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  • Aceh: In the Shadow of Iraq

    Did anyone notice the uncanny similarities between the recent U.S.-led war in Iraq and Indonesia in its crackdown of Aceh?

    Last week, the peace agreement between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and Indonesian government collapsed and Indonesia’s President Megawati Sukarnoputri imposed a state of martial law in the remote province, ordering tens of thousands of troops to militarily crush the guerrilla force.

    Indonesia’s foreign minister Hassan Wirayuda, seems to see the connection between Aceh and Iraq, quoted by the BBC as saying “Honestly, what we are doing or will do in Aceh is much less than the American power that was deployed in Iraq.”

    A spokesman for Mr. Wirayuda said that “Iraq may cause some pause in criticism against us among governments who readily used force.”

    The United States seems not to be making the connection between its actions and the military prerogatives of other countries. U.S. State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher indicated that both sides of the conflict in Indonesia had not explored every peaceful alternative at the Tokyo negotiations, seemingly oblivious to the U.S. policy of “do as I say, not as I do.”

    Prior to the war in Iraq, the international community overwhelmingly supported dialogue and international weapons inspectors through the United Nations to root out any weapons of mass destruction that Iraq might have been hiding. The United States preferred military action to negotiations, and against the better judgment of the United Nations and most allies, proceeded with the invasion.

    In Aceh, too, negotiations and dialogue had been underway through the Henry Dunant Center (HDC) which had brokered a peace deal that included a monitoring agency comprised of representatives from the Indonesian government, the Free Aceh Movement and the HDC. The United States and Japan had provided ample financial backing to the monitoring agency, called the Joint Security Committee, and have been invested in finding a non-military solution to the problem in Aceh.

    Indonesia has complete support from every country in the world for its sovereignty over Aceh. No secession is seriously at hand and the world was actively engaged in disarming the rebels and negotiating a solution. The

    Indonesian government and military, following in the footsteps of the United States, steamrolled through international pleading, trashed the peace talks and launched a military crack down of Aceh.

    Besides arresting the negotiators, the military campaign started with a dramatic photo opportunity as the Indonesian military parachuted hundreds of soldiers into the Banda Aceh airport, a location they already controlled. Why didn’t they just disembark out of a landed plane. This stunt rivals the grandiose rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq.

    However, staged photo-ops are only one way to manipulate a “free media”. Fifty Indonesian journalists have been embedded in the Indonesian military (TNI), a cadre of individuals whose newspapers largely support the Indonesian military action in Aceh. It appears that in Aceh, as in Iraq, mainstream media has surrendered its perspective and impartiality by becoming the public relations arm of bloodthirsty governments.

    Like the USA, Indonesia also uses the label of terrorism to validate its war on Aceh. A senior advisor of President Sukarnoputri said that separatist movements, like the GAM, could now be considered terrorist groups. I wonder how she would label the the United States revolutionary patriots?

    A major component of the U.S.-led war on Iraq was control of Iraq’s oil.

    The war in Aceh also has similar subtexts. The gas-rich area of northwestern Sumatra houses a huge Exxon-Mobil gas field which is at the heart of the controversy. Acehnese universally claim that revenues from natural resources found in Aceh are distributed unequally to the benefit of the Indonesian government.

    To complicate matters, the Exxon-Mobil plant is guarded by the Indonesian military which, according to human rights groups, receives upwards of $100,000 per month for security services from the corporation. In a dual role, the TNI forces is massacring civilians while protecting the interests of multi-national enterprise.

    The TNI is using U.S.-made military equipment in Aceh that it acquired prior to the U.S. Congressional ban on military sales, according to Human Rights Watch. While currently not supplying the Indonesian military with weapons, last year the House and Senate Appropriations Committees voted to restart the International Military Education and Training for Indonesia akin to the training that Latin American soldiers receive at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, GA.

    The Indonesian troops have drawn lessons from the US military doctrine of “overwhelming force” General Endriartono Sutarto told his troops to fight the rebels “until your last drop of blood,” telling them that “you are trained to kill, so wipe them out.”

    What concerns many humanitarian groups in Aceh and the international community is that civilians, and human rights workers, are already being killed in this renewed war. An estimated 10,000 innocent people have been killed in the 26-year-old fight for independence, and according to recent UNICEF figures, 23,000 children have been displaced. Plans for massive civilian relocation camps trouble many people concerned with human rights violations in the region.

    With disturbing parallels from the U.S.-led invasion Iraq, the Indonesian invasion last week could signal a dangerous trend in international affairs. Has diplomacy become a disingenuous euphemism for placating other countries’ hopes for peaceful resolution of disputes and flouting the rule of international law until the military is good and ready to attack?

    How many other countries will resort to force rather than dialogue?
    * Leah C. Wells worked in Aceh in 2002 on a peace curriculum called Program Pendidikan Damai, and has visited Iraq three times since 2001.

  • International Action Against ‘Dirty’ Weapons: Huge Public Support for the Second International Day of Action Against Depleted Uranium

    For immediate release:

    This Thursday 29th May the Second International Day of Action Against Depleted Uranium is taking place. The scale of the event promises to be many times larger than previously seen as public outrage over the recent use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons in Iraq by Britain and America grows. Groups all over the world have pledged to take part and will be involved in protesting against military, government and commercial targets involved in the production and use of depleted uranium weapons and public awareness raising in their local communities.

    Countries that will be seeing protests on the 29th May include so far; Yugoslavia, Greece, the USA, Ireland, Germany, Finland and Britain. Organizers of the many protests range from groups such as Nuke Resister in the States who have a long history of working against DU weapons to individuals who have just found out about the use of these weapons after the recent attack on Iraq and feel compelled to take a stand. Fittingly Britain and the US will see the highest levels of protests with at least 15 events planned across Britain and 10 across the States, including Washington DC and New York. Anger at the issue in Britain is especially strong in Scotland where DU weapons are tested.

    Anna Bell from the Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (CADU), who have been working to support those taking part in the day, said “We have been completely taken by surprise at how many groups have wanted to take part in the Day of Action. People who have not been involved in campaigning before have come to us and have said they couldn’t believe their governments were capable of such hypocrisy and irresponsible behavior. Iraq was the first time many people had heard of the weapons and their effects. With the international trade in these weapons and the contamination they cause respecting no borders an International Day of Action is the most effective way of saying DU weapons are completely unacceptable to the world community.”

    DU weapons are both chemically toxic and radioactive and can cause long term damage to human health and the environment. They are have been labeled a weapon of indiscriminate effect by the UN Subcommission for Human Rights.

    For more information please contact:

    The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium
    Fax or telephone: 0161 273 8293
    http://www.cadu.org.uk
    info@cadu.org.uk

  • No More Nukes

    The Bush administration succeeded last week in advancing one of its most radical, dangerous and underdebated policy ideas. Shrugging off objections from a handful of Democrats, both the House and the Senate approved legislative language removing a decade-old ban on research into a new class of “low-yield” nuclear weapons and authorizing $15 million for the study of another category of “robust” warheads designed for underground targets. The administration insists it wants only to pursue research on the new nukes. But even this research will, at a minimum, multiply the incentives for rogue states and rival powers to build nuclear arsenals of their own — a trend that President Bush has rightly defined as the most serious danger of the new century. At worst, the administration will succeed in making nuclear war easier and more tempting, both for the United States and for other powers — an outcome at odds with any reasonable understanding of national security or morality.

