4.11.2007
Announcement: Moved to Wordpress
I've now moved my blog to Wordpress. I thought it would be better since this type of blog could use multiple pages. My new url is here.
An Invasion of Iran?
Iran has been in the news much recently; from its nuclear program, to its arming of militants in Iraq, and of course, recently with the capturing of 15 British sailors and then releasing them back to Britain. What also has been in the news is a possible invasion of Iran by the United States. This has especially been worrying to many because of the increased rhetoric of the Bush administration against Iran; much of the rhetoric and maneuvering towards Iran looks eerily similar to the position the United States took against Iraq in the last quarter of 2002. But is an invasion of Iran plausible, especially in today's political climate?First, we should look at the country itself. Iran has a population of over 68-and-a-half million people with a land mass of 1.636 million sq. km. (1) Iraq only has a population of 26.783 million and a land mass of 432,162 sq. km. (2)
The U.S. military is already having enough trouble as it is in its occupation of Iraq and many military experts and ex-generals are critical of the current quagmire in Iraq saying that it is taxing the Army and stretching U.S. forces too thin. The downgrading of the famed 82nd Airborne is just one example of this.
Yet, despite all of this why would some in the Pentagon and the White House want to invade Iran, despite the fact that Iran's meddling in the resistance forces in Iraq is likely minimal at this time? Well, for one some neo-cons (the neo-con philosophy has been widely discredited in conservative foreign policy circles in Washington) think that one of the main factors for lack of success in Iraq is because of the "meddling" from Iran. Yet even if this was the case (more likely true on a smaller scale than a larger scale) invading Iran would make the situation in Iraq, and the Middle East, worse of the United States, not better. And many of the imperial wishes of the U.S. would go up in smoke. Another reason could be the fact that many within the Bush administration want to re-rally the American public with more drumbeats of war, hoping that the public would rally behind the White House as they did post-9-11 and during the first phases of the Iraq War. Yet this is also likely to backfire on them because of the recent mid-term elections (with even more loses likely in 2008, unless the Democrats overstretch their mandate from the voters) and the increased public antagonism against the Bush administration and against the Iraq War.
With these factors it may be the case that the wishes to go to war against Iran are just that, wishes, and not a reality. It could have been possible that if the Republicans managed to hold the House and Senate that there could have been an invasion of Iran (all though with the over stretching of American resources the invasion would have probably been quite weak), but this seems no longer possible. If anything we might see a small air war and special forces actions in Iran as we saw in Cambodia and Laos yet that too is subject to public criticism as well as a backlash by Congress.
With all of this it seems that an invasion, while still possible, might not come into fruition anytime soon.
3.31.2007
Faith and Scholarship
I recently read a great piece in the Biblical Archeology Review (a journal I subscribe to) on four scholars, two who lost their religious faith through scholarship and two who kept it. The author interviews them and asks them questions on their faith and loss of faith.The article opens up with:
Several media stories recently reported that Bart Ehrman, a leading expert on the apocryphal gospels and one of BAS’s most popular lecturers, had lost his faith as a result of his scholarly research. This raised a question for us that is not often talked about, but seemed well worth a discussion: What effect does scholarship have on faith? We asked Bart to join three other scholars to talk about this: James F. Strange, a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister; Lawrence H. Schiffman, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew; and William G. Dever, one of America’s best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew and now says he’s a non-believer.
Here are some highlights from the interviews:
Ehrman: First, I lost my fundamentalist faith because of my scholarship. Like Bill Dever, I have a fundamentalist background. I had a very high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God, no mistakes of any kind—geographical or historical. No contradictions. Inviolate.Image From:
...I started finding contradictions and finding other discrepancies and started finding problems with the Bible. What that ended up doing for me was showing me that the basis of my faith, which at that time was the Bible, was problematic.
...
Theodicy is the question of how God can be righteous, given the amount of suffering in the world. The issue as it’s usually put today is that if God is all-powerful and is able to prevent suffering, and is all-loving so that he wants to prevent suffering, why is there suffering? This problem isn’t ever expressed that way in the Bible, but Biblical authors do deal with the problem by asking: Why does the people of God suffer?
...I decided that I couldn’t believe in a God who was in any way intervening in this world, given the state of things. So that’s why I ended up losing my faith.
...
Strange: ...I’m still a Baptist minister. I don’t have a pulpit. The only thing I do every now and then is a wedding for someone—or a funeral. Maybe now it’s more funerals. [Laughs] I bury more than I marry.
But to answer you more directly, I just don’t see the connection. My faith is not based upon anything like a propositional argument. When I indulge myself in all this scientific research and explication, I’m not doing anything about faith.
...
My faith is based on my own experience—a good old Protestant principle.
...
I love the existentialist philosophers. I love to read them, not because they’re giving me any testable facts. It’s because it’s like reading a really good poet. It does something to you that propositional truth never does.
...
Propositional truth is like: There is a loving God that intervenes upon the earth. That’s a proposition. It’s testable or it’s not. If it’s not testable, then you can’t falsify it; you can’t know if it’s true or not. If it really is testable, then the way you test it is to start checking out a list of experiences people have—and suffering is a prime one human beings have in common. So you end up saying, I’ve tested the hypothesis and it is now wanting. Suffering tends to disconfirm the hypothesis.
Shanks: You say your faith is not based on this proposition?
Strange: That’s correct.
Shanks: What is it based on?
Strange: Based on my own experience with God. For a lot of people, this makes me sort of a mystic in a cave or something. But I think it’s eminently practical and out there.
...
Shanks: Would you say that your scholarship, then, has had really no effect on your faith?
Strange: Virtually none. I mean I have a wonderful intellectual time with my scholarship. I get the same existentialist thrill out of touching the dirt when I’m excavating as I do holding my wife’s hand.
...
I grew up in east Texas, where the choices were you believed in the Bible literally or you didn’t believe in the Bible literally. That was it. I didn’t. So it’s my own experience with God that tipped me over on the other side. My best analogy is falling in love.
...
Ehrman: It seems to me that Christianity—Christian faith—has always been grounded in certain historical claims, for example, about Jesus. One thing that scholarship did for me: It led me to question historical claims that Christians have made about Jesus.
...
If Jesus hadn’t been crucified, if he grew up to be an old man and died and was buried in a family plot outside of Nazareth, then for me, when I was a Christian, that would’ve destroyed my faith.
In other words, the faith is rooted in certain historical claims. As historical claims, they can be shown as either probable or improbable. And I got to a point where the historical claims about Jesus seemed implausible, especially the resurrection.
...
Schiffman: One of the principles of the Jewish faith is not believing in Jesus. [Laughter] But, like Bart, I of course believe that he lived, preached and was crucified by the Romans.
From a Jewish point of view, these kinds of problems aren’t problems. First of all, the Bible was never taken literally in Judaism. It doesn’t mean that it’s not historical, but it is not taken literally in the Protestant sense. It’s not an issue in Judaism. Admittedly there is a literalist strain in a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers and a minority—maybe a growing minority—in modern Judaism, but it’s not classical Judaism. The Talmud doesn’t take the Bible literally in the Protestant sense.
...
I heard a recent lecture by a rabbi who is becoming a medical doctor. He talked about the problem of creation. And he said, well, evolution is obviously true. What do I do about it if evolution is obviously true? He said that we learn from Nachmanides that nothing in the Bible about creation is intended literally. What’s important to me is that I have the experience of God as the creator.
