The Rag Blog

Venezuela is changing. Fast. No other word captures the speed and magnitude of change as well as that weighty word–‘revolution.’ This is indeed the word used by many of the Venezuelans I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing during ten days in March. Venezuela is undergoing a ‘Bolivarian’ revolution. But what does ‘Bolivarianism’ entail?

Contrary to the image often portrayed in the foreign media, Chavez has gone overboard in seeking to include as many as possible in the Bolivarian state. He has time and again extended an olive branch to his enemies.

To be honest, Zhou Enlai’s quip about the results of the French Revolution—that it is ‘too early to tell’—is doubly applicable to Venezuela. Radically different constituencies, political visions and potential futures are today co-existing more or less harmoniously within the dramatic process of change. This is perhaps inevitable. But some of the wide ranging ambiguity about the future direction of Bolivarianism has to do with Chavez’s crucial strategic choice in favour of peaceful social change. Contrary to the image often portrayed in the foreign media, Chavez has gone overboard in seeking to include as many as possible in the Bolivarian state. He has time and again extended an olive branch to his enemies.

For example, immediately after the failed coup against him, his first act was to guarantee the constitutional rights of the coup leaders, none of whom have been harmed. Likewise, he has consistently avoided using military and police forces under his command to repress the opposition, and had been exceedingly cautious towards foreign companies and investors. Some of his strongest supporters therefore consider Chavez excessively soft. The ideological message of Bolivarianism is straddling this society — deeply divided by class — with a strong Venezuelan and pan-latinoamerican nationalism. The ambiguity is patently visible in the street iconography of Caracas, which combines the faces of the aristocratic liberal Simon Bolivar and the radical communist Che Guevara, both sharing the landscape with huge billboards of fashionable young women advertising beer.

Yet if the future is foggy, the present is dramatically clear. Under pressure from Venezuela’s poor, on whose support Chavez’s political survival depends, the government moved decidedly leftwards over the course of the last few years. This leftward move consists in two processes: democratization and redistribution.

First, redistribution. Having wrestled control of the national oil company from the old oligarchy, Chavez redirected a portion of Venezuela’s significant oil revenues to new social projects, called missions, each targeting a specific social privation. The bulk of the resources were earmarked for non-cash benefits such as education and health. But government policies have also helped more people to move out of the informal economy and take formal jobs, affecting a significant rise in cash wages for the poorest workers. An international chorus of snickers erupts whenever these social spending programs are mentioned. Most completely miss the point. Is there corruption? Inefficiency? Probably. But by relying on the army, the national oil company, and ad hoc communal organizing rather than on the traditional state bureaucracy, the social missions manage a level of efficiency that is quite stunning.

U.S. occupation troops forced their way into the offices of the Antiquities Department with its chief denouncing the move as “a violation.”

In a statement to Azzaman, Abbas al-Hussaini, said the raid was the second in a week. Earlier a force of four U.S. military vehicles had forced its way into the department’s offices.

“This action is a violation of the Iraqi ancient heritage,” Hussaini said.

The department offices are adjacent to the Iraq Museum which was looted shortly after U.S. invasion troops entered Baghdad.

The department faces an uphill battle to protect Iraqi ancient sites of which there are more than 10,000 archaeologically significant ones in the country.

Illegal digging is reported to be taking place at some of the most famous Mesopotamian metropolitans such as Nimrud and Khorsabad in the north and Ur and Borsipa in the south.

At least 10,000 pieces of Iraq Museum treasures are still missing following the museum’s plunder and looting as U.S. invasion troops entered Baghdad.

Baghdad, May 19, (VOI) – The Iraqi interior ministry will call on all staff from security agencies during the time of the former regime to appear at the ministry’s institutions and police stations, “otherwise they will be dealt with in accordance with the terrorism law,” an official source said.

“The decision to bring back the old security staff includes those who worked in intelligence, public security and special services, except those who have reached the age of retirement,” Maj. General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, the interior ministry’s national command center chief, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
“Security staff outside Iraq will have to refer to the country’s consulates and interest sections in 90 days, and those inside the country have to refer to the interior ministry in 60 days,” added Khalaf.

The interior ministry official affirmed that those “who fail to report to the security organizations in the country, during the mentioned period of time, will be considered involved in acts of hostility against the Iraqi people.”

GORDON Brown will remove all British forces from Iraq before the next election under a plan to rebuild support among disillusioned Labour voters.

Scotland on Sunday can reveal the Prime Minister elect is working on a withdrawal plan that could see troop numbers slashed from 7,000 to as few as 2,000 within 12 months.

If implemented, the strategy would culminate in total withdrawal no later than spring 2010, the date by which Brown must go to the country to seek his own mandate.

Policy under Tony Blair involved keeping a small force in Iraq for many years to come. But it emerged last night that President George Bush has been briefed by White House officials to expect an announcement from Downing Street within Brown’s first 100 days in power.

Progressives should think twice before rejoicing over Wolfie’s departure.

When Paul Wolfowitz’s name was put forward to become president of the World Bank in 2005, I wrote a piece entitled: “Top 10 Reasons Why Paul Wolfowitz Would Make a Good World Bank President”. As he gracefully steps down from that job, I believe that history has proven me right. Consider the following:

1. He personally helped address the nagging problem of unequal pay for women by giving his “female companion” a $47,000 raise.

2. This past week, he diverted Bush cabinet officials from fighting the Iraq War, spinning Alberto Gonzales, and figuring out a way to invade Iran by keeping them on the phone to foreign governments to defend his proud record.

3. He weakened the Bush administration’s Iraq War brain trust by bringing other key neo-conservative bureaucrats from the Pentagon with him to run the Bank and badger its staff.

4. He buttressed the “Coalition of the Willing” (the brave countries that backed Bush’s invasion of Iraq) by promoting unqualified people from those countries into numerous top positions at the Bank.

5. He managed to convince governments of the world’s eight most powerful countries to give the Bank key global leadership role in the fight against climate change while the Bank continued to be the world’s largest subsidizer of fossil fuels.

6. He made the difficult concept of corruption real to ordinary people.

7. He unified the World Bank staff against a common enemy.

8. He took up so much of The Washington Post the day after tendering his “resignation” that Paris Hilton’s sentencing got pushed to page three of the “Style” section.

9. His scandal drew attention to three decades of terrific work by World Bank critics on everything from the environment to worker rights to family planning to the irony of someone who makes nearly $400,000 offering advice to those who make less than a dollar a day.

For there to be a progressive movement in this country — an evolutionary leap forward in the way we relate to each other and the environment — we need massive direct action.

You can’t expect a chicken to produce a duck egg — Malcolm X

Thank God, there are people willing go to jail in obedience to a higher law in protesting, say, the continued occupation of Iraq. It’s inspiring.

What’s discouraging, though, is the possibility that there’s not enough activists and/or movement organization in the U.S. right now to make a lasting difference on a whole host of foreign and domestic policy issues.

Because the pollsters don’t ask about people’s willingness to take part in civil disobedience, I have no way of knowing for sure. I just hope my sense of it all is waaaaay off. But, it feels like most disaffected Americans — profoundly disturbed with the State of the Union, in particular; and the State of the World, in general — have deceived themselves into thinking that electing the “right” person to government office is going to change things; that if only we get-out-the-vote, write even more letters, and create yet another blog … I’m not saying it’s trivial to do such things, but if folks think that’s enough, then we’re in trouble.

Think about it.

The Republicans got spanked during the mid-term elections in what was billed as a referendum on Bush’s Mess-in-Potamia and just as I predicted in this very column immediately following “the thumpin,'” Bush interpreted the election results — not as a call for an exit strategy — but as a plea for better war management. And what have the Democrats done?

Maybe the conventional wisdom, inside-politics view is that the Dems still don’t have enough power to end the occupation of Iraq, or they’re just “playing politics” by exploiting the now popular anti-this-war momentum, while not wanting to be seen as being “weak on defense” or “soft on terror.”

When even Lee Iacocca is writing: “Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind … but instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘Stay the course.’ Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic” — you know it’s “fill-the-jails” time, to borrow from Gandhi’s tactical playbook. America’s Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., touched on the idea in his celebrated Letter From Birmingham Jail:

Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a better path? You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue so that it can no longer be ignored.

The lives of many Iraqi women have become appreciably harsher following international sanctions and the US-led invasion. Although pleased to see Saddam toppled, some look back on the prosperity and social liberation of the Ba’athist years with nostalgia, says Nadje Sadig Al-Ali. Iraqi women sometimes remember that they have lived in a multi-ethnic, multicultural national entity with a prospering economy and rapid modernisation; at other times they recall repression, discrimination, declining living conditions and sectarian tensions.

I have tried to document the diversity of experiences during the monarchy, the years after the revolution of 1958, the economic boom (and the expansion of the middle class) in the 1970s, the Iran-Iraq war from 1980-88, the first Gulf war of 1991 and the economic sanctions of 1990-2003.

Since the United States invasion many under-represented sections of society fail to acknowledge these experiences as different. I feel uneasy when people say “Iraqi women think…” or “Iraqi women want…” because how can that represent such a wide variety of views? The difference in perspectives is historically based and cannot simply be reduced to ethnicity and religion.

The period after the first Ba’athist coup of 1963 is associated with increased political violence, greater sectarianism and a reversal of progressive laws and reforms. Yet many women remember relative social freedom and cultural vibrancy during the rule of the Arif brothers, 1963-68, and the early Ba’ath period, 1968-78.

Many secular, apolitical middle-class Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and Christian women appreciated the achievements of the early Ba’ath period in education, modernisation of infrastructures and welfare provisions. While those who actively opposed the regime remember political repression, mass arrests, torture and executions, even some who had first hand experiences of the regime’s repressive practices retrospectively appreciated its developmental policies.

Cosmopolitan Baghdad

Women’s memories show that an urban middle-class identity, especially the cosmopolitan Baghdadi identity, subsumed ethnic and religious differences even throughout sanctions. A middle-class Shia family in Baghdad had more in common with its Sunni Arab and Kurdish middle-class neighbours in mixed neighbourhoods than they did with the impoverished Shia living in Madina al-Thawra (renamed Saddam city, now Sadr city) or with Shia in the south. Baghdadi families were often multi-religious and multi-ethnic, and mixed marriages were common among the urban Baghdadi middle classes.

Zeynab, a sympathiser of the Islamist Shia Da’wa party who now lives in Dearborn in the United States, said: “We were all friends. We celebrated holidays together. When we had the [Shia] celebration in commemoration of Imam Hussein, even Jews and Christians joined us. We never thought about race or religion. Schools were open to everybody. In schools, we had Jewish, Christian, Sunni and Kurdish classmates. There were no bad feelings towards anyone.”

From the late 1970s differences between secular and Islamist political positions started to matter more, influencing experiences of the regime. Members or sympathisers of the Da’wa party were targeted not so much for their religious affiliation but because of their opposition to the regime and their aim to establish an Islamic state. No one wants to diminish the suffering that members of the Shia Islamist opposition parties endured, but they were not the only targets of state repression; Kurds and others, including Sunni Arabs who actively resisted the regime, all suffered.

The Shia Islamists’ claim to having been singled out because of religious affiliation rather than political conviction contributes to the current atmosphere in which rights, privileges and power are linked to sectarian divisions and arguments over who suffered most. Of course, specific atrocities committed by the previous regime should not be swept under the carpet for the sake of national unity. The trial of Saddam Hussein was a missed opportunity to initiate a credible truth and reconciliation process.

Many Iraqi women gained socially and economically during the 1970s despite political repression. Living conditions improved for most of the population as the state relied not only on force and its power to control, but also devised generous welfare programmes and opened opportunities for investment and capital accumulation that helped many in the expanding middle classes.

Whew! Thank God that’s over!

The mighty wind you hear coming from Washington today is the huge sigh of relief from Democratic leaders, glad that they can now drop all the political posturing about ending the war in Iraq and get back on board with the imperial program. With the crushing defeat yesterday of what was purported to be a bill to “end” the war, Senate Majority Leader Harry “Give ‘Em Mild Heck” Reid moved quickly to give the Dear Leader all the money he needs to keep feeding the Babylonian inferno with the dead bodies of Iraqi citizens and American soldiers.

In fact, the bill in question, the Feingold Plan, would not have actually ended the illegal occupation of Iraq – God forbid! However, it would have curtailed the extent of the war crime to some degree – withdrawing “combat forces” but keeping troops in Iraq for “counterterrorism” (and aren’t we constantly told that all the Iraqi insurgents are “terrorists”?) and “training Iraqi forces” and protecting the fortress embassy being constructed in the heart of Baghdad. But even this slight slackening of the garrotte would not have taken effect until April 2008 – or after 10 more months of savage “surging” by Bush and his sectarian death-squadding allies. (Such as this kind of thing.)

In any case, it was well-known that the bill was dead on arrival and had no chance of passing; that’s precisely why the Democratic leaders put it up for consideration. It was a PR exercise to give political cover to those Democrats whose ambitions have forced them to at least nod toward the “consent of the governed,” as clearly expressed in the anti-war vote last year. But now that the stunt is over, it’s back to bipartisan business. As the New York Times reports:

After the vote, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader and a co-sponsor of the Feingold plan, said he was committed to delivering legislation acceptable to Mr. Bush by the end of next week. He conceded that the compromise was likely to disappoint war opponents who had pushed Congress to set a pull-out date…

In the end, the only proposal to pass the Senate [with overwhelming Democratic support] was a resolution by Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, senior Republican on the Appropriations Committee, which urged Congress to provide about $95 billion sought by the president for the war before Memorial Day.

Of course, those “war opponents” who will be “disappointed” that the Democrats failed to pass the Feingold “mild curtailment of the slaughter” bill include the majority of citizens in the United States who now oppose the war and want to see it brought to an end, according to all polls. This why they voted the Democrats into power in last year’s election – to do something about stopping the war.

It was a vain hope, of course. The Democrats (with a handful of honorable exceptions) had already displayed their preternatural spinelessness throughout the Bush imperium, culminating in their failure last fall to mount a proper, furious, public, frenzied – if doomed – resistance to the “Military Commissions Act,” the anti-Magna Carta measure that transformed the United States into a banana republic run by a tyrannical “Unitary Executive” and his military junta. (The essence of the bill allows the unchallengeable Commander-in-Chief to declare anyone on earth an “enemy combatant” and keep them chained up indefinitely, with only one legal recourse allowed: a military tribunal, set up by the Commander, for those captives he decides to put to the question. As for the rest, they can rot forever at his pleasure.)

The Democrats, afraid of looking “soft” on terrorism, put up only the most token, tepid defense of the Constitutional Republic and let the MCA sail through, all the while telling their supporters with a wink: “This is just tactical. Wait till we win back Congress in November, then we’ll get rid of this law.” Yet the mephitic measure remains on the books, in full force – five months after the Democrats were sworn in.

It was therefore the height of folly – or the depths of desperation – to believe that these Democrats would do anything substantial to upset the imperial apple-cart that Bush has set rolling through the Middle East and Central Asia. They are too cowardly, too co-opted, too corrupt and too comfortable to challenge the long-standing, bipartisan policies of loot and domination that have burdened us with a vast empire of more than 730 military bases on every continent, and endless, churning wars – overt and covert, direct and proxy – all over the world.

There is not ‘one’ civil war, nor ‘one’ insurgency, but several civil wars and insurgencies between different communities in today’s Iraq. Within this warring society, the Iraqi government is only one among many ‘state-like’ actors, and is largely irrelevant in terms of ordering social, economic, and political life. It is now possible to argue that Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation. These are some of the key findings of Accepting Realities in Iraq a new Briefing Paper written by Dr Gareth Stansfield and published today by Chatham House.

The paper also assesses Al-Qaeda activity within Iraq, especially in the major cities in the centre and north of the country. Dr Stansfield argues that, although Al-Qaeda is challenged by local groups, there is momentum behind its activity. Iraq’s neighbors too have a greater capacity to affect the situation on the ground than either the UK or the US. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all have different reasons for seeing the instability in Iraq continue, and each uses different methods to influence developments.

Dr Stansfield argues that with the myriad conflicts in Iraq following societal, religious and political divides and often involving state actors, the multinational forces are finding it exceptionally difficult to promote security normalization. The recent US ‘surge’ in Baghdad looks likely to have simply pushed insurgent activity to neighboring cities and cannot deliver the required political accommodation. A political solution will require Sunni Arab representatives’ participation in government, the recognition of Moqtada al-Sadr as a legitimate political partner, and a positive response to Kurdish concerns. Further, it would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak and can be reorganized by the US or the international community, there must be ‘buy-in’ from the key Iraqi political actors.

I arrived in Iraq before L. Paul Bremer arrived in May 2003 and stayed on long after his ignominious and furtive departure in June 2004 — long enough to see the tragic consequences of his policies in Iraq. So I was disappointed by the indignant lack of repentance on full display in his Outlook article on Sunday.

In it, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority argues that he “was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny,” including the Baath Party and the Iraqi army. He complains about “critics who’ve never spent time in Iraq” and “don’t understand its complexities.” But Bremer himself never understood Iraq, knew no Arabic, had no experience in the Middle East and made no effort to educate himself — as his statements clearly show.

Time and again, he refers to “the formerly ruling Sunnis,” “rank-and-file Sunnis,” “the old Sunni regime,” “responsible Sunnis.” This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves — at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of “Sunni Iraqis” or “Shiite Iraqis” before the war, just like there was no “Sunni Triangle” or “Shiite South” until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq’s regions.

Despite Bremer’s assertions, Saddam Hussein’s regime was not a Sunni regime; it was a dictatorship with many complex alliances in Iraqi society, including some with Shiites. If anything, the old tyranny was a Tikriti regime, led by relatives and clansmen from Hussein’s hometown. Hussein punished Sunnis who became too prominent and suppressed Sunni Arab officers from Mosul and Baghdad in favor of more pliable officers from rural and tribal backgrounds. Local Sunni movements that were not pro-Hussein were repressed just as harshly as the Shiites.

Bremer was not alone in his blindness here. Just two weeks ago, I interviewed John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, about the crisis of Iraqi refugees, who now number more than 2 million. He displayed the same dismal approach to Iraq as Bremer. Bolton claimed that most of the refugees were Sunnis, fleeing because “they fear that Shiites are going to exact retribution for four or five decades of Baath rule.”

Many Iraqis saw the Americans as new colonists, intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. That was precisely Bremer’s approach. When he succumbed slightly to Iraqi demands for democracy and created Interim Governing Council, its members were selected by sectarian and ethnic quotas. Even the Communist Party member of the council was chosen not because he was secular but because he was a Shiite.

In Bremer’s mind, the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities. So he pitted the minority that was not benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and then expected them both to be grateful to him. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the Shiites by punishing the Sunnis. He did not see his job as managing the country; he saw it as managing a civil war. So I accuse him of causing one.

Bremer claims that Hussein “modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler’s” and compares the Baath Party to the Nazi Party. Set aside the desperation of the debater who reaches immediately for the Nazi analogy and remember that there is no mention of such “modeling” in any of the copious literature about Iraq. This ludicrous Nazi analogy permeates the entire article; it also permeated the proconsul’s time in Baghdad, when Bremer imagined himself de-Nazifying postwar Germany, saving the Jews (the Shiites) from the Nazis (those evil Sunnis).

This thoughtless comparison is one of the main reasons why he performed so horribly in Iraq. (Remember, most Baath Party members were Shiites; so in Bremer’s analogy, I suppose most of the Iraqi “Nazis” would be “Jews.”)

Bremer claims that Iraqis hated their army at the time of the U.S. invasion. In fact, the army was the most nationalist institution in the country, one that predated the Baath Party. In electing not to fight U.S. forces, the army was expecting to be recognized by the occupation — and indeed, until Bremer arrived, it appeared that many soldiers and officers were hoping to cooperate with the Americans.

Bremer is wrong to say that Shiites hated the Iraqi army. He treats Iraqis as if they were Hutus and Tutsis, claiming that “Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers.” This is just not true. To be sure, Sunnis were overrepresented in the officer corps, and Shiites sometimes felt as if they faced a glass ceiling. But just as there were Shiite ministers under Hussein, there were also Shiite generals. At least a third of the famous deck of cards of Iraqi leaders most wanted by the Americans were Shiites.

Bremer also claims that the “Fallujah Brigade” was a recalled brigade from Hussein’s former army. Again, simply not true. I was there. The brigade may have been led by a former Iraqi general, but enlistment was open to all volunteers in Fallujah, as I personally saw. The brigade was not a pre-existing unit that was merely recalled; rather, it was composed of a diverse group of former officers, soldiers, policemen and members of the resistance.

Bremer also exaggerates the numbers of casualties in the 1991 uprisings against Hussein. While the Baathist regime was brutal and killed tens of thousands, there is no evidence that Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as Bremer claims. But there is growing evidence that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since Bremer first came to power in Baghdad.

Some have indeed pilloried Bremer for his individual errors, such as disbanding the army. But these blunders are not the reasons why most Iraqis hate the American occupation and support violent resistance to it. The main grievance most Iraqis have with America is simply the occupation itself — an occupation that lingers on years after Bremer waved goodbye.

rosen@newamerica.net

Newly declassified data show that as additional American troops began streaming into Iraq in March and April, the number of attacks on civilians and security forces there stayed relatively steady or at most declined slightly, in the clearest indication yet that the troop increase could take months to have a widespread impact on security.

Even the suggestion of a slight decline could be misleading, since the figures are purely a measure of how many attacks have taken place, not the death toll of each one. American commanders have conceded that since the start of the troop increase, which the United States calls a “surge,” attacks in the form of car bombs with their high death tolls have risen.

The attack data are compiled by the Pentagon but were made public in a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. It analyzed the effect of the attacks on the struggling American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq, especially the program’s failings in the electricity and oil sectors.

A draft version of the report, obtained by The New York Times last week, indicated that every day during much of the past four years, somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil, valued at anywhere from $5 million to $15 million, had been unaccounted for. But the draft report did not contain the attack statistics.

When asked about the new data, Barham Salih, an Iraqi deputy prime minister, said in an interview that the troop increase was having a positive impact in specific neighborhoods in Baghdad, particularly in the Shiite-dominated eastern half of the city. But he said Iraqi intelligence had concluded that Al Qaeda was in effect surging at the same time in Iraq to counteract the American program, damping any immediate gains.