misagh parsa, states, ideologies, and social revolutions

(7, 10, 21): structures are insufficient to explain revolutions -- need to discuss structures + process; "structural vulnerabilities by themselves do not inevitably produce social conflict, let alone revolution... there is always more than one potential outcome... any analysis of revolution must also take into account the revolutionary process"

(8): problem w/ Skocpol:multiple actors and multiple conflicts ('labor radicalism might affect capitalists from taking on the State'); States in developing countries do not necessarily rule in tandem with capitalist classes

(8-9): problem w/ ideology in explanations -- the burden of proof is actually quite serious, for a claim like this: have to show that actors were both aware of and supportive of a given ideology, and weren't supporting it out of tactical convenience.

1. methodological reductionism ('ideology of successful revolutionary challengers, assuming that participants adhered to those ideologies)
2. explantions use outcomes of revolution to account for its causes
3. ideological debates might be cryptic in revolutionary situations

(11): [1] Exclusive rule, centralization and repression -- consequences:

1. states resort to violence at time of social conflict, reducing support for regime
2. may weaken elite/moderate challengers, strengthen radicals [a la Jeff's argument]
3. more likely to be externally dependent, which might be detrimental at times of crisis

(12-21): [2] State intervention and target of social conflicts: regulative (conflicts will occur in civil society -- State is unlikely to be the direct target of collective action)* vs. administrative vs. hyperactive (State more vulnerable to challenge and attack -- also likely to negatively affect a segment of elites, even the majority of elites depending on the extent to which the rule is personalistic)

(19): conflating the 'self-employed' with the capitalist class [bizarre!]*

(21 -24): [3] Collective action and coalition formation: large-scale insurgencies emerge when political opportunities emerge (b/c state feeling external pressures, schisms within the state, or state reforms). in the absence of state breakdown or military victory, insurgencies are more likely to succeed if they are organized as a cross-class coalition (cross-class coalitions are encouraged, remember, by a high level of state intervention and a low level of open, class conflict). there is something, here, about disruptive collective action, also, suggesting that it can weaken the State's hold over society.

(24-25): [4] Ideology and social revolution: the challengers that seize power matter, for whether you will have simply political change or social revolution. all things being equal, moderate challengers are typically in a better position to win power (more resources, less repression, allies within gov't) -- but there are limits to their activism. radical challengers lack these advantages, and only a few will succeed -- they are likely to do better the more exclusive the regime was, when moderate paths to the State's overthrow have been exhausted. but radical challengers will benefit from 'toning down' their radical platform.

(26): in sum -- classes are important, but intensified class conflict can hurt, reducing the likelihood of social revolutions.* students reveal the greatest propensity toward adopting revolutionary ideologies, following intellectuals.

(26): Iran--Shah constructed exclusive polity, intervened in capital allocation/accumulation and working of market; government policies increased inequality;* political opportunities arose in 1977, as external pressure forced repression to decrease; different groups mobilized and made different claims; forced to mobilize through the mosque; a coalition succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy; but soon after the overthrow, a small minority of the clergy succeeded in repressing coalition partners and establishing a theocratic state.

(27): Nicaragua--Somoza constructed exclusive state; state intervened in the economy and capital accumulation; policies increased inequality;* after 1972 earthquake, there were mobilizations against the regime, which lasted until 1974; a new round began in 1977, when external pressures led to reduced repression; assasination of Chamorro in January 1978 intensified the conflict; a coalition overthrew the state in 1979, led by the FSLN; FSLN had turned to armed struggle because moderate tactics had been ruled out (but they had credibility,* for this reason)

(27-28): Philippines -- formal democratic institutions till 1972; Marcos imposes martial law, repressing moderates and creating a centralized executive; expanded State intervention in the economy; country comes into crisis after period of spectacular growth, and experiences rising social and economic inequalities; in 1981, in response to external pressures Marcos lifts Martial law and some repression; political mobilization emerges in 1983 as a result of the assasination of Aquino; for two years opposition can't remove Marcos b/c of lack of broad coalition, as Marcos is able to tempt moderates into running for elections in 1984; from there, a complex set of processes (having to do with elevated levels of class struggle, and the strength of the Communist Party) lead to an elite-brokered transition (elements in the Army are important); this results in a political revolution.

