The Rag Blog

On August 6, Congress begins its month long recess. August 6 also marks the start of Year 62 After Hiroshima-the one and only time that nuclear weapons were used. And it marks Year 17 After Iraq Sanctions, when the brutal economic sanctions regime against Iraq was first imposed by the international community.

On August 6, the Occupation Project will launch a reinvigorated campaign of sustained nonviolent civil disobedience / civil resistance to end Iraq war funding. Office occupations-both legal and extralegal-will commence at the offices of Representatives and Senators who refuse to publicly pledge to vote against any additional funding of the Iraq war. Occupations will continue at least through the end of September. The Occupation Project will work in conjunction with campaigns organized by Declaration of Peace, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, Grassroots America for Us and others.

The hottest weather of the year occurs in August. Let us commit to creating the hottest political weather: focused upon Congress to force an end to the Iraq war. Let us commit to forcing Congress to vote down the $145 billion being sought in supplemental spending to wage the Iraq – Afghanistan war through September of 2008. Let us commit to forcing Congress to force the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year.

Let us commit to using every nonviolent means at our disposal to defeat the Iraq war supplemental spending bill for 2008 and to bring every U.S. soldier home from Iraq by the end of this year.

Last fall, in Panora, Iowa social justice advocates discussed ways to bring the occupation of Iraq home to the offices of Representatives and Senators. The Occupation Project grew from these discussions. From February 5 through Tax Day, over 320 arrests occurred at the offices of 39 Representatives and Senators across the country. 15 of the 39 voted against the final Iraq war supplemental spending bill that Congress passed in May. 14 of the 15 who voted against the final bill had voted in favor of the Iraq war spending bill last year. Actions occurred at the offices of both Republicans and Democrats-challenging the reality that both parties are responsible for the ongoing war.

Meanwhile, sustained campaigns of office occupations that did not result in arrests took place in such diverse locations as Nashville, Tennessee (the birthplace of the Occupation Project); Huntsville, Alabama; Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; and across the state of Minnesota. Social justice advocates entered the offices on a weekly basis (and, in the case of Sacramento, CA, on a daily basis) and occupied the offices, pressing the demand that the Representative or Senator commit to voting against any additional funding for the war.

These next three months are critical to ending the war in and occupation of Iraq. Through the end of July, Grassroots America for Us is organizing the Swarm on Congress, intensive and extensive lobbying on Capitol Hill. In August, we must turn up the heat on Representatives and Senators while they are in their home districts and states for the month long recess.

In early September, General Petraeus will report to Congress on the progress-or lack thereof-that is being made in Iraq. Shortly after, the House will vote on HR 2451 as an amendment to the Iraq – Afghanistan war supplemental spending bill. Next the House will vote on the final version of the $145 billion war supplemental for FY 2008, and send it to the Senate for consideration. It will be a one-two punch vote. It is entirely probable that the final version of the supplemental spending bill will not be publicly available until less than 24 hours prior to the vote (the final version of the supplemental passed in May was not publicly available until the morning of the vote).

H.R. 2451 (sponsored by David Obey and Jim McGovern) requires that the redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq begin within 90 days of enactment. The partial redeployment is to be completed by June 30, 2008.

HR 2451 will keep U.S. troops in Iraq to: protect the U.S. embassy and diplomatic personnel; protect U.S. forces remaining in Iraq; engage in “target special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with global reach”; and to train and equip the Iraqi Security Forces. Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies examined nearly identical language in March 2007 and concluded that it would allow for upwards of 40,000 to 60,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq.

Our demand must remain clear: end all funding for the Iraq war and withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. The language of HR 2451 is not sufficient.

And what of the argument that a vote against the $145 billion supplemental spending for 2008 will further endanger the well-being of U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq? U.S. troops will not be in danger when the U.S. withdraws the troops from Iraq. $36 billion of this $145 billion will be for the procurement of ammunition, weapons systems and combat vehicles that will not be delivered to the military until 1 to 3 years has passed. The Army seeks $46 billion for “operations and maintenance” to fund its actions at current levels through September 30, 2008-a sure way to place U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens in further danger. (see “Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental Spending 2008” at for an in-depth analysis of the 2008 war funding request).

Recall that the President is seeking $482 billion for the baseline military budget for 2008. That’s an 11 percent increase over the current year’s budget-and nearly 62% more than was spent on the military in 2001. The money is clearly available to safely and quickly withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year.

It is easy to be discouraged and lose heart after Congress passed the Iraq war bill in May. It is easy to be tempted to give up completely on the legislative process.

But giving up on the legislative process is, indeed, the easy route to take. It is the route that ensures that the Iraq war will continue as a war without end.

Instead, we should intensify our legal and extralegal lobbying efforts. We should recognize that nearly twice as many Representatives voted against the supplemental this year than last year and that, for the first time, Senators voted against an Iraq war supplemental spending bill because of their opposition to the war’s continuation (Arlen Specter voted against the supplemental in 2006 was because he did not believe it provided sufficient funds for a medical program). We should maintain pressure upon those Representatives and Senators who voted against the final war supplemental spending bill-working to ensure that they again vote against war funding this fall.

We should also recognize that the only way that this war will be ended is if we organize to exert sufficient pressure on Republicans and Democrats to force an end to war funding. With this in mind, we should recognize the tricks of the parliamentary trade and demand that David Obey and Nancy Pelosi do more to end the war. But we should also recognize that had Obey bottled up the war supplemental in committee or Pelosi refused to allow a floor vote, Jerry Lewis (as ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee) would have submitted his own version of a war supplemental and obtained 218 signatures on a discharge petition to force his version to be voted upon in the House.

Ending the war requires pressure on both Democrats and Republicans-both via legal lobbying and nonviolent civil disobedience / resistance.

Multiple efforts and allied campaigns are underway to force an end to the war in and occupation of Iraq. Become engaged with these efforts and organize locally.

· Join the efforts of the Swarm on Congress, an intensive and extensive lobbying effort in Washington, D.C. through the end of July initiated by Grassroots America for Us

· Organize local actions with the Occupation Project campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience / civil resistance / office occupations to demand that Representatives and Senators vote to end to all funding for the Iraq war. A reinvigorated campaign will be launched on August 6 to continue through the vote on war funding in September. Get involved at http://vcnv.org/project/the-occupation-project. You can contact the Occupation Project via email at occupationproject@vcnv.org for suggestions and advice on how to organize a local Occupation Project campaign. Resources including voting records, legal information, etc. are available on this website.

· CODEPINK’s work includes the Occupation Project and the Don’t Buy Bush’s War campaigns (among other critical work to end the war).

· Join the Declaration of Peace campaign efforts. DoP will be lobbying Representatives and Senators through the summer, culminating with a week of actions nationally during the critical week of September 14 to 21. Visit www.declarationofpeace.org.

· Participate in the efforts of the National Campaign of Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) as it challenges the war in Iraq through nonviolent direct action. NCNR has organized actions at military recruiting centers, Congressional offices, the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers. Visit www.iraqpledge.org.

· Participate in the legislative network of United for Peace and Justice as well as its nonviolent direct action working group to force an end to the war. Visit www.unitedforpeace.org.

Time is short to end funding for the Iraq war. And the costs are immeasurably high each day that the war continues. Much organizing work remains to be done.

Break time is over.

BAGHDAD (IPS) – Simmering in the summer heat, Iraqis now have a dream called electricity.

It is a part of the bigger dream of reconstruction that collapsed. On all measurable levels, the infrastructure is worse than under the former regime of Saddam Hussein, even when it was crippled by the harshest economic sanctions in modern history.

Iraqis lack security, jobs, potable water, and these days when it really pinches, electricity.

“This permanent electricity failure is just another way of giving Iraqis slow death.”
“Electricity is life,” said 45-year-old Zahra Aziz, a schoolteacher and mother of four, using a hand-fan in an attempt to cool herself. “Modern life depends on power, and we do not have that here. Having no electricity means having no water, no light, no air-conditioning, and in other words, no life.”

Most people IPS spoke to in Baghdad said they get one hour of electricity in 24 hours.

“June is a very hot month, and this permanent electricity failure is just another way of giving Iraqis slow death,” Umayma Salim, a doctor who quit her work at a hospital in Baghdad due to security threats told IPS.

“We are getting all kinds of diseases — sun strokes among those work outdoors to provide their children food, and psychological effects on all people. The weak functioning of hospitals and other infrastructure facilities have brought all kinds of complications of health and life.”

“We are boiling here Sammy,” a woman said to her husband on her mobile phone while talking to IPS. “You enjoy the breeze and electricity in Jordan my dear, but do try to take us off this frying pan. We are sweating like Niagara falls over here.”

