"ghost wars," steve coll

central thesis: the trouble is, of course, that there really isn't one. the virtue of coll's book is its detail, no doubt--almost six hundred pages of dense narrative (sometimes tedious, sometimes thrilling) tracing the tumultuous relationship between the jihadis, the Saudis, the Pakistani gov't/ISI, and the Empire from the late 70s to the days before 9/11. in that sense, it is an invaluable reference book.

the pretext, though, that this intention to "story-tell"--to do no more than weave a narrative through events that haven't been told together--is somehow apolitical is laughable. and, in fact, as Coll moves closer and closer to 9/11, i found that the book became more and more insufferable. the latter part of the narrative concentrates almost entirely on the CIA's earnest attempts to assassinate Bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11. this resplendent, heroic mission is cast against the dark, seedy world of entangling alliances, diplomatic considerations, and even international law; the abiding impression is "if only"--if only the Pakistanis had been more attentive to terror, if only the Saudis weren't protectors of oil reserves and our strategic interests, if only the White House had let the CIA off the legal leash. and while that's instructive, i suppose, as an insight into the establishment, it's terribly difficult to wade through without becoming angry at Coll's willingness to distill the problem of terrorism through the framework of a Bond movie.

the book really lacks a serious willingness to come to terms with the aggressively offensive posture of Empire, which is--in a general sense--at the root of all the troubles documented here. there are harsh words reserved for the Pakistani intelligence and the Saudis, as there should be--but the book never really indicts the Americans for decades of more unforgivable forms of interference. nor, then, does it suggest that these threats to the homeland require a radical re-think of the premises of American foreign policy. this dovetails with another serious weakness of the nature of the narrative, I think, which is its obsessive focus with Bin Laden. while Coll, on reflection, would likely reject the silly notion that, were Bin Laden killed, America (and indeed, the world) would face no threat from these types of terrorists, reading his book imparts precisely this sort of urgency to the task of tackling UBL.

in sum, Coll's narrative really needs to be infused, again and again, with an appropriate political position. his current posture-less-ness merely masks the obvious fact that he is reading and telling this history through the red-white-and-blue prism of post-9/11 America.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(25): "because it had long cultivated ties to informal Islamic networks in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, Jamaat-e-Islami found itself afloat during the 1970s on a swelling tide of what the French scholar Gilles Kepel would later term "petro dollar Islam"

(36): "by attacking the American embassy, Jamaat had far exceeded Zia's brief. Yet Zia felt he could not afford to repudiate his religious ally."

(40): uprising in Herat in 1979 led by "charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan"--air raids in response, killing "as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone."

(41): on the murder of political prsioners in Kabul, "Nur Muhammad Taraki once told his KGB handlers... 'Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure the victory of the October Revolution'"

(45): KGB report put together by Yuri Andropov for Brezhnev: "The Afghan revolution was struggling because of 'economic backwardness, the small size of the working class,' and the weakness of the local Communist Party, as well as the selfishness of its Afghan leaders"

(49): decision to invade Afghanistan taken by Politburo on November 26, 1979

(56): interesting paragraph here about changing composition of CIA officers in post-Vietnam America. before, Coll is arguing, predominated by the JFK, Ivy-league types. but now these folk sought a career in Wall Street, especially given the beating taken by the civil service in the aftermath of the debacles of the 60s. "Instead of prep school grduates came men like Gary Schroen, working-class midwesterners who had enlisted in the army when others their age were protesting the Vietnam War."

(58): Karachi as a key hub in weapons supplied to mujahideen--"Langley secretly purchased hundreds of thousands of the .303 rifles from Greece, India and elsewhere, and shipped them to Karachi."

(59): more Empire, not less--"But the United Stateds did not own a subcontinental empire, as the British had a century before. If the CIA wanted to pump more and better weapons into Afghanistan, it had to negotiate access to the Afghan frontier through the sovereign nation of Pakistan."

(60): "...as the mujahedin resistance grew and stiffened, the agency's passivity about who led the Afghan rebels--who got the most guns, the most money, the most power--helped ensure that Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own."

(66-67): details re: weapons trade

(73): "As much as any individual, Prince Turki became an architect of Afghanistan's destiny--and of American engagements with Islamic radicalism--in the two decades after 1979. He picked winners and losers among Afghan commanders, he funded Islamic revolutionaries across the Middle East, he created alliances among these movements, and he paid large subsidies to the Pakistan intelligence service, aiding its rise as a kind of shadow government" [though much of the later narrative of this book details how much of the Saudi money is private, channeled through a madrassa- and charity-led network.]

(76): the strategy "employed by the Saudi royal family throughout the twentieth century: Threatened by Islamic radicalism, they embraced it, hoping to retain control. The al-Sauds' claims to power on the Arabian peninsula were weak and grew largely from conquests made by allied jihadists. They now ruled the holiest shrines in worldwide Islam. There seemed to them no plausible politics but strict official religiosity..." [see also pg. 230, "The proper and legal outlet for Islamic activism, the royal family made clear, lay not inside the kingdom but abroad, in aid of the global umma, or community of muslim believers."]

(79): "Saudi Arabia's five-year government budget from 1969-1974 was $9.2 billion. During the next five years it was $142 billion."

(86): "In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies working the Afghan jihad--GID, ISI, and the CIA--began to "compartment" their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liasons. Working together they purchased and shipped to the Afghan rebels tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition. Separately they spied on one another and pursued independent political agendas." [SUMMARY OF AGENDAS: (1) Saudis needed to outsource threat of radical Islamism, prove to their own population their Islamist credentials--Abdurrab Rasal Sayyaf received bulk of aid, but also a very significant private, non-official component to Saudi involvement. (2) Pakistan needed an allied Pashtun presence, which would give it "strategic depth" and stave off "Pashtunistan" (remember Daud Khan's attachment to that project)--it cultivated Hekmatyar and then the Taliban. (3) US wanted to give the Soviet Union its vietnam--it gave indiscriminately, not thinking enough about the future, and split once the USSR fell. it re-entered, aggrieved, as UBL became much more of a threat.]

(92): profile of William Casey, CIA chief--"most influential man in Reagan administration after the President." Committed anti-communist, fueled by evangelical zeal that made him more sympathetic to Islamists than secularists.

(99): "Casey and Zia emphasized that Soviet ambitions were spatial. For them, Soviet strategy echoed the colonial era's scrambles among European powers for natural resources, shipping lanes, and continental footholds... Zia used...to drive home his belief that Moscow had invaded Afghanistan in order to push toward the Middle East's oil. He displayed a regional map and then pulled out a red triangular celluloid template to illustrate the Soviets' continuing southwestern thrust toward warm water ports and energy resources."

(108-114): Coll's primer on Afghanistan.

(114): after Daud expelled Hekmatyar, Massoud, Rabbani, "Pakistan embraced them... General Naseerullah Babar and Hekmatyar, both ethnic Pashtuns, soon became confidants, and together they hatched a plan for an uprising against Daoud in 1975. They drafted Massoud to sneak back into the Panjshir and start the revolt from there. He did so reluctantly, and the episonde ended badly. Massoud fled to Pakistan... The failed uprising exacerbated a split among the Afghan exiles... Hekmatyar created his own organization, Hezb-e-Islami, composed primarily of ethnic Pashtuns, and he forged close relations with the ISI. Massoud struck by Rabbani in Jamaat-e-Islami, which was made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks. When massoud secretely returned to the Panjshir Valley once again in 1978, however, he did so on his own. He no longer trusted the other Afghan leaders... [REMEMBER: this is another of the book's undoubted weaknesses--it's overly generous portrayal of Massoud as the "lost hope" of Afghanistan, another one of the "if onlys."]

(119): [Massoud called a truce in 1983; ISI used it to say he ought to be cut-off]. "Hekmatyar emerged as the most powerful of ISI's Pakistan-based mujahideen clients just as Charlie Wilson and Bill Casey, along with Prince Turki, suddenly poured hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new and more lethal supplies into ISI warehouses."

(140): The CIA's Counterterrorist center was born on February 1, 1986 [at this stage, though, remember, they were concerned with Secular terrorism: "Secular leftist groups carried out the most visible terrorist strikes in 1985 and 1986."]

(144): "By early 1986, Brigardier Mohammed Yousaf [Afghan Bureau ISI 1983-1987] had constructed a large and sophisticated serious infrastructure along the Afghan frontier. Between sixteen thousand and eighteen thousand fresh recruits passed through his camps and training courses each year."

(150): filming a Blackhawk down scene, replace US pilot with Soviet, and reaches a gleeful Ronald Reagan, who preferred video briefings.

(151): funding accelerating in the second half of the decade--numbers here

(152): another fact about the late 1980s--"But for the first time came complaints from some Afghan fighters to the CIA about a rising force in their jihad: Arab volunteers"

(156): ISI's use of Arab money and cooperation, in particular, to construct a border infrastructure to wage jihad (roads, caves, warehouses, and camps) that would be safe from Soviet bombardment.

(157): " 'It was largely Arab money that saved the system' recalled Brigadier Yousuf"

(158-160): November 1986, Gorbachev sets the goal of withdrawal; furious to discover that no negotiated settlement is really on the table, Coll is writing.

(164): Brigadier Yousuf retires, Hamid Gul comes in; CIA-ISI ties, at this point, begin to strain. Brigardier Januja, ardent Islamist, takes over Afghan bureau.

(165): "...the massive weight of private Saudi and Arab funding that tilted the field toward the Islamists--up to $25 million a month by Bearden's own estimate. Nor did they account for the intimate tactical and strategic partnerships between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Islamists, especially along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. By the late 1980s the ISI had effetively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist rule."

(175): "Zia felt this was only Pakistan's due: 'We have earned the right to have a power which is very friendly toward us. We have taken risks as a front-line state, and we will not permit a return to the prewar situation, marked by a large Indian and Soviet influence and Afghan claims on our territory. The new power willb e really Islamic, a part of the Islamic renaissance which, you will see, will someday extend itself to the Soviet Muslims."

(182): "Majrooh's independent Afghan Information Center had reported in a survey that 70 percent of Afghan refugees supported exiled King Zahir Shah rather than any of the Peshawar-based mujahedin leaders such as Hekmatyar."

(194): details re: failed attack on Jalalabad, after Soviet withdrawal

(201): in 1989, about four thousand Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, organized under Sayyaf's leadership. "He was in turn heavily supported by Saudi intelligence and Gulf charities."

(204): Azzam, who had wanted to concentrate on Afghanistan, killed. Osama takes power of his network, morphs into Al-Qaeda.

(221): Kashmir erupts in 1989; "inspired by their success against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers announced to Bhutto that they were prepared to use the same methods of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir."

(222-223): Osama and the Gulf War--turning point.

(233): "Afghan poppy farmers supplied heroin labs nestled in cities and along the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border. By 1992 hundreds of tons of refined heroin flowed from these labs east through Karachi's port or north through the new overland routes of the Russian mafia, destined for European cities."

(236-237): Battle for Kabul begins. "The first Afghan war was over. The second had begun."

(250-251): Ramzi Yousef's letter: "For a terrorist sermon composed by a graduate of Arab jihad training camps in Afghanistan, his letter struck remarkably secular political themes."

(273): Yousef, on capture, "said he took no thrill from killing American citizens and felt guilty about the civilian deaths he had caused. But his conscience was overridden by the strength of his desire to stop the killing of Arabs by Israeli troops."