(36): Iran, in sum: Shah had constructed a State that excluded the population, no real social base,* external dependence on US --> rendered regime vulnerable

(44): Nicaragua, in sum: Somozas built a dynasty excluded the population, based on National Guard, no real social support* --> rendered the regime vulnerable

(53): Philippines, in sum: Marcos built centralized regime after '72 martial law, abolished democratic institutions, no real social base* and support of US --> rendered the regime vulnerable

(54): regimes varied in the success of their repression -- Iran was the most demobilizing, and Philippines the least

(66): in Iran, gov't policies --> rising economic inequalities*

(85-86): summary of account is that participation on/exposure to market --> crisis in all three cases*

(89): summary of argument that declining repression (due to external pressures) --> favorable opportunities for collective action. in this context, further repression may actually make the regime more vulnerable (the Aquino and Chamorro assasinations, he's thinking of)

(94-96): students as 'relentless revolutionaries', ideological radicals*

(96): students' role was contradictory -- frequent mobilization important part of challenge; but students' ideological orientation was also polarizing, preventing the formation of a broad coalition.

(99-101, 104): assertion that, for the most part, students were basically secular in orientation/outlook (repression of 1963 did lead a 'sizable minority' to adopt Islam, but this then waned in the 70s; some rebound after of 1978 (Khomeini becoming popular), but didn't change this basic fact)

(102): student activism predates the clergy, who did get involved until January of 1978

(106-107): in sum, students in Iran

(108): in Nicaragua, expansion of education + role of US + Sandinistas --> radical students

(110): two bouts of struggle, in Nicaragua: (1) post-earthquake (1973-1974), and (2) pre-revolution and post-opening (1977-1979)

(112): it was in the second phase that students began to draw close to the FSLN

(115-116): in sum, students in Nicaragua

(127): in sum, students in Philippines: like elsewhere, most active social group, at the forefront of collective action; assumed a radical character towards the end of the 'revolutionary' process, as the failure of the moderates became obvious

(127-129): in sum, students: (1) first social group to mobilize; (2) acted with most frequency (he acknowledges, of course, that this doesn't at all mean that they wield significant power--he's not noting their capacity/threat, but rather their proclivity. here he once again makes the point about how radical students can prevent the formation of the necessary coalitions)

(130): the breakdown of the clergy-State pact results in the politicization of the clergy--and while most stay conservative, a minority break off as radicals

(131-132): only a minority of the clergy become radical: in Iran, they advocated the formation of an Islamic government; in Nicaragua and the Philippines, they shifted to the left and liberation theology. the explanation of this is the 'weakness of the religious left, the Islamic mohajideen, in Iran [pushes the question back, to an extent]

(132): upper clergy varied--in Iran on the sidelines, in Nicaragua and especially the Philippines, in support of the regimes

(133, 140): again, in Iran, radical clergy demanding an Islamic government were a minority [this is a good example of why Parsa's right that the 'process' is important; revolutions as highly 'open' times]; moderates were the majority; conservative backers of the Shah were also a minority.

(134): the 'White Revolution' in the late 50s marked the end of the State-clergy pact: 'land reform' (opposed by Khomeini) and 'female franchise' (which he said was Baha'i)

(135, 145): in sum, in Iran, the clergy was undermined as a source of support by the Shah's policies

(143): Taleghani ('Red Ayatollah'--who demanded popular democracy, workers' councils to run factories, etc.) was actually asked by Khomeini to lead the Tasoua march on December 10, 1978, which became the largest march in Iranian history

(145): in sum, clergy undermined as a source of support. but the clergy's response to the State was not unanimous. most were moderates, which made the mosque comparatively repression free. ideal places in which to organize. this helped Khomeini and the small minority that supported him.

(146): until 1970, Catholic Church supported Somoza

(146): 'all authority comes from God; He who resists authority resists God'

(153): in sum, in Nicaragua the Catholic Church was unable to play any significant role in the months leading up to the revolution, because of Somoza's unwillingness to tolerate non-violent solution. Church hierarchy remained largely inactive, despite the fact that a minority were radicalized.

(155): radical clergy vs. Church leadership, in Philippines (Father Conrado Balweg: the gun as 'an instrument for a higher value, the value of justice...')

(157): in early 80s, clergy is becoming politicized, but still in weak ways ('reconciliation,' etc.)

(159-161): in sum, role of the clergy in revolutions--segments became politicized, after the breakdown of the clergy-State alliance (greatest in Iran). but there was heterogeneity in their response (mainly along lines of rank, though). in only the Philippines were leading clergy able to impose their will on the outcome; in Iran, it was a small minority that had their way.

(162): vs. Marxists, on workers -- too much class struggle can be a bad thing, by threatening privileged social classes, preventing coalition

(163): large-scale mobilization of workers could only emerge where opportunities were favorable

(164): workers, in sum:

1. in Iran: a low level of organization + targeting of the State --> a coalition with capitalists (here, remember, he means shop-keepers/petit-bourgeois elements)
2. in Nicaragua: better organization + targeting of State and Capitalists in '72-74, but State in '77-79 --> a coalition with capitalists, but one that the Sandinistas led ('workers shifted their support to the FSLN, after moderates failed)
3. in Philippines: well-organized radical segment, post-Martial law + targeted State and Capitalists ('low level of State intervention') + economic deterioration in mid-1980s --> prevented coalition*
   

(169): not unlike Fitzpatrick claim re: Russia, noting that high level of State intervention was 'inherently politicizing' when workers went into struggle

(171): although vast majority of workers supported Khomeini, they did not display ideological, but political support.

