The Rag Blog

“The man who risked everything…
To speak for those who could not…
To make the blind see…
And to lead a movement that would change the world.”

Anyone who has seen the film Amazing Grace will appreciate the parallels between the career of William Wilberforce, as romanticised by Hollywood, and that of Tony Blair, as romanticised by Tony Blair.

Like Mr Blair, Wilberforce had his roots in the north of England. Like Mr Blair, he did not distinguish himself at Oxbridge. Like Mr Blair, he lost no time in entering politics, where his affability ensured rapid advancement. And, like Mr Blair, Wilberforce was strongly influenced by the Evangelical movement.

The revelation of “the infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner” came to Wilberforce like a thunderbolt after he had entered Parliament.

But he was persuaded by (among others) the repentant slave trader and composer of Amazing Grace John Newton, that he could “do both”: politics and God’s work. It took a few false starts before, alerted to the atrocious conditions aboard slave ships making the transatlantic “Middle Passage”, he found his cause célèbre.

The moral transformation of England achieved by the Evangelical movement, without which the law abolishing the slave trade would never have been passed, has its echoes in our own time.

Today, of course, most English people are faintly embarrassed by religion and regard Americans as rather absurd for reading the Bible. Nevertheless, the English retain an authentically 19th-century enthusiasm for moral crusades. Part of Mr Blair’s original appeal as a politician was precisely the impression he gave of being able to lead one.

In our time, as in the 1800s, Africa has an especially strong appeal to the Evangelical sensibility. There is something irresistible about being able to feel simultaneously guilty about the continent’s problems (“I once was blind…”) and capable of solving them (“… but now I see”).

The problem is, of course, that generation after generation thinks it has found the solution, and generation after generation is disappointed. Wilberforce and his friends were convinced that abolishing the slave trade, and then slavery itself, would do the trick.

To give them their due, they knew that actions always speak louder than mere legislation. It should never be forgotten that, after the passage of the abolition legislation in 1807, the Royal Navy waged a sustained campaign against those who defied the British ban. Indeed, the campaign against slavery was a classic example of unilateral humanitarian intervention, in which the rights of other nations were repeatedly violated.

Yet doing away with the slave trade had less impressive consequences than the reformers had hoped. The same was true of abolishing slavery itself. Most of Africa remained not much better off in 1907 than it had been in 1807.

So something else had to be tried, and that something was state-led economic development. Throughout the Fifties, well-meaning administrators in the Colonial Office toiled to enrich Africa with groundnut schemes and the like. With minimal success.

So we tried again. This time the solution was political independence. British self-doubt was a much more important cause than indigenous nationalism of the “winds of change” that began to blow through Africa in the Fifties and Sixties. With astonishing speed, all British colonies in Africa were granted their freedom. Again, disappointment. Economically, the majority of the countries in question did even worse under self-government than they had under British rule.

We tried lending them money. That didn’t work. Then we gave them aid. That, too, had relatively meagre results. Many well-meaning people – led by that most Evangelical of economists, Jeffrey Sachs – continue to have faith in aid as a policy, arguing that it simply needs to be better targeted, for example on the provision of free malaria nets. But economists who know Africa better than Sachs are sceptical.

Oxford’s Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, persuasively argues that Africa’s biggest problems (apart from incurable ones such as its location) are political. Corrupt tyrannies and civil wars between them account for a huge proportion of Africa’s economic under-performance since the end of colonial rule.

British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq’s heritage is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq’s supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument.

Yesterday Hussaini reported to the British Museum on his struggles to protect his work in a state of anarchy. It was a heart breaking presentation. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today’s Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don’t. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre.

When I visited the museum six months later, its then director, Donny George, proudly showed me the best he was making of a bad job. He was about to reopen, albeit with half his most important objects stolen. The pro-war lobby had stopped pretending that the looting was nothing to do with the Americans, who were shamefacedly helping retrieve stolen objects under the dynamic US colonel, Michael Bogdanos (author of a book on the subject). The vigorous Italian cultural envoy to the coalition, Mario Bondioli-Osio, was giving generously for restoration.

The beautiful Warka vase, carved in 3000BC, was recovered though smashed into 14 pieces. The exquisite Lyre of Ur, the world’s most ancient musical instrument, was found badly damaged. Clerics in Sadr City were ingeniously asked to tell wives to refuse to sleep with their husbands if looted objects were not returned, with some success. Nothing could be done about the fire-gutted national library and the loss of five centuries of Ottoman records (and works by Piccasso and Miro). But the message of winning hearts and minds seemed to have got through.

