from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part II)
(62): After centuries of imperialism, the new nations had been left with economies that relied on the sale of raw material and the import of finished goods. This fundamental imbalance meant that countries like Argentina had to export vast amounts of raw materials at relatively low prices, whereas their import bills would be inflated with the high prices commanded by industrially manufactured goods.
(62-63): Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina had no brief for nation building. The oligarchs... ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which mean that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina's economic strength). This detachment of the elite fueled the growth of a socialist movement... Argentina's industrialization grew in the breach, when European and US capital neglected the region for the period between the Depression of the 1920s and the wars of the 1940s... British capital owned most of Argentina's railroads and the Swiss, the United States, and the British owned almost half of its industries. The authoritarian populist Juan Peron bought the railroads from the British...
(63-64): A combination of technological advantages, unionization, and the vagaries of the prices of primary products meant that the core enjoyed a sizable gain in the "terms of trade."
(66): Why is India poor, asked Dadabhai Naoroji? It is not the pitiless operation of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of India's substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is destroying India." The Third World bled to make Europe grow. Modernization theory avoided this, and rather sought to "Protestantize" the cultures of the world to seed capitalist culture.
(66): Colonialism ravaged the world, and left more than half of it bereft of capital and with a surfeit of poverty. In 1500, the average per capita income in Europe ran only three times more than that in Africa and Asia, whereas in 1960, it was ten times greater.
(67): Prebisch rejected the theory of comparative advantage, because he demonstrated that each region of the world could enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as the others. [T]rade is crucial because some regions have smaller markets than otehrs, and raw materials and agricultural lands are not evenly distributed along national lines. But the basis of trade had to be altered. It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development.
(68): The contempt of the First World's economists was palpable. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, complained to the English government about the invitations being sent out to the darker nations for the Bretton Woods Conference. Those that had been invited from Colombia to Venezuela, from Liberia to the Philippines, he noted, "clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground." For Keynes, this is "the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years." Only technocrats from the advanced industrial states should be allowed to formulate the rules, because otherwise thsoe from the raw material states would begin to make unbearable demands.
(71): The US president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, quite forthrightly remarked, "Our foreign aid programs constitute a distinct benefit to American business. The three major benefits are (1) foreign aid provides a substantial and immediate market for United States goods and services, (2) foreign aid stimulates the development of new overseas markets for United States' companies, (3) foreign aid orients national economies toward a free enterprise system in which United States' firms can prosper.
(73): [BARAN'S CRITIQUE OF ISI] Paul Baran published The Political Economy of Growth in which he demonstrated the futility of foreign aid and the import-substitution industrialization strategy... While Baran might have overstated his thesis and the role of monopoly capitalism within the darker nations, his critique on the reliance on the growth strategy was on point. The aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. A more substantial way for development would be the destruction of feudal social relations, band by the socialization of production. These parasitic elites acceded to the Prebisch logic in order to benefit their own class interests, rather than move their societies to socialism. The cominant classes in each of these societies purchased third-rate, out-of-date plants and machinery from the advanced industrial states, and paid top dollar for them... Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World order: "We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake." What was needed alongside growth were "changes in the social structure," indeed "a complete social transformation."
(74): It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in consideration for equity.
(75): One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. Langley's man in Tehran was Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. Ordered to take out the democratically elected National Front government led by Muhammed Mosaddeq and restore the Shah of Iran, Roosevelt spread the cash and waited for it to do its magic...
(76): The Tudeh Party (heir to the Communist Party founded in 1920) had a cadre of 25,000, while its union federation boasted a membership of 335,000. The influence of the Tudeh angered the US establishment, which offered the National Front leader a choice: either crush the Communists, take US aid and remain in power, or else fall under Soviet-Communist influence. On May 2, 1953, Mosaddeq revealed the shallowness fo his class, whose investment in nationalism and national sovereignty only went as far as it would guarantee its rule and luxury; he wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he cowered, "Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration." Afraid of the Soviets, Mosaddeq crushed the Tudeh Party, thereby destroying the most organized defenders of Iranian sovereignty, and then fell before a coup engineered by the CIA's representative and a far more reliable US ally, the Shah.
(76-77): The Shah exiled tens of thousands of National Party members and Communists, and killed thousands of both... The Tudeh was paralyzed by the coup. The USSR paid it little heed, preferring to make every concession to the Shah in hopes of pacifying a border state and gaining access to the oil--all this despite the close relationship between the United States and the Shah.
(80): Although Iran had never been formerly colonized, it belonged with the hungry.... English oil firms... had dominated Iran's oil fields since 1901... Iran's government paid for the infrastructure to remove the oil, and earned a pittance from the oil company cartel. Not for nothing did Mossadeq's struggle over oil earn him the affection of the masses.
(97): Whereas when the Bolshevik Revolution took Russia out of World War I in an anti-imperialist flourish (the new government revealed the hidden imperialist correspondence of the European regimes), the Soviet state under Stalin had a much more cautious approach toward the new postcolonial states. The Soviet Union had been battered by the war... The USSR could neither afford to rest easy nor antagonize the hoards that gathered on its borders. In this vise, the USSR's principle leadership offered two contrary theses: that any entente between the United States and the USSR was "perfectly feasible" (as Stalin put it in December 1946), and that the United States and its allies were "rapacious imperialists" who were on the verge of defeat by the tide of socialism... Zhadanov's two-camp theory privileged the national Communist parties at the same time as the USSR's commissars made arrangements with bourgeois forces within the postcolonial states at the expense of the local Communists. This vacillation manifested itself in the ambiguity over the Soviet position regarding the Third World and peaceful co-existence. After the demise of Stalin, the new leadership led by Khruschchev and Bulganin adopted peaceful co-existence and pledged their support to the bourgeois nationalist regimes (often against the domestic Communists). The unclear situation suggested that the USSR seemed keener to push its own national interests than those of the national Communist parties to which it pledged verbal fealty.
(98): Secretary of State Dulles traveled to both Egypt and India in 1953. In South Asia, Dulles found Nehru "utterly impractical," whereas he enjoyed the "martial and religious qualities of the Pakistanis."
(100-101): In 1961, the other big three welcomed the representatives of twenty-two states from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to Belgrade to create NAM, an institution that gre in stregnth from conference to conference, within and without the UN, and lumbers on today. The nature of the regimes that participated in the NAM meeting reflects its limitations. With their pageantry came the monarchs... This was a mixed crowd, and its sheer political diversity made an ideologically coherent and unified stance by NAM almost impossible. NAM would remain a political platform, a sub-United Nations, but it would only be able to act in concert on two broad issues: to champion global nuclear disarmament, and to democratize the United Nations.
(103): Cabral acknowledged that while PAIGC's struggle is also the struggle "for peaceful co-existence and for peace," he made it clear that "to co-exist one must first of all exist, so the imperialists and the colonists must be forced to retreat so that we can make a contribution to human civilization, based on the work, the dynamic personality and the culture of our peoples."
(104): In early December 1964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this... As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited."
(106): Between 1900 and 1933, the US military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).
(106): For Castro, part of the problem lay in the new doctrine that had been developed by the Third World project and adopted by the Soviets, the "strange concept of peaceful co-existence for some and war for others." Castro expected NAM and the USSR to do something concrete for Vietnam as well as other colonized people.
(108): In a letter to the Tricontinental, Che asked the hardest question of all: What is the value of solidarity when the imperialist guns were not challenged? "The solidarity of the progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today," he wrote, "is similar to the bitter irony of the plebians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victims of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory."
(110): Nehru and Sukarno had been ruthless against the Communist movements in their own countries, and they were incapable of a genuine challenge to finance capital. Like Nehru and Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana enjoyed the momentum of a successful freedom struggle and disliked any opposition. His Preventive Detention Act and use of the state apparatus against the rail workers in 1961 led inexorably to the creation of a one-party state in 1964 with Nkrumah as Osagyefo or Redeemer... Nkrumah's populatrity plummeted along with world cocoa prices, and in 1966, the CIA encouraged his opposition to conduct a coup against him.
(120): The FLN's gambit succeeded politically, even if the military cost was enormous. During the course of the war, from 1954 to 1962, between three hundred thousand and a million people lost their lives. It was a heavy price to pay. All the factions within Algeria, even the liberals, lined up behind the FLN.
(123): The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrated the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party."
(125): The seven-and-a-half year war and the long period of colonial rule (1830-1962) had drained Algerian society. The FLN inherited the desiccated earth... Algeria's wealth had been siphoned off by the First World... Few factories, few schools, and few hospitals--the emblems of modernity had been built around the colonial maintenance of "tradition."...Of the twelve million Algerians, four and a half million lived in poverty, and two million had been locked in concentration camps, from which they went to abandoned herds and overgrown lands.
(127): National liberation parties that came to power without a well-honed class analysis opened themselves up to pressure from the newly confident mercantile and industrial classes, whose own position was greatly enhanced by the national liberation agenda for the domestic creation of industry, for the creation of a national economy. Although the national liberation party remained largely beholden to the bureaucratic-managerial-intellectual (sometimes military) elite, it did build close ties to the industrial class. Import-substitution type projects opened some space for institutional reform and social-development projects, but in most cases they simply protected domestic industrialists who had no long-term commitment to the Third World agenda.
(128): [IMPORTANT] Algeria followed a tradition already established and defended in large parts of postcolonial Africa, whether ruled by governments of the "Right" or the "Left"--in Guinea (1958), Congo (1960), Ivory Coast (1961), Tanzania (1963), Malawi (1963), and Kenya (1964). The defenders of the "one-party staet" argued that rival parties "have generally little interest for the great majority of the people."...The one party vision is one of fear of the people, fear that any devolution of power would lead to antinational activity... A state that acted bureaucratically on a population had a built-in tendency to rely on congealed, traditional sources of social power and control. Older forms of association returned to the fore, such as tribal and class loyalties. These power bases became indispensable for elections or the implementation of the state's development agenda. The national liberation state that came into being as the instrument of popular power now turned to the very agents who had often not supported it to enact its policies.
