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Divide and Conquer: The Anglo-American Imperial Project

Posted on July 15, 2008 by kf1

Anglo-American

Establishing an “Arc of Crisis”

Many would be skeptical that the Anglo-Americans would be behind terrorist acts in Iraq, such as with the British in Basra, when two British SAS soldiers were caught dressed as Arabs, with explosives and massive arsenal of weapons.[1] Why would the British be complicit in orchestrating terror in the very city in which they are to provide security? What would be the purpose behind this? That question leads us to an even more important question to ask, the question of why Iraq was occupied; what is the purpose of the war on Iraq? If the answer is, as we are often told with our daily dose of CNN, SkyNews and the statements of public officials, to spread democracy and freedom and rid the world of tyranny and terror, then it doesn’t make sense that the British or Americans would orchestrate terror.

However, if the answer to the question of why the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq occurred was not to spread democracy and freedom, but to spread fear and chaos, plunge the country into civil war, balkanize Iraq into several countries, and create an “arc of crisis” across the Middle East, enveloping neighboring countries, notably Iran, then terror is a very efficient and effective means to an end.

An Imperial Strategy

In 1982, Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist with links to the Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote an article for a publication of the World Zionist Organization in which he outlined a “strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” In this article, he stated, “The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front. Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.” He continued, “An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon.” He continues, “In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and Shiite areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”[2]

The Iran-Iraq War, which lasted until 1988, did not result in Oded Yinon’s desired break-up of Iraq into ethnically based provinces. Nor did the subsequent Gulf War of 1991 in which the US destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, as well as the following decade-plus of devastating sanctions and aerial bombardments by the Clinton administration. What did occur during these decades, however, were the deaths of millions of Iraqis and Iranians.

A Clean Break for a New American Century

In 1996, an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, issued a report under the think tank’s Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, entitled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” In this paper, which laid out recommendations for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they state that Israel can, “Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats,” as well as, “Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas,” and to, “Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West.”

The report recommended Israel to seize “the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon,” and to use “Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.” It also states, “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”[3]

The authors of the report include Douglas Feith, an ardent neoconservative who went on to become George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005; David Wurmser, who was appointed by Douglas Feith after 9/11 to be part of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and served as a Mideast Adviser to Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2007; and Meyrav Wurmser, David’s wife, who is now an official with the American think tank, the Hudson Institute.

Richard Perle headed the study, and worked on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004, and was Chairman of the Board from 2001 to 2004, where he played a key role in the lead-up to the Iraq war. He was also a member of several US think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century.

The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is an American neoconservative think tank, whose membership and affiliations included many people who were associated with the present Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Peter Rodman, Dov Zakheim and Robert B. Zoellick.

PNAC produced a report in September of 2000, entitled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” in which they outlined a blueprint for a Pax Americana, or American Empire. The report puts much focus on Iraq and Iran, stating, “Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests in the Gulf as Iraq has.”[4] Stating that, “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” the report suggests that, “the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,” however, “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime change of Saddam Hussein.”[5]

Engineer a Civil War for the “Three State Solution”

Shortly after the initial 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus and Board Member of the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, the most influential and powerful think tank in the United States. The op-ed, titled, “The Three State Solution,” published in November of 2003, stated that the “only viable strategy” for Iraq, “may be to correct the historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.” Citing the example of the break up of Yugoslavia, Gelb stated that the Americans and Europeans “gave the Bosnian Muslims and Croats the means to fight back, and the Serbs accepted separation.” Explaining the strategy, Gelb states that, “The first step would be to make the north and south into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines,” and to “require democratic elections within each region.” Further, “at the same time, draw down American troops in the Sunni Triangle and ask the United Nations to oversee the transition to self-government there.” Gelb then states that this policy “would be both difficult and dangerous. Washington would have to be very hard-headed, and hard-hearted, to engineer this breakup.”[6]

Following the example of Yugoslavia, as Gelb cited, would require an engineered civil war between the various ethnic groups. The US supported and funded Muslim forces in Bosnia in the early 1990s, under the leadership of the CIA-trained Afghan Mujahideen, infamous for their CIA-directed war against the Soviet Union from 1979-1989. In Bosnia, the Mujahideen were “accompanied by US Special Forces,” and Bill Clinton personally approved of collaboration with “several Islamic fundamentalist organisations including Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.” In Kosovo, years later, “Mujahideen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO’s war effort.” The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the British Secret Intelligence Services (MI6), British SAS soldiers and American and British private security companies had the job of arming and training the KLA. Further, “The U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden,” and as well as that, “the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Jihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict.”[7]

Could this be the same strategy being deployed in Iraq in order to break up the country for similar geopolitical reasons?

The Asia Times Online reported in 2005, that the plan of “balkanizing” Iraq into several smaller states, “is an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq – an essential part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East. Curiously, Henry Kissinger was selling the same idea even before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.” It continued, “this is classic divide and rule: the objective is the perpetuation of Arab disunity. Call it Iraqification; what it actually means is sectarian fever translated into civil war.”[8]

In 2006, an “independent commission set up by Congress with the approval of President George W Bush,” termed the “Baker Commission” after former Secretary of State, James Baker, “has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls ‘cutting and running’ or ‘staying the course’.”[9]

It was also reported in 2006 that, “Iraq’s federal future is already enshrined within its constitution, allowing regions to form, if not actually prescribing how this should happen,” and that, “the Iraqi parliament (dominated by Shi’a and Kurds) passed a bill earlier this month [October, 2006] allowing federal regions to form (by majority vote in the provinces seeking merger).” Further, “The law, which unsurprisingly failed to win Sunni support, will be reviewed over the next 18 months in a bid to bring its opponents round.” The article, however, stated that instead of a three state solution, “a system based upon five regions would seem to have more chance of succeeding. A five-region model could see two regions in the south, one based around Basra and one around the holy cities. Kurdistan and the Sunni region would remain, but Baghdad and its environs would form a fifth, metropolitan, region.”[10] The author of the article was Gareth Stansfield, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House think tank in London, which preceded, works with and is the British equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Ethnic Cleansing Works”

In 2006, the Armed Forces Journal published an article by retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, titled, “Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look.” In the article, Peters explains that the best plan for the Middle East would be to “readjust” the borders of the countries. “Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected.” He states that after the 2003 invasion, “Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately.” However, Iraq is not the only country to fall victim to “Balkanization” in Peters’ eyes, as, “Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan,” and “Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today’s Afghanistan.” Further, “What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in the east, as Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren.” Peters states that “correcting borders” may be impossible, “For now. But given time — and the inevitable attendant bloodshed — new and natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen more than once.” He further makes the astonishing statement that, “Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.”[11]

The map of the re-drawn Middle East, initially published alongside Peters’ article, but no longer present, “has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.”[12] Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed wrote of Peters’ proposal, that “the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale.”[13]

Federalism or Incremental Balkanization?

A month before Peters’ article was published, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Joseph Biden, a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, in which they stated, “America must get beyond the present false choice between “staying the course” and “bringing the troops home now” and choose a third way that would wind down our military presence responsibly while preventing chaos and preserving our key security goals.” What is this third option? “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.”

They describe a few aspects of this plan. “The first is to establish three largely autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad. The Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions would each be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security. The central government would control border defense, foreign affairs and oil revenues.” Then, “The second element would be to entice the Sunnis into joining the federal system with an offer they couldn’t refuse. To begin with, running their own region should be far preferable to the alternatives: being dominated by Kurds and Shiites in a central government or being the main victims of a civil war.”[14]

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, Leslie Gelb stated that his plan for “federalizing” Iraq, “would look like this: The central government would be based on the areas where there are genuine common interests among the different Iraqi parties. That is, foreign affairs, border defense, currency and, above all, oil and gas production and revenues.” And, “As for the regions, whether they be three or four or five, whatever it may be, it’s up to—all this is up to the Iraqis to decide, would be responsible for legislation, administration and internal security.”[15]

The Senate subsequently passed a nonbinding resolution supporting a federal system for Iraq, which has still yet to be enacted upon, because it stated that this resolution was something that had to be enacted upon by the Iraqis, so as not to be viewed as “something that the United States was going to force down their throats.” Further, “when Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he testified in favor of federalism. In his private conversations with senators, he also supported the idea,” yet, while in Baghdad, the Ambassador “blasted the resolution.”[16] Could this be a method of manipulation? If the American Embassy in Baghdad promotes a particular solution for Iraq, it would likely be viewed by Iraqis as a bad choice and in the interest of the Americans. So, if the Ambassador publicly bashes the resolution from Iraq, which he did, it conveys the idea that the current administration is not behind it, which could make Iraqis see it as a viable alternative, and perhaps in their interests. For Iraqi politicians, embracing the American view on major issues is political (and often actual) suicide. The American Embassy in Baghdad publicly denouncing a particular strategy gives Iraqi politicians public legitimacy to pursue it.

This resolution has still not gone through all the processes in Congress, and may, in fact, have been slipped into another bill, such as a Defense Authorization Act. However, the efforts behind this bill are larger than the increasingly irrelevant US Congress.

Also in 2007, another think tank called for the managed “break-up of Iraq into three separate states with their own governments and representatives to the United Nations, but continued economic cooperation in a larger entity modeled on the European Union.”[17] In a startling admission by former US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, stated in 2007 that the “United States has “no strategic interest” in a united Iraq,” and he also suggested “that the United States shouldn’t necessarily keep Iraq from splitting up.”[18]

Conclusion

Clearly, whatever the excuse, or whatever the means of dividing Iraq, it is without a doubt in the Anglo-American strategy for Iraq to balkanize the country. Saying that what is being proposed is not balkanization, but federalism, is a moot point. This is because reverting to a more federal system where provinces have greater autonomy would naturally separate the country along ethno-religious boundaries. The Kurds would be in the north, the Sunnis in the centre, and the Shi’ites in the south, with all the oil. The disproportionate provincial resources will create animosity between provinces, and the long-manipulated ethnic differences will spill from the streets into the political sphere. As tensions grow, as they undoubtedly would, between the provinces, there would be a natural slide to eventual separation. Disagreements over power sharing in the federal government would lead to its eventual collapse, and the strategy of balkanization would have been achieved with the appearance of no outside involvement.

NOTES[1] Global Research, Iraqi MP accuses British Forces in Basra of “Terrorism”. Al Jazeera: September 20, 2005: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050920&articleId=983 [2] Linda S. Heard, The Prophecy of Oded Yinon. Counter Punch: April 25, 2006: http://www.counterpunch.org/heard04252006.html [3] Richard Perle, et. al., A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies: June 1996: http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm[4] PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Project for the New American Century: September 2000: Page 17[5] PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Project for the New American Century: September 2000: Page 14

[6] Leslie Gelb, The Three State Solution. The New York Times: November 25, 2003:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/6559/threestate_solution.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F3325%2Fleslie_h_gelb%3Fpage%3D3

[7] Michel Chossudovsky, “Osamagate.” Global Research: October 9, 2001:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html

[8] Pepe Escobar, Exit strategy: Civil war. Asia Times Online: June 10, 2005:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF10Ak03.html

[9] Sarah Baxter, America ponders cutting Iraq in three. The Times: October 8, 2006: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article664974.ece

[10] Gareth Stansfield, The only solution left for Iraq: a five-way split. The Telegraph: October 29, 2006: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/10/29/do2904.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/10/29/ixopinion.html

[11] Ralph Peters, Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look. Armed Forces Journal: June 2006: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899

[12] Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”. Global Research: November 18, 2006: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3882

[13] Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Mapto Stave Off Looming Global Meltdown. Dissident Voice: September 1, 2006: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept06/Ahmed01.htm[14] Leslie Gelb and Joseph Biden, Jr., Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq. The New York Times: May 1, 2006: http://www.cfr.org/publication/10569/unity_through_autonomy_in_iraq.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F3325%2Fleslie_h_gelb%3Fpage%3D2 [15] Leslie Gelb, Leslie Gelb before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The CFR: January 23, 2007: http://www.cfr.org/publication/12489/leslie_gelb_before_the_senate_foreign_relations_committee.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F3325%2Fleslie_h_gelb [16] Bernard Gwertzman, Gelb: Federalism Is Most Promising Way to End Civil War in Iraq. CFR: October 16, 2007: http://www.cfr.org/publication/14531/gelb.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F3325%2Fleslie_h_gelb [17] Robin Wright, Nonpartisan Group Calls for Three-State Split in Iraq. The Washington Post: August 17, 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR2007081700918.html [18] AP, French report: Former U.N. envoy Bolton says U.S. has ‘no strategic interest’ in united Iraq. International Herald Tribune: January 29, 2007: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/01/29/europe/EU-GEN-France-US-Iraq.php

Andrew G. Marshall contributed to breaking the Climate Change consensus in a celebrated 2006 article entitled Global Warming A Convenient Lie, in which he challenged the findings underlying Al Gore’s documentary. According to Marshall, ‘as soon as people start to state that “the debate is over”, beware, because the fundamental basis of all sciences is that debate is never over’. Andrew Marshall has also written on the militarization of Central Africa, national security issues and the process of integration of North America. He is also a contributor to GeopoliticalMonitor.com He is currently a researcher at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal and is studying political science and history at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.

Source

Breaking Iraq and Blaming Iran -British Black Ops and the Terror Campaign in Basra by Andrew G. Marshall

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U.S. trade with Iran increases tenfold under Bush administration

Posted on July 9, 2008 by kf1

In Greed We Trust

Iran may be part of the “axis of evil,” but it is good enough to be able to buy increasing amounts of American products — including bull semen, brassieres and possibly even weapons — despite U.S. sanctions that have been in place for decades.

An analysis of seven years of U.S. trade statistics done by the Associated Press shows that exports from the United States to Iran grew more than tenfold during President George W. Bush’s years in office, even as he accused the Mideast country of having nuclear ambitions and helping terrorists.

Cigarettes were Iran’s favorite U.S. import, the statistics said, with the Islamic republic’s smokers going through more than $169 million worth of popular U.S. brands since 2001.

Other surprising shipments to Iran during the Bush administration have included fur coats, sculptures, perfume and musical instruments.

Despite increasingly tough rhetoric toward Iran, and reports of U.S. or Israeli plans for a military strike, trade in a range of goods has survived on-again, off-again sanctions originally imposed nearly three decades ago.

Sanctions target ‘regime, not people’

Theoretically, the U.S. government-imposed rules allow only sales of agricultural commodities, medicine and a few other types of goods. What exemptions exist are aimed at helping Iranian families, officials said.

“Our sanctions are targeted against the regime, not the people,” said Adam Szubin, director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces the country’s sanctions against foreign nations, including Cuba.

The U.S. and Europe recently agreed on a new round of financial sanctions against one of Iran’s leading banks, as part of international efforts to discourage Tehran from enriching uranium.

Washington also moved Tuesday to impose targeted sanctions on certain Iranian companies and individuals suspected of funding Islamic militant groups and nuclear weapons development.

Economic embargoes and sanctions are intended in part to frustrate Iran’s efforts to build its military, but the U.S. government’s own figures show that hundreds of thousands of dollars in unspecified weapons, rifle parts and other military gear were exported from the U.S. to Iran during Bush’s time in office.

Szubin said it was unlikely that exports of military gear occurred, but he added that the government was looking into the matter.

The United States sent Iran about $546 million in goods from 2001 through last year, government figures show. It exported roughly $146 million last year, compared with just under $9 million in 2001, Bush’s first year in office. Even adjusted for inflation, that is more than a tenfold increase.

Snowmobiles, golf carts on list

Top U.S. exports to Iran over Bush’s years in office include agricultural products such as corn and soybeans, vaccines, blood products, chemicals, wood pulp, medical equipment, vitamins, bull semen and vegetable seeds, according to the AP’s analysis of government trade data compiled by the World Institute for Strategic Economic Research in Holyoke, Mass.

Iran is listed as a top customer of Alta Genetics Inc., a Canadian company with an office in Watertown, Wis., that sells bull semen, used to produce healthier, more profitable cattle.

“The animals we’re working with are genetically superior to those in many parts of the world,” said Kevin Muxlow, Alta’s global marketing manager.

The trade statistics also show that Iran has purchased several thousand dollars’ worth of snowmobiles and golf carts from U.S. suppliers.

Source

McCain jokes about killing Iranians with cigarettes – Reuters PITTSBURGH (Reuters) – U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the country by saying it may be “a way of killing ’em.”

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Obama’s other Muslim problem

Posted on July 4, 2008 by kf1

As soon as Barack Obama rose to the top of the field of Democratic presidential contenders, he developed a “Muslim problem” based on false accusations that he is, or once was, a Muslim.

There is little doubt that these accusations will be raised again, however unfairly, when Obama squares off against John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, in November’s election.

