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By Nile Bowie

The deal reached in Lausanne between Iran and major world powers represents a high point in negotiations aimed at outlining the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. Considerable concessions have been made by both sides, while Hassan Rouhani’s government in Tehran has moved closer to freeing Iran from almost all economic and financial sanctions, a key goal of his administration.

Though the full details of a comprehensive deal will not be finalized until late June and differences remain on various technical and legal dimensions of the programme, a successful settlement of the nuclear issue could open the door to a new stage in the US-Iran relationship, the effects of which have already begun to slowly reshape the region’s existing strategic order.

Iran must now fulfill a number of stringent conditions over the next six to eight months before Western states lift the sanctions regime placed on the country, which have weakened the Iranian economy and wrought widespread human suffering. The tasks are designed to reduce Iran’s breakout capacity, by extending the period of time Tehran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead, if it decided to do build one.

Due to the politicized nature of the issue, it is necessary to address several preliminary facts about Iran’s nuclear program. Though Iran has accelerated its capacity to enrich uranium in recent years, assessments that represent the consensus view of America’s intelligence agencies have continued to maintain since 2007 that there is no hard evidence of Iran’s intentions to develop a nuclear weapon.

Al Jazeera has recently published a secret cable that demonstrates how Israeli intelligence assessments of Iran’s nuclear program are consistent with those of American intelligence agencies. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has conducted extensive inspections of the Iranian program for years, also concluded that Tehran was not seeking to weaponize its nuclear program.

The Iranian government has consistently renounced the use of nuclear weapons, but has steadfastly upheld its right to maintain a peaceful nuclear program and a capacity to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, which it is entitled to as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Tehran views the politicization of the nuclear issue as an affront to its sovereignty and a pretext for Western powers to enforce sanctions to undermine and contain the Islamic Republic.

Some of the tasks Iran must now adhere to involve intrusive daily IAEA inspections, a significant reduction of low-enriched uranium stockpiles, disabling two-thirds of installed centrifuges for a period of 10 years, a pledge not to construct any new uranium enrichment facilities or enrich above an agreed percentage, among other stipulations. Tehran must also cooperate and provide access to the IAEA as it investigates evidence of past work on nuclear weaponization.

Upon fulfilling these conditions, the European Union has agreed to lift its embargo on Iranian oil in addition to all other economic and financial sanctions. The Obama administration would then issue waivers corresponding to US extra-territorial sanctions that would deter banks and European companies from financing trade and investments within Iran. The removal of economic sanctions will be a huge boost to the Iranian economy and mutually advantageous for western business interests.

Global corporations view Iran as a largely untapped market with a vast potential for development. Swiss banks have begun positioning themselves to prospective investors as an alternative to European banks that cannot conduct business with Tehran until sanctions are formally withdrawn. Oil and gas companies, automakers, industrial manufacturers, and global aviation giants such as Airbus and Boeing have the potential to profit enormously.

Iran possesses large oilfields along its border with Iraq, as well as the South Pars offshore gasfield in the Gulf along the maritime border with Qatar, one of the largest gasfields in the world. The Rouhani administration’s business-friendly approach, along with Iran’s potential for large oil and gas discoveries and low cost of production, are indications that Iran will resume its position as one of the world’s biggest crude exporters once sanctions are dismantled, placing greater downward pressure on energy prices.

Sanctions have reduced Iranian oil exports by half, from 2.5m barrels a day in 2012 to 1.1m a day, while sources indicate that Iran has a large backlog of at least 30m barrels of unsold crude being stored. Ordinary Iranians will not immediately feel the benefits of sharp inflows of western money and investment, though a strengthened Iranian economy will lift the national mood and solidify the victory of Iran’s pragmatists, who have secured support from political forces that cautiously endorsed the negotiations, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

In Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown vociferous opposition to the Iranian deal, echoing the hardline stance of Israel and Saudi Arabia. While American companies stand in gain from access to Iranian markets, there are clearly more strategic considerations that have motivated the Obama administration’s policy shift toward Tehran to favor diplomacy on the nuclear issue, when previously the position was narrowly reliant on sanctions, non-engagement and the threat of use of force.
US Needs Iran to Offset Strategic Decline (PT2)

Washington’s web of contradictory alliances, overt and covert interventions, and attempts to consolidate a pro-American regional order throughout the Middle East have resulted in that region becoming more sectarian and violently unstable than at any point in modern history, while the strategic position of the United States more generally is in decline. It is in this context that strategic rapprochement between Washington and Tehran has become more advantageous to American interests than a policy of non-engagement and open support for regime change.

Though engagement and communication between the governments in Washington and Tehran are at their highest point since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there is no understating the mutual antipathy and distrust that both governments hold toward one another. While there are several areas where the interests of Washington and Tehran align, this strategic confluence does not imply that any US-Iran cooperation on issues outside the nuclear deal would be direct or even coordinated.

The Obama administration sees Iran as a potential tool that it can leverage to protect American interests and investments in Iraq, force Israel into greater restraint and compliance, and reduce dependence on its traditional Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia. However, this would not imply that Washington would scale back its attempts to curtail Iranian influence in areas where it suits US strategic interests, such as through support for anti-Assad militias in Syria and Saudi intervention in Yemen to reinstall a pro-American regime.

The Saudi monarchy feels deeply insecure about US-Iran rapprochement after being kept in the dark about the establishment of diplomatic backchannels between Washington and Tehran, while being subsequently excluded from the nuclear negotiations. Riyadh’s opposition to a Western détente with Tehran is grounded in the fear of competing with an economically dynamic, energy-rich rival, which would reduce its own strategic importance and increase the vulnerability of the regime.

Increased US shale production and Iran’s reentry into global energy markets weakens Riyadh’s leverage with Washington, which may be beginning to harbor doubts about the long-term durability of the Saudi gerontocracy’s continued control over the reigns of state power. The Obama administration undertook its policy reversal on Iran because it almost certainly sees the potential for the Saudi monarchy to become a growing liability, an impression that has been spurred on by policy differences with regard to intervention in Syria.

While the United States aided and abetted Saudi Arabia’s export of weapons and radical Salafism to fuel the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the autonomy of the Islamic State (ISIS) group and its expansion into Iraq threatens US interests and energy investments in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, as well as Saudi national security. Moreover, Iran believes that the US is insincere about fighting terrorist groups like ISIS because it has enabled the rise and condoned the conduct of similar groups in Syria – with the goal of containing Iranian influence – before they turned their guns against Western interests.

Iran is widely seen as the only force capable of defending Iraq from ISIS through its ability to bring together Kurdish troops, the Iraqi Army and the Shiite militias into a coherent force. Iran’s military involvement in Iraq has indirectly protected American interests in Baghdad and Erbil without the US having to deploy troops to engage ISIS in direct combat. In other words, Washington stands to gain by letting Iran clean up the mess created by US-Saudi policies that intended to constrain Iranian influence.

Israel, like Saudi Arabia, is principally opposed to Iran normalizing diplomatic and business relations with the Western world – not over any fantastic existential threat posed by Iran against the Jewish people – because doing so would shift the regional balance of power and constrain Israeli impunity. Tel Aviv is well aware that a nuclear deal that verifies Tehran’s peaceful compliance serves to erode any justification it could have to launch a military operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Obama administration is clearly aware that Iran poses no substantial threat to Israel, which maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal that is entirely unmonitored by the international community. Therefore, the strategic basis of the nuclear deal has more to do with constraining the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Tel Aviv, which has notoriously strained relations with the White House, thus allowing Washington to reap the aforementioned benefits of a strategic rapprochement with Iran.

Furthermore, the Obama administration was inclined to reverse its policy on Iran to avoid Russia and China displacing American business interests as they increasingly deepen strategic relations with Tehran. Washington sees the pragmatism of the Rouhani government and its desire to open to the global economy as the best bet of ensuring the unimpeded flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, at a time when the US is drawing down its military presence in the region. As long as the strategic utility of cooperation with Iran remains greater than the strategic utility of hostility, the United States can be expected to cautiously continue on its current trajectory vis-à-vis Tehran.

Nile Bowie is a Singapore-based political commentator and columnist for the Malaysian Reserve newspaper. His articles have appeared in numerous international media outlets, including Russia Today (RT) and Al Jazeera, and newspapers such as the International New York Times, the Global Times and the New Straits Times. He is a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), a NGO based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

11 April 2015

 

 

By Eric Zuesse

The motivation behind U.S. President Barack Obama’s trans-Pacific trade-deal TPP, and his trans-Atlantic trade-deal TTIP — the motivation behind both of these enormous international trade-deals — is the same, and Democratic U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown are correct: it is not at all progressive. It is instead to transfer political power away from the public in a democracy, and for that power to go instead to the international aristocracy (i.e., to go as far away from any national democracy as is even possible to go). This is to be done by switching the most fundamental thing of all: the global power-base itself. Instead of that power-base being democratic votes of the national publics, who elect their political representatives who determine the laws and regulations, that national democratic political system becomes instead the exact opposite: the global aristocratic stockholder votes of the international aristocracy who elect the corporate directors of international companies, who will, in their turn, then be selecting the members to the international-trade-panels which, in TPP and TTIP, will, in their turn, be determining the rules and enforcements regarding especially workers’ rights, product-safety, and the environment.

The international aristocracy’s weakening of these national rules will enable lowering wages of the public, who are the people who don’t control international corporations but who control only their own personal labor, which goes down in value to the lowest hourly wage in the entire international trading-area. This new system will also enable minimizing regulation of the safety of foods and other products and thus maximizing the ability of international corporations to avoid any expenses that companies would otherwise need to devote to raising the safety of their products. Those expenses (the liabilities of dangerous products) will thus be increasingly borne only by the products’ consumers. Risks to investors (which is the thing that aristocrats seek most to avoid) are consequently reduced — shifted more onto the public. It will also enable environmental harms to become virtually free to international corporations that perpetrate them, and to become likewise costs that are borne only by the general public, in toxic air, water, etc. Thus, yet another category of risks to investors will be gone. This will increase profit-margins, which go only to the stockholders — not to the public. Profits will thus become increasingly concentrated in international corporations and the families that control them, and losses will become increasingly socialized among consumers and workers — and just generally to livers and breathers: the public. ‘Government’ will increasingly be merely the spreader and enforcer of risks and penalties to the public; and, this, in turn, will enhance yet further the ‘free-market’ ideal of there being less and less, or ‘smaller,’ government; i.e., of there being less and less of ‘democratic’ government. That’s what the aristocracy’s ‘small government’ jag has really been all about: it’s about cost-shifting, from aristocrats, to the public. Thus, the maximum percentage of the costs — for product-safety, workers’ rights, and the environment — become borne by the public, and the minimum percentage of costs become borne by the stockholders in international corporations. In turn, aristocrats will be able to pass along to their designated heirs their thus ever-increasing dominance and control over the general public. Thus, the concentration of wealth will become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer families, a gradually smaller hyper-aristocracy. This is what’s happening, and it will happen now a lot more if TPP and TTIP pass. (According to the most detailed study of the matter, as of 2012, the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%.” So: the world is already extremely unequal in its wealth-distribution. TPP and TTIP are designed to increase that inequality.)