Let's take the problem of evil...We talk about the debate in Job and the various approaches explored there. We see the continuation of these debates in Midrash. But we know that we can’t explain evil, especially after the Holocaust. Any person who says that he can give an explanation for the Holocaust is crazy. So the bottom line is that we all go along living with the fact that this horrible thing happened and we can’t explain it. Judaism doesn’t claim that the individual will get all the answers to everything.
...
Dever: Well, my father was a fire-breathing fundamentalist. I grew up hearing him preach in tent meetings in the hills of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. He had a bigger voice than I do. I was ordained a minister at 17, put myself through undergraduate school and on through divinity school, through Harvard, then a congregation. I have 13 years’ experience as a parish minister and two theological degrees. For me, it was this typical Protestant conundrum: It’s all true or none of it is true. My sainted mother once said to me, If I can’t believe that the whale swallowed Jonah, I can’t believe any of it.
...
Living in the Holy Land, I became extremely cynical about religion. I began to think, more or less, maybe like all of you, that I had no talent for religion, that faith might be a matter of temperament as well as training. I never had a pious bone in my body. And I realized I was never really a believer, but it just took me 40 years to figure out that it was no longer meaningful. That’s when I converted to Judaism. [Laughs] I did it precisely because you don’t have to be religious to be a Jew. And I’m perfectly comfortable where I am.
...
Schiffman: You’ve got to decide: Do I believe there is a God? Do I believe that God communicated some kind of way of life to someone that became Judaism?
Dever: I think Judaism is about practices rather than a correct theology.
Strange: I think precisely that [about Judaism]. Christian tradition, on the other hand, made a mistake because we intellectualized it so much that Christian experience got submerged. Theology was bereft of any kind of experience.
...
Schiffman: But I think modern Judaism goes too far with the notion that you don’t have to believe anything to be Jewish. You don’t in the sense that you’re part of the community even if you don’t believe. But the question is, doesn’t Judaism really have in mind that a person will have certain types of faith commitments that are then acted out in certain ways?
Shanks: Larry, do you believe in God?
Schiffman: Yes.
...
I believe in a personal God, but I’m conditioned by the philosophical approach of Maimonides...I can say there’s a lot that I don’t know.
An Orthodox Jew can believe whatever he wants and be part of the community, but Orthodox Judaism assumes that a person does believe that there really is a God. There is a force that cannot physically be accounted for. There is a force, even if we don’t know how to present what it is in words. Somehow or other God reveals himself or his will to humanity. This revelation and its experience constitute in some mystical way, if not in a physical way, the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings. Otherwise, you could be a Jew...
Ehrman: It’s very interesting, because two of us have remained within our religious traditions and two of us have left our religious traditions. Bill and I have both left our original traditions. But there’s a difference between Bill and me. Bill adopted another tradition. It seems to me that, as somebody who has left his tradition, I have to decide if I’m going to believe something and what it is I’m going to believe. And even if that isn’t expressed propositionally, there still have to be reasons. Once one leaves one’s tradition, it isn’t an automatic move for me to go from Christianity to Judaism. There are hundreds of religions in the world. Why would I choose one over the other?
...
Schiffman: I don’t believe in pluralism. I believe in toleration and mutual respect. But I do believe that certain things are ultimately true or untrue. I believe that my religion is more correct than some other people’s religion. But I’m the first to admit that many other people’s religions make them better people and that many things taught in their religions are things that I agree with. We share a lot in common.
...
Ehrman: Larry thinks that at the end of the day you have to believe in God. And then your original question about “What kind of attributes does God have?” matters. Just believing in God is for me an amorphous idea. I think belief has content. Without content it’s simply some kind of feeling that you have inside. I think that faith has to have substance. But once you start putting some substance onto that, you get into trouble. Faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition has a God who intervenes...I don't see a God who intervenes.
Strange: What I can’t help but notice is that two people look at precisely the same event and one sees God intervening and the other does not. Apparently the one who has seen God is either fooling himself or there is something genuinely happening that’s going on.
...
Ehrman: I would actually like to be a believer.
Schiffman: I see the whole thing as a lifelong quest. It’s not that either a person believes or doesn’t believe. The life experiences of people are very difficult and very complex, and believing in God is itself a challenge. It’s not about whether I know the Exodus happened or didn’t happen. It has to do with understanding the difficult world that we’re in. Faith is a process.
...
Ehrman: I just think faith, in order to be intelligent, needs to have reasons behind it. I myself just don’t have sufficient reasons for believing in the Christian tradition. The same thing, I think, for the Jewish tradition.
...
Strange: I think I would say that faith/unfaith is sort of a false dichotomy. I think faith always contains elements of unfaith and vice versa. So in a way, we can’t avoid it. It’s just a matter of deciding what fits and what works. And also, where we get hope from.
Ehrman: Historical scholarship calls into question certain beliefs and can call into question faith. But it can’t resolve any faith issues. There are historians who agree with everything that I think about the historical Jesus, about the New Testament, about the development of Christian doctrine, and yet they’re professors in theological seminaries training pastors. If you ask them, they will say, “Yes, Jesus is God. Historical scholarship doesn’t determine what we believe.” So I think what’s important is that people engage in historical scholarship. It’s better to have a knowledgeable faith than an ignorant faith...
The Age
3.26.2007
Iraqi Death Report
Man, it's been quite some time since I've posted a blog on this blog. I've been floating around ideas about Iran and a recent pseudo "revelation" of the family tomb of Jesus (bunch of bullshit) but I haven't gotten around to posting it. I have been posting plenty though on The Blog and the Bullet and Double Consciousness.Here's an excerpt from an article on from The Guardian (U.K.) about a report on Iraqi civilian deaths:
Chief government advisers accepted as "robust" research that put the death toll from the Iraq war 10 times higher than any previous estimate, new documents have revealed.Image From:The study, by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, prompted worldwide alarm when it was published in the Lancet medical journal in October last year.
It estimated that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the violence in the country. It has now emerged chief advisers warned ministers not to "rubbish" the report.
Hyde Park
3.07.2007
News Analysis: French Elections
I thought I would give you guys some news and views from around the world on the French elections. I'm working on a short blog on the continuing focus on Iran by the Bush administration, but I'm not sure the angle I want to do for it since it has been covered so much by other bloggers, possibly a strict foreign policy angle. But, on to the news.
Le Monde (France)
March 7, 2007
Smiles Do Not Erase the Dissension Between Mrs. Royal and Merkel
By Cecile Calla and Isabelle Mandraud
Divergences "I do not see any," ensured Ségolène Royal, while leaving a meeting in Berling on Tuesday March 6, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "I would say that despite the political differences things went very well," said the socialist candidate at the end of an hour long meeting which was described as "very cordial, I was even going to say supportive." With a handshake, smile, and photograph Mrs. Merkel has, on other side, scrupulously and equally respected Nicolas Sarkozy during his visit to Berlin on February 12. And as in this case, she left the meeting without commenting.
For Mrs Royal this is her last trip abroad before the presidential election, which is of a particular importance due to due to the debate on the reorganization of Airbus, but it also to shore up links with German partners before the French rotation of the European Union presidency in 2008. "This is preparing for at least a year in advance," underlined Elisabeth Guigou, the former minister for European business, during a private conversation with the French delegation...(Read More)
Der Spiegel (Germany)
March 6, 2007
Paris Calls for End to Dual Management at EADS
By SMD, Reuters, Spiegel, DPA
With the French presidential campaign heating up, politicians in Paris are seizing on the Airbus crisis as an election issue. Sarkozy is calling for an end to the dual leadership at parent company EADS and Royal is calling for more state investment instead of job cuts.