Today the picture is transformed. Donny George fled for his life last August after death threats. The national museum is not open but shut. Nor is it just shut. Its doors are bricked up, it is surrounded by concrete walls and its exhibits are sandbagged. Even the staff cannot get inside. There is no prospect of reopening.

Hussaini confirmed a report two years ago by John Curtis, of the British Museum, on America’s conversion of Nebuchadnezzar’s great city of Babylon into the hanging gardens of Halliburton. This meant a 150-hectare camp for 2,000 troops. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavement to the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged. The archaeology-rich subsoil was bulldozed to fill sandbags, and large areas covered in compacted gravel for helipads and car parks. Babylon is being rendered archaeologically barren.

Meanwhile the courtyard of the 10th-century caravanserai of Khan al-Raba was used by the Americans for exploding captured insurgent weapons. One blast demolished the ancient roofs and felled many of the walls. The place is now a ruin.

The testimony is the first evidence suggesting that any officer may have engaged in a coverup in the 2005 deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians.

CAMP PENDLETON — A staff sergeant testified Thursday that he was ordered to destroy grisly pictures of women and children killed by Marines so that the images would not be part of a statement being prepared for an investigative officer and a magazine reporter.

The testimony by Staff Sgt. Justin Laughner, taken under a grant of immunity, is the first evidence suggesting that any Marine officer may have engaged in a coverup in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005.

Other testimony has suggested that officers made only a superficial review before deciding that the deaths were combat-related and thus no war crimes investigation was required.

At the Article 32 inquiry, similar to a preliminary hearing, for a former battalion commander, Laughner testified hat he felt the order to destroy the pictures, which he said was given by Lt. Andrew Grayson, amounted to obstruction of justice but that he complied and later lied when asked whether any pictures had been taken.

“It was wrong,” Laughner said. “Somebody was asking for them [the pictures], and we’re not going to give them to them? It’s not right, but I didn’t say anything.”

Although Laughner deleted the pictures from his computer, the images remained on his digital camera and are now part of the criminal case against four officers and three enlisted Marines.

Grayson is charged with dereliction of duty and obstruction of justice in the aftermath of the killings, which occurred in the Iraqi town of Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005. The three other officers — including the former commander of the Marine battalion involved, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani — are charged with dereliction of duty for not calling for a war-crimes investigation.

At the inquiry on Chessani’s conduct, Laughner said that he had no evidence the lieutenant colonel ever saw the photographs or knew of their existence.

Laughner had taken the pictures in the hours after the killings.

Three months later, when he and Grayson were preparing a statement for high-ranking officers and a Time magazine reporter, Grayson told him to delete the pictures, Laughner testified Thursday.

The statement they prepared reiterated the Marines’ official position that the deaths were the result of crossfire after Marines were attacked by insurgents. Laughner and Grayson were part of an intelligence team assigned to work with the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, in Haditha.

Team members interview civilians and, among other things, review the scene of civilian deaths to gather information that can be helpful to Marines.

Laughner arrived several hours after a roadside bomb had killed a Marine from the battalion’s Kilo Company. After that blast, Marines killed five young men outside their car and, after being ordered to search for insurgents in nearby houses, killed 19 civilians.

Laughner testified that Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who led the troops involved in the shootings, told him that the men in the car had “engaged” the Marines with weapons, that Marines encountered an insurgent firing at them in one house, and that AK-47s were found in the houses. Prosecutors say all three assertions are lies.

Laughner said Wuterich did not tell him that the Marines had killed women and children in the houses. But when Laughner went to the houses to look for evidence of insurgents, he found instead a young girl who was in hysterics.

It was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran

06/09/07 “The Independent” — — – When I was a schoolboy, I loved a column which regularly appeared in British papers called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”. In a single rectangular box filled with naively drawn illustrations, Ripley – Bob Ripley – would try to astonish his readers with amazing facts:

“Believe It or Not, in California, an entire museum is dedicated to candy dispensers … Believe It or Not, a County Kerry man possesses an orange that is 25 years old … Believe It or Not, a weather researcher had his ashes scattered on the eve of Hurricane Danielle 400 miles off the coast of Miama, Florida.” Etc, etc, etc.

Incredibly, Ripley’s column lives on, and there is even a collection of “Ripley Believe It or Not” museums in the United States.

The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes (“Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon”), no major casualty tolls (“Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq”). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).