Temperatures in Iraq are usually above 40 degrees centigrade in June, and can jump to more than 50 degrees in July and August.

“We cannot supply frozen and cooled food properly because of electricity failures,” Jamal Rfai, a supermarket owner in Baghdad told IPS. “We bring very limited quantities and if there is any curfew or trouble in the street, then it is all wasted because of the heat, and of course no one will compensate our loss.”

Workers at water service stations speak of incessant electricity cuts. “The main problem we are facing is electricity supply,” a worker who gave his name as Ahmed told IPS. “We have our standby generators, but they are meant to be used in emergency, not for so many hours a day as we do nowadays. Besides, the fuel supply is also not sufficient.”

Waiting time at petrol stations in Baghdad continues to average more than 24 hours. People sleep in their cars, or hire others to sit in their cars for them. And there is no guarantee there will be petrol at the end of the wait.

Most factories have stopped production because of the security situation and the lack of electricity.

“I moved my plastic bags factory to another area seeking better security, but now I cannot work because there is no electricity,” Ahmad Ali, a factory owner from Baghdad told IPS. “We are wasting our time hoping for something that we will never have because this occupation intentionally kills life in this country.”

Similar complaints are coming from farmers. Many say production is down at least 80 percent from what it was before the U.S.-led occupation.

“It is deliberate damage caused by the occupation,” Salim Abdul-Sattar, a local politician from Baghdad told IPS. “To cut electricity is to cut the main vein of life, and that is the main goal of the occupation.”

Abdul Sattar believes that the occupation authorities “could have provided electricity in a few months if they wanted to, but this problem is useful for what they call creative chaos.”

Most of Iraq faced near total electricity failure last week. Iraqi media outlets like al-Hurra and al-Iraqiyah which are known to be heavily influenced by the U.S. government broadcast messages claiming that terrorists had attacked the main electricity stations, causing power outages.

The Iraqi government scoffs at claims by international human rights organisations that security and living conditions in Iraq are deteriorating, reports Nermeen Al-Mufti from Baghdad

In a country where no less than 70 civilians are killed on any given day, and where over a million have fled their homes to live in makeshift camps, the Iraqi parliament has taken the extraordinary step of forming a committee to question what they term “exaggerated reports” by international humanitarian organisations about the situation in Iraq.

Alaa Al-Talabani, chairperson of the committee on civil society organisations, was quoted by the local press as saying that a parliamentary committee had been established to investigate the statistics and reports released by international organisations about the security and living conditions in Iraq. “A great number of those organisations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), have no headquarters in Baghdad and issue statistics that border on the fictitious,” Al-Talabani said.

The committee on civil society organisations intends to question representatives of these international organisations about the statistics they release. “Reports from the Human Rights Commission, the UNHCR and the ICRC have made serious allegations concerning the deteriorating health and social conditions of large numbers of orphans and widows. These reports and figures do not reflect reality, and some are exaggerated,” Al-Talabani remarked.

In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, an ICRC spokesman in Iraq Hesham Hassan said that the ICRC had expressed dismay at Al-Talabani’s remarks, as well as “the suggestion that the credibility of international organisations was questionable. We work independently and provide credible and reliable data derived from the activities of our special mission and the Iraqi Red Crescent.” Hassan explained that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating due to the government focussing exclusively on political matters.

¡Presente!

By the time candles supposedly made from remains of a deceased ExxonMobil janitor named Reggie Watts were handed out, an audience of oil and gas professionals attending a keynote luncheon at Calgary’s Gas and Oil Exposition realized they’d been had.

A man named “S.K. Wolff,” claiming to be an analyst for the Washington-based National Petroleum Council, and co-speaker “Florian Osenberg,” said to represent ExxonMobil, were getting ready to show a memorial video made by Watts when security officers forcibly ushered the two men from the stage.

Wolff is really Andy Bichlbaum and Osenberg is Mike Bonanno — or so they say.

As the Yes Men, the pair have travelled the world with an anti-globalization agenda perpetrating hoaxes on groups ranging from the World Trade Organization to the BBC.

In Calgary, ostensibly to promote their book and a documentary they filmed three years ago at the Plaza Theatre tonight, the activists said they couldn’t resist taking a shot at the oil and gas trade show, held over three days this week at Stampede Park.

“This was a great opportunity for us, like the holy grail, really,” said Bichlbaum. “We’ve never had an audience like this. These people are wrecking the Earth and they’re quite conscious of it.”

