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US President Barack Obama announced Friday that the remaining US troops in Iraq would be withdrawn from the country before the end of December, following the collapse of talks with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on extending the US presence into 2012.

Obama, in a statement delivered on short notice at a hastily called press appearance, portrayed the decision as the realization of a promise from the 2008 election campaign to end the war in Iraq. The pretense of fidelity to a campaign promise is ludicrous, given that the Obama administration has been striving for most of this year to overturn the December 31, 2011 deadline for a full US withdrawal, negotiated by the Bush administration in 2008.

US political and military officials have shuttled in and out of Iraq for months seeking to browbeat the Maliki government into a deal that would keep US troops in Iraq into 2012 and beyond. They proposed first to keep tens of thousands, then 18,000, then 5,000, then 3,000, but ultimately no deal could be finalized before the deadline.

Obama extended the war for nearly three years after taking office, and essentially carried out the policy adopted by the Bush administration before its departure.

The lack of advance notice of Obama’s White House announcement of the supposed end of the nearly nine-year war and the curious timing of the announcement—shortly before 1 PM on a Friday afternoon—suggest an attempt to keep the statement low-key and direct it largely to an Iraqi audience.

Obama’s announcement was broadcast live in Iraq at about 8 PM local time. This indicates that the statement, claiming an end to the US occupation and the beginning of a new relationship between “sovereign” and “equal” partners, was aimed at least in part at placating mass hostility in Iraq to the US troop presence, while providing Iraqi parliamentarians and politicians with political cover to negotiate some new deal to return US troops to the country.

The Iraqi defense minister followed Obama’s statement with one of his own declaring the need for a continued US troop presence, ostensibly to train Iraqi forces.

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is to visit Washington in December for further talks, and Obama held out the possibility of a future agreement to station US troops in Iraq in the guise of training Iraqi soldiers in the use of weapons systems the Iraqi government is buying from American military contractors.

There is no disguising, however, the debacle for the foreign policy of American imperialism. After nine years of warfare, with 4,400 US troops killed, tens of thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars squandered, the United States will lose its privileged access to bases on Iraqi soil as well as the legal immunity enjoyed by US soldiers.

The announcement produced bitter recriminations from Republican presidential candidates and representatives of the core of neoconservative pundits and strategists who played a central role in the Bush administration’s drive to war in Iraq.

Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading adviser to General David Petraeus in the 2008 “surge” of US troops into Iraq, condemned the action as empowering the regime in neighboring Iran. “I don’t see how you can talk about containing Iran when you leave Iraq to its own devices in such a way that it has no ability to protect itself,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney denounced the decision, declaring, “President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women.”

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann complained that the United States was being “kicked out” of Iraq “by the very people we liberated.” She complained, “Once we’re finished in Iraq, we’ll have more troops in Honduras than we’ll be leaving behind in Iraq.”

Significantly, however, the congressional Republican leadership was far more cautious in its response. House Speaker John Boehner claimed that the war in Iraq was a military victory won by American troops “under the strategy developed and implemented by our generals, and the leadership of both President Bush and President Obama.”

Romney, his chief rival Texas Governor Rick Perry, and several other Republican presidential candidates suggested that in taking the action, Obama was caving in to antiwar public opinion in the United States. “President Obama is putting political expediency ahead of sound military and security judgment,” Perry said, while Romney chimed in that he wanted to know what the US military advice to Obama had been—ignoring the inconvenient fact that it was political opposition within Iraq, not in the United States, that blocked an agreement.

In the face of overwhelming popular hostility to a continued American occupation, not one of the parties represented in the Iraqi parliament was willing to support an agreement that declared that US soldiers could not be held accountable under Iraqi law for crimes committed against Iraqi citizens.

This includes not only Maliki’s Dawa Party, which heads a shaky coalition dependent on support from the radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but also the Sunni-based Iraqiya coalition, headed by the former CIA asset Ayad Allawi, who felt compelled to oppose any agreement with his former paymasters. Even the Kurdish nationalist parties, the KDP and PUK, which have long enjoyed close relations with Washington, opposed any continuing grant of immunity to American soldiers in Iraq.

At a press conference in Baghdad, Maliki said, “When the issue of immunity was brought up and the Iraqi side was told that the American side won’t leave a single soldier without full immunity, and the Iraqi answer was that it’s impossible to grant immunity to a single American soldier, negotiations stopped regarding the numbers, location and mechanics of training.”

The Obama administration and the Pentagon insisted on maintaining the regime of legal impunity, despite or rather because of the countless atrocities committed in the course of the invasion and conquest of Iraq and the occupation that followed. These were perpetrated not only by uniformed US soldiers, but also by tens of thousands of paramilitary security personnel, Blackwater mercenaries and plainclothes spies and operatives.

At least 5,000 of these mercenaries will remain in Iraq after December 31, most of them working as security contractors for the huge US Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world. The State Department will have a staggering 16,000 employees in Iraq, according to one estimate. These will have diplomatic immunity, but the security contractors will be subject to arrest and prosecution in Iraqi courts in the event of future actions like the Blackwater massacre in Nisour Square in Baghdad four years ago.

Obama sought to put the best possible face on the political setback, claiming that he and Maliki “are in full agreement about how to move forward” and that future US-Iraqi relations would be conducted as “a normal relationship between sovereign nations, an equal partnership based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” As though such a relationship were possible between an invaded country that saw a million of its citizens slaughtered and its infrastructure destroyed and the invading power which perpetrated that catastrophe!

In his remarks Friday, and then again in his Internet and radio speech Saturday, Obama suggested that the end of direct US military involvement in Iraq was a turning point on the road to a reduction of US military actions around the world. “The tide of war is receding,” he said Friday.

In his Saturday speech, Obama took note of the Iraq decision and the destruction of the Gaddafi regime in Libya—culminating in the murder of Gaddafi last week—and declared, “After a decade of war, we’re turning the page and moving forward… As we end these wars, we’re focusing on our greatest challenge as a nation—rebuilding our economy and renewing our strength at home.”

This is a brazen lie on at least two levels. The US forces are being pulled out of Iraq only to facilitate the deployment of troops in many other countries around the world. Since Obama succeeded George W. Bush in the White House, after running a cynically false campaign posing as an “antiwar” candidate, he has greatly expanded the scope of US military operations around the world.

Bush had US forces engaged in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and covertly in Pakistan. Obama greatly escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and added new wars in Libya, Yemen, Somalia and now Uganda, where 100 US special forces were dispatched last week.

As for the claim that his administration is turning to “nation building” in the United States rather than in Iraq, this is mere posturing for electoral purposes. The Obama administration has worked hand-in-glove with the Republican right to slash social spending at home, even as it has increased military spending to levels far beyond those that prevailed during the Cold War.

Nor is the “withdrawal” from Iraq in any sense a pullback by the United States from the Bush doctrine of remaking the Middle East by military force. Obama has merely acted on the recognition, both in the Pentagon and in ruling class circles generally, that the US could no longer afford an open-ended military commitment on the scale of Iraq and had to find other methods to carry out its program of dominating the oil resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who visited Afghanistan, Pakistan and several Central Asian dictatorships during the week, took the occasion of the Iraq announcement to issue a warning to Iran not to “miscalculate” on US intentions in the Middle East.

Interviewed on the Sunday talks shows, she pointed to the 50,000 US troops that will remain deployed in the region, even after a final pullout from Iraq. This includes troops stationed at bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia, as well as Djibouti, just across the Red Sea from Yemen. There is also a newly established CIA base for firing drone missiles at an undisclosed location on the Arabian Peninsula.

By Patrick Martin

 

 

 

By Shamus Cooke

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org)

The leader of the moderate Tunisian Islamist party that won the first election of the Arab spring met stock exchange executives on Wednesday to reassure financial markets of its commitment to free enterprise and foreign investment.

The Tunisian stock exchange fell earlier this week amid concerns over the victory of Nahda, which had been crushed by the autocratic regime ousted in January but re-emerged to gain at least 40 per cent of the seats in the constituent assembly.

But after a meeting with Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Nahda, the bourse rallied. Mr Ghannouchi said his party was in favour of more companies listing and would help remove hurdles.

“We wanted to reassure them that we are on their side and that we want to play a positive role in the Tunisian economy,” said Moaz Ghannouchi, an economist and the son of the leader, who was also present at the meeting.

Officials of the party signalled they would protect the country’s crucial tourism sector and would not ban alcoholic drinks and bathing suits on its beaches, which draw millions of European holidaymakers every year.

Votes are still being counted, but Nahda officials are confident they are by far the single largest force in the constituent assembly that will write Tunisia’s first democratic constitution. Nahda has already started talks with secular parties on forming a coalition government to lead the country during a one-year transition. Hamadi Jbeli, secretary-general, said on Wednesday he was hoping to take the position of prime minister.

Mr Jbeli was quoted by the official TAP news agency as saying that the tourism sector was a national “achievement” that Nahda would not “touch”.

“Is it logical to handicap a strategic sector like tourism by forbidding wine or wearing bathing costumes?” he asked. “These are personal liberties for Tunisians and foreigners as well.”

He also said his party would not make Islamic banking “universal” or abolish Tunisia’s conventional banking system. “The market is central to Nahda’s economic philosophy as we can see in its programme,” he said.

Adel Grar, who heads the Tunisian stockbroker association and attended the meeting with Mr Ghannouchi, said he was reassured. The stock market, he said, was central to Nahda’s economic philosophy. “In addition, they seem to understand the practical problems we face,” he said.

 

Tunisia’s first democratic election has confirmed that the Islamists are the biggest political force – a development likely to be replicated in Egypt and Libya, the two other north African states, which also shook off dictators this year.

Soaring corruption in ruling circles was among the reasons behind the revolt which, in January toppled Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s former president.

Relatives of the president and his wife controlled large sectors of the economy and ensured there was no competition.

By Heba Saleh

27 October 2011

@ The Financial Times

This time last week the diplomatic world was on tenterhooks, as President Mahmoud Abbas prepared to make Palestine’s claim to recognition at the UN General Assembly. Seven days on, his historic demand languishes in a vague limbo, as Americans and Europeans try to pre-empt an ill-tempered stand-off in the Security Council and the US veto that would surely follow. The idea seems to be to try to deflect the Palestinians with a promise of revamped peace talks with Israel.

Whether or not this tactic works, however, there can be little doubt that one day, sooner rather than later, a fully fledged Palestinian state will come into being. There have been many mis-starts, including the 2006 elections that much of the West rejected retrospectively when Hamas emerged as the biggest party. But the momentum is inexorable. The Arab Spring, better described as the Arab awakening, can only speed the process along.

The bigger and longer-term question relates not to the existence, or even the viability of a Palestinian state – which should be a given. The demographics, economics and politics all point the same way. It relates to the future, and long-term survival, of Israel. In short, will Israel, as the Jewish state, still be around to celebrate its centenary in 2048?

Let me make it absolutely clear: the question is not whether Israel should continue to exist. That is beyond doubt. It is a legally constituted state with full UN recognition. It is a stable, albeit fractious, democracy and has survived more than 60 years in a distinctly hostile neighbourhood. It has created a thriving economy, with intensive agriculture and advanced industry, from almost nothing. It has a rich cultural life. It is not alone in having borders that are not finally demarcated and are regarded by some as illegal. The fact that it has enemies who withhold recognition does not negate its legitimacy.

No, the question is not whether Israel should survive, but whether it can and will survive. And here there must be room at the very least for doubt. A string of recent developments contains hints that the state of Israel, as currently constituted, may not be a permanent feature of the international scene.

One is the new porousness of its borders. Despite massive spending on security and recent, controversial, efforts to erect physical barriers along what Israel defines as its border with the Palestinian Authority, its other frontiers have become, or threaten to become, porous. On several weekends in May and June, Palestinians in Syria breached the border with Israel. They did not use overwhelming force. Numbers were enough, against Israeli troops – rightly – reluctant to mow down dozens of young people.

The incursions appeared to be encouraged, if not actually incited, by the Syrian authorities seeking a diversion from their own difficulties. They have since ceased; but the threat remains, and could soon escalate were the situation in Syria to deteriorate. If, in the worst case, Syria descended into civil war, chaos could present an even greater danger to Israel because there would be no one in Damascus with the authority to call the crowds of frustrated young Palestinians back.

Something similar, perhaps even less tractable, applies in the south, on Israel’s border with Egypt. Sinai is a vast territory and hard to patrol. Security on the Egyptian side has already deteriorated as a by-product of the fall of the Mubarak regime, and there have been attacks on Israeli convoys in the Negev. If unrest in Syria and Egypt were to extend to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, the consequences for Israel’s security could be even worse.

Add to these growing security problems the demographics – very young and fast-increasing populations in the countries all around – and it is clear that present trends will not easily be reversed. It is just about possible to imagine Israel resorting to the sort of impenetrable fortifications that extend along stretches of the US frontier with Mexico, but the investment would be huge, the message one of isolation, and the effect on daily life in Israel almost entirely negative.

A second reason why Israelis might be justified in having qualms about their future relates to the political aftermath of the Arab Spring. For a long time the fear was that any change in Arab countries would bring Islamist regimes to power, with fiercely anti-Israel agendas. That still cannot be ruled out. But what has happened so far could have more insidious consequences for Israel. Not only is the Jewish state losing its kudos as the sole democracy in the region, but those Arab leaders who actively supported peace have lost, or are losing, power, and the US is giving up on intervention.

One hope was that the emergence of more democratic regimes around Israel might foster a climate of normalisation and mutual respect. That may yet happen. But another effect is that leaders will have to be more responsive to the wishes of their people. As can already be discerned with Egypt, this may not bode well for stability in Arab-Israel relations. With the Arab Spring also bolstering the self-confidence of the Palestinians – a factor in Mr Abbas’s decision to take his case to the UN last week – the political balance in the region is shifting.

A third reason for doubt about Israel’s future lies within the Jewish state itself. With the early pioneering spirit fading, and even the Holocaust – dare one hazard – less of a unifying force, Israel is not the same country it was 60, 30, even 10 years ago. And demography means that it will continue to change, with the Arab, Orthodox Jewish and second-generation Russian populations increasing much faster than other groups. The Israel of the next 30 years is likely to be more divided, less productive, more inward-looking and more hawkish than it is today – but without the financial means and unquestioning sense of duty that inspired young people to defend their homeland by force of arms.

Recent mass protests against inequality and the cost of middle-class living also suggest that the social solidarity that has prevailed hitherto could break down. In such circumstances, it must be asked how much longer Israel can maintain the unity it has always presented against what it terms the “existential threat”.

An Israel whose borders are leaky, which is surrounded by states that are at once chaotic and assertive, and whose citizens are less able or willing than they were to fight, could face real serious questions about its viability. The choice then might be between a fortress state, explicitly protected by nuclear weapons, and a state so weak that association, or federation, with the burgeoning independent Palestine would become plausible: the so-called one-state solution by other means.

In either event, those with other options – the younger, more educated, more cosmopolitan sections of the population – might well seek their future elsewhere, leaving the homeland of their ancestors’ dreams a husk of its former self. The emotive call, “Next year in Jerusalem” would be the wistful vestige of a noble ambition overtaken by cruel demographic and geopolitical reality.

Mary Dejevsky

Friday, 30 September 2011

 

Saudi Arabia’s political paradoxes mean that a woman can be elected to parliament – but she’ll need a man to drive her there

What’s it like being a Saudi woman? A common question I’ve come to expect from outsiders – even fellow Arabs. The restrictiveness of the guardianship system, gender segregation and a persistently sexist culture add up to create an exotic and mysterious lifestyle that is difficult to not only explain but also to comprehend.

How do you explain the ingrained paradox of the driving ban on women? The point of the ban is that women avoid situations that lead to them mixing with and meeting men. However, the ban then leads to the necessity of hiring a strange man and getting into the car with him on a daily basis.

How do you explain the huge amounts of money the government spends on educating and training women, so much so that 60% of college graduates in Saudi are women – educating and training all these women, despite the fact that gender segregation laws makes employing them virtually impossible.

How do you explain that this is the way of life that the average Saudi wants for his or her country, when anyone getting on a plane leaving Saudi cannot help but notice how quickly the Saudi passengers abandon their abayas and conservative mannerisms?

A country of contradictions; Saudis have coined an Arabic phrase to explain the unexplainable that translates into “Saudi exceptionality”. This past week Saudi exceptionality did not disappoint.

After years of Saudis campaigning and petitioning the king to lift the women driving ban and ease the restrictiveness of the guardianship system, King Abdullah decreed last week that women would be allowed as full members of the Saudi parliament and would be allowed to vote and run in future municipal elections. In bafflement, we celebrated the decree.

Then, within a couple of days of the decree, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 10 lashes for driving her own car. Although women are banned from driving, they have never been sentenced to physical punishment for it. The usual is signing a pledge and in extreme cases paid suspension from their jobs and prison sentences that are never more than a few days.

Local political analysts believe that this lashing was some sort of reaction from the judicial courts to the king’s decree. A national and international outcry soon followed and the woman was later pardoned but the contradiction still stands. So in 18 months’ time a Saudi woman can be a member of parliament providing that her male guardian allows her to and she finds a man to drive her there.

How do Saudis explain that? It depends on where they stand concerning women’s rights issues. Those for women’s rights commend the wisdom of empowering women at the highest levels of decision-making so that their voices will trickle down to create real change in the everyday life of the average Saudi woman.

Women members on the Shura council will help bring issues such as child marriages and the unemployment rate for women to the forefront. However, those who oppose the decision see it as the government bending to international pressure. To them, the recent campaigns by organisations such as Amnesty International and Change.org have pushed the government to go against the will of the people.

Either way, the end result is the same, another paradox. Another item to add to the list of things that make explaining what it’s like being a Saudi woman difficult; another illogical milestone in Saudi history. The only consistency is “Saudi exceptionality”.

Eman Al Nafjan

29 September 2011

@ The Guardian

 

 

Life Among the 1% …a letter from Michael Moore

27 October 2011

Friends,

Twenty-two years ago this coming Tuesday, I stood with a group of factory workers, students and the unemployed in the middle of the downtown of my birthplace, Flint, Michigan, to announce that the Hollywood studio, Warner Bros., had purchased the world rights to distribute my first movie, ‘Roger & Me.’ A reporter asked me, “How much did you sell it for?”

“Three million dollars!” I proudly exclaimed. A cheer went up from the union guys surrounding me. It was absolutely unheard of for one of us in the working class of Flint (or anywhere) to receive such a sum of money unless one of us had either robbed a bank or, by luck, won the Michigan lottery.

On that sunny November day in 1989, it was like I had won the lottery — and the people I had lived and struggled with in Michigan were thrilled with my success. It was like, one of us had made it, one of us finally had good fortune smile upon us.

The day was filled with high-fives and “Way-ta-go Mike!”s. When you are from the working class you root for each other, and when one of you does well, the others are beaming with pride — not just for that one person’s success, but for the fact thatthe team had somehow won, beating the system that was brutal and unforgiving and which ran a game that was rigged against us.

We knew the rules, and those rules said that we factory town rats do not get to make movies or be on TV talk shows or have our voice heard on any national stage. We were to shut up, keep our heads down, and get back to work.

If by some miracle one of us escaped and commandeered a mass audience and some loot to boot — well, holy mother of God, watch out! A bully pulpit and enough cash to raise a ruckus — that was an incendiary combination, and it only spelled trouble for those at the top.

Until that point I had been barely getting by on unemployment, collecting $98 a week. Welfare. The dole. My car had died back in April so I had gone seven months with no vehicle. Friends would take me out to dinner, always coming up with an excuse to celebrate or commemorate something and then picking up the check so I would not have to feel the shame of not being able to afford it.

And now, all of a sudden, I had three million bucks! What would I do with it? There were men in suits making many suggestions to me, and I could see how those without a strong moral sense of social responsibility could be easily lead down the “ME” path and quickly forget about the “WE.”

So I made some easy decisions back in 1989:

1. I would first pay all my taxes. I told the guy who did my 1040 not to declare any deductions other than the mortgage and to pay the full federal, state and city tax rate. I proudly contributed nearly 1 million dollars for the privilege of being a citizen of this great country.

2. Of the remaining $2 million, I decided to divide it up the way I once heard the folksinger/activist Harry Chapin tell me how he lived: “One for me, one for the other guy.” So I took half the money — $1 million — and established a foundation to give it all away.

3. The remaining million went like this: I paid off all my debts, paid off the debts of some friends and family members, bought my parents a new refrigerator, set up college funds for our nieces and nephews, helped rebuild a black church that had been burned down in Flint, gave out a thousand turkeys at Thanksgiving, bought filmmaking equipment to send to the Vietnamese (my own personal reparations for a country we had ravaged), annually bought 10,000 toys to give to Toys for Tots at Christmas, got myself a new American-made Honda, and took out a mortgage on an apartment above a Baby Gap in New York City.

4. What remained went into a simple, low-interest savings account. I made the decision that I would never buy a share of stock (I didn’t understand the casino known as the New York Stock Exchange and I did not believe in investing in a system I did not agree with).

5. Finally, I believed the concept of making money off your money had created a greedy, lazy class who didn’t produce any product, just misery and fear among the populace. They invented ways to buy out companies and then shut them down. They dreamed up schemes to play with people’s pension funds as if it were their own money. They demanded companies keep posting record profits (which was accomplished by firing thousands and eliminating health benefits for those who remained). I made the decision that if I was going to earn a living, it would be done from my own sweat and ideas and creativity. I would produce something tangible, something others could own or be entertained by or learn from. My work would create employment for others, good employment with middle class wages and full health benefits.

I went on to make more movies, produce TV series and write books. I never started a project with the thought, “I wonder how much money I can make at this?” And by never letting money be the motivating force for anything, I simply did exactly what I wanted to do. That attitude kept the work honest and unflinching — and that, in turn I believe, resulted in millions of people buying tickets to these films, tuning in to my TV shows, and buying my books.

Which is exactly what has driven the Right crazy when it comes to me. How did someone from the left get such a wide mainstream audience?! This just isn’t supposed to happen (Noam Chomsky, sadly, will not be booked on The View today, and Howard Zinn, shockingly, didn’t make the New York Times bestseller list until after he died). That’s how the media machine is rigged — you are not supposed to hear from those who would completely change the system to something much better. Only wimpy liberals who urge caution and compromise and mild reforms get to have their say on the op-ed pages or Sunday morning chat shows.

Somehow, I found a crack through the wall and made it through. I feel very blessed that I have this life — and I take none of it for granted. I believe in the lessons I was taught back in Catholic school — that if you end up doing well, you have an even greater responsibility to those who don’t fare the same. “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” Kinda commie, I know, but the idea was that the human family was supposed to divide up the earth’s riches in a fair manner so that all of God’s children would have a life with less suffering.

I do very well — and for a documentary filmmaker, I do extremely well. That, too, drives conservatives bonkers. “You’re rich because of capitalism!” they scream at me. Um, no. Didn’t you take Econ 101? Capitalism is a system, a pyramid scheme of sorts, that exploits the vast majority so that the few at the top can enrich themselves more. I make my money the old school, honest way by making things.

Some years I earn a boatload of cash. Other years, like last year, I don’t have a job (no movie, no book) and so I make a lot less. “How can you claim to be for the poor when you are the opposite of poor?!” It’s like asking: “You’ve never had sex with another man — how can you be for gay marriage?!” I guess the same way that an all-male Congress voted to give women the vote, or scores of white people marched with Martin Luther Ling, Jr. (I can hear these righties yelling back through history: “Hey! You’re not black! You’re not being lynched! Why are you with the blacks?!”).

It is precisely this disconnect that prevents Republicans from understanding why anyone would give of their time or money to help out those less fortunate. It is simply something their brain cannot process.”Kanye West makes millions! What’s he doing at Occupy Wall Street?!”

Exactly — he’s down there demanding that his taxes be raised. That, to a right-winger, is the definition of insanity. To everyone else, we are grateful that people like him stand up, even if and especially because it is against his own personal financial interest. It is specifically what that Bible those conservatives wave around demands of those who are well off.

Back on that November day in 1989 when I sold my first film, a good friend of mine said this to me: “They have made a huge mistake giving someone like you a big check. This will make you a very dangerous man. And it proves that old saying right: ‘The capitalist will sell you the rope to hang himself with if he thinks he can make a buck off it.'”

Yours,

Michael Moore

MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com

@MMFlint

MichaelMoore.com

P.S. I will go to Oakland tomorrow afternoon to stand with Occupy Oakland against the out-of-control police.

China’s rapid economic development over the past two decades is something to celebrate. But after the display of horrifying indifference that some Chinese showed toward a bleeding two-year-old girl – in a video watched by millions around the world – the country’s leaders acknowledged Tuesday that the country’s “cultural development” lags behind its other accomplishments.

The official report released by the Xinhua news agency at the end of the annual gathering of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party made no mention of Wang Yue, the toddler who was run over twice and ignored by 18 passersby as she lay in a pool of her own blood in a Guangdong market last week. But it was hard not to see a connection between the jarring incident – which has provoked widespread soul-searching among Chinese Internet users – and the Central Committee’s call for a shift in focus from the country’s booming economy to addressing the voids that success has created.

After a four-day closed-door meeting, the 200-plus member Central Committee issued a communiqué calling for the country to build a “powerful socialist culture” that would involve “significantly improving the nation’s ideological and moral qualities.” Earlier, senior Politburo member Li Changchun was quoted as saying “venality, lack of integrity and moral anomalies” were on the rise in Chinese society.

Little Yueyue, as the girl is known here, remained in intensive care in a Guangzhou hospital yesterday, clinging to life, breathing with the help of a respirator. Local media quoted the hospital’s head of neurosurgery as saying the girl will likely remain in a vegetative state if she survives.

The Central Committee decided on cultural development as its main theme for this year’s plenum (last year’s focused on the five-year economic plan) well before the shocking video started an emotional discussion on the Chinese Internet about why people seem to have so little compassion for each other. Yueyue’s case was just the latest scandal in a country that has become increasingly accustomed to astonishing stories of wanton corruption, Internet scams, tainted baby food, and even child abductions with official involvement.

Many see the Communist Party as having created the vacuum it now seeks to fill. Religion was crushed following the country’s 1949 Revolution, and the ideology that was supposed to replace it – Maoism – went out the window when the country undertook its economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

“The Central Committee knows there’s something very, very seriously wrong with the Chinese value system. Officially, they say that they do have a socialist value system, but no one knows what that means,” said Bo Zhiyue, an expert on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore. “No one believes in Marxism any more, Confucianism is not being revived, and the so-called Western universal values are not being accepted.”

What the government can do about it is unclear. A statue of Confucius was briefly erected on the edge of Tiananmen Square early this year, signalling what some saw as a campaign to resurrect the great scholar’s values as something of a moral code for the country. However the statue’s placement raised the ire of Maoists, and it was later moved to a less prominent spot inside the nearby National Museum.

The communiqué issued by the Central Committee suggested the Ministry of Culture and the Propaganda Department will lead the push to create a more ethical “socialist” culture, following the long-standing Communist tradition of trying to lead the masses through media and propaganda campaigns. But many Chinese believe that little can change unless the country’s widely distrusted legal system is overhauled.(Many Internet commentators admitted they understood the reaction of those who walked by injured Yueyue, since getting involved in another’s business can often have unpredictable consequences.)

With President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao set to retire next year, the debate over the country’s direction will almost certainly fall to the next generation of China’s leaders to resolve. Not mentioned in the communiqué was the behind-the-scenes jockeying for posts in the next Standing Committee of the Politburo, the Party’s top decision-making body.

While Vice-President Xi Jinping and Vice-Premier Li Keqiang are seen as virtual locks to succeed Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen next year, there could be as many as seven other spots available on the nine-person Politburo.

A taste of the campaigning taking place behind the sealed doors of the Great Hall of the People drifted onto the pages of the People’s Daily newspaper, which on the eve of the Central Committee meeting devoted a 3,000-word front-page article to the accomplishments of Bo Xilai, the charismatic boss of the megacity of Chongqing.

Mr. Bo has made himself the hero of the Party’s “new left” through his campaigns in Chongqing – which have included a harsh crackdown on crime and an effort to restore “Red culture” by encouraging the singing of Mao-era songs – and the prominent article was seen as a sign that he and the leftists might be in ascendance.

But on Monday, the Party’s liberals – often seen as the weaker grouping – got their moment in the People’s Daily, which devoted only slightly less prominent front-page coverage to Wang Yang, the reformist Party boss of coastal Guangdong province.

Mr. Wang recently launched a campaign known as “Happy Guangdong,” arguing that the region’s development needs to be measured by factors other than the pace of economic development. Citizens need to be “both rich of pocket and rich of brain,” the People’s Daily quoted him as saying.

By MARK MacKINNON

18 October 2011

@ Globe and Mail

NAIROBI, Kenya — The Kenyan government revealed on Wednesday that its extensive military foray into Somalia this month to battle Islamist militants was not simply a response to a wave of recent kidnappings, as previously claimed, but was actually planned far in advance, part of a covert strategy to penetrate Somalia and keep the violence in one of Africa’s most anarchic countries from spilling into one of Africa’s most stable.

For several years, the American-backed Kenyan military has been secretly arming and training clan-based militias inside Somalia to safeguard Kenya’s borders and economic interests, especially a huge port to be built just 60 miles south of Somalia.

But now many diplomats, analysts and Kenyans fear that the country, by essentially invading southern Somalia, has bitten off far more than it can chew, opening itself up to terrorist reprisals and impeding the stressed relief efforts to save hundreds of thousands of starving Somalis.

Somalia has been a thorn in Kenya’s side ever since Kenya became independent in 1963, and the two countries have followed wildly different paths. Somalia has become synonymous with famine, war and anarchy, while Kenya has become one of America’s closest African allies, a bastion of stability and a favorite of tourists worldwide.

Kenyan officials said it was becoming impossible to coexist with a failed state next door. They consider the Shabab, a ruthless militant group that controls much of southern Somalia, a “clear and present danger,” responsible for piracy, militant attacks and cross-border raids.

When Kenya sent troops storming across Somalia’s border on Oct. 16, government officials initially said that they were chasing kidnappers who had recently abducted four Westerners inside Kenya, two from beachside bungalows, and that Kenya had to defend its tourism industry.

But on Wednesday, Alfred Mutua, the Kenyan government’s chief spokesman, revised this rationale, saying the kidnappings were more of a “good launchpad.”

“An operation of this magnitude is not planned in a week,” Mr. Mutua said. “It’s been in the pipeline for a while.”

Many analysts wonder how Kenya will be able to defy history and  stabilize Somalia when the United Nations, the United States, Ethiopia and the African Union have all intervened before, with little success. They argue that the Kenyan operation seems uncoordinated and poorly planned, with hundreds of troops bogged down in the mud from rains that fall at this time every year.

Kenyan military officials also publicly said the United States and France were helping them, but both countries quickly distanced themselves from the operation, insisting that they were not taking part in the combat.

“The invasion was a serious miscalculation, and the Kenyan economy is going to suffer badly,” said David M. Anderson, a Kenya specialist at Oxford.

The Shabab, who have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, have killed hundreds in suicide attacks in Somalia and are now vowing to punish Kenya, much as they struck Uganda last year for sending peacekeepers.

There have already been two grenade attacks in Nairobi, which Kenyan officials said were the work of Shabab members, and this usually laid-back capital city has shifted into war mode. Security guards peer into purses at supermarkets, shopping centers are deserted because many Kenyans are now scared to congregate in public, and the American government has warned of “an imminent threat of terrorist attacks” at malls and nightclubs.

Despite their close relationship with Kenyan security services, which receive millions of dollars in American aid each year, American officials said they had been caught off guard by the incursion.

“The United States did not encourage the Kenyan government to act, nor did Kenya seek our views,” said Katya Thomas, a spokeswoman at the American Embassy in Nairobi. “We note that Kenya has a right to defend itself.”

Pentagon officials are now watching cautiously. “This is not something that’s coordinated with us at all, so it’s not something we have much knowledge about,” a senior Pentagon official. “We want to see how this develops.”

Pentagon officials said the immediate impact of dispersing Shabab fighters was good. But without knowing much about the overall Kenyan strategy or long-term plan, they are a bit wary.

“It’s difficult to discern what’s the next step,” the official said.

Kenyan officials say the next step is marching to Kismayu, a port town controlled by the Shabab, who derive tens of millions of dollars a year in taxes from it.

But Lazarus Sumbeiywo, a former leader of Kenya’s army, said the Kenyans were erring tactically. “It should have been surgical strikes,” Mr. Sumbeiywo said, arguing for small teams of special forces to hunt down militants and eliminate them quietly.

In 1990, before he became chief of staff, Mr. Sumbeiywo said, he ran special operations to kill Somali gunmen who had infiltrated Kenya. He said that his men had worked in small units —   tracker, sharpshooter, translator —   and that Kenya had been bedeviled by Somalia for decades. “It was like that all the way from the beginning,” he said, describing how Kenyan forces fought Somali militants in the 1960s and 1970s, losing hundreds of men.

Kenya has tried to use proxy militias in Somalia to push out the Shabab and create a buffer zone stretching to Kismayu. But the militias have been struggling, and Kenyan officials said their plans for a major port in Lamu, near Somalia’s border, were imperiled by the instability pouring out of southern Somalia.

“This isn’t about tourism,” said a senior Kenyan official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “This is about our long-term development plan. Kenya cannot achieve economically what it wants with the situation the way it is in Somalia, especially Kismayu.”

“Just imagine you’re trying to swim,” he added. “If someone is holding your leg and your arm, how far can you swim?”

Somali officials, despite being enemies of the Shabab, have been furious about the Kenyan incursion. Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, called it an “inappropriate” encroachment on Somali sovereignty

The dispute has left Western diplomats to mediate between the two sides, but Mr. Mutua said that “a lot has been lost in translation” and that the Kenyans and the Somalis were still close.

Still, aid organizations are deeply concerned that the military operations will affect efforts to reach starving people in Somalia’s famine-stricken interior. The United Nations has said that tens of thousands of Somalis have died and that 750,000 could starve to death. The Shabab control many of the hardest-hit areas, and have blocked most Western aid groups from entering.

“Some of the drought-affected people who arrived from other parts of the country are now facing multiple displacements in the wake of the military activities,” a United Nations report said Wednesday. “Movement of humanitarian personnel and supplies are also likely to be restricted, subsequently affecting the timely delivery of assistance.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Josh Kron from Nairobi.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

26 October 2011

@ The New York Times

Wars are constructed as a ‘Masculine’ concept where in only men are interested. Whatever women have done as warriors or ideologues or revolutionaries seems to be a deviation or aberration from the ‘norm’. The recognition of norm which is ‘War is Masculine’ is coming from none other than the women who challenge the norms of patriarchy. Feminists believe that ‘women’ are the enormous populaces who get crushed are helpless when there is a conflict between two ‘armed masculinities’. Therefore the one stop solution of the problem is ‘if there is a conflict women must ‘Build Peace’. The idea we are entering is not women are peaceful or women ignore the conflict and stay peaceful but “women build peace”. As can be pointed out by even a non intellectual movement ‘all women are not peaceful’ or thinking women to be peaceful alone is another essentialist argument that needs to be condemned.

What is peace building? When questioned about the process, an Indian feminist’s response is “please do not think it is a situation where women are standing with a white flag” but it is a very political process. Although she did not explain how it was a political process, we are here amidst the Kashmir conflict left to wonder.

Being peaceful is a virtue and we all struggle to attain peace through out our lives. In a ravaging conflict situation, peace has many meanings, for some it is the absence of the conflict, for many it is to be able to live in their dwellings without much worry of outer space and for most it is the ultimate resolution of the conflict. In this imagination, resolution of the conflict comes across as a situation which would leave way for others to have their understanding of peace eventually. Women in traditional societies, see the need of peace in the place where they struggle which most often is the dwelling. They strive hard to maintain an amiable living condition inside the house while completely ignoring the outer conflict. Emancipated women in traditional societies are the ones who are ‘political’ who believe in achieving peace in the society by nonconformist standpoints fetch for their localities whatever they need without have to realize their right’s independent of the community. But their rights as embedded as much are the rights of non-warring men, children and old aged.

In Kununposhpora, Bakhiti is a local activist who fought with the army personals to save women of her village from ‘sexual assaults’ and the men from the ‘physical beating’. Not only did women run to her even men never shied away from taking her help and governance as a local leader.

At the level of armed struggle, women if convinced about the struggle that would get the peace they have visualized women have taken part in the armed struggle as well. The LTTE in Srilanka or the Palestinian women in the Intifada movement are important examples.

But here the question is ‘peace building’ as a political process. The women of the ‘oppressor community’ want to create women’s ‘peaceful groups’ in a community which is oppressed.

Women of oppressor’s have easy access to the women of the oppressed community, since when women of oppressed community are discouraged from being political who is benefiting from this association? Where patriarchy is breathing its last when the oppressed community’s men are ‘Emasculated’, indeed ‘peace building’ is a very political process for oppressors. Women should not take part in the protests of the oppressed because their men oppress them? Then why should Indian feminists feed into the back channel of its masculine army? Why should this distinction fall as void or invalid?

The Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation (CDR) in collaboration with Srinagar based NGO—Women for Peace (WFP)—organized the conference titled—Women’s Roles in Society: Issues of Mutual Concern. In Kashmir valley where Indian feminists are raising the slogans in the name of women are doing an oppressed community more harm than good. Kashmiri woman prefers her helpless oppressed man that the backchannel of her husband’s oppressor. In these peace groups seldom is the patriarchal and communal out lash of the oppressors acknowledged or evaluated.

When asked about her son’s death, Maugel says “My husband and my two sons were martyred while fighting the Indian Rule. I am 70 years old now, have no energy in my ailing bones, but if I had (I swear by God) I would give the last inch of it for my people to be relieved of a tyranny’

Women visualize peace in much different way than the ones in the seminars. Peace for Zainab who lives in front of the army camp and her daughters move through the surveillance of army and have to hear sexual remarks as usual, is nothing but “AZADI”

By Inshah Malik

03 October 2011

Countercurrents.org

Inshah Malik is scholar from Tata Institute of Social Sciences

 

 

 

Israeli museum not so tolerant, group of archaeologists say

REPORTING FROM JERUSALEM — A group of prominent international archaeologists are among the latest people to publicly denounce plans to build a museum on the site of a centuries-old Muslim cemetery not far from Jerusalem’s historic Old City.

In a letter addressed to the board of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, the mayor of Jerusalem and the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, all of whom are backing the controversial project, 84 archeologists argued that construction of the museum would desecrate the sanctity of the site, known to be the location of the Mamilla Cemetery, or Ma’man Allah, the sanctuary of God.

The site is “one of the most historically renowned and ancient Muslim cemeteries in the world,”  said the group, which includes American, European, Arab and Israeli architects. “Such insensitivity towards religious rites, towards cultural, national and religious patrimony, and towards families whose ancestors lay buried there causes grave concern from a scientific and humanitarian standpoint.”

The project is slated for 33 acres of land in the heart of Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Municipality gave the property to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

However, the project has been dogged by lawsuits filed by opponents who say not only would it defile a sacred site, but it’s also too large. Differences over architectural design and a turnover of architects have also slowed the project’s launch.

The archaeologists contend that such treatment of the burial site would not have occurred if were a Jewish burial site, and they quoted an Israeli official from the Ministry of Religious Affairs as saying that excavations would immediately stop “if one Jewish skeleton were found.”

But the Wiesenthal Center has defeated legal challenges in Israeli courts and has vowed to press ahead with the museum.

By Maher Abukhater

24 October 2011

@ Los Angeles Times