(129) [ATTEMPTS AT FIGHTING THE BUREAUCRACY] At the 1961 Second Congress of the Vietnam Workers' Party, Ho Chi Minh warned his party and nation about the tendency toward bureaucratization and commandism, for the bureaucratic attitude "shows in fondness for red tape, divorce from the masses of the people and reluctance to learn the experiences of the masses," while commandism did not allow the people to "work on their own initiative and own accord tand to use compulsion to do unexplained tasks." ... Che's lyrical esays on volunteerism and Communist morality come from and engendered the "work councils" that continue to be a feature of Cuban social life. Cabral's speeches on the duty of the Communist address the problem. Within a year of Guniea-Bissau's freedom from Portuguese rule, Cabral's government invited the renowned Brazilian educator Paolo Freire to visit the country, study its educational system, and provide assistance on a popular pedagogy for the creation of a nonbureaucratic society.
(132): By the late 1960s, Algeria had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military.
(136) : [BOLIVIA] The second reform came in 1953, when the MNR conducted farily extensive land redistribution on behalf of the landless labor, the campesinos. The 6 percent of the landowners who owned more than a thousand hectares, the hacendados, controlled 92 percent of the land, and they had not more than 1.5 percent of that land under cultivation... Despite the drawbacks of the revolution, Bolivia in the early 1950s was in the same sort of social ferment as Algeria a decade later. For a few years, Bolivia trod a path unfamiliar to most Third World states... From 1952 until the late 1950s, the MNR attempted to dismantle the military and hand over the power of the gun to the militias of the campesions and the tin miners, and the MNR's own grupos de honor. Its 1951 experience with the military led the MNR to shut down the Colegio Militar, dismiss a fifth of the officer corps, drastically cut the expenditure for the army from 22 percent in 1952 to 7 percent in 1957), and even consider the complete elimination of the armed forces...
(137-138) [ALAS]... the MNR had by the late 1950s already begun to build up the military and had ceaed to rely on its central allies for popular support... [Coup in 1964].
(138): The events in Bolivia replicated those elsewhere in the darker nations, from its neighbor Paraguay's 1954 coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner to the distant Thailand's 1957 coup led by Army Chief Sarit Tanarat. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, one scholar estimates that at the most two hundred coups took place in Africa and Asia as well as Central and South America.
(138-139): [THE ARMY] Where every other instituion had been batttered by colonialism and neocolonialism, the military stood out as efficient and disciplined. The bureaucracy is often poorly trained and prone to corruption, whereas the political parties are frequently, even in South America, better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance. In this situation, and with the general demobilization and disarmament of the population, the military is an obvious actor for social order. Fanon has a prescrption to prevent the golpe. "The only way to avoid this menace," he writes, "is to educate the army politically, in other words to nationalize it."... Indeed, Third World states that did not disarm the population, and that created citizens' militias and retained the population in a general political mobilization, did not succumb to coups or easy intervention by imperialism. The classic case is revolutionary Cuba.
(140): Most new nations that demobilized and disarmed their populations fell prey to military intervention, often driven by imperialist pressure.... The US-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example... Whereas the evidence of US involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the US military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973). This is the short, uncontroversial list.
(146-148): I want to distinguish betwen at least two kinds of coups: the generals' coups and the colonel's coups. All coups are structurally reactionary, because they adorn the military with the solitary role for social change... Some coups are, however, more reactionary than others. Coups that are conducted in countries that have had either a national liberation struggle... or an electoral victory against the oligarchs tend to be reacitonary. The military frequently takes power to reverse the gains... The generals often lead these goups... To the rank and file, the generals say that the revolutionary government wanted to cut back on the role of the military in social life... The aggreived military brass in Algeria (1965), Dahomey (1965), Ghana (1966), Togo (1967), Uganda (1971), and Chad (1975) [and Pakistan (1958, 1977), Chile (1973)]. (...) For states where there is no national liberation movement, and where there is no hope for social reform, the coup d'etat is often the means for aggrieved social classes within the military to asser the rule not so much of the military as for their social class. These are the colonels' coups.... The modular form of this coup is the Egyptian overthrow of the monarchy in 1952... The latest variant of the colonels' coup comes from Colonel Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 1999. The colonels' coups succumbed to their authoritarian roots in military culture... Even if the colonels' cop comes with tremendous promise, it can only momentarily deliver the administrative apparatus to energetic officers.... The military in power, as Frist shows, regardless of its motivations, freezes the political process and cuts down the ability of social movements to move the historical process in a progressive direction. Nothing good comes from a military dictatorship.
(152): Unhappy with the nationalist negotiations with the Dutch, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) urged a popular uprising agaisnt both the Dutch and the newly emergent bourgeoisie in Indonesia... The army killed many of the PKI's leaders, jailed about 36,000 people, and crushed the party into relative insignificance. The "adventure of 1948" ended swiftly. President Sukarno's rise to power came with the blood of the Communists on his hands. His fall, in 1965, would be accompanied by the murder of one or perhaps two million Communists and sympathizers. [in 1965... the party commanded the oloyalty of more than 20 million Indonesians, in a country of 110 million]
(153): The PKI followed a well-hewed analysis among Marxists across the Third World: that a relatively nonindustrial society cannot have a proletarian revolution, and so the Communist Party must work alongside progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to create democratic capitalism. When the conditions of industry are more developed, the Communists can come to state power.
Friday, February 27, 2009
from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part I)
(xvi): Thrown between these two major formations, the darker nations amassed as the Third World. Determined people struck out against colonialism to win their freedom. They demanded political equality on the world level. The main institution for this expression was the United Nations. From its inception in 1948, the United Nations played an enormous role for the bulk of the planet.
(xvii): THESIS: The Third World project came with a built-in flaw. The fight against the colonial and imperial forces enforced a unity among various political parties and across social classes. Widely popular social movements and political formations won freedom for the new nations, and then took power. Once in power, the unity that had been preserved at all costs became a liability. The working class and the peasantry in many of these movements had acceded to an alliance with the landlords and emergent industrial elites. Once the new nation came into their hands, the people believed, the new state would promote a socialist program. What they got instead was a compromise ideology called Arab Socialism, African Socialism, Sarvodaya, or NASAKOM that combined the promise of equality with the maintenance of social hierarchy. Rather than provide the means to create an entirely new society, these regimes protected the elites amongst the old social classes while producing the elements of social welfare for the people. Once in power, the old social classes exerted themselves, either through the offices of the military or the victorious people's party... By the 1970s, the new nations were no longer new... Internecine warfare, a failure to control the prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the budgets of much of the Third World... The assassination of the Third World led to the desiccation of the capacity of the state to act on behalf of the population, an end to making the case for a new international economic order, and a disavowal of the goals of socialism. Dominant classes that had once been tethered to the Third World agenda now cut loose... Atavisms of all kinds emerged to fill the space once taken up by various forms of socialism. Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage of the Third World project.
(2): Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution... The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home empty-handed.
(4): [VIETNAM] In 1945-46, thousands of French troops returned to the Red River delta in Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh and his comrades retreaded to the highlands of the Viet Bac to regroup for an extended war of liberation. This war lasted for almost a decade. But the French had an ally in another ambivalent revolutionary. By 1952, the US government had already begun to pay for almost two-thirds of the battered French military treasury's expenses. The French had to deaprt after their army suffered an embarrassing defeat from the poorly equipped but highly motivated Viet Minh at the garrison town of Dien Bien Phu (1954).
(4-5): [ALGERIA] In 1945... the French paratroopers and air force used brutal force to disband the anticolonial Algerian Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberte (Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), harass hundreds of thousands of people through the French policy of ratonnades, and kill tens of thousands of Algerians. This massacre provoked the formation of the FLN...
(5): [MADAGASCAR] And.. in 1947, when the people of Madagascar demanded their freedom...and rose in revolt, the French forces countered them with bloodthirsty violence and killed tens of thousands. The guerrilla war continued, until the French had to concede some power to the Malagasy people, but only after a decade of repression and deceit.
(6): Cesaire invokes the barbarity of Western Europe and the United States, only to stop and warn us, "I am not talking about Hitler, or the prison guard, or the adventurer, but about the 'decent fellow' across the way; not about the member of the SS, or the gangster, but about the respectable bourgeoisie."
(7): The First and Second Worlds fell out openly when US president Harry S. Truman announced his support for the anticommunist forces in Turkey and Greece (1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the conservatives defeat the popular Communists in the Italian and French elections of 1957, the USSR forced the Eastern European states into its orbit, and the animosity attained dramatic proportions during the First World's blockade of Berlin in June 1948.
(7): Goran Therborn wrote, "The Cold War was a fundamentally unequal conflict, that was presented and experienced on both sides as being equal." The USSR and the United States portrayed each other as equivalent adversaries, although the former had an economic base that was far inferior to the latter.
(8): In 1941, both the United States and the USSR had populations of about 130 million, but whereas the United States lost upward of four hundred thousand troops in the war, the Soviets lost between twenty and thirty million troops and civilians.
(9-10): Yet the Second World had an attitude toward the former colonies that in some ways mimicked that of the First World. For the founding conference of the Cominform held in Poland in 1947, the Soviets did not invite even one Communist Party from the former colonized world, and certainly not the Chinese Party... The Soviets did not see the rest of the planet as a storehouse of resources, but neither did they see it as filled with people who had fought a strong anticolonial struggle and wanted to lead their own movements, craft their own history. In answer to the formation of NATO in 1949, the USSR had created the Warsaw Pact in 1955...
(10): While there has been much deserved attention to the role of Eleanor Roosevelent for the drafting of the human rights agenda at the SF meeting, the historical record tends to underplay the crucial role played by the twenty-nine Latin American states. Cuba sent thirty-year-old Guy Perez Cisneros as its representative, and he fought doggedly for an expansive interpretation of human rights, helped along the way by the Panamanian delegation, which offered the decisive draft declarations on education, work, health care, and social security.
(11): A central character in this story is Nehru, the prime minister of the Republic of India from 1947-1964... Nehru [reiterated] the main points of the third world platform: political independence, nonviolent international relations, and the cultivation of the United Nations as the principle institution for planetary justice.
(12): [A NEW NATIONALISM?] If European nationalism took as a given that a people (who are perhaps a "race") need to be organized by a state so that their nation can come into its own, the anticolonial nationalists mostly argued that the people (who are often far too diverse to classify one way or another) need to be free of colonial rule. The formerly colonized people have at least one thing in common: they are colonized. Nehru, Sukarno, and others who had been pushed by similar social processes developed an alternative "national" theory. For them, the nation had to be constructed out of two elements :the history of their struggles against colonialism, and their program for the creation of justice. Whereas there were several limitations to their program, it was clear that few of the movements that moved toward the Third World agenda came with a theory of the nation that based itself wholly or even largely on racial or monocultural grounds... Instead they had an internationalist ethos, one that looked outward to other anticolonial nations as their fellows. The Third World form of nationalism is thus better understood as an internationalist nationalism.