The premise of the presentation, which included a PowerPoint lecture by “S.K. Wolff,” was that as humans begin to die as a result of calamities caused by climate change, their remains could be harvested for an alternative fuel source called “vivoleum” that would eventually replace oil.

Osenberg, supposedly the director of human resources with the vivoleum program, took the stage carrying a lit candle while volunteers handed out candles to the audience.

The approximately 250 assembled guests were told the vivoleum for the candles had been “sourced” from an ExxonMobil maintenance worker who donated it before dying of cancer.

The candles were actually made of wax and human hair from barbershops.

Organizers of GO-Expo were not impressed. Officials from dmg world media, the company that runs GO-Expo, apologized profusely for the incident.

Police were called in, but no charges were laid and no investigation will be launched, said a spokesman.

Bichlbaum and Bonanno said they were each issued a $287 fine for trespassing.

“The organizers were furious,” said Bichlbaum. “They thought we should be charged with crimes against humanity or something. The police were great. They were just going to let us go but the organizers insisted we be charged with criminal trespass.”

The Yes Men started their unique form of protesting when they created a fake WTO website to protest the Seattle summit in 1999. When conferences began inviting them to speak, thinking they were actual representatives of the WTO, they began accepting.

“It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.” General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Press Club, February 17, 2006.

“They will be held accountable for the decisions they make. So they should in fact not obey the illegal and immoral orders to use weapons of mass destruction.” General Peter Pace, CNN With Wolf Blitzer, April 6, 2003

The surprise decision by the Bush regime to replace General Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been explained as a necessary step to avoid contentious confirmation hearings in the US Senate. Gen. Pace’s reappointment would have to be confirmed, and as the general has served as vice chairman and chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past 6 years, the Republicans feared that hearings would give war critics an opportunity to focus, in Defense Secretary Gates words, “on the past, rather than the future.”

This is a plausible explanation. Whether one takes it on face value depends on how much trust one still has in a regime that has consistently lied about everything for six years.

General Pace himself says he was forced out when he refused to “take the issue off the table” by voluntarily retiring. Pace himself was sufficiently disturbed by his removal to strain his relations with the powers that be by not going quietly.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page interpreted Pace’s removal as indication that “the man running the Pentagon is Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan. For that matter, is George W. Bush still President?”

The Wall Street Journal editorial writers’ attempt to portray Pace’s departure as evidence of a weak and appeasing administration does not ring true. An administration that escalates the war in Iraq in the face of public opposition and pushes ahead with its plan to attack Iran is not an appeasing administration. Whether it is the war or Attorney General Gonzales or the immigration bill or anything else, President Bush and his Republican stalwarts have told Congress and the American people that they don’t care what Congress and the public think. Bush’s signing statements make it clear that he doesn’t even care about the laws that Congress writes.

A president audacious enough to continue an unpopular and pointless war in the face of public opinion and a lost election is a president who is not too frightened to reappoint a general. Why does Bush run from General Pace when he fervently supports embattled Attorney General Gonzales? What troops does Bush support? He supports his toadies.

There are, of course, other explanations for General Pace’s departure. The most disturbing of these explanations can be found in General Pace’s two statements at the beginning of this article.

In the first statement General Pace says that every member of the US military has the absolute responsibility to disobey illegal and immoral orders. In the second statement, General Pace says that an order to use weapons of mass destruction is an illegal and immoral order.

The context of General Pace’s second statement above (actually, the first statement in historical time) is his response to Blitzer’s question whether the invading US troops could be attacked with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But Pace’s answer does not restrict illegal and immoral only to Iraqi use of WMD. It is a general statement. It applies to their use period.
Despite the illegality and immorality of first-use of nuclear weapons, the Bush Pentagon rewrote US war doctrine to permit their use regardless of their illegality and immorality. For a regime that not only believes that might is right but also that they have the might, law is what the regime says.

The revised war doctrine permits US first strike use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. We need to ask ourselves why the Bush administration would blacken America’s reputation and rekindle the nuclear arms race unless the administration had plans to apply its new war doctrine.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, a number of neoconservatives, prominent Jewish leaders such as Norman Podhoretz, and members of the Israeli government have called for a US attack on Iran. Most Republican presidential candidates have said that they would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

Allegedly, the US Department of State is pursuing diplomacy with Iran, not war, but Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns gives the lie to that claim. On June 12 Burns claimed that Iran was not only arming insurgents in Iraq but also the Taliban in Afghanistan. Burns’ claims are, to put it mildly, controversial in the US intelligence community, and they are denied not only by Iran but also by our puppet government in Afghanistan. On June 14, Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak told the Associated Press that Burns’ claim has no credibility.