Furthermore, President Obama and the Republican Party in Congress (which support him on this, and on all other matters that are of highest concern to America’s aristocracy, such as the defeat of Russia, China and the other BRICS nations — for example, by Obama’s yanking Ukraine away from Russia’s aristocracy and into control instead by America’s aristocracy) are ensuring that America’s aristocracy will be increasingly on top internationally, and these trade-deals are additionally taking advantage of America’s being the top power across both of this planet’s two major oceans: the Atlantic, and the Pacific.

In other words: the United States, with the TPP & TTIP, will be in the extraordinary position of basically locking in, perhaps for the next century, the U.S. aristocracy’s participation in both of the two major international-trade compacts. This commercial lock-in will retain the American aristocracy’s control over the national aristocracies of almost all of the other major industrial nations — encompassing virtually all of the northern hemisphere, which is where most of this planet’s land-mass is located.

Consequently: not only will the global aristocracy control the global public, but the U.S. aristocracy will also control the other aristocracies in ways that will increase their collective power against any non-member national aristocracy; and, so, America’s Empire will be increasingly the biggest global Empire that the world has ever known, by exploiting the publics everywhere, and not only within merely one country.

Obama told graduating West Point cadets, on 28 May 2014: “China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: part of these future military officers’ jobs will be to help make sure that the BRICS, and other countries that have lower per-capita wealth than in America, stay poor, so that America’s aristocrats can send jobs there instead of pay America’s own workers to do it — in other words: get America’s workers competing against ones in poor countries, rather than get America’s investors competing against ones in poor countries. He’s telling America’s military that they are soldiers in this international class-war, paid by the public, but working actually for America’s aristocracy and not for the public, but against America’s public — to drive down their wages, food-safety, etc.

This is the way toward a certain type of world government by the super-rich for the super-rich, keeping them and their appointed heirs in control over the assets of the entire globe — both its natural and its human resources — and using as the local agents throughout the world the local aristocrats, who will be the people who will keep their local publics in line and working for the ever-increasing intensification of the planet’s wealth, in the hands of, first, the global aristocracy, and, second, America’s aristocracy as being the globally dominant aristocracy.

What will remain of local national governments will then become mere shells.

Benito Mussolini, who learned his fascism from the founder of fascism, his teacher Vilfredo Pareto (whom Mussolini called “the Karl Marx of fascism”), who was also the founder of modern economic theory and especially of its Welfare Criterion, which shapes so much of the rest of economics and especially all cost-benefit analyses (such as of proposed means to restrain global warming), explained as follows the “corporationism” that he held to constitute fascism:

“The corporation plays on the economic terrain just as the Grand Council and the militia play on the political terrain. Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director. Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created.”

Following below this article will be Mussolini’s essay on that issue, in which he sets forth what he claims is a post-capitalist, post-socialist, ideology, and which the also self-described post-capitalist post-socialist Barack Obama (as an agent for the global aristocracy) is increasingly putting into actual practice — especially via TPP & TTIP.

Regarding specifically international-trade deals, Mussolini’s master, Pareto, said that the free market should reign supreme and untrammeled by the State in all regards, not only within nations, but also, and even especially, between nations. As I noted in this regard, in my recent book on the historical development of fascism, up to and including our own time:

“Pareto was consistently a free-market purist, since at least 1896. For example, in his 1 September 1897 ‘The New Theories of Economics’ in the Journal of Political Economy, he stated: ‘Were I of the opinion that a certain book would contribute more than any other to establish free trade in the world at large I would not hesitate an instant to give myself up heart and soul to the study of this particular work, putting aside for the time all study of pure science.’ He also said there: ‘We have been able vigorously to prove that the coefficients of production are determined by the entrepreneurs in a régime of free competition precisely in the same way as a socialist government would have to fix them if it wanted to realize a maximum of ophelimity [his invented term for ‘welfare’ in order to obscure the actual value-base so as to enable economists to pretend to be value-free even as they ranked things in benefit/cost analyses that are, in fact, applying his pro-aristocratic or ‘fascist’ theory] for its subjects.” [And notice there Pareto’s slip-up, referring to the government as having not ‘citizens’ but instead ‘subjects’ — the underlying aristocratic assumpion, that the public are ‘subjects’ instead of real ‘citizens’.] Pareto always challenged whether a socialist government would be able to achieve that, but he was here saying that the free market would do it naturally, just like the physiocrats had said that ‘natural law’ should reign instead of any tampering with it.

Pareto set Adam Smithian economics, and the economics of the French physiocrats who had laid the foundation for Smith’s economic theory, upon a basis that subequent economists could then develop mathematically in a way that would hide the theory’s essential fascism — the modernized (i.e., post-agrarian) form of feudalism.

Barack Obama and congressional Republicans are simply carrying this fascist operation to the next level. As for congressional Democrats, they are split on it, because (at least until the new economic theory that I put forth in my new book) no one yet has formulated an economic theory for a democracy; current economic theory has been designed instead specifically for a fascism — an aristocratically controlled State. Consequently, the few progressive Democrats that still remain in Congress are experiencing difficulty to communicate easily and readily to the public what the real political and economic stakes are in Obama’s proposed TPP and TTIP: the transfer of national democratic sovereignty over to an international fascist aristocracy, which will be dominated by American aristocrats. Without that transfer, of democratic national sovereignty to international fascist bodies that represent global corporate management, these deals would be nothing.

This transfer is called Investor-State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS. It is really an emerging, and distictively fascistic, world government. It is not at all democratic, and it is a creeping form of international government which, to the extent that it becomes imposed, reduces national sovereignty. The prior, progressive, type of world-government proposal, which had been fashionable after World War II in order to make a WW III less likely, was based instead upon the idea of an international federation of independent democracies. ISDS has nothing in common with that, the original vision for world government. It is instead pure fascism, on an international scale.

In the first decades after World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision of an ultimately emerging democratic world government predominated, aiming for an emerging democratic United Nations, which would evolve to encompass in an increasingly equalitarian way more and more of the world; but, after Republican control started becoming restored in the U.S. with Dwight Eisenhower and his installation of the Dulles brothers to control and shape future U.S. international policies, things moved increasingly in the direction of a U.S.-aristocracy-based control over the world (especially with the Allen Dulles CIA coup in 1953 Iran); and Barack Obama is thoroughly in that fascist, overwhelmingly Republican, tradition, even though he is nominally a ‘Democrat.’ Some analysts even consider Obama to be a CIA operative from early in his life. (The CIA, when Eisenhower came into office, placed the CIA’s pro-Nazis into control; and, afterward, this control has only become more deeply entrenched there.) The British journalist Robert Fitch seems to have figured Obama out even as far back as 14 November 2008, right after Obama was elected to become President. Basically, Fitch described Obama as a fascist who had determined to rise to power by fooling progressives into thinking he was one of them. He was portraying Obama as a Manchurian-candidate, Trojan-Horse, Republican-in-Democratic-rhetorical-clothes, conservative operative. He had Obama right, even that early.

As regards not what economic theory but instead empirical economic studies indicate would likely be the result from both the TPP and the TTIP: one independent economic analysis has been done for each of these two international-trade deals, and both of them come up with the same conclusion: the publics everywhere will lose wealth because of them, but aristocrats, especially in the United States, will gain wealth because of them. They’ll probably do what they were designed to do.

As regards what some of Obama’s defenders say about his trade-deals, namely that Investor-State Dispute Settlement is merely a detail and the overall deal is good: that’s like saying that a person’s health is good but the brain or the heart needs to be fixed or maybe even replaced. These people know it’s a bad deal; that’s why they support it. They’re being paid by the aristocracy.

WOULD HILLARY CLINTON BE ANY BETTER?

What, then, about Obama’s intended successor? Would she be any different? Here’s the record concerning that:

On 23 February 2008, Hillary Clinton stood before microphones and cameras, and harangued in angry tones, “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” alleging that two of his campaign’s flyers lied about her positions.

One of the flyers said that her proposed health-insurance mandate would penalize Americans who didn’t buy health insurance. It was true but she tried to deny it. (Only after Obama was elected did he copy her plan by merely adding the individual mandate to his own.) The other flyer which Hillary was complaining about, quoted Newsday’s characterization of Hillary’s NAFTA view in 2006: “Clinton thinks NAFTA has been a boon to the economy.” Hillary now was also claiming that this was a lie. Many in the press blindly supported her accusation against Obama here, because “a boon” was Newsday’s phrase, not hers. However, again, it was she, and not Obama, who was lying. Her 2003 Living History (p. 182) actually did brag about her husband’s having passed NAFTA, and she said: “Creating a free trade zone in North America — the largest free trade zone in the world — would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our country was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization.” This was one of, supposedly, her proudest achievements, which were (p. 231) “Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA.” But Hillary was now demanding that Obama apologize for his flyer’s having said: “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals.” That statement was just a fact, notwithstanding what Hillary, and many of the major U.S. “news” media, were now alleging. (Obama was saving his worst to be delivered to the nation only after he would become President — and, especially, after he would be re-elected and then he could be free to go far-right, which was his genuine inclination even at the start, though he couldn’t achieve the goal if he didn’t first deceive about what his goal actually is, so that he could maybe get into position to achieve it.)

On 20 March 2008, the day after Hillary finally released her schedule during her White House years, the Nation’s John Nichols blogged “Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy,” and he said: “Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that [the] former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; … now that we know she was in the thick of the maneuvering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement; … now that we know from official records of her time as First Lady that Clinton was the featured speaker at a closed-door session where 120 women opinion leaders were hectored to pressure their congressional representatives to approve NAFTA; now that we know from ABC News reporting on the session that ‘her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA’ and that ‘there was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time’; … what should we make of Clinton’s campaign claim that she was never comfortable with the militant free-trade agenda that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of union jobs?”

The next day, ABC’s Jake Tapper, at his “Political Punch” blog, headlined “From the Fact Check Desk: The Clinton Campaign Misrepresents Clinton NAFTA Meeting,” and he reported: “I have now talked to three former Clinton Administration officials whom I trust who tell me that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed the idea of introducing NAFTA before health care, but expressed no reservations in public or private about the substance of NAFTA. Yet the Clinton campaign continues to propagate this myth that she fought NAFTA.” She continued this lie even after it had been repeatedly and soundly exposed to be a lie.

Consequently: the only real difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that Obama is a vastly more skilled liar. It’s how he has gotten as far as he has. She probably won’t; she’s the same incompetent now that she was back then.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

Excerpts from George Seldes’s 1935 book about Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar:

APPENDIX 15

Capitalism and the Corporate State
by Benito Mussolini, November, 1933

Is this crisis which has afflicted us for four years a crisis in the system or of the system? This is a serious question. I answer: The crisis has so deeply penetrated the system that it has become a crisis of the system. It is no longer an ailment; it is a constitutional disease.

