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.

"ghost wars," steve coll

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

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

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

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

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(66-67): details re: weapons trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(224): A hundred years after Columbus arrived on the island of Jamaica in 1494, the Arawak population of a hundred thousand dwindled to a handful. In time, the entire population was cleansed, and the island was peopled by English colonial officials and plantation owners as well as enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. Captive labor grew the sugarcane that provided the main economic resource of the island. Rebellions came over time, and these generated a strong consciousness of distaste for the brutality, and paternalism of colonial rule. It took centuries for independence to come, and when it did come in 1962, it was overdue.
(224-225): The new regime of Nelson Manley's People's National Party crafted a social development agenda to counter the chainless bondage of postcolonial life.... Economic policy generally drew from the import-substitution theory, and the government relied on targeted direct foreign investment, notably in the bauxite sector. The latter provided Jamaica with most of its foreign exchange earnings. Discovered in the 1940s, the bauxite reserves fell prey to Canadian and US firms starting in 1952. These firms have since dominated the extraction of the mineral, with Jamaica becoming the largest exporter to North America in the 1960s. But as with sugar and tourism, the Jamaican people did not benefit from their natural resources. The only return to Jamaica came in the way of modest taxes to the government, meager wages to the working class, and a small tribute to the Jamaican managers at the mines and plantations--for this reason, what Jamaica exported despite its fabulous resources was cheap labor, and what it gained for that was a pittance toward its grandiose development aims.
(225-226): Despite the decent rate of growth, Jamaica could not raise the funds to cover its import bill; over 60 percent of the goods used in the country came from abroad (including energy and consumer goods, but also about half its food). Unable to cover its import bill as a result of a failure to diversify its economy, the Jamaican government relied on foreign investment and tourism to balance its books. The erratic, but almost always low prices of its minerals (bauxite) as well as its plantation crops (bananas and sugar) meant that the balance of payments suffered from a chronic deficit.
(226): By the early 1970s, the government reactivated its efforts to break Jamaica out of its impoverished chrysalis at the nether end of global capitalism. Manley's son Michael ran a ferocious and successful political campaign against the global economic system that stacked the deck against countries like Jamaica. Once in power, Michael Manley promoted the construction of democratic socialism for Jamaica, but his regime did not try to disassociate itself from the world capitalist system... Keeping Jamaica hooked up to the infusion of foreign aid or investment meant that the government had to respond to the demands of the foreign money managers rather than the long-term developmental needs of the people of Jamaica.
(227): [DECLINING TERMS OF TRADE] Bauxite was not the only unprocessed commodity to experience a sharp decline in its price into the early 1980s. If the 1970s saw a marginal rise in the price of certain nonpetroleum commodities, by the 1980s there was an across-the-board drop in these prices. Single commodity export-dependent countries lost earnings of as much as $290 billion between 1980-1991 as a result of the decline in their terms of trade. For sub-Saharan Africa, the impact was gruesome. For much of the region, nonfuel primary commodity goods amount for about one-third of the state's export earnings. The decline in the terms of trade meant that these countries lost on average about 5 percent of their gross domestic product...
(229): [DEBT CRISIS] World inflation, high oil prices, and a drop in commodity prices affected the reserves, as it did those of most of the darker nations. In 1960, the total debt of the 133 states that the World Bank counted as part of the "developing countries" held a total public and private debt just short of US $18 billion. In ten years, the debt had escalated to $75 billion., and when Jamaica went into fiscal crisis, it was $113 billion. By 1982, the debt had reached the astronomical figure of $612 billion. While many scholars and commentators blame the oil crisis of 1973-1974 for the ballooning debt, this is a superficial argument. The rise in oil prices due to the action of the OPEC cartel only exacerbated tendencies that had already stymied the social development of the formerly colonized states. The distorted development agenda followed by most of the third World... and the imperialist pressure faced by these states produced a structurally impoverished international political economy. When the oil crisis hit, it provided the conjuncture for the Third World's structural rot.
(229): In 1974-1975, the nonpetroleum exporting states of the Third World had to come up with $80 billion to finance their external deficits. Of this, about $36 billion came from private sources. Commercial banks in the G-7 that found that the rate of return within the advanced industrial states declined as productivity rates grew flat, turned eagerly to fund the Third World states... But the banks would not dole out their capital without cover from the IMF. If the IMF sanctified the state with a short-term standby agreement, it provided a "seal of approval" for more funds. The IMF loans often fell far short of the amount needed, so the IMF acted as insurance for the private commercial banks... The money swept into the Third World, but not without a prospect of return. In 1975, Rothschild reports, "each of the five largest US banks made more than 40 percent of its profits from foreign operations. Chase was an extreme case. It earned 64 percent of its profits abroad, as compared to only 22 percent in 1970.
