Archives: Articles

By Christa Case Bryant,

For years, boycott efforts in Europe seemed to be only symbolic gestures. But several major efforts announced in the past year, including one by the EU, are raising alarm.

Jerusalem; and Rotterdam, Netherlands

Drive down the steep road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, and as the desert hills unfold toward the Jordan River the eye meets hundreds of rows of lush palms laden with succulent dates.

More than a third of the world’s Medjool dates are grown here in the Jordan Valley, a narrow strip of the West Bank where Israeli agriculture is flourishing. Nearly all Israeli grape exports, as well as abundant crops of peppers and herbs, also come from this arid region.

The European Union, Israel’s No. 1 trading partner, accounts for about a third of its total trade, and was long the favored destination for Jordan Valley produce. But these fruits and vegetables are grown on land that Israel has occupied since 1967. For a growing number of European consumers, that’s a problem. They say that buying such produce is supporting the illegal confiscation and control of land and water resources that should be in Palestinian hands.

The campaign is starting to bite. Last year, Jordan Valley farmers lost an estimated $29 million, or 14 percent of revenue, because they were forced to find alternative markets for their exports, such as Russia, where prices are 20 to 60 percent lower. Pepper exports to Western Europe have stopped completely, and grape exports are likely to be phased out this year because of consumer pressure, says David Elhayani, mayor of the Jordan Valley Regional Council and a farmer himself.

Israeli leaders have for years scoffed at the notion that fewer dates or peppers in European shopping carts could put a dent in the Israeli economy. But in the past six months, a flurry of European banks, pension funds, engineering firms, and lawmakers have driven home their displeasure with Israeli settlements, and Israeli leaders are taking the threat more seriously.

On Feb. 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

convened a special meeting of government ministers to formulate a strategy against the growing economic boycott. One minister reportedly pushed for a $28 billion budget to counter the movement with aggressive media and legal campaigns.

It’s not so much that their pocketbook is starting to feel the pressure – last year’s drop in Jordan Valley exports represents a mere 0.01 percent of total Israeli exports for 2013. But there’s concern that rising opposition to Israeli policies signals increasing displeasure with the very idea of Israel. “Sanctions are also what we Israelis should fear most – disenchantment of the world with the very idea that Jews are entitled to have a state of their own,” says Yitzchak Mayer, who served as the Israeli ambassador to Belgium and Switzerland in the 1990s.

 

Discontent on the rise

According to a 2013 BBC poll, public opinion of Israel is worsening. Favorability ratings dropped 8 percent in both Spain and Germany, to the single digits. Even in Britain, the first European country to formally support the establishment of a Jewish state, only 14 percent of citizens have a positive view of Israel today.

EU citizens and lawmakers alike have long opposed Israeli policies, but popular discontent – cultivated by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement since 2005 – is increasingly pressuring businesses and governments to take more concrete action.

Dutchman David Ross says he supports such moves. “What it accomplishes is putting more focus on the problem,” he says. “People will ask, ‘What are we really doing there?’ It brings the problem to the streets.”

Nothing brought the issue to the streets quite like Scarlett Johansson’s recent endorsement of the home sodamaker SodaStream, which operates a factory in the West Bank. Ms. Johansson refused calls to stop supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands with her endorsement, instead praising the factory as a haven of coexistence that provides some 500 Palestinians with badly needed jobs. The Hollywood star’s step into the fray gave the BDS movement new currency.

“[The SodaStream boycott] has … led to mass education of the public everywhere about the illegality of Israel’s settlements, Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights, and, crucially, the need to boycott companies producing in settlements as a minimal measure of ending complicity in grave violations of human rights,” says human rights activist and BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti.

Many of the nongovernmental organizations in Israel that challenge the government’s policies in the West Bank have long been funded by European governments, but the fact that lawmakers are now making their own moves ups the ante.

“The language has become sharper, and the instruments are sharper,” says Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor, which tracks European funding of NGOs with a critical eye. “Diplomatically Israel has lived without Europe for 15 years, if not longer. Militarily, Europe isn’t much of a power. So most of this is about economics.”

Last summer the EU said it would refuse to provide funds from Horizon 2020 – the largest EU research and innovation program, with €80 billion ($109 billion) in funding over seven years – to entities operating in East Jerusalem or West Bank settlements.

Then European institutions stepped up demands for verification and guarantees that none of their business was happening over settlement lines.

One of the most significant moves came in January. A $200 billion Dutch pension firm, among the world’s largest, divested from five top Israeli banks. The fund, PGGM, said it would be almost impossible for the banks to “end their involvement in the financing of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

 

In September a Dutch engineering firm, under pressure from the government, dropped plans to build a sewage treatment plant in East Jerusalem, and in December, a Dutch water company cut ties with Israel’s national water carrier over its operations in the West Bank.

But it’s not just the Dutch. Germany announced in January that it would not renew research grants to Israeli companies that do business over the Green Line, the de facto border before Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 war. That was the first move by an individual EU member to apply standards for academic research to the private sector. The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz called it “a significant escalation in European measures against the settlements.”

Germany’s move prompted concern that if Israel’s best friend in Europe, still burdened by the guilt of the Holocaust, takes such steps, every other EU country could follow suit.

“I think there is a danger that one should not underestimate, which is the snowball effect that once someone starts, the others begin to adopt the same kind of policy,” says Oded Eran, the Israeli ambassador to the EU from 2002 to 2007.

Why now?

For years Europe tried to use incentives on Israel, eliminating trade tariffs and enhancing cooperation in other areas. But Israel’s 2008-09 war against Hamas-run Gaza sparked demonstrations in Europe and pushed EU lawmakers to adjust, wrote Claire Spencer, head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the London-based think tank Chatham House, in an April 2009 report. Still, last year, Israel was the only non-EU country invited to join Horizon 2020.

Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London, says the flurry of activity of European firms is not a reaction to any specific Israeli action. Rather, it comes at a time when companies are more accountable to consumer and civil society groups, whether it’s human rights violations in Bangladeshi garment factories or logging in the Amazon.

“What you are seeing is this slow accumulation of a sense that there are legal and reputational risks for companies to engage in business activities which involve the settlements,” he says.

But retiree Pieter Duistermaat of Rotterdam, whose job in the chemicals industry took him to Israel a few times, says that his opinion of Israel has worsened over time because of Israeli actions toward Palestinians.

“I don’t like their attitude,” he says. “No one deserves that.”

He says he would not support a large-scale boycott of Israeli products or companies doing business in Israel, however, because it punishes the wrong culprits. “I have nothing against Israelis. It is the Israeli government that is very tough towards these people.”

Sacha Stawski, who runs a media watchdog called Honestly Concerned in Frankfurt, says some Germans are increasingly moving in an “extremely critical, if not anti-Israel” direction.

Mr. Stawski says that he considers German Chancellor Angela Merkel – who is visiting the Jewish state on Feb. 24 – to be pro-Israel but says she’s surrounded by a new generation of politicians and voters who increasingly are trying to “rid themselves of their past.”

“There is this new generation that is saying, ‘We have nothing to do with [the Holocaust].’ They are not understanding the relationship between guilt and responsibility. The new generation is not guilty, but they still have a responsibility to make sure nothing of the sort ever happens again.”

Mr. Mayer, the former ambassador to Belgium and Switzerland, sees the rise of terrorism and intractable conflicts as one of the factors driving opposition to Israeli policies. The perception that the world has become ungovernable – bolstered by crises like Syria, where world leaders have failed to curb violence – is causing citizens and governments to act out of fear to reduce such instability.

“One of those ways is to believe that part of the global problem is … the unfinished problem between Palestinians and Israelis,” he says. “And therefore the pressure of the world to bring about a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians is increasing.”

Pocketbook pain

Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, acknowledged a movement to label products from West Bank settlements, which do not enjoy the exemption from trade tariffs that is granted to farmers in Israel proper. But he denied a wider campaign.

“There is no boycott, and in the European Parliament there is for sure no majority for a potential boycott,” he said in a speech about the future of EU-Israel relations in Jerusalem on Feb. 11. “My personal view, a boycott is not a solution for anything.”

Numerous leaders, from US Secretary of State John Kerry to Israel’s own minister of finance, Yair Lapid, have warned that a collapse of current negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians could bring increasing diplomatic and economic consequences for Israel.

“There is a risk that you will face increasing isolation [if talks fail],” EU Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen told Israel’s Channel 2 recently. “Not necessarily as a result of European Union policy, but Israel has to realize that economic relations are established by private economic actors – be it consumers, be it companies – and we, as a government, have no influence on the private decisions that private citizens and companies are making.”

That has Mr. Lapid worried, especially given that pocketbook issues were one of the primary issues of the latest Israeli elections.

“If the negotiations with the Palestinians get stuck, and we enter the reality of a European boycott, even a partial one, the Israeli economy will retreat; every Israeli citizen will be hit directly in his pocket; the cost of living will rise; budgets for education, health, welfare, and security will be cut; and many international markets will be closed to us,” he said last month.

But Mr. Netanyahu has refused to be cowed by an economic boycott, and some of his ministers have dismissed it, pointing to increasing trade relations with developing countries from Mexico to China. Last year, exports to Asia pulled nearly even with US-Israel trade.

“Attempts to impose a boycott on the State of Israel are immoral and unjust. Moreover, they will not achieve their goal,” Netanyahu said, who made it the first order of business at his weekly cabinet meeting Feb. 2, amid the Soda-Stream firestorm.

