In a speech to a disabled veterans group in Atlanta Monday, President Barack Obama claimed credit for winding down the US war in Iraq, even as tens of thousands of troops remain there, and his administration continues to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

The speech appeared calculated to divert rising opposition to the Afghanistan war, particularly in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosure of tens of thousands of classified battlefield reports, exposing an unrelenting and savage assault on the country’s civilian population.

Obama touted the reduction of US troop strength in Iraq—now down to some 65,000 from a high of 144,000—and vowed that the target of pulling out all but 50,000 troops by the end of this month would be met, as well as the withdrawal of all US military forces by the end of 2011.

“As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Obama told the veterans audience. The “responsible end” formulation was employed by Obama as a clear signal to the US ruling elite that his antiwar rhetoric in the presidential campaign would be quickly discarded once the Democrat entered the White House and assumed the role of commander in chief for US imperialism.

Obama continued: “Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy for Iraq and for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility. And I made it clear that by August 31, 2010 America’s combat mission in Iraq would end. And that is exactly what we are doing—as promised, on schedule.”

These targets were, in fact, set by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, in a 2008 status of forces agreement negotiated with the US-backed regime in Baghdad. The incoming Democratic president quickly jettisoned a pledge he had made to pull out all US troops more rapidly, conforming to the original schedule, even as he kept at their posts all of the top civilian and military officials picked by Bush to run the war.

In his speech, Obama extolled the feats of the US military in overrunning Iraq and waging a one-sided war against its civilian population.

“They took to the skies and sped across the deserts in the initial charge into Baghdad,” he declared. “When the invasion gave way to insurgency, our troops persevered, block by block, city by city, from Baghdad to Fallujah,” he continued.

One would never know from this lyrical description that the US had waged a criminal war of aggression that has cost the lives of over a million Iraqi men, women and children and left an entire country in ruins.

Nor, for that matter, would one guess from his words that the speaker was a candidate who won the Democratic nomination less than two years ago by proclaiming that the Iraq war “should never have been authorized and never been waged.” One could be excused for thinking instead that it was George W. Bush.

In extolling the supposed withdrawal from Iraq, Obama hailed the military for “moving out millions of pieces of equipment in one of the largest logistics operations that we’ve seen in decades” and bringing “90,000 of our troops home from Iraq since I took office.”

He failed to add, however, that these millions of pieces of military hardware and tens of thousands of troops aren’t being brought home, but are instead being shipped to Afghanistan. While reducing the US troop level in Iraq by two thirds, the Obama administration has tripled the size of US forces in Afghanistan, while spreading the war across the border into Pakistan.

He defended the US war in Afghanistan, however, using the same pretext as his predecessor, claiming that US forces are there to fight al Qaeda and foil terrorist attacks. This, even as US and military and intelligence officials acknowledge that there are less than 100 al Qaeda members in the entire country.

In reality, Obama has appropriated the Bush administration’s rhetoric even as it pursues the same strategic goals laid out at the beginning of the century—the assertion of US hegemony over the geostrategically vital and oil-rich regions of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf by means of military aggression. The continued pursuit of this policy, which enjoys the support of decisive layers of America’s ruling financial elite, ensures the continuous escalation of war in both regions and beyond.

The claim that all US “combat troops” will be out of Iraq by August 31 is fraudulent. Units previously classified as “combat” troops are merely being relabeled as “advice and assist” brigades, with their mission supposedly restricted to training and “advising” the Iraqi security forces.

US military commanders, however, have made it clear that the remaining troops will continue to carry out “counterterrorism” operations, which are combat missions, and will be prepared to directly intervene against any major challenge to US domination of the oil-rich country.

“I would say that 50,000 troops on the ground is still a significant capability,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Lanza, a US military spokesman, told the media. “There is still a lot we can do with the capability we have, and we will still have influence here,” he added in a considerable understatement.

There is little reason to believe that the remaining US troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011. Senior military officers have repeatedly stressed that US forces will remain in the country for many years to come, and Washington has continued to build up and retain control of giant military bases, such as those at Balad, Al Asad and Tallil.

After seven years of war, costing the US more than $700 billion and the lives of at least 4,400 troops—and an estimated one million Iraqis—the American occupation will continue.

There is no plan to have a self-sufficient Iraqi military by 2011. The American military will remain in strategic control, with the US Air Force controlling Iraq’s skies, the US Navy its Persian Gulf coastline and US Army tanks and artillery backing under-equipped Iraqi units.

