Tag: The Other

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.!

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.

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.)

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.

The “Military-Marriage Goal”

January 11, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

With the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the state will now recognize openly gay men and women as worthy to fight and die in its imperial wars.

On the one hand it is great that the U.S. is beginning to recognize openly gay citizens as fully human — and likely will continue to do so in the nearish future by conceding also the right to marry.

But to get married and become soldiers?  How did these things become the focus of the fight for gay rights?

It wasn’t always like this.  In the wake of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front issued a Manifesto that located the root of the oppression of gay people in the very form of the Patriarchal Family, “consisting in a man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models.”

The Manifesto argued that “gay liberation” required more than mere reforms to such oppressive social institutions — it required nothing less than revolutionary social change, including a rejection of the very ideal of monogamy.  And of course gays “openly serving in the military” was not even on the radar.

Part of the story of how we got here from there is that the rejection of the ideal of monogamy was made difficult by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and in the ’90s a conservative reaction emerged which fetishized “normality” against the earlier radicalism. A brief history of that debate can be read here, but I’ll quote Judith Butler’s succinct summary of the conflict in her essay “Competing Universalities“:

The lesbian and gay movement, which in some quarters has extended to include a broad range of sexual minorities, has faced a number of questions regarding its own assimilation to existing norms in recent years. Whereas some clamoured for inclusion in the US military, others sought to reformulate a critique of the military and question the value of being included there. Similarly, whereas… some activists have sought to extend the institution of marriage to non-heterosexual partners, others have sustained an active critique of the institution of marriage, questioning whether state recognition of monogamous partners will in the end delegitimate sexual freedom for a number of sexual minorities…. the enstatement of these questionable rights and obligations for some lesbians and gays establishes norms of legitimation that work to remarginalize others and foreclose possibilities of sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of the movement. The naturalization of the military-marriage goal for gay politics also marginalizes those for whom one or the other of these institutions is anathema, if not inimical. Indeed, those who oppose both institutions would find that the way in which they are represented by the ‘advance of democracy’ is a violation of their most central, political commitments.

So, what is really to be gained by the repeal of DADT?

First, it must be granted that because gays have been barred from a public enterprise on the basis of their sexual orientation, the repeal of DADT can be seen as an advance of “civil rights”. But there is a moral principle of equality at work here, and it stands in tension with more global considerations. The equality won by the repeal of DADT comes with a built in and nefarious limitation, since it is merely an equality among U.S. Americans in good standing — those outside of the imperial in-group can be (and in fact are) annihilated or disappeared with impunity. In this case an advance in “civil rights” is an affront to human rights universally.

Second, given the general hero-worship of those who sign up to be imperial pawns, gay soldiers stand to gain a satisfying increase in social respect and cultural acceptance from the repeal — but only at the cost of agreeing to follow orders from demonstrably untrustworthy imperial managers.

In these respects, fighting for the right to serve in the U.S. Military looks like a slavish response to Baby Bush’s Manichean Challenge — “We are with you! We are with you!”

In the end, the only thing gained is to be more completely recognized as a part of the imperial in-group, set against the global dispossessed. So winning the right to openly participate in the U.S. military is indeed a victory of sorts, but certainly not a victory for humanity generally speaking.

So much for what is gained. Now what is lost?

Self-described “queer” Medical Student Jess Guh asks this question in a thoughtful essay.  Guh is saddened by the repeal of DADT, in part because she had seen the exclusion of queers from the U.S. military as an “insurance policy against any eventual draft”.  In the event of a draft, she could have simply revealed herself as queer and thereby escaped conscription.

In that sense, the repeal of DADT is the loss of an asset for draft dodgers.

But, she continues, it is also the loss of a “huge opportunity to make more significant gains.”

Like the teen-aged Vietnam War draftees who fought for the right to vote, gay rights activists could have used willingness to participate in the U.S. military as a concession in a negotiation for other rights they lacked:

…equal marriage rights, rights to have a family through adoption, and discrimination protection (the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Law still doesn’t bar firing or harassment over the issue of sexual orientation).  Partners of queer military personnel won’t even be eligible for health benefits, because that benefit requires a marriage certificate.”

Estimating the number of “homosexuals” in the U.S. is a complex project, but it is fair to say that a significant portion of the population fell under the category prohibited from participating openly in the armed forces. Since “a substantial portion of current and future military personnel” are “queer”, Guh asks:

…what would have happened if every queer soldier and ally refused to work, fight? What if queer folk just refused to enlist?  From infantry to engineering to culinary services, all fronts of the American military would have been crippled.  Would we have been able to demand equality in more controversial areas in addition to the simply right to serve?

This would have been negotiating from a position of power.

And actually, such a move remains a possibility. It is also possible (for everyone) to make participation in the military contingent on a just and legal cause — conscientious objectors can come in any flavor.  But as far as I know, the DADT debate was abstracted from any question about the justice or legality of the U.S. military project.

And really, from an anti-imperialist perspective, it is strange to speak of the “right” to “serve” in the military. Why is it considered a “right” to “serve” an aggressive war machine? And is this right universal and human? If so, then what of the universal human rights of those on the receiving end of this machine?

______________________________

Some sources for the collage:  The gay pride revelers come from an amusing satire from the Onion; the Navy officer is retired Reserve Commander Zoe Dunning (Ret.) and her partner; the central body in black and white is from genderqueer, a blog featuring “images of gender-bending, trans and queer people of all sorts, meant to empower and celebrate the beauty within all gender expressions.”; Dan Choi is a prominent activist who worked to challenge DADT.

The portrait of a gay soldier hiding his identity is by Jeff Sheng, from a beautiful series I first encountered at the Manifest Equality artshow in L.A.

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.

Tanks Giving

November 25, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

The U.S. and its NATO allies are introducing the Abrams tanks to Afghanistan this holiday season, despite the rise in civilian casualties — such as Asan and Slima, pictured above — brought on by the recent intensification of air strikes, in which more than 1000 bombs and missiles were fired in October.

Up until now, NATO has avoided using tanks in Afghanistan for fear of reminding the Afghans of the tank heavy Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

According to the AP, Colonel Dave Lapan explained to reporters in Washington that “American tanks would have a much different role than the Soviet tanks, which he said had been used to ‘oppress’ the Afghans.”

U.S. tanks don’t oppress Afghans, you see – they “protect” them from “insurgents”.

Meanwhile, a recent poll taken by the International Council on Security and Development finds that 92% of young men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces know nothing about 9-11, the putative reason the U.S. has been occupying their country for almost a decade.

In any case, many Afghans themselves refuse to give thanks to the occupiers of their country, choosing instead to lodge complaints with U.S. and Afghan officials about the destruction of their trees, crops, homes and loved ones.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of Imperial Functionaries, such destruction can be seen as a good thing:

Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor’s office to submit a claim for damaged property, “in effect, you’re connecting the government to the people,” the senior officer said.

Success!