Today we are able to say that the method of capitalistic production is vanquished, and with it the theory of economic liberalism which has illustrated and excused it. I want to outline in a general way the history of capitalism in the last century, which may be called the capitalistic century. But first of all, what is capitalism?

Capitalism is … a method of industrial production. To employ the most comprehensive definition: Capitalism is a method of mass production for mass consumption, financed en masse by the emission of private, national and international capital. Capitalism is therefore industrial and has not had in the field of agriculture any manifestation of great bearing.

I would mark in the history of capitalism three periods: the dynamic period, the static period, and the period of decline.

The dynamic period was that from 1830 to 1870. It coincided with the introduction of weaving by machinery and with the appearance of the locomotive. Manufacturing, the typical manifestation of industrial capitalism, expanded. This was the epoch of great expansion and hence of the law of free competition; the struggle of all against all had full play.

In this period there were crises, but they were cyclical crises, neither long nor universal. Capitalism still had such vitality and such power of recovery that it could brilliantly prevail.

There were also wars. They cannot be compared with the World War. They were brief. Even the War of 1870, with its tragic days at Sedan, took no more than a couple of seasons.

During the forty years of the dynamic period the State was watching; it was remote, and the theorists of liberalism could say: ‘You, the State, have a single duty. It is to see to it that your administration does not in the least turn toward the economic sector. The better you govern the less you will occupy yourself with the problems of the economic realm.’ We find, therefore, that economy in all its forms was limited only by the penal and commercial codes.

But after 1870, this epoch underwent a change. There was no longer the struggle for life, free competition, the selection of the strongest. There became manifest the first symptoms of the fatigue and the devolution of the capitalistic method. There began to be agreements, syndicates, corporations, trusts. One may say that there was not a sector of economic life in the countries of Europe and America where these forces which characterize capitalism did not appear.

What was the result? The end of free competition. Restricted as to its borders, capitalistic enterprise found that, rather than fight, it was better to concede, to ally, to unite by dividing the markets and sharing the profits. The very law of demand and supply was now no longer a dogma, because through the combines and the trusts it was possible to control demand and supply.

Finally, this capitalistic economy, unified,’trustified,’ turned toward the State. What inspired it to do so? Tariff protection.

Liberalism, which is nothing but a wider form of the doctrine of economic liberalism, received a death blow. The nation which, from the first, raised almost insurmountable trade barriers was the United States, but today even England has renounced all that seemed traditional in her political, economic and moral life, and has surrendered herself to a constantly increasing protectionism.

After the World War, and because of it, capitalistic enterprise became inflated. Enterprises grew in size from millions to billions. Seen from a distance, this vertical sweep of things appeared as something monstrous, babel-like. Once, the spirit had dominated the material; now it was the material which bent and joined the spirit. Whatever had been physiological was now pathological; all became abnormal.

At this stage, super-capitalism draws its inspiration and its justification from this Utopian theory: the theory of unlimited consumers. The ideal of super-capitalism would be the standardization of the human race from the cradle to the coffin. Super-capitalism would have all men born of the same length, so that all cradles could be standardized; it would have babies divert themselves with the same playthings, men clothed according to the same pattern, all reading the same book and having the same taste for the movies — in other words, it would have everybody desiring a single utilitarian machine. This is in the logic of things, because only in this way can super-capitalism do what it wishes.

When does capitalistic enterprise cease to be an economic factor? When its size compels it to be a social factor. And that, precisely, is the moment when capitalistic enterprise, finding itself in difficulty, throws itself into the very arms of the State; It is the moment when the intervention of the State begins, rendering itself ever more necessary.

We are at this point: that, if in all the nations of Europe the State were to go to sleep for twenty-four hours, such an interval would be sufficient to cause a disaster. Now, there is no economic field in which the State is not called upon to intervene. Were we to surrender — just as a matter of hypothesis — to this capitalism of the eleventh hour, we should arrive at State capitalism, which is nothing but State socialism inverted.

This is the crisis of the capitalist system, taken in its universal significance. …

Last evening I presented an order in which I defined the new corporation system as we understand it and wish to make it.

I should like to fix your attention on what was called the object: the well-being of the Italian people. It is necessary that, at a certain time, these institutions, which we have created, be judged and measured directly by the masses as instruments through which these masses may improve their standard of living. Some day the worker, the tiller of the soil, will say to himself and to others: ‘If today I am better off practically, I owe it to the institutions which the Fascist revolution has created.’

We want the Italian workers, those who are interested in their status as Italians, as workers, as Fascists, to feel that we have not created institutions solely to give form to our doctrinal schemes, but in order, at a certain moment, to give positive, concrete, practical and tangible results.

Our State is not an absolute State. Still less is it an absolutory State, remote from men and armed only with inflexible laws, as laws ought to be. Our State is one organic, human State which wishes to adhere to the realities of life. …

Today we bury economic liberalism. The corporation plays on the economic terrain just as the Grand Council and the militia play on the political terrain. Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director.

Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. All the Socialist parties of Europe are in fragments.

Evidently the two phenomena — I will not say conditions — present a point of view which is strictly logical: there is between them a historical parallel. Corporative economy arises at the historic moment when both the militant phenomena, capitalism and socialism, have already given all that they could give. From one and from the other we inherit what they have of vitality.

We have rejected the theory of the economic man, the Liberal theory, and we are, at the same time, emancipated from what we have heard said about work being a business. The economic man does not exist; the integral man, who is political, who is economic, who is religious, who is holy, who is combative, does exist.

Today we take again a decisive step on the road of the revolution.

Let us ask a final question: Can corporationism be applied to other countries? We are obliged to ask this question because it will be asked in all countries where people are studying and trying to understand us. There is no doubt that, given the general crisis of capitalism, corporative solutions can be applied anywhere. But in order to make corporationism full and complete, integral, revolutionary, certain conditions are required.

There must be a single party through which, aside from economic discipline, enters into action also political discipline, which shall serve as a chain to bind the opposing factions together, and a common faith.

But this is not enough. There must be the supremacy of the State, so that the State may absorb, transform and embody all the energy, all the interests, all the hopes of a people.

Still, not enough. The third and last and the most important condition is that there must be lived a period of the highest ideal tension.

We are now living in this period of high, ideal tension. It is because step by step we give force and consistency to all our acts; we translate in part all our doctrine. How can we deny that this, our Fascista, is a period of exalted, ideal tension?

No one can deny it. This is the time in which arms are crowned with victory. Institutions are remade, the land is redeemed, cities are founded.

Here are two excerpts from the Seldes book’s APPENDIX 9, “the Labor Charter,” a document that dates from 22 April 1927:

Art. 2. Labor in all forms, intellectual, technical and manual, is a social duty. In this sense, and in this sense only, is it protected by the State. From the national point of view all production is a unit; its objects are unitary and can be defined as the wellbeing of the producers and the development of national strength. …

Art. 7. The Corporate State considers private initiative in the field of production the most efficacious and most useful instrument in the interest of the nation. Private organization of production being a function of national interest, the organization of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction of its production. Reciprocity of the rights and duties is derived from the collaboration of the productive forces. The technician, office employee and worker is an active collaborator in the economic undertaking, the direction of which is the right of the employer, who has the responsibility for it.

26 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Bill Van Auken

Saudi warplanes carried out at least 20 air strikes across Yemen Thursday, just two days after a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian military announced that so-called Operation Decisive Storm, which began March 26, had ended and a new phase, described as “Operation Renewal of Hope,” had begun.

The continued bombardment came as UN and Yemeni officials both placed the death toll at roughly 1,000 Yemenis, the majority of them civilians, including at least 134 children.

For millions of Yemenis who have survived the nearly month-long bombing campaign, conditions are growing increasingly desperate.

“The country is going completely down the drain, and I don’t think it is good for anybody to have Yemen completely collapse and in total chaos,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told Foreign Policy in an interview late Wednesday.

The head of Middle East operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described the destruction inflicted on the country as “shocking.”

Speaking after a three-day visit to the impoverished country, the ICRC’s Robert Mardini said, “Nowhere is safe in Yemen today. Nearly a month of death and destruction after years of crisis leaves little hope for Yemenis to lead a normal life.”

Describing the humanitarian catastrophe in the capital of Sana’a, he said there was “no electricity, no water, no food, no public services, no garbage collection.” He added that children “are traumatized by the air strikes at night.”

In the latest round of bombings, at least 20 people were killed in the northwestern city of al-Dhale, where Saudi warplanes targeted two schools and a gym.

Even before the dropping of some 3,500 bombs on its cities, Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East, with some 16 million people—over 60 percent of the population—dependent upon aid for their survival. A US-backed Saudi blockade has cut off that aid.

The brutal bombing campaign has led to increasing charges of war crimes, as Saudi warplanes have struck schools, hospitals, residential neighborhoods and a dairy factory, where 31 workers were killed.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch warned Thursday that the Saudi-led air assault appeared to involve war crimes in the deliberate targeting of “civilians and civilian objects” and the impeding of humanitarian aid to the civilian population.

It cited in particular the bombing on April 18 of a warehouse facility of the British-based charity Oxfam in the northern city of Sadaa.

“Destroying an aid group warehouse harms many civilians not even near the strike zone and threatens aid delivery everywhere in Yemen,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

Oxfam’s Yemen country director, Grace Ommer, denounced the strike on the warehouse as “an absolute outrage.” She said the aid group had informed the Saudi-led military coalition of the location of its offices and storage facilities.

“The contents of the warehouse had no military value,” she said, noting that material kept there was needed to provide clean drinking water to Sadaa’s population.

The Obama administration is directly complicit in the war crimes against the people of Yemen. It has provided logistical support for the bombing campaign, including the aerial refueling of Saudi warplanes, as well as targeting information and other intelligence. It has also rushed bombs, missiles and other weaponry to replenish the supplies of the military of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchical regimes participating in the war.

Washington has backed the war in order to support the dictatorship of the Saudi royal family, which has long functioned as a lynchpin for US domination and reaction in the Middle East.

The goal of the war is to suppress the so-called Houthi rebels (the Ansar Allah insurgency, based among the Zaydi Shi’a population, which makes up between 35 and 40 percent of Yemen’s population) and restore to power Riyadh’s own stooge, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Hadi was installed as president in a 2012 “election” in which he was the only candidate.

While anxious to curry favor with the Saudi monarchy and placate its opposition to the deal being pursued by Washington and the other major powers on the nuclear program of Iran—Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival—the Obama administration has appeared to grow increasingly wary of the war, which has accomplished little outside of inflicting mass civilian casualties and further destabilizing Yemen.

Among the principal beneficiaries of the war has been Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Previously portrayed by Washington as the premier terrorist threat to the US “homeland,” now, as a vicious sectarian enemy of the Houthis, it has been given tacit support by the Saudis and the US itself.

