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With the long awaited decision by the Obama Administration in regards to the new strategy for Afghanistan, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated to the point that the US commanders started using the word ‘defeat’ in their report to Washington. The word defeat has rarely been uttered by military; however, Afghanistan is the exception, where defeat is a realistic outcome. There, defeat is a reality that all invaders have faced since the beginning when Pashtuns have inhabited this region. The Pashtuns’ resistance is one of multiple factors characterizing the Anatomy of US’s Defeat in Afghanistan, where the inevitability of defeat for the US and NATO appears to be a certainty.

FACTORS OF DEFEAT

American Military underestimated the Afghans (Pashtuns)

When the American troops landed in Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, they were confident that the defeat of the Taliban and take over of Afghanistan was inevitable. Their behavior was typically American characterized with excessive over confidence totally oblivious of Afghan history. Characteristically, they did not expect to suffer significant casualties either; however, much to their dismay, American causality has become quite apparent The overconfidence of American military was detailed by a reporter of IWPR:

“…in October when the Americans began deploying at the airport,

they were gung-ho, telling their Uzbek counterparts that it would take no more than a month and a half to defeat the Taleban…”

The report continues:

“Uzbek army personnel working at the air base said scores of US casualties have been arriving there. From November 25 to Decemeber [sic] 2, an Uzbek orderly working with American medical staff said he had witnessed the arrival of four to five US helicopters – carrying between them 10-15 American casualties – each day.”

The wounded soldiers that had returned from Afghanistan were frustrated by the sudden change in their self-perceived invincibility. The frustrations of the wounded soldiers on the base played out in daily occurrences of shouting and name-callings. These were the same soldiers that had heroic mentality before entering Afghanistan.

Similar experiences were reported in other parts of Afghanistan. For example, during operation Anaconda in 2002, America had used massive firepower to subdue a Taliban Commander Saifu-r-Rahman Mansoor in Shah-e-Kot in Southeastern Afghanistan. The Americans thought they could destroy the Afghan resistance by having superior airpower. They learned this to be more a wishful thinking. In the days of the fighting, Pentagon made various extravagant claims of having destroyed Mansoor’s defenses and killing more than a thousand (1000) Taliban fighters. The facts were otherwise. The US forces went to the battle with a heroic mind set, but they were bitterly surprised when they sustained heavy losses and had lost 16 helicopters ranging from apaches to Chinooks. The escalation reached a point of no return when 22 American Special Forces were caught alive. The heavy losses coupled with the captured soldiers started to take its toll on the US forces until March 10, 2002 when General Tommy Frank decided to pull back 400 troops to Bagram. The official explanation was that the conflict had ended for the most part while media reported that the troops suffered from battle fatigue. The truth was that the pull back was an attempt at building confidence aimed at convincing Taliban that American military is serious in seeking the release of the 22 Special Forces Commandos. The Taliban Commander, Maulana Mansoor demanded the release of all captives held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the 22 Special Forces soldiers.

Meanwhile, as the US forces encountered stiff resistance, it claimed to be fighting against a force of 1000 fighters when in reality there were 100 Afghan fighters, 120 Uzbek, and 30 Arab fighters. The US claimed to have killed 700 of 1000 Taliban/Al-Qaida fighters:

“U.S. military spokesmen estimate 700 out of roughly 1,000 Islamic extremists have been killed in the past nine days of fighting, which has cost the lives of eight Americans and three allied Afghans.”

The number of Taliban and foreign fighters killed stood at 88 (mostly Uzbek including 8 Arabs) while the number of US, British and others were much higher. Different media sources reported different numbers in regards to US losses. For example, the Russian online newspaper Strana.Ru on April 8, 2002, reported that the US lost 100 Special Forces and four Apache helicopters. However, data obtained from the battlefield put the casualty figure at 228 killed. From this figure 186 Americans killed in the battle, 22 prisoners executed when the US refused to release Guantanamo prisoners and 20 British SAS were killed when their vehicles were ambushed. The 186 killed Americans included those that were onboard helicopters. The total number of helicopters shot was 16 out of which two Chinook and 6 Apaches were totally destroyed and the remaining crash landed. The Canadians and Australians killed were reported as victims of friendly fire.

This is what happens when armed forces exhibit patronizing mentality and underestimate the enemy.

American Brutality-Excessive Use of Force and Racist View

The sheer use of excessive force coupled with individual cases of callous murder and torture could be viewed in the dichotomy of intention and reaction. The aspect of intentionality points to the way the military views the targeted population. The US military as an institution and their personnel must consider the people they bomb or murder perhaps less human, otherwise, the excessive use of force, committing murder and tortures would not be wide spread in their ranks. For example, by October 2002, the first anniversary of US invasion of Afghanistan, more than 10000 tons of bombs dropped on Afghan soil. (Socialist Worker Online, October 11, 2002) Imagine the magnitude of carnage and contamination caused by such massacre. While another report by Kate Randall on December 2001, put the number of US bombed dropped at 12000:

“Since the US launched the war on Afghanistan October 7, more than 12,000 US bombs have been dropped on the country. According to the Pentagon, about 60 percent of these bombs have been precision-guided by satellite or laser technology. However, many of these bombs—dropped by B-52s and other aircraft from tens of thousands of feet in the air—have strayed off course, hitting civilian targets.” (WSWS, December 29, 2001)

In another report, a year after September 11, 2001, Matt Kelley of the Associated Press put the US munitions statistics as follows:

“U.S. and coalition airplanes have conducted more than 21,000 flights over Afghanistan, dropping more than 20,000 munitions. About 60 percent of the ordnance dropped on Afghanistan has been precision guided, the highest percentage in any conflict.”

Similarly the Guardian reported on April 10, 2002:

“More than 22,000 weapons – ranging from cruise missiles to heavy fuel-air bombs – have been dropped on the country over the past six months…. US pilots dropped more than 6,600 joint direct attack munitions (J-dams), the satellite-guided bombs… One in four bombs and missiles dropped by the US on Afghanistan may have missed its target”

The new generations of hard target weapons whose warheads are made of uranium have contributed to the heavy contamination of land, water and general population. The carnage brought upon by the usage of these Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) would remain essentially forever. Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.5 Billion years. This means Afghans would be dying from cancers and other diseases for generations. For the past several years, the rate of various cancers have risen all over Afghanistan, however, the rate of this menace has been highest among the Pashtun people since they are on the receiving end of bombing raids. Imagine the magnitude of carnage and contamination caused by such barbarism.

The individual cases of slaughter are too many to list. However, I need to point out that American military shoots first and asks questions later. Many Afghans are shot on mere suspicion. In many cases, the person would be either going to work or coming from work.

The most serious of all the behaviors of the US military is their disregard for the privacy, dignity and lives of the Pashtun People. The behavior of the US military is similar to the South African police of the apartheid era entering Black African and Indian homes with no regard to their privacy. Similarly, American Soldiers enter Pashtun homes without any regard for their privacy and dignity. Moreover, they behave like thieves in the way they attack a residence at night when families are deep asleep. The entrances to peoples’ houses are blown with explosives and then men and boys are dragged from bed in full view of their children and wives. More often, before they could drag anyone from bed, they order their attack dogs to attack these families before they could leave their bedrooms. Consequently, many children are bitten to death. In many instances, after the inhabitants are bitten, the soldiers have shot indiscriminately. In Laghman Province, a man recalled the following event:

“At night, the Americans entered our homes, commandeered their attack dogs and then shot my son and my brother. I was asleep; when I woke up; a dog was standing next to me and bit me. Subsequent to that, the dogs pulled the corpse of my brother and son to the ally. We were terrified and abandoned our village.”

In another case in Khost, in mid-December of 2008, the home of Dr. Bilal was raided by the US forces. The US forces mistaken believed he was linked to Al-Qaida network while he worked for the province public health department. The AFP reported the following:

“The Americans entered without warning. They first killed one of my nephews, Amin, who was 14 years old, who was sleeping next to a rifle,” says Bilal Hassan, who works for the provincial department of health.

“My brother went out with a gun. He was shot down, like his wife who followed him,” he says.

A sister-in-law was hit in the spinal cord and paralysed [sic].

“Then they released their dogs,” the doctor remembers. The dogs attacked the bodies and bit off some of the fingers, he says. Then they bit the wounded woman and a child of five. “They took our savings, all our guns, used for self-defence [sic], and even papers for some of our properties…. Why did they do all that?”

The question is why are Pashtuns specifically targeted? One of the answers could be the racist mentality of the American military. However, the most likely explanation is that Pashtuns are the custodians of Afghanistan and they have defended Afghan independence throughout history. As long as the Pashtuns remain a potent force, US-NATO alliance would not only succeed but also face a realistic prospect of utter defeat.

In all fairness, other militaries exhibit dreadful behaviors as well. However, the US military appears to be one of the worst violators among the so-called democratic societies.

American over Reliance on Tajiks and Other Minorities

In the aftermath of 911, the Afghan Tajiks who were affiliated with the brutal and rapist organization of Northern Alliance or were supporters of these criminals stepped forward to the Bush Administration to accomplish two things. First, it was an opportunity for them to undermine the Pashtun (Afghan) majority of the country. These Northern Alliance elements were toppled by Taliban in 1996 after they carried out some of the most gruesome atrocities ever committed in Afghan history. The Northern Alliance was formed from war criminals, rapist and human rights violators. Thousands of women disappeared during the reign of the Northern Alliance. Second, by offering their services as mercenaries, the Northern Alliance wanted to take advantage of the situation to control the post-Taliban regime. Despite the massive air power and indiscriminate usage of wide array of bombs, the Northern Alliance failed to break through Taliban defenses situated 90 miles north of the Capital Kabul. After 45 days of bombing, Taliban decided to retreat to the countryside.

With the Taliban’s retreat, the Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul. The first task on their agenda was the firing of most civil servants that spoke Pashto. The imposition of minorities that constitute roughly 37% of the population on 63% Pashtun created resentment among the Pashtuns. It is worth mentioning that the CIA World Facts Book is grossly inaccurate when it comes to the percentage of Pashtuns in Afghanistan. Dr Zirakyar has traced the pattern of false statistics in this book and presented his analysis as follows:

“Until 1991, this type of “finished intelligence” registered Pashtuns as majority of the Afghan population (50% as ethnic group and as language group). Almost a year later in April 1992, the Northern Alliance (Masood-Rabani group) took over the power in Kabul. The World Factbook 1992, considerably lowered the statistical significance of the Pashtun ethnic group and their language (Pashto): 38% as ethnic group, and 35% as language group. In World Factbook 2009, statistical data for Pashtuns shows improvement as ethnic group (42%) but remained the same as language group (35%).”

He established the true number representing the percentage of Pashtuns in Afghanistan by tapping into the research of Wak Foundation:

“For the record, a six-year survey and research project (1991-1996) was conducted by WAK-Foundation for Afghanistan, the results of which was published in 1998 (1377 A.H.). According to this source, from the total population of Afghanistan, Pashtuns make up 62.73 percent as ethnic group and 55 percent as language group.”

Based on the pattern of falsehood illustrated in the CIA World Facts Book and consistently presenting false information about the Pashtuns, it would not be far fetched to state that there is an international conspiracy against the Pashtuns. That is why; Pashtuns are killed in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

In the post US invasion, Pashtuns were cleansed from many areas in Northern Afghanistan, where majority of the minority Tajik population is living. Pashtun lands were confiscated, forcing more than 300,000 Pashtuns to become refugees to neighboring Pakistan. This group of people formed the backbone of Taliban insurgency against the US and their mercenaries of the Northern Alliance.

Incidentally, the Afghan Tajiks and other minorities were lining up to become translators and falsely claiming to speak Pashto. These individuals intentionally while others due to ignorance of Pashto language labeled every Pashtun the Americans arrested as member of Taliban and Al Qaida. That is why; the youngest inmate in Guantanamo Bay was 11 years old. The unfair mentality of the American military and the animosity of the Tajiks and other minorities toward the Pashtuns resulted in many tragedies. Many innocent Pashtun men were tortured and killed in Bagram.

The reader might ask as to why Tajiks have this type of animosity toward the Pashtuns. The answer is Tajiks were mostly artisans, musicians-entertainers and refugees from Central Asia ungrateful for the life they had in Afghanistan. Similar to most minorities in different parts of the world, they also wanted to occupy the power in the country. However, they desired power at the expense of Pashtun majority.

Consequently, Pashtuns whether they agreed with Taliban or not joined Taliban led insurgency to secure their rights. To this end, both Americans and their mercenaries have become their targets. Meanwhile, the Afghan National Army (ANA), which hardly has a national character, is dominated by Tajiks. Majority of the commanders of the ANA are Tajiks. Equally, the current President, who is from Kandahar, is more than eager to please these criminal elements of the Northern Alliance by instituting their language as the administrative language ignoring Pashto and Pashtuns. It is speculated that Karzai is half-Pashtun, hence, the influence of his maternal uncles, who are qazelbash, on him drew him away from his own language. At this point it is purely speculative; however, Pashtuns are trying to rationalize the indifference of Karzai by presenting various explanations.

This unnatural arrangement and oppression of the Pashtuns inspired Pashtuns to fight against Americans and their installed regime in Kabul.

Americans Lack of knowledge of the Pashtun Culture

Lack of knowledge of Pashtun culture is another important factor ensuring US’s defeat in Afghanistan. There are two sources wherein this lack contributes to the permanence of hostility of Pashtuns toward the US and her allies. The first issue is the tribal structure and the cohesion within the tribes in matters of self-defense. When a member of the tribe or sub-tribe is killed, the killer is not only the enemy of the family whose member he has killed, but rather he has gained the enmity of the tribe whose member he has murdered. Thus, the US forces have turned tribes, sub-tribes and villages against them by slaughtering their members in the hundreds and thousands. The second source is a tenet of the Pashtunwali—the Pashtun Code of Honor. This tenet is that of revenge, which goes hand in hand with tribal cohesion. A Pashtun father, brother, and son and tribesmen have to avenge the death of their relative. There is an old saying that after a Pashtun took his revenge after100 years, he said, “I think I rushed it.” This points to the permanence of hostility.

Surge or the Final Nails in the Coffin of US’s Defeat

With the hoopla of surge and new strategy, the US politicians and military leaders lack complete awareness of the Afghan society, especially the Pashtun culture. To the Pashtun people surge means continuation of the indignity imposed on them by the US and her allies. This means more Afghan civilians would die. This also means the continuation of the same pattern of disregard to the privacy of Pashtuns’ homes. In essence, Pashtuns view this as affirmation by the part of the political and military leaders that the crimes they have committed for the past 8 years are not crimes, but rather righteousness which adds insult to injury.

Furthermore, this would increase the resolve of the Afghan insurgency and their supporters. Meanwhile, the insurgents are working on obtaining modern Russian Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers. In the past, Afghan Mujahideen used RPG7; however, RPG7 is not effective against NATO armor. Hence, the most effective weapon would be RPG32, which penetrates all NATO and US armor vehicles and tanks. Furthermore, insurgents are also working on obtaining modern version of SAM7 anti aircraft shoulder-held missiles. This would be the final nails in the coffin of US’s defeat in Afghanistan.

I have tried in vain to get the attention of the US political and military leaders with my peace proposal to institute permanent peace in Afghanistan. But unfortunately, they showed no interest for the most part. My proposal ‘White Paper for Permanent Peace in Afghanistan’ is a comprehensive approach to a long lasting peace for Afghanistan.

After receiving cold shoulders from political and military leadership, I came to hypothesize that they must be gaining financial benefits in the form of contracts or perhaps even kickbacks. Otherwise, it would be natural to seek peace than war especially when the insurgency has gained a lot of momentum.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned factors outline a pattern of hatred and killing. This pattern contributed to the permanence of hatred and enmity of Americans and their allies. The violations outlined depict acts of righteousness on the part of the American forces and points to strong conviction on the part of the US-NATO forces to continue committing atrocities.

Finally, President Obama’s speech in Norway by referring to the genocide in Afghanistan as a ‘just war’ is adding insult to injury. The award of the Nobel Prize to the President of a country that is actively murdering Afghans and turning their environment uninhabitable with the continued usage of uranium munitions is a travesty of justice and an abomination that should be condemned worldwide. Moreover, the award of the Nobel Prize is affirmation of support on the part of the Western establishment that the murder and genocide of the Pashtun people is acceptable, and it strengthens the hypothesis that the war on terror is in part an international conspiracy against the Pashtun Nation.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2010

Mohammed Daud Miraki, MA, MA, PhD

– mdmiraki@ameritech.net This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

– maidan11@yahoo.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.com

22 April, 2010

Written by Mohammed Daud Miraki, MA, MA, PhD

23 April 2010 00:00

Notes

1.Afghanistan: US Casualty Spiral

http://www.iwpr.net/?p=rca&s=f&o=162298&apc_state=henirca2001

2. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80079&page=1

3.Similar events happened one too many times

http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2009/february/feb2

2009.html#3

4. Anti-Taliban alliance composed of Afghan minorities

5.http://www.sabawoon.com/articles/index.php?page=kite_runner

6.http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KL01Df02.html

7.www.sabawoon.com/articles/index.php?page=

home and www.rense.com/general88/whitep.htm

 

Recently, Live Science published a chart showing that the US spends about one-fifth of its budget on the military. But this aggregate view hides how Congress prioritizes spending, when you consider what is discretionary and voted upon each year. A more salient view of these figures segregates ‘discretionary’ spending from ‘mandatory’ spending. During the severe economic downturn of the past two years, how has Congress prioritized spending?

When it comes to discretionary spending, Congress gives 58% to the military. Here are US budget charts for the years 2009 and 2010, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP):

NPP describes these charts this way, explaining the difference between ‘mandatory’ and ‘discretionary’ spending:

“[These charts show] the breakdown of the proposed federal discretionary budget for fiscal year 2010 [or 2009] by function area.

“The discretionary budget refers to the part of the federal budget proposed by the President, and debated and decided by Congress each year. The part of the budget constitutes more than one-third of total federal spending. The remainder of the federal budget is called ‘mandatory spending.’ Fiscal Year 2009 will run from October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009.

“Note that this chart includes the war-related spending requested by the administration as supplemental to the regular budget proposal.”

Note, too, per NPP:

“Federal Discretionary and Mandatory Spending

“Congress directly sets the level of spending on programs which are discretionary. Congress can choose to increase or decrease spending on any of those programs in a given year….

“About half of the discretionary budget is ‘national defense,’ a government-defined function area that roughly corresponds in common parlance as ‘military.’ However, this category does not include foreign military financing, security assistance, and other programs commonly thought of as military. Other types of discretionary spending include the budget for education, many health programs, and housing assistance.

“Mandatory spending includes programs, mostly entitlement programs, which are funded by eligibility rules or payment rules. Congress decides to create a program, for example, Food Stamps. It then determines who is eligible for the program and any other criteria it may want to lay out. How much is appropriated for the program each year is then determined by estimations of how many people will be eligible and apply for Food Stamps.

“Unlike discretionary spending, the Congress does not decide each year to increase or decrease the Food Stamp budget; instead, it periodically reviews the eligibility rules and may change them in order to exclude or include more people.

“Mandatory spending makes up about two-thirds of the total federal budget. By far the largest mandatory program is Social Security which makes up one-third of mandatory spending and continues to grow as the age demographic of the country shifts towards an older population. [See more at National Priorities Project.]

Also see discussion at How Are Our Federal Tax Dollars Spent? which shows that, in the aggregate, the military budget is one-fifth (21%) of our budget:

But, which is the more realistic view of military spending? Which captures how Congress prioritizes spending? Which is more relevant to us?

Arguably, discretionary spending is most relevant to ordinary citizens, as we continue to suffer under rising unemployment, increased foreclosures, bankster bailouts, million dollar industry bonuses while the minimum wage remains below poverty, all amid a global financial crisis.

And what does that 58% of discretionary spending amount to? In 2010: $1,027.8 billion, or over a trillion dollars, according to Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, at Defense Spending Is Much Greater than You Think: more than $1Trillion a year.

By Rady Ananda

25 April, 2010

Countercurrents.org

 

I published a paper on April 6 highlighting a recent report by the Department of Defense ( Joint Operating Environment for 2010 ) which focused on an impending energy crisis — a lack of oil production sufficient to meet global demand.

Following this paper, backed in particular by the Guardian, an American surfer [Energy Bulletin reader Chris A.] had the good idea to look at the previous report of the United States Joint Forces Command, the Joint Operating Environment for 2008 .

Surprisingly, the report published two years ago already offered the same diagnosis, word for word (p. 17):

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.

The authors – anonymous – of the 2008 report specified:

The implications for future conflict are ominous. If the major developed and developing states do not undertake a massive expansion of production and refining capabilities, a severe energy crunch is inevitable.

We find virtually the same analysis in the new report in March 2010.

So far, neither the press nor the specialized sites had seen pass this diagnosis very worrying.

I hope I can soon tell you more about the origin of the data put forward by the Pentagon …

Editorial Notes

Translated by me from the French with help from Google Translate.

Original article in French: Le Pentagone alerte depuis… 2008 : vers une “crise énergétique sévère”.

Thanks to EB reader Chris A. who pointed out warning in the 2008 report to us, which we then forwarded to French journalist Matthieu Auzanneau.

Rick Munroe who wrote about the Joint Operating Environment (JOE) report earlier in Energy Bulletin adds:

If we think that other readers have the same impression (that the March review in EB missed the fact that most of the JOE content is re-rerun), then we should clarify things.

The previous JOE (released in Nov. 08, I believe) indeed “has the same warnings nearly word-for-word.” But Chris is incorrect in suggesting that our March 18th EB article missed that.

There are numerous references to the similarities between the two versions (paragraphs 1, 2, 7, 8 and 12).

The JOE’s reiteration of prior concerns could be viewed as simply “old news” and no longer relevant, or (more appropriately) as reminders that prior concerns have still not been addressed and may be even more pressing than they were 18 months ago.

What may be most significant in the new JOE is the inclusion of the Peak Oil text-box, which is new, and is long-awaited.

http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/04/18/le-pentagone-alerte-depuis-2008-vers-une-crise-energetique-severe/

By Matthieu Auzanneau

19 April, 2010

Petrole.blog.lemonde.fr

 

Dear Franklin,

I have just read your letter to Janet with its heart-rending account of the Sabra-Shatilla massacre. It is good to know there are still people who care about humanity and display a decency that is all too rare among humans, especially the most powerful – those who control such events as the Sabra-Shatilla massacre as described at A Letter To Janet About Sabra-Shatilla.

We live in a sick, sick world, a world that is full of hypocrisy and duplicity. Science has opened the door to all kinds of wizardry that allows evil people to control the destiny of most of humanity. I was taught Physics by the man who first split the atom (in 1932). He was a mild-mannered man who, on seeing where his discovery was leading, left Cambridge to return to his native Ireland and dedicate himself to teaching. Ironically, he was a pacifist. Who can tell what evil men will do with our discoveries? But science marches on regardless, putting more and more powerful weapons into the hands of powerful and unscrupulous humans: such is the madness of the human brain.

Recently, I have read the accounts given by Arundhati Roy of what is happening to the poor forest-dwellers of India who are being dispossessed of their lands and way of life by International mining companies, aided and abetted by a government which actively supports global corporations against the people whose interests they supposedly represent. The lives of these innocent, harmless people are being torn apart in the most violent manner, both physically and mentally, by so-called educated and civilised human beings, the elite of our society. What is the future of humankind in such circumstances?

Robotic planes now deliver death from the sky on innocent civilians. These are the modern-day equivalents of the olden day thunderbolts of vengeful gods. They are controlled by vengeful and evil men, men that WE elect into power.

I have just finished reading a little of the evils perpetrated by Christian Europeans against many, many innocent millions in North America, in Central and South America, in Africa, in Australia, and in South and South-East Asia. Their evil rivals and, in scale, far outdoes all that happened in Sabra and Shatilla. All this is done by people who pride themselves on being the acme of cultured civilisation, but who are strangely blind to their own true nature.

I ask myself why these things happened, and keep on happening again and again? The only explanation I can think of is that it lies in the human brain, and in particular in the imagination, that uncontrolled part of the brain that in our blindness we so much admire: the inventive/creative imagination.

We invent language. We invent writing. We tell stories and invent god(s). We invest these gods with all kinds of power. We then focus on a single god – THE GOD – God of gods! We imagine we are made in the image of this god of ours. We image that HE (note the gender – isn’t that a give away?) gave us dominion over all life, to treat as we will, and, of course, this god of ours blesses us whenever we are called to arms to slaughter our fellow-men with the same enthusiasm and lack of conscience as we slaughter and destroy the rest of life. In raining death down without mercy on the innocent, we are indeed made in his image.

Your account of Sabra-Shatilla was a another painful reminder of just how despicable humans can be, not least when they are fulfilling the imagined destiny decreed by this god of ours.

If ever we are to find a way out of the mess our imaginations have created for us (and the rest of life) it will surely come from our confronting the evil that is us, and then seeking honestly to devise a better way of life. Your message serves this end since there can be no peace without justice, and no justice without truth.

Thank you for your contribution to truth.

Yours sincerely,

David Kennedy

19 April, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Written by David Kennedy

Posted: 22 April 2010 00:00

Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.

Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.

Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable — at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan — would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.

Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that — it goes without saying — only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet’s premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you.

It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.

It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.

It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield.

The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us — whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country — the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing.

Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there — by proxy and directly — on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.

Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.

In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly.

And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious. There’s always some reason to hesitate — and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).

The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it.

It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.

Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously — including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.

Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different — and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn’t end.

And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country.

We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go.

A Brief History of American Withdrawal

Of course, there’s a small problem here. All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw — not really, not from either region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands.

And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea.

Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the U.S. either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.

A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of “people power” (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. (“We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorian base,” he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.

Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come “cut and run” charges and blame for “losing” Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere.

In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains. Already, the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying Washington to establish “an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after… Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is quoted as saying. “I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”)

If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the mega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre U.S. embassy built along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At present, it’s the largest “embassy” on the planet and represents something new in “diplomacy,” being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not.

In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future “embassy” personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1,875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country.

Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not, rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the “civilian surge”; nor, for instance, the special $10 million “pool” of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend “winning hearts and minds.”

Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.

Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better sooner.

Written by Tom Engelhardt

Posted: 27 April 2010 11:53

25 April, 2010

TomDispatch.com

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

[Note of thanks: I found a brief commentary TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz sent around of particular interest in thinking about this piece. Let me just add that the offhand comments of my friend Jim Peck often bear fruit in pieces like this, and the daily news summaries and updates from Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz are a constant help. A bow to all three of them.]

25 April, 2010

TomDispatch.com

Countercurrents.org

This article is a adapted from the introduction to the upcoming book Sacred Economics. The purpose of the book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe.

Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of all our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought “I can’t afford to” blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term “a sellout” demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forests, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

From at least the time that Jesus threw the moneychangers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. When a politician seeks money instead of the public good, we call him corrupt. Adjectives like “dirty” and “filthy” naturally describe money. Monks are supposed to have little to do with it: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”

At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. From ancient times thinkers have marveled at the ability of a mere mark to confer this power upon a disk of metal or slip of paper. Unfortunately, looking at the world around us, it is hard to avoid concluding that the magic of money is an evil magic.

Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature. It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, as some self-help gurus and “prosperity programming” teachers would have us believe; rather, we will create a new kind of money that embodies and reinforces our changed attitudes. Sacred Economics describes this new money and the new economy that will coalesce around it. It also explores the metamorphosis in human identity that is both a cause and a result of the transformation of money. The changed attitudes of which I speak go all the way to the core of what it is to be human: they include our understanding of the purpose of life, humanity’s role on the planet, the relationship of the individual to the human and natural community; even what it is to be an individual, a self. This should not be surprising, since we experience money (and property) as an extension of our selves; hence the possessive pronoun “mine” to describe it, the same pronoun we use to identify our arms and heads. My money, my car, my hand, my liver. Consider as well the sense of violation we feel when we are robbed or “ripped off,” as if part of our very selves had been taken.

A transformation from profanity to sacredness in money, something so deep a part of our identity, something so central to the workings of the world, would have profound effects indeed. But what does it mean for money, or anything else for that matter, to be sacred? It is in a crucial sense the opposite of what sacred has come to mean. For several thousand years, increasingly, the concepts of sacred, holy, and divine have referred to something separate from nature, the world, and the flesh. Three or four thousand years ago the gods began a migration from the lakes, forests, rivers, and mountains into the sky, becoming the imperial overlords of nature rather than its essence. As divinity separated from nature, so also it became unholy to involve oneself too deeply in the affairs of the world. The human being changed from a living soul to a mere receptacle of spirit, a profane envelope for a sacred soul, culminating in the Cartesian mote of consciousness observing the world but not participating in it, and the Newtonian watchmaker God doing the same. To be divine was to be supernatural, non-material. If God participated in the world at all, it was through miracles — divine intercessions violating or superseding nature’s laws.

Yet, paradoxically, this separate, abstract thing called spirit is supposed to be what animates the world. Ask the religious person what has changed when a person dies, and she will say the soul has left the body. Ask her who makes the rain fall and the wind blow, and she will say it is God. To be sure, Galileo and Newton appeared to have removed God from these everyday workings of the world, explaining it instead as the clockwork of a vast machine of impersonal force and mass, but even they still needed the Clockmaker to wind it up in the beginning, to imbue the universe with the potential energy that has run it ever since. This conception is still with us today as the Big Bang, a primordial event that is the source of the “negative entropy” that allows movement and life. In any case, our culture’s notion of spirit is that of something separate and non-worldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way.

It is hugely ironic and hugely significant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money! It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an “invisible hand” that, it is said, makes the world go ’round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper, but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature’s most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural. The natural substance that comes closest to these properties is gold, which does not rust, tarnish, or decay. Early on, gold was therefore used both as money and as a metaphor for the divine soul, that which is incorruptible and changeless.

Money’s divine property of abstraction, of disconnection from the real world of things, reached its extreme in the early years of the 21st century as the financial economy lost its mooring in the real economy and took on a life of its own. The vast fortunes of Wall Street were unconnected to any material production, seeming to exist in a separate realm.

Looking down from Olympian heights, the financiers called themselves “masters of the universe,” channeling the power of the god they served to bring fortune or ruin upon the masses, to literally move mountains, raze forests, change the course of rivers, cause the rise and fall of nations. But money soon proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). Soon, perhaps, we will blame the priests themselves.

What we call deflation, an earlier culture might have called, “God abandoning the world.” Money is disappearing, and with it a third property of spirit, the animating force of the human realm. At this writing, all over the world machines stand idle. Factories have ground to a halt, construction equipment sits derelict in the yard. Yet all the human and material inputs to operate them still exist. There is still fuel, there are still raw materials, and there are still human beings in abundance who know how to operate the machines. It is rather something immaterial, that animating spirit, which has fled. What has fled is money. That is the only thing missing, so insubstantial (in the form of electrons in computers) that it can hardly be said to exist at all, yet so powerful that without it, human productivity grinds to a halt. It is as if God had forsaken the world. Even beyond the mechanical realm, we can see the demotivating effects of lack of money. Consider the stereotype of the unemployed man, nearly broke, slouched in front of the TV in his undershirt, drinking a beer, hardly able to rise from his chair. Money, it seems, animates people as well as machines. Without it we are dispirited.

We do not realize that our concept of the divine has attracted to it a god that fits that concept, and given it sovereignty over the earth. By divorcing the soul from the flesh, spirit from matter, and God from nature, we have installed a ruling power that is soulless, alienating, ungodly and unnatural. So when I speak of making money sacred, I am not invoking a supernatural agency to infuse sacredness into the inert, mundane objects of nature. I am rather reaching back to an earlier time, a time before the divorce of matter and spirit, when sacredness was endemic to all things.

My understanding of sacredness is secondary to my feeling of sacredness, or to put it better, to the feeling of being in the presence of the sacred. I cannot define that feeling, nor need I define it, because I am sure that you have felt it as well. In the presence of the sacred, we are moved to the very core of our being, we feel reverence and awe, humility and amazement, and a profound sense of gratitude. Even though, intellectually, I know that I am in the presence of the sacred all the time, only rarely do I actually feel its fullness. When I do, I feel like I have returned to a home that was always there and to a truth that has always existed. It can happen when I observe an insect or a plant, hear a symphony of birdsongs or frog calls, feel mud between my toes, gaze upon an object beautifully made, apprehend the impossibly coordinated complexity of a cell or an ecosystem, witness a synchronicity or symbol in my life, watch happy children at play, am touched by a work of genius. Extraordinary though these experiences are, they are in no sense separate from the rest of life. Indeed, their power comes from the glimpse they give of a realer world, a sacred world that underlies and interpenetrates our own.

What is this “home that was always there, this truth that has always existed”? It is the truth of the unity or the connectedness of all things, and the feeling is that of participating in something far greater than oneself, yet which also is oneself. In ecology, this is the principle of interdependence: that all beings depend for their survival on the web of other beings that surrounds them, ultimately extending out to encompass the entire planet. The extinction of any species diminishes our own wholeness, our own health, our own selves: something of our very being is lost. We can feel this sense of loss directly, as an emotion, as well as indirectly through the multiplying health crises of our time. This book will draw from ecology to help describe a sacred economy. For example, in the planetary ecosystem there is no such thing as waste: the waste of one creature is the food of another, creating a sacred gift circle. For an economy to be sacred, it must be the same.

If the sacred is the gateway to the underlying unity of all things, it is equally a gateway to the uniqueness and specialness of each thing. A sacred object is one-of-a-kind; it carries a unique essence that cannot be reduced to a set of generic qualities. That is why reductionistic science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks. This conception mirrors our economic system, itself consisting mainly of standardized, generic commodities, job descriptions, processes, data, inputs and outputs and, most generic of all, money, the ultimate abstraction. In earlier times it was not so. Tribal peoples saw each being not primarily as a member of a category, but as a unique enspirited individual. Even rocks, clouds, and apparently identical drops of water were thought to be sentient, unique beings. The products of the human hand were unique as well, bearing through their distinguishing irregularities the signature of the maker. Here was the link between the two qualities of the sacred, connectedness and uniqueness: in their uniqueness, objects retain the mark of their origin, their place in the great matrix of being, their dependency on the rest of creation for their existence.

In this book I will describe a vision of a money system and an economy that is sacred. In other words, I will describe an economy that is no longer separate, in fact or in perception, from the natural matrix that underlies it. I will describe a reunion of the long-sundered realms of human and nature. The human economy will no longer be something separate from nature; it will be an extension of nature that obeys all of its laws and bears all of its beauty, wholeness, and enchantment.

Within every institution of our civilization, no matter how ugly or corrupt, there is the germ of something beautiful: the same note at a higher octave. Money is no exception: its original purpose is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance. How instead money has come to generate scarcity rather than abundance, competition rather than sharing, is one of the threads of this book. Yet despite what it has become, in that original beauty of money we can catch a glimpse of what will one day make it sacred again. We intuitively recognize the exchange of gifts as a sacred occasion, which is why we instinctively make a ceremony out of gift-giving. Sacred money, then, will be a medium of gifting, a means to recreate the gift economy of a hunter-gatherer or village society on a planetary level. A sacred economy will be an economy of the Gift.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then, I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: “We must reduce carbon emissions by 90%.” Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it, that did not describe what I, personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions can come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call “living in the Gift.”

The economic crisis we face today is just one of many crises that are converging upon us all at once: crises in energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, and the environment. My previous book, The Ascent of Humanity, traced the origin of each to a common root, millennia old, that I call Separation. Their convergence is a birth crisis, in which we are expelled from the old world into the new. Unavoidably, these crises invade our personal lives, our world falls apart, and we too are born into a new world, a new identity. This is why so many people sense a spiritual dimension to the planetary crisis.

I dedicate all of my work to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I say our “hearts”, because our minds tell us it is not possible. Our minds doubt that things will ever be much different than experience has taught us. You may, as you read the forgoing encomium to a sacred economy, have felt a wave of cynicism, contempt, or despair. You might have felt an urge to dismiss my words as hopelessly idealistic. Indeed, I myself was tempted to tone down my description, to make it more plausible, more responsible, more in line with our low expectations for what life and the world can be. But such an attenuation would not have been the truth. I will, using the tools of the mind, speak what is in my heart. In my heart I know that an economy and society this beautiful is possible for us to create, and indeed, that anything less than that is unworthy of us. Are we so broken, that we would aspire to anything less than a sacred world?

Written by Charles Eisenstein

Posted: 27 April 2010 11:46

25 April, 2010

Realitysandwich.com

Dear Student Leaders at the University of California – Berkeley

It was with great joy that I learned of your recent 16-4 vote in support of divesting your university’s money from companies that enable and profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights. Principled stands like this, supported by a fast growing number of US civil society organizations and people of conscience, including prominent Jewish groups, are essential for a better world in the making, and it is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power.

I am writing to tell you that, despite what detractors may allege, you are doing the right thing. You are doing the moral thing. You are doing that which is incumbent on you as humans who believe that all people have dignity and rights, and that all those being denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings.
I have been to the Ocupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle, and I write this letter with a special indebtedness to your school, Berkeley, for its pioneering role in advocating equality in South Africa and promoting corporate ethical and social responsibility to end complicity in Apartheid. I visited your campus in the 1980’s and was touched to find students sitting out in the baking sunshine to demonstrate for the University’s disvestment in companies supporting the South African regime.

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel’s 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the Apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.

To those who wrongly accuse you of unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one’s own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. You, students, are helping to pave that path to a just peace. I heartily endorse your divestment vote and encourage you to stand firm on the side of what is right.

God bless you richly,

Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town.

By Archbishop Desmond Tutu .

Archbishop Tutu is an active and prominent proponent of the campaign for divestment from Israel

Yusuf al-Qaradawi: ‘If the Prophet Mohamad was alive today, he would lend his support to NATO

“… Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based (and financed) preacher often described as the de facto spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, has recently kept up a barrage of verbal attacks on the Shias. He is president of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, a loose Brotherhood-inspired body designed to pronounce on issues of common concern to Muslims. Founded in the friendlier climate of 2004, its top ranks also include Shia clergy.

But Mr Qaradawi now attacks Shias for compromising the oneness of God (about the worst thing a Muslim can do) by ascribing semi-divine status to the people they regard as Muhammad’s legitimate successors. Another accusation is that Shias poach souls in Sunni lands.

Time was when Mr Qaradawi praised the feats of Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Shia militia in Lebanon, as fighters against Israel. But in recent punditry he has stressed the gap between Sunni and Shia beliefs and passionately called for regime change in Syria, where, among other things, a Sunni majority is rebelling against a ruling elite whose Alawite belief is a Shia offshoot. Senior Shia clergy have deplored his hardening line. Mr Qaradawi, whose utterances command attention from Marseilles to the north Caucasus, also backs Bahrain’s Sunni rulers in their anti-Shia stance.”

By  Yorum Yaz

16 May 2012

@ www.velfecr.com

A large swath of the US Midwest and mid-South has been devastated by extreme heat and the worst drought since at least 1956. Last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) declared more than 1,000 counties disaster areas—more than half of the land surface of the country—making the drought officially the largest disaster on record in the country. More than two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought.

The US is the world’s largest producer of corn, soybeans, and wheat, accounting for one in every three tons of the grains traded globally. In its weekly crop estimates this season, the USDA has repeatedly downgraded its forecasts for yields on corn and soybeans. The two crops are staple foods, and prime components of animal feed, cooking oils, and many other products.

On Monday, the government found only 34 percent of soybean acreage was in “good” or “excellent” condition, down six percentage points from the week before and 31 percentage points lower than the 10-year average for this time of year. Good/excellent ratings for corn fell to 31 percent, less than half the 10-year average rate. In the major corn-producing states of Indiana and Illinois, two-thirds of the crops were rated “poor” or “very poor.” In many of the 18 states surveyed, only 1 percent of crops were found to be “excellent.”

Overall, the government has cut its projected corn harvest to 13 billion bushels, the lowest yield since 2003.

The long-term economic, social, and environmental consequences of the extreme weather may be even more catastrophic than the immediate disaster. Meteorologists have noted that the 2012 drought is unusual in comparison to previous years in that it is impacting virtually all US growing areas at once. The widespread nature of the disaster, like other recent severe weather events, points to the impact of global warming.

“There’s not an exact definition of what the USDA means by ‘very poor’ except that it can’t be any worse,” explained Chris Hurt, an agricultural economist at Purdue University in Indiana, who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site by phone Tuesday. “For crops in that rating, it’s probably approaching no yield. The conditions continue to be extreme and the temperatures are in triple digits. We’ve only gotten spotty rain, and the forecast remains pretty much the same for the next two weeks.”

“The drought is really the worst we’ve experienced in the Midwest since 1988,” Hurt said. The drought of 1988 marked a turning point for the family farm in America, when small farmers went out of business en masse after a decade-long crisis.

“If this weather continues, it will surpass that year,” Hurt added. “We will have to go back to 1934 and 1936 for comparison. The Dust Bowl is associated with that period, and those were its worst years.”

Hurt noted that climatologists have projected that the primary corn belt would move north and westward due to warming. “I think we are seeing that. There are also many implications on animal and plant species,” he said. “Planting dates are two to three weeks earlier than they were 20 to 30 years ago.”

In addition to downgrading grain estimates, the USDA rated half of the nation’s grazing land in poor or very poor condition. Indeed, US grasslands have been so dry that since June some two million acres have burnt in wildfires.

Increasing numbers of cattle deaths have been reported in long-blighted Texas, some attributed to poisonous weeds because of the depleted pasture grass and fodder. The distress in some parts of the agricultural southwest bears a growing similarity to famine-stricken regions of Africa, and suggests a creeping desertification of arable land in the US due to climate change and poor agricultural practices.

Low river and water table levels have forced larger farms to halt irrigation, placing in question the harvest quality of currently healthy acreage. The state of Nebraska ordered 1,100 farms to halt irrigation this week because of plummeting river levels. Two hundred Kansas farms were ordered to halt irrigation last week. The southern half of the Mississippi River is so low that cargo barges have been running aground.

Some counties in the federal disaster area have recorded rainfalls 10 inches below annual averages. In a statement posted on the USDA web site, meteorologist Brad Rippey said the dry spell and temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit will continue for most of the corn belt through the week, and projected “hotter- and drier-than-normal weather pattern to persist nearly nationwide.”

“I’m about an hour south of Omaha in Nebraska, and this week will end the corn crop for 2012,” Agriculture.com Marketing Talk contributor and farmer “Highyields” said. “South of me about 10 days ago, they got a shot of rain but it was a small area. We haven’t had any rain since the first half of June… Soybeans are hanging out but you can still see a mouse running down the row.”

“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” University of Arizona geosciences and atmospheric sciences professor Jonathan Overpeck told the Associated Press July 5. “This extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.” Since the beginning of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has logged more than 40,000 high temperature records.

A parallel disaster is gripping the grain belt of southern Russia, the world’s third largest wheat exporter. At a press conference July 16, Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fedorov forecast a 22 percent year-over-year decline in the wheat harvest. A mild winter, followed by a spring drought, then torrential rains, have battered the entire region. The Ukraine has not publicly released an estimate on its wheat crop, but the International Grains Council has said that the country’s harvest could be halved from its initial projections.

US officials are seeking to downplay the risk of food inflation. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, said that while commodity prices would rise, “it will have a marginal impact on food prices… The impact of a drought probably will not likely be seen in the grocery aisles until 2013.”

Seizing on the disaster, speculators worldwide have flocked to grain futures. Following Russia’s downward revision Monday, wheat futures surged by 3.1 percent to $8.74 a bushel, up 34 percent for the year. The same day, prices for corn due for December delivery climbed five percent to $7.89 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade. This is near the record of $7.9925 set during the 2008 food crisis. Soybeans for November delivery are currently trading as high as $16.07 a bushel, also the highest since the summer of 2008.

The price spikes that year, caused by the confluence of extreme weather and the influx into commodities markets of hedge funds and other speculators escaping the financial meltdown, pushed at least 100 million people into dire poverty. Within a year, a record one billion people—one in six of the earth’s inhabitants—suffered from hunger. The crisis triggered riots in more than 30 countries and contributed to the upheavals in the Middle East that culminated in the Arab Spring of last year.

By Naomi Spencer

18 July, 2012

@ WSWS.org