Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?

To judge from the talk in Washington, the 'surge' that put 30,000 more
US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to
a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life,
the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very
different story.

By Patrick Cockburn

The Independen/UK
Friday, 15 February 2008

People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek
desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by
Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern
Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and
my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to
check with their commander. "I believe," Bassim said afterwards, "that
if Patrick had an American or an English passport [instead of an Irish
one] they would have killed us all immediately."

In the following years, I saw Bassim less and less. He is a Sunni, aged
about 40, from west Baghdad. After the battle for Baghdad between Shia
and Sunni in 2006, he could hardly work as a driver as three-quarters
of the capital was controlled by the Shia. There were few places where
a Sunni could drive in safety outside a handful of enclaves.

What happened to Bassim was also to happen to millions of Iraqis who
saw their lives ruined by successive calamities. As their world
collapsed around them they were forced to take desperate measures to
survive, obtain a job and make enough money to feed and educate their
families.

In the US and Europe, the main measure of whether the war in Iraq is
"going well" or "going badly" is the casualty figures. The number of
American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed went down to 39 US
soldiers and 599 Iraqi civilians in January. The White House is
promoting the idea that the United States is finally on the road to
success, if not victory, in Iraq.

On the back of this renewed optimism about the war, Senator John
McCain, the premier hawk among the Republican candidates for the
presidency, has been able to revive his foundering campaign and is set
to be his party's nominee. Despite the scepticism of many US
journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper
newsrooms in New York and Washington (in London they are more
sceptical) have largely bought into the idea that "the surge" ` the
wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006 ` has
succeeded.

But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a
less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if
people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It
must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they
stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2
million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq,
are coming back.

At the time we had our encounter with the Mehdi Army in Kufa, Bassim
was living in a house in the mixed Sunni-Shia area of Jihad in
south-west Baghdad. He loved the house, which had a sitting room and
two bedrooms, because he had built it himself in 2001. "I didn't
complete it because I didn't have enough money," he said. "But we were
so happy to have our own home."

He was living there in the summer of 2006 with his wife Maha, 38, and
his children Sarah, 13, Noor, eight, and Sama, three, when Shia
militiamen took over Jihad. The struggle for the capital had begun on
22 February when Sunni insurgents blew up a revered Shia shrine in
Samarra. Bassim fled to Syria with his family and, when he returned to
Jihad three months later, he found pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr, the
Shia nationalist cleric who heads the Mehdi Army, pasted to the gate of
his house.

The Essence Of Neoliberalism

Pierre Bourdieu
Professor at the Collège de France

Pierre Bourdieu
Deceased in 2001
Le Monde, December 1998
En español: La esencia del neoliberalismo
La globalización en La BitBlioteca
La nouvelle vulgate planétaire (au Monde diplomatique)
Pierre Bourdieu en La BitBlioteca

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or — more unusually — through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of a utopia — the utopia of neoliberalism — thus converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application.

Interview with Simone de Beauvoir 1976

The second sex 25 years later

Interview: John Gerassi, 1976;
Published: Society, Jan-Feb. 1976;
Source: Southampton University;
Proofed: and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005.
Copyright: 1995 by Transaction Publishers.

Gerassi. It’s now about twenty-five years since The Second Sex was published. Many people, especially in America, consider it the beginning of the contemporary feminist movement. Would you ...

Beauvoir. I don’t think so. The current feminist movement, which really started about five or six years ago, did not really know the book. Then, as the movement grew, some of the leaders took from it some of their theoretical basis. But The Second Sex in no way launched the feminist movement. Most of the women who became very active in the movement were much too young in 1949-50, when the book came out, to be influenced by it. What pleases me, of course, is that they did discover it later. Sure, some of the older women – Betty Friedan, for example, who dedicated The Feminine Mystique to me – had read it and were perhaps influenced by it somewhat. But others, not at all. Kate Millet, for example, does not cite me a single time in her work. They may have become feminists for the reasons I explain in The Second Sex; but they discovered those reasons in their life experiences, not in my book.

Gerassi. You have said that your own feminist consciousness grew out of the experience of writing The Second Sex. In what way, and how do you see the development of the movement after it was published in terms of your own trajectory?

