The Rag Blog

Every time I go to the United States (I have just returned from two weeks in Washington), I am astonished by the antic security, by the proliferation of admonitions and alarms and inchoate fear. Now it is illegal to carry toothpaste on airplanes. I find myself wondering: Is this just another spasm of periodic hysteria, like Prohibition, the Sixties, and a Commie Under Every Bed? Or is it calculated political programming?

Most of it impinges at best lightly upon reality. For example, measures for security at airports are largely useless—if their purpose is to increase security. Think about it. Time and again the public-address system warns that vehicles left unattended in passenger-loading zones “may be ticketed and towed.” Why? By the time anyone notices that the truck is unattended, by definition the driver will be somewhere else. He will certainly be able to walk a hundred yards before the tow-truck arrives—and push the button. Boom. In the case of a suicide bomber (which is what we are worried about, no?) it doesn’t matter anyway. Boom.

For that matter, at any airport you can drive up, load a hundred pounds of suitcases containing god knows what onto a baggage cart, and go into a crowded waiting area. Boom. You probably couldn’t get them onto an airplane. Why would you need to? Terroristically, killing two hundred people in the airport is as good as dropping an airliner.

Most of security is just theater. Over and over, the PA system tells you not to leave baggage unattended or it may be destroyed by security personnel. This doubtless serves to make legitimate passengers watch their luggage. Who cares? A suitcase full of bras and socks isn’t perilous. But none of this keeps a terrorist from leaving a baggage cart and walking for two minutes, far enough to be outside the blast radius.

No, I’m not giving ideas to terrorists. Everything in this column is obvious to anyone with a three-digit IQ.

It gets sillier. If you ride Metro, Washington’s subway, you will incessantly hear things like, “Passengers! Look up from your papers occasionally. Be alert! Report any suspicious behavior to Metro employees.”

Yeah, sure. As a security measure, this is worthless. Why? First, a terrorist would be careful not to look suspicious. Second, what is suspicious behavior on an urban subway? You’ve got rastas, Goths, spike-haired young in leathers, semi-derelicts, blacks from the slums, people from India, Guatemala, Morocco, drunks, stoners, people talking to Mars through the transmitters the CIA put in their teeth, and swarthy men speaking languages you can’t identify. What’s suspicious?

So how do report any of this? You could get off the train at the next stop, go up the escalators, and find the Metro kiosk by the exit gates. You find a bored guy inside waiting for his shift to end.

“Hey, I saw this suspicious guy on the train!” you say.

“Yeah? What was he doing?”

“He had a backpack, and he was looking around a lot like he was nervous, and I think he was sweating.”

When questioned about the peace process, or rather the absence of one, Israeli officials are fond of laying the blame on Palestinian divisions.

We don’t have a partner for peace, they say. The Palestinians don’t have a single address. We are willing to talk but whom should we talk to, was their favoured bleat.

In recent months, their mantra had the ring of truth. The military wings of Fatah and Hamas fought on the streets of Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Esmail Haniya were at odds. There were whispers that an all out civil war was in the cards.

But now that Fatah and Hamas have come together to announce a unity government that will represent most Palestinian factions, the Israelis and their US backers have acted predictably by imposing pre-conditions on their recognition of the new entity.

These are the recognition of Israel, the renouncement of “terror” and agreement to honour prior agreements between Israel and the former Palestinian leadership.

This set of conditions is a one-way street. We must ask ourselves who is terrorising whom, the occupier or the occupied?

Which party is most terrifying? The one with the F16s, the helicopter gunships and the tanks or the one with homemade missiles that more often or not fail to reach their targets?

As for the recognition of Israel and a commitment to honour previous agreements, this is implied in the Makkah Accord, brokered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and signed by Abbas and exiled Hamas leader Khalid Mesha’al.

But such subtleties aren’t good enough for Ehud Olmert and friends. They want total prostration. Total humiliation, when they just might hand the Palestinians a few crumbs. No guarantees, mind you.

It’s ironic, too, that Israel hasn’t abided by any of the agreements it is demanding the new unity government ratify, and neither has it adhered to decades of UN resolutions requiring it to pull back to pre-’67 borders and refrain from building illegal colonies.

This situation could be equated to a man whose home is taken over by squatters. The squatters have guns and the man has only stones. The squatters imprison and starve the man in his own basement and will only agree to talk about handing over one of the bedrooms when the man agrees to recognise the squatter’s rights to his home and throws away his rights together with his stones.

Unfortunately, when the man shouts for help he discovers that the police are firmly on the side of the squatters and even urge the squatters to make the man’s life as difficult as possible. When the man calls upon his friends and neighbours to come to his aid, they throw a little food over the wall now and again, and call out a few words of encouragement, hoping that the squatters and their friends don’t decide to call on them.

I’m sure that Israelis will object to being called squatters, but under international law they are indeed squatting on land occupied in 1967.

Following the 1967 war, the UN passed Resolution 242, under its Chapter 7 powers, calling for Israel’s withdrawal from “territories of recent conflict.”

Moreover, according to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, reaffirmed by the 1948 Nuremburg Tribunal, the acquisition of territory using military means is outlawed, while maintaining the integrity of international borders is enshrined in the UN Charter.

In this case, why on Earth should the Palestinians or anyone else recognise Israel’s right to exist on land it illegally grabbed in 1967?

Here’s one for the “stranger than fiction” department: Stand on any street corner in Alabama selling guns and dildoes, and guess which one can land you in jail for a year? You got it: Those deadly dildoes!

In a unanimous decision, the three judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on February 16th upheld a 1998 Alabama statute that outlaws the sale of devices used to stimulate human genitals. Instruments to blow out someone’s brains are perfectly fine. Sounds about right for a state with a rich history of slavery, lynchings and beatings of civil rights activists.

Alabama’s not the only state where you can’t buy a vibrator or cock ring at your favorite porno store. There’s also Georgia, Mississippi, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. Talk about a Hall of Shame.

‘Security Forces’ Rob Baghdad Academics (Sunday Times)

One of the most curious, and ominous, aspects of life in the Bush gang’s Babylonian satrapy has been the continual, unrelenting and clearly deliberate targeting of Iraq’s academics, intellectuals, technicians – basically, anyone who might be capable of independent thought and action, transcending the sectarian, ethnic and tribal cliques empowered by Bush’s aggression, and outside the control of the occupiers and their sycophants as well.

The sectarians, such as the Shiite death squads enthroned by Bush, want to get rid of the intelligentsia because they stand in the way of the fundamentalists’ desire to impose religious obscurantism on Iraqi society. In addition, many of the intelligentsia – though by no means all – are Sunni, owing to the prejudice in favor of Sunni advancement under the old regime. Meanwhile, certain factions of the Sunni insurgency (which contains its own religious fanatics) also target the intelligentsia in order to make the nation ungovernable under the occupation. Meanwhile, the Bush animus toward any independent thought that might challenge the murderous fantasies of the Leader is also well-known.

In other words, to be an independent thinker in Iraq, educated and capable of taking effective action in civic society – the supposed goal of the “liberation” for all Iraqis – actually makes one an avowed enemy of all the factions either deliberately empowered or inadvertantly loosed in Iraq by Bush, including the land’s most powerful faction: the White House, backed up by the U.S. military, which Bush has turned into his own private militia, serving the financial, political and ideological interests of his own little clique, at the expense of the peace, prosperity and liberty of the American people.

The new “surge” ordered by Bush has only accelerated this purging of the Iraqi intelligentsia, as the Sunday Times reports. The “sovereign” Iraqi government – whose security organs are in large part scarcely distinguishable from the Shiite death squads – are using the “crackdown” to ramp up the brain drain, harassing, robbing and beating academics.

But this is to be expected. As Arthur Silber succinctly notes, no good thing can come from America’s criminal enterprise in Iraq. Conceived in evil – in lies, in the lust for blood, loot and dominion – it can only breed more evil. And it will go on breeding evil, on scales large and small, for as long as it is allowed to continue. Silber’s conclusion is the whole and utter truth of the matter: “We should never have been there. Get out now. Make what reparations we can. If we have any remaining sense of decency at all, that is all we can do — and what we must do.”

