The Rag Blog

The following is excerpted from a talk given by Fred Goldstein — Workers World newspaper contributing editor and Workers World Party (WWP) Secretariat member—at a Jan. 12 WWP forum in New York. The podcast of the entire speech is available for listening at www.workers.org.

I can’t resist opening up about something that seems so obvious: capitalist democracy is democracy for the imperialists.

Everybody knows that the vast sentiment of the people in the election was to get the troops out of Iraq. That’s how the Democrats swept in. But apparently the majority of the ruling class has not come to that conclusion yet. So in spite of the fact that the latest polls show that 67 percent of the people are against sending the troops in, this escalation, and 30 percent of the people are strongly against it, it’s proceeding as the Bush administration is planning it.

That’s why Lenin said that capitalist democracy is the best shell for hiding the capitalist class. It allows the people to have the feeling that they have a say in the matter when actually it’s the capitalists and the imperialists who pull all the strings.

I would like to read to you something about Bush’s troop escalation announcement by an eminent imperialist strategist—Zbigniew Brzezinski—who is a reactionary, an anticommunist in every cell of his body, and who was the architect of the Afghanistan counter-revolution.

In an [op-ed column] in the Jan. 12 Washington Post entitled, “Five Flaws in the President’s Plan,” he wrote, “The speech reflects a profound misunderstanding of our era. America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating. That is the fatal flaw of Bush’s policy.”

Well, it’s rare when we agree, not only with the substance of what an imperialist strategist says, but with the formulations. It’s very rare that someone like this speaks truth, class truth, to say this is a colonial war.

There’s a lot more he didn’t say: It’s a war for oil, for bases, for strategic position. But the fact that he would say something so stark shows a level of fear and desperation on his part—high anxiety, you might say.

This phrase is meant to throw a block in the way of Bush and his grouping and say, “Stop, stop.” But Bush isn’t about to listen.

It is the agony of imperialism, U.S. imperialism, that they cannot leave and they cannot stay.

But the temptation is to take another shot at it, to find a way to keep from having a huge strategic defeat. What the Bush administration is doing is buying time. We don’t know if they have a plan for a lot more troops. They’re fully committed and they have something up their sleeve.

Losing hearts and minds

All the Pentagon commanders in Iraq were required to watch the movie “Battle of Algiers” in the early stages of the war, because it showed that no amount of torture, military repression, kicking down doors, going into neighborhoods, isolating them, worked once you lost the population and they were ready to fight to the end on an anti-colonial basis.

The Pentagon had the same experience in Vietnam. They had “pacification” programs, strategic hamlets, tiger cages, torture. They had the Phoenix Program where they assassinated 15,000 cadres, presumably of the National Liberation Front. But they lost the population because they were fighting a colonial war.

The new commander in Iraq, Gen. [David] Petraeus, is the great hero of the military establishment because he brought “counterinsurgency” up to date. He wrote the post-Vietnam manual for Iraq. Some of the things he wrote sound good on paper, like that the number one mistake is overemphasizing killing and capturing the enemy, rather than securing and engaging the populace.

Yet only the other day, the Pentagon sent F-16s and Black Hawk helicopters right into Baghdad and pulverized a neighborhood. And they’re about to send soldiers into 22 neighborhoods to break down doors. They have A-10 fighter planes that shoot 5,000 rounds [a minute] that they used in Fallujah and in Baghdad.

What happened to Petraeus’s doctrine? They already tore it up. They’re planning to succumb to the temptation of going in after having been straight-jacketed by Rumsfeld—this is the way they look at it. Rumsfeld was fired because he wanted to stay in Iraq and he didn’t want to escalate the war.

Escalation supporters already appear to be creating a scapegoat in case President Bush’s new Iraq policy fails. Prominent neoconservatives have set their aims on top U.S. military commanders and their allies in the Pentagon (apparently including Defense Secretary Robert Gates), who they claim are sabotaging President Bush’s escalation plan by “slow-walking” the deployment of U.S. forces to Iraq.

Congress Wants to Blame the Grassroots for Its Own Corruption

MANASSAS, Va., Jan. 16 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The following is a statement by Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of GrassrootsFreedom.com, regarding legislation currently being considered by Congress to regulate grassroots communications:

“In what sounds like a comedy sketch from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, but isn’t, the U. S. Senate would impose criminal penalties, even jail time, on grassroots causes and citizens who criticize Congress.

“Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.

“The bill would require reporting of ‘paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying,’ but defines ‘paid’ merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers.

“On January 9, the Senate passed Amendment 7 to S. 1, to create criminal penalties, including up to one year in jail, if someone ‘knowingly and willingly fails to file or report.’

“That amendment was introduced by Senator David Vitter (R-LA). Senator Vitter, however, is now a co-sponsor of Amendment 20 by Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT) to remove Section 220 from the bill. Unless Amendment 20 succeeds, the Senate will have criminalized the exercise of First Amendment rights. We’d be living under totalitarianism, not democracy.

“I started GrassrootsFreedom.com to fight efforts to silence the grassroots. The website provides updates in the legislation and has a petition to sign opposing Section 220.

“Thousands of nonprofit leaders, bloggers, and other citizens have hammered the Senate with calls in opposition to Section 220, which seeks to silence the grassroots. The criminal provisions will scare citizens into silence.

“The legislation regulates small, legitimate nonprofits, bloggers, and individuals, but creates loopholes for corporations, unions, and large membership organizations that would be able to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars, yet not report.

A real antiwar movement would end our Iraq disaster. But the middle class doesn’t care enough to protest, so the kids who go to community college will keep dying.

So now we wait for the end. The man who led America into the most disastrous war in its history has run out of tricks, out of troops and out of time. It is no longer a question of whether George W. Bush’s presidency will officially die, but when — and how many more Americans will have to die before it does.

One of Iraq’s most powerful Shia politicians has condemned the arrest of Iranians by US forces in Iraq as an attack on the country’s sovereignty.

The comments by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, made in a BBC interview, are seen as the strongest expression yet of Iraq’s concern about the US approach to Iran.

They follow two recent US raids in which Iranians were arrested.

The remarks are interesting as Mr Hakim is seen as close to President Bush, says the BBC’s Andrew North in Baghdad.

Mr Hakim also has close links to Iran, after many years in exile there.

Late last year, US troops descended on Mr Hakim’s residential compound in Baghdad and detained two Iranian officials.

They were later released, but last week, five more were detained at the Iranian liaison office in Irbil. They are still being held.

US officials say they are linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard which they allege trains and arms Iraqi insurgents.

Delicate balance

Iran, which has demanded their immediate release, says they are diplomats engaged in legitimate work.

Iraq has sought to bring about a dialogue between the US, Iran and Syria, Mr Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told the BBC.

Any tension between Washington and Tehran might have adverse consequences for Iraq, he said.

“Regardless of the Iranian position we consider these actions as incorrect,” Mr Hakim said.

KUWAIT CITY, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) — U.S. might launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, Kuwait-based daily Arab Times released on Sunday said in a report.

The report, written by Arab Times’ Editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Jarallah citing a reliable source, said that the attack would be launched from the sea, while Patriot missiles would guard all Arab countries in the Gulf.

Recent statements emanating from the United States indicated the Bush administration’s new strategy for Iraq doesn’t include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran, added the report.

The source told al-Jarallah that U.S. President George W. Bush recently had held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House, where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.

Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iran to not only Saudi Arabia but also the whole Gulf region, according to the source.

“Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country’s religious influence to support the aggressive regime’s ambition to expand,” Dick Cheney was quoted by the source as saying.

This is sort of as though in the US, federal troops attacked the South Carolina State House and arrested the elected secretary of state and treasurer.

Senate leaders will introduce a bipartisan resolution of opposition to President Bush’s new Iraq policy as early as today, taking the lead from House Democrats who are increasingly divided on how far to go to thwart additional troop deployments to Iraq.

The resolution — crafted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) — will not come to a vote before Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. But by sending it to Biden’s committee this week, Democratic leaders will give senators from both parties multiple opportunities to voice concerns about the president’s policy.

In another high-profile move, Democratic leaders yesterday tapped Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), a Reagan administration Navy secretary who secured victory in November on an antiwar push, to deliver the party’s nationally televised response to Bush’s speech.

Here is this week’s national feel-good story: the New Orleans Saints have rebounded from a 3-13 season in 2005 and are now only one victory away from reaching the Super Bowl. The Saints are said to embody the “never say die” spirit of the city’s residents, and a victory over the Chicago Bears next Sunday will help revive spirits among the long-suffering victims of Hurricane Katrina. If the Saints can come back from the devastation of 2005, so can New Orleans. This story line will be repeated time and again in the coming week, but the truth is that the fortunes of the Saints football team are totally irrelevant to the city’s rebirth. And while the corporate hucksters who run the NFL try to lure non-football fans to identify with the Saints’ cause, the greater truth is that, as Bob Herbert put it in the January 15 New York Times, the Saints may be rising but New Orleans is “Descending to New Depths.”

There is nothing that warms the hearts of the sports industry and television networks more than when a professional team’s fortunes can be shrouded in a higher purpose. In some cases—as when Doug Williams became the first African-American quarterback to lead his team to winning a Super Bowl—the outcome of a game does have a broader social impact. But most of the time this framing is only about marketing, and even Williams only ushered in more black quarterbacks, not a society more supportive of racial justice.

In 2005, the New Orleans Saints football team lost their home field when the hurricane damaged the Superdome. The team’s plight was said to echo that of hundreds of thousands of its residents, who also were displaced by President Bush’s incompetent handling of the storm.

Today, the Saints have made one of the most remarkable turnarounds in football history, and only must beat the Chicago Bears next Sunday to reach the Super Bowl for the first time. Everyone outside Chicago will be rooting for the plucky Saints, whose victory is said to provide a shot of inspiration for those still struggling to rebuild the community.

But while a Saints victory would be exciting for a long inept NFL team, it is irrelevant to the real life situation in New Orleans. In fact, I have yet to hear a single sports announcer say anything about President Bush’s responsibility for the mess in New Orleans, as they instead focus all attention on Hurricane Katrina as the sole cause.

In other words, the Saints crusade has given the media another excuse to whitewash President Bush’s unprecedented failure to prevent the destruction of a major American city. So long as we link the team’s success to progress in the city, we can forget about federal government’s ongoing malfeasance.

How could anyone say the conservative-liberal controversy is a myth? Our nation has become red state versus blue state, right versus left, conservative versus liberal, Republicans versus Democrats. Some friends and families cannot discuss politics lest tempers flare and fights erupt. Anthony Signorelli’s excellent book Call to Liberty, Bridging the Divide between Liberals and Conservatives clearly explicates the factors behind this divisive polarizing behavior.

Many conservative pundits relish slamming liberals. The liberal response appears inept because liberals do not identify with charges the conservatives make. One of the conservative’s favorite authors, Ann Coulter, even claims that to be a liberal is to commit treason against America.

Former Republican Congressman Jim Gibbons of Nevada once declared, “Tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals [in Hollywood should]… go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else…. It’s just too damn bad we didn’t buy them a ticket to become human shields in Iraq.”

01/14/07 “Slate” — — Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become perfectly clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?

Why is the United States still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have been held out to be?

And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch holds the power to open mail as it sees fit?

Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I once believed the common thread here was presidential blindness — an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism. That this is some piece of self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is just a chump and Guantanamo merely a holding pen for a jumble of innocent and half-guilty wretches.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn’t really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio interviewed Mark Corallo, spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the Padilla case—a case that’s lolled through the federal courts for years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla’s case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration’s sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. “Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose,” she reports, which is why Padilla was hauled back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that “key players in the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney’s office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved.”

Deborah Sontag’s excellent New York Times story on Padilla on Jan. 4 makes the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court only as “a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court.” So this is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla’s dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they’d already won.

This need to preserve newly won legal ground also explains the continued operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the camp that—according to Donald Rumsfeld in 2002—houses only “the worst of the worst.” Now that over half of them have been released (apparently, the best of the worst) and even though only about 80 of the rest will ever see trials, the camp remains open. Why? Civil-rights groups worldwide and even close U.S. allies like Germany, Denmark, and England clamor for its closure. And as the ever-vigilant Nat Hentoff points out, new studies reveal that only a small fraction of the detainees there are even connected to al-Qaida—according to the Defense Department’s own best data.

But Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground. In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees. And having gone nose-to-nose with the Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts for these “enemies,” courts guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot just call off the trials.

I’ve written about the movie, The Battle of Algiers; today, CNN is reporting that George Bush is reading a book on the subject (A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962) for lessons on what to do in Iraq. In closing out the piece, both the author and the reporter cautioned the viewer that after the French decided to pull out, tens of thousands of people were killed in the civil war which followed. According to Wikipedia, that’s true enough. What CNN failed to inform its viewers, though, was that before the pullout, while the French were still fighting the Algerians, between 300,000 and 1 million Algerians are estimated to have died. Very much shades of Iraq.