But, of course, none of the administration’s propagandistic claims that set the stage for the invasion of Iraq had any credibility either, and the lack of credibility did not prevent the claims from deceiving the Congress and the American people. As the US media now function as the administration’s Ministry of Propaganda, the Bush regime believes that it can stampede Americans with lies into another war.

The Bush regime has concluded that a conventional attack on Iran would do no more than stir up a hornet’s nest and release retaliatory actions that the US could not manage. The Bush regime is convinced that only nuclear weapons can bring the mullahs to heel.

The Bush regime’s plan to attack Iran with nuclear weapons puts General Pace’s departure in a different light. How can President Bush succeed with an order to attack with nuclear weapons when America’s highest ranking military officer says that such an order is “illegal and immoral” and that everyone in the military has an “absolute responsibility” to disobey it?

An alternative explanation for Pace’s departure is that Pace had to go so that malleable toadies can be installed in his place.

Crimes against humanity don’t happen unless it is possible to commit them with impunity. Government corruption and gross imbalances of power will bring them closer to the edge of possibility. But the anticipation of impunity must be personal and social as well as legal and political. The perpetrators need to make sense of their crimes within a positive sense of themselves.

A shared sense of impunity that can pay for mass murder and torture chambers without self-reproach requires denial, distortion, and ignorance of swaths of reality. In totalitarian societies, the state handles these chores to try to keep the people unaware of its most criminal activities.

But in societies that enjoy relative freedom of the press, citizens encounter many unsavory facts that are impossible to deny directly. When “democracies” engage in war crimes, this knowledge pressures citizens to internalize a collective sense of impunity, which must be robust enough to neutralize incriminating truth as it appears.

Most informed US citizens are aware that their government runs a global network of secret detention centers where torture is routinely employed. They also know what this activity looks like, having seen photos of their troops’ bestial behavior at Abu Ghraib. If they followed the story, they know that this behavior was also reported at several other prisons and detention centers in Iraq, under policy directives from the very top of the Pentagon.

They know about the human rights horrors of Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force base, that the CIA runs a global ring dedicated to kidnappings, “extraordinary rendition”, and torture, that hundreds of our detainees have disappeared, and so on.

It is possible to know these things by reading big city newspapers. An objective observer could glean the general shape of these facts from network television news. The American public has been told. And the public has turned the page.

It’s also a matter of record that our government has orchestrated an international economic blockade against the occupied Palestinian Authority, while Israel withholds the PA’s tax revenues. After 15 months of this policy, an economy that aid experts had previously compared to sub-Saharan Africa has imploded. Social and civic services have ground to a virtual halt. (1) Diligent readers know that the Palestinians’ already high rates of malnutrition and food insecurity are now at alarming levels. Doctors warn that skyrocketing numbers of Palestinian children are being crippled for life by chronic malnutrition. (2)

The predictable (and predicted) result of economic siege against an occupied people has been burgeoning chaos and civil strife, eroding what is left of the rule of law in the occupied territories. The informed American knows that this is happening because, in the fairest elections yet seen in the Middle East, the Palestinian people voted for the wrong party.

Yet even the best-informed Americans will be hard put to think of a similar instance in history. When have great powers conspired to destroy the government and economy of a destitute people already crumbling under another power’s long colonial war?

To know about our government’s global gulag and remain silent requires a reckoning with snatching people and repeatedly subjecting them to depraved acts of torture, knowing that those who do not die will suffer lifelong physical and psychological torment.

This reckoning appears to turn on variants of a calculation; that our collective security is worth more than the cost to a few tens of thousands of foreigners of questionable race and religion. This quantifies and prioritizes an otherwise difficult problem, allowing us to minimize the crimes by rounding our sums.

We don’t notice that this pragmatic solution also fingers the people responsible for this inhumanity: us, the ‘collective’ whose security is so valuable that it’s worth committing torture every day of the week to protect it.

To know about the economic siege against the occupied Palestinian territories and say nothing is to acquiesce in crippling collective punishment of millions of poor people, for the crime of holding a democratic election.

Unlike our straightforward torture-for-security deal in the global reign of terror against terror, our justifications for the Palestinian siege are bureaucratic and symbolic.