Beauvoir. In writing The Second Sex I became aware, for the first time, that I myself was leading a false life, or rather, that I was profiting from this male-oriented society without even knowing it. What had happened is that quite early in my life I had accepted the male values, and was living accordingly. Of course, I was quite successful, and that reinforced in me the belief that man and woman could be equal if the woman wanted such equality. In other words, I was an intellectual. I had the luck to come from a sector of society, the bourgeoisie, which could afford not only to send me to the best schools but also to allow me to play leisurely with ideas. Because of that I managed to enter the man’s world without too much difficulty. I showed that I could discuss philosophy, art, literature, etc., on “man’s level.” I kept whatever was particular to womanhood to myself. I was then reinforced by my success to continue. As I did, I saw I could earn as good a living as any male intellectual and that I was taken as seriously as any of my male peers. Being who I was, I then found that I could travel by myself if I wanted to, that I could sit in cafés and write and be as respected as any male writer, and so on. Each stage fortified my sense of independence and equality. It became, therefore, very easy for me to forget that a secretary could in no way enjoy the same privileges. She could not sit in a café and read a book without being molested. She was rarely invited to parties for “her mind.” She could not establish credit or own property. I could. More importantly still, I tended to scorn the kind of woman who felt incapable, financially or spiritually, to show her independence from men. In effect, I was thinking, without even saying it to myself, “if I can, so can they.” In researching and writing The Second Sex I did come to realize that my privileges were the result of my having abdicated, in some crucial respects at least, my womanhood. If we put it in class economic terms, you would understand it easily: I had become a class collaborationist. Well, I was sort of the equivalent in terms of the sex struggle. Through The Second Sex I became aware of the struggle needed. I understood that the vast majority of women simply did not have the choices that I had had, that women are, in fact, defined and treated as a second sex by a male-oriented society whose structure would totally collapse if that orientation was genuinely destroyed. But like economically and politically dominated peoples anywhere, it is very hard and very slow for rebellion to develop. First, such peoples have to become aware of that domination. Then they have to believe in their own strength to change it. Those who profit from their “collaboration” have to understand the nature of their betrayal. And finally, those who have the most to lose from taking a stand, that is, women like me who have carved out a successful sinecure or career, have to be willing to risk insecurity – be it merely ridicule – in order to gain self-respect. And they have to understand that those of their sisters who are most exploited will be the last to join them. A worker’s wife, for example, is least free to join the movement. She knows that her husband is more exploited than most feminist leaders and that he depends on her role as the housewife-mother to survive himself. Anyway, for all these reasons, women did not move. Oh yes, there were some very nice, very wise little movements which struggled for political promotions, for women’s participation in politics, in government. I could not relate to such groups. Then came 1968, and everything changed. I know that some important events happened before that. Betty Friedan’s book for one, was published before ’68. In fact, the American women were well on the move by then. They, more than any other women, and for obvious reasons, were most aware of the contradictions between the new technology and the conservative role of keeping women in the kitchen. As technology expands – technology being the power of the brain and not of the brawn – the male rationale that women are the weaker sex and hence must play a secondary role can no longer be logically maintained. Since technological innovations were so widespread in America, American women could not escape the contradictions. It was thus normal that the feminist movement got its biggest impetus in the very heartland of imperial capitalism, even if that impetus was strictly one of economics, that is, the demand for equal pay for equal work. But it was within the anti-imperialist movement itself that real feminist consciousness developed. Whether in the anti-Vietnam War movement in America or in the aftermath of the 1968 rebellion in France and other European countries, women began to feel their power. Having understood that capitalism leads necessarily to domination of poor peoples all over the world, masses of women began to join the class struggle – even if they did not accept the term “class struggle.” They became activists. They joined the marches, the demonstrations, the campaigns, the underground groups, the militant left. They fought, as much as any man, for a nonexploiting, nonalienating future. But what happened? In the groups or organizations they joined, they discovered that they were just as much a second sex as in the society they wanted to overturn. Here in France, and I dare say in America just as much, they found that the leaders were always the men. Women became the typists, the coffee-makers of these pseudorevolutionary groups. Well, I shouldn’t say pseudo. Many of the movement’s male “heavies” were genuine revolutionaries. But trained, raised, molded in a male-oriented society, these revolutionaries brought that orientation to the movement as well. Understandably, such men were not voluntarily going to relinquish that orientation, just as the bourgeois class isn’t going to voluntarily relinquish its power. So, just as it is up to the poor to take away the power of the rich, so it is up to women to take away power from the men. And that doesn’t mean dominate men in turn. It means establish equality. As socialism, true socialism, establishes economic equality among all peoples, the feminist movement learned it had to establish equality between the sexes by taking power away from the ruling class within the movement, that is, from men. Put another way: once inside the class struggle, women understood that the class struggle did not eliminate the sex struggle. It’s at that point that I myself became aware of what I have just said. Before that I was convinced that equality of the sexes can only be possible once capitalism is destroyed and therefore – and it’s this “therefore” which is the fallacy – we must first fight the class struggle. It is true that equality of the sexes is impossible under capitalism. If all women work as much as men, what will happen to those institutions on which capitalism depends, such institutions as churches, marriage, armies, and the millions of factories, shops, stores, etc.. which are dependent on piece work, part-time work. and cheap labor? But it is not true that a socialist revolution necessarily establishes sexual equality. Just look at Soviet Russia or Czechoslovakia, where (even if we are willing to call those countries “socialist”, which I am not) there is a profound confusion between emancipation of the proletariat and emancipation of women. Somehow, the proletariat always end up being made up of men. The patriarchal values have remained intact there as well as here. And that – this consciousness among women that the class struggle does not embody the sex struggle – is what is new. Yet most women in the struggle know that now. That’s the greatest achievement of the feminist movement. It’s one which will alter history in the years to come.