(283): The Taliban laying claim to the Durrani legacy--"Much of this Taliban narrative was undoubtedly rooted in fact even if credible eyewitnesses to the most mythologized events of 1994, such as the hanging of notorious rapists from a tank barrel, proved stubbornly elusive. In the end, however, the facts may have matterd less than the narrative's claims on the past. The Taliban assembled their story so that pashtuns could recognize it as a revival of old glory. The Taliban connected popular, rural Islamic values with a grassroots Durrani Pasthun tribal rising. They emerged at a moment when important wealthy Pashtun leaders around Kandahar hungered for a unifying cause... [The Taliban] preached for a reborn alliance of Islamic piety and Pashtun might."

(287): Hamid Karzai contributed $50,000 to the Taliban "as they began to organize around Kandahar."

(289-291): Bhutto and Babar--Bhutto wants to keep the army "happy," and project into Central Asia, as well. Babar and Javed Ashraf Qazi (new head of ISI) author a break with Hekmatyar.

(293): "'I was horrified to learn that they [the Taliban] had emerged literally from the villages' recalled Qazi"

(296): "As the months passed, it became clear to both Turki and Badeeb that Pakistani intelligence had decided to back the Taliban at Hekmatyar's expense. Saudi intelligence had no objection to this betrayal. Hekmatyar had angered Turki by denouncing Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War."

(298): "As the Taliban swept west from Kandahar in sophisticated military formations, the US embassy reported that 'their use of tanks and helicopters strongly suggested Pakistani tutelage or direct control.'"

(302): details of "stranded gas" in Turkmenistan--pipelines oriented towards Russia, despite "bitter battles over how they should be used." hence the appeal of the T-A-P.

(332-333): the story of Kabul's fall--Taliban gets monetary assistance from UBL, ISI, and others; Hekmatyar's feigend alliance with Massoud, Massoud's retreat into the Panjshir.

(342): This is the narrative offered in this book, re: the "radicalization" of the Taliban--"Bin Laden had his own plan: He would convert the Taliban to his cause"

(346): Hekmatyar sent into exile in Iran upon Kabul's fall.

(352-353): in comes George Tenet, the "unsung hero" of this tale, in a sense. apolitical and fiercely committed. BORING.

(358): no better example of this book's unquestioning acceptance of imperial premises. Tenet opposed Gulf War; a political miscalculation because the war didn't take many American lives (oh, but it did take thousands of Iraqi lives, as Coll acknowledges)

(364): UNOCAL, 1997--Taliban stands to earn as much as $100 million a year, from pipeline.

(366): Taliban take pictures with the Christmas Tree, in Miller's house.

(386): winter 1998, Bill Richardson visits Taliban.

(411-413): Clinton's attack on the Somalia plant. NOT ONE MENTION OF THE ACTUAL FALL-OUT (Coll speaks only about the political controversy it caused, presumably regrettable).

(440): allegations of ties between Bin Laden and ISI in late 90s, united by anti-Massoud and Kashmir.

(448): "The UAE royal family had also been targeted by the Clinton administration's "buy American" campaign to win overseas contracts for weapons manufacturers and other corporations. And Sheikh Zayed had come through in a very big way: In May 1998, in a deal partially smoothed by Clarke, the UAE had agreed to an $8 billion multiyear contract to buy 80 F-16 military jets."

(458): mentioning Uzbekistan, and its "jowly, secular ex-communist autocrat named Islam Karimov," who in 1999 arrested 2,000 Islamic activists after an attempt on his life.

(461-462): 1999, murder of Abdul Haq's family and Hamid Karzai's father announce the beginnings of Pashtun opposition to Mullah Omar.

(478): no need to overstate "Islamization"--"Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999"

(505): "By 2000 there were still a few analysts at the State Departments' Intelligence Bureau who argued for patient engagement with the Taliban. But most of Clinton's Cabinet now accepted that Al Qaeda had hijacked Mullah Omar."