For its part, the US State Department is reportedly preparing to field its own private army of “security contractors,” i.e., private mercenaries. As McClatchy Newspapers reported, the top US commander in Iraq, Gen. Raymond Odierno flew back to Washington last week to discuss plans for deploying this force. The news service reported that the State Department has already asked the Pentagon for “Black Hawk helicopters; 50 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles; fuel trucks; high-tech surveillance systems; and other military gear.”

The State Department was a major employer of Blackwater mercenaries, whose bloody actions in Iraq earned the hatred of the local population.

According to McClatchy, the bipartisan legislative Commission on Wartime Contracting issued a report last month that said “the number of State Department security contractors would more than double, from 2,700 to between 6,000 and 7,000, under current plans.”

McClatchy quoted the State Department’s Under-secretary Patrick Kennedy defending the use of private contractors, insisting that it was the only feasible way to assemble such a paramilitary force. “This is the kind of surge activity that it seems very, very logical to use contractors for,” he said.

In his speech Monday, Obama touted the “progress” achieved by the seven-year-old US war in occupation in Iraq—which as a candidate he had ostensibly opposed—claiming that “violence in Iraq continues to be near the lowest it’s been in years.”

His administration and the Pentagon know this statement is a barefaced lie. Only days earlier, the Iraqi government issued a report showing that Iraqi casualties for July month had risen to their highest level since May 2008, nearly double the number killed the previous month. In all, the figures compiled by the Iraqi defense, interior and health ministries recorded 635 deaths for the month, 396 of them civilians. In addition, 50 Iraqi soldiers, 89 police officers were killed, along with 100 individuals declared by the Iraqi regime to have been “terrorists.” Nearly another 1,400 Iraqis, the vast majority of them civilians, were wounded.

The US military heatedly disputed the casualty figures from the Baghdad regime, claiming that the real number killed in “enemy action” was only 222. This figure is absurd on its face. The Associated Press counted 350 Iraqis killed based solely on its own reporting. The news agency considers this a significant underestimate, given that many deaths do not get news coverage.

Just last week, the Baghdad Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya saw insurgents overrun an Iraqi army checkpoint, killing 10 members of the security forces in a pitched battle.

Bombings and shooting remain daily occurrences, despite the fact that the Iraqi capital remains under what amounts to martial law, with some 1,500 checkpoints and large numbers of concrete blast walls dividing its neighborhoods.

The increasing violence has been widely attributed to the continuing political stalemate in the efforts to cobble together a new government based on elections held last March, after being delayed from January. After five months of wrangling between the country’s corrupt political factions, prospects for a coalition agreement appear even more distant. Over the weekend, the Iraqi National Alliance, a Shi’ite-based grouping that includes the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) of Ammar al-Hakim and the followers of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, announced that it would no longer talk to the State of Law Coalition unless it chose someone else than incumbent Nouri al-Maliki as its candidate for premier.

There is speculation that the INA will now turn to the bloc led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite who won electoral support from Iraq’s Sunni population.

Behind the scenes, Iran has been backing the INA, while Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Syria have been supporting Allawi. None of the three factions can muster by itself the 163 majority in parliament needed to seat a new government.

The resulting tensions pose a serious threat that sectarian violence can erupt on a scale even greater than the bloodbath that swept the country in 2007.

As for the supposed “progress” hailed by Obama, it has passed by the great majority of the country’s population. Four million Iraqis remain displaced refugees, roughly half of them forced to flee the country and the rest driven from their homes by the violence, with many subsisting in refugee and squatter camps inside Iraq. These camps have reportedly been swelled by new arrivals: people driven out of their homes by economic desperation.

Roughly a quarter of Iraq’s nearly 30 million citizens are forced to subsist below the poverty line of approximately $2 a day. Unemployment is rampant, rising in a number of provinces to over 30 percent. These conditions have worsened, not improved, since 2008.

Vast portions of the population are denied the most basic public services, from electricity and water to adequate sewerage. The New York Times reported Monday that in the capital of Baghdad, electricity was available only five hours a day last month, this despite the US allocating $5 billion to the power sector. It is typical of the entire infrastructure. “Still, the streets are littered with trash, drinking water is polluted, hospitals are bleak and often unsafe, and buildings bombed by the Americans in 2003 or by insurgents since remain ruined shell,” the Times reports.

Norway’s foreign minister has described the group of the 20 most important industrialized and developing nations, which will meet this weekend in Toronto, as the “greatest setback” for the international community since World War II. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Jonas Gahr Støre explains why the organization won’t function in the long run.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Foreign Minister, this week the most important industrial and developing nations will meet at the G-20 summit in Toronto. You oppose the organization. Is that because Norway, which is one of Europe’s richest countries, is not a part of it?

