The Rag Blog

I have to admit that I was quite surprised when I read that Cindy Sheehan is leaving the peace movement. After reading her explanation for the move, I was less surprised, but still a bit disappointed. After reading the piece, it is clear that Sheehan has discovered that politics can be an ugly affair. When one is the focus of a political movement like Ms. Sheehan became, they become even uglier. Her departure will leave a hole, but it should not leave a vacuum. After all, there are thousands of US residents that have been hurt by the loss of a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan, unfortunately. In addition, there are millions around the world that are just plain fed up and pissed off about these wars and the death and destruction they are causing.

Ms. Sheehan is planning to go home and raise her remaining children. That’s a good thing. Her screed makes it clear that she is burned out from her past two years of antiwar activism and doing something real like caring for children will surely put her back in touch with the better side of humanity. This move is similar to the retreat from politics and the streets that much of an entire generation underwent in the years following the government murders at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 during antiwar protests. Another side of this retreat was the turn away from politics and towards cultural and religion. Unlike caring for one’s children, the latter two were mere escapism and somewhat solipsistic. One could argue that these phenomenon destroyed the potential for radical change in the United States, but a more appropriate analysis would merely claim that here in the US we had (and have) the luxury to stop fighting against the war because we do not live where the bombs are exploding and the assault weapons firing.

Ms. Sheehan makes it clear that she still opposes these wars and the power mongers who insist on continuing it. Indeed, she saves her harshest words of her farewell message for these men and women who “move them (US soldiers) around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction” and are ” worried more about elections than people.” Naturally, this includes the Democrats as well as the Republicans. And that, is the crux of Sheehan’s despair. She honestly thought that the Democrats were different. Now that they have proved they are not, she is ready to give it all up and, by doing so, hand the forces of war and reaction a victory that they will surely relish. Yeh, there will probably be some tentative cries from various Democrats telling Cindy that their party is not a war party and that she needs to hang in there. Those cries will most likely come from party rank and file, not its leaders or elected types, since the latter are much more concerned with the 2008 elections, as Sheehan clearly points out. Meanwhile, one can almost imagine the nasty jokes and high-fives going around George Bush’s breakfast table. They finally got rid of that pesky Mom whose son they killed. Maybe now they can get on with the war, especially since the Democrats caved like a cardboard box in a hurricane.

In another section of her letter, Sheehan directs her anger and frustration at the so-called leadership of the antiwar movement. Pointing a well-deserved finger at the movement and its divisions, she writes: ” I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there…. It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.” What else can one say except, once again Ms. Sheehan has drawn an incorrect conclusion. As many others have written when addressing this issue, who cares about the pettiness of egos and power players in the movement? If one opposes the war, one gets in the streets and opposes it. Screw the fools jockeying for a future or a media spot. The war will be ended by the mass protest of the people who oppose it, not by getting a director’s job with MoveOn, UFPJ, or some other antiwar organization.

The most poignant paragraph in Sheehan’s statement begins with her sad acknowledgment that her son died for absolutely nothing. One can only imagine the emotions that come from this realization. Like many of her fellow citizens, Sheehan wants to believe that the United States is a good place and that the people who live there do believe in the principles espoused in its documents and by its greatest leaders. Her discovery that “(her son) Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months” is a difficult thing to take. Yet, this is not a reason to quit. It is, instead, a motivation to change things at an even more fundamental level. One may not like being called a radical because they oppose the wars Washington has dragged us into, but one must also become aware that only radical analysis and action undertaken by millions will change a system that requires those wars to survive.

I recall a discussion I had with a friend during the buildup to the first Gulf War. We were talking about activist burnout and egotistical activists as we watched the antiwar movement in Olympia, WA. grow by leaps and bounds while it struggled with internal conflicts that were primarily ego-driven. I said to my friend that whenever I felt an organization couldn’t live without me, then it was time for me to step back from whatever high-profile position I happened to be in and go back to the grunt work of passing out leaflets and setting up stages. After all, it wasn’t me that mattered, but the movement.

Bedawi Camp is much like other Palestinian Camps: crowded, narrow streets winding between cement buildings hung with tangles of wire, the ground running with water, often muddy because it is not tarred. Small scooter motor bikes push their way between the people, children with clothes too small from them and holed at the knees running and playing ball and wanting to pose for photo after photo. But today Bedawi Camp is more crowded than usual as it is offering refuge to a people who are yet again displaced and are yet again fleeing conflict and are yet again having to leave everything behind them: clothes, food, mattresses and often brothers and husbands as well. They have come here with nothing and the Palestinian people in Bedawi Camp are opening their poverty-stricken homes to them.

It is not just Bedawi that is now sheltering the families who have been fortunate enough to escape the besieged and death-strewn streets of Nahr al-Bared Camp. Families have fled as far south as Beirut and some say even further. Shatila, witness to its own massacre, is now opening its homes to the 153 families who have so far arrived there. Aid is funneling into Bedawi but nothing is yet reaching Shatila. Many of the families here have escaped without so much as their IDs on them.

In Bedawi the injured and the well share the same piece of bread; in Shatilla the wife is without her husband and shares the same mattress as her three or four children, and often no mattress at all.

Many who have fled have no way of knowing how their men-folk are, still stuck within their besieged Camp. One woman told me how the last thing she saw as she left with her baby was her husband bleeding from a gun shot wound to his shoulder. She was weeping as she told me she couldn’t help wondering if she would ever see him again.

‘How do I know that Shatila is not going to be my home now forever? Maybe you can not understand what the life of the refugee is. Always fleeing, always living in a place that it temporary and always dreamingWhat do I dream for now you ask?

To return to Palestine? No, just to return to Nahr al-Bared and see that my husband is well.’

It is humbling to see how much the Palestinian people are giving to their newly displaced brethren. I have seen men donating $100.00, piling clothes into the central bin where we are collecting, giving blankets and of course the roof of their homes, when they themselves have so little. These people are living below the poverty line, in crowded and cramped camps with no stable income or prospect of a future and yet they are the ones donating and opening their arms to the victims of political complexities and international interference that is escalating out of control in this country.

As we were working in Shatila we received news that the Lebanese government has given Palestinian leaders 72 hours to solve the standoff in the north of Lebanon or they will storm the Camp with their US donated weaponry.

The Palestinian leaders must solve the problem with a group of extreme militants who are 70 per cent not Palestinian and who were armed in the first placed by the Siniora Government against Hezbollah, or else their people will be massacred and another Camp will be stained with a history of horror?

The Colossus of Baghdad
Wonders of the Imperial World
By Tom Engelhardt

Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.

We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and gods; nowadays, at least, it’s easier to identify the various wonders of our world with their architects. Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable brain for the veterans of that war; Frank Gehry dreamt up his visionary titanium-covered museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim; and the architectural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas; the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri; and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest wonder of all — an embassy large enough to embody the Bush administration’s vision of an American-reordered Middle East. We’re talking, of course, about the still-uncompleted American embassy, the largest on the planet, being constructed on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of Baghdad’s embattled Green Zone, now regularly under mortar fire. As Patrick Lenahan, Senior Architect and Project Manager at BDY, has put it (according to the firm’s website): “We understand how to involve the client most effectively as we direct our resources to make our client’s vision a reality.”

And what a vision it was! What a reality it’s turned out to be!

Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush-administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein’s mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian-Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of UN sanctions. Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, “The Hands of Victory,” supposedly modeled on Saddam’s own, holding 12-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly; while, as Jane Arraf has written, Saddam’s actual hands,”the hands that wrote the orders for the war against Iran and the destruction of Iraqi villages, the hands handcuffed behind his back as he went to trial and then was led to his execution are moldering under ground.”

It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad, wanted their victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant’s exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam’s pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday’s private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them themselves); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose — are you surprised? — one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Baghdadis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to Saddam’s benighted land.

And then, as the Iraqi capital’s landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration’s dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even one of Saddam’s palaces, roomy enough for a dictator interested in the control of a single country (or the odd neighboring state), wasn’t faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet’s New Rome.

Hence, Missouri’s BDY. That midwestern firm’s designers can now be classified as architects to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the company seems proud of it. You can go to its website and take a little tour in sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its Bush-inspired wonder, its particular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this: At $592 million, its proudest boast is that, unlike almost any other American construction project in that country, it is coming in on budget and on time. Of course, with a 30% increase in staffing size since Congress approved the project two years ago, it is now estimated that being “represented” in Baghdad will cost a staggering $1.2 billion per year. No wonder, with a crew of perhaps 1,000 officials assigned to it and a supporting staff (from food service workers to Marine guards and private security contractors) of several thousand more.