But I was reminded of dear old Ripley when I was prowling through the articles marking the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Memoirs there have been aplenty, but I think only the French press – in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique – was prepared to confront a bit of “Believe It or Not”.

It recalled vividly – and shamefully – how the world’s newspapers covered the story of Egypt’s “aggression” against Israel. In reality – Believe It or Not – it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. “The Egyptians attack Israel,” France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to “It’s Middle East War!”.

Quite so. Next day, the socialist Le Populaire headlined its story “Attacked on all sides, Israel resists victoriously”. On the same day, Le Figaro carried an article announcing that “the victory of the army of David is one of the greatest of all time”. Believe It or Not, the Second World War – which might be counted one of the greatest of all time, had ended only 22 years earlier.

Johnny Hallyday, France’s undie-able pop star, sang for 50,000 French supporters of Israel – for whom solidarity was expressed in the French press by Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterand. Believe It or Not – and you can believe it – Mitterand once received the coveted Francisque medal from Pétain’s Vichy collaborationists.

Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel “is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions – and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called ‘terrorism'”. This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur – to the effect that “Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests”. And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.

I owe it to the academic Anicet Mobé Fansiama to remind me this week that – Believe It or Not – Congolese troops from Belgium’s immensely wealthy African colony scored enormous victories over Italian troops in Africa during the Second World War, capturing 15,000 prisoners, including nine generals. Called “the Public Force” – a name which happily excluded the fact that these heroes were black Congolese – the army mobilised 13,000 soldiers and civilians to fight Vichy French colonies in Africa and deployed in the Middle East – where they were positioned to defend Palestine – as well as in Somalia, Madagascar, India and Burma.

Vast numbers of British and American troops passed through the Congo as its wealth was transferred to the war chests of the United States and Britain.

A US base was built at Kinshasa to move oil to Allied troops fighting in the Middle East.

But – Believe It or Not – when Congolese trade unions, whose members were requisitioned to perform hard labour inside Belgium’s colony by carrying agricultural and industrial goods and military equipment, often on their backs, demanded higher salaries, the Belgian authorities confronted their demonstrations with rifle fire, shooting down 50 of their men.

At least 3,000 political prisoners were deported for hard labour to a remote district of Congo. Thus were those who gave their blood for Allied victory repaid. Or rather not repaid. The four billion Belgian francs which was owed back to the Congo – about £500m in today’s money – was never handed over. Believe It or Not.

So let’s relax and return to Ripley reality. “Believe It or Not, Russell Parsons of Hurricane, West Virginia, has his funeral and cremation instructions tattooed on his arm! … Believe It or Not, in April 2007 (yes, these are new Ripleys) a group of animal lovers paid nearly $3,400 to buy 300 lobsters from a Maine fish market – then set them free back into the ocean! … Believe It or Not, in a hospital waiting room, 70 per cent of people suffer from broken bones, 75 per cent are fatigued, 80 per cent have fevers. What percentage of people must have all four ailments?” Believe It or Not, I don’t know. And oh yes, “Geta, Emperor of Rome AD189-212, insisted upon alternative meals. A typical menu: partridge (perdix), peacock (pavo), leek (porrum), beans (phaseoli), peach (persica), plum (pruna) and melon (pepone).”

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld famously called the detainees at Guantánamo “the worst of the worst.” General Richard B. Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” These claims were designed to justify locking up hundreds of men and boys for years in small cages like animals.

George W. Bush lost no time establishing military commissions to try the very “worst of the worst” for war crimes. But four and a half years later, the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that those commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. So Bush dusted them off, made a few changes, and rammed his new improved military commissions through the Republican Congress last fall.

Only three detainees have been brought before the new commissions. One would expect the people Bush & Co. singled out for war crimes prosecutions would be high-level al-Qaeda leaders. But they weren’t. The first was David Hicks, who was evidently not so dangerous. The U.S. military made a deal that garnered Hicks a misdemeanor sentence and sent him back to Australia.

Salem Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who used to be Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, was the second. Hamdan, whose case had been overturned by the Supreme Court, was finally brought before a military commission Monday for arraignment on charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

The third defendant was Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who appeared for arraignment the same day as Hamdan. Khadr was 15 years old when he arrived at Guantánamo. He faced charges of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and supporting terrorism.

On Monday, much to Bush’s dismay, two different military judges dismissed both Hamdan’s and Khadr’s cases on procedural grounds.

The Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year says the military commissions have jurisdiction to try offenses committed by alien unlawful enemy combatants. Unlawful enemy combatants are defined as (1) people who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its allies; or (2) people who have been determined to be unlawful enemy combatants by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) or another competent tribunal. The Act says that a determination of unlawful enemy combatant status by a CSRT or another competent tribunal is dispositive.

But there are no “unlawful” enemy combatants at Guantánamo. There are only men who have been determined to be “enemy combatants” by the CSRTs. The Act declares that military commissions “shall not have jurisdiction over lawful enemy combatants.” In its haste to launch post-Hamdan military commissions, Bush’s legal eagles didn’t notice this discrepancy. That is why the charges were dismissed.

The Bush administration may try to fix the procedural problem and retry Khadr and Hamdan. But regardless of whether Guantánamo detainees are lawful or unlawful enemy combatants, the Bush administration’s treatment of them violates the Geneva Conventions. Lawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. Unlawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by Common Article Three.

Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guantánamo when he was 15 years old. In both places, he has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to inhumane treatment. At Bagram Air Base, Khadr was denied pain medication for his serious head and eye shrapnel wounds. At Guantánamo, his hands and feet were shackled together, he was bolted to the floor and left there for hours at a time. After he urinated on himself and on the floor, U.S. military guards mopped the floor with his skinny little body. Khadr was beaten in the head, dogs lunged at him, and he was threatened with rape and the removal of his body parts.

Khadr cried frequently. He has nightmares, sweats and hyperventilates, and is hypervigilant, hearing sounds that he can’t identify. When Khadr’s lawyer saw him for the first time in 2004, he thought, “He’s just a little kid.”

Why was Khadr treated this way? He comes from a family allegedly active in al-Qaeda. His charges stem from an incident where the U.S. sent Afghans into a compound where Khadr and others were located. The people inside the compound killed the Afghans and began firing at the U.S. soldiers. The Americans dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound, killing everyone inside except Khadr. After Khadr threw a hand grenade which killed an American, the soldiers shot Khadr, blinding and seriously wounding him. Khadr begged them in English to finish him off. He was then taken to Baghram and later to Guantánamo.

According to Donald Rehkopf, Jr., co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Military Law Committee, “The government has steadfastly refused to allow hearings on this alleged [unlawful enemy combatant] status because there are so many prisoners at GTMO that were not even combatants, much less ‘unlawful’ ones. Khadr is in an unusual situation because he has a viable ‘self-defense’ claim – we attacked the compound that he and his family were living in, and the fact that he was only 15 at the time.”

If Khadr were a U.S. citizen, he would not even be subject to trial by court-martial because of his age. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that children under 18 at the time of their crimes could not be executed, it said that youths display a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” that “often results in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” A juvenile, the Court found, is more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and his character is not as well-formed as that of an adult. “From a moral standpoint,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” The Bush administration’s treatment of Omar Khadr flies in the face of the Court’s reasoning.

The United States may be able to retry Khadr and Hamdan. They have a few days to file an appeal. But the Court of Military Commissions Review hasn’t even been established yet, so it’s unclear where the appeals would be brought.

The Military Commissions Act, which denies basic due process protections, including the right to habeas corpus, is a disgrace. But an even bigger disgrace is the concentration camp the United States maintains at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Act should be repealed and the Guantánamo prison should be shut down immediately.

Over the past few weeks, American planes have landed at Beirut airport with arms and ammunition for the Lebanese army. The army’s battle with a small Islamist militia in a Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon has galvanised the Bush administration to support a middle east army in crisis. But what does Lebanon have to do with the US and its national interests?

Even if Lebanon connects, however tangentially, with the twin western concerns of Israel and oil, there is no strong case for America to involve itself in Lebanese affairs. As Edward Luttwak said—arguing in the May 2007 issue of Prospect that the west should start to take the middle east less seriously — “Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war… And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining.”

I am not denigrating the seriousness of the violence in Lebanon and its potential to push the country back into civil war. Nor do I lack passion for Lebanon, my home for many years and birthplace of my maternal grandparents. Its politics fascinate me, in part because the country governs itself much as it did in Ottoman times—with tribal leaders seeking outside protection, allying with one another and, occasionally, battling old friends. Lebanon, like the rest of the region, masked its conflicts in the garb of the cold war when it needed to, and it is adept at portraying itself as a battleground between secularism and Islamic fundamentalism now. The game, however, has always been local—which pasha or bey will dominate which hilltop, which tribe will take the larger share of the trade in banking or hashish, which local commander will pledge his men to which regional overlord. Lebanon happens to be significant to me. But it is not important to the US.

Supporters of American intervention in Lebanon may contend that, without US military support, Syria will come to dominate the country. The Shia Hizbullah will gain the upper hand against the Sunnis, Druze and Christians. Israel might have to invade again. These outcomes are possible, perhaps probable, but, unless you are Lebanese, so what? America approved the Syrian interventions in Lebanon in 1976, 1986 and 1990; it may well approve the next.

The US need not play every political game on earth. Half a million American troops are losing a war in Iraq, the US is waging war in Afghanistan, and it has troops stationed in a majority of the world’s countries. It is taking part, covertly and overtly, in small wars in Colombia, the Philippines and a dozen other places. It provides training and materiel to governments around the globe, usually unelected, to keep the peasants down, drive them from the land, sustain local clients and ensure American business pride of place at trading tables everywhere.

Lebanon is one of the most telling examples of the futility of America’s global policies, and the hell of it is that America has been in Lebanon before. In 1982 and 1983, the US stationed marines in Beirut, ostensibly to protect the Palestinian refugee camps from further massacres of the type that Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies inflicted in September 1982. It also sent military advisers to train the Lebanese army, whose commanders understood American support to mean they could arrest, torture and otherwise dispose of their enemies. But the US could not hold the Lebanese army together, the Lebanese government’s opponents drove the marines out of the country in February 1984 and for seven years American citizens could not walk the streets of Beirut without being kidnapped or killed. President Reagan once said that the future of the free world depended on the ability of the Lebanese army to hold out in the mountain village of Souk el-Gharb. Souk el-What? Despite US intervention, Souk el-Gharb fell. The US survived. And in 2007, whether the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp falls will not affect any American’s safety or livelihood.

Edward Luttwak’s otherwise snide and patronising critique of a region for which America has displayed an exaggerated imperial interest makes the valid observation that the middle east is not important enough to fight over. But Luttwak did not carry his argument to its obvious conclusion: if the mideast is no big deal, the US should cut all arms sales and military aid to the region. That means withdrawing from Iraq; closing bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain; ending arms deliveries to the reactionary monarchy in Saudi Arabia; and cutting aid to Israel.

Why should the American taxpayer give $5.5bn in total aid to Israel every year so that it can dominate a region of diminished strategic value? If the US doesn’t give Israel cluster bombs, Israel won’t drop millions of them all over south Lebanon. And why send arms to Saudi Arabia, a country that has never fought a war? The Congressional Research Service reported this year that the US had delivered $17.9bn in weapons to Saudi Arabia between 1998 and 2005. If the US didn’t give Saudi Arabia the advanced tanks and jet fighters that it can never deploy, there would be no danger of the weapons finding their way into the hands of Islamist militants. The US is arming Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the Fateh portion of the Palestine authority. In whose interest is that? The US should introduce a resolution in the UN security council to enforce an arms embargo on all states in the middle east — at least until they resolve their disputes without benefit of the American firepower that makes their wars all the more destructive. That would make the region — and the rest of us — safer.

BAGHDAD – Inside the bloody kaleidoscope of Iraq, the list of enemies and allies is long, shifting and motley, running from “revolution brigades” and Baathists to Salafists, secularists and suicidal zealots, but only one group routinely is tagged “Public Enemy No. 1” by the Americans.

Nine out of 10 times, when it names a foe it faces, the U.S. military names al-Qaida in Iraq. President Bush says Iraq may become an al-Qaida base to “launch new attacks on America.” The U.S. ambassador here suggested this week al-Qaida might “assume real power” in Iraq if U.S. forces withdraw.

Critics say this is overblown and possibly a diversion.

“Such speculation is unrealistic,” Amer Hassan al-Fayadh, Baghdad University political science dean, said of the U.S. statements.

Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, strong Kurdish ethnic minority, secularist Sunni Muslims and others would suppress any real power bid by the fringe Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaida, al-Fayadh said.

“The people who are fighting al-Qaida in Iraq are the Sunnis themselves,” he said.

Since Iraqis rose up against the U.S. occupation in 2003, the insurgency has spawned a long roster of militant groups – the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Islamic Army in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah and the Mujahedeen Army, among others – drawing on loyalists of the ousted, Sunni-dominated Baathist regime, other nationalists, Islamists, tribal groups and militant Shiites.

Some 30 groups now claim responsibility for attacks against U.S. and government targets, said Ben Venzke, head of the Virginia-based IntelCenter, which tracks such statements for the U.S. government.