Jonas Gahr Støre: No. The G-20 had a meaning when the financial crisis broke out, the situation was serious and joint decisions had to be swiftly made in order to calm the markets. This importance remains. But the G-20 is a grouping without international legitimacy — it has no mandate and it is unclear which functions it actually has.

SPIEGEL: The president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, views the G-20 as being the main forum for steering the global economy.

Støre: It is for precisely that reason that one must be allowed to question its legitimacy. After World War II, we set up international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund with clear responsibilities and clear mandates. We need to make them fit for the new realities in the world and for the new balance of power.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t the G-20 an attempt to do precisely that?

Støre: The G-20 is a self-appointed group. Its composition is determined by the major countries and powers. It may be more representative than the G-7 or the G-8, in which only the richest countries are represented, but it is still arbitrary. We no longer live in the 19th century, a time when the major powers met and redrew the map of the world. No one needs a new Congress of Vienna.

SPIEGEL: Who do you feel is missing from the current grouping of major powers?

Støre: South Africa is part of it, but not as a representative of Africa. Saudi Arabia is part of it, but not as a representative of the Arab world. So why is the European Union represented in addition to having four individual EU member states and two others as observers? That is not acceptable. You don’t have to change everything, but with a few small adjustments you could achieve a regional representation like that which we have achieved with the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, among other organizations. We need the kind of strong, smaller alliances, or “voting groups,” of the type that we see, for example, with the Nordic or the Baltic states, so that we can react quickly.

SPIEGEL: What can the Nordic countries do better than the G-20?

Støre: Taken together, the Nordic countries are the world’s eighth- or ninth-largest economy. We are small in terms of our populations, but we are big in terms of our economic power. Norwegians are the biggest contributors to the international development programs of the United Nations and the World Bank. Norway’s trade surplus is one-third of China’s, and its current account surplus is one-third of that of Germany. Our pension and future fund (editor’s note: the sovereign wealth fund that reinvests Norway’s gas and oil riches for future generations) is the second largest in the world. So our experiences could be valuable in discussions about a reform of the global financial world.

SPIEGEL: Other countries could also use the same justification to demand admission to the Group of 20.

Støre: The 20 or effectively 22 are big, but there are also the countries that play a decisive role in a few areas. If the G-20 or another international body were to discuss, for example, energy security without Norway, which already provides one-third of Germany’s natural gas, then that would be a real surprise for everyone. When climate change is discussed, one has to keep in mind the fact that Norway makes one of the largest contributions to saving rainforests and pays out billions of dollars, we should also have a voice, because we have something to say. Decisions on fighting poverty in the world without the participation of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, who make the greatest financial contributions, make no sense.

SPIEGEL: If Norway wants to strengthen its international influence, then why don’t you just join the EU?

Støre: Because our people have rejected (membership) twice in referenda, the last time 16 years ago. In contrast to my own wishes, there is no majority support for membership today either. That is how democracy works.

SPIEGEL: Proponents of the G-20 want to reform the body and also to provide it with additional competencies — in combating climate change, international development and in health care.

Støre: It would be a great paradox if the G-20 contributed to undermining the legitimacy of the UN and its institutions. It would mean a further creeping devaluation of the responsible world organizations, if decisions like those of the World Health Organization or the World Trade Organization were in the future effectively made in advance by the G-20.

SPIEGEL: The UN and its institutions haven’t exactly proven themselves to be powerful instruments in the fight against global crises.

Støre: But that cannot lead us to give up reform of, for example, the UN Security Council and instead, out of convenience, create a new body with a new voice. That would be a kind of “key mandate” for a small, self-appointed group against the rest of the world — the remaining 170 or 171 nations. From that perspective, the Group of 20, in terms of international cooperation, is one of the greatest setbacks since World War II.

SPIEGEL: Will the summit in Toronto this week make progress on introducing a global bank levy and bank participation in providing financial help to bankrupt countries like Greece?

Støre: That is a difficult task. The ability to find a compromise between the divergent national interests will show just how serious the desire for better international regulation of the financial markets really is. But it still doesn’t answer the question of whether the world will accept the decisions made by the G-20.

Interview conducted by Manfred Ertel

This interview was published on the German monthly news magazine “Der Spiegel”.

Spiegel Online, source:  http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,druck-702104,00.html

In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.

So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq? Where are we, as we impose sanctions on Iran and North Korea (and threaten worse), while sending our latest wonder weapons, pilotless drones armed with bombs and missiles, into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, Yemen, and who knows where else, tasked with endless “targeted killings” which, in blunter times, used to be called assassinations? Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services?

I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of our own guns of August in 2060. The fog of war, after all, is just a stand-in for what might be called “the fog of the future,” the inability of humans to peer with any accuracy far into the world to come. Let me nonetheless try to offer a few glimpses of what that foggy landscape some years ahead might reveal, and even hazard a few predictions about what possibilities await still-imperial America.

Let me begin by asking: What harm would befall the United States if we actually decided, against all odds, to close those hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that we garrison around the world? What if we actually dismantled our empire, and came home? Would Genghis Khan-like hordes descend on us? Not likely. Neither a land nor a sea invasion of the U.S. is even conceivable.

Would 9/11-type attacks accelerate? It seems far likelier to me that, as our overseas profile shrank, the possibility of such attacks would shrink with it.

Would various countries we’ve invaded, sometimes occupied, and tried to set on the path of righteousness and democracy decline into “failed states?” Probably some would, and preventing or controlling this should be the function of the United Nations or of neighboring states. (It is well to remember that the murderous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot was finally brought to an end not by us, but by neighboring Vietnam.)

Sagging Empire

In other words, the main fears you might hear in Washington — if anyone even bothered to wonder what would happen, should we begin to dismantle our empire — would prove but chimeras. They would, in fact, be remarkably similar to Washington’s dire predictions in the 1970s about states all over Asia, then Africa, and beyond falling, like so many dominoes, to communist domination if we did not win the war in Vietnam.

What, then, would the world be like if the U.S. lost control globally — Washington’s greatest fear and deepest reflection of its own overblown sense of self-worth — as is in fact happening now despite our best efforts? What would that world be like if the U.S. just gave it all up? What would happen to us if we were no longer the “sole superpower” or the world’s self-appointed policeman?

In fact, we would still be a large and powerful nation-state with a host of internal and external problems. An immigration and drug crisis on our southern border, soaring health-care costs, a weakening education system, an aging population, an aging infrastructure, an unending recession — none of these are likely to go away soon, nor are any of them likely to be tackled in a serious or successful way as long as we continue to spend our wealth on armies, weapons, wars, global garrisons, and bribes for petty dictators.

Even without our interference, the Middle East would continue to export oil, and if China has been buying up an ever larger share of what remains underground in those lands, perhaps that should spur us into conserving more and moving more rapidly into the field of alternative energies.

Rising Power

Meanwhile, whether we dismantle our empire or not, China will become (if it isn’t already) the world’s next superpower. It, too, faces a host of internal problems, including many of the same ones we have. However, it has a booming economy, a favorable balance of payments vis-à-vis much of the rest of the world (particularly the U.S., which is currently running an annual trade deficit with China of $227 billion), and a government and population determined to develop the country into a powerful, economically dominant nation-state.

Fifty years ago, when I began my academic career as a scholar of China and Japan, I was fascinated by the modern history of both countries. My first book dealt with the way the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s spurred Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party he headed on a trajectory to power, thanks to its nationalist resistance to that foreign invader. Incidentally, it is not difficult to find many examples of this process in which a domestic political group gains power because it champions resistance to foreign troops. In the immediate post-WWII period, it occurred in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia; with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, all over Eastern Europe; and today, it is surely occurring in Afghanistan and probably in Iraq as well.

Once the Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966, I temporarily lost interest in studying the country. I thought I knew where that disastrous internal upheaval was taking China and so turned back to Japan, which by then was well launched on its amazing recovery from World War II, thanks to state-guided, but not state-owned, economic growth.

This pattern of economic development, sometimes called the “developmental state,” differed fundamentally from both Soviet-type control of the economy and the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Despite Japan’s success, by the 1990s its increasingly sclerotic bureaucracy had led the country into a prolonged period of deflation and stagnation. Meanwhile, post-U.S.S.R. Russia, briefly in thrall to U.S. economic advice, fell captive to rapacious oligarchs who dismantled the command economy only to enrich themselves.

In China, Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping and his successors were able to watch developments in Japan and Russia, learning from them both. They have clearly adopted effective aspects of both systems for their economy and society. With a modicum of luck, economic and otherwise, and a continuation of its present well-informed, rational leadership, China should continue to prosper without either threatening its neighbors or the United States.

To imagine that China might want to start a war with the U.S. — even over an issue as deeply emotional as the ultimate political status of Taiwan — would mean projecting a very different path for that country than the one it is currently embarked on.

Lowering the Flag on the American Century

Thirty-five years from now, America’s official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy. It may, for all we know, still be Hollywood’s century decades from now, and so we may still make waves on the cultural scene, just as Britain did in the 1960s with the Beatles and Twiggy. Tourists will undoubtedly still visit some of our natural wonders and perhaps a few of our less scruffy cities, partly because the dollar-exchange rate is likely to be in their favor.

If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can’t imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn’t mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won’t go someday.

Instead, I foresee the U.S. drifting along, much as the Obama administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

I have always been a political analyst rather than an activist. That is one reason why I briefly became a consultant to the CIA’s top analytical branch, and why I now favor disbanding the Agency. Not only has the CIA lost its raison d’être by allowing its intelligence gathering to become politically tainted, but its clandestine operations have created a climate of impunity in which the U.S. can assassinate, torture, and imprison people at will worldwide.

Just as I lost interest in China when that country’s leadership headed so blindly down the wrong path during the Cultural Revolution, so I’m afraid I’m losing interest in continuing to analyze and dissect the prospects for the U.S. over the next few years. I applaud the efforts of young journalists to tell it like it is, and of scholars to assemble the data that will one day enable historians to describe where and when we went astray. I especially admire insights from the inside, such as those of ex-military men like Andrew Bacevich and Chuck Spinney. And I am filled with awe by men and women who are willing to risk their careers, incomes, freedom, and even lives to protest — such as the priests and nuns of SOA Watch, who regularly picket the School of the Americas and call attention to the presence of American military bases and misbehavior in South America.

I’m impressed as well with Pfc. Bradley Manning, if he is indeed the person responsible for potentially making public 92,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan. Daniel Ellsberg has long been calling for someone to do what he himself did when he released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He must be surprised that his call has now been answered — and in such an unlikely way.

My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her. I wish I could be more optimistic about what’s in store for the U.S. Instead, there isn’t a day that our own guns of August don’t continue to haunt me.

© 2010 Chalmers Johnson

By Chalmers Johnson

17 August, 2010

TomDispatch.com

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), among other works. His newest book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Johnson discusses America’s empire of bases and his new book, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

New Delhi: For the last two months only bullets are talking in Kashmir. Dozens of people, mostly school-going young men and women, have succumbed to the bullets fired by the security forces directly into their chests. Ten such victims have died within the last twenty four hours for pelting stones and violating curfew. The central cabinet’s security committee met last night without the attendance of even the governor, the de facto ruler, of the state. Today the dummy chief minister of the state was called for a meeting in Delhi and assured that direct central rule will not be imposed on the state.

The situation in the Valley has not deteriorated within a day or two and forces across the border alone are not responsible for the chaos seen in the length and breadth of the Valley. Today’s chaos in the Valley basically reflects the failure of the central government which despite declarations and promises to the contrary, has utterly failed to negotiate with the people who matter in Kashmir, which has thrown in the dustbin the autonomy and self-rule proposals presented by its own trusted hands in the state. Musharraf and even the current Pakistani government have been time and again offering proposals to arrive at a settlement of sorts taking into account the ground realities but visionless people in Delhi have squandered the opportunity. The army bulletts once again prove what our enemies claim that India is interested only in the land of Kashmir and not in its people. Manmohan is fast becoming Jagmohan for Kashmir.

The way forward is to sack the childish government of Omar Abdullah, set free all activists and political leaders arrested during the last few weeks, withdraw the army and allied forces from all inhabited areas in the Valley, impose governor raj for a fixed and declared period of six months, accept the autonomy proposal presented by the J&K Assembly during Farooq Abdullah’s tenure in 2000, announce a general amnesty for all militants and welcome those who crossed over into POK, hold a fair election with none barred from contesting and monitored by foreign observers like Jimmy Carter and representatives from the UN, EU, OIC etc and let the real winner rule the state. Meanwhile, India must engage in a serious and purposeful dialogue with Pakistan taking into account the various proposals offered by Musharraf and the current government in Islamabad.

Failure to work on these lines will be fatal. The protests in the Valley are quickly taking the shape of an intifadah which no amount of army bullets will be able to control. Rather, these criminal bullets and their innocent victims will invite foreign intervention. Let the short-sighted strategists in Delhi realise that foreign intervention is no longer a myth. A prolonged protest, wanton wholesale murder of the civilians and children by the security forces and collapse of the dummy civilian government will be enough to pass a resolution in the UN to authorise foreign military intervention and the small men in Delhi will not be able to prevent such forces from landing in Srinagar. The Valley today is a Kosovo-in-waiting. Act now before it is too late.

The Cowardice of Harvard’s President Larry Summers

I’m not going to go through the entire history of the Israeli divestment/disinvestment movement, except to say that in the late summer of 2002 the President of Harvard, Larry Summers accused those of us Harvard alumni involved in the Harvard divestment campaign of being anti-Semitic.

After he made these charges, WBUR Radio Station in Boston, which is a National Public Radio affiliate, called me up and said: “We would like you to debate Summers for one hour on these charges, live.” And I said, “I’d be happy to do so.” They then called up Summers and he refused to debate me.

Summers did not have the courage, the integrity, or the principles to back up his scurrilous charges. Eventually Harvard fired Summers because of his attempt to impose his Neo-Conservative agenda on Harvard, and in particular his other scurrilous charge that women are dumber then men when it comes to math and science. Well as a triple

Harvard alumnus I say: Good riddance to Larry Summers!

Debating Dershowitz

WBUR then called me back and said, “Well, since Summers won’t debate you, would you debate Alan Dershowitz?” And I said, “Sure.” So we had a debate for one hour, live on the radio. And there is a link that you can hear this debate if you want to. I still think it’s the best debate out there on this whole issue of Israeli apartheid. Again that would be WBUR Radio Station, Boston, 25 September 2002.

The problem with the debate, of course, is that Dershowitz knows nothing about international law and human rights. So he immediately started out by saying “well, there’s nothing similar to the apartheid regime in South Africa and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.” Well the problem with that is that Dershowitz did not know anything at

all about even the existence of the Apartheid Convention.

The definition of apartheid is set out in the Apartheid Convention of 1973.

And this is taken from my book Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, Trial Materials on South Africa, published in 1987, that we used successfully to defend anti-apartheid resistors in the United States. If you take a look at the definition of apartheid here found in Article 2, you will see that Israel has inflicted each and every act of apartheid set out in Article 2 on the Palestinians, except an outright ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians. But even there they have barred Palestinians living in occupied Palestine who marry Israeli citizens from moving into Israel, and thus defeat the right of family reunification that of course the world supported when Jews were emigrating from the Soviet Union.

Israel: An Apartheid State

Again you don’t have to take my word for it. There’s an excellent essay on Counterpunch.org by the leading Israeli human rights advocate Shulamit Aloni saying basically: “Yes we have an apartheid state in Israel.” Indeed, there are roads in the West Bank for Jews only. Palestinians can’t ride there and now they’re introducing new legislation that Jews cannot even ride Palestinians in their cars.

This lead my colleague and friend Professor John Dugard who was the U.N. Special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine to write an essay that you can get on Google, saying that in fact Israeli apartheid against the Palestinians is worse than the apartheid that the Afrikaners inflicted on the Blacks in South Africa. Professor Dugard should know.

He was one of a handful of courageous, white, international lawyers living in South Africa at the time who publicly and internationally condemned apartheid against Blacks at risk to his own life. Indeed, when I was litigating anti-apartheid cases on South Africa, we used Professor Dugard’s book on Human Rights and the South African Legal

Order as the definitive work explaining what apartheid is all about.

So Professor Dugard has made this statement. Of course President Carter has made this statement in his book that Israel is an apartheid state. And certainly if you look at that definition of the Apartheid Convention, right there in front of you, it’s clear – there are objective criteria. Indeed if you read my book Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, I have a Bibliography at the end with the facts right there based on reputable human rights reports, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc. Many of them were also compiled and discussed by my friend Norman Finklestein in his book Beyond Chutzpah, which I’d encourage you to read.

By Francis A. Boyle

18 August, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations (1991-93)

Nazareth: Two of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are on the brink of signing large arms deals with the US in a move designed to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, according to defence analysts.

By Jonathan Cook

The 2010 summer in the disputed area of Jammu and Kashmir, administered by India, has been marked by popular protests by Kashmiris and crackdowns by India’s military. The stream of violence has left more than fifty dead, mostly young protestors. The situation in Kashmir has some parallels with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even borrowing the term intifada to describe the uprising. But the connection is more than analogy — Israel’s pacification efforts against Palestinians have proven valuable for the Indian police, army and intelligence services in their campaigns to pacify Jammu and Kashmir with numerous Indian military and security imports from Israel leading the way.

India and Israel had a limited relationship prior to 1992. India, as a prominent member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), had helped to form the NAM political positions on Palestine as part of the “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, racism, including Zionism and all forms of expansionism, foreign occupation and domination and hegemony” (1979, Havana Declaration). Beyond its anti-colonial and Third World solidarity politics, India also had realpolitik reasons for keeping a distance from Israel. The nation had a developing economy with a huge need for petroleum resources, of which it had no domestic source. Good relations with the Arab League and the Soviet Union helped to secure access to resources necessary for India to become the regional and global economic power it aspires to be.

With the beginning of the Oslo negotiations process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s and the end of the Cold War, India was free to pursue relations with Israel from a NAM standpoint. An end to the Israeli occupation was assumed a formality under Oslo by most international observers, especially early on — and had, by that time, gained the economic strength to pursue a policy taking it, as described in a US Army War College (USAWC) analysis, “from a position of nonalignment and noncommitment to having specific strategic interests taking it on a path of ‘poly-alignment.'” The report states that India has been in a “scramble to establish ‘strategic relationships’ with most of the major powers and many of the middle powers,” including Israel.

Israel rendered limited military assistance to India in its 1962 war with China and the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan. It was not until after the Oslo process began though, that the limited military contacts developed into a fuller strategic relationship. According to The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in 1994 “India requested equipment to guard the de facto Indo-Pakistan Kashmiri border. New Delhi was interested in Israeli fences, which use electronic sensors to track human movements” (Thomas Withington, “Israel and India partner up,” January/February 2001, pp.18-19). The remaining years of the decade were peppered with arms sales from Jerusalem to New Delhi, most notably unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electronic warfare systems.

The strategic military relationship picked up even more steam in the new millennium and annual arms sales average in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The shift of Israel being a major defense supplier to a strategic partner was formalized in a September 2003 state visit by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to India where the Hindu nationalist government then in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party led by then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, hosted the Israeli delegation and coauthored the Delhi Statement on Friendship and Cooperation between India and Israel. The statement’s longest segment is on terrorism. It declares that “Israel and India are partners in the battle against this scourge” and that “there cannot be any compromise in the war against terrorism.” The relationship has expanded drastically since 2000 with, in some recent years, Israel even supplanting Russia as India’s largest arms supplier. Surface-to-air missile systems, naval craft, advanced radar systems and other remote sensing technologies, artillery systems and numerous joint production initiatives ranging from munitions to avionics systems have all further boosted the relationship.

But as the Kashmiri uprising enters its third decade, the most telling part of the relationship is the export of Israeli pacification efforts against Palestinians to India, and their use in Jammu and Kashmir (and elsewhere as India faces multiple popular revolts). Israel has trained thousands of Indian military personnel in counterinsurgency since 2003. According to a 2003 JINSA analysis, “Presumably to equip these soldiers, India recently concluded a $30 million agreement with Israel Military Industries (IMI) for 3,400 Tavor assault rifles, 200 Galil sniper rifles, as well as night vision and laser range finding and targeting equipment.”

In 2004, the Israeli intelligence agencies Mossad and General Security Services (Shin Bet) arrived in India “to conduct the first field security surveillance course for Indian Army Intelligence Corps sleuths.” The Globes article on the topic cites an Indian source stating “The course has been designed to look at methods of intelligence gathering in insurgency affected areas, in keeping with the challenges that Israel has faced.” The further acquisition of UAVs, their joint production and the acquisition of other surveillance systems, notably 2010 agreements for both spy satellites and satellite communications systems, have all helped to further India’s pacification campaigns in Jammu and Kashmir. A notable example of how deeply embedded in India the Israeli counterinsurgency and homeland security industries are is the May 2010 agreement whereby Ra’anana-based Nice Systems will provide security systems and a command and control center for India’s parliament. Parliament security head Sandeep Salunke noted the context for the $5 million contract being “In light of the recent increase in global terrorism” (Nice Systems press release, 25 May 2010).

India’s political trend towards poly-alignment whereby it can have both strategic energy agreements with Iran and strategic defense agreements with Israel is part of a broader strategy the USAWC report noted by which “India will fiercely protect its own internal and bilateral issues from becoming part of the international dialog (Kashmir being the most obvious example).” This hostility towards international engagement with its occupation is not the only resemblance to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both were born out the the end of the British colonialism, both are seen as front lines of the “War on Terror,” both the Kashmiri and Palestinian armed groups are erroneously seen as illegitimate in their own right, being mere tools of a foreign aggressor (Pakistan for Kashmir and Iran or Syria for Palestine), both have widespread abuses of human rights, and the Israeli public’s general apathy about or hostility towards Palestinian self-determination is surpassed by the domestic discussion in India, where Kashmiri self-determination isn’t even an issue, though pacifying Kashmir and securing the border with Pakistan is.

The analogy between the two conflicts can only be taken so far, but the direct connection by which Israel’s pacification industry exports tools of control developed for use against the Palestinians (and Lebanese) to be deployed against Kashmiris (as well as against the Naxalites and others in India) shows a deep linkage between the two conflicts and how one feeds the other. So long as Israel seeks to maintain control over Palestine it will continue to develop pacification tools, and so long as India continues its campaigns in Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmiris can expect to taste the fruits of Palestinian pacification.

By Jimmy Johnson

19 August, 2010

The Electronic Intifada

Jimmy Johnson is a Detroit-based mechanic and an organizer with the Palestine Cultural Office in Dearborn. He can be reached at johnson [dot] jimmy [at] gmail [dot] com.

Widening income inequality is a major obstacle to the unity and solidarity that 1Malaysia envisions. 

Since Merdeka(Independence) in 1957, the top 20% of income earners in Malaysia have benefited much more from economic growth than the bottom 40%. It is significant that the report of the National Economic Advisory Council (NEAC) on the New Economic Model (NEM) admits that, “ The bottom 40% of households have experienced the slowest growth of average income, earning less than RM 1,500 per month in 2008.”  The wage trend in Malaysia recorded only an annual 2.6% growth during the past 10 years, compared to the escalating cost of living during the same period. It explains why almost 34% of about 1.3 million workers earn less than RM700 a month, below the poverty line of RM 720 per month— a point emphasised by the Minister of Human Resources, Datuk Dr. S. Subramaniam, recently.

It is not difficult to fathom why workers earn so little and why income disparities are so glaring.  The huge influx of unskilled, lowly paid foreign labour into the country since the late eighties has played a big part in depressing wage levels at one end of the spectrum. At the same time, the liberalisation of the financial sector and the privatisation of public enterprises in Malaysia as in so many other countries have led to the elevation of incomes at the other end of the spectrum, thus contributing to widening inequalities.

The government is attempting to respond to the challenge by reducing our dependence upon foreign workers and by improving wage levels and working conditions in certain sectors of the economy. It plans to increase the percentage of the bottom 40% households with SPM qualification and above, from 30% in 2009 to 45% in 2015.  Both government and private companies are expected to help workers garner new skills that will enable them to earn better incomes.

While there is a degree of support for these measures, many private employers, it appears, are against one of the fundamental demands of workers unions for ameliorating the plight of the poor— namely, a basic minimum wage for all workers. 90% of countries have laws that provide for a minimum wage in one form or another. In most cases, various criteria are taken into account, including the needs of the workers and their families, the prevailing economic situation, and the social environment.

Many economists and sociologists today feel that the term “minimum wage” itself, which is the product of an earlier era, should be replaced with the term “ living income” and linked to the dignity of the human being. A living income is a minimum level of income by which all human beings can provide for themselves and their dependents the five basic

material human needs— food, housing, clothing, health care and education. These needs are vital for protecting human dignity.

It is because governments, the owners of capital, and other powerful elements in the upper strata of society have failed to protect the dignity of the masses that there is  growing alienation and discontent in many parts of the world.  China is an example of a country whose phenomenal growth rates since the early nineties have benefited a minority, rather than the majority, which is why social unrest is on the rise, as the respected Chinese Academy of Social Sciences acknowledges. Similarly, India’s much lauded economic success has not transformed the lives of its teeming millions. A recent United Nations study has shown that one-third of the world’s poor live in conditions of utter destitution in that country. It is one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the Naxalite rebellion in various districts in India. Even the “red shirt” protest movement in Thailand that galvanised a huge segment of the rural poor has been described by some analysts as an expression of the anger and disillusionment of the marginalised.

The bottom 40% in Malaysian society is nowhere as desperate as the poor of China or India or Thailand. Nonetheless, there is alienation. Some of this alienation manifested itself through the ballot-box in the March 2008 General Election. The tremendous increase in crime rates, and numerous cases of social delinquency that surfaced between 2006 and 2008 may also have been the consequences of alienation and marginalisation. It is also quite possible that a segment of those at the bottom of the heap— especially the youths—feel marginalised by a society which they perceive panders more to the glitz and glitter of the elite than to their yearning for recognition and respect. How the alienation of the poor and those who are struggling to make ends meet will express itself in the next few years, no one knows.

This is why it is imperative that the government continues to address the challenge of low incomes and widening inequalities in society. It should not be distracted by a small group motivated by self-interest and blinded by a myopic notion of “market forces determining wages.”  If 1Malaysia is premised upon inclusiveness, it must not only ensure a living income for the bottom 40% but also reduce the yawning economic and social disparities that are an affront to human dignity.

by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the 1Malaysia Foundation and Professor of Global Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia.

8 August 2010.