But if we were to assume that Obama overcomes this and other obstacles to win his historic bid for the White House, a far more serious Muslim problem awaits “President” Obama: A majority of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims have an utter lack of trust in the US.

Senator Obama’s experience of living in a Muslim country (Indonesia, where he attended school during his childhood), along with his relative youthfulness and message of hope, have the potential to heal this rift, however.

He has the merits which can energise young Muslims in the same way he has inspired millions of young Americans.

Comprehensive changes required

But this potential will not easily be realised, partially because of the ill-advised policies of the Bush administration and their impact on the Muslim world.

Most of the Generations X, Y Muslims I know, from Morocco to Pakistan, will not be swayed by Obama’s lofty rhetoric unless it is backed by comprehensive changes in US foreign policy.

Indeed, the young and educated citizens of the Muslim majority world are more politically sophisticated and historically knowledgeable of Washington’s foreign policy than their generational cohorts in the US.

They feel deeply and negatively impacted by these policies as they try to find coherence and stability in the increasingly chaotic post-9/11 landscape.

Islamic demographics

How can Obama reach Islam’s most crucial demographic – the young and passionate?

Muslim youth are not one homogeneous entity but comprise a remarkable diversity.

From the Saudi teenagers who listen to Britney Spears to those who are swayed by the farewell messages of female suicide bombers; the Egyptian metalheads who spend Friday afternoons at the mosque and Friday evenings playing Black Metal; and the graduate students in Islamabad whose Talibanesque appearance is belied by their study of Hebrew and the latest theories of comparative religion.

While it is heartening to hear Obama tell young people around the world “You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now,” it is not at all clear that his presidency would seize that moment to implement a mutual drive across the Muslim world.

In the US today merely to advocate talking with our adversaries is considered radical. But the students, activists, religious figures and artists who are struggling against the robust authoritarianism that dominates the Muslim world want action.

What Obama must do

The senator from Illinois must stop offering political, economic and military support to repressive governments who torture political prisoners, discourage economic and political reform, and censor Facebook, YouTube and other key nodes of the emerging Muslim public and cultural spheres.

He must push to get US forces out of Iraq, now. And, perhaps more importantly, Obama must hold all the countries of the Middle East – including Israel – to one standard.

Would a President Obama satisfy any of these demands? Not likely. Obama locates the root of the region’s woes solely inside it, “emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam”.

He is unwilling to even question the role and impact of US Middle East policy in analysing the region’s problems.

He will not offer even mild criticism of Israel while wholeheartedly endorsing Tel Aviv’s refusal to consider granting Palestinian sovereignty over any part of East Jerusalem, which forecloses any possibility for peace.

It becomes difficult to see how such views would enable the kind of “aggressive diplomatic effort” across the region the senator calls for.

Talking to Iran

Will Obama sit for talks with the Iranian leadership if he becomes president? [EPA]

Moreover, Obama’s much debated willingness to talk to Iran is undercut by his support for implementing confrontational policies.

For example, he supported designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation and pushing for increased sanctions against the Islamic Republic -before even sitting down with its leadership.

Most importantly, Obama hedges his pledge to remove US forces from Iraq, refusing to commit to a full withdrawal of US troops while calling for a large expansion of the ranks of the active duty military.

This suggests that as president, Obama would continue and even increase US military engagements in the region, against the wishes of the vast majority of its inhabitants.

Luckily, a burgeoning coalition of people across the Middle East – in particular, the younger generation – are not waiting for “President” Obama, or anyone else, to save them.

American activist youths

A growing activist community, religious and secular together, is challenging the sclerotic politics of their governments and the resistance identities of Islamist extremism – in cyberspace, in the emerging media sphere, and when possible on the streets – with a positive, peace, justice and development oriented Islam.

But this is not the “moderate” Islam preferred by American policy-makers. Rather, it is based on a radical critique of the status quo – of US global economic and military supremacy as much as of the self-inflicted problems of their societies.

If an Obama administration is unwilling or unable to break free of the geopolitical and economic priorities that have long determined US Middle East policy, it will be up to the young Americans who helped elect him to join their counterparts across the Muslim world in demanding that their leaders finally walk the talk of peace, democracy and equitable development.

If they do, an Obama White House could preside over the birth of a new and more positive relationship between the US and the Muslim world.

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Notable

Posted on July 4, 2008 by kf1

Barak Hints at Israel’s Readiness to Strike Iran

US Grants Israeli Jets OK to Use Iraq’s Airspace for Iran Attack

Rice Warns Iran That US Will Defend Israel

OPEC Chief Warns of ‘Unlimited’ Oil Prices if Iran Is Attacked

Pullout Demand Signals Final Bush Defeat in Iraq

Sistani’s Role Pushing Pullout Timetable Divides Parties

Marine’s Graphic Interview Describes Killing of Prisoners in Iraq

US Poised for Raids on Pakistan Rebels

Did A Plutonium Generator End Up in the Ganges? – “Making A Billion Hindus Glow in the Dark” – By PETER LEE

Inside the world of UK Muslim women

European converts to Islam

Euro May Be Poised for `Explosive Breakout,’ Citigroup Says

Riots rage in Kashmir

10-year-old subjected to torture by Israeli soldiers

A Shortage Of Troops in Afghanistan

Posted in Disclosure, Editorials | Leave a comment

Separation and Ethnic Cleansing- Israel’s Encaging of Gaza – Jonathon Cook

Posted on July 2, 2008 by kf1

The following is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21.

In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to “try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.

Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine — separation and transfer — were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used together, the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary, the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his most enduring legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism.

In recent years, with the Palestinian population under Israeli rule about to reach parity with the Jewish population, the threat of a Palestinian majority has loomed large again for the Zionists. Not suprisingly, debates about which of these two Zionist solutions to pursue, separation or transfer, have resurfaced.

Today these solutions are ostensibly promoted by two ideological camps loosely associated with Israel’s centre-left (Labor and Kadima) and right (Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu). The modern political arguments between them turn on differing visions of the nature of a Jewish state orginally put forward by Labor and Revisionist Zionists.

To make sense of the current political debates, and the events taking place inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, let us first examine the history of these two principles in Zionist thinking.

During the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the dominant Labor Zionist movement and its leader David Ben Gurion advanced policies much in line with Herzl’s goal. In particular, they promoted the twin principles of “Redemption of the Land” and “Hebrew Labor”, which took as their premise the idea that Jews needed to separate themselves from the native population in working the land and employing only other Jews. By being entirely self-reliant in Palestine, Jews could both “cure” themselves of their tainted Diaspora natures and deprive the Palestinians of the opportunity to subsist in their own homeland.

At the forefront of this drive was the Zionist trade union federation, the Histadrut, which denied membership to Palestinians — and, for many years after the establishment of the Jewish state, even to the remants of the Palestinian population who became Israeli citizens.

But if separation was the official policy of Labor Zionism, behind the scenes Ben Gurion and his officials increasingly appreciated that it would not be enough in itself to achieve their goal of a pure ethnic state. Land sales remained low, at about 6 per cent of the territory, and the Jewish-owned parts of the economy relied on cheap Palestinian labour.

Instead, the Labor Zionists secretly began working on a programme of ethnic cleansing. After 1937 and Britain’s Peel Report proposing partition of Palestine, Ben Gurion was more open about transfer, recognising that a Jewish state would be impossible unless most of the indigenous population was cleared from within its borders.

Israel’s new historians have acknowledged Ben Gurion’s commitment to transfer. As Benny Morris notes, for example, Ben Gurion “understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst.” The Israeli leadership therefore developed a plan for ethnic cleansing under cover of war, compiling detailed dossiers on the communities that needed to be driven out and then passing on the order, in Plan Dalet, to commanders in the field. During the 1948 war the new state of Israel was emptied of at least 80 per cent of its indigenous population.

In physically expelling the Palestinian population, Ben Gurion responded to the political opportunities of the day and recalibrated the Labor Zionism of Herzl. In particular he achieved the goal of displacement desired by Herzl while also largely persuading the world through a campaign of propaganda that the exodus of the refugees was mostly voluntary. In one of the most enduring Zionist myths, convincingly rebutted by modern historians, we are still told that the refugees left because they were told to do so by the Arab leadership.

The other camp, the Revisionists, had a far more ambivalent attitude to the native Palestinian population. Paradoxically, given their uncompromising claim to a Greater Israel embracing both banks of the Jordan River (thereby including not only Palestine but also the modern state of Jordan), they were more prepared than the Labor Zionists to allow the natives to remain where they were.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionism, observed in 1938 — possibly in a rebuff to Ben Gurion’s espousal of transfer — that “it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of non-Jewish citizens”. The Revisionists, it seems, were resigned to the fact that the enlarged territory they desired would inevitably include a majority of Arabs. They were therefore less concerned with removing the natives than finding a way to make them accept Jewish rule.