Despite this proliferation of enemies, the U.S. command’s news releases on American operations focus overwhelmingly on al-Qaida.

When George Bush announced that he favored keeping troops in Iraq for decades, the media apparently didn’t think the opinion of Iraqis mattered.

On May 25, George Bush signed a defense bill that outlawed the construction of (new) permanent bases in Iraq. But only five days later, White House press flack Tony Snow told reporters that the president is now modeling the future of his bloody signature project on the half-century U.S. experience in South Korea, with troops in Iraq for the long haul to provide, in Snow’s words, “a security presence” and to serve as a “force of stability.”

Asked how long that commitment would last, Snow said, “A long time.” Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been stationed in South Korea since 1953 — for 54 years.

In the days that followed Snow’s revelation, senior Pentagon officials weighed in with their support for applying the Korea Model to Iraq: keeping a few divisions of U.S. troops in-country for the next five decades or so sounded just about right to them.

It was such a naked acknowledgement of America’s long-term designs on carving out a strategic foothold in the region that even the milquetoast American press had to acknowledge it, and most of the major news outlets ran stories in the last week that at least touched on the Iraq hawks’ shiny new analogy.

But we noticed something fascinating when reading those articles: In story after story, U.S. reporters were quick to seek comment from White House officials and to “balance” those comments with quotes from congressional Democrats and from analysts at various D.C. think tanks who are critical of the administration. They talked to foreign policy and military experts, historians and even Korea experts.

But here’s the rub: None of the reporters we read bothered to pick up a phone and call Baghdad to get reactions from, well, actual Iraqis.

So we did — we called Iraqi lawmakers from different parties representing the country’s different ethnic and sectarian groups, and found that, without exception, just hearing that there were official whispers in Washington about plans for a decades-long U.S. troop presence in their country shocked and awed them, and not in a good way.

But it didn’t only inflame the Iraqi nationalists with whom we spoke — politicians who have long opposed the occupation — it also absolutely incensed those officials who have been among the coalition’s most vocal supporters. Even those who approve of George Bush’s Middle East adventurism were infuriated by the idea and insulted that the administration would make the statement publicly.

But that was one viewpoint that didn’t find its way into any of the stories we read. Which leads to a question: What would the reporting out of Iraq look like if all reporters embraced the simple idea that Iraqis’ views on the future of their country are worth a few column inches or a couple of seconds on American television screens?

The New York Times’ David Sanger, for example, wrote an analysis in which he quoted Tony Snow, Defense Secretary Robert Gates — Gates said, “The idea is more a model of a mutually agreed arrangement whereby we have a long and enduring presence but under the consent of both parties” — and a few anonymous “administration officials and top military leaders,” all of whom favored the idea.

Editor’s Note: Ian Pinklus reflects on how the ideology of individualism has trumpeted and triumphed over almost all individuals living under monoply capitalism’s “free market” economy based on the natural need to acquire maximum profit for the fewer and fewer owners of production.

Individualism — my individual needs and desires are greater than social needs and wishes — instructs us to accept as “natural” that there will always be winners and losers. I believe that imposed economic competition presents all of us with the need to face moral dilemmas in all aspects of life. Therefore, we anti-capitalists (including socialists, communists, anarchists, autonoms and any other collective approach to society) must find ways of communicating with our fellows with moral arguments aimed at destabilising individualism and replacing it with collective moral agendas. So, our fight must not rest only on economic incentives–more wage per hour of labour imput — but more on how can we best live with one another. The messages of idealists and materialists — such as Jesus and Ghandi, Marx and Plekanov, Lenin-Stalin-Trotsky, Che, Castro and Chavez–should be interwoven in our struggles. And we need to see one another (all of us anti-capitalists, including those with whom we are stragetically or tactically in disagreement) as brothers and sisters in the global struggle to create a world based on justice, equality and peace. Ron Ridenour, columnist.

Not long ago, a correspondent to the Morning Star letters column suggested that Tesco be nationalised.

Strictly speaking, what was proposed was that this should become a plank of policy for the left. I suspect that the suggestion may have been made a little tongue in cheek. All the same, it brought to mind some interesting, as well as some rather depressing, possibilities.

First, it would not make sense to campaign solely for the nationalisation of Tesco. We would not want the other “one-stop grocery” giants, such as Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrison to feel left out.

Anyway, partial nationalisation of the industry would miss the point. The ultimate objective is common ownership of the means of production. Nationalisation of one industry, let alone just part of one industry, is no more than a stepping stone.

