The Rag Blog

03/05/07 “ICH” — — It was a struggle between the United States and the Third World. What there was, was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political changes against US-supported repressive regimes, or setting up their own progressive governments. These acts of self-determination didn’t coincide with the needs of the American power elite, and so the United States moved to crush those governments and movements even though the Soviet Union was playing virtually no role at all in these scenarios. (It is remarkable the number of people who make fun of conspiracy theories but who accepted without question the existence of an International Communist Conspiracy.)

Washington officials of course couldn’t say that they were intervening to block economic or political change, so they called it “fighting communism”, fighting a communist conspiracy, fighting for freedom and democracy.

I’m reminded of all this because of a recent article in the Washington Post about El Salvador. It concerned two men who had been on opposite sides in the civil war of 1980-1992. One was José Salgado, who had been a government soldier, and is now the mayor of San Miguel, El Salvador’s second-largest city.

Salgado enthusiastically embraced the scorched-earth tactics of his army bosses, the Post reports, even massacres of children, the elderly, the sick — entire villages. It was all in the name of beating back communism, Salgado says he remembers being told. But he’s now haunted by doubts about what he saw, what he did, and even why he fought. A US-backed war that was defined at the time as a battle against communism is now seen by former government soldiers and former guerrillas as less a conflict about ideology and more a battle over poverty and basic human rights.

“We soldiers were tricked,” says Salgado. “They told us the threat was communism. But I look back and realize those weren’t communists out there that we were fighting — we were just poor country people killing poor country people.”

Salgado says he once thought that the guerrillas dreamed of communism, but now that those same men are his colleagues in business and politics, he is learning that they wanted what he wanted: prosperity, a chance to move up in the world, freedom from repression.

All of which makes what they see around them today even more heartbreaking and frustrating. For all their sacrifices, El Salvador is still among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere — more than 40 percent of Salvadorans live on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations. The country is still racked by violence, still scarred by corruption. For some the question remains: Was it all worth it?

“We gave our blood, we killed our friends and, in the end, things are still bad,” says Salgado. “Look at all this poverty, and look how the wealth is concentrated in just a few hands.”

The guerrillas Salgado once fought live with the same doubts. Former guerrilla Benito Argueta laments that the future didn’t turn out as he’d hoped. Even though some factions of the coalition of guerrilla armies that fought in the civil war were Marxist, he said, ideology had nothing to do with his decision to take up arms and leave the farm where his father earned only a few colones for backbreaking work. Nor did ideology play a role in motivating his friends in the People’s Revolutionary Army. He remembers fighting “for a piece of land, for the chance that my children might someday get to go to the university.”[1]

The Salvadoran government could never have waged the war as destructively and for as long as it did without a massive influx of military aid and training from Washington — estimated value: six billion dollars; 75,000 Salvadorans dead; about 20 Americans killed or wounded in combat; dissidents today still have to fear right-wing death squads; scarcely any significant social change in El Salvador; the poor remain as ever; a small class of the wealthy still own the country. But never mind. “Communism” was defeated, and El Salvador remains a loyal member of the empire, sending troops to Iraq.[2]

This is not merely of historical interest. A civil war still rages in Colombia. Government soldiers and large numbers of right-wing paramilitary forces, with indispensable and endless military support from the United States, battle “communism”, year after year, decade after decade. The casualties long ago exceeded El Salvador. The irony is monumental, for of those labeled “communist”, a handful of the older ones may have fancied themselves as heirs to Che Guevara 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, but for a long time now the primary motivation of these “left-wing” paramilitary forces has been profits from drugs and kidnapings, obtaining revenge for their comrades’ deaths, and staying alive and avoiding capture. Someday the survivors on both sides may well be expressing sentiments and regrets similar to the Salvadorans above, wondering what the hell it was all really about, or at least wondering what the United States’s obsessive interest in their country was. (For those who may have forgotten, it should be noted that the Soviet Union has not existed since 1991.)

The Bush administration is very focused these days on Iran’s nuclear program. This focus has only sharpened in the aftermath of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent report that Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of a UN Security Council demand.

“A nuclear-armed Iran is not a very pleasant prospect for anybody to think about,” Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl in Australia. “It clearly could do significant damage. And so I think we need to continue to do everything we can to make certain they don’t achieve that objective.” Asked if the administration would continue to pursue diplomacy, the vice president responded that while “we’ve been working with the EU and going through the United Nations with sanctions the President has also made it clear that we haven’t taken any options off the table.”

In the White House, “options on the table” is code for military action. There have been many media reports of U.S. preparations to attack Iran. But the primary rationale for such an attack–to prevent Iran from going nuclear–is deeply problematic. Not only is the United States beefing up its military in general, it is even planning a modernization of its nuclear arsenal. The nuclear hypocrisy of the Bush administration makes any resolution of the conflict with Iran all the more difficult.