Excerpts from the Sunday Times:

The security forces separated the men from the women and then ordered [Mohammad] Jabouri’s wife to give them a suitcase filled with jewellery and £20,000 in cash. When she argued they threatened to shoot her. Then they destroyed the furniture and broke the windows of the cars in the garage. “The same militiamen who used to raid our areas in the past are now conducting the security crackdown, using this as a chance to attack us further,” Jabouri said.

Later the same night, security forces raided a compound containing the homes of 110 university professors and their families. Professor Hameed al-Aathami described what happened: “They dragged us out of our beds as we slept with our wives and children, took us outside, bound our hands and blindfolded us. They beat, cursed and insulted us.”

Dr Salah Bidayat, the dean of the school of law, fired two shots from his licensed gun in the air to get the soldiers’ attention. “They caught him, lay him on the ground and proceeded to beat, kick and curse him in the most aggressive manner and when he explained we were teachers and professors they told him you are all a bunch of asses and terrorists,” Aathami said.

“They gathered all the men in the centre of the compound and proceeded to their homes, where they broke furniture, stole money, mobile telephones and jewellery as we sat outside listening to our women and children scream and cry,” he said.

“It was very hard for us to go through this. This is the security crackdown they have been bragging about. There is no such thing as a security plan; it is all an attempt to rid the country of the few remaining educated and decent people,” said Aathami, who is planning to leave Iraq as soon as he can.

Editor’s note: Jabria Jassim, an Elgin Community College chemistry professor, recently visited Baghdad to see relatives. She left Iraq years ago. Here is an edited essay on her observations.

Baghdad in 2007

This past December, I had a chance to visit Iraq for about two weeks. Previous to my travel, I was warned that landing at Baghdad’s airport is too dangerous and too risky, so I took a plane from Amman to Irbil, which is in the northern region. The majority of Irbil residents are Kurds. I found the city to be very peaceful, and the people there live “normal” lives. However, the living expenses for an outsider are very high due to the large influx of immigrants coming from Baghdad and a few other cities to the east and south of Baghdad where the violence is predominant. People who had lived in these areas either left their houses by choice or were forced to leave by the insurgents.

I stayed in Irbil for few days before heading to Baghdad. As I traveled across the land with some companions, we were stopped along the way at many checkpoints — some guarded by Americans and some by Iraqi soldiers. Tanks and artillery were on both sides of the highways so we all felt safe; but I was bothered by the reality of these so-called checkpoints. They either don’t check at all or the checking was not adequate. I heard comments from some travelers (Kurds, Arabs, and even foreigners) that these checkpoints were useless, and only there to slow the traffic.

The insurgents know this fact very well; so they continue to smuggle weapons and terrorists into Iraq from the neighboring countries. My gut feeling told me that it was too risky and too dangerous for the soldiers at the checkpoints to even peak into let alone to check inside cars and trucks.

What’s in Baghdad

At first sight, the city looked more damaged and brutally wounded, and more devastated than when I left it last year. Not a single hour passes without one hearing an explosion, a car bomb, or devastated women and children screaming for help. I saw people running from a suicide bomber and others trying to pull bodies from a fire. Sirens from ambulances and police cars and helicopters flying day and night all over the city all join in to create a constant roar of horrible noises.

My beloved Baghdad has a 9 p.m. curfew. The government-run power plants provide residential electricity one hour a day, but not every day. Private sources of electricity are available at very high rates so they are only for people who can afford the high rates. One source is a man located at the end of the block from where I’m staying. He runs a huge generator, and his deal is $100/month for four hours of electricity a day. If we remember that the average salary of an Iraqi college graduate is only $300/month, then we have to agree that the price is a little steep. Most of the people are jobless due to lack of security, the fear of kidnapping, and all the other atrocities being committed on a daily basis. Others buy their own generator run on either gasoline or benzene, which cost about $5/gallon. This is also sold by a private enterprise and the supplies are not always available. Therefore, people look for a few liters of fuel in the black market and pay double if not triple the cost.