French politicians are calling for an increase in state involvement in Airbus. The principle of dual French-German leadership is also being questioned in Paris...(Read More)
EUobserver.com (Belgium)
March 5, 2007
French commissioner worried by presidential election campaign
By Helena Spongenberg
Jacques Barrot, the French EU commissioner, has warned the French presidential candidates that France could lose out if it does not resume its leadership role in Europe.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Barrot, responsible for EU transport, said Europe is in danger of becoming the "big forgotten issue" in the French presidential campaign, at a time when the country needs to get out of its "whingeing, pessimistic and defensive" mindset...(Read More)
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
France's Presidential Elections Face Neck-And-Neck Race
Feb. 27, 2007
By DW Staff
The French election campaign has focused closely on the leading candidates Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. But the "third man" François Bayrou could upset the first round of voting on April 22.
The latest polls in France show that conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist rival Ségolène Royal are running neck-and-neck. But outside contenders in the vote could upset a clear outcome...(Read More)
Journal Turkish Weekly
France's elections, Turkey's choice
March 4, 2007
By Beril Dedeoglu
As the president has important powers in the French political system, the winner of the presidential elections this May is important not only for France but also for many other countries. The rightist UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who says that “Together Everything is Possible,” seems to receive the support of the conservative sectors of the electorate. He wants to restore France’s former power and importance.
But having said that, he seems to be supportive of a federal Europe. He affirms that as in De Gaulle’s time, France and Germany should be the EU’s pivots, and he thinks that the UK is an obstacle on the path to full European integration. Sarkozy would be right if the world were the same as in De Gaulle’s time. Today the UK is a member of the EU -- and a powerful one -- even if it doesn’t please France. Sarkozy also affirms that France would be stronger if it joined fully in the dynamics of globalization. He defends globalization and a federal Europe at the same time. Beside this, he promises to take harsh measures to tackle the immigration issue, even though it’s not understandable how he reconciles this with globalization...(Read More)
People's Daily (China)
March 8, 2007
Feminist campaigners split over 'sexy Socialist' Royal
By China Daily and Agence France-Presse
The women of France agree electing a female president would be a giant step forward for a nation which has treated career women poorly.
However, feminists are split over whether presidential hopeful Segolene Royal is the best person to advance their fight for equal rights in a country where a revolutionary heroine is the national symbol...(Read More)
Time Magazine (U.S.A.)
March 8, 2007
Not Your Father's Anti-Immigrant Right
By Bruce Crumley
U.S. comedian Dave Chapelle wrought comic havoc by creating a fictional blind African-American who supports the Klu Klux Klan, unaware of his own blackness. But Farid Smahi is not a comedian, nor is he blind, although he does confound a stereotype: The son of Algerian parents and a longtime victim of anti-immigrant prejudice, Smahi is a candidate in France's forthcoming legislative election — for the anti-immigrant National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
"There is no contradiction in being Arab or black or any other minority and voting Le Pen," argues Smahi, who joined the party a decade ago after having initially backed leftist causes and marching for immigrant rights. "French minorities and banlieue [housing project] residents see they've been manipulated and exploited by both the hypocritical left and sham right for years now. Nothing has changed except the racism. So this time around, expect a lot of people to be casting votes for Le Pen in the hopes that, at last, things may change."...(Read More)
Washington Post
March 5, 2007
Candidate Wants Le Pen on France Ballot
By Elaine Ganley
Globe and Mail (Canada)
March 2, 2007
Suddenly sexy
By Doug Saunders
PARIS — Until a few days ago, Margot Gardelon's friends were telling her to get with the reality of French politics: Either side with the romantic promise of socialism offered by Ségolène Royal or the stern certainties of a U.S.-inspired conservatism represented by Nicolas Sarkozy. In this year's dramatic presidential election, those were the choices.
The 20-year-old university student was ridiculed, even harassed, for her distinctly unfashionable affinity: She backed an obscure, charisma-challenged farmer named François Bayrou, who proudly called himself a centrist, a concept that has never been taken very seriously in French politics...(Read More)
Mail and Guardian (South Africa)
Feb. 20, 2007
Royal Faces the nation to revive campaign
Ségolène Royal mounted a determined effort on Monday night to revive her ambitions, appearing on primetime TV to defend her campaign to become France's first female president.
Three months ago, Royal (53) a mother of four and the Socialist head of Poitou Charentes region, appeared to represent an unstoppable new face in politics. But her popularity has been dented by gaffes and infighting, with more than 20 consecutive opinion polls in recent weeks showing the public is not convinced. Her right-wing opponent, the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has a lead of up to 10 points...(Read More)
Le Monde (France)
March 7, 2007
Smiles Do Not Erase the Dissension Between Mrs. Royal and Merkel
By Cecile Calla and Isabelle Mandraud
Divergences "I do not see any," ensured Ségolène Royal, while leaving a meeting in Berling on Tuesday March 6, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "I would say that despite the political differences things went very well," said the socialist candidate at the end of an hour long meeting which was described as "very cordial, I was even going to say supportive." With a handshake, smile, and photograph Mrs. Merkel has, on other side, scrupulously and equally respected Nicolas Sarkozy during his visit to Berlin on February 12. And as in this case, she left the meeting without commenting.
For Mrs Royal this is her last trip abroad before the presidential election, which is of a particular importance due to due to the debate on the reorganization of Airbus, but it also to shore up links with German partners before the French rotation of the European Union presidency in 2008. "This is preparing for at least a year in advance," underlined Elisabeth Guigou, the former minister for European business, during a private conversation with the French delegation...(Read More)
Der Spiegel (Germany)
March 6, 2007
Paris Calls for End to Dual Management at EADS
By SMD, Reuters, Spiegel, DPA
With the French presidential campaign heating up, politicians in Paris are seizing on the Airbus crisis as an election issue. Sarkozy is calling for an end to the dual leadership at parent company EADS and Royal is calling for more state investment instead of job cuts.
French politicians are calling for an increase in state involvement in Airbus. The principle of dual French-German leadership is also being questioned in Paris...(Read More)
EUobserver.com (Belgium)
March 5, 2007
French commissioner worried by presidential election campaign
By Helena Spongenberg
Jacques Barrot, the French EU commissioner, has warned the French presidential candidates that France could lose out if it does not resume its leadership role in Europe.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Barrot, responsible for EU transport, said Europe is in danger of becoming the "big forgotten issue" in the French presidential campaign, at a time when the country needs to get out of its "whingeing, pessimistic and defensive" mindset...(Read More)
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
France's Presidential Elections Face Neck-And-Neck Race
Feb. 27, 2007
By DW Staff
The French election campaign has focused closely on the leading candidates Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. But the "third man" François Bayrou could upset the first round of voting on April 22.
The latest polls in France show that conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist rival Ségolène Royal are running neck-and-neck. But outside contenders in the vote could upset a clear outcome...(Read More)
Journal Turkish Weekly
France's elections, Turkey's choice
March 4, 2007
By Beril Dedeoglu
As the president has important powers in the French political system, the winner of the presidential elections this May is important not only for France but also for many other countries. The rightist UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who says that “Together Everything is Possible,” seems to receive the support of the conservative sectors of the electorate. He wants to restore France’s former power and importance.
But having said that, he seems to be supportive of a federal Europe. He affirms that as in De Gaulle’s time, France and Germany should be the EU’s pivots, and he thinks that the UK is an obstacle on the path to full European integration. Sarkozy would be right if the world were the same as in De Gaulle’s time. Today the UK is a member of the EU -- and a powerful one -- even if it doesn’t please France. Sarkozy also affirms that France would be stronger if it joined fully in the dynamics of globalization. He defends globalization and a federal Europe at the same time. Beside this, he promises to take harsh measures to tackle the immigration issue, even though it’s not understandable how he reconciles this with globalization...(Read More)
People's Daily (China)
March 8, 2007
Feminist campaigners split over 'sexy Socialist' Royal
By China Daily and Agence France-Presse
The women of France agree electing a female president would be a giant step forward for a nation which has treated career women poorly.
However, feminists are split over whether presidential hopeful Segolene Royal is the best person to advance their fight for equal rights in a country where a revolutionary heroine is the national symbol...(Read More)
Time Magazine (U.S.A.)
March 8, 2007
Not Your Father's Anti-Immigrant Right
By Bruce Crumley
U.S. comedian Dave Chapelle wrought comic havoc by creating a fictional blind African-American who supports the Klu Klux Klan, unaware of his own blackness. But Farid Smahi is not a comedian, nor is he blind, although he does confound a stereotype: The son of Algerian parents and a longtime victim of anti-immigrant prejudice, Smahi is a candidate in France's forthcoming legislative election — for the anti-immigrant National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
"There is no contradiction in being Arab or black or any other minority and voting Le Pen," argues Smahi, who joined the party a decade ago after having initially backed leftist causes and marching for immigrant rights. "French minorities and banlieue [housing project] residents see they've been manipulated and exploited by both the hypocritical left and sham right for years now. Nothing has changed except the racism. So this time around, expect a lot of people to be casting votes for Le Pen in the hopes that, at last, things may change."...(Read More)
Washington Post
March 5, 2007
Candidate Wants Le Pen on France Ballot
By Elaine Ganley
PARIS -- One of France's top presidential candidates asked mayors and other elected officials on Monday to give their backing to an extreme right-wing politician to ensure he has enough endorsements to run in the spring elections.
Nicolas Sarkozy's plea for goodwill on behalf of Jean-Marie Le Pen _ in the name of democracy _ followed a similar call earlier in the day from Sarkozy's party, the governing Union for a Popular Movement, known as the UMP...(Read More)
Globe and Mail (Canada)
March 2, 2007
Suddenly sexy
By Doug Saunders
PARIS — Until a few days ago, Margot Gardelon's friends were telling her to get with the reality of French politics: Either side with the romantic promise of socialism offered by Ségolène Royal or the stern certainties of a U.S.-inspired conservatism represented by Nicolas Sarkozy. In this year's dramatic presidential election, those were the choices.
The 20-year-old university student was ridiculed, even harassed, for her distinctly unfashionable affinity: She backed an obscure, charisma-challenged farmer named François Bayrou, who proudly called himself a centrist, a concept that has never been taken very seriously in French politics...(Read More)
Mail and Guardian (South Africa)
Feb. 20, 2007
Royal Faces the nation to revive campaign
Ségolène Royal mounted a determined effort on Monday night to revive her ambitions, appearing on primetime TV to defend her campaign to become France's first female president.
Three months ago, Royal (53) a mother of four and the Socialist head of Poitou Charentes region, appeared to represent an unstoppable new face in politics. But her popularity has been dented by gaffes and infighting, with more than 20 consecutive opinion polls in recent weeks showing the public is not convinced. Her right-wing opponent, the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has a lead of up to 10 points...(Read More)
2.26.2007
Target Iran
Seymour Hersh writes an interesting article (having read it in full but I will) in the New Yorker on certain groups within the Pentagon who are planning to attack Iran and want to attack Iran. Here's a short excerpt:To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”
Image From:
Fly Over Guy
2.15.2007
Announcement: Change of Blog Mission
I'm changing the concentration and mission of my blog site. Essentially I'm making it into more of a blog and less of a website where I post long essays. This will still "be a place of well thought out and smart discussions on mainly theological and political issues pertaining to American foreign policy and on religion in general." But instead of posting long essays every two weeks or so filled in with other articles I find interesting I'm going to be publishing more posts that are blogs and less posts that are "articles." I'm still doing my Mesopotamia Burning series (see part II and III) and I will still be publishing long articles as well. My blogs and my articles will both "be well thought out with good supporting evidence, and with footnotes." So I won't just be blogging and spouting off my opinion without (at least) some evidence to back it up.
Part of this change has to do with the fact that school is getting in the way of concentrating on quality essays and I'm now working at UPS as a loader and unloader for trucks (with the Teamseters Union) from 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Monday through Friday. So this change also reflects my busy schedule. Right now I'm in the planning phases of Mesopotamia Burning Part III, I'm going through a bunch of articles, journals, and Frontline documentaries. It should be done in a few weeks or so. Thanks to all of those who are reading my blog.
Part of this change has to do with the fact that school is getting in the way of concentrating on quality essays and I'm now working at UPS as a loader and unloader for trucks (with the Teamseters Union) from 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Monday through Friday. So this change also reflects my busy schedule. Right now I'm in the planning phases of Mesopotamia Burning Part III, I'm going through a bunch of articles, journals, and Frontline documentaries. It should be done in a few weeks or so. Thanks to all of those who are reading my blog.
2.11.2007
News Analysis: Elections in Turkmenistan
There were elections recently in the former Soviet Republic, Turkmenistan. The country had been ruled, dictitorially, by one president, Saparmurat Niyazov, for the past 21 years, until his recent death on Dec. 21, 2006. Here are some of the news and views about the elections from around the world.Europe:
BBC News
Feb. 11, 2007
High Turnout for Turkmen Election
Voters were choosing between six men, in the gas-rich Central Asian nation's first multi-candidate election.
Interim leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, a former dentist, is seen as the clear favourite...(Read More)
Institute for War & Peace Reporting (U.K.)
Feb. 9, 2007
Turkmenistan Needs to Choose its Friends Carefully
As the February 11 presidential election in Turkmenistan draws close, there is little doubt who will win, but considerable uncertainty about what will happen next. Will Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov really live up to his pledges to reform education, health and pensions and give his people greater opportunities to travel and access information, or will he revert to the tough style of the man he replaces, the late Saparmurat Niazov?
On the foreign policy front, most observers agree Russia will remain Turkmenistan’s key partner, not least because it buys most of the country’s natural gas. But Turkmenistan’s proximity to Iran is likely to give it some role to play - albeit unwillingly - in the confrontation between Washington and Tehran...(Read More)
International Herald Tribune (France)
Feb. 11, 2007
Turkmenistan Votes For New Leader
By C. J. Chivers
MOSCOW: Turkmenistan held the first officially contested presidential elections in its history Sunday, conducting a carefully choreographed vote almost certain to be won by a confidante of the reclusive Central Asian country's late autocratic leader.
The election, organized by the tightly controlled state after Saparmurat Niyazov, the only president in the country's 15-year history, died in late December, was not formally monitored by international observers, who sent small teams of experts that were not expected to make any public statement about the government's conduct...(Read More)
North America:
Feb. 9, 2007
Turkmen Elections Provides Opportunities For International Condemnation of Authoritarian Regime
By John C. K. Daly
As foreign observers gear up to monitor Sunday’s presidential elections in Turkmenistan, the first since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, more adventurous foreigners can catch a bus from Ashgabat and journey some 40 miles north of the capital into the Karakum desert, where they can visit one of the more odious remnants of the Soviet “gulag archipelago,” a custom-built prison housing about 150 opponents of the Niyazov regime.
They had better hurry, as it might not be there much longer. According to Deutsche Welle, the facility is being demolished and its prisoners transferred elsewhere (Novye izvestiya, February 7)...(Read More)
East Asia:
Chosunibo (South Korea)
Feb. 12, 2007
Turkmenistan Votes for Presidential Successor
Voters in the isolated, gas-rich Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan are voting for a successor to replace the late president, Saparmurat Niyazov, who died last December. VOA's Lisa McAdams in Moscow reports the current acting president, Gurbanguli Berdymukhammedov, is expected to easily defeat his five lesser-known challengers.
By mid-day local time Sunday, Turkmenistan's Central Election Commission declared the election valid, saying more than half the country's registered voters had cast ballots in the country's first multi-candidate election...(Read More)
Tehran Times
Feb. 12, 2007
Turkmens Begin Voting for New Leader
KIPCHAK, Turkmenistan (AP) -- The people of Turkmenistan, ruled for more than two decades by Niyazov, began voting Sunday for his replacement in their first presidential election with more than one candidate — but still only one party. The multiple candidates in the election are among a series of hints that Turkmenistan, a strategic Central Asian nation with immense natural gas reserves, may be slowly changing its ways. But it's unclear how far it will move out of the late President Saparmurat Niyazov's shadow...(Read More)
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Bassirat.Net
2.04.2007
The Christian Right and American History
By Jeff SharletThis was an article that was originally published in Harper's. This version can be found on the website The Revealer which is "a daily review of religion and the press." The article is about how the Christian right views, and uses, history.
Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor of Harper's as well as the editor for the web log The Revealer.
We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history. An unpleasant odor that will pass.
We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can’t conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.
Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”—coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers—still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.
If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.
The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.
Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call “kairos” and “chronos,” the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology, but a manifold movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just loving it to death anyway.
The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He chose, it could just as easily be five.
* * *
It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984>, “control the future.” History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman, which was what he’d wanted to be: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in one of the nation’s most expensive congressional races, forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a providential outcome.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.
* * *
The first pillar of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is history; and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging. Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not always acknowledged) since their transmission from Heaven, first through the Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely inspired, devoutly intended—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared “religion” necessary to “good government” and thus to be encouraged through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren learned their ABCs from The New-England Primer, which begins with “In Adam’s Fall/We sinned all”—and continues on to “Spiritual Milk for American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments.” In 1836, McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling some 122 million copies of lessons such as “The Bible the Best of Classics” and “Religion the only Basis of Society” during the following century.
It wasn’t until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history, that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that the nationalism of manifest destiny—itself thinly veiled Calvinism—rather than open piety was the American educational tradition. The movement now sees that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition for Him, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history.
Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academies that together account for at least 2 million of the nation’s children, an expanding population that buys more than half a billion dollars of educational materials annually. “Who, knowing the facts of our history,” asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American Republic for Christian Schools, a junior-high textbook, “can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?” So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of homeschooling. In addition to The American Republic, I read the two-volume teacher’s edition of United States History for Christian Schools, appropriate for eleventh graders, as well as Economics for Christian Schools, and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape lecture series on America up to 1865 created for Christian college students by Rousas John Rushdoony, the late theologian who helped launch Christian homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a providential lens. [1]I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a note on Alexis de Tocqueville—Rushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchman—when a white-and-blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There were four officers inside.
“What are you writing?” the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the window.
“Notes,” I said, tapping my headphones.
“Okay. Whatcha listening to?”
I said I didn’t think I had to tell him.
“This is a high-security area,” he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals. “Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn.” Note-taking in the vicinity might be a problem. “So, I gotta ask again, whatcha listening to?”
How to explain—to the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist target in Brooklyn—that I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how democracy as practiced in America was defiance of God’s intentions, how God gave to the United States the “irresistible blessings” of biblical capitalism unknown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?
Like this: “American history.”
“Providence” would have been a better word...
Continue reading "Through a Glass, Darkly.”
Image From:
Father Dan
1.31.2007
Mesopotamia Burning, Part III
It has been awhile since I did my last post in this series. That mainly had to do with work and school getting in the way. For an introduction to the series see Part I and for a history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and the Iran-Iraq War see Part II. Part III covers the history of the start of the first Gulf War right up to the election of George W. Bush.After the Iran-Iraq war, both countries were exhausted. Specifically, Iraq owed Gulf states, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, massive amounts of money given to the country as loans, in order to fight against the Shia Muslim state of Iran.(1) On top of loans Iraq also suffered economically from the many years of war with Iran. In 1975 Iraq had 3% of its labor force in the armed forces. But, during the late 1970s and early 1980s Iraq shifted, under Hussein, from a mostly civilian economy to a mostly military economy. By 1988, when the major fighting had ended, 21% of the Iraqi labor force was in the armed forces. Also, military spending in Iraq had risen from $1 billion in 1970 (19% of GDP) to $12.1 billion in 1980 (nearly 23% of GDP) and during the period of 1981-1988 Iraq had spent 40% of its GDP, $111 billion, in military endeavors. Military spending was also outpacing Iraq’s production of oil, during the period of 1981-1988 while Iraq was spending $111 billion on the military, it only raised $72 billion in oil revenues. By the time the war had ended Iraq had an economy that was a mere shadow of its former self during the pre-war years. In 1980 the government generated $26 billion, by the near end of the war in 1988 Iraq was only generating $11 billion. To make matters worse Iraq suffered a 9% decline in its GDP in as little as two years, from 1988-1989.(2) According to Abbas Alnasrawi the decline in the Iraqi economy “constituted a severe blow to the government and forced it to adopt an austerity program of spending. But to reduce government spending in a period of sever economic crisis had the effect of worsening the crisis.”(3) Iraq was caught in between a rock and a hard place and had almost no place to go, especially since there was no hope that any of the governments in the Gulf region would ease up on their demands for repayment of loans.
Hussein began looking towards Kuwait, a country that Iraq owed millions of dollars in loan repayments to, as the solution to Iraq’s economic woes. Iraq was extremely vulnerable, a situation that benefited the U.S., and needed to boost its economy. Yet the economy had been fully militarized years before by Hussein and only continued military action could boost the economy. Kuwait also had strategic oil wells that Iraq could further use to bolster its economy. Hussein decided to invade Kuwait in July of 1990 and started amassing troops by the Kuwaiti boarder, but before he took action Hussein meet with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie.
In the meeting Glaspie reportedly told Hussein. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Hussein saw this as American backing, or at least American indifference, to his intended invasion of Kuwait.(4) The army presence, and Hussein’s threats against the Gulf states (he said the Gulf states were tools of the Western powers and that there was an intentional campaign to “impoverish Iraq’s people” by lowering oil prices), seemed to work since OPEC raised the price of oil from $18 per barrel to $21 per barrel. Yet, despite that, in August of 1990 Hussein ordered his army to invade Kuwait.(5) Justifying the invasion to the Iraqi people the deputy prime minister for the economy stated that “Iraq will be able to pay its debt in less than five years” and that “the new Iraq would have a much higher oil production quota” and “that its income from oil would rise to $38 billion; and that it would be able to vastly increase spending on development projects and imports.”(6)
In the same month that Iraq invaded, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 661, which demanded an immediate withdrawal from Kuwait. With that President George H. W. Bush started rallying nations from around the region and Europe as he began sending U.S. troops to the Gulf to prepare for an invasion. In September Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Hussein would have a “stranglehold” over the U.S., and the world, if he was able to take control of Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s oil wells.(7) In November of 1990 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678, authorizing force to ouster Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Before the U.S. lead invasion of Kuwait a “last-minute proposal was made by the French” that Iraq would pull its troops out if the U.S. agreed to propose an international conference on peace on the Middle Eastern region. The U.S. and Britain rejected this proposal with “U.S. officials saying that a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal was ‘nightmare scenario.’”(8)
The coalition forces made quick work in their fight against the Iraqi military once the air campaign began in January of 1991. “During forty-three days of war, the United States flew 109,876 sorties and dropped 84,200 tons of bombs. Average monthly tonnage of ordnance used nearly equaled that of the Second World War” and 93% “of munitions used by the allies consisted of unguided ‘dumb’ bombs, dropped primarily by Vietnam-era B-52 bombers.”(9) By February 26 Hussein ordered his troops to abandon their positions in Kuwait and return to Iraq. Instead of pursuing the Iraqi army all the way to Baghdad and overthrowing Hussein, President Bush held back.
Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, reluctant from the beginning to commit U.S. forces to the Gulf, said. “I took the president through the situation on the ground. I pointed out that within the next 24 hours, I would be bringing a recommendation with respect of the cessation of hostilities. The president then said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, we’re within the window. Why not end it now?’”
This was considered by many of the neoconservatives, or neo-Reaganites (as they called themselves), a huge miscalculation and that overthrowing Hussein should be the primary objective of the United States in order for the U.S. to exert its power and influence over the Gulf Region.(10)
While the victory over Iraq was an important victory for the U.S., especially during the post-Vietnam era, the fall of the Soviet Union was even more important, and changed the political landscape forever. On December 25, 1991, Secretary-General Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov resigned and handed over all power to the president of Russia, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. Wit the fall of the Soviet Union many where saying that the world had entered a new era and the threat of nuclear annihilation was no longer a factor. Also, with the end of the Cold War, said many political analysts, was the end of neoconservative policy. Yet, instead of disappearing, the neoconservative doctrine further intensified by “contending that the moment had come to create an American-dominated world order.”(11) In order for the neoconservative movement’s ideology to gain traction they needed a document that spelled out their beliefs and what they would need to do in order for America to gain complete hegemonic power. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, was just the man to create such a document.
During the early part of 1992 Wolfowitz created a 46 page document that had been circulating in the defense department called the “Defense Planning Guidance” which was to define America’s role in a post-Cold War world.(12) The plan called for the United States to position itself in the world by using economic, diplomatic, and military means in order to remain the worlds only superpower and “to discourage [other countries] from challenging [U.S.] leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.”(13) The document also said that the U.S. should “talk loudly and carry a big stick” as well as using unilateral action when necessary.(14) While there were some within the Pentagon that agreed with the documents views many found the document abhorrent, as a result the document was leaked to the New York Times in March of 1992. In the Times article it was stated that the document’s “concept of benevolent domination by one power, the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II.”(15) The publishing of the article caused a public outcry and an undue strain on President Bush during a time when he was running for reelection. Because of this Bush ordered Cheney to personally rewrite the draft to make it more suitable to the public, as well as to many within the Pentagon who did not agree with its radical departure from traditional foreign policy goals. Because of this, the document was left on the backburner and kept in Pentagon vaults to collect dust, that is, until another president arose who agreed with the document’s policy goals.
It was obvious, however, from the start, that the newly elected President William Jefferson Clinton, was not the president to resurrect the Defense Planning Guidance. With the defeat of Bush many of the neoconservatives that had been working in Washington since Ronald Reagan (and some since President Gerald Ford, Jr.) took up jobs in public life. Then Senior Director of Soviet and Eastern European Affairs, Condoleezza Rice (who had left in 1991) returned to Stanford University to teach and to also work at the Hoover Institution. After making contacts she quickly became a board member of the oil company Chevron, and even had an oil tanker named after her, the Condoleezza Rice. Paul Wolfowitz also went back to the academic life and was appointed dean to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Cheney, after making a speech that seemed like he would never return to politics, became the president and CEO of the Haliburton Company, a top military contractor and oil services company that had many ties with the Pentagon.(16)
Clinton brought a more realist, or realpolitik, and pragmatical foreign policy to the table (as did former President George H. W. Bush), much to the dismay of the neoconservatives. Instead of focusing on regions around the world and targeting countries that would increase American hegemony and cement America as the world’s only superpower, such as Iraq and North Korea, Clinton instead focused on Somalia, Hattie, and the Balkans. In reaction to this (and for planning for the future), according to Gary Dorrien, “They tightened their hold over leading conservative think tanks,” such as the American Enterprise Institute, “and magazines, strengthened their alliances with Cheney and Rumsfled,” who had been the Secretary of Defense under Ford and had been involved in private business and other ventures since (he also introduced Cheney to Washington life), “founded The Weekly Standard magazine, and got a huge boost from the rise of the Fox network.”(17) In 1997 William Kristol, a prominent neoconservative outside of government, founded the Project for the New American Century, which called for the United States to step up its role and to make moves to further cement itself as the world’s dominant superpower and to spread American values across the globe, as well as to act militarily against other countries that challenged America’s supremacy. The following year the Project for the New American Century wrote an open letter to Clinton urging him to overthrow Hussein.
In the letter the group stated, “The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action…In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein.”(18) Obviously the neoconservatives were still interested in Iraq and still saw Iraq as a key player in furthering U.S. political power in the Middle East. While weapons of mass destruction may have been a legitimate worry for some within the group, the most important thing was the removal of Hussein because Iraq could be used as a tool to further U.S. dominance in the region, WMDs were a secondary issue (in fact, they seemed to be more of an excuse to invade than a legitimate concern for most). Those who signed the letter to Clinton were Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Richard Armitage, and John Bolton, among others.
Yet Clinton was still unreceptive to their calls. While he did sign a bill calling for the overthrow of Hussein latter on in his presidency and while he did initiate Operation Desert Fox, he did not take the type of action that the neoconservatives wanted. For that, they would need to look forward to another president.
Notes
1. Research Unit for Political Economy. “Behind the War On Iraq.” Monthly Review 55, no. 1 (May 2003): 33.
2. Alnasrawi, Abbas. “Oil, Sanctions, Debt and the Future.” Arab Studies Quarterly 23, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 5-6.
3. Alnasrawi, 6.
4. Research Unit for Political Economy, 36; Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen M. Walt. “An Unnecessary War.” Foreign Policy no. 134 (Jan/Feb 2003): 54.
5. Alnasrawi, 6.
6. Ibid., 6-7.
7. Klare, Michael. “The New Geopolitics.” Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (July 2003): 55.
8. Research Unit for Political Economy, 37.
9. Ibid.
10. Frontline. The War Behind Closed Doors. Prod. and dir. Michael Kirk, 60 minutes. Originally aired on PBS Feb. 20, 2003.
11. Dorrien, Gary. “Consolidating the Empire: Neoconservatism and the Politics of American Dominion.” Political Theology 6, no. 4 (Oct. 2005): 413-414.
12. Tyler, Patrick E. “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop.” New York Times, 8 March 1992, 1.
13. Tyler, 1.
14. “Excerpts From 1992 Draft ‘Defense Planning Guidance.’ Frontline. The War Behind Closed Doors. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.html (accessed Jan. 29 2007); “Chronology: The Evolution Of The Bush Doctrine.” Frontline. The War Behind Closed Doors. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html (accessed Jan. 29, 2007).
15. Tyler, 1.
16. Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 225, 227, 229.
17. Dorrien, 415.
18. “Chronology: The Evolution Of The Bush Doctrine.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html (accessed Jan. 29, 2007).
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Wikipedia
1.25.2007
News Analysis: General Strikes and Chaos in Lebanon
The past two months there have been protests against the Lebanese government, especially against Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. It’s important to know what is going on in Lebanon as it is a key country to U.S. foreign policy and an important country in the region. Especially because it’s the base of Hezbollah, went through a brutal civil war and occupation during the 1980s and especially due to the recent war with Israel. These are some of the news articles I’ve read from around the world.Middle East:
Daily Star (Lebanon)
Jan. 24, 2007
One Day Was More Than Enough
By Rym Ghazal
BEIRUT: The Hizbullah-led opposition's general strike against the government on Tuesday led to a nationwide protest that paralyzed the country and left its capital engulfed in barricades of blazing tires and bloodied by clashes that left at least three dead and over 130 wounded.
Late Tuesday, the opposition announced that it would lift its strike. Prior to the announcement, however, the man whom the crippling protest was aimed at unseating - Prime Minister Fouad Siniora - issued a brief, firm address to the nation in which he stood his ground and announced he would remain in office, even as the country appeared to be drawing to the verge of another civil war...(Read More)
Daily Star (Lebanon)Jan. 26, 2007
Rival Mobs Plunge Beirut Into Anarchy
By Iman Azzi and Rym Ghazal
BEIRUT: Clashes erupted between government loyalists and opposition supporters in Lebanon on Thursday, escalating swiftly and leaving at least three dead and 158 others wounded by the time a rare curfew was imposed on the city at 8:30 p.m. Scenes across the capital were reminiscent of the country's brutal 1975-1990 Civil War; burning cars, reports of snipers on rooftops and a curfew for the first time since 1996.
Thirteen Lebanese Army soldiers, including four officers, were also wounded while trying to defuse the violence that spilled over from a political argument on a university campus in Tariq al-Jdideh...(Read More)
Al Jazeera (Qatar)Jan. 25, 2007
Curfew Follows Fatal Beirut Clashes
By Al Jazeera and Agencies
A curfew has been declared in Beirut after four students were reported killed as rival groups of pro and anti-government students fought a pitched battle at a university, leaving at least 35 others wounded.
The curfew, from 8.30pm (1830 GMT) until dawn on Friday, was declared by the Lebanese army following hours of violence in the capital...(Read More)
Middle East Times (Egypt)
Jan. 25, 2007
Donors Pledge $7.6 Bn In Aid to War-Scarred Lebanon
By Agencies France-Presse
PARIS -- International donors Thursday pledged more than $7.6 billion in aid for Lebanon to bolster the Western-backed government in Beirut and help the country recover from war.
Saudi Arabia, the United States, France, and multilateral lenders led the drive to raise the massive aid package at a donors' conference for Lebanon, which was partly ruined during the July-August war between Hezbollah and Israel...(Read More)
South Asia:
News International (Pakistan)
Jan. 26, 2007
Respect Curfew, Says Nasrallah
BEIRUT: Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah urged his followers on Thursday to respect the orders of the Lebanese army which declared an overnight curfew after violent street protests.
“We are using a Fatwa in the interests of the country and civil peace... everyone should evacuate the streets, remain calm and leave the stage for the Lebanese army and security forces,” he said...(Read More)
Southern Africa:
Mail & Guardian (South Africa)
Jan. 25, 2007
Beirut Clashes Leave Students Dead
At least two students were shot dead and 35 others wounded in Beirut street fighting on Thursday between students loyal to the government and opposition supporters, a security source said.
Opposition-run television station NBN put the death tally from the fighting, which spilled over from the Arab University campus, at four, including two students. But the security source could not confirm this...(Read More)
Europe:
U.K. Guardian
Jan. 26, 2007
Four Dead, 35 Wounded in Beirut Violence
By Clancy Chassay
A three-hour battle between opposition and government supporters at a Beirut university yesterday left at least four students dead and 35 wounded, in a sign of Lebanon's deepening political crisis.
The army, which struggled to keep the two sides apart by firing into the air, declared a curfew last night in an attempt to end further skirmishes. Opposition and government leaders urged supporters to stay off the streets...(Read More)
Der Spiegel (Germany)Jan. 23, 2007
General Strike in Lebanon: Violence in Lebanon as Opposition Aims to Topple Government
Previously-peaceful protests in Lebanon aimed at toppling the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora took a violent turn Tuesday at the start of a general strike in the country.
Thousands of opposition supporters blocked main roads in the capital Beirut and around the country with rubble and burning tires early Tuesday morning as a general strike aimed at toppling the government began. In addition, at least 14 people have sustained gunshot wounds in central and northern Lebanon in addition to a number of fistfights and other violence, according to police reports. Several have been injured in scuffles in Beirut, particularly in Christian areas...(Read More)
Le Monde (France)
Jan. 25, 2007
In Beirut, the Curfew Was Raised Without Incident
An hour after the lifting the curfew in Beirut on Friday, calm reigned in the capital where confrontations between partisans of the opposition and the government claimed the lives of three and wounded more that 152. Circulation was fluid in the middle of the Lebanese capital with some trade being opened for the day. In the district of Zokak Al-Blat, only the presence of dismantled roadblocks of refuse, as armored tanks of the army rolled by the crossroads, recalled the violent clashes of the day before. Grocers and bakeries raised their iron curtains as the district still slept, all of the schools of Beirut will remain closed until Monday…(Read More)
North America:
New York Times Jan. 25, 2007 Beirut University Dispute Escalates Into Rioting, Killing 4 By Nada Bakri and Hassan M. FattahBeirut - Violence erupted in Beirut on Thursday for the second time in three days, as an altercation in a university cafeteria escalated into rioting and gunfire.
The army declared a rare night curfew throughout the city amid fears that Lebanon’s two-month political crisis had entered a violent phase...(Read More)
Chicago Tribune
Jan. 25, 2007
Lull in Deadly Beirut Battles
By Megan K. Stack
BEIRUT -- By the time morning commuters headed off to work Wednesday, the fires had been snuffed out. The roadblocks had melted away. The rampaging youths who were burning cars and choking off the nation's roads seemed to have evaporated.
As quickly as they mobilized a vast network of demonstrators to lay siege to much of the country, Hezbollah and its anti-government allies pulled Lebanon back from a day of sectarian tensions and street fights by calling off a general strike...(Read More)
Image From:
New York Times
1.21.2007
Indian Left, Caste and the Dalits
By Bhupinder SinghI asked Bhupinder Singh to write a guest post for me to complement my series on "The Oppression of Shudras/Dalits in India." Part 1 was the introduction to the series, Parts 2, 3, and 4 were based on a Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) report on the situation of Dalits in India and Parts 5 and 6 were written by me on a Hindu Liberationist Dalit issues.
I asked Bhupinder to write a blog on the situation of the left in India and the left's interactions with Dalit issues.
Bhupinder Singh is the author of a reader's words which is a very perceptive and excellent blog that mainly focuses on Indian affairs. He also is an editor for Blogbharti which "is an aggregator that brings to you the best of the Indian blogosphere."
The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
(Thanks to Jack for inviting to write this guest post)
The Indian Left has had a troubled association with the caste question.
The major reason, in case of the Left has been the over arching importance that Marxism has attached to class and class conciousness. This has been true of the Marxist Left which includes the original and later CPI, the CPM and even most of the Maoist formations. The socialist parties, specially under Ram Manohar Lohia and to a lesser extent Acharya Narendra Dev acknowledged the issue of caste since the fifties though from the backward caste, and not a Dalit perspective.
This post, however, focuses on the relationship between the Marxist Left and Dalit politics.
The class based approach of the Marxist Left gave little importance to caste, and even saw it as an impediment for growth of class consciousness. It's mass fronts consisted of the trade unions, the peasant associations, landless agricultural workers. Outside these class based fronts were those for women, students and the cultural wing (the famous Indian People's Theater Association).