But let us be realistic. In the present economic climate, the proposal to nationalise almost any industry would be met with derision and ridicule from the political establishment.

We can more or less be certain that 99 per cent of economists would be aghast at any such proposal. They would lead the opposition to it.

We know that they would argue that nationalisation would harm the industry or industries concerned. They would argue that enterprises such as Tesco could never operate as “efficiently” under public ownership as under private ownership. They would cry that nationalisation would be an economic disaster.

What they are argue is that enterprises in the private sector are more motivated because they need to make a profit.

From the top down, from directors, through the managerial strata to the shop floor, the profit motive drives what they would term “efficiency.” It seeks out waste and eliminates it. It finds innovation and rewards it.

State-owned and run enterprises invariably provide both managers and workers with greater job security. Failure to turn a profit does not immediately threaten the workforce with redundancies and unemployment. The profit motive is not uppermost, so individual performance is not prey to the firm’s balance sheet.

Since the principal test of “efficiency” in a capitalist economy is the size of profits, the claim that private-sector business are more “efficient” becomes self-justifying.

The track record of many, though by no means all, privatised industries suggests that they are more innovative, more cost conscious, more profit-oriented and, overall, more profitable than their nationalised predecessors.

But the reason does not lie simplistically in the fact that they are owned privately rather than by the state. It lies in the ideological framework within which they operate.

Capitalism uses economic incentives to cajole and motivate economic agents, whether they be directors, managers or workers. The vast majority of people who go to work – indeed, the vast majority of the population, accept these economic or financial incentives, not just as justifiable but as “natural,” part of the way that the world is.

They have been brought up to accept such values and norms by their families, by their schools, their religions and their televisions.

Almost all of us, even if we intellectually reject these values, cannot but help live some significant part of our lives governed by them.

Such ideological values are not restricted to economic concerns. These are just a part of a whole ideological range of value systems that extend into all quarters of our individual and social lives.

Underpinning this ideological framework are some very basic values. One of the most significant of these is the principle of individualism.

‘The main test of efficiency in a capitalist economy is the size of profits, so it’s not surprising that the private sector is “efficient”.’

The primacy of the individual as the basic unit of capitalist society is well established. It did not need Margaret Thatcher to pronounce that there was no such thing as society, only individuals. In the 19th century, utilitarian philosophy and Darwinian science had already established individualism as a foundation stone of bourgeois thinking.

The influence of this philosophical cornerstone extends to all aspects of our lives. In no aspect is it more apparent than in our economic behaviour.

We are a workforce trapped in an economic system not of our making. Our need to provide for ourselves and our family forces us into competitive behaviour where our success is at the expense of someone else’s failure. The ramifications of this are manifest to all of us on a daily basis. As socialists, this confronts us with moral dilemmas each day.

So, whether we acquiesce to the values of the marketplace willingly, unwillingly or unconsciously, we comply with its demands.

Hence, it is not surprising that the stricter, profit-driven financial incentives of the private sector are likely to prove more effective in driving the workforce towards the creation of higher profits.

We can take some comfort from the fact that, so far at least, bourgeois capitalism has yet to successfully privatise health, education and social services. But the Labour government will do its best.

Recently, it proposed 17 licensed casinos. Not for a microsecond did it contemplate the possibility that they might be state owned and run.

In France there are no betting shops, no private-sector betting, there is only the PMU. This is a state-owned and run system of pool betting. In Britain, we call it the Tote.

Is this just a hangover from when France was socialist? Not at all. Australia, whose socialist credentials are less than those of France, also has a state-owned Tote that has a monopoly everywhere except the racetracks. And, in Hong Kong, that showcase of capitalist success, there is a complete Tote monopoly.

In Britain, the state-owned Tote has to compete with the private sector. The Labour government is in the process of privatising it.

The proposal to nationalise Tesco is a sharp reminder of how capitalism is constantly undergoing change.

Even 20 years ago, Tesco would not be anywhere near to the top of the nationalisation “must-do list.”

Today, it is one of the most obvious targets. Tesco has grown fast and big. Its expansion is a fascinating illustration of a growing trend in modern capitalism for industries to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Monopoly capitalism continues to grow and restructure the economic landscape. This is largely the consequence of technological advances and it is unlikely to stop.

Cubans say they offer health care to the world’s poor because they have big hearts. But what do they get in return?