Hamas is on our “terror list” and therefore beyond the pale of humanity. Before we will end the blockade, Hamas must kiss the three poisoned rings of obeisance: recognize Israel’s unique “right to exist” (as a “Jewish state” that refuses to recognize the rights of its current and former Arab residents), “renounce violence” (unlike Fatah, Israel, the US, etc.), and “accept past agreements” (the long sorry record of unreciprocated PLO concessions to Israel).

The public seems to accept this flimsy hypocrisy as reason enough to force Palestinian doctors to beg for syringes and bandages. (3) It goes down as easily as we close the cell door against the screams, to ease our pathetic fear of “terror”.

Objectively, the American public is much more responsible for the crimes committed in its name than were the people of Germany for the horrors of the Third Reich. We have far more knowledge, and far greater freedom and opportunity to stop our government’s criminal behavior.

But who is even asking the presidential candidates for their positions on torture and starving the Palestinians, or what they think of the respected study that found our war had killed as many as 665,000 Iraqis, as of almost two years ago?

Do we have any excuse for our abject failure to hold our leaders and ourselves responsible for our nation’s most heinous crimes?

If we cannot bring ourselves to say, “guilty”, then “innocent by reason of insanity” appears to be our only plausible defense before a future court of the world.

We will have to claim that our minds were not our own. The corporate media-government propaganda network had grown so ubiquitous that the people were essentially subjects in a mass brainwashing experiment. Unfortunately, the experiment was a success, so increasingly absurd versions of re-manufactured reality were implanted in the public mind.

At the time, some of us complained about cover-ups, lies, all the things we weren’t being told by the media. But the public already knew too much, so our values had already been subverted to accommodate us to our national life of crime. In the reality we were fed, deceit could be virtuous, “terrorists” could destroy us, only leaders could understand the world, and in “extreme” cases the normal questions of morality did not apply. This is why we were silent while “our” government committed these terrible deeds.

The argument has some merit. The elites of this country invented modern propaganda almost a century ago. Today the immense power of corporate-political “opinion formation” in certain reaches the public mind is undeniable. We need to understand how much this system has undermined the public will and dehumanized our lives.

However, to the extent that we as individuals still possess free will and are responsible for our own values, we have no excuse for our mute acceptance of these and other national crimes against humanity. Don’t we pay for them with our taxes, continue them with our votes, and support them with our silence?

James Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. He can be contacted at jamiedb@wildblue.net.

NOTES.

1. Occupied Palestinian Territory, Malnutrition in Gaza “as bad as Zimbabwe” says Clare Short Relief Web/Christian Aid, 1/30/2003

2. Poll: 10% of Palestinian children have lasting malnutrition effects Ha’aretz/Associated Press 4/11/2007

After gathering proposals during a six-week trip around the country, members of Bolivia’s National Constituent Assembly met on April 30, 2007, to present the proposals and draft recommendations for synthesizing these proposals into a new constitution. As in Venezuela, where a new constitution followed the swearing in of leftist president Hugo Chávez, hopes were high for constitutional reform in Bolivia that could alter entrenched inequalities and facilitate the inclusion of indigenous majorities into society.

But more than nine months after this process was initiated in Bolivia under President Evo Morales it has become delayed by debates over procedure, weakened by the exclusion of social movements, and bogged down in partisan conflicts. Is it possible for radical change to be achieved through constitutional reform? How does the Constituent Assembly in Bolivia compare to Venezuela’s? These are important questions to consider, especially as other leftist leaders in the continent such as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa are embarking on a similar process of rewriting the constitution.

The demand for a constituent assembly in Bolivia originally came from indigenous social movements in the east of the country who sought greater participation in decisions about land use and ownership, distribution of natural resources, and development policy. This demand for an assembly was taken up by social movements who participated in several protests and campaigns in the early 2000s against the privatization of water (the Water Wars) and for the nationalization of gas (the Gas Wars). After successive governments were forced to resign and Morales was elected in December 2005, he initiated the process of rewriting the constitution. There were demands for new articles to address issues of land distribution, resource management, and regional autonomy, among others. On July 2, 2006, there was a nationwide election of the 255 assembly representatives, who would be in charge of rewriting the constitution.