Art Against Empire (On Alliez & Negri’s ’Peace and War’)
par Alberto Toscano
Mise en ligne janvier 2003

http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article270.html
Sur Paix et guerre, Multitudes 11, hiver 2003, Majeure : Guerres et paix dans l’empire
Unlike law, which acknowledges in the « decision » determined by place and time a metaphysical category that gives it a claim to critical evaluation, a consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. Its power is formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states. And though the police may, in particulars, appear the same everywhere, it cannot finally be denied that in absolute monarchy, where they represent the power of a ruler in which legislative and executive supremacy are united, their spirit is less devastating than in democracies, where their existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence.
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence (1921)

’Peace and War’ is a dense text, teeming with allusions and ellipses, calls to arms and abrupt conceptual foreshortenings of entire politico-philosophical regimes. In this respect, it is a singular stylistic exemplar of what Deleuze & Guattari designated as the stratigraphic time of philosophy. [1] And yet, whilst never reneging on the virtuosity of the concept (as witnessed by a whole host of ’portmanteau notions’ : the ’Project of perpetual world war’, ’the imbalance of terror’, ’the common sense of the Unworldly’…) this almost frenzied mustering of a vast intellectual archive is in no way intended as a mere show of erudition. First of all, the text is an intervention bound to a very definite site - that of an art exhibition in which it was literally projected. [2] Far from designating it as a catalogue piece, this ’site-specificity’ accounts for both its mannerism and its urgency. The latter is determined by a deceptively simple question : What is the artist to do today, in a situation that some have termed that of a global civil war ? Or, in the paradoxical terms of Hardt & Negri’s Empire, what is the place of art in the non-place of contemporary global capital and its apparatuses of control ? Upon closer attention, this question, which might at first appear to belong to the rich tradition of interrogations concerning the link between politics and aesthetics in the 20th century, is revealed as profoundly ontological in character and intimately driven by the constructive force of a material desire for emancipation (what the authors, somewhat provocatively, term a ’teleology of liberation’). By conceiving artistic practice as a ’Combat against War’, Alliez & Negri wish bestow shape and colour upon what they regard as the ’subject’ of a radical politics : the ’multitude’ as a tendency towards communism and as the present experience of a practical vitalism. [3]

Toni Negri: Finally a Little Revolt

Interviewed by Jacopo Iacoboni, La Stampa, 12/11/05

TN: What gangs! The explosion of the banlieues is not some random jacquerie. Even if it were, it would be in a radically changed social context, whose basic features are the crisis of Fordism and the absence of a political response – not only in France - to this crisis. That is why for me it remains a revolt, but I could even say insurrection, if we understand the term in a mild sense. There is a lack of political consciousness of the objectives, what Marx called the for-itself. This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants.

JI: Much of the international press has tried to read the explosion of the banlieues by seeing in it the failure of the French model of integration. Are you persuaded by this explanation?
TN: Not at all. After all, hasn’t the Anglo-Saxon model failed as well? Just look at the America of New Orleans or the England of July 7th, with terrorists who were born English in the deepest sense of the term, Englishmen dressed like everybody else, kids who before becoming bombs go to the pub and get drunk on beer…The point is not the failure of the two multicultural models.
JI: Now you’ll say: “it’s a matter of the organisation of work”.
TN: The elements hidden behind the burning banlieues are at least three. What is in crisis is the Fordist industrial model, which implied permanent employment and an indefinite schema of growth sustained by the state. Later this crisis was linked with the processes of economic globalisation. These are joined by neo-liberal policies of cuts on public spending, which produce a crisis in welfare interventions. This has nothing to do with integration, the problem here is a total absence of a political response to the crisis of Fordism. This missing response is tied to the crisis of democratic representation.
JI: So why then are the suburbs in turmoil only in France and not in Italy? Post-Fordist dynamics are the same here too.
TN: In part because we are a socially less advanced country. And then because, paradoxically, such turmoils have been partly exhausted in Italy. The 70s unleashed a potential for social struggles, or rather, Italy or Germany extended ’68 by ten years. But in so doing they also diluted its effects. We should be careful however: we already have protest movements. The Val Di Susa [popular protests and strikes against the building of the high-speed Turin-Lyon rail connection and tunnel, for both ecological and economic reasons], the movements for housing in the cities, migrants, battles against detention centres for immigrants…

Published on Sunday, February 17, 2008 by TomDispatch.com

The War Against Women
A Dispatch from the West African Front
by Ann Jones
Kailahun, Sierra Leone — Greetings from a war zone that’s not Iraq. And not Afghanistan either.

I’m checking in from West Africa, where I’ve been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire. The Iraq debacle has monopolized attention and obscured these “lesser” wars — now officially “over” — but millions of West African women are struggling to recover. For them, the war isn’t really over at all, not by a long shot. This is the war story that’s never truly told. Let me explain.

Surely you remember these conflicts. Liberia’s war came in three successive waves lasting 14 years altogether, from 1989 to 2003. Sierra Leone’s war started in 1991 when guerillas of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own country. The war drew many players and lasted until January 2002, a decade in all. In Côte d’Ivoire, a civil war started in 2002 when northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, but by that time the international community had decided to act to prevent any further destabilization of the region. French, African, and later UN peacekeepers stepped in and a treaty was signed in 2003.

So, officially, these countries are no longer “war zones.” Accords have been signed. Peacekeeping forces are on duty or close at hand. The UN and international aid agencies are assisting “recovery.” Some arms have been surrendered; some refugees have returned from exile. Some men are making mud bricks and building huts to replace the spacious houses of embossed concrete and tile that once graced towns and villages throughout the region. Officially, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire are now designated “post-conflict zones,” but they are so fractured, so traumatized, and — especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone — so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace either. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the poorest country on the planet and, like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows.

Visit one of these countries and you’ll see for yourself that, at best, real peace will take a long, slow time to come. The destruction in Sierra Leone’s Kailahun District, for instance, is as shocking as anything I ever saw in the devastated Afghan capital, Kabul. UN officials and an array of international aid organizations like to use the term “post-conflict” for such places in such moments. It sounds vaguely hopeful, even if it designates a desperate place embarked on a difficult period of “recovery” that may or may not be recognizable after a decade or two, or even a generation or two, as peace.

That’s what our leaders don’t bother to mention (possibly don’t even grasp) when they talk blithely about war and peace as if they were simply opposite sides of the same coin, attained with equal ease with a heads-or-tails flip. Any fool can start a war swiftly with a shock and awe assault — as George Bush did from the air in Iraq or the RUF did on the ground in Sierra Leone — but peace is no sudden acquisition.

Just last month, the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague resumed proceedings begun last June against Charles Taylor, the charming American-educated sociopath and former president of Liberia. Taylor faces 11 charges for war crimes related to matters including terrorizing civilians, murder, rape, sexual slavery, amputations, and enslavement. These atrocities were committed not against his own country but against his neighbor. It was Taylor who backed RUF rebels as they terrorized the populace and augmented their numbers by abducting civilians.

Both Taylor and RUF leader Foday Sankoh reportedly received tactical training in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, who aimed to disrupt the West African region. Yet these wars were largely not about ideology or even politics. They were about greed, about the power to control and exploit the natural resources of the region — Liberia’s primal rain forests and especially Sierra Leone’s “blood diamonds.” Political scientists and military historians may eventually advance other theories to explain these wars — though they’ll be hard pressed to find any redeeming features, any “just cause” — but West Africans will tell you that they took place simply because a few “bad, bad men” craved power and wealth. When Foday Sankoh’s RUF forces invaded Sierra Leone, they numbered no more than 150 men, but what they started laid waste to a promising country.

Here’s what I want to remind you of, though: When you think about these men who start wars, remember what they’ve done not to soldiers on either side, but to civilian populations — especially to women. Today, it is civilians who are by far the most numerous casualties of war. Each successive conflict of recent times has recorded a greater proportion of civilians displaced, exiled, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed, killed, or disappeared. In every modern war, most of the suffering civilians are women and children.

In many wars, maimed and dead civilians are counted (if at all) merely as “collateral damage” — like the estimated 3,000 innocent citizens who died in the initial American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. In the West African wars, civilians became the designated targets. Foday Sankoh intended to conquer Sierra Leone, but having only 150 fighters, he resorted to forcible recruitment. Like Charles Taylor’s forces in Liberia, Sankoh’s destroyed whole villages, murdering most of the residents and taking away only those who might serve them as soldiers, porters, cooks, or “wives.” Again, many of the dead and most of the abducted were women and children.

And here’s a little-known reality: When any conflict of this sort officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried seamlessly into the “post-conflict” era. Where normal structures of law enforcement and justice have been disabled by war, male soldiers and civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do.

So I’m writing to you, here in “post-conflict” West Africa, from an active war zone. I’m writing from the heart of the war against women and children.

Counting Casualties

Listen to this report from Amnesty International. It describes the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Côte d’Ivoire:

“The scale of rape and sexual violence in Côte d’Ivoire in the course of the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture (including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim… All armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity.”

Published on Monday, February 18, 2008 by The Dallas Morning News
What FBI Whistle-Blower Sibel Edmonds Found in Translation
Why is her story being covered up?
by Philip Giraldi
Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will.

The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels - sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Ms. Edmonds’ account is full of dates, places and names.

And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Ms. Edmonds’ case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Ms. Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world - but not in the United States.

Ms. Edmonds is an ethnic Azerbaijani, born in Iran. She lived there and in Turkey until 1988, when she immigrated to the United States. Nine days after 9/11, she took a job at the FBI as a Turkish and Farsi translator. She worked in the 400-person translations section of the Washington office, reviewing a backlog of material dating to 1997 and participating in operations directed against several Turkish front groups, most notably the American Turkish Council.

The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums.

MANY DIE WITH TARGETED LEADER
by Mohammed Omer

Inter Press Service
February 17, 2008

GAZA CITY - Human remains mix with debris following the latest Israeli
assault Friday on Bureij Camp in Gaza Strip. Early reports listed
nine dead and more than 50 injured.A targeted leader was killed,
but many others were killed too.

"It's very hard for us to rescue, or even locate bodies beneath the
building," said a medical relief worker from the local Bureij hospital.

Israel has not confirmed responsibility for the missile attack by
F-16 aircraft.

"This is a barbaric crime," said Dr. Hassan Khalaf, head of the local
al-Shifa hospital. "They bombed residential areas where people were
sleeping in their houses."

The attack apparently targeted the house of a top leader of the
al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad party. The
leader, Ayman al-Fayed, 42, was reported killed, along with two of
his children and his wife.

Other victims were from the Bureij camp.

Palestinian sources said seven houses were destroyed, and about 100
others damaged. According to hospital sources, many of the casualties
were children under the age of 12, and included a baby only a few
months old.

Fire and ambulance crews continued to fight several fires that erupted
after the bombing.

In military language, the loss of civilian lives was "collateral
damage".

The economic disaster that is military keynesianism

Why the US has really gone broke

Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month’s stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation’s economic life
By Chalmers Johnson

The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room” — the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to the US debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defence” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the US. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

On the subject of public and political acts of atonement -rg

US MUST ATONE FOR AIDING SUHARTO
by Joseph Nevins

Newsday February 3, 2008 New York

The death of Suharto, the strongman who ruled Indonesia for more
than three decades, is cause for reflection in the United States,
particularly as Americans choose our next president and wrestle with
the question of our nation's proper role in the world.

Countless atrocities marked Suharto's rule, and his legacy scars
Indonesia's politics as well as the social fabric of neighboring East
Timor, which his regime violently annexed. But the United States backed
those crimes and, like Indonesia, has never taken responsibility -
which has made it that much easier for the Bush administration to
strengthen ties with the country's brutal military under the guise
of fighting terrorism.

In late 1965, as part of a power grab from his predecessor, Sukarno,
Gen.

Suharto and his army organized and carried out what the CIA described
as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." Over
several months, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of members
of the Indonesian Communist Party, a legal entity, and of loosely
affiliated organizations such as women's groups and labor unions. A
decade later, Suharto's military invaded neighboring East Timor. The
ensuing war and almost 24-year occupation cost many tens of thousands
East Timorese lives.

The U.S. embassy in Indonesia encouraged and lauded the military's
actions in the 1965-66 killings' early stages. It supplied radio
equipment and small arms, and gave the army thousands of names of
Communist Party members. In the case of the Dec. 7, 1975, East Timor
invasion, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
approved the aggression and the use of American weaponry while meeting
with Suharto the previous day in Jakarta. About 14 hours after they
left, Indonesian forces attacked.

EGYPT 'TORTURING HIV SUFFERERS'

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/7231082.stm
Published: 2008/02/06 18:10:04 GMT

HIV-positive Egyptian men are tortured and chained to hospital beds
while awaiting unfair homosexuality trials, a human rights group
has claimed.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) decried the "ignorance and injustice" of a
case in which a group of arrested men were given HIV tests without
their consent.

They were also subjected to anal tests to "prove" their homosexual
conduct.

Two of the men tested HIV-positive and are now handcuffed to hospital
beds for 23 hours a day, HRW said.

"These men have been subjected to anal examination without their
consent which amounts to torture," Gasser Abdel-Razek, HRW's acting
director of regional relations in the Middle East, told the BBC
on Wednesday.

"Egypt should release the men unconditionally and put a system in
place that does not deal with HIV-positive individuals as criminals
but as patients who require medical care and attention."

Egypt's Interior Ministry had no immediate comment on the case.

'Ignorance and injustice'

Two of the men were arrested in October after a scuffle in central
Cairo and when one said he was HIV-positive they were taken to the
police branch which deals with issues of public morality.

Both men claim they were beaten for refusing to sign statements
written by the police.

These cases show Egyptian police acting on the dangerous belief that
HIV is... a crime to be punished
Scott Long, Human Rights Watch

Two more men were arrested when police found their photographs and
contact numbers in the wallets of those detained.

All four men, who have not been identified, remain in custody pending
a prosecutor's decision on possible charges.

SECRECY PLEA TIES UP TORTURE FLIGHTS CASE
by Bob Egelko

The San Francisco Chronicle
Published on Wednesday, February 6, 2008

A lawsuit accusing a San Jose flight-planning company of helping the
CIA transport prisoners to overseas torture chambers must be dismissed
because it would risk exposing state secrets, a Bush administration
lawyer argued Tuesday to a federal judge, who seemed to reluctantly
agree.

The five plaintiffs can't prove that Jeppesen International Trip
Planning subjected them to wrongful imprisonment and torture without
first showing that the company aided the CIA, that foreign governments
collaborated, and that the so-called extraordinary rendition program
subjected them to brutal treatment, Justice Department attorney Michael
Abate said at a hearing in San Jose. Each one of those assertions
depends on classified information that can't be aired in court,
he said.

"Without the information in question, this case cannot be litigated,"
Abate told U.S. District Judge James Ware. The result of allowing the
government to keep its secrets out of court "can be harsh," he said,
but under the state-secrets doctrine recognized by the U.S. Supreme
Court since 1953, "private parties bear that burden on behalf of
society."

Ware did not issue a ruling after the 70-minute hearing, and made it
clear that he considered some aspects of the government's position
to be extreme. He questioned Abate's argument that the imprisonment
and interrogation of each plaintiff remained an official secret,
even though the men knew how they were treated.

"If they're in the program, the secret's disclosed, at least to them,"
the judge said. When Abate insisted that legal precedents require
official government confirmation to remove the veil of secrecy,
Ware said the doctrine known as the state-secrets privilege "should
be called a state privilege to do whatever it wants."

But Ware later questioned the plaintiffs' ability to prove Jeppesen's
alleged role without secret information. Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the
American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing five people who
say they were tortured or abused in overseas prisons, said statements
by a company official and records of foreign governments tie Jeppesen
to the CIA program, but Ware said he wasn't sure he could consider
them as long as the government claims its relationships with private
operators are confidential.

Iraq Conflict Has Killed A Million Iraqis: Survey

Published on Thursday, January 31, 2008 by Reuters

LONDON - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the
conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,
according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling
groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414
adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had
had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict,
rather than natural causes.

The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million
households in the country, a figure ORB used to calculate that
approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war, the
researchers found.

The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September
2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12
million.

ORB originally found that 1.2 million people had died, but decided to
go back and conduct more research in rural areas to make the survey as
comprehensive as possible and then came up with the revised figure.

The research covered 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Those that not covered
included two of Iraq's more volatile regions ' Kerbala and Anbar ' and
the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a
permit to work.

The Uses of the Word "Jew"
Alain Badiou
translated by Steve Corcoran

For the last couple of decades, the intellectual situation in France has been marked by countless discussions about the status to be accorded to the word "Jew" within the divisions of thought.

Undoubtedly, this has to do with the suspicion, based on some indubitable facts and some contrived ones, that anti-Semitism has made a "return". But had it ever disappeared? Or is it not rather crucial to see that a considerable change has taken place in the nature of anti-Semitism's forms, criteria and inscription in discourse over the last thirty years? Recall that in 1980, after the attack on the synagogue in rue Copernic, the prime minister in person, and in all calmness, distinguished between those victims who had gone to worship and the "innocent French" {sic} who were only passing by. Besides distinguishing between Jews and French with a kind of false concern, the good Raymond Barre appeared to mean that a Jew blindly targeted by an attack must be guilty in some way or other. People said it was a slip of the tongue. Instead, this amazing way of looking at the situation disclosed the subsistence of a racialist subconscious directly from the 1930s. Today, as regards the uses of the word Jew', such discriminatory confidence would be inconceivable at the level of the state, and one can only be unreservedly glad of it. Calculated anti-Semitic provocations and false discriminatory naivety, such as denials of the existence of gas chambers or the Nazi destruction of the European Jews, have today been taken in by, or confined to the extreme right. So, although it is quite incorrect to say that anti-Semitism has disappeared, it is fair to maintain that its conditions of possibility have altered, to the extent that it is no longer inscribed in any sort of natural discourse, as was the case during Raymond Barre's time. In this sense, Le Pen, in France, is the somewhat jaded custodian of a historical anti-Semitism that public opinion of the 1930s accepted as entirely commonplace. All in all, it may well be that this new sensitivity to anti-Semitic acts and inscriptions is a basic component of the diagnosis that anti- Semitism has made a 'return'. Thus this return might for a large part be simply an effect of a significant and favorable lowering of the threshold at which public opinion no longer tolerates this sort of racialist provocation.

Below, I shall return to the issue of the birth of a new type of anti-Semitism, one articulated on conflicts in the Middle East and the presence, in France, of large minorities of workers of African extraction and of Muslim persuasion. For now, suffice it to say that the existence of this type of anti-Semitism is not in doubt, and that the zeal with which some deny its existence - generally in the name of supporting the Palestinians or the working-class minorities in France - is extremely harmful. That being the case, it doesn't seem to me that the data, which are freely available, are such that they justify raising a full alert, although it should be clear that, on such questions, the imperative of vigilance admits of no interruption.

On Nationalism, Sarkozysm, Zionism, Leftism, the European Memory of the Shoah, and the Legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish only state

French philosopher Alain Badiou gave this interview to Le Monde last week. The original title was about the crisis of the intellectual Left. While the first two questions focused on why the unreformed present day French Left is defending Sarkozysm (the latter being anti-left, combining the most brutal forms of neoliberalism and populism), most of the interview was about the particularisms lying at the foundations of Israel as a Jewish only state.

Le Monde: How do you interpret the recent political and electoral changes in France ?
Alain Badiou: We are witnessing the end of French Politics as it emerged from the second world war: a Left-Right, Gaullo-Communist system that endorsed a common assessment of the second world war; pétainism (France's Pétain collaborated with the Nazis) on one hand, and resistance on the other. Chirac was the Brejnev of Gaullism, the guardian of a crumbling party, whose cautiousness dictated immobilism. The election of Sarkozy, and the fact that some from the Left have joined his government, mark the end of the political system that was born after the war. Meanwhile, one can ask who is this new Right in France ? Not Gaullist but successful among the extreme Right voters. Let's say what is evidence by now: This new Right is a decomplexified Capitalism reinstating Nationalism in an artificial and agressive manner .

The 'reactions' we hear today about this new capitalism or Sarkozysm are taken from old adages like "It is perfectly O.K. to be rich" or "We want the poor to work more and to obey us". Any other content or positive significance in Sarkozysm are still uncertain while its negative content is certain and well known:
Persecution of foreigners, especially if they are workers and/or poor;
Special ministery "to deal with" these immigrant workers;
Repressive clamp down on lower classes' youth.
The real campaigning Sarkozy has done to woo France's voters wasn't through his election campaign but rather through his actions as interior minister. His law on immigrants which is criminal and little known to the public, his open support for a police control of the French society and his boasting about it, have officialised Lepénism (Le Pen is the leader of the extreme right party le Front National) as a policy for the state and buried the "French exception". Therefore we are witnessing, the total collapse of the Left, and the extreme Left, who are still holding on to the old political scheme built in France after the second world war.

Given what is taking place in Kenya, we can add that to the list of "trouble spots" this article mentions. There should be much more detailed articles available about the results of this trade talk, but posting something concise to bring to attention the economic EU program. -rg

Africa says no – and means it
By Ignacio Ramonet

The unimaginable has happened, to the displeasure of arrogant Europe. Africa, thought to be so poor that it would agree to anything, has said no in rebellious pride. No to the straitjacket of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), no to the complete liberalisation of trade, no to the latest manifestations of the colonial pact.

It happened in December at the second EU-Africa summit in Lisbon, where the main objective was to force the African countries to sign new trade agreements by 31 December 2007 in accordance with the Cotonou Convention of 2000 winding up the 1975 Lomé accords. Under these, goods from former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are imported into the European Union more or less duty-free, except for products such as sugar, meat and bananas that are a problem for European producers. The World Trade Organisation has insisted that these preferential arrangements be dismantled or replaced by trade agreements based on reciprocity, claiming that this is the only way African countries can continue to enjoy different treatment. The EU opted for completely free trade in the guise of EPAs. So the 27 were asking African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to allow EU goods and services to enter their markets duty-free (1).

US JUSTICE CHIEF REFUSES TO CALL WATERBOARDING TORTURE
by Paul Handley

Agence France Presse
January 30, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused
Wednesday to define waterboarding as illegal torture, even while
admitting that if he underwent the interrogation technique that he
would "feel" it is torture.

Fending off pressure in a Senate Justice Committee hearing to
categorically call waterboarding, which simulates drowning, as torture
under US law, the top US legal official suggested that under certain
conditions it could be legal, and said that learned people could
disagree on the issue.

"I don't think it would be appropriate for me to pass definitive
judgement on the technique's legality," he said.

"There are some circumstances where current law would appear clearly
to prohibit waterboarding's use. Other circumstances would present
a far closer question."

In his first testimony to the committee since becoming attorney general
on November 9, Mukasey said that torture is illegal under US statutes,
but that waterboarding is not definitively covered by those statutes.

"There is a statute which says it is a relative issue," Mukasey said
to questioning by Senator Joe Biden.

He also said that the Central Intelligence Agency does not now use
waterboarding and that the technique is "currently" not approved for
its interrogation program.

However, he declined to say whether it had been used in the past.

"I am not authorized to talk about what the CIA has done in the past,"
he told the Senate panel.

Senators were adamant that it is torture, with committee head Patrick
Leahy insisting that waterboarding "has been recognized as torture
for the last 500 years."

"Would waterboarding be torture if it was done to you?" Senator Ted
Kennedy asked Mukasey.