top 10 myths about iraq, 2007

another death in rawalpindi:
Today, military analyst Ayesha Siddeque estimates, the five conglomerates, or "welfare foundations," under military control own about $20 billion of assets and twelve billion hectares of land. This stake in the nation's economic life means the military necessarily has a large and persisting interest in control of the politic

bipartisan paradise:
It is now obvious that one impetus behind the "surge" was to accelerate the "ethnic cleansing" of Iraq. Given the manifest failure to establish a strong central government to serve as a client state, the conquerors now find it easier to deal with separate ethnic enclaves, which can police themselves, shake out their own internal conflicts (however bloodily) and thus establish some kind of solid leadership that can cut deals and guarantee investments. Most of the measures taken during the "surge" seem aimed precisely at ethnic cleansing: the increased support of the Iraqi government security forces -- which are largely Shiite militias -- has been matched with what some see as the lunatic policy of arming Sunni militias.
(...) And so the strategy behind the "surge" becomes clear: A united, independent Iraq cannot be allowed to exist, because such a state would not permit a permanent American military presence nor sign away the nation's oil wealth. Therefore, Iraq must be torn apart -- by sectarian strife, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and "counterinsurgency" warfare. And violence must continue until this shake-out is completed, in order to justify the continuing American presence.
(...) This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them. And all of this done for no other reason but to enhance the coddled elite's power, privilege and pleasures.

the gates of hell (on iran):This ratcheting-up of the arms race in the Middle East, on top of $30 billion in military aid provided earlier this year to Saudi Arabia and Israel, is somehow portrayed by Gates as the surest route to insuring peace. The notion that the Mideast suffers from a dire shortage of military hardware like missiles is, to say the least, a unique interpretation of recent history.
(...) while oil-rich Iran's development of nuclear power is now portrayed as persuasive proof that its real intent is to build nuclear weapons, leading hawk Henry Kissinger took a different view when Iran was under the US-implanted dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Kissinger defended Iran's development of nuclear energy during the Shah's reign, arguing that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion into petrochemicals."

embedded in power
I have heard from a few investment bankers what their wet dream is all about – it's the Bush administration's dream, for that matter: the world as a Green Zone guarded by Blackwater types, everything privatized, provided Halliburton-style, and "out there" a Mad Max Red Zone. In this sense Baghdad is a living metaphor of the future.

chiquita in the dock for murder:
For lawyer Terry Collingwood, capital punishment has its place, especially if it means "the death of a truly evil corporation." The reference was to Ohio-based Chiquita Corp., which last March pleaded guilty to making 100 payments over seven years totaling $1.7 million to the right-wing, paramilitary Colombian Self Defense Units — AUC in Spanish. The payoffs began in 1997. Observers say the aim was to suppress labor activism, bar left-wing insurgents and control territory
(...) Rights groups blame the AUC for killing 10,000 Colombians over a period of 10 years
(...) Victims' lawyers say the AUC not only killed students, unionists and peasants allegedly associated with left-wing insurgents, but also seized land for the Chiquita empire and arranged for thousands of automatic weapons plus ammunition to pass across Chiquita docks at the northwestern port city of Turbo. The AUC had gained control of the area after expelling the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s.
(...) For Terry Collingsworth, "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks." Paul Wolf adds, "Chiquita's victims are living in dire poverty."

venezuela

hugo chavez' future (wilpert):
One thing you have to consider is that the proportion of agriculture in the gross national product is only about 6%, so it´s really a miniscule portion of the economy. The amount of U.S. interest in that 6% is probably not more than 1% at the most. I don´t think land reform will have any impact on U.S. relations. The most prominent case was this Lord Vestey ranch which belongs to the British, but that case was more or less settled. The government really wants to expand agricultural production and it would be very careful not to disrupt this production. The agreement then with Vestey has to be seen in that context.
(...) I think the danger is that any effort to move away from so-called liberal, representative democracy will be interpreted as an effort to bring about dictatorship. I don´t think that´s a fair conclusion to draw, but I think the U.S. would say this as well as many people in the international community and within the international media. That could isolate Venezuela. And, I think the Chavez government is intent on moving away from capitalism and liberal representative democracy.
(...) In the measures that he´s already announced. On the political level, for example, giving more power to communal councils, and giving priority to them over representative government or elected officials, also in terms of allocating budgets and making various decisions in the regions of the country. On the economic level, more nationalizations, more worker self-management at all levels. And so, these changes at the political and economic levels will be interpreted as anti-democratic, even if they´re not.
(...) And yes, it is definitely an attempt to convince a larger segment of the population to support the program. I personally think it´s a bad idea, not because I´m against that type of education but from what I can see there´s an over emphasis on this kind of moral dimension and being moralistic. To my mind that´s not what socialism is about. It´s an elaborate critique which I won´t go into now, but there´s a simplified idea about education that I feel is being propagated sometimes, that we just need to teach people how to think in more collective terms and the collective good instead of the individual good, more in terms of solidarity and everything will follow from there. I just don´t think that´s how education works and it could easily lead to a new form of dogmatism which is quite dangerous.
(...) So, we are left with three main internal obstacles. One of these is a kind of in-group mentality related to clientelism. Because of the external threats, even though these threats have subsided, there´s still this idea that we need to protect ourselves and promote only those who are with us. That usually leads to a skewed notion of citizenship, where government services and jobs are given mainly to supporters, which has been widely discussed in the media. I think this is a problem which exists and could even get worse. This is a mild form of corruption but it could lead to more serious corruption.
(...) Even if the opposition is a minority, they become more and more willing to actively resist the government if they are completely cut out and cut off from any kind of participation in the social and political life in the country. That could lead to a situation like what we had in Nicaragua, where you had people taking up arms in a low intensity civil war. You could get this in Venezuela, or a terrorist campaign. I still think that´s a possibility if enough people in the opposition were convinced that this was the only way to be politically active.
(...) I think assassination is a real possibility because people in the opposition who don´t like the government, if they´re smart, they realize that everything is so dependent on Chavez that if they get rid of him they have a very good chance of coming back to power. But, they might also conclude that such a development could provoke total chaos in the country. I think analysts in the U.S. government know that, and maybe I´m being too optimistic or thinking too highly of them, but I kind of doubt they would be interested in total social unrest in Venezuela because that would threaten the oil supply. So that´s why I doubt the U.S. government is behind an attempt to assassinate Chavez. But that doesn´t prevent people in the opposition from wanting it, especially since they probably don´t care very much whether oil goes to the U.S. or not, and their main concern is getting back into power. The third obstacle is Chavez´s governing style. Even though he wants to bring about participatory democracy, he still has a very top down management system and that creates contradictions. He´s not very participatory in his own environment, I have this feeling that he has a very militarist mentality of giving orders and expecting everyone to follow them. This works for a leader in that it´s good to be strong, but it´s lacking a certain amount of flexibility and willingness to accept criticism and input from various sectors. Also, the whole idea of the Enabling Law, of democratizing the country through a relatively undemocratic process, is also contradictory.