(14): [THESIS]: A small, almost minuscule class became brokers between the massive social upsurge across the planet from the 1910s to the 1950s channeling that energy into the organizations they led. This group of leaders (whether India's Nehru or Indonesia's Sukarno, Mexico's Lazaro Cardenas or Ghana's Nkrumah) elaborated a set of principles that both skewered the hypocrisy of imperial liberalism and promoted social change. On paper, the Third World gleamed. As the project met governance, it began to tarnish rapidly. One of the reasons for this is that the third World failed to seriously undermine the deep roots of the landed and financial gentry in the social and political worlds that had been governed from above by imperial powers and their satraps. Without a genuine social revolution, the Third World leadership began to rely on the landed and merchant classes for it political power. Capillaries of power that provided legitimacy to the colonial rulers often transformed themselves into avenues for the delivery of votes in the new democratic dispensation.... The class character of Third World leadership constrained its horizon, even as it inflamed the possibilities in its societies. The Third World, then, is not just the voice of the leaders or their political parties but also their opposition.
(16-17): Leopold II, the second king of modern Belgium, had transformed the medieval city during his long reign (1865-1909) into a modern wonder--with wide roads, proper sewers, and a magnificent urban display... For centuries the city had been known for its textiles, lace, and glassware, and it is this craft production that the city celebrated. But by 1927, the main source of wealth for Belgium and the city was not from the artisans but from Africa. It was Africa, particularly the Congo, that made Leopold II one of the richest people on the planet, and it enable the Belgian economy to become the sixth largest in the world.
(17): The Congo Free State... was eighty times the size of Belgium.
(17): If a worker did not work hard, the officer would cut off their hand; one district official received 1,308 hands in one day from his subordinates.
(18): To supply the emergent tire industry, Leopold II's Free State, therefore, sucked the life out of the rubber vines and murdered half the Congo's population in the process (between 1885 and 1908, the population declined from twenty million to ten million).
(18): The Foreign Office in London wrote a tepid note critical of the Belgians, and Leopold II's reply rightly accused the British of hypocrisy: much of the policies followed by the Belgians in the Congo had been standard for the English elsewhere. Indeed, Casement found that British companies in the Putamayo region between Colombia and Peru followed the same kinds of barbarism, the US-based United Fruit Company in Central America pillaged the dignity of the natives there, and in Portuguese Angola as well as French and German Cameroon, the companies used much the same kind of rubber plantation regime.
(19): Between 1876 and 1915, a handful of European imperial states controlled a full quarter of the globe's land, with Great Britain and France in possession of far more than Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the states of the Iberian peninsula (the United States directly controlled a small amount, but it held sway over all the Americas).
(19): In 1908, Leopold turned over the management of the Free State to the Belgian government, and the barbarism continued until the Belgians completed their rail system in 1914 that rationalized the removal of the Congo's minerals all the way to 1961 and beyond.
(19): The conveners of the 1927 League against Imperialism conference chose Brussels deliberately.
(20): Regardless of the Comintern's vacillation over alliances with the national bourgeoisie, the general support given to national liberation movements across Asia and Africa by the Russian Communists is clear... In early 1920, delegates from across the planet gathered in Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern, where they studied the condition of imperialism and debated the effectiveness of strategies to combat it. Two divergent lines grew out of the congress--whether to ally with the national bourgeoisie and treat nationalism as a transitional phase toward socialism, or reject the national bourgeoisie and forge an international working-class alliance for socialism against the illusions of nationality.
(21): The League against Imperialism was a direct attack on the League of Nations's preservation of imperialism in its mandate system. In April 1919, the Paris Peace Conference produced the League of Nations... The "interests" of the colonized had to be curtailed, the Covenant of the League noted, because the colonized were "peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world" (Article 22).
(22): While they planned to meet frequently, this did not happen for several reasons: the Comintern took a hard position against national liberation movements in 1927, with the view that these efforts would eventually betray the working class (the Comintern revised this line in 1935)...
(25): When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the peoples under its yoke mobilized for their freedom. The "Arab Revolt" on the Arabian Peninsula (1916-1932), in Egypt (1918-1919), in Iraq (1920-1922), in Syria and Lebanon (1925-1926), in Palestine (1936-1937), and elsewhere united the Arab people not just against the Ottomans and others but also on behalf of a united Arab nation.
(27-28): These regional formations had a wide appreciation for the universal struggle against imperialism, for the need for coordination and consultation toward a just world. The best evidence for this is the enthusiasm with which each of these groups, and most of the countries within them, embraced the United Nations. It could be argued that one of the reasons for the success of the United Nations in its first three decades, unlike that of the League of Nations, is that the states of the Third World saw it as their platform. It was from the United Nations's mantle that the states of Africa, America, and Asia could articulate their Third World agenda.
(29): [CRITIQUE OF COMINTERN--V. GOOD] The Soviets and the Comintern did squander much of the goodwill gained in the immediate aftermath of Brussels by their impulsive and distancing shifts in political line. During the league's foundation, the majority opinion of the Comintern was that the Communists should work in a broad front with national liberation movements. Because of this, the Kuomintang joined the Comintern to fund the conference, and both worked together for its success. Just after the Brussels meeting, however, the Kuomintang massacred more than five thousand Communists in Shanghai and elsewhere to prolong a civil war. That the Comintern had joined forces with the Kuomintang in Brussels is astounding, but in the nationalists' postconference violence lay the seeds of the league's destruction. This and other instances led the Comintern to denounce non-communist national liberation forces, including Nehru, Roger Baldwin, and Hatta. The problem with the league's line was that it was inflexible--it chose to work with the Kuomintang before Shanghai, much to the chagrin of the Chinese Communists, and it chose to abandon its relationship with the Indian and Indonesian freedom movements even though these two did not have the kind of antipathy to the Left as the Kuomintang. In places such as India and Indonesia, anticolonial nationalism, even if led by a relatively weak national bourgeoisie, had become a powerful social force that could not be sidestepped. The context of each setting, such as the internal class alignments, did not seem to bear on the Comintern's insistence on a homogeneous strategy for world revolution.
(31): In 1955, the island of Java bore the marks not only of its 300-year colonial heritage, but also its recent and victorious anticolonial struggle.... The cry of Siaaaap (Attention!) rang out in the streets not only to the Japanese occupiers but also the British who had replaced them, and the Dutch who watied in the wings to reclaim the island. In March 1946, when it appeared as if the British would not allow the Indonesians their independence, half a million residents of Bandung abandoned their city en masse, as they set fire to warehouses, homes, and government offices.
(32): ...[W]hat is still important about Bandung is that it allowed these leaders to meet together, celebrate the demise of formal colonialism, and pledge themselves to some measure of joint struggle against the forces of imperialism. Despite the infighting..., Bandung produced something: a belief that two-thirds of the world's people had the right to return to their own burned cities, cherish them, and rebuild them in their own image.
(35): The Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), like the Congress Party and the Kuomintang, had a grab bag ideology, rooted in an anticolonial ethos, but in favor of a vague nationalism that attracted all social classes. The middle class came on board because many of them had been discriminated against in terms of administrative jobs and humiliated by the colonial hierarchy. Already veterans in the struggle for justice, the working class and the peasantry would gradually move to the PNI as it became central to the freedom struggle. Unlike the Congress Party in India that had become a mass movement by the 1920s... and unlike the Vietnamese Communist Party whose mass base emerged through diligent organizational work..., the PNI looked very much like other urban, middle-class anticolonial organizations in palaces as diverse as Peru and the Gold Coast--it developed out of an idea and reflected the views of a narrow stratum, but is platoform would soon be adopted by many beyond its original circle...
(35): Frustrated by Sukarno's actions, the Dutch administration arrested him in 1931 and held him until the Japanese invasion of the archipelago in 1942... On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno (and his associate Hatta) declared independence for Indonesia--a move delayed by the entry of British troops who had come to restore the islands to the Dutch.
(36): Sukarno stood for freedom and justice, but not necessarily for a gernal revolution...--hence the complicity of the Dutch and the PNI in the crackdown on the 1948 Communist rebellion in Madiun (which led to the execution and incarceration of scores of PKI cadre, and the suppression of the PKI in 1951-1952, when the government arrested fifteen thousand party members). Sukarno did put money into education and state industries, drawing some of the agenda from the Communists, who continued to recruit a mass party (by 1965, the PKI numbered three and a half million cadre and twenty million members in mass organizations). In 1965, at his last Independence Day ceremony before a US-backed coup ejected him, Sukarno stated, "We are now ofstering an anti-imperialist axis... He had moved closer to the Communists than he would have imagined when he first entered politics.
(38): The pro-First World states at Bandung shared at least one thing in common: they were ruled by weak national bourgeoisises that had militant mass movements within which threatened their own legitimacy and power [EXAMPLES GIVEN: Phillipines, regime of Roxas and Magsayay, challenged in Huk Rebellion of 1946-1954; Thailand, rocked by Communist insurgency in Malaysia that ran from 1948-1960; Pakistan, attempted coup by Pakistan Communist Party in 1951; Iraq, which at this time had the Arab land's largest communist party]
(40): Whatever the orientation of the states, they agreed that world peace required disarmament. During Europe's era of relative peace (1815-1914), the part of the planet under its control grew from a third to 85 percent, and Europe's military technology exerted itself on much of this newly conquered terrain.
(42): The IAEA... is a child of Bandung.
(46-47): Nowhere was the impact felt stronger than in Moscow... Nikita Krushchev and Nicolay Bulganin went on a major world tour... in 1956, the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rejected its earlier two-camp theory of the world... Some argue that the new leadership... had revised the previous commitment to the working class in the formerly colonized world and had now shifted its allgiance to the national bourgeoisie... Others contend that the policy is motivated less by any general theory of world revolution, and more by the invluence of the Chinese in the Third World.
(48): After Bandung, the US foreign policy establishment took a strong position against what it called "neutralism."
