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Majer, Libya: Located about 20 miles east of the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna, six miles south of Zliten, and off Libya’s southern coast across the Mediterranean from Rome, Majer was a picturesque village known for the fine quality of its dates and is claimed by locals to produce the best tarbuni (date juice) in Libya.

Family members, eyewitnesses and Libyan government officials claim that NATO’s air-strikes at Majer killed 85 people, including 33 children, 32 women and 20 men. Reporters and visitors were shown 30 of the bodies in a local morgue, including a mother and two children. Officials and residents explained that approximately 50 bodies were taken to other locations for family burial and most of the injured rushed to hospitals at Tripoli.

At Majer, NATO chose to bomb three neighboring compounds and visitors examined a total of five bombed-out houses. There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but rather mattresses, clothes and books littered the area. One badly injured 15-year old young lady, Salwa Ageil Al Jaoud, had earlier written her name inside one notebook found amidst the rubble. She was later visited in hospital and attested, like the witnesses at Qana had, that there was no military presence in the homes that were bombed.

NATO used the same tactic that Israel used during the two Qana massacres. After the first three bombs dropped at around 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) on Monday, August 8, many residents of the area ran to the bombed houses to try to save their loved ones. NATO then instantly struck with more bombs slaughtering 85 Libyans.

The badly burned and mangled bodies of two boys named Adil Moayed Gafes and Aynan Gafees were pulled from the rubble by family members deeply in shock. One anguished gentleman repeated the words, “”There is no God but Allah, and a martyr is loved by Allah,” and soon others joined in.

Standing on a pile of rubble, Libyan government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, declared, “This is a crime beyond imagination. Everything about this place is civilian!”

According to Libyan officials interviewed at the Rixos Hotel here in Tripoli last night, NATO attacked Majer “to try to help rebel fighters enter the government-held city from the south as it deepens its involvement and military command and control of one side in what has become a civil war hoping for billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts and special oil deals from its chosen team set up in eastern Libya.”

Seemingly borrowing a page from the Israeli army media office, NATO’s Carmen Romero, the NATO Deputy Spokesperson and Colonel Roland Lavoie, Operation ”Unified Protector” military spokesperson on 8/9/11 told a joint Brussels-Naples news conference that “the village bombed contained a military assembly area and that NATO to date had no evidence of any civilian casualties but that NATO always takes extraordinary measures to assure the safety of civilians.”

 

It is predictable, that as the evidence of the massacre at Majer becomes public and NATO is pressed to explain the killing of yet more Libya civilians, NATO, probably within the next 48 hours, will announce “an internal investigation” into the events at Majer while asserting in advance, as the Israelis regularly do, that their bombing was only directed at “legitimate military targets.”

Every Muslim and Christian Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, and every Lebanese citizen whose family members or loved ones were slaughtered during Israel’s two massacres at Qana, Lebanon, is reminded today of the indescribable loss suffered yesterday by their Libyan sisters and brothers at Majer, Libya.

The Majer massacre was perpetrated yet again with American weapons once more gifted by American taxpayers without their knowledge or consent and against every American humanitarian value shared by all people of good will.

As at Qana, the inventory of American weapons that has been provided to NATO and available for use here in Libya since March 29, 2011, sometimes indiscriminately, in order “to protect civilians” includes, but if not limited to, the following:

B-2 stealth bombers from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, F-15Es currently based at the 492nd Fighter Squadron and 494th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath, Britain, F-16CJ “defense-suppression” aircraft based at the 480th Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, EC-130 Commando Solo psychological operations aircraft from the 193rd Special Operations Wing, Pennsylvania Air National Guard, Middletown, PA, KC-135s from the 100th Air Refueling Wing currently based at Mildenhall, Britain and the 92nd, Air Refueling Wing, Fairchild AFB, WA,C-130Js recently based at the 37th Airlift Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and A-10 attack fighters, and AC-130 gunships. The NATO attacks on Libya began with the bombing of claimed Libyan air-defense equipment using 110 American Tomahawk and Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles. Also launched were bombing attacks using three American B-2 Spirit Bombers delivering 45 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) against Libyan air bases. Tomahawks were also fired from British ships in the area.

U.S. Navy ships being used by NATO “to protect Libyan civilians” include:

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Stout (DDG 55) and USS Barry (DDG 52),Submarines USS Providence (SSN 719), USS Scranton (SSN 756) and USS Florida (SSGN 728),Marine amphibious ships USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) and USS Ponce (LPD 15) Command ship USS Mount Whitney (LCC/JCC 20), Support ships Lewis and Clark, Robert E. Peary and Kanawha,AV-8B Harrier fighters, CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters and MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft aboard the Kearsarge and Ponce, KC-130J tanker aircraft flying from Sigonella Air Base, Italy, EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft of VAQ-132, based at Whidbey Island, WA and flying from Aviano Air Base, Italy (the above listed aircraft were diverted from Iraq at NATO’s request “to help protect Libyan civilians”), P-3 Orion sub-hunters and EP-3 Aries electronic attack aircraft.

In addition to the above listed weapons, more than 50 types of American bombs and missiles are stockpiled for NATO use “to protect civilians in Libya” and their use to date is illegal under both American and International law, because it has resulted in the killing, maiming or wounding of approximately 7,800 Libyan civilians between March 29 and August 9, 2011.

A survey of NATO bombing sites, ground inspections, cataloged serial numbers from unexploded ordnance, examination of bomb and missile fragments at civilian sites in Western Libya, and consultation with Libyan military sources confirm what two US Senate Armed Services Committee staffers and international lawyers have postulated. NATO, like their Israeli allies at Qana, Lebanon, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity at Majer, Libya on August 8, 2011.

Specifically, NATO stands accused of committing the following crimes against the people of Libya according to a consensus from meetings with an increasing number of visiting international lawyers and human rights advocates who have come here from Europe, Asia and South and North America.

Applicable international law includes but is not limited to Article 3 of the Statute of The Hague International Penal Court which clearly states that one criterion for indictment for war crimes is: “Attack or bombardment, by whatever means, against undefended cities, towns, villages, buildings or houses”. 

NATO’s continuous use of civilian targets for military purposes, a scenario which NATO wantonly and callously calls “collateral damage” fits this clause exactly and would be a cornerstone of a case accusing this organization of being guilty of war crimes. 

Violation of the Geneva Convention IV, Article 3 (a): “To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds.”

These are similar causes of action that were filed against Israeli officials by American lawyers at the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights in Ali Saadallah BELHAS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Moshe YA`ALON, Defendant (466 F.Supp.2d 127 (2006) A case that educated the international legal community and the public about the necessity to strip sovereign immunity from international outlaws and allow lawsuits in domestic as well as international courts.

The NATO massacre at Majer requires international law suits that achieve nothing less.

Rioting and looting was not the only violent activity being carried out by Englishmen on Sunday night. Some hours before Cameron appeared on our TV screens vowing to take revenge on the risen British youth, his bomber pilots carried out a raid which slaughtered 33 Libyan children, along with 32 women and 20 men in Zlitan, a village near Tripoli. He, along with the rulers of France and the USA, are desperately trying to stave off economic collapse in the same way they always have – through the slaughter of third world people and the theft of their resources.

That is the context in which these riots need to be seen. Our mode of living in the West is predicated on violence and looting. For those who do not understand this, you need to look into how Western military forces have turned Afghanistan into a giant heroin poppy plantation with one of the lowest life expectancies on the planet, how they have turned Iraq into a living hell to steal its oil, how they are setting up Syria for an invasion as a prelude to the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian ‘problem’ and how they are already stealing Libyan oil wealth which Gaddafi had ploughed into African development but will now go straight into the coffers of Western arms companies. This is before we even mention the debt-extortion under which third world countries pay 13 times as much in loan interest to the West (on loans they have already paid back many times over) as they receive in aid.

Our young people have grown up witnessing all of this. They are well aware that the West enriches itself by violent plunder. They are also aware that more than half of their so-called ‘representatives’ in parliament have been systematically stealing TVs, electronic goods, clothes and anything else they think they can get away with, by means of large-scale fraud. They know that the police murder people with impunity, and their communities are subject to harassment and humiliation by police on a mass scale. They know that the bankers who have destroyed the livelihoods of millions, are still paying themselves bonuses extorted from the public purse.

They also know that none of these people are ever likely to be bought to justice through legal mechanisms. Most of the MPs guilty of fraud either still have their jobs, or have moved on to lucrative directorships with the companies for whom they did favours whilst in office. The police investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty. The army investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty. Tony Blair investigates himself and finds himself not guilty. The rich and powerful are demonstrating to our young people daily that the way to succeed is through robbery, theft and violence. This is the world into which they were born. This is the morality which surrounds them. This is the air they breathe.

Compared to their role models, the vast majority of the rioters have behaved impeccably. Attacks on small businesses, houses and civilians have been the exception, not the rule; the main activity has been the looting of big chain stores and the besieging of police stations. In so doing, the youth have succeeded in achieving what everyone else has failed to achieve – holding the police and corporations to account. The message to the police has been clear – you cannot murder, beat and humiliate us with impunity. Several police stations have been burned to the ground and all London police have had their summer leave cancelled. When incidents like Mark Duggan’s murder arise, it is never a case of one ‘bad apple’; the process of cover-up is a systematic one which requires large-scale collusion. Some officers may now think twice before getting entangled in such matters in the future.

As for the big corporations, the efficiency of their exploitation and enslavement of third world people has created such poverty across the globe that people are increasingly unable to afford to buy what they produce. This is the major systemic cause of the economic crisis. They may not know it, but the corporations our children are attacking are indeed the primary cause of their own poverty. More than this, these companies employ advertising techniques that ruthlessly target our children with a cruel message that their social status depends on the acquisition of their goods; they should not then feign surprise when poor children also try to acquire them.

With their so-called “mindless looting”, the dispossessed youth are in fact carrying out a primitive form of wealth redistribution. What they are doing in a disorganised and spontaneous way, is precisely what we should be doing in a systematic and disciplined way. We need to build organisations that are serious about creating ‘socialism from below’ – taking control of the factories, chain stores and land, and using them in a way that provides for the massive social needs for which capitalism is completely unable to provide. This is the real Big Society – the one Cameron and his ilk are utterly scared of.

I am not blaming Cameron, or the politicians, or the media. These are our enemies. They are being true to their class. They are exploiting us and lying to us efficiently and effectively. They are doing their jobs perfectly. I am blaming those of us who do care, who do want equality and an end to classism, racism and imperialism. We need to step up and provide leadership and organisation, and until we do that – our criticisms of the youth are hollow and deceitful. If we leave it to children to bring accountability to policing and to redistribute wealth, without any leadership or guidance, we shouldn’t be surprised if they do a messy job.

 

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has issued a stark warning to Syrian authorities to immediately halt military operations across the country or he said there will be nothing left to talk about the steps that would be taken.

Davutoğlu told reporters on Monday after full-scale military operations in a number of Syrian cities since Thursday by Syrian authorities to crush the five-month uprising against the 11-year rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that Turkey is demanding that all military operations that result in civilian death must be stopped immediately and unconditionally.

“If these operations do not stop there will be nothing left to say about the steps that would be taken,” he said, without elaborating.

“This is our final word to the Syrian authorities, our first expectation is that these operations stop immediately and unconditionally,” Davutoğlu said in Turkey’s strongest rhetoric yet against its once close ally and neighbour.

Stressing that Turkey will always stand by Syrian people, Davutoğlu said the Syrian army indeed stepped back for two days after he had talks with Assad in Damascus last Tuesday but has resumed military operations since Thursday.

He stressed the Turkish government has contacted with Syrian authorities every day to stop the bloodshed in the neighboring country, strongly dismissing allegations that Turkey gave time to Syria to stop military operations.

Davutoğlu said his message to the Syrian government is that all operations in big cities must be stopped and the military should be withdrawn from the cities, life should return to normal.

“In the context of human rights this cannot be seen as a domestic issue,” he told reporters.

 

 

The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a “doomsday mechanism” for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger military budget.

None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.

Consider this my contribution to a future 12-step program for national security sobriety.

Let’s start with the three basic post-9/11 numbers that Washington’s addicts need to know:

1. $5.9 trillion: That’s the sum of taxpayer dollars that’s gone into the Pentagon’s annual “base budget,” from 2000 to today. Note that the base budget includes nuclear weapons activities, even though they are overseen by the Department of Energy, but — and this is crucial — not the cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, even without those war costs, the Pentagon budget managed to grow from $302.9 billion in 2000, to $545.1 billion in 2011. That’s a dollar increase of $242.2 billion or an 80% jump ($163.6 billion and 44% if you adjust for inflation). It’s enough to make your head swim, and we’re barely started.

2. $1.36 trillion: That’s the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars by this September 30th, the end of the current fiscal year, including all moneys spent for those wars by the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other federal agencies. Of this, $869 billion will have been for Iraq, $487.6 billion for Afghanistan.

Add up our first two key national security spending numbers and you’re already at $7.2 trillion since the September 11th attacks. And even that staggering figure doesn’t catch the full extent of Washington spending in these years. So onward to our third number:

3. $636 billion: Most people usually ignore this part of the national security budget and we seldom see any figures for it, but it’s the amount, adjusted for inflation, that the U.S. government has spent so far on “homeland security.” This isn’t an easy figure to arrive at because homeland-security funding flows through literally dozens of federal agencies and not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A mere $16 billion was requested for homeland security in 2001. For 2012, the figure is $71.6 billion, only $37 billion of which will go through DHS. A substantial part, $18.1 billion, will be funneled through — don’t be surprised — the Department of Defense, while other agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion) and the Department of Justice ($4.1 billion) pick up the slack.

Add those three figures together and you’re at the edge of $8 trillion in national security spending for the last decade-plus and perhaps wondering where the nearest group for compulsive-spending addiction meets.

Now, for a few of those questions I mentioned, just to bring reality further into focus:

How does that nearly $8 trillion compare with past spending?

In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon base budget added up to an impressive $4.2 trillion, only one-third less than for the past decade. But add in the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars and total Pentagon spending post-9/11 is actually two-thirds greater than in the previous decade. That’s quite a jump. As for homeland-security funding, spending figures for the years prior to 2000 are hard to identify because the category didn’t exist (nor did anyone who mattered in Washington even think to use that word “homeland”). But there can be no question that whatever it was, it would pale next to present spending.

Is that nearly $8 trillion the real total for these years, or could it be even higher?

The war-cost calculations I’ve used above, which come from my own organization, the National Priorities Project, only take into account funds that have been requested by the President and appropriated by Congress. This, however, is just one way of considering the problem of war and national security spending. A recent study published by the Watson Institute of Brown University took a much broader approach. In the summary of their work, the Watson Institute analysts wrote, “There are at least three ways to think about the economic costs of these wars: what has been spent already, what could or must be spent in the future, and the comparative economic effects of spending money on war instead of something else.”

By including funding for such things as veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related borrowing, they came up with $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in war costs, which would put those overall national security figures since 2001 at around $11 trillion.

I took a similar approach in an earlier TomDispatch piece in which I calculated the true costs of national security at $1.2 trillion annually.

All of this brings another simple, but seldom-asked question to mind:

Are we safer?

Regardless of what figures you choose to use, one thing is certain: we’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. And given the debate raging in Washington this summer about how to rein in trillion-dollar deficits and a spiraling debt, it’s surprising that no one thinks to ask just how much safety bang for its buck the U.S. is getting from those trillions.

Of course, it’s not an easy question to answer, but there are some troubling facts out there that should give one pause. Let’s start with government accounting, which, like military music, is something of an oxymoron. Despite decades of complaints from Capitol Hill and various congressional attempts to force changes via legislation, the Department of Defense still cannot pass an audit. Believe it or not, it never has.

Members of Congress have become so exasperated that several have tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to cap or cut military spending until the Pentagon is capable of passing an annual audit as required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. So even as they fight to preserve record levels of military spending, Pentagon officials really have no way of telling American taxpayers how their money is being spent, or what kind of security it actually buys.

And this particular disease seems to be catching. The Department of Homeland Security has been part of the “high risk” series of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) since 2003. In case being “high risk” in GAO terms isn’t part of your dinner-table chitchat, here’s the definition: “agencies and program areas that are high risk due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of broad reform.”

Put in layman’s terms: no organization crucial to national security spending really has much of an idea of how well or badly it is spending vast sums of taxpayer money — and worse yet, Congress knows even less.

Which leads us to a broader issue and another question:

Are we spending money on the right types of security?

This June, the Institute for Policy Studies released the latest version of what it calls “a Unified Security Budget for the United States” that could make the country safer for far less than the current military budget. Known more familiarly as the USB, it has been produced annually since 2004 by the website Foreign Policy in Focus and draws on a task force of experts.

As in previous years, the report found — again in layman’s terms — that the U.S. invests its security dollars mainly in making war, slighting both real homeland security and anything that might pass for preventive diplomacy. In the Obama administration’s proposed 2012 budget, for example, 85% of security spending goes to the military (and if you included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that percentage would only rise); just 7% goes to real homeland security and a modest 8% to what might, even generously speaking, be termed non-military international engagement.

Significant parts of the foreign policy establishment have come to accept this critique — at least they sometimes sound like they do. As Robert Gates put the matter while still Secretary of Defense, “Funding for non-military foreign affairs programs… remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military… [T]here is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.” But if they talk the talk, when annual budgeting time comes around, few of them yet walk the walk.

So let’s ask another basic question:

Has your money, funneled into the vast and shadowy world of military and national security spending, made you safer?

Government officials and counterterrorism experts frequently claim that the public is unaware of their many “victories” in the “war on terror.” These, they insist, remain hidden for reasons that involve protecting intelligence sources and law enforcement techniques. They also maintain that the United States and its allies have disrupted any number of terror plots since 9/11 and that this justifies the present staggering levels of national security spending.

Undoubtedly examples of foiled terrorist acts, unpublicized for reasons of security, do exist (although the urge to boast shouldn’t be underestimated, as in the case of the covert operation to kill Osama bin Laden). Think of this as the “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” approach to supposed national security successes. It’s regularly used to justify higher spending requests for homeland security. There are, however, two obvious and immediate problems with taking it seriously.

First, lacking any transparency, there’s next to no way to assess its merits. How serious were these threats? A hapless underwear bomber or a weapon of mass destruction that didn’t make it to an American city? Who knows? The only thing that’s clear is that this is a loophole through which you can drive your basic mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle.

Second, how exactly were these attempts foiled? Were they thwarted by programs funded as part of the $7.2 trillion in military spending, or even the $636 billion in homeland security spending?

An April 2010 Heritage Foundation report, “30 Terrorist Plots Foiled: How the System Worked,” looked at known incidents where terrorist attacks were actually thwarted and so provides some guidance. The Heritage experts wrote, “Since September 11, 2001, at least 30 planned terrorist attacks have been foiled, all but two of them prevented by law enforcement. The two notable exceptions are the passengers and flight attendants who subdued the ‘shoe bomber’ in 2001 and the ‘underwear bomber’ on Christmas Day in 2009.”

In other words, in the vast majority of cases, the plots we know about were broken up by “law enforcement” or civilians, in no way aided by the $7.2 trillion that was invested in the military — or in many cases even the $636 billion that went into homeland security. And while most of those cases involved federal authorities, at least three were stopped by local law enforcement action.

In truth, given the current lack of assessment tools, it’s virtually impossible for outsiders — and probably insiders as well — to evaluate the effectiveness of this country’s many security-related programs. And this stymies our ability to properly determine the allocation of federal resources on the basis of program efficiency and the relative levels of the threats addressed.

So here’s one final question that just about no one asks:

Could we be less safe?

It’s possible that all that funding, especially the moneys that have gone into our various wars and conflicts, our secret drone campaigns and “black sites,” our various forays into Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other places may actually have made us less safe. Certainly, they have exacerbated existing tensions and created new ones, eroded our standing in some of the most volatile regions of the world, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the misery of many more, and made Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, potential recruiting and training grounds for future generations of insurgents and terrorists. Does anything remain of the international goodwill toward our country that was the one positive legacy of the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001? Unlikely.

Now, isn’t it time for those 12 steps?

Chris Hellman, a TomDispatch.com regular, is a Senior Research Analyst at the National Priorities Project (NPP). He is a member of the Unified Security Budget Task Force and the Sustainable Defense Task Force. Prior to joining NPP, he worked on military budget and policy issues for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and the Center for Defense Information. He is also a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill, where as a congressional staffer he worked on defense and foreign policy issues.

 

 

WASHINGTON — When congressional cost-cutters meet later this year to decide on trimming the federal budget, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could represent juicy targets. But how much do the wars actually cost the U.S. taxpayer?

Yes, Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department. There are long Pentagon spreadsheets that outline how much of that was spent on personnel, transportation, fuel and other costs. In a recent speech, President Barack Obama assigned the wars a $1 trillion price tag.

But all those numbers are incomplete. Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.

Lawmakers remain sharply divided over the wisdom of slashing the military budget, even with the United States winding down two long conflicts, but there’s also a more fundamental problem: It’s almost impossible to pin down just what the U.S. military spends on war.

To be sure, the costs are staggering.

According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including everything from personnel and equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying intelligence-gathering drones — had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan. That total is roughly the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.

To compare, it would take the State Department — with its annual budget of $27.4 billion — more than four months to spend that amount. NASA could have launched its final shuttle mission in July, which cost $1.5 billion, six times for what the Pentagon is allotted to spend each month in those two wars.

What about Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush’s 2003 expansion of prescription drug benefits for seniors, which cost a Congressional Budget Office-estimated $385 billion over 10 years? The Pentagon spends that in Iraq and Afghanistan in about 40 months.

Because of the complex and often ambiguous Pentagon budgeting process, it’s nearly impossible to get an accurate breakdown of every operating cost. Some funding comes out of the base budget; other money comes from supplemental appropriations.

But the estimates can be eye-popping, especially considering the logistical challenges to getting even the most basic equipment and comforts to troops in extremely forbidding terrain.

In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. military spent $1.5 billion to purchase 329.8 million gallons of fuel for vehicles, aircraft and generators from October 2010 to May 2011. That’s a not-unheard-of $4.55 per gallon, but it doesn’t include the cost of getting the fuel to combat zones and the human cost of transporting it through hostile areas, which can hike the cost to hundreds of dollars a gallon.

Just getting air-conditioning to troops in Afghanistan, including transport and maintenance, costs $20 billion per year, retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson told National Public Radio recently. That’s half the amount that the federal government has spent on Amtrak over 40 years.

War spending falls behind tax cuts and prescription drug benefits for seniors as contributors to the $14.3 trillion federal debt. The Pentagon’s base budget has grown every year for the past 14 years, marking the longest sustained growth period in U.S. history, but it seems clear that that era is ending.

Since the U.S. government issued war bonds to help finance World War II, Washington has asked taxpayers to shoulder less and less of a burden in times of conflict. In the early 1950s Congress raised taxes by 4 percent of the gross domestic product to pay for the Korean War; in 1968, during the Vietnam War, a tax was imposed to raise revenue by about 1 percent of GDP.

No such mechanism was imposed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the early years of the wars Congress didn’t even demand a true accounting of war spending, giving the military whatever it needed. Now, at a time of fiscal woes and with the American public weary of the wars, the question has become how much the nation’s largest bureaucracy should cut.

“The debt crisis has been a game changer in terms of defense spending,” said Laura Peterson, a national security analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.

“It used to be that asking how much the wars cost was unpatriotic. The attitude going into the war is you spend whatever you cost. Now maybe asking is more patriotic.”

Still, deep cuts to the Pentagon remain unpalatable to many lawmakers. The debt limit deal that Congress passed earlier this month calls for $350 billion in “defense and security” spending cuts through 2024, but that’s expected to be spread across several government agencies, sparing the Pentagon much of the blow.

However, if the 12-member bipartisan “super-committee” of lawmakers can’t agree on further federal budget cuts later this year, the law mandates across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years, with half of that coming from the Pentagon. The prospect of such deep defense cuts is thought to provide a strong incentive for deficit hawks to compromise and spread the pain more broadly.

Politics aside, finding defense savings is complex, even with the Obama administration trying to wind down two wars. For one thing, reducing troop levels doesn’t necessarily yield commensurate cost reductions, given the huge amount of infrastructure the military still maintains in each country.

In Afghanistan, the cost per service member climbed from $507,000 in fiscal year 2009 to $667,000 the following year, according to the Congressional Research Service. Fiscal year 2011 costs are expected to reach $694,000 per service member, even as the U.S. military begins drawing down 33,000 of the 99,000 troops there.

In Iraq, even with the overall costs of the war declining and the U.S. military scheduled to withdraw its remaining 46,000 troops by the end of this year, the cost per service member spiked from $510,000 in 2007 to $802,000 this year.

In fiscal year 2011, Congress authorized $113 billion for the war in Afghanistan and $46 billion for Iraq. The Pentagon’s 2012 budget request is lower: $107 billion for Afghanistan and $11 billion for Iraq.

In the more austere fiscal climate, the Pentagon has tried to be proactive, proposing cuts to some major military programs such as the controversial and hugely expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the national debt the biggest threat to U.S. national security. Before leaving office last month as defense secretary, Robert Gates ordered his department to find ways to cut $400 billion from the defense budget over 12 years, under Obama’s orders.

Among the challenges of determining the costs of war is defining what to include. Rising health care costs for veterans? The damage done to Iraqi and Afghan families, cities and institutions? Holding tens of thousands of detainees at U.S. military prisons in those two countries and others around the world? The massive interest on war-related debt, which some experts say could reach $1 trillion by 2020?

“The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated,” wrote a team of Brown University experts who authored a June report called “Costs of War.”

Critics of the defense budget process note that the U.S. already has paid a heavy cost for the wars, spending billions to wind up with older equipment and troops receiving less training.

Winslow Wheeler, who worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill for 30 years, said the Navy and Air Force fleets were smaller after a decade of war. The Army has been left with run-down, overworked vehicles and equipment.

“The danger of that is that as we blithely go on not paying attention, things happen that we don’t notice, like the older, less trained forces,” Wheeler said. Because the cost of replacing equipment has risen dramatically over the past decade, “what we are paying is a higher cost for a smaller force.” He likened it to replacing a Lamborghini with a Volkswagen.

The stock market panic of the past two weeks has clearly shown that none of the problems have been solved that led the world financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008. On the contrary, the global economic crisis has deepened over the past three years.

An editorial in the Süddeutsche Zeitung at the weekend drew a parallel to the Great Depression of 1931, which culminated in the Second World War. Two years after the Wall Street crash of 1929, several economic experts declared with optimism that the worst was over.

“What an illusion—and what disturbing parallels to today’s crisis, to the second world economic crisis, as one must now call it,” says the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Meanwhile, it was clear that as was the case “eight decades ago, several waves of crisis will follow: triggered by collapsing banks, bankrupt states, poor credit ratings or—at worst—the collapse of the euro zone.”

Three years ago, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, politicians protested they had drawn the lessons of 1931 and would not repeat the mistakes of stifling the world economy through a deflationary policy. With the help of bank bailouts, stimulus packages and low interest rates, they pumped billions from state coffers into the banks that had triggered the crisis through their irresponsible and criminal speculation.

Now the state budgets stand at the heart of the crisis. State debt has risen sharply because of the support for the banks. For example, Irish government debt has quadrupled, Spain’s has doubled, America’s has grown by one third and Germany’s by one fifth. The banks have turned the tables. First they were rescued using public funds, now they are demanding that budgets be slashed through brutal cost-cutting measures.

Governments have bowed to the dictates of the financial markets and are responding like their predecessors eighty years ago. They no longer talk about the lessons of the Great Depression. Instead, they are destroying the livelihoods of broad layers of the population, pushing the economy into recession through new austerity measures.

The stock market panic of recent days must be seen in this context. The trigger was the downgrading of the United States credit rating by Standard & Poor’s and the deepening of the debt crisis in Europe.

Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating on US government bonds because the financial markets considered that the social cuts agreed by the Obama administration and the Congress were insufficient. In Europe, Spanish, Italian and French government bonds came under the spotlight of the speculators because the financial markets were not satisfied with the devastating austerity programmes in the peripheral countries of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The run on the financial markets signalled that investors will not rest until the last remaining social achievements of recent decades are destroyed—and not just in the small countries in the periphery of the euro zone, but throughout Europe.

The political elite understood the message and responded immediately. Last week, the Italian government agreed on an additional cuts package of €45 billion, although it had only recently slashed spending by €79 billion. The German Chancellor and French President agreed to meet at a special summit today to give a sign to reassure the financial markets.

The main topic dominating financial discussions is the introduction of common European bonds—that is, debt issued jointly by all the euro zone countries. So-called euro-bonds would allow countries such as Greece to finance their debt at the same rate as Germany. Greece would face much lower interest rates than before, while Germany would face higher interest rates on its debts.

This is why Germany has so far categorically refused to accept such euro-bonds. Although the German economy, more than any other, has benefited from the euro, Berlin rejects in any form a “transfer union,” a transfer of finances from richer to the poorer countries of the euro zone.

But the pressure on Germany has grown considerably in recent days. In an urgent appeal last weekend Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti called for the establishment of common bonds. Euro-group president Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn also called for euro-bonds.

In a contribution published in a number of German newspapers, the financial investor George Soros spoke in favour of the introduction of euro bonds. “Germany and other countries with ‘AAA’ bond ratings must agree to some form of euro-bond regime. Otherwise, the euro will collapse,” he told finance daily Handelsblatt.

The German government still officially rejects euro-bonds. And on Monday Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman even explained that euro-bonds were not the subject of the meeting with Sarkozy.

However, the Welt am Sonntag reported over the weekend, citing several government members, that Berlin was now prepared to accept common European bonds if this was the only way to save the euro. The previously chosen route, to help countries with financial difficulties with multi-billion dollar bailouts is reaching its limits.

However, Berlin does not want to openly announce such a move, but negotiate “concessions from its euro-partners” in a longer process, was how Welt am Sonntag described it. In essence, the highly indebted countries must give up their economic and monetary sovereignty and submit to the dictates of the financial markets unconditionally.

In this context, German Economics Minister Philipp Rösler suggested the formation of a “stability union,” in which hard, tangible criteria would automatically ensure the reliability of the single currency. First, all countries should take up the German model of a constitutionally mandated balanced budget and put their labour market to a stress test. A European “stability council” should then decide on the use of credit and monitor compliance with the loan conditions. It would act as an “executive committee” of the EU in accordance with specified criteria that cannot be mitigated by political influence.

Rösler justified his proposal, which had been agreed with Chancellor Merkel, with the fact that the markets express a “basic mistrust” of the reliability of political decisions. The markets assessed the economic situation of a country more objectively than the political institutions.

In other words, the German government is demanding that the euro countries subordinate their financial and economic policies to a European body that stands outside any democratic control, and whose policies are largely determined by Berlin. In return, they would then be willing to finance some of the debts of weaker countries by means of euro-bonds.

The billionaire George Soros also supports this position. Euro-bonds would “then be acceptable for German voters if they were based on clear financial rules that must be set from Germany,” he told Der Spiegel.

What additional burden euro-bonds would mean for Germany’s budget is a matter of dispute. A representative of the Ifo Institute spoke of a total of €47 billion per year, which is likely to be an exaggeration. What is certain is that the German government would shift the additional costs onto the working class and pursue a harsh austerity plan similar to what Berlin has dictated for Greece, Portugal and other highly indebted countries.

Several economists have calculated that a failure of the euro would prove far too expensive for the export-dependent German economy.

Daniel Gros of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) expects a complete collapse of the European financial and banking systems if the monetary union should break up. The German economy would slump by 20 to 30 percent. In 2009, it only dropped by five percent due to the financial crisis.

Gustav Horn from the Institute for Macroeconomic Research, and Michael Burda of Berlin’s Humboldt University, anticipate that a re-introduced Deutschemark would soon grow in value against the dollar and other European currencies by up to 50 percent. According to Horn, this would be a catastrophe for the export sector. “It would wipe out medium-sized German businesses in one fell swoop.”

Nevertheless, the German government coalition is deeply divided over the issue of euro-bonds. The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and some Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentarians oppose European community bonds categorically. Many media comments now consider the question a political powder keg that could cost Chancellor Merkel her majority.

Both the Greens and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) are ready to step into the breach. Both have spoken out forcefully for the course that is currently advocated in the majority of German business circles: the introduction of euro-bonds, combined with strict European finance rules and other austerity measures.

In a TV broadcast, SPD chair Sigmar Gabriel advocated the introduction of euro-bonds. The prerequisite, however, was that countries seeking access to the bonds submit themselves to strict European control and give up their budget rights, he said.

Green Party chair Cem Ozdemir told the Rheinische Post that the appointment of a European finance minister, control over the budgets of member states by the European Union, and effective measures and incentives for fiscal discipline were prerequisites for introducing euro-bonds. He specifically advocated even more austerity measures. Those who want the euro must “be willing to pay a price for it,” he said.

The establishment parties—whether conservative, social democratic or Green—know only two answers to the economic crisis: the introduction of a European financial dictatorship in defence of the euro, or the Balkanization of Europe in the name of national interests. Both lead to disaster, deepening the social crisis and exacerbating national tensions.

The worsening of the economic crisis is putting immense class struggles on the agenda. In Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Israel and many other countries, workers and young people have begun to oppose the dictates of finance capital. But these struggles can only succeed if they are guided by an international socialist perspective.

Workers all over Europe must unite across the national borders and launch a joint struggle against the dictates of the banks and their stooges in the establishment political parties and the trade unions. Its goal must be the establishment of the United Socialist States of Europe. This requires the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections in the whole of Europe.

 

The riots in London and other cities of U.K. like Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Liverpool indicate end of multi-culturalism in the West. The horrible massacre in Norway last month also a pointer in that direction? We need to seriously analyze these events. When Asians and Africans from former colonies began to migrate to western countries the Europe began to be multi-racial and multi-cultural which was a new experience for people of the West. In other words they were now paying the price for their colonial policies the brunt of which so far was borne by colonized countries only.

 

When the considerable number of Afro-Asian peoples became part of these former colonies, like France, England, Germany, Netherland and several other countries, the sociologists and political scientists evolved a theory of multi-culturalism. So far these countries had only one religion, one language and one culture. But now these countries had people of different cultures, religion and language and hence called this phenomenon as multi-culturalism.

 

It is interesting to note that they called their countries multi-cultural rather than multi-religious because culture has deeper impact on human behaviour and intellectual orientation than religion. Among those who migrated to western countries many were their fellow religionists i.e. Christians but with African or Asian cultural background which was as unacceptable to them despite sharing religion with them. Also, their ethnic origin (skin colour) was also very different.

 

Thus being Hindu, Muslim or Christian hardly mattered to the whites of Europe. They considered themselves as superior culturally, racially and educationally and considered non-whites as inferior. So for them culture and ethnicity were far more important than being of different religion.

 

Also, they thought they are more tolerant and people of Afro-Asian origin more religiously orthodox and much less tolerant. However, it was mere rhetoric than reality. When the numbers of migrant began to reach certain critical limit, their intolerance manifested itself. As long as their (migrants) number was insignificant they boasted about their tolerance but when it exceeded certain limits their intolerance surfaced and governments began to make stringent laws to control migration. In Netherland, government even decided to show naked women’s pictures to Muslim migrants and see whether they would accept it. They did not even think about women’s dignity.

 

The massacre in Norway was also result of extreme intolerance of other cultures and religions. Anders Behring Breivik was angry because more migrants (especially Muslims) were coming to his country and the ruling party was too liberal towards migrants and hence migrations must stop. It is interesting to note that he learnt a lesson or two from Hindutva forces also in intolerance and especially mentioned that in his voluminous manifesto comprising over 1500 pages. Thus it is evident that all rightwing forces, whatever their religion or cultural background, think alike.

 

This intolerance becomes sharper at the time of economic downturn. The Western economy is going through crisis and unemployment is increasing which causes frustration among the unemployed youth and frustration and anger motivates them to indulge in acts of violence. They begin to think that real cause of their unemployment is migrants who take away their jobs though that is not the real reason. It is crisis of capitalist economy and also American war dependent economy but migrants become target of their wrath.

 

What happened in London a few days ago and spread to several other cities of U.K., especially Birmingham and Manchester which have large sub-continental population, is much more complex and one should understand it with all its complexity. It all started with police killing a coloured person of 30 years age who was married with three children. The way it spread rapidly not only in different parts of London but to several other cities shows there was much more than most commentators have written about.

 

The British Prime Minister called it ‘pure criminality’. It is too superficial an observation and cannot be accepted as a comprehensive explanation from a responsible person like Prime Minister. Indeed criminals are also involved but it is not doing of criminals only. Criminals just joined in when disturbances started as always happen. In communal rots too in our country criminals too take benefit of rioting and indulge in looting and even settling scores with their rivals. One did not expect from the Prime Minister of a country to give such over-simplistic explanation.

 

A comprehensive explanation would include political, economic as well as cultural aspects. It also has to be seen in the background of rising intolerance and rejection of multi-culturalism in Europe in the wake of revival of rightwing politics and revival of rightwing politics is mainly on account of deep economic crisis western world is going through. It has been observed since Second World War that economic downturn brings in its wake revival of racism and neo-fascism.

 

This again shows that tolerance or intolerance is not a religious phenomenon as often thought  but quite a complex phenomenon which include several factors including cultural ones and those of identity and power-sharing. We unfortunately think it is religion which makes one tolerant or intolerant. The way blacks have killed Asians not only during these disturbances in London and Birmingham but also in earlier riots in England shows it is not merely racial but also economic.

 

Asians, especially those from Indian sub-continent have done well economically as they run businesses and have better standard of living than blacks, blacks bear grudge towards more successful Asians and take it out during such disturbances. The widespread looting of shops in which some whites were also involved as in India many middle class people, especially women loot shops during communal riots, shows how our values have collapsed.

Our education system itself is to be blamed for this. Like everywhere in capitalist system whole emphasis in education system is on competition, not on cooperation. Competitive spirit is the very foundation of our education and, of the two pillars of capitalism, competition and consumerism, consumerism generates spirit of jealousy and people want to imitate the rich and super-rich and want to consume what they consume and that leads to crime of all sorts.

 

A little spark can ignite the whole city or cities. As if people were waiting just for a spark to fly and everything will go up in flames. A few years ago, in Los Angeles it erupted when a white cop beat up a Blackman for minor traffic violation and this incident was video-recorded and shown. Whole of Los Angeles went up in flame. It shows how skin-deep is our culture and our civilizational values.

 

Riots like those of London and massacre like that of Norway show mirror to people of the west how superficial is their understanding of their culture and civilization. They accuse Muslims of being violent and undemocratic, how violent they themselves are and how deep are their prejudices. It was not very difficult for Hitler to capture imagination of German with his Nazi philosophy, Germany which had centuries of civilization.

 

Also USA, in partnership with U.K. and certain other European countries has been waging wars in Asia and Africa and recruiting soldiers for that purpose and indulges in propaganda justifying violence has its own effect on the youth who go and fight as soldiers. It tells upon their psychology. The American debt crisis, though it is not being admitted, has much to do with the needless wars it waged in Iraq and Afghanistan and that has brought about economic crisis in whole of Europe causing so much socio-economic woes and frustration among the youth.

 

There are violent tendencies among all of us and it needs great efforts to keep them under check and time and again we have to stress basic values like compassion, justice, human dignity, wisdom, mutual cooperation in goodness, humility and so on especially through our education system. But if all the time we all of competition and achieving at the cost of others and bullying weaker sections by parading our strength would only spur violent tendencies and these tendencies would recoil on ourselves also. The old adage that if you dig a pit for other to fall in, you yourself are likely to fall in it, is based on great deal of wisdom.

 

There is no doubt that western society evolved concept of human dignity and human rights  but its ruling classes are greatest violators of those norms and values. The Western societies which all the time talk about tolerance is increasingly becoming intolerant of the others. Will they learn from events such as in Norway and London?

To call Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption a ‘second freedom movement’ may be hyperbole but in recent times there has been no mass upsurge for a purely public cause, that has captured the imagination of so many.

For an Indian public long tolerant of the misdeeds of its political servants turned quasi-mafia bosses this show of strength was a much-needed one. In any democracy while elected governments, the executive and the judiciary are supposed to balance each other’s powers, ultimately it is the people who are the real masters and it is time the so-called ‘rulers’ understand this clearly.

Politicians, who constantly hide behind their stolen or manipulated electoral victories, should beware the wrath of a vocal citizenry that is not going to be fooled forever and demands transparent, accountable and participatory governance. The legitimacy conferred upon elected politicians is valid only as long as they play by the rules of the Indian Constitution, the laws of the land and established democratic norms.

If these rules are violated the legitimacy of being ‘elected’ should be taken away just as a bad driver loses his driving license or a football player is shown the red card for repeated fouls. The problem we face in India is clearly that there are no honest ‘umpires’ left to hand out these red cards anymore and this is not just the problem of a corrupt government or bureaucracy but of the falling values of Indian society itself.

That is why it is not clear at all whether the passing of the Jan Lokpal Bill with its draconian powers of oversight over government functioning will work as an effective measure against financial or political corruption.

The other larger obstacle to actually bringing meaningful change in the way India works lies only in the lack of clarity on what the term ‘corruption’ itself really means. The sources of this multi-headed evil run deep in our society and must be identified, debated and finally uprooted in all its forms.

The policeman or government official taking a bribe, the politician acting as a middleman for a corporation and so on are common examples of corruption in India. However going beyond the obvious meaning of corruption as just financial fraud or bribery there is a need to look at the many other ways in which established rules and universal principles are constantly bent to suit one vested interest or the other.

Here is my take on what I think are at least Ten Avatars of Indian Corruption :

1) Caste: This is the oldest form of corruption in the Indian sub-continent and one that continues to this day- the bending of rules in favour of the ‘upper’ castes over the ‘lower’ ones. In traditional India laws were always discriminatory in content, prescribing as they did different kinds of punishment to people from different rungs of the caste ladder for the same crime. Even today in many parts of India a savarna can go scot-free after murdering a Dalit while the latter can be lynched for even skinning a dead cow. People of the same caste favour each other over members of other castes all the time in different sectors of Indian life from government and business to sports and even crime. Even in Bollywood the hero of every movie is a Singh, Sharma or a Verma and almost never an Ahir, Topno, Pramanik or Sutar. For that matter, there are very few in the English and Hindi language media too with such surnames. Next round Anna can maybe target this form of corruption and kick some ass (in his inimitable Gandhian way, of course) to set things right.

2) Class: Money power has become the biggest bender of established rules in India as the wealthy get away with almost anything and everything from evading taxes and stealing common resources to changing national policies to suit their business interests. Across political parties today members of parliament have become puppets of different big Indian and even foreign corporations and act against the interests of the ordinary Indian people. Even more than the politicians, who are mostly middlemen, it is the Tatas, Ambanis, Ruias and Mittals who wield real power in India. That many of these corporate bosses have today joined the chorus of voices against corruption is as dubious and laughable as Pappu Yadav going on fast in solidarity with Anna’s movement.

3) Race: Racism of skin color and looks is deeply rooted in a lot of Indian society and is a constant source of discrimination in not just public behavior but also national policy and politics. What else, if not racism, could be the reason that much of India and the national media has not paid any attention to the heroic ten year long fast unto death of Irom Sharmila from Manipur for repealing the dreaded Armed Forces Special Powers Act while a four day long fast by Anna Hazare has the urban middle classes all emotionally charged up? And why else should every depiction of Mother India be of a fair skinned Aryan looking lady with pink lips and not one with dark skin or curly hair or north-eastern looks? Racism is surely one of the most abhorrent forms of corruption possible in any society and Anna can help change social attitudes next time by having a nice Santhal, Munda or Oraon woman play Bharat Mata in the portrait behind him while he fasts on stage.

4) Gender: The ratio of women to men in the Indian population has been steadily falling in many parts of the country as a silent genocide takes place every hour with parents willfully killing off their girl children. According to the UNICEF foetal sex determination and sex selective abortion by unethical medical professionals has today grown into a Rs. 1,000 crore industry. Women get routinely discriminated against in job selection, the wages they get and the public and domestic violence they are subjected to. Denying women their equal rights as Indian citizens is a form of corruption that not only violates the Indian Constitution but also basic human principles. One does not expect Anna’s movement to take on every issue in Indian society but at least they can rebuff the public support that has been expressed for their cause by the khap panchayats of Haryana!

5) Nepotism : This is the most widespread form of corruption in the Indian context with not just politicians but film stars and cricketers promoting their kids over other more competent candidates all the time. Power, wealth, beauty, talent almost everything it seems can be ‘inherited’ without any effort and leads to the accumulation of undue influence in the same few families. The most glaring form of nepotism is practiced by family run business houses of India where, irrespective of their competence or ability, the reins of control keep passing on from father to son or daughter. If Indians want the country to be run solely on merit and transparent rules then they should insist that the CEOs of Indian companies be selected on the basis of an all India examination where everyone can participate. A severe taxation on inherited property as practiced in the UK and other countries will also go a long way in promoting a truly merit-based society.

6) Urban bias: Here I am referring to the discrimination against rural Bharat by urban India of course. Whether it be in terms of remuneration for their work and produce, investment in infrastructure, job opportunities, healthcare or education the rural Indian is far worse off than the urban one. Every national policy and rule is bent in favor of the cities and this must end if India is to remain a united country for long. The city is always prioritized over the countryside and it is ironic in some ways that almost all the support for Anna’s Gandhian movement is coming from the big cities and towns and virtually nothing from the villages.

7) Language: Forget about the imposition of Hindi on the people of southern India, it turns out that the most oppressive use of the ‘national language’ is in fact in the so-called Hindi speaking states. Over a dozen languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, Rajasthani, Bundelkhandi, Sadri, Chhattisgarhi are given short shrift by the champions of the elite Sanskritised Hindi over the local languages of the northern Indian states. The lack of educational materials in their mother tongue has resulted in low literacy rates for both children and adults in these parts of India for decades, keeping them at a perpetual disadvantage. In states where the local languages are properly supported and promoted like in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal and Gujarat there is much greater literacy and also empowerment of the people. Favouring Hindi or any language for that matter over another is a violation of the principle of equal access to opportunities and a form of corruption that has not been properly addressed as yet in the country.

8) Education: The open economic and cultural discrimination practiced against the ‘uneducated’ people of India is a form of corruption that most ‘educated’ people don’t want to recognize because this obviously works in their own favour. As a result of this bias those with degrees- real and fake- get paid many, many times more than those who never went through school and confined to manual work of different kinds. Many well meaning people think that the solution is to provide ‘education’ the masses of India obfuscating the fact that the ‘uneducated’ need food, clothing, shelter and dignified jobs before anything else. The worst aspect of this phenomenon is that the poverty of the poor is blamed on their ‘lack of education’ and not on the unjust economic structures of Indian society.

9) Religion: The biggest religious discrimination in India is not really against Muslims, who are at least organized and vocal about their problems, but against the Adivasi populations of the country. Subsumed under the category ‘Hindu’ there is no recognition as yet of their spiritual and religious traditions that are distinct from Hinduism in many, many ways. Several Adivasi groups in recent years have been demanding that the Indian government categorise their faiths as a separate religion called ‘Adi-dharm’ or ‘Sarna’, a call that has repeatedly fallen on deaf ears. Forcing indigenous people, who form over 10 percent of the Indian population, into a religious identity not of their choice is to deny them their Constitutional right to freedom of religion. Instead of imposing Hindu gods on them and seeking to ‘convert’ them to Hinduism with trishuls and Shiva lingas they should be allowed to practice whatever religion they want, derived from their own historical roots.

10) Nationality: India, for all its ancient glory and history, is really a new nation forged together by first the Mughals and then the British empire. The latter in particular forced dozens of smaller nationalities to become part of the ‘Raj’, whose territory was inherited by the current Indian Republic. Gandhi, more than anyone else in the Indian freedom movement was sensitive to this and had in fact declared his support for the demand for independence of the Naga people. Other Indian leaders like Nehru and Patel looked upon themselves as the managers of colonial property that the British had handed over to them. The reduction of the entire idea of Indian nationalism to control over territory and domination over smaller nationalities has been the biggest blot on the record of modern India in the last six decades. It has led to countless killings of innocent people and even crimes against humanity in the name of protecting the ‘integrity’ of the nation and is a corruption of every principle of non-violence and humanism that Gandhi espoused.

Anna Hazare could perhaps take on the Indian administration to recognize the rights to autonomy or even self-determination of all nationalities within Indian borders that don’t feel or want to be Indian. Doing that will truly make Anna a true inheritor of the Gandhian tradition, which is after all about the fight for justice for every human being and much more than merely sitting on a fast for a public cause or wearing khadi or leading a simple life. When that happens, the sub-continent will surely say ‘We are all Anna Hazare’ to the last man, woman and child.

The Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi appeared on the brink of collapse Sunday night, as ground forces of the NATO-backed Transitional National Council entered Tripoli, the capital city, from the west, south and east.

There were television reports Sunday night from neighborhoods of Tripoli where police and soldiers of the Gaddafi regime had fled and the anti-Gaddafi forces were in control. Other neighborhoods, particularly in the eastern half of the city, were said to be engulfed in heavy fighting between supporters and opponents of the regime, with hundreds dead.

Many units of the Libyan military were said to have fled their positions without a fight, including, significantly, the 32nd Brigade, a supposedly elite unit under the command of the longtime Libyan ruler’s son, Khamis. An Associated Press report said the military unit charged with the defense of downtown Tripoli and Muammar Gaddafi’s personal security had surrendered.

The same report said that rebel forces had reached Girgash, a neighborhood only a mile and a half from Green Square, the center of Tripoli and the symbolic heart of the regime, where Gaddafi’s supporters held rallies over the past five months in defiance of the NATO bombing campaign.

TNC officials claimed to have captured two of Gaddafi’s sons, including Seif al-Islam, the most politically influential son and the main public spokesman for the regime throughout the six months of civil war.

The Gaddafi regime, in power for 42 years, seemingly crumbled in the 48 hours following the fall of Zawiya, an oil-refining city 30 miles west of Tripoli. Zawiya was a battleground for nearly a week, with rebel forces moving into it from the west and south, backed by intense air bombardment by NATO warplanes.

The decisive two-day battle for the central square of the city culminated in air strikes that incinerated the last stronghold of the pro-regime forces, in the upper floors of the city’s only large hotel. The fall of Zawiya cut off Tripoli’s supply lines to the west and marked the loss of the last remaining source of fuel for the government, a vital necessity for its tanks and other military vehicles.

The TNC forces consolidated their hold over Zawiya on Saturday, and on the same day made breakthroughs in Zlitan, 85 miles east of Tripoli, where troops advancing from Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, overcame heavy resistance, and in Brega, 420 miles southeast of Tripoli, where pro-Gaddafi troops were driven out of another refinery town.

In each of these battles, NATO forces, in the air and on the ground, played the decisive role, and there was little or no mass involvement by the Libyan people themselves.

The internal disintegration of the Gaddafi regime foreshadowed the final breakdown. Three top aides or former officials fled the country in the past week. Interior Minister Nassr al-Mabrouk Abdullah fled to Cairo with his family, former deputy prime minister Abdel Salam Jalloud fled to rebel-held territory in the western mountains, and the regime’s top oil official, Omran Abukraa, defected to Tunisia.

The sudden collapse of Gaddafi’s forces seems in large measure the product of the NATO bombing campaign, which has included nearly 20,000 sorties, with more than 7,500 strikes against ground targets. Press reports suggested that the air strikes had intensified greatly in the last two weeks, and were closely coordinated with the offensive by opposition ground troops.

According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, despite the claims that the United States has taken a back seat in the war in Libya, “the Pentagon is now the second-largest player in the air war, racking up 16 percent of strike sorties,” with only the French conducting more attacks.

Without any public announcement, the Obama administration has authorized US forces to fill in the gaps as smaller European NATO powers like Norway have exhausted their inventories of bombs and pulled back from the war.

Numerous media reports, particularly in the British press, which is anxious to highlight the contribution of British warplanes and special forces, confirm that the collapse of the Gaddafi regime is the byproduct of imperialist intervention, not popular revolt.

“The overwhelming game-changer in the war has been international support for the rebels,” the Independent wrote Saturday. The newspaper described the scene in Zintan, southwest of Tripoli, a key center of the “rebels,” where their reporter encountered “a group of Western men in unmarked combat clothing, watchful, carrying guns. They were shy to speak to me and would not say who they were. According to rebel fighters, the current success in the field has been due to the planning carried out by these ‘advisers.’”

A second report in the Independent, published Sunday, declared: “The regime forces, after being pulverised for months by NATO, do not appear to have the capabilities to break through the rebels and re-establish a lifeline to the outside world. The rebels are still pretty inept, but they are receiving training and considerable assistance from Western former forces contractors, who are now planning and accompanying their missions.”

The Guardian recounted one incident from the battle in Zlitan, in which dozens of rebel troops were killed in heavy fighting, until a NATO warplane attacked and destroyed a T-72 tank that was wreaking havoc. The newspaper cited a rebel soldier who “thought the air strike had been called in by a British forward air controller who has become a familiar sight on the front lines west of Misrata in recent weeks.”

Reports in the US, British and Arab press uniformly describe the final push into Tripoli as an offensive “coordinated” between the Transitional National Council and NATO, with the imperialist alliance dropping the pretense that its military operations are aimed at defending civilians from the Gaddafi regime, and effectively admitting that its goal all along has been regime change.

The Associated Press wrote: “Libyan rebels said Saturday that they had launched their first attack on Tripoli in coordination with NATO and gun battles and mortar rounds rocked the city. NATO aircraft also made heavy bombing runs after nightfall, with loud explosions booming across the city.”

The New York Times reported Sunday, “NATO troops continued close air support of the rebels all day, with multiple strikes by alliance aircraft helping clear the road to Tripoli from Zawiyah. Rebel leaders in the west credited NATO with thwarting an attempt on Sunday by Qaddafi loyalists to reclaim Zawiyah with a flank assault on the city.”

The security analyst service Stratfor, which has close ties to the US intelligence apparatus, observed, “It is unlikely that the rebel forces advancing from Zawiya are fighting on their own. It will be important to watch for any signs of special operations forces from participating NATO countries quietly leading the offensive and preparing operations to locate and seize Gadhafi.”

Stratfor described the assistance of special ops soldiers as “crucial for the rebels, especially when it comes to coordinating close-air support.”

Perhaps the clearest indication of the close integration of the so-called rebels and their NATO commanders was the landing of several hundred troops from Misrata on the coast just east of Tripoli, an operation that had to be monitored by NATO naval and air forces, which control all sea access to the Libyan capital.

What will replace the right-wing bourgeois Gaddafi regime is not “democracy,” but a reactionary stooge government completely dependent on the imperialist powers that waged war against Libya in order to turn the country once again into a semi-colony.

The United States and the European powers cut their deals with Gaddafi over the past decade, as the longtime ruler abandoned his radical and populist pretenses and made his peace with imperialism. But there was always an underlying concern that the interests of the giant oil companies were not really secure so long as Gaddafi remained in power.

After the initial revolt in Benghazi in February—where the Western intelligence agencies, particularly the French, likely played a role—the United States, France and Britain moved quickly to create an alternative regime and mobilize military forces against the existing government.

While the supposed pretext for intervention was to save the Libyan people from a bloodbath at the hands of Gaddafi, far more Libyans have been killed by NATO bombing—many of them conscripts in the military, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians.

According to NATO, at least one third, and as many as half, of the personnel in Libya’s armed forces have been “degraded”—military-speak for killed or severely wounded. This may represent a death toll in the tens of thousands, although both NATO and the Gaddafi regime have, for their separate reasons, refused to give any figures on Libyan military casualties.

Already there are reports that post-Gaddafi Tripoli will be policed by outside forces from the imperialist powers and their closest stooges among the Arab states. Reuters reported that a “bridging force” of about 1,000 regular troops from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan would be sent to the Libyan capital to keep order.

The New York Times cited the comments of one US officer, who “said that small teams of American military and other government weapons experts could be sent into Libya after the fall of Qaddafi’s regime to help Libyan rebel and other international forces secure the weapons.”

This was confirmed by US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who told the military newspaper Stars & Stripes that any US personnel would consist of specialized detachments, not regular troops. “Panetta said that effort would fall to the larger diplomatic governance effort, which he sees as a function for the State Department and other NATO governments,” the newspaper said.

There are ominous indications that a bloody settling of scores is in preparation in Tripoli. The Washington Post wrote Sunday that a “Tripoli brigade” of Libyan “rebels” has “trained for months with special forces from the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar.” The commander of this brigade told the newspaper of plans to arrest “over a hundred” people in Tripoli, who were described as “high-profile Gaddafi loyalists designated as criminals and potential troublemakers.”

Reuters interviewed one “rebel” leader, Husam Najjair, whom it described as “more concerned about the possibility of rebels turning on each other when they try to take control of the capital Tripoli than the threat posed by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.”

Reuters described the fighters entering Tripoli as “weighed down by factionalism and ethnic and tribal divisions. An increasing number of fighters in the Western Mountains, for instance, are growing long, thick beards, the trademark of Islamists who are likely to reject close ties with the West in a new Libya…”

Libya has only 60 years of existence as a nation-state since it was created after World War II out of three provinces, ruled for centuries by the Ottoman Empire, then brutally oppressed for three decades by Italian colonialism, which slaughtered half the Libyan population.

The US-backed monarchy was overthrown in 1969 by radical Arab nationalist officers, headed by Gaddafi. For the next four decades, he maintained his control over Libya by balancing atop an array of ethnic, tribal and religious groups, using the country’s oil wealth to buy off rivals and appease social grievances.

The imperialist-sponsored destruction of the Gaddafi regime sets the stage for an explosion of these underlying antagonisms, with horrific consequences for the people of Libya. It also threatens the transformation of Libyan territory into a base and launching pad for imperialist attacks on the popular movements in Tunisia, Egypt and throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

 

Is religion in multi-religious Malaysia a force for unity — or disunity? This is an important question to ask at this juncture since religion has assumed tremendous significance in the public arena in recent times.

In the first decade and a half of our Independence, religion was not perceived as a hindrance to national unity. The Malaysian Constitution recognised Islam as the religion of the Federation. It was an affirmation of the identity of the new nation which had evolved from Muslim Sultanates. If this identity was not acknowledged, the Malay-Muslim populace would have felt that the Malaysian state had not taken cognisance of their identity as a people.

The Islamic identity of the land expressed itself through both ceremony and substance in the early years of Merdeka.  The recital of the doa at official functions was an example of the former; state funding for the building of mosques and Islamic religious instruction in national schools were examples of the latter. Ceremony and substance continue to feature in the expression of Malaysia’s Islamic identity.

The non-Muslim communities were not unhappy about the status and practise of Islam. By and large the nation’s Islamic identity did not impinge upon their rights. In fact, the Constitution, then and now, protects their right to profess and practise their religion, to manage their own religious affairs, “to establish and maintain institutions for religious or charitable purposes; and “to acquire and own property and hold and administer it in accordance with law.”  It is a truism that Buddhist Viharas, Hindu temples, and Christian Churches are integral to the landscape of a nation where more than 60% of the population is Muslim. The religious festivals of communities which constitute less than even 10% of the total are celebrated as public holidays, and have become etched in the people’s collective psyche.

However, the relatively tension free coexistence among the majority and minority religious communities of the first 15 years, began to witness some strains from the eighties onwards. Rapid Malay urbanisation since the seventies has created a situation in which Muslims  today share physical and cultural space with people of other faiths as never before. The consequent interaction has resulted in an increase in inter-religious marriages and divorces, and the attendant problems of conversion especially of minors, custody of children, the abandonment of one’s religion, the religious status of the deceased, and so on.

Often, in situations like this where interaction gives rise to friction, segments within a religious community become more conscious of religious boundaries. Any breach of what is sometimes an artificially constructed boundary arouses passions and heightens tensions. The controversy over the use of the term “Allah” by non-Muslims is a case in point.

To overcome this and other controversies, there has to be a fundamental change in the mindset of the influential stratum of Muslim society. There will be no solution to controversies such as child conversion as long as one accords primacy to religious injunctions that have developed over time rather than the perennial values and principles of the Qur’an. Our religious establishment, religious teachers at all levels and the media will have to be imbued with a more enlightened and dynamic outlook on the meaning and practice of faith in a multi-religious society grappling with contemporary challenges.

In this regard, it is important to emphasise that while this conservative, sometimes atavistic, mindset that confronts us transcends party affiliations, the dogma associated with it is more closely aligned to PAS than UMNO. This is why it is PAS that sought to introduce hudud—the emblem of this dogma— in Kelantan and Trengganu , something which no UMNO-led state or federal government has done in the last 54 years.

If a certain mindset within a segment of the Muslim population is a barrier to national unity, so is a certain movement within the growing Christian community. Evangelical Christians determined to spread Christianity are becoming more zealous. Non-Muslim communities are their main targets in Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah and Sarawak. But there is increasing evidence to suggest that Malays are also being approached — in spite of the constitutional provision that restricts “the propagation of any religious doctrine or belief among persons professing the religion of Islam.”

The evangelical push in Malaysia and other parts of the world has a lot to do with the rise of what is broadly described as the Christian Right in the United States. For the Christian Right exporting their brand of the religion serves to strengthen the global hegemonic power of the US. As Iain Buchannan shows in his superb academic study of this movement entitled The Armies of God, converting Muslims to Christianity is one of the evangelist’s cherished goals. Since Muslims worldwide have always resisted conversion, the tactics employed are more subtle and sophisticated.

Many Christian groups in Malaysia and other countries are opposed to this sort of evangelism. They know that it is not only a betrayal of the essence of Jesus’ message of love, compassion and justice but also inimical to harmonious relations among different religious communities. They emphasise universal values shared by Christianity, Islam and other religions.

It is these shared values that should be the fount of unity in a multi-religious society. They underscore our common humanity. If religions through the deeds of their adherents bring forth our common humanity, they will help forge unity in this land that we call our home.

 

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