(230): How could the impoverished pay back these enormous loans?... The defaults did not come because the IMF, backed by the US government and the newly confident elites of the darker nations, strong-armed governments into the cannibalization of their resources to maintain the payment schedules. After the Mexican collapse of 1982, the US government proposed the Brady Plan (1989), which had two elements. First, the banks lent money to cover the debt if the country provided assurances to pay back the loan and the debt, and second, the IMF and the US Department of the Treasury sanctified the loan if the country entered a process of significant economic reform.
(231): [DEBT CRISIS AS TRIBUTE] By 1983, capital flows reversed, as more money came from the indebted states to the G-7 than went out as loans and aid. In other words, the indebted countries subsidized and funded the wealthy nations. In the late 1980s, the indebted states sent an average of $40 billion more to the G-7 than the G-7 sent out as loans and aid; this became the annual tribute from the darker nations. By 1997, the total debt owed by the formerly colonized world amounted to about $2.17 trillion, with a daily debt-service payment of $717 million. The nations of sub-Saharan Africa spent four times more on debt service, on interest payments, than on health care. For most of the indebted states, between one-third and one-fifth of their gross national product was squandered in this debt-service tribute. The debt crisis had winners: the financial interests in the G-7.
(231): During the first six months of 1974, when the fiscal effects of the oil crisis became clear,
the G-7 enjoyed a $6 billion surplus with the nonpetroleum exporting Third World states, but it suffered a $41 billion deficit with the oil exporting states. A year later, the nonpetroleum states owed $21 billion, whereas the G-7 owed the oil group $21 billion. The scale had been balanced.
(231): Furthermore, the oil states... held their profits largely in US dollars, which meant that as the US dollar abandoned the gold standard in 1971, its own standing in the global economy remained high because petrodollars kept it in demand. The rise in petrodollars allowed the United States to abandon the very macroeconomic restrictions it demanded of the Third World, and therefore run a deficit to strengthen its domestic economy and expand its already-considerable military.
(233): The IMF plan was rigorous. First, it called on the government to devalue its currency to discourage imports and increase its ability to export its products. The policy intended to shift the import-substitution thrust to an export-oriented economy. Second, the government had to discourage an increase in wages to keep down the need to import goods. Third, the IMF called for the reduction of the role of the state in the economy... Fourth, the state needed to sell off its public-sector assets and enhance the private enterprises. Finally, the state had to hamper the money supply and raise interest rates to induce "fiscal discipline."
(233): In Jamaica, the immediate effects of IMF policy fell on the rural and urban working class. Inflation soared as the Jamaican dollar faced significant devaluation and price of basic goods began to skyrocket (chicken up 74 percent, salt-fish 285 percent, milk 83 percent, flour 214 percent, and cooking oil 72 percent). The IMF austerity regime dropped real wages by as much as 35 percent in 1978 alone. By 1980, the unemployment rate in Jamaica soared to 30 percent or perhaps more. About 60 percent of Jamaican households began to rely primarily, if not exclusively, on the income of women, many of whom worked in unrewarding sweatshops in Kingston's free trade zone. In that zone, 80 percent of the employees were single mothers whose desperation to keep their families alive meant that three-quarters of them worked overtime.
(234): In 1990, a senior IMF economist studied the IMF-enforced stabilization measures from 1973 to 1988, the period when the structural adjustment bombed the Third World. His measured study found that "the growth rate is significantly reduced in program countries relative to the change in non-program countries." The IMF produced a patient with contracted economic activity, the destruction of the capacity for long-term economic growth, the cannibalization of resources (what is known as "asset stripping"), and a consequent return to being an exporter of raw materials. Much of this resulted in rising inequality in terms of class and gender, in addition to widespread environmental devastation.
(236): By the end of 1980, the per capita income in Jamaica fell by 40 percent.
(237): Marcos, Suharto, and Seaga [Edward Seaga, who succeeded Manley in 1980] mastered the art of political illusion: by a sleight of hand, they posed as efficient nationalists as they opened their countries to unregulated corporations. The national bourgeoisie, represented in Jamaica by Seaga, camouflaged their enthusiasm for "reform" by making the claim that there is no alternative and the IMF made us do it as well as by touting the amount of US and IMF money that flowed into the country as a result of the reforms.
(238): In 1981, the island's gross domestic product was $3 billion, but three years later it fell to $2 billion... IMF-driven globalization exacerbated the collapse of the Jamaican economy... The institutional impact of IMF-driven globalization was heavy. The new reforms pushed by Seaga's government resulted in a weakened responsive state. Between the mid-1980s and 1989, Jamaica's government fired about a third of its public employees, "both through privatization of public companies and through central government layoffs"... The national liberation state was disemboweled in this process.
(238): The neoliberal state now stakes itself more on repression than on responsiveness... From 1979 to 1986, the Jamaican police killed more than two hundred people per year... In the conditions of total social and economic collapse, gang violence or community protection against gang violence became the order of the day. Social anomie intensified alongside IMF-driven reforms, and the neoliberal state responded with the bullet.
(243): The G-7 dominated the IMF procedures and policies, and regarded its rules as being for the darker nations and not for the advanced industrial states. For this reason, the G-7 did not adhere to the IMF structural adjustment demands against budget deficits and subsidies. The G-7 broke the rules when it wanted to... The IMF served the G-7, and not the G-77... The statement showed that whereas almost a hundred Third World states accounted for less than 37 percent of the IMF's voting power, the five leading industrial powers controlled more than 40 percent, while the United States alone held 20 percent of the votes in the IMF.
(245): In the thirty years after 1960, the Tigers' total share of total world exports increased from 1.5 to 6.7 percent. Their share of total exports from the Third World rose from 6 to 34 percent, as their share of Third World manufacturing exports rose from 13.2 to an unbelievable 61.5 percent. Unlike most great leaps forward of this kind, the Tigers did not grow at the cost of extreme domestic inequality. By 1990, all the Tigers showed a substantial improvement in income distribution...
(246): Singapore... had the privilege of being the second most competitive economy in the world (after the US). The GDP of this small island grew from 1965 to 1990 by an average of 6.5% per year... The engine for this explosion was Singapore's exports of manufactures. In1960, only 7.2 percent of Singapore's gross domestic product came from manufactured exports, whereas by 1990 manufactured exports accounted for a little more than three-quarters of the gross domestic product.
(249): The sensation of Singapore and other other Tigers came in large part from a set of advantages exceptional to them. For one, the colonial experience of the Tigers was objectively beneficial. Seized by the British as commercial bases for their China trade, Singapore (1819) and Hong Kong (1841) inherited few of history's problems. There was little agriculture, and what there was soon vanished before the hunger for buildings... Both Singapore and Hong Kong thrived as duty-free ports for opium and other commodities. These were paradises of capital, where the problem of production (and hence workers) was shipped elsewhere. [SEEMS CONTRADICTORY, IN LIGHT OF LATER ADMISSION THAT COMMUNIST TRADE UNIONS PLAYED PROMINENT ROLE IN SINGAPORE] These were almost purely entrepots. Occupied by the Japanese, Taiwan and Korea experienced an assault on their landlord class and forced land reform. Feudalism disappeared at the butt of an Arisaka rifle. In addition, the Japanese colonial machine exported its zaibatsu-state complex for capitalist development.
(249): A brutal war between the British and the Communist Party ran from 1948 until Malaysia's independence in 1957.
(250-251): Politics interfered with the necessary work of development; the ideological framework developed by Lee for PAP secluded the work of development... The Tigers emulated each other on this score: two consecutive dictatorships (led by Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan) controlled South Korea from 1960-1988; in Taiwan, the Kuomintang ruled a one-party state from 1949-1996; and Hong Kong remained a British colony until 1997.
(251): Even as the Third World's bourgeoisie lavished praise on the East Asian miracle in the 1980s, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Tigers traveled a familiar route, albeit with better basic conditions (land reforms and institutions such as the chaebols for industrial organizations). Singapore's PAP, led by the charismatic Lee, followed Goh Keng Swee's advice on state intervention. The Development Plan (1960-64) adopted the import-substitution industrialization strategy. Whatever funds could be harnessed went into state-owned enterprises...