The failure of Morales’ supporters to gain a majority during the July 2 elections of the constituent assembly introduced certain constraints for progressive forces from the start. Morales’ party Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) won 135 seats, which was 35 seats short of the two-thirds required in order to control the assembly. Further, the exclusive control by political parties over the electoral process meant that social movements leaders not belonging to political parties were left out of the assembly. In order to participate, social movement organizations needed to gather 15,000 signatures, fingerprints and identification numbers in the space of a few weeks, while political parties were automatically included on the ballot. Key movement leaders such as Oscar Olivera, who played an important role during the 2000 Water Wars, were not even included on the ballot. Requests from indigenous organizations to elect representatives to the assembly according to their own customs were rejected; the indigenous leaders who were elected belong to MAS or other political parties.

In August 6, 2006, the Constituent Assembly was sworn in. For six months, the Constituent Assembly was not able to achieve anything, as it was caught up in a procedural debate about voting, that was finally resolved on February 14, 2007. As the assembly now embarks on the deliberation process, it will also be strongly divided along partisan lines, as a two-thirds vote is required in order to approve each of the articles, and MAS and its aligned parties do not have these numbers. Many are concerned that MAS will be forced to water down its proposals in order to seek support from the opposition parties and fulfill the required two-thirds vote.

By contrast, the rewriting of the constitution in Venezuela, which began in August 1999, was not hampered by a divided assembly, as Chávez supporters won 125 out of the 131 seats in the assembly. Like in the Bolivia case, political parties dominated the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly. Chávez’s Movimiento Quinta Republica (Fifth Republic Movement, MVR) and allied parties who formed the Polo Patriotico (Patriotic Pole), won 120 of the seats. In order to speed up the process of deliberation, the assembly met in 22 commissions rather than a larger plenary. The new constitution was completed over the next few months and approved by referendum in December 1999.

Responsibility for the disaster of Iraq lies not only with the President of the United States, but also with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president needs expert and candid military counsel. Not yes-men in uniform.

Washington was briefly abuzz last week with the news that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will not recommend the reappointment of General Peter Pace for a second two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gates is instead nominating Admiral Michael Mullen for the post. The political classes reacted first with surprise and then with approval. The New York Times editorial page declared Mullen a “good choice.” Senate confirmation seems assured.

A better idea might be to abolish the position of JCS chairman altogether — and the entire JCS system along with it.

History will render this judgment of Pace, who succeeded General Richard B Myers as chairman in September 2005: As U. S. forces became mired ever more deeply in an unwinnable war, Pace remained a passive bystander, a witness to a catastrophe that he was slow to comprehend and did little to forestall. If the position of JCS chair had simply remained vacant for the past two years, it is difficult to see how the American military would be in worse shape today.

Softening history’s verdict will be this fact: Long before Pace arrived on the scene the JCS had established a well-deserved reputation as one of the most ineffective institutions in Washington. Dissatisfaction with the Joint Chiefs dates virtually from the moment in 1947 when Congress passed the legislation creating it. Trying to fix the JCS soon became a cottage industry. The widespread unhappiness with Pace’s performance, culminating in his de facto firing, affirms that these various reforms have failed.

Expectations that a permanent mechanism for providing military advice could improve the quality of civilian decision-making inspired the creation of the Joint Chiefs in the first place. After all, this had seemingly been the case during World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt had created a precursor of the modern JCS whose members had collaborated effectively with FDR in successfully directing a massive global war.

The creation of a permanent JCS two years after the war was intended to replicate that success: drawing on the accumulated wisdom of their profession, the new Joint Chiefs would help the president and Congress maintain adequate but economical defenses, avoid unnecessary wars, and wage effectively those wars that proved unavoidable.

Measured by these criteria, over the course of six decades the Joint Chiefs of Staff have performed miserably. Attempts to fix the institution only introduced new varieties of dysfunction, culminating in the rise of General Colin Powell, the most talented — and most problematic — officer ever to preside over the JCS. After Powell, things would only get worse.

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute announced the world’s top 10 military spenders for 2006 on June 11, 2007.

The list below shows the amount that each country spent on weapons in 2005 US dollars and the share of world arms expenditures.

1. United States, $528.7 billion, 46 per cent
2. Britain, $59.2 billion, 5 per cent
3. France, $53.1 billion, 5 per cent
4. China, $49.5 billion, 4 per cent
5. Japan, $43.7 billion, 4 per cent
6. Germany, $37.0 billion, 3 per cent
7. Russia, $34.7 billion, 3 per cent
8. Italy, $29.9 billion, 3 per cent
9. Saudi Arabia, $29.0 billion, 3 per cent
10. India, $23.9 billion, 2 per cent

06/16/07 “ICH” — — -Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George W. Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a traitor, or a geopolitical naif.

To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or all of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments herein, nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I will even include some of the comments and arguments made by the administration and its supporters.

Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly complete account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating America’s policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim that they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart – but actually for all citizens in a democracy – it is incumbent upon us to educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.

Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about this question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices are justified.

So, in that spirit – and as the Founders themselves said – “let Facts be submitted to a candid world”.

* Mesopotamia has long been a playground for great powers. The British invaded the area in 1917, causing a widespread revolt of the Iraqi people. Britain later ruled under a League of Nations mandate that produced the artificial creation of the country Iraq (and Kuwait), and continued to control oil production in the region. Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour said at the time, “I do not care under what system we keep this oil, but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available”.

* Saddam Hussein started his career as a political thug, on the payroll of the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s, torturing and murdering Iraqi leftists whose names were provided by American intelligence, and participating in an armed coup against the Iraqi government.

* In 1972, the United States conspired with Iran and Israel to support a revolt of the Kurdish people within Iraq against their government.

* In 1980, the United States provided encouragement, weapons, intelligence, satellite data and funding for Saddam’s Iraq to invade Iran, launching an eight year war – the longest and probably the bloodiest of the post-WWII era.

* During this war, Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to improve relations with Saddam. The United States then restored full diplomatic relations with Iraq, despite the administration’s clear awareness that Saddam was using chemical weapons at the time.

* The Reagan administration also knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds rising up again against Baghdad (this was the incident George W. Bush would later repeatedly invoke, saying of Saddam, “He gassed his own people”), but nevertheless authorized expanded sales to Iraq of highly sophisticated equipment that could be used to manufacture weapons, only two months after the Halabja incident.

* George H. W. Bush equated Saddam to Hitler. But, in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War, after the elder Bush had encouraged Kurds and Shiites to rise up against the regime, he abandoned them, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam’s military, in many cases right before the eyes of US forces who were ordered not to intervene.

* The senior Bush had a chance after that war to occupy Iraq and topple Saddam. He chose not to because, in his own words and those of his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, “Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq … would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. …furthermore, we had been self‑consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post‑cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”

* The younger Bush, George W., never asked his father for advice on Iraq. Instead, he said: “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” Bush has also stated, “I’m driven with a mission from God. …God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq…’ And I did.”

* George W. Bush gave twenty interviews in 1999 to Mickey Herskowitz, a friend of the Bush family contracted at the time to ghostwrite his autobiography. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq at that time, saying “‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander‑in‑chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.” Herskowitz said that Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were shaped by Dick Cheney’s ideas, based on the power and glory Margaret Thatcher earned from her Falklands War: “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.” Herskowitz also reports this interesting note from his interviews with Bush: “He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That was one of the keys to being a leader.”

* During the presidential campaign of 2000, candidate Bush said very little about Iraq, and certainly never suggested the need for urgent action. Somehow, though, in just two years time – during which, if anything, Iraq actually got weaker, not stronger – Saddam and his country became a perilous and imminent threat that had to be addressed immediately.

* Former members of his own cabinet have revealed that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, well before 9/11. All discussions were about the how of doing it, never about the why, the justification, the costs or the wisdom.

* Bush claims he is fighting a war on terror in response to 9/11. But in the first eight months of his administration, his own top terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, could not get a meeting of cabinet-level security officials to discuss terrorism. They finally met, one week before 9/11, and then the meeting was ‘hijacked’ into discussing Iraq instead. In 2004, Clarke said “Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re‑election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.” Clarke is a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, and also served in the administrations of Bush’s father, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

* Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’ He came back at me and said, ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection’. And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again’.”

* Iraq was not in league with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, whom the administration blamed for the 9/11 attacks. As Richard Clarke put it, “There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever”. Indeed, the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is a Muslim fundamentalist organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the secular regimes ruling Islamic countries, precisely what Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was. Indeed, even the highly religious Saudi Arabia (from which 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers came, none of them being Iraqis) is under violent pressure from al Qaeda for not being theocratic enough.

* Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even George Bush has now admitted this. However, over the last six years, and still to this day, Bush constantly conflates the two in almost every speech he gives, to the point where in 2003 sixty-nine percent of Americans came to believe that Saddam had been behind the 9/11 attacks. There can be little doubt that the administration used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, though they had nothing whatsoever to do with each other.