(172): Marxists/socialists were in the leadership of the workers' movement

(172-173): workers in Iran, in sum: needed an opening to organize (workers started mobilizing in August 1978, after reforms); most workers were neither political nor revolutionary at outset, but were politicized (because of the State), even if it was quite late in the game; leadership of movement was in hand of socialists; mobilization was crucial to the outcome, through disruption.

(182-183): workers in Nicaragua, in sum: better organized than Iran; more employed in private sector, targeting capitalists and the State; for a long time workers' activism rendered ineffective by repression; in 1978, quickly focused attacks on the State*

(184): 23% of the labour force unionized, in the mid-1960s to 1970 in the Philippines (a robust labour movement, in short)

(186-187): radicalized in the early 1970s

(192-193): in sum, workers in Philippines: tradition of collective bargaining in 50s and 60s; institutionalization of industrial conflicts generated a reformist labour movement; radicalized in early 1970s, after (1) moderates didn't gain concessions, (2) repression, and (3) rise of radical allies; favorable opportunities after 1983 brought workers' movement out; militant workers attacked States and capitalists; this threatened the social structure, and helped prevent the formation of a class coalition.

(197): key amendment -- the defection of the capitalist class is not sufficient to explain revolutions; instead, the capitalist class must take an active role in the conflict, and pursue disruptive tactics; capitalists can be scared away from this by radical threats.*

(198): in protectionist States, division between minority of capitalists, who benefit, and majority, who do not

(198): you can have 'reluctant rebels,' provided that they're not scared off by workers

(199): in sum -- capitalists in all three countries opposed because of lack of access to the polity/economy*

(201-203): Bazaaris -- not w/ clergy, but with liberal-nationalists

(214): minimal mention of Islamic gov't in statement

(215-216): Bazaaris in Iran, in sum -- political coalition rather than ideological conversion (not interested in a theocratic State)

(220): private sector wasn't politicized in '74, in Nic, but by '77 and '78 the 'desperate economic situation' and assasination of Chamorro had politicized them [so there's a story of their radicalziation, too]

(224): capitalist support for FSLN was tactical, not ideological--happened only in the final few days [and didn't live long in the memory]

(239): coalitions are important because:

1. isolate the government [aren't they an effect of this?]
2. increase the likelihood of factionalism in the armed forces
3. essential to initiate disruptive tactics [you need capitalists for the general strike]
4. broad coalitions may encourage greater support for armed struggle (thinking of Nicaragua)

(243-247): reason for the failure of secular challengers, in Iran, is repression (for the Feda'iyan, who were anyway quite weak) and political mistakes (for the National Front, who prevented students from organizing after June 1965 uprising, after they themselves had been repressed)

(247): Khomeini's rise was for political, rather than ideological reasons: (1) he had the advantage of the mosques; (2) he made good, strategic decisions (such as not to publicly advocate for theocratic State in build-up to revolution)

(254-255): the moderates fail, in Nicaragua, bringing the Sandinistas to the fore ['coalition-building'?]

(256): in 1974, FSLN had 100 members!

(261): members of Chamber of Commerce occupied Church in Leon, after FSLN deaths

(267): New People's Army/ Communist Party Philippines had a 'social base' of one million [so, so much stronger than the FSLN!]

(270):NPA had enormous power in countryside, but couldn't overthrow Marcos by rural insurgency. this is why a coalition was needed*

(270): in line with Jeff's argument, Marcos pre-empted them and brought moderates over to his side, with elections in 1985 (this also then explains something about Nicaragua, in the way Jeff wanted to).*

(275 - 278): in sum, coalitions: in the absence of State breakdown, coalitions are important for the success of 'revolutionary' challengers; broad coalitions in Iran and Nicaragua (explained by low level of class conflict) brought the regimes down; in Philippines, broad coalition could not form.

(277): in Iran, army was integrated with population, which faciliated revolution; in Nicaragua, National Guard was insulated, which meant they fought till the end

(287): vs. Skocpol, upper class defection is not the only reason that revolutions happen; here, external pressures can open up opportunities, which coalitions can take advantage of

(288): Iran, whose revolution is supposed to be explained by a 'culture of martyrdom', lost far fewer people per capita than in Nicaragua's revolution

- - - -

[1] on the one hand, it could be argued that this a recognition problem (in which case ideology, we might further argue, becomes a central determinant of whether this holds true?) on the other hand, Parsa means that this applies somewhat unconditionally -- meaning that it is impossible to make the case, to people, that the State is complicit in their suffering even when it isn't actively involved in the economy. this is either because (a) people won't accept it, no matter how accurate it is [why?]; (b) because it's true, in his opinion [no it's not!]