In 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his answer, one that implicitly included the notion of separation but not necessarily transfer: an “iron wall” of unremitting force to cow the natives into submission. In his words, the agreement of the Palestinians to their subjugation could be reached only “through the iron wall, that is to say, the establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure”.

An enthusiast of British imperial rule, Jabotinsky envisioned the future Jewish state in simple colonial terms, as a European elite ruling over the native population.

Inside Revisionism, however, there was a shift from the idea of separation to transfer that mirrored developments inside Labor Zionism. This change was perhaps more opportunistic than ideological, and was particularly apparent as the Revisionists sensed Ben Gurion’s success in forging a Jewish state through transfer.

One of Jabotinsky disciples, Menachem Begin, who would later become a Likud prime minister, was leader in 1948 of the Irgun militia that committed one of the worst atrocities of the war. He led his fighters into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where they massacred over 100 inhabitants, including women and children.

Savage enough though these events were, Begin and his followers consciously inflated the death toll to more than 250 through the pages of the New York Times. Their goal was to spread terror among the wider Palestinian population and encourage them to flee. He later happily noted: “Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery’, were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede.”

Subsequently, other prominent figures on the right openly espoused ethnic cleansing, including the late General Rehavam Ze’evi, whose Moledet party campaigned in elections under the symbol of the Hebrew character “tet”, for transfer. His successor, Benny Elon, a settler leader and rabbi, adopted a similar platform: “Only population transfer can bring peace”.

The intensity of the separation vs transfer debate subsided after 1948 and the ethnic cleansing campaign that removed most of the native Palestinian population from the Jewish state. The Palestinian minority left behind — a fifth of the population but a group, it was widely assumed, that would soon be swamped by Jewish immigration — was seen as an irritation but not yet as a threat. It was placed under a military government for nearly two decades, a system designed to enforce separation between Palestinians and Jews inside Israel. Such separation — in education, employment and residence — exists to this day, even if in a less extreme form.

The separation-transfer debate was chiefly revived by Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. With Israel’s erasure of the Green Line, and the effective erosion of the distinction between Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, the problem of a Palestinian majority again loomed large for the Zionists.

Cabinet debates from 1967 show the quandary faced by the government. Almost alone, Moshe Dayan favoured annexation of both the newly captured territories and the Palestinian population there. Others believed that such a move would be seen as transparently colonialist and rapidly degenerate into an apartheid system of Jewish citizens and Palestinian non-citizens. In their minds, Jabotinsky’s solution of an iron wall was no longer viable.

But equally, in a more media-saturated era, which at least paid lip-service to human rights, the government could see no way to expel the Palestinian population on a large scale and annex the land, as Ben Gurion had done earlier. Also possibly, they could see no way of persuading the world that such expulsions should be characterised as voluntary.

Israel therefore declined to move decisively in either direction, neither fully carrying out a transfer programme nor enforcing strict separation. Instead it opted for an apartheid model that accommodated Dayan’s suggestion of a “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories that he rightly believed would go largely unnoticed by the West.

The separation embodied in South African apartheid differed from Herzl’s notion of separation in one important respect: in apartheid, the “other” population was a necessary, even if much abused, component of the political arrangement. As the exiled Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara has noted, in South Africa “racial segregation was not absolute. It took place within a framework of political unity. The racist regime saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity.”

In other words, the self-reliance, or unilateralism, implicit in Herzl’s concept of separation was ignored for many years of Israel’s occupation. The Palestinian labour force was exploited by Israel just as black workers were by South Africa. This view of the Palestinians was formalised in the Oslo accords, which were predicated on the kind of separation needed to create a captive labour force.

However, Yitzhak Rabin’s version of apartheid embodied by the Oslo process, and Binyamin Netanyahu’s opposition in upholding Jabotinsky’s vision of Greater Israel, both deviated from Herzl’s model of transfer through separation. This is largely why each political current has been subsumed within the recent but more powerful trend towards “unilateral separation”.

Not surprisingly, the policy of “unilateral separation” emerged from among the Labor Zionists, advocated primarily by Ehud Barak. However, it was soon adopted by many members of Likud too. Ultimately its success derived from the conversion to its cause of Greater Israel’s arch-exponent, Ariel Sharon. He realised the chief manifestations of unilateral separation, the West Bank wall and the Gaza disengagement, as well breaking up Israel’s rightwing to create a new consensus party, Kadima.

In the new consensus, the transfer of Palestinians could be achieved through imposed and absolute separation — just as Herzl had once hoped. After the Gaza disengagement, the next stage was promoted by Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. His plan for convergence, limited withdrawals from the West Bank in which most settlers would remain in place, has been dropped, but its infrastructure — the separation wall — continues to be built.

How will modern Zionists convert unilateral separation into transfer? How will Herzl’s original vision of ethnic cleansing enforced through strict ethnic separation be realised in today’s world?

The current siege of Gaza offers the template. After disengagement, Israel has been able to cut off at will Gazans’ access to aid, food, fuel and humanitarian services. Normality has been further eroded by sonic booms, random Israeli air attacks, and repeated small-scale invasions that have inflicted a large toll of casualties, particularly among civilians.

Gaza’s imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become a daily reality. In fact, Gaza’s condition is far worse than imprisonment: prisoners, even of war, expect to have their humanity respected, and be properly sheltered, cared for, fed and clothed. Gazans can no longer rely on these staples of life.

The ultimate goal of this extreme form of separation is patently clear: transfer. By depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions of a normal life, it is assumed that they will eventually choose to leave — in what can once again be sold to the world as a voluntary exodus. And if Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist thinking they have forfeited their right to it — just as earlier generations of Zionists believed the Palestinian refugees had done by supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Is this process of transfer inevitable? I think not. The success of a modern policy of “transfer through separation” faces severe limitations.

First, it depends on continuing US global hegemony and blind support for Israel. Such support is likely to be undermined by the current American misadventures in the Middle East, and a gradual shift in the balance of power to China, Russia and India.

Second, it requires a Zionist worldview that departs starkly not only from international law but also from the values upheld by most societies and ideologies. The nature of Zionist ambitions is likely to be ever harder to conceal, as is evident from the tide of opinion polls showing that Western publics, if not their governments, believe Israel to be one of the biggest threats to world order.

And third, it assumes that the Palestinians will remain passive during their slow eradication. The historical evidence most certainly shows that they will not.

Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book, “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East“, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

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The End of the Anglo-American Empire?

Posted on July 2, 2008 by kf1

Much of the world’s history over the last century has been dominated by the United States . But by the turn of the millennium in 2000-2001, the “American Century” had begun to descend into a chamber of horrors.

The years since then have been marked by the huge financial bubbles engineered by the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the virus of predatory global capitalism. We have the looming worldwide economic crisis with rising bankruptcies, credit disruptions, and soaring fuel and food prices. Alongside has been the thinly-disguised but continuing attempt by the U.S. to conquer the Middle East by force of arms under the heading of the “War on Terror.”

Some have argued that the U.S. at war is nothing new and that we have always been a nation of aggression and militarism. While this may be true, the expansion of the original thirteen states to cover much of the North American continent was done with far less violence than the constant fighting among the European nations over the centuries for domination.

The key event was President Thomas Jefferson’s choice to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, thus turning America ’s energy to westward expansion rather than competition with the European powers for colonial empires. The long-term result has been a nation that has led the world in science, technology, social and political innovation, and individual prosperity and freedom.

Still, there seems to have been a critical change that took place in both America and the world in the early 1900s.

To many, the arrival of the 20th century seemed to be a time of great hope. There had not been a major international conflagration since the Napoleonic Wars which ended with the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. Despite inequities in income, the industrial age showed promise of raising the standard of living everywhere. Four large nations whose territory had been consolidated during the latter part of the 19th century—the U.S. , Russia , Germany , and Italy —were flourishing.

But by 1914, the worst war in history—World War I—had begun. A century of conflict and chaos, which has not yet ended, was underway, with hundreds of millions of non-combatants eventually losing their lives through war, famine, epidemics, or genocide. The modern world has seen many holocausts in addition to the one befalling European Jewry during World War II.