(252-253): [KEY BREAK WITH ISI--THIS WHOLE ACCOUNT IS SLIGHTLY WEAK, I THINK] When Singapore broke from Malaysia in 1965, it had to reassess the import-substitution strategy because now the small island alone did not have a sufficient domestic market to carry through the program. This specific event, the caesura from Malaysia, caused the cabinet to move the island state toward an export-oriented manufacturing plant... To transform Singapore into a major transshipment entrepot and manufacturing site required an enormous infusion of capital... The secret to the Tigers' sensation lies in this original infusion of capital, because only with it could their various institutional advantages shine. A large amount of the investement capital came from PAP's ability to capture domestic savings... Additional money came from US government aid, although this played less of a role in Singapore than in Taiwan ($13 billion) and Korea ($5.6 billion)... More than domestic savings and foreign aid, the Tigers in the 1960s relied on investment from transnational corporations. Lee Kuan Yew recognized early that his goal was "to make Singapore into an oasis in Southeast Asia, for if we had First World standards then business peple and tourists would make us a base for their business and tours of the region." To draw in tourists and finance capital required lenient rules and clean streets. Lee provided the latter through his authoritarian state; his government created the conditions for the former in haste. It worked: between 1960 and 1990, Singapore enjoyed the world's highest investment ratio... By 1973, Singapore abolished quotas and tariffs to create a free-trade port. It created EPZ's, which blossomed because the staet removed all income taxes and allowed them to function without regulation... [YET] The high rates of investment did not change the nature of the Singaporean economy; it produced low-end goods for the world market. Singapore needed to go after the high-end, high-value goods to hasten its development and break out of its dependency on foreign capital. Starting in 1979, PAP inaugurated a new targeted investment strategy. It gave immense incentives for foreign capital to invest in industrail manufacturing, tourism, trade, transport, and communication as well as "brain services" (medical and financial). This "Second Industrial Revolution" required and infusion of skill and a new kind of investment. The import of skill was not new to the Tigers. Because of Communist insurrection and insurgency, the well-educated and upwardly mobile professionals fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong (from China), South Korea (from the North), and Singapore (from China and Malaysia). These professionals brought with them mercantile and technical skills that came gratis to their host societies. In the early years, all the Tigers invested heavily in their human capital: state-funded and managed educational systems that stressed technical skills, and an enhanced social wage that drew and maintained populations... Singapore developed its high-technology firms, but structurally its economy remained dependent on foreign investment (mainly from transnational corporations and private portfolio investment). As Japanese investment dried up in the late 1980s, Chinese investment kicked in. China, boosted by the human capital growth of its socialist era and the EPZ performance on its coastal rim, generated investment for the East Asian manufactures...
(255): IN 1997, the Thai bhat failed, setting off a chain reaction across the rim until the Tigers had to go to the IMF with their hats in hand for a bailout. What had struck the rest of the Third World from the late 1970s onward, hit East Asia two decades later. While the Tigers' collapse appeared structural, as the dust settled it became clear that they had been the victims of financial speculators... China's sheer economic size allowed it to weather the storm, and its stability provided a lifeline for parts of the East Asian world. The commodity price drop explains not only the downturn but also the structural closeness of the Tigers to the rest of the darker nations.
(261): ...[M]ost of the Saudi royal family had enjoyed a pragmatic relationship with Wahhabism: they accorded it respect in public, but lived wilder lives in private (including during long sojourns to Europe). [Crown Prince] Faysal was different. He was a true believer.
(262): The reinvention of tribalism and other atavistic ideas is equally central. Joseph Desire Mobutu, raised in the Belgian Congo by European friars, led the coup against the left-wing prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Lumumba's Congolese National Movement Party took the newly freed Congo leftward and disadvantaged European capital... Mobutu, backed by the Belgians and the United States, overthrew and killed Lumumba... Within a few years, to consolidate his position, Mobutu conducted the Zaireanization of the Congo: he changed his name (Mobutu Sese Seko) and that of his country (Zaire), and insisted on a series of cultural returns to an idea of the pure cultural heritage of Zaire.... Mobutu stole an estimated $5.5 billion from his country at the same time as he tried to portray himself as a Zairean like any other.
(263-265): Oil came into the picture for Saudi society in the early years of ibn Saud's rule (1933). Hastily, ibn Saud signed concessions to US-British oil firms. The corporations flourished. The Saudis acted as sentries of a reservoir that holds a quarter or more of the world's oil, while the US and British governments offered security for the longevity of the antidemocratic regime... Saudi largess went toward the prolfligate consumption of the royal family and religious charity. By 1958, the oil-rich land was in debt by $480 million. Crown Prince Faysal, who exerted his own authority against his brother King Saud, went to the IMF in 1957, and earned some credits in lieu of a tighter fiscal policy and a devalued rial. The oil merchants thrived, but the Saudi people suffred... The stalled state expenditure exacerbated the population's already-diminished set of expectations. They were tinder for Nasserism, Third World nationalism, and Communism... In 1953, the workers at Aramco conducted an unsuccessful two-week strike to form a union. Then, in July 1956, when King Saud came to Dhahran mass demonstrations greeted him. The workers wanted basic rights, while the population wanted the removal of the growing military base... The year before, at the Taif Air Base in the western mountains of the kingdom, Saudi troops mutinied in Nasser's name. They were executed. In this context, Nasser arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1956... These Nasserite currents came to the fore in the early months of 1958... By March, Saudi frustration with Nasser had reached a high pitch. The crown tried to assasinated him as his airport approached Damascus International Airport The Nasserite threat was always greater than that of the Communists, who in Saudi Arabia numbered few. The Organization of Saudi Communists operated under the aegis of the National Renewal (later, Liberation) Front from 1954 onward. Only in the 1960s did peninsular Marxism make its mark--in Yemen and Oman. The 1962 nationalist revolution in Yemen provided a haven for the export of Third world nationalist and revolutionary ideas across the region... When the Marxists seized power in South Yemen in 1967, the Popular Front was renamed the Popular Front for the liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. The Saudis, now much more militarily confident than they were in the 1950s, financed the resistance against South Yemen and that of the Omani government against the Popular Front. They were scrupulous in the extrication of the Left from the peninsula.
(265): Nasserism, like a virus entered the palace walls... Their leader was Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, the "Red Prince"... Talal broached the idea of a National Council in 1958, and now the Free Princes moved to gain public support. They had no mass base., and since they did not have the support of their clans, they failed to penetrate Saudi society... Talal used the bulk of 1961 to create secular social institutions in Saudi society and ameliorate unemployment through public works. The Free Princes appeared to be on the road to accomplish a left-wing palace coup, to do what the Free Officers did without the use of the military. Then Faysal moved against Talal... Talal and his group withdrew to Beirut. The Free Princes were squashed...
(266): Not long after Faysal's coup de grace against the Nasserites and the Communists, he hosted the WML. Faysal had a senior partner in Aramco, and behind them was the US government. The US government gave "wholehearted support" to the WML as an instrument to roll back Third World nationalism and dent the USSR by appeal to its large Muslim population (perhaps 45 million)... US president Eisenhower held a summit in 1957 with the Saudis and enunciated his doctrine. The Eisenhower Doctrine was framed to contain Communism in general, but in the specific instance of the Middle East to promote the Saudis and monarchical forces (such as the Shah of Iran and the kings of Jordan and Iraq) as an alternative to Nasserism.
(269): [EVEN THIS ONLY WENT SO FAR--INJUSTICE CAN ONLY BE MADE SO PALATABLE, IN OTHER WORDS] IN 1979, a group of devout Muslim activists organized into the Movement of the Muslim Revolutionaries of the Arabian Peninsula laid siege to the Masjid al-Haram. They defended their actions as the only way to take back the holy shrines from the "drunkards" who "led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces." ... Simultaneously, but independently, the Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia came out in mass demonstrations (many of them were oil workers in Aramco's fileds). The National Guard crushed both the siege and the rebellion. The egalitarian noises from the Iranian Revolution (but no so much the Islamic republic that followed it) petrified the Saudi royals and indeed the entrenched elites across the Third World... The ulema in Saudi Arabia were quick to line up with the monarchy.
(269): The oil price rise after 1973 provided Saudi Arabia with the singular ability among the darker nations to buy off its citizenry. A few years of liquidity in the 1970s allowed the state to increase the social wage, although the monarchy did not fundamentally change the dependent basis of the Saudi economy. Saudi industry produced less than 2 percent of the gross national product, and dates remained the second-largest export item after crude and refined oil... In the fundamentals, Saudi society reflected the same problems as much of the Third World: a one-commodity economy, with a poorly developed industrial sector, a large state apparatus, a growing military (costing about 14 percent of the gross national product), and a languished population. At the whim of fickle oil prices, the Saudi economy went into a nosedive beginning in the late 1970s. The World Bank recommended that the Saudi state shore up its fundamentals, and the royal family conducted a self-directed structural adjustment during the 1980s... For a society with a young population and growing structural unemployment, the social and cultural consequences of austerity were great. As dissent and protest grew, the Saudis met this both through outright repression and an ideological campaign. In 1976, the Saudi royals welcomed the head of the religious police into the cabinet... Chauvinisms of various kinds were encouraged. The royals called for the "Saudiization" of the workforce as a means to turn the blame for unemployment on the five million foreign contract workers (almost a third of the total population).
(271): The IMF instituions prodded the post-colonial states in the 1970s to give up on the delivery of public goods such as education, health care, and relief services, and allow private or charitable entities to do the work. In Pakistan and Egypt, for instance, as the state slowly eroded its public educational system, the exponential growth of cheap Islamic schools provided opportunities for lower-middle-class and working-class youth.
(273): As Part of the Pakistan National Alliance, the Jamaat reaped the benefit of Zia's cutback in educational funding--money now came in from the WML, the International Islamic relief Organization, the Saudi and Kuwaiti Red Crescent, the Saudi General Intelligence Department, the Saudi royals, and other such private avenues. This money created a web of religious schools (madrassas): from nine hundred madrassas in 1971, the number swelled to eight thousand by 1988.
(274): As it undermiend the idea of nationalism, conservative social forces and various powerful social classes gathered together to offer an alternative vision of what it meant to be patriotic, indeed what it meant to be nationalistic. The secular-socialist nationalism of the Third World agenda withered before the rise of a cultural nationalism now deeply invested in racial, religious, and such atavistic differences... National liberation regimes had not been able or did not try to dethrone the old social classes and the older forms of social solidarity but they did create mechanisms to create national solidarity. Public schools, military service, voluntary labor, and other such institutions attempted to make equality a real social value and part of the experience of the citizenry. If the social classes do not mingle, there can be no real national solidarity. That said, once the state ceased to make this token effort, the significance o fht eolder, generally unmolested class bonds now attained a greater deal of purpose.
(275): Globalization and cultural nationalism are not opposites or irreconcilable doubles; they exist together, they feed of each other. Indeed, cultural natioanlism is the Trojan horse of IMF-driven globalization. The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soullesss corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities. That is the mecca of the post-Third World era.
(276): Debt hangs heavy for the bulk of the planet. In 1970, when the Third World project was intact, the sixty states classified as "low-income" by the World Bank owed commercial lenders and international agencies $25 billion. Three decades later, the debt of these states ballooned to $523 billion. An impoverished conversation on debt yields no agenda to combat this fundametnal ailment for the former Third world. These are not "poor" countires. Over the course of these three decades, the sixty states paid $550 billion in principle and interest on loans worth $540 billion. Yet they still owe $523 billion. The alchemy of international usury binds the darker nations.
(276-277): For there was a gradual realization that such progress as was made in the first three decades after 1945 did not imply any fundamental change in the status or real development prospects of Third World countries. Dependency was increasing rather than decreasing, poverty was persisting and the income gap between the Rich North and the Poor south was gettting wider. According to the World Bank, "In 1960 per capita GDP in the richest 20 countries was 18 times more than in the poorest 20 countries. By 1995 this gap had widened to 37 times." The divergence between the North and the South grew as the Third World fragmented. But even this spatial metaphor of the North and South is insufficient; it ignores the mature class hierarchies that had grown within each of the countries in the South and the North.
(281): The limitations of IMF-driven globalization and revanchist traditionalism provoke mass movements across the planet. The battles for land rights and water rights, for cultural dignity and economic parity, for women's rights and indigenous rights, for the construction of democratic institutions and responsive states--these are legion in every country, on every continent. It is from these many creative initiatives that a genuine agenda for the future will arise. When it does, the Third World will have found its successor.

It's the U.S, according to a new report from the New America Foundation, which "is the world's largest arms supplier". And with 23 billion dollars in receipts in 2007 and 32 billion dollars in 2008, including only foreign sales, the U.S. is also cashing in.
(...) The U.S. has signed more than twice as many arms transfer agreements over the past eight years (200-2007) than its nearest competition. In that time, the U.S. made nearly 124,000 deals, compared to the Russia, which has made just over 54,000. In the past two years for which figures are available, 2006 and 2007, three of the top four largest U.S. buyers in the developing world were Middle East allies. Saudi Arabia acquired 2.5 billion dollars worth of U.S. arms, with Israel dishing out just over 2.0 billion dollars. The post-invasion Iraqi government spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars on weapons. But the U.S. biggest arms client is turbulent Pakistan, which spent more than 3.5 billion dollars on U.S. weapons.

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.

in prince's pockets:
To look at the landscape today, you would think nothing had changed. Saudi princes, unaccustomed to exercising their inventive faculties, continue to distinguish themselves by the size of the commissions they procure from Western corporations. The competition here is restricted to fellow royals or nominated bagmen. It is usually friendly and always corrupt. Given that weaponry deals with the West cost billions rather than millions nobody begrudges the Saudis a token twenty million or so by way of a thank you. Meanwhile, Western PR firms get the regime’s message out. At a European airport several months ago I saw exactly the same handout regurgitated in the Guardian, El Pais, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, La Repubblica: the gist of it was that terrorists were handing in their weapons, renouncing their past and progressing well at re-education schools.
(...) The seamier side of princely life – is there another side? – formed the subject-matter of bin Laden’s powerful pre-9/11 samizdat videos, which continue to circulate in the kingdom, encouraging many young people to see their country through his eyes and share his disgust with its ruling family.

(...) It didn’t quite happen like that. The aged Saud was retired, and Crown Prince Faisal became king. It was only after his nephew Prince Faisal ibn Musa assassinated him for personal reasons in 1975 that Tariki and a few other dissidents could return home. Faisal is largely responsible for the Saudi Arabia that exists today, with its reliance on Wahhabism for social control. Even though his brother and father before him had sought to institutionalise Wahhabi beliefs, they were more relaxed about it. Faisal believed that the only way to defeat Nasser and the godless Communists was by making religion the central pillar of the Saudi social order and using it ruthlessly against the enemy. It was Islam that was under threat and had to be defended on all fronts. This pleased his allies in Washington, who were tolerant even of his decision to impose an oil embargo against the West after the 1973 war, something that has never been attempted since. Visiting Western politicians were surprised when the king gave them copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but his deeply felt anti-semitism was treated as an eccentricity. There is nothing on or off the record to indicate that a single US or European leader enlightened him by pointing out that the Protocols were forgeries.
(...) Saudi oil was fully nationalised in 1980
(...) In Contesting the Saudi State, the London-based Saudi historian Madawi Al-Rasheed argues that the defeat of 1818 taught the Wahhabis the art of survival. This entailed the adoption of more pragmatic policies, i.e. straightforward political opportunism. For literalists this could not have been easy. One of Muhammad’s sterner injunctions left little room for misinterpretation: infidels had to be kept out of the peninsula. The Sauds fought with the British against the Ottoman Empire and later accepted US suzerainty without many qualms. Each twist and turn considered necessary to hang on to power was justified by senior Wahhabi clerics. Pandering to power made the clerics ultra-dogmatic on other questions: the denial of equal rights for women, for example, or the refusal to ‘encourage idolatry’ by restricting the number of visitors to the tombs of the Prophet and his wives in Mecca. Some of the tombs have now been destroyed (one replaced with a public urinal); there have been no angry campaigns by Islamic extremists.

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.

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.

darfur:
Darfur is typical in terms of the traditions and culture of Sudan's vast regional backwaters: liberal voices seldom penetrate this hermetically sealed world in which women are systematically gang-raped. The women of Darfur have emerged as the most downtrodden victims of violence in the Sudan's westernmost province.
(...) What is clear is that Khartoum is urging Arab states to play a more prominent part in the resolution of the Darfur crisis. "Saudi Arabia has the biggest share in the humanitarian effort in Darfur and there should be no misunderstanding between Arab countries over the way to bring a solution to the problem in Sudan's westernmost region," said Special Advisor to Sudanese President Mustafa Othman Ismail.

on uk foreign policy as brown replaces blair:
Virtually every speech for the last ten years has been a reassurance to business that Labour is on its side and a defence of ‘free trade’ and ensuring climates around the world favourable for British foreign investment, along with ongoing commitments to low corporation taxes and cutting business regulation. Brown is the ultimate liberalisation theologist and every one of his policies has pushed in this direction. Brown (and indeed Blair) should be known for their (largely successful) imposition of neo-liberal economics on Africa – instead they are hailed in the mainstream as the champions of Africa. The government’s propaganda campaign on ‘development’ has been if anything deeper than over Iraq, yet the mainstream media have reported it uncritically, with hardly any deviation. In reality, debt relief, aid and trade policy have all been geared to further liberalizing and privatizing economies in Africa and elsewhere, with deepening poverty the (well-documented) result.
(...) I’ve no doubt that Blair will be seen in the mainstream as a ‘liberal interventionist’ who started well (in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan) and then overstepped the mark with Iraq, to the extent that he ‘mislead’ the British public, but who was genuinely committed to the cause of Africa. This view is totally absurd and therefore can be expected to dominate discussions in the mainstream. It doesn’t matter how much evidence emerges as to the reality of Kosovo in 1999 and the bombing of Yugoslavia to counter the mainstream view that Kosovo was all about defending human rights; I dealt with more plausible explanations in Web of Deceit and there are various other analyses.
(...) we are dealing here with a very primitive mainstream political culture: it doesn’t and cannot recognize obvious policies such as the extraordinary British support provided to the brutal regime in Colombia, the total backing of Russia bloody onslaught against Chechnya (including the flattening of its capital city in 1999/2000) and of support for Indonesia’s attacks on Aceh and West Papua (with British arms), to name but some, while it remains incapable of recognizing British support under Blair (fairly unequivocal, actually) for Israel. One day, you never know, the BBC might mention Britain’s extraordinary abuse of the legal system to prevent the Chagos islanders returning to even the outlying islands in the archipelago, let alone Diego Garcia – but this is admittedly very unlikely. Or perhaps mention might be made that while Blair and Brown profess their support for ‘democracy’ in the Middle East, their closest ally is Oman – whose despot was installed in a British coup 37 years ago! The official theology has it that Zimbabwe is the only repressive regime in Africa – since it is an official enemy, it is the subject of endless media articles while Mugabe is (correctly) seen as a total despot. Nigeria, on the other hand, is a key ally and oil-rich state which our companies benefit from – therefore it wouldn’t be right to mention obvious facts such as that the military in Nigeria is complicit in far more deaths in recent years than even Zimbabwe’s.
(...) Blair should be remembered as a war criminal who has made the world a more dangerous place. I can think of no other British prime minister who has been so contemptuous of human rights as Blair, the one possible exception being Harold Wilson’s government of 1964-70, which covertly supported the bloodbath in Indonesia in 1965, removed the Chagos islanders, provided a mountain of weaponry to the Nigerian government to wipe out three million people in Biafra, armed Baghdad as began major operations against the Kurds and offered significant private support to the US attack on Vietnam.
(...) For example, it would be entirely rational for Iran to develop nuclear weapons – it has been repeatedly threatened with invasion. Indeed, there is a much stronger rational case for Iran to have these weapons than Britain. The UK faces no conceivable military threat and is not surrounded by enemies. It is simply a rational insurance policy for any regime to have nuclear weapons these days since you might end up on the receiving end of a cruise missile attack or carpet bombing on some flimsy pretext or other from the wackos in the White House and Number 10.
(...) One should also not underestimate the extent of British arms exports around the world under Blair – arming (modernizing) key states such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Israel – heaven knows how these might be used in the future. I’ve just done some research on UK arms exports – at least £45 billion worth has been sold by Britain over the past 10 years, an incredible legacy. In all this light, if it is possible to think of some positive features of foreign policy under Blair – they pale in comparison with the big picture.
(...) I am presuming that the British elite is opposed to, and extremely worried, by the prospect of a US attack on Iran. For one thing, the military is totally opposed – they already want to pull out of Iraq without getting bogged down against a much more powerful opponent. For another, the incoming Gordon Brown would barely survive politically a UK role in a US attack on Iran given that the British public is likely to be overwhelmingly opposed.
(...) No doubt, the UK and US are using all their available assets to covertly incite unrest within Iran, as some reports suggest. This of course was a feature of the 1953 overthrow and is entirely to be expected now. UK planners must be extremely worried about the prospect of rising Iranian influence in southern Iraq, a majority Shia area, together with perennial ongoing concerns about the majority Shias areas in the other major oil state, Saudi Arabia.
(...) I think the 2003 invasion was intended to ensure that at least one of the three major oil producers – Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia – was made a pure Western bastion and ‘stable’, given an enemy government in Iran and ongoing major uncertainty in Saudi Arabia. The government’s concerns about ‘energy security’ were clearly outlined in a February 2003 document, released just weeks before the invasion, which stated that the UK would soon become dependent on imported oil and gas and that key relations needed to be developed with the world’s leading energy suppliers.
(...) If even a weak state with a reluctant army and hated dictator (Iraq) cannot be controlled, and neither can a failed state with no formal army (Afghanistan), what hope does the Anglo-American alliance have of continuing to shape the world in its interests? I think there is a lot at stake here for the UK/US elite, especially at a time of a rising China threatening the established world order and with energy resources far from under the full control of the US/UK alliance.