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16 March, 2011

Rachelcorriefoundation.org

On Wednesday, March 16th, we mark the eighth anniversary of our daughter Rachel’s stand in Rafah, Gaza, to protect the right of a Gazan family to be safe and secure in their home and the rights of all Palestinians to self-determination, freedom, equality, and security in the same measure as their Israeli neighbors.

Here in Olympia, Washington – our hometown and Rachel’s – our family, the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, and our community will mark this anniversary with an event that emphasizes three components: community-building, education, and action. Strengthening community connections was important to Rachel when she lived and worked here in Olympia, but, also, beyond, as she embraced the world as her community. As we pursue a more just global community, we must arm ourselves with solid information and knowledge. Rachel believed this profoundly and emphasized in her writing from Gaza the importance of seeking and communicating the facts and doing so without exaggeration. And it is not enough for us to think and talk. We must, also, act. Indeed, it is because of Rachel’s action on March 16, 2003, that we pause to mark this day.

As we consider where Rachel would want us to focus now, Gaza still remains high on the list. The UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that the number of weekly civilian injuries in Gaza was recently higher than it has been for any week since May 2010. The number includes injuries to five children. During the week of February 20-26, imports from Israel into Gaza were only 36 percent of the average amount that entered weekly before Israel imposed its blockade of Gaza in 2007. Exports and movement of people in and out of the Strip remain severely restricted. Collective punishment of the 1.7 million residents of Gaza by the Israeli government and military continues. We must, therefore, continue to focus on improving their situation and ending the blockade and siege under which they have suffered for so many years.

Rachel Corrie

Rachel would want us to remember the courageous activists whose lives were claimed this past year in nonviolent actions against Israeli policies and those who have found themselves in prison because of their nonviolent resistance. They are American, Palestinian, Turkish, Israeli, and from elsewhere. We had the privilege recently of meeting Ahmet Dogan, the father of Furkan Dogan, the 18-year-old American citizen executed by the Israeli military aboard the Mavi Marmara in international waters. We spent an evening in Istanbul with the wives, children, and grandchildren of others struck down on the same ship. We have followed the stories of Jawaher Abu Rahma. fatally injured by teargas during protest in the Palestinian village of Bil’in and of Ahmad Suliman Salem Deeb, the 19-year-old Gazan shot and killed as he participated in a demonstration against the no-go zone east of Gaza. We have read of the fishermen and farmers injured and killed while grazing their sheep and plying the waters just off the shore of Gaza. We have followed the Israeli court actions against our friends Abdullah Abu Rahma of Bil’in and Jonathan Pollack of Tel Aviv, imprisoned in Israel because of their leadership and nonviolent actions to resist Israeli confiscation of land and the continuing presence of the wall in West Bank villages. With admiration, we have watched the courageous pursuit of freedom and democracy unfold and spread throughout the Middle East. We have celebrated the victories and mourned the losses. In keeping with our memory of Rachel, we are listening to the voices of young people as they struggle worldwide to assert their visions for a democratic, free, and peaceful future – in Gaza, the West Bank, in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, in Kabul, Cairo, and beyond. We call on U.S. officials to listen, too. We ask for them to be consistent and strong in their demands that foreign governments and militaries be accountable for their actions, that they respect the right of people to assemble and protest, and that they respond only nonviolently to such protests.

On March 10, 2010, our family’s civil lawsuit against the State of Israel and its Ministry of Defense opened in Haifa District Court. In sessions spread over the course of the past year, we have heard from four of the internationals who stood with Rachel in Gaza in 2003 and, also, from state’s witnesses who include the bulldozer driver, commander, and the lead investigator in the military police inquiry into Rachel’s case. The testimony has often been disturbing. We have recently learned that the case will resume on April 3rd. Six state’s witnesses remain to testify, including commanders who were in charge on March 16, 2003. As our family continues our quest for truth and accountability for Rachel, we demand it for all the others, as well. We know that for there ever to be peace, there must be an airing and resolution of the grievances.

Some of you – in Madison, Wisconsin, Marin County, California, in Turkey, in the U.K. and elsewhere – have told us that you, too, plan commemorative events for March 16th or during the upcoming weeks. Thank you for remembering Rachel with us. As you do, we hope you will, keep in mind the community-building, education, and action so important to her. We hope, too, that you will recall those others who have stood and been struck down, those imprisoned for their nonviolent action, and those who carry on the work – and that you will do what you can to support them all. With events this week and beyond that keep compassion, humility, and love at their core, together, we will honor Rachel’s commitment and spirit.

With appreciation always and in solidarity with all who pursue justice,

Cindy and Craig Corrie

16 March, 2011

Huffington Post

Nuclear power was sold in the United States as being “Too cheap to meter.” This miracle power source that harnessed the might of the atom to light American homes and power their TVs was seen as a way to put a happy face on the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lewis Strauss who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, the predecessor of today’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC), spoke of an era when “atomic furnaces” from fission and fusion reactors would provide clean, safe, reliable, abundant and cheap power for generations to come. It hasn’t been the panacea he foretold. In fact, it’s been a train wreck of accidents, cost overruns, nuclear weapons proliferation and an ever-growing waste problem that is always on the verge of being solved.

This hasn’t stopped the nuclear power industry from promoting its product as the safe, clean alternative to coal for a green future. Wrapping nukes in a green cloak and declaring their oneness with those concerned with climate change has helped to sway public opinion. The banks are still skeptical but the industry, like their friends on Wall Street, has turned to the government for support. The Bush and Obama administrations have kept the light on for nuclear power with loan guarantees, federal dollars for research and foreign policy initiatives like the treaty with India that forgave its transforming a research reactor into a bomb factory.

The impact on the industry of the Japanese reactors destruction as a result of the earthquake and tsunami may reverse the tide of support built by the nuclear industry. But trust me, they won’t give up. They’ll try to spin the disaster as proof that nuclear power is still safe and that if anything can be learned it’s that we need newer nukes, with more safety features, not alternatives. So, to arm the public with some mental shielding from the thought rays likely to be beamed by the misconstruers of fact and swayers of emotion here are 10 myths of nuclear power you need to know.

Myth #1: Nuclear power is safe.

The experience at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, the Russian reactor at Chernobyl and the meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States, the nuclear Trifecta, are the most well known nuclear accidents but there have been thousands of accidents and near misses that could have led to a disaster.

The biggest fear, in all of these cases, stems from the fact that a nuclear power plant has about as much radioactivity inside it as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. There is more sitting in the adjacent pools where the used nuclear fuel rods are stored. In Japan, we’ve seen what happens when there isn’t enough coolant to cover the fuel rods. The rods start melting and, in a worst case scenario, the China Syndrome, the core melts down and breeches the containment facility. The heat build up can stop short of a China Syndrome but can get hot enough to melt the metal around the fuel rods and create a reaction that produces hydrogen gas that triggers an explosion. Which is what happened in Japan. Having redundant safety measures, a plan B, C and D, doesn’t mean they can’t all fail.

“The only safe nuclear reactor is 93-million miles away, the sun,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy organization.

Myth #2 Nuclear power will help us kick our addiction to foreign oil.

Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) on last Sunday’s Meet the Press cited our need to get off of foreign oil as a strong reason for pursuing nuclear power. He’s wrong. We don’t use oil to produce electricity in the United States, we mainly use it to power our cars and trucks and to a much lesser degree, to heat our homes. Unless we’re proposing to put a nuke under the hood of our cars this “argument makes no sense,” said Hirsch.

Of course, if we all switched to electric cars we’ll need power to charge, them but this can be provided by wind, solar and other sources. We don’t need nukes.

Myth #3: Without nuclear reactors, the U.S. cannot hope to combat climate change.

It would be like “using caviar to fight world hunger,” said Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and current staff member of the Environmental Law Center.

The least expensive and most productive way to reduce our carbon footprint is to be energy efficient, not to build expensive nuclear power plants.

“The money that was sunk into building the reactors in Japan should have gone into something that would really have helped us combat global warming like solar or wind power,” and improving the national energy grid so that it’s integrated, said Hirsch.

We can’t spend money on everything we should spend it on solutions and not on technology that creates more problems.

Myth #4: The U.S. is in the midst of a nuclear renaissance.

We’ve had a nuclear bubble but “when builders came to realize the costs it started to dissolve,” said Bradford.

The myth of the nuclear renaissance has been an effective public relations ploy of the nuclear industry but we’ve seen the operators at the Calvert Cliffs, Maryland reactor pull out and the backers behind a proposed reactor in Houston, Texas have also pulled out. Things are sputtering.

“If this is what the original renaissance looked like then we never would have had Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci,” said Hirsch.

Myth #5: Without new nuclear reactors, we won’t have enough power in the United States.

Dave Freeman, who calls himself the “green cowboy,” knows something about large-scale power generation. He ran the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the municipal power department in Sacramento and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). He says this is completely false. The best way to generate new power for the long term is not to build nukes but to invest in large scale solar and wind, coupled with natural gas as a transition in the short term.

The problem has been coordinating the power produced when the wind blows and the sun shines, distributing the power and storage. There are solutions to all of these. “You need to link up the disparate sources to compensate for when the wind is blowing and the sun isn’t shining,” said Hirsch. He also pointed to new ways that we can store excess energy in batteries or use it to create hydrogen, which can also be employed as a power source.

The problem is “old people have forgotten about the dangers of Three Mile Island and young people never knew,” said Freeman.

Nuclear power is a limited resource dependent on mining compared to solar power. An unlimited amount of solar power exists, “which would you choose,” asked Freeman?

Myth #6: Why not fund nuclear power just to make sure we do have enough power since there’s practically no risk of losing any money with government loan guarantees?

The nuclear industry has asked for loan guarantees from the Federal government because the banks looked at the risk and took a pass. With the loan guarantees in hand the companies can get financing and if they default, or walk away from the projects (which is what happened before) the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill. “It’s the same as if you defaulted on your mortgage and the Federal government had to step in to pay the banks back,” said Hirsch.

The problem is that these plants are so expensive, and it’s not clear that they’d ever be profitable even with guarantees, that the likelihood of companies abandoning the effort mid way through is pretty high. Look at what’s happened at Calvert Cliffs and in Houston.

Myth #7: The nuclear industry’s past problems were caused by overzealous environmentalists, regulators and the public’s fear after Three Mile Island.

“The industry’s problems were the result of trying to build too many plants too quickly,” said Bradford.

The industry couldn’t compete in the marketplace in the US or anywhere else in the world. This is why it turned to loan guarantees that shift the risk to the taxpayers.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) ignored the environmental concerns of one group, The Mothers for Peace, when it was building a reactor near Diablo Canyon in California. The Mothers said that the plant was situated on an earthquake fault and the company just plowed ahead. The Mothers were right and PGE had to go back and retrofit the plant to increase its safety.

“The safety of millions was put at risk to hubris,” said Hirsch.

Myth #8: Nuclear power will be an important source for jobs and economic development.

It’s true that building the reactors does create jobs, but these disappear when the reactor is complete. And there are staff positions for running the reactors, providing maintenance and security but not enough to warrant the high costs and risks. Building an alternative energy industry is a much better long-term proposition that will create more jobs in manufacturing and stimulate exports. People will need to build the windmills, the photovoltaic cells, install them, maintain them and even replace them as they wear out.

Ironically some fear that building new nukes will chase jobs away because electric rates will have to dramatically increase to pay them off. “No state ever created a net increase in jobs by raising electric rates to commercial and industrial customers. Such a policy drives jobs out of many businesses to create relatively few permanent jobs at the new reactor,” said Bradford.

Myth #9: France has found solutions to all of nuclear power’s problems.

France is pointed to as demonstrable proof that nuclear power can be affordable and safe. While it’s true France gets about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power and that it has avoided a large scale disaster but we don’t know very much about their accident record since its industry is nationalized and run behind a veil of secrecy. We’ve been told that Japan runs its program much better than France, so we can only assume that there have been problems.

One has to believe that their aging reactors are just an “accident waiting to happen,” said Hirsch. “They are just playing a game of Russian roulette.”

Many point to their ability to make nuclear waste disappear into easily stored glass balls while we continue to battle over where to bury our waste that piles up in temporary storage ponds next to the reactors.

“In high level waste, they are no further along than anybody,” said Hirsch. “They just dissolve the waste in highly toxic acid and store it in warehouses in the glass. Which is still radioactive and the glass eventually disintegrates and has to be replaced.”

The famous scene of 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley lovingly holding one of the glass balls came to mind. “That was just a prop,” said Hirsch.

They also reprocess their fuel to create new fuel but this still leaves “most of the radioactivity to be disposed of,” explained Bradford.

It also adds to the costs of the producing nuclear power which is one reason French electric rates are 20% above U.S. rates despite subsidies, according to Bradford.

One big problem is that the French reprocessing creates plutonium that adds to the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Myth #10: The growth of civilian nuclear power won’t promote the spread of nuclear weapons, or as it’s called, proliferation.

There is no “peaceful atomic power. If promoting nuclear power you are promoting bombs,” said Freeman.

According to Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC commissioner, the “main obstacle to obtaining nuclear weapons is the material. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of America’s nuclear program, feared that countries could too easily start with a civilian power program and then build a bomb. He proposed that an international authority handle all nuclear material. Eisenhower reversed course and launched the Atoms for Peace program that spread civilian nukes around the world and taught the basics of nuclear engineering to people in countries like Iran. This boosted the earnings of the contractors but laid the groundwork for weapons programs in all the countries that obtained nuclear weapons after the first five nuclear powers. There’s “too much greed and too little fear,” said Gillinsky. All civilian nuclear programs create spent fuel that can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. This is what Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan have done.

It doesn’t take much. At first you needed a chunk of plutonium about the size of a softball now it’s down to the size of a golf ball. “If a country has done its engineering, it can take about a week to go to a bomb,” said Gillinsky. “Safeguard inspections are too late.”

Currently there are plans to build new nuclear power plants throughout many unstable parts of the world like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kazakhstan and more.

We need to stop looking at nuclear power and concentrate on real clean energy sources like wind and solar. But these aren’t really fun challenges for scientists. Building a solar collector or an improved windmill is boring compared to unleashing the power of the atom. Especially, dabbling in that chimera — the real Holy Grail — fusion power. Can’t beat that for a fun brain twister, one that’s sucked up countless billions of federal research dollars but is still “the power of the future.” While scientists like to do what’s hard, exotic and new, people want and need what’s simple, effective, reliable and affordable.

To paraphrase President Eisenhower’s speech about the Military Industrial Complex, every dollar we spend on nuclear power is stolen from developing real solutions to our energy needs. Nuclear power, once touted as “too cheap to meter” is really too expensive and dangerous to use.

Michael Rose is a Documentary filmmaker

Many thanks to Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission whose presentation “The Myths of the Nuclear Renaissance” inspired this piece.

Follow Michael Rose on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MichaellRose

2011-03-15

NEW YORK – Mediterranean countries are experiencing turbulence unseen since the era of decolonization and independence. Popular revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have swept away entrenched autocracies. Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi is holding on by the skin of his teeth, and political leaders in Algeria and Morocco are scrambling to maintain authority.

Can a Mediterranean space nurtured by shared democratic values, interests, and hopes emerge from this maelstrom?

The Mediterranean countries are home to 475 million people – 272 million Europeans, including 20 million Muslims, and 200 million non-European Arabs and Jews. It now seems possible that the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), the mechanism that French President Nicolas Sarkozy set up in 2008 to increase regional cooperation, may actually step up to the challenge of reclaiming the region’s past as the cradle of reason, tolerance, and humanism. The UfM could offer a model for coexistence to a world injured by dictatorship and fear of Islamic fundamentalism.

Rising tensions in Europe over what has ominously crystallized as “the Muslim Question” has made it all too easy to forget that there was a time when Islam – a more tolerant and inclusive civilization than it appears to be in the post-9/11 West – was fully a part of European life.

Today, no less than yesterday, Mediterranean people – Muslims, Christians, and Jews –share inescapable geopolitical, demographic, and economic realities. They should remind themselves that demonization, exclusion, and division are not the only options – and should not be the region’s destiny.

Among Sarkozy’s main interlocutors at the birth of the UfM in 2008 were Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Now that they are gone, so is their limited and limiting approach to international dialogue, based almost exclusively on state-to-state relations without any significant input from civil society.

It is sad to note that European leaders sometimes adopt such narrow positions, too, responding to the short-term demands of electoral politics instead of facing the challenges of long-term strategic thinking. Sarkozy, too, has fallen prey to this trend. Indeed, in February, he declared that multiculturalism was a “failure,” adding, “Our Muslim compatriots should be able to live and practice their religion like anyone else…but it can only be a French Islam, not just an Islam in France.”

Sarkozy, of course, did not define what he meant by a “French Islam.” But the comments were widely interpreted as an echo of pronouncements a few days earlier by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the far-right National Front party.

Cooler heads should look, instead, to Muslim Spain, Al-Andalus, which shone in Europe from the eighth century until the fifteenth century – a fertile period of cultural brilliance that paved the way for the Western Renaissance, as well as an inspiring paradigm of convivencia, or coexistence.

Integrating the Mediterranean world into a tolerant community that ensures the peace and prosperity of all its peoples can happen today, because it has happened before. Such an achievement would offer the world a needed alternative to the increasingly questionable model of economic globalization.

Looking at Europe from a distance, it is tempting to see a continent receding from the world stage and in conflict with itself and with its past. Yet the reality is more nuanced. Today’s Europe is filled with potential, provided that the Mediterranean region harnesses the forces and wealth implicit in such initiatives as the UfM.

Two important features of both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions will be significant in assessing the chances for a renewed Mediterranean Union.

First, the large and effective use of social media in both countries revealed remarkable technological savvy and creativity among the young. More significantly, it displayed this generation’s unprecedented level of political awareness and activism. Indeed, the test of success of any new Mediterranean structure will be the degree to which it meets the aspirations and scrutiny of this young, politically aware generation throughout the region.

For the same reasons, a new Mediterranean union could be a framework for a new moral vibrancy, informed by the same universal values that mobilized the young in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond – freedom, individual responsibility and accountability, transparency, tolerance, solidarity with the weak and oppressed, justice, gender equality, and other fundamental human and democratic rights.

In light of this hopeful trend, how long can Europe’s obsession with Islamic fundamentalism hold sway? How long can the so-called “Muslim Question” be used as a tool to defeat political adversaries? Many young European voters, who may know better, will most likely not look kindly at such opportunistic tactics.

Finally, one would hope that the concept of belonging to the same Mediterranean family could bring about new solutions to old conflicts – for example, offering Palestinians and Israelis alike the healing that both peoples desire, but which the dying old Arab order failed to achieve.

The great philosophers of the Enlightenment would not hesitate to endorse the moral consciousness expressed in the postings that flooded cyberspace during the Tunisian revolution. Moral secularism at its best was on full display from the rugged streets of Sidi Bouzid to the imposing refinement of Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis.

This renewed sense of belonging to the same human family and the same moral universe resonated profoundly with Mediterranean Europeans, who found, in the claims and expectations emerging on the opposite shore, echoes of their own unfulfilled claims and expectations.

Mustapha Tlili is a research scholar at New York University, founder and director of the NYU Center for Dialogues, and a member of Human Rights Watch’s advisory committee for the Middle East and North Africa.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011. www.project-syndicate.org

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mtlili2/English

Published: March 17 2011 23:55 | Last updated: March 17 2011 23:55

The belated US decision to support Anglo-French proposals for a Libyan no-fly zone seems no more than a cynical gesture.

Washington concedes that merely grounding the Tripoli regime’s aircraft and helicopters may not change outcomes.

But the situation today is where it always was: once Muammer Gaddafi showed himself determined to fight, only direct ground intervention by the US and its allies would have enabled the ill-armed rebels to prevail.

Monopoly possession of organised force gives tyrannies a decisive advantage, unless they either lose the support of their own soldiers or are vulnerable to diplomatic pressure from Washington, as Colonel Gaddafi is not.

True, his forces are so weak that a small western army could crush them. But that is not the point. The important difficulties are political, moral and diplomatic.

Throughout this crisis, western leaders have looked foolish. France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy crippled himself by appearing hostile to the insurgents both in Tunisia and Egypt. His subsequent change of direction to lead a charge against Col Gaddafi impresses no one.

David Cameron has exposed his inexperience. The decision to deploy armed SAS soldiers in Libya to protect a wildly implausible liaison mission to the rebels was pointless unless the force was empowered to use its weapons. Their capture and subsequent release was a gratuitous embarrassment. Thereafter, for a British prime minister presiding over draconian cuts in his own armed forces to posture ahead of the US in favour of military action invited the ridicule that it received, not least in Washington.

The first principle for any nation using force is to ensure it succeeds. But in Iraq and Afghanistan the west has learnt that unseating regimes is relatively easy; the hard part is to promote acceptable alternatives.

The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow.

To be sure, local goodwill for western assistance in supplanting the Libyan tyranny would quickly dissipate. The most powerful single strand in opinion throughout the Muslim world is bitterness about America’s continuing support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

It is irrelevant whether this is just, or reflects a misplaced sense of priorities. It is a core political reality, depriving the west of moral authority throughout the region. If American troops displaced Col Gaddafi, within weeks they would either abandon the country to anarchy or find themselves the objects of popular hostility as they grappled with the hideously familiar problem of which factions to put in charge.

I am not an opponent of interventions on principle. The UK government’s recent defence review prompted widespread scorn, and its swingeing cuts well-founded dismay, precisely because it seems likely that this country will wish to participate in some future western military operations, while lacking means convincingly to do so.

But grown-up governments do not indulge emotional lunges, committing warplanes as if sending a donation to Oxfam. They make cool calculations about self-interest. The American people have no appetite for a Libyan adventure. This week’s poll in The Washington Post shows that almost two-thirds now elieve the Afghan war is not worth fighting.

In shaping future western strategy and foreign policy, it seems essential to disengage in Iraq and Afghanistan before contemplating any further overseas military action. The west should lead a vigorous offensive designed to bring down Col Gaddafi by economic and financial siege. The legitimacy of his regime, always precarious, now seems irreparable. Even the Russians and the Chinese, though unwilling to use force, will have difficulty justifying a resumption of business as usual with him.

Some people regard containment as a synonym for infirmity, and today wring their hands at Col Gaddafi’s military success. But the boy scout ethic that characterised Tony Blair’s leadership of Britain, driven by eagerness to do good deeds in a naughty world, is discredited by experience.

The west can do much more to show its repugnance towards dictatorships. But both the US and its allies know it is folly to deploy their own forces against perceived wickedness, unless their own vital interests are at stake and their intervention is likely to enjoy legitimacy within a given region. Neither of these propositions holds good in Libya.

The writer is an FT contributing editor

17 March, 2011

The Nation

The combined devastation of Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant explosion begs the question: Doesn’t Mother Nature provide enough forces of destruction without humans adding one of our own?

The horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters. First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris. In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people. In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as the New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan thirteen feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).

But this was not all. Another shock soon followed. Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s fifty-four nuclear power reactors were shut down. At this writing, three of them have lost coolant to their cores and have experienced partial meltdowns. The same three have also suffered large explosions. The spent fuel in a fourth caught fire. Now a second filthy wave is beginning to roll—this one composed of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. They include unknown amounts of cesium-137 and iodine-131, which can only have originated in the melting cores or in nearby spent fuel rod pools. Both are dangerous to human health. The Japanese government has evacuated some 200,000 people in the vicinity of the plants and issued potassium iodide pills, which prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine. The U.S. carrier USS Ronald Reagan had to change course when it sailed into a radioactive cloud.

The second shock was, of course, different from the first in at least one fundamental respect. The first was dealt by Mother Nature, who has thus reminded us of her sovereign power to nourish or punish our delicate planet, its axis now tipping ever so slightly in a new direction. No finger of blame can be pointed at any perpetrator. The second shock, on the other hand, is the product of humankind, and involves human responsibility. Until the human species stepped in, there was no appreciable release of atomic energy from nuclear fission or fusion on earth. It took human hands to introduce it into the midst of terrestrial affairs. That happened sixty-six years ago, also in Japan, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, Harry Truman used language that is worth pondering today. “It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, referred to the atomic bombings by implication when he stated that the current crisis was the worst for Japan “since the Second World War.”

For some years afterward, atomic energy was understood mainly to be an inconceivably malign force—as the potential source of a sort of man-made equivalent of earthquakes, and worse. In the 1950s, however, when nuclear power plants were first built, an attempt began to find a bright side to the atom. (In 1956 Walt Disney even made a cartoon called Our Friend the Atom.) A key turning point was President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons.

As Ira Chernus has chronicled in his book Atoms for Peace, the proposal paradoxically grew out of Eisenhower’s distaste for arms control. He had launched a nuclear buildup that would increase the U.S. arsenal from 1,436 warheads at the beginning of his two terms to 20,464 by the end. His strategic nuclear policy was one of “massive retaliation,” which relied more heavily on nuclear threats than Truman’s policy had. Arms control would have obstructed these policies. Yet Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was “to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace”—chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants. Of course, the weapon never was taken out of the hands of soldiers, but the basic power of the universe was indeed handed over to nuclear power engineers, including Japanese engineers.

The long, checkered career of nuclear power began. The promise at first seemed great, but the problems cropped up immediately. The distinction between Disney’s smiling, friendly atom and the frowning, hostile one kept breaking down. In the first place, the technology of nuclear power proved to be an open spigot for the spread of technology that also served the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the second place, the requirement of burying nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it takes for its radioactive materials to decline to levels deemed safe mocked the meager ingenuity and constancy of a species whose entire recorded history amounts only to some 6,000 years. Finally, the technology of nuclear power itself kept breaking down and bringing or threatening disaster, as is now occurring in Japan.

The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch. These predictable and unpredictable failings affect every stage of the operation. For instance, in Japan, the nuclear power industry has a record of garden-variety cover-ups, ducking safety regulations, hiding safety violations and other problems. But which large bureaucratic organization does not? And if these happen in Japan, as orderly and efficient a country as exists on Earth, in which country will they not? When the bureaucracy is the parking violations bureau or the sanitation department, ordinary mistakes lead to ordinary mishaps. But when the basic power of the universe is involved, they court catastrophe.

The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax. It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom. When nature strikes, why should humankind compound the trouble? The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more. We should leave those to Mother Nature.

Some have suggested that in light of the new developments we should abandon nuclear power. I have a different proposal, perhaps more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the peril. Let us pause and study the matter. For how long? Plutonium, a component of nuclear waste, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of it is transformed into other elements through radioactive decay. This suggests a time-scale. We will not be precipitous if we study the matter for only half of that half-life, 12,000 years. In the interval, we can make a search for safe new energy sources, among other useful endeavors. Then perhaps we’ll be wise enough to make good use of the split atom.

Jonathan Schell is the Doris Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, an analysis of people power, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

Copyright © 2011 The Nation

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17 March, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Saudi Arabia’s decision to send troops to Bahrain to put down an uprising in the neighboring country is not going to prevent the Arab spring of 2011 from blooming in the dessert kingdom.

The Saudi invasion, made on the “invitation” of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and after the visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, will most probably backfire.

In a full-scale assault on Wednesday launched at dawn in Pearl Square, the center of the uprising against the Khalifa regime, Saudi soldiers, with other foreign and local mercenary security forces, with no previous warning, attacked sleeping, peaceful protesters, killing many and injuring hundreds.

But Saudi Arabia’s dream of becoming a regional power is almost certainly going to turn into a nightmare very soon.

Saudi Arabia is nothing but a client state, like many other Persian Gulf monarchies, whose regimes consider their natural, primarily energy, resources as family property and make little distinction between national and personal wealth. They have used these resources to buy support from their own subjects and influenced politics in some other countries in the region.

For about a century, the family of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, founder of the absolute monarchy, built palaces on sandy hills without knowing that one day there would be desert storms raging in the region. Now they are about to be blown away.

According to a recent Reuters report based on U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, the royal stipends in the mid-1990s ran from about $800 a month for the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family to $270,000 a month for one of the surviving sons of Ibn Saud.

“Bonus payments are available for marriage and palace building,” according to the cable, which estimates that the system cost the country, which had an annual budget of $40 billion at the time, some $2 billion a year.

The king is lavishing the national wealth on members of the royal family while ordinary people are struggling to make ends meet, resulting in widespread resentment.

Saudi Arabia should focus on improving the lot of its own people instead of invading other countries.

The Arab spring of 2011 has arrived, and the rulers of Saudi Arabia must realize that even vast wealth cannot stop the changing of the seasons.

Gul Jammas Hussain is a Pakistani journalist based in Tehran, Iran.

16 March, 2011

Al Jazeera

At least six people are reported dead and hundreds injured after security forces in Bahrain drove out pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl Roundabout in the capital, Manama.

A 12-hour curfew came into force at 4pm in areas of the city including the Pearl Roundabout, the Bahrain Financial Harbour, and several other buildings which have recently been targets of protests.

By then, most of the area had been cleared after troops backed by tanks and helicopters stormed the site – the focal point of weeks-long anti-government protests in the tiny kingdom – early on Wednesday, an Al Jazeera correspondent said.

Multiple explosions were heard and smoke was seen billowing over central Manama.

Hospital sources said three protesters had been killed and hundreds of others injured in the offensive, the Reuters news agency reported. Three policemen were also reported dead.

Our correspondent said the police backed by the military attacked the protesters from all sides and used tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd.

Protesters, intimidated by the numbers of security forces, retreated from the roundabout, he said. By 5pm the area was quiet, although a few people remained on the streets. A helicopter circled overhead.

Bahrain’s youth movement had called for a mass demonstration on Wednesday afternoon but it was unclear whether protesters planned to regroup elsewhere in the city.

Bahrain’s main opposition Wefaq party has called off protests, saying it is too dangerous to continue. There are fears that a small gathering could result in a high level of casualties, our correspondent said.

Wefaq has advised people since this morning to avoid confrontation with security forces and to remain peaceful,” a Wefaq official told Reuters.

Ali Al Aswad, a Wafaq member, told Al Jazeera that the government used Apache helicopters to shoot at peaceful protesters.

He said the situation was very bad and Bahrain was heading towards a disaster. “The security forces are killing the people, we call upon UN to help us,” Aswad said.

State of emergency

The move by the security forces came a day after a state of emergency was declared on the island and at least two people were killed in clashes in the Shia suburb of Sitra outside Manama.

An order by the king “authorised the commander of Bahrain’s defence forces to take all necessary measures to protect the safety of the country and its citizens,” a statement read out on television on Tuesday said.

Hundreds of Saudi-led troops entered Bahrain on Monday as part of a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) initiative to help protect government facilities there amid an escalation in the protests against the government.

It was not immediately clear if Wednesday’s security crackdown involved Saudi troops.

Syed Al Alawi, a witness, told Al Jazeera that troops were surrounding the Salmania hospital and not allowing doctors and nurses to enter.

Calling for help, Alawi said: “The GCC troops are for fighting against foreign forces, instead they are targeting the people of Bahrain. What’s our fault, we are asking for our legitimate rights.”

At least 500 protesters have been camping at the Pearl Roundabout in central Manama as part of their demonstration.

The small kingdom with a dominant Shia majority has been swept by protests over the last several weeks. The protesters, alleging discrimination and lack of rights, are seeking political reforms.

The arrival of foreign troops followed a request to members of the GCC from Bahrain.

The United Arab Emirates also sent about 500 police to Bahrain, according to Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Emirati foreign minister. Qatar, meanwhile, did not rule out the possibility of its troops joining the force.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, told Al Jazeera: “There are common responsibilities and obligations within the GCC countries.

International concern

The US, which counts both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia among its allies, has called for restraint, but has refrained from saying whether it supports the move to deploy troops.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who was speaking in Egypt, said Bahrainis must “take steps now” towards a political resolution of the crisis.

Iran, meanwhile, has warned against “foreign interferences”.

“The peaceful demonstrations in Bahrain are among the domestic issues of this country, and creating an atmosphere of fear and using other countries’ military forces to oppress these demands is not the solution,” Hossein Amir Abdollahian, an official from the Iranian foreign ministry, was reported by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency as saying.

15 March, 2011

TomDispatch.com

How the Tiny Kingdom of Bahrain Strong-Armed the President of the United States

The men walking down the street looked ordinary enough. Ordinary, at least, for these days of tumult and protest in the Middle East. They wore sneakers and jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. Some waved the national flag. Many held their hands up high. Some flashed peace signs. A number were chanting, “Peaceful, peaceful.”

Up ahead, video footage shows, armored personnel carriers sat in the street waiting. In a deadly raid the previous day, security forces had cleared pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain’s capital, Manama. This evening, the men were headed back to make their voices heard.

The unmistakable crack-crack-crack of gunfire then erupted, and most of the men scattered. Most, but not all. Video footage shows three who never made it off the blacktop. One in an aqua shirt and dark track pants was unmistakably shot in the head. In the time it takes for the camera to pan from his body to the armored vehicles and back, he’s visibly lost a large amount of blood.

Human Rights Watch would later report that Redha Bu Hameed died of a gunshot wound to the head.

That incident, which occurred on February 18th, was one of a series of violent actions by Bahrain’s security forces that left seven dead and more than 200 injured last month. Reports noted that peaceful protesters had been hit not only by rubber bullets and shotgun pellets, but — as in the case of Bu Hameed — by live rounds.

The bullet that took Bu Hameed’s life may have been paid for by U.S. taxpayers and given to the Bahrain Defense Force by the U.S. military. The relationship represented by that bullet (or so many others like it) between Bahrain, a tiny country of mostly Shia Muslim citizens ruled by a Sunni king, and the Pentagon has recently proven more powerful than American democratic ideals, more powerful even than the president of the United States.

Just how American bullets make their way into Bahraini guns, into weapons used by troops suppressing pro-democracy protesters, opens a wider window into the shadowy relationships between the Pentagon and a number of autocratic states in the Arab world. Look closely and outlines emerge of the ways in which the Pentagon and those oil-rich nations have pressured the White House to help subvert the popular democratic will sweeping across the greater Middle East.

Bullets and Blackhawks

A TomDispatch analysis of Defense Department documents indicates that, since the 1990s, the United States has transferred large quantities of military materiel, ranging from trucks and aircraft to machine-gun parts and millions of rounds of live ammunition, to Bahrain’s security forces.

According to data from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the branch of the government that coordinates sales and transfers of military equipment to allies, the U.S. has sent Bahrain dozens of “excess” American tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter gunships. The U.S. has also given the Bahrain Defense Force thousands of .38 caliber pistols and millions of rounds of ammunition, from large-caliber cannon shells to bullets for handguns. To take one example, the U.S. supplied Bahrain with enough .50 caliber rounds — used in sniper rifles and machine guns — to kill every Bahraini in the kingdom four times over. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency did not respond to repeated requests for information and clarification.

In addition to all these gifts of weaponry, ammunition, and fighting vehicles, the Pentagon in coordination with the State Department oversaw Bahrain’s purchase of more than $386 million in defense items and services from 2007 to 2009, the last three years on record. These deals included the purchase of a wide range of items from vehicles to weapons systems. Just this past summer, to cite one example, the Pentagon announced a multimillion-dollar contract with Sikorsky Aircraft to customize nine Black Hawk helicopters for Bahrain’s Defense Force.

About Face

On February 14th, reacting to a growing protest movement with violence, Bahrain’s security forces killed one demonstrator and wounded 25 others. In the days of continued unrest that followed, reports reached the White House that Bahraini troops had fired on pro-democracy protesters from helicopters. (Bahraini officials responded that witnesses had mistaken a telephoto lens on a camera for a weapon.) Bahrain’s army also reportedly opened fire on ambulances that came to tend to the wounded and mourners who had dropped to their knees to pray.

“We call on restraint from the government,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of Bahrain’s crackdown. “We urge a return to a process that will result in real, meaningful changes for the people there.” President Obama was even more forceful in remarks addressing state violence in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen: “The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries, and wherever else it may occur.”

Word then emerged that, under the provisions of a law known as the Leahy Amendment, the administration was actively reviewing whether military aid to various units or branches of Bahrain’s security forces should be cut off due to human-rights violations. “There’s evidence now that abuses have occurred,” a senior congressional aide told the Wall Street Journal in response to video footage of police and military violence in Bahrain. “The question is specifically which units committed those abuses and whether or not any of our assistance was used by them.”

In the weeks since, Washington has markedly softened its tone. According to a recent report by Julian Barnes and Adam Entous in the Wall Street Journal, this resulted from a lobbying campaign directed at top officials at the Pentagon and the less powerful State Department by emissaries of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and his allies in the Middle East. In the end, the Arab lobby ensured that, when it came to Bahrain, the White House wouldn’t support “regime change,” as in Egypt or Tunisia, but a strategy of theoretical future reform some diplomats are now calling “regime alteration.”

The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council include (in addition to Bahrain) Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which have extensive ties to the Pentagon. The organization reportedly strong-armed the White House by playing on fears that Iran might benefit if Bahrain embraced democracy and that, as a result, the entire region might become destabilized in ways inimical to U.S. power-projection policies. “Starting with Bahrain, the administration has moved a few notches toward emphasizing stability over majority rule,” according to a U.S. official quoted by the Journal. “Everybody realized that Bahrain was just too important to fail.”

It’s an oddly familiar phrase, so close to “too big to fail,” last used before the government bailed out the giant insurance firm AIG and major financial firms like Citigroup after the global economic meltdown of 2008. Bahrain is, of course, a small island in the Persian Gulf, but it is also the home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which the Pentagon counts as a crucial asset in the region. It is widely considered a stand-in for neighboring Saudi Arabia, America’s gas station in the Gulf, and for the Washington, a nation much too important ever to fail.

The Pentagon’s relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries has been cemented in several key ways seldom emphasized in American reporting on the region. Military aid is one key factor. Bahrain alone took home $20 million in U.S. military assistance last year. In an allied area, there is the rarely discussed triangular marriage between defense contractors, the Gulf states, and the Pentagon. The six Gulf nations (along with regional partner Jordan) are set to spend $70 billion on weaponry and equipment this year, and as much as $80 billion per year by 2015. As the Pentagon looks for ways to shore up the financial viability of weapons makers in tough economic times, the deep pockets of the Gulf States have taken on special importance.

Beginning last October, the Pentagon started secretly lobbying financial analysts and large institutional investors, talking up weapons makers and other military contractors it buys from to bolster their long-term financial viability in the face of a possible future drop in Defense Department spending. The Gulf States represent another avenue toward the same goal. It’s often said that the Pentagon is a “monopsony,” the only buyer in town for its many giant contractors, but that isn’t entirely true.

The Pentagon is also the sole conduit through which its Arab partners in the Gulf can buy the most advanced weaponry on Earth. By acting as a go-between, the Pentagon can ensure that the weapons manufacturers it relies on will be financially sound well into the future. A $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia this past fall, for example, ensured that Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and other mega-defense contractors would remain healthy and profitable even if Pentagon spending goes slack or begins to shrink in the years to come. Pentagon reliance on Gulf money, however, has a price. It couldn’t have taken the Arab lobby long to explain how quickly their spending spree might come to an end if a cascade of revolutions suddenly turned the region democratic.

An even more significant aspect of the relationship between the Gulf states and the Department of Defense is the Pentagon’s shadowy archipelago of bases across the Middle East. While the Pentagon hides or downplays the existence of many of them, and while Gulf countries often conceal their existence from their own populations as much as possible, the U.S. military maintains sites in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and of course Bahrain — homeport for the Fifth Fleet, whose 30 ships, including two aircraft carriers, patrol the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Red Sea.

Doughnuts Not Democracy

Last week, peaceful protesters aligned against Bahrain’s monarchy gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Manama carrying signs reading “Stop Supporting Dictators,” “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” and “The People Want Democracy.” Many of them were women.

Ludovic Hood, a U.S. embassy official, reportedly brought a box of doughnuts out to the protesters. “These sweets are a good gesture, but we hope it is translated into practical actions,” said Mohammed Hassan, who wore the white turban of a cleric. Zeinab al-Khawaja, a protest leader, told Al Jazeera that she hoped the U.S. wouldn’t be drawn into Bahrain’s uprising. “We want America not to get involved, we can overthrow this regime,” she said.

The United States is, however, already deeply involved. To one side it’s given a box of doughnuts; to the other, helicopter gunships, armored personnel carriers, and millions of bullets — equipment that played a significant role in the recent violent crackdowns.

In the midst of the violence, Human Rights Watch called upon the United States and other international donors to immediately suspend military assistance to Bahrain. The British government announced that it had begun a review of its military exports, while France suspended exports of any military equipment to the kingdom. Though the Obama administration, too, has begun a review, money talks as loudly in foreign policy as it does in domestic politics. The lobbying campaign by the Pentagon and its Middle Eastern partners is likely to sideline any serious move toward an arms export cut-off, leaving the U.S. once again in familiar territory — supporting an anti-democratic ruler against his people.

“Without revisiting all the events over the last three weeks, I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history,” President Obama explained after the fall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak — an overstatement, to say the least, given the administration’s mixed messages until Mubarak’s departure was a fait accompli. But when it comes to Bahrain, even such half-hearted support for change seems increasingly out of bounds.

Last year, the U.S. Navy and the government of Bahrain hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for a construction project slated to develop 70 acres of prime waterfront property in Manama. Scheduled for completion in 2015, the complex is slated to include new port facilities, barracks for troops, administrative buildings, a dining facility, and a recreation center, among other amenities, at a price tag of $580 million. “The investment in the waterfront construction project will provide a better quality of life for our Sailors and coalition partners, well into the future,” said Lieutenant Commander Keith Benson of the Navy’s Bahrain contingent at the time. “This project signifies a continuing relationship and the trust, friendship and camaraderie that exists between the U.S. and Bahraini naval forces.”

As it happens, that type of “camaraderie” seems to be more powerful than the President of the United States’ commitment to support peaceful, democratic change in the oil-rich region. After Mubarak’s ouster, Obama noted that “it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, but nonviolence, moral force, that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” The Pentagon, according to the Wall Street Journal, has joined the effort to bend the arc of history in a different direction — against Bahrain’s pro-democracy protesters. Its cozy relationships with arms dealers and autocratic Arab states, cemented by big defense contracts and shadowy military bases, explain why.

White House officials claim that their support for Bahrain’s monarchy isn’t unconditional and that they expect rapid progress on real reforms. What that means, however, is evidently up to the Pentagon. It’s notable that late last week one top U.S. official traveled to Bahrain. He wasn’t a diplomat. And he didn’t meet with the opposition. (Not even for a doughnut-drop photo op.) Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived for talks with King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa to convey, said Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, “reassurance of our support.”

“I’m convinced that they both are serious about real reform and about moving forward,” Gates said afterward. At the same time, he raised the specter of Iran. While granting that the regime there had yet to foment protests across the region, Gates asserted, “there is clear evidence that as the process is protracted — particularly in Bahrain — that the Iranians are looking for ways to exploit it and create problems.”

The Secretary of Defense expressed sympathy for Bahrain’s rulers being “between a rock and hard place” and other officials have asserted that the aspirations of the pro-democracy protesters in the street were inhibiting substantive talks with more moderate opposition groups. “I think what the government needs is for everybody to take a deep breath and provide a little space for this dialogue to go forward,” he said. In the end, he told reporters, U.S. prospects for continued military basing in Bahrain were solid. “I don’t see any evidence that our presence will be affected in the near- or middle-term,” Gates added.

In the immediate wake of Gates’ visit, the Gulf Cooperation Council has conspicuously sent a contingent of Saudi troops into Bahrain to help put down the protests. Cowed by the Pentagon and its partners in the Arab lobby, the Obama administration has seemingly cast its lot with Bahrain’s anti-democratic forces and left little ambiguity as to which side of history it’s actually on.

Nick Turse is an historian, essayist, investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). He is also the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.

Copyright 2011 Nick Turse

18 March, 2011

WSWS.org

The United Nations Security Council Thursday night approved a resolution that paves the way for the United States and other major imperialist powers to conduct a direct military intervention in Libya under the pretense of a “humanitarian” mission to protect civilian lives.

The resolution, sponsored by the US, France, Britain and Lebanon, goes far beyond earlier proposals for a no-fly zone, authorizing the use of military force including “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” These “areas” include Benghazi, the city of one million which remains the sole stronghold of the revolt that began against the Gaddafi dictatorship one month ago. The sole limitation placed by the resolution is its exclusion of “a foreign occupation force on any part of Libyan territory.”

The vote sets the stage for a bombardment of Libya by US, French and British warplanes. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told France-2 Television that military action could begin within hours of the resolution’s approval. And the Associated Press cited an unnamed member of the British Parliament as saying, “British forces were on stand by for air strikes and could be mobilized as soon as Thursday night.”

American military officials have already warned that even the imposition of a no-fly zone entails the prior destruction of Libya’s air defense capabilities, meaning a major bombing campaign against Libya that will undoubtedly entail “collateral damage” measured in the killing and maiming of Libyan civilians.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Pentagon officials as saying, “Options included using cruise missiles to take out fixed Libyan military sites and air-defense systems … Manned and unmanned aircraft could also be used against Col. Gaddafi’s tanks, personnel carriers and infantry positions, with sorties being flown out of US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization bases in the southern Mediterranean.”

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Gen. Norton Schwartz, the chief of the US Air Force, said that a no-fly zone would take “upwards of a week” to prepare, signaling a sustained bombing campaign. He also warned that in addition to US warplanes based in the US and Europe, aircraft would also have to be diverted from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like other military officials, Schwartz said that the imposition of the no-fly zone would “not be sufficient” to halt the advance of forces loyal to the dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which have swept steadily eastward toward Benghazi over the past 10 days. Clearly, what is being prepared are air strikes against Gaddafi’s ground forces. The prospect of carrying out a bombing raid aimed at assassinating Gaddafi has also been broached.

These plans for war are motivated not by any desire to protect the Libyan people or further the cause of democracy, as its proponents within the UN Security Council proclaimed. The impending intervention in the oil-rich North African country is driven by profit interests and geopolitical imperatives that have nothing to do with the “humanitarian” pretenses of the major powers. The aim is to exploit the civil war in Libya to impose a regime that is even more subordinate to these powers and to the major Western oil conglomerates intent on exploiting the country’s resources.

The gross hypocrisy and cynicism of the imperialist powers backing the intervention was underscored by the choice of French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé to motivate the UN resolution. Juppé, who invoked the “Arab spring” as one of the “great revolutions that change the course of history,” recently assumed his post after his predecessor, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was forced to resign over a scandal involving her close political and private relations with the ousted Tunisian dictator Ben Ali. Juppé’s government was in the process of shipping anti-riot gear to its former colony when the mass protest forced the dictator to flee.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who had worked to insert the “all necessary measures” language allowing for an open-ended military assault on Libya, praised the passage of the resolution, declaring, “The future of Libya should be decided by the people of Libya.”

This is unquestionably the case. The task of overthrowing the right-wing dictatorship of the Gaddafi clique is that of the workers and oppressed of Libya, who had begun to carry it out. The aim of the US-backed intervention, however, is precisely to abort any genuine revolution and ensure that any regime that replaces Gaddafi serves not the interests of the Libyan people, but rather the demands of Washington and Big Oil. The US hopes to use Libya, moreover, as a base of operations for suppressing revolutionary movements of workers throughout the region.

The Security Council vote was 10 in favor and five abstentions. The countries abstaining included Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India. While, as permanent members of the council, both Russia and China had the power to defeat the resolution by casting “no” votes, they chose not to do so, ensuring that the UN continued to fulfill its function as a rubber stamp for the demands of the major imperialist powers.

In their statements explaining their abstentions, however, the ambassadors of the five countries made clear that the impending attack on Libya has nothing to do with any consensus by the “world community” to protect the Libyan people, but rather is the outcome of a conspiracy worked out in secret between Washington, London and Paris.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that the measure “opens the door to large scale military intervention” and stressed that questions had been raised in the prior discussions of the resolution as to how it would be enforced, by what military forces and under what rules of engagement, but there had been “no answers.”

India’s ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri noted that while the UN Security Council had appointed a special envoy on the situation in Libya, it had received “no report on the situation on the ground” and was acting despite having “little credible information.” He said that there had been no explanation as to how the resolution was to be enforced, “by whom and with what measures.” He expressed concern over the fate of Libya’s “sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.”

Singh also voiced reservations about a range of new economic sanctions, which target, among other entities, Libya’s national oil company. He said that the measures could disrupt trade and investment by member states.

Germany’s ambassador, Peter Wittig, warned that the authorization of the use of military force increased the “the likelihood of large-scale loss of life” and said that Germany’s armed forces would take no part in the intervention.

China’s ambassador Li Baodong, the acting president of the Security Council, also voiced reservations, but then justified Beijing’s failure to veto the measure by invoking the vote last weekend of the Arab League calling on the UN to implement a no-fly zone.

NATO has also claimed this vote as somehow legitimizing intervention by demonstrating “regional support.” The reality is that the Arab League is itself composed of a collection of dictatorships, monarchies and emirates that in no way represent the desires or interests of the Arab people. Many of them are actively engaged in the violent suppression of popular upheavals.

While Washington has stressed that any intervention against Libya should include direct participation by the Arab countries, it appears that their involvement will be minimal. Following the visit to Cairo by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry told Reuters: “Egypt will not be among those Arab states. We will not be involved in any military intervention. No intervention, period.”

On Thursday, the Arab League could name only two countries prepared to join the US-NATO assault: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Both ruled by royal dynasties, the two emirates are direct participants in Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain to suppress the mass movement against the ruling monarchy. While security forces have shot protesters dead in the streets, invaded hospitals and carried out a reign of terror in Shia villages, none of the supposed champions of democracy in Libya are proposing any UN intervention in Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet.

The Gaddafi government warned that any attack on Libya “will expose all air and maritime traffic in the Mediterranean Sea to danger and civilian and military facilities will become targets of Libya’s counter-attack.”

US Secretary of State Clinton set the new strident US tone towards Libya in a statement made in Tunisia denouncing Gaddafi as “a man who has no conscience and will threaten anyone in his way. … It’s just his nature. There are some creatures that are like that.”

As recently as April 2009, the same Hillary Clinton warmly welcomed Gaddafi’s son and minister of national security to the US State Department, declaring, “We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya. We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation and I am very much looking forward to building on this relationship.”

Like her European counterparts, only months ago Clinton was currying favor with the Gaddafi regime in pursuit of oil profits and the collaboration of his secret police apparatus in prosecuting Washington’s “global war on terrorism.”

Now, under the cover of a crescendo of human rights propaganda, with sections of the media claiming that the repressive actions of the Gaddafi regime amount to “genocide”, Washington together with French and British imperialism are intervening in a civil war in Libya which they themselves had no small part in provoking.

No amount of rhetoric about “saving lives” can mask the fact that what is being carried out is an act of out and out imperialist banditry, comparable to the attempts to partition the Congo and Nigeria during the second half of the 20th century. In those cases, as in Libya, behind the interventions was the drive for control of strategic resources.

The justifications given for the Libyan intervention are full of grotesque contradictions. Washington, which professes to be outraged over the killing of Libyan civilians and bent on saving lives, is itself responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan and, on the very eve of the UN vote, carried out the cold-blooded murder of some 40 civilians in a drone attack in Pakistan.

The US and its allies have shown no inclination to seek a resolution authorizing the use of military force in the Ivory Coast, where a conflict comparable to that in Libya is unfolding. The obvious explanation is that cacao is not considered to have the same strategic importance as oil.

And, while claiming that the intervention in Libya is needed to ensure the triumph of democracy in the Middle East, Washington continues to back the regimes in Bahrain and Yemen as they mow down protesters demanding democratic rights.

There is an element of extreme recklessness in the US-NATO intervention. What will it produce? One likely variant would be Libya’s partition and the resurrection of Cyrenaica, the colonial territory set up by Italy in Benghazi in the 1920s. Any elements coming to power under such a regime would be right-wing puppets of imperialism, comparable to Karzai in Afghanistan or Maliki in Iraq, and would inevitably carry out an even bloodier slaughter of the Libyan people.

18 March, 2011

Countercurrents.org

The use of the American-made and supplied Apache helicopter gunships, the British-made and supplied tear gas canisters and guns and various other weapons has exposed the catastrophic moral and ethical downfall of all involved in the attack on the unarmed civilians of Bahrain. The latest episode of the all out war started at around 4.00 am GMT with massive attacks from the air and land at the peaceful protesters at the Pearl Square, many of whom were asleep. They were hit with salvo of tear and nerve gases, live ammunition and rubber bullets. Hundreds have so far been injured and many killed. Among those confirmed to have lost their lives are Jaffar Ali Salman, 31, from Karranah and Ahmad Abdulla Hassan, 23, from Hamad Town. The Pearl Square has been scorched by the invading Saudi army.

The Salmaniyah Hospital has been overstretched as the injured taken for treatment of the horrific wounds. It had already been overcrowded from yesterday as the Saudi invaders unleashed their revenge against the people of Bahrain. The private international Hospital also opened its doors for emergency treatment. Makeshift hospitals were opened by the people, one of which is in Matam Khamis in Sanabis. Calls were made for blood donation as the Saudi and Al Khalifa killers opened fire with no mercy on Bahrainis.

The past 48 hours have been amongst the worst in the history of Bahrain as Death Squads roamed the towns and villages, wielding swords, axes, iron bars and wooden sticks and attacked Bahrainis. Last night residents were attacked inside their homes in several villages, including Malikiyah, Sitra, Nuwaidrat, Bani Jamra, Masha, Daih, Karzakkan, Dar Kulaib and others. There are plenty of images clearly showing these vicious militias attacking and destroying people’s lives and property. The American and British ambassadors in Manama have failed to take moral stands against what the Bahraini natives see as genocide by the Al Khalifa.

Feelings of despair have continued as it became clear that Robert Gates, the American Secretary of State for Defence, had given the green light for the Saudis to carry out their invasion and to use the American weapons. He was in Bahrain on Saturday 12th March, once day before the bloody attack on the demonstrators near the financial harbor in which one civilian was killed and more than 1000 injured. Yesterday, Washington insisted on defending the Saudi aggression and refused to accept that it was an “invasion”. The Saudis and the Al Khalifa could not have deployed their American and British-made and supplied weapons without the approval of the American officials. There is country-wide revulsion at the indifference to the value of human life shown by those officials who had sided with the Al Khalifa hereditary dictatorship.

Bahrain Freedom Movement

16th March 2011