reading arendt in venezuela:
"They bring along their habit of hierarchy, of not listening, their love to give orders to followers who do not question," Petkoff told me when I met him after my Catholic University talk, which had taken place in a hall that bore a wonderful inscription above its door: "Use your ears here, that's why it's called an auditorium."
(...) She has no trouble with Chávez's ends, only with his means, which she described to me as "sacrificing our democracy to his socialism." We had quite an intense conversation about why Hannah Arendt had distrusted revolutions that try to solve problems of social injustice without first achieving a stable, constitutional republic. "But you have to tell," she challenged me, "what is the guarantee that people in a constitutional republic will be responsible to the poor?"
(...) In short, I was told, Chávez is no different from the standard Latin American caudillo.
(...) The hodgepodge of quotations that Chávez disseminates in his regular addresses (which all the networks are obliged by law to air) and his weekly television appearance--a call-in show known as Alo, Presidente!--is symptomatic of the hodgepodge of his policies. His is a type of revolution not anticipated in Hannah Arendt's 1963 book On Revolution, I suggested to my audience at the Simon Bolivar University, one of the most active outposts of the emergent student movement. (The campus has huge parking lots full of Minis with their back windows painted playfully "I am free speech!" and "I am the spirit of liberty!")
(...) they produced a truly remarkable American-style Constitution based on checks and balances, which calls for five branches of government, one of which is dedicated to oversight of the government through an ombudsman and a general prosecutor. But the Constitution did not put as effective a check on executive power as it might have, and almost as soon as it was printed in little portable editions to be distributed free to millions of Venezuelans, who took to carrying it at all times and quoting it, Chávez began to obscure it with decrees and laws that are never challenged as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which was itself unconstitutionally expanded so that it could be packed with his appointees. Not satisfied to control the court, in 2000 Chávez got the unicameral Assembly to, in effect, erase its power by granting him a year of nonconsultative decision-making (in European history this kind of antidemocratic achievement is known as an enabling law, or Ermachtigungsgesetz). Chávez's political critics in the universities are alarmed that the Bolivarian Constitution is being ignored or undermined, and the constitutional lawyer who did most of the drafting has turned anti-Chavista.
(...) s. The government directly funds hundreds of so- called misiones in communities. The missions do provide employment and bring food (delivered in military trucks), healthcare (aided by Cuban doctors) and education directly to the people, which is surely a good thing; but they are not like the revolutionary councils that have sprung up, Arendt noted, in all revolutions, constituting the people's forums for ongoing political participation (until they were, time and again, crushed by parties aspiring to total control). Despite a lot of rhetoric about participatory democracy, the missions are not political formations that could reform local, city and provincial governments, making them more responsive to the grassroots, and they have alienated rather than inspired the country's labor unions because they are run and firmly controlled from the center, often quite literally from Chávez's office. No totalitarian military and secret police bureaucracy has been built up in Venezuela, but a controlled service sector has, and a rerun of centralized state socialism will ensue unless the political problem is grasped by the Chavistas, by the anti- Chavistas or, more likely, by the students, who are grassroots political actors and not caught up in haggling about whether the missions have, in statistical terms, benefited the poor or not, at what cost and how efficiently or inefficiently.
(...) I met a young woman, an art student making her political debut as a T-shirt designer, who told me, tearfully, that she is so "hurt in my heart" because Chávez says the students are spoiled rich white kids who are "puppets of imperialism." "What do I do? I do not want my parents to think I cannot act for myself! And we want the Chavistas to believe us, to unite with us--because we want to help them, too. We are all socialists."
(...) I assured him that many people in America were worrying even more stronger than Hannah Arendt did about the American President being an autocrat but that it was the task of students everywhere to speak and act freely, as they do naturally, because, in her words, "they are new beginnings."

coup 2002
The next day was a very busy one for the coup leaders. Everyone who was anyone in the opposition gathered at the presidential palace, to celebrate, to congratulate, and to lobby for positions in the transition government. The private mass media was celebrating too, with tremendous headlines that cheered, “It’s Over!” (El Universal), “Chavez Resigned” (El Universal), “The Assassin Has Fallen” (Asi es la Noticia), “Good-bye Hugo” (Tal Cual). Napoleón Bravo’s morning talk show (24 Horas) opened program with, “Good morning, we have a new president,” and then Bravo proceeded to read the resignation letter Chavez supposedly signed, but actually did not sign. The state media, though, was still off the air.
(...) While the coup organizers were working out the details of a decree that would name Carmona as president, among other things, Isaias Rodriguez, the country’s Attorney General, managed to convince the private broadcast media to let him onto live television with the argument that he wanted to publicly announce his resignation. Once on live television, at 2:04 pm, he said, “This is a coup d’état. There is no doubt about it. The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the Washington protocol have been violated here.” He went on to say that Chavez did not resign and that even if he had, it would not be effective unless he did so to the National Assembly and that next in line of succession is the vice-president and then the president of the National Assembly. A few minutes into his announcement, as soon as they noticed that Rodriguez was not announcing his resignation, the private television stations cut him off mid-sentence. Already word had spread, by word of mouth and via the community media, that Chavez had not resigned and that he was being held against his will on a military island somewhere. Isaias Rodriguez’s announcement thus confirmed what many had already suspected.
(...) The next morning, April 13th, as the spontaneous demonstrations in support of Chavez grew increasingly larger, the Greater Caracas city police (Policia Metropolitana), began repressing these demonstrations. Also, rioting and looting broke out in many poor neighborhoods, as Chavez supporters vented their anger on their surrounding infrastructure. The metropolitan police ended up shooting and killing between 50 and 60 people in the confrontations with demonstrators.[32] Many of these deaths happened in front of Fort Tiuna, where the Metropolitan police repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to disperse the crowd with live ammunition. Also, demonstrations were taking place throughout the country, with people demanding the immediate return of their president.
(...) None of this was viewable on television, however. The previous day, on the 12th of April, all four main private TV channels were broadcasting interviews with gloating opposition leaders and the resume of Pedro Carmona. On the 13th, however, a complete news blackout had taken over. The private broadcasters were showing nothing but cartoons and old Hollywood movies. Channel 8, the state television channel was off the air for all of the 12th and most of the 13th. The lack of information was bizarre. At first one had the impression that there was no news simply because nothing was happening, because everything was back to “normal,” now that Chavez was out of office. Anyone who could receive cable television or who was in some way connected to the network of Chavez supporters, knew, via CNN or via word of mouth (or directly, if they lived in or near a barrio) that nothing was normal at all. Later, the owners of the media outlets would claim that the reason they did not broadcast any news was because it was too dangerous to send reporters onto the street. This argument, though, is hardly credible, especially because they could at least have reported on their fear of going onto the street. Also, it was later learned that in the afternoon of the 12th, Carmona had gathered the heads of the main media outlets and asked them to make sure that their broadcasts do not contribute to any instability in the country.
(...) By endorsing the coup, with its confirmation of the opposition’s version of events as the only valid version, the U.S. government essentially became an accomplice to the coup, regardless of whether the U.S. government also had a larger hand in the coup behind the scenes. More than that, since it is now proven that the Bush administration knew of the coup plans well in advance, its endorsement of the opposition’s version of events constitutes active participation in the cover-up of the actual events in order to support the coup plotters’ version of what happened.
(...) It will probably take twenty years, as was the case with the uncovering of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende, before the full story of U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan coup is revealed.
(...) What these bits and pieces of evidence point to is a suggestive picture of direct U.S. government support for the coup. The exact extent and nature of this support will probably remain an issue of controversy for quite some time. It seems that the support was minimally in the form of supportive statements and advice on what the coup would have to look like in order for the U.S. to accept it. It seems more plausible, though, that the support was much more substantial than that and included extensive coordination between Venezuelan and U.S. coup planners, logistical military support as described by Madsen, and a plan for secretly flying Chavez to the U.S. or some other country, as happened to both President Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2005 and to General Manuel Noriega in 1990, when they were deposed with U.S. help.

mission accomplished:
Olmert's notion of "painful compromises" really means causing the Palestinians "pain" that will induce them to "compromise."
(...) In launching this new "peace process," the Bush Administration continues to provide Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestinian land with the requisite time to create further facts on the ground and stifle Palestinian aspirations for a viable, independent state. In order for this to be successful, Washington and Tel Aviv need a Palestinian leadership that will actively participate in such a charade in return for US funding and the title of President or Prime Minister. Abbas and his appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are perfectly suited for this role and are in the process of obtaining the necessary political, economic and military support from the US and Israel to maintain their positions against internal opponents, including Hamas and other members of Fatah.