(53): The history of national liberation movements, Abdul-Rahman pointedout, often ignores the central role played by women in them, and in the liberation of women by the struggle. "The renaissance fo the Eastern woman has alwyas conincided with liberation movements," for liberation from imperialism meant that "women were emancipated from the fetters of social slavery and escaped from moral death." Within the confines allowed by imperialism, "women remained the victim of ignorance, isolation, and slavery."
(54): In 1919, Egyptian women of all classes took to the streets of Cairo to protest the British crackdown on demonstrations for a free Egypt... During the major mass protests in India in 1905, 1909, 1919, 1920-21, and 1930-31, women held the streets. Iran's constitutional movement saw women in public protest from 1907 to 1911, and again in 1919.
(56): Few of the new states that had experienced anticolonial struggles had a problem with universal adult franchise.
(59): On the more progressive side of national liberation, one finds many who argued that cultural traditions had ossified under the impact of patriarchy and feudal relations, and any opportunity to rederess this had been suffocated by imperialism's alliance with the old social classes, which benefited from misogyny and status.
(xvi): Thrown between these two major formations, the darker nations amassed as the Third World. Determined people struck out against colonialism to win their freedom. They demanded political equality on the world level. The main institution for this expression was the United Nations. From its inception in 1948, the United Nations played an enormous role for the bulk of the planet.
(xvii): THESIS: The Third World project came with a built-in flaw. The fight against the colonial and imperial forces enforced a unity among various political parties and across social classes. Widely popular social movements and political formations won freedom for the new nations, and then took power. Once in power, the unity that had been preserved at all costs became a liability. The working class and the peasantry in many of these movements had acceded to an alliance with the landlords and emergent industrial elites. Once the new nation came into their hands, the people believed, the new state would promote a socialist program. What they got instead was a compromise ideology called Arab Socialism, African Socialism, Sarvodaya, or NASAKOM that combined the promise of equality with the maintenance of social hierarchy. Rather than provide the means to create an entirely new society, these regimes protected the elites amongst the old social classes while producing the elements of social welfare for the people. Once in power, the old social classes exerted themselves, either through the offices of the military or the victorious people's party... By the 1970s, the new nations were no longer new... Internecine warfare, a failure to control the prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the budgets of much of the Third World... The assassination of the Third World led to the desiccation of the capacity of the state to act on behalf of the population, an end to making the case for a new international economic order, and a disavowal of the goals of socialism. Dominant classes that had once been tethered to the Third World agenda now cut loose... Atavisms of all kinds emerged to fill the space once taken up by various forms of socialism. Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage of the Third World project.
(2): Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution... The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home empty-handed.
(4): [VIETNAM] In 1945-46, thousands of French troops returned to the Red River delta in Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh and his comrades retreaded to the highlands of the Viet Bac to regroup for an extended war of liberation. This war lasted for almost a decade. But the French had an ally in another ambivalent revolutionary. By 1952, the US government had already begun to pay for almost two-thirds of the battered French military treasury's expenses. The French had to deaprt after their army suffered an embarrassing defeat from the poorly equipped but highly motivated Viet Minh at the garrison town of Dien Bien Phu (1954).
(4-5): [ALGERIA] In 1945... the French paratroopers and air force used brutal force to disband the anticolonial Algerian Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberte (Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), harass hundreds of thousands of people through the French policy of ratonnades, and kill tens of thousands of Algerians. This massacre provoked the formation of the FLN...
(5): [MADAGASCAR] And.. in 1947, when the people of Madagascar demanded their freedom...and rose in revolt, the French forces countered them with bloodthirsty violence and killed tens of thousands. The guerrilla war continued, until the French had to concede some power to the Malagasy people, but only after a decade of repression and deceit.
(6): Cesaire invokes the barbarity of Western Europe and the United States, only to stop and warn us, "I am not talking about Hitler, or the prison guard, or the adventurer, but about the 'decent fellow' across the way; not about the member of the SS, or the gangster, but about the respectable bourgeoisie."
(7): The First and Second Worlds fell out openly when US president Harry S. Truman announced his support for the anticommunist forces in Turkey and Greece (1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the conservatives defeat the popular Communists in the Italian and French elections of 1957, the USSR forced the Eastern European states into its orbit, and the animosity attained dramatic proportions during the First World's blockade of Berlin in June 1948.
(7): Goran Therborn wrote, "The Cold War was a fundamentally unequal conflict, that was presented and experienced on both sides as being equal." The USSR and the United States portrayed each other as equivalent adversaries, although the former had an economic base that was far inferior to the latter.
(8): In 1941, both the United States and the USSR had populations of about 130 million, but whereas the United States lost upward of four hundred thousand troops in the war, the Soviets lost between twenty and thirty million troops and civilians.
(9-10): Yet the Second World had an attitude toward the former colonies that in some ways mimicked that of the First World. For the founding conference of the Cominform held in Poland in 1947, the Soviets did not invite even one Communist Party from the former colonized world, and certainly not the Chinese Party... The Soviets did not see the rest of the planet as a storehouse of resources, but neither did they see it as filled with people who had fought a strong anticolonial struggle and wanted to lead their own movements, craft their own history. In answer to the formation of NATO in 1949, the USSR had created the Warsaw Pact in 1955...
(10): While there has been much deserved attention to the role of Eleanor Roosevelent for the drafting of the human rights agenda at the SF meeting, the historical record tends to underplay the crucial role played by the twenty-nine Latin American states. Cuba sent thirty-year-old Guy Perez Cisneros as its representative, and he fought doggedly for an expansive interpretation of human rights, helped along the way by the Panamanian delegation, which offered the decisive draft declarations on education, work, health care, and social security.
(11): A central character in this story is Nehru, the prime minister of the Republic of India from 1947-1964... Nehru [reiterated] the main points of the third world platform: political independence, nonviolent international relations, and the cultivation of the United Nations as the principle institution for planetary justice.
(12): [A NEW NATIONALISM?] If European nationalism took as a given that a people (who are perhaps a "race") need to be organized by a state so that their nation can come into its own, the anticolonial nationalists mostly argued that the people (who are often far too diverse to classify one way or another) need to be free of colonial rule. The formerly colonized people have at least one thing in common: they are colonized. Nehru, Sukarno, and others who had been pushed by similar social processes developed an alternative "national" theory. For them, the nation had to be constructed out of two elements :the history of their struggles against colonialism, and their program for the creation of justice. Whereas there were several limitations to their program, it was clear that few of the movements that moved toward the Third World agenda came with a theory of the nation that based itself wholly or even largely on racial or monocultural grounds... Instead they had an internationalist ethos, one that looked outward to other anticolonial nations as their fellows. The Third World form of nationalism is thus better understood as an internationalist nationalism.
(14): [THESIS]: A small, almost minuscule class became brokers between the massive social upsurge across the planet from the 1910s to the 1950s channeling that energy into the organizations they led. This group of leaders (whether India's Nehru or Indonesia's Sukarno, Mexico's Lazaro Cardenas or Ghana's Nkrumah) elaborated a set of principles that both skewered the hypocrisy of imperial liberalism and promoted social change. On paper, the Third World gleamed. As the project met governance, it began to tarnish rapidly. One of the reasons for this is that the third World failed to seriously undermine the deep roots of the landed and financial gentry in the social and political worlds that had been governed from above by imperial powers and their satraps. Without a genuine social revolution, the Third World leadership began to rely on the landed and merchant classes for it political power. Capillaries of power that provided legitimacy to the colonial rulers often transformed themselves into avenues for the delivery of votes in the new democratic dispensation.... The class character of Third World leadership constrained its horizon, even as it inflamed the possibilities in its societies. The Third World, then, is not just the voice of the leaders or their political parties but also their opposition.
(16-17): Leopold II, the second king of modern Belgium, had transformed the medieval city during his long reign (1865-1909) into a modern wonder--with wide roads, proper sewers, and a magnificent urban display... For centuries the city had been known for its textiles, lace, and glassware, and it is this craft production that the city celebrated. But by 1927, the main source of wealth for Belgium and the city was not from the artisans but from Africa. It was Africa, particularly the Congo, that made Leopold II one of the richest people on the planet, and it enable the Belgian economy to become the sixth largest in the world.
(17): The Congo Free State... was eighty times the size of Belgium.
(17): If a worker did not work hard, the officer would cut off their hand; one district official received 1,308 hands in one day from his subordinates.
(18): To supply the emergent tire industry, Leopold II's Free State, therefore, sucked the life out of the rubber vines and murdered half the Congo's population in the process (between 1885 and 1908, the population declined from twenty million to ten million).
(18): The Foreign Office in London wrote a tepid note critical of the Belgians, and Leopold II's reply rightly accused the British of hypocrisy: much of the policies followed by the Belgians in the Congo had been standard for the English elsewhere. Indeed, Casement found that British companies in the Putamayo region between Colombia and Peru followed the same kinds of barbarism, the US-based United Fruit Company in Central America pillaged the dignity of the natives there, and in Portuguese Angola as well as French and German Cameroon, the companies used much the same kind of rubber plantation regime.
(19): Between 1876 and 1915, a handful of European imperial states controlled a full quarter of the globe's land, with Great Britain and France in possession of far more than Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the states of the Iberian peninsula (the United States directly controlled a small amount, but it held sway over all the Americas).
(19): In 1908, Leopold turned over the management of the Free State to the Belgian government, and the barbarism continued until the Belgians completed their rail system in 1914 that rationalized the removal of the Congo's minerals all the way to 1961 and beyond.
(19): The conveners of the 1927 League against Imperialism conference chose Brussels deliberately.
(20): Regardless of the Comintern's vacillation over alliances with the national bourgeoisie, the general support given to national liberation movements across Asia and Africa by the Russian Communists is clear... In early 1920, delegates from across the planet gathered in Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern, where they studied the condition of imperialism and debated the effectiveness of strategies to combat it. Two divergent lines grew out of the congress--whether to ally with the national bourgeoisie and treat nationalism as a transitional phase toward socialism, or reject the national bourgeoisie and forge an international working-class alliance for socialism against the illusions of nationality.
(21): The League against Imperialism was a direct attack on the League of Nations's preservation of imperialism in its mandate system. In April 1919, the Paris Peace Conference produced the League of Nations... The "interests" of the colonized had to be curtailed, the Covenant of the League noted, because the colonized were "peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world" (Article 22).
(22): While they planned to meet frequently, this did not happen for several reasons: the Comintern took a hard position against national liberation movements in 1927, with the view that these efforts would eventually betray the working class (the Comintern revised this line in 1935)...
