The real world’s competition this week is on the streets of Georgia

August 11, 2008

To Amer­i­can eyes the news of the esca­lat­ing war in the Cau­ca­sus nation of Geor­gia almost reads as farce: a break­away region of a break­away region, tanks rolling to main­tain con­trol of… well, not that much real­ly. We won­der how it could be in either Rus­sia or Geor­gia’s inter­ests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Rus­si­a’s de fac­to leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fight­ing the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Geor­gia’s Pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunt­ing the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weari­ness as we real­ize just how famil­iar this all is. Tiny eth­nic enclaves with cen­turies of ani­mosi­ties and well rehearsed sto­ries of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the oth­er set fight­ing by the break­down of an empire that had uneasi­ly unit­ed them in repres­sion. Change a few details and we could be talk­ing recent con­flicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwan­da, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood mon­ey from the drug trade, from oil bil­lions and human traf­fick­ing add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fight­ing these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seri­ous­ly: oth­er­wise strong economies col­lapse under the chaos that these ter­ri­to­r­i­al wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in mar­gin­al areas and all sides would be bet­ter off if the politi­cians stopped wor­ry­ing about these con­test­ed ter­ri­to­ries and just focused on build­ing a econ­o­my attrac­tive to inter­na­tion­al trade.
Why has­n’t the world learned the mech­a­nisms to end these con­flicts before they erupt into open war­fare? Where is the polit­i­cal will to end this class of war once and for all? Dis­ease and ter­ror­ism are the invari­able fruits of these con­flicts and strike us all across nation­al bound­aries. The “inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty” needs to be mean more than impres­sive chore­og­ra­phy and a few thou­sand ath­letes in Bei­jing. This week’s real gold met­al will go to the lead­ers that can tran­scend macho pos­tur­ing and weak-willed apol­o­giz­ing and get those Russ­ian tanks out of Georgia.

Johan Maurer: More about boldness

November 12, 2004

Johan has a great post about “Quak­er evan­ge­liz­ing in Russia”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2004/11/more-about-boldness.htm that real­ly applies to Quak­ers reach­ing out any­where. My favorite paragraph:
bq. I per­son­al­ly have a hard time with hob­by­ist Quak­erism, espe­cial­ly when defined in terms of ultra­finicky pre­scrip­tions of how “we” do things, “our” spe­cial pro­ce­dures and folk­ways, or any­thing else that detracts from Jesus being in the cen­ter of our com­mu­ni­ty life. How can we present some­thing so stilt­ed and crab­by and cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic as an answer to spir­i­tu­al bondage? It is just anoth­er form of bondage!

Con­tin­ue read­ing

Manufactured terrorist threat

August 14, 2003

The big news this week has been the foil­ing of a plot to smug­gle ground-to-air mis­sile from Rus­sia into the Unit­ed States. ABC News claims there’s “less in mis­sile plot than meets the eye”:abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html and goes so far as to call it a set-up. From start to fin­ish, the plot was orches­trat­ed as a sting oper­a­tion by U.S. and Russ­ian agents. The accused mas­ter­mind Hemant Lakhani had no Russ­ian con­tacts and no his­to­ry of arms smug­gling. The ABC arti­cle paints him as a small-time black mar­ket importer down on his luck who thought this would be a good way of mak­ing easy mon­ey and pay­ing off debts.
This does­n’t excuse his actions but it does change the way this we think about this whole plot. There was no arms sell­er. There was no ter­ror­ist user. No weapon made it by U.S. or Russ­ian intel­li­gence (for they were the ones who shipped it). What we do have is a two-bit mid­dle­man who talked trash abou the U.S. and offered to be a link of the arms trade. Like an idiot, Lakhani fol­lowed the bread crumbs of oppor­tu­ni­ty left for him by U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies. We now know there are peo­ple desparate enough to sel­ll any­thing if the price is right (did­n’t we already know that?) and that sales­men will talk­ing trash about a poten­tial buy­er’s com­peti­tors to close a deal.
That there’s some­one will­ing to sell mis­siles is indeed fright­en­ing, but it’s not worth this sort of media cov­er­age. No ter­ror­ist was involved in all this and the only ones talk­ing about using these weapons were U.S. agents! One has to to won­der if this is the lat­est “threat” all “cooked up by some White House insider”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000116.php. “Lets pose as Al Qae­da, wave lots of mon­ey in front of a desparate idiot, nail him when he grabs for it and declare it as a Al Qua­da plot foiled.”

The Real Phantom Menace is Us

May 27, 1999

Being the home to a cou­ple of dozen peace groups, the Non­vi­o­lence Web has pub­lished a lot of press releas­es call­ing for an end to bomb­ing in Koso­vo and Yugoslavia. They’re all very fine but also all very predictable.

But as we write, the U.S. gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues pur­su­ing a war that has no clear real­is­tic goals, has led to even more killing in the region, and has seri­ous­ly dis­rupt­ed post Cold-War rela­tion­ships with Rus­sia and Chi­na (See George Lakey’s “Cold War Return­ing? — A Chill­ing Russ­ian Visit”).

At home, Amer­i­cans just watch the pic­tures on TV as they go about liv­ing a glo­ri­ous Spring. We laugh, cry, work and play; we make trips to the shore for Memo­r­i­al Day week­end; and we obe­di­ent­ly flock to a movie called Phan­tom Men­ace that tells the sto­ry of the start of cin­e­ma’s most famous Evil Empire.

A new empire is being shaped here. The Unit­ed States has been able to claim the title of “empire” for at least a hun­dred years. But some­thing new is at work here ( see my own War Time Again). We’re wit­ness­ing the birth of a new Amer­i­can order which is start­ing a new wars every three months. New kinds of wars, which bare­ly touch Amer­i­can lives, even those of the bombers wag­ing them from 20,000 feet. The Pen­ta­gon and State Depart­men­t’s plan­ners are build­ing on lessons learned at the start of the decade in the Gulf War. They’re refined their mis­siles for accu­ra­cy but they’ve learned how to spin the media

Now every new vil­lain is pre­sent­ed to the media as the new Hitler. Sad­dam Hus­sein. Osama bin Laden. Milosvic. Every­one call­ing for peace is paint­ed as a neo-isolationist, a con­tem­po­rary Cham­ber­lain appeas­ing a tyrant. After­wards it’s easy to see how overly-dramatic the pro­pa­gan­da was and how inef­fec­tu­al all the Amer­i­can bombs were. But still, here we are in Koso­vo, in anoth­er Nineties war and next year we’ll be in yet anoth­er. Unless we stop the zest for these Clin­ton wars now.

What do we have to do to end this war? And what do we need to do to stop the U.S.‘s new­found zest for cruise mis­siles? How can peace and anti­war activists start act­ing beyond the press releas­es and iso­lat­ed vig­ils to think cre­ative­ly about link­ing folks togeth­er to bring new peo­ple and ideas into the peace movement?

I don’t pre­tend to know what exact­ly we need. All I know is that I’m per­son­al­ly bored of the stan­dard issue peace actions we’ve been engag­ing in and want to see some­thing new. Some of it might look like clichés from the 60s and some might look like rip-offs of McDon­ald’s lat­est ad cam­paign. But we need to build an anti­war cul­ture that will intrude upon a sun­ny spring and remind peo­ple that a war is on. The real phan­tom men­ace this sum­mer is an Amer­i­can Empire that is retool­ing it’s mil­i­tary and re-conditioning its cit­i­zens to think of war as a nor­mal course of affairs.

American Spies and Blood for Oil

January 15, 1999

Sad­dam Hus­sein was right: the U.N. teams inspect­ing Iraq did con­tain U.S. spies. His expul­sion of the teams was legit­i­mate, and the U.S. bomb­ing that fol­lowed was farce.

Karl Marx once wrote: “Hegel remarks some­where that all facts and per­son­ages of great impor­tance in world his­to­ry occur, as it were, twice. He for­got to add: the first time as tragedy, the sec­ond as farce.” We’re see­ing that today, with each suc­ces­sive mil­i­tary action by the U.S. against Iraq becom­ing ever more trans­par­ent and ridiculous.

Per­haps you haven’t heard the news. It was con­ve­nient­ly released the day before Pres­i­dent Clin­ton’s Sen­ate impeach­ment tri­al was to begin and the major Amer­i­can news net­works did­n’t give it much atten­tion. They were too busy with seg­ments on how the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Jus­tice designed his own robes. With hooks like fash­ion and sex attend­ing the impeach­ment tri­al, how could they be blamed for under-reporting more Iraq news.

But on Jan­u­ary 7th, the New York Times con­firmed rumors that Unit­ed States plant­ed spies on the Unit­ed Nations: “Unit­ed States offi­cials said on Wednes­day that Amer­i­can spies had worked under­cov­er on teams of Unit­ed Nations arms inspec­tors fer­ret­ing out secret Iraqi weapons pro­grams.” The Wash­ing­ton Post and Boston Globe fur­ther report­ed that the oper­a­tion was aimed at Sad­dam Hus­sein him­self. NBC News report­ed that U.N. com­mu­ni­ca­tion equip­ment was used by U.S. intel­li­gence to pass along inter­cept­ed Iraqi messages.

This is exact­ly what Sad­dam Hus­sein has been charg­ing the U.N. teams with. He has long claimed that the teams, run by the Unit­ed Nations Spe­cial Com­mis­sion or UNSCOM, were full of “Amer­i­can spies and agents.” It was for this rea­son that he denied the inspec­tors access to sen­si­tive sites. And it was this refusal that prompt­ed Pres­i­dent Clin­ton to attack Iraq last month.

So what’s going on here? Senior U.S. offi­cials told NBC News that the main tar­gets of last mon­th’s attack weren’t mil­i­tary but eco­nom­ic. The cruise mis­siles weren’t aimed at any alleged nuclear or bio­log­i­cal weapons fac­to­ries but instead at the oil fields. Specif­i­cal­ly, one of the main tar­gets was the Bas­ra oil refin­ing facil­i­ties in south­ern Iraq.

In a sep­a­rate arti­cle, NBC quot­ed Fad­hil Cha­l­abi, an oil indus­try ana­lyst at the Cen­ter for Glob­al Ener­gy Stud­ies in Lon­don, as say­ing Iraq’s oil pro­duc­ing neight­bors are “hop­ing that Iraq’s oil instal­la­tions will be destroyed as a result of Amer­i­can air strikes. Then the [U.N.-mandated] oil-for food pro­gram would be par­a­lyzed and the mar­ket would improve by the dis­ap­pear­ance of Iraqi oil altogether.”

Since the start of the Gulf War, Iraq has pro­duced relatively-little oil because of a com­bi­na­tion of the U.N. sanc­tions and an infra­struc­ture destroyed by years of war. A report by the Unit­ed States Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion back in the sum­mer of 1997 stat­ed Iraq’s per cap­i­tal Gross Nation­al Prod­uct was at lev­els not seen since the 1940s.

Sau­di Ara­bia and Kuwait have picked up this slack in pro­duc­tion and made out like ban­dits. Before the Gulf War, Sau­di Ara­bia was only allowed to pump 5.4 mil­lions bar­rels a day under it’s OPEC quo­ta. Today it pro­duces 8 mil­lion bar­rels a day, a fifty per­cent increase that trans­lates into bil­lions of dol­lars a year in prof­it. If the sanc­tions against Iraq were lift­ed, Sau­di pro­duc­tion would once more have to be lim­it­ed and the Anglo-American oil com­pa­nies run­ning the fields would lose ten bil­lion dol­lars a year in revenue.

t’s time to stop kid­ding our­selves. This is a war over mon­ey. The U.S. and Britain are get­ting rich off of Sau­di Ara­bi­a’s increased oil pro­duc­tion and don’t want any­one muscling in on their oil prof­its. It is in the eco­nom­ic inter­est of the U.S. and Britain to main­tain Iraqi sanc­tions indef­i­nite­ly and their for­eign pol­i­cy seems to be to set off peri­od­ic crises with Iraq. France and Rus­sia mean­while both stand to get lucra­tive oil con­tracts with a post-sanctions Iraq so they rou­tine­ly denounce any bomb­ing raids and just as rou­tine­ly call for a lift­ing of sanctions.

Sad­dam Hus­sein is also mak­ing out in the cur­rent state of affairs. A economically-healthy Iraqi pop­u­la­tion would­n’t put up with his tyran­ny. He cur­rent­ly rules Iraq like a mob boss, siphon­ing off what oil prof­its there are to pay for fan­cy cars and pres­i­den­tial palaces. He gets to look tough in front of the TV cam­eras and then retreats to safe under­ground bunkers when the bombs start falling on the Iraqi people.

It is time to stop all of the hypocrisy. It is esti­mat­ed that over a mil­lion Iraqis have died as a results of the post-Gulf War sanc­tions. These oil prof­its are blood mon­ey and it is long past time that they end.

Hussein Backs off, Clinton Whines

November 14, 1998

Sddam Hus­sein has just backed off. He’s agreed to a diplo­mat­ic solu­tion and has agreed to let Unit­ed Nations weapon inspec­tors back in.

U.S. offi­cials said that they were about to attack Sat­ur­day night, Nov. 14, when Hus­sein agreed to the inspec­tions. One Pen­ta­gon offi­cial is quot­ed as say­ing “It was almost as if he knew,” which is a ridicu­lous state­ment con­sid­er­ing that rumors of an immi­nent attack were cir­cling the inter­net and news sites all week­end. Of course Hus­sein knew, we all did.

This should be cause for rejoic­ing. Blood won’t have to be shed, diplo­ma­cy (notably France and Rus­si­a’s) have saved the day again, and the U.N. teams can go back to work.

But U.S. admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials are upset. They want­ed a war. They’re double-guessing their tim­ing, wish­ing they had bombed him ear­li­er this week. They’re imply­ing that they might bomb Bagh­dad any­way. They’re whin­ing that now they have to once again work with the U.N. and with Iraqi officials.

Why is the Admin­is­tra­tion so upset? It’s because they have no real pol­i­cy in the Gulf. Ear­li­er this week they admit­ted that they did­n’t know what they would do after the attack. Here they were send­ing war­ships and per­son­nel into the Gulf and they had no long- or mid-term vision for what these peo­ple were going to do after the first hun­dred cruise mis­siles went off. U.S. pol­i­cy is once more stuck in the same mud­dle its been in since mid-1991.

Clin­ton wish­es Hus­sein would just dis­ap­pear. That his mil­i­tary would launch a coup and dri­ve him from pow­er. That a cruise mis­sile would hit and kill him. They wish that Iraqi mil­i­tary know-how would dis­ap­pear. But none of this is like­ly to hap­pen. In the real world, high-tech U.S. mis­siles can’t do very much. The real world requires diplo­ma­cy, nego­ti­at­ing with peo­ple you don’t trust, de-escalating rhetoric. These are skills that the Clin­ton Admin­is­tra­tion needs to develop.

It is time for the U.S. to stop whin­ing when diplo­ma­cy works. And it is time for a U.S. to devel­op a real­is­tic pol­i­cy for build­ing a last­ing peace in the Gulf.

Stop the Zipper War Before It Starts

January 30, 1998

Why is Pres­i­dent Clin­ton talk­ing about a reprise of the 1991 Per­sian Gulf War?

We’re told it’s because U.N. inspec­tors believe that Iraq has hid­den “weapons of mass destruc­tion.” But of course so does the Unit­ed States. And Britain, France, Rus­sia, the Ukraine, Chi­na, India and Pak­istan. Iraq does­n’t even hold a region­al monop­oly, as Israel cer­tain­ly has atom­ic weapons atop U.S.-designed rock­ets aimed this very moment at Hus­sein’s Bagh­dad palaces.

Insanely-destructive weapons are a fact of life in the fin-de-Millennium. There’s already plen­ty of coun­tries with atom­ic weapons and the mis­sile sys­tems to lob them into neigh­bor­ing coun­tries. Hus­sein prob­a­bly does­n’t have them, and the weapons U.N. inspec­tors are wor­ried about are chem­i­cal. This is the “poor man’s atom­ic bomb,” a way to play at the lev­el of nuclear diplo­ma­cy with­out the expens­es of a nuclear program.

Clin­ton seems obliv­i­ous to the irony of oppos­ing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruc­tion with our own. The air­craft car­ri­ers and bat­tle fleets that have been sent into the Gulf in recent weeks are loaded with tac­ti­cal nuclear missiles.

If the pos­ses­sion of weapons of mass destruc­tion is wrong for Iraq, then it is wrong for every­one. It is time to abol­ish all weapons pro­grams and to build real world peace along lines of cooperation.

He’s our Bully

Most Amer­i­cans, on hear­ing a call to let Hus­sein be, will react with dis­be­lief. Con­di­tioned to think of him as our mod­ern Hitler, any­one oppos­ing a new Gulf War must be crazy, some­one unfa­mil­iar with the his­to­ry of the appease­ment of Hitler pri­or to World War II that allowed him to build his mil­i­tary to the fright­en­ing lev­els of 1939.

But Amer­i­cans have alas not been told too much of more recent his­to­ry. Sad­dam Hus­sein is our cre­ation, he’s our bul­ly. It start­ed with Iran. Obsessed with glob­al mil­i­tary con­trol, the U.S. gov­ern­ment start­ed arm­ing region­al super­pow­ers. We gave our cho­sen coun­tries weapons and mon­ey to bul­ly around their neigh­bors and we looked the oth­er way at human rights abus­es. We cre­at­ed and strength­ened dic­ta­tors around the world, includ­ing the Shah of Iran. A rev­o­lu­tion final­ly threw him out of pow­er and ush­ered in a gov­ern­ment under­stand­able hos­tile to the Unit­ed States.

Rather than take this devel­op­ment to mean that the region­al super­pow­er con­cept was a bad idea, the U.S. just chose anoth­er region­al super­pow­er: Iraq. We looked the oth­er way when the two got into a war, and start­ed build­ing up Iraq’s mil­i­tary arse­nal, giv­ing him the planes and mil­i­tary equip­ment we had giv­en Iran. This was a bloody, crazy war, where huge casu­al­ties would be racked up only to move the front a few miles, an advance that would be nul­li­fied when the oth­er army attacked with the same lev­el of casu­al­ties. The Unit­ed States sup­port­ed that war. Inter­na­tion­al human rights activists kept pub­li­ciz­ing the abus­es with­in Iraq, and denounc­ing him for use of chem­i­cal weapons. They got lit­tle media atten­tion because it was not in U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests to fight Hussein.

Noth­ing’s real­ly changed now except U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests. Hus­sein is still a tyrant. He’s still stock­pil­ing chem­i­cal weapons. Why are U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests dif­fer­ent now? Why does Bill Clin­ton want U.S. media atten­tion focused on Iraq? Look no fur­ther than Big Bil­l’s zip­per. Stop the next war before it starts. Abol­ish every­one’s weapons of mass destruc­tion and let’s get a Pres­i­dent who does­n’t need a war to clear his name.