PolPop

Post-Traumatic Love Syndrome

2006-07-24T14:46:00.000+01:00

An after-love story in verses

The Girl From Llanilar

A lovely young girl from Llanilar
stole my heart but I could not fulfil her.
She had beautiful hair, in her eyes I would stare
though now gone for once loved I’m a winner.

Mountain Rescue

You took me to the top of Cader Idris,
said it would be good for me to go.
At the summit I stole a kiss.
Pale sky above, blue lake below,
we walked beside the precipice.
Your sweet smile, that sunny glow:
I wondered what could better this.
That’s when I fell in love with you –
I won’t forget your mountain rescue.

Seren (Star)

You will still be there when I am gone.

No star will ever shine as bright,
whilst you are there what is midnight?

What marvellous stuff are you made from,
how can you glow . . . so long, so long?

I know a girl much like yourself,
her eyes are bright her hair is red,
on this cold earth she was my sun,
A friend and lover all in one.

I called her Seren when I could,
A girl that shines so bright you should.
Her three initials were S.E.R.
so obviously she was my star.

The Rocks of Skiathos

Remember when I was your broken-toed bastard,
following you around Skiathos on borrowed crutches?

I had slipped on the rocks on the first afternoon
of a fortnight’s holiday.

We had to come home early. I wish it could have lasted.

Remember leading me up the steep cliff face to safety?
My eyes were glued to your backside.
How else could I survive?

Despite the heat and the pain and my toes pointing up
I would have happily stopped to make love,
but then you had saved me more than once
so that was understandable.

I’m sorry for our Greek tragedy.
In the second week I was going to ask you to marry me.
But things happen for a reason so they say
and this time it was because
foolishly I wore flip-flops
on and island renowned for its slippery rocks.

Picture

So that's it then, we're through
All I have now is this picture of you
The eyes are the same but there's no animation
No action, no motion, no sweet conversation.

It's over now so what can I do
But stare at this image, this vision of you
It doesn't move me in the way that you do
It has captured your beauty but it hasn't caught you.

If only I could unfreeze this frame
Bring it to life and be with you again
My kisses don't work, your pose doesn't change
Your inscrutable outlook is trapped in its range.

This too still life will never age
But with you I wanted to turn every page
The distance between us grows in front of my eyes
That's why, with this picture, I am cutting all ties.

What does he call you?

I called you tweets
cos you were like a small song bird,
and sweets cos it rhymed with tweets
and you were sweet.
I called you Seren
cos your name was Sarah
and your initials were s.e.r.
So obviously a star.

Does he call you honeybun
and babycakes?
Does he make those mistakes?
If he does he does not know you
not like I do.

Does he call you his sugar muffin
or compare you to the bright-billed puffin?
A lovely creature it is true
but, intellectually, not you.

I called you lover
and argued with you.
Does he care what you say
about the issues of the day?

What can he give you that I can’t give you?

Can he tell you who you are?
A gorgeous little mega star.

Self-Pity
(with apologies to Sir Walter Scott)

If there’s a man without self-pity
that lost a girl one half so pretty,
who cannot say that he is sad
or inside doesn't feel a lack
and truly want to win her back,
I'd say to you that man is mad.
If this type you should encounter
don't waste your time in idle banter.
It matters not how rich he be
or if on his CV it says MD.
For all his power and apparent wealth
lack of regret means all is self;
though alive that's only half
and when he finally comes to pass,
interred beneath the cold, cold earth,
who, with affection, will recall his birth?

Swimming fool

Having completed many lengths
in the vitreous fluid of your come to bed eyes,

I now realise -

that whilst I was enjoying swimming
in those languid pools,

I had been a fool.

For I’d done far too many rotes
in the same stroke.

Typical bloke!

On Being Dumped

Do not text or make a call -
that's the first rule of them all.
Delete her from your mobile phone,
get used to being on your own.

Another thing you must not do
is visit her parents after a few.
They'll be worried and she'll go mental.
That rule my friends is fundamental.

Then the e-mails have to stop.
I sent my girlfriend quite a lot.
In the beginning she did reply
mostly to say `I hope you die'.

Put away pictures and memorabilia,
she's already burned your trivia.
Don't dream she'll ever take you back,
her pride's at stake - she won't do that.

Shelve the biography of your lives together,
it'll only remind her why she's with another
and if you really must write a song
make it a short one about moving on.

Sometimes during Happy Hour
you'll dedicate a poem to her.
That's not what a beer mat's for,
in any case they'll be ignored.

The world is full of dumped and dumper
and when it's sunk in that you've lost her
there's only one thing left to do,
remember this: she's lost you too.

Death by Hyperbole

Let Tsunamis wash over me and volcanoes explode on me,
order fire to consume, the cold earth to entomb.
Invent diseases to sicken me, plagues that just pick on me,
bring on tornadoes and hurricanes, send floods from all origins.

But please don’t leave me.

Find vipers to bite, African elephants to smite,
Grizzly bears to unbowel me [sic], Great White sharks to devour me,
bulls to gore, piranhas that gnaw, birds (they can peck), what the heck,
stampede herds that will trample, grow plants that can strangle.

Pay robbers to shoot me, offer knives while they loot me,
use sticks and throw stones, just aim at my bones.
Call on henchmen to hurt me, tell your friends all about me,
clone me then kill me twice, you might find that nice.

But please don’t leave me.

Call elections to topple, send thugs to throttle,
politicians to oppose, journalists to expose,
doctors to section, lawyers to threaten,
ask boffins to baffle me, perhaps a charity could raffle me?

The Ancient Greeks should hear of me, they could record my vile history,
get my name in the bible (snake) come, there’s no time to be idle.
Buddha and Mohammed? They’ll want to hear the things I did,
Hindus too should be put in the frame, all religions be alert to my name.

But please don’t leave me
because if you do, I will surely o.d.
on far too much hy-per'-bo-lee.

Perspectives

There are only sunsets in Aber now.
Endless vistas they provide
but without you by my side
how can there ever be sunrise?

The castle is in ruins there
like the plans we used to share.
The prom it's true still has the sea
but what became of you and me?

The views from Constitution Hill
cannot make sweet a bitter pill
whilst Pendinas on the other side
mocks the folly of my pride.

The prematurely shortened pier
illustrates our brief affair.
Even crazy golf's no charm
without you putting on my arm.

Mind you when all is said and done,
before we notch up more regrets,
there's one thing we should not forget:
Aberystwyth does a great sunset.

Happy Time

I would go back before the happy time
that now seems inaccessible to grief
to when we called each other friend of mine.

If we had some how thought to draw a line,
to stop the clock that sprung a tragic thief,
I would go back before the happy time.

Before we twined as serious couplets rhyme,
then blushing set to fashion Eden's leaf,
to when each called the other friend of mine.

To live all innocence would suit me fine,
those funny naked days, no grave belief.
Yes, I'd go back before said happy time.

Do you recall how simple stood each sign -
the flowers we picked then weren't put to wreath,
back when one called the other friend of mine?

Moonward a weary heart should never climb;
sublime love's labour’s lost. I'd be naive.
I would go back before the happy time
to when we called each other friend of mine.

On Love and Pain

When I put my hand in to the fire,
nerves and sinews soon conspire
to cause an unrelenting pain
that makes me take it out again.

That mechanism is defensive
preventing damage too extensive.
So why then, when we find a lover,
don’t we feel pain instead of pleasure?

Surely it would be much wiser
to see in love potential danger?
To turn away from one’s desire
and treat it like that flaming fire.

Unfortunately, the pain comes after
to act as late-arriving measure
of just how total was the pleasure.
But why come now when it’s all over?

To warn the gallivanting fool,
the cavalier, the trite, the cruel,
that love must always, always be
taken very seriously.

So next time when you meet the one
the memory of pain will come
and you will treat your new-found lover
with care that you will stay together.

I have overheard the future

2006-07-19T10:14:00.000+01:00

Here is a letter to a national newspaper with a unique perspective on the Israeli attack on Lebannon.

SIR - The seemingly overheard and improptu little tet-a-tet at the G8 Summit between Bush and Blair demonstrates that the pair are planning a reprise of their pre-Gulf War double act. Blair pretends to be seeking UN approval for `international' intervention, though he's already secretly agreed to war, then Bush moves in with the fake evidence to override other Security Council members' objections with probably Condaleeza Rice stepping in to Colin Powell's role at the UN. With Lebannon subdued by US, and possibly French troops on this occasion, the regime-changing pincer move against Syria is ready to go and Israel can concentrate on bombing Iran's nuclear programme in retaliation for its supplying of rockets to Hezbollah. Meanwhile, millions of ordinary Arabs and muslims become radicalized by the obvious collusion between the West and the murderous and racist Israeli regime. In retaliation for Isreal's bombing of its infrastructure and the invasion of Syria and as a result of mass pressure from below, Iran invades southern Iraq and to protect `our' troops Bush launches strategic nuclear weapons at the advancing Iranian army wiping it and southern Iraq off the map. The stage is set for the real war to begin as China starts to feel ever more that it is the ultimate target. Later, with China defeated and plunged back into the stone age having only managed to land one nuclear weapon on Los Angeles, the big powers have only each other to go at as they scramble for land and influence. They split into two great camps with Russia, France, Germany and Italy on one side and the US, Britain and Japan on the other. The stage is now set for World War 3 which ends in the destruction of the world. And that was how the war against terror was won . . . by the terrorists.

Yours.

Anti-Commuting Legislation: Towards the Post-urban Society

2006-07-13T13:23:00.000+01:00

Below is a series of letters to The Western Mail. Some were published and some were not due to their length.

Published

SIR - I must add my voice to that of Alan Williams (Letters: On the Levels, Wednesday) who opposes the building of the new Levels Motorway. However, given the parlous state of the environment I believe he does not go far enough. Alan suggests using planning to cut down on unnecessary commuting but the time has come for a more radical approach. I suggest that over the course of say the next ten years, through the use of legislation, that 80% of all workers must live within two miles of their workplace. The free market social engineers have got us to the point where millions of man/woman hours are wasted in traffic and tons and tons of pollutants are spewing into the air for no reason. Of course there are many details and implications to work out but the policy would start with major companies and government departments and would be achieved at the expense of the employers not the employees. Corporate opponents and laggards should face the possibility of nationalisation. Maybe someone even more radical might suggest that the policy be accompanied by a bold programme of road closures. The school run too must be dealt with. I suggest that all children must attend their nearest school and that no secondary school be larger than 400 pupils. This `live where you work, shool where you live' approach is the only way to seriously get to grips with the disintegration of our environment, stop ghettoisation of the poor and end the scandal of human traffic(jam)ing.

Not published - too long

SIR – Glyn Erasmus thinks a policy that puts an end to the scandal of commuting miles to work is `utopian idiocy' (Letters, Friday 14 April). I would have expected more cultivated common sense from a man so named. I suggested that over the course of the next ten years, through the use of legislation, that we should be aiming for a target of 80% of workers living within two miles of where they work. In addition all children should attend their nearest school which should be no more than 400 pupils in size. He says that if I want to know what this would be like that I should `check out the way people lived in the 18th Century'. However, this is not a pre-modern but a post-modern policy. It recognises the achievements of modernism and seeks to build on them whilst at the same time transcending their often anti-human characteristics. In the field of trivial consumption, Henry Ford's modernist rallying call that `you can have any colour you like as long as it's black' is very much a thing of the past but in our day-to-day lives we are still expected to attend the kind of enormous, faceless institutions and workplaces that arose during the 19th Century. Of course there will still be roads and lorries and people going on holiday but why subject ourselves to the waste that is commuting. As far as the Valleys `communities' are concerned, there are forgotten and abandoned estates up there where people cannot, through no fault of their own, remember what a job is and where they live in complete poverty and hopelessness. At the same time thousands of `better off' workers endure endless traffic jams to get into Cardiff and home every day. Why cannot jobs be relocated to the Valleys? If anybody should be accused of `utopian idiocy' it is those who believe that the current state of affairs is sustainable either economically or environmentally. Needless to say, the current proposals to close so many schools in Cardiff are very much a step in the wrong direction unless seen from Mr Erasmus's point-of-view in which case a lot of `precious' real estate will be freed up for more important things such as casinos and estate agents.

Edited version of above which was published

SIR – Glyn Erasmus thinks a policy that puts an end to the scandal of commuting miles to work and school is `utopian idiocy' (Letters, Friday 14 April). He implies that this would be like living in the 18th Century. However, this is not a pre-modern but a post-modern policy. It recognises the achievements of modernism and seeks to build on them whilst at the same time transcending their often anti-human characteristics. In the field of trivial consumption, Henry Ford's modernist rallying call that `you can have any colour you like as long as it's black' is very much a thing of the past but in our day-to-day lives we are still expected to attend the kind of faceless institutions and workplaces that arose during the 19th Century. Of course there will still be roads and lorries and holidaymakers but why subject ourselves to the waste that is commuting?

Not published - too long

SIR - So, the traffic in Cardiff is even more snarled up than that in London. Guess what, it is due to get a whole lot worse. Everything that happens in Wales is governed by the `Wales Spatial Plan’ which is a good old-fashioned piece of 20th Century unsustainable, dystopian nonsense. Its implementation in the South East is supposed to `strengthen the existing system of towns and cities’. So far so good but, the crowning jewel of the plan is that Cardiff `requires a much greater ``mass’’ of population and activity’. This is behind the desperate bid for a `super casino’ which is what passes nowadays for economic progress and should sit nicely next to the `super’ schools, the `super’ hospitals and prisons and the `super’ car parks. Super.

The Spatial Plan is a missed opportunity. South Wales, in regenerating itself after the brutal closures of mines, docks and steelworks, could have been transformed into a post-urban society where people live where they work and go to school where they live. A society that is not just sustainable but which produces a surplus of energy from the very act of living. Houses, schools and workplaces that actually feed into the national grid not off of it. An example: the tax office in Llanishen. What possible logic can there be to 3,000 people travelling to and from that building everyday (no jokes please)? With modern communications technology the workforce could be spread around ten beautiful energy producing workplaces located throughout the valleys with the stipulation that to work in them you have to live by them. To add to the idiocy of the situation, hundreds of new `houses’ are being built all along the Caerphilly Road and I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of salt that not one of them will be occupied by anybody who works in Ty Glas.

Instead of building new roads we should clear the ones we’ve got of pointless commuter traffic. That would increase efficiency no-end. And more and better public transport is not the answer either. Public transport, to be of any use, requires that people live and work on top of each other which is why the middle classes, to avoid this, took up commuting in the fist place. Often, those who do travel into town by train have driven to the station. Irony upon irony. In attempting to move away from the slums and areas of pollution commuters have managed only to globalise pollution as a phenomenon so that now there is no escape for anybody.

In the Spatial Plan the relative smallness of Cardiff is lamented. But, Wales’s great advantage could have been that, unlike every other cloned capitalist economy, it didn’t have an overbearing, energy and life-sapping capital city. That advantage, not to mention Cardiff’s charm, is being squandered.

The Global Descent of America

2005-01-29T15:23:00.000Z

Click title to link to this discussion article from The Black Commentator

Aijaz Ahmad

Now, more than ever, African Americans and people with sense must disconnect from the insane conversation that passes for news in the United States. Fortunately, the Internet exists, allowing us to connect with the global conversation, which is far different than the foul discourse we are drowning in, here at home. The U.S. has passed a point of no return, in terms of world reputation and leadership. No one is listening to the bizarre rantings of the Bush crew except his own crazed base in the heartland of racism and reaction, and the corporate media that urge us to leap into a Grand Canyon of lunacy – a kind of suicide. . .

Escape from the Universe

2005-01-29T15:18:00.000Z

Click title to link

The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it

Michio Kaku

The universe is out of control, in a runaway acceleration. Eventually all intelligent life will face the final doomâ€”the big freeze. An advanced civilisation must embark on the ultimate journey: fleeing to a parallel universe.

In Norse mythology, Ragnarokâ€”the fate of the godsâ€”begins when the earth is caught in the vice-like grip of a bone-chilling freeze. The heavens themselves freeze over, as the gods perish in great battles with evil serpents and murderous wolves. Eternal darkness settles over the bleak, frozen land as the sun and moon are both devoured. Odin, the father of all gods, finally falls to his death, and time itself comes to a halt.

The power to resist

2005-01-24T08:57:00.000Z

Harith Al-Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars Association, spoke to Mohamed Al-Anwar in Baghdad about the US attempts to court Iraq's Sunnis. Click title to link to this Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly article.

Harith Al-Dhari comes across as a strong and imposing figure. Al- Dhari and his movement is one of the staunchest opponents of the fact that elections should be held while the country is labouring under the US-led occupation. The status of the Muslim Scholars Association rose to prominence in recent months when the movement championed a campaign to boycott the 30 January elections. Al-Ahram Weekly visited Al-Dhari at the association's headquarters in Um Al-Qura Mosque in western Baghdad.

Dr Phil meets Metallica

2005-01-24T08:51:00.000Z

From the Green Left Weekly

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
By Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

REVIEW BY OWEN RICHARDS

Heavy metal legends Metallica on the couch with Dr Phil? Well, not quite, but Berlinger and Sinofsky’s documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is just as regrettable as any Dr Phil episode.

Metallica is widely credited with founding heavy metal music as it is known today. They delivered four classic albums during the 1980s — Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightening, Master of Puppets and ... And Justice For All — all instant cult releases of blistering riff-a-rama, fast heavy drum beats and aggressive singing.

Then something changed. The 1990s brought a new and improved Metallica. Fans deserted in droves as the band shed the customary long hair and denim jackets and began softening their musical approach.

In 2000, fans were further disappointed when drummer Lars Ulrich testified in US Congress against song-swapping website Napster for costing the multi-million-dollar band royalties.

Berlinger and Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster casts light on the modern Metallica, and a monster is exactly what’s revealed.

Here’s the story: Metallica is in the studio attempting to record a new album — their first in five years — and their bass player of 15 years, Jason Newstead, has just quit the band. Personal and creative differences divide the three remaining members, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett, who are also at an all-time creative low. At the behest of their managers, Metallica does what any rock band would do in the situation — they enter group therapy. In the middle of the therapy/recording process, guitarist/vocalist Hetfield enters rehab for several months leaving the new album — St Anger — on ice.

The therapy process, led by $40,000-a-month “therapist/performance enhancement coach” Phil Towle, is farcical. One wonders if he is really a qualified therapist, as he and the band members engage in over two hours of pop-psych drivel, discussing their feelings to the point of dysfunctional absurdity.

It is clear from the get-go that the reason they can’t get it together enough to record the damn album is that there is no longer a creative reason for the existence of the band. So why do they persist? The band members themselves reveal the answer — Metallica is big business. The members, as well as their parasitical hangers-on (such as their managers, record company and therapist), all have a stake in the existence of the monster.

The creative dead-end is prevalent. The band turns up to record without a single song written. It’s painful to watch them sit around trying to concoct new material. Hetfield jams second-rate riffs and writes meaningless end-rhyme lyrics. Sometimes the others try to contribute. Hilariously, even therapist Towle writes some of the lyrics.

How did Metallica get to be like this? Berlinger and Sinofsky’s documentary provides many clues. We hear of Hetfield and Hammett’s hundreds of expensive guitars, see Hammett at his California ranch, watch Hetfield burn down roads in expensive cars and motorbikes, while Ulrich parades his private art collection worth millions of dollars. That’s right — they’re filthy rich.

After 140 minutes enduring these spoilt brats’ narcissism, psychobabble, power-tripping, greed and creative boredom, one can only agree with ex-bass player Newstead’s comment on hearing of the band’s entry into therapy: “This is lame. This is fucking lame and weak”. Indeed.

Letter From Baghdad

2005-01-24T08:36:00.000Z

From the Atlantic Monthly

Life in the wilds of a city without trust

by William Langewiesche

Now that the roads into Iraq have effectively been closed to Westerners by banditry and insurgent attacks, the best way into Baghdad for ordinary civilians is by air from Jordan, aboard a decrepit airliner, an old Fokker that shuttles two or three times a day between Amman and Baghdad-that is, as long as the airport is open. The airplane is operated by Royal Jordanian, and is flown by a South African crew-people who for whatever reasons are willing day in and day out to risk ground fire and surface-to-air missiles in a thin-skinned machine with limited maneuverability and no active defenses. For passengers willing to share briefly in the same risk, the ticket price is stiff-about $1,500 round-trip, for a one-hour flight each way. Nonetheless, dozens of takers show up at Amman's airport every day, many lugging duffels heavy with booze and body armor. They filter silently through the dim, dingy terminal, and collect at the gate in an elongated waiting room that seems to have been chosen for its isolation. There they eye one another with a single paradoxical question in mind: What sort of fool would travel voluntarily to Iraq these days?

The answer varies. A few are elite Iraqis, heavyset men in old three-piece suits, sometimes with their wives, returning home as people strangely insist on doing, out of habit or perceived necessity, and quite possibly to die. Some are Western war correspondents, the real thing, young-looking and scruffy in their street beards and their rumpled shirts without epaulets, who are less concerned about missiles than about the daily challenge that awaits on the far side, of doing their work while somehow preserving theirnecks. Others seem to be engineers or technical consultants, and first-timers in war; they are middle-aged men with wedding rings, carrying briefcases and appearing unsure, as if they took a wrong turn somewhere and are surprised. Still others are returning Green Zone hands, trading certainties among themselves with a familiarity bred in the relative safety and isolation of their fortress lives within the sprawling American compound at the center of Baghdad. But most of the passengers on most of the flights are different again, visibly tough and muscular men, British, South African, and American, often tattooed and clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair-contract warriors among the thousands who have signed on to ride shotgun for the Iraqi infrastructure projects where so much American and Iraqi money has been ploughed into the ground. All these people are acutely aware of their destination. The trip lies ahead with the inevitability of a sentence that has been pronounced on them. The mood in the waiting room is not fearful, but it is decidedly fatalistic.

During the short bus ride across the tarmac the passengers stand for the most part silent. But then there is the flight itself, at the start of which a couple of pretty South African attendants maintain the pretense of normalcy, performing an ordinary airline welcome ("Thank you for flying Royal Jordanian") and advising the passengers on the standard safety rules-to fasten their seat belts, for instance, despite a sentiment in the cabin of "Why bother?" and the unavoidable contemplation of the effect of a missile strike. In a war like this one the battlefield takes so many innocent-looking forms. The airplane climbs over Amman and heads east at high altitude across a desert of tans and blacks. The desert is scarred by military works. At some point it becomes Iraq. The attendants serve coffee with smiles. There is a boxed snack that it is wise to avoid. The captain comes on with the weather ahead, which for most of the year is simply hot. Then the Euphrates appears below, and the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia, and finally the Tigris, and Baghdad itself-a sprawl of a city, hazy with dust. The airplane holds overhead the Baghdad airport at 15,000 feet, above the range of the insurgency. When cleared for the approach it descends rapidly, with the landing gear and spoilers out, in an aggressive left spiral that is intended to reduce exposure to ground fire but, given the proximity of insurgents, offers no guarantees. After a final left turn it immediately touches down. During the taxi to the terminal a flight attendant says, "Welcome to Baghdad," but has the grace at least not to wish the passengers a pleasant stay.

It is a strange sensation to be delivered alone and so quickly into the radical world of a shapeless war. The Baghdad terminal is a grandiose, nearly deserted edifice, roamed by heavily armed guards, and sometimes shaken by the distant thumps of outgoing artillery or incoming mortars-at first it is hard to tell which. The new Iraqi government provides a visa on the spot, and stamps the passengers through amid confusion and delay. They get their bags and go to the curbside, where U.S. government employees and contractors are picked up in armored convoys for the drive to the Green Zone. Those who do not qualify for such treatment-which now means mostly Iraqis and Western journalists-catch a minibus that takes them several miles to a heavily defended checkpoint at the airport perimeter, where presumably they have arranged for someone trusted to pick them up. If that person does not appear (a common problem in a place where telephone communication is inadequate at best), there is no choice but to return to the terminal and try somehow to get a message through from there. The alternative of taking a taxi, of which there are many in Baghdad, has become impossibly dangerous as criminality and the insurgency have intertwined and spread, and the street price for a captive American has risen to $25,000, or so it is said.

Beyond the checkpoint the war is immediately all around. Indeed, the divided highway into town, though merely five miles long, is notorious for the frequency of lethal attacks. Western journalists generally negotiate it in ordinary Iraqi sedans, which are less likely than the American-style armored SUVs to draw the insurgents' fire, but by the same token cannot easily be distinguished as innocuous by the U.S. troops who have been given the tricky job of patrolling the road in their Bradley fighting vehicles and armored Humvees. It is prudent for people in the sedans, including the drivers, to raise their hands when passing one of those patrols, to show that they are empty. Of course the floors of the sedans these days are probably littered with loaded weapons-Kalashnikovs, pistols, and even grenades at the ready-and the soldiers know that, too. The soldiers are increasingly nervous
and ready to fire. Almost imperceptibly their discipline is fraying. One of the ironies for Westerners trying to reduce the dangers in Iraq by blending in, however partially, is that as the war worsens, they run an increased risk of attack from both sides. This is the danger that Iraqis face as well. If there is any relief in leaving the airport road and entering the deadly slow-moving traffic within the city, it is that at least the American patrols are less present.

Several days before the U.S. elections in November, American officials revised their count of hard-core insurgents upward to as many as 12,000-or 20,000 if active sympathizers were included. Leaving aside the question of how isolated bureaucracies can derive such numbers in the midst of a genuine and popular insurrection, the cap at 20,000 elicited grim disbelief among ordinary Iraqis, frontline soldiers, and others with a sense of a struggle on the streets that has spun out of control. There are six million people in Baghdad alone, and another 10 million in the angriest areas of central Iraq, and many are young men with a taste for war. Meanwhile, foreign fighters continue to arrive from throughout the Middle East, across borders that are unpoliceable not merely because they are long and wild but, more significant, because of the support these travelers receive once they cross the line and mix into the local populations. Moreover, though they probably number a few thousand, the foreign fighters constitute only a small fraction of the forces now arrayed against the United States. As for the tactics
involved, some are indeed crudely terroristic-the ongoing assassination of university professors, for instance, and the occasional car bombings of innocent market crowds in the cities. For the most part, however, the insurgents' attacks are less nihilistic than they are logical and precisely focused, whether against the American coalition and its camp followers or their Iraqi agents and collaborators. The truth is that however vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional "collateral" casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces. Rhetoric aside, this is not a war on terror but a running fight with a large part of the Iraqi people. It is a classic struggle between the legions of a great power and the resistance of a native population. It is infinitely wider and deeper than officials can admit. And the United States is on the way to losing it.

Tragically, this was not the necessary outcome of the American invasion. After Baghdad fell, in the spring of 2003, the mood of the people was cautious but glad for the demise of Saddam Hussein, and open to the possibility that an American occupation would be a change for the better. By most measures it has not worked out that way. Though some of the blame lies with the immaturity and opportunism of the Iraqi people, these were factors that needed to be handled, and were not. The Iraqi people are far from stupid or unaware. But in the isolation and arrogance that have characterized the American occupation, never have we addressed them directly, explained ourselves honestly, humbly sought their support, respected their views of solutions, of political power, of American motivations, or of the history and future of Iraq. Even short of the killing we have done, we have broken down their doors, run them off the roads, swiveled our guns at them, shouted profanities at them, and disrespected their women-all this hundreds or thousands of times every day. We have dishonored them publicly, and within a society that places public honor
above life itself. These are the roots of the fight we are in. Now Saddam himself is re-emerging as a symbol of national potency.

There is more: faced with resistance, we have failed with both the carrot and the stick. Take the stick first. The mere presence of American troops may help prevent the outbreak of factional fighting, but the U.S. military is not a police force, and at no level of strength can it serve as one on Iraqi soil. The soldiers don't know the language, the culture, or the people, and they don't know who does know, or whom to trust. As measured by the personal risks they take they stay in the country too long, but in terms of understanding the human terrain they rotate out far too soon. Their mission amounts to driving around in armored vehicles from which visibility is poor, trying to protect themselves, and occasionally engaging in
politically disastrous assaults on neighborhoods and towns. The American success in Fallujah amounts to little more than a measure of American frustration. Across large swaths of central Iraq the insurgents exploit the troops adroitly. They fire on passing patrols from ordinary houses and slip away, counting on the Americans perhaps to pull back at first, but then to return in force to shoot, make arrests, and generally retaliate. The residents of the targeted neighborhoods understand the insurgents' trick, but it is the Americans they blame, as they blame them for drawing the insurgents' fire in the first place. Similarly, the insurgents get the
Americans to deliver their smart bombs to the wrong addresses-making a mockery of the conceit, already seen on Iraqi streets as a sign of American cowardice, that this war can be fought at standoff distances from the comfort of a combat jet. Then, of course, there are all the collateral dead: officially their numbers are not known, but they amount to a lot nonetheless, every one with family and friends.

On the carrot side of the American intervention are the infrastructure projects-fixing the electrical grid, for instance, and providing for clean water and sewage treatment, and upgrading the hospitals (into which the growing numbers of casualties are now carried). These projects were supposed to promote stability and provide Iraqis with better lives. Billions of dollars have been poured into them through the device of open-ended "cost plus" contracts, by which companies (almost all of them large and American) are reimbursed for the cost of the work, however they define that work, with an additional fee on top. There is no incentive to run efficient or discreet operations-to tread lightly on Iraqi soil. Indeed, quite the opposite. The main contractors base themselves in the Green Zone in grandly redundant style, with an abundance of people, equipment, and backup. Because of the
danger that exists on the outside, they have retreated from many of the reconstruction projects, but they remain in the country fully staffed, and continue to drink from public funds. Day to day much of their attention is taken up by complying with the arcane accounting requirements of the U.S. Federal Acquisition Regulations-a thicket of rules that do not limit the cost-plus profits so long as the columns are kept straight, and whose mandates serve, however unintentionally, to exclude potential low-cost competitors, particularly the Iraqis. In truth, the fact that the large contractors are sitting inefficiently in the Green Zone is of little direct consequence to the war outside. What is of consequence, paradoxically, is that they are not entirely inactive: despite the hazards, they continue to pursue some reconstruction projects in the city and beyond, and these
projects-intermittent, inconclusive, and unconvincing to the intended beneficiaries, ordinary Iraqis overwhelmed by anarchy-require visits by the contractors' expatriate technicians and construction managers. The visits, in turn, require the expatriates to travel to and from the sites, and this is done in the heaviest possible manner (where again one can see the cost-plus dynamic at play), in convoys of aggressively driven armored SUVs, typically three, with a team of as many as ten ostentatiously armed drivers and bodyguards. These are the personal-security details, made up of the private contract warriors who have been such a visible part of the American presence, and who operate outside any effective control, often in a hostile and undisciplined manner, sowing hatred wherever they move. With every trip to or from a reconstruction site they threaten and anger untold numbers of Iraqis on the streets. If the purpose of the infrastructure projects was to win the sympathy of Iraq, then this is one important reason why we have sunk into war instead.