(522): Richard Clarke on the Northern Alliance: [They're] "not a very good group of people to begin with. They're drug runners. They're human rights abusers. They're an ethnic minority. It's just not something that you're going to build a national government around."

(555-556): The American "beard census" of the Pakistani military--"Only two or three generals at the rank of lieutenant general or higher kept beards in 2001. The rate was less than 10% among graduates of the elite officers' schools."

(561): Ahmed Shah Massoud's anti-Taliban alliance: Karzai among Kandahar's Durrani, Ismail Khan in western Afghanistan, Karim Khalili among the Shiites, Haji Qadir around Kunar province, and Aburrashid Dostum among the Uzbeks in the North.

(572): to Karzai, after intensive lobbying--"'You're basically asking for the overthrow of the Taliban,' an incredulous midlevel State Department officer told Qayum Karzai in one meeting that August. 'I'm not sure if our government is prepared to do that.'

(576): Ahmed Shah Massoud, Coll is arguing, was the exception to the rule that modern Afghanistan had produced no nationalists. this is a critical and very weak point in his narrative.

(578): after already clarifying the strategic interests behind Pakistan's cultivation of the jihadists, for some reason he argues that the State is beholden to Al Qaeda. this is just silly.

After all, there is virtually no convergence between Hekmatyar’s Islamicist militancy based on the Leninist and elitist doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the obscurantist fundamentalism of the Taliban, nurtured in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s west.
(...) An Afghan political analyst and head of the affairs of the Middle East and African countries during the Taliban regime, Waheed Muzda while talking to journalists said, “The alliance between the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami is impossible as they have differences over many issues. Gulbadeen Hikmatyar believes in democracy and elections but Taliban oppose it. They say such elections in which every person even corrupt people also take part are not justified according to the Shariah. Similarly, Hizb-e-Islami favors education and jobs of women whereas Taliban do not like it. Another different thing between the both groups is that Taliban are closely linked with al-Qaeda and their movement is separate from those of other Islamist organizations.
(...) It is not unreasonable to think that Hekmatyar, the most significant Pashtun power not beholden to al Qaeda muscle, would embody the hopes of Pakistan for a strongman to cut the Taliban down to size—or at least neutralize the Taliban on the battlefield and create a bloody stalemate.
(...) After all, although the Chinese role was never as highly publicized as the efforts of the United States and Saudi Arabia, China was a major participant in the mujahideen network sponsored by the ISI to battle the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet-backed government in Kabul accused the Chinese of providing $400 million in military aid, though it might be more accurate to say that the Chinese did $400 million in business, paid for by the CIA. When the covert campaign to supply the Afghan fighters, in particular Hekmatyar, got so big that the CIA had exhausted the traditional sources of clandestine weaponry, China happily took on the profitable duty of providing guns and bullets from its factories. China even provided mules to ease the famous transport shortage engendered by the flood of material.

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.

the CIA's successors and collaborators:
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1983, ostensibly as a non-profit-making organisation to promote human rights and democracy. In 1991 its first president, the historian Allen Weinstein, confessed to The Washington Post: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" (1)
(...)In its first 10 years, the NED distributed $200m among 1,500 projects to support friends of the US (10). Since 1988 it has taken a significant interest in Venezuela. Philip Agee said: "There was a quiet operation against the Bolivarian revolution. It began under President Clinton and intensified under George Bush Jr. It's like the campaign against the Sandinistas, but so far without the terrorism or the economic embargo: promote democracy, keep an eye on elections and support public life." The US lawyer Eva Golinger discovered from official documents that between 2001 and 2006 the NED and USAID gave more than $20m to Venezuelan opposition groups and private media (11). On 25 April 2002 The New York Times revealed that Congress had ordered a quadrupling of the NED budget for Venezuela just a few months before the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez.
(...) Washington's idea of democracy is elections and business walking hand in hand. In his January 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that he would be asking Congress "to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labour unions in the Middle East"; ideological work would accompany military action. Hitherto the NED's involvement in the region had been minimal. It moved into Afghanistan in 2003. According to its website, it decided "to establish and strengthen business associations inside Afghanistan to ensure a more sustained and diversified effort to build democracy and market economy". It funded emerging NGOs.
(...) In 1996, to justify increasing the NED's budget, an enlightening report was submitted to Congress: "The US cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy at a time when American interests and values are under sustained ideological attack from a wide variety of anti-democratic forces around the world... [They] remain threatened by deeply entrenched communist regimes, neo-communists, aggressive dictatorships, radical nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists. Given this reality, the US cannot afford to surrender the ideological battlefield to these enemies of a free and open society." (14). Three years later, Benjamin Gilman, the president of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the same line.

the FBI in peace and war:
The CIA also collected files. In 1982, in response to an FOIA request, the Agency sent me copies of letters I had written to and received from friends in the Soviet Union and Cuba. From the 1950s on, the CIA spied on thousands of U.S. citizens. In June 1970, President Nixon brought together Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms and other intelligence heavies to expand and “coordinate efforts against domestic dissenters,” (Verne Lyon, former CIA undercover operative, Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1990.)
(...) According to ABC's “The Blotter,” a recent unclassified report told Congress that the FBI, driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush, wants to recruit more than 15,000 informants in the U.S., entailing a complete overhaul of its database systems at a cost of around $22 million. The FBI apparently wants to maximize the information provided by "more than 15,000" informants. Many of the new and old informants will apparently be U.S. citizens and residents, but the FBI also wants to go overseas.

the imperial imperative (chalmers johnson):
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
(...) As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
(...) And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.
(...) Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.
(...) In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way: "All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed... So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.... What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."
(...) The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).
(...) Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
(...) a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote: "There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"
(...) The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war.
(...) Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.
(...) One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.
(...) the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts.
(...) America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.
(...) The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department.
(...) Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.
(...) This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year. Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."
(...) I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.
(...) Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.
(...) Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
(...) Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.
(...) We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return[!?] to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.
(...) In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence.
(...) In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade." [and what of capital?]
(...) When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. [and that dirty war, chalmers?] But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

us and uk meddling, and the legacy of one tony blair:
The catastrophe that started in 2003 in Iraq is only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe that began early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted brutal military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so. Of course for legitimate interests. It continued to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. I discuss this Protracted Holocaust in Iraq in my book Behind the War on Terror (2003). Dr Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these interventions and occupations over a period of almost a century. Since 1950, 5.2 million, during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators until they finally got Saddam himself in power. Between 1991 and 2003, about 1.7 million from the UN sanctions regime. Add to this the figures for the 1991 Gulf War, at least 150,000. And after the 2003 war, as many as 650,000. That's just under eight million up to now.
(...) The blood of eight million Iraqi civilians on the hands of the Anglo-American axis since the early twentieth century, and still counting What does this say about "Civilization"? About the fruits of "liberal democracy" as it stands? About the wonders of "modernization" and "globalization"? Why is the progress of the West tied to the installation of metaphorical gas chambers in the East?
(...) But if there's anything that this brief glimpse of Anglo-American historical genocide in the Middle East reveals, it's that Blair's resignation means absolutely nothing whatsoever in the way of halting the genocidal march of the global system. Blair was one particularly clever cog in a machine that has yet to run its course.

democracynow summary (may 8, 2007):
Iraq's infant mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990 according to a new report by the charity Save the Children. One in eight Iraqi children now die of disease or violence before the age of five. In 2005 alone, 122,000 Iraqi children died before reaching their fifth birthday. Save the Children said Iraq's child-survival ranking is now the lowest in the world.
(...) The New York Times is reporting, the U.S. oil company Chevron is preparing to pay up to $30 million in fines for illegally paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein for access to Iraq's oil before the U.S. invasion in 2003. The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal. It appears Chevron began paying Iraq kickbacks in August 2000. At the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a member of Chevron's board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
(...) In Los Angeles, two high-ranking police department commanders have been reassigned over their role in the police department's violent crushing of a lawful immigrants rights rally last week. Police dressed in riot gear fired 240 rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas. Officers were seen on video clubbing protesters and journalists with batons. Overall 10 people – including seven journalists -- were taken to hospitals with injuries. On Sunday LA Police Chief William Bratton took 60 members of the police department's elite Metropolitan Division's B Platoon off the street.
(...) Investigative reporter Tim Shorrock of Salon.com has revealed that former CIA Director George Tenet has made at least $2.3 million since he left the agency by working for four corporations that are directly profiting from the so-called war on terror and the war in Iraq. Tenet did not disclose any of his corporate ties in his new book "At the Center of the Storm." Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tenet is also a member of an advisory board for Analysis Corporation which is designing terrorist watch lists for the government. Tenet also serves on the boards of two other government contractors, Guidance Software and Kinetic.
(...) A new report from Amnesty International has revealed that Native American women are more than two and a half times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the United States in general. Studies show that one in three Native American women will be raped during their lifetime. Amnesty said many rape cases are never prosecuted because there is confusion regarding tribal and county jurisdiction. It is estimated that 86 percent of rapes against Native women are committed by non-Native men, but tribal councils have no jurisdiction over non-Native offenders even if the crime takes place on tribal lands.

fbi and kent state:
In July of 1963, a memo from the Cincinnati office on the subject of "Communist Speakers on College Campuses" noted that "Governor James A. Rhodes has signed into law legislation authorizing the trustees of any state-operated college or university to bar from using campus facility any person that they wish to bar."
(...) By the mid-1960s, the CIA and the FBI were working together through the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on radical groups and harass peace organizations. The FBI's operation was known as COINTELPRO. The CIA's was Operation CHAOS.
(...) In 1967, declassified government documents reveal that CIA Director Richard Helms, Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson believed that the domestic protest movements against the Vietnam War were being orchestrated by the Communist governments in Moscow, Peking, Havana and Hanoi.
(...) On May 4, 1970, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause and William Schroeder were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. Numerous investigative accounts have alleged that the FBI was involved in the burning of the campus ROTC building, which led to the deaths of the students.
(...) The SAC in Cincinnati paid a "courtesy call" on Governor Rhodes 18 days after the shootings. Governor Rhodes informed the FBI agent that he intended to keep the Ohio State University campus open, despite what some historians regard as one of the largest student riots in U.S. history. ". . . He [Rhodes] intends to mobilize sufficient members of the Ohio National Guard (ONG) to accomplish this, 'even if he has to put a guard in every classroom,'" the memo reads. The Governor blamed the unrest on outside agitators and "commented that of the upwards of 100 persons arrested on May 21 and May 22, 1970, only a few were OSU students. . ." the memo notes. The FBI memo cites that of the 78 arrests, 35 were OSU students and two OSU employees, even though the majority of the arrests were made off-campus.
(...) Critics have long charged that the FBI deliberately covered up information about those responsible for ordering the Kent State shootings. A tape was recently released revealing what appears to be an order to shoot at Kent State. FBI declassified docouments strongly suggest that the FBI's extensive influence over Governor Rhodes, perhaps due to their knowledge of his ties to organized crime and the numbers rackets, may have played a key role in the Governor's violent and repressive tactics that led to death of four students at Kent State in 1970.

rendition:
The "rendition" program began under President Clinton, but has roots in covert air operations begun by the CIA after WWll (carried out most famously via "Air America" during the Vietnam War). But, recalling Vietnam historian Marilyn Young's description of the Iraq war as "Vietnam on crack," the Bush Administration's "war on terror" has increased the use of these flights dramatically.