In an interview with MSNBC late Tuesday, US president Barack Obama acted as if the US was not a participant in the war against Yemen, while indicting Iran for providing supposed aid to the Houthi rebels. Washington has repeatedly charged that the Tehran has supplied arms to the Houthis, while presenting no evidence. Iran has denied the charges.

The Pentagon has dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to join eight other US warships off the coast of Yemen amid threats that they could be used to intercept Iranian ships. US defense secretary Ashton Carter refused Wednesday to say whether the US Navy would forcibly stop and board the ships, saying only, “We have options.”

While the Obama administration has claimed it supports a negotiated political settlement in Yemen, and the Houthi leadership has indicated that it also sought such a settlement, it is far from clear such a deal can be reached.

The Saudis have insisted talks are possible only if the Houthis first lay down their arms, and that they must restore Hadi to power. Meanwhile, forces in the south of the country that have resisted the Houthis have indicated they have no interest in supporting Hadi or any other central government leader, but rather want to secede from the north.

The filthy character of the war, waged by a group of parasitic oil monarchies against the poorest country of the region, found expression in a message tweeted by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family and the richest man in the kingdom. He declared that “in appreciation of their role” in the war, he was offering to give “100 Bentley cars to the 100 Saudi [fighter] pilots.” The British-made luxury cars sell for roughly $200,000 each.

The prince’s offer provoked an outraged response on Twitter. One Yemeni replied, “100 Bentley cars to 100 pilots who bombed Yemen. Not a single ambulance to its hospitals they devastated.”

Another Yemeni, who had posted photographs of his bomb-ravaged apartment and his children looking out at the rubble of Sana’a, wrote, “Glad I’m alive. But who’s paying for all this mess? I get blown up, pilots get the Bentleys. Unfair world.”

24 April, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Serge Jordan

The barbarous terrorist attack on the 18 March at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, that claimed 22 lives, represents a watershed in the political situation of post-revolution Tunisia. This appalling event, the first terrorist act of this scale to take place in the heart of the capital, came as a reminder of the stark reality hidden behind the laudatory propaganda of the mainstream media and politicians about the successful “democratic transition.”

But the Bardo attack has also given a convenient excuse for the ruling class to try and speed up its counter-revolutionary offensive on the Tunisian masses, in both the economic and political fields. It appears that the newly-elected President Beji Caid Essebsi’s obsession of “restoring the prestige and authority of the State” has been given a boost. The US government has already announced a tripling of its military aid to the country.

The Tunisian government -whose leading political force, Nidaa Tounes, is partly a recycling machine for old regime supporters and corrupt businessmen linked to the former Ben Ali dictatorship- has seized the recent terrorist strike as a golden opportunity to reassert a heavier State machinery, and to target the social movements and strikes which have been increasing since the beginning of this year.

The official position focuses on the fact that the Bardo attackers were targeting the new “symbol of democracy” that Tunisian institutions arguably represent. This ironically coincides with the new government exploiting this very event to impose a clampdown on democratic rights. A recent report from Human Rights Watch detailed how the government’s new anti-terrorism draft bill, if passed in parliament, would allow extended detention without charge, would see the disruption of public services prosecuted as a “terrorist act”, and justify the use of the death penalty.

Under the guise of the “protection of the armed forces”, another draft law adopted by the council of ministers on 8 April would, de facto, give a status of impunity to the security forces at the expense of people’s freedoms. Among other things, it says that “no criminal liability shall be attached to an agent who would cause the death of an individual in the context of the mission he pursues”.

The shift in language used in the Tunisian press since 18 March also highlights an acceleration of the ideological offensive to shame all the workers and poor people who fight for their rights:

“The gratuitous and manipulated protest movements are threatening the fragile economic balance of the country. Why do we see them everywhere and without any valid reasons? Should Tunisia decree that those who attack the country’s economic fabric must be considered as economic terrorists? And why not after all? Should we tolerate that a handful of badly intentioned people, conducted by saboteurs, manipulators and destroyers, make of our country a new Somalia?” (Directinfo, 14/04)

This comes also with a new spike in vilifications of the revolution itself, and in some cases, the spreading of a perfume of nostalgia for the days of overt dictatorial rule:

“Human rights lose all their meaning in the face of these terrorists” (Touhami Abdouli, Le Temps, 21/03)

“Obviously, we will never ask ourselves the question of why Tunisia had peace during 23 years of dictatorial regime” (Le Temps, 22/03)

This attempt to bury the legacy of the revolution marks a certain re-assertion of the “old guard” within the State and its appendages, that the electoral victory of Nidaa Tounes has unleashed. The composition of the government is no exception. The Prime Minister Habib Essid himself occupied several posts as secretary of state under the Ben Ali regime, and others in his cabinet have similar pedigrees. After the Bardo attacks, some high security officials who had been sacked in 2011 during a mild cleansing reform within the Interior Ministry have been re-incorporated in their jobs. This move is justified by their supposed experience in the struggle against terrorism – a “struggle against terrorism” which, under Ben Ali, was a cover for the harassment, imprisonment and torture of thousands of political and trade union activists. Similarly, two days after the attack, Essebsi argued in a TV speech for the country to accept “painful reforms”, and defended the lifting of all the restrictions on businessmen who are within the scope of lawsuits and travel bans for their connections with the Ben Ali regime.

National unity?

The Tunisian ruling class and its imperialist backers such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Western governments behind them, plans more deregulation of business requirements, privatisations of state-owned banks and other companies, liquidation of the state subsidy system and other neo-liberal measures. All of which have one essential aim -squeezing the revenues of working class families further, while maximising the profit-making avenues for the bosses, the shareholders and the international creditors.

They all hope to exploit the shock following the Bardo bloodshed to push through their anti-working class agenda.

Part of this involves the hammering down of the need for “national unity”. How convenient! A few months ago, the leading parties in the present government, Nidaa Tounes and the right-wing Islamists of Ennahda, were still both trying to convince us that there was an irreconcilable fracture in Tunisian society, between the “modernists” in favour of a “civilian State” on the one hand, and the Islamists in favour of a “religious State” on the other hand. Now that this masquerade has been exposed for what it is, because the enemies of yesterday have now joined hands in the same coalition to the exclusive benefit of their big business friends, we are supposed to be convinced that their “sacred union” should be ours as well.

National unity is a suitable weapon of the ruling class to try and neutralise opposition to its rule, even as its mouthpieces engage in throwing mud at striking workers and communities in struggle. This new mantra for national reconciliation is aimed at deflecting the mounting class anger by rallying the whole country behind a common enemy, and at trying to bind the workers’ hands and feet with their capitalist masters.

But the growing number of disputes taking place in the workplaces, in both public and private sectors, illustrates that a serious gulf is building up between the capitalist class’s wishful thinking and the reality on the ground. Government officials are well aware that beyond the political use of the present state of affairs, they will not prevent serious backlashes from the working class. The repeated militant national strike actions by the teachers’ union since the beginning of the year have given a flavour of what people in power might have to expect for the year to come. The teachers’ strike, last Wednesday, recorded an average participation rate of 95.3 % across the country according to union figures (the highest being in the central region of Gafsa with 99.6%, and the lowest in the northern region of Bizerte with 91%).

In the phosphate mines, in the textile industry, in the postal services, among the pilots, in public transport -numerous sectors have been involved in industrial action in the recent weeks. The UGTT also announced a two-day national strike in the health sector on the 28 and 29 April. A report published on the day of the Bardo tragedy noted that 94 strikes had taken place since the beginning of 2015, including 74 in the private sector. It is becoming clear that the government’s hope of using the terrorism scarecrow to reduce this nascent wave of working class resistance has been extremely short-lived.

The burning question is: when is the leadership of the workers’ movement eventually going to decide to waken up to the burgeoning reality and lead the millions who are striving for action and real change?

Leadership missing in action

While the government pretends to be engaged in a resolute fight against terrorism, its policies of social devastation only increase the sense of hopelessness and despair among the poorest in society, leading to the growth of religious extremism in the country. Poor neighbourhoods that have become a fertile ground for the recruitment of jihadists are, before anything else, areas where state policy has failed in every respect.

This is why the struggle against terror is intimately linked with the struggle to achieve a decisive break from the economic policies pursued by successive governments since the fall of Ben Ali who have all fundamentally applied the disastrous recipes of the old regime.

The Tunisian General labour Union UGTT has called for a “national congress against terrorism”. But its appeal is directed towards the existing capitalist establishment. It even aims at bringing on board the UTICA (Tunisian Union of Industry and Commerce), the national bosses’ organisation, rather than serving as a lever to organise the fight-back against the government and to engage in a serious discussion on building a working class alternative to the continuing austerity and state repression, which is all that this right-wing government has on offer for the Tunisian people.

Since the Bardo museum attack, the UGTT central executive has essentially echoed the government’s rhetoric about the need for “national unity” rather than providing its affiliates with a plan of action worthy of its name, independently from all the manoeuvres of the capitalists and their parties, and challenging the state’s pretensions to set the tone on anti-terrorism.

The lack of lead from the trade union leadership, and from the left-leaning Popular Front coalition for that matter, has allowed a vacuum that has been occupied by pro-capitalist establishment figures. This has meant that the voice of working people, of trade unionists and left activists, of the revolutionary youth, of the unemployed, has hardly been heard in this debate.

The workers’ movement needs its own political voice

In its last paper, the CWI in Tunisia, Al-Badil al-Ishtiraki (Socialist Alternative), draws parallels between the terror of the jihadists and the State-sponsored terror, and pushes forward proposals for actions based on rejecting both, and campaigning for the transformation of all the local and sectorial social battles into a mass political struggle to eventually topple Essid’s government.

At the present time, this might sound like a herculean task. But the present government is much weaker than it seems. More than four million Tunisians (out of a population of eleven million), including about 80% of the youth between 19 and 25 years old, abstained in the last legislative elections. An internal crisis is already affecting the main governing parties. The existence of such an improbable coalition is in itself a sign of the difficulties for the ruling class to assemble in the first place a tool capable of implementing their desired policies.

The apparent “strength” of the present government only betrays the extremely timorous character of the workers’ leaders and their lack of confidence in the class whose interests they are supposed to defend.   The acquaintances between parts of the UGTT bureaucracy and the Nidaa Tounes party have notably acted as a brake on the response, or rather the lack of it, from the UGTT headquarters in the recent events.

A united front of all workers and social organisations, around the militant bases of the UGTT and the left, of unemployed organisations like the UDC (Union of Unemployed Graduates) and of the social movements, is urgently needed to push back the counter-revolutionary offensive. The starting point of such a movement could be the campaign for organising a mass 24-hour general strike in order to bring all the layers in struggle together, on the basis of the total refusal of any economic “sacrifices” or any erosion of democratic rights.

Such a general strike would have to be seen as a springboard towards escalating actions and demands, until the government is given a decisive blow. Local general assemblies and democratic committees of action in the communities and workplaces would help widen the active support base of the movement, by providing a space to discuss and democratically decide the next steps in the struggle. In the long run, the local, regional and national coordination of such bodies could constitute the backbone for a government genuinely fulfilling the revolution’s demands.

All the governments since the overthrow of Ben Ali have failed the revolution entirely, and the present one is no exception. If anything, this cabinet is composed of all the fundamental components of the reaction put together. The struggle for a progressive government of the poor, the youth and the working masses, based on a socialist program of nationalisation of all major industries, banks, and big land properties under the democratic control of the Tunisian people, is what the left and the trade union movement should strategically prepare the people for.

An independent working class political alternative decisively turned towards grassroots struggles, equipped with a militant programme of action, as well as with democratic and inclusive structures, is what is crucially missing at this point. The rise of reactionary religious forces, the electoral victory of a party based on old-regime cronies, the lack of a proper response from the left after the Bardo attack -all recent developments in Tunisia underline the need to urgently rebuild an authentic independent political voice for the working class, the youth and all the people who have carried out the revolution with genuine hopes for a better future.

Serge Jordan works for the Committee for a Workers’ International

22 April, 2015
Socialistworld.net

By Rod Such

On Palestine by Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky (UK: Penguin, 224 pp, US: Haymarket)

When they write or speak about Palestine, few academics on the left command the same attention as Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe. Their latest joint effort, a sequel to the 2010 book Gaza in Crisis, is titled simply On Palestine.

This slim volume, which runs to approximately 200 pages, is notable not only for the many issues on which the two men agree but also for their disagreements. Both center on some of the principal strategic and tactical issues facing the global Palestine solidarity movement.

These include applying the “apartheid model” to Israel, the effectiveness of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, and the debate over the one-state and two-state solutions. For these discussions alone, this book merits attention.

The first part of the book consists of dialogues between Chomsky and Pappe on Palestine’s past, present and future. Editor and human rights activist Frank Barat guides these conversations. He also separately interviews Pappe on the current political situation inside his native Israel and Chomsky on the current role of the United States in the so-called peace negotiations.

Paradoxes

An introductory chapter by Pappe helps frame these conversations. In it, the historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine outlines four paradoxes confronting the solidarity movement.

The first paradox is why international public opinion overwhelmingly condemns Israel’s human rights violations and yet Israel can still rely on the support of Western governments. The second is why Israeli society has failed to acknowledge global opinion and continues to perceive itself in a positive way.

The third is why the Palestine solidarity movement has largely failed to make Zionist ideology the centerpiece of its critique of Israel despite the fact that Zionism is at the root of Israel’s criminality. The fourth paradox is why Israeli propaganda has still largely succeeded in portraying the conflict as “complicated” when in reality, as Pappe puts it, it’s a familiar and simple case of settler colonialism.

To address these paradoxes, Pappe suggests that the solidarity movement needs to introduce a new lexicon that frames the struggle in terms of decolonization, “regime change” and the imperative of a one-state solution. These terms, Pappe argues, give activists a way of getting beyond the old orthodoxy of resolving the conflict through peace negotiations and a two-state solution, which have failed, he says, because Israel is guided by an ideology that seeks to “de-Arabize” all of historic Palestine.

The Israeli government will never cease to seek this goal until it’s confronted with the necessity to end its colonial project, become a state of all its citizens, pay reparations to the Palestinians it forced into exile, and abandon the project of apartheid that is implicit in the two-state solution.

Tantalizing ideas

Chomsky and Pappe agree on many of these issues. The dialogues show both men acknowledging that Israel is a settler-colonial society.

Chomsky notes that this fact probably explains why Australia, Canada and the United States are Israel’s most consistent supporters since the settler-colonial origins of all four countries make them natural allies.

Like any conversation, much of the content in these dialogues is often suggestive rather than grounded in rigorous argument. The two scholars throw out some tantalizing ideas.

Pappe, for example, proposes that Islamophobia is not a recent phenomenon and that it played a prominent role in winning Western support for Israel’s existence. Chomsky says it is critical for the BDS movement to target the US role in supporting Israel since Israel, like apartheid South Africa before it, understands that it can persist as a “pariah state” as long as it has US backing.

Chomsky comes off as much less hostile to and dismissive of the BDS movement in this volume than he was in a notorious article he wrote for The Nation last year. He criticizes advocates of an academic and cultural boycott for failing to prepare the groundwork for their campaign, resulting, he says, in a vulnerability to charges of violating academic freedom.

Pappe disagrees, but despite his defense of the academic boycott, one of the deficiencies of this book — namely the absence of Palestinian voices — becomes particularly glaring here.

Chomsky also appears to be much less rigid in maintaining that US support for Israel is solely guided by its own imperialist interests, an argument forcefully sustained in his 1983 book The Fateful Triangle. Here he appears to envision waning US support for Israel, especially because of the shift in US public opinion among young people.

Peace talks charade

The sharpest divergence between Pappe and Chomsky becomes apparent in part two, which consists of several articles previously published by Chomsky and original contributions by Pappe. Both scholars agree that the peace negotiations have been an elaborate charade allowing Israel to continue to colonize the West Bank.

Chomsky argues that Israel’s conception of a two-state solution is at best a group of isolated, landlocked cantons in the West Bank in which a tiny Palestinian elite enjoys limited autonomy in Ramallah and Gaza exists wholly apart so that a Palestinian state will have no access to the outside world.

Nevertheless, Chomsky believes that a two-state solution is the only realistic one given that there is an international consensus behind it. The US government, he argues, could be compelled to cease providing support for Israel’s violations of international law.

Facing that prospect, Israel might recognize its total international isolation and negotiate a two-state solution based on the international consensus.

Pappe, on the other hand, argues that the two-state solution is no solution at all because it doesn’t address the problem: Zionism as a colonialist movement and Israel as a “racist, apartheid state.” The solution starts, he writes, “within a framework where all [including Palestinian refugees] enjoy full rights, equality and partnership.”

Unfortunately, neither Pappe nor Chomsky invoke the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. That was the fundamental right denied the Palestinians in 1948, and until that right is exercised, it’s hard to see how the Palestinian people will win liberation from colonialism.

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He is active with Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace-Portland Chapter and the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign

22 April 2015
The Electronic Intifada

 

By John Dalhuisen

The killing of journalist Oles Buzyna on a Kyiv street this week was shocking enough in and of itself.

According to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, the 45-year-old journalist – who was widely known for his pro-Russian views – was gunned down by masked assailants in a drive-by shooting.

But what makes his murder especially chilling is the fact that it is just the latest among a string of suspicious deaths of former allies of Ukraine’s deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych. It came only a day after a member of Ukraine’s political opposition, Oleg Kalashnikov, was also found shot dead in the capital.

This week’s deaths are not alone. Since the end of January, several allies of Ukraine’s deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych have been found dead – many of them in suspicious circumstances.

Oleksandr Peklushenko, a former regional governor, and ex-MP Stanislav Melnyk were also shot. Mykhaylo Chechetov, former deputy chairman of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, allegedly jumped from a window in his 17th-floor flat. Serhiy Valter, a mayor in the south-eastern city of Melitopol, was found hanged, as was Oleksiy Kolesnyk, ex-head of Kharkiv’s regional government. The body of Oleksandr Bordyuh, a former police deputy chief in Melitopol, was found at his home.

This string of deaths has put the Ukrainian authorities in the hot seat.

Police were initially quick to classify many of them as suicides.

It is certainly plausible that some of the deaths were suicides or accidents. However, in the absence of credible investigations, and given the rapid succession of the deaths within the wider context of Ukraine’s political climate at the moment, nobody can rule out that some of them were politically-motivated killings. But by whom? No-one will know without independent, impartial and thorough investigations.

Most of the deaths took place amid mysterious circumstances. Maybe as a recognition of this, the authorities have opened probes into some of the cases. But Amnesty International has yet to see evidence of a credible outcome of any of these.

They must be followed up by prompt, impartial and effective investigations. All such investigations must be credible if Ukraine is to begin to tackle its pervasive lack of accountability for serious human rights violations. A recent Amnesty International report revealed, for example, how virtually nobody has been brought to account for more than 100 killings, and an even greater number of police beatings and ill-treatment, of protesters during the February 2014 EuroMaydan demonstrations.

Beyond the lingering lack of justice for the EuroMaydan deaths, and the more recent spate of deaths of opposition members this year, the organization has also documented a worrying rise in other forms of persecution.

Opposition politicians are facing mob violence, often carried out by groups or individuals affiliated with the right-wing.

Meanwhile, members of the media are suffering harassment at the hands of the authorities. Among them is the journalist and prominent blogger Ruslan Kotsaba – recently named as Amnesty International’s first Ukrainian prisoner of conscience in five years. He could face more than a decade in prison on the charge of “high treason” and for his views on the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Ruslan Kotsaba was arrested on 7 February in Ivano-Frankivsk, 130 km south-east of Lviv, after he posted a video describing the conflict as “the Donbas fratricidal civil war”. He also expressed opposition to military conscription of Ukrainians to take part in the conflict.

After being formally charged on 31 March with “high treason”, he faces up to 15 years in prison, as well as up to an eight-year sentence on a further charge of “hindering the legitimate activities of the armed forces”. Amnesty International has called for his immediate and unconditional release, and we see his treatment as a brazen restriction on the right to freedom of expression.

The freedom to peacefully exercise that right was one of the fundamental rallying cries of the EuroMaydan protesters.

To now deny Yanukovych’s allies or other opposition members that same right – through imprisonment or death, or through lack of an effective investigation – would be the height of hypocrisy. It is also a betrayal of human rights, which must be protected for everyone, regardless of their political stripes.

John Dalhuisen is Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International.

22 April 2015
Amnesty International

 

By Robert Barsocchini

HuffPo reports that US intelligence says:

Iranian representatives discouraged Houthi rebels from taking the Yemeni capital…

Iran is not directing the rebels, who follow a different branch of Shiite Islam than Iran’s leaders and are believed to care more about corruption and the distribution of power in Yemen than the spread of Shiite influence across the Middle East.

“It remains our assessment that Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told The Huffington Post.

“It is wrong to think of the Houthis as a proxy force for Iran,” a U.S. intelligence official told The Huffington Post.

These judgements by US intelligence confirm a prior assessment by Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges, made over a week ago:

“Houthis are not Shiite [they are Zaidi], and it is totally incorrect to identify them as an Iranian proxy force.”

It is suspected that Iran has provided limited material support for the Houthis, but leaked US cables state that most intelligence believes the Houthis bought their weapons not from Iran but on the black market, a market largely stocked with US imports and weapons from state arsenals looted due to US aggression campaigns. Indeed, the US, the world’s biggest arms dealer, has, when it found doing so advantageous, provided lethal or material support both for Iran (illegally) and the Houthis themselves.