[2] the strangest part of his argument is the case that these small, discontented capitalists can be captured by the category 'self-employed' (this may include shopkeepers, but also those scraping for survival in the informal sector -- and, in Pakistan's case, peasants!). it is quite strange, needless to say, to stick with figures that suggest that the size of your 'capitalist class' is larger the lower your level of development.

on p. 199, they're one-third of the labour force! this is important also because it suggests, to me, that --even while his 'interventionist State offends most capitalists' line is important--he is mis-specifying the causes behind much-bourgeois activism. he thinks exclusion from the State/economy --> 'capitalist' activism. this is no doubt true, for some big bourgeois types. but when we're talking about a third of the labour force in underdeveloped countries, this is going to be, mainly, a story of pretty impoverished types, i'd expect--in that case, what's doing the work isn't really exclusion from the State (I suspect), but insecurity/poverty/etc.

[3] the suggestion that intensified class conflict reduces the likelihood of social revolution rests on the Nicaragua/Philippines examples. in Nicaragua, a coalition led to social revolution; in the Phillipines, the failure of a coalition to form (due to heightened class conflict) explains the lack of a social revolution.

but Parsa is ignoring the profound limits of what then happened in Nicaragua, as elements of the elite turned on the 'revolutionary coalition,' profoundly limiting the nature of the 'social revolution' (making it a political revolution?) -- and setting the stage for the reversal of the 1990s. this is not to suggest that a social revolution was possible; but it ought to suggest that the counterintuitive conclusion he reaches (a social revolution is more likely when you have less class conflict) is actually not perplexing (because it didn't happen!)

a related concern, here, is with revolutionaries and their audience -- he seems to suggest that the most critical constituency to 'get on board', for revolutionaries, is elites, basically. analytically this might have some insights, though not without the enormous caveats mentioned above. but politically this is ludicrous--at some level isn't it true, also, that the only reason you can force elites to sit at the same table with you is because you have a measure of popular clout that threatens them (in this sense, there might be a middle ground, where elites are intimidated, but not scared enough to run to the arms of the State)

[4] is Parsa's argument about why people become revolutionary like Skocpol on peasants, insofar as 'increasing inequalities' are sufficient to produce revolutionary outcomes. or are these real grievances, which different State policies could have avoided? put differently, is there something specific about people's rage, that can be connected to specific government policies. or are people always ready to rebel? (alternatively, maybe 'crises' are doing most of the work in the argument? in which case the extent to which you can hold the government responsible would be in question)

the case of Iran, for example, it's not at all clear, from his narrative, that it's the fact of State intervention itself that's responsible for greater inequalities (he seems to want to indict State development strategies). in one sense (taxation policy), it seems to be the fact that the State is partial to a particular elite (big capital, rather than small traders) -- the fact that the State is unwilling to move against the wealthy (p. 66), that land reform was weak (p. 67), etc. -- which is surely independent of whether or not the State chooses to intervene. indeed, it's almost as if the State couldn't become 'autonomous enough' from certain elites

so, in short, one question is what exactly about these States --> rising inequalities/unfairness in economic benefits (can we indict State intervention in the economy?)

a second question, also, is whether any of this can explain the nature of the crises they confront. the just-so stories he tells (pp. 79-85) rest on the claim that increasing integration on the world market with specialization in a few commodities --> being prone to crises. but this is independent, we should be clear, of the fact of the State's involvement in the economy.

[5] seems at first as if the State intervention claim explains, for his schema, whether or not workers will be radical and closed to 'coalition-building' (because they won't attack capitalists).
if it is his argument, this seems insufficient. even in the examples where there is supposed to be heavy State intervention (Iran), a majority of workers are employed in the private sector (is the mechanism for his argument actually ideological, as was suggested earlier?). note also that the 50s and 60s in Philippines (p. 193) are almost the opposite argument--a lack of State intervention produces a reformist trade union movement. though this presumably has something to do with the political climate at the time?

regardless, in his reconstruction of the claims, on p. 193, it's not exactly State intervention that's doing the work -- instead, it's lack of success of moderates + repression + rise of radicals --> social revolution. is this plausible? (it partly lines up with Jeff's account)

in the Nicaragua example (182-183), two of these three things are also here (repression + lack of success of moderates)? so what needs to be explained is rise of radicals?

on the one hand this might be a State intervention claim? so the repression of the Somoza regime leads not to radical hegemony, but to a coalition with the capitalists, because workers focus on their primary antagonist, the State. in the Philippines, what's supposed to be different is the lower level of State intervention (because there's severe repression in the Philippines, too, but workers still indict capitalists), and thus the heightened level of explicit class conflict, which scares the moderates away from a coalition

but (a) what seems to be doing much more work is the longstanding strength of radical elements in the labour movement in the Philippines (vs. the much weaker position of the FSLN in Nicaragua, which wasn't supported by the trade unions until later, correct?), which cannot be best explained by conjunctural (repression) or this structural ('State-intervention') factor. this gives them the ability to refuse an alliance with 'capitalists'; (b) if not the above, perhaps strategy would be a superior way of understanding this? I understand the importance of a structural theory of strategy (to a point); but Parsa's account just doesn't sit right.

[6] worth thinking about, in the context of theories of the State, what it means for a State to 'lack' a social base. on the one hand, this history could be read as a perversion of the theory -- the State must serve society, so how you can you have a State that fails to serve society? more accurately, however, the narratives of these regimes' collapse might better be understood as a confirmation of that same argument: it is precisely the fact that these States failed to serve the social base that explains elite opposition to them, and the instability in which they found themselves (though it's not simply elite opposition, of course, that explains the social revolutions; there would be other mechanisms for elites to discipline the State, more like what happens in the Philippines)

[7] on the claim about students: it's unclear whether this is best understood as students --> radicals, or whether it should really be 'the historical context' --> radical students. the explanation on pg. 98 makes the latter seem much more plausible (a 'just-so' kind of story about student radicalism)

[8] he's not particularly alive to the passive weapons that the capitalist class wields over the State.

[9] NPA and coalition -- it's not at all clear that what's at issue is the fact that they weren't in coalition with elites. what's at issue is the fact that they were strong in rural areas and not the city (whether this is for reasons of strategy or not, is irrelevant to this point).

[10] Jeff's argument seems to have more purchase on Philippines vs. Nicaragua, which cuts against what Parsa's trying to do. the critical difference in explaining the lack of revolution is Marcos' 1985 concession. Somoza's intransigence is important to the Nicaraguan outcome. this means, also, that 'coalition' isn't the real issue -- that the FSLN was in coalition, is true, but presumably this was a tactical decision which they didn't, necessarily, need to take. could they have won, without coalition, given Somoza's intransigence?

[11] can you really measure the strength/leadership of a movement through 'newspaper reports'?

This populism helps explain not only the success of the revolution but also the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. The Republic's constitution -- with 175 clauses -- transformed these general aspirations into specific inscribed promises. It pledged to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, slums and unemployment. It also vowed to provide the population with free education, accessible medical care, decent housing, pensions, disability pay and unemployment insurance. "The government," the constitution declared, "has a legal obligation to provide the aforementioned services to every individual in the country." In short, the Islamic Republic promised to create a full-fledged welfare state -- in its proper European, rather than derogatory American, sense.

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.

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.

"We should privatize the sanctions against Iran by launching a worldwide divestment campaign," said Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for the presidency, in a speech to the AIPAC conference. "Years ago, the moral clarity and conviction of civilized nations came together in a divestment campaign against South Africa helping to rid that nation of the evil of apartheid," he said, without a trace of irony.

the fallacy of islamic 'national suicide':
A new buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a U.S. attack on Iran: "national suicide." The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have purportedly launched ruinous wars they could not have reasonably hoped to win, condemning their nations to destruction.
(...) "National suicide" will soon be an incantation by neoconservative and other pro-Israeli pundits and politicians on the "bomb Iran" bandwagon. Its strategic implications are clear: We can't trust irrational regimes because they are not deterred by threat of annihilation. Therefore, extraordinary actions -- such as preemptive attack -- may be not only justified but necessary. It further shifts moral responsibility to the victim. In the "national suicide" formulation, it is the martyr that chooses death, while the actual killers are merely the instrument by which the suicide -- or, as the case may be, the destruction of a country -- is carried out.
(...) "National suicide" is easier to believe in if you're willing to lump all Arabs and all Muslims into a single mind-set. For example, the Palestinian national movement under Arafat was staunchly secular; members of the non-Arab Taliban are Islamist extremists. The concept elides the enormous diversity within the Arab and Muslim worlds and ignores the local particularities of their multifarious -- and sometimes ideologically opposed -- political movements. A hint of these intra-regional tensions was displayed in Bin Laden's recent audiotape denouncing Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
(...) Arafat, for his part, continued negotiating after Camp David in Taba and never chose to ignite the second intifada. The uprising was sparked by Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Al Aqsa mosque and was fueled by Palestinians' sense of betrayal over a peace process that brought no peace but doubled the number of Israeli settlers on their land. The "Arafat chose violence" canard was rejected by the Mitchell report. Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, concluded: "Yasser Arafat neither prepared nor triggered the intifada."
(...) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a convenient whipping boy. He has frequently predicted Israel's eventual demise, and yet -- accurately translated -- he has not threatened it with offensive attack. Nor does he command the country's armed forces.

where are those iranian weapons in iraq?:
US officials have failed thus far to provide evidence that would support that claim, and a long-delayed US military report on Iranian arms is unlikely to offer any data on what proportion of the weapons in the hands of Shiite fighters are from Iran and what proportion comes from purchases on the open market.

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

it's the oil:
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
(...) The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.
(...) By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions.
(...) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
(...) As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.'
(...) Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
(...) In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
(...) And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.

the secret dealings of israel, iran, and the united states:
Israel has for a very long time been a critical factor in America's formulation of a policy vis-à-vis Iran. But what's really interesting is that the influence of Israel has gone in completely different directions, if we just go back fifteen years. During the 1980s, in spite of the Iranian Revolution, in spite of Ayatollah Khomeini’s many, many harsh remarks about Israel, far, far worse than what anything Ahmadinejad has said so far, Israel at the time was the country that was lobbying the United States to open up talks with Iran to try to rebuild the US-Iran relations, because of strategic imperatives that Israel had. Israel needed Iran, because it was fearing the Arab world and a potential war with the Arabs.
(...) After 1991, ’92, that's when you see the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations, because that's when the entire geopolitical map of the Middle East is redrawn. The Soviet Union collapses. The last standing army of the Arabs, that of Saddam Hussein, is defeated in the Persian Gulf War. And you have an entirely new security environment in the Middle East, in which the two factors, the Soviets and the Arabs, that had pushed Iran and Israel closer together suddenly evaporate. But as their security environment improves, they also start to realize that they may be ending up in a situation in which they can become potential threats to each other. And that's when you see how the Israelis shift 180 degrees. Now the Israeli argument was that the United States should not talk to Iran, because there is no such thing as Iranian moderates.
(...) So the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations come after the Cold War, not with the revolution in 1979.
(...) But once Israel was a fact, the Iranian government felt that because it was facing a hostile Arab world, as well as a very hostile Arab ideology, Pan-Arabism, Israel was a potential ally for the Iranians, particularly as Israel started to shift closer and closer to the Western camp and the United States. So throughout the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the Iranians and the Israelis were working very, very closely together, had a very robust alliance.
(...) They tried to keep it secret. It wasn't necessarily very secret, but Iran never recognized Israel de jure. They recognized it de facto. They had an Israeli mission in Tehran, but they never permitted it to be called an embassy. They had an Israeli envoy to Tehran, but they never called him an ambassador. When the Israeli planes were landing at the Tehran airport, they created -- they built a specific tarmac off the airport for Israeli planes to land, so that no one would really see that there are so many El Al planes flying to Tehran. And the reason why the Iranians were doing this is because, on the one hand, they needed Israel as an ally because they were fearful of the Arab world, and, on the other hand, they felt that if they got too close to Israel, they would only fuel Arab anger towards Iran.
(...) I wanted, Professor Abrahamian, to read from Juan Cole's piece, who says, talking about Ahmadinejad, “He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament,” that Khamenei is the one with the real power. ... He is right on target, yes. I think Juan Cole sums it up. And the question is, then, why is basically in American politics so much focused on Ahmadinejad? I think he serves the function that Saddam Hussein played. He's an easy person to demonize. And yesterday's Bollinger's introduction, when he described him as a dictator, I think, shows how little people like Bollinger really know about the Iranian political system. One can call Ahmadinejad many things, but a dictator he is by no means. He can’t even -- he doesn't even have the power to appoint his own cabinet ministers. It's a presidency with very limited power. And to claim that he is in a position to threaten the United States or Israel is just bizarre, frankly. I think someone like Bollinger should know more about Iran before they sling around smears like terms such as “dictator.”
(...) Here, again, he is, you can say, the Supreme Leader [khameni], but the Iranian system is actually very sort of a collective leadership. The foreign policy is made in a council, where the Supreme Leader appoints those members, but there are very different views there. And Ahmadinejad does not run that committee. Someone like Rafsanjani has a great deal of influence. The former President Khatami has a great deal of influence. And they are much more willing to negotiate. In fact, they were, I think, the people who offered this grand bargain in 2003 to settle all the issues with the United States. And for reasons that are not clear, the White House just basically brushed it aside.
(...) One of the things that I describe in the book that I think is extremely important is that when you take a look at how Iran has made its decisions vis-à-vis Israel, it's actually been geopolitical and strategic factors that have been driving their decisions. It’s not been ideology.
(...) [Azar Derakhshan:] I try to tell to the people in foreigner countries, in European countries, it's not true, this portrait. There is another fact, very important. The people of Iran, the movement, they are going to take the future. They are not forced to choose between neither the United States, neither the government of Iran. There is another force in Iran. If really somebody wants to prevent the war, the clashes, should be support this movement, this movement for equality, for freedom. ... We don't need United States to liberate us. First of all, we are here, and this is our legitimate to liberate ourselves. We want to decide about our future ourselves. We want to fight our native enemy by ourselves. We don’t need -- that’s first. Second one, we already have seen, because Afghanistan and Iraq, they are neighbor of Iran. And the women of Iran, they can see it. Maybe before, not, but right now it’s really -- it’s enough to know what kind of program they have for the people of Iran.
(...) it [an attack] would play right into the hands of Ahmadinejad, because you would have a national emergency. He would declare, basically, the country's in danger. Everyone would have to rally around the flag. People who disliked him would keep their mouth shut. At a time of when the existence of the state is in question, you don't mess around with the leaders. He would basically be able to act as a much more of a strongman national leader.
(...) I think the Iranians have played a game in Iraq in which they basically have invested in every potential faction in Iraq, making sure that whoever comes up on top is going to be a player who has strong relations with Iran, because it's in Iran’s hardcore national interest to make sure that Iraq never again becomes a hostile state, so they never have to experience the eight-year war that they had with Iraq in the 1980s. So, again, I think we're seeing a policy by the Iranian government there that is quite independent of whether Ahmadinejad is in power or not. It's probably something that another Iranian government would be pursuing, as well, at least under this regime that we're having in Iran right now.
(...) And I think the only way for the United States to be able to find a way out of Iraq is not only to talk to the Iranians, but really include all of the other neighbors of Iraq into the process, giving these neighbors not only a stake in the outcome, but also a stake in the process itself. We have a tremendous amount of problems with what the Saudis are doing in Iraq and also what the Jordanians are doing. We're not talking about that at all. On the contrary, we’re just focusing on Iran's role.
(...) For instance, the constant drumbeat that Iran is actually supplying weaponry to the insurgents that are killing Americans, this is basically saying that Iran has already declared war on the United States. When you try to actually pin down what is the evidence for that, it boils down to the yellowcake stories and the stuff about Saddam Hussein being behind al-Qaeda. Until the United States actually gets real evidence that Iran is providing lethal weapons to the insurgents, I would not accept any of those arguments at face value.

let's go bomb iran:
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei recently revealed that Iran has agreed to cooperate in providing requested information on its nuclear development program. He has suggested that the Iranians should be given more time. ElBaradei told the New York Times, "This is the first time Iran is ready to discuss all the outstanding issues which triggered the crisis in confidence." However, the U.S. State Department is planning a full court press for a third resolution in the Security Council, against Iran.
(...) And don't wait for the major mass media in the U.S. to adequately inform the public of the danger of a military attack on Iran. Almost totally ignored on its pages and on the airwaves was the Sept. 2nd report in the London Times that "The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in three days, according to a national security expert." According to the paper's correspondent, Sarah Baxter, Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, told a recent public meeting of conservatives that the plan was not for "pinprick strikes" against Iran's nuclear facilities. "They're about taking out the entire Iranian military," he said.
(...) One story that did attract some attention was the report that the Israeli government did not goad the Bush Administration into attacking Iraq in 2001, that in fact the Israelis saw it as a diversion from what should be on the agenda: taking out Iran. Word these days amongst the conservatives and their neo- cousins is that Tel Aviv went along with the propaganda campaign leading up to the war on Iraq on the assumption that it was only a preliminary step. "The word among the neocon family is Cheney believes Bush will stick to his pledge not to leave office 16 months hence with Iran's nuclear facilities unscathed," right wing columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote in June. On Aug. 8th, former CIA operative Robert Baer wrote in Time magazine, "Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on [Iran] within the next six months."
(...) One thing is certain. Should the White House decide to take such a dangerous step, it is unlikely, at this point, to be constrained by domestic opposition. There is no widespread sentiment for war against Iran. According to a March poll, 57% of people in the U.S. believe Iran is a threat that can be contained with diplomacy. 20% don't see Iran as an imminent threat and only 15% support military action. However, there is practically no opposition in Congress. A Democratic Party majority, already too cowed to end the carnage in Iraq, doesn't even want to talk about Iran. Earlier this year there was talk about a resolution requiring the President to "consult" with Congress before attacking Iran. The House Democratic Party leadership dropped the idea.

jockeying for power:
The US may have succeeded in toppling the Iraqi regime, but Iran succeeded in placing its allies in positions of power in Baghdad in the post-invasion phase. Iran won its influence in Baghdad not only through its political, sectarian, economic, military and intelligence presence in Iraq, but also through its skill at capitalising on the momentous bungling of the neo-conservative administration in Washington. In 15 years it reversed the outcome of the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988). From near military defeat it has now scored almost total political victory. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that Al-Maliki's visit was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Iraq-Iran war.
(...) All three parties appear to be operating on a tacitly agreed-upon premise: a compromise solution will only work if each party does what it takes to ensure that the other parties' worst nightmares do not come true. Riyadh's nightmare is that Iran will succeed in securing a large base of operations in the area of southern Iraq adjacent to the Saudi Arabian borders, within a stone's throw of Saudi oil fields. Tehran fears the emergence of a central government in Baghdad which owes its primary allegiance to Washington and which could eventually build up a strong enough army to threaten Iran again in the future. Washington is cringing at the spectre of a forced withdrawal without face-saving agreements and, therefore, having to sustain the internal and external fallout from an unequivocal defeat while Tehran is left to crow over its political victory in Iraq.