Still, some Europeans say they’d like to see their governments take stronger action – and that’s a role Europe can play, Mr. Levy says.

“If anything, I think Europe’s role is to be a little more demanding than Americans can be because of their politics,” he says, adding Europe has to wield a stick rather than allowing Israel to keep “feasting” on carrots from both parties. “Europe has to be able to have relations, but also hold its ground.”

February 16, 2014

By Franklin Lamb

Al Nebek, Syria: Who authored the seemingly designed-to-fail UN Security Council Draft Resolution on delivering urgent humanitarian aid into the Old City of Homs and other besieged areas of conflict-torn Syria? When we know this, much may become clearer with respect to the cynical politicization of the continuing civilian suffering.

The draft resolution was put forward by Australia, Luxembourg, and Jordan, and according to a UN/US congressional source—one who actually worked on rounding up the three countries to front for the US and its allies—none was pleased with the decidedly raw and undiplomatic pressure they received from the office of US UN Ambassador Samantha Power.

When this observer inquired how such a poorly drafted, one-sided, adversary-bashing draft resolution could actually have seen the light of day and been submitted to the UN Security Council, the reply he received was terse: “Ask Samantha.”

Suspicions are being raised in Geneva, in Syria, and among certain UN aid agencies, in Homs and elsewhere, that efforts on behalf of those they are trying to save from starvation were ‘set-up’ to fail as a result of power politics and influences emanating from Washington and Tel Aviv.

This observer is not a big fan of conspiracy theories. No doubt it’s a personal congenital defect of some sort that makes him want to hear at least a modicum of relevant, prohibitive, material, non-hearsay evidence to support some of the wilder and internet-fueled claims ricocheting around the globe. However, some things are becoming clear as to what happened at the UNSC last week and why certain specific language was included in the resolution.

Ms. Power, it has been claimed by two Hill staffers who monitor AIPAC, owes her position as UN Ambassador to Israeli PM Netanyahu, who views her and her husband, AIPAC fund raiser, Cass Sunstein, as Israel-first stalwarts. Congressional sources claim the White House went along with her appointment so as not to provoke yet another battle—either with AIPAC’s congressional agents or the wider US Zionist lobby. As part of her continuing gratitude for her “dream job,” as she told an American Jewish Committee convention on 2/10/14 in New York, Ms. Power assured the AJC that the United States “strongly supports Israel’s candidacy for a seat on the UN Security Council, and we have pushed relentlessly for the full inclusion of Israel across the UN system.” Ms. Power is said to have assured AIPAC officials in private that evening that “one of Israel’s few survival reeds may be to grasp, in the face of rising anti-Semitism, a seat on the council.” Insisting that “there is growing and rampant hostility towards Israel within the UN, where a large number of member states are not democratic,” Ms. Power, continued” “I will never give up and nor should you.”

Following the standing ovation from her adoring audience, she repeated, according to one eye witness: “We have also pushed relentlessly for the full inclusion of Israel across the UN system.” What the Zionist regime still occupying Palestine knows, as does no doubt Ms. Power, is that the American public and increasingly even the US Congress is finally pulling back from the regime in favor of justice for Palestine. Thus the lobby’s strange reasoning that the UN system, where the American public is essentially absent, is increasingly important.

So what’s the problem with the US-mission-spawned Security Council draft resolution on Syria so dutifully submitted by three chummy and faithful allies?

Well, for starters, the resolution is DOA, as presumably every sophomore poli-sci, civics, or governance student would have recognized from the outset. The aggressive language—demanding the UNSC immediately take action by targeting only one claimed violator with yet more international sanctions—would have caused chaff and cringing among many, probably most. But even beyond that, Moscow, with a UNSC veto ready to use, sees the US-initiated draft as a bid to lay the groundwork for military strikes against the Syrian government, interpreting the language as an ultimatum: that if all this isn’t solved in two weeks then the Security Council will automatically follow with sanctions against the Syrian government.

As Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov told the media on 2/10/14, “Instead of engaging in everyday, meticulous work to resolve problems that block deliveries of humanitarian aid, they see a new resolution as some kind of simplistic solution detached from reality.”

The draft text, obtained by this observer from Reuters, expresses the intent to impose sanctions—on individuals and entities obstructing aid—if certain demands are not met within the next two weeks.

“It is unacceptable to us in the form in which it is now being prepared, and we, of course, will not let it through,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov.

One diplomat in Syria, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, had told the Security Council on 2/11/14 that Moscow opposes some 30 percent of the original draft, but did not specify what which parts. He added, “We’re not aiming for a Russian veto, we’re aiming for a resolution that everybody can agree. That is what we want.”

For his part, President Obama, speaking at a joint news conference in Washington with French President Francois Hollande, kept up the pressure for the Security Council to accept the US resolution. He insisted that there is “great unanimity among most of the Security Council” in favor of the resolution and “Russia is a holdout.” Secretary of State John Kerry and others have “delivered a very direct message” pressuring the Russians to drop their opposition.

“It is not just the Syrians that are responsible” for the plight of civilians, but “the Russians as well if they are blocking this kind of resolution,” Kerry claimed. “How you can object to humanitarian corridors? Why would you prevent the vote of a resolution if, in good faith, it is all about saving human lives?”

Among international observers, the draft resolution is widely viewed as one-sided, condemning rights abuses by Syrian authorities, demanding Syrian forces stop all aerial bombardment of cities and towns as well as indiscriminate use of bombs, rockets and related weapons. It also, parenthetically and somewhat obliquely, condemns “increased terrorist attacks,” and calls for the withdrawal of all foreign fighters from Syria, but the latter language is believed to be aimed mainly at Hezbollah. Sources in Syria claim that the draft heaps all the blame on the Syrian government without devoting the necessary attention to the humanitarian problems created by the actions of the rebels.

These gratuitous draft elements are not only aggressive, but frankly appear calculated to end serious discussion and to undermine a solution of the problem.

Being new on the job is one thing for Ms. Power (she has served as UN ambassador only since August of last year), but politicizing relief from starvation for a besieged civilian population is quite another. Likewise for promoting a draft resolution focusing all blame on one side. Such things violate a broad range of applicable and mandatory international norms, and if Ms. Power is hazy on this subject, the State Department’s Office of International Organization Affairs is not—or at least was not when this observer interned there following law school years ago.

Language that would have stood a much better chance of ending the siege of Homs, Yarmouk and other areas under siege was drafted this week by a Syrian law student at the Damascus University Faculty of Law. The widely esteemed university witnessed the death of 17 of its students, along with the serious injuring of more than 20 others, when rebel mortar bombs, on 3/28/13, targeted the canteen of the College of Architecture. Those responsible for the shelling later admitted they were trained and armed by agents of the US government.

The DU law student’s draft resolution on unfettered humanitarian aid into besieged areas of Syria will hopefully be widely discussed over the weekend at a news conference tentatively scheduled on campus. Perhaps the next UN draft resolution will reflect the student’s homework assignment.

The starving victims besieged in Syria, and all people of goodwill, are demanding immediate, non-politicized humanitarian aid without further delay. Virtually every American voter is in a position to pressure his or her congressional representative, and would possibly achieve much good by making the White House aware of their demands to end playing international ‘gotcha’ politics, and to cooperate to end the needless deaths by starvation that continue today.

Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

16 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rarely been so politically embattled. His travails indicate the Israeli right’s inability to respond to a shifting political landscape, both in the region and globally.

The context for his troubles was his commitment in 2009, under great pressure from a newly elected US president, Barack Obama, to support the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a concession he never wanted to make and one he has regretted ever since.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has exploited that pledge by imposing the current peace talks. Now Netanyahu faces an imminent “framework agreement” that may require him to make further commitments towards an outcome he abhors.

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, is not helping. Rather than digging in his own heels, he offers constant accommodation. Last week Abbas told the New York Times that Israel could take a leisurely five years removing its soldiers and settlers from a key piece of Palestinian territory, the Jordan Valley. The Palestinian state would remain demilitarised, while Nato troops could stay “for a long time, and wherever they want”.

The Arab League is another thorn. It has obliged by renewing its offer from 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative, that promises Israel peaceful relations with the Arab world in return for its agreement to Palestinian statehood.

Meanwhile, the European Union is gently turning the screws on the occupation. It regularly trumpets condemnation of Israel’s settlement-building frenzies, including last week’s announcement of 558 settler homes in East Jerusalem. And in the background sanctions loom over settlement goods.

European financial institutions are providing a useful barometer of the mood among the 28 EU member states. They have become the unexpected pioneers of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, with a steady trickle of banks and pension funds pulling out their investments in recent weeks.

Pointing out that boycotts and “delegitimisation” campaigns are only going to gather pace, Kerry has warned that Israel’s traditional policy is “unsustainable”.

That message rings true with many Israeli business leaders, who have thrown their weight behind the US diplomatic plan. They believe that a Palestinian state is the key to Israel gaining access to lucrative regional markets and continued economic growth.

Netanyahu must have been disconcerted by the news that among those meeting Kerry to express support at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month was Shlomi Fogel, the prime minister’s long-time intimate.

 

Pressure on these various fronts may explain Netanyahu’s hasty convening last weekend of his senior ministers to devise a strategy to counter the boycott trend. Proposals include a $28 million media campaign, legal action against boycotting institutions, and intensified surveillance of overseas activists by the Mossad.

On the domestic scene, Netanyahu – who is known to prize political survival above all other concerns – is getting a rough ride as well. He is being undermined on his right flank by rivals inside the coalition.

Naftali Bennett, the settlers’ leader, provoked a chafing public feud with Netanyahu this month, accusing him of losing his “moral compass” in the negotiations. At the same time, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister from the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, has dramatically changed tack, cosying up to Kerry, whom he has called “a true friend of Israel”. Lieberman’s unlikely statesmanship has made Netanyahu’s run-ins with the US look, in the words of a local analyst, “childish and irresponsible”.

It is in the light of these mounting pressures on Netanyahu that one should understand his increasingly erratic behaviour – and the growing rift with the US.

A damaging falling-out last month, following insults from the defence minister against Kerry, has not subsided. Last week Netanyahu unleashed his closest cabinet allies to savage Kerry again, with one calling the US secretary of state’s pronouncements “offensive and intolerable”.

Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, tweeted her displeasure with a shot across the bows. The Israeli government’s attacks were “totally unfounded and unacceptable”, she noted. Any doubt she was speaking for the president was later dispelled when Obama praised Kerry’s “extraordinary passion and principled diplomacy”.

But despite outward signs, Netanyahu is less alone than he looks – and far from ready to compromise.

He has the bulk of the Israeli public behind him, helped by media moguls like his friend Sheldon Adelson who are stoking the national mood of besiegement and victimhood.

But most importantly he has a large chunk of Israel’s security and economic establishment on side too.

The settlers and their ideological allies have deeply penetrated the higher ranks of both the army and the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret intelligence service. The Haaretz newspaper revealed this month the disturbing news that three of the four heads of the Shin Bet now subscribe to this extremist ideology.

Moreover, powerful elements within the security establishment are financially as well as ideologically invested in the occupation. In recent years the defence budget has rocketed to record levels as a whole layer of the senior military exploits the occupation to justify feathering its nest with grossly inflated salaries and pensions.

There are also vast business profits in the status quo, from hi-tech to resource-grabbing industries. Indications of what is at stake were illuminated recently with the announcement that the Palestinians will have to buy from Israel at great cost two key natural resources – gas and water – they should have in plentiful supply were it not for the occupation.

With these interest groups at his back, a defiant Netanyahu can probably face off the US diplomatic assault this time. But Kerry is not wrong to warn that in the long term yet another victory for Israeli intransigence will prove pyhrrhic.

 

These negotiations may not lead to an agreement, but they will mark a historic turning-point nonetheless. The delegitimisation of Israel is truly under way, and the party doing most of the damage is the Israeli leadership itself.

 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

14 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

Hans M. Kristensen

Robert S. Norris

Abstract

The United States has an estimated 4,650 nuclear warheads available for delivery by more than 800 ballistic missiles and aircraft. Approximately 2,700 retired but still intact warheads await dismantlement, for a total inventory of roughly 7,400 warheads. The stockpile includes an estimated 2,130 operational warheads, about 1,150 on submarine-launched ballistic missiles and 470 on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Roughly 300 strategic warheads are located at bomber bases in the United States, and nearly 200 nonstrategic warheads are deployed in Europe. Another 2,530 warheads are in storage. To comply with New START, the United States is expected to eliminate land-based missile silos, reduce the number of launch tubes on its missile submarines, and limit its inventory of nuclear-capable bombers in coming years. Coinciding with a revised nuclear weapons strategy, the Obama administration is also planning an upgrade of all nuclear weapons systems. The three-decade-long plan would cost more than $200 billion in the first decade alone.

The US Defense Department maintains a stockpile of an estimated 4,650 nuclear warheads for delivery by more than 800 ballistic missiles and aircraft. The stockpile did not decline significantly over the last year, but has shrunk by roughly 460 warheads compared with May 2010, when the United States announced that the Defense Department’s stockpile contained 5,113 warheads.

The current stockpile includes an estimated 2,130 operational warheads, of which approximately 1,620 strategic warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles—1,150 on submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and 470 on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); roughly 300 strategic warheads are located at bomber bases in the United States; and nearly 200 nonstrategic warheads are deployed in Europe (see Table 1). The remaining 2,530 warheads are in storage as a so-called hedge against technical or geopolitical surprises.

In addition to the warheads in the US stockpile, approximately 2,700 retired, but still-intact warheads are in storage and await dismantlement, for a total inventory of roughly 7,400 warheads.

Implementing New START

As of September 1, 2013, the United States nuclear arsenal was counted under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with 1,688 strategic warheads attributed to 809 deployed missiles and bombers—an increase of 34 warheads and 17 launchers compared with the previous count in March 2013. The increase is an anomaly, however, reflecting fluctuations in launchers in overhaul rather than an actual increase of strategic forces. Since the treaty entered into force in February 2011, the United States has reduced a total of 146 strategic warheads and 90 launchers counted under the treaty (Kristensen, 2013a).

To meet the treaty limit on non-deployed launchers, the Air Force plans to eliminate 104 empty ICBM silos. This includes 50 silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which until 2008 housed the 50 Minuteman III missiles of the 564th Missile Squadron; 50 silos at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, which was until 2005 used by MX/Peacekeeper ICBMs of the 400th Missile Squadron; and one MX/Peacekeeper and three Minuteman III test-launch silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The 50 silos at Malmstrom will be destroyed in 2013–2014, the 50 silos at Warren in 2015–2016, and the four test-launch silos at Vandenberg in 2017.

The next step will be the reduction of missile tubes from 24 to 20 on each US nuclear missile submarine in 2015–2016. The third and final step will be the denuclearization of excess bombers to reduce the accountable inventory to 60.

Nuclear weapons employment guidance

The Obama administration’s long-awaited nuclear weapons employment guidance was announced in June 2013 after more than two years of internal deliberations. The administration published a nine-page report and a fact sheet that described the employment guidance—known as Presidential Policy Directive 24—setting four overall principles for the role of US nuclear forces.

Under the directive, the fundamental role of US nuclear weapons remains to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies and partners. The United States will only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners. The United States will maintain a credible nuclear deterrent capable of convincing any potential adversary of the adverse consequences of attacking the United States or its allies and partners. And US policy seeks to achieve a credible deterrent with the lowest possible number of nuclear weapons, consistent with its current and future security requirements (Defense Department, 2013).

These planning principles are based on the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, and the guidance report describes an employment strategy that contains a mix of constraints on and reaffirmations of nuclear planning.

In terms of constraining nuclear plans, the guidance document declares that the United States can safely pursue up to a one-third reduction in deployed nuclear weapons from the level established in New START in negotiated cuts with Russia; directs the Defense Department to focus planning only on those objectives and missions that are necessary for deterrence; and tells the department to examine further options to reduce the role Launch Under Attack plays in US planning. The guidance also directs the Defense Department to take concrete steps toward reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US national security by increasing planning for non-nuclear strike options and assessing what objectives and effects could be achieved through them; declares that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in compliance with their non-nuclear obligations;1 declares that the United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects; reiterates the intention to work toward the goal of making deterrence of nuclear weapons the sole purpose of US nuclear weapons; and outlines a more efficient strategy for hedging against unanticipated risks with fewer non-deployed nuclear weapons (Defense Department, 2013; White House, 2013).

The reaffirmations contained in the guidance document in some cases simply confirm that long-held principles for nuclear war planning still are in force. In other cases, however, the reaffirmations appear to contradict the constraints asserted in the same document. Among other things, the document declares that the new guidance is consistent with the fundamentals of deterrence that have long undergirded US nuclear weapons policy, and that the United States will retain a nuclear triad so it can credibly threaten “a wide range” of nuclear responses if deterrence should fail; these responses could include nuclear attacks against adversaries armed with chemical, biological, and conventional weapons. The guidance also states that the United States will maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries and rejects countervalue or minimum deterrence as the basis for US nuclear strategy. It also directs the Defense Department to retain the ability to Launch Under Attack; declares that the new employment strategy does not direct any changes to currently deployed nuclear forces; decides to continue to keep a reserve of non-deployed warheads to increase the deployed force if needed; calls for retaining the ability to forward-deploy nuclear weapons with heavy bombers and dual-capable fighter aircraft in support of extended deterrence; says that the United States should continue a forward-based nuclear posture in Europe; and declares that non-nuclear strike options are not a substitute for nuclear weapons (Defense Department, 2013; White House, 2013).

Based on the new employment guidance, the Office of the Secretary of Defense will update the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy, and the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will update the nuclear supplement to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan. These documents will in turn guide Strategic Command’s revision of the strategic nuclear war plan (Kristensen, 2013b). Some changes will be implemented quickly, while others (such as increasing the role of non-nuclear forces) could take years to achieve.

Nuclear modernization plan

Coinciding with the revised nuclear weapons employment strategy, the Obama administration is planning an extensive upgrade of all nuclear weapons systems: missiles, bombers, submarines, fighters, warheads, and the supporting complex and factories. The plan extends three decades into the future and costs more than $200 billion in the first decade and hundreds of billions of dollars more in the next two decades.

The plan envisions the production of significantly modified nuclear weapons, including the addition of a guided tail kit to the B61 bomb to increase its accuracy, broaden strike options against underground targets, and reduce radioactive fallout. The new B61 bomb (B61-12) is already being designed and is expected to cost around $10 billion for 400 to 500 bombs—the most expensive nuclear bomb project ever.

The plan also envisions building a family of so-called interoperable warheads that could be used on both land- and sea-based missiles. Little is known about the precise configuration of these warheads, but even though they would incorporate components from previously tested warhead designs, each could differ significantly from warheads currently in the stockpile and potentially increase uncertainty about warhead performance. Each interoperable warhead will be extremely expensive, with IW1 projected at $14.7 billion. The plan is known as the 3 + 2 plan because it envisions the entire future stockpile containing three warhead types for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and two warheads for bombers, compared with seven warhead types today (see Figure 1). The high cost will likely result in significant modification, even cancelation, of the 3+2 plan.

Land-based ballistic missiles

The US Air Force operates a force of 450 silo-based Minuteman III ICBMs split evenly across three wings: the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren Air Force Base; the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; and the 341st Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base. Each wing has three squadrons, each with 50 missiles controlled by five launch-control centers. Under New START, the Air Force plans to reduce the ICBM force to 400 missiles, probably by retiring one of three missile squadrons at one of the three bases, leaving two bases with 150 missiles each and one with 100 missiles.

Each missile carries either the 335-kiloton W78 warhead or the 300-kiloton W87 warhead. A few missiles still carry multiple warheads but are being downloaded in order for the United States to meet the limits of New START. Despite the download, the ICBM force will retain a re-MIRVing capability that could increase warhead loading if directed.

The Air Force is in the final phase of a multibillion-dollar, decade-long modernization program to extend the service life of the Minuteman III to 2030. Although the United States has not officially announced deployment of a new ICBM, the upgraded Minuteman IIIs “are basically new missiles except for the shell” (Pampe, 2012). The total modernization program will be completed in 2015.

In mid-2014, the Air Force is scheduled to complete an analysis of alternatives for replacing the Minuteman III missiles. Options being studied range from extending the existing missile to beyond 2030 to more exotic options, such as a mobile ICBM to increase survivability. Three Minuteman IIIs were test-launched in 2013.

Nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines

The US Navy operates 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (eight based in the Pacific and six in the Atlantic), all equipped with Trident II D5 SLBMs. Normally 12 of the subs are considered operational, with a 13th and 14th boat in overhaul at any given time. The aggregate New START data show that normally fewer than 12 of these submarines are fully equipped with missiles. Of the 14 boats, 10 or 11 are normally capable of deploying with their missiles.

The deployed submarines carry approximately 1,150 warheads—or an average of 4.8 warheads per missile. In practice, each missile probably has three, four, or five warheads, depending upon the requirement of the war plan. Loading with fewer warheads increases a missile’s range.

Three versions of two basic warhead types are deployed on the SLBMs: the 100-kiloton W76-0, the 100-kiloton W76-1, and the 455-kiloton W88. The W76-1 is a refurbished version of the W76-0, with the same yield but with an added safety device, a dual strong link detonation control. Moreover, a new arming, fuzing, and firing unit provides improved targeting capabilities. Full-scale production of an estimated 1,200 W76-1 s is under way at the Pantex plant in Texas. So far, roughly 500 W76-1 s have replaced W76-0 s on Trident II SLBMs, and production is scheduled to continue through 2019. W76-1 s are also being supplied to Britain’s missile submarines (Kristensen, 2011a).

US submarine nuclear deterrent patrols have decreased significantly over the past decade from 64 patrols in 1999 to 28 in 2011. As a result, each sub now conducts an average of 2.5 patrols per year compared with 3.5 patrols a decade ago. The average duration of a patrol is 70 days, with a few lasting more than 100 days. More than 60 percent of the patrols take place in the Pacific Ocean, reflecting nuclear war planning against China, North Korea, and eastern Russia.

At any given time, eight or nine of the 12 operational nuclear missile submarines are at sea. Four or five of the at-sea boats are on “hard alert,” which means they are in designated patrol areas within range of the targets specified in their assigned target package in accordance with the strategic war plan. The other three or four subs at sea are in transit to or from their patrol areas, and the remaining boats are in port, some with their missiles removed.

Starting in 2015, the number of missile tubes on each Ohio-class boat will be reduced by four, from 24 to 20. The reduction is intended to reduce the number of deployed SLBMs to no more than 240 at any given time, to meet the 2018 limit on deployed strategic delivery vehicles set by New START.

The Navy has ambitious modernization plans to replace the Ohio-class subs with a new design, a submarine that is 2,000 tons larger than the Ohio-class submarine, but with 16 missile tubes instead of the current 24—four fewer than the 20 planned under New START. Twelve replacement boats (tentatively known as SSBNX) are planned, a reduction of two compared with the current fleet of 14, at an estimated cost of approximately $100 billion. Construction of the first new submarine is scheduled for 2021, with deployment on deterrent patrol starting in 2031.

The plan is that during the first decade of its service life, this new class of submarine will be armed with a life-extended version of the current Trident II D5 SLBM. This upgraded missile, the D5LE, has a guidance system designed to “provide flexibility to support new missions” (Draper Laboratory, 2006: 8) and make the missile “more accurate” (Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, 2008: 14); it will also be backfitted onto existing Ohio-class subs for the remainder of their service life, starting in the Pacific in October 2017. The D5LE will also be deployed on Britain’s missile submarines.

The US submarine force conducted eight SLBM test-launches in 2013. In April, following completion of its reactor-refueling overhaul, the Pennsylvania launched four missiles including the second flight test of the D5LE guidance package. And in September, another submarine launched two salvos of two missiles in the Atlantic Ocean.

Strategic bombers

The Air Force operates a fleet of 20 B-2 and 93 B-52H bombers at three bases. Of those, 18 B-2 s and 76 B-52Hs are nuclear-capable. An estimated 60 bombers (16 B-2 s and 44 B-52Hs) are assigned nuclear weapons under the strategic nuclear war plan.

Each dedicated B-2 can carry up to 16 nuclear bombs (B61-7, B61-11, and B83-1). The dedicated B-52Hs are assigned air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) but are no longer assigned gravity bombs. From the 2020s, the B-2 is scheduled to receive the planned B61-12 precision-guided nuclear bomb, a program currently estimated to cost in excess of $10 billion. It is estimated that approximately 1,000 nuclear weapons, including 528 ALCMs, are assigned to the bombers. Most of these weapons are in central storage at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, but a small number (we estimate 200 to 300) are stored at Minot Air Force Base and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri; nuclear weapons are no longer stored at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana (Air Force Magazine, 2011; Ferrell, 2012). The weapons are not deployed on the bombers under normal circumstances but could be loaded on short notice.

From the mid-2020s, the Air Force plans to begin replacing B-52 and B-1 (and later also B-2) bombers with a new long-range bomber. Procurement of 80 to 100 aircraft is envisioned; some of the new bombers are planned to be nuclear-capable, at a total cost of well over $55 billion. The new bomber will be equipped to deliver the planned B61-12 precision-guided bomb, as well as a new nuclear ALCM that is currently known as the Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) missile. The current ALCM is scheduled to remain operational through the 2020s. The administration has promised that it will not produce “new” nuclear warheads, so the LRSO could either use a life-extended version of the ALCM’s W80-1 warhead or a life-extended version of the retired W84 warhead that once armed the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile. The LRSO warhead could cost as much as $12 billion, with billions more needed to produce the missile itself.

Nonstrategic nuclear weapons

The US inventory of nonstrategic nuclear weapons includes approximately 500 warheads, all B61 gravity bombs. Nearly 200 of the bombs are deployed in Europe at six bases in five NATO countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. The Belgian, Dutch, and Turkish air forces (with F-16 s) and German and Italian air forces (with PA-200 Tornado aircraft) are assigned nuclear strike missions with the US nuclear weapons (Kristensen and Norris, 2011). The weapons in Europe no longer serve a military purpose and are not tasked with providing the ultimate security guarantee to NATO, a mission that is assigned to strategic weapons.

Although the May 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago approved the Deterrence and Defense Posture Review conclusion that the existing “nuclear force posture currently meets the criteria for an effective deterrence and defense posture” (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2012: paragraph 8), NATO has approved modernization in Europe through the addition of a guided tail kit to the B61 bomb to increase its accuracy, and the deployment of the stealthy F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter in Europe. Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey have decided to buy the F-35A, and it is under consideration in Belgium. The modified bomb, known as the B61-12, will also be carried on other fighter aircraft (F-15E, F-16, and PA-200 Tornado) as well as strategic bombers (B-2 and the new long-range bomber), potentially complicating future arms control agreements (Kristensen, 2011b, 2012).

Funding

This research was carried out with grants from the New-Land Foundation and the Ploughshares Fund.

 

Hans M. Kristensen is the director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, DC.

Robert S. Norris is a senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, DC.

17 December, 2014

 

 

By Nicola Nasser

International, regional and internal players vying for interests, wealth, power or influence are all beneficiaries of the “al-Qaeda threat” in Iraq and in spite of their deadly and bloody competitions they agree only on two denominators, namely that the presence of the U.S.-installed and Iran–supported sectarian government in Baghdad and its sectarian al-Qaeda antithesis are the necessary casus belli for their proxy wars, which are tearing apart the social fabric of the Iraqi society, disintegrating the national unity of Iraq and bleeding its population to the last Iraqi.

The Iraqi people seem a passive player, paying in their blood for all this Machiavellian dirty politics. The war which the U.S. unleashed by its invasion of Iraq in 2003 undoubtedly continues and the bleeding of the Iraqi people continues as well.