In any case, the war has degenerated to the extent that the construction sites have become nothing more than symbols of the despised American presence. For the resistance they also serve as convenient collection points for identifiable collaborators-usually laborers-who can easily be hunted down and killed as a lesson for others. There is a lot of that sort of teaching going on these days. At just one sewage project in Baghdad, for example, as many as thirty Iraqi workers were shot in only three months late last year. It is an unusual record only because someone kept count. The assassination campaign is systematic. It is decimating American projects throughout central Iraq, and has taken a particularly heavy toll among Green Zone workers. So pervasive is the threat that Iraqis still working with the occupation do not dare speak English on the phone, even at home in front of
only their children, lest word leak out. When I call the Iraqis who work for me, a driver and a guard, my first question is whether they can talk. As often as not they answer by hanging up. This is new. It has gotten to the point where collaborators feel lucky if they are not killed at once but instead given a chance to mend their ways. That chance comes in the form of one of several standard letters.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
To the brothers of the monkey and pig. Show your regret, or your destiny will be like that of your brother spies. You shall follow your brothers. You will not succeed before God's anger, and our own. You are the enemy of God and Country.
Signed,
Self-Sacrificers

Or

BY GOD MOST GRACIOUS, MOST MERCIFUL.
You, the Afterbirth, DO NOT sell your soul to the enemy. Because you are our brother in religion, we give you this one last warning before death.

Whichever note he receives, a collaborator generally has forty-eight hours to stop working with the occupation, and somehow to make this very clear. If he does not stop, he will certainly die. As a result, almost everyone hastens to comply. A few of the most stubborn do not. They move with their families to new neighborhoods and houses. They change their names, and grow beards or shave beards off. They come up with new fictions to explain their days. They avoid at any cost traveling directly from home to work, and especially traveling directly back. For all this, though, they cannot escape an aura of doom; they are people who at best seem to have slowed the clock. Outside the Green Zone there is really no hiding from the insurgency
anymore.

Nonetheless, some Westerners still live in the wilds of the city. They are reduced now mostly to a few journalists and the best of the contract warriors-people whose work requires them to maintain some sort of connection to the realities of the Iraqi street. This is difficult, because the realities are lethal quite particularly to them: they are being stalked, captured, tortured, and killed. The armed forces who sometimes pass by, whether Iraqi or American, will not or cannot protect them, and indeed pose significant threats of their own. Furthermore, there are no safe refuges in which to hunker down. Out of inertia the network-television crews, clumsy with bodyguards and equipment, remain nearly prisoners in the large hotels at the center of the city. The hotels have become famous even beyond Iraq-the Palestine, the Sheraton, and across the Tigris the Mansour. They are grim concrete structures-stale with tobacco smoke, bad food, and dust-that, though heavily protected and surrounded by blast walls and concertina wire, present obvious targets for the insurgents' attacks. They have been rocketed already, and it seems just a matter of time until one or another gets badly bombed. The television crews know it, too. They rotate through a few months at a time, and send out their Iraqi stringers to gather stories and video footage on the streets (a bomb here or there, the wounded and the crying), and do their "standups" with live backdrops of the city, and for their personal safety trust in luck.

Most of the print reporters rotate through as well. During the golden times of the summer and fall of 2003, before the insurgency gathered force, those who worked for the large newspapers and wire services left the big establishments and installed their "bureaus" in private houses, which were both more comfortable and less obvious than the hotels. Some had gardens and pools. Gradually, then, as the war deepened, they fortified those places with higher walls, steel doors, sandbags, iron grilles, wire mesh, and even safe rooms into which, in theory (if they moved impossibly fast), they could escape in the event of an assault. They hired guards with AK-47s, and then hired more. They hooked up TV cameras to watch the roofs, and the streets outside. They put a halt to the sort of partying that had gone on in the
early days, after Baghdad's fall. And they tried very hard to maintain low profiles. There were scares now and then, when one group or another would flee a house believed to have come under surveillance, but the security seemed to work fairly well-until the insurgents simply ignored it and began to invade houses, last fall.
It became clear then that the defenses had been an illusion all along. And so the reporters migrated again, or most of them did, this time into some of the small hotels, where they remain today, on the theory of the middle ground-the idea that such establishments may offer stiffer resistance to incursions than can private households, but nonetheless may appear too insignificant to waste rockets and car bombs on. These are wishful thoughts, of course, and they have already been proved wrong, but what else are people to do? The reporters spend much of their time now in earnest conversation over such fine-tunings, knowing full well, as they readily admit, that by any normal standards, even those of an ordinary war zone, in Baghdad there are no acceptable solutions.

The greater danger anyway is in driving through the city or beyond. The basics are clear. Discreet sedans, again, are the vehicles of choice. The armored versions of them, which some news organizations now have, might get you through a short gunfight, but they can kill you, too, particularly through the overpressure that results from the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade that penetrates to the inside. A thin-skinned car won't stop rifle rounds, but it may allow a rocket grenade to pass right through. So pick your poison. It may help to wear body armor if it does not have a visible neck guard and can be hidden under a loose shirt. Conversely, helmets and ballistic sunglasses are far too showy. Of course, the goal is to avoid being attacked in the first place. There is no sure way to do this
and still get around. If you are staying in a hotel, you have to assume that you are being watched on the street both coming and going, and probably by the desk clerks as well. It is essential therefore to avoid set schedules and routines, to vary routes, and if possible occasionally to change cars. It is also important to have a skillful driver, who knows when to move fast and when not to, and who is aware of what is happening around him on the streets. The same goes for the guard, who needs to be good with a gun but, more important, to be smart. And, of course, it is important to have people you can trust.

Sadly, as the insurgency grows, trust is fading away. This is one of the most sensitive and dangerous aspects of life for reporters in Baghdad today: nearly every news organization is facing troubles with its Iraqi staff, and to various but increasing degrees is being held in some way hostage, out of fear of the consequences of disagreement or disciplinary action. You don't just go around laying off people in Iraq these days. Indeed, the very air of Baghdad seems thick with suspicions of betrayal. Even within the Green Zone, which is largely self-sufficient, many Americans now automatically distrust any Iraqi employee who has been there for longer than about two months. Why has this person not been assassinated, people wonder-or at least frightened off with a letter? The question is legitimate. Americans have awakened and found that the enemy is closer even than dreamed of before.

It is a new day in Iraq, yes. In the space of just a few months the interim government of Ayad Allawi has gutted many of the earlier reforms and has lost any hope of legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people, who see it as a flimsy construct propped up by the United States, and powerless in the face of their own disdain. Corruption is rife on every level, and with it cynicism. The courts are bowing to political pressure. The Iraqi security forces are riddled with insurgents, not because the vetting is poor, or because agents have been planted, but because hatred of America has grown within the ranks just as it has in Iraqi society at large. There is still some hope attached to the coming elections-if only because most Shiites have so far stayed out of the fray. People have different thresholds for crossing over into the resistance, and different capacities for violent action, but even some of my old friends, once so welcoming to me as an American, are telling me that they are approaching those lines. The question is no longer who is against the United States in Iraq but who is not.

The Right to Resist Occupation

2005-01-22T19:36:00.000Z

Counterpunch, January 21, 2005

The Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance

By SHARON SMITH

The Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation is growing, as is its support among
ordinary Iraqis. Iraq's interim government recently admitted that the
insurgency involves at least 40,000 "hardcore fighters" and up to 200,000
active sympathizers--a far cry from the isolated 5,000 "Baathist remnants"
and "foreign fighters" the Pentagon initially claimed to be fighting.

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in March concluded, "The
insurgents...seem to be gaining broad acceptance, if not outright support.
If the [pro-U.S.] Kurds, who make up about 13 percent of the poll, are
taken out of the equation, more than half of Iraqis say killing U.S. troops
can be justified in at least some cases."

That was shortly before the first siege on Falluja, in which U.S. forces
killed over 600 civilians before the armed resistance drove them out.
Support for the resistance can only have grown now that U.S. bombs have
flattened Falluja, killing hundreds more civilians and driving 200,000
residents to live in the squalor of refugee camps--while dispersing the
resistance fighters to other localities.

In mid-December, for example, Knight Ridder reported on a 41-year-old Iraqi
woman, Kifah Khudhair, injured in a car bombing in Baghdad--whose rage was
directed not at the car bombers, but at the Americans. "What can we do?"
her son said. "These things happen every day, like looting and murder. I am
angry at the Americans because it is all their fault. This is all because
of them."

* * *

IRAQIS SUPPORT the resistance against the U.S. occupation of their country
for one simple reason: they want the Americans to get out--now.

Yet many in the U.S. antiwar movement have had difficulty accepting this
black-and-white reasoning, preferring to see the world in shades of gray.
"[Iraqi] jihadis or America's terror-using hypocrites? If we are truly to
stop the terrorists, the world must take sides against both," wrote New
Left veteran Steve Weissman recently on Truthout.

This argument by Weissman is faulty on two counts.

First, Weissman equates the 500-pound bombs and high-tech weapons used by
the world's biggest superpower occupying Iraq (at the cost of $7.8 billion
per month) to the rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs of those
resisting that occupation. One side aims to control Iraq to fulfill its
grand plan to dominate the Middle East and its oil. The other merely seeks
the right for Iraqis to determine their own future.

Some 100,000 Iraqi civilians are now estimated dead because of the war and
occupation. This followed the roughly 1 million Iraqis killed from the
deprivation caused by more than a decade of economic sanctions. And this
followed a death toll of up to 200,000 in the 1991 Gulf War. Choosing sides
should not be so difficult.
Without for a moment endorsing the tactic of targeting civilians, which is
used by parts of the resistance, the sheer magnitude of the death and
destruction inflicted by the U.S. upon ordinary Iraqis should dispel any
myth that the two sides in this war deserve equal condemnation.

Moreover, Weissman accepts at face value the Bush administration's absurd
characterization of the insurgency as dominated by "terrorists" and Islamic
"extremists."

On December 15, the Boston Globe published a report by Molly Bingham, who
lived from August 2003 until June 2004 in Baghdad researching the
resistance. She observed, "The composition of the Iraqi resistance is not
what the U.S. administration has been calling it, and the more it is
oversimplified, the harder it is to explain its complexity. I met Shia and
Sunnis fighting together, women and men, young and old. I met people from
all economic, social and educational backgrounds."

She continued: "The original impetus for almost all of the individuals I
spoke to was a nationalistic one--the desire to defend their country from
occupation, not to defend Saddam Hussein or his regime." Bingham's
conclusion should help focus the aims of every antiwar activist in the
U.S.: "The resistance will continue until American influence has
disappeared from Iraq's political system."

* * *

SUPPORT FOR the right of Iraqis to resist occupation must extend beyond an
abstract principle for the U.S. antiwar movement.

While recognizing "the right of the Iraqi people to resist as a point of
principle," Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies--in widely
circulated notes for a speech to the steering committee of United for Peace
and Justice (UFPJ) on December 18--argued, "We should not call for
'supporting the resistance' because we don't know who most of them are and
what they really stand for, and because of those we do know, we mostly
don't support their social program beyond opposition to the occupation."

To be meaningful, however, supporting the "right to resist" must include
support for that resistance once it actually emerges.

Award-winning Indian writer and global justice activist Arundhati Roy got
to the heart of the issue in a San Francisco speech on August 16: "It is
absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq, as being
masterminded by terrorists," she said. "After all, if the United States
were invaded and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a
terrorist?"

If we are waiting for the "ideologically pure" movement--assuming the
unlikely scenario that all those opposed to the war could agree on one--we
could be waiting forever.

As Roy explained, "Like most resistance movements, [the Iraqis] combine a
motley range of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists,
fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with
opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery and criminality. But if we were to
only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our
purity.

"Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their
secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our
end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allied governments to
withdraw from Iraq."

Focus on the Global South's Walden Bello made a similar point in June.
"What western progressives forget is that national liberation movements are
not asking them mainly for ideological or political support," he wrote.
"What they really want from the outside is international pressure for the
withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can
have the space to forge a truly national government based on their unique
processes. Until they give up this dream of having an ideal liberation
movement tailored to their values and discourse, U.S. peace activists will,
like the Democrats they often criticize, continue to be trapped within a
paradigm of imposing terms for other people."

* * *

THE U.S. antiwar movement should heed this advice and expend less energy in
judging the character of the Iraqi resistance and more effort on building a
visible resistance to the Iraq occupation from inside the U.S.

When the U.S. invaded Falluja and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in
the spring of 2004, the U.S. antiwar movement--already ensconced in its
misguided effort to elect prowar John Kerry--declined to mount a visible
response to these and other atrocities committed by the U.S. in Iraq,
effectively sparing the Bush administration from the need to account for
its war crimes.

The main challenge for antiwar activists in the United States is to rebuild
a visible, national antiwar movement. That means opposing the January 30
election--held under martial law, which will effectively exclude 50 percent
of the population--and supporting the resistance that exposes its utter
hypocrisy.

Is this strategy too ambitious--too far to the left for "mainstream"
America? That is unlikely, since a majority of Americans continue to oppose
the war.

U.S. troops are also divided, and we need to actively support those troops
who--at great personal risk--are resisting. The latest is U.S. Army Sgt.
Kevin Benderman, who refused to redeploy to Iraq earlier this month after
serving there from March to September 2003.

"The people that we are fighting now are for the most part people like you
and me, people who are defending themselves against a superior military
force and fighting to keep that which is rightfully theirs," Benderman
said. He added that the Iraqi people have the right to choose their own
form of government, "just like we did in America after the revolution."

The antiwar movement must not lose sight of the fact that its main enemy is
at home--and any resistance to that enemy deserves our unconditional support.

Iraq, Fallujah polls top-secret

2005-01-22T19:26:00.000Z

Only 8,500 residents left in Fallujah and fighting continues. Click title to link.

Iraq News]: WASHINGTON - For their own safety, voters who dare to show up in the battered and mostly abandoned city of Fallujah will be among the last to know where to go to cast their ballots, the top Marine in Iraq said yesterday. "We have not even put the word out to the Iraqi people" on the locations of polling sites nationwide for the Jan. 30 elections, said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in charge of western Iraq.

That information will be even more closely guarded in Fallujah. . .

Why the emperor has no clothes

2005-01-22T19:20:00.000Z

Click title to link

By Andre Gunder Frank

01/20/05 "Asia Times" -- Uncle Sam has reneged and defaulted on up to 40% of its trillion-dollar foreign debt, and nobody has said a word except for a line in The Economist. In plain English that means Uncle Sam runs a worldwide confidence racket with his self-made dollar based on the confidence that he has elicited and received from others around the world, and he is a also a deadbeat in that he does not honor and return the money he has received.

How much of our dollar stake we have lost depends on how much we originally paid for it. Uncle Sam let his dollar fall, or rather through his deliberate political economic policies drove it down, by 40%, from 80 cents to the euro to 133 cents. The dollar is down by a similar factor against the yen, yuan and other currencies. And it is still declining, indeed is apt to plummet altogether. . .

Arabs wary of Bush's 'freedom' speech

2005-01-22T19:16:00.000Z

Click title to link to this Aljazeera story

George Bush's pledge to spread liberty around the globe has earned a frosty reception in the Arab world, with observers dismissing as hollow rhetoric his insistence on promoting freedom.

U.S. to Take Bigger Bite of Iraq's Economic Pie

2005-01-21T15:10:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story

Emad Mekay

The United States is helping the interim Iraqi government continue to make major economic changes, including cuts to social subsidies, full access for U.S. companies to the nation's oil reserves and reconsideration of oil deals that the previous regime signed with France and Russia.

WASHINGTON, Dec 23 (IPS) - The United States is helping the interim Iraqi government continue to make major economic changes, including cuts to social subsidies, full access for U.S. companies to the nation's oil reserves and reconsideration of oil deals that the previous regime signed with France and Russia.

During a visit here this week, officials of the U.S.-backed administration detailed some of the economic moves planned for Iraq, many of them appearing to give U.S. corporations greater reach into the occupied nation's economy.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE: Lost in Translation?

2005-01-21T14:33:00.000Z

A great review from Science magazine

A review by Stuart McCook*

Plants and Empire Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. 318 pp. $39.95, £25.95, euro36.90. ISBN 0-674-01487-1.

In Plants and Empire, Londa Schiebinger uses an innovative analytical approach to revisit the familiar subject of natural history in the colonial Atlantic world. Her study seeks to understand the production of culturally induced scientific ignorance, or agnotology. "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge," she argues, "but an outcome of cultural and political struggle." In particular, she seeks to understand how and why knowledge of West Indian abortifacients was not
transferred to 18th-century Europe. The book explores the history of the silences, struggles, and structures that prevented this transfer.

The 18th-century West Indies were, in Schiebinger's words, a "biocontact zone." The region's inhabitants included people, plants, and animals from the Americas, Africa, and Europe. European bioprospectors scoured the region for new plants and animals of scientific, commercial, or medical value. Schiebinger, a historian of science at Stanford University, paints the 17th and 18th centuries as a period of relative openness in the world of European science. She provides vivid portraits
of representative European naturalists, such as the English physician Sir Hans Sloane, who worked in Jamaica, and the Dutch entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who worked in Surinam. European naturalists learned much about West Indian flora and fauna from indigenous and African informants, the names of whom are largely lost to history. Such exchanges of information did not take place on an equal footing and were fraught with cultural and social obstacles.

Schiebinger's study explores these exchanges and transfers by focusing on the history of one plant. The peacock flower (Poinciana pulcherrima) is a tropical shrub with seeds that have abortifacient properties. Its botanical origins remain obscure, but by the 18th century it was cultivated throughout the West Indies. Amerindian and African communities in the Caribbean had incorporated it into their
pharmacopoeia. Schiebinger situates the plant in the context of colonial racial and gender struggles, showing how Africans in particular used abortion as a form of anti-colonial resistance, robbing Europeans of potential labor. Europeans eventually learned about the peacock flower's abortifacient properties. Merian heard about it directly from slave women in Surinam, and she describes its role in slave resistance in her 1704 study of the insects of Surinam. Sloane independently learned about the plant's properties while working as a physician in Jamaica.

The peacock flower itself was first transferred to Europe in the late 17th century. It came to be cultivated in the continent's leading botanical gardens, including the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. Schiebinger carefully distinguishes between the transfer of the plant and the transfer of knowledge about the plant. With its flaming red and yellow flowers, Poinciana became well known to European gardeners as a favored ornamental. But knowledge of its abortive properties only rarely crossed the Atlantic and did not take
root in Europe.

Schiebinger explains this nontransfer of knowledge by situating the peacock flower in the context of 18th-century drug testing and comparing it with similar remedies that were taken up in Europe. During the 18th century, the regulation and systematic testing of drugs became more common. Approved drugs were listed in the official Pharmacopoeia of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Neither the peacock flower nor any other West Indian abortifacient was ever included in 18th- century European
pharmacopoeia. Schiebinger shows that this exclusion did not reflect a European prejudice against drugs from the New World: European pharmacopoeias included many New World medicines, such as chinchona to treat malaria and guaiacum to treat syphilis. Nor did it reflect a prejudice against drugs related to women's reproduction. European physicians experimented extensively with emmenagogues--drugs designed to regulate the menses--including many from the New World. Nor were there
any official regulations or laws prohibiting the medical study of abortifacients.

The principal obstacle to inclusion was rooted in a broader shift in attitudes toward abortion and abortifacients that took place in the 18th and early 19th centuries. According to Schiebinger, "late eighteenth-century experimental physicians stood at a fork in the road with respect to abortifacients." Abortifacient plants were an integral part of traditional knowledges and practices, in both the Old and New Worlds. Physicians might have chosen to incorporate these plants into their pharmacopoeias, as they did with many other forms of traditional
knowledge, or they might have chosen "the road toward the suppression of these knowledges and practices." Almost universally, European physicians chose the latter.

Schiebinger argues carefully that knowledge of the peacock flower and other abortifacients was not overtly suppressed or proscribed. She shows, instead, how the cultural and political structures of 18th-century Europe collectively impeded the transfer of knowledge about abortifacients. She concludes that the "agnotology of abortives among Europeans was not for want of knowledge collected in the colonies; it resulted from protracted struggles over who should control women's
fertility." Europe's mercantilist states were anxious to increase their populations, both at home and in the colonies. National wealth and national strength depended on healthy and increasing populations. Most naturalists and physicians were part of these imperial enterprises to encourage population growth. Even when European naturalists and physicians in the West Indies did learn about new abortifacients, they chose not to disseminate their knowledge. Their counterparts in Europe, similarly, had little incentive to promote the use of abortifacients, or even to study them. Limiting population was simply anathema to the prevailing goals of late 18th-century science and government.

The book does leave some questions unanswered. Religious groups play a central role in contemporary debates over contraception and abortion, so their absence from Schiebinger's account is striking. Some explanation of organized religion's involvement (or non-involvement) in the 18th-century debates would have been helpful. This reservation aside, Plants and Empire presents a subtle and compelling explanation for why knowledge of West Indian abortifacients was not taken up by scientists in Europe. More broadly, Schiebinger illustrates the explanatory power
of agnotology. Her study of scientific ignorance demonstrates that understanding what scientists do not know is just as important as understanding what they do know.

The reviewer is in the Department of History, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada.

Volume 307, Number 5707, Issue of 14 Jan 2005, pp. 210-211. Copyright © 2005 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.

Marxism and the Call of the Future

2005-01-21T14:18:00.000Z

Click title to link to the first chapter of this book published on line

Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics

The Revolutionary Worker is proud to feature an excerpt from the forthcoming book Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics by Bob Avakian and Bill Martin.

Published by Open Court—whose titles run the gamut from works on analytic philosophy to philosophical studies of The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—this provocative new book will be available in March.

Marxism and the Call of the Future is a wide- ranging dialogue between two provocative thinkers: Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Bill Martin, a radical social theorist and professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. The two address the relevance and challenges before Marxism in the contemporary world; imperialism and the state of world humanity; secularism and religion; animal rights; the prospects for revolution; and much more. They discuss philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida—and along the way make contact with diverse figures like Tecumseh and Bob Dylan.

Marxism and the Call of the Future is a lively exchange that often goes in unexpected directions. In the chapter we are printing, "Calculation, Classes, and Categorical Imperatives," Bob Avakian and Bill Martin explore people’s "objective interests" in replacing the current system, the role of "the ethical" or "the good" in the revolutionary process, and the nature of ethics itself. The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his view that people should be treated as an end and never only as a means is an important point of reference in the discussion.

We thank Open Court for their cooperation in making advance publication of this chapter possible.

Conservatives Pick Soft Target: A Cartoon Sponge

2005-01-20T16:29:00.000Z

NY Times, January 20, 2005

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 - On the heels of electoral victories barring same-sex marriage, some influential conservative Christian groups are turning their attention to a new target: the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.

"Does anybody here know SpongeBob?" Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, asked the guests Tuesday night at a black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate the election results.

SpongeBob needed no introduction. In addition to his popularity among children, who watch his cartoon show, he has become a well-known camp figure among adult gay men, perhaps because he holds hands with his animated sidekick Patrick and likes to watch the imaginary television show "The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy."

Now, Dr. Dobson said, SpongeBob's creators had enlisted him in a "pro-homosexual video," in which he appeared alongside children's television colleagues like Barney and Jimmy Neutron, among many others. The makers of the video, he said, planned to mail it to thousands of elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge" that includes tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."

The video's creator, Nile Rodgers, who wrote the disco hit "We Are Family," said Mr. Dobson's objection stemmed from a misunderstanding. Mr. Rodgers said he founded the We Are Family Foundation after the Sept. 11 attacks to create a music video to teach children about multiculturalism. The video has appeared on television networks, and nothing in it or its accompanying materials refers to sexual identity. The pledge, borrowed from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is not mentioned on the video and is available only on the group's Web site.

Mr. Rodgers suggested that Dr. Dobson and the American Family Association, the conservative Christian group that first sounded the alarm, might have been confused because of an unrelated Web site belonging to another group called "We Are Family," which supports gay youth.

"The fact that some people may be upset with each other peoples' lifestyles, that is O.K.," Mr. Rodgers said. "We are just talking about respect."

Mark Barondess, the foundation's lawyer, said the critics "need medication."

On Wednesday however, Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family, said the group stood by its accusation.

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids," he said. "It is a classic bait and switch."

The Chemical Brothers: Packing serious beats

2005-01-19T16:17:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story

The new album contains their most political moment to date. Even dance music can't ignore the real world, they tell Fiona Sturges

Published : 19 January 2005

They may be the biggest thing in dance music since the mixer was invented, but you'd be hard pushed to spot The Chemical Brothers - aka Tom Rowlands, 33, and Ed Simons, 34 - in a crowd. It's probably a result of all that time spent indoors realigning his hard drive that Simons could easily pass for a computer salesman or a schoolteacher - almost anything, in fact, except one half of a world-famous dance duo. Rowlands, who has finally abandoned his long indie-kid tresses in favour of a more sensible crop, is at least vaguely recognisable in his trademark tinted specs, though he, too, retains the look of someone who could do with getting out more. . .

THE COMING WARS

2005-01-18T10:27:00.000Z

Click title to link to full article in The New Yorker

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Pentagon can now do in secret

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way. . .

Bush’s Grand Plan: Incite Civil War

2005-01-18T09:55:00.000Z

Click title to link to full article on ZNet

by Mike Whitney

The Bush Administration is intentionally steering Iraq towards civil war. The elections are merely the catalyst for igniting, what could be, a massive social upheaval. This explains the bizarre insistence on voting when security is nearly nonexistent and where a mere 7% of the people can even identify the candidates. (This figure gleaned from Allawi’s Baghdad newspaper, Al-Sabah) Rumsfeld is using the elections as a springboard for aggravating tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and for diverting attention away from the troops. It’s a foolhardy move that only magnifies the desperation of the present situation. The Pentagon brass expected a “cakewalk” and, instead, they’ve found themselves mired in a guerilla war. . .

Trouble In Our Back Yard

2005-01-18T09:09:00.000Z

From the Washington Post

In Latin America, Democracy Is Faltering

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, January 17, 2005; Page A17

The Bush administration expects to focus much of its attention in a second term on promoting a political transformation of the Arab Middle East. But it may also have to spend some time on a parallel problem: preventing the unraveling of the democratic change the United States successfully nurtured a generation ago.

As Ronald Reagan began his second term 20 years ago, the United States was struggling to foster democracy in Latin America. Amid deep skepticism in Washington, Reagan's team promoted imperfect elections in Central America while trying to train the feckless army of El Salvador to defeat insurgents. Meanwhile, it pushed dictators with whom the United States had once been friendly, such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet, toward holding democratic elections. In the end, democracy
did sweep the region, extending to every country but Cuba. When several challenges to the new order were successfully turned back during the 1990s, it appeared irreversible.

Now Latin America's buried tradition of authoritarian populism is making a comeback, fueled by sluggish economic growth, corruption and weak leadership. In the past few weeks, what had been a slowly deteriorating situation has begun to snowball:

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez has responded to his victory in a controversial recall referendum by aggressively moving to eliminate the independence of the media and judiciary, criminalize opposition, and establish state control over the economy. He is also using his country's surging oil revenue to prop up the once-beleaguered Cuban dictatorship of Fidel Castro, sponsor anti-democratic movements in
other Latin countries and buy influence around the region. Last week he literally declared war against privately owned farms, sending troops to occupy one of the country's largest cattle ranches.

In Bolivia, the Chavez-funded Movement Toward Socialism has already driven one democratically elected president from office through violent protests. Last week it was working on his successor, Carlos Mesa, who faced paralyzing strikes by the leftists that closed off roads to the capital for two days.

In Ecuador, another populist president, Lucio Gutierrez, used his slim majority in the national legislature last month to pack the country's judiciary, including the Supreme Court, Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Electoral Council.

Nicaragua's president, Enrique Bolanos, avoided a de facto coup last week only by striking a deal with former Sandinista ruler Daniel Ortega, who has threatened to use a corruptly assembled alliance to alter the constitution and transfer power from the presidency to the Sandinista-run legislature. Though polls show that an overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans oppose him, Ortega is closer to regaining
power than at any time since Nicaragua rejected his Marxist dictatorship and returned to democracy in 1990.

A decade ago Latin America's stronger democratic leaders could be counted on to rally against such authoritarian movements with the help of the United States, using the vehicle of the Organization of American States. Just three years ago the OAS adopted a democracy charter that allows for collective action against member states that violate such principles as an independent judiciary. But even the
strong democracies, like Brazil and Chile, have grown weaker: Both have leftist presidents who frequently strike poses against President Bush's policies but have little stomach for taking on a menace such as Chavez. Even if they were to challenge the Chavistas, the Latin democrats would find few followers in the OAS assembly. Venezuela has bought off a raft of governments with subsidized supplies of oil.

All of this puts the Bush administration in a difficult position. If it assertively challenges the anti-democratic leaders, it may find itself alone, shunned by Latin leaders and accused by liberals in Washington of reviving Yanqui imperialism. Working from Castro's playbook, Chavez already uses Bush as a foil and excuse for
persecuting democratic opponents. But quiet diplomacy doesn't work either. The Bush team has tried to quietly reach out to Chavez in recent months while urging his neighbors to stand up to him -- only to see his reckless "revolution" accelerate. Ignoring the trouble in Ecuador and Bolivia hasn't made it go away.

So what can be done? One option is simply to wait for Chavez and his populist imitators to crash and burn, as they have throughout Latin American history, while seeking to shore up democratic Latin governments in the meantime. But that could take a long time, especially if oil prices remain high; and a Venezuelan collapse could be costly, given the country's position as the supplier of 13 percent of U.S. oil. The alternative is a long, arduous and carefully calibrated program to rally support for democratic freedoms and convince Latin leaders that they cannot afford to allow their neighbors to subvert them. That would require deep engagement by Bush
and his new secretary of state -- in other words, a reversal of the administration's neglect of Latin America during the past four years. It doesn't seem likely; but the way things are going, there may be little choice.

Falluja on Film: "City of Ghosts"

2005-01-17T08:41:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story

Guardian Films and Channel 4 News produced a film on Falluja. You can watch the film and read its transcript at the websites of Channel 4 and Journeyman Pictures:

Falluja: The Fall and Fall Out (January 10, 2005)

Fallujah: The Real Fall (January 11, 2005)

The film follows an Iraqi doctor Ali Fadhil, as he interviews Fallujans in refugee camps and inside Falluja itself. It opens with a tragicomic episode:

Fallujah has been closed as a city for two months. Nahida is one of the first Fallujans to go back since the the Americans occupied the city.

She wanted to show me what had been left behind.

"Look at it ! Furniture, clothes thrown everywhere! They smashed up the cupboards, and they wrote something bad on the dressing-table mirror." -- Nahida Kham

She doesn’t speak English so I explained to her what the words mean: "FUCK IRAQ AND EVERY IRAQI IN IT!"

"I knew it. I knew these words were insulting." -- Nahida Kham (emphasis added, January 11, 2005)

Once inside the city, Fadhil "could smell bodies beneath the rubble" (January 11, 2005). Rotting corpses have been "eaten by hungry dogs," the source of "a serious outbreak of rabies" (January 11, 2005). Falluja, once "the City of Mosques," is now "the City of Rubble," where "over 300,000 people have lost their homes" (January 11, 2005) and every Fallujan is required to obtain an ID card from the US military to enter his own city: "They took prints of all my fingers, two pictures of my face in profile, and then photographed my iris. I was now eligible to go into Falluja, just like any other Fallujan" (Ali Fadhil, "City of Ghosts," The Guardian, January 11, 2005). . .

Bush inauguration: don't look him in the eye

2005-01-17T08:36:00.000Z

By: Joan Lowy

Scripps Howard

WASHINGTON - The nation's 55th presidential inauguration, the first to be held since 9/11, will take place this month under perhaps the heaviest security of any in U.S. history.

Dozens of federal and local law enforcement agencies and military commands are planning what they describe as the heaviest possible security. Virtually everyone who gets within eyesight of the president either during the Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony at the U.S. Capitol or the inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue later in the day will first go through a metal detector or receive a body pat-down.

Thousands of police officers and military personnel are being brought to Washington from around the country for the four-day event. Sharpshooters will be deployed on roofs, while bomb-sniffing dogs will work the streets. Electronic sensors will be used to detect chemical or biological weapons.

Anti-abortion protesters have been warned to leave their crosses at home. Parade performers will have security escorts to the bathroom, and they've been ordered not to look directly at President Bush or make any sudden movements while passing the reviewing stand.

"It's going to be very different from past inaugurals," said Contricia Sellers-Ford, spokeswoman for the U.S. Capitol Police, which is responsible for the Capitol and grounds. "A lot of the security differences will not be detected by the public - there will be a lot of behind the scenes implementation - but the public will definitely see more of a police presence."

The Department of Homeland Security has designated the inaugural a National Special Security Event under a protocol introduced by President Bill Clinton that calls for especially heavy security during events of national significance at which large numbers of government officials and dignitaries are present.

There have been 20 previously designated special security events, including Bush's first inaugural, last year's Democratic and Republican conventions, former President Ronald Reagan's funeral and the 2002 Super Bowl.

Under the protocol, the Secret Service takes the lead in drawing up the security plan, while the FBI gathers intelligence and the Federal Emergency Management Agency oversees response scenarios to possible terror attacks.

The Secret Service also works closely with the Defense Department, the National Park Service, and local police agencies, especially the Washington police department and the Capitol police. About 40 agencies are involved.

The Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region, which was created two years ago to bring coordination to the many disparatemilitary units in the Washington area, will provide more than 4,000 troops to help.

Washington, D.C., police chief Charles Ramsey has sent invitations to police departments across the country inviting them to send squads of officers to help with inauguration security. The federal government is paying for officers' hotels, meals and air travel.

Several thousand officers are expected, Ramsey said. That includes squads from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Bradenton, Fla., Charlotte and Greensboro, N.C., the North Carolina state highway patrol, several law enforcement agencies in Texas and other parts of the country.

"This is the first post 9/11 (inauguration) so obviously there are some more security concerns this time than in past years," Ramsey said.

The extra officers from around the country will free up Washington police officers so that they can form "mobile platoon civil disturbance units" to prevent protest demonstrations from getting out of hand, Ramsey said.

Groups planning demonstrations during the inauguration festivities are already smarting from security restrictions. Anti-war protesters with the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition have complained that large sections of the parade route have been set aside for Bush's political contributors and supporters and will be closed to the general public.

The anti-abortion Christian Defense Coalition, which is also planning a demonstration, has threatened to sue the government because the Secret Service recently added crosses to its list of objects that are banned from the parade route.

"I think it's censorship no matter how you look at it," said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the defense coalition.

Besides weapons, other items on the banned list include coolers, folding chairs, bicycles, pets, papier-mache objects, displays such as puppets, mock coffins, props and "any items determined to be a potential safety hazard."

Parade performers said they also have been warned to expect unprecedented security.

"They've told us right out that it's going to be very, very tight," said Peter LaFlamme, executive director of the Spartans Drum and Bugle Corps in Nashua, N.H. LaFlamme said he has been receiving almost daily phone calls from inaugural organizers to apprise him of new security procedures.

Thousands of performers - marching bands, color guards, pompon dancers, hand bell-ringers, drill teams on horseback and Civil War re-enactors - will be bused early in the morning to the Pentagon parking lot across the Potomac in Virginia. While performers disembark and go through metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs will search the buses.

Then everybody will get back on the buses for a trip to the National Mall, where they will spend most of the day in heavily guarded warming tents. Participants have been warned that they will not be allowed to leave the tents except to go to portable toilets accompanied by a security escort.

Other instructions given performers include a warning not to look directly at Bush while passing the presidential reviewing stand, not to look to either side and not to make any sudden movements.

"They want you to just look straight ahead," said Danielle Adam, co-director of the Mid American Pompon All Star Team from Michigan, which also performed in the 2001 inaugural parade.

"Last time we went security was really tight," Adam said. "This time we got almost like a book of things we needed to fill out beforehand."

ACEH GOES TO HEAVEN!

2005-01-12T09:09:00.000Z

ZNET update - Jan.11 -

By Andre Vltchek

Resting in a comfortable seat of super-express speeding towards northern Japan, I was admiring the snow-covered beauty of the rural countryside.It was getting dark and the wheels of the train were gently drumming against the rails in a monotonous and reassuring rhythm. The worldseemed harmonious and safe.

Then suddenly my eyes caught sight of the letters of a news bulletin passing through the digital display above the door. Strong earthquake shook northern Sumatra. There were dozens of casualties. Just that - no further information was provided. I checked the news, one hour later, on the internet in my hotel in Sendai. It seemed that hundreds of people lost their lives in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. An earthquake off the coast of Aceh, reaching magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, was followed by a tsunami - a monstrous 10 meters high tidal wave - which crashed mercilessly and with unimaginable force against the shores of several unfortunate countries.

In the next few days the number of victims grew to thousands, then to tens of thousands. Whole villages and entire towns disappeared from the map. Hundreds of thousands of refugees hit what was left of the roads, but the roads were leading nowhere; as bridges were washed away/ Floods were fragmenting the entire North of Sumatra Island. Electricity and water supply collapsed (limited and unreliable everywhere in Indonesia even before the disaster); there was no food, no blood for the injured and no medicine. There was no reliable information either, since the
foreign press was banned from traveling to the province, "for its own safety".

The Army - a tremendous contingent of it based in the province in order to suppress insurgency - did close to nothing. It was ordered to clean corpses and it cleaned some, but it otherwise showed no initiative, leaving a desperate population with almost no help.

The government did close to nothing. Instead of ordering special military units to travel immediately to the province, instead of using hundreds of military helicopters and aircraft to supply food and medicine, instead of ordering all seaworthy vessels to the area of disaster, the President of Indonesia urged the citizens to "scale down New Year's celebrations and pray instead."

Huge transport planes were sitting on runways all over Java, waiting for the order to take off - an order which never arrived.

Instead of employing professionals trained to cope with emergency situations, vice president Jusuf Kalla used military planes and commercial aircraft to shuttle Muslim militants (they called themselves "volunteers") from Majelis Mujahedeen Indonesia and Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Muslim - better known as its acronym FPI - militant Muslim group from Jakarta devoted to enforcing Islamic law against drinking, gambling, and prostitution), a fact later reported by The New
York Times. Then Laskar Jihad, one of the most militant Muslim groups in Southeast Asia made inroads into the province. Hundreds of Christians, mainly of Chinese origin, were forced to flee Aceh.

The presence of "volunteers" - directly sponsored by the government - had one main purpose: to secure Indonesian and religious order (already the strictest in entire Indonesia) in the province which was fighting for independence for almost thirty years, at enormous cost. Practically speaking, these untrained urbanites were only taking precious space in scarce flights to the province, although the propaganda machine fired the stories how some of them single- handedly managed to restore
electric supplies and telecommunications in Banda Aceh.

And the dead kept mounting, diseases were spreading, hunger began to kill those who miraculously survived the brutality of the nature.

At one point the refusal to help Aceh began to look like a vengeance killing by the government and the military. Then Aceh suddenly appeared in the spotlight of interest of the international community and after some hesitation, the government "benevolently" allowed foreign aid and some international press agencies to enter the province.

The results were almost immediate. International organizations and foreign military flew in and began building infrastructure from scratch. Not to rebuild it - there was not much social infrastructure even before the tsunami - but to construct provisory hospitals, food supply centers, shelters for the homeless. It was not enough, but it was at least something; definitely more than the state did in the last three decades when it came to investment in social infrastructure.

While this was happening, the Indonesian government was bragging that the disaster would not jeopardize predicted economic growth for the year 2005 (the lowest in the region even before the tsunami).

The Finance Minister openly declared that it expects foreigners to rebuild the area, while not diverting any substantial funds from state coffers. He was also quick to point out that vital oil production (the main reason for the occupation and the main income of the province - basically controlled by foreign multi-nationals after corrupt deals signed by Suharto's government few decades ago) suffered only a minor setback, although some inside reports suggest the contrary.

The government also suggested that Aceh is an outskirt of Indonesia; therefore its plight will have no major impact on the economy. In fact, it argued with no scruples, Indonesia could benefit, because it may attract thousands of tourists who will be avoiding damaged holiday resorts in Thailand.

To put the situation into perspective, the social system in Indonesia collapsed during the years when Suharto, supported by the West, fully controlled the political and economic life of Indonesia. This was also a period when Indonesians went through rigorous religious indoctrination which was supposed to reinforce the culture of obedience, which in turn served the regime.

Almost all public services were privatized, the quality of education nose-dived and life expectancy stagnated at around 64 years (one of the lowest in the region). Indonesia has, per capita, one of the highest numbers of orphans anywhere in the world and one of the worst records of child prostitution in the region. The poor have no safety net and justice is for sale. Indonesia, according to "Transparency
International", is one of the most corrupt nations on earth.

The Indonesian military had been involved in a massacre of Sukarno's supporters after the coup in 1965 (up to 3 million people were butchered in a matter of months), it led genocidal war in East Timor (one of the most horrific barbarities of the 20th Century, happily applauded by the West), and caused gross human rights violations in Papua, Ambon, Aceh and elsewhere. It was and still is much better trained in raping and torturing civilians than in any sort of humanitarian assistance.

This compassionless, paralyzed and morally corrupt society was now facing one of the most terrible natural disasters in human history. Government officials and their business associates smelled a tremendous influx of foreign aid, which could, if unchecked, easily meet the same fate as the money from former foreign loans originally intended for development, infrastructure, and social programs but which disappeared in the deep pockets of elites, never reaching the impoverished majority
of Indonesians.

As foreign governments were trying to outdo each other in pledging hundreds of millions of dollars for reconstruction of disaster stricken areas, Indonesian officials and military on the ground in Aceh were openly sabotaging relief efforts.

Food and medicine were piling in Medan and Banda Aceh, while almost no help was reaching desperate communities. A chartered Boeing 737 hit a buffalo after landing, shutting down for hours the only runway in the then only functioning airport in all of Aceh. Apparently it was not worth it to assign the military to guard this vital lifeline. But was it really an accident?

"One of the consequences of the lack of distribution of aid and medical assistance to several refugee camps has been the death of many refugees, especially women and children", says Yulia Evina Bhara from SEGERA (Alliance-Solidarity Movement For the People of Aceh). "This has occurred in Mata Le, Ulee Kareng, and large part of Pidie and Aceh Jeumpa... It is evident that the government has not taken any cooperative steps in terms of allowing easy access to areas in which aid needs to be distributed. If this continues to be the case, it means that the government is effectively disregarding the much needed humanitarian solidarity..."

Shortly after the tsunami hit the coast, GAM (Free Aceh Movement) declared a ceasefire. Few days later there were reports that Indonesian military continued with its operations. Sporadic exchanges of fire erupted in several places of Aceh. With no shame and no hesitation, the President of Indonesia began accusing GAM of breaking the ceasefire.

Foreign mainstream press (traditionally friendly to the post-1965 Indonesian regime), which initially concentrated its coverage strictly on disaster itself and later on the foreign relief operations, began asking some uncomfortable questions. Although still omitting information concerning the horrific human rights record of the Indonesian state, it couldn't fully ignore voices of Acehnese people who were accusing the government of sabotaging relief operations.

Sharp criticism of Indonesian government and military also came from foreign aid workers.

That seemed to be unacceptable for the establishment. On January 9th, the government began tightening restrictions on the movement of foreigners in the province. Reuters reported that on the 11th of January all good will vanished. Indonesia restricted foreign aid workers to two large cities because of "militant threats".

Indonesian army chief - General Endriartono Sutarto - declared that GAMmight soon attack foreign aid workers or troops in Aceh. All aid agencies and NGOs operating in the province were urged to provide a full list of their staff.

GAM responded by denying all accusations made by the government,claiming that it never intended to cause harm to those who came to help, be it foreigners or locals. Foreigners operating in Aceh confirmed that they felt no threat from the independence movement.

A crackdown on independent sources of information by the Indonesian state is becoming inevitable. As in East Timor, Papua, and Aceh (before the disaster) it will be done under the cover of "protecting" the lives of the foreigners. The question is what will happen to Acehnese people afterwards. Even now, several members of Indonesian NGOs claim that the government actions (or more precisely - inaction) are responsible for at least 50 thousand out of 100 thousand known victims of disaster.

Is Aceh going to become another East Timor? Is the present situation just a result of impotence and incapability of the government, military, and the whole system, or of something much more sinister? Is it revenge; an extermination campaign design to break and secure this economically vital province?

Acehnese are proud and tough people. When Javanese elites were selling their country to foreigners, when most of the islands of today's Indonesia were accepting the presence of Dutch colonizers; Aceh fought bitterly for independence. "Under the Dutch, Java used to send assassins to break Aceh", said Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the greatest Indonesian writer and intellectual father of Indonesian state. "We have so much to learn from them!"

Recently, exploited by foreign multinational companies and by new Javanese elites, the people of Aceh began to fight again, against all odds. This time they fought against the Indonesian state - against one of the largest military forces on earth. 10 thousand men, women and children died in almost three decades of the conflict; maybe many more.

One of "profound" religious interpretations of this disaster in Indonesia was that God punished the people of Aceh for fighting for their independence. Official media even managed to find some Acehnese who declared it on the record. "If we don't stop fighting, we'll all go to hell."

Those who always suspected that there are no eternal flames, those who respect human life above anything else always knew that Aceh was already going through hell for many years. But "hell is the others" - those who fight innocent civilians, those who torture, those who are blocking help from the suffering people in their moment of tremendous need and catastrophe.

If those who are using disaster and human suffering for their own political, economic and military goals are not stopped soon, the entire country of Indonesia may soon go to hell. Not to some hell depicted by religious books - but to a real hell which is life in a society which has lost all basic moral human values; which allows small minority of people vulgarly lavish lifestyles at the expense of tens of millions who are starving and desperate.

Aceh is bleeding and the worst may still be ahead. Those who are arriving in Aceh should know that they are not only entering a land devastated by horrific natural disaster; they are entering a territory which was brutalized and exploited for decades and which still is. It doesn't only need aid - it needs solidarity, protection, and determined long-term help; and it needs it now! It needs a referendum and if it decides to vote for it - freedom. Anything will be better than the present situation - from here Aceh can only go to heaven!

ANDRE VLTCHEK, writer, political analyst and filmmaker lives and works
in Southeast Asia and South Pacific and can be reached at: andre-wcn@usa.net

"Why I Refused A 2nd Deployment To Iraq"

2005-01-12T08:42:00.000Z

22 More At Ft. Stewart Refuse To Deploy So Far

By: Sgt. Kevin Benderman, Published in `Project For The Old American
Century'

First a brief forward from POAC co-editor Jack Dalton: I received an email a few moments ago from Kevin's wife Monica. In it she has told me a total of 22 people in Sgt Benderman's unit have refused to deploy to Iraq.

17 have gone AWOL and 2 have attempted suicide. The status of the remaining 3 is unknown at this time. We at the POAC fully support the decision to refuse deployment to Iraq which has been made by Sgt Benderman, and the others in his unit.

I am Sgt Kevin Benderman and these are the chronological events that led me to conclude that I had no other choice than to refuse the deployment order to Iraq.

I was deployed to Iraq in March 2003 and returned in September 2003; while I was there I was with the 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. We staged our vehicles in Kuwait and then proceeded to move out into Iraq.

We were carried on the back of heavy equipment transporters to about fifty miles south of Baghdad and then we downloaded the vehicles. We were in the vehicles while they were on the trucks, which I thought was a little odd considering that in the garrison environment those types of actions are considered unsafe and are therefore not allowed.

During the road march north through the country I saw the effects of what war does to people, those effect are such; homes were bombed, people were living in mud huts, people were obtaining their drinking water from mud puddles along the side of the road and were catching rain in buckets when it did rain, they begged us for food and water and we had enough, we would share it with the people that were there, the kids looked especially hungry and thirsty. The commander told us to stop
giving the people food because they would get food from other sources after the trucks started bringing in relief supplies.

Somewhere along the route there was this one woman standing along side the road with a young girl of about 8 or 9 years old and the little girl's arm was burned all the way up her shoulder and I don't mean just a little blistered, I mean she had 3rd degree burns the entire length of her arm and she crying in pain because of the burns. I asked the troop executive officer if we could stop and help the family and I was told that the medical supplies that we had were limited and that we may need them, I informed him that I would donate my share to that girl but we
did not stop to help her.

When we were there, the command elements ordered the unit to perform all types of actions that are considered unsafe to soldiers, such as, having military vehicle maintenance personnel retrieve missiles that were present in our area of operations using a M88 recovery vehicle and transport them to sites to be destroyed by the explosive ordnance personnel.

They also ordered mortar personnel to enter into a compound that held various types of munitions that the Iraqi army had left behind and to load these munitions onto trucks. When these personnel were not working fast enough for the 1SG he ordered them to throw the mortar rounds onto the trucks whereupon one of rounds exploded and inflicted shrapnel wounds on two soldiers.

We were using an old custom building that was located in the middle of the town that we were in for the troop HQ and naturally that attracted the attention of the local populace. Small children would come up to the wall that surrounded the place before we had a chance to apply concertina wire along the top of the wall and they would toss small pebbles at us inside the walls.

We would tell the children to get down from the wall and leave the area, one day the troop commander saw us telling the children top get down from the wall and he told everyone there that if the children came back at any time after that to shoot them if they were to climb back onto the wall.

I was in charge of a group of soldiers that were in their late teens through their early twenties and I had to constantly tell them to keep their heads down because they thought that the war was like the video games that they played back at the barracks. War is not like that at all and until you have the misfortune to engage in it for yourself you cannot begin to understand how insane it all is.

There are no restart buttons on reality and that is why I cannot figure out why now we are pursuing such a policy in this day and age. War should be relegated to the shelves of history, as was human sacrifice. If you stop to think about it you become aware that war is just human sacrifice. There is no honor in killing as many as you can as quickly as you can.

We, in America refer to ourselves as civilized and people from other countries still living the simple life are backwards and un-civilized, but what is civil about the capability to create atomic weapons? What is civil about being able to kill over 100,000 people with just one bomb?

We may be more technologically advanced but are we more civilized? I think the answer is no. War has to be considered the absolute enemy of mankind. Where we would be without it?

I would presume that we as a nation would be out of debt if we were to apply as much energy to pursuing sound economics as we do pursuing war, we would never get sick if we spent as much on preventive medicine as we do on war, the elderly would get affordable prescription medication if we were to use the resources that are spent on war to work for that purpose, there would not be un educated children if we were to buy new classrooms and books for schools instead of new weapons systems, social security would be a lot more secure with some of the money that war costs.

Why do we want to train the young people in the world that the only way we can settle our differences is to kill one another?

Why shouldn't we train them to become surgeons or homebuilders? Why shouldn't we train to become anything but killers? I think that the world would be better off if we were to do that instead.

I have talked to veterans from every war from WWII on and their opinion is that the wars they fought were to be the last war ever fought. How many more are we going to fight before we realize that the act of war is for small minded people that are intent in only satisfying their own needs and not the needs of the people in general?

I do not want to be killed because I am living in a place that has a ruler that wants to go to war with any one.

The only way to bring peace to the world is to let the people of the world decide for themselves what they want to spend their efforts on. I feel that in this day and age governments start wars, and not people, and since the governments want the wars then why don't we let the government fight the war? All of the politicians that want to fight a war are free to trade places with me at any time.

I will gladly go and learn war no more.

There are activities that I have been involved in that have led me to these new and developed beliefs, and they are numerous but I can tell you some of them.

When you walk in the woods and you see a deer stand and look at you, or you are on the river in the morning and the mist rises off the water while you hear the morning calls of the river birds, and the otters just lie there as you glide past in your boat and don't even move, you know that there is a better way.

When you can find solitude in the woods that are so filled with peace and the wildlife that is all around you, you feel the better way all around. A person must acknowledge the fact the we are a part of the universe and the universe does not want to be out of sorts with itself, so why do we spend so much effort on trying to be out of sorts with others of the human race?

I have been to the war zone and I have seen the devastation it causes. Why can't everyone agree that war is the most repugnant of all human endeavors? Why is it considered noble to be able to look through the sights of a rifle and kill another human being from 300 meters away? Why are you a hero if you can throw a hand grenade farther than the next guy in the foxhole?

Shouldn't these young men and women that are in the army be throwing footballs or baseballs or softballs instead? It would impress me a lot more to see someone make the winning free throw at the basketball game or kick the winning extra point at the football game, or knock in the winning run at the World Series than to see them be able to shoot more humans from 300 hundred meters.

I would rather they spend their time at the golf course or the tennis courts or in college, any where but in the war zone trying to survive and having to kill to do it. It just doesn't make sense to me.

A Brief History of Sgt Kevin Benderman's Military Service

I first entered the army on 27 Jan 1987 and received basic training at Ft. Bliss, TX. I received advanced individual training at Ft. Sam Houston, TX. My military occupational specialty was designated as 91R10 Veterinary Food Inspection Specialist which is basically the equivalent to a U.S.D.A. Food Inspector.

My first duty assignment was Ft. Leavenworth, Ks. Where I worked in the commissary and my duties included; inspecting poultry and dairy products, fresh fruits and vegetables, canned goods, and the general sanitation of the facility. My mission was to ensure the health of the soldiers. Was a part if the United States Army Medical Dept. Activity or USA MEDDAC.

I received an Army Achievement Medal while serving on the unit fund counsel, which utilized funds, raised through various activities to help provide for soldiers that were not able to get home during Christmas. I received another AAM for assisting during an increased workload due to personnel shortages during the Persian Gulf War. I also received my first Good Conduct Medal during this enlistment.

I received an honorable discharge from the Army after the Persian Gulf War on 24 Apr 1991. I re-entered the Army 26 Jun 2000 and was awarded the MOS of 63M10, which is a Bradley Fighting Vehicle mechanic. Re-took basic training at Ft. Knox, KY and went the US Army Armor School at Ft. Knox, KY

Received AAM for being honor graduate from the Class.

First duty assignment after completion of training was Ft. Hood, TX. Unit was 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. Also known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

Went to Iraq with the 4th I.D. in March 2003 returned to Ft. Hood Sep 2003. Re-enlisted with choice of duty station of Ft. Stewart, GA.

ARMY AWARDS RECEIVED INCLUDE TWO ARMY COMMENDATION MEDALS, 4 ARMY ACHIEVEMENT MEDALS, 3 GOOD CONDUCT MEDALS, 2 NATIONAL DEFENSE SERVICE MEDALS, And ONE GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM SERVICE MEDAL. RECEIVED NUMEROUS LETTERS OF COMMENDATION. RECEIVED COMBAT LIFESAVER CERTIFICATION, WAS CHOSEN TO BE THE STUDENT 1ST SGT OF THE PRIMARY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT COURSE OUT OF FOUR HUNDRED STUDENTS.

Venezuela Mayor Orders Private Land Seized

2005-01-12T08:38:00.000Z

By FABIOLA SANCHEZ
Associated Press Writer

Article published Jan 11, 2005

The mayor of Venezuela's second-largest city ordered the government to seize two swaths of abandoned private lands Tuesday, saying the property would be used for projects to benefit the entire population.

Giancarlo Di Martino, Maracaibo mayor and staunch supporter of President Hugo Chavez, told The Associated Press the lands include 62 acres within the city and an abandoned industrial zone running along the shore of lake Maracaibo about 20 miles to the southeast.

Di Martino's order coincides with a sweeping land reform being led by Chavez to turn over "idle" farmlands to the poor. Chavez declared on Monday that the government would survey farmland across the country and gradually redistribute unused acreage.

Despite Venezuela's position as a major global producer of oil, a majority of its people live in poverty.

"We have embarked on a process under the law for the expropriation" of the lands, Di Martino told the AP in the telephone interview.

The mayor said the lands are partly owned by a bank and a hotel, which has been closed for decades.

The city of 1.7 million people plans to build public housing, a center for street children and a public sports center on the lands, Di Martino said.

He said the owners would be paid fair compensation. The owners couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Asked if the land seizures in Maracaibo were part of the president's effort, Di Martino said: "Politically the moment is favorable for this."

What is the debt crisis?

2005-01-11T11:03:00.000Z

Click title to link to the Jubilee Debt Campaign

Billions of people in the world's poorest countries are held captive by debts that can never be repaid. Year after year their governments struggle to pay back millions of pounds - with little hope of ever clearing their debts. . .

Campaigners say Brown tsunami debt plan ‘welcome but inadequate’

2005-01-11T11:02:00.000Z

Click title to link

Joint press release of Jubilee Debt Campaign and World Development Movement

Debt campaigners the Jubilee Debt Campaign and the World Development Movement today described the plan by world leaders, including Gordon Brown, to introduce a moratorium on debt repayments by tsunami affected countries as “welcome but inadequate” saying that they need debt cancellation not just temporary relief from debt repayments. . .

Asian Rivals Put Pressure On Western Energy Giants

2005-01-10T13:52:00.000Z

In a String of Recent Deals, China, India Display Clout, Funds and Stomach for Risk

By ANDREW BROWNE in Hong Kong, BHUSHAN BAHREE in New York, PATRICK BARTA in Bangkok and JOHN LARKIN in Bombay

Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 10, 2005; Page A1

Major Western oil companies, already feeling squeezed as
easy-to-exploit oil and natural-gas fields become scarcer,
have brash new rivals to contend with in Asia.

As a flurry of proposed and completed deals attest, energy
companies in India and China want bigger slices of the
global oil patch. They're aided by the political and
financial might of their government backers and spurred by
the need to keep their billion-person economies racing
ahead and to ease their dependence on oil and gas imports.

The companies have other advantages. They don't shy from
oil-rich countries like Sudan deemed too dangerous or
politically unsavory in the West. They settle for
less-favorable commercial terms that scare away Western
competitors cowed by demanding shareholders. And they're
more prepared to risk losses drilling holes that come up
dry.

On Friday, India signed a 25-year agreement to import
liquefied natural gas from state-owned National Iranian Gas
Export Corp. starting in 2009. It also agreed to develop
three oil fields in Iran, the second-largest exporter after
Saudi Arabia in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries.

China and Canada could be ready this month to sign a
general agreement on Chinese investment in Canadian oil
resources, including so-called oil sands in the province of
Alberta, although details are still sketchy.

India's state-owned Oil & Natural Gas Corp. said it had its
eye on a stake in Yuganskneftegaz, the key oil-production
unit of troubled Russian oil giant OAO Yukos. Yugansk, as
it is known, produces 1% of world crude output. Just a few
weeks ago, Russia said it would offer a minority stake in
the same asset to China. There has been no official Russian
comment on either deal.

And in the most eye-catching evidence so far of these
global ambitions, China's third-largest oil-and-natural-gas
company, China National Offshore Oil Corp., may be
interested in buying Unocal Corp., the ninth-largest U.S.
oil company in terms of reserves. Investment bankers in
Hong Kong confirmed the Chinese company's interest. (See
related article1.)

"Over the next 10 years, Chinese and Indian oil companies
will emerge as major players in the global oil industry,"
says Daniel Yergin, oil historian and chairman of Cambridge
Energy Research Associates in Cambridge, Mass. "It reflects
the reality of economic growth and the scope of China and
India in the world oil market."

A key reason the Chinese and Indian oil companies have a
chance to challenge the U.S. and European giants is that
the Western majors are losing their stomach for risk.
Investors in the majors insist on high returns on any
drilling or exploration project into which the companies
pour their dollars, a practice the industry dubs "capital
discipline."

The obsession with returns derives from the 1990s, when the
high-technology sector sucked in capital and the oil
industry was seen headed the way of steel and coal, mature
industries faced with low prices and dim financial
prospects. The oil-price crash of 1997-1998 reinforced this
view, and the more successful oil companies gobbled up
weaker ones.

"At the end of the day, [Chinese and Indian companies]
don't have shareholders," says Rick Mueller, an analyst at
Energy Security Analysis Inc., a Wakefield, Mass.,
consulting company.

There isn't a Chinese Exxon Mobil Corp. on the horizon.
Indian and Chinese companies lack the technology and
know-how offered by their Western competitors. Some
analysts question the commercial merits of China's interest
in Unocal, and it would be a huge swallow for China
National Offshore Oil. Politically, it might prove
impossible for China to buy one of the biggest U.S.
companies, even assuming any were for sale.

Nor does the growing economic might of China and India
guarantee that they will spawn energy giants as mighty as
Exxon Mobil or BP PLC. Japan, Asia's first economic
superpower, tried in the 1970s and '80s to create a
national oil powerhouse but failed.

But the Unocal idea indicates that China may have learned
from Japan's mistakes. Japan invested heavily in
exploration; China is more focused on buying existing,
producing assets. And while those fields don't come close
to meeting China's demand, they give its oil companies an
opportunity to pick up the technical expertise they need to
become more formidable competitors to Western rivals in the
years ahead. India, too, is going for existing oil and
natural-gas assets abroad.

China, long self-sufficient in oil, is now becoming one of
the world's biggest importers, and accounted for more than
half of world oil-demand growth in 2002 and 2003. The IEA
expects China to be importing 82% of its oil by 2030. Right
now, China's biggest oil companies have massive reserves
but aren't nearly as productive as the Western majors. What
is more, it now appears that predictions of an oil bonanza
in China's offshore fields and in its remote far west have
been overblown, giving added impetus to China's overseas
shopping expeditions.

India has the world's fastest-growing car market, which is
driving oil consumption and imports. The International
Energy Agency forecasts oil demand in South Asia will grow
by 3.3% a year between 2000 and 2030, the highest of any
region in the world.

The Western majors and the Asian energy companies all face
the same big problem: a lack of easy-to-tap oil. The vast
oil reserves of the Persian Gulf states, some two-thirds of
the world's total, are mostly off-limits to foreign
companies. International oil giants jealously guard choice
assets elsewhere, and have already picked over the best of
the smaller oil companies on sale. China was rebuffed in
2003 by Western majors when it tried to grab a stake in an
enormous field in Kazakhstan.

At the same time, the growing obsession of China and India
with owning oil and gas assets for energy security means
they are likely to pay high prices.

The Chinese, despite their famed negotiating skills, "are
noted for overpaying" in the commodities sector, says David
Hurd, a Hong Kong-based energy analyst with Deutsche Bank.
Japan discovered how costly miscalculation can be when it
tried to develop its own energy giant: A state-owned
Japanese oil-exploration company ended up as a black hole
for taxpayers and was disbanded last March with debts of at
least one trillion yen, or about $9.5 billion, and little
oil to show for its 300 exploration projects. Japan now
buys its oil on global markets.

Another problem for the huge Asian neighbors may be their
own rivalry. Distrust runs deep between them. ONGC Videsh,
the Indian unit dealing with equity oil purchases, has
spent more than $3.5 billion since 2000 in its global hunt
for energy. Most of this has gone to stakes in blocks in
Syria, Angola, Russia and Sudan. But the Chinese regularly
outbid India for the juiciest leases. As a sweetener to a
deal last year in Angola, the Chinese extended a $2 billion
loan to help the nation build infrastructure after three
decades of civil war. While the deal has yet to be
completed, industry observers say India seems to have been
left out in the cold after offering substantially less in
credit.

"They get beaten by the Chinese on almost every important
deal nowadays," says Madhu Nainan, editor in chief of
Petrowatch, an online petroleum-industry newsletter in
India. "Maybe the Indians aren't willing to play the game
the way the Chinese are."

China is worried that most of its oil is shipped on sea
lanes that run close to the Indian subcontinent, says
Mikkal Herberg, director of the Asian Energy Security
Program at the National Bureau of Asian Research in
Seattle. Partly to counter this, Mr. Herberg says, it is
projecting its navy into regional waters. That, in turn,
has India worried about the security of its own sea lanes.
"There is the potential in broad terms for rivalry between
China and India," he says.

China and Japan are already scrambling for resources in
Russia. Beijing felt bitterly betrayed this month when
Moscow opted to build an oil pipeline from Siberia to the
Pacific coast, a jumping-off point for Japan, instead of to
China's oil heartland around Daqing in the northeast.

When China pitches for energy business in countries from
Angola to Ecuador it can offer a wealth of inducements --
everything from interest-free loans to help building phone
networks, plus political benefits that flow from its role
as a permanent member of the United Nations Security
Council.

Some oil strategists see this kind of broad state-to-state
cooperation as a potential threat to the current energy
giants in the private sector. Indian and Chinese oil
companies often act less as commercial entities and more as
extensions of government policy. In the future, some oil
experts say, big oil-producing countries will increasingly
cut deals directly with big oil-consuming countries,
leaving state companies to ink in the details.

--Martin Fackler in Tokyo contributed to this article

The other tsunami

2005-01-09T14:10:00.000Z

Click title to link

While the sea may have killed tens of thousands, western policies kill millions every year. Yet even amid disaster, a new politics of community and morality is emerging.

John Pilger

01/06/05 "New Statesman" -- The west's crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week's bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush's coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of "aid" only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and that a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government's current "generous" contribution is one-sixteenth of the £800m it spent on bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one-twentieth of a £1bn gift, known as a soft loan, to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.

Venezuela to seize aristocrat's cattle ranch

2005-01-09T14:03:00.000Z

By Andy Webb-Vidal in Caracas and Henry Tricks in London
Published: January 7 2005 22:04 | Last updated: January 7 2005 22:04
Financial Times

Venezuelan authorities backed by troops are on Saturday expected to
seize a 32,000-acre ranch owned by Lord Vestey, an English aristocrat
and meat tycoon.

The move, the first in what is likely to be a number of
Zimbabwe-style expropriations of big estates, appears to signal a
renewed radicalisation in the leftwing government of President Hugo
Chávez.

Lord Vestey, known as "Spam" to friends because his family's wealth
comes from the meat trade, is one of Britain's richest men and a
close friend of Prince Charles.

With interests that have ranged from overseas cattle ranches to a
chain of butchers' shops, his fortune was estimated last year at
£750m ($1.4bn, ¤1.07bn).

But the value of the Vestey Group has declined recently, and it has
written down Venezuelan assets. The company had net assets of £78m in
the last published set of accounts in 2003, down from £105m in 2002.

Nevertheless, the Vestey Group remains one of Venezuela's largest
meat producers. Its El Charcote estate in the lush
cattle-ranchingpastures of Cojedes, a state west of Caracas, is one
the country's most modern. When his lands were first seized in
Venezuela in 2001, Lord Vestey staged a one-man protest outside the
Venezuelan embassy in London. He is now reluctant to discuss the
matter in public, due to its sensitivity.

On Friday, Alfredo Toro Hardy, Venezuelan ambassador in London, said
the ranch was among those in Venezuela considered "partly idle" and
its property titles were not considered to be in proper order. That,
he said, prompted the need for an investigation.

For the past four years the property has been partially squatted by
poor farmers.

"We've been in Venezuela for just over 100 years and we hope to be
there for some time yet," Lord Vestey told the Financial Times. The
land had been bought by his great grandfather in 1903, he said.

Land reform has faded in most of Latin America since the early 1980s.
However, since his election six years ago, Mr Chávez has vowed, as
part of his self-styled "revolution", to attack an "oligarchic"
system of land tenure in Venezuela. This week his government urged
regional governors to press ahead with the programme by
redistributing land to poor farmers and landless peasants. Critics
complain that property rights are being disregarded, with no mention
of any compensation for landowners.

In addition, agronomists argue that in regions with relatively poor
soil, large areas of land are needed to graze a herd of cattle,
creating a false impression of large tracts lying idle.

Ranchers also say that productivity is far higher on big estates,
such as El Charcote, than on the small farms that the government
wants to encourage. Eliezer Otaiza, director of Venezuela's National
Land Institute and one of Mr Chávez's political allies, said at least
100,000 plots would be redistributed in the next six months.

The show of "revolutionary" force expected today appears intended to
make an example of the Vestey estate.

"The full weight of the armed forces and the police will be present
to implement the first phase of the land mission," said Alexis Ortiz,
Cojedes's attorney-general.

The "takeover" of the El Charcote estate is concerning other
landowners. As one Venezuelan cattle-rancher yesterday put it: "It's
deeply worrying. I'm certainly going to look at selling my cattle and
ranch while I can."

Pentagon May Use Death Squads in Iraq

2005-01-09T14:01:00.000Z

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 5:33 p.m. ET Jan. 8, 2005

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s
latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that
it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald
Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as
we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a
way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are
playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in
Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of
the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at
the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an
option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan
administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El
Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against
Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist"
forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt
down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency
was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have
been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the
subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current
administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is
John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan,
he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces
teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely
hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target
Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into
Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It
remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of
assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are
sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is
that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria,
activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi
paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the
Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an
operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its
own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation
run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib
interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any
operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform
Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such
covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a
special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel
operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it
instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)

Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate
Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand
the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in
intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’
intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related
to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in
military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials,
some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of
Special Forces for other intelligence missions.

Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA
civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning
and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces
soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are
believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the
Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send
soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or
participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads,
even operating covertly, could be deemed to fall within the Defense
department’s orbit.

Photo: Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, center, was ambassador to
Honduras during the Reagan years
Alaa Al-Raya / AP

The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among
the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad
Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service,
may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of
interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based
Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named
three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam
Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a
Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily
between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to
extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the
problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said,
"are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost
200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not
actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or
logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One
military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the
crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are
needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni
population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the
terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We
have to change that equation."

Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the
Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star
general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the
entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the
breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach
might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.

With Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Iraq: The Devastation

2005-01-08T13:51:00.000Z

By Dahr Jamail
TomDispatch.com

Friday 07 January 2005

The devastation of Iraq? Where do I start? After working 7 of the last 12 months in Iraq, I'm still overwhelmed by even the thought of trying to describe this.

The illegal war and occupation of Iraq was waged for three reasons, according to the Bush administration. First for weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to be found. Second, because the regime of Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda, which Mr. Bush has personally admitted have never been proven. The third reason - embedded in the very name of the invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom - was to liberate the Iraqi people.

So Iraq is now a liberated country.

I've been in liberated Baghdad and environs on and off for 12
months, including being inside Fallujah during the April siege and
having warning shots fired over my head more than once by soldiers. I've
traveled in the south, north, and extensively around central Iraq. What
I saw in the first months of 2004, however, when it was easier for a
foreign reporter to travel the country, offered a powerful - even
predictive - taste of the horrors to come in the rest of the year (and
undoubtedly in 2005 as well). It's worth returning to the now forgotten
first half of last year and remembering just how terrible things were
for Iraqis even relatively early in our occupation of their country.

Then, as now, for Iraqis, our invasion and occupation was a case of
liberation from - from human rights (think: the atrocities committed in
Abu Ghraib which are still occurring daily there and elsewhere);
liberation from functioning infrastructure (think: the malfunctioning
electric system, the many-mile long gas lines, the raw sewage in the
streets); liberation from an entire city to live in (think: Fallujah,
most of which has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment and other
means).

Iraqis were then already bitter, confused, and existing amid a
desolation that came from myriads of Bush administration broken
promises. Quite literally every liberated Iraqi I've gotten to know from
my earliest days in the country has either had a family member or a
friend killed by U.S. soldiers or from the effects of the
war/occupation. These include such everyday facts of life as not having
enough money for food or fuel due to massive unemployment and soaring
energy prices, or any of the countless other horrors caused by the
aforementioned. The broken promises, broken infrastructure, and broken
cities of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months of 2004 - and
the sad thing is that the devastation I saw then has only grown worse
since. The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous as it was, was
but a prelude to what was to come under the U.S. occupation. The warning
signs were clear from a shattered infrastructure, to all the torturing,
to a burgeoning, violent resistance.

Broken Promises

It was quickly apparent, even to a journalistic newcomer, even in
those first months of last year that the real nature of the liberation
we brought to Iraq was no news to Iraqis. Long before the American media
decided it was time to report on the horrendous actions occurring inside
Abu Ghraib prison, most Iraqis already knew that the "liberators" of
their country were torturing and humiliating their countrymen.

In December 2003, for instance, a man in Baghdad, speaking of the
Abu Ghraib atrocities, said to me, "Why do they use these actions? Even
Saddam Hussein did not do that! This is not good behavior. They are not
coming to liberate Iraq!" And by then the bleak jokes of the beleaguered
had already begun to circulate. In the dark humor that has become so
popular in Baghdad these days, one recently released Abu Ghraib detainee
I interviewed said, "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before
they brought it to my house!"

Sadiq Zoman is fairly typical of what I've seen. Taken from his home
in Kirkuk in July, 2003, he was held in a military detention facility
near Tikrit before being dropped off comatose at the Salahadin General
Hospital by U.S. forces one month later. While the medical report
accompanying him, signed by Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, stated that Mr.
Zoman was comatose due to a heart attack brought on by heat stroke, it
failed to mention that his head had been bludgeoned, or to note the
electrical burn marks that scorched his penis and the bottoms of his
feet, or the bruises and whip-like marks up and down his body.

I visited his wife Hashmiya and eight daughters in a nearly empty
home in Baghdad. Its belongings had largely been sold on the black
market to keep them all afloat. A fan twirled slowly over the bed as
Zoman stared blankly at the ceiling. A small back-up generator hummed
outside, as this neighborhood, like most of Baghdad, averaged only six
hours of electricity per day.

Her daughter Rheem, who is in college, voiced the sentiments of the
entire family when she said, "I hate the Americans for doing this. When
they took my father they took my life. I pray for revenge on the
Americans for destroying my father, my country, and my life."

In May of 2004, when I went to their house, a recent court-martial
of one of the soldiers complicit in the widespread torturing of Iraqis
in Abu Ghraib had already taken place. He had been sentenced to some
modest prison time, but Iraqis were unimpressed. They had been convinced
yet again - not that they needed it - that Bush administration promises
to clean up its act regarding the treatment of detained Iraqis were no
less empty than those being offered for assistance in building a safe
and prosperous Iraq.

Last year, the empty promises to bring justice to those involved in
such heinous acts, along with promises to make the prison at Abu Ghraib
more transparent and accessible, fell on distraught family members who
waited near the gates of the prison to see their loved ones inside.
Under a scorching May sun I went to the dusty, dismal, heavily-guarded,
razor-wire enclosed "waiting area" outside Abu Ghraib. There, I heard
one horror story after another from melancholy family members doggedly
gathered on this patch of barren earth, still hoping against hope to be
granted a visit with someone inside the awful compound.

Sitting alone on the hard packed dirt in his white dishdasha, his
head scarf languidly flapping in the dry, hot wind, Lilu Hammed stared
unwaveringly at the high walls of the nearby prison as if he were
attempting to see his 32 year-old son Abbas through the concrete walls.
When my interpreter Abu Talat asked if he would speak with us, several
seconds passed before Lilu slowly turned his head and said simply, "I am
sitting here on the ground waiting for God's help."

His son, never charged with an offense, had by then been in Abu
Ghraib for 6 months following a raid on his home which produced no
weapons. Lilu held a crumpled visitation permission slip that he had
just obtained, promising a reunion with his son...three months away, on
the 18th of August.

Along with every other person I interviewed there, Lilu had found
consolation neither in the recent court martial, nor in the release of a
few hundred prisoners. "This court-martial is nonsense. They said that
Iraqis could come to the trial, but they could not. It was a false
trial."

At that moment, a convoy of Humvees full of soldiers, guns pointing
out the small windows, rumbled through the front gate of the penal
complex, kicking up a huge dust cloud that quickly engulfed everyone.
The parent of another prisoner, Mrs. Samir, waving away the clouds of
dust said, "We hope the whole world can see the position we are in now!"
and then added plaintively, "Why are they doing this to us?"

Last summer I interviewed a kind, 55 year-old woman who used to work
as an English teacher. She had been detained for four months in as many
prisons...in Samarra, Tikrit, Baghdad and, of course, at Abu Ghraib. She
was never, she told me, allowed to sleep through a night. She was
interrogated many times each day, not given enough food or water, or
access to a lawyer or to her family. She was verbally and
psychologically abused.

But that, she assured me, wasn't the worst part. Not by far. Her 70
year-old husband was also detained and he was beaten. After seven months
of beatings and interrogations, he died in U.S. military custody in
prison.

She was crying as she spoke of him. "I miss my husband," she sobbed
and stood up, speaking not to us but to the room, "I miss him so much."
She shook her hands as if to fling water off them...then she held her
chest and cried some more.

"Why are they doing this to us?" she asked. She simply couldn't
understand, she said, what was happening because two of her sons were
also detained, and her family had been completely shattered. "We didn't
do anything wrong," she whimpered.

With the interview over, we were walking towards our car to leave
when all of us realized that it was 10 pm, already too late at night to
be out in dangerous Baghdad. So she asked us instead if we wouldn't
please stay for dinner, all the while thanking me for listening to her
horrendous story, for my time, for writing about it. I found myself
speechless.

"No, thank you, we must get home now," said Abu Talat. By this time,
we were all crying.

In the car, as we drove quickly along a Baghdad highway directly
into a full moon, Abu Talat and I were silent. Finally, he asked, "Can
you say any words? Do you have any words?"

I had none. None at all.

Broken Infrastructure

Everything in Iraq is set against the backdrop of shattered
infrastructure and a nearly complete lack of reconstruction. What the
Americans turn out to be best at is, once again, promises - and
propaganda. During the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority
ruled Iraq from Baghdad's Green Zone, their handouts often read like
this one released on May 21, 2004: "The Coalition Provisional Authority
has recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi children in
Ramadi, Kerbala, and Hilla. Iraqi women from Hilla sewed the soccer
balls, which are emblazoned with the phrase 'All of Us Participate in a
New Iraq.'"

And yet when it came to the basics of that New Iraq, unemployment
was at 50% and increasing, better areas of Baghdad averaged 6 hours of
electricity per day, and security was nowhere to be found. Even as far
back as January, 2004, before the security situation had brought most
reconstruction projects to the nearly complete standstill of the present
moment, and 9 months after the war in Iraq had officially ended, the
situation already verged on the catastrophic. For instance, lack of
potable water was the norm throughout most of central and southern Iraq.

I was then working on a report that attempted to document exactly
what reconstruction had occurred in the water sector - a sector for
which Bechtel was largely responsible. That giant corporation had been
awarded a no-bid contract of $680 million behind closed doors on April
17, 2003, which in September was raised to $1.03 billion; then Bechtel
won an additional contract worth $1.8 billion to extend its program
through December 2005.

At the time, when travel for Western reporters was a lot easier, I
stopped in several villages en route south from Baghdad through what the
Americans now call "the triangle of death" to Hilla, Najaf, and
Diwaniyah to check on people's drinking-water situation. Near Hilla, an
old man with a weathered face showed me his water pump, sitting lifeless
with an empty container nearby - as there was no electricity. What water
his village did have was loaded with salt which was leaching into the
water supply because Bechtel had not honored its contractual obligations
to rehabilitate a nearby water treatment center. Another nearby village
didn't have the salt problem, but nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones,
cramps, and even cases of cholera were on the rise. This too would be a
steady trend for the villages I visited.

The rest of that trip involved a frenetic tour of villages, each
without drinkable water, near or inside the city limits of Hilla, Najaf,
and Diwaniya. Hilla, close to ancient Babylon, has a water treatment
plant and distribution center managed by Chief Engineer Salmam Hassan
Kadel. Mr. Kadel informed me that most of the villages in his
jurisdiction had no potable water, nor did he have the piping needed to
repair their broken-down water systems, nor had he had any contact with
Bechtel or its subcontractors.

He spoke of large numbers of people coming down with the usual list
of diseases. "Bechtel," he told me, "is spending all of their money
without any studies. Bechtel is painting buildings, but this doesn't
give clean water to the people who have died from drinking contaminated
water. We ask of them that instead of painting buildings, they give us
one water pump and we'll use it to give water service to more people. We
have had no change since the Americans came here. We know Bechtel is
wasting money, but we can't prove it."

At another small village between Hilla and Najaf, 1,500 people were
drinking water from a dirty stream which trickled slowly by their homes.
Everyone had dysentery; many had kidney stones; a startling number,
cholera. One villager, holding a sick child, told me, "It was much
better before the invasion. We had twenty-four hours of running water
then. Now we are drinking this garbage because it is all we have."

The next morning found me at a village on the outskirts of Najaf,
which fell under the responsibility of Najaf's water center. A large
hole had been dug in the ground where the villagers tapped into already
existing pipes to siphon off water. The dirty hole filled in the night,
when water was collected. That morning, children were standing idly
around the hole as women collected the residue of dirty water which sat
at its bottom. Everyone, it seemed, was suffering from some water-born
illness and several children, the villagers informed me, had been killed
attempting to cross a busy highway to a nearby factory where clean water
was actually available.

In June, six months later, I visited Chuwader Hospital, which then
treated an average of 3,000 patients a day in Sadr City, the enormous
Baghdad slum. Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the head manager there, promptly
began describing the struggles his hospital was facing under the
occupation. "We are short of every medicine," he said and pointed out
how rarely this had occurred before the invasion. "It is forbidden, but
sometimes we have to reuse IV's, even the needles. We have no choice."

And then, of course, he - like the other doctors I spoke with -
brought up their horrendous water problem, the unavailability of
unpolluted water anywhere in the area. "Of course, we have typhoid,
cholera, kidney stones," he said matter-of-factly, "but we now even have
the very rare Hepatitis Type-E...and it has become common in our area."

Driving out of the sewage filled, garbage strewn streets of Sadr
City we passed a wall with "Vietnam Street" spray painted on it. Just
underneath was the sentence - obviously aimed at the American liberators
- "We will make your graves in this place."

Today, in terms of collapsing infrastructure, other areas of Baghdad
are beginning to suffer the way Sadr City did then, and still largely
does. While reconstruction projects slated for Sadr City have received
increased funding, most of the time there is little sign of any work
being done, as is the case in most of Baghdad.

While an ongoing fuel crisis finds people waiting up to two days to
fill their tanks at gas stations, all of the city is running on
generators the majority of the time, and many less favored areas like
Sadr City have only four hours of electricity a day.

Broken Cities

The heavy-handed tactics of the occupation forces have become a
commonplace of Iraqi life. I've interviewed people who regularly sleep
in their clothes because home raids are the norm. Many times when
military patrols are attacked by resistance fighters in the cities of
Iraq, soldiers simply open fire randomly on anything that moves. More
commonly, heavy civilian casualties occur from air raids by occupation
forces. These horrible circumstances have led to over 100,000 Iraqi
civilian casualties in the less than two year-old occupation.

Then there is Fallujah, a city three-quarters of which has by now
been bombed or shelled into rubble, a city in whose ruins fighting
continues even while most of its residents have yet to be allowed to
return to their homes (many of which no longer exist). The atrocities
committed there in the last month or so are, in many ways, similar to
those observed during the failed U.S. Marine siege of the city last
April, though on a far grander scale. This time, in addition, reports
from families inside the city, along with photographic evidence, point
toward the U.S. military's use of chemical and phosphorous weapons as
well as cluster bombs there. The few residents allowed to return in the
final week of 2004 were handed military-produced leaflets instructing
them not to eat any food from inside the city, nor to drink the water.

Last May, at the General Hospital of Fallujah, doctors spoke to me
of the sorts of atrocities that occurred during the first month-long
siege of the city. Dr. Abdul Jabbar, an orthopedic surgeon, said that it
was difficult to keep track of the number of people they treated, as
well as the number of dead, due to the lack of documentation. This was
caused primarily by the fact that the main hospital, located on the
opposite side of the Euphrates River from the city, was sealed off by
the Marines for the majority of April, just as it would again be in
November, 2004.

He estimated that at least 700 people were killed in Fallujah during
that April. "I worked at five of the centers [community health clinics]
myself, and if we collect the numbers from these places, then this is
the number," he said. "And you must keep in mind that many people were
buried before reaching our centers."

When the wind blew in from the nearby Julan quarter of the city, the
putrid stench of decaying bodies (a smell evidently once again typical
of the city) only confirmed his statement. Even then, Dr. Jabbar was
insisting that American planes had dropped cluster bombs on the city.
"Many people were injured and killed by cluster bombs. Of course they
used cluster bombs. We heard them as well as treated people who had been
hit by them!"

Dr. Rashid, another orthopedic surgeon, said, "Not less than sixty
percent of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves
for yourself." I had already visited the Martyr Cemetery and had indeed
observed the numerous tiny graves that had clearly been dug for
children. He agreed with Dr. Jabbar about the use of cluster bombs, and
added, "I saw the cluster bombs with my own eyes. We don't need any
evidence. Most of these bombs fell on those we then treated."

Speaking of the medical crisis that his hospital had to deal with,
he pointed out that during the first 10 days of fighting the U.S.
military did not allow any evacuations from Fallujah to Baghdad at all.
He said, "Even transferring patients in the city was impossible. You can
see our ambulances outside. Their snipers also shot into the main doors
of one of our centers." Several ambulances were indeed in the hospital's
parking lot, two of them with bullet holes in their windshields.

Both doctors said they had not been contacted by the U.S. military,
nor had any aid been delivered to them by the military. Dr. Rashid
summed the situation up this way: "They send only bombs, not medicine."

As I walked to our car at one point amid what was already the
desolation of Fallujah, a man tugged on my arm and yelled, "The
Americans are cowboys! This is their history! Look at what they did to
the Indians! Vietnam! Afghanistan! And now Iraq! This does not surprise
us."

And that, of course, was before the total siege of the city began in
November, 2004. The April campaign in Fallujah, which resulted in a rise
in resistance proved - like so much else in those early months of 2004 -
to be but a harbinger of things to come on a far larger scale. While the
goal of the most recent siege was to squelch the resistance and bring
greater security for elections scheduled for January 30, the result as
in April has been anything but security.

In the wake of the destruction of Fallujah fighting has simply
spread elsewhere and intensified. Families are now fleeing Mosul, Iraq's
third largest city, because of a warning of another upcoming air
campaign against resistance fighters. At least one car bomb per day is
now the norm in the capital city. Clashes erupt with deadly regularity
throughout Baghdad as well as in cities like Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba and
Balad.

The intensification is two-sided. With each ratchet upwards in
violence, the tactics by the American military only grow more
heavy-handed and, as they do, the Iraqi resistance just continues to
grow in size and effectiveness. Any kind of "siege" of Mosul will only
add to this dynamic.

Despite a media blackout in the aftermath of the recent assault on
Fallujah, stories of dogs eating bodies in the streets of the city and
of destroyed mosques have spread across Iraq like wildfire; and reports
like these only underscore what most people in Iraq now believe - that
the liberators have become no more than brutal imperialist occupiers of
their country. And then the resistance grows yet stronger.

Yet among Iraqis the growing resistance was predicted long ago. One
telling moment for me came last June amid daily suicide car bombings in
Baghdad. While footage of cars with broken glass and bullet holes in
their frames flashed across a television screen, my translator Hamid, an
older man who had already grown weary of the violence, said softly, "It
has begun. These are only the start, and they will not stop. Even after
June 30." That, of course, was the date of the long-promised handover of
"sovereignty" to a new Iraqi government, after which, American officials
fervently predicted, violence in the country would begin to subside. The
same pattern of prediction and of a contrarian reality can now be seen
in relation to the upcoming elections.

Three weeks ago, a friend of mine who is a sheikh from Baquba
visited me in Baghdad and we had lunch with Abdulla, an older professor
who is a friend of his. As we were eating, Abdulla expressed a sentiment
now widely heard. "The mujahideen," he said, "are fighting for their
country against the Americans. This resistance is acceptable to us."

The Bush administration has recently increased its troops in Iraq
from 138,000 to 150,000 - in order, officials said, to provide greater
security for the upcoming elections. Such troop increases also occurred
in Vietnam. Back then it was called escalation.

What I wonder is, will I be writing a piece next January still
called, "Iraq: The Devastation," in which these last terrible months of
2004 (of which the first half of the year was but a foreshadowing) will
prove in their turn but a predictive taste of horrors to come? And what
then of 2006 and 2007?

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He
has spent 7 of the last 12 months reporting from inside occupied Iraq.
His articles have been published in the Sunday Herald, Inter Press
Service, the website of the Nation magazine, and the New Standard
internet news site for which he is the Iraq correspondent. He is the
special correspondent in Iraq for Flashpoints radio and also has
appeared on the BBC, Democracy Now!, Free Speech Radio News, and Radio
South Africa. This is his first piece for Tomdispatch.com.<em>

Open purses with strings attached

2005-01-07T13:18:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story

By Alan Boyd

SYDNEY - Stung by United Nations criticism and eclipsed by a global outpouring of private aid, the world's wealthiest nations on Thursday assembled a massive financial package for the 5 million victims of South Asia's tsunami.

Meeting with their Asian counterparts in Jakarta, leaders of the United States, Japan, Australia and Western Europe pledged US$3.7 billion in immediate help and reconstruction funds for 13 affected countries. And more is expected as development needs are assessed.

NLF decries induction of foreign troops

2005-01-06T15:03:00.000Z

[TamilNet, January 03, 2005 18:17 GMT]

The New Left Front (NLF), a vocal leftist group, in statement signed by the group's leader Dr. Vickramabahu Karunarathne and issued in Colombo Monday, condemned the induction of foreign troops into Sri Lanka in the guise of helping the tsunami victims. In a strongly worded statement the New Left Front said 'it is totally unnecessary to commit troops' for relief work and accused the US of having its own agenda of gaining a foothold with designs to suppress the LTTE and control the Tamil liberation struggle on behalf of local capitalist rulers."

It also provides an opening for the US not only to arm-twist Sri Lanka to go along with "global capitalism, but also to use Sri Lanka's strategic location to consolidate its neo-colonial agenda all the more blatantly," NLF's statement added.

Karunarathne had called upon all "oppressed people and the left and democratic forces to protest strongly against the induction of foreign troops to Sri Lanka under cover of relief and rescue operations.

Meanwhile, a contingent of 42 US marines arrived today in two aircraft. They were in addition to the dozen who arrived during the week end to prepare for the arrival of about 1500. US marines arrived in Sri Lanka as foreign military aid efforts picked up US marines would be deployed in reconstruction work, a US embassy officials said.

A multi purpose assault ship, five hovercraft and 20 helicopters will provide logistic support to the marines who are expected to be based near the Colombo international airport.

A British military vessel, HMS Chatham, arrived in Colombo early Monday.

Pakistan and Bangladesh are also sending their navy ships.

India had earlier sent 1,000 Indian military personnel, a 45 bed floatinghospital in addition to five Navy vessels and six MI-17 Indian Air Force helicopters. They are stationed at the Galle and Trincomalee ports.

India is concerned about the arrival of US and British ships, observers said.

A Sri Lanka Government spokesperson said foreign troops would only be deployed to do relief work.

Next Iraqi government may not be so pro-U.S.

2005-01-06T14:59:00.000Z

By ANNA BADKHEN, San Francisco Chronicle

Published: Sunday, Jan. 2, 2005

President Bush has been vigorously advocating the Jan. 30 election in war-ravaged Iraq, but is he ready for the consequences?

Should Bush's wish come true, the new Iraqi government that will rise to power probably will bear little resemblance to the Washington-friendly, pro-Western leadership of secular interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, analysts say.

"They will have a Shia-dominated, Islamic-oriented government in Iraq," said Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. "Is the United States ready for that?"

Iraq's Shiites make up 60 percent of the country's nearly 26 million people and are more likely to vote in January's election than Sunni Muslims, who represent 20 percent of Iraqis. Most Sunnis live in central Iraq, where raging violence threatens to prevent voters from going to the polls, and leading Sunni clerics have called for a boycott of the election.

In this situation, a powerful alliance of Shiite groups, formed at the initiative of Iraq's most revered spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is poised to win a dominant share of the 275-seat National Assembly, which will elect a prime minister and Cabinet from within its ranks.

Alliance leaders have said they consider negotiating a date for the withdrawal of America's troops one of their main orders of business. Firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has instigated two violent uprisings against U.S.-led forces and vehemently opposes the U.S. occupation, called in December for a guarantee of immediate departure of foreign troops after the elections.

While not an official member of the Shiite coalition, he has endorsed several candidates on the coalition's list who describe themselves as independents.

On Dec. 15, the first day of the election campaign, Hazem Shaalan, the defense minister in Allawi's interim Cabinet, called the alliance "an Iranian list" that wants Iraq to be run by Shiite clerics.

Shaalan's comment reflected concerns that leading figures in a new government, notably Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the first name on the Shiite coalition's list, have close ties to Iran.

All this would seem to be a far cry from the Bush administration's vision of a secular, democratic Iraq that would become America's crucial ally in the Middle East, one that would even establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

"A stable, democratic country in the foreseeable future in Iraq is not probable," said Shibley Telhami, an expert on Iraq at the Brookings Institution. "The next government . . . is not likely to be as responsive to the U.S. as Allawi's has been."

U.S. officials and experts close to the Bush administration play down such concerns. "Yeah, there will be a Shia majority, but the Shia aren't united. Some are more religious, some are more secular," said a senior State Department official, who did not wish to be named.

While the United States does not have "any expectation that there would be any victory for anybody other than Shiites," the Bush administration will be able to influence the new government, especially in the drawing up of a new constitution next year, said Danielle Pletka, an expert on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute.

"It's really a question of moving the process ahead and providing a genuine mandate to the new prime minister and president of Iraq and getting them on track and helping them draft the new constitution," she said.

"You try to make sure the safeguards (that ensure a plurality in government, with protection for minority groups as laid out in the transitional law) get carried through," the State Department official said. But analysts warn that, unlike the current, U.S.-friendly interim government led by Allawi, a future Iraqi government will likely see the emergence of more conservative Islamic groups.

By putting al-Hakim first on the list of its ranking members, the main Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, is suggesting that he may take a senior position in the new government.

Allawi's future is less clear. He announced Dec. 15 that he will run for the National Assembly, backed by a 240-member bloc of Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders and clerics. He pledged to promote national unity and move away from "religious and ethnic fanaticism" if elected.

The Supreme Council and the Islamic Dawa Party, another member of the main Shiite coalition, have ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the military force that has served as the main pillar of support for the Islamic republic. "Any legitimately elected Shiite government in Iraq is not likely to have a confrontational relationship with Iran," said Telhami of Brookings. "They have cultural ties, religious ties and personal ties. They will want to have a partnership. It's going to put the U.S. in a difficult bind."

Anna Badkhen covered the war in Iraq and its aftermath in 2003

Foreknowledge of A Natural Disaster:

2005-01-06T14:36:00.000Z

Click title for full article

Washington was aware that a deadly Tidal Wave was building up in the Indian Ocean

The US Military and the State Department were given advanced warning. America's Navy base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was notified.

Why were fishermen in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand not provided with the same warnings as the US Navy and the US State Department?

Why did the US State Department remain mum on the existence of an impending catastrophe?

With a modern communications system, why did the information not get out? By email, telephone, fax, satellite TV... ?

It could have saved the lives of thousands of people. . .

Sontag and Tsunami

2005-01-06T14:34:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story

by Rebecca Solnit, Tomdispatch.com/Alternet
January 4th, 2005

It may be strange to weigh two recent incidents – Susan Sontag's death and the Asian tsunamis – against each other. But Sontag's comments allow us to examine the terms in which news and images are delivered to us. The news of Susan Sontag's death arrived as a single sentence spoken in the opening moments of a radio news program Tuesday morning, and then the program returned to what had been the main story since the day after Christmas: the tsunami and the death toll, then in the tens of thousands, that would continue to rise. It was strange to weigh these two incidents of mortality against each other. Though for some people it would be considered insensitive or irreverent even to do so, one of the things to be appreciated about Sontag, I think, is that she considered everything a proper occasion for more thinking, more analyzing, more writing . . .

Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say

2005-01-05T08:16:00.000Z

Sorry folks, I have been on holiday so haven't updated for a short while. Happy New Year to all. Click on the title for full article - PolPop

FALLUJAH, 4 January (IRIN) - "It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children. It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started," Dr Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, director of the main hospital in Fallujah city, some 60 km west of Baghdad, told IRIN.

According to al-Iyssaue, the hospital emergency team has recovered more than 700 bodies from rubble where houses and shops once stood, adding that more than 550 were women and children. He said a very small number of men were found in these places and most were elderly. . .

Class and Religion: Co-evolution

2004-12-22T15:04:00.000Z

December 21, 2004
7,000 Years of Religious Ritual Is Traced in Mexico
By NICHOLAS WADE NY TIMES

Archaeologists have traced the development of religion in one location over a 7,000-year period, reporting that as an early society changed from foraging to settlement to the formation of an archaic state, religion also evolved to match the changing social structure.

This archaeological record, because of its length and completeness, sheds an unusually clear light on the origins of religion, a universal human behavior but one whose evolutionary and social roots are still not well understood.

The new findings are the fruit of 15 years of excavations in the Oaxaca Valley of southern Mexico that have brought to light a remarkably complete series of structures used for religious purposes. Dr. Joyce Marcus and Dr. Kent V. Flannery, two archaeologists at the University of Michigan, describe their results in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Oaxaca Valley was home to people who around 7000 B.C. were hunters and gatherers with no fixed abode. By 1500 B.C., the Oaxacans had developed strains of maize that enabled them to settle in villages that were occupied throughout the year. The earliest village societies were probably egalitarian like the foragers who preceded them. But by 1150 B.C. the first signs of social hierarchy appear, with an elite who lived in big houses, wore jade-studded clothes and deformed their skulls, as a sign of nobility, by binding their children's heads. The Oaxacans flourished and in 500 B.C. founded a populous and warlike society at Monte Albán known as the Zapotec state.

The religious practices of each of these four stages of society can be inferred from the structures that the archaeologists have excavated and dated. At the hunter-gatherer stage, ceremonies took place on a plain dance floor, its sides marked by stones. To judge by the behavior of modern hunter-gatherers, ritual dancing took place at times of year when many foraging groups came together for initiations and courtship.

The pre-Zapotec dance floor has been dated to 6650 B.C. But the foragers' ritual practices were not confined to dancing. A cave of the same period in a nearby valley has yielded the remains of individuals who appear to have been beheaded, cooked and eaten. Their remains were then buried with baskets of harvested wild plants, indicating that the human sacrifice that was such a notorious feature of later Mesoamerican cultures had ancient roots, possibly associated with harvest seasons.

When the Oaxacans settled in permanent villages, their rituals became more formal. The Michigan archaeologists have excavated four men's houses, all oriented in the same direction, one that may have been determined by the sun's path at the spring equinox. This suggests the Oaxacans had formalized the ad hoc rituals of their forebears and now held their ceremonies at fixed times determined by the position of the sun or stars. In contemporary societies, similar men's houses are used by groups of families who claim descent from a common ancestor. They are open only to a select group of men who have passed acceptability tests and been initiated into secret rituals.

By the third stage of society, marked by the emergence of elites, these men's houses had metamorphosed into temples. The temples were oriented in the same direction as the men's houses, but were now subject to a baroque system of two interlocking calendars, one of 260 days and one of 365 days, which came into synchrony once every 52 years. The Michigan archaeologists have shown that one Oaxacan temple was destroyed and rebuilt twice at periods close to or exactly 52 years apart.

By the time of the Zapotec state, the fourth stage of society, the temples had grown more complex, with special rooms for the new caste of religious officers, the priests.

The religion of the Oaxacan people became both more elaborate and more exclusionary as society evolved, the archaeologists conclude. The hunter-gatherers' ritual dances would have been open to all, the men's houses were open only to initiated members of the public, and by the state stage, religion had come under the control of a special priestly caste.

Why did religion evolve with society in this way? Anthropologists have advanced many different ideas about the role of religion, but a leading proposal is that it plays a cohesive role. Rituals were especially important in hunter-gatherer societies, which were egalitarian and had no chiefs or hierarchy to coordinate activities.

Religion may have continued to serve as the principal source of cohesion in the first settled societies until they developed systems of political authority. Early village societies "needed to integrate larger numbers of people than had been motivated to live together before, but these societies didn't yet have leaders with real political power," Dr. Marcus said.

But when elites and kings emerged, they did not dispense with the religious systems that were the previous source of social authority. Instead they employed religion as another mechanism of social control and as a means of maintaining their privileged position. "Ritual becomes part of the justification for being politically elite," Dr. Marcus said.

The Michigan archaeologists believe that the ideas of a former colleague, the anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport, may explain several of their findings. Dr. Rappaport, who died in 1997, felt that religion, because of its universality, must have played some salient role in human evolution. A critical threat for all social animals is the free rider - an errant member who seizes the advantages of sociality without contributing to its costs.

When humans evolved language, a process that was probably completed some 50,000 years ago, they developed a crucial new element of human sociality, but one that was easily subverted by free riders who used language to deceive.

Dr. Rappaport proposed that religion evolved with language as a means of certifying certain messages as true, and also of imposing some kind of order among those who bought into the idea. An essential feature of these sanctified messages is that they should be unfalsifiable, like "Henry is by grace of God king," "Pharaoh is the living Horus" or "The chief has great mana."

Sanctity, Dr. Rappaport wrote, "made it possible for early authorities to begin to command the men and control the resources that eventually provided them or their successors with actual power."

Dr. Marcus said she agreed with Dr. Rappaport that "sanctity can be a substitute or equivalent of political power in societies that still lack political control" and that the concept of the sacred may have evolved with language, "making religious ritual a candidate to be something selected for in human evolution."

Dr. Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, said the Michigan archaeologists' study delineated the process of religion adapting to different environments as Oaxacan society changed. Among foragers, ritual serves to cement solidarity, he said, and the "powerful moralistic gods that we associate with contemporary religions" are a later development, introduced at the stage when priests have acquired control of a religion and "are effectively controlling the masses through ritual activities that instill the fear of supernatural punishment."

Precision of Base Attack Worries Military Experts

2004-12-22T15:00:00.000Z

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 22, 2004; Page A01

In April 2003, as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was ending, the Pentagon projected in a formal planning effort that the U.S. military occupation of the country would end this month.

Instead, December 2004 brought one of the deadliest single incidents of the war for U.S. forces. More than 80 casualties were suffered yesterday by U.S. troops, civilian contractors and Iraqi soldiers when a U.S. base near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was blasted at lunchtime.

Defense officials said 15 of those killed in the attack on a mess tent at the city's airport were American soldiers -- more U.S. troops than have been lost in nearly any other major incident in the fighting, even during the spring 2003 invasion. Before yesterday, the worst incidents were the deaths of 17 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division in the November 2003 collision of two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, also in Mosul, and, two weeks before that, the loss of 15 soldiers when a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter crashed west of Baghdad. All three occurred after President Bush's May 2003 declaration that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

The major difference between the latest attack and the earlier incidents is that it was an attack on a U.S. base, rather than on troops in transit in vulnerable aircraft. That difference appears to reflect both the persistence of the insurgency and its growing sophistication, as experts noted that it seemed to be based on precise intelligence. Most disturbingly, some officers who have served in Iraq worried that the Mosul attack could mark the beginning of a period of even more intense violence preceding the Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30.

"On the strategic level, we were expecting an horrendous month leading up to the Iraqi elections, and that has begun," retired Army Col. Michael E. Hess said.

U.S. takes border war on the road

2004-12-21T13:58:00.000Z

Click title to link - PolPop

Boats being sunk near Ecuador

By Bruce Finley
Denver Post Staff Writer

Manta, Ecuador - U.S. counterterrorism officials have set up a high-seas gantlet deploying Coast Guard cutters off Latin America and arresting foreign nationals trying to leave their own countries.

Coast Guard crews have blocked at least 37 Ecuadoran boats and detained more than 4,575 suspected illegal migrants over the past four years, records show. Then, over the past two years, they've sunk a dozen emptied migrant boats they deemed "unseaworthy" - setting them ablaze and firing on them with their .50-caliber guns.

A POLL GOVERNED BY FEAR

2004-12-21T13:51:00.000Z

By Patrick Cockburn

"Millions will get no chance to vote, and the war will go on"

Independent (UK) December 19, 2004

BAGHDAD -- The Iraqi election on 30 January, for which campaigning began last week, will be one of the most secretive in history. Iraqi television shows only the feet of election officials rather than their faces, because they are terrified of their identity being revealed. It will be a poll governed by fear.

Those fears were amply borne out yesterday when insurgents launched attacks on election offices in northern Iraq. Two people were killed and eight wounded when mortars landed on an election office in Dujail, one of many around the country registering and educating potential voters. Two Iraqis were killed in execution-style shootings and four American contractors were wounded by a roadside bomb in other incidents.

When Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, announced his slate of candidates for the 275-member National Assembly in Baghdad last week, it was to a small audience of American security guards. The venue had been changed at the last minute to baffle potential assassins, and foreign journalists deemed it too dangerous to attend.

Shopkeepers distributed registration forms, tucked into the bags of monthly rations on which most Iraqis depend for survival. In Sunni districts in Baghdad some shopkeepers, fearing execution by the resistance, had begged their customers not to reveal where they got the forms.

There is now little doubt that the elections will go ahead. The Sunni political powers, fearing mass abstention by their constituents, would like a delay. But they could provide no convincing argument that the security situation will be any better in six months. Hoshyar Zebari, the powerful foreign minister, argued that "a delay in holding the election would be taken as a sign of weakness," and the interim government is doing what it can to manipulate public opinion.

Announcements that former members of the Saddam regime will go on trial this week, starting with the notorious "Chemical Ali," Ali Hassan al-Majid, are seen as electioneering more than anything else. The same applies to news yesterday that judges had begun interrogating him and another top suspect.

It is doubtful if the election, at least at first, will mark a real change in the balance of power between the three main communities in Iraq: the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds. Nor is it likely to see a shift in authority from the U.S. to Iraqis. The outcome could simply be a photocopy of the present government.

Few votes will be cast in the Sunni cities, towns and villages strung along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers north of Baghdad. Even if voters did want to go to the polls, it would be extremely dangerous to do so in places where anybody seen co-operating with the U.S. is a target.

American and British officials persistently underestimate the extent to which all of Iraq is unstable. President George Bush and Tony Blair genuinely appear to believe that there are only limited trouble spots in Iraq and the rest of the country is at peace. Since the beginning of the insurgency, Washington and London have portrayed it as confined to the so-called "Sunni triangle" west and north of Baghdad. The phrase is designed to minimize the extent of the uprising, but in reality there is guerrilla warfare in all the Sunni towns and cities as well as Baghdad.

As U.S. generals were issuing triumphant claims of victory in Fallujah, with a population of 300,000, last month they lost control of Mosul, 250 miles to the north, with a population of 1.2 million. The unexpected insurgent uprising on
10 November, which led to the disintegration of the 8,000-strong police force, was clearly planned to take advantage of the U.S. assault on Fallujah on 8 November.

In the most militant cities there is no sign of insurgent activity diminishing: Every day there are attacks on U.S. and interim government forces in Baiji, Baquba, Ramadi, Samarra and Tal Afar. Fallujah itself is far from subdued. Ayham al-Samarrai, the minister of electricity, told the *Independent* on Sunday that it would be difficult to hold fair elections in provinces with a total population of eight million -- a third of the Iraqi population.

Most serious of all is the situation in Baghdad. U.S. military briefings give the impression that Fallujah has been the heart of the uprising since the invasion. In reality the deadliest location for a U.S. soldier in Iraq is Baghdad, where 240 U.S. troops have been killed since March last year, more than twice as many as in Fallujah. It is the capital that may witness the most violence as the election gets
closer.

Whatever the outcome of the poll, the five million Sunni in Iraq are numerous enough to continue the uprising. The feeling that their community is being disenfranchised may increase support for the resistance. Because all Iraq is being treated as a single constituency, the Sunni may have few representatives. Had each of the 18 provinces in Iraq been allocated a set number of deputies to the National Assembly, then the Sunni provinces would be represented, despite a low turnout.

Voters will go to the polls in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Shia districts of Baghdad, and in southern Iraq. Ever since the U.S. invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein in April last year, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has demanded an election in which the Shia could show that they make up between 15 and 16 million of the 25 million Iraqi population.

But power in Iraq today grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani, the highly respected and influential nuclear scientist tortured and imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, announced the Shia electoral list earlier this month, it was in the Convention Centre in the Green Zone in Baghdad, protected by U.S. soldiers.

Ayatollah Sistani, the most influential Shia religious leader, is behind the Shia list, but it is not quite clear how far behind. The list may not elect 120 to 130 members of the National Assembly, as it expects.

The Shia leaders, though they have agreed an electoral pact, are deeply divided. At the head of the list is Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a party long based in Iran. Perhaps the most popular politician in Iraq is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the head of one of factions of the Dawa party. But the list also includes Ahmed Chalabi, once the choice of the Pentagon to be the new leader of Iraq.

Mr. Allawi, the surprise choice as interim Prime Minister, could go on holding the job, for the same reason he got it in the first place: the main players can live with him. The most important of these is the U.S. "There is simply no one else on whom the National Assembly could reach consensus," a senior official from a leading Shia party was quoted as saying. "Kurds would rather deal with Allawi than an Islamist Shia. So would Sunnis. We also realize that an Islamist Shia prime minister is a red line for the Americans."

But Mr. Allawi has shown that he looks first of all to Washington for instructions. He supported the assault on Fallujah, despite the bloodshed. Militarily he is dependent on the U.S. army. This might not damage him in the eyes of many Iraqi voters if he had satisfied their desire for security or improved the supply of electricity and fuel. Unfortunately for him the shortages are getting worse.

The police and the National Guard lack legitimacy. Often they are not prepared to fight the resistance. During the uprising in Mosul last month, the insurgents captured 10 police stations, some of them simply by phoning ahead and telling the police to get out.

The problems for the U.S. and the interim government will be largely unchanged after the election. The Sunni will not stop their uprising while the occupation continues. The government will still depend on American guns to defend it. The differences between the three main Iraqi communities are increasing, and the war will go on.

Hotel Rwanda: Revisited

2004-12-20T11:03:00.000Z

We had a review of this film a little while back but here is another one - PolPop

By Louis Proyect

As drama, "Hotel Rwanda" is very good. Politically and historically, it has some serious flaws.

It is based on the true story of a Hutu named Paul Rusesabagina (played brilliantly by Don Cheadle), who sheltered Tutsis in the swank hotel he managed in Rwanda's capital. In an extraordinary act of courage reminiscent of Oskar Schindler, he repeatedly buys off or cajoles Hutu soldiers who have come to the hotel bearing death lists to spare the Tutsis who have taken refuge there. Unlike Stephen Spielberg's treatment of Schindler, Irish director and screenplay author Terry George does not romanticize Rusesabagina. The hotel manager appears driven by feelings of neighborliness and decency rather than a desire to be a hero. In the early scenes of the film, when his Hutu beer wholesaler is revealed with a cache of machetes obviously intended to be used in the coming massacre, Rusesabagina remains silent. He only decides to take action when a next door Tutsi neighbor is beaten mercilessly and then dragged off by a uniformed Hutu death squad.

Ultimately, however, the message of the film is similar to that of "Welcome to Sarajevo" which blamed Western indifference for an alleged genocide against the Bosnian Muslims. Since the Tutsis were black, the indifference took on racist aspects. In a key scene, Nick Nolte playing a UN soldier tells Cheadle that the Tutsis are doomed because they are the wrong color.

Terry George was clearly influenced by New Yorker reporter Philip Gourevitch, who included Paul Rusesabagina's story in his 1999 "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda". In an interview with Gourevitch in connection to a PBS documentary on Rwanda, we discover that he views the slaughter of Tutsis as having the same logic as the Holocaust:

"What distinguishes Rwanda is a clear, programmatic effort to eliminate everybody in the Tutsi minority group because they were Tutsis. The logic was to kill everybody. Not to allow anybody to get away. Not to allow anybody to continue. And the logic, as Rwandans call it, the genocidal logic, was very much akin to that of an ideology very similar to that of the Nazism vis-à-vis the Jews in Europe, which is all of them must be gotten rid of to purify in a sense the people."

To Gourevitch's credit, he also acknowledges the role of European colonialism in fostering enmity against the Tutsi in the interview. His comments are echoed in a scene from the film in the hotel's bar, where a Rwandan journalist blames the Belgians for the unfolding bloodlust. Gourevitch states:

"Rwanda's population essentially consists of two groups, the Hutu majority (roughly 85%), the Tutsi minority (roughly 15%). There's a tiny minority of Pygmies as well. Until the late 19th century, which is to say, until European colonization, Tutsis (the minority) represented the aristocratic upper classes; Hutus were the peasant masses. The Europeans brought with them an idea of race science, by which they took this traditional structure and made it even more extreme and more polarized into an almost apartheid-like system. And ethnic identity cards were issued, and Tutsis were privileged for all things, and Hutus were really made into a very oppressed mass."

What Gourevitch omits (at least in this interview), however, is the economic crisis that raised this ethnic division to a qualitatively more lethal degree. It is modern *neocolonialism* rather than 19th century colonialism that is to blame for this.

More recently, Gourevitch has turned his attention to North Korea, which he regards as being under the grip of a "[James] Bond villain." He also covers the Iraq beat for the increasingly neoconservative New Yorker magazine, about which he states, "The President cannot afford to lose Iraq."

Another high-profile commentator on the Rwandan genocide is Samantha Powers, who is an associate of Michael Ignatieff at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Basically, Ignatieff and Powers position themselves as Wilsonian liberals urging the USA to intervene anywhere in the world where human rights are threatened. Between these Wilsonians and the neoconservatives in Bush's administration, the differences are less about the right of imperialism to make war but the rationale for such wars. With the Harvard liberals, you get a bit more angst thrown in with the war whoops.

In a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article titled "Bystanders to Genocide," Powers puts forward an analysis that dovetails with Gourevitch's and Terry George's:

"The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices. We also see that with the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Rwanda taken off the table early onand with crises elsewhere in the world unfoldingthe slaughter never received the top-level attention it deserved. Domestic political forces that might have pressed for action were absent. And most U.S. officials opposed to American
involvement in Rwanda were firmly convinced that they were doing all they couldand, most important, all they shouldin light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was "possible" for the United States to do."

For an alternative to these sorts of "the West should have done more" arguments, we can turn to Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia professor and author of "When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda." He also wrote an article in the March-April 1996 New Left Review titled "Understanding the Rwandan Massacre" that is unfortunately not online. Fortunately, there is a good presentation of Mamdani's ideas in the December 1996 Socialist Review, the theoretical magazine of the British SWP by Charlie Kimber. Drawing from Mamdani's work and other critical-minded journalists and scholars, Kimber writes:

"From 1973 to about 1990, Rwanda was relatively peaceful. This had little to do with Habyarimana himself and much to do with the generally stable price of coffee and tin. The economic blizzard of the later 1980s caused havoc. The striped blazer brigade on the London commodity exchange traded Rwanda's coffee and tin. As they settled the claims of supply and demand, matched the purchasing power of the multinationals against the weakness of African countries, they were sealing the fate of peasants 6,000 miles away."

He has an extensive quote from Gerard Prunier's "The Rwanda Crisis" which is worth requoting in its entirety:

"The political stability of the regime followed almost exactly the curve of coffee and tin prices. For the elite of the regime there were three sources of enrichment: coffee and tea exports, briefly tin exports and creaming off foreign aid. Since a fair share of the first two had to be allocated to running the government, by 1988 the shrinking sources of revenue left only the third as a viable alternative. There was an increase in competition for access to this very specialised resource. The various gentlemen's agreements which had existed between the competing political clans started to melt down as the resources shrank and internal power struggles intensified."

"Internal battles meant not only further pressure on the Tutsi elite, but also more clashes between regional leaders who were Hutu. These battles were projected onto the much bigger screen of the tensions created over a century by colonialism and its aftermath. The countdown to murder had begun.

"In 1989 the government budget was cut by 40 percent. The peasantry faced huge increases in water fees, health charges, school fees, etc. Land became scarce as farmers tried to increase their holdings to make up for the fall in raw material prices. The peasantry (both Hutu and Tutsi) were on the verge of open rebellion by 1990. The state absorbed more and more of the land which parents hoped to pass on to their children. State tea plantations opened up new sources of foreign exchange but restricted family holdings. The IMF's structural adjustment programme for Rwanda was imposed in 1990. As usual it meant the removal of food subsidies, privatisation and devaluation and job losses.

"The World Bank and the IMF took no account of the likely effects of their shock therapy on a country that was ripe for civil war and had a history of massacres.

"A second devaluation followed in June 1992. Just as the war began, these [economic changes] saw urban living standards cut and a dramatic decline in the standards of health care and education. Inflation accelerated... By 1993, there was acute hunger in much of southern Rwanda."

full: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj73/kimber.htm

What films like "Welcome to Sarajevo" and "Hotel Rwanda" miss is the fact that West *was* involved in places like Yugoslavia and Rwanda all along. The IMF and the World Bank did not neglect such places at all. They were intimately involved along the line with turning such countries into pressure cookers. If a country like Rwanda had simply been *left alone* to begin with, it is doubtful that conditions would have reached the bloody state that they did.

This is something that ideologues like Samantha Powers cannot acknowledge. Despite the fact that there is an element of human rights imperialism in "Hotel Rwanda," this should not detract from the personal story of Paul Rusesabagina. Terry George has made a very good film and Don Cheadle's performance is top-notch. "Hotel Rwanda" is appearing in theaters all around the USA right now and is well worth seeing, as opposed to the meretricious "Welcome to Sarajevo".

Vegetarianism: More than an ideology?

2004-12-19T17:29:00.000Z

ALEXANDER COCKBURN ON BEEF

Unsustainable grazing and ranching sacrifice drylands, forests and wild species. For example, semi-deciduous forests in Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay are cut down to make way for soybeans, which are fed to cows as high-protein soycake. Humans are essentially vegetarian as a species and insatiate meat-eating bring its familiar toll of heart disease, stroke and cancer. The enthusiasm for meat also produces its paradox: hunger. A people living on cereals and legumes for protein need to grow far less grain than a people eating creatures that have been fed by cereals. For years Western journalists described in mournful tones the scrawny and costly pieces of
meat available in Moscow's shops, associating the lack of meat with backwardness and the failure of Communism. But after 1950, meat consumption in the Soviet Union tripled. By 1964 grain for livestock feed outstripped grain for bread, and by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, livestock were eating three times as much grain as humans. All this required greater and greater imports of grain until precious foreign exchange made the Soviet Union the world's second-largest grain importer, while a dietary "pattern" based on excellent bread was vanishing.

Governments--prodded by the World Bank--have plunged into schemes for intensive grain-based meat production, which favors large, rich producers and penalizes small subsistence farmers. In Mexico the share of cropland growing feed and fodder for animals went from 5 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 1980. Sorghum, used for animal feed, is now Mexico's second-largest crop by area. At the same time, the area of land producing the staples--corn, rice, wheat and beans--for poor folk there have fallen relentlessly. Mexico is now a new corn importer, from rich countries such as Canada and the United States, wiping out millions of subsistence farmers, who have to migrate to the cities or to El Norte. Mexico feeds 30 percent of its grain to livestock--pork and chicken for urban eaters--while 22 percent of the population suffers from malnutrition.

Multiply this baneful pattern across the world. Meanwhile, the classic pastoralists, who have historically provided most of the meat in Africa with grazing systems closely adapted to varying environments, are being marginalized. Grain-based livestock production inexorably leads to larger and larger units and economies of scale.

(From the "Beat the Devil" column in the April 22, 1996 Nation magazine)

Democrats eye softer image on abortion

2004-12-19T17:20:00.000Z

This from the Boston Globe. Click title. Time to redouble efforts to transform the popular front into a united front me thinks before these bourgeois leaders deliver the US working class tied hand and foot to Bush's vile regime - PolPop

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff | December 19, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Leading Democrats, stung by election losses, are signaling they want the party to embrace antiabortion voters and candidates, softening the image of the party from one fiercely defensive of abortion rights to one that acknowledges the moral and religious qualms some Americans have about the issue. . .

Evildoers, here we come

2004-12-18T10:51:00.000Z

From The Information Clearing House. Click title to link - PolPop

"Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event."
- Michael Ledeen, neo-conservative and member of the American Enterprise Institute, June 2003

Comment by Pepe Escobar

12/6/04 "Asia Times" -- Iran is very much in the US spotlight at present over concerns that it is developing nuclear weapons, with much talk of "regime change". Over the next four years of the second George W Bush term, any of a number of countries could come into the crosshairs - Syria, Saudi Arabia and "axis of evil" original North Korea.

In Bed with Terrorists

2004-12-18T10:48:00.000Z

Click title to link

Hell-bent on regime change in Iran, some neoconservative hawks are lobbying the Bush administration to support an organization designated as a terrorist group by the State Department. . .

The Ukraine Reality Show

2004-12-17T11:18:00.000Z

Moscow Times, Thursday, December 16, 2004. Page 11.

By Boris Kagarlitsky

The state-run television channels were in hysterics reminiscent of the Cold War. Bewildered viewers discovered that next door in Ukraine, a coup was under way, allegedly planned by foreign secret service agents. The goal of these enemies, state television reported, was to bring a pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, to power instead of pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. At the same time, liberals in Russia dreamed of repeating Kiev's Orange Revolution at home.

Average Russians are taking a far more cynical view of events. They don't really buy the propaganda but are watching their neighbors to the south closely. The Ukrainian elections have become a kind of reality show for many Muscovites, complete with a cast of millions and unprecedented prizes.

The theories that a pro-American opposition is battling with a pro-Moscow political elite do not hold water. Yushchenko is without a doubt pro-American. But the same can be said for all the current leaders in Ukraine. After all, it was current Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and his prime minister, Yanukovych, who sent troops to Iraq. They created an absurd crisis in Russian-Ukrainian relations over a dam near the tiny island of Tuzla in straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. In contrast, right at the height of the confrontation in Kiev, the Verkhovnaya Rada resolved to withdraw Ukraine's troops from Iraq. Communists and
socialists were joined in their support of the measure by a significant number of Yushchenko supporters.

The attempts to divide Ukrainian society along language lines have also failed. Kiev, where Russian reigns supreme, is the backbone of the opposition's strength. Protests were held in Kharkiv, the center of Russian culture in Ukraine. The events in favor of the current authorities held in Donetsk and other industrial cities resembled the Soviet rallies where attendance was mandatory. Most of the speakers were labor union functionaries and civil servants, while the workers did their best to get home as quickly as possible. The ruling oligarchy still has the ability to
control the industrial regions of eastern Ukraine using Soviet methods, but it cannot mobilize mass public support.

It is difficult to call Russia's leadership anti-American or anti-Western. None other than President Vladimir Putin himself publicly announced his support of George W. Bush during the recent U.S. presidential elections. And while the Moscow television channels were condemning American involvement in Ukraine, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told journalists about possible plans to arm local forces in Iraq under U.S. control, as well as to send military specialists to Iraq.

The Cold War was a confrontation of two economic and political systems. But now Russia and the West share the same system, capitalism. The real axis of confrontation in world politics is no longer the standoff between NATO and the long-defunct Eastern Bloc, but the standoff between the dollar and the euro blocs. The Kremlin can't seem to make up its mind which side to take in this rivalry, dodging back and forth between Brussels and Washington and dooming itself to a whole string of unilateral concessions to both competing sides.

If the whole point was to undermine Russia's position in Ukraine, it is hard to imagine a more successful move than the Kremlin collaboration with Yanukovych. The Kremlin not only shocked everyone with its crude tactics and open meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state; most importantly, it also managed to do so effectively and to its own detriment.

The stakes in the political battle in Ukraine are indeed high for the Kremlin. But they do not have anything in common with national interests or the long-gone conflict between the communist East and the bourgeois West. Privatization in Ukraine is being rolled back. Oligarch clans, both Russian and Ukrainian, are locked into a battle for assets. Everyone understands that political influence is the main collateral needed to conclude privatization deals and the best guarantee they will not be overturned later.

Whoever does win in the end, Putin will remain one of the main victims of the Ukraine crisis. Even if Yanukovych wins, his main concern will be improving relations with the West. Putin will lose the last remnants of his political authority. He will have demonstrated his weakness once again to Russia, to his people and to the siloviki. And in Russia, this is a very dangerous thing indeed.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute for Globalization Studies.

Balance in the Service of Falsehood

2004-12-17T11:10:00.000Z

By David Edwards and David Cromwell
The Guardian U.K.
Wednesday 15 December 2004

The media's failure to challenge official deception over Iraq was the product of a journalism with built-in bias. The British and U.S. governments stand accused of lying their way to war on Iraq, both at home and abroad. But while a series of what were widely regarded as nobbled inquiries have at least gone through the motions of holding them to account, there has been no attempt to hold the media to account for its role in making war possible. To his credit, George Monbiot argued on these pages earlier this year that "the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job." But an examination of this failure, and its roots in a mass media with a long history of protecting and promoting the powerful, is conspicuous by its absence.

And yet it is only by exploring these issues that we can answer the question of how it is possible that a free press could fail to challenge even the most transparent govern ment deceptions in the run-up to the attack. The crucial arguments of the vindicated former chief Unscom weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, for example, were largely ignored. In his 2002 book, Ritter - who was at the heart of the inspections process for seven years - argued that the Iraqi regime had cooperated with his team in dismantling "90-95%" of its WMD by December 1998, leaving the country "fundamentally disarmed". Subsequent rearmament would have been impossible, Ritter insisted, and any retained chemical or biological material would long since have become "harmless sludge". But evidence of the success of the 1991-98 inspections - which fundamentally undermined government claims that war was required to enforce disarmament - was given the scantest coverage, even in the liberal press.

Of 12,447 Guardian and Observer articles mentioning Iraq in 2003 on the Guardian Unlimited website, Ritter was mentioned in only 17, mostly in passing. Denis Halliday, who set up the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq, and who blamed the U.S. and British governments for the huge death toll of Iraqi civilians under sanctions, was mentioned in two articles. His successor, Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned in protest at sanctions, received five mentions. The Independent mentioned Ritter only eight times in 5,648 articles on Iraq in 2003. Ritter's disarmament claim received fewer than a dozen brief mentions in the Guardian the year before.

The failure of the liberal media, including the Guardian and Independent, is vital to this debate because, while they are consistently more open than their conservative counterparts, they set the boundaries of permissible dissent. In the case of Iraq, those boundaries helped create a disaster. Thus, while whistleblowers were effectively ignored, one prominent in-house Guardian commentator declared in January 2003 that it was "a given" that Saddam was hiding
WMD. Despite the fact that while in 1999 and 2000 the Guardian and the Independent both reported that Unscom inspections had been infiltrated by the CIA, this almost never featured in the saturation 2002-2003 coverage of resumed inspections and Iraqi attitudes to them. In January 1999, a Guardian article described how U.S. officials "acknowledged that American spies participated in the work of United Nations weapons inspectors". In March 2002, the same reporter wrote that "Iraq has stoked war fever" by "rejecting a return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq and calling them 'western spies' for extra measure".

We would argue that the media's failure on Iraq was not really a failure at all, but rather a classic product of "balanced" professional journalism. The modern conception of objective reporting is little more than a century old. There was little concern that newspapers were partisan so long as the public was free to choose from a wide range of opinions. Newspapers dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues, such as the Guardian and Independent, would have been regarded as independent by few radicals and progressives in, say, the 1940s. Balance was instead provided by a thriving working class-based press. Early last century, however, the industrialization of the press, and the associated high cost of newspaper production, meant that wealthy private industrialists backed by advertisers achieved dominance in the mass media. Unable to compete on price and outreach, the previously flourishing radical press was brushed to the margins.

And just as corporations achieved this unprecedented stranglehold, the notion of professional journalism appeared. The U.S. media analyst Robert McChesney argues: "Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers." By promoting schools of journalism, media owners could claim that trained editors and reporters were granted autonomy to make decisions based on professional judgment, rather than on the needs of proprietors and advertisers. As a result, owners could present their media monopoly as a service to the community. In Britain, similar developments resulted in "a progressive transfer of [media] power from the working class to wealthy businessmen", in the words of media historians James Curran and Jean Seaton, while dependence on advertising "encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press".

Built in to the new concept of neutral, professional journalism were two major biases. First, the actions and opinions of official sources were understood to form the basis of legitimate news. As a result, news came to be dominated by mainstream political and business sources representing establishment interests. As the ITV News political editor, Nick Robinson, commented in relation to the Iraq war controversy: "It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking... That is all someone in my sort of job can do." Second, carrot-and-stick pressures from advertisers, business interests and political parties had the effect of steering journalists in the corporate media away from some issues and towards others. It is inherently implausible that newspapers or broadcasters which are dependent on corporate advertisers for revenue will focus too hard on the destructive impact of these same businesses, whether on public health, the developing world or the environment. The result is that what is regarded as neutral journalism today consistently promotes the views and interests of the powerful.

Many journalists reject the idea that a corporate free press is a contradiction in terms. Yet if even the government's most obviously fraudulent pre-war propaganda claims were not seriously challenged, the implications are hardly academic for the next likely targets of U.S. and British military force, be they in Iran, Syria or North Korea.

We Will Reclaim Our Armed Forces!

2004-12-16T15:33:00.000Z

Click title for full article from Bring Them Home Now web site - PolPop

Speech by Stan Goff at the December 11 Public Meeting and Speak Out in New York City

I want to thank the organizers for this very important defibrillation of the anti-war and anti-empire work that was put on hold by the recent elections. I want to thank my fellow speakers and presenters, and I want to thank everyone who is here for your tireless and stubborn refusal to confuse setbacks with defeats.

I tend to think of resistance politics these days as if they were a Charles Dickens novel. There is always a happy ending in the last chapter, but every chapter leading up to that ending… is sad.

MONEY, POWER and MODERN ART (Part 2)

2004-12-16T15:29:00.000Z

A monetary coup d'etat

By Henry C K Liu

The nature of money has been a controversial issue since the founding of the United States. . .

MONEY, POWER, and MODERN ART

2004-12-16T15:24:00.000Z

Click the title to link to this two-parter in the Asian Times - PolPop

PART 1: Ruthless empire builders

By Henry C K Liu

A major event of high culture unfolded in a series of elegant receptions during the third week of November in New York, a city of seriously moneyed art collectors, scathing critics and a discriminating public. Three years in design and construction, the Museum of Modern Art reopened on its 75th anniversary with a new US$850 million building on the same site as the old museum in midtown Manhattan. Loved by all who have been fortunate enough to have their lives enriched by it, this cultural flower in one of the world's greatest cities, affectionately referred to as The Modern, has been cultivated in the supercharged greenhouse of modernist milieu, aiming to define fundamental issues of meaning and truth through the vehicle of esthetic preference at the forefront of modern civilization. . .

People of the World!

2004-12-16T15:17:00.000Z

Communiqué Number 6

The media platoon of the Islamic Jihad Army. On the 27th of Shawal 1425h.
10 December 2004

These words come to you from those who up to the day of the invasion were struggling to survive under the sanctions imposed by the criminal regimes of the U.S. and Britain.

We are simple people who chose principles over fear.

We have suffered crimes and sanctions, which we consider the true weapons of mass destruction.

Years and years of agony and despair, while the condemned UN traded with our oil revenues in the name of world stability and peace.

Over two million innocents died waiting for a light at the end of a tunnel that only ended with the occupation of our country and the theft of our resources.

After the crimes of the administrations of the U.S and Britain in Iraq, we have chosen our future. The future of every resistance struggle ever in the history of man.

It is our duty, as well as our right, to fight back the occupying forces, which their nations will be held morally and economically responsible; for what their elected governments have destroyed and stolen from our land.

We have not crossed the oceans and seas to occupy Britain or the U.S. nor are we responsible for 9/11. These are only a few of the lies that these criminals present to cover their true plans for the control of the energy resources of the world, in face of a growing China and a strong unified Europe . It is Ironic that the Iraqi's are to bear the full face of this large and growing conflict on behalf of the rest of this sleeping world.

We thank all those, including those of Britain and the U.S., who took to the streets in protest against this war and against Globalism. We also thank France, Germany and other states for their position, which least to say are considered wise and balanced, till now.

Today, we call on you again.

We do not require arms or fighters, for we have plenty.

We ask you to form a world wide front against war and sanctions. A front that is governed by the wise and knowing. A front that will bring reform and order. New institutions that would replace the now corrupt.

Stop using the U.S. dollar, use the Euro or a basket of currencies. Reduce or halt your consumption of British and U.S. products. Put an end to Zionism before it ends the world. Educate those in doubt of the true nature of this conflict and do not believe their media for their casualties are far higher than they admit.

We only wish we had more cameras to show the world their true defeat.

The enemy is on the run. They are in fear of a resistance movement they can not see nor predict.

We, now choose when, where, and how to strike. And as our ancestors drew the first sparks of civilization, we will redefine the word "conquest."

Today we write a new chapter in the arts of urban warfare.

Know that by helping the Iraqi people you are helping yourselves, for tomorrow may bring the same destruction to you.

In helping the Iraqi people does not mean dealing for the Americans for a few contracts here and there. You must continue to isolate their strategy.

This conflict is no longer considered a localized war. Nor can the world remain hostage to the never-ending and regenerated fear that the American people suffer from in general.

We will pin them here in Iraq to drain their resources, manpower, and their will to fight. We will make them spend as much as they steal, if not more.

We will disrupt, then halt the flow of our stolen oil, thus, rendering their plans useless.

And the earlier a movement is born, the earlier their fall will be.

And to the American soldiers we say, you can also choose to fight tyranny with us. Lay down your weapons, and seek refuge in our mosques, churches and homes. We will protect you. And we will get you out of Iraq , as we have done with a few others before you.

Go back to your homes, families, and loved ones. This is not your war. Nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq.

And to George W. Bush, we say, "You have asked us to `Bring it on', and so have we. Like never expected. Have you another challenge?"

New Year Glum As Prices Soar

2004-12-15T08:27:00.000Z

The St. Petersburg Times

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

By Irina Titova
STAFF WRITER

With New Year just a couple of weeks away, many Russian are looking to the future not with joyful anticipation of holidays or optimism, but with dread of financial instability and rising prices.

"I don't feel excited about the New Year holidays because, as usual, on Jan. 1 prices will shoot up," said Tatyana Rybkina, 42, a teacher.

St. Petersburg residents already have an impending taste of the doom approaching them; long lines have formed at metro stations ever since it was announced that the cost of one ride on public transportation services in St. Petersburg price will rise from 8 rubles (28 cents) to 10 rubles (36 cents) on Jan. 1.

As they did in Soviet times, people not only tried to buy as many tokens as they could to save money, but they also hoarded them because they feared that there might not be any left because others are also hoarding them.

The metro first limited sales to 10 tokens at a time, but this has now been reduced to two tokens, meaning people have to line up every second ride. On Tuesday, a new type a plastic card will be issued in place of tokens.

"It's very hard for me as a pensioner to have prices going up for transportation when from next year we pensioners will no longer be able to ride for free," said Tamara Sokolova, 60, who boosts her pension by working as a librarian. "My income is 3,000 rubles ($107), and now I'll have to pay about 500 rubles a month on public transportation all together."

She doesn't "experience any joy expecting New Year, because nowadays New Year automatically means prices go up," she added.

"It's a modern gift for this holiday from our government - they increase the prices of everything - food, fuel, services, etc," she said.

In Soviet times prices would go down before the New Year holidays, she added.

Food prices have been skyrocketing in recent months, she said.

In early fall, Sokolova could buy 10 eggs for 23 rubles, while the same number costs 32 rubles.

The price of meat in markets has doubled since spring; a kilo of beef or pork cost 100 rubles in May, today it's 200 rubles and more, Sokolova said.

Consumer price inflation is 11.9 percent this year, RIA Novosti reported.

According to the Federal Statistics Service, egg prices rose 12.9 percent in November and 24.3 percent for the year to date.

The service said milk prices rose 6.6 percent and meat prices 1.7 percent in November. Experts say the rising food and transportation prices are related to rising fuel prices.

Valery Nesterov, an oil and gas analyst at Moscow's office of brokerage Troika Dialog, said the prices for oil in Russia doubled between October 2003 and October 2004.

Thus, if at the end of 2003 a liter of A-92 gasoline in St. Petersburg cost 8 or 9 rubles, this month it costs almost 16 rubles. The rise has been so great that it stimulated President Vladimir Putin last week to ask Vagit Alekperov, head of leading oil company LUKoil, to lower prices for oil products on the domestic market.

Putin expressed his hope that if LUKoil did so, other big oil companies would follow suit, which would improve the situation that "one cannot describe as normal."

On Friday, State Duma deputies also expressed their deep concern about fuel prices, saying they were holding back economic development.

Alekperov said LUKoil will lower its domestic wholesale but that it is no less important that oil retailers do the same. Troika Dialog's Nesterov said that although Putin's approach to Alekperov was unusual, it was still a positive moment.

"Such action creates an image that the government is working and cares about the economic situation in the country," Nesterov said in a telephone interview. "However, it's better not to rule by giving such kind of directions, but to do so by a providing well-balanced economy and preventing the influence of monopolies."

Dmitry Belousov, an expert with the Center for Microeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Factors, named several other factors that he linked to rising prices.

Rising grain prices led to higher meat prices because of the fodder feed to livestock. The stabilization of ruble in relation to the dollar led imported goods getting more expensive, there had been fears about banks, and the dollar had depreciated. At the same time prices for communal services had gone up.

The effects of these had hit some sectors of the population harder than others, he said.

"Today prices for the poor grow quicker than for the wealthy," Belousov said. "The prices for household equipment, which are products that mainly interest the well-off are stable. Prices for products such as bread and communal services, which are of bigger demand among the poor, are rising."

Sokolova said that her librarian's wage, which is paid by the state, is supposed to be raised in line with rising costs, but the raises never catch up with runaway prices.

"I feel that I'm catastrophically short of money," she said. "Today I have to think hard about buying meat. Usually, we buy it only by for a festive dinner."

Ordinary Russians not only have to count their kopeks when it comes to buying food, they say they barely have enough money to buy clothes.

"I can't afford to buy good clothes," Sokolova said. "That's why I can't buy good quality winter shoes for 2,500 rubles and I buy lower quality ones for 1,000 rubles. Such shoes wear out very quickly, I mend them, and wear them again."

Nadezhda Chekhovich, 50, a historian who works at one of the city's scientific institutes, said her monthly salary is 1,700 rubles.

"I buy only secondhand clothes," Chekhovich said.

The prices for books and concerts, products that are important to her, have doubled in recent times, she said.

However, not all are down about life, even if it is becoming more expensive.

Pensioner Alexander Vasserman, 60, said he is not depressed about the economic situation despite his low income.

"I'm sure there are always at least two ways out of a difficult situation," he said. "Sometimes there are even more ways out. It means we'll find a way out that will enable us to live no worse."

"For instance, instead of complaining about the metro getting more expensive, I will ride a bicycle because it's healthy and free," he said.

Fallujah still being bombed

2004-12-14T08:18:00.000Z

Today's suicide bomb but also reports of further fighting in Fallujah - PolPop

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide bomber blew up his car early Tuesday at the same entrance to the Green Zone where a blast Monday killed 13 Iraqis. The latest blast killed 7 people and injured 13, according to a hospital official.

On Monday, an al-Qaida-linked suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near cars waiting to enter the Green Zone, home to the U.S. Embassy and Iraq’s interim government.

Also, the military reported two more U.S. Marines were killed in action in Iraq’s volatile western Anbar province, taking the number of Marines killed in the region in the past three days to 10. . .

Killings Sting Proud Battalion

2004-12-13T20:35:00.000Z

Click title. This from the Los Angeles Times

BAGHDAD — The men from Task Force 1-41 fought the battle for Sadr City last summer, chasing Al Mahdi militiamen through the slums in 120-degree heat. A year earlier, the unit had helped lead the charge into Baghdad.

The 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment has a distinguished combat history, from the D-Day landing to the Iraq desert campaign of the Persian Gulf War. Its motto: "Straight and Stalwart." . . .

Mountain Rescue

2004-12-13T20:26:00.000Z

Let's have a bit of poetry to lighten the load. Click title to link - PolPop

Germany's New Reality

2004-12-11T13:02:00.000Z

From the Washington Post

Layoffs by Automaker Confirm Labor's Diminishing Power

By Peter S. Goodman and Petra Krischok

Friday, December 10, 2004; Page E01

BOCHUM, Germany, Dec. 9 -- During much of Germany's postwar economic boom, as prosperity mounted and car sales multiplied, workers at the Opel
automobile factory here became accustomed to getting their way: six weeks of vacation, a 35-hour week and some of the highest factory wages on earth. Whatever was left of that era ended on Thursday.

Undercut by vastly cheaper labor in neighboring Poland and by increasing global competition, the union at Adam Opel AG acceded to a plan by General Motors Corp. to cut 12,000 jobs throughout Europe -- 10,000 of them in Germany and an estimated 4,000 at the Bochum plant alone. The job reductions will be voluntary, and GM, which owns the Opel, Saab and Vauxhall brands, is offering buyouts, early retirement and retraining worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most senior workers.

Though geared to help GM rebound from its global slide in the auto market -- the company has not been profitable in Europe since 1999 and expects to save $665 million a year through the jobs cuts -- the deal underscores the extent to which globalization has torn at the social consensus governing Germany and much of Western Europe.

Rigid labor rules are blamed for European unemployment rates stuck around 9 percent, compared with less than 6 percent in the United States. Economic growth has also lagged, and labor-market reform is cited by many economists as an important step toward changing that.

When Opel workers went on strike for five days in October, it was clear how times were changing. They went back to work with nothing more than the promise of talks and the lingering threat that many of the Bochum plant's 9,600 jobs would be shifted to Poland, where labor costs about $4.70 an hour, compared with $29 an hour here.

"It's not negotiations, what's happening now," said Peter Jaszczyk, who worked at the Opel plant for 40 years and formerly headed the worker's council. "Management is just dictating conditions. The union doesn't have the power anymore."

Around the world, labor is grappling with the impact of capital flowing to lower-cost countries. Textile workers in Mexico are losing ground to China; software engineers in the Silicon Valley succumb to skilled counterparts in India. The changes in Western Europe have been particularly wrenching because labor has occupied such a powerful perch for much of modern times -- one that has, until recently, cushioned against the restructuring and layoffs that have occurred elsewhere.

Now, labor in Europe's wealthiest countries is reeling as capital flows eastward. Investment is pouring in to new members of the European Union such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, where workers earn roughly one-sixth what they do in Germany and France, and farther away to still cheaper Romania, Turkey and China. Unions once accustomed to wage increases and sweetened bonuses submit to slashed pay and benefits in a desperate bid to keep jobs.

In Germany -- still struggling to integrate its wealthier western half with the formerly communist east -- the export of jobs is exacerbating an unemployment crisis. More than 4 million people are out of work, and unemployment is 10 percent.

A recent survey conducted by the economist Horst Wildemann found that 6 in 10 German companies were preparing to establish a manufacturing base outside the country in the next four years. That could cost as many as 400,000 jobs a year. A similar study by the Boston Consulting Group found that transfers of work abroad could eliminate one-fourth of Germany's industrial workforce by 2015, wiping out 2 million jobs.

Germans have long taken pride in their social harmony and benevolent welfare state, which has virtually guaranteed decent living standards and generous health and vacation benefits. Now, the country is bitterly debating proposals to roll back benefits, particularly those for workers and the elderly. Meanwhile, a society once accustomed to upward mobility revises its expectations downward. In a poll conducted by TNS Infratest in October, nearly two-thirds of the respondents said they would be willing to give up some of their salaries to make their jobs more secure.

"Germany is now confronted with a process of fundamental change," said Ulrich Beck, a sociologist at the University of Munich. "We will have to redefine the notion of work and our entire social system. The notion that we can return to full employment is a great illusion. It will be a conversion from a society of having more to a society of having less."

Siemens AG, the archetypal German electronics giant, now employs more people outside of Germany than within. It recently persuaded its German workforce to accept longer hours for the same pay by threatening to transfer jobs to Hungary. German manufacturer Robert Bosch GmbH used similar threats of shifting work to the Czech Republic to extract longer hours from workers in France, where unemployment is near 10 percent.

The transfer of work to the lower-cost east is particularly intense in the auto industry. In 1990, only about one-fourth of the cars produced by German brands were manufactured outside the country. By 2003, the share was close to half. The German wheel producer Continental AG employed about one-third of its workforce outside Germany in 1980. Last year, it was 60 percent. The company will soon churn out 16 million wheels a year at its factory in Temesvar, Romania, where wages are about one-tenth what they are in Germany.

"We have to adapt our labor costs at least to those in Western Europe," said auto expert Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer. "If we maintain our current standard, then everything will melt away."

The experience in Germany's Ruhr Valley suggests that the disparity with the east is so vast that minor adjustments will have little effect.

Bochum was dominated by coal until the 1950s, when lower costs in the United States shut down the mines. The Opel plant, opened in 1962, created jobs for 4,000 people. They built about 50 no-frills sedans for lower-middle-class families in an eight-hour shift.

By 1970, sales were exploding, with sports cars and higher-end sedans added to the mix. The factory was churning out 1,000 cars per shift with 20,000 workers on the floor. It was the largest employer in the region.

The factory was a key source of parts for other plants in Germany, giving workers here in Bochum outsized power. When they were rebuffed in demands for increased Christmas bonuses, a three-day strike secured the extra pay. In 1973, another three-day walkout yielded a lump-sum bonus. Longer strikes in the 1980s delivered the 35-hour workweek.

Germany's largest union, IG Metall, negotiates with an association of employers for a contract covering basic wages for metal and textile workers throughout the country. But worker councils at individual factories are free to negotiate for wages above those contract minimums, which the Bochum workforce regularly did successfully.

"The Opel workers were always the aristocrats of the German labor force," Jaszczyk said. "Usually, we would get wages 20 percent higher than the IG Metall contract. It was normal for us to get salary increases of 8 to 9 percent a year. But it didn't come for free: Opel and GM were making good profits."

At vacation time, workers set off with their families in late-model Opel sedans they helped produce, driving to the beaches of Italy with an extra half-month's salary for their trips.

The first tensions came in the mid-1980s as management began installing robots on the shop floor. No one was laid off, but workers who retired were not replaced. By 1985, the workforce was about 14,000.

In 1991, Opel opened a factory in Eisenach, in the former East Germany, where wages were one-third less than those at Bochum, diminishing the company's dependence on its traditional workforce. About the same time, it set up an engine factory in western Hungary.

The sentinel moment came in 1997 when Opel opened a factory in Gliwice, in western Poland. "People weren't worried at first," Jaszczyk said. "They figured the Polish workers would produce lower quality, older models for sale in the Polish and Russian markets."

By last summer, the workforce at the Gliwice plant had doubled to 1,200 and the German press was filled with rumors of layoffs. In October, GM confirmed the dark talk. At a news conference at the company's European headquarters in Zurich, it said it would transfer the production of 120,000 minivans a year from Bochum to Poland.

"People are angry," said Benjamin Dreher, an assembly line worker. "They feel like they're getting sold out."

At city hall, Mayor Ottilie Scholz frets about the prospect of lost jobs while calling on bureaucrats in Berlin and Brussels to intervene -- how exactly, she isn't sure.

"There's nothing we can do as a city," she said. "This is part of a worldwide phenomenon." The head of the workers council, Dietmar Hahn, sounds resigned to a future in which the workforce is far smaller, if the factory is even open.

"The situation is very difficult," he said. "We've been shown proposals by management that we don't like. There's so much fear. I don't think long-term anymore."

Spoils of War: The Antiquities Trade and the Looting of Iraq

2004-12-11T11:57:00.000Z

This from the Centre for Research on Globalisation. Click title to link - PolPOP

by Gregory Elich

It has been called the worst cultural disaster to happen since the Second World War, and one archaeologist has likened it to a "lobotomy of an entire culture." (1) To the dismay of archaeologists throughout the world, the toppling of the Iraqi government by U.S. troops unleashed a wave of looting and destruction of Iraq’s national patrimony. Despite pleas for action from outraged scholars, the culturally blinkered Bush Administration remained indifferent, belatedly acting only when media coverage mushroomed into a public relations fiasco that threatened to upend the manufactured image of benign liberation. Although the scale of loss from the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad was less serious than initially indicated, it was nevertheless a crippling blow, while elsewhere in Iraq the situation ran alarmingly out of control. . .

The world's first multinational

2004-12-11T11:35:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story

NS Essay 1- Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern complaints were made against the British East India Company in the 18th century. Nick Robins draws the lessons.

In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part of his "prison trilogy", written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on the country he would shortly rule. "The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of British rule in India," he wrote, "is something which passes comprehension." It was, he added, "significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is 'loot'". . .

Falluja Fighting Goes On And On An On

2004-12-11T11:18:00.000Z

December 07, 2004 Associated Press & Aljazeera 12.6.04

FALLUJAH, Iraq - The mangled cables and trash that litter the power station's control room do not bother Adil Raffah. But the bespectacled chief engineer begins to shake when he sees the desk he has worked behind for 25 years, now smashed.

"Only animals could do this, no Iraqi, never," he whispers, picking up a hammer left on the floor. "It must have been the Americans."

To the Marines combing Fallujah, the appearance of these two men is a positive sign: Perhaps they can play a small role in getting the shattered city up and running again. Kasim is said to know the power grid in this part of Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, better than anyone.

But the two Iraqis may not be so willing to play the part.

"I'm doing my job for my country and my family, not for the Americans," Kasim says. What hurts most, he adds, is that he still cannot go back into the city. "I don't know what happened to my home," he says.

Marines are still edgy - facing sporadic pockets of resistance and being highly suspicious of the few Fallujans who stayed behind.

Although the city has fallen, Marines daily fight scattered groups of rebels.

Once known as the "city of the mosques," Fallujah is now a landscape of pancaked multistory buildings, ruined homes and broken minarets that testify to the overwhelming firepower the U.S. military employed to retake the city.

