Tag: Empire

Famine and War in the Horn of Africa

August 15, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Famine in the Horn of Africa, again.

The U.N. is currently calling it the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world.”

Writing for al-Jazeera, economist Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the immediate causes of the crisis: Two years of failed rains, and colonial-era political boundaries that both divide and restrict the movements of traditionally pastoral communities.

Sachs reviews other contributing factors as well: the increasing instability of climate change, high fertility rates in the absence of contraception and family planning, widespread poverty and political instability.

The U.S. of course blames the political instability on — what else — Islamic “terrorist” groups like al-Shabaab, who are the target of and justification for black site torture prisons, drone strikes and proxy armed groups in Somalia.

Al-Shabbab, which has just lifted its ban on Western aid groups in the face of the severity of the famine,  has been the target of U.S. airstrikes and proxy attacks for years.  In a WGP post from May 2008, I tried to put a couple of these air strikes in context:

These bombings are directed at members of al-Shabaab, which is the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union who briefly controlled much of Somalia in 2006 — and who had brought relative peace and stability to the chaotic yet oil rich nation — before they were forced from power by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops. (Christian Ethiopia is a historic enemy of Somalia, which is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.)

In that same three year old post, it was already clear how the U.S. proxy war against Somalia contributed to the threat of widespread famine:

The U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion has contributed to a humanitarian crisis the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as “catastrophic”. Over a million people have been made internal refugees, and the U.N warned that 3.5. million Somalis — nearly half the country’s population — face famine. Moreover, Amnesty International has collected many accounts of atrocities by Ethiopian troops.

Here is a recent episode of al-Jazeera’s Inside Story that focuses on the rather facile question, “Are the problems in the Horn of Africa down to nature, or are people and politics to blame?”

Khadija O. Ali, a former member of the Somali Transitional National Parliament, laments the lack of women in Somali government as “women and children are the primary victims of ongoing conflict and deepening drought and famine.”

See here for a story about how U.S. universities are participating in an “African Land Grab”.

See here for the darker side of the World Food Program’s efforts in Somalia.

The image of the starving boy was originally published in the NYT, and was commented upon here and here.

Borders

May 31, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

In his recent speech on Middle East policy, Obama became the first U.S. President to explicitly assert that a Palestinian state must be based on 1967 borders.

Although Obama’s reference to 1967 borders was not an unfamiliar position and was highly qualified — see here for a summary of the positions of past U.S. presidents and here for a discussion on whether Obama’s Mideast Speech signaled a true shift on Palestine — the move drew guarded praise from the left, but ire from the Zionist right, including the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

So, true to capitulationist form, the U.S. President quickly softened his already tepid position, grovelling before AIPAC just as he did the day after he clinched the Democratic nomination for President in 2008.

Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk highlights one aspect of Obama’s collapse:

There was an interesting linguistic collapse in the president’s language over those critical four days. On Thursday 19 May, he referred to the continuation of Israeli “settlements”. A day later, Netanyahu was lecturing him on “certain demographic changes that have taken place on the ground”. Then when Obama addressed the American Aipac lobby group (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) on the Sunday, he had cravenly adopted Netanyahu’s own preposterous expression. Now he, too, spoke of “new demographic realities on the ground.” Who would believe that he was talking about internationally illegal Jewish colonies built on land stolen from Arabs in one of the biggest property heists in the history of “Palestine”? Delay in peace-making will undermine Israeli security, Obama announced – apparently unaware that Netanyahu’s project is to go on delaying and delaying and delaying until there is no land left for the “viable” Palestinian state which the United States and the European Union supposedly wish to see.

The day after Obama’s kowtowing to AIPAC, Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress where he delivered a speech that even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as “an address with no destination, filled with lies on top of lies and illusions heaped on illusions” — concluding that “the Americans will buy anything, or at least their applauding legislators will.”

Indeed, the speech was greeted by wild applause by the U.S. Congress, who gave the foreign leader more standing ovations than they could muster for the U.S. President. This, as a lone protester was violently whisked away.

Political Philosopher Andrew Levine asks the interesting question,  “Are geopolitical considerations the decisive factor joining the United States and Israel or is American domestic politics to blame?”

Columbia Political Historian Joseph Massad reviews Obama’s lopsided rhetoric and asks, “Are Palestinian Children Less Worthy?”

Interviewing AIPAC attendees, Max Blumenthal just points a camera and lets the idiocy manifest:

Other Notes:

Meanwhile the Egypt’s interim ruling council is opening its border with the Gaza strip, ending the blockade and allowing its residents some relief from what has been an open air prison. Now they will be able to import concrete to rebuild the homes destroyed by the brutal Israeli assault in 2008-9.

Characteristically, the Israeli right thinks such freedom for beleaguered Palestinians is a “dangerous development”.

Arab Spring (and Imperial Frost) in Bahrain

May 14, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Inspired by democratic successes in Tunisia and Egypt, the people of the tiny island monarchy of Bahrain (a majority of whom are Shia) petitioned their (Sunni) King for more representation in government.  For this they have suffered a brutal repression, including violent crackdowns of peaceful protesters, mass arrests, beatings, disappearances and death sentences.

One of the challenges faced by the Bahraini protesters is that, unlike in Egypt, the state “security forces” — primarily Sunni and increasingly foreign — lack sympathy for the people in the streets.  According to the Guardian, the Bahraini Kingdom “has made a concerted effort to recruit non-native Sunni Muslims as part of an attempt to swing the demographic balance against the Shia majority – who make up around 65% of the population of 1 million.”

Worse still, the Bahraini Royals invited Saudi “security forces” into the country  to crush the uprising. (Saudi Arabia, btw, is the recent beneficiary of the largest U.S. arms deal in history.) The king, meanwhile, blamed the unrest on a foreign plot — leading to absurd headlines.

U.S and British political executives have remained silent, demonstrating their selective and cynically employed “concern” for human rights and democracy.

As Amy Goodman points out, Obama justified military intervention into Libya on the grounds that “innocent people were targeted for killing”, “hospitals were attacked” and “journalists were arrested”, but when the same things transpire in Bahrain, he has little to say.

Obama’s silence is due in part to the fact that, unlike Libya, where the head tyrant has proven unreliable to U.S. (and European) Imperial Interests, the Malik of Bahrain was an early ally in Bush’s Terror War and is a gracious host to the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Robert Fisk, after taking the Qatar-based al-Jazzeera to task for its silence (they “know where their bread is buttered”), argues that the U.S. (and British) silence on Bahrain is primarily a consequence of the resource alliance with the Saudis.

Other Notes:

Bahraini doctors are being tried in military courts for the crime of treating wounded protesters.

Bahrain Protest Photos.

REALLY fucked up videos.

U.S. labor organizations are advocating for Bahrain workers Caught in the Crossfire.

Buried at Sea…

May 6, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

After the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi Aluminum Tubes, Nigerian Yellowcake, The Escape of Jessica Lynch, The Death of Pat Tillman, and many other war justifying and glorifying fictions, it is unreasonable not to look askance at U.S. Government announcements regarding Imperial Threats and Milestones — especially when elements of these announcements are demonstrated at once to be false, or at least embarrassingly incoherent.

Curiously, several false claims regarding the Assassination of bin Laden had to be publicly corrected by the Government itself, even after establishment media had dutifully parroted them: No, actually bin Laden wasn’t armed. No, he did not use his wife as a human shield. No, there was no 40 minute gun battle, only one armed man in a guest house. (But maybe not even that.)  And no, this wasn’t a “capture or kill mission” but a “kill mission”.

But enough questions about the killing!

Other claims fell to minimal scrutiny.  The claim that bin Laden was buried at sea “in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition” could be easily debunked by anyone who bothered to look up what the Qu’ran actually says.  And why, in any case, would the U.S. go out of its way to respect bin Laden’s religious sentiments, especially after putting two holes in his head?

Another absurdity: That the U.S. won’t release documentary photos of bin Laden’s body, so as not to incite violence –  “because that’s not who we are” — as if the world (outside of the U.S.) is not regularly exposed to photographic evidence of civilians slaughtered as a result of U.S. military operations.

But perhaps the most insidious lie was uttered by the President himself, who asserted that assassinating an old man in his pajamas “is a testament to the greatness of our country” — despite the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the decade of misdirected, proliferating war leading up to this glorious event.

Other notes:

Reuters did manage to acquire some photos of the bodies left behind by the kill team in the hours following the assassination:

Remember when Bush rejected a Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden way back at the beginning of the Terror War?

Do the Gitmo Files show that the U.S. knew where Osama was since 2005?

And, for good measure, some embarrassing morons:

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Barack and Bradley

May 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The case of Bradley Manning  has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.

After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.

Meanwhile, over 250 U.S. legal scholars, including Obama’s former Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, denounced Manning’s detention as torture.

It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.

Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):

It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:

i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”

Other notes:

Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.

The Obama White house has tried  to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.

Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.

Another Drone War

April 26, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The U.S. has extended its Drone War into Libya, as if to commemorate the centennial of the first aerial bombardment of history, when Italian Lieutenant Giulio Gaviotti dropped hand grenades from a Taube monoplane (pictured above, let) on targets near modern Tripoli.

It wasn’t long before the Ottomans were complaining (and the Italians were denying) that hospitals were being bombed and civilians killed.

At the time, this innovation was praised by proto-fascists and Nobel peace laureates alike — “anticipating Barak Obama’s faith in aerial bombardment as a tool of progress for humanity”.

The Kingdom of Italy’s claims to Libya could be traced back to the 1884 Conference of Berlin, when European powers divided Africa up into zones of control — with no input from Africans themselves, of course — thereby initiating, in the words of ANSWER’s Brian Becker, “the dynamic transformation of capitalism into a system of global imperialism.”

Fast forward, and the inheritors of colonial wealth are banding together once again to use their latest technology — vastly more destructive than grenades thrown from monoplanes — to bomb Libya.

Imperial functionaries tout the “precision capability” of Drones, but I suspect that their precision would be doubted by the children whose bodies they routinely blow apart — follow this link to glimpse the mindset of the trigger-happy Drone operators who sit behind computer terminals in Nevada.

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.