backstage issue.

Edwar said that the Constitutional Review Committee has been granted another month to complete its work. Refusing to be discouraged by the lack of international attention, she looks at the delay as an opportunity to advance the movement’s goals of ensuring that women’s rights and family law will be included in her country’s new constitution and that civil society will be a part of the process.

The Iraqi Women’s Movement has submitted its own language to the review committee for consideration to replace the objectionable Article 41. It says that, “The Iraqi state should ensure that personal status laws should be organized according to law.” Edwar said they were often met with support for the Movement’s appeal but that “women’s issues are one of the compromise issues among politicians.”

There is likely little that will stop the political maneuvering in the run-up to the referendum on the new constitution. But Edwar made clear that the Iraqi Women’s Movement will continue its campaign to preserve human rights until the very last moment and she represents a political force that will keep women’s rights on the political agenda for years to come.

BAGHDAD — Surviving without electricity in the simmering Baghdad summer poses an unwelcome choice for 22-year-old Ferrah al-Caisy.

With the limited amperage of her family’s generator, she can use their second-rate air cooler to battle temperatures pushing 120 degrees, or she can switch on the pump to pull water to their fourth-floor shower.

But neither the timid cooler nor the tepid water really cools her off, she says, and it takes full-blown city power to run an air conditioner — a forgotten luxury now that electricity is available barely two hours a day.

“Sometimes I cry, I swear,” she said as a fan churned hot air through her apartment. “This stuff? It doesn’t help that much, you know.”

This is about as good as it gets for Baghdad residents, who have waited four years since the U.S. invasion for the lights to come back on — and will have to go on waiting into the foreseeable future.

Under pressure to find an endgame for American involvement in Iraq, U.S. officials ordered a surge of troops to open the broad offensive last week against insurgents. At the same time, officials are wrapping up once-ambitious efforts to restore Iraq’s electricity, far short of original goals.

The U.S. is within months of exhausting its $4 billion reconstruction fund for Iraq’s electrical sector, meaning the end of American efforts to underwrite what had been the signature reconstruction mission of the initial occupation.

Nowadays, when American electrical advisers in Baghdad discuss projects to “generate capacity,” they refer not to new power plants but to training Iraqis to take over the complicated rebuilding effort.

Fuel problems, sabotage, regional disputes and overdue maintenance dogged the first months of 2007, contributing to average generation of 3,877 megawatts of power, less than the estimated 4,300 megawatts produced before the war. Though outlying provinces gained more electricity than they had under Saddam Hussein, feeble production and surging demand have meant far less for Baghdad, and it is reliable nowhere.