They live longer than almost anyone in Latin America. Far fewer babies die. Almost everyone has been vaccinated, and such scourges of the poor as parasites, TB, malaria, even HIV/AIDS are rare or non-existent. Anyone can see a doctor, at low cost, right in the neighborhood.

The Cuban health care system is producing a population that is as healthy as those of the world’s wealthiest countries at a fraction of the cost. And now Cuba has begun exporting its system to under-served communities around the world—including the United States.

The story of Cuba’s health care ambitions is largely hidden from the people of the United States, where politics left over from the Cold War maintain an embargo on information and understanding. But it is increasingly well-known in the poorest communities of Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa where Cuban and Cuban-trained doctors are practicing.

In the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, Cuba is showing that “you can introduce the notion of a right to health care and wipe out the diseases of poverty.”

Health Care for All Cubans

Many elements of the health care system Cuba is exporting around the world are common-sense practices. Everyone has access to doctors, nurses, specialists, and medications. There is a doctor and nurse team in every neighborhood, although somewhat fewer now, with 29,000 medical professionals serving out of the country—a fact that is causing some complaints. If someone doesn’t like their neighborhood doctor, they can choose another one.

House calls are routine, in part because it’s the responsibility of the doctor and nurse team to understand you and your health issues in the context of your family, home, and neighborhood. This is key to the system. By catching diseases and health hazards before they get big, the Cuban medical system can spend a little on prevention rather than a lot later on to cure diseases, stop outbreaks, or cope with long-term disabilities. When a health hazard like dengue fever or malaria is identified, there is a coordinated nationwide effort to eradicate it. Cubans no longer suffer from diphtheria, rubella, polio, or measles and they have the lowest AIDS rate in the Americas, and the highest rate of treatment and control of hypertension.

For health issues beyond the capacity of the neighborhood doctor, polyclinics provide specialists, outpatient operations, physical therapy, rehabilitation, and labs. Those who need inpatient treatment can go to hospitals; at the end of their stay, their neighborhood medical team helps make the transition home. Doctors at all levels are trained to administer acupuncture, herbal cures, or other complementary practices that Cuban labs have found effective. And Cuban researchers develop their own vaccinations and treatments when medications aren’t available due to the blockade, or when they don’t exist.

Exporting Health Care

For decades, Cuba has sent doctors abroad and trained international students at its medical schools. But things ramped up beginning in 1998 when Hurricanes George and Mitch hammered Central America and the Caribbean. As they had often done, Cuban doctors rushed to the disaster zone to help those suffering the aftermath. But when it was time to go home, it was clear to the Cuban teams that the medical needs extended far beyond emergency care. So Cuba made a commitment to post doctors in several of these countries and to train local people in medicine so they could pick up where the Cuban doctors left off. ELAM, the Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine, was born, and with it the offer of 10,000 scholarships for free medical training.

Today the program has grown to 22,000 students from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the United States who attend ELAM and 28 other medical schools across Cuba. The students represent dozens of ethnic groups, 51 percent are women, and they come from more than 30 countries. What they have in common is that they would otherwise be unable to get a medical education. When a slum dweller in Port au Prince, a young indigenous person from Bolivia, the son or daughter of a farmer in Honduras, or a street vendor in the Gambia wants to become a doctor, they turn to Cuba. In some cases, Venezuela pays the bill. But most of the time, Cuba covers tuition, living expenses, books, and medical care. In return, the students agree that, upon completion of their studies, they will return to their own under-served communities to practice medicine.

The curriculum at ELAM begins, for most students, with up to a year of “bridging” courses, allowing them to catch up on basic math, science, and Spanish skills. The students are treated for the ailments many bring with them.

At the end of their training, which can take up to eight years, most students return home for residencies. Although they all make a verbal commitment to serve the poor, a few students quietly admit that they don’t see this as a permanent commitment.

One challenge of the Cuban approach is making sure their investment in medical education benefits those who need it most. Doctors from poor areas routinely move to wealthier areas or out of the country altogether. Cuba trains doctors in an ethic of serving the poor. They learn to see medical care as a right, not as a commodity, and to see their own role as one of service. Stories of Cuban doctors who practice abroad suggest these lessons stick. They are known for taking money out of their own pockets to buy medicine for patients who can’t afford to fill a prescription, and for touching and even embracing patients.

Cuba plans with the help of Venezuela to take their medical training to a massive scale and graduate 100,000 doctors over the next 15 years, according to Dr. Juan Ceballos, advisor to the vice minister of public health. To do so, Cuba has been building new medical schools around the country and abroad, at a rapid clip.