    The protestations that only research is at stake appear questionable when placed against the nuclear weapons doctrine drawn up by the administration, largely at the behest of a circle of civilian advisers in the Pentagon and White House who for years have been advocating the development of new nuclear weapons. An administration plan disclosed last year called for a three-year process of developing the new arms; another measure approved by Congress last week, to lower the time needed to prepare for new nuclear testing from three years to 18 months, hints at the larger agenda. The new generation of nuclear strategists envisions using “low-yield” weapons — with an explosive force up to one-third that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — to attack stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons held by rogue states. The “robust nuclear earth penetrator,” with destructive power at least 70 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, would be intended to reach bunkers buried far underground — like those where North Korea is thought to be producing and storing weapons materials.

    Many scientists believe that earth-penetrating nuclear weapons will never be feasible. Current technology limits earth penetration to about 50 feet; a low-yield weapon exploded at that depth would do no harm to a deep bunker while wreaking enormous damage by spewing tons of radioactive rock and soil. A “robust” weapon powerful enough to destroy a bunker 1,000 feet underground, in turn, would kill at least as many people and cause as much damage as a conventional nuke. The administration’s doctrine nonetheless allows for the possibility of using such weapons not only in response to a nuclear attack on the United States but also preemptively against a state thought to be stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Any such preemptive attack ought to be unthinkable — the harm it would cause this country, and the world, would be catastrophic.

    At the moment, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed for use only in a situation where the survival of the nation or its closest allies is at stake. That scenario died with the end of the Cold War — but it ought to remain the threshold. The rapid progress of conventional weapons technology offers sufficient means for tackling the problem of deep bunkers and rogue arsenals. By pursuing other options, realistically or not, the Bush administration is feeding the budgets of nuclear weapons labs and the dreams of misguided strategists at the expense of the far more urgent nonproliferation agenda it adopted after 9/11. Congress should return to the issue as the appropriations process proceeds; this is a project that ought to be stopped before it causes real harm.

  • Nuclear Age Amnesia

    Memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki eloquently testify that nuclear weapons are not simply a bigger, better version of conventional explosives. Yet the haze of passing time seems to have dulled congressional understanding of the ghastly difference.

    Last week, the Senate bowed to Bush administration wishes and voted to repeal a 10-year-old congressional ban on the development of small nuclear weapons for tactical use on battlefields. The Senate also gave preliminary approval to $15 million for further research on a nuclear “bunker-buster” that would explode underground with yields far greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It allocated more millions for nuclear testing, in case the Pentagon decides to resume the program suspended by President Clinton. That authorization vote, to be confirmed in later appropriations bills, puts the United States on a backward path.

    The Pentagon says research is not the same as development, testing, deployment or use. All true. But once a new weapon is developed, pressure to test it and then to verify that it actually works in battle becomes great.

    The military’s trumpeted success with existing precision weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq undercuts arguments that more nuclear arms are needed. Consider what the reaction of Iraqis and the world would have been if one of the precision bombs aimed at Saddam Hussein had been a small nuke.

    Washington should not be showing the way to new atomic weapons that are easier to use. Anything that spurs nuclear competition will increase the number of bombs — and bomb developers — that can fall into the hands of an Al Qaeda. Beyond that, the world should fear an arms race that produces more nuclear weapons in perennial enemy states like India and Pakistan and unpredictable nations like North Korea.

    The United States has disposed of most of its smaller, tactical nuclear weapons and has agreed with Russia to destroy many larger strategic ones as well. Pledging support for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as the administration does, is inconsistent with developing new weapons.

    The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review of 2001 was decried for reviving possible U.S. use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries and raising the possibility of preemptive attacks on any nation developing weapons of mass destruction. The review, a periodic updating of U.S. nuclear strategy, and the Pentagon’s weapons request make the world more dangerous, not less. The nuclear genie has been out of the bottle since 1945. Continued control of its spread should be a hallmark of U.S. policy.

  • Economic Justice for All

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

    These revolutionary words from the Declaration of Independence are worth reflecting upon in light of the current struggle for economic justice in America. The government of the United States, the richest and most powerful country in the world, is perpetuating economic injustice within the United States and throughout the world. While the government seems to have unlimited funds for missiles and munitions, it is failing to provide health care, housing or education for large segments of the US population.

    Millions of Americans, including working Americans, live below the poverty line. There are more than 40 million Americans without health insurance with little or no access to basic medical care. There are tens of millions of Americans without homes, and home ownership is becoming an impossible dream for most young Americans. The possibilities of a college education are also receding for young Americans, as the funds provided for education diminish. The truth is that we have no economic justice in this country and the situation is growing rapidly worse under the Bush administration.

    State budgets are running in the red, and that means that their services to the people are diminishing. In 2002, states cut $49 billion in health care, welfare benefits, education and other public services. They plan to cut another $25.7 billion in 2003. State budget cuts this year and last year will be nearly equivalent to the initial amounts requested by Mr. Bush and allocated by Congress for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rather than help the states in meeting their budgets, and thereby support the American people, Mr. Bush has squandered our federal funds on an illegal foreign war.

    In spite of these shortfalls, Mr. Bush pressed for tax cuts of over $700 billion over a ten year period, tax relief that would go largely to the wealthiest Americans. Congress ended up passing tax cuts of $330 billion, less than half of the Bush request. While some $20 billion will go back to the states, the bulk of the relief will benefit the very rich, including Mr. Bush and many in his cabinet. Most Americans will receive a few hundred dollars or less, and the poorest Americans will receive nothing or next to nothing. By contrast, the richest Americans will receive tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax relief.

    This means that those at the top of the economic pyramid will have more money to contribute to the candidates of their choice, who in turn will help them to get a larger share of the economic pie. The rest of us predictably will get a smaller share of the pie, and there are far more of us to compete for these leftovers.

    In America, if you are rich, it is very likely that the president and the Congress will be working for your interests, by providing tax cuts and other benefits. If you are poor, who will be representing you in our democracy? It is not likely to be the present incumbent of the White House. Nor is it likely to be your member of Congress, when many in Congress are indebted to corporate interests.

    If you are poor and not well educated in America, you may be able to work for minimum wage. That will probably be enough to keep you struggling below the poverty line, particularly if you have children, and your children will be forced to join you in poverty. Further, if these children do not receive a decent education, the cycle will go on and will likely be perpetuated to their children.

    If you are poor in America and you are young, you may be able to join the military. We couldn’t have a voluntary military without high levels of poverty. And without a voluntary military, we couldn’t have perpetual wars because then the politicians and their financial supporters would have to send their own sons and daughters to fight. They wouldn’t be any more likely to do this than they would be to volunteer to go themselves to fight. They far prefer to send your sons and daughters to kill and die in foreign lands. In actuality, only one member of Congress had a child fighting in Iraq.

    The war against Iraq is likely to cost the American taxpayer at least $100 billion and possibly much more. Those who profit will certainly include the Defense Contractors, those who provide the munitions and other material expended in the war. Other profiteers from the war will be those contracted to rebuild what we have destroyed in Iraq and, of course, the multinational oil companies.

    Corporate names such as Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company, and Bechtel will be among the winners from this war. Lockheed Martin, Ratheon, the Carlyle Group and other giant defense contractors will undoubtedly also be among the winners. The poor and middle class in America, as well as the people of Iraq, will be among the losers.

    We are now spending some $400 billion a year on our military forces, not including the special expenditures for the war in Iraq. This is approximately one-half of the money that Congress has discretion to allocate each year. The money that goes to the military cannot go to social programs that would lead to economic justice in our country. Money that goes to the military cannot even defend America as 9/11 demonstrated so dramatically.

    Four hundred billion dollars a year on the military is over $1.1 billion dollars a day. It works out to $45.5 million per hour, $761,000 per minute. Imagine all of the important social programs that will go unfunded or underfunded to pay that $400 billion per year for a military that cannot defend us.

    Some 500 billionaires on this planet, mostly Americans, have the equivalent assets of half of the world’s population. Three billion people on our planet live on less that $2 per day. More than one billion people live on less than $1 dollar per day. Over a billion people lack access to clean water, and over 2.5 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation. Millions of people die annually throughout the developing world due to water-borne diseases and inadequate sanitation.

    On our planet over one billion people are illiterate, and some 100 million children are denied access to primary education. For a small portion of what the US government spends on its military, it could be saving lives and building friendships by humanitarian assistance in food, health care, education and sanitation.

    Secretary of State Colin Powell has called for battling against poverty in the war against terrorism. “We have to go after poverty,” he said. “We have to go after despair. We have to go after hopelessness.”

    Of course, Secretary Powell is right about this, but it isn’t what our country has done historically, and Powell’s clarion call will not likely be heard in the White House. The US remains last among industrialized countries in the amount of its gross domestic product that it allocates for international development at 0.11 percent. The US is spending more on its plans to research, develop and deploy missile defenses ($7.8 billion) than it for its international humanitarian and development assistance ($7.6 billion). We are not seriously “going after poverty,” as Mr. Powell advised, but rather going after bombs, wars and missile shields.

    Our failure to make a serious effort to stem poverty and injustice in the world is leading to resentment, anger and aggression toward America and innocent Americans. Pumping large amounts of money into the military is not an answer to these problems and makes the situation even less secure for the average American. We need to change our policies both at home and abroad to bolster economic and social justice. We need to fund bread rather than bombs.

    If we want economic justice in America, we are going to have to change our direction. We are going to have to share the resources of the country with its people, not only the wealthy few, and also be more generous abroad. The United States is not meant to be a country “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.” It is a country, we are taught, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We are the People and, for the good of ourselves and the world, we had better reclaim our country and reallocate our resources.

    This means a far greater involvement of the people in our democratic processes. It means throwing out the politicians of both political parties who serve the interests of the corporations over the interests of the People. It means reallocating resources away from the militarization of America toward meeting the social needs of the poorest among us and allowing all Americans to live a better life.

    The American dream is being squandered by a small group of extremist ideologues who are both greedy and myopic. Let us reclaim our land from these extremists. Let us strive to be a great country because we care for each other, particularly the least among us, and for the world in which we live. The implications of restoring economic justice are profound. They lie at the heart of environmental devastation of our planet and the suffering of large portions of humanity. Economic justice may prove to be a far more important factor in quelling terrorism than military force.

    We can begin by empowering ourselves to bring about the changes necessary to achieve economic justice in our country and in the world. We can start by speaking out and urging our members of Congress to oppose tax cuts and instead allocate this money to support health care, housing and education. Let us also urge our members of Congress to vote to cut back on obscene military expenditures and transfer these funds instead to meeting human needs, in the United States and throughout the world. The next step should be to work through the electoral process to replace those political leaders who remain indebted to corporate interests and committed to the militarization of America. By taking these steps, by our engagement, we can move toward restoring dignity and economic justice at home and abroad.
    * David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the co-author of Choose Hope, and the editor of Hope in a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future.
    Readers Comments

    If you’d like to send us your comments please e-mail us at: letters@napf.org
    (Please include the name of the article in the subject line)

    America needs to seperate itself from the imperilist Corporate giants who drive the economy and our government.I think the first thing we could do is start to elect officials that are not so easily corrupted and lust after money,I think the first Question that should be asked any new candidate for any political office should be “Do you wish to partake in or put a stop to the plunder of the American People?”We need men who are strong willed and moraly driven not profit driven if we abide by Gods law we will prosper without manipulating markets and enslaving poor third world economys with high interest loans taken under deress and with conditions that are impossible to meet That would be the Imf and its buisness practices.

    –Stephen, USA

    Timely comments. In my opinion the current Bush tax cut proposal amounts to a radical departure from sound principles not only of economic justice but also of fiscal management — aided and abetted by what Alan Greenspan refers to as “the deafening silence” of Congress. This proposal is merely the latest in a series of measures thinly disguised as economic stimulants but cynically calculated to divide our society further into two economic spheres and to consolidate political power in the hands of the wealthy few. As you suggest, this plutocratic system (let’s not call it “democracy”) builds upon itself — as money influences our political processes, the moneyed interests are able to expand their control over those processes and eventually come to dominate all policy. Having consolidated their control and governed in their own interests, they then denounce any dissenters as fomenters of “class division.” The question is, how may we free our politics from the grip of money and thus approach “Democracy in America?”

    —Rob, USA

  • Iraq War, “Unprovoked Invasion of A Sovereign Nation”

    Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.

    But the danger is that at some point it may no longer matter. The danger is that damage is done before the truth is widely realized. The reality is that, sometimes, it is easier to ignore uncomfortable facts and go along with whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a lot of this today in politics. I see a lot of it – – more than I would ever have believed – – right on this Senate Floor.

    Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises.

    There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein and his direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

    Since the war’s end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

    The Administration assured the U.S. public and the world, over and over again, that an attack was necessary to protect our people and the world from terrorism. It assiduously worked to alarm the public and blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden until they virtually became one.

    What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq was no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane against us. Iraq’s threatening death-dealing fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so much morphed into one prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles proved to be outdated and of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our technology and our well trained troops.

    Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a mission and they continue to be at grave risk. But, the Bush team’s extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion has become more than embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the world?

    What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are “liberators.” The facts don’t seem to support the label we have so euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we have unseated a brutal, despicable despot, but “liberation” implies the follow up of freedom, self-determination and a better life for the common people. In fact, if the situation in Iraq is the result of “liberation,” we may have set the cause of freedom back 200 years.

    Despite our high-blown claims of a better life for the Iraqi people, water is scarce, and often foul, electricity is a sometime thing, food is in short supply, hospitals are stacked with the wounded and maimed, historic treasures of the region and of the Iraqi people have been looted, and nuclear material may have been disseminated to heaven knows where, while U.S. troops, on orders, looked on and guarded the oil supply.

    Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and refurbish its oil industry are awarded to Administration cronies, without benefit of competitive bidding, and the U.S. steadfastly resists offers of U.N. assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the real motives of the U.S. government are the subject of worldwide speculation and mistrust?

    And in what may be the most damaging development, the U.S. appears to be pushing off Iraq’s clamor for self-government. Jay Garner has been summarily replaced, and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling face of the U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier. The image of the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand of freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacerbate that image, as U.S. soldiers try to sustain order in a land ravaged by poverty and disease. “Regime change” in Iraq has so far meant anarchy, curbed only by an occupying military force and a U.S. administrative presence that is evasive about if and when it intends to depart.

    Democracy and Freedom cannot be force fed at the point of an occupier’s gun. To think otherwise is folly. One has to stop and ponder. How could we have been so impossibly naive? How could we expect to easily plant a clone of U.S. culture, values, and government in a country so riven with religious, territorial, and tribal rivalries, so suspicious of U.S. motives, and so at odds with the galloping materialism which drives the western-style economies? As so many warned this Administration before it launched its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our crack down in Iraq is likely to convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens to plan other horrors of the type we have seen in the past several days. Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have given them new fuel for their fury. We did not complete our mission in Afghanistan because we were so eager to attack Iraq. Now it appears that Al Queda is back with a vengeance. We have returned to orange alert in the U.S., and we may well have destabilized the Mideast region, a region we have never fully understood. We have alienated friends around the globe with our dissembling and our haughty insistence on punishing former friends who may not see things quite our way. The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the window to be replaced by force, unilateralism, and punishment for transgressions. I read most recently with amazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our longtime friend and strategic ally. It is astonishing that our government is berating the new Turkish government for conducting its affairs in accordance with its own Constitution and its democratic institutions.

    Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms race as countries move ahead to develop WMD as a last ditch attempt to ward off a possible preemptive strike from a newly belligerent U.S. which claims the right to hit where it wants. In fact, there is little to constrain this President. This Congress, in what will go down in history as its most unfortunate act, gave away its power to declare war for the foreseeable future and empowered this President to wage war at will.

    As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are reluctant to ask questions which are begging to be asked. How long will we occupy Iraq? We have already heard disputes on the numbers of troops which will be needed to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight answer. How will we afford this long-term massive commitment, fight terrorism at home, address a serious crisis in domestic healthcare, afford behemoth military spending and give away billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit which has climbed to over $340 billion for this year alone? If the President’s tax cut passes it will be $400 billion. We cower in the shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or may be politically costly.

    But, I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American people unfortunately are used to political shading, spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood – – when it comes to wrecking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women, and children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie – – not oil, not revenge, not reelection, not somebody’s grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory.

    And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the “powers that be” will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall.

  • Strange Weather Lately

    The following is adapted from a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut.

    First things first: I want it clearly understood that this mustache I’m wearing is my father’s mustache. I should have brought his photograph. My big brother Bernie, now dead, a physical chemist who discovered that silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain, he wore it, too.

    Speaking of weather: Mark Twain said some readers complained that there wasn’t enough weather in his stories. So he wrote some weather, which they could insert wherever they thought it would help some.

    Mark Twain was said to have shed a tear of gratitude and incredulousness when honored for his writing by Oxford University in England. And I should shed a tear, surely, having been asked at the age of 80, and because of what I myself have written, to speak under the auspices of the sacred Mark Twain House here in Hartford.

    What other American landmark is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln were country boys from Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves and appreciate really important, really moral jokes. I note that construction has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford — behind the carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue.

    Work persons have been sent home from that site because American “conservatives,” as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy.

    Shock and awe.

    And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice.

    Shock and awe.

    What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?

    Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.

    And they have turned loose a myriad of our high-tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

    The other day I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq, and he said, “Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.”

    What are conservatives? They are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and to themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals. They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail — and so on.

    Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies.

    Shock and awe.

    Class war? You bet.

    They have proved their superiority to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth, with an able assist from television, making inconsequential our protests against their war.

    What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government.

    On what grounds did we protest their war? I could name many, but I need name only one, which is common sense.

    Be that as it may, construction of the Mark Twain Museum will sooner or later be resumed. And I, the son and grandson of Indiana architects, seize this opportunity to suggest a feature which I hope will be included in the completed structure, words to be chiseled into the capstone over the main entrance.

    Here is what I think would be fun to put up there, and Mark Twain loved fun more than anything. I have tinkered with something famous he said, which is: “Be good and you will be lonesome.” That is from Following the Equator. OK?

    So envision what a majestic front entrance the Mark Twain Museum will have someday. And imagine that these words have been chiseled into the noble capstone and painted gold:

    Be good and you will be lonesome most places, but not here, not here.

    One of the most humiliated and heartbroken pieces Twain ever wrote was about the slaughter of 600 Moro men, women and children by our soldiers during our liberation of the people of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Our brave commander was Leonard Wood, who now has a fort named after him. Fort Leonard Wood.

    What did Abraham Lincoln have to say about such American imperialist wars? Those are wars which, on one noble pretext or another, actually aim to increase the natural resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans who have the best political connections.

    And it is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln in a speech about something or somebody else. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him.

    Lincoln was only a Congressman when he said in 1848 what I am about to echo. He was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us.

    We were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders wasn’t murder.

    What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

    The person congressman Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said was James Polk, our president at the time. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, our armed forces’ commander-in-chief, “Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood — that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.”

    Holy smokes! I almost said, “Holy shit!” And I thought I was a writer!

    Do you know we actually captured Mexico City during the Mexican War? Why isn’t that a national holiday? And why isn’t the face of James Polk up on Mount Rushmore, along with Ronald Reagan’s?

    What made Mexico so evil back in the 1840s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery was illegal there. Remember the Alamo?

    My great-grandfather’s name was Clemens Vonnegut. Small world, small world. This piquant coincidence is not a fabrication. Clemens Vonnegut called himself a “freethinker,” an antique word for humanist. He was a hardware merchant in Indianapolis.

    So, 120 years ago, say, there was one man who was both Clemens and Vonnegut. I would have liked being such a person a lot. I only wish I could have been such a person tonight.

    I claim no blood relationship with Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. “Clemens,” as a first name, is, I believe, like the name “Clementine,” derived from the adjective “clement.” To be clement is to be lenient and compassionate, or, in the case of weather, perfectly heavenly.

    So there’s weather again.

  • Let Us Inspect Everywhere

    After Sept. 11, the risk of a further spread of weapons of mass destruction is seen in a new light. There is a fear that terrorist groups or reckless states might launch attacks with such weapons. The United States and its allies have now shown their readiness to deal with the risk through armed action in the case of Iraq. A horribly brutal regime has been eliminated and can no longer reactivate a weapons program — if there still was one. How are other suspicious cases to be tackled?

    First, which are the suspicious cases, and which weapons are we talking about? Listening to the debate one might sometimes get the impression that the world is full of terrorist organizations and rogue states bent on proliferation. The matter is serious enough without such exaggerations. Chemical and biological weapons might be within the reach of terrorists — whether these are groups or individuals. That risk is taken seriously and there seems to be relatively little problem achieving cooperation between police and financial institutions.

    However, the greatest concerns relate to states. The spread of long-range missiles seems to be only somewhat impeded by export controls. As for nuclear weapons, we know that the U.S. and Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan have them. We know further that Iraq was developing them and that its capability was eliminated under International Atomic Energy Agency, or IDEA, supervision after the Gulf War. North Korea currently claims it has developed nuclear weapons, while Iran denies it has any ambitions to do so.

    If North Korea is not induced to abandon its present course of action, it may create incentives for a further nuclear buildup in East Asia. If Iran were to move toward a nuclear-weapon capability the Middle East situation may be further aggravated.

    Clearly, we are no longer where we were only a few years ago, namely, in an almost universally shared effort to write the final chapters of the nuclear nonproliferation book. The U.S. is developing a missile defense, has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and may be interested in constructing new types of nuclear weapons.

    What can be done to resume the remarkably successful efforts that were under way only a few years ago? Nuclear-weapon-free zones had come to extend from Latin America across the whole of Africa to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. These developments were brought about not through armed actions but through regional and global détente, patient negotiation and the good example of the great powers participating in real disarmament.

    The crucial point was always that the foreign and security policies of individual states in the regions, and of the great powers, helped to reduce the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons and to pave the way for a renunciation of them. Security guarantees, including alliances, are among the means of reducing incentives.

    It is not hard to see even now that peaceful solutions of the political and security problems in the Middle East, on the Indian subcontinent, and the Korean peninsula probably are the most important elements both to prevent armed conflicts and to tackle the problem of proliferation in these areas. Multilateral assurances to North Korea that it will not be attacked must be a central part of the effort to lead that country away from the possession and export of nuclear materials and missiles. Security Council resolution 687 on Iraq states that disarmament in Iraq constitutes steps toward the goal of establishing a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. That thought should not be missed at the present time, when disarmament is being secured in Iraq and the road map for peace is on the table. Steady movement along the map is clearly fundamental not only for peace but also to the eventual freedom from weapons of mass destruction in the whole region, including Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria.

    It has not been questioned that export controls remain important. Effective long-term international on-site inspection similarly remains a vital instrument in the efforts to counter proliferation. Inspection is designed to create confidence among neighbors and in the world by verifying the absence of weapons programs and by deterring such programs through the risk of detection. In open societies, like Japan’s and South Korea’s, the task is relatively straightforward. The transparency of the societies combined with the international inspection process gives a high degree of confidence. In closed totalitarian societies, like Iraq and North Korea, the task is more difficult.

    Inspections in Iraq brought a high degree of confidence that there remained no nuclear-weapon capability and few, if any, SCUD-type missiles. However, despite very far-reaching rights of immediate access to sites, authorities and persons, and despite access to national intelligence and overhead imagery, many years of inspection did not bring confidence that chemical and biological weapons had been eliminated in Iraq. In March, the U.S. gave up on the possibility of attaining adequate and durable assurance on the elimination of proscribed weapons in Iraq through U.N. inspections and instead moved to seek it through armed action.

    Does this suggest that international inspection is meaningless in closed societies? No, it can be relied on to verify the absence of the large installations that are likely to be indispensable for nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Full guarantees against research and development are hardly attainable and possible hidden stores of biological and chemical weapons may also be very hard to discover. Armed action and occupation can obviously deal with these risks, but these approaches have great costs and problems and the assurance obtained from them is not likely to last forever.

    Inspection and long-term monitoring requires patience and persistence, scarce commodities in national and international politics. While it requires support by individual states it is clearly more easily accepted — and more credible — if managed by authorities which are independent of the states which assist them, for instance, by providing intelligence. Used in this manner, inspection and long-term monitoring through international organizations could provide an important element in the prevention of the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere.

    In the fields of missiles and biological weapons, there are presently no specialized intergovernmental organizations that could provide inspection in the manner that the IAEA and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons do in the nuclear and chemical fields. Over the years, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — Unmoved — has acquired much experience in the verification and inspection of biological weapons and missiles as well as chemical weapons — but only in Iraq. It has scientific cadres who are trained and could be mobilized for cases other than Iraq. If the Security Council gave it a broader mandate, it could provide the Council with a capability for ad hoc inspections and monitoring, whenever this might be needed in the efforts to prevent proliferation.
    * Hans Blix is executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

  • In Iraq, Water and Oil Do Mix

    World Water Woes

    Conspicuously missing from the ubiquitous Iraq war critique was the subtle agenda of water rights in the parched Middle East region. Of all the reasons for invading Iraq, securing water rights was never mentioned because it implicates too many countries with volatile connections to Iraq, like Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Israel. Protest signs read, “No Blood For Oil,” as American corporations salivated in line for the opportunity to win contracts to rebuild the ravaged infrastructure. Why did no antiwar protesters carry signs saying, “No War for Water”? They should have.

    The current litany of reasons for invading or threatening to invade countries pertains to terrorism, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and undemocratic, fundamentalist regimes. These reasons are particularized and specific, and keep the world guessing where the United States will launch its next attack. With an explicit agenda for controlling water in the Middle East, however, the roadmap for regime change and regional control would become transparent and predictable.

    A land of displaced people and destroyed ecosystems, the once thriving marshland area of southern Iraq was home to hundreds of thousands of marsh Arabs who had sustained a 5,000 year-old culture until the ancient life-giving waters were drained and dammed by the recently-toppled Saddam Hussein government as well as by other riparian states. Truly Saddam created a catastrophic situation by redirecting the water and razing marsh Arab villages. Yet aside from the apparent ecological and humanitarian crisis pertaining to the area, why is the project of rehydrating the marshlands so urgently important for American interests?

    A World Bank webcast in May 2001 quotes Jean-Louis Sarbib, Vice President of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region, as saying that the CIA had identified water as one of the key issues of the 21st century. Water is a pressing issue in the Middle East which, like the sparse underground aquifers, stays beneath the surface. With 45 million people in the Middle East not having access to drinking water and 80 million not having access to sanitation, Sarbib’s commentary is an understatement.

    Jeffrey Rothfeder, author of explained in an article to the Boston Globe in January 2002 that “a freshwater crisis has already begun that threatens to leave much of the world dry in the next twenty years. One-third of the world’s population is starved for water. In Israel, extraction has surpassed replacement by 2.5 billion meters in the last 25 years. There are 250 million new cases of water-related diseases annually, chiefly cholera and dysentery, and ten million deaths. What’s more, vital regions are destabilized as contending countries dispute who controls limited water resources.”

    Rothfeder, quoting another World Bank official, former Vice President Ismail Serageldin, reminded readers that “the next world war will be over water.”

    Undercurrent of Water Politics

    The dialogue about access to clean water is commonplace in peace talks throughout the Middle East, but Western diplomats rarely broach the topic. An anonymous U.S. State Department official quoted in National Geographic said, “people outside the region tend not to hear about the issue (of water). It just doesn’t make the news.” By design, not by accident, this issue is obscured from Western eyes because the propaganda machinery from Washington, DC has not allowed it. Although water is at the top of the list in negotiations between Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Iraq,

    Only the region’s countries, the riparian states of Syria, Turkey and Iraq themselves have directly conferred on the issue of sharing the water of the Tigris and Euphrates. The United States cannot dictate water usage as a formal part of its foreign policy, or even legitimate the crisis surrounding clean water, in part because of its wholly unsustainable practices, and in part because a straightforward concession on the issue of dwindling water supplies would mean an complete overhaul of global diplomatic relations with a new emphasis on aquatic vulnerability.

    Published after the 9-11 terrorist attacks but prior to the recent war on Iraq, Peaceful Uses of International Rivers: The Euphrates and Tigris Dispute written by water rights expert Hilal Elver outlines the hydrohistory of the Fertile Crescent as well as the present challenges to settling the disputes between countries vying for water access in the 21st century. She notes that the “last trilateral meeting of the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi technical committee was concluded in Damascus in 1996” with Iraq still under the United Nations-imposed sanctions regime which severely hindered international diplomatic relations. With the United States effectively in control of Iraqi politics and lobbying for the removal of the sanctions, presumably negotiations between the three nations will resume with respect to shared water issues.

    According to Thomas Naff, a professor of Middle East History at Pennsylvania State University, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which provide Iraq with nearly 100% of its water “depend essentially on agreements with Turkey” where both rivers originate. Turkey disagrees over quotas to meet Syria and Iraq’s minimum requirements for what would be the natural flow of the water and what would provide their people with adequate access to those resources, claiming that Syria and Iraq take more than their allotted amount of water from the rivers as compared to how much each country contributes to the rivers’ flows.

    Thus Turkey began constructing a major series of dams to control the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and flex their regional muscle. The Southeast Anatolia Project consists of 15 dams, 14 hydroelectric stations and 19 irrigation projects. Maybe to prove its capacity for controlling Syria’s and Iraq’s access to the life-sustaining waters of the two rivers or maybe just to fill the largest of the Project’s dams, Turkey cut off the water flow for 29 days in 1990. The point of potable prowess was well taken, and Iraq and Syria effectively tabled their mutual disagreements and colluded in 1998 to resist the construction of the Southeast Anatolia Project in Turkey. In the close quarters of Middle East politics, shared water resources often make for temperamental bedfellows.

    Closely tied to the disputes surrounding Iraq and Syria’s water supply is the proximity to Israel. Syria faces water difficulties on its southwestern border as well in the water-rich area of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The Golan Heights has important water resources that, according to Professor Emeritus Dan Zaslavsky at Bar-Ilan University, if handed back over to Syria would mean that Israel loses nearly one-third of its fresh water.

    On May 7, 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Bouthaina Shabaan of Syria to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to returning the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, as a key step in the peace process between Syria and Israel.

    Should the U.S. broker a peace plan that guaranteed the Golan to Syria, Israel would have to find a replacement source for its lost resources. Stephen Pelletiere, a former CIA analyst, wrote in the New York Times that Turkey had envisioned building a Peace Pipeline carrying water that would extend to the southern Gulf States, and as he sees it, “by extension to Israel.” He continued by saying that “no progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.”

    The assumptions about pan-Arab unity seem to dissolve when talking about the scarce commodity of water, especially when the two of the countries commanding control over the resources are also recipients of large amounts of financial and military aid from the United States: Turkey and Israel. This cosmetic overture to feign regional fairness and non-partiality toward Israel in returning the Golan Heights to Syria does not mask the fact that the United States has strategic goals to control water and oil supplies in the Middle East. The continued destruction of Palestinian homes and agribusiness by Israeli settlers is second only to continued U.S. aggression toward Iraqis via sanctions and wars, inciting and exacerbating global disgust at perceived American imperialism and anti-Arab, anti-Islamic policies. These sentiments contribute to the ongoing worldwide terrorist threats, which in turn propels the United States foreign policy to search and destroy any would-be terrorists and lending encouragement for further invasions in “uncooperative” countries like those listed as the Axis of Evil.

    The Dammed Water Problem

    While the regional water issues have been obscured, to some extent the poor condition of water in Iraq is no new news.

    Professor Thomas Nagy of George Washington University unloaded a massive compilation of U.S. Government documents from 1990-1991 that showed in no uncertain terms the malevolent intent to target sites of vital civilian importance in the first Gulf War. In an expose entitled “The Secret Behind the Sanctions” Nagy cites macabre foreknowledge of the effects of bombing water purification and sewage treatment facilities which provide clean water to the Iraqi people. Moreover, these documents detail how the economic sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, would crescendo the effects of the bombings by banning items like water chlorinators and spare parts to rebuild the obliterated infrastructure, claiming that they could serve “dual use” purposes in making weapons of mass destruction.

    The result has been pandemic waterborne illnesses that have targeted the most vulnerable people in Iraqi society the children. The United Nations estimates that 5,000 children under age 5 have died every month as a result of preventable illnesses such as cholera and dysentery. Because electrical facilities were also targeted in the first Gulf War, vaccinations needing refrigeration (which requires electricity or functioning generators) spoiled, and several generations of children in Iraq have not been inoculated for illnesses which had been completely controlled under the socialist, secular Iraqi government which once provided its citizens with comprehensive, free medical care.

    It is safe to address topics like waterways contaminated by sewage in Iraq because most of the dialogue on impure water centers on the immorality of targeting civilian infrastructure. It is dangerous to talk about the scarcity of water in the region because less dialogue covers the most pressing issue: regional instability intensifying as a result of growing population rates and diminishing water supplies. The United States is testing the waters of hydropolitics by starting to acknowledge the shortage of water in the marshlands of Iraq. Missing from the critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region is a dialogue on regional and global sustainability, to the advantage of American interests.

    In justifying the recent invasion, we heard history about Saddam gassing his own people, the Kurds, developing and hiding weapons of mass destruction, displacing the marsh Arabs and ruining their land, and leading a torturous repressive regime that deprived Iraqi people from democracy and self-governance and led them to the deplorable conditions they now live in.

    The U.S. Department of State lists an interview with Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-born engineer and environmental activist, who explained that the Iraqi government diverted water by building canals and dams for many reasons. One was to catch soldiers fleeing the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980’s, and another was to punish the Shi’a people who, doing as the United States had told them to do at the end of the first Gulf War, led an uprising against the central Iraqi government and were abandoned by the U.S. military and forcefully put down by Saddam’s military.

    Alwash describes three different systems that Saddam’s regime used for redirecting the water away from the marshlands, claiming that even in the early 1990’s when dams in Turkey and Syria were built to harness hydroelectric energy and retain water for their countries’ usage, the marshlands of Iraq were vibrant and thriving. He maintains that it was exclusively the malicious ehydration campaign led by Saddam which ruined the marshlands and displaced or killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Marsh Arabs, draining 60% of the marshes between 1990-1994.

    Interestingly enough, draining the marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers what the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) calls “one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters” was done under the auspices of the sanctions and the watchful eye of the southern No-Fly-Zone, patrolled by Great Britain, the United States and, for some time, France. The No-Fly-Zones were established in 1992 to protect the Kurdish people in the north and the Shi’a people in the south from Saddam’s regime. These minority groups have received targeted repression and mistreatment, and the No-Fly-Zones were supposed to inhibit Saddam’s power to further oppress them.

    “We watched it happen,” said Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne at a forum on the marshlands at the Brookings Institution on May 7. “We had the power, the knowledge and the responsibility and we did nothing.” Undoubtedly, the long arms of Baghdad were able to reach to the southern marshlands despite the sanctions and the No-Fly-Zones, and wreak havoc on the indigenous people as well as the landscape.

    For the past twelve years while Iraqis were unable to import pencils because they contained graphite, blood bags because they contained anti-coagulants and cleaning supplies, because the Sanctions Committee 661 asserted that some parts could be used in making weapons of mass destruction, the government of Iraq was able to bring in materials and massive equipment to construct dams which rerouted the marshland waters and wrought misery on the Madan.

    Inundated by Foreign Interests

    One of the many claims of barbarism on the part of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime is displacing hundreds of thousands of Madan, or Marsh Arabs, and draining the legendary swamps where millennia-old culture had been practiced and preserved. In post-war Iraq, the United States has assumed the responsibility of restoring these marshlands. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been a vocal proponent of bringing water to the arid landscape, addressing the humanitarian needs of the remaining Marsh Arabs, and fixing the ecological crisis which, according to the UNEP, has vanished about 90% of the 20,000 square kilometers of Iraq’s marshlands.

    While addressing the marshland concerns attempts to smooth over twelve-year-old political rifts between the American administrators now governing Iraq and the displaced Madan people, it seems somewhat odd that such a relatively isolated minority of the Iraqi population would receive such attention and consideration so immediately after the war, especially since the Madan are Shi’a, a population that has largely rejected the occupying American forces and has rejoiced at the return of Islamic leaders from exile to Iraq.

    And yet, American interests are moving forward swiftly.

    Bechtel, an American firm with a controversial history of water privatization, who won the largest contract from USAID to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, is set to be a major player in the process with a contract worth $680 million. Bechtel’s history speaks for itself.

    Blue Gold, a book exposing global control of water by private corporations, listed Bechtel in the second tier of ten powerful companies who profit from water privatization. According to Corpwatch, two years ago current USAID administrator Andrew Natsios was working for Bechtel as the chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, a massive transportation project in Boston whose cost has inflated exponentially in the billions of dollars. While providing political disclaimers on its website as a result of investigative reporting centering on the close relationship between government and private business, Bechtel certainly will benefit from its positioning as the sole contractor for municipal water and sanitation services as well as irrigation systems in Iraq.

    Vandana Shiva also implicates Bechtel in attempting to control not only the process of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, but also control over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers themselves. Bechtel has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Bolivia for their plan to privatize the water there, which would drastically rise the cost of clean water for the poorest people in the country. To control the water in the Middle East, Bechtel and its fiscal sponsors, the United States government, would have to pursue both Syria and Turkey, either militarily or diplomatically. Syria has already felt pressure from the United States over issues of harboring Iraqi exiles on the U.S.’s “most wanted” list, as well as over issues of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

    It is not stretch of the imagination that a company like Bechtel with a history of privatization would have its sights set on water in the Middle East, starting with their lucrative deal in Iraq. However, the United States is not positioned to enter a new phase of global geopolitics where water, a limited vital resource that every human needs, is the hottest commodity and where American corporations like Bechtel have not already capitalized on the opportunity to obtain exclusive vending rights.

    Devoting attention to restoring the marshes clearly serves U.S. businesses and corporations who have control over which areas of the marshes get restored, and which ones get tapped for their rich oil resources. Control of the marshlands by the U.S.-led interim government and by the American corporations who have won reconstruction contracts is crucial in deciding where new oil speculation will take place. If only a percentage 25% according to experts on a Brookings Institution panel on marshland reconstruction can be restored, then it would behoove those working on issues of oil and water not to rehydrate areas where such oil speculation will likely take place.

    Water is vital to the production of oil as well; one barrel of water is required to produce one barrel of oil. Bechtel and Halliburton, who received a U.S. Army contract to rebuild the damaged oil industry which will likely reach $600 million, are the two most strategically-positioned corporations to control both the water and oil industries in Iraq.

    Yet this ruse of generous reconstruction and concern seems both an unlikely and peculiar response after a less-than-philanthropic U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. Supporters and opponents of the war alike could hardly miss its transparency. Whether the reasoning was because of oil, liberating the Iraqi people, ferreting out weapons of mass destruction or exerting regional influence, few pretenses were made to distance the war profiteers from the battlefield in the war’s wake.

    The actions of agencies like USAID, which has pledged more than a billion dollars to facilitate rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq which the U.S. military and policymakers had a large hand in destroying, are far from altruistic. The problem of the Marsh Arabs was not invented overnight at the end of the recent war, but rather has developed in plain view of the whole world via satellite images and documented in-country reports of displacement and abuse. Moreover, the marshlands are not Iraq’s sole antiquity. Museums, regions and sites of archaeological importance were destroyed, bombed and looted not only during this last war, but also continuously since the first Gulf War. Will we be paying to rebuild those as well?

    According to Peter Galbraith, a professor at the Naval War College, three weeks of ransacking post-war Baghdad left nearly every ministry in shambles, including the Irrigation Ministry, except for the Oil Ministry that was guarded by U.S. troops. The people of Iraq are becoming rapidly disenchanted with a prolonged U.S. presence in their country as their former disempowerment under Saddam is translated into present disempowerment under the Americans.

    According to those working closely with the project to rehydrate the arshlands, in the newly “liberated” Iraq the silenced voices of the oppressed peoples can now be heard and addressed, the stories of destruction can be told and the much-needed healing of humans and terrain can take place. Whether this will actually happen is another story. At the Brookings Institution forum on the marshlands, no native Iraqis were represented, and the larger question arising in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq is what tangible legitimacy is given to voicing the will of the people by putting representative Iraqis in power.

    Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink

    Perhaps the issue of water is left unspoken on the global level because the transnational corporations supported by powerful Western governments ontribute largely to water pollution and privatization and do not want to draw attention to this fact lest they be forced to clean up their acts and sacrifice profits. Certainly higher standards and levels of accountability would be imposed on industries relying on expendable water resources if the true shortage of water were openly acknowledged.

    Perhaps it is because the leaders, politicians and diplomats who negotiate issues like this do not want to cause mass hysteria in the region, or in the United States or Western world, by directly addressing the problem of diminishing water supplies. Instead they prefer to keep it their little secret, hidden from public view and accountability, prolonging the inevitable panic and hording that will ensue when people’s needs will outweigh the planet’s capacity for providing potable water.

    Perhaps water issues in Iraq and in the Middle East in general do not make the news so as not to legitimize the environmental movement’s claims that water is a precious and ever-diminishing resource that requires drastic reprioritizing on a personal, national and global level. Sustainable practices of water conservation are given cursory attention worldwide and are not yet being implemented on a credible, meaningful scale.

    Population growth expectations for the Middle East provide a staggering predicament. According to Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars, the regional population was near 500 million in 1998, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2050. There will be no peace in the Middle East without addressing issues of sustainability and access to water. The microcosm of war in the Middle East is a staggering prediction of a potential widespread global crisis if countries do not learn to conserve and cooperate.

    Or perhaps it is because resources are not allocated fairly in the region, and acknowledging massive humanitarian crises means that the whistle-blowers are accountable to fixing the problem. Israelis and Palestinians already compete for limited water resources, with Palestine getting short shrift and less water. As noted in Resource Wars, Jewish settlers already get five to eight times more water per capita than Palestinians.

    Addressing problems of war, famine, the environment, human rights, democracy and sustainability has traditionally been compartmentalized work with little overlap and interdependent relevance. The situation of the marsh Arabs integrates the urgency of ending wars, providing for humanitarian crises and looking ahead into the future at the necessity of sharing natural resources equitably. In the near future, wars may be fought not over intangible ideologies like communism, terrorism or religion, but rather fought overtly about access to clean water. It will soon be much more difficult for governments to euphemize about their intent to wage war.

    The policy of rehydrating the marshlands of Iraq is significant in that it marks American interests’ recognition of water scarcity in the Middle East. It also means that following the blue lines on the map charts a precarious course toward war or peace, depending on the management of water resources.
    * Leah C. Wells serves as the Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). She has visited Iraq three times with Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organization Voices in the Wilderness (htpp://www.vitw.org).

  • Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)

    In these times, when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight?

    As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries.

    So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night.

    Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an “Indian citizen,” to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I’m no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.

    Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free).

    Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.”

    I don’t care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.

    When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the “Free Press,” that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

    Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

    Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be “suicidal” for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries – earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time it wasn’t just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That’s Official.

    The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they’ll have to be planted before they’re discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn’t use them when his country was being invaded.

    Of course, there’ll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they’re really chemicals, whether they’re actually banned and whether the vessels they’re contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.)

    Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation.

    Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a “Homicidal Dictator.” And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a “regime change.”

    Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba’ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba’ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba’ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, “We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq.” Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the “Allies” fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.

    The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren’t the faces of U.S. and U.K. government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women?

    Because when it comes to Empire, facts don’t matter.

    Yes, but all that’s in the past we’re told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the U.S. can stop him. It’s an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan – the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics.

    U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are “not the grant of any government or document, but….our endowment from God.” (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)

    So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb).

    But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs don’t really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don’t qualify as real deaths. Our histories don’t qualify as history. They never have.

    Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a “power vacuum.” Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization slid into anarchy. On live TV.

    Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq’s infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq’s oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were “secured” almost before the invasion began.

    On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a “liberated people” venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: “It’s untidy. Freedom’s untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things.” Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder – did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in U.S. prisons right now? (The world’s “freest” country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas?

    Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world’s first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world’s first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice.

    At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. “The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, ‘My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’”

    Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?

    The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down?

    Television tells us that Iraq has been “liberated” and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century’s leading feminists. In reality, Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.

    Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged “positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush’s speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline.” President Bush, who never served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress – a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was “just one victory in a war on terror … [which] still goes on.”

    It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the “War on Terror” might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill.

    It was Herman Goering, that old Nazi, who said, “People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.… All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

    He’s right. It’s dead easy. That’s what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast.

    The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less.

    At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, “This campaign will be like no other in history.” Maybe he’s right.

    I’m no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this?

    After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the “Coalition of the Willing” (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) – sent in an invading army!

    Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It was more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

    As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped for the “rapid collapse” of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very naïve could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise.

    Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments – despite the opposition from the majority of their people – was overwhelming.

    When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned down the U.S. government’s offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking “democratic principles.” According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out “unilaterally by America and its allies” higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What’s it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain’s New Labour?)

    In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I’m sure, were among them. They – we – were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, “It’s like deciding, well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case the security of the people.”Democracy, the modern world’s holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will.

    Until quite recently, right up to the 1980’s, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice.

    But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy – the “independent” judiciary, the “free” press, the parliament – and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.

    To fully comprehend the extent to which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World’s Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and therefore will not speak about tonight). The World’s Most Interesting: South Africa. The world’s most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world’s newest: Iraq.

    In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services – electricity, water, and housing-has meant that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have been evicted from their homes.

    Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism barely disturbed the grass. It’s apartheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of Democracy.

    Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

    In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate.

    Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy’s TV viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, “How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?” That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy’s TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech for whom?

    In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush’s election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic “Rallies for America” across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

    As America’s show business gets more and more violent and war-like, and America’s wars get more and more like show business, some interesting cross-overs are taking place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and “Good Morning America.”

    It is a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.

    The news and entertainment industry in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations – AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed.

    America’s media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.

    So here it is – the World’s Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America’s Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency?

    In the three years of George Bush the Lesser’s term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush’s initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars.

    So who’s paying for the war? America’s poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers.

    And who’s actually fighting the war?

    Once again, America’s poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq’s desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America’s “volunteer” army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population. It’s ironic, isn’t it – the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised.

    For African Americans there’s also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African American men from here in Harlem.

    This year, on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program favouring Blacks and Latinos. He called it “divisive,” “unfair,” and “unconstitutional.” The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don’t suppose affirmative action for White Boys From Yale ever is.

    So we know who’s paying for the war. We know who’s fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America’s poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America’s single mothers? Or America’s Black and Latino minorities?

    Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton.

    Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate, military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous.

    Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny.

    The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President’s Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, “I don’t know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there’s work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it.”

    Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts.

    Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America’s anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, “Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation.”

    The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law.

    Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as “unlawful combatants.” (In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be “disappeared” like the people of Chile under Washington’s old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives.

    Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of “liberation” with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of “New Democracy” in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.

    Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for “liberation.” (Or did they mean “liberalization” all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that “the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq’s economy in the U.S. image.”

    Iraq’s constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.

    The United States Agency for International Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks.

    Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam’s policy director, said, “Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission.”

    The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.

    Tom Brokaw (one of America’s best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. “One of the things we don’t want to do,” he said, “is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we’re going to own that country.”

    Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.

    So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done?

    Well…

    We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It’s like threatening Brer Rabbit that you’ll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government’s suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.

    The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it’s no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.

    Its “homeland” may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets – Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds – government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

    It would be naïve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples’ Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning.

    Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press.

    The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor’s chambers. Empire’s conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.

    You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to remind yourself of this.

    Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that’s as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.

    If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.

    I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.

    History is giving you the chance.

    Seize the time.
    Copyright 2003 by Arundhati Roy