Month: March 2011

Humanitarian Intervention

March 28, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The idea that the U.S./European intervention is motivated by humanitarian concerns appears plausible at first glance because Gaddafi was slaughtering protesters and openly threatening to slaughter more — so “intervention” could be sold as a humanitarian act.

But a bit of critical reflection on the wider context of this policy reveals how shallow such an explanation is.

First, there is the question of consistency.  If the U.S. (et. al.) were motivated by humanitarian concern, then what of concern for the protesters being slaughtered in the streets of other autocratic states, like Syria, Yemen or Bahrain?

The White House managed to verbally condemn the crackdown in Syria, but the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, important assets in the imperial project, get a pass or even support –  Secretary of State Clinton asserted that Yemen had the “sovereign right” to invite Saudi Arabian forces into the country to violently crush dissent.

And what about Israel?  Siddharth Varadarajan asks the multi-billion dollar question:

Why does only Libya get attacked or referred to the International Criminal Court and not other countries? If there is one country in the Middle East which has threatened international peace and security for decades and which, even as these words are being written, has launched its air force, yet again, against a defenceless civilian population, it is Israel. Yet never have the cheerleaders for the war on Libya argued in favour of a mandatory no-fly zone to protect the Palestinian and Lebanese people from Israeli airstrikes.

This selective application of humanitarian intervention exposes it as a whitewash.

Furthermore, if concern for humanity was a motivating factor for the U.S. (et. al.), then what of concern for its own citizens? Writing in the NYT, Bob Herbert reminds us that this “humanitarian intervention” is also “pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war… while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.”

“Humanitarian Concern”, like “Spreading Democracy”, is a PR label cynically used to sell imperial military projects to a (still-too-naive) domestic market, as well to serve as cover for complicit (and equally cynical) international institutions.

So, too, is the use of the euphemistic term “no-fly zone”, which had some Arab League support until it turned out to mean the shock and awe of missile strikes to inaugurate more or less unbounded military action, with its own inevitable civilian casualties.

But if not concern for humanity, then what motivates the U.S.(et. al.) attack on Libya?

Well, there is always the geopolitics of a dwindling oil supply. Or profits for the military-industrial-complex, which over decades gets to provide weapons to both Gaddafi and the coalition forces attacking him.

Cha-ching.

8th Anniversary of Supreme International Crime

March 21, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Nothing symbolizes more acutely the dark matrix of corporate hegemony, war, lies, unaccountability, torture and secrecy than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 8 years ago.

This weekend, as the U.S. Executive Branch (without Congressional approval) began bombarding yet another oil rich predominantly Muslim country, Los Angeles joined other cities in protest to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a “supreme international crime” according to principles laid out by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.

As I did last year, I documented the event in video.  This year the most compelling speaker was Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Vet and co-founder of March Forward!, a anti-war veterans group.  Here is a recording I made of his speech at the rally, edited with time lapse video of the protest march:

The AP reported that “hundreds” of people marched, but the time lapse sequences seem to indicate more. Looks like at least a few thousand to me.

Meanwhile, in D.C., Daniel Ellsberg and about 100 others were arrested in protests outside the White House.

Rap News 7: #Revolution

March 20, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

From The Juice Media:

Rap News, Episode 7: It’s 2011 and amid a flurry of political leaks and revelations, revolutions have rolled across North Africa and The Middle East, sweeping regimes and dictatorships before them. Join your host Robert Foster for long overdue analysis of these events, asking the question that’s on everyone’s lips — where will revolution spark next? But when a news flash comes in from a special embedded correspondent, the episode takes an unprecedented turn, as that very question is answered in dramatic fashion. How will the world treat the latest courageous country to throw off the yoke of oppression? Is any cow sacred in this time of massive upheaval? Can there be any doubt that History Is Happening?

We almost lost [your city here].

March 16, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

In October 1966, there was a partial meltdown of the Fermi I Breeder Reactor in Michigan. Gil Scott Heron wrote a song about it.

As the news from Japan becomes more dire, what else is there to do but turn to a bluesman:

Read about this and four other times “we almost nuked ourselves by accident.”  A fuller list of “civilian nuclear accidents” worldwide is here.

Nuclear Crisis in Fukushima and beyond.

March 14, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Japan is reeling from the onslaught of monumental challenges triggered by the 9.0 earthquake off of its eastern coast — a devastating tsunami, whole towns annihilated, thousands of missing and dead, and a quickly developing nuclear crisis.

DN summarizes:

Japan remains in a state of emergency three days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the country. An estimated 10,000 people have died, and Japan is facing the worst nuclear crisis since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Monday, a second explosion hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and a third reactor lost its cooling system, raising fears of a meltdown. Radiation levels have been detected as far as 100 miles away. Dozens of people have tested positive for radiation exposure, and hundreds of thousands of have been evacuated, with the number expected to rise.

Japan’s nuclear crisis has put the spotlight on the facilities of other countries. Over the weekend, Germany witnessed mass demonstrations advocating the retirement of its own nuclear facilities, and on Monday Germany joined Switzerland in putting a freeze on nuclear development.

Although the U.S. is home to 104 nuclear power plants, some of which are situated along the coast and in earthquake prone areas, there has so far been no such revision to U.S. policy, with the Obama administration joining senators from both corporate parties in defending the continued use of nuclear power.

In fact, in 2009 Obama “cited Japan’s nuclear facilities as a model for [U.S.] America’s nuclear renaissance”; in 2011 he called for “a three-fold increase in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, from the $18.5 billion that Congress has already approved to $54.5 billion.”

Here is a map of U.S. nuclear facilities:

If there ever is a full on Chernobyl style disaster at any of these sites, it might look something like this:

Other links: At CounterPuch, A. Cockburn takes government and corporate media reassurances about the severity of the crisis as cause for worry, having trained himself to believe what is officially denied, while Robert Alvarez reviews the precarious situation in Fukushima. BagNews compares the image of a child undergoing a radiation check to a stick-up.

NHK World

March 14, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Here is a live feed from NHK World News in English for info on the situation in Japan:

This We’ll Defend

March 7, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

It can be rough for people living under the U.S. occupying forces in Afghanistan, many of whom have been liberated from existence by NATO gunships in at least 3 air strikes in the past couple of weeks – scores of women and children here, 9 boys here — thus continuing the dark trend that saw 2010 as the worst year yet for civilian deaths of the Afghanistan war.

General Petraeus, current commander of the the ISAF, had to apologize about the slaughter of the 9 boys, but reportedly tried to dodge responsibility for civilian deaths resulting from a separate operation by suggesting  that “residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on U.S. forces.”

“Killing 60 people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologizing for any deaths? This is inhuman,” one Afghan official said. “This is a really terrible situation.”

Johnathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution suggests that this is how one inflicts “horrible burns on a bunch of kids and yet sleep soundly at night” and points to an historical precedent to such behavior — Nixon allowed himself to wonder whether the famous picture of wailing children running from a U.S. napalm strike was “a fix”.

Meanwhile, speaking on the situation in Libya, Obama said he wants to make sure that the U.S. “has the full capacity to act” in case “defenseless civilians” find themselves “trapped and in great danger.”

But, in Afghanistan, it is often precisely the exercise of U.S. capacities that puts “defenseless civilians” — such as the 9 wood-gathering boys ripped to shreds by NATO helicopters — not only in “great danger” but in caskets.

Those boys now join the 2,500 other people killed by the 101st Airborne Division since they arrived in eastern Afghanistan last June.

(The images of the wounded Afghan children in the above collage come from the website of The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who don’t shy away from illustrating their updates with images that reflect the violence of the U.S. occupation of their country.)