Though eight countries, including Russia, China, and India, are rescuing thousands of their nationals, as well as foreign nationals, including Americans, from the Yemen war-zone, the US still refuses to do so, ignoring lawsuits trying to force Obama to allow a rescue operation for the 3-4,000 Americans trapped there.

In theory, rescuing Americans is exactly the kind of thing our armed forces, which wouldn’t exist without us, are supposed to be used for, but in practice they are simply used by US elite sectors to expand US hegemony through violence and terror, such as by invading Iraq.

Instead of rescuing US citizens trapped in Yemen, the US has been rescuing Saudi bombers, refueling Saudi bombers, directing Saudi bomb-attacks from within and outside of Saudi Arabia, and re-arming Saudi Arabia with bombs and ammunition – all openly announced by US officials in public statements. Such behavior is standard operating procedure and unsurprising to people who seriously follow US actions.

Obama has been planting and detonating explosives in Yemen throughout his time in power, working to keep the former US-backed dictator, whom the Saudis are now trying to re-install, in place. A week after being awarded the Nobel “peace” prize, Obama planted a banned cluster bomb (an industrial version of the type the Boston Bombers attempted to improvise) in a Yemeni farmer’s market and detonated it, blasting shrapnel through and murdering 44 civilians, including at least 14 women, five of them pregnant, and 21 children. Whether Obama would have carried out this act of terrorism if it were his daughters and wife in the line of fire and shrapnel remains unanswered but predictable.

For its part, Saudi Arabia has stressed that its aggression against Yemen is in line with Wahhabi Sharia law, an ideology traditionally supported by the US and known for its brutality, particularly against women and civilians, though the US kills far more.

Indeed, with the US coordinating its targets, Saudi Arabia this weekend carried out a bombing that killed 46 civilians and zero armed forces, adding to thousands already killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

The extremist Wahhabi/Sharia-law ideology is favored by groups such as the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS, the first two of which have been openly supported by the US, and the latter knowingly, though purportedly unintentionally, strengthened through US arming of terrorists in Syria.

Indeed, due to the Saudi-led axis-of-dictators’ campaign against Yemen, al Qaeda is making unprecedented gains in that country, a fact well known to the US and its Wahhabi proxy, Abdulaziz. The presence of the Houthi had been blocking al Qaeda from obtaining a foothold.

Historian and US-empire expert William Blum, in a recent interview, stressed that Washington simply acts to expand its empire, already the biggest in history. When that is understood, there is nothing confusing or contradictory about US policy.

Author and UK-based colleague on Twitter. Author is a regular contributor to Washington’s Blog and Counter Currents, and writes professionally for the film industry.

By Samar

Stunned, Speechless or disoriented? I have no clue what to feel about a suicide I saw unfolding on the computer screen in front of me 3 oceans away from where it happened. Gajendra Singh, a farmer from Rajasthan, hanged himself from a tree during an Aam Aadmi Party rally at Jantar Mantar in the heart of New Delhi.

No, I was not in denial like the authorities, I knew that more than 600 farmers have killed themselves in Vidarbha, a part of BJP ruled Maharashtra alone. Being in denial was a prerogative of top bureaucrats and their political masters after all. It was a prerogative of, for instance, Alok Ranjan, Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh, a state ruled by opposition Samajwadi Party. While admitting that farmers were in fact committing suicide in Uttar Pradesh Mr. Ranjan had the cheeks to claim that there was no conclusive proof “yet, that any of the suicides that have been reported have anything to do with unseasonal, heavy rains.” That was despite at least 73 recorded suicides from Bundelkhand region alone after the rains and hailstorms.

Farmers are committing suicide all around the country. India where 70 % of its population are small time farmers who are desperately trying to keep their to heads up the flooding waters of debt and crop loss are dying like flies around a lighted lamp. Now, India’s farmer’s suicide epidemic has come to the nation’s capital. Now nobody can deny it. Now nobody can ignore it. This is a nation’s death.

That is a prerogative of Union Agricultural Minister Radha Mohan Singh too, who even while admitting in Rajya Sabha on March 20, 2015 that the government’s own statistics pegged the numbers of suicides committed by people ‘self employed in farming/agriculture’ was 14027, 13754 and 11772 respectively for 2011, 2012 and 2013. Specifically attributing less than 10 percent of these suicides to agrarian crisis was his prerogative too. The numbers, as per the National Crime Records Bureau, if you must know, were pegged at 1066, 890 and 1357 for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively. Hiding why did the rest kill themselves and why these numbers are significantly higher than the corresponding figures of ‘general’ population is a prerogative of his and his government, too.

And yes, the Minister also has the prerogative of hiding the fact that these numbers are achieved by the small maneuvering by states like like Chhattisgarh which simply took out some of the farmer suicides out of the “Self-Employed (farming/agriculture)” category and put them into the category of “Self-Employed (Others)’.

In short, farmers’ suicides is something where political stands don’t emanate not from ideology but the status of being in power or in opposition. Farmers’ suicides are anything from conspiracy to personal distress if you are the regime and failure of the state if in opposition.

I, as thousands of other activists like me, had neither any such prerogative nor any reasons to stay in denial so I was writing, to the best of my capacity to expose the crisis engulfing the peasantry. I was trying, to the best of my capacity again, to bring this to the notice of powers that may. I don’t want to repeat how governments from those of UPA to NDA have devised Kill and Compensate Humiliating Policy, I am not up for that. You can read it here, if you must. All I want to talk about here is Gajendra Singh’s suicide and how it exposes us all.

First, about the suicide that busted the denial from all those in power from the centre to state. It was almost like a competition to defeat others in shamelessness. The account was opened by Somnath Bharti, the Law Minister of AAP’s Delhi government who saw a conspiracy in the suicide and tweeted about the same. He, of course, reneged on that tweet in no time, deleted the same and claimed that the tweet’s second part was targeted at contractual teachers opposing his party’s, and government’s Kisan Rally. It is just that he had to be reminded of his grief, and breaking down, by a fellow activist of his party.

He was matched in shamelessness by Ms. Vasundhara Raje in no time who blamed delayed action by AAP for the death of Gajendra Singh happily forgetting that it was apathetic inaction of her government that had pushed Gajendra Singh against the wall and forced him to take his life. She, in turn, was matched by several Congress leaders who had started blaming Modi regime by then, happily forgetting the fact that the blood of more than a 100,000 farmers are on the hands of UPA as well as Atal Bihari Vajpayee led NDA regimes.

Let us get back to the suicide of Gajendra Singh and ask ourselves why did he had to die? Let us also ask why AAP’s rally continued well after the attempted suicide and why AAP ‘leaders’ like Asutosh (Gupta) and Kumar Vishwas made insensitive statements about the same? Ashutosh had the guts to question media if Arvind Kejriwal should have climbed up the tree to save Gajendra happily forgetting that the same Kejriwal had actually climbed up an electrical pole before elections.

The answers might seem illusive but they are not, in fact. The answer lies in a simple statement- both the political leadership and the civil society has lost the connect with the people, citizens of the country. It is simple, the self designated ‘largest democracy of the world’ has stopped listening to the democratic and peaceful voices of dissent, and of distress on the ground. It would not have been much of an issue had this oblivion limited itself to the regime. But then, it has expanded to us, the people who have organized themselves into a Republic. Are not we the same people who keep complaining about the filth, the traffic jams and what not that protests of the downtrodden and the dispossessed bring to Delhi? We read about all these suicides but from a distance, didn’t we? Are not we the same who want to throw the slums out of city boundaries while clinging to the labour we get from them?

We have all read about the farm crisis killing farmers en masse, haven’t we? but then, that was happening far away from us, we were safe from that. Gajendra’s suicide brought that crisis right in front of us- in fact right inside our living rooms. Neither do we watch a suicide on camera everyday nor have we gone inhuman in quest for TRP like the media-persons who kept filming the act instead of helping him, after all.

I am ashamed of my republic. I am more so because AAP leadership, that offered a different politics, ended up proving to be worse than the ‘mainstream’ political parties. I am ashamed, more so, of claiming to be a Republic.

Let us accept the fact, that we are a heartless people, a people where a shameless Ashutosh of AAP can try to defend his party’s criminal negligence against an even more shameless BJP (or Congress) for letting a man kill himself in front of thousands, that too on camera.

Having said that, the rally of AAP continued for more than an hour after the suicide. AAP leader, and now Chief Minister, Kejriwal did not bother to stop it then and there. Was not he the same Kejriwal who had, admiringly, stopped his speech to respect a call for Azaan during election campaign? Stopping the speech for respecting Azaan call was ridiculed by the Hindu fanatics but then that was a great gesture for asserting republic’s composite culture and need for coexistence. What, then, is message of not stopping his speech despite a man’s suicide in front of him? It is not merely a criminal negligence but utter disrespect for the constitution that guarantees the right to life with dignity to all Indians, a right that Mr. CM is oath-bound to protect.

How guilty, though, Kejriwal and other AAP leaders are? Despite their sickening defense of their criminal disdain for life, they are far less guilty than the Congress and BJP who have always practiced a Kill But Never Compensate policy for the farmers.

Need I say more other than thanking Gajendra Singh, posthumously, for exposing all of them by a single act?

Samar, Programme Coordinator, Right to Food, AHRC, Hong Kong.

22 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Nick Turse

Six people lay lifeless in the filthy brown water.

It was 5:09 a.m. when their Toyota Land Cruiser plunged off a bridge in the West African country of Mali. For about two seconds, the SUV sailed through the air, pirouetting 180 degrees as it plunged 70 feet, crashing into the Niger River.

Three of the dead were American commandos. The driver, a captain nicknamed “Whiskey Dan,” was the leader of a shadowy team of operatives never profiled in the media and rarely mentioned even in government publications. One of the passengers was from an even more secretive unit whose work is often integral to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which conducts clandestine kill-and-capture missions overseas. Three of the others weren’t military personnel at all or even Americans. They were Moroccan women alternately described as barmaids or “prostitutes.”

The six deaths followed an April 2012 all-night bar crawl through Mali’s capital, Bamako, according to a formerly classified report by U.S. Army criminal investigators. From dinner and drinks at a restaurant called Blah-Blah’s to more drinks at La Terrasse to yet more at Club XS and nightcaps at Club Plaza, it was a rollicking swim through free-flowing vodka. And vodka and Red Bull. And vodka and orange juice. And vanilla pomegranate vodka. And Chivas Regal. And Jack Daniels. And Corona beer. And Castel beer. And don’t forget B-52s, a drink generally made with Kahlúa, Grand Marnier, and Bailey’s Irish Cream. The bar tab at Club Plaza alone was the equivalent of $350 in U.S. dollars.

At about 5 a.m. on April 20th, the six piled into that Land Cruiser, withCaptain Dan Utley behind the wheel, to head for another hotspot: Bamako By Night. About eight minutes later, Utley called a woman on his cell phone to ask if she was angry. He said he’d circle back and pick her up, but she told him not to bother. Utley then handed the phone to Maria Laol, one of the Moroccan women. “Don’t be upset. We’ll come back and get you,” she said. The woman on the other end of the call then heard screaming before the line went dead.

A Command With Something to Hide

In the years since, U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM, which is responsible for military operations on that continent, has remained remarkably silent about this shadowy incident in a country that had recently seen its democratically elected president deposed in a coup led by an American-trained officer, a country with which the U.S. had suspended military relations a month earlier. It was, to say the least, strange. But it wasn’t the first time U.S. military personnel died under murky circumstances in Africa, nor the first (or last) time the specter of untoward behavior led to a criminal investigation. In fact, as American military operations have ramped up across Africa, reaching a record 674 missions in 2014, reports of excessive drinking, sex with prostitutes, drug use, sexual assaults, and other forms of violence by AFRICOM personnel have escalated, even though many of them have been kept under wraps for weeks or months, sometimes even for years.

“Our military is built on a reputation of enduring core values that are at the heart of our character,” Major (then Brigadier) General Wayne Grigsby Jr., the former chief of AFRICOM’s subordinate command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), wrote in an address to troops last year. “Part of belonging to this elite team is living by our core values and professionalism every day. Incorporating those values into everything we do is called our profession of arms.”

But legal documents, Pentagon reports, and criminal investigation files, many of them obtained by TomDispatch through dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and never before revealed, demonstrate that AFRICOM personnel have all too regularly behaved in ways at odds with those “core values.” The squeaky clean image the command projects through news releases, official testimony before Congress, and mainstream media articles — often by cherry-picked journalists who are granted access to otherwise unavailable personnel and locales — doesn’t hold up to inspection.

“As a citizen and soldier, I appreciate how important it is to have an informed public that helps to provide accountable governance and is also important in the preservation of the trust between a military and a society and nation it serves,” AFRICOM Commander General David Rodriguez said at a press conference last year. Checking out these revelations of misdeeds with AFRICOM’S media office to determine just how representative they are, however, has proven impossible.

I made several hundred attempts to contact the command for comment and clarification while this article was being researched and written, but was consistently rebuffed. Dozens of phone calls to public affairs personnel went unanswered and scores of email requests were ignored. At one point, I called AFRICOM media chief Benjamin Benson 32 times on a single business day from a phone that identified me by name. It rang and rang. He never picked up. I then placed a call from a different number so my identity would not be apparent. He answered on the second ring. After I identified myself, he claimed the connection was bad and the line went dead. Follow-up calls from the second number followed the same pattern — a behavior repeated day after day for weeks on end.

This strategy, of course, mirrored the command’s consistent efforts to keep embarrassing incidents quiet, concealing many of them and acknowledging others only with the sparest of reports. The command, for example, issued a five-sentence press release regarding those deaths in Bamako. They provided neither the names of the Americans nor the identities of the “three civilians” who perished with them. They failed to mention that the men were with the Special Operations forces, noting only that the deceased were “U.S. military members.” For months after the crash, the Pentagon kept secret the name of Master Sergeant Trevor Bast, a communications technician with the Intelligence and Security Command (whose personnel often work closely with JSOC) — until the information was pried out by the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock.

“It must be noted that the activities of U.S. military forces in Mali have been very public,” Colonel Tom Davis of AFRICOM told TomDispatch in the wake of the deaths, without explaining why the commandos were still in the country a month after the United States had suspended military relations with Mali’s government. In the years since, the command has released no additional information about the episode.

True to form, AFRICOM’s Benjamin Benson failed to respond to requests for comment and clarification, but according to the final report on the incident by Army criminal investigators (obtained by TomDispatch through a FOIA request), the deaths of Utley, Bast, Sergeant First Class Marciano Myrthil, and the three women “were accidental, however [Captain] Utley’s actions were negligent resulting in the passengers’ deaths.” A final review by a staff judge advocate from Special Operations Command Africa found that there was probable cause to conclude Utley was guilty of negligent homicide.

AFRICOM’s Sex Crimes

The criminal investigation of the incident in Mali touched upon relationships between U.S. military personnel and African “females.” Indeed, the U.S. military has many regulations regarding romantic attachments and sexual activity. AFRICOM personnel have not always adhered to such strictures and, in the course of my reporting, I asked Benson if the command has had a problem with sexual misconduct. He never responded.

In recent years, allegations of widespread sex crimes have dogged the U.S. military. A Pentagon survey estimated that 26,000 members of the armed forces were sexually assaulted in 2012, though just one in 10 of those victimsreported the assaults. In 2013, the number of personnel reporting such incidents jumped by 50% to 5,518 and last year reached nearly 6,000. Given the gross underreporting of sexual assaults, it’s impossible to know how many of these crimes involved AFRICOM personnel, but documents examined by TomDispatch suggests a problem does indeed exist.

In August 2011, for example, a Marine with Joint Enabling Capabilities Command assigned to AFRICOM was staying at a hotel in Germany, the site of the command’s headquarters. He began making random room-to-room calls that were eventually traced. According to court martial documents examined by TomDispatch, the recipient of one of them said the “subject matter of the phone call essentially dealt with a solicitation for a sexual tryst.”

About a week after he began making the calls, the Marine, who had previously been a consultant for the CIA, began chatting up a boy in the hotel lounge. After learning that the youngster was 14 years old, “the conversation turned to oral sex with men and the appellant asked [the teen] if he had ever been interested in oral sex with men. He also told [the teen] that if the appellant or any of his male friends were aroused, they would have oral sex with one another,” according to legal documents. The boy attempted to change the subject, but the Marine moved closer to him, began “rubbing his [own] crotch area through his shorts,” and continued to talk to him “in graphic detail about sexual matters and techniques” before the youngster left the lounge. The Marine was later court-martialed for his actions and convicted of making a false official statement, as well as “engaging in indecent liberty with a child” — that is, engaging in an act meant to arouse or gratify sexual desire while in a child’s presence.

That same year, according to a Pentagon report, a noncommissioned officer committed a sexual assault on a female subordinate at an unnamed U.S. base in Djibouti (presumably Camp Lemonnier, the headquarters of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa). “Subject grabbed victim’s head and forced her to continue having sexual intercourse with him,” the report says. He received a nonjudicial punishment including a reduction in rank, a fine of half-pay for two months, 45 days of restriction, and 45 days of extra duty. The latter two punishments were later suspended and the perpetrator was, at the time the report was prepared, “being processed for administrative separation.”

At an “unknown location” in Djibouti in 2011, an enlisted woman reported being raped by a fellow service member “while on watch.” According to a synopsis prepared by the Department of Defense, that man “was not charged with any criminal violations in reference to the rape allegation against him. Victim pled guilty to failure to obey a lawful order and false official statement.”

In a third case in Djibouti, an enlisted woman reported opening the door to her quarters only to be attacked. An unknown assailant “placed his left hand over her mouth and placed his right hand under her shirt and began to slide it up the side of her body.” All leads were later deemed exhausted and no suspect was identified. According to Air Force documents obtained byTomDispatch, allegations also surfaced concerning an assault with intent to commit rape in Morocco, a forcible sodomy in Ethiopia, and possession of child pornography in Djibouti, all in 2012.

On July 22nd of that year, a group of Americans traveled to a private party in Djibouti attended by U.S. Ambassador Geeta Pasi and Major General Ralph Baker, the commander of a counterterrorism force in the Horn of Africa. Baker drank heavily, according to an AFRICOM senior policy adviser who sat with him in the backseat of a sport utility vehicle on the return trip to Camp Lemonnier. While two military personnel, one of them an agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), sat just a few feet away, Baker “forced his hand between [the adviser’s] legs and attempted to touch her vagina against her will,” according to a classified criminal investigation file obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

“I grabbed his hand and held it on the seat to try to prevent him from putting his hand deeper between my legs,” she told an investigator. “He responded by smiling at me and saying, ‘Cat got your tongue?’ I was appalled about what he was doing to me and did not know what to say.” She later reported the offense via the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Hotline. According to a report in the Washington Post, “Baker was given an administrative punishment at the time of the incident as well as a letter of reprimand — usually a career-ending punishment.” Demoted in rank to brigadier general, he was allowed to quietly retire in September 2013.

A Pentagon report on sexual assault lists allegations of three incidents in Djibouti in 2013 — one act of “abusive sexual contact” and two reports of “wrongful sexual contact.” The report also details a case in which a member of the U.S. military reported that she and a group of friends had been out eating and drinking at a local establishment. Upon returning to her quarters at the base, one of her male companions asked to enter her room and she gave him permission. He then began to kiss her neck and shoulders. When she resisted, according to the report, “he grabbed her shorts and began to kiss and lick her vagina.” That man was later charged with rape, abusive sexual contact, and wrongful sexual contact. He was tried and acquitted.

The Pentagon has yet to issue its 2014 report on sexual assaults and AFRICOM has failed to release any statistics on its own, but given that military personnel fail to report most sexual crimes, whatever numbers may emerge will undoubtedly be drastic undercounts.

Sex, Drugs, and Guns

On the morning of April 10, 2010, a Navy investigator walked through the door of room 3092 at the Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort in Mombasa, Kenya. Two empty wine bottles sat in the trash can. Another was on the floor. There were remnants of feminine hygiene products on the bathroom countertop, Axe body spray in an armoire, unopened condoms on a table, and inside a desk drawer, a tan powder that he took to be “an illicit narcotic,” all of this according to an official report by that NCIS agent obtained byTomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act.

Three days before, on April 7th, Sergeant Roberto Diaz-Boria of the Puerto Rico Army National Guard had been staying in this room. On leave from Manda Bay, Kenya — home of Camp Simba, a hush-hush military outpost in Africa — he had come to Mombasa to kick back. That night, along with a brother-in-arms, he ended up at Causerina, a nearby bar that locals said was a hotspot for drugs and prostitution. Diaz-Boria left Causerina with a “female companion,” according to official documents, paid the requisite fee for such guests at the hotel, and took her to his room. By morning, he was dead.

A news story released soon after by Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa stated that Diaz-Boria had died while “stationed” in Mombasa. The cause of death, the article noted, was “under investigation.” CJTF-HOA failed to respond to a request for additional information about the case, but an Army investigation later determined that the sergeant “accidentally died of multiple drug toxicity after drinking alcohol and using cocaine and heroin.” Where he obtained the drugs was never determined, but according to the summary of an interview with an NCIS agent, a close friend in his infantry unit did say that there were “rumors within the battalion about the easy access to very potent illegal narcotics in Manda Bay, Kenya.”

Kenya is hardly an anomaly. Criminal inquiries regarding illicit drug use also took place in Ethiopia in 2012 and Burkina Faso in 2013, while another investigation into distribution was conducted in Cameroon that same year, according to Air Force records obtained by TomDispatch. AFRICOM did not respond to questions concerning any of these investigations.

In late 2012, when I asked what U.S. personnel were up to in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, AFRICOM spokesman Eric Elliott replied that troops were “supporting humanitarian activities in the area.” Indeed, official documents and other sources indicate U.S. personnel have been carrying out aidactivities in the region for years. But that wasn’t all they were doing.

The Lonely Planet guide says that the Samrat Hotel provides the best digs in town, with a “classy lobby” and “a good nightclub and restaurant.” The one drawback: “stiff mattresses.” That apparently didn’t affect the activities of at least nine of 19 U.S. military personnel from the 775th Engineer Detachment of the Tennessee Army National Guard. After an unidentified “local national female” was seen emerging from a “secured communications room” in the hotel, a preliminary investigation was launched and found “military members of the unit allegedly routinely solicited prostitutes in the lobby of the hotel and later brought the prostitutes back to their assigned rooms or to the secured communications room,” according to documents obtained via FOIA request. A later report by Army agents determined that personnel from the 775th Engineer Detachment and the 415th Civil Affairs Battalion “individually engaged in sexual acts in exchange for money” at the hotel between July 1 and July 22, 2013. In the room of a staff sergeant, investigators also found what appeared to be khat, a popular local narcotic that offers a hyperactive high marked by aggressiveness that ultimately leaves the user in a glassy-eyed daze.

A sworn statement by a medic who served in Dire Dawa that month — obtained by TomDispatch in a separate FOIA request — paints a picture of a debauched atmosphere of partying, local “girlfriends,” and a variety of sex acts. “Originally, before we departed to Ethiopia, I grabbed around 70 condoms. However, I was told that was not going to be enough,” said the medic, noting that it was his job to carry medical supplies. Instead, he brought 200. He confessed to obtaining a prostitute through the bartender at the Samrat Hotel and admitted to engaging in sex acts with another woman who, he said, later revealed herself to be a prostitute. He paid her the equivalent of $60. Another service member showed him pictures of a “local national in his bed in his hotel room,” the medic told the NCIS agent. He continued:

“I know this girl is a prostitute because I pulled her from the club previously. The name of the club was ‘The Pom-Pom’… I had hooked up with this girl before [redacted name] so when he showed me the photo I recognized the girl. [Redacted name] stated how she had a nice booty and was good in bed… I want to say that [redacted name] told me he paid about 1,000 Birr (roughly $30 US dollars), but I can’t recall exactly.”

Army investigation documents obtained by TomDispatch also indicate similar extracurricular activities by members of the 607th Air Control Squadron and the 422nd Communications Squadron in neighboring Djibouti. An inquiry by Army criminal investigators determined that there was probable cause to believe three noncommissioned officers “committed the offense of patronizing a prostitute” at an “off-base residence” in June 2013.

AFRICOM failed to respond to repeated requests for comment on or to provide further information about members of the command engaging in illicit sex. It was similarly nonresponsive when it came to criminal inquests into allegations of arson in South Africa, larceny in Burkina Faso, graft in Algeria, and drunk and disorderly conduct in Nigeria, among other alleged crimes. The command has kept quiet about violent incidents as well.

On April 19, 2013, for instance, something went terribly wrong in Manda Bay, Kenya. A specialist with the Kentucky Army National Guard, deployed at Camp Simba and reportedly upset by a posting he saw on Facebook, got drunk on bourbon whiskey — more than a fifth of Jim Beam, according to witnesses — stole a 9mm pistol, and shot a superior officer. He would also point the pistol at a staff sergeant and a master sergeant and then barricade himself in his barracks room. A member of the Army’s Special Forces serving at the base told an NCIS agent what he saw when the soldier emerged from his quarters:

“He had a gun in his hand and he was waving it around with the barrel level. He was saying something to the effect of ‘Fuck you!’ or something like that. I heard the [redacted] say something like ‘put the gun down!’ a couple of times and then the [redacted] shot at the subject 2-3 times with his handgun.”

The drunken soldier was hit once in the leg and later surrendered. An investigation determined that the specialist had probably committed a host of offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including wrongful appropriation of government property, failure to obey an order, and aggravated assault, although a charge of attempted murder was deemed “unfounded.” The incident, detailed in previously classified documents, was never made public.

General Malfeasance

AFRICOM has certainly had its troubles, starting at the top, since it began overseeing the U.S. military pivot to Africa. Its first chief, General William “Kip” Ward, who led the fledgling command from 2007 until 2011, was demoted after a 2012 investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office found he had committed a raft of misdeeds, such as using taxpayer-funded military aircraft for personal travel and spending lavishly on hotels.

During an 11-day trip to Washington, for example, he billed the government $129,000 in expenses for his wife, 13 employees, and himself, but conducted official business on just two of those days. According to the Inspector General’s report, Ward also had AFRICOM personnel ferry his wife around and run errands for the two of them, including shopping for “candy and baby items, picking up flowers and books, delivering snacks, and acquiring tickets to sporting events.” He even accepted “complimentary meals and Broadway show tickets” from a “prohibited source with multiple [Department of Defense] contracts.”

Ward was ordered to repay the government $82,000 and busted down from four stars to three, which will cost him about $30,000 yearly in retirement pay. He’ll now only receive $208,802 annually. An AFRICOM webpagedevoted to the highlights of Ward’s career mentions nothing of his transgressions, demotion, or punishment. The only clue to all of this is his official photo. In it, he’s sporting four stars while his bio states that “Ward retired at the rank of Lieutenant General in November 2012.”

Ward’s wasteful ways became major news, but the story of his malfeasance has been the exception. For every SUV that plunged off a bridge or general who was busted down for misbehavior, how many other AFRICOM sexual assaults, shootings, and prostitution scandals remain unknown?

For years, as U.S. military personnel moved into Africa in ever-increasing numbers, AFRICOM has effectively downplayed, disguised, or covered-up almost every aspect of its operations, from the locations of its troop deployments to those of its expanding string of outposts. Not surprisingly, it’s done the same when it comes to misdeeds by members of the command and continues to ignore questions surrounding crimes and alleged misconduct by its personnel, refusing even to answer emails or phone calls about them. With taxpayer money covering the salaries of lawbreakers and the men and women who investigate them, with America’s sons dying after drink and drug binges and its daughters assaulted and sexually abused while deployed, the American people deserve answers when it comes to the conduct of U.S. forces in Africa. Personally, I remain eager to hear AFRICOM’s side of the story, should Benjamin Benson ever be in the mood to return my calls.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. A 2014 Izzy Award and American Book Award winner for his book Kill Anything That Moves, he has reported from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa and his pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, has just been published.
Copyright 2015 Nick Turse

21 April, 2015
TomDispatch.com

 

By Johannes Stern & Bill Van Auken

The horrific death toll of African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe is a damning indictment of all the major imperialist powers, and most particularly the United States.

The American president, Barack Obama, and his former secretary of state, Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, have blood up to their elbows. They set the present catastrophe in motion through brutal wars for regime change waged under the hypocritical and discredited banner of “human rights.”

At least three more boats packed with refugees from North Africa and the Middle East were reported to be in distress in the Mediterranean on Monday, with a minimum of 23 more people said to have drowned.

This adds to the many hundreds of people, perhaps 1,400, who have lost their lives over the past week in a desperate bid to escape military violence by the US and its European allies, civil wars stoked by Washington and the European Union, and pervasive poverty exacerbated by the machinations of imperialism in the region.

On Monday, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said distress calls had been received from an inflatable life raft carrying 100 to 150 migrants and a second boat with some 300 people aboard. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said a caller reported that 20 people died when one of the vessels sank in international waters.

In a separate incident, at least three migrants, including a child, died when a boat, apparently coming from Turkey, ran aground off the Greek island of Rhodes. Video footage showed the wooden boat, with people crowded on the deck, heaving in the Aegean Sea just off the island. Eyewitnesses told the local radio station that there were many Syrians, but also people from Eritrea and Somalia.

The latest drownings follow the deaths of close to 950 people on Sunday in the sinking of a refugee boat off of Libya. According to the Italian Coast Guard, the completely overloaded boat capsized about 130 miles off the Libyan coast.

“We were 950 people on board, including 40 to 50 children and 200 women,” a survivor from Bangladesh told the Italian news agency ANSA. Many people were trapped in the hold of the ship and drowned under horrible circumstances. “The smugglers had closed the doors and stopped them leaving,” said the man.

Over 500 more people died the previous week in two separate sinkings of boats attempting to reach Europe across the Mediterranean.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 1,700 people attempting to immigrate to Europe have died in transit, 50 times the number for the same period last year. According to the IOM, the number of people dying in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe rose by more than 500 percent between 2011 and 2014.

Of course, 2011 was the year that the US and its NATO allies, principally France and Britain, launched their war for regime change in Libya, under the fabricated pretext that they were intervening to prevent a massacre by the government of Muammar Gaddafi in the eastern city of Benghazi.

This “humanitarian” mission initiated a six-month US-NATO bombing campaign that killed at least 10 times the number who died in the scattered fighting between government troops and armed rebels that had preceded it. This imperialist intervention, which utilized Islamist militias with ties to Al Qaeda as its proxy ground forces, left Libya descending rapidly into chaos and destruction.

Nearly two million Libyan refugees—more than a quarter of the population—have been forced to flee to Tunisia to escape an unending civil war between rival Islamist militias and two competing governments, one based in Tripoli and the other in the eastern city of Tobruk. According to the web site Libya Body Count, some 3,500 people have been killed just since the beginning of 2014—three years after the US-NATO intervention.

The escalating barbarism in Libya has included mass executions. The latest, made public in a video released Sunday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was of some 30 Ethiopian migrants. This follows by less than two months the similar mass beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians at the hands of ISIS, which has seized Libya’s eastern port city of Derna as well as parts of the city of Sirte.

There were no such mass sectarian murders in Libya before the US-NATO war for regime change, nor for that matter did Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias exist as any more than a marginal force. These elements were promoted, armed and backed by massive airpower after the major imperialist powers decided to topple and murder Gaddafi and carry out a new rape of Libya.

The disastrous consequences of this predatory neocolonial intervention are now undeniable. It is only one in a growing number of imperialist wars and interventions in the oil-rich Middle East and North Africa that have destroyed entire societies and turned millions into refugees. These include the wars in Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, as well as interventions by the imperialist powers or their regional proxies in Mali, Somalia and Sudan.

According to Amnesty International, the escalating conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have “led to the largest refugee disaster since the Second World War.” Amnesty estimates that 57 million people have been forced to flee worldwide in the last year, 6 million more than in 2012.

The American press, led by the New York Times, writes of refugees fleeing poverty and violence in the Middle East and North Africa without so much as mentioning the actions of the United States and its European allies that have caused the humanitarian catastrophe. What is unfolding in the Mediterranean is not a tragedy; it is an imperialist war crime.

21 April, 2015
WSWS.org