No scope was seen for a Dalit or any other caste based association. In fact, when the DS4 of Kanshi Ram began to grow in the 1980s, it was seen, even by those cadres in the existing communist parties who came from a Dalit background, as reactionary and dangerous- since these threatened to break the unity of the class based fronts along casteist lines. At no time, till the Mandal Commission forced it to take a firm stand, did the Indian Left see centrality of the caste question in India.
Within the CPI and the CPM, the leadership has been, even till recently, primarily drawn from the Brahmins or the local dominant castes, with very few exceptions. Neither have these parties made any conscious attempt to bring cadre from the Dalit strata into leadership positions. Instead, they have recreated in their internal structures the imbalances of society.
This is not to deny the fact that they have also been relatively less susceptible to casteism, and many among their cadre continue to be within these parties because of the relative absence of casteism within these parties in comparison with others. This is especially so where Dalit movement has been weak or non- existent.
In comparison with some other countries, the Indian communists' participation and acceptance of parliamentary politics has been long and unquestionable. However the stress of political action also blunted the social and mass based actions that these parties should have been involved in.
This came out very clearly when, after the CPI(M) Congress in 1998, in reply to a question as to why the Left had failed to strike roots in Uttar Pradesh, the then party General Secretary H.S. Surjeet explained the reasons thus:
"There has been no social reform movement in the state".This surely is a case of putting the cart before the horse, since for those on left of the political spectrum, reforms are only a part of a much more comprehensive radical agenda. The task of the left is to carry out changes that go beyond reforms and not wait for others to carry out the job. Surjeet's words raise an existential question for the CPI(M).
Another reason of this dichotomy between the Left and the Dalit movement has been that Dr. Ambedkar, by far the most towering leader of the Dalit movement if not its only one till the rise of Kanshi Ram, had been an opponent of Marxism. His focus remained the social upliftment of the Dalits and as a politician his sensibilities honed in English liberalism restricted his view. W.N. Kuber puts it thus:
In 1937, (Ambedkar) founded the Independent Labour Party, for sometime joined hands with the communists in the labor field but did not take consistent attitude and fight class battles. Though his community was downtrodden and landless and mostly wage- earners, still he could not make them class- conscious, because of the weakness in his inherent thinking. After the Poona Pact he tried to lead the working class, but failed and left the field forever, and chose to become the leader of his community.(source: Ambedkar: A Critical Study by W.N. Kuber, 1973. Page 304)
His insistence on Buddhism as an alternative to Marxism also did not help to build bridges.
Buddhistic countries that have gone over to communism do not understand what communism is. Communism of the Russian type aims at bringing it about by a bloody revolution. The Buddhist communism brings it about by a bloodless revolution. The South East Asians should give a political form to Buddha's teaching.... Poverty cannot be an excuse for sacrificing human freedom.
(Source: Ambedkar, Life and Mission, page 487, quoted in Kuber).
To the over arching importance that Dr. Ambedkar gave to conversion as a salvation for the Dalits (then called the Depressed Classes), the scholarly CPI leader Hiren Mukerjee commented:
But merely by changing one's religion, one cannot bring a solution, particularly to the kind of problem that we have in our country. That is why I say the conversion to Buddhism was a gesture, a moral gesture, with certain conceptual connotations of its own. Buddhism is a magnificent religion, but somehow it was eased out of India. If by some miracle, Buddhism is brought back again, well and good. But things do not happen in real life like that.(source: Hiren Mukerjee: Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Extirpation of Untouchability, page 46, quoted in Kuber)
If the Left parties are more sensitive to the caste question in recent years, it is because of the battle lines that were drawn in the aftermath of the Mandal Commission and also because of the political base that caste based parties, especially the Bahujan Samaj Party have been to create for themselves. While these made a dent in the following of all existing parties, the ones specially impacted were the Congress and the Left.
The second reason is the recognition of near absolute identity of the Dalits as one of the more oppressed sections in the country. Earlier observers, even among the most radicals ones, disdained this. Groomed in the modernist, Nehruvian framework in the backdrop of global appeal of Marxism, the caste factor was pushed under the carpet. It was even seen as an obstacle in establishing class-consciousness.
This has now changed, and rightly so. The communists and the Dalit movement share a complementary role. While the Dalit movement has articulated the social and political aspirations of the oppressed community, it has lacked a firm economic program, with the result that once power is gained (in Uttar Pradesh, for example), the lack of a class based theoretical perspective restricts it to either parliamentary politics or the perspective, often narrow, of a single leader. A Marxist understanding and placing the Dalit movement within a larger national and world wide struggle for emancipation complements this social and political approach.
It is not that this has not been attempted, it was there during the brief existence of the Dalit Panthers Movement in the 1970s before its disintegration. It was also there in the approach of Sharad Patil who broke away from the CPM to form the Satyashodak Communist Party in Maharastra in the 1980s.
Given the ossification in the dominant Left, however, this dialogue will have to be initiated by the cadre of the Dalit movement and independent Marxists.
1.20.2007
Somalia: A History of U.S. Interventions
By Anand GopalThis was an article I read at the MR Zine about U.S. involvement in Somalia. This can also bring into focus the recent U.S. airstrikes in Somalia against Islamic insrugents.
Anand Gopal is a doctoral student in physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
There's a woman -- some call her "Black Hawk Down" lady -- who lives in a packed, squalid neighborhood in the middle of Mogadishu and runs a rather simple but grisly museum. For under a dollar, visitors can view her prized possession, the mangled, mud-splattered nose of a US Black Hawk helicopter that was shot down during the American intervention in Somalia thirteen years ago. The wreckage, quite popular among Somalis and foreigners alike, serves as a macabre memento of the decades of civil war that have raged on Somali soil. But more than anything, this strange little museum in the heart of Mogadishu reminds one of the constant, often disastrous foreign interventions into Somali affairs. As US-backed Ethiopian troops occupy Mogadishu and American helicopters fire at targets in southern Somalia, the time is ripe for a reexamination of the US role in the region.
The Mayor of Mogadishu
American involvement in Somalia began as early as World War II, when the US rejected the British-sponsored consolidation of all areas with Somali majority (including the Ethiopian territory of Ogaden, but excluding areas in northern Kenya, then under British control) into a Somali state. The US, eager to protect the territory and rule of their strong ally Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, instead fashioned a partitioningthat has defined the politics of the region ever since. Eritrea was placed under federation with Ethiopia, while Somalis were dispersed among Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and the Republic of Somalia, which gained independence in 1960. The consequences were calamitous; Eritrea's amalgamation with Ethiopia sparked an increasingly bloody thirty-year battle for independence, while the goal of a Greater Somalia fueled rapacious irredentist wars over the next fifty years.
With unwavering US support of Selassie's monarchy in Ethiopia, the USSR increasingly turned towards Somalia, and the Horn of Africa became a critical theater for the Cold War. Siad Barre's coup in 1969 ushered in "scientific socialism" and attracted even more Soviet assistance, and in 1975 the US lost influence in Ethiopia following the overthrow of Haile Selassie and the monarchy. By the late Seventies, the Russians shifted support away from Somalia and began underwriting Mengistu's brutal regime in Ethiopia. No sooner had the Russians left than the US sought to bring Somalia into its sphere.
The Carter administration was quick to declare that Somalia should become "a friend." Befriending Somalia, however, meant supporting the severely repressive Barre regime, with its dismal human rights record and penchant for causing regional wars. Barre packed the government with members of his Mareheen clan, tortured and summarily executed opponents, silenced critics, outlawed opposition parties, crushed freedom of the press, and employed a feared secret police. Barre also exacerbated existing clan divisions by habitually playing various clans off one another.
Carter easily forgot the rhetoric of being a "human rights president" whenever strategic interests were involved. Somalