Category: Terror Wars

The Specter of “Genocide”

April 26, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Although he continues to avoid referring to the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in such terms, Obama used the specter of “genocide” to justify U.S. military intervention into Libya.  But historian A. Kuperman argues that this is an exaggeration that served as (another) false pretense for war.  No genocide has taken place in cities that Gaddafi did recapture, he argues, and neither did Gaddafi “ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged”:

The “no mercy’’ warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.’’ Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight “to the bitter end.’’

False pretenses for war are routine, sadly, but by prolonging the conflict — Admiral Mullen thinks it is “moving toward a stalemate” — the number of civilians killed will steadily rise and likely overtake what might have transpired as a result of Gaddafi’s fight against domestic insurgents.

Taxes for Chumps

April 18, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

As corporations and the rich become expert at tax avoidance, the bill for Washington’s Imperial Swan Song gets passed along to chumps like you and me. Consider these stats:

Over the past 12 years income for the richest U.S. Americans quadrupled as their tax rate was almost cut in half.

Corporations and the wealthy use offshore banks and tax havens to avoid paying taxes and other government regulations.

Many of the largest corporations avoid paying any taxes at all.

Half of your income taxes go to pay for the Imperial military machine.

And here is 9 other things the rich don’t want you to know about taxes.

Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings asks a relevant question:  What if we all stopped paying taxes?

Here are some charts come (from a collection at Mother Jones and the WRL) to help visualize:

PS: Here are ways to resist war tax, from the War Resisters League.

Left Vs. Left on Libyan Intervention

April 4, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The U.S./NATO intervention, command of which is gradually being shared with other European and North American allies (as well as token contributions from a small number of Arab states), has divided opinion on the left, with one side arguing that the humanitarian crisis posed by Gaddafi’s threat to wipe out his domestic enemies justified military intervention by Western powers, and the other side remaining distrustful of the motives, legality, and putative beneficial consequences of Western military interventions into resource-rich African and Middle Eastern lands.

Exemplifying this division is the debate between Juan Cole and critics of his “Open Letter to the Left on Libya“, which argued the justice of the (UNSC sanctioned / NATO executed) intervention follows from its humanitarian aim, its Libyan support, its international legality, and its limited scope. In short:

… in Libya intervention was demanded by the people being massacred as well as by the regional powers, was authorized by the UNSC, and could practically attain its humanitarian aim of forestalling a massacre through aerial bombardment of murderous armored brigades. And, the intervention could be a limited one and still accomplish its goal.

Left critics of the intervention have questioned all of these premises, including Gaddafi’s power to successfully carry out his threats to annihilate his opposition. (See for example this overview of Socialist literature on the subject.)

In my last post, I argued that the selective application of humanitarian intervention exposes it as whitewash.

The touted degree of international support can also be doubted.  As Philip Hiro discusses, the foreign intervention in Libya has exposed divisions within and among international security institutions — the Arab League, EU, NATO, UN Security Council — and has served as an occasion for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) to “adopt a unified stance on a matter of war and peace.”

The BRIC countries, representing 40% of the worlds population abstained from the Security Council vote, while the Asia Times clarifies that Arab League support for the intervention was really a “House of Saud led operation” — “only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone.”  (Nevertheless, as Siddharth Varadarajan points out, this fact alone does not “absolve them of their failure to mount an effective political challenge to the drive for war.” Thanks to MTK, SF mayoral candidate and friend of the blog, for pointing to these discussions in comments).

The pro-intervention forces may have taken the steps to secure international legality for the operation, but its legality has been questioned on domestic legal grounds, since according to the U.S. Constitution the President lacks the authority to make war without Congressional approval. Ohio Rep. Kucinich is the leading the charge on this point, insisting that the rule of law should also apply to the President.

But Cole’s most contentious premise is his faith that the intervention can be limited in scope.  That is why the implausibility of a humanitarian motive is important to consider, for once its talons puncture flesh, the imperial eagle is unlikely to release until it is time to feed.

T. Miles exposes Cole’s false dilemma succinctly:

…as past history going back to the 1880s shows, that inviting the global imperial power to save them will enslave the Libyan people to a more subtle yoke in the coming years. This may be better than Gadaffi’s death squads, but that accepts the fallacy which goes completely unnoticed by Professor Cole that there are not simply two choices: domestic tyrant or Pax Imperia.

Along these lines, another of Cole’s reasons to support intervention — that the leaders of the uprising in Bengazi are “simply the notables of the city”  — has been rendered untrue by the logic of intervention itself: it is now Canadians and expatriate residents of Langley, VA that are filling leadership roles.

Cole’s narrow focus also misses how the attack sends a clear message to other outlier regimes: “no matter what, no matter the inducements or pressure, never ever give up chemical weapons or a nuclear weapons program. Doing so will not ensure that the U.S. does not attack you—on the contrary, it will make it much more likely.”

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.

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.)

Unacknowledged Ironies

February 27, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

This month, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waxed about internet freedom, a silent protester was forcibly whisked from her presence and administration lawyers subpoenaed Twitter in their effort to crack down on Wikileaks operatives.

From Partnership for Civil Justice:

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking.

From Democracy Now:

In an unacknowledged irony, Clinton’s comments came just as government lawyers appeared in a Virginia court to argue their case for cracking down on the online whistleblower WikiLeaks. The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed the internet company Twitter for personal information from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and four other people linked to WikiLeaks, including Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament. The subpoena asks Twitter for all records and correspondence relating to their accounts, including apparently private direct messages sent through Twitter.

Civil Discourse and Targeted Concern

January 19, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Everyone affected by the murderous rampage of the disturbed Loughner deserved a public memorial, but to my eyes the irony of Obama’s targeted concern for victims of the massacre in Arizona was impossible to ignore. Obama is in command of an enterprise which has resulted in the slaughter of many little girls, but one would be a fool to expect him to condemn his own “senseless violence” or publically grieve for the victims of his own drone strikes — that would run counter to the imperial ideology of American Exceptionalism, according to which the lives of U.S. American are regarded as more valuable than those outside the nationalist circle of concern.

Obama even reserves for his office the right to execute anyone in the world, even U.S. citizens, and claims this right to be unlimited even by  judicial oversight. He therefore stands as a model for extra-legal vigilantism.

But these questions are not explored in the MSM, generally speaking, which instead has been dominated by the question of violent rhetoric in U.S. political discourse.

These two images present competing ways to look at the current “political climate”.  Where the cover of The Economist makes an easy equivalence between “left” and “right” rhetorical bellicosity, L. Dangle at Troubletown appeals to ideological stereotypes to suggest such equivalence is an illusion.

It is difficult to escape the idea that certain people have a particular responsibility.  I mean, before she was shot, the Congresswoman saw it coming, and saw it coming from particular places:

We’re on Sarah Palin’s “Targeted” list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. And when people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action.

In response to the charge that the violent rhetoric is exclusively coming from the right, rightward leaning commentators are quick to point out recent examples of violent rhetoric coming from the left, which are in fact not hard to find.

Fair enough, but that abstracts from at least two important considerations.  First, there is a double standard about how the state deals with left leaning activism, even when it is not violent. Consider this comparison by A. Cockburn:

If Palin was in the Animal Rights movement she would have  been indicted, sentenced and imprisoned long ago. To draw a specific comparison: the SHAC 7 were convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a website which posted the names and addresses of individuals tied to the animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences. They were not charged with any act of property destruction, they were charged with “conspiracy” on the grounds that they should be held accountable for the actions of others in the same movement.

Second, I don’t think it is controversial to claim that those on the right are, at least these days, more thoroughly armed.  And considering this compilation of “lone nuts” who have translated rhetoric into action, many are more dangerous as well.  Anti-war protesters I’ve seen — and I’ve seen many — are generally equipped with nothing more threatening than cardboard and crayons and costumes and drums, just as the Troubletown cartoon contends. Maybe if there WAS an armed left in the U.S. it would not be so easily and thoroughly taken advantage of.

Other perspectives / sources:

Tom Engelhardt writes about how civilian casualties in Afghanistan go underreported while the nation mourns the Arizona victims.

Amy Goodman, the best news anchor in the U.S., calls for an assault weapons ban and connects the debate to the violence in Juarez.

Billy Wharton argues that we should take Loughner as a reason to have single payer health care.

Enough about Assange: What WikiLeaks has Revealed

December 29, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

By focusing on the personalities or philosophy behind Wikileaks, in addition to the Imperial and Corporate reactions to its successes thus far, it is easy to lose focus on the actual substance of the leaks themselves. So here is an incomplete list of significant revelations emerging from Wikileaks in 2010, summarized from a list of headlines compiled by G. Greewald:

UPDATE: Here is another round-up of what Wikileaks revelations, compiled by CBS news.

Rap News 6: Cablegate

December 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Some source material links from The Juice Media: