“The [UN] Security Council Resolutions on Iraq passed during the 1990s did not constitute a mandate for the US-British military intervention in 2003,” the report concludes. “Despite the existence of certain ambiguities, the wording of Resolution 1441 cannot reasonably be interpreted (as the government did) as authorizing individual Member States to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council’s resolutions, without authorization from the Security Council.”

But the U.S. Army’s own specialists in Afghanistan’s culture and society are warning that relying on the tribes there may be a waste of time. “Most of Afghanistan has not been ‘tribal’ in the last few centuries,” notes a recent report from the Army’s Human Terrain System at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. “In fact, many scholars are reluctant to use the word ‘tribe’ at all for describing groups in Afghanistan.”

But of course the drawdown isn’t actually happening. President Obama inherited a war with roughly 135,000 troops in Iraq, and today there are 131,000 and thousands of contractors.

and

Gen. McChrystal is now ‘privately’ requesting another 40,000 troops for the eight year old war, which would bring the overall US presence there to well over 100,000 troops, and nearly triple the number in the nation with President Obama was elected last November.

marxism/resistance mp3's, part II

middle east through a marxist mirror, gilbert achcar (2003): very interesting talk, though makes arguments that can only be fully developed in the book of the same name. the underlying thread is that Marxism is going to be tested when applied to a region like the middle east (yet, of course, gilbert is also suggesting that it's important to make that "extra" effort--i would argue that, in truth, marxism always needs to be re-applied, rather than mechanically imputed). the issues he raises: (1) combined and uneven development--trotsky's methodology is critical, as you see the co-existence of the very modern with the very backward (and, indeed, the very point is that you can't make sense of the assemblage of structures without this framework to orient your analysis). but, and this is a point that is undoubtedly better developed in the book, the actually existing conditions in the middle east are very different from tsarist russia. whereas in the latter trotsky read the urgency of permanent revolution into the conjuncture of a weak bourgeoisie and urban petty bourgeoisie counterposed to a concentrated (if small) working-class, in the middle east, achcar's argument is that the urban petty bourgeoisie is much, much stronger (and that the working-class less so). it is the urban petty bourgeoisie that led the national democratic revolution (here he discusses them as an example of bonapartism, which again could not be fully developed in this talk--what he mentions is that, in the form of Nasser, they even went as far as expropriation of the national bourgeoisise--state capitalism), before it collapsed at the end of the 60's. what we are seeing now is what Marx argued--most of the urban petty bourgeoisie will not play a progressive role, but will want to turn back the clock of the history that is crushing them (hence islamic fundamentalism--and this is certainly a major part of the story, as many others have written). (2) achcar also argues that classical marxism needs to re-calibrated if we're to understand rentier states run by individuals or families--the heavy dependence on oil renders them, as those who control the oil rent, autonomous from the prevailing balance of class forces. this, achcar continues, means that the individual psychology of the leaders can play an important role in the policy that the state enacts--in other words, the paramount importance of oil enables erratic behavior (behavior that is not rational from the perspective of bourgeois economic development--i.e., Gaddafi. the state doesn't have to "deliver" to its bourgeoisie). (3) he makes some auxiliary observations about Islam, arguing that it has calcified into something less moldable than Christianity (he makes a strange claim about how christianity was born as a religion of the oppressed, which makes it amenable to theologies of liberation, whereas Islam and Judiasm do not have that character--the trouble is that this seems to neglect the very quick co-option of Christianity (and Islam, of course) as a ruling ideology (i mean that both (a) the imprint of the early years, in other words, would fade; and (b) thus, if christianity can make room for theologies of liberation, so can islam, surely (what about ali shariati?).

emiliano zapata, mike gonzalez (1993): more of an excellent history of the mexican revolution than a summary of zapata's life--gonzalez' narrative centers on the "lost possibility" of the winter of 1914, when zapata and villa found themselves in possession of mexico city for almost two months. after the defeat of general huerta (who had united the forces of reaction to topple madero)--a defeat which owed principally to the stregnth of the peasant armies, gonzalez argues--there was an opening for villa and zapata to cease power; the bourgeoisie was weak, disorganized, and plagued by in-fighting. but--and this is the point that gonzalez stresses--they failed to make common cause with the working-class (and two points are key, which make this "lost possibility" all the more lamentable: (1) the urban working-class existed, and was militant, as evidenced by a strike in 1908 and general activism; (2) the peasantry themselves was comprised of a significant number who worked for a wage, thereby offering a more potent basis for this possible alliance). the bourgeoisie, under the leadership of carranza and others, united to push zapata and villa back to the south and north respectively--they pursued, then, to besiege them for the next few years. these campaigns were a priority for the government, and demonstrated its commitment to a decisively bourgeois economic and political framework--as they encroached upon zapata's domain, they picked off the land he had reclaimed for the peasantry in order to hand it back to the landed elites that had fled the fighting. of course, it goes without saying that whatever was relatviely progressive in the constitution that was eventually consolidated in 1917--owed everything to the activism of zapata and villa.

john rees, the politics and economics of modern imperialism (2007): not unlike david harvey's "the new imperialism," john enumerates a dialectical schema for thinking about imperialism in capitalism. he argues that there are two "threads" to its DNA--two distinct logics: (1) an economic logic--capitalism invariably involves competition amongst different economic units for resources, labor and markets--conflicts which can hardly be limited by geographic boundaries; (2) a political logic--insofar as the modern era is defined by the existence of the nation-state, we contend also with a territorial logic of power, in which administrators are driven by geo-strategic compulsions to exercise control over regions beyond the borders of their own nation-states. while rees contends that these two dynamics have been in operation since the birth of modernity, imperialism has nonetheless developed in the hundreds of years since modernity was born (in other words, victorian imperialism is distinct from today's imperialism--it would be useful to enumerate how, which this talk doesn't do). the modern character of today's imperialism rests on two turning points, the first economic and the second political: (1) 1979, which represents the birth of neoliberal capitalism--the context of course is the petering out of the tremendous growth of the "golden age," in which capitalism both needed and was able to afford the welfare state. to revive profitability, capital sought the famous "three fixes"--neoliberalism, globalization, and financializaiton (he doesn't go into this in much detail, but this argument is there); (2) 1989, which represents the ascent of the neo-conservative vision in the united states--the nutters that advocate imperial expansion. he ends with the critical observation that, while the united states' military might is still unparalleled, its economic power has faded dramatically since the zenith of WWII--where once the dollar's stregnth was unquestionable and america's manufacturing base very impressive, america today is a de-industrializing debtor nation which depends on the oil states and e. asia to hold its dollars (in a sense we are seeing the interdependence and independence of the economic and political in this very fact--capital is fleeing the US, even as the nation-state desperately needs it to stay). the uneasy alliance rumsfeld brokered between the neo-cons and the fiscal republicans led the US into an iraq "invasion-lite" (half the number troops they used in the first gulf war)--but it was, as a result, rees argues, trapped in a unplanned, underfunded invasion of a population deeply hostile to its presence. the iraq invasion, of course, has worsened the fiscal deficit of the US considerably, making its economic position only more insecure (much like vietnam hit the american state in the early 70s). reed concludes by arguing that we are heading towards the definitive end to the american empire--what awaits us, though, we know not.

Sluglett's main argument is that the circumstances of the mandate locked Britain and the Sunni ruling clique into a relationship of interdependence that lasted through 1958. It is an instructive insight, and the book details the working of that relationship and the odd and mostly unfortunate dividends it paid in central matters of government, including defense, education, land revenue, minority rights, and so on. This argument remains in tension with another red thread running through the book: the British effort to devise institutions through which they could exercise power discreetly enough to convince Iraqis and the world of Iraq's independence despite Britain's actual control. The end of the mandate in 1932 was thus a momentous non-event in Sluglett's shrewd assessment, since little changed in substance until the revolution of 1958. In 1976, this was a revisionist view of a mandatory government that many were still holding up as an exemplary experiment in international development.

With the dramatic decline in the price of oil and the slashing of the budget for 2009, the prospects for integrating significant numbers of the sahwat into the security forces or otherwise accommodating them look bleak. To date, while the actual numbers are contested and public pronouncements by the government have varied, recent estimates suggest that only 5,000 of these individuals have been formally inducted into the security forces.[13] Furthermore, the outbreak of hostilities following al-Mashhadani’s arrest is still seen by many Sunnis in sectarian terms. A stepped-up and more comprehensive campaign against the sahwat could still trigger a broader sense of Sunni Arab grievance and a series of uncoordinated reactions that would catalyze a larger outbreak of destabilizing sectarian violence.

So if Zubaydah had already yielded all the information he had, why was there a need to turn to torture? The answer: There was a ticking clock, but not one attached to a bomb. The Bush administration wanted its war against Iraq and thought that the perfect justification would be a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq--a link that the Bush and Cheney White House had asserted, but couldn't prove because no such link existed.

Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype. In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

Most of us remember all too well the praise from the Bush administration lavished on the Awakening Groups, a Sunni militia comprised of former resistance fighters and al-Qaeda members (according to the US military), each member paid $300 per month of US taxpayer money. They grew in strength to 100,000 men. US aid to the Councils was cut off last October on the understanding that the members would be absorbed into Iraqi government forces. To date, less than a third have been given government jobs.

Well, I’m starting to call a series of pieces I’m doing “Operation Rebranded,” because what we’re seeing unfold with the Obama administration’s foreign policy is basically continuing many of the worst parts of Bush’s foreign policy and sort of repackaging these policies. So, for instance, the Obama administration has dropped the use of the term "global war on terrorism” and uses phrases like “contingency operations” to describe the US occupation of Iraq. The latest news we have is that the Obama’s administration has decided on its mercenary firm of choice. Clearly, Obama did not want to continue at least a public relationship with Blackwater.

According to a CBS News report last April, the head of mental health for the VA, Ira Katz, said the following in an internal VA email regarding suicide attempts by veterans:

Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?

Speaking on the record in November 2007, however, Katz told CBS News, "There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA." But if 1,000 veterans a month attempting suicide is not an epidemic, then what is? Katz's duplicity is chilling--not only for the veterans who are already enrolled in the VA, but also for soldiers who are being ordered to Iraq and Afghanistan today, and are likely to return home to a mental health system even more overburdened than it is currently.

from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part III)

(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...

notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part V)

(159): As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar's forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar.
(161): An old man in a mosque in Kandahar...confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmed, "They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life."
(172): The shift in Hizbullah's ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi'a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation.
(172): The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without.
(175): One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam--opium production, madrasah education, and the very notion of jihad--to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the "evil empire."
(181): On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic US support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT reported that "the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988." Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published int he late 1960s noted that "the US army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological, and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.
(183): [on Iran-Iraq] The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: "We hope they kill one another."
(183): Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: "to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the 'collateral damage.'"... Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law," from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq's infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties... Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor... reported that the bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq--electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry, and health care."
(184): But George H.W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam... [He] faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized... to take advantage of Saddam's overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally... On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq's majority Shi'a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America's hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.
(185): By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the WSJ they would soon run out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse." That was two months before President Clinton... decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16,1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox...
(185-186): The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used 14 times, 12 of those since the collapse of the USSR. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a US veto.
(186-187): As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to an agreement on an oil-for-food program.... Iraq was allowed to sell a net amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Brtain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25% thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Comission on the... noted, "Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs..."
(187-188): The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge... was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur... was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions.
(189): Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention... By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Comission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths "directly attributed to the sanctions" ranged "from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children." Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic bomb attacks.
(190): How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long?... The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council 661 Committee... to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country... [T]he reason it gave most often was concern over dual use... [A]s of September 2001, the United States had blocked "nearly 200 humanitarian contracts." The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were "a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
(191-192): Forced to take reponsibility for a policy they could neither defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Dennis Halliday..., declaring: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
(194): Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement.
(199): Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
(204-205): It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington's patience ran out. He criticized Washington's preoccupation with Bosnia--"a war of the rich"--and its neglect of Somalia, where "one third of the population was likely to die of hunger," and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of "standing idly by"... In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan... Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali.
(210): The United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court's attention to the year's of US carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.
(215): In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: "They are products of a culture... in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
(217): Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective greivances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgement that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds.
(222): We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life--both our own and that of others--to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.

The voting shows that Mr Maliki and his Dawa party are stronger but the significance can be exaggerated. Although he fought a secular campaign, on important decisions Mr Maliki does not generally act without seeking the opinion of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The election has also been painted as a setback for Iranian influence but Mr Maliki is still going to keep close relations with Tehran while remaining on good terms with the US. One test of the success of the election will be how far the results are accepted by the losers.

U.S. forces in Iraq have detained 10,000 prisoners without evidence of their wrongdoing, a U.S. detention centers in Iraq commander said on Monday.

Others might question Cockburn’s pessimism: from his base in Qom, Muqtada retains influence over a strong nationalist current in Iraq, and in August 2008, it was Sadrists who led protests against the ‘Status of Forces’ agreement between the us and the Maliki government, which was obliged to reject the treaty amid a wave of anti-Occupation sentiment. Muqtada continues to weave between the traditions of Iraqi nationalism and Shia communalism—ministering to his Shia working-class base while making sporadic appeals to Iraqi society as a whole. Whether he can help to forge a coherent political force that will reject any further accommodations with the occupiers remains to be seen. But Cockburn has given us a valuable portrait of an individual who is pivotal to the country’s future political arrangements—and more importantly, of the social forces that will sustain him as long as he continues to speak for them.

The ICRC noted that around 40 percent of Iraqis, mostly people living in suburbs and rural areas, are not connected to a water network, and must thus either buy water at a cost of around 50 US cents (40 euro cents) for 10 litres, or collect it from often polluted rivers or wells if they cannot afford it.

More than $125.7 billion has now been committed to rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and government since U.S.-led forces toppled the government of Saddam Hussein five years ago. Though all of that has not been spent, it includes $50.77 billion in money appropriated by the U.S., $57.96 billion in Iraqi funds and $17 billion pledged by other international donor, the bulk of it in the latter in loans and under $5.3 billion in grants.

Abdulsada's struggle is anything but rare here. Though precise figures don't exist, most approximations put unemployment across Iraq at between 30 percent and 60 percent. U.S. officials estimate that well over half of Iraqis who want to work can't find jobs.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement. "Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.