(25): When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the peoples under its yoke mobilized for their freedom. The "Arab Revolt" on the Arabian Peninsula (1916-1932), in Egypt (1918-1919), in Iraq (1920-1922), in Syria and Lebanon (1925-1926), in Palestine (1936-1937), and elsewhere united the Arab people not just against the Ottomans and others but also on behalf of a united Arab nation.
(27-28): These regional formations had a wide appreciation for the universal struggle against imperialism, for the need for coordination and consultation toward a just world. The best evidence for this is the enthusiasm with which each of these groups, and most of the countries within them, embraced the United Nations. It could be argued that one of the reasons for the success of the United Nations in its first three decades, unlike that of the League of Nations, is that the states of the Third World saw it as their platform. It was from the United Nations's mantle that the states of Africa, America, and Asia could articulate their Third World agenda.
(29): [CRITIQUE OF COMINTERN--V. GOOD] The Soviets and the Comintern did squander much of the goodwill gained in the immediate aftermath of Brussels by their impulsive and distancing shifts in political line. During the league's foundation, the majority opinion of the Comintern was that the Communists should work in a broad front with national liberation movements. Because of this, the Kuomintang joined the Comintern to fund the conference, and both worked together for its success. Just after the Brussels meeting, however, the Kuomintang massacred more than five thousand Communists in Shanghai and elsewhere to prolong a civil war. That the Comintern had joined forces with the Kuomintang in Brussels is astounding, but in the nationalists' postconference violence lay the seeds of the league's destruction. This and other instances led the Comintern to denounce non-communist national liberation forces, including Nehru, Roger Baldwin, and Hatta. The problem with the league's line was that it was inflexible--it chose to work with the Kuomintang before Shanghai, much to the chagrin of the Chinese Communists, and it chose to abandon its relationship with the Indian and Indonesian freedom movements even though these two did not have the kind of antipathy to the Left as the Kuomintang. In places such as India and Indonesia, anticolonial nationalism, even if led by a relatively weak national bourgeoisie, had become a powerful social force that could not be sidestepped. The context of each setting, such as the internal class alignments, did not seem to bear on the Comintern's insistence on a homogeneous strategy for world revolution.
(31): In 1955, the island of Java bore the marks not only of its 300-year colonial heritage, but also its recent and victorious anticolonial struggle.... The cry of Siaaaap (Attention!) rang out in the streets not only to the Japanese occupiers but also the British who had replaced them, and the Dutch who watied in the wings to reclaim the island. In March 1946, when it appeared as if the British would not allow the Indonesians their independence, half a million residents of Bandung abandoned their city en masse, as they set fire to warehouses, homes, and government offices.
(32): ...[W]hat is still important about Bandung is that it allowed these leaders to meet together, celebrate the demise of formal colonialism, and pledge themselves to some measure of joint struggle against the forces of imperialism. Despite the infighting..., Bandung produced something: a belief that two-thirds of the world's people had the right to return to their own burned cities, cherish them, and rebuild them in their own image.
(35): The Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), like the Congress Party and the Kuomintang, had a grab bag ideology, rooted in an anticolonial ethos, but in favor of a vague nationalism that attracted all social classes. The middle class came on board because many of them had been discriminated against in terms of administrative jobs and humiliated by the colonial hierarchy. Already veterans in the struggle for justice, the working class and the peasantry would gradually move to the PNI as it became central to the freedom struggle. Unlike the Congress Party in India that had become a mass movement by the 1920s... and unlike the Vietnamese Communist Party whose mass base emerged through diligent organizational work..., the PNI looked very much like other urban, middle-class anticolonial organizations in palaces as diverse as Peru and the Gold Coast--it developed out of an idea and reflected the views of a narrow stratum, but is platoform would soon be adopted by many beyond its original circle...
(35): Frustrated by Sukarno's actions, the Dutch administration arrested him in 1931 and held him until the Japanese invasion of the archipelago in 1942... On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno (and his associate Hatta) declared independence for Indonesia--a move delayed by the entry of British troops who had come to restore the islands to the Dutch.
(36): Sukarno stood for freedom and justice, but not necessarily for a gernal revolution...--hence the complicity of the Dutch and the PNI in the crackdown on the 1948 Communist rebellion in Madiun (which led to the execution and incarceration of scores of PKI cadre, and the suppression of the PKI in 1951-1952, when the government arrested fifteen thousand party members). Sukarno did put money into education and state industries, drawing some of the agenda from the Communists, who continued to recruit a mass party (by 1965, the PKI numbered three and a half million cadre and twenty million members in mass organizations). In 1965, at his last Independence Day ceremony before a US-backed coup ejected him, Sukarno stated, "We are now ofstering an anti-imperialist axis... He had moved closer to the Communists than he would have imagined when he first entered politics.
(38): The pro-First World states at Bandung shared at least one thing in common: they were ruled by weak national bourgeoisises that had militant mass movements within which threatened their own legitimacy and power [EXAMPLES GIVEN: Phillipines, regime of Roxas and Magsayay, challenged in Huk Rebellion of 1946-1954; Thailand, rocked by Communist insurgency in Malaysia that ran from 1948-1960; Pakistan, attempted coup by Pakistan Communist Party in 1951; Iraq, which at this time had the Arab land's largest communist party]
(40): Whatever the orientation of the states, they agreed that world peace required disarmament. During Europe's era of relative peace (1815-1914), the part of the planet under its control grew from a third to 85 percent, and Europe's military technology exerted itself on much of this newly conquered terrain.
(42): The IAEA... is a child of Bandung.
(46-47): Nowhere was the impact felt stronger than in Moscow... Nikita Krushchev and Nicolay Bulganin went on a major world tour... in 1956, the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rejected its earlier two-camp theory of the world... Some argue that the new leadership... had revised the previous commitment to the working class in the formerly colonized world and had now shifted its allgiance to the national bourgeoisie... Others contend that the policy is motivated less by any general theory of world revolution, and more by the invluence of the Chinese in the Third World.
(48): After Bandung, the US foreign policy establishment took a strong position against what it called "neutralism."
(53): The history of national liberation movements, Abdul-Rahman pointedout, often ignores the central role played by women in them, and in the liberation of women by the struggle. "The renaissance fo the Eastern woman has alwyas conincided with liberation movements," for liberation from imperialism meant that "women were emancipated from the fetters of social slavery and escaped from moral death." Within the confines allowed by imperialism, "women remained the victim of ignorance, isolation, and slavery."
(54): In 1919, Egyptian women of all classes took to the streets of Cairo to protest the British crackdown on demonstrations for a free Egypt... During the major mass protests in India in 1905, 1909, 1919, 1920-21, and 1930-31, women held the streets. Iran's constitutional movement saw women in public protest from 1907 to 1911, and again in 1919.
(56): Few of the new states that had experienced anticolonial struggles had a problem with universal adult franchise.
(59): On the more progressive side of national liberation, one finds many who argued that cultural traditions had ossified under the impact of patriarchy and feudal relations, and any opportunity to rederess this had been suffocated by imperialism's alliance with the old social classes, which benefited from misogyny and status.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part VI)
(224): The movement of settlers into the Occupied Territories took place in phases, accelerating with each successive one. Settlers numbered an estimated forty-six thousand by 1984, the end of the decade that followed the Yom Kippur War. By the time the Oslo Accord was signed a little less than ten years later, in 1993, there were roughly 200,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories. The irony is that the flow increased after the Oslo Accord. In the third decade, by the end of 2002, the number of settlers had doubled, to nearly 400,000---including those in East Jerusalem, now claimed by Israel. A recent israeli human-rights report notes that Israeli settlements now control almost 42 percent of the West Bank, not including Palestinian East Jerusalem.
(231): Political terror comes out of a government's or guerilla movement's failure to win civilian support. The most obvious link is with the practice of counterinsurgency that the British pioneered in their Malaysian colony during the Second World War and that Samuel Huntington advised America to emulate during the Vietnam War. Huntington called for the creation of strategic hamlets, to which to relocate the population sympathetic to the Viet Cong, so as to detach guerrilas from the population on which they had come to depend for support. Counterinsurgency turned the theory of guerrilla struggle on its head. If guerrillas claimed to be waging a political struggle with arms, moving through the population with the ease of fish in water, to use Mao's metaphor--and not a conventional war in which one could easily separate soldiers from civilians--then the point of counterinsurgency was first to drain the water so as to isolate the fish. Counterinsurgency, however, did not work as long as guerillas actually enjoyed the political support of part of the civilian population. So civilians had to be targeted militarily and intimidated into submission.
(234): The second cost of the Afghan war arose because the United States and its allies created, trained, and sustained an infrastructure of terror, international in scope, free of any effective state control, and wrapped up in the language of religious war.
(235): The third cost... was the development of a parallel infrastructrue of criminality connected with the international development of an illicit drug trade. The simple fact the government had to face was that if you decide to wage war without legislative consent, then you are likely to be short of funds.
(236): When it came to the contra war and CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, the consequences were direct. Between 1982 and 1985, the number of cocaine users in the United States rose by 38 percent to 5.8 million, more than ten times the number of heroin addicts.
(239): Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.
(242): US-Israeli relations have gone through different phases since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Relations were the most stretched during the 1956 Suez Crisis when Israel, along with Britain and France, was forced to acknowledge America's rise as the hegemonic Western power. It is only after 1967, and more so 1973, that we can speak of the building of a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel.
(246): Who can forget that apartheid South Africa claimed to be "the only democracy in Africa," just as Israel today claims to be "the only democracy in the Middle East"? This is not entirely a hozx, but neither does it reflect the whole truth... The larger truth... is that the "civilizing mission" was never meant to include all the natives. It was never meant to generalize the regime of rights or democracy to natives. The whole truth is that, just as the colony of Liberia and apartheid South Africa, Zionist Israel, too, reflects a contradictory unity, a democratic despotism, in a single space.
(249): At the same time, the founders of Israel considered themselves secular Jews, as the founders of Pakistan were self-declared secular Muslims. The shift from a secular to a religious Zionism in Israel under Begin, just as the Islamization of the Pakistani state, under Zia, occurred under the protective American umbrella during the Cold War.
(252): Rather than argue whether terrorism is a foreign import or a homegrown product, I have tried to point up the relationship between the two: the homegrown product could not have flourished except in a global environment where at least one superpower turned a blind eye to "its" terror.
(252): Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, 1 million died, another 1.5 million were maimed, another 5 million became refugees, and just about everyone was internally displaced. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half went clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world. Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the American bombing began.
(255): If state terror claims to be an exercise in maintaining law and order, societal terror presents itself as a fight for justice. I have stressed the importance of grasping the relation between the two.
(260): To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live with it.
(224): The movement of settlers into the Occupied Territories took place in phases, accelerating with each successive one. Settlers numbered an estimated forty-six thousand by 1984, the end of the decade that followed the Yom Kippur War. By the time the Oslo Accord was signed a little less than ten years later, in 1993, there were roughly 200,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories. The irony is that the flow increased after the Oslo Accord. In the third decade, by the end of 2002, the number of settlers had doubled, to nearly 400,000---including those in East Jerusalem, now claimed by Israel. A recent israeli human-rights report notes that Israeli settlements now control almost 42 percent of the West Bank, not including Palestinian East Jerusalem.
(231): Political terror comes out of a government's or guerilla movement's failure to win civilian support. The most obvious link is with the practice of counterinsurgency that the British pioneered in their Malaysian colony during the Second World War and that Samuel Huntington advised America to emulate during the Vietnam War. Huntington called for the creation of strategic hamlets, to which to relocate the population sympathetic to the Viet Cong, so as to detach guerrilas from the population on which they had come to depend for support. Counterinsurgency turned the theory of guerrilla struggle on its head. If guerrillas claimed to be waging a political struggle with arms, moving through the population with the ease of fish in water, to use Mao's metaphor--and not a conventional war in which one could easily separate soldiers from civilians--then the point of counterinsurgency was first to drain the water so as to isolate the fish. Counterinsurgency, however, did not work as long as guerillas actually enjoyed the political support of part of the civilian population. So civilians had to be targeted militarily and intimidated into submission.
(234): The second cost of the Afghan war arose because the United States and its allies created, trained, and sustained an infrastructure of terror, international in scope, free of any effective state control, and wrapped up in the language of religious war.
(235): The third cost... was the development of a parallel infrastructrue of criminality connected with the international development of an illicit drug trade. The simple fact the government had to face was that if you decide to wage war without legislative consent, then you are likely to be short of funds.
(236): When it came to the contra war and CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, the consequences were direct. Between 1982 and 1985, the number of cocaine users in the United States rose by 38 percent to 5.8 million, more than ten times the number of heroin addicts.
(239): Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.
(242): US-Israeli relations have gone through different phases since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Relations were the most stretched during the 1956 Suez Crisis when Israel, along with Britain and France, was forced to acknowledge America's rise as the hegemonic Western power. It is only after 1967, and more so 1973, that we can speak of the building of a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel.
(246): Who can forget that apartheid South Africa claimed to be "the only democracy in Africa," just as Israel today claims to be "the only democracy in the Middle East"? This is not entirely a hozx, but neither does it reflect the whole truth... The larger truth... is that the "civilizing mission" was never meant to include all the natives. It was never meant to generalize the regime of rights or democracy to natives. The whole truth is that, just as the colony of Liberia and apartheid South Africa, Zionist Israel, too, reflects a contradictory unity, a democratic despotism, in a single space.
(249): At the same time, the founders of Israel considered themselves secular Jews, as the founders of Pakistan were self-declared secular Muslims. The shift from a secular to a religious Zionism in Israel under Begin, just as the Islamization of the Pakistani state, under Zia, occurred under the protective American umbrella during the Cold War.
(252): Rather than argue whether terrorism is a foreign import or a homegrown product, I have tried to point up the relationship between the two: the homegrown product could not have flourished except in a global environment where at least one superpower turned a blind eye to "its" terror.
(252): Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, 1 million died, another 1.5 million were maimed, another 5 million became refugees, and just about everyone was internally displaced. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half went clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world. Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the American bombing began.
(255): If state terror claims to be an exercise in maintaining law and order, societal terror presents itself as a fight for justice. I have stressed the importance of grasping the relation between the two.
(260): To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live with it.
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part V)
(159): As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar's forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar.
(161): An old man in a mosque in Kandahar...confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmed, "They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life."
(172): The shift in Hizbullah's ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi'a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation.
(172): The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without.
(175): One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam--opium production, madrasah education, and the very notion of jihad--to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the "evil empire."
(181): On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic US support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT reported that "the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988." Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published int he late 1960s noted that "the US army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological, and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.
(183): [on Iran-Iraq] The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: "We hope they kill one another."
(183): Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: "to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the 'collateral damage.'"... Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law," from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq's infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties... Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor... reported that the bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq--electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry, and health care."
(184): But George H.W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam... [He] faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized... to take advantage of Saddam's overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally... On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq's majority Shi'a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America's hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.
(185): By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the WSJ they would soon run out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse." That was two months before President Clinton... decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16,1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox...
(185-186): The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used 14 times, 12 of those since the collapse of the USSR. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a US veto.
(186-187): As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to an agreement on an oil-for-food program.... Iraq was allowed to sell a net amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Brtain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25% thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Comission on the... noted, "Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs..."
(187-188): The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge... was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur... was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions.
(189): Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention... By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Comission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths "directly attributed to the sanctions" ranged "from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children." Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic bomb attacks.
(190): How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long?... The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council 661 Committee... to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country... [T]he reason it gave most often was concern over dual use... [A]s of September 2001, the United States had blocked "nearly 200 humanitarian contracts." The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were "a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
(191-192): Forced to take reponsibility for a policy they could neither defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Dennis Halliday..., declaring: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
(194): Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement.
(199): Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
(204-205): It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington's patience ran out. He criticized Washington's preoccupation with Bosnia--"a war of the rich"--and its neglect of Somalia, where "one third of the population was likely to die of hunger," and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of "standing idly by"... In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan... Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali.
(210): The United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court's attention to the year's of US carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.
(215): In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: "They are products of a culture... in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
(217): Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective greivances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgement that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds.
(222): We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life--both our own and that of others--to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.
(159): As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar's forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar.
(161): An old man in a mosque in Kandahar...confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmed, "They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life."
(172): The shift in Hizbullah's ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi'a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation.
(172): The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without.
(175): One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam--opium production, madrasah education, and the very notion of jihad--to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the "evil empire."
(181): On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic US support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT reported that "the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988." Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published int he late 1960s noted that "the US army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological, and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.
(183): [on Iran-Iraq] The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: "We hope they kill one another."
(183): Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: "to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the 'collateral damage.'"... Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law," from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq's infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties... Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor... reported that the bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq--electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry, and health care."
(184): But George H.W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam... [He] faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized... to take advantage of Saddam's overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally... On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq's majority Shi'a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America's hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.
(185): By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the WSJ they would soon run out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse." That was two months before President Clinton... decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16,1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox...
(185-186): The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used 14 times, 12 of those since the collapse of the USSR. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a US veto.
(186-187): As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to an agreement on an oil-for-food program.... Iraq was allowed to sell a net amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Brtain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25% thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Comission on the... noted, "Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs..."
(187-188): The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge... was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur... was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions.
(189): Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention... By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Comission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths "directly attributed to the sanctions" ranged "from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children." Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic bomb attacks.
(190): How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long?... The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council 661 Committee... to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country... [T]he reason it gave most often was concern over dual use... [A]s of September 2001, the United States had blocked "nearly 200 humanitarian contracts." The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were "a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
(191-192): Forced to take reponsibility for a policy they could neither defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Dennis Halliday..., declaring: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
(194): Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement.
(199): Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
(204-205): It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington's patience ran out. He criticized Washington's preoccupation with Bosnia--"a war of the rich"--and its neglect of Somalia, where "one third of the population was likely to die of hunger," and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of "standing idly by"... In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan... Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali.
(210): The United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court's attention to the year's of US carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.
(215): In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: "They are products of a culture... in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
(217): Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective greivances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgement that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds.
(222): We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life--both our own and that of others--to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part IV)
(137): The madrassahs were both private and government-funded, and ranged from those who thought of Islamic piety in religious terms to those for whom Islam was also a political calling. In spite of their proliferation, military training was mainly carried out in army camps. The trainees were divided into two groups: Afghan mujahideen and non-Afghan jihadi volunteers. Brigadier Muhammad Yusuf, a chief of the Afghan cell of ISI for four years, confirmed: "During my four years, some 80,000 mujahideen were trained." Ahmed Rashid estimates that 35,000 Muslim radicals from forty-three Islamic countries fought for the mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. United States authorities estaimated that "at least 10,000" received "some degree of military training." A LA Times team of reporters that did a four-continent survey of the Afghan jihad estimated that "no more than 5,000 had actualy fought." Between the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul's Communist government in April 1992, another round of "at least 2,500 foreigners" recieved "military instruction of some sort." That made for a total of 7,500, no mean figure... Around this core was a larger group: tens of thousands more studied in the thousands of new madrassahs in Pakistan. Eventually, Rashid concludes, "more than a hundred thousand Muslim radicals around the world had direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan."
(138): The real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and money but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence--the formation of private militias--capable of creating terror.
(141): Steve Galster at the National Security Archive calculated that Congress ultimately provided "nearly 3 billion dollars in covert aid for the mujahideen, more than all other CIA covert operations in the 1980s combined."
(141-142): Besides these external funds, there were the funds generated by the drug trade... Alfred McCoy traced the different steps in the drug economy, beginning with peasant production: "As the Mujahideen guerillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax." It no doubt helped that for the grower the price of opium was five times that for wheat. Also, there was no dearth of processing facilities: "Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories." Writing in The Nation in 1988, Lawrence Lifschultz pointed out that the heroin laboratories, located in North-West Frontier Province, were operated under the protection of General Fazle Haq, an intimate of General Zia. The next link in the chain was transport, which was provided by trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell (NLC)... Finally, the CIA provided the legal cover without which this illict trade could not have grown to monumental proportions.
(143): Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The production there was of opium, a very different drug, which was directed to small, rural, regional markets. By the end of the Afghan jihad, the picture had changed drastically: the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands becamed the world's leading producers of both opium and processed heroin, the source of "75 percent of the world's opium"... The big push came after 1985. Accounting for less than 5 % of global opium production in 1980, the region accounted for 71 percent of it by 1990, according to this same report.
(143): The worst... was Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who received more than half of CIA covert resources, estimated to be worth $2 billion over the ten-year war, and quickly came to dominate the Afghan mujahideen... Hikmatyar became the Pakistani army's favorite "contract revolutionary." When introduced to the CIA by the ISI, HIkmatyar was leading an armed guerilla force called Hizb-i-Islami, a creation of the ISI that had little support inside Afghanistan... With a guaranteed long-term subsidy, the Hizb-i-Islami grew into the mujahideen's "largest guerilla army," one that Hikmatyar used "to become Afghanistan's leading drug lord."
(143): Hikmatyar's chief rival was Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, known as the "King of Heroin."... [He] decreed that half of all peasant holdings be planted to opium. He "issued opium quotas to every landowner" and responded "by killing or castrating those who defied his directives."
(150): The Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islam (JUI), a key party in the alliance behind the Afghan jihad, became a part of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's governing coalition in 1993. The JUI was the party of Pakistani Deobandis and was the sponsor of the Taliban, the ideological product of Deobandi madrassahs. Entry into government gave the JUI its first opportunity to build close relations with both the ISI and the army. The harvest came soon after: when the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1995, they handed over the training camps to the JUI.
(153): ...heroin-addicted population had gone from negligible in 1979 to 1.3 million by 1985...
(153): There were seven mujahideen groups in all. They reflected every kind of fisssure, internal and external, to which the Afghan resistance was subject. The internal differences in the Afghan jihad were of two different kinds. Teh first involved regional (north vs. south), linguistic (Farsi vs. Pashtun), and ethnic (Pashtun vs. non-Pashtun) differences... A different kind of internal division arose from doctrinal differences, as between Shi'a and Sunni... The overriding ideological difference among the seven mujahideen groups was between two political points of view: traditionalist nationalists and Islamist ideologues. The traditionalists generally came from the religious leadership, whereas the ideologues came mainly from the ranks of political intellectuals.
(154): Two political objectives, one regional, the other global, shaped US policy in Afghanisan. The regional objective was to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution. This was accomplished with two regional alliances against Iran, one with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the other with Iraq. Whereas the United States saw Islamist social movements as a threat, it was eager to reinforce Islamist--Sunni, not Shi'a--state projects. The American strategy provided a political opening for the intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to promote exaggeratedly anti-Shi'a Sunni doctrines, chief among them the Wahhabi doctrine from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi doctrine from Pakistan.
(154-155): ...the Regan administration showed no interest in a negotiated or compromise settlement. It wanted to ally itself with internationalist, militantly anti-Communist Islamist ideologues rather than moderately pragmatic Muslims, a view shared by the ISI.
(156): The seven resistance groups that made up the Afghan jihad were divded into two opposing political constellations, one traditional-nationalist, the other Islamist... The leadership of the traditionalist bloc came from the historic elite of Afghanistan, who were either heads of the Sufi orders or traditional alims versed in Islamic jurisprudence. None of these three mainstream groups received extrenal assistance of any significance. The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, led by the head of the Qadariyya Sufi order, was considered too "nationalist" and "insufficiently Islami" to recieve funds. The Afghan National Liberation Front was led by the family that headed the Naqshbandi tariqa. It was more of a centrist group..."hardly existed as a military force." The only traditional-nationalist group with a military presence on the ground was called the Movement of the Islamic Revolution... its commanders (in particular, Mullah Masim Akhundzada of the Helmland Valley) were also among the largest drug lords inside Afghanistan.... ...Leaders of the four Islamist groups came from students and faculty active in the Jamiat-i-Islami, the parent Islamist organization at Kabul University in the 1970s. The first split from the Jamiat came in 1975 and led to the formation of Hikmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami (Hizb). A later split from the Hizb led to the creation of the Khalis faction. The fourth Islamist organization was led by Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, who had studiet at Al-Azhar... The key parties in the Islamist constellation were the Jamiat and the Hizb. After the split with the Hizb, Jamiat had turned into the "main voice for non-Pashtuns, especially Persian speakers."... Led by the most successful of the commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Jamiat developed into "the most powerful party of the resistance" over the course of the war. In spite of that, the Jamiat was not the preferred recipient for CIA support. There was one important reason for this: Jamiat respresented the moderate center...
(159): The United States and its allies had to continue to support a myriad of groups if only to ensure that the jihad continued to have an even chance. The support of different groups turned out to be support for several wars fought by rival groups. This is why as soon as the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan and victory seemed at hand, the CIA-supported jihad mutated into a civil war. With the traditionalists marginalized, the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 led to a turf battle between different Islamist groups, pitting the extremists led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Hizb against the moderates in the Jamiat led by Burhaneddin Rabbani and his spectacularly successful field commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud.
(137): The madrassahs were both private and government-funded, and ranged from those who thought of Islamic piety in religious terms to those for whom Islam was also a political calling. In spite of their proliferation, military training was mainly carried out in army camps. The trainees were divided into two groups: Afghan mujahideen and non-Afghan jihadi volunteers. Brigadier Muhammad Yusuf, a chief of the Afghan cell of ISI for four years, confirmed: "During my four years, some 80,000 mujahideen were trained." Ahmed Rashid estimates that 35,000 Muslim radicals from forty-three Islamic countries fought for the mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. United States authorities estaimated that "at least 10,000" received "some degree of military training." A LA Times team of reporters that did a four-continent survey of the Afghan jihad estimated that "no more than 5,000 had actualy fought." Between the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul's Communist government in April 1992, another round of "at least 2,500 foreigners" recieved "military instruction of some sort." That made for a total of 7,500, no mean figure... Around this core was a larger group: tens of thousands more studied in the thousands of new madrassahs in Pakistan. Eventually, Rashid concludes, "more than a hundred thousand Muslim radicals around the world had direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan."
(138): The real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and money but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence--the formation of private militias--capable of creating terror.
(141): Steve Galster at the National Security Archive calculated that Congress ultimately provided "nearly 3 billion dollars in covert aid for the mujahideen, more than all other CIA covert operations in the 1980s combined."
(141-142): Besides these external funds, there were the funds generated by the drug trade... Alfred McCoy traced the different steps in the drug economy, beginning with peasant production: "As the Mujahideen guerillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax." It no doubt helped that for the grower the price of opium was five times that for wheat. Also, there was no dearth of processing facilities: "Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories." Writing in The Nation in 1988, Lawrence Lifschultz pointed out that the heroin laboratories, located in North-West Frontier Province, were operated under the protection of General Fazle Haq, an intimate of General Zia. The next link in the chain was transport, which was provided by trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell (NLC)... Finally, the CIA provided the legal cover without which this illict trade could not have grown to monumental proportions.
(143): Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The production there was of opium, a very different drug, which was directed to small, rural, regional markets. By the end of the Afghan jihad, the picture had changed drastically: the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands becamed the world's leading producers of both opium and processed heroin, the source of "75 percent of the world's opium"... The big push came after 1985. Accounting for less than 5 % of global opium production in 1980, the region accounted for 71 percent of it by 1990, according to this same report.
(143): The worst... was Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who received more than half of CIA covert resources, estimated to be worth $2 billion over the ten-year war, and quickly came to dominate the Afghan mujahideen... Hikmatyar became the Pakistani army's favorite "contract revolutionary." When introduced to the CIA by the ISI, HIkmatyar was leading an armed guerilla force called Hizb-i-Islami, a creation of the ISI that had little support inside Afghanistan... With a guaranteed long-term subsidy, the Hizb-i-Islami grew into the mujahideen's "largest guerilla army," one that Hikmatyar used "to become Afghanistan's leading drug lord."
(143): Hikmatyar's chief rival was Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, known as the "King of Heroin."... [He] decreed that half of all peasant holdings be planted to opium. He "issued opium quotas to every landowner" and responded "by killing or castrating those who defied his directives."
(150): The Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islam (JUI), a key party in the alliance behind the Afghan jihad, became a part of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's governing coalition in 1993. The JUI was the party of Pakistani Deobandis and was the sponsor of the Taliban, the ideological product of Deobandi madrassahs. Entry into government gave the JUI its first opportunity to build close relations with both the ISI and the army. The harvest came soon after: when the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1995, they handed over the training camps to the JUI.
(153): ...heroin-addicted population had gone from negligible in 1979 to 1.3 million by 1985...
(153): There were seven mujahideen groups in all. They reflected every kind of fisssure, internal and external, to which the Afghan resistance was subject. The internal differences in the Afghan jihad were of two different kinds. Teh first involved regional (north vs. south), linguistic (Farsi vs. Pashtun), and ethnic (Pashtun vs. non-Pashtun) differences... A different kind of internal division arose from doctrinal differences, as between Shi'a and Sunni... The overriding ideological difference among the seven mujahideen groups was between two political points of view: traditionalist nationalists and Islamist ideologues. The traditionalists generally came from the religious leadership, whereas the ideologues came mainly from the ranks of political intellectuals.
(154): Two political objectives, one regional, the other global, shaped US policy in Afghanisan. The regional objective was to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution. This was accomplished with two regional alliances against Iran, one with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the other with Iraq. Whereas the United States saw Islamist social movements as a threat, it was eager to reinforce Islamist--Sunni, not Shi'a--state projects. The American strategy provided a political opening for the intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to promote exaggeratedly anti-Shi'a Sunni doctrines, chief among them the Wahhabi doctrine from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi doctrine from Pakistan.
(154-155): ...the Regan administration showed no interest in a negotiated or compromise settlement. It wanted to ally itself with internationalist, militantly anti-Communist Islamist ideologues rather than moderately pragmatic Muslims, a view shared by the ISI.
(156): The seven resistance groups that made up the Afghan jihad were divded into two opposing political constellations, one traditional-nationalist, the other Islamist... The leadership of the traditionalist bloc came from the historic elite of Afghanistan, who were either heads of the Sufi orders or traditional alims versed in Islamic jurisprudence. None of these three mainstream groups received extrenal assistance of any significance. The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, led by the head of the Qadariyya Sufi order, was considered too "nationalist" and "insufficiently Islami" to recieve funds. The Afghan National Liberation Front was led by the family that headed the Naqshbandi tariqa. It was more of a centrist group..."hardly existed as a military force." The only traditional-nationalist group with a military presence on the ground was called the Movement of the Islamic Revolution... its commanders (in particular, Mullah Masim Akhundzada of the Helmland Valley) were also among the largest drug lords inside Afghanistan.... ...Leaders of the four Islamist groups came from students and faculty active in the Jamiat-i-Islami, the parent Islamist organization at Kabul University in the 1970s. The first split from the Jamiat came in 1975 and led to the formation of Hikmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami (Hizb). A later split from the Hizb led to the creation of the Khalis faction. The fourth Islamist organization was led by Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, who had studiet at Al-Azhar... The key parties in the Islamist constellation were the Jamiat and the Hizb. After the split with the Hizb, Jamiat had turned into the "main voice for non-Pashtuns, especially Persian speakers."... Led by the most successful of the commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Jamiat developed into "the most powerful party of the resistance" over the course of the war. In spite of that, the Jamiat was not the preferred recipient for CIA support. There was one important reason for this: Jamiat respresented the moderate center...
(159): The United States and its allies had to continue to support a myriad of groups if only to ensure that the jihad continued to have an even chance. The support of different groups turned out to be support for several wars fought by rival groups. This is why as soon as the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan and victory seemed at hand, the CIA-supported jihad mutated into a civil war. With the traditionalists marginalized, the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 led to a turf battle between different Islamist groups, pitting the extremists led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Hizb against the moderates in the Jamiat led by Burhaneddin Rabbani and his spectacularly successful field commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud.
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part III)
(71): Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later... its richest province, Katanga, seceded... Led by Moish Tshombe... trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga's mines were operated by a Belgian company... in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest. Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba... was 'an African Castro' and must be eliminated... On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether 'we can't get rid of this guy.' (... [Belgium/US collusion to kill Lumumba]) With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: 'General, if it hadn't been for you, ... the Communists would have taken over. (72): By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government's behalf... By October 1964, the CIA estimated the humber of mercenaries in Conto at more than one thousand... Washington was clear from the outset that there would by no US citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four US C-130s with American crews transported mecenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow.
(77): [In Angola], Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to powe, having identified it as a Soviety proxy... Washington's preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo's General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa.... Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces.... South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
(80): On February 10, 1976, the US Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages...
(81): The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam US foreign policy... Pulbic resistance... was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon's budget for special operations was cut; the CIA's paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of US troops overseas.... The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information act and the passage of the Clark Amendment. The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States.
(83): Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amenment was repealed in 1985.
(87): CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and proterrorist movements around the world--from Renameo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afgahnistan--through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the US government decided to harness and even cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.
(91): A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95% of the instances of civilian abuse inthe war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians.
(91): Political terror had brought a kind of war never befroe seen in Africa. The hallmark of the terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields, and kidnapping civilians--particularly children--to press-grang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerillas claimed that they were like fish in water, right-wing terrorists were determined to drain the water--that is, civilian life--so as to isolate and eliminate the fish. What is now termed collateral damage was not an unfortunate by-product of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
(95): The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low-intensity conflict" (LIC). The move from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict signified a strategic reorientation in US war strategy...
(97): With the shift in military strategy to rollback, a clear distinction was made between counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict: the ambition of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam era had been to defeat revolutionary insurgents; LIC aimed to undermine revolutionary governments, not just movements.
(109): Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Roberston and other Christian-right leaders lobbied succssfully for the resumption of US military aid to the country. when Montt's army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the 'scorched earth' campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: 'The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.'
(110-111): Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three... As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,' Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'... Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.
(111): Israel's military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War... Retired General Aharon Yariv... told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that 'it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.' Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.
(116): [In Nicaragua] When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.
(118) [In sum] The United States' embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a dicstinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally--apartheid south Africa--the Unites States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illict trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in US support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international crusade: a jihad.
(120-121): The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islaami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt.... Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas top operate unhindered during the first intifada--letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly ehelping it with funding--only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.
(126-127): 'literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.' Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia relationship remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan 'a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of US foreign aid'--after Israel and Egypt.
(127-128): Historically, the tradition of 'lesser jihad' itself comprises two different--and conflicting--notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin's jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi's anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth century Sudan... The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jiad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered 'heretic.' This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam.... [T[he notion of a standing jihad--a state institution in defense of state interests--is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia.
(128): The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan's second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing 'stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.' The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advissers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikisan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The thrid was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.
(131): Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.
(132): The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals 'directly influenced by the Afghan jihad' is upwards of one hundred thousand.
(133): Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came twoards the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden 'envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,' whereas Azzam 'strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.' Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad... [A] new organization was created in the meeting[:]... al-Qaeda, 'the Base.'
(134): [T]he Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, [was] founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to 'purify' borderline Muslims 'who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past.
(71): Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later... its richest province, Katanga, seceded... Led by Moish Tshombe... trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga's mines were operated by a Belgian company... in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest. Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba... was 'an African Castro' and must be eliminated... On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether 'we can't get rid of this guy.' (... [Belgium/US collusion to kill Lumumba]) With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: 'General, if it hadn't been for you, ... the Communists would have taken over. (72): By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government's behalf... By October 1964, the CIA estimated the humber of mercenaries in Conto at more than one thousand... Washington was clear from the outset that there would by no US citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four US C-130s with American crews transported mecenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow.
(77): [In Angola], Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to powe, having identified it as a Soviety proxy... Washington's preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo's General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa.... Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces.... South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
(80): On February 10, 1976, the US Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages...
(81): The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam US foreign policy... Pulbic resistance... was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon's budget for special operations was cut; the CIA's paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of US troops overseas.... The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information act and the passage of the Clark Amendment. The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States.
(83): Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amenment was repealed in 1985.
(87): CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and proterrorist movements around the world--from Renameo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afgahnistan--through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the US government decided to harness and even cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.
(91): A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95% of the instances of civilian abuse inthe war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians.
(91): Political terror had brought a kind of war never befroe seen in Africa. The hallmark of the terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields, and kidnapping civilians--particularly children--to press-grang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerillas claimed that they were like fish in water, right-wing terrorists were determined to drain the water--that is, civilian life--so as to isolate and eliminate the fish. What is now termed collateral damage was not an unfortunate by-product of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
(95): The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low-intensity conflict" (LIC). The move from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict signified a strategic reorientation in US war strategy...
(97): With the shift in military strategy to rollback, a clear distinction was made between counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict: the ambition of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam era had been to defeat revolutionary insurgents; LIC aimed to undermine revolutionary governments, not just movements.
(109): Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Roberston and other Christian-right leaders lobbied succssfully for the resumption of US military aid to the country. when Montt's army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the 'scorched earth' campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: 'The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.'
(110-111): Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three... As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,' Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'... Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.
(111): Israel's military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War... Retired General Aharon Yariv... told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that 'it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.' Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.
(116): [In Nicaragua] When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.
(118) [In sum] The United States' embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a dicstinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally--apartheid south Africa--the Unites States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illict trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in US support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international crusade: a jihad.
(120-121): The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islaami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt.... Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas top operate unhindered during the first intifada--letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly ehelping it with funding--only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.
(126-127): 'literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.' Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia relationship remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan 'a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of US foreign aid'--after Israel and Egypt.
(127-128): Historically, the tradition of 'lesser jihad' itself comprises two different--and conflicting--notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin's jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi's anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth century Sudan... The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jiad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered 'heretic.' This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam.... [T[he notion of a standing jihad--a state institution in defense of state interests--is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia.
(128): The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan's second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing 'stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.' The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advissers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikisan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The thrid was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.
(131): Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.
(132): The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals 'directly influenced by the Afghan jihad' is upwards of one hundred thousand.
(133): Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came twoards the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden 'envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,' whereas Azzam 'strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.' Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad... [A] new organization was created in the meeting[:]... al-Qaeda, 'the Base.'
(134): [T]he Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, [was] founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to 'purify' borderline Muslims 'who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part II)
(51): Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a 'just struggle' has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan--until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century. The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century... Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders (marabout) intent on unifying the region against the negative affects of the slave trade... The thrid time jihad was widely waged as a 'just war' was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab's jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi'a 'heretics,' whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain... The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British).... Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. [Of course,] once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions..., the anti-colonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north, and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898.
(53): As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power--at the expense of its supporters.
(53): Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A'la Mawdudi... and Sayyid Qutb.... As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the umma. The irony was the though the formation of Pakistan gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism that Muhammad Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other... Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islmist intellectual. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan was still Na-Pakistan. For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an Islamic state. Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad."
(56): Qutb elaborated Mawdudi's thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization...
(58): The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi'a identity as the identity of the oppressed...
(58): The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. [Hassan Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
(60): The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances... The attitude toward ijtihad the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered--and progressive from reactionary--Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the 'gates of ijtihad remain forever closed... The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and sitinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement."
(61): Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity--that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
(63-64): [in 1975], two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed [a shift in US strategy]. One was drawn by the president of the US, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment... The Nixon Doctrine held that 'Asian boys must fight Asian wars.' It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of US involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weight the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos... After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, 'Americanization' gave way to Vietnamization'
(66): Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the US Air Force had fought 'the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2,1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.'
(51): Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a 'just struggle' has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan--until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century. The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century... Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders (marabout) intent on unifying the region against the negative affects of the slave trade... The thrid time jihad was widely waged as a 'just war' was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab's jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi'a 'heretics,' whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain... The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British).... Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. [Of course,] once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions..., the anti-colonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north, and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898.
(53): As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power--at the expense of its supporters.
(53): Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A'la Mawdudi... and Sayyid Qutb.... As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the umma. The irony was the though the formation of Pakistan gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism that Muhammad Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other... Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islmist intellectual. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan was still Na-Pakistan. For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an Islamic state. Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad."
(56): Qutb elaborated Mawdudi's thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization...
(58): The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi'a identity as the identity of the oppressed...
(58): The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. [Hassan Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
(60): The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances... The attitude toward ijtihad the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered--and progressive from reactionary--Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the 'gates of ijtihad remain forever closed... The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and sitinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement."
(61): Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity--that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
(63-64): [in 1975], two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed [a shift in US strategy]. One was drawn by the president of the US, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment... The Nixon Doctrine held that 'Asian boys must fight Asian wars.' It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of US involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weight the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos... After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, 'Americanization' gave way to Vietnamization'
(66): Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the US Air Force had fought 'the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2,1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.'
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