Has the war in Iraq increased jihadist terrorism? The Bush administration has offered two responses: First, the moths-to-a-flame argument, which says that Iraq draws terrorists who would otherwise “be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders,” as President Bush put it in 2005. Second, the hard-to-say position: “Are more terrorists being created in the world?” then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked at a press conference in September 2006. “We don’t know. The world doesn’t know. There are not good metrics to determine how many people are being trained in a radical madrasa school in some country.”

In fact, as Rumsfeld knew well, there are plenty of publicly available figures on the incidence and gravity of jihadist attacks. But until now, no one has done a serious statistical analysis of whether an “Iraq effect” does exist. We have undertaken such a study, drawing on data in the mipt-rand Terrorism database (terrorismknowledgebase .org), widely considered the best unclassified database on terrorism incidents.

At a Washington, D.C., press conference last November, Harvard University professor Michael Porter claimed that globalism was bringing benefits to Americans (Manufacturing & Technology News, Nov. 30, 2006). Porter was introducing the latest report, “Competitiveness Index: Where America Stands” of which he is a principal author, from the Council on Competitiveness.

I recognized a number of Porter’s claims to be inconsistent with empirical data. After examining the report, I can confidently state that the report provides scant evidence that America is benefiting from globalism.

This is not to say that the statements in the report and the information in the numerous charts are untrue. It is to say that the data do not support the claim that America is benefiting from globalism.

The competitiveness report boasts that the United States “leads all major economies in GDP per capita”; that “household wealth grew strongly, supported by gains in real estate and stocks”; and that “poverty rates improved for all groups over the past two decades.”

All of this is true over the time periods that the report measures.

But it is also true that all of this was happening prior to globalism. Moreover, in recent years as globalism becomes more pronounced, the U.S. economy is performing less well.

The report provides no information that would suggest that the gains measured over 20 years or more occurred because of globalism or that the economy is performing better today than in past periods.

Indeed, the report acknowledges under-performance in critical areas.

U.S. job creation in the 21st century is below past performance. Debt payments of Americans as a percent of their disposable incomes are rising while the savings rate has collapsed into dis-saving. Poverty rates have turned back up in the 21st century when the impact of globalism on Americans has been most pronounced.

A total critique of the competitiveness report would be as long, or longer, than the report’s 100 pages. As this is beyond the capacity of the Manufacturing & Technology News’ newsletter and readers’ patience, I will limit my remarks to the most critical issues.

The report mentions many times that the United States is the driver of global growth without emphasizing that U.S. growth is debt-driven. Both the U.S. government and U.S. consumers are accumulating debt at a rapid pace. Debt-driven consumption is exceeding U.S. output by a sum in excess of $800 billion annually.

The trade and current account deficits are rapidly increasing the burden of debt service on Americans and threatening the dollar’s role as reserve currency. The competitiveness report makes these negatives sound like America is leading the world by driving economic growth.

In the middle of the report there is a misleading chart that shows that “U.S.A. attracts most foreign direct investment” — in terms of dollars. The report asserts that “the United States remains a magnet for global investment” because of “America’s high levels of productivity, strong growth and unparalleled consumer market.”

This is one of the instances in which the report becomes totally propagandistic.

At a time when U.S. occupation troops and puppet Iraqi troops have committed hundreds of thousands of murders of Iraqi civilians, three women are being executed for their alleged role in the armed resistance. The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court has sentenced the women to death by hanging, with the executions set for March 3 in Baghdad.

According to attorney Walid Hayali of the Iraqi Lawyers Union, 31-year-old Wassan Talib has been charged with the killing of five police officers in an attack on the police; 25-year-old Zainab Fadhil was charged for an attack on a joint patrol of the Iraqi and U.S. armies in Baghdad; and 26-year-old Liqa Muhammad was charged with the killing of an official in the Green Zone in the course of a kidnapping.

The attorney points out that the women were denied legal counsel before and during the trial, and therefore there was no lawyer present to appeal the convictions.

Muhammad is still nursing a child she recently gave birth to in prison. Talib has a 3-year-old daughter with her in the prison.

A fourth woman, Samar Sa’ad Abdullah, has been sentenced to execution for the murder of several family members, which she has denied. (amnesty.org)

Amnesty International notes that the Iraqi interim government reinstated the death penalty in August 2004, and that at least 65 people were executed in 2006 following the ruling. AI states that on Sept. 6 alone, 27 people were reportedly hanged, and 11 more on Sept. 21.

Introduction

The imperial system is much more complex than what is commonly referred to as the “US Empire”. The US Empire, with its vast network of financial investments, military bases, multi-national corporations and client states, is the single most important component of the global imperial system (1). Nevertheless, it is overly simplistic to overlook the complex hierarchies, networks, follower states and clients that define the contemporary imperial system (2). To understand empire and imperialism today requires us to look at the complex and changing system of imperial stratification.

The Case of Somalia: Black Masks – White Faces

The recent Ethiopian invasion of Somalia (December 2006) and overthrow of the de-facto governing Islamic Courts Union (ICU)or Supreme Council of Islamic Courts and imposition of a self-styled ‘transitional government’ of warlords is an excellent case study of the centrality of collaborator regimes in sustaining and expanding the US empire.

From 1991 with the overthrow of the government of Siad Barre until the middle of 2006, Somalia was ravaged by conflicts between feuding warlords based in clan-controlled fiefdoms (3). During the US/UN invasion and temporary occupation of Mogadishu in the mid-1990’s there were massacres of over 10,000 Somali civilians and the killing and wounding of a few dozen US/UN soldiers (4). During the lawless 1990’s small local groups, whose leaders later made up the ICU, began organizing community-based organizations against warlord depredations. Based on its success in building community-based movements, which cut across tribal and clan allegiances; the ICU began to eject the corrupt warlords ending extortion payments imposed on businesses and households (5). In June 2006 this loose coalition of Islamic clerics, jurists, workers, security forces and traders drove the most powerful warlords out of the capital, Mogadishu. The ICU gained widespread support among a multitude of market venders and trades people. In the total absence of anything resembling a government, the ICU began to provide security, the rule of law and protection of households and property against criminal predators (6). An extensive network of social welfare centers and programs, health clinics, soup kitchens and primary schools, were set up serving large numbers of refugees, displaced peasants and the urban poor. This enhanced popular support for the ICU.

After having driven the last of the warlords from Mogadishu and most of the countryside, the ICU established a de-facto government, which was recognized and welcomed by the great majority of Somalis and covered over 90% of the population (7a). All accounts, even those hostile to the ICU, pointed out that the Somali people welcomed the end of warlord rule and the establishment of law and order under the ICU.

The basis of the popular support for the Islam Courts during its short rule (from June to December 2006) rested on several factors. The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians (7). Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation. In the process of unifying the country, the Islamic Courts government re-affirmed Somali sovereignty and opposition to US imperialist intervention in the Middle East and particularly in the Horn of Africa via its Ethiopian client regime.

US Intervention: The United Nations, Military Occupation, Warlords and Proxies

The recent history of US efforts to incorporate Somalia into its network of African client states began during the early 1990’s under President Clinton (8). While most commentators today rightly refer to Bush as an obsessive war-monger for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they forget that President Clinton, in his time, engaged in several overlapping and sequential acts of war in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Yugoslavia. Clinton’s military actions and the embargoes killed and maimed thousands of Somalis, resulted in 500,000 deaths among Iraqi children alone and caused thousands of civilian deaths and injuries in the Balkans. Clinton ordered the destruction of Sudan’s main pharmaceutical plant producing vital vaccines and drugs essential for both humans and their livestock leading to a critical shortage of these essential vaccines and treatments (9). President Clinton dispatched thousands of US troops to Somalia to occupy the country under the guise of a ‘humanitarian mission’ in 1994 (10).

Washington intervened to bolster its favored pliant war-lord against another, against the advice of the Italian commanders of the UN troops in Somalia. Two-dozen US troops were killed in a botched assassination attempt and furious residents paraded their mutilated bodies in the streets of the Somali capital. Washington sent helicopter gunships, which shelled heavily, populated areas of Mogadishu, killing and maiming thousands of civilians in retaliation.