When the BDY-designed embassy opens in September (undoubtedly to the sound of mortar fire), its facilities will lack the gold-plated faucets installed in some of Saddam’s palaces and villas (and those of his sons), but they won’t lack for the amenities that Americans consider part and parcel of the good life, even in a “hardship” post. Take a look, for instance, at the embassy’s “pool house,” as imagined by BDY. (There’s a lovely sketch of it at their site.) Note the palm trees dotted around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis courts discretely in the background. For an American official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily fortified, four-mile square Green Zone during a year’s tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on the taxpayer’s dollar) is undoubtedly no small thing.

Admittedly, it may be hard to take that refreshing dip or catch a few sets of tennis in Baghdad’s heat if the present order for all U.S. personnel in the Green Zone to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times remains in effect — or if, as in the present palace/embassy, the pool (and ping-pong tables) are declared, thanks to increasing mortar and missile attacks, temporarily “off limits.” In that case, more time will probably be spent in the massive, largely windowless-looking Recreation Center, one of over 20 blast-resistant buildings BDY has planned. Perhaps this will house the promised embassy cinema. (Pirates of the Middle East, anyone?) Perhaps hours will be wiled away in the no less massive-looking, low-slung Post Exchange/Community Center, or in the promised commissary, the “retail and shopping areas,” the restaurants, or even, so the BDY website assures us, the “schools” (though it’s a difficult to imagine the State Department allowing children at this particular post).

And don’t forget the “fire station” (mentioned but not shown by BDY), surely so handy once the first rockets hit. Small warning: If you are among the officials about to staff this post, keep in mind that the PX and commissary might be slightly understocked. The Washington Post recently reported that “virtually every bite and sip consumed [in the embassy] is imported from the United States, entering Iraq via Kuwait in huge truck convoys that bring fresh and processed food, including a full range of Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, every seven to 10 days.” Recently, there has been a “Theater-Wide Delay in Food Deliveries,” due to unexplained convoy problems. Even the yogurt supplies have been running low.

Kabir Joshi-Vijayan and Matthew Skogstad-Stubbs: A friend, returning from Caracas, described a bus attempting to scale a mountain, gradually making its way up the slope, frequently stalling or stopping as the engine sputtered, but eventually reaching the summit. It reminded him of the Venezuelan revolutionary process. Why don’t we begin today by describing both the process and the impact that the Bolivarian revolution of today has had. Could you lay out how the Venezuelan society, and the daily life of its people, has changed since Chavez’s inauguration in 1999.

Noam Chomsky: There have been some changes. I don’t think they’re dramatic. This is probably the first time in Venezuelan history that there’s a government that’s making more than gestures towards using its huge resources to help the poorer parts of the population. This is mostly towards health, education, cooperatives and so on. Just how great the impact is it’s pretty hard to say. But certainly we know the popular reaction to them, which is after all the most important question. What’s important is not what we think about it, but what Venezuelans think about it. And that’s pretty well known. There are pretty good polling agencies in Latin America, the main one is Latinobarometro, which is in Chile. Very respected organization. There are similar polls in the United States in less detail. They monitor attitudes throughout Latin America on all sorts of crucial issues. The most recent one in Chile, in December, found – as earlier ones have – support for democracy and support for the government have been rising very sharply in Venezuela since 1998. Venezuela is now essentially tied with Uruguay at the top in support for the government and support for democracy. It’s well ahead of the other Latin American countries in support for the economic policies of the government and also well ahead in the belief that the policies help the poor, meaning the huge majority, instead of elites. And there are similar judgments on other issues, and as I say it has been rising rather sharply… Despite the obstacles there has been a degree of progress that has been considered by the population as very meaningful, and that’s the best measure.
With the announcement of the creation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV, and the acceleration in their attempted appropriation of various services and companies, can you predict the maturing of this revolution?

It’s not easy to say. There are conflicting tendencies, and the question for Venezuela is which one will prevail. There are democratizing tendencies, devolution of power, popular assemblies, communities taking control of their own budgets, workplace cooperatives and so on. All of that is building towards democracy. There are also authoritarian tendencies: centralization, charismatic figure, and so on. These policies in themselves you can’t really judge in which direction they’ll go. For a country to control its own resources is certainly perfectly reasonable.

Take, say Chile, which is considered the poster-boy of democratic capitalism, the advocate of the free-market, and so on and so forth. That’s the standard party line. More or less suppressed in this story is that Chile’s major export is copper – that’s its main source of income – and the world’s largest copper producer, CODELCO, is in Chile, and it happens to be nationalized. It was nationalized by Allende, and it’s still nationalized. There are also private producers. CODELCO, the government producer, provides probably ten times as much revenue to the state as the private ones, which send the revenue abroad. And that funds what there is of Chilean social programs, and so on. And many other countries control their own resources. It’s taken for granted. So if Venezuela takes greater control of its own resources, that could be a very positive development. On the other hand, it might not be. So for example, when Saudi Arabia nationalized its oil in the 1970s, that did mean that they were controlling their own oil instead of foreign corporations – mainly ARAMCO – which is to the good. On the other hand it’s in the hands of a pretty harsh tyranny. Washington’s major and most valued ally in the region, which is a pretty brutal tyranny and the most extreme Islamist fundamentalist state in the world. So the story depends on how the resources are used.

Kabir Joshi-Vijayan and Matthew Skogstad-Stubbs: Mercosur, the common market of the southern cone, is a group that boasts the largest economies of South America. It is founded on free-market style arrangements, like NAFTA, and does not seem to be leaning towards any alternative to the prevailing neoliberal doctrine. Could you comment on the organization?

Noam Chomsky: Mercosur for the moment is more of a hope than an actuality. It has plans, and has made some steps. The latest Mercosur meeting was actually in Brazil, this past December, and it did lay plans along with the meeting of Latin American leaders in Cochabamba. They’re sort of making plans for a European Union type federation. This is extremely important, historically the Latin American countries have been very much separated from one another, oriented towards the imperial power that happened to be dominant, most recently the United States. Separated from one another there was no integration in Latin America, and moves towards integration are very significant, and they’re just beginning really in a serious way. Mercosur is part of it, Cochabamba meetings are another step, and there are other steps. Integration is a powerful step towards maintaining sovereignty and independence. When countries are separated from one another they can kind of be picked off, either by force or by economic strangulation. If they integrate and cooperate, they’re much more free from external control, meaning U.S. control in the last half-century – but it goes back much farther than that.

So that’s an important step, but there are barriers. One barrier is that there is also a desperate need in Latin America for internal integration. Each of the countries has a very sharp divide between a small wealthy Europeanized, mostly white, elite, and a huge mass of deeply impoverished people, usually indian, black and mestizos. The race correlation isn’t perfect, but it’s a correlation. Latin America has some of the worst inequality in the world, and those problems are also beginning to be overcome. There’s a long way to go, but there are steps towards them. In Venezuela, in Bolivia, to some extent in Brazil, in Argentina, and not much elsewhere for the moment. Maybe Ecuador, with the new government. But both the internal integration and the external integration among the countries, these are quite important steps, and it’s really the first time since the Spanish colonization 500 years ago, so that’s of some significance.

Kabir Joshi-Vijayan and Matthew Skogstad-Stubbs: Let’s return to some of the criticisms of authoritarianism that have followed term extensions and the recent so-called enabling law.

Noam Chomsky: Well those laws were passed by the parliament. The parliament happens to be almost completely dominated by Chavez, but the reason for that is that the opposition refuses to take part. Probably under U.S. pressure. I don’t like those laws myself. How they turn out depends on popular pressures. They could be steps towards authoritarianism. They could be steps towards implementing constructive programs. It’s not for us to say, it’s for the Venezuelan people to say, and we know their opinion very well.

Kabir Joshi-Vijayan and Matthew Skogstad-Stubbs: Oil wealth in Venezuela has given the country the opportunity to extend aid to poor communities in the West, including New York and London, and it has allowed it to buy up the debt of Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador. Could you speak to the uses that Venezuela has put its oil wealth.

Noam Chomsky: Let’s begin with its aid to the West, which is a little ironic. But there’s a little bit of background to that. It began with a program right here in Boston, where I am. What happened is that a group of Senators approached the 8 major energy corporations and asked if they could provide short-term assistance to poor people in the United States, to get through the harsh winter, when they were unable to pay their oil bills because of the high oil prices. They got one response, from Citgo, the Venezuelan owned company, and that one company did indeed provide temporary low-cost oil in Boston, then the Bronx in New York and elsewhere, to survive the harsh winter. That’s the Western aid. So there’s more to it than just Chavez giving aid.

As for the rest, yes Chavez did buy up a quarter, or a third of the debt of Argentina. That was an effort to help Argentina rid themselves of the IMF, as the President of Argentina put it. The IMF, which is sort of an off-shoot of the US Treasury Department, has had a shattering effect in Latin America. Its programs have been followed more rigorously in Latin America than any other part of the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and they’ve been a disaster. So take say Bolivia. They’ve been following IMF policies for 25 years, and at the end per-capita income is lower than it was in the beginning. Argentina was the poster-child of the IMF. It was marvelous, it was doing all the things right, they were urging everyone else to follow the same policies, same for the World Bank and the US Treasury Department. Well what happened is it led to a total economic catastrophe. Argentina did manage to get out of the catastrophe by radically violating IMF rules, and they determined to rid themselves of the IMF, as Kirchner put it, and Venezuela helped them. Brazil was doing the same thing in its own way and now Bolivia is doing it with Venezuelan help. The IMF is in fact in trouble because it’s financing came largely from debt collection and if the countries refuse to accept it’s borrowing because the policies are too harmful, well it’s not clear what they’re going to do.

There was also Petrocaribe. A program to provide oil on favorable terms, with delayed payment, to many of the Caribbean countries as well to some others. Another program was called Operation Miracle. It uses Venezuelan funding to send Cuban doctors – Cuban doctors are very highly trained, they have a very advanced medical system, comparable to the first-world systems – to places like Jamaica, and other countries of the region. It began by finding people who are blind, have completely lost vision, but could be surgically treated to recover vision, and they are identified by Cuban doctors, brought back to Cuba, and treated with their high-class medical facilities, and returned to their countries able to see. That leaves an impression.

Corruption within the Department of Interior may have allowed oil companies to improperly save billions at the expense of the taxpayers. The Department’s Inspector General has already made at least two criminal referals to the FBI and the Justice Department, and Congressional Democrats have launched several investigations and introduced new legislation to fix the problem.

In a nutshell, oil companies leasing federal land to drill for oil are required to pay the government royalties based on a percentage of their sales. But under the Royalty-in-Kind program, the companies can pay in the form of oil and gas instead of cash. The problem is that oil prices have increased more than the value of the oil and gas royalty revenues being recieved, meaning that the oil companies are managing to withhold a growing amount of their profits from Uncle Sam.

As you might guess, Royalty-in-Kind was proposed and remains supported by the oil industry, and Bush implanted officials with deep ties to the oil industry in charge of the agency responsible for enforcing the program, the Minerals Management Service (MMS).

In light of the growing scandal, MMS Director Johnnie Burton has already announced that she will be retiring by the end of May. Burton started an oil exploration business before becoming a staunch Republican politician in Wyoming, where she developed ties with Dick Cheney. Greg Smith became the new head of MMS, but he just announced his own sudden retirement Tuesday.

“It appears this Administration uses retirement like some perverse witness protection program,” said Rep. Nick Rahall. “Get them out of the spotlight and off the list of in-the-know folks who could provide damaging evidence. Instead of Watergate’s ‘follow the money,’ the Bush Administration has “follow the retirements.’ “

Rep. Rahall is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, which held a hearing Wednesday on the Energy Policy Reform and Revitilization Act aimed at eliminating the oil royalty corruption and loopholes, among other things.

Much of the controversy surrounds a mistake inadvertantly created during the Clinton Administration that went unaddressed and not publically acknowledged until 2006. MMS Director Burton claimed at the time that she had only recently discovered the problem, but midlevel officials spotted the mistake in 2000 and the Interior Department’s Inspector General and even top Republicans say she either knew or should have known about the mistake as early as 2004.

The delay allowed oil companies to save more money and prevented the chance for easier lease renegotiations since energy prices were much lower at the time.