According to the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq, 34452 Iraqis were killed since 2008 and more than ten thousand were killed in 2013 during which suicide bombings more than tripled according to the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk’s recent testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The AFP reported that more than one thousand Iraqis were killed in last January. The UN refugee agency UNHCR, citing Iraqi government figures, says that more than 140,000 Iraqis have already been displaced from Iraq’s western province of Anbar.

Both the United States and Russia are now supplying Iraq with multi–billion arms sales to empower the sectarian government in Baghdad to defeat the sectarian “al-Qaeda threat.” They see a casus belli in al–Qaeda to regain a lost ground in Iraq, the first to rebalance its influence against Iran in a country where it had paid a heavy price in human souls and taxpayer money only for Iran to reap the exploits of its invasion of 2003 while the second could not close an opened Iraqi window of opportunity to re-enter the country as an exporter of arms who used to be the major supplier of weaponry to the Iraqi military before the U.S. invasion.

Regionally, Iraq’s ambassador to Iran Muhammad Majid al-Sheikh announced earlier this month that Baghdad has signed an agreement with Tehran “to purchase weapons and military equipment;” Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen defense and security agreements with Iran last September.

Meanwhile Syria, which is totally preoccupied with fighting a three –year old wide spread terrorist insurgency within its borders, could not but coordinate defense with the Iraq military against the common enemy of the “al-Qaeda threat” in both countries.

Counterbalancing politically and militarily, Turkey and the GCC countries led by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in their anti-Iran proxy wars in Iraq and Syria, are pouring billions of petrodollars to empower a sectarian counterbalance by money, arms and political support, which end up empowering al–Qaeda indirectly or its sectarian allies directly, thus perpetuating the war and fueling the sectarian strife in Iraq, as a part of an unabated effort to contain Iran’s expanding regional sphere of influence.

Ironically, the Turkish member of the U.S.–led NATO as well as the GCC Arab NATO non–member “partners” seem to stand on the opposite side with their U.S. strategic ally in the Iraqi war in this tragic drama of Machiavellian dirty politics.

Internally, the three major partners in the “political process” are no less Machiavellian in their exploiting of the al-Qaeda card. The self–ruled northern Iraqi Kurdistan region, which counts down for the right timing for secession, could not be but happy with the preoccupation of the central government in Baghdad with the “al–Qaeda threat.” Pro-Iran Shiite sectarian parties and militias use this threat to strengthen their sectarian bond and justify their loyalty to Iran as their protector. Their Sunni sectarian rivals are using the threat to promote themselves as the “alternative” to al-Qaeda in representing the Sunnis and to justify their seeking financial, political and paramilitary support from the U.S., GCC and Turkey, allegedly to counter the pro-Iran sectarian government in Baghdad as well as the expanding Iranian influence in Iraq and the region.

Exploiting his partners’ inter-fighting, Iraqi two–term Prime Minister Nouri (or Jawad) Al-Maliki, has maneuvered to win a constitutional interpretation allowing him to run for a third term and, to reinforce his one-man show of governance, he was in Washington D.C. last November, then in Tehran the next December, seeking military “help” against the “al-Qaeda threat” and he got it.

U.S. Continues War by Proxy

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has pledged to support al-Maliki’s military offensive against al–Qaeda and its offshoot the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

24 Apache helicopter with rockets and other equipment connected to them, 175 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, ScanEagle and Raven reconnaissance drones have either already been delivered or pending delivery, among a $4.7 billion worth of military equipment, including F-16 fighters. James Jeffrey reported in Foreign Policy last Monday that President Barak Obama’s administration is “increasing intelligence and operational cooperation with the Iraqi government.” The French Le Figaro reported early this week that “hundreds” of U.S. security personnel will return to Iraq to train Iraqis on using these weapons to confirm what the Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Steve Warren, did not rule out on last January 17 when he said that “we are in continuing discussions about how we can improve the Iraqi military.”

Kerry ruled out sending “American boots” on the Iraqi ground; obviously he meant “Pentagon boots,” but not the Pentagon–contracted boots.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) online on this February 3 reported that the “U.S. military support there relies increasingly on the presence of contractors.” It described this strategy as “the strategic deployment of defense contractors in Iraq.” Citing State Department and Pentagon figures, the WSJ reported, “As of January 2013, the U.S. had more than 12,500 contractors in Iraq,” including some 5,000 contractors supporting the American diplomatic mission in Iraq, the largest in the world.

It is obvious that the U.S. administration is continuing its war on Iraq by the Iraqi ruling proxies who had been left behind when the American combat mission was ended in December 2011. The administration is highlighting the “al-Qaeda threat” as casus belli as cited Brett McGurk’s testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on this February 8.

The Machiavellian support from Iran, Syria and Russia might for a while misleadingly portray al-Maliky’s government as anti – American, but it could not cover up the fact that it was essentially installed by the U.S. foreign military invasion and is still bound by a “strategic agreement” with the United States.

 

Political System Unfixable

However the new U.S. “surge” in “operational cooperation with the Iraqi government” will most likely not succeed in fixing “Iraq’s shattered political system,” which “our forces were unable to fix … even when they were in Iraq in large numbers,” according to Christopher A. Preble, writing in Cato Institute online on last January 23.

“Sending David Petraeus and Ambassador (Ryan) Crocker back” to Iraq, as suggested by U.S. Sen. John McCain to CNN’s “State of the Union” last January 12 was a disparate wishful thinking.

“Iraq’s shattered political system” is the legitimate product of the U.S.–engineered “political process” based on sectarian and ethnic fragmentation of the geopolitical national unity of the country. Highlighting the “al-Qaeda threat” can no more cover up the fact that the “political process” is a failure that cannot be “fixed” militarily.

Writing in Foreign Policy on this February 10, James Jeffrey said that the “United States tried to transform Iraq into a model Western-style democracy,” but “the U.S. experience in the Middle East came to resemble its long war in Vietnam.”

The sectarian U.S. proxy government in Baghdad, which has developed into an authoritarian regime, remains the bedrock of the U.S. strategic failure. The “al-Qaeda threat” is only the expected sectarian antithesis; it is a byproduct that will disappear with the collapse of the sectarian “political process.”

Iraq is now “on the edge of the abyss,” director of Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), professor Gareth Stansfield, wrote on this February 3. This situation is “being laid at the door of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,” who “is now portrayed as a divisive figure,” he said.

In their report titled “Iraq in Crisis” and published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on last January 24, Anthony H. Cordesman and Sam Khazai said that the “cause of Iraq’s current violence” is “its failed politics and system of governance,” adding that the Iraqi “election in 2010 divided the nation rather than create any form of stable democracy.” On the background of the current status quo, Iraq’s next round of elections, scheduled for next April 30, is expected to fare worse. Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly last August 14, Salah Nasrawi said that more than 10 years after the U.S. invasion, “the much-trumpeted Iraqi democracy is a mirage.” He was vindicated by none other than the Iraqi Speaker of the parliament Osama Al Nujaifi who was quoted by the Gulf News on last January 25 as saying during his latest visit to U.S.: “What we have now is a facade of a democracy — superficial — but on the inside it’s total chaos.”

Popular Uprising, not al-Qaeda

Al-Maliki’s government on this February 8 issued a one week ultimatum to what the governor of Anbar described as the “criminals” who “have kidnapped Fallujah” for more than a month, but Ross Caputi, a veteran U.S. Marine who participated in the second U.S. siege of Fallujah in 2004, in an open letter to U.S. Secretary Kerry published by the Global Research last Monday, said that “the current violence in Fallujah has been misrepresented in the media.”

“The Iraqi government has not been attacking al Qaeda in Fallujah,” he said, adding that Al-Maliki’s government “is not a regime the U.S. should be sending weapons to.” For this purpose Caputi attached a petition with 11,610 signatures. He described what is happening in the western Iraqi city as a “popular uprising.”

Embracing the same strategy the Americans used in 2007, Iran and U.S. Iraqi proxies have now joined forces against a “popular uprising” that Fallujah has just become only a symbol. Misleadingly pronouncing al-Qaeda as their target, the pro-Iran sectarian and the pro-U.S. so-called “Awakening” tribal militias have revived their 2007 alliance.

The Washington Post on this February 9 reported that the “Shiite militias” have begun “to remobilize,” including The Badr Organization, Kataib Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army; it quoted a commander of one such militia, namely Asaib Ahl al-Haq, as admitting to “targeted” extrajudicial “killings.”

This unholy alliance is the ideal recipe for fueling the sectarian divide and inviting a sectarian retaliation in the name of fighting al-Qaeda; the likely bloody prospects vindicate Cordesman and Khazai’s conclusion that Iraq is now “a nation in crisis bordering on civil war.”

Al – Qaeda is real and a terrorist threat, but like the sectarian U.S.-installed government in Baghdad, it was a new comer brought into Iraq by or because of the invading U.S. troops and most likely it would last as long as its sectarian antithesis lives on in Baghdad’s so–called “Green Zone.”

“Al-Maliki has more than once termed the various fights and stand-offs” in Iraq “as a fight against “al Qaeda”, but it’s not that simple,” Michael Holmes wrote in CNN on last January 15. The “Sunni sense of being under the heel of a sectarian government … has nothing to do with al Qaeda and won’t evaporate once” it is forced out of Iraq, Holmes concluded.

A week earlier, analyst Charles Lister, writing to CNN, concluded that “al Qaeda” was being used as a political tool” by al–Maliki, who “has adopted sharply sectarian rhetoric when referring to Sunni elements … as inherently connected to al Qaeda, with no substantive evidence to back these claims.”

Al–Qaeda not the Only Force

“Al–Qaeda is “not the only force on the ground in Fallujah, where “defected local police personnel and armed tribesmen opposed to the federal government … represent the superior force,” Lister added.

The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) had reported that the “Iraqi insurgency” is composed of at least a dozen major organizations and perhaps as many as 40 distinct groups with an estimated less than 10% non-Iraqi foreign insurgents. It is noteworthy that all those who are playing the “al-Qaeda threat” card are in consensus on blacking out the role of these movements.

Prominent among them is the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshabandi (JRTN) movement, which announced its establishment after Saddam Hussein’s execution on December 30, 2006. It is the backbone of the Higher Command for Jihad and Liberation (HCJL), which was formed in October the following year as a coalition of more than thirty national “resistance” movements. The National, Pan-Arab and Islamic front (NAIF) is the Higher Command’s political wing. Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, is the leader of JRTN, HCJL and NAIF as well as the banned Baath party.

“Since 2009, the movement has gained significant strength” because of its “commitment to restrict attacks to “the unbeliever-occupier,” according to Michael Knights, writing to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) on July1, 2011. “We absolutely forbid killing or fighting any Iraqi in all the agent state apparatus of the army, the police, the awakening, and the administration, except in self-defense situations, and if some agents and spies in these apparatus tried to confront the resistance,” al-Duri stated in 2009, thus extricating his movement from the terrorist atrocities of al-Qaeda, which has drowned the Iraqi people in a bloodbath of daily suicide bombings.

The majority of these organizations and groups are indigenous national anti-U.S. resistance movements. Even the ISIL, which broke out recently with al-Qaeda, is led and manned mostly by Iraqis. Playing al-Qaeda card is a smokescreen to downplay their role as the backbone of the national opposition to the U.S.-installed sectarian proxy government in Baghdad’s green Zone. Their Islamic rhetoric is their common language with their religious people.

Since the end of the U.S. combat mission in the country in December 2011, they resorted to popular peaceful protests across Iraq. Late last December al-Maliki dismantled by force their major camp of protests near Ramadi, the capital of the western province of Anbar. Protesting armed men immediately took over Fallujah and Ramadi.

Since then, more than 45 tribal “military councils” were announced in all the governorates of Iraq. They held a national conference in January, which elected the “General Political Council of the Guerrillas of Iraq.” Coverage of the news and “guerrilla” activities of these councils by Al-Duri’s media outlets is enough indication of the linkage between them and his organizational structure.

No doubt revolution is brewing and boiling in Iraq against the sectarian government in Baghdad, its U.S. and Iranian supporters as well as against its al-Qaeda sectarian antithesis.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

 

12 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Ramzy Baroud

“When they first put the electricity on me, I gasped; my body went rigid and the bag came off my head,” Israa Salah, a detained Iraqi woman told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in her heartrending testimony.

Israa (not her real name) was arrested by US and Iraqi forces in 2010. She was tortured to the point of confessing to terrorist charges she didn’t commit. According to HRW’s “No One is Safe” – a 105-page report released on Feb 06 – there are thousands of Iraqi women in jail being subjected to similar practices, held with no charges, beaten and raped.

In Israa’s case, she received most degrading, but typical treatment. She was handcuffed, pushed down on her knees, and kicked in the face until her jaw broke. And when she refused to sign the confession, it was then that electric wires were attached to her handcuffs.

Welcome to the ‘liberated’ Iraq, a budding ‘democracy’ which American officials rarely cease celebrating. There is no denial that the brutal policies of the Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki is a continuation of the same policies of the US military administration, which ruled over Iraq from 2003 until the departure of US troops in Dec. 2011.

It is as if the torturers have read from the same handbook. In fact, they did.

The torture and degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners – men and women – in Abu Ghraib prison was not an isolated incident carried out by a few ‘bad apples.’ Only the naïve would buy into the ‘bad apples’ theory, and not because of the sheer horrendousness and frequency of the abuse. Since the Abu Ghraib revelations early in 2004, many such stories emerged, backed by damning evidence, not only throughout Iraq, but in Afghanistan as well. The crimes were not only committed by the Americans, but the British as well, followed by the Iraqis, who were chosen to continue with the mission of ‘democratization.’

“No One is Safe” presented some of the most harrowing evidence of the abuse of women by Iraq’s criminal ‘justice system’. The phenomenon of kidnapping, torturing, raping and executing women is so widespread that it seems shocking even by the standards of the country’s poor human rights record of the past. If such a reality were to exist in a different political context, the global outrage would have been so profound. Some in the ‘liberal’ western media, supposedly compelled by women’s rights would have called for some measure of humanitarian intervention, war even. But in the case of today’s Iraq, the HRW report is likely to receive bits of coverage where the issue is significantly deluded, and eventually forgotten.

In fact, the discussion of the abuse of thousands of women – let alone tens of thousands of men – has already been discussed in a political vacuum. A buzzword that seems to emerge since the publication of the report is that the abuse confirms the ‘weaknesses’ of the Iraqi judicial system. The challenge then becomes the matter of strengthening a weak system, perhaps through channeling more money, constructing larger facilities, and providing better monitoring and training, likely carried out by US-led training of staff.

Mostly absent are the voices of women’s groups, intellectuals and feminists who seem to be constantly distressed by the traditional marriage practices in Yemen, for example, or the covering up of women’s faces in Afghanistan. There is little, if any, uproar and outrage, when brown women suffer at the hands of western men and women, or their cronies, as is the situation in Iraq.

If the HRW report remerged in complete isolation from an equally harrowing political context created by the US invasion of Iraq, one could grudgingly excuse the relative silence. But it isn’t the case. The Abu Ghraib culture continues to be the very tactic by which Iraqis have been governed since March 2003.

Years after the investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses had begun, Major General Antonio Taguba, who had conducted the inquiry, revealed that there were more than 2,000 unpublished photos documenting further abuse. “One picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee,” reported the Telegraph newspaper on May 2009.

Maj Gen Taguba had then supported Obama’s decision not to publish the photos, not out of any moralistic reasoning, but simply because “the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.” Of course, the British, the builders of security in Afghanistan, wrote their own history of infamy through an abuse campaign that never ceased since they had set foot in Afghanistan.

Considering the charged political atmosphere in Iraq, the latest reported abuses are of course placed in their own unique context. Most of the abused women are Sunni, and their freedom has been a major rallying cry for rebelling Sunni provinces in central and western Iraq. In Arab culture, dishonoring one through occupation and the robbing of one’s land comes second to dishonoring women. The humiliation that millions of Iraqi Sunni feel cannot be explained by words, and militancy is an unsurprising response to the government’s unrelenting policies of dehumanization, discrimination and violence.

While post-US invasion Iraq was not a heaven for democracy and human rights, the ‘new Iraq’ has solidified a culture of impunity that holds nothing sacred. In fact, dishonoring entire societies has been a tactic in al-Maliki’s dirty war. Many women were “rounded up for alleged terrorist activities by male family members,” reported the Associated Press, citing the HRW report.

“Iraqi security forces and officials act as if brutally abusing women will make the country safer,” said Joe Stork, deputy MENA director at HRW. It was the same logic that determined that through ‘shock and awe’ Iraqis could be forced into submission.

Neither theory proved accurate. The war and rebellion in Iraq will continue as long as those holding the key to that massive Iraqi prison understand that human rights must be respected as a precondition to a lasting peace.

Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

12 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Mike Head

As this week’s second round of talks in Geneva remained at an impasse, US President Barack Obama yesterday renewed talk of possible military intervention against Syria, on the cynical pretext of “humanitarian” concern for the Syrian people.

Accompanied by French President Francois Hollande at a joint media conference in Washington, Obama declared there was “enormous frustration here” over the situation in Syria. While he discounted military intervention, for now, he ratcheted up the pressure on the Syrian and Russian governments to accept the removal of Syria’s Assad regime.

“Right now we don’t think that there is a military solution per se to the problem,” Obama stated. “But the situation’s fluid, and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue to solve this problem.”

His remarks underscore the reality that the US and its allies remain committed to an agenda of regime change. If the current talks, brokered by Russia, do not achieve that soon, then a military attack remains an option, as previously carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Obama emphasised: “I always reserve the right to exercise military action on behalf of America’s national security interests,” adding only, “That has to be deployed wisely.” He underscored Washington’s insistence on the removal of President Bashar al-Assad’s government, describing it as “crumbling.” Obama said the conflict was “one of our highest national security priorities.”

The US president also sought to intensify the pressure on Iran to prevail upon its Syrian ally to accede to Washington’s dictates. Having initiated talks with Tehran in recent months, partly with a view to securing the US agenda in Syria, Obama declared that his administration would come down like “a ton of bricks” on firms that violated the still crippling sanctions imposed on Iran.

Five months ago, Obama and Hollande were on the brink of bombing Syria on the basis of utterly false allegations, later exposed by a UN report, that the Assad regime used chemical weapons in towns near Damascus. Confronted by popular opposition, and with differences in US ruling circles over a new Middle Eastern war, Obama pulled back, seeking to create more favourable conditions for pursuing Washington’s predatory interests in the Middle East and elsewhere, notably against China and Russia.

During the first round of the Geneva talks, which ended in failure last month, the US provocatively renewed US arms shipments to the Syrian “rebel” forces, but they have suffered further setbacks on the ground and there is intensifying fighting occurring between the Islamist militias themselves.

At yesterday’s press conference, during which the two presidents hailed their two countries’ “exceptionally” close alliance, Hollande also spoke of other “choices” if the Geneva negotiations did not result in Assad’s removal. Hollande bluntly stated that the “only purpose” of the Geneva talks was to “make political transition possible.”

This exposes the pretence that the Geneva talks are about “peace.” The Western-backed Syrian National Coalition delegation in Geneva warned on Monday it would not return for a third round of talks if the Syrian government representatives did not agree to Assad’s ouster as a pre-condition for negotiations. UN convenor Lakhdar Brahimi announced that the talks were proving just as “laborious” and unsuccessful as the previous round.

Hollande also revealed the aggressive agenda behind his and Obama’s hypocritical claims to be dismayed by the plight of the Syrian people—whose suffering is the direct result of the nearly three year US-instigated war for regime-change. Hollande denounced the Russian government for opposing a proposed Western-sponsored US Security Council resolution to supposedly increase aid access to people trapped in the conflict. “How can you object to humanitarian corridors, why would you prevent the vote of a resolution if in good faith, it is all about saving human lives?” he declared.

Such demands for military “corridors” and “no-fly zones”—ostensibly to protect civilians—have provided the trigger for repeated imperialist interventions over the past two decades, including the 2011 US-NATO war of aggression that ousted Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya. The draft UN resolution reportedly includes the threat of punitive sanctions. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday described the resolution as “absolutely one-sided” and “unacceptable” because it contained “an ultimatum for the government that if they don’t solve all this in two weeks then we automatically introduce sanctions.”

While the Western media has focussed sole attention on the plight of 1,100 war refugees trapped in besieged opposition-held areas of Homs, the responsibility for the humanitarian disaster in Syria lies above all with the “rebel” militias. Spawned and funded by the US and its collaborators, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they are carrying out massacres and laying siege to towns and villages, while engaged in ferocious in-fighting for territorial control. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is locked in battles with another coalition of Islamist militias led by the al-Nusra Front, which swears allegiance to Al Qaeda.

Even as the Geneva talks resumed on Monday, Islamist forces killed 20 civilians—including women and children—and 20 local fighters during an attack on the Alawite village of Maan in the central Syrian province of Hama. There were also reports that ISIL forces had been forced to withdraw from Syria’s oil-rich eastern province of Deir al-Zor after days of heavy fighting against its Islamist rivals. ISIL reportedly alienated the province’s population by imposing harsh rulings against dissent, such as beheadings, in areas it controlled.

The chemical weapons issue, temporarily downplayed after a Moscow-brokered disarmament pact was reached last September, is also being brought back to centre stage, with the Obama administration accusing the Assad government of stalling in meeting deadlines for the destruction of its stockpiles. The agency supervising the agreement, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), reported that a third shipment of chemicals was exported on Monday from the port of Latakia, despite the fighting raging in the country. Nevertheless, OPCW director general Ahmet Uzumcu warned against “further delays” in meeting the “concrete schedule” laid down in September.

In the US, two items in the New York Times signalled a shift to a more aggressive posture. A February 10 editorial backed the proposed UN resolution, declaring that the UN Security Council had “failed to respond to the bloodshed” in Syria, “largely because of Russia’s slavish allegiance to President Bashar al-Assad.”

Yesterday, the newspaper published an op-ed piece by two academics, Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “geostrategic calculations” and Assad’s “coldblooded recalcitrance” of standing in the way of “thousands of Syrian civilians eating.” Invoking the UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine, adopted in 2005 to sanctify imperialist interventions against targeted states, they declared: “And if a multinational force cannot be assembled, then at least some countries should step up and organize Syria’s democratically oriented rebel groups to provide the necessary force on the ground, with air cover from participating nations.”

This call for military intervention, and a confrontation with Russia, would no doubt find support from the pseudo-left groups, such as the US International Socialist Organisation and the French New Anti-capitalist Party, that have adopted similar appeals in acting as cheerleaders for the imperialist operations in Libya and Syria. Such demands for action in the name of humanitarianism have become vehicles for the continuing drive by the US to assert hegemony over the resource-rich and strategically critical Middle East and Central Asia.

12 February, 2014

WSWS.org

 

By Franklin Lamb

Yarmouk Palestinian camp, Damascus: As of 2/6/14 it’s been seven days since the first humanitarian aid, generally in the form of 56 lb. food parcels packed by UNWRA, the World Food Program, the ICRC or European aid organizations have been able to enter Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp following half a dozen aborted attempts the past few months by various militia and political groups to achieve consensus to deliver aid. The aid parcels, including two kilos of rice, two kilos sugar, three kilos lentils, three kilos dry macaroni, plus flour, jam, tea, oil, and sweet Halawi spread are intended to feed a family of five to eight for ten days. The boxes have been trickling into the South side of the Yarmouk Palestinian camp and up along Rima Street where this observer has seen crowds this past week tensely waiting and hoping for food and clean water. For some camp residents the wait for relief began in June of 2013 when all entrances and exits to Yarmouk camp were cut.

Up to this morning, approximately 5,300 food parcels have been allowed into Yarmouk or an average of 800-1,000 food packages daily. Aid has been entering sporadically and sometimes chaotically, with perceptible but slight increases over the past week.

A large yellow flat-bed truck arrived on the morning of 2/5/14 and this observer watched as food parcels were off-loaded and neatly stacked into six white pick-up trucks that were then driven into Yarmouk under the watchful gaze of pro and anti-regime forces and security agents. According to one source from South Beirut who this observer had met earlier, Jabhat al Nusra, Jabhat Islam, Daash and Jund al Cham snipers could be observed on rooftops monitoring the distribution activity with their eyes pressed against their rifle scopes. One SARCS volunteer who this observer has known for two years advised that she feared there might be a shootout between these fighters and nearby Palestinian forces allied with the government (Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-GC) suspected Hezbollah fighters with hand radio phones who were watching and seemingly discussing the events. Frankly, for this observer, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish which group which around here is given the proliferation of fighters with beards and essentially indistinguishable attire.

For many food parcel recipients, their first act is to open the jar of jam inside the cardboard box and scoop the confections into the mouths of their children or the nearby infirm refugees, usually elderly. On 2/6/14, UNWRA also started a polio vaccination program, its first in Yarmouk and which is urgently needed by thousands of trapped camp residents. Ten thousand dosages of polio vaccines are being allowed into the camp with vaccinations currently underway for the second day running.

In addition to the so far paltry amount of food allowed into the camp, approximately 1,600 people have been allowed to leave Yarmouk for medical treatment. Young Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) volunteers, wearing shirts with large Red Crosses can be seen trickling out from the besieged camp this morning. Invariably holding the hands, arms, or shoulders of those who could walk the 50 yards to waiting ambulances that will evacuate and transport these patients, suffering the effects of starvation including muscle atrophy and dehydration. Most will be taken to the PCRS Jaffa hospital two kilometers away. Others are being transferred to Syrian government hospitals in Mazah, in central Damascus, including al-Mujtahed, al-Muwasat, al-Tawleed and children hospital.

This observer mingled for a couple of hours among the approximately 250 family members of trapped refugees, many of whom appear daily outside the only exit from Yarmouk camp, hoping that a relative might be allowed to leave. One elderly lady, maybe in her late sixties, explained to this observer that every day for the past seven months, i.e. since the tight siege of Yarmouk began last June, she has stood in the same location waiting for her son Mahmoud to come to her from inside besieged Yarmouk. She has no idea if he is alive but she explained to me that she believes that God will deliver him safely to her.

Another view of much needed Divine assistance was articulated by a lovely young mother who had just exited Yarmouk with her two toddlers who looked, as she did, to be in fairly bad shape and in need of immediate hospitalization. A former English literature student, the lady, whose family is from Haifa, Occupied Palestine, explained to this observer that she no longer has any belief in God and as she elaborated why, she lowered her voice so as not to offend the nearby elderly believer waiting for her son Makmoud.

She told of her experience trapped inside Yarmouk: “For the past more than five months I have sold my body for one hour to whoever would give me a kilo of rice which sometimes costs as much as 14,000 s.p. (close to $ 100). I was proud to be a whore for these terrorists in order to keep my parents alive and who are still trapped and I also prevented complete starvation of my children.” She continued, “God did not help me and my family but I promise if I live and ever see one of those dogs I will kill him and he can learn if his God exists or not. None existed for me!” and she sobbed as two young lady volunteers from the PRCS held her as she and her little ones made their way to a waiting PRCS ambulance.

Given the 18,000 in need of urgent aid this cold winter morning inside Yarmouk camp, what has been allowed in so far has been a mere trickle, rather minor in a sense. But major for those getting the live saving food parcels and urgently required medical treatment.

As this observer waits to return to Yarmouk this morning, and for a promised and expensive taxi to hopefully arrive, for few cabs want to go anywhere near Yarmouk camp these days and charge five times the normal fare if they do, ones imagines that as has been the case this past week, there will be large crowds and long lines of people waiting and sometimes jostling for food. This attests to the enormous humanitarian need and to the desperation of thousands of civilians, Palestinian and Syrian, being starved and used as a weapon of war and as human shields.

After months of false starts toward reaching an agreement among fourteen Palestinian factions here in Damascus, as well as a green light from the Syrian government, and more than a dozen rebel militias, each with disparate agendas, this week’s agreement, and the 8th since early December, may or may not hold. And it may not end the carnage that criminally took 6000 more lives just last month.

If it does succeed, it will be one more half-step, to use UN Envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi Geneva II term, toward lifting the siege of Yarmouk camp which achievement might then augur well for more widespread humanitarian efforts to achieve a nationwide ceasefire as a full step toward serious reconciliation work in order to save this great country.

Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

07 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Kate Randall

A wave of layoff announcements over the past week has exposed the reality of the economic “recovery” touted by the Obama administration and governments worldwide. Deep-going job cuts are hitting the manufacturing, pharmaceutical, technology and retail sectors across North America, Europe and Japan.

Despite stagnant revenues, reflecting sluggish economic growth, companies are reporting booming profits. These profit gains are almost entirely due to a relentless assault on jobs, wages and working conditions being carried out by the ruling class.

The layoff of tens of thousands of workers comes amid news of unprecedented compensation packages for the heads of major US corporations. It is combined with ruthless austerity measures in the US and across Europe. As the chasm between rich and poor continues to grow, social programs and benefits upon which millions rely are being gutted.

Weatherford International plans to cut its global workforce by 7,000 by mid-2014. The oilfield services company, which currently employs more than 65,000 people, hopes to generate annual cost savings of $500 million with the job cuts.

Vehicle maker Volvo announced Thursday that it will lay off 4,400 employees in 2014, including a previously announced reduction of 2,000 jobs. CEO Olof Persson said the layoffs would affect workers worldwide.

Chemical maker Ashland Inc. will cut up to 1,000 jobs as part of a restructuring program being carried out under pressure from investors to boost “shareholder value,” i.e., share prices. With revenue remaining flat at $1.9 billion for the quarter ended December 31, Ashland aims to save $150 million to $200 million annually from the restructuring.

Swiss drug maker Novartis plans to eliminate or transfer up to 4,000 jobs. The plan will affect up to 6 percent of the company’s workforce and is part of a larger plan to cut costs, including the closure of production sites. Pharmaceuticals are under increasing pressure from investors to restructure in response to expiring drug patents and government efforts to cut health care costs.

British-Swedish multinational drug maker AstraZeneca has increased its job-cutting toll to 5,600, raising by 550 last year’s announced layoff of 5,050. The company expects the job cuts, to be completed by 2016, to bring annual savings of $2.5 billion.

Japanese tech giant Sony confirmed that it will sell its struggling PC unit to investment firm Japan Industrial Partners and cut some 5,000 jobs in its TV, PC, marketing and other departments.

A mass layoff program began this week at Dell Inc., the multinational computer technology company, with over 15,000 people expected to lose their jobs. A source speaking to the Register described the impending job cuts as “a bloodbath.”

US tech companies have also announced layoffs. Massachusetts-based EMC Corp. has approved a restructuring plan that will result in layoffs “similar in size” to job cuts of more than 1,000 last year.

 

Several hundred people will be laid off as early as this week at Disney’s Interactive group. The job cuts will come mostly from Disney’s Playdom unit, which produces games for social media platforms.

Time Inc., publishers of People, Time, Sports Illustrated and In Style, began job cuts on Tuesday expected to number about 500.

North American manufacturers are shedding workers as companies close plants and make across-the-board cuts. Five hundred workers will lose their jobs beginning next week as International Paper shuts down the remaining two paper machines at its plant in Courtland, Alabama and winds down production at the facility.

GenCorp Inc. announced Tuesday it is eliminating 225 jobs nationwide as it seeks to “eliminate redundancies and achieve efficiencies” following its $550 million acquisition of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.

Pittsburgh-based US Steel is laying off nearly a quarter of the non-unionized workforce at its operations in Nanticoke and Hamilton, Ontario—about 175 workers. The steelmaker’s operations in Hamilton, which once employed 15,000, will be trimmed to around 820 workers.

Michigan-based Kellogg Co. said Tuesday it will close its Charlotte, North Carolina snack factory by the end of 2014 at a cost of 195 jobs.

Retailers in the US and Canada announced major layoffs along with store closures. RadioShack will close 500 of its 4,300 stores.

Best Buy in Canada is laying off 950 workers at stores in British Columbia, Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta and Ontario.

Sears Canada announced layoffs Wednesday for the second time this month, eliminating 634 jobs. Two weeks ago, the company said 1,600 positions would go as it moved ahead with plans to close its Canadian call centers and reduce warehouse staff.

United Airlines said last Saturday it would drop its hub in Cleveland, slashing many of its daily flights and eliminating 470 jobs. The hub formerly served Continental Airlines, which merged with United in 2010.

Even as they continue to attack jobs and wages, the corporations, with the full backing of the Obama administration and governments worldwide, are sitting on massive cash reserves. US corporations are estimated to be holding a cash hoard of $1.5 trillion.

Instead of using this money for productive investment and an expansion of employment, the corporate-financial elite is using it to finance speculative operations and stock buyback programs that drive up share prices and further enrich corporate CEOs and big investors—at the expense of the living standards of billions of people around the world.

07 February, 2014

WSWS.org

 

By William T. Hathaway

Countercurrents.org

Review of Eric Walberg, From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization, Clarity Press, 2013

Most western Middle East experts see Islam as a problem for the West — a source of terrorism, religious fanaticism, unwanted immigrants — and they see their job as helping to change the Middle East so it’s no longer a problem for us. Eric Walberg, however, recognizes that this is another instance of the Big Lie.

The actual problem is the multifaceted aggression the West has been inflicting on the Middle East for decades and is determined to continue, no matter what the cost to them and us will be. His books and articles present the empirical evidence for this with scholarly precision and compassionate concern for the human damage done by our imperialism.

His latest book, From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our ongoing war on the Muslim world — from Libya to the Philippines, from growing beleaguered communities scattered across North America and Europe to South Africa and Australia — from the perspective of those on the receiving end of America’s violence today. It is a compelling representation of both the breathtaking sweep of fourteen centuries of Islamic civilization and the current state of the Muslim world.

In this sequel to his impressive Postmodern Imperialism (2011), Walberg attempts to bridge the East-West gap, “not through a reconciliatory discourse, but through a critical reading of history,” according to the Palestinian-American writer Ramzy Baroud. Walberg looks at Islam as both religion and ideology, tracing it both via a methodological and an epistemological critique, and takes it seriously as a civilizational alternative to our present bankrupt secular imperialist order.

Our politicians and media have created an image of fiendish Muslim terrorists who “hate us for our freedom.” But they really hate us for subjugating them, for overthrowing their governments, dominating their economies, and undermining their way of life. Since we started the aggression, the attacks won’t end until we leave their countries.

Walberg asks the logical question: What can replace the neocolonial order so ruthlessly and cleverly put in place by the imperial powers in the Middle East over the past century? He explores many alternative answers ranging from “more of the same” to radical transformation.

What does Islam have to say about economics, politics, community, relations with Nature? Walberg charts a wealth of experience from the past fourteen centuries. Islam was the first world order to unite people on the basis of genuine equality, in a truly multicultural way. It never created empires like the Romans, the Christian heirs to the Romans, and most recently the British and Americans. Why?

Who are the great Muslim thinkers, and how do they differ from western thinkers of the time? How do the Prophet Muhammad’s efforts to enact the revelations of the Quran in the seventh century compare with the teachings of Marx about how to create a world order without the depredations of capitalism?

 

These are some of the questions Walberg addresses, trying to bring together the two main opponents of imperialism today: Islamists and socialists. Our foe is the entire Western corporate juggernaut, of which Israel is only a part. To survive, we must set aside our religious and political differences and form a united front. Shias, Sunnis, secularists, and socialists need to work together to defeat our common enemy. As Samir Amin wrote, “To bring the militarist project of the United States to defeat has become the primary task, the major responsibility, for everyone.” If we join in solidarity, we can win. Otherwise the imperialists will continue to divide and rule.

But it is essential for socialists to take Islamists seriously, and vice versa, for both sides to understand the various currents in the common resistance to imperialism, and to forge alliances that will be lasting. So far, Islam has been at best tolerated by socialists, at worst, dismissed and opposed. At the same time, Islamists have been suspicious of the socialist reaction to imperialism, in a sense, wishing a pox on both houses.

Leftists are quick to condemn Islamists as strategically obtuse, or worse craven, willing to collaborate with imperialists (Saudis from the start, Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s–60s against Nasserists), and to take CIA money (Afghanistan). There are those who denounce Hamas as an Israeli creation. Walberg looks closely at these arguments, based on his analysis of imperialist strategies during the past two centuries.

That Hamas possibly got support from Israeli sources is part of the age-old imperialist use of Islamists, but it has backfired. Hamas didn’t sell out. Fatah/PLO discredited themselves over decades and are now empty shells. The role of Hamas in exposing PLO hypocrisy and “holding the fort” against Israel has been proved decisively since it came to power in democratic elections in 2006.

From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization is a gripping and informative wake-up call to both sides of the anti-imperial equation, pulling together the many threads that can unite us, from Foucault’s “political spirituality,” to the Egyptian revolutionaries’ solidarity with America’s 99%, to the American Muslims’ support for the peace and ecology movements.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and a member of the Freedom Socialist Party

06 February, 2014