Alongside miracles of medicine, agriculture, sanitation, engineering, transportation, communications, and information technology have come terrible weapons of mass destruction, the latest being depleted uranium. There have been appalling refinements in the diabolical arts of assassination, torture, propaganda, mind control, and political manipulation.

Economic crime has occurred on an epic scale, including currency manipulations, privatization of public resources, the aforesaid financial bubbles, involvement of governments in the illicit drug trade, attacks by financiers on national economies, the creation of offshore tax havens, money laundering, destruction of entire industries to benefit global capitalism, human trafficking, cornering of markets on food and other vital commodities, speculative hedge funds whose managers earn a billion dollars a year, and looting of private companies and pension funds by highly-paid CEOs and executives..

What then happened, especially during the latter part of the “American Century,” to turn so much promise into the continuing spectacle of prosperity for some side-by-side with recurrent catastrophes for others? Likely this question will be debated for centuries.

It would appear, however, that once it became apparent how much wealth the industrial revolution was capable of generating, the world’s economies began to develop so fast that the traditional means of resolving the distribution of power and wealth among and within nations and social classes fell apart. Because human beings were not capable of exercising the wisdom, generosity, fairness, and restraint to master the industrial genie that was now out of the bottle, the worst inclinations of individuals and society exerted themselves. The history of the 20th century and the battles among nations and blocs for supremacy resemble nothing so much as neighborhood gang wars among Mafia dons, the latest being the Bush-Cheney cabal that has controlled the U.S. government since 2001.

Another gang has been those among the world’s money-lenders who became experts at parasitic high finance and got rich through the explosive growth of fractional reserve banking. These people have dominated the economies of nations through such institutions as the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and other central and commercial banks, currency and commodity exchanges, and stock and bond markets.

The bankers on the one hand and the political racketeers on the other merged over a century ago under the oversight of figures associated with the creation of the Anglo-American Empire, such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner, Colonel House, Winston Churchill, the House of Windsor, and, as examples of families involved, the Rothschilds, Schiffs, Morgans, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Myers, and Bushes. Among the major projects of the empire in recent decades have been the creation and maintenance of both the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel as Western bridgeheads of influence, power, and wealth in the Middle East .

This has led to the ongoing campaign by the U.S. to exercise complete military control of that region, with Israel the principal beneficiary. It is an astonishing spectacle to watch the “world’s greatest superpower” bankrupt itself financially and in its world reputation because its politicians are too corrupt and cowardly to take a stand against the domestic Jewish lobby.

This campaign of conquest seems to have had its roots in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who intended to bring a new era of peace through rapprochement with the Soviet Union, restraint of Israel ’s nuclear ambitions, withdrawal of combat forces from Vietnam , and dismantlement of the CIA as an agency of covert warfare. Kennedy’s brief presidency coincided with an amazing period of social and spiritual renewal among America ’s youth in the 1960s.

With the killing of Kennedy, the dogs of war were unleashed. After America ’s disastrous war in Vietnam ended in 1975, President Jimmy Carter tried to introduce a policy of civility and restraint in domestic and world political affairs, but he was swept away in the election of 1980 by the “Reagan Revolution,” whose catastrophic legacy we see today.

President Ronald Reagan set in motion the current mudslide of worldwide cataclysms through his huge military build-up, the “Reagan doctrine” of proxy warfare in third-world countries, the pathologically paranoid Strategic Defense Initiative—“Star Wars”—program, and the deregulation of the financial industry. Since our economy is the largest in the world, such action was bound to affect every other nation in making them subservient to the U.S. bankers and financiers who organized themselves in such institutions as David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.

Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, did little to stem the tide of barbarism. He completed the destruction of the U.S. as an industrial democracy by signing the legislation for NAFTA and opening the floodgates to foreign control of U.S. business. He also completed the deregulation of the financial industry by repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which had prohibited the merger of investment and deposit banks. But Clinton still was attacked by the right-wing who wanted him to unleash a new military assault against Iraq .

When George W. Bush became president in 2000, the grand strategy of Middle East occupation was facilitated by the skillful exploitation of the 9/11 attacks as the excuse for military mobilization to be financed by the housing bubble and the forced sale of U.S. Treasury debt to foreign investors. The historic jack-up of petroleum prices—including the most recent ones that have brought gas at-the-pump in the U.S. to $4 a gallon—are clearly a de facto tax on the American public to pay for these wars.

It has become obvious in recent months—even as Bush et. al. plot a possible attack on Iran before the end of his presidency—that the rest of the world is heartily sick of U.S. arrogance. Even our allies in NATO have refused to allow us to build a defensive missile shield virtually to the borders of Russia .

And there are indications that the European financial community—headed by the Bank of International Settlements—may force the Federal Reserve to start raising interest rates again to stem inflation, even if this drives the U.S. domestic population into an economic depression. Recent signs from the Council on Foreign Relations are that the U.S. will accept that the dollar can no longer reign supreme as the world’s sole reserve currency and that it must give way to the Euro and the Chinese Yuan in sharing this role. Thus the U.S. political leadership seems to have begun to realize that we will no longer be allowed to posture as the unchallenged bully of the world.

What we may be seeing—even as the U.S. military has extended its reach to the insertion of uniformed personnel in 135 nations—is the end of the Anglo-American Empire and the birth of a multi-polar world. It appears that the more level-headed among the U.S. and worldwide elite are tilting toward Barack Obama as the best choice to manage America ’s inevitable decline.

This decline is by no means a bad thing. Through graceful acceptance, America may even have a chance someday to regain its soul. A good place to start would be to establish a National Historical Truth Commission to investigate such historical puzzles as the real causes of U.S. entrance into the wars of the past century; assassinations—such as JFK, Senator Paul Wellstone, and JFK, Jr.; and 9/11. Another worthwhile proposal is for a tribunal on “International and Domestic Crimes Committed by High U.S. Government Officials,” which will be discussed at a national conference planned for Andover , Mass. , in September.

Can anything else be done to ease the shocks to come? If people took the trouble to read the available literature, they would see that hundreds of potential economic and political reforms have been presented and discussed—at least in books and on the internet—that could make our society more just, functional, and humane and not just the ugly police state it is rapidly becoming.

In the mind of this writer, a viable economic solution would be policies based on government control of credit treated as a vital public utility, rebuilding of our public and private infrastructure, radical reduction of pollution and dependence on foreign oil through green energy R&D, enactment of a basic income guarantee, and implementation of a national dividend which would monetize productivity and savings.

The theory of a national dividend, not dependent on either taxation or government borrowing, is sound and was worked out decades ago by the British Social Credit movement. It can be seen on a small scale in the annual residents’ stipend provided by the Alaska Permanent Fund. Such a program would be more in accord with the largely successful social welfare policies of the Western European democracies and less with the leanings, for instance, of the American Libertarians. The manner in which they view with suspicion any action taken by representative government to benefit the general welfare—misleadingly labeling it “socialism”—is an ideological dead end.

Of course the mainstream media ignore any real reform proposals, because they are afraid to suggest that there are any alternative political structures to ones that are controlled by usurers and war-mongers.

Ultimately, we are all responsible for the current state of affairs, because we have profited from it in one way or another so must reap the consequences. There is no use worrying about how we might escape the wave of events while everyone else goes down with the ship. But those who at least recognize what is going on have an obvious advantage. From there the only conscionable approach is what it has always been—diligence, honesty, and prudence in all our affairs.

Ultimately, mankind must grow up and became more humane and compassionate. This includes the angry white male American conservatives who—under the tutelage of conniving European-born intellectuals like Kissinger and Brzezinski—have been the real global terrorists for the past generation.

Philosophically, we need to realize that we live in an infinite universe of abundance where all God’s children can be provided for, rather than one of scarcity where we can only survive by taking away what belongs to our neighbor. We can all choose to begin seeing the world in this manner.

We need to understand that we are at an early point of a new age of humanity. If enough people attain a sufficient degree of enlightenment—and it won’t take that many—real change in social, economic, and political relations will follow, just as the flowers bloom in the spring.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites and in Eurasia Critic magazine. His book on monetary reform, entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.”

His website is at www.richardccook.com Comments may be sent via email to EconomicSanity@gmail.com

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Never say die: return of the warriors – SMH – 02 July.08

Posted on July 2, 2008 by kf1

John Mccain

The neocons who pushed for the invasion of Iraq got egg on their faces, but are regrouping for another battle, writes Peter Hartcher.

At a dinner in London this year, a leading US commentator on foreign policy decided to have some fun at the expense of America’s neoconservatives.

The neocons, as they have come to be known, are the ideologues who successfully advocated the invasion of Iraq. They may have been thoroughly discredited by that blighted war, but they are now regrouping.

At the dinner, Kurt Campbell told his companions that some people compared the neocons to vampires and werewolves, creatures able to stay alive long after they should have been dead.

But Campbell, a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration and now head of the Centre for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, wanted to explain that these metaphors did not quite capture the true nature of the neocon.

A silver bullet in the heart could kill a vampire, but not a neocon; and werewolves went crazy at night, but a neocon did crazy things at any time, Campbell joked to much laughter, reported Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation in his blog, The Washington Note.

Campbell continued that “a better analogy was ‘intellectual special forces’ – highly trained, confident, ninja-like, working well in small teams but always seeking to define the terrain of conflict. They will not stand and fight if things go poorly but instead will search for a better battle.”

The problem was that a leading neocon was at the same dinner. Robert Kagan was not amused. He decided to protest. The Americans were in London for a conference the next day. Kagan, who had been invited as a speaker, decided to boycott the conference so he could avoid sharing the stage with Campbell.

A rueful Campbell went shopping to buy Kagan a tie and wrote him a note of apology, says Clemons. Here is the irony. Kagan is a card-carrying neocon. He was a co-founder of the main neocon vehicle for pressing for the invasion of Iraq, the Project for the New American Century. Through this he shares responsibility for that disastrous misadventure.

Yet it was not Kagan writing the apology. It was Campbell, a member of the “realist” school of foreign policy and not an advocate of the invasion, while Kagan struck an indignant pose. Elsewhere, Campbell had marvelled at this phenomenon – the insouciance of people he calls Iraqitects: “Perhaps part of the curiosity is because this current generation of war planners has conducted themselves so much differently than the Vietnam era Masters of the Universe,” he wrote in The New York Times in November.

“Many from the version 1.0 of the best and the brightest – those intrepid Cold Warriors who led the country to a slogging defeat in Vietnam – had to subsequently endure booing on college campuses, shunning from old friends and colleagues, brutal treatment from the commentariat of the time, and the kind of bitter despair that generally accompanies a thoroughgoing battlefield defeat.

“The version 2.0 era of neoconservative advocates of military action to topple Saddam have behaved very differently in the midst of our current quagmire in Iraq. Almost all have generally tried to put on a brave public face and to remain on the intellectual offensive, pointing out the weaknesses and limitations of their critics and full of ideas for what the US can do next in the world. Even after offering atrocious advice to President Bush during the 2000 campaign, most of them are back again.”

And they have indeed found their “better battle”. The neocons are now agitating nonstop in the campaign to attack Iran.

But weren’t the neocons in the Bush Administration all purged?

Men like the deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, and the undersecretary of defence for policy, Doug Feith, were forced out. So was the former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, and the chief of staff to the Vice-President, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

With no neocons in government, surely their only attacks now have to be rhetorical – surely they cannot wage war. But a number of key neocons have arrived in the inner circle of the candidate to become the next Republican president, John McCain.

This is being taken very seriously by American foreign policymakers. “There’s no doubt that some neocons like Senator Joe Lieberman are linked to McCain at the elbow like Siamese twins,” said one of the grey eminences of US foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter and now an adviser to the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

“Lieberman believes that we are already in World War Four and his complaint is that we are not sufficiently conscious of it or sufficiently belligerent,” Brzezinski told the Herald. On Iran, Lieberman advocates air strikes to disable its nuclear program.

Other notable neocons who are now counted as McCain advisers are Bolton; William Kristol, the editor of the neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard and son of the neocon intellectual founder, Irving Kristol; a former Wolfowitz ally at the Bush Pentagon, Peter Rodman, and the easily offended Robert Kagan.

Crucially, a neocon has landed as chief co-ordinator of McCain’s foreign policy and national security teams. Randy Scheunemann was the founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and, like Kagan, was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century.

This clustering of neocons around a possible next president troubles American analysts for two principal reasons.

First, the neocons’ record lends them no credibility, yet their positioning around the candidate gives them enormous potential power. The neocons were adamant about the need to invade Iraq. Kristol and Kagan wrote in 2001: “The road that leads to real security and peace is the road that runs through Baghdad.” They were wrong. The invasion destabilised Iraq and unleashed a civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites whose future remains completely unpredictable.

The invasion empowered Iran. It energised terrorists around the world. It compromised US power. It sent the US to its lowest point in world regard since Vietnam. It needlessly killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and 4000 US troops to date. Its ultimate financial cost will be counted in the trillions of dollars. It reduced Iraq’s oil output. And yet the neocons, in general, remain unbowed and unrepentant.

Second, the neocons’ world view is ideological; zealotry is a poor guide for cool-headed and judicious policy-making. The neocon, unlike the realist, is an idealist and believes in a revolutionary doctrine. He believes that America’s unique mission is to civilise the world at gunpoint.

Professor Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University, says there are five defining characteristics of neoconservatism. The neocon believes that:

* US global domination is benign and other nations see it as such;

* Any lapse in US domination will create chaos;

* Military force is necessary to impose democracy;

* US military power must always be expanded to allow it to intervene decisively in every critical region of the world simultaneously if necessary; and

* Realists in foreign policy must be aggressively targeted and defeated.

As Bacevich puts it, the neocon cannot abide the realist because “realism was about defending national interests, not transforming the global order”.

So it has been much remarked in Washington that McCain’s advisory group contains not only some of America’s leading neocons, but also some of its famous realists. Asked about the influence of neocons in McCain’s campaign, his lead Asia adviser, Mike Green, points to this fact: “If you look at McCain’s senior group, it includes Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and Bob Zoellick – it’s hardly a pantheon of neocons.

“And the advisory group, at the next level down, includes moderate conservatives like me,” said the former senior director for Asia in the Bush White House. “I have never felt I’ve needed to butt heads with neocons.

“But John McCain has been involved in national security for decades. The idea that he could be taken over by any adviser is totally mistaken. On almost everything, McCain already has a stated position.”

And his stated position on Iran? “You mean a serious position, or him singing ‘Bomb Iran’?” asks Green, referring to the infamous YouTube clip of McCain during a public appearance singing those two words over and over to the tune of the Beach Boys tune Barbara Anne.

Asked for the longer version of the candidate’s position, Green says: “Barack Obama’s pledge to meet personally with the leadership of Iran is definitely not where McCain is. He’s been one of the leading people in the Senate arguing that Iran is the leading threat to Iraq, arguing that Iran is on the offensive in Gaza and Lebanon and efforts of diplomacy and offers of carrots have been rebuffed by the regime.

“You have France, Germany and Britain arguing we need more pressure on Iran – that’s pretty much where McCain is. He is sceptical of what you can get through talking. The more important thing is to put more pressure on them.”

Green portrays this as a practical middle way of approaching Tehran: “There is more to Iran policy than bombing them or talking to them.”

Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation explains that he is anxious about the neocons’ Iran policy “because they regard the mullahs of Iran as the greatest threat to Western values, and many of them also worry about Israel. When you take these concerns and then consider Iran with nukes, the neocons just go crazy.”

But the simple answer is not necessarily to vote Democrat: “I worry that Barack Obama worries that he won’t be trusted by the American people on national security and he may be looking for an action to define himself. So Obama could end up looking a lot like a neocon.”

It is easy to make fun of the neocons, but Washington is alive with the concern that they may yet have the last laugh.

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Traitor

Posted on July 2, 2008 by kf1

Traitor

Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda, Crash) and Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential) star in Traitor, a taut international thriller set against a jigsaw puzzle of covert counter- espionage operations. Traitor is written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff (screenwriter of The Day After Tomorrow).

When straight arrow FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) heads up the investigation into a dangerous international conspiracy, all clues seem to lead back to former U.S. Special Operations officer, Samir Horn (Don Cheadle). A mysterious figure with a web of connections to terrorist organizations, Horn has a knack for emerging on the scene just as a major operation goes down. The inter-agency task force looking into the case meets with Carter (Jeff Daniels), a veteran CIA contractor who seemingly has his own agenda and Max Archer (Neal McDonough), a fellow FBI agent. The task force links Horn to a prison break in Yemen, a bombing in Nice and a raid in London, but a tangle of contradictory evidence emerges, forcing Clayton to question whether his quarry is a disaffected former military operative — or something far more complicated. Obsessed with discovering the truth, Clayton tracks Horn across the globe as the elusive ex-soldier burrows deeper and deeper into a world of shadows and intrigue.