Across town, in the eastern Askari neighborhood, some 70 young men huddled in the yard of the Red Crescent, sister organization to Geneva's Red Cross. The office was set up in late November to assist those civilians who stayed behind during the fighting.

"Of course I am angry, my house is destroyed, my city is in ruins, everything is gone," says Saad Mohammed Mansur, 23, one of the many young Sunni Arabs here who claim they are students, left behind by their families to guard homes and property. They deny having anything to do with the Mujahedeen.

Marines search the youths and test them for gunpowder residue on fingers. Those who test positive are arrested; the rest can either stay at the Red Crescent, be escorted back to their homes or out of the city, says Capt. Derek Wastila.

"Gunpowder residue is by no means an immediate recognition of guilt, but if they test positive, they get taken to a higher level of detention," says Wastila, of San Diego.

The next day, the Red Crescent says the U.S. military has ordered it to suspend operations temporarily. Its modest staff heads out, and American troops move in, arresting eight more of the young men inside.

The occupation has decided that personal vehicles will not be allowed into the city because of the threat of car bombs.

Haiti: Colin Powell's Crime In Progress

2004-12-10T13:27:00.000Z

From the Black Commentator. Click title to link to full story - PolPop

History will record that the first Black U.S. Secretary of State personally engineered the theft of the national sovereignty of Haiti, the world’s first Black republic and the second nation in the western hemisphere to free itself from European rule. Such is Colin Powell’s horrific legacy – an historic shame and blight on the collective honor of Black America. . .

Workers of the world are uniting

2004-12-10T08:57:00.000Z

This from the FT

By Brendan Barber,
General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (UK)

The world trade union movement is poised to follow the lead of transnational companies, by extending its reachand throwing off the shackles of national boundaries. Unions are about to go global.

It will come as news to some employers - and a shock to some of the anti-globalisers - but trade unions are in favour of globalisation. Most of the world's trade union movements are meeting this week in Japan to discuss an epoch-making strategy called "Globalising Solidarity". By the end of this week, we may well have
ended 50 years of division in world trade unionism, abandoned a creativity-stifling global bureaucracy and refocused our core business on campaigning and recruitment.

In recent years, trade unions have sometimes looked, and felt, outdated and sluggish, unable to respond as business "delocalises" and the free movement of capital and jobs makes it possible for companies to race for the bottom in terms of wages, employment conditions and questions of health and safety. Some have called this the "Wal-Mart-isation" of the workplace.

Unions have made academic statements and sent symbolic deputations to address global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation and the World Trade Organisation. Bureaucrat has spoken unto bureaucrat while transnational corporations have spread around the globe, revolutionising world trade.

Some of this is overstated. Despite comparatively little progress in the US, Wal-Mart has been dragged to negotiating tables from Canada to China by UNI, the
global union federation for private service sector unions.

Global union campaigns to encourage ethical sourcing for goods have been linked to this year's Athens Olympics, with the purpose of spreading decent labour standards right along the global supply chain. The campaign will be resurrected for the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, the soccer World Cups in Germany and South Africa, and the Olympics in China. The Trades Union Congress is already discussing the issue with the 2012 London Olympics bid.

The global trade union movement has learnt from the tactics of non- governmental organisations and is working more closely with them on corporate social
responsibility. We increasingly recognise the power of consumers, shareholders and pension funds.

This week's world congress of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) could take the bold next step. The ICFTU is the largest trade union confederation in the world, with 250 affiliates in 152 countries representing 148m trade union members. It was created in 1949 at the start of the cold war but has been split since then. The breakaway communist- backed confederation formed at the time is fading. This week's congress may decide to merge the two remaining global organisations - the ICFTU itself and the World Confederation of Labour, originally a Christian body.

Such a merger would create a single free trade union movement around the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe, united by a common vision of social globalisation that
works for people rather than the other way around.

But, as so many companies have found out, mergers are not enough. The new global union federation would need to refocus on its core function. Its unique selling proposition would be the ability to mobilise a total of 174m members and attract more. In this way, global businesses, world institutions and governments would
take the organisation seriously and would have to negotiate and reach agreements.

Old committee structures, conferences and paperwork must go. In their place must come the ability to target key companies, sectors and campaigns. Guy Ryder, the
ICFTU's popular and thoughtful general secretary, has had his work cut out securing agreement from often- embattled unions to give up the security of their
bureaucracy. But he has the support of the TUC, the DGB in Germany, the AFL-CIO in the US, Cosatu in South Africa and many more.

Each of these bodies, with their proud traditions, knows it cannot continue to champion the interests of its members if it does not operate internationally.

Trade unions in every developed country face the challenge of delocalisation. We must not re-erect the barriers of protectionism but we must protect the
livelihoods of workers at both ends of the delocalisation equation.

British unions have done a lot in the financial services sector to ensure retraining at home and better wages in places such as India. We could do a lot more
if our international organisations were focused on helping unions address the organising and bargaining challenges that delocalisation presents. But how much more could we achieve if employers faced the same union when they arrived in Mumbai as they did when they deserted Macclesfield or Milwaukee?

That is a huge challenge for a trade union movement that has admirable internationalist credentials yet sticks rigidly to 20th -century borders. This week trade unionism will try to show it up to that challenge.

CIA, Contras and Crack

2004-12-10T08:40:00.000Z

An archive of articles on the link between the CIA, the Contras (Nicaragua) and crack cocaine from the Consortium of Independent Journalism Inc. Click title to link - PolPop

US Army plagued by desertion and plunging morale

2004-12-10T08:34:00.000Z

This story from the Times On Line. Click title to link to full story - PolPop

From Elaine Monaghan in Washington

WHILE insurgents draw on deep wells of fury to expand their ranks in Iraq, the US military is fighting desertion, recruitment shortfalls and legal challenges from its own troops.

The irritation among the rank and file became all too clear this week when a soldier stood up in a televised session with Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, to ask why the world’s richest army was having to hunt for scrap metal to protect its vehicles

Hero Reviewed

2004-12-10T08:20:00.000Z

A review of Hero by Louis Proyect of Marxmail

Zhang Yimou is one of China's most talented film directors. He has also run afoul of the authorities over the years for making films that pushed the envelope of what was politically acceptable. In 1990, "Ju Dou" was banned because it represented a woman committing adultery against an oppressive husband. The 1999 "Not One Less" depicts a teenaged schoolteacher locked in struggle with government bureaucrats over funding for her rural school. Perhaps the censors approved this film because of its happy ending, when the bureaucrats are won over by the plucky youth.

Nowadays Zhang is making films that are a retreat from the earlier films. Dispensing entirely with themes that challenge the status quo, "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" seem very much influenced by Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." My comments here are directed toward "Hero," which I saw recently in DVD.

During the 1980s and 90s Hong Kong studios churned out film after film starring Jet Li or Jackie Chan as itinerant swordsman standing up to evil. These films were marketed to a mass audience and made no pretenses to high art. They also relied on combat scenes that relied strictly on the acrobatic and martial arts skills of the stars. Unfortunately, first Ang Lee and now Zhang Yimou decided to use the sort of computer-assisted special effects that were found in the Matrix films where characters defy the laws of gravity routinely.

In "Hero," the star Jet Li floats through the air at the drop of a hat. This allows Zhang Yimou to choreograph some spectacular mid-air sword fights that remind one of a Chagall painting. Since they are so obviously disconnected from physical reality, they tend to convey as much danger as a Chagall painting.

Zhang seems much more interested in visual effects than anything in this elaborate costume drama. Armored soldiers march in formation as if on stage. At the end of the film, they demand the execution of Jet Li in unison. The effect is positively operatic. Zhang does have a demonstrated affinity for opera. In 1997 he directed the Puccini opera "Turandot" in Florence, Italy with Zubin Mehta serving as conductor. In 1998, he and Mehta once again collaborated on a re-staging of the opera in Beijing. "Turandot," of course, is an opera that revolves around vast numbers of Chinese imperial attendants and soldiers marching in and off stage to great effect.

The story itself revolves around the plot of Jet Li and his associates to assassinate the King of Qin, who has decided to subjugate the five other kingdoms in ancient China in order to create a unified state and a unified language. The assassins all come from a kingdom that has suffered from his assaults. Ultimately, "Hero" becomes a Rashomon-type tale in which the King of Qin and his enemies present contrasting accounts of both their involvement and his culpability. I don't think I am giving away anything when I say that the King is ultimately vindicated as a national unifier in the mold of Stalin or Mao. One must conclude that Chinese film-makers operate under tremendous constraints.

Islam in Jail: Europe's Neglect Breeds Angry Radicals

2004-12-09T09:11:00.000Z

NY Times, December 8, 2004

By CRAIG S. SMITH

NANTERRE DETENTION CENTER, France - Abdullah, tall and muscular, with a shaved head and closely cropped goatee, sat on a metal bunk in the cramped cell here and described how he got religion.

"When I was in La Santé, I read books about the Prophet," he said, referring to a notorious Parisian detention center, the third of five jails where he has spent time during the past two years for dealing drugs and stealing cars.

When he arrived at the fourth, Fleury-Merogis, Europe's largest, another inmate gave him a DVD about the life of Muhammad and later, while enduring a three-week stint in solitary confinement, he vowed to devote himself to Islam.

"People here find God," he said.

In less than a decade, there has been a radical shift in France's prison population, a shift that officials and experts say poses a monumental challenge.

Despite making up only 10 percent of the population, Muslims account for most of the country's inmates and a growing percentage of the prison populations in many other European countries, an indication of their place at the bottom of the Continent's hierarchy.

With radical strains of Islam percolating through Europe, authorities are unsure how to address the spiritual needs of the prisoners while guarding against the potentially toxic mix of extremist ideology and a criminal past. One result is often neglect, which officials say can be a still greater force for radicalization.

Prison populations have been expanding across Europe in recent years, partly because of stricter anticrime regimens influenced by the sort of zero tolerance on quality-of-life crimes that was epitomized by the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

France's prison population has risen by 20 percent in the past three years, largely because of aggressive pursuit of lower-level crimes.

The proportion of Muslims in prison has been growing even faster, reflecting the relative youth of Europe's largely Muslim immigrants.

While there are no official data on issues of race and ethnicity in much of Europe - it is in fact illegal to keep such data in many places - experts on prison populations agree on the new disproportion of Muslims here and elsewhere.

Two months ago Pierre Raffin, the director of La Santé detention center, warned officials looking into the role of religion in France that extremist proselytizing in prisons was growing.

Other countries are facing the same problem. Spain's chief counterterrorism magistrate, Baltazar Garzón, said recently that the men accused of plotting to blow up the country's main counterterrorism court were recruited from among fellow inmates by an Islamic militant serving time for credit card fraud.

Most famously, Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in
December 2001 using a bomb in his shoe, converted to Islam while in a British jail.

Those who are detained or convicted for terrorist-related crimes are not always separated from the larger prison population and are often ready to act as spiritual guides at a time when mainstream Muslim chaplains are in severely short supply.

Abdullah (prison rules prevented him from giving his last name) said that while he was at Fleury-Merogis, militants were active in the prison yard, preaching that Christians and Jews are enemy infidels. In May, the militants defied prison rules by organizing a prayer meeting during an exercise break. Several prisoners were disciplined as a result.

"Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time," said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian-French scholar who has written a book on Islam in prisons. He says the growing Muslim prison population is evidence of an Islamic underclass that is developing across Europe and, at its margins, is increasingly sympathetic to the coalescing ideologies of political Islam.

Colin Powell: Failed Opportunist

2004-12-09T09:01:00.000Z

Click title to link to full story - PolPop

By Robert Parry

Colin Powell’s admirers – especially in the mainstream press – have struggled for almost two years to explain how and why their hero joined in the exaggerations and deceptions that led the nation into the disastrous war in Iraq. Was he himself deceived by faulty intelligence or was he just acting as the loyal soldier to his commander-in-chief?

But there is another, less flattering explanation that fits with the evidence of Powell’s life story: that the outgoing secretary of state has always been an opportunist who consistently put his career and personal status ahead of America’s best interests.

Hotel Rwanda

2004-12-08T08:39:00.000Z

Found this review of a film which I suppose will not be released over here until the new year - PolPop

By Joe D

I was fortunate enough to attend a preview screening of the movie, Hotel Rwanda, last night in Los Angeles. Due for release on December 22nd, it tells the true story of a Rwandan - and Hutu - hotel manager in Kigali who saved the lives of 1200 Tutsis during the height of the genocide in 1994. The movie was directed by Terry George, whose previous credits include In The Name Of The Father, which he co-wrote with Jim Sheridan, and Some Mother's Son, which he wrote and directed. Hotel Rwanda stars Don Cheadle as the hotel manager, Nick Nolte as a Canadian UN Colonel, Joaquin Phoenix as an American cameraman, as well as many other lesser-known actors.

This is one of the most powerful and heartrending movies I have ever seen. The chaos and terror sucks you up scene after scene, helped along by Oscar winning performances from Cheadle and Nolte. The racism of the West is excellently portrayed when Belgian paratroopers arrive to escort the white hotel guests to safety, abandoning the Tutsi refugees despite them pleading with them to stay and protect them from marauding, machete-wielding Hutu gangs (I'm not giving it away, btw. This is a scene from the movie's preview).

Cheadle's character, the situation he finds himself in and his response to the carnage taking place around him, echoes that of Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List. I'd always considered Don Cheadle to be a good, solid actor, but with this performance he takes the craft, in my view, to new heights. Everything he does is done subtly, charting the character's journey from social climbing hotel manager to a man walking a fine line between life and death for the lives of others.

Nolte, too, excels in his portrayal of a brave and honorable Canadian U.N. Colonel whose hands are tied by a lack of manpower and rules of engagement that preclude him from taking a firm stand when the massacre begins. The uselessness of the U.N. in such situations - we've seen it all over Africa, the Middle East, Yugoslavia, East Timor - is forcefully revealed, though it won't come as a shock to the subscribers of this list.

The hand wringing that took place in the corridors of power in the West, by Clinton and his acolytes, by the French and Belgian governments, as the genocide took place, left me outraged and disgusted. This hand wringing is excellently and subtly depicted throughout the movie and is, of course, testament to filmmaker and actors' success in sucking me into the story and making me suspend disbelief.

Finally, just as we see genocide unfolding again in the Sudan and new tensions arise in Rwanda, Hotel Rwanda is a graphic and terrible reminder of Africa's tortured history at the hands of European colonialism. Policies of divide and rule, the arbitrary drawing of maps to portion out natural resources and land, lie at the root cause of the mess we see in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent today.

Every member of the ruling class should be taken by the scruff of the neck and dragged along to see this movie.

Then, afterwards, drowned.

U.S. Warns Of Plans To "Liberate" Cuba"

2004-12-08T08:30:00.000Z

This from Democracy Now - PolPop

The State Department's top official in Latin America has announced that President Bush is committed to the "liberation of Cuba" during the next four years. Roger Noriega said last week Washington already has a blueprint of plans for a post-Castro Cuba to prevent Castro's supporters from retaining control of the country after his death. Noriega said Washington wants to "ensure that vestiges of the regime don't hold on." He added "The transition essentially is under way today." Ricardo Alarcon, the speaker of Cuba's Parliament, warned the U.S. would fail in any such efforts. Alarcon said, "If they try it, they have to attack Cuba, then use military occupation and then attempt a regime change. They can attempt it, they can try, but they will be handed a defeat they will never forget." In other news from Cuba, the government released journalist Jorge Olivera from jail Monday. He is the seventh dissident freed in the past week.

NEW BOOM OR NEW BUBBLE?

2004-12-07T21:41:00.000Z

From the New Left Review

The Trajectory of the US Economy

The shape of the US economy as it emerges from recession, in election year. With the giant manufacturing sector still crippled by over-capacity, can the take-off be sustained by bubble-driven finance, retail and construction booms?

ROBERT BRENNER

In early 2002 Alan Greenspan declared that the American recession which had begun a year earlier was at an end. By the fall the Fed was obliged to backtrack, admitting that the economy was still in difficulties and deflation a threat. In June 2003 Greenspan was still conceding that ‘the economy has yet to exhibit sustainable growth’. Since then Wall Street economists have been proclaiming, with ever fewer qualifications, that after various interruptions attributable to ‘external shocks’—9/11, corporate scandals and the attack on Iraq—the economy is finally accelerating. Pointing to the reality of faster growth of gdp in the second half of 2003, and a significant increase in profits, they assure us that a new boom has arrived. The question that therefore imposes itself, with a Presidential election less than a year away, is the real condition of the us economy. [1] What triggered the slowdown that took place? What is driving the current economic acceleration, and is it sustainable? Has the economy finally broken beyond the long downturn, which has brought ever worse global performance decade by decade since 1973? What is the outlook going forward?

The price of People Power

2004-12-07T16:20:00.000Z

Some pretty revealing stuff about Ukraine. Click title to link to full story - PolPop

The Ukraine street protests have followed a pattern of western orchestration set in the 80s. I know - I was a cold war bagman

Mark Almond
Tuesday December 7, 2004
The Guardian

People Power is on track to score another triumph for western values in Ukraine. Over the last 15 years, the old Soviet bloc has witnessed recurrent fairy tale political upheavals. These modern morality tales always begin with a happy ending. But what happens to the people once People Power has won?

Save us from the politicians who have God on their side

2004-12-06T08:24:00.000Z

This from the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings. Wouldn't normally blogg anything by such a right wing figure but this lament about the grip that religion has over our leaders is worth a read. Click the title to link to full story - PolPop

These American hijackers have made the world a more dangerous place

Max Hastings
Monday December 6, 2004
The Guardian

A week in the United States, such as I have just spent, is enough to make anybody feel a trifle fed up with God, or rather with the relentless invocation of the deity by American politicians, led by their president. No public occasion would be complete without the blessing of the Almighty being besought for whatever endeavour tops the agenda, most prominently the war in Iraq. The appeal to faith, seldom mere ritual, is usually founded upon conviction.

Third Time as Farce: Respect Heads for Political Oblivion

2004-12-06T04:27:00.000Z

This from What Next magazine. A solid enough analysis I think. Click title for full story - PolPop

Martin Sullivan

FOLLOWING THE degeneration of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party into a tiny Stalinoid sect, and with the Socialist Alliance having succeeded only in demonstrating its own political irrelevance, we now see yet another attempt to build a left alternative to Labour – Respect, the Unity Coalition, headed by the Socialist Workers Party and former Labour MP George Galloway.

Respect has set itself the aim of attracting the forces that were mobilised around the big demonstrations against the Iraq war last year, in order to mount an electoral challenge to the Labour Party in elections to the European Parliament and the Greater London Authority. Indeed, in a press release in February announcing its failure to agree a joint slate of candidates with the Green Party, Respect proudly declared that the new organisation was "seen as the political wing of the anti-war movement". The problems with this approach are surely obvious.

Palestinian prisoners start hunger strike

2004-12-06T02:22:00.000Z

This from the Defence For Children International - Palestine Section. Click title for full story - PolPop

Female prisoners in Telmond start hunger strike protest

On 30 November 2004, a DCI/PS lawyer visited the women's section of Telmond prison where he was able to talk to one Palestinian detainee, Samah Abdallah. Samah informed him that on Sunday 28 November, the female Palestinian prisoners in Telmond went out to the exercise yard as normal. However, before the end of their allotted time outdoors, the prison administration ordered the Palestinian women and girls to return to their cells. The representative of the Palestinian female detainees, Amna Mouna, complained to the guards that it was too soon for the women to go back inside. As she did so, she was severely beaten by a group of prison guards after which she was taken to the punishment cells, which are cold bare rooms with no bedding, no heating and no natural light.

To protest against the manner in which the prison administration deals with female Palestinian prisoners and in particular against the beating of their spokeswoman and her subsequent isolation, the remaining Palestinian female detainees began screaming and shouting. The guards responded by bringing in other troops, armed with batons, water hoses and tear gas, who began to beat the women and spray them with water and gas.

Bring Them Home Now

2004-12-06T02:04:00.000Z

Have a look at The Bring Them Home Now Campaign's web site. It organises amongst US military members, their families and veterans for an end to the war on Iraq - PolPop

Commando Correspondents

2004-12-06T01:59:00.000Z

From the Fairfield County Weekly. Click title to link to full story - PolPop

Armed with computers, cell phones and digital cameras, today's soldiers are the real embedded journalists.

by Brita Brundage

The e-mail came from 27-year-old soldier Ryan McNutt, who returned from Iraq last April. In plainspoken language, it voiced his support for the troops in the 343rd Quartermaster Company. In mid-October, 18 reserve soldiers in that company refused orders to transport fuel down dangerous Iraqi roads from the Tallil Air Base to Taji, north of Baghdad, because their trucks were not properly armored, the fuel was contaminated and they had no armed escorts. Four members of the unit considered “ring leaders” will probably be court-martialed, involving prison terms, while others will likely receive reprimands. The company commander was relieved of her command. Contacting their families via e-mail, the North Carolina reservists involved were able to generate instant media attention to the lack of proper equipment and unsafe conditions in Iraq, illustrating a growing unease and resistance among the part-time soldiers sent to fight the war.

McNutt spent a year on the same air base, working with the 110th Maintenance Unit. He knew what kind of sorry shape those Humvees were in because he was one of the guys improvising ways to armor them. As far as he was concerned, the 343rd Quartermaster should never have been sent on one of Iraq’s most dangerous stretches unprotected in the first place.

Galloway/Sheridan claim and counter-claim

2004-12-06T01:22:00.000Z

An apparent exclusive from The Mail On Sunday claiming George Galloway intends to stand for the Scottish Parliament in alliance with Tommy Sheridan followed by a press release from the Scottish Socialist Party denying it - PolPop

The Mail On Sunday, 05/12/04

Galloway to team up with Sheridan for assault on Labour seats at Holyrood.

EXCLUSIVE By Jane Simpson

REBEL MP George Galloway wants to stand as an MSP and is planning to launch a ferocious assault on the Scottish parliament. And he revealed he is considering a radical joint assault on the parliament with former Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan.

Mr Galloway believes the recent implosion of the SSP, coupled with its treatment of Mr Sheridan over newspaper allegations, has created a crucial opening for his anti-war party, Respect, in the 2007 Holyrood elections. Attacking First Minister Jack McConnell's `parody' of an administration, Mr Galloway, 50, said he was certain Scots voters would support his alliance with Mr Sheridan in its bid to win seats from the Labour Party. Speaking exclusively to the Scottish Mail on Sunday, Mr Galloway added: `I would certainly like to contend in Glasgow for the Scottish parliament elections. `Tommy and I would be a great double act, a dream ticket and people would vote for us. I am certain that together we could set the cat among the
pigeons. `Tommy is still fighting his corner in the SSP but I fear he will have to accept they have betrayed him and move on.' Mr Galloway revealed his Holyrood plans after winning £150,000 damages from The Daily Telegraph over an article suggesting he was on Saddam Hussein's payroll. And just days ago he announced that he will step down as MP for Glasgow Kelvin to stand for Parliament in Bethnal Green and Bow at next year's General Election under his new Respect party banner. Although he could be a Westminster MP if he wins the East London seat, he said that would not necessarily stand in the way of his Scottish ambitions.

He explained: `We are talking about two years down the line. `If I am in Westminster we'll have to see if it is possible and look at the situation in more depth. If I am not in Westminster then obviously it is more possible.' The MP, who vowed the Labour Party would `rue the day' it ditched him over his anti-war views, said Respect has already started to explore the best way to use the proportional representation list system to wins Holyrood seats at the 2007 elections. Yesterday, Mr Galloway kicked off his assault on Holyrood with a stinging attack on Mr McConnell and the Labour-LibDem coalition. He said: `Jack McConnell's administration is all about small-time with small horizons and lacking in its ideas. It is a shameless parody of what Labour is supposed to be. `They strike me more as people running Cumbernauld town council than powering the whole of Scotland and I think the country deserves etter.' Mr Galloway, who won his Glasgow Kelvin seat for Labour with a majority of more than 7,000 at the last General Election, would have a powerful support base if he contested the Holyrood elections.

Respect, The Unity Coalition was launched last January as an alternative to Labour. It now has a reported 1,000 members Mr Galloway intends to steer it down a more socialist path. As well as its strong anti-war stance, party policies include linking pensions to earnings and repealing union laws. Mr Sheridan was one of the speakers who took to the stage to offer support at the launch of the party. Yesterday, Mr Galloway said he had discussed the extra-marital allegations about Mr Sheridan with the former SSP leader, who claims never to have met the woman at the centre of the reports - now the subject of legal action. Since the story appeared, there has been bitter division within the SSP and members have admitted they are in crisis. Mr Galloway added: `The Scottish Socialist Party has made a catastrophic blunder.

It is my estimation that much more than half, maybe even much more than three-quarter who voted for them, did so because of Tommy Sheridan. `The idea that these unknown Trotskyite apparatchiks who have done him down are going to get the same kind of vote that they did when led by Sheridan seems to me inherently improbable. These people who have done him down are not fit to tie his shoe laces.' Mr Galloway has stated he has made no plans for his libel winnings as they have been frozen until The Daily Telegraph makes a decision whether or not to appeal. He added: `In the end I will spend it on my political life, which is what I spend my existing earnings on.'

SSP Research, Policy & Media Unit Press Release: 05/12/04 Eddie Truman:

SSP attacks Galloway for attempting to split left in Scotland

The Scottish Socialist Party today angrily condemned George Galloway for coming to the aid of New Labour with a threat to split the left vote in Scotland In an article in The Mail on Sunday George Galloway raises the prospect of Tommy Sheridan standing as a Respect Unity Coalition candidate at the next Scottish Parliament elections.

Today Tommy Sheridan categorically ruled out any such move. Tommy said; "I don't know why George is raising this idea. "I am absolutely committed to the Scottish Socialist Party and expect to be a leading candidate for the party in the 2007 Holyrood election. "Respect is doing a good job in England of campaigning against the Iraq war and raising basic socialist policies but there is already a socialist party in Scotland, it is called the SSP. "I have no plans to be anything other than a representative of the Scottish Socialist Party and if George wants to stand for the same list as me he will have to join the SSP before the next Scottish Parliament elections."

An SSP spokesperson condemned George Galloway's comments outright and accused him of coming to the aid of New Labour by threatening to split the left vote in Scotland.

The spokesperson said; "We are disappointed that George Galloway has launched this astonishing attack on the SSP, based on ignorance and misinformation. We are angry that George Galloway has launched this attack in a right wing newspaper with a tawdry track record of promoting racism and virulent anti-trade unionism. "George Galloway has made no attempt to contact any member of the SSP executive to clarify the facts behind Tommy Sheridan's resignation. "The Scottish Socialist Party has assisted and supported the development of the Respect Coalition in England. Unfortunately, it appears that George is prepared to cynically exploit the short term difficulties faced by the SSP to further his own parliamentary ambitions. "The SSP has united the left in Scotland and was campaigning for peace and socialism years before George Galloway finally broke with New Labour. "The only people who could benefit from a divided left in Scotland would be the British establishment and New Labour on both sides of the border. "The Scottish Socialist Party will be writing to the Respect Unity Coalition in England to call upon the party to dissociate from George Galloway's divisive outburst."

'A fairly survivable trade'

2004-12-04T10:37:00.000Z

From the Beeb. Interesting in that it stresses the local nature of the insurgents - PolPop

By David Lyon BBC Correspondent

The area south of Baghdad where the Black Watch have been operating in support of US Marines for the last month has turned out to be one of the key centres of the insurgency in Iraq.

There have been more suicide bomb attacks, and other attacks, on the occupation forces there than anywhere else in the country in the last month, according to US intelligence sources.

The British troops from the Black Watch regiment have been based on the west side of the River Euphrates. . .

When their month-long tour ends shortly, this single battalion will be replaced by two US army battalions in the lead up to the Iraqi elections, scheduled for the end of January.

Ukrainian Scenario Could Happen in Russia — Experts

2004-12-04T09:24:00.000Z

Link via the title

The geopolitical game with huge funds on both sides being played out in Ukraine could be repeated in Russia, a political analyst said on Wednesday.

Speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio, Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the Politics Foundation, called this possibility “bad news” for Russia’s independent media because Russian authorities would not want a repeat of the events currently unfolding in Ukraine to occur in their country. . .

Danilo Anderson vigil in London

2004-12-04T09:16:00.000Z

The Hands Off Venezuela Campaign have a new website. Check it out by clicking the title - PolPop

By Hands Off Venezuela

Yesterday, December 2, a candle-lit vigil was held outside the Venezuelan consulate in London, in memory of Danilo Anderson, the state prosecutor assassinated two weeks ago by car bomb in Caracas (see Prosecutor investigating anti-Chavez coup killed in terrorist attack). The vigil had been organised by the Hands Off Venezuela campaign and the UK Bolivarian Circle. With about thirty people present, the vigil was a succesful commemoration.

How the Workers are Robbed

2004-12-04T08:52:00.000Z

Click on title for full script - PolPop

Who produces the wealth and who gains most from its production? In a pamphlet written 97 years ago, John Wheatley described an imaginary court case, with a coalmaster, a landowner and several others being charged with “having conspired together and robbed an old miner, Dick McGonnagle.”

The pamphlet, How the Miners Are Robbed, had considerable impact before the First World War. Its basic class analysis remains valid for workers today as they are still being robbed. In the following extracts from the pamphlet, the magistrate interrogates the witnesses. The first person to enter the witness box is the Coalmaster. [Magistrate = M, Prisoner = P]

'They hate our policies, not our freedom'

2004-12-04T08:34:00.000Z

What is the source of the antagonism between the West and the Islamic world? Is it, as Bush and co. suggest, hatred and jealousy on the part of Islam of America's freedoms and wealth and decadence or, as the left has always insisted the West's policies and imperialist attitude to the Middle East? Well, it seems the left has a new ally in the form of this Pentagon Committee's report - PolPop

Pentagon report contains major criticisms of administration.

by Tom Regan

Late on the Wednesday afternoon before the Thanksgiving holiday, the US Defense Department confirmed the contents of a report by the Defense Science Board that is highly critical of the administration's efforts in the war on terror and in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report had been originally placed on the DSB's website in early November.

'Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies [the report says]. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.'

The Pentagon confirmed the study after The New York Times ran a story about the report in its Wednesday editions.

Voices of Reason, or Voices of Treason?

2004-12-04T08:08:00.000Z

Karen K quit the military after a stint at the Pentagon in the Office of Special Plans this year. Check out this superb web site - PolPop

By Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col USAF (ret)

Voices of reason are rising in unison. The Bush war in Iraq is increasingly recognized as unwinnable.

Military historian and strategist Martin Van Creveld provides a re-reading of the diaries of General Moshe Dayan as the famous one-eyed warrior toured Vietnam in 1966. In preparation for his visit to the battlefields, Dayan attended a small private dinner in Washington with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, where questions about the situation in Vietnam were asked and answered. Van Creveld writes,

[McNamara] admitted that many of the figures being floated by the Pentagon – particularly those pertaining to the percentage of the country and population "secured" – were meaningless at best and bogus at worst. No more than anybody else could he explain to Dayan how the Americans intended to end the War. What set him apart was the fact that he was prepared to admit it, albeit only in a half- hearted way; as we now know, he already had his own doubts which led to his resignation in the next year. He consoled himself by saying that the War was not hurting the US economy. In other words, it could go on and on until one side or the other gave way.

Van Creveld concludes his article by reminding us of the three problems Dayan saw in America’s military conduct of Vietnam: lack of intelligence, a failed campaign for "hearts and minds" and the problem faced when "an armed force ... keeps beating down on a weaker opponent ... [The stronger force] will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up by losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops." One needn’t open one’s eyes or heart far to see the similarities in Iraq. . .

Criminal Lawyers Award Contest

2004-12-04T08:02:00.000Z

A bit of light reading to kick off the day - PolPop

A Charlotte, NC, lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month of having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated that the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires". The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason: that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued...and won!

In delivering the ruling the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company in whi9ch it warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire, and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeals process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars list in the "fires."

NOW FOR THE BEST PART:

After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!

With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

This true story (not an Urban Myth) was the First Place Winner in a recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest.

Inside the Leviathan

2004-12-03T14:09:00.000Z

More from the NYRB. Long article on the rise of Wal-Mart and it's blueprint for 21st Century Capitalism - PolPop

By Simon Head

Throughout the recent history of American capitalism there has always been one giant corporation whose size dwarfs that of all others, and whose power conveys to the world the strength and confidence of American capitalism itself. At mid-century General Motors was the undisputed occupant of this corporate throne. But from the late 1970s onward GM shrank in the face of superior Japanese competition and from having outsourced the manufacture of many car components to independent suppliers. By the millennium GM was struggling to maintain its lead over Ford, its longstanding rival.

With the technology boom of the 1990s, the business press began writing about Microsoft as if it were GM's rightful heir as the dominant American corporation. But despite its worldwide monopoly as the provider of software for personal computers, Microsoft has lacked the essential qualification of size. In Fortune's 2004 listings of the largest US corporations, Microsoft ranks a mere forty-sixth, behind such falling stars as AT&T and J.C. Penney. However, Fortune's 2004 rankings also reveal the clear successor to GM, Wal-Mart. In 2003 Wal-Mart was also Fortune's "most admired company.". . .

REBELS RETURN TO 'CLEARED' AREAS

2004-12-03T13:48:00.000Z

Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

In Fallujah, US forces are going through 50,000 houses one by one. But Iraqi insurgents are coming back.

FALLUJAH, December 3, 2004 - The embers in the house were still hot from the fire of battle when Cpl. Joshua Richard went in to view the remains of the insurgents who killed a fellow US marine.

At the base of the stairs - the same dark place where Lance Cpl. Blake Magaoay of Pearl City, Hawaii, had fallen in a burst of rifle fire - Corporal Richard harangued the burnt Iraqi corpse."You got what you wanted, didn't you?" he sneered, referring to the Marine casualties.

The corporal's anger is not unusual among marines who for three weeks have been taking casulties among comrades, as they continue to face an up-close battle in Fallujah. The Pentagon now says US forces will see their tour of duty extended until after the Jan. 30 elections. While their fight is no longer a front-page story, the physical and mental toll is growing, as the marines here continue to hunt an enemy that rarely seeks them out. Instead, pockets of insurgents lie waiting until teams - like that led by Corporal Magaoay - come crashing through their door.

Magaoay's death brings the US fatality toll in November to at least 134, one short of the toll of the most lethal month to date for Americans in Iraq. Seventy-one US troops died retaking the rebel-held city, according to Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq. An additional 623 American troops were wounded in the most intense urban conflict for US forces since the Vietnam War.

Iraqi civilians are not expected to be permitted to begin returning to the badly damaged city until mid-December, and extensive damage to virtually every house and building across Fallujah means that detailed US and Iraqi government plans for rebuilding will take months, at least, to realize.

But the original problem persists: US forces sweep through one neighborhood after another, only to find insurgents popping up in "cleared" areas.

The battle Monday killed one marine and wounded three others - a high cost against three insurgents, who had moved into a house 50 feet across the street from a newly established marine position at a Fallujah fire station. That house and several others nearby had been cleared just two days earlier.

The ensuing fight revealed an enemy that has hardly given up and is making US forces learn the lesson of the warning taped up on the inside gate of the Marine fire station base: "Complacency kills."

"They are in survival mode, and they're just waiting until someone comes to them [to fight], rather than going out and initiating attacks," says Lt. Col. Dan Wilson, the deputy current operations officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in charge of western Iraq.

"We have to go through close to 50,000 structures in the town of Fallujah," Colonel Wilson says, "to make sure that when someone comes home [an insurgent] doesn't jump out from a hidden wall or a spider hole, kills them, and continues to operate from that house."

Marines are pursuing insurgent cells, and have picked up cell leaders who are "making mistakes" because they are "on the run," adds Wilson.

General Sattler says that at least 1,200 insurgents had been killed in the city. The amount of weaponry found so far in Fallujah confirms to marines that the city had been the nationwide hub of the Iraq's insurgency.

Catalogued so far, US intelligence officers say, are more than 4,500 mortar systems, 400 grenades, 800 rocket-propelled grenades, 800 land mines, and more than 260,000 rifles and small arms.

"You could issue one [Fallujah] rifle to every man in the United States Marine Corps, and still have a bunch left over," says Wilson.

Senior officers say attacks in the Fallujah area have dropped off 44 percent since the invasion of the city began.

A chemical workshop that appeared designed to boost the explosive power of roadside bombs has also been found.

The Fallujah assault "is not good for the families and marines who have suffered and died, putting their lives on the line for the freedom of Iraq. But it has been good in terms of dealing a blow to the insurgency," says Wilson.

That message hadn't gotten through to the three insurgents who killed Magaoay. The insurgents, armed with assault rifles and pineapple grenades, had set up one sleeping area on each floor. Upstairs, they blocked the window with a bedding material and created a small, dark cubbyhole. A book lay on one mattress on the floor.

The marines estimate the insurgents had been in the house less than 12 hours. A bar of soap in the bathroom was still wet with use, immediately after the firefight.

One burst from the rebel rifle - and the toss of a hand grenade heralded the start of battle. Lance Cpl. Chris Anderson, a Marine scout from Tucson, Ariz., watched the grenade roll before it exploded. Shrapnel struck his left hand and shoulder.

"They knew where to place themselves in that house," Lance Corporal Anderson said later at a combat hospital. Magaoay's fate was not immediately clear, so marines used nonlethal stun and flash-bang grenades to fight their way back into the house to find him. Another team was led, in a split-second decision when others hesitated to enter, by Lance Cpl. Edward Lonecke, from Manchester, Ga. He was shot in the thigh, the moment he stormed in from the kitchen door.

"I knew if we could get Magaoay [out], we could blast the place," Lance Corporal Lonecke said later, as he waited for an evacuation flight to Germany. Once the marines pulled out, the house was pummeled with rockets and 25mm explosive rounds.

It was after the flames died down, that Corporal Richard, of Lafayette, La., returned, took snapshots, cursed the dead insurgents, and spat on their corpses.

Upstairs, an intelligence officer gingerly picked through the pockets of the bodies for evidence. His fingers came to rest on a steel pin, and a familiar shape: a final surprise left for the Americans by the suicidal insurgent.

"Grenade!" shouted the officer, leaning over the corpse. The marines dashed for the doorway.

Iraq, the Press and the Election

2004-12-03T10:04:00.000Z

This from the New York Review of Books. Click title to link to full article - PolPop

By Michael Massing

In the end, the war in Iraq did not have the decisive impact on the election that many had expected. In the weeks before the vote there were the massacre of forty-nine Iraqi police trainees; a deadly attack inside the previously impenetrable Green Zone in Baghdad; the refusal by an army unit to carry out a supply mission on the grounds that it was too dangerous; the explosion of several car bombs at a ceremony where soldiers were handing out candy, killing dozens of children; the abduction of contractors, journalists, and aid workers, including the director of the CARE office in Baghdad; the release of a report holding the highest reaches of the Pentagon and the military responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib; a report by President Bush's hand-picked investigator confirming that Iraq had long ago lost its ability to produce weapons of mass destruction; and the spread of the insurgency to every corner of the country, bringing reconstruction to a virtual halt. All of this, in the end, counted for less to voters (if the exit polls are to be believed) than such issues as whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry and whether discarded embryos should be used for stem cell research.

How did this happen? In many ways, George Bush's victory seems to have confirmed the fact that large numbers of voters in America today are very conservative, dominated by strong attachments to God, country, and the traditional family. At the same time, it's not clear to what extent the public was aware of just how bad things had gotten in Iraq. For while there was much informative reporting on the war, a number of factors combined to shield Americans from its most brutal realities. A look at these factors can help to understand some neglected aspects of George Bush's victory. . .

Scarcity of What and for Whom?

2004-12-03T09:36:00.000Z

This from the December issue of Monthly Review - PolPop

Scarcity of What and for Whom?

by Mark Hudson

(Mark Hudson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon in Eugene, specializing in the political economy of the environment).

Michael Perelman, The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 224 pages, hardcover $55.00.

There is no shortage of opinion within the circles of policy and punditry that the free market is, or ought to become, the new Atlas. The dominant discourse holds that the weight of the world, and its scourges from poverty to pollution, can only be borne and transcended through utter reliance on the market. Michael Perelman’s latest book confronts this position head on, arguing that far from providing a basis for sustainability and health, markets provide and respond to incentives which impoverish, dehumanize, mutilate, and kill workers, and which are leading us further into ecological ruin. Perelman scrutinizes a number of pillars of conventional economic theory, assessing them under the light of their implications for people and the environment, and emerges with an argument that economic theory justifies an unjustifiable system.

This requires two separate points. First, the market produces disastrous results for workers and for nature. Second, economics as a profession has consistently functioned to obscure and apologize for those results.

Over the last few decades, beginning most notably with the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, critiques of the anti-ecological quality of economic theory have become numerous. In this short and highly accessible book, Perelman makes two very worthy contributions to this body of critical inquiry. The first is to approach a highly complex set of relations in a way that is straightforward and direct. The second is to examine critically the disconnection between economic theory and
history. In confronting the relations between economic theory, the economy, workers, and the environment, Perelman dares to ask the most basic of questions and to judge both markets and economic theory on the basis of their abilities to produce sane, sensible, and sustainable outcomes and explanations. Perelman’s interrogation of markets begins with what he calls the farm worker paradox.

The farm worker paradox illuminates how those who produce the things most vital to human survival and development are compensated the least. In the United States an individual farm worker earns an annual income of about $7,500. How has economic theory attempted to explain this? Given that economics claims to address how resources are allocated in the service of meeting human needs, this would seem to be a central question. However, following a brief flirtation with the problem by Adam Smith, conventional economics from Alfred Marshall onward has dismissed the paradox as an easily explained phenomenon, whereby the market doles out to each person—capitalist or worker—exactly what they put in. That is, mainstream economics “solves” the paradox by claiming that low wages signal low productivity (and that high wages, such as those bestowed upon the CEO’s of Tyco, Enron, and the rest, are indicative of tremendous productivity). This conclusion is the result of a long evolution of economic thought, summarized by Perelman, which has systematically attempted to both obscure and justify the social inequality that is inherent to capitalist organization.

In early political economy, the vast difference between workers and owners was attributed mainly to a “natural order.” In this system, it was natural that everybody but a small elite would labor long hours in exchange for their daily crust. For some prominent thinkers and moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, the resulting prod of hunger and poverty among the laboring class was a positive stimulus. Robert Townsend, for example, suggested that the wage system was, relative to slavery, a much-improved system for the appropriation of labor:

[Slavery]...is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, ...whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions....Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse. (p. 145)

The few who were spared the fate of the laboring masses were distinguished by their control over productive resources, beginning with land. The bloody and conniving histories of land “ownership” were pushed into obscurity and effaced by the laws of individual private property and what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities.”

With the development of fossil-fuelled manufacturing and industrialization, there arose a bubbling discontent concerning the persistent gap between workers and owners in the midst of skyrocketing “productivity.” Social and economic trends contributed to heightened, class-based conflicts, from the Paris Commune to clashes between strikers, National Guardsmen, and Pinkerton agents. Economists addressed
themselves to these social clashes by turning their efforts toward the refutation of Marx’s critique of political economy and his analysis of capitalism, in order to reassert the justice of the market system. The development of marginal value theory (independently and simultaneously, as the legend in economics departments goes) by Jevons, Walras, and Menger, was motivated in all three cases by a desire to undermine socialist tendencies in Europe through the reformulation of value theory. Within the marginalist framework, capital and labor each get out of production exactly what they put in. If, for example, the addition of an hour of labor yields one more dollar in revenue for the firm, the worker gets one dollar in return. If one more machine contributes five dollars to revenue, the capitalist gets five dollars in return. What could be more just than rewards commensurate with contribution? Exploitation in this framework vanishes. In the words of then-prominent U.S. economist John Bates Clark,

the distribution of income [is] controlled by a natural law, and...this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth which that agent creates....Free competition tends to give labor what labor creates, to capitalists what capital creates, and to entrepreneurs what the coordinating function creates. (p. 152)

Despite the fact that Clark’s “proof” rested on what Perelman refers to as “absurdly unrealistic assumptions,” (p. 152) its comforting message became a “central part of economic dogma” (p. 153).

Clark also implicitly contributed to modern economic theory the notion that the distribution of ownership is irrelevant for economic outcomes. Transactions within the labor market are seen as voluntary exchanges no different than those in any other market. The vast difference in power between capitalists and individual workers disappears, as best summed up by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson’s urging that we “remember that in a perfectly competitive market, it doesn’t matter who hires whom” (p. 153). The ridiculous degree to which eoclassical economists have taken this conceptualization of relations between workers and owners is well demonstrated by Perelman’s presentation of the theories of economists like Clark Nardinelli, who proposed, “presumably in all seriousness...that children in the factories would voluntarily choose to have their employers beat them: ‘Now if a firm in a competitive industry employed corporal punishment the supply price of child labor to that firm would increase. The child would receive compensations of the disamenity of being beaten’” (pp. 153–154). In
other words, agreeing to be whipped into greater effort is simply entrepreneurial initiative on the part of workers.

Perelman’s second major contribution is to take a long historical perspective on the interplay between economic theory on the one hand, and the environmental and human requirements of capitalist development on the other. His juxtaposition of the rationalizing contortions carried out by mainstream economic theorists and the often-contrasting realities—political, ecological, and social—emerging around them is striking. Perelman provides a nice selection of examples pertinent to issues of the environment and natural resource scarcity. One of these draws on the history of the passenger pigeon to illustrate the disconnection between market signals and species extinction. In neoclassical theory, when a resource becomes scarce, prices are supposed to rise, thereby inducing consumers to use less of it. The market is
thus seen as the best tool for conservation. Perelman, however, notes that passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction (from a population of staggering numbers) between about 1840 and 1900 without so much as a blip in the price. The reason for this “anomaly” was that passenger pigeons were (a) easy to hunt even as their numbers dwindled; and (b) seen as a substitute for chickens—or more accurately, for chicken (it is the meat that is relevant, rather than the bird)—which was still in plentiful supply. This makes perfect economic sense and is completely unproblematic from the theorist’s perspective. Passenger pigeons are, to
the market, indistinguishable from chickens. However, if the relevance of species goes beyond their place on the dinner plate (and, even more fundamentally, their potential as exchange value) the price mechanism must be seen as an inadequate, indeed a “perverse” instrument for mediating the relations between humans and nature.

In probing this disconnection between economic theory and the actual functioning of the economy, Perelman also looks at the reception given by mainstream economists to those among their own ranks who attempt to deal with resource scarcity. Since these instances are rare, he pays particular attention to the reaction of economic theorists to William Stanley Jevons’s 1865 book, The Coal Question, in which Jevons lays out the inevitability of the depletion of British coal deposits. In what later became known as the “Jevons Paradox,” Jevons argued that increases in efficiency of coal use would actually result in increased total coal use, rather than conservation of it, thus raising the uncomfortable prospect that economists—self-professed scholars of the allocation of scarce resources—might actually have to consider the possibility of scarcity.

This is not to say that neoclassical economists never worry about scarcity. It is an indispensable economic concept, constructed as a relation between the insatiable) wants and limited means of firms and individuals. Thus, every economic decision is made within a “budget constraint,” meaning simply that although the world is full of possibilities, each individual actor can only afford to get their hands on so much of it at a given point in time. However, as Perelman points out, this has little or nothing to do with the kind of scarcity that Jevons was discussing. “[T]he overarching scarcity that economists study is the general scarcity of capital; that is, complex conditions artificially collapsed down to a single monetary measure....This sort of scarcity does not represent an ultimate barrier to the economy” (p. 41). Within the neoclassical framework, given the appropriate mobilization of savings and investment, more can be produced in perpetuity. Substitution of one resource for another will take care of any particular scarcity that might threaten, like Jevons’s dwindling coal supplies, to limit the growth of the economy. Of course, Perelman observes, coal has not run
out, and Jevons did not foresee the emergence of oil or atomic energy. However, the point about general scarcity—the economy’s ultimate reliance on the productive consumption of both energy and matter for the transformation of natural resources into useful items—remains the proverbial elephant in the economist’s living room. While Jevons is viewed as a giant of neoclassical economics for his pioneering of
marginal value theory, his work on the scarcity of coal was, and continues to be, seen by economic theorists as an eccentric slip up. Perelman confesses that he “never took a class that mentioned Jevons without some snide remark about his ‘foolish’ book on scarcity” (p. 40).

A final important point that Perelman discusses (one that is of particular and increasing relevance these days) is the giant gap between the comforting conclusions of economic theory—that resource scarcity is not a problem because markets will induce substitution for scarce goods—and the monumental political and military efforts carried out by world powers to ensure this result. History is crowded with violence, coercion, and conquest designed to ensure the access of civilizations to a steady supply of vital resources. While the ideological agents of capital derive equations demonstrating that scarcity is kept at bay by the operation of the free market, its political agents work to ensure that this is never put to the test. Local scarcities looming on the horizons of core nations are in reality warded off most often with violence. That violence might be administered by the IMF and World Bank through neoliberal economic discipline and the prying open of fresh markets, or it might be more directly delivered via the bullet and the bomb.

In all, Perelman does an excellent job of revealing the terrible consequences of the “normal” functioning of markets for people and the environment. While the book adds little that is brand new to the critique of market-dominated society, The Perverse Economy’s historical and direct approach to examining the contradictions between economic theory and the material unfolding of capitalist production is a worthy contribution. Unlike most of this body of literature, this book is highly accessible and engaging.

So, what is to be done? Perelman suggests we rehabilitate the good name of economic planning. He argues that the spur of war once urged countries to undertake massive social and economic transformations, in which markets were subordinated to goals of improving worker morale, health, and productivity. The experience, he argues, demonstrated that efficiency and social solidarity work in unison (p. 182). The problem, as Perelman acknowledges, is the difficulty of a democratic check on the
planners. In fact we already have, in a very selective way, a planned economy. It is an economy planned at both national and transnational levels to benefit a tiny minority, under the cover of market rule. The real questions then are who plans, how, and for what? It is a question of democratic or elite control, and we are currently witnessing an increasingly intense period of the latter. The emergence of the former will depend ultimately on the organized power and democratic yearnings
of those on the wrong end of the farm worker’s paradox.

George Galloway wins Saddam libel case

2004-12-03T08:10:00.000Z

It would be wrong of me not to include something on this. Way to go George. - PolPop

BBC Report

MP George Galloway has been awarded £150,000 in libel damages from the Daily Telegraph over claims he received money from Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The Glasgow Kelvin MP was awarded the damages in compensation for articles published by the paper in April 2003.

He had denied ever seeking or receiving money from Saddam Hussein's government, which he said he had long opposed. The newspaper said it was in the public interest to publish the claims, based on documents found in Baghdad.

Mr Justice Eady said he was "obliged to compensate Mr Galloway and to make an award for the purposes of restoring his reputation".

Outside the court, Mr Galloway said: "I had to risk absolute and utter ruin to bring this case.

"If I had lost I would have been homeless, I would have had everything I possess taken from me and would have been bankrupted and forced out of public office. I don't feel in any way happy about the award of £150,000."

The Bad vs. the Corrupt

2004-12-03T08:04:00.000Z

More from Counter Punch on the Ukraine crisis - PolPop

Standoff in Ukraine

By LEE SUSTAR

The election standoff in Ukraine is portrayed in the U.S. media as a battle between pro-Washington democrats and pro-Moscow authoritarians. But it's really a scramble for power within a ruling class dominated by corrupt politicians and their wealthy backers.

It's almost certainly the case that the current government's candidate for president, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich--who has the high-profile support of Russian President Vladimir Putin--stole the election with widespread fraud in the runoff election November 21. But according to election observers, there were also reports of fraud in the Western Ukrainian strongholds of Viktor Yushchenko, a former prime minister who's supported by the U.S. and the European Union (EU). . .

The Anne Winters Challenge

2004-12-02T09:20:00.000Z

Bit of culture for us. And who doesn't like poetry? Link via the title for full story - PolPop

Should a Marxist poet be stylistically ornate?

By Dan Chiasson

Anne Winters is one of the scarcest talents in American poetry. Winters is the author of two books of poems, The Key to the City and the new The Displaced of Capital, published 18 years apart. The books themselves are slim, even by the standards of poetry books. Her reputation comes to rest on perhaps a dozen poems written over the course of 30 or so years. All of these poems take New York City as their primary subject, and all of them are written from an inveterately leftist, even Marxist, point of view. There are good and expert and delightful things throughout all of Winters' poems, but these dozen or so poems about New York are her best, and a few of these are so good that they do what R.P. Blackmur says great art does: They "enlarge the stock of available reality."

To get the flavor of a Winters poem, you need to put two very unlike, even incompatible, things together: a stern-faced and rather old-fashioned Marxism and a poetic style seemingly exempt, self-exempted, from her own Marxist critique. The Marxism governs her choice of subjects: In her New York, there are two types of people—the type that lives in Connecticut and the type that lives in squalor. When she writes a poem about seeing Tosca at the Met, it's four lines about Puccini and 10 lines about the guy who works in the sewers under the building. She sees the world in terms of economics and sees economics as a force as willful and vengeful as a Greek god. The boy at the green-grocer's village was razed, his country "de-developed" because of its debt to the First World. People end up in crudely partitioned apartments under the bridge and not because they spun a roulette wheel and came up bust; they live that way because people like you and me have an interest in keeping them poor. There is indignation in this stance and a strong suspicion that art is one of the surpluses created by other people's labor. . .

Dispatches From Romania

2004-12-02T09:02:00.000Z

How the capitalist `miracle' in Eastern Europe can engender nostalgia for even an old rogue like Ceausescu. Click title for full article - PolPop

By Sarah E. Richards

BUCHAREST—Once a month, at 6:30 in the morning, Angela Boteza arrives at the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in western Bucharest. She walks down a gravel path to a nondescript grave, where she clears away dead leaves and candle wax and leaves yellow gladiolas in a wine bottle with a handwritten note: "May God forgive your evil deeds. Rest in peace. May the earth not be heavy upon your soul." A modest granite cross bearing a red star reveals the grave's occupant: Nicolae Ceausescu, 1918-1989. She then she goes to the other side of the cemetery to do the same at the graves of his wife Elena and son Nicu. . .

Iraq's Gravity Pulls a Soldier Down

2004-12-02T08:26:00.000Z

From the not normally so thoughtful Village Voice - PolPop

A fateful path from Nigeria, through Brooklyn, to war

by Kareem Fahim

Among the family, friends, and colleagues who inhabited his short life, the broad, handsome National Guardsman went by several names.

His college professors and classmates knew him as Lekan, a shy, diligent student working toward a bachelor's degree in computer science. The men from Alpha Company, 108th Infantry Regiment out of New York State, called the Nigerian-born machine gunner with the deep voice by his last name, Akintade. His family, many of whom traveled from Lagos two weeks ago to mourn their boy, just called him Sunday, for the day he was born.

And to the surrogate family he had gathered in Flatbush since he immigrated to the U.S. in 1997—Liyah Njoroge, his Kenyan fiancée; Lawrence Koleosho, his "cousin"; and Ojo Oyebisi, another friend—he was just Freddie. . .

End of an era at livestock market

2004-12-01T14:55:00.000Z

This one is for all the locals. Poor Aber. Click title to link to full story - PolPop.

A final Christmas sale has taken place at a mid Wales livestock market, which has served farmers for more than 100 years.

Aberystwyth's Park Avenue site will close in the next few weeks to make way for a £15m shopping development. . .

China steady on the peg

2004-12-01T14:08:00.000Z

This from the Asia Times. Analysis of imperialism from Chinese perspective. Useful. Click on the title to link to full, lengthy, article. - PolPop

By Henry C K Liu

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has criticized the US for not taking measures to halt the dollar's slide and made it clear that China would not revalue the yuan under pressure. "You must consider the impact on China's economy and society and also the impact on the region and the world," Wen said in Laos late Sunday on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meet when asked about pressures to change the yuan's decade-old peg to the dollar. Wen also signaled that speculation was too rife in the market at the moment to make such a change.

The announcement was timely as China stands at the crossroads of economic destiny, the direction of which will determine if it will be the latest victim of bankrupt neo-liberal ideology or the sole survivor that manages to develop an effective immunity from the deadly financial virus of dollar hegemony that regularly assaults all economies. On a strategic level, China, the most populous nation on Earth, cannot possibly expect to develop toward world-class living standards by exporting to a rich minority of the world's population. The poor economies' excessive dependence on export to the rich economies under dollar hegemony will perpetuate the maldistribution of wealth on a global scale and put China permanently on the lower end of that scale. . .

Rumsfeld to be tried for war crimes in German court?

2004-12-01T10:31:00.000Z

This is an Action Alert from the Centre for Constitutional Rights. The web page has a form at the bottom so that you can send a message to the German prosecutor to urge him to put the case to trial. Click on title to link - PolPop.

Action Alert

The Center for Constitutional Rights and four Iraqis who were tortured in U.S. custody have filed a complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office against high ranking United States civilian and military commanders over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq.

We are asking the German prosecutor to launch an investigation: since the U.S. government is unwilling to open an independent investigation into the responsibility of these officials for war crimes, and since the U.S. has refused to join the International Criminal Court, CCR and the Iraqi victims have brought this complaint in Germany as a court of last resort. Several of the defendants are stationed in Germany. . .

Iraq: Covering Up US War Crimes

2004-12-01T10:28:00.000Z

This from the Green Left Weekly. Click on the title to link to the full story - PolPop.

James Petras

I am reading William Shirer's Berlin Diary, a journalist's account of Nazi political propaganda during the 1930s, as I watch the US “news” reports of the violent assault on Fallujah.

The US mass media “reports”, the style, content and especially the language, echo their Nazi predecessors of 70 years ago to an uncanny degree. Coincidence? Of course! In both instances we have imperialist armies conquering countries, levelling cities and slaughtering civilians — and the mass media, private in form, state appendages in practice, disseminate the most outrageous lies, in defense and praise of the conquering “storm troopers” — call them SS or marines.

Both in Nazi Germany and contemporary US, we are told by the mass media that the invading armies are “freeing the country” of “foreign fighters” and “armed terrorists”, who are preventing “the people” from going about their everyday lives. Yet we know that of the 1000 prisoners there are only four foreigners (three Iranians and one Arab); Iraqi hospitals report less than 10% of casualties are foreign fighters. In other words, over 90% of the fighters are Iraqis — most of whom were born, educated and raised families in the cities in which they are fighting. . .

Beware Aaronovitch

2004-12-01T10:14:00.000Z

Yesterday, for the sake of balance, I posted a link to an article in The Guardian in which Aaronovitch criticises Laughland (article by him posted earlier). But to be criticised by this guy is probably good for your reputation. Below is a quote from another article by Aaronovitch in which he sings the praises of the gangster, US-imposed, so-called Iraqi Interim Government.

"Right now, in Iraq, a disparate bunch of extraordinarily brave men and women are trying to bring about a new future. They are Shia clerics, communists, academics, trade unionists, Kurdish autonomists and even some feminists. The kind of people that George Galloway, who supped with the Saddamites even as these others languished in jail, calls - using his trademark moral inversion - "quislings". They're the ones who will be risking everything to register their compatriots to vote, to formulate a new constitution and give birth to a new Middle East. No wonder then, that other corrupt regimes and violent bigots so loathe them."

These `extraordinarily brave men and women' were the ones anxious for the US to destroy Fallujah on their behalf. When it was `discovered' that Iraq had no WMD the new rationale for the war was that Saddam was a brutal dictator `who killed his own people'. This lot not only kill their own people they act like a bunch of cheer leaders whilst it is going on - PolPop.

The Anxious Epic

2004-11-30T11:54:00.000Z

In the wake of the release in America of Oliver Stone's new film `Alexander'. Here is a review from the Boston Globe examining cinema's take on empire. Click on the title to link. - PolPop.

By By J.D. Connor | November 28, 2004

WRITING ABOUT the Romans seen on film 50 years ago, the French theorist Roland Barthes saw in their sweaty brows the mythology of "man thinking." These days, however, our Greeks and Romans do not think, they remind. They remind themselves of their destiny. They remind their followers of the glory they might win. And their stories remind us a great deal of our current empire, and its strategic uncertainties. . .