who should bomb iran first?
You would not know it from this media performance, but in fact there is a second conceivable question: Is the corporate media biased in favour of the state-corporate establishment of which it is a part? But this is one of the great mainstream taboos and is essentially never discussed. Remarkably, then, it turns out that the perennial media focus on the claim that the media is “left-leaning” is itself symptomatic of the reality that the media is anything but!
(...) Last year, John Pilger presented a more sobering picture to an audience at Columbia University: “If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to ‘soften-up‘ the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us.”
(...) At the top of the emailed version of the June 21 edition of the New York Times, this “advertisement” appeared in large red letters: “Should We Bomb Iran? “Vote in This Urgent Poll”
(...) In the 1,000-word article that followed, the term “al Qaeda” was used eight times. This was a transparent attempt to equate Iraqi insurgents with the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks, much as Bush attempted to associate Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda in the minds of the American public.

the tables turn, somewhat expectedly:
Rebels killed in clashes with Iranian forces this week had recently infiltrated border areas of the Islamic Republic carrying U.S.-made arms, an Iranian commander was quoted as saying on Thursday.

building wall on pak-iran border:
He said excesses were being committed against the Baloch since 1948 in West Pakistan. The building of this wall would futher divide the Baloch families. He said the Germans had built a wall, which was demolished. But neither the Pakistani nor the Iranian Baloch were taken into confidence over the construction of the wall along the Gold Smith Line. "We demand that the construction of the wall should be stopped immediately."

fear breeds hatred breeds war breeds doom:
Fully 71 percent of Israelis believe that the United States should launch a military attack on Iran if diplomatic efforts fail to halt Tehran's nuclear program, according to a new poll.

cheney and imperial strategy:
[the imperial arc] Since coming to power in January 2001, the neo- conservatives, especially the ultra-neoconservatives championed by Cheney, were obsessed by a single goal: reordering the world in a way that would establish Washington's global hegemony for the 21st century and ensure that no other power, such as China, could contest America's perch at the pinnacle of the new order. The key to accomplishing this goal, they thought, lay in seizing control over the world's major oil reserves, and Iraq, which sits atop one of the largest oil reserves and which was crippled by a decade of sanctions, was the obvious place to start. Of course, they had the minor problem of having to take a detour through Afghanistan due to that country's immediate connection with 11 September, but they dealt with that as quickly as possible and, as soon as they toppled the Taliban, redirected their guns towards Iraq. Then, following the occupation of Iraq, they shifted their sights to the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah- Palestinian resistance axis, which they felt formed a major impediment to their designs to reshape the Middle East to their liking. Moreover, such was their hubris that they imagined they could cajole, blackmail and twist the arms of the US's European and Arab allies into the service of their policy.
(...) Despite the rapidity of the rise of the Iraqi resistance and the recalcitrance of the resistance on the Lebanese and Palestinian fronts, the Bush administration remained convinced that its plans were proceeding as intended. All these mere glitches meant was that implementation would take a little longer than expected -- a reading of the situation that seemed confirmed by the assassination of Rafik Al-Hariri that set into motion dynamics that would lead to Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and pressure to disarm Hizbullah, the Iranian nuclear crisis that opened an avenue to clamp down on Iran politically and economically, and Sharon's massive offensive against Palestinian resistance factions.
(...) The most likely purpose of Cheney's tour, therefore, is to lay the diplomatic groundwork and secure support for a military strike against Iran. Cheney undoubtedly thinks that there is enough anti-Iranian paranoia in the region to facilitate his task. However, he also knows that the Arabs will also want to see some progress on the Arab-Israeli front, so he certain to perform the types of gestures that we have seen from the Americans before when they were gearing up for a war in this region. Today, in order to show how serious he is about getting the negotiations ball rolling again, he will give some play to the Arab peace initiative. But play is about as far as it will go; firstly, because Cheney is mostly interested in playing for time and, secondly, because an acceptable settlement has never been more out of reach than it is at present. So probably the most we will see will be some preliminary talks while preparations are put into place for a strike against Iran, which could take place much sooner than many imagine and probably no later than October or November. It was not just for show that Cheney climbed aboard an American aircraft carrier in the Gulf and shouted threats at Iran.