Jeffrey Nachmanoff (dir.)
Don Cheadle
Guy Pearce
Jeff Daniels
Neal McDonough

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Wanted: a Calif – Time Magazine – Monday, May. 31, 1926

Posted on July 1, 2008 by kf1

Time Magazine Cover - 31 May 1926

The potent representatives of Islam who assembled at Cairo (TIME, May 24) to select a new Calif, disbanded last week after irreconcilable rivalries had kept the Califate Congress in an uproar almost from its inception.

The Conference’s most notable act was to adopt a resolution stressing the fact that when a new Calif should be appointed he must be a free sovereign capable of defending Islam. Since the two other traditional qualifications for a Calif—descent from Mohammed and possession of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina—were not mentioned, it was inferred that these latter qualifications may be explicitly waived at a later date.

A further resolution significantly recorded the opinion that “a Calif can attain that office by conquest, providing always that he be a Moslem.” More succinctly, Islam will rally to any Moslem who arises, smites the faithful and their enemies into submission, and proclaims himself Calif—the temporal and spiritual overlord of Islam.

The so-called “last true Calif,” the deposed Sultan of Turkey, Mohammed VI, died recently in Italy (TIME, May 24).

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Who’s Actually Winning in Iraq?

Posted on June 27, 2008 by kf1

Special Report from the Battlefields – Who’s Actually Winning in Iraq? By PATRICK COCKBURN

The American occupation of Iraq follows the same course as that of British rule after the First World War. At first there was imperial over-confidence following military victory and a conviction that what Iraqis did was of no importance. Then there was the shock and surprise of an Iraqi rebellion against the British in 1920 and the Americans after 2003. In both cases the occupiers responded by establishing an Iraqi national government but with limited powers. In 1930 under the Anglo-Iraqi treaty Iraq achieved nominal independence and joined the League of Nations but Britain retained two large bases and remained the predominant power in 1raq. Iraqi governments were tainted and lacked legitimacy because of Iraqis’ perception that their rulers were foreign pawns until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.

America is now behaving in much the same way. It is negotiating a security agreement to replace the present UN mandate. It is to all intents and purposes a treaty that will determine future relations between Iraq and the US. It is not being called a treaty only because President Bush does not want to submit it to Senate approval. But in effect it continues the occupation under another name. The US will keep possession of over 50 bases though there will be a few Iraqi soldiers manning an outer perimeter so the US can say they will be in Iraqi hands. American soldiers and contractors will have legal immunity. The US will be free to carry out operations against ‘terrorists’ without informing the Iraqi government so it can arrest Iraqis or carry out military campaigns as and when it feels like it. Some of the Iraqi negotiators have been horrified by the extent of the American demands which would mean long term American control. But the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whatever his private misgivings, believes that at the end of the day he relies on American backing. His coalition of Shia religious parties, Sunni representatives and the Kurds feel the same way.

The Iraqi-American security agreement, which Bush wants signed by July 31, is a better barometer of where real power lies in Iraq than military developments on the ground. It comes just as the Iraqi government is trying to regain control of the largest cities in the country. It has launched three military offensives since the end of March against Shia militias and Sunni insurgents, sending its army into Basra, Sadr City in Baghdad and Mosul. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers have moved into Shia districts once dominated by the Mehdi Army which follows the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. In the Sunni Arab city of Mosul the government claims it is crushing the last remnant of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and has arrested over 1,000 suspects. The aim of the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is to show that the Iraqi state, feeble and dependant on the US since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is back in business. The operations in Basra and Mosul have bombastic names – ‘Charge of the Knights’ and ‘Roar of the Lion’ – in a bid to underline Maliki’s intention to show that the Iraqi army is the strongest non- American military power in Iraq.

At first sight the government seems to be succeeding after initial failures. The attack on the Mehdi Army in Basra on March 25 at first made no headway and Iraqi soldiers even ran out of food after a couple of days fighting. They had to be heavily reinforced by American advisers calling in US air strikes and British artillery fire. But, after a few weeks, government soldiers were taking over in districts long held by the Mehdi Army. In Sadr City—with a population of two million it is less of a district of Baghdad than a twin city—the Americans again bore the brunt of the fighting. Some 1,000 Iraqis, 60 per cent women and children according to the UN, were killed in seven weeks. In both Basra and Sadr City the clashes ended because Muqtada al-Sadr called his men off the streets under ceasefires brokered by the Iranians. The Iraqi army moved in though without the Americans. Maliki may not have won the decisive military victory he claimed, but his government looked stronger at the end of the fighting than at the beginning.

The crucial political and military question in Iraq is whether the Iraqi government’s success will be long lasting or temporary. Will it lose control once again if al-Sadr orders his militiamen back into the streets? Are al- Qa’ida and other Sunni insurgents simply lying low and waiting for American troops to leave? Again and again in the last five years, the US and its Iraqi allies have genuinely believed that they were winning on the ground only to see their supposed successes evaporate when their opponents launched a counter-attack. But for the moment at least Maliki’s grip on central government is stronger than ever. A year ago the Americans and the Kurds wanted him replaced, as did the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), the biggest Shia party in his governing coalition. But Washington soon began to stress privately that it wanted Iraq to appear as politically stable as possible during an election year in the US, while the Kurds and ISCI came to believe that they could get most of what they wanted with Maliki in power. For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, many Iraqis think the present government might last.

This may be misleading. The government’s position looks stronger than it is because its opponents are waiting for the Americans to leave or draw down their forces. Al-Sadr does not want to fight now because he sensibly wishes to avoid a direct military confrontation with the US army, which his lightly armed militiamen are bound to lose. This has been his strategy ever since his militiamen fought ferocious battles with the US Marines in Najaf in 2004. The Iranians are playing a more and more overt role in Iraq this year and do not want to see an intra-Shia civil war between ISCI and the Sadrists. The Iraqi Minister of Defense says that the Iraqi army will not be strong enough to stand on its own against insurgents until 2012. A further weakness of the government is that it faces crucial provincial elections in October which its constituent parties may well lose. One US military intelligence estimate is that in a fair poll the Sadrists would win 60 per cent of the vote in overwhelmingly Shia southern Iraq. The surprise government offensive at the end of March may have been launched in order to make sure that the vote can be fixed in favor of the government parties. A more Machiavellian explanation is that ISCI expected the Iraqi army to fail and wanted to lure the American army into a military confrontation with the Sadrists.

The government parties supporting Maliki now make up what some Iraqis called ‘the Council of Five’. There are the two Kurdish parties—the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdkistan—the Dawa party to which Maliki himself belongs, ISCI and the Islamic Party of the Sunni. Their aim seems to be to be eliminate their domestic Iraqi opponents while they still have the backing of American firepower. It is a brutal plan but it might come off. Maliki could become the Iraqi version of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Like Putin, Maliki controls the state machine, a large if unreliable army and benefits from the high price of oil so he has control of over $40 billion in unspent reserves. Iraqis do not trust their own government but, like Russians when Putin first came to power in 1999, they are desperately war weary. Many people will support anybody who provides peace and security. But the analogy should not be carried too far. Putin’s enemies were fictional or in distant Chechnya, while Maliki’s opponents are real, dangerous and close by.

I was in Mosul, a city of 1.4 million people on the Tigris river in northern Iraq, on the day the government forces started their ‘Roar of the Lion’ offensive at 4 am on May 10. As had happened in Basra and Sadr City a few weeks earlier there were thousands of government troops and police guarding every street and alleyway. The entire civilian population had disappeared indoors or had fled the city. The operation, supposedly aimed at depriving al Qa’ida of its last bastion in Iraq, had been promised by Maliki some months earlier after a previous chief of police of Mosul was assassinated by a suicide bomber with explosives hidden under his police uniform. But its actual timing had caught people in Mosul by surprise so they had no time to stock up on food. Nobody was venturing onto the streets because of a curfew. In the first hours of the operation US troops shot dead men, a woman and a child in a car which failed to stop at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul because, according to a US military statement, the two men were armed and one man inside the car made ‘threatening movements.’

I have been visiting Mosul ever since the Kurds and Americans captured it in 2003. Each time I go there the Kurdish authorities, who effectively run the city, allocate more armed guards to protect what ever official I am travelling with. We began the journey from Arbil in a convoy of white pick up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert- looking soldiers, some with black face masks, escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the old Baathist headquarters on the left bank of the Tigris. The official border between Kurdistan and Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, is the Zaab river, very low this year because of poor rainfall. But the real frontier is further down the road at a small village called Ghazik after which the road becomes increasingly dangerous. At a bridge near Ghazik police were stopping trucks and cars whose drivers had not heard of the curfew declared late the previous day. A few miles further on in a Chaldean Christian village called Bartilla we turned into a fort and exchanged our pick-ups for more heavily armoured vehicles with small windows like spy holes with thick bullet proof glass.

People in Nineveh province were taking the curfew very seriously. There are kilns processing gypsum along the road through the plain east of of Mosul city but none of them was working. Even the dreary tea houses serving food to truck drivers were closed. The Kurdish minority in east Mosul city live close to a small hill on top of which there is the mosque of Nebi Yunis, where the Prophet Jonah is supposedly buried. Usually the Kurdish districts of the city are filled with street traders but during the present operation the metal grill of every shop was down. The operation was being carried out by 15,000 troops, the three brigades of the 2nd and 3rd divisions that are normally stationed in Mosul and an extra brigade from Baghdad. I could see the black vehicles of Interior Ministry special commandos with a yellow tiger’s head insignia on their doors. American drones and helicopters passed over head but I did not see any American troops patrolling the city. There was the occasional burst of machine gunfire in the distance but no street fighting.

On the face of it the government had control of Mosul. This was not difficult to do because, unlike Baghdad and Basra, insurgents had never taken over entire districts. But everything in Nineveh province is a little different from what it looks. “The province is more like Lebanon,” said Saadi Pire, the former leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the city, “than anywhere else in Iraq.” It is divided between the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds and Christians, but many of the Kurds belong to the Yazidi sect which believes in a mixture of Zoroastrianism, Islam and Christianity. Their chief divinity is the peacock angel who rules the cosmos with six other angels. Last year a Yazidi girl who converted to orthodox Islam to marry her boyfriend was beaten to death by her relatives and in revenge Muslim Kurds dragged 23 Yazidi workers off a bus near Mosul and shot them dead. The government in Baghdad might claim that it was pursuing al Qa’ida in Mosul, but real power struggles in northern Iraq revolve around sectarian and ethnic differences. The Sunni majority in Mosul certainly see the ‘Roar of the Lion’ operation as being directed against them. Any al- Qa’ida in Mosul had long left the city for the country or had temporarily moved across the nearby Syrian border. Everybody I spoke to in Mosul expected they would be back.

In Baghdad there is also a sense that we are seeing a lull rather than end to violence. Places I used to know well still get destroyed. I used to eat in a restaurant in the al-Mansur district of west Baghdad called the Samad. It opened soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein, served good food and somehow survived the next five years of violence. But at 5pm on 8 May some policemen parked their vehicle outside the restaurant and went inside to eat. A few minutes later a large car bomb parked beside the police car blew up and destroyed the Samad, killing seven people and wounding a further 19. The explosion caused a massive traffic jam. Ambulances and the fire brigade could not get through and the building beside the Samad caught fire and burned to the ground. Though the Iraqi government is claiming that al Qa’ida has been driven from Baghdad and Anbar province to the east, this is not really true. In January I went to see Colonel Ismail Zubaie, the police chief of Fallujah, who was a former insurgent fighting al-Qa’ida who had cut his brother’s throat. He seemed to be in full control of Fallujah. But in May fighters from al Qa’ida confronted Colonel Ismail’s uncle, who was a teacher, and shot him dead. The next day they sent a suicide bomber to blow up the tent where his relatives were receiving mourners. The operation, clearly an elaborate attempt to kill Colonel Ismail, shows that al Qa’ida remains well organized and with agents everywhere in the Sunni community.

The Americans lost only 21 soldiers killed in Iraq in May which are the lowest monthly casualties since February 2004. But these do not mean that the chief Republican contender senator John McCain is correct in believing that with enough resolution the American army is on the road to victory. Paradoxically, the Americans are now benefiting from their failure to turn Iraq into a virtual American colony in 2003-4. Iran and Syria no longer fear, as they once did, that as soon as the US had gained complete control of Iraq it would try to overthrow their governments. There may be those in the White House who still privately dream of doing just that, but Iraq’s neighbors no longer feel they must destabilize Iraq in order to avert the American threat to themselves. American casualties are also down because the Sunni Arab and the Shia Arab communities in Iraq are not only divided but fighting low level civil wars. Part of the old anti- American Sunni resistance has turned on al Qa’ida and allied itself to the Americans. The Sunni were driven out of most of Baghdad by the Shia militias in the sectarian civil war of 2006-7 and are increasingly marginalized. Among the Shia, once known for their impressive unity after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, internecine battles between the Shia parties in government and the Sadrists have become bloodier and more frequent.

The main supporters of Nouri al-Maliki’s government are the US and Iran. This has never been admitted by Washington but from the Iranian point of view the present Shia-Kurdish government in Baghdad is as good as it is going to get. It does not want to overthrow Maliki, but it does want to reduce American influence on him. The fighting in Basra and Sadr City between the Mehdi Army and the Iraqi government backed by the American army between March and April was in each case brought to an end by Iranian mediation. This has become very public. To arrange the ceasefires in Basra and Baghdad President Jalal Talabani twice went to see Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the Iraq-Iran border, though President Bush has denounced the Quds brigade as terrorists orchestrating attacks on US forces in Iraq. Iranian influence in Iraq is stronger than ever and the Iranians are increasingly willing to flaunt it. When the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad visited Baghdad this years his visit was announced in advance and he drove through the city by car. When President George W Bush comes to Baghdad it is a kept a secret until the last moment, he moves only by helicopter and he has never ventured outside the Green Zone.

Suppose Barack Obama wins the US presidential election America could withdraw its forces from Iraq over the next eighteen months without provoking an explosion of violence but only if it first had an agreement with Iran and Syria. An increase in Iranian influence in Iraq has been inevitable since 2003. Once the US had decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein the beneficiaries were always going to be the Shia religious parties, because they represented the majority of Iraqis, and they would be supported by Iran. Many of America’s problems in Iraq over the last five years have happened because Washington believed it could prevent or dilute the triumph of Iran and the Shia in Iraq.

Iranian strategy in Iraq is to keep the pot boiling but not over-boiling. They do not want the present government displaced. “The Iranians are very good at creating crises in Iraq and then solving them,” one Kurdish leader told me. Iran wants a weak Iraq, incapable of posing a threat to Tehran, and allied to itself. It wants a Shia government in power in Baghdad and the Americans out. “The three great powers of the Gulf historically are Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia,” the same Kurdish leader told me. “If Iran and Iraq act together then they will dominate the Gulf.” It may not be as easy as that. The Iraqis like the Iranians no more than they do the Americans. Muqtada al-Sadr, who is calling for an American withdrawal, has always been an Iraqi nationalist as suspicious of Iran as of the US. Paradoxically, the Shia governing parties in Baghdad, ISCI and Dawa, have traditionally had closer links with Iran than the Sadrists. ISCI was founded by the Iranians in Tehran in 1982 to be their puppet if they succeeded in defeating Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. It is still heavily influenced by them, but at the end of the day neither ISCI nor the Sadrists want the Americans nor the Iranians to treat Iraq as a client state.

Probably the most astute politician in Iraq is Muqtada al-Sadr, who has chosen not to tell his militiamen to fight for the enclaves they controlled in Basra and Baghdad. Instead in the last days of May he called tens of thousands of his followers into the streets to protest against the a new bilateral pact between the US and Iraq that is being secretly negotiated and would govern the future political, military and economic relationship between Washington and Baghdad. “Why do they want to break the backbone of Iraq?” asked Sheikh Mohammed al-Gharrawi addressing crowds in Sadr City. “The agreement wants to put an American in each house. This agreement is poison mixed in poison, not poison in honey because there is no honey at all.”

This opposition to the occupation can only grow if Senator McCain wins the US presidential election and tries to win an outright military victory in Iraq. The US can only stay in Iraq so long as it is allied to a large part of the Sunni or Shia communities. The occupation has always depended on ‘divide and rule’. If the US is ever faced with a united opposition by both Shia and Sunni in Iraq then it will have to leave. Everybody in Iraq overplays their hand at one time or other. The US position in Iraq has slightly improved over the last year but the improvement is limited. But by trying to impose a security pact on Iraq that would turn Iraq into a client state the Washington is fueling a fresh insurgency. It is discrediting the Iraqi government and the ruling parties who will be seen as foreign pawns. If McCain wins the presidential election and tries to put the security agreement into operation then neither the occupation nor the resistance to it will end.

Patrick Cockburn is the the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.”

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Who’s Actually Winning in Iraq?

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