U.S. Military Spending

The new round of hand-wringing and saber-rattling about Iran’s nascent but worrisome nuclear program comes just a few weeks after the Bush administration announced its new budget, which included billions for nuclear weapons development. The Department of Energy’s “weapons activities” budget request totals $6.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the Pentagon’s $481.4 billion proposed budget. But the budget for new nukes is large and growing — even in comparison to Cold War figures.

During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the nuclear animosity between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons.

New Zealand prides itself on human rights, social compassion and political “neutrality”. Moreover, New Zealanders pride themselves on being “peace loving” people. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. These images are a distortion of reality. New Zealand is a fully-fledged member of America’s war on Muslims.

I recently spent some time in New Zealand. As an Australian citizen, I do not need visa to enter or work in New Zealand. However, on my arrival from Melbourne at Wellington Airport, I was singled-out for “questioning” and thorough search. I was told; “it is our policy to identify and question particular passengers”. After a lengthy argument, I was allowed to leave the Airport. Outside the Airport, an Australian passenger said to me; “it has nothing to do with you being Australian or not. Are you a Muslim”? To be plain honest, I never expected this to happen to me in New Zealand.

In Christchurch, I was abused by another proud New Zealander who questioned me if I was “carrying a bomb in my backpack”. He soon learned that those like him are the real terrorists masquerading as crusaders of “democracy” and “freedom”. In the same ‘English’ town, a Saudi man was removed from his accommodation at the YMCA – the Christian Association Hostel – because one resident complained that the Saudi man was “praying in his room”. He was forced to pay for the day he was thrown-out on the street.

Meanwhile, New Zealand is well-known destination for Israeli soldiers “recuperating” from their roles enforcing the occupation of Palestinian land. Most of them have Palestinian blood on their hands. Nonetheless, they are treated like most Europeans. They were issued with “working-holiday” visas to “work and relax” and start “new life”. New Zealand can show great compassion if it starts bringing traumatised Palestinian children to recuperate from Israel’s daily terror.

It surprises me that New Zealand daily newspapers are addicted to stories of anti-Muslims false stereotypes and ignorance – adopted from Islamophobia’s mouthpiece, The Times – designed to promote racism against Muslims. Scapegoating of Muslims has become a lucrative career in the “West”. Fascist politicians, academics, pundits and journalists are attacking Muslims in order to further their own careers and positions.

Furthermore, New Zealand foreign minister Winston Peters – the Australian Pauline Hanson – of the New Zealand First Party has benefited immensely from his anti-Muslims and anti-immigrants racism. Peters was appointed foreign minister in a deal between Helen Clark’s Labour Government and New Zealand First. Like his Australian counterpart, Peters has become an official propaganda mouthpiece for American violence and terrorism.

KARACHI – Recent Taliban operations in southwestern Afghanistan’s Helmand province and Pakistan’s anti-Taliban swoop in its southwestern province of Balochistan mark a broadening of the struggle into Pakistani territory.

The Taliban claim to have overrun the Kabul-installed administration in Nawzad district headquarters in Helmand and all surrounding villages.

This only confirms the belief among North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials that until a broader strategy is devised that takes in the whole region – including the Pakistani border areas – there can be no level playing field between NATO and the insurgency, and NATO will be the loser.

“The Taliban besieged NATO bases and offices of the Afghan administration [in Nawzad] during [the] whole winter season. We did not attack them because of the difficulties of a winter mobilization of men, and the sustainability of battle remains a problem,” Taliban commander Abdul Khaliq Akhund told Asia Times Online by satellite phone from Nawzad district. “Nevertheless, we just curtailed the mobility of the Afghan administration and NATO forces throughout the winter and it was a real blow to their morale.

“As soon as the summer started, we announced the end of the ceasefire with the [Hamid]-Karzai backed administration of Nawzad district and the Taliban and moved into district headquarters. I gladly inform you that the Taliban are now fully in control of Nawzad district headquarters and all villages around it.”

A NATO spokesperson in Kabul did not respond to an Asia Times Online request for comment on the Taliban’s claim to have taken control of Nawzad.

During a visit to Helmand province last November, this correspondent observed the ceasefire between the Taliban and NATO forces in Nawzad district (see Time out from a siege, Asia Times Online, December 9, 2006). NATO saw the ceasefire as a chance slowly and peacefully to extend the influence of NATO forces as well as the writ of the Afghan government. However, the scheme seems to have come to nothing.

“The fall of Nawzad is the start of the Taliban-led uprising in southwestern Afghanistan, and soon the entire province of Helmand will be in the hands of the mujahideen,” Abdul Khaliq claimed.

As events in Nawzad illustrate, the Taliban are unlikely to receive much opposition from Kabul-backed administrations across the province.

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn’t work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. “I’m a Marine,” Pace told them, “and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.”

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration’s position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. “Plan B was to make Plan A work.”

In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq — including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government — senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

03/02/07 “ICH” — — “The Star-Spangled Banner” painted the United States in 1814 as “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” These words, though still mumbled by apathetic consumers at sporting events, amount to a cruel satire of the American people in 2007.

The 4th sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads “…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (ie, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness) it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…” It would be hard to find a more apt description of the US government in 2007, or a more appropriate remedy for this oppressive regime, increasingly loathed and feared by the citizenry.

We have a Constitution which defines a separation of powers. It also defines procedures for impeaching officials who violate its bedrock principles — in particular, its Bill of Rights, its separation of powers, and its foundational notion that power derives from the consent of the governed. We make elected officials swear an oath to “protect and defend” this Constitution. Why bother with all this, if, when the day of tyranny finally arrives, the Constitution’s own provisions are not used to defend the document’s principles against the would-be tyrants who have so egregiously violated them?

In November, US voters told Washington that the public does not support the war; sees with increasing clarity that it is immoral and was launched on false pretexts; and wants it terminated. In response, Vice-Emperor Cheney snarled in a TV interview with an obsequious Bush toady that regardless of what the public or Congress might say about it, the White House intends not only to continue the war, but to escalate it.

Let’s examine this extraordinary position. Here is a top official of a “democracy” — in a war marketed as an effort to “spread democracy” — stating publicly & with imperial scorn that he and his co-conspirators have the right to order the US war machine to bombard and occupy any nation they wish to target, even if their war is launched under demonstrably false pretexts. They claim the right to compel the public to furnish lives and bodies to be killed and maimed in the war, and to bear the moral and financial burdens of the war, in an action which not incidentally lets administration allies in the “defense” and oil industries profit handsomely from the ensuing mayhem. Needless to say, from Cheney’s viewpoint, it’s also of no moment that the war violates the Nuremberg Principles and UN Charter forbidding aggressive war, and that the conduct of the war violates international accords to which the US is a signatory.

BAGHDAD, 5 March (IRIN) – Apart from dodging bombs and bullets in their schools and neighbourhoods, children in Iraq are suffering from worryingly high levels of malnourishment, according to specialists.

Poverty and insecurity are said to be the main causes of the children’s deteriorating diets. Despite efforts by NGOs and the Iraqi government, violence and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people are making it very difficult for monthly food rations to reach those families that need them most.

“We are displaced and have to change our place [because of spreading sectarian violence] every month, making it difficult for us to get our food rations. As a result, our children are constantly ill and are malnourished because we don’t have enough money to afford good food,” said Samira Abdel-Kareem, a mother-of-three who was forced to flee her Yarmouk neighbourhood of Baghdad to the outskirts of the city.

“I lost a child three months ago because of malnutrition. He was only two years old. I don’t want to lose my other three children and hope someone can help us overcome this problem,” she added.

According to the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF), about one in 10 children under five in Iraq are underweight and one in five are short for their age. This means that some 4.5 million children in the country are under-nourished.

CARACAS, Venezuela (March 4) – President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said he believes enemies including the CIA are out to kill him, and called U.S. diplomat John Negroponte a “professional killer.”

Chavez said Venezuelan officials have intelligence that associates of jailed Cuban anti-communist militant Luis Posada Carriles also are involved in plotting to assassinate him.

He said the death plot idea has “gained weight” due to various factors, including the recent appointment of Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice .

I was folding fliers for a high school workshop on nonviolence when my husband, a mortar platoon sergeant with the Army National Guard 81st Brigade, walked into my office and said, “I got the call.”

We hadn’t talked about the possibility of him being deployed for months, not since President Bush had declared, “Mission accomplished.” But I knew exactly what he meant; I didn’t know then what it would mean for us.

We weren’t prepared, and neither was the Guard. The Guard sent him into harm’s way without providing some of the basic equipment and materials, such as global positioning systems, night vision gear, and insect repellant, that he would rely on during his year-long tour of duty at LSA Anaconda, the most-attacked base in Iraq, as determined by the sheer number of incoming rockets and mortars, which averaged at least five per day.

Unlike active duty military, the National Guard had no functional family support system or services in place. While the Guard was scrambling to get it together, my husband was already gone, and I was alone, just months after we had moved to Seattle. It is the soldiers, their families, and the people of Iraq that pay the human costs. The tab so far: more than 3,000 dead U.S. troops, tens of thousands of wounded, over half a million Iraqi casualties, roughly 250,000 American servicemen and women struggling with PTSD, and almost 60,000 military marriages that have been broken by this war.

Twenty-four hours after Lorin boarded the plane for Iraq, I hung a blue star service flag–denoting an immediate family member in combat–in the front window. Then I closed the blinds, hoping to keep the harbingers of death at bay. They still got in, through the phone, the Internet, the newspaper, and the TV.

Each week, I heard of a friend’s husband or son: wounded, maimed, shot, hit, hurt, burned, amputated, decapitated, detonated, dead. A glossary of pain. I checked icasualties.org all the time, cursing and crying as the numbers rose relentlessly, praying that Lorin wouldn’t be next.

On January 11, 2007, the Pentagon discarded the time limit that prevented Guard members and Reservists from serving more than twenty-four total months on active duty for either the Iraq or Afghan wars. The Pentagon’s announcement came in the wake of President Bush’s decision to deploy an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

The escalation contradicts the advice of top U.S. military officials. Although the majority of Americans are opposed to the “surge,” most members of Congress are reluctant to block the supplemental appropriations request that will fund it, claiming that they don’t want to abandon the troops. Congress has abandoned the troops for nearly four years.

It is the soldiers, their families, and the people of Iraq that pay the human costs. The tab so far: more than 3,000 dead U.S. troops, tens of thousands of wounded, over half a million Iraqi casualties, roughly 250,000 American servicemen and women struggling with PTSD, and almost 60,000 military marriages that have been broken by this war.

Including mine.

It was hard to reconnect after more than a year apart, and the open wound of untreated PTSD made it virtually impossible. Lorin is still the best evidence I have of God’s grace in this world, but we just couldn’t find our way back together after the war came home.

“TOWNS PUT DREAMS IN PRISONS”

Sometimes it’s the silences that speak the loudest. Consider, for example, a page-one article that appeared in the New York Times in the summer of 2001 under the title “Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies.” According to this piece, non-metropolitan America was relying like never before on prison construction for jobs and economic development. Formerly, Times reporter Peter Kilborn noted, rural communities had depended for employment and economic development on agriculture, manufacturing, and/or mining. Now, however, they were counting on mass incarceration to deliver the goods. Reporting that “245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties” during the 1990s, Kilborn quoted the cheerful city manager of Sayre, Oklahoma, which had just opened a prized new maximum-security lockdown. “There’s no more recession-proof form of economic development,” this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because “nothing’s going to stop crime.”

By Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investment were possible before the prison, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry(1).

But each article also made three critical omissions for those who wish to understand the meaning and impact of the rise of a giant rural American prison industrial complex fed by primarily urban, human “raw material.” The first thing missing was any appropriate sense of horror at a society in which local officials sell the nightmare of mass human confinement as a ticket to the American Dream. As Huling observes, “hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions have become dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of crime-producing conditions” [emphasis added] in other parts of the nation (6).

For the past thirty years, the United States has been on an imprisonment binge unprecedented in world history. In 1980, the total number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was 500,000. Today the number stands at 2.2 million, with a further 4.8 million on probation or parole. The total U.S. prison budget increased from $9 billion in 1980 to $61 billion by 2003.

While the U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. In other words, the country that often proclaims itself the freest in the world, imprisons its population at a rate over six times higher than the rest of the planet. The U.S. incarceration rate stands at 737 per 100,000, over five times higher than Great Britain and over twelve times higher than Norway. The statistics for minority populations are even more shocking. For Latinos, the imprisonment rate is twice the national average. For Blacks it is four times the national average, with over one million African-American men in prison or jail. In 2002, 10.4 percent of all Black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned, and the numbers have not improved since then.

In a report presented to Congress last year, the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons concluded, “We should be astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and saddened by the waste of human potential.” The report found medical and mental health care in prisons to be grossly inadequate, and noted a “desperate need for the kind of productive activities that discourage violence and make rehabilitation possible.”

Another report, issued in February by the Public Safety Performance Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, predicted that the prison population alone (not including jails, juvenile institutions, and other detention facilities) will rise by 13 percent, or another 192,000 people, over the next five years, at an increased cost of $27.5 billion. The report identified long mandatory minimum prison sentences, reduced use of parole, and harsh parole and probation rules, which often send people to prison for minor violations, as mainly responsible for the increase. “Every additional dollar spent on prisons,” it pointed out, “is one dollar less that can go for preparing for the next Hurricane Katrina, educating young people, providing health care to the elderly or repairing roads and bridges.”

Nowhere is the crisis worse than in California. In 1977, the state had fewer than 20,000 prisoners. Thirty years later the number stands at 173,000. In its first 130 years as a state, California built twelve prisons. Between 1980 and 2005 it added another twenty-one, at enormous cost. Today, California spends $35,000 a year for every prisoner, compared to $7,000 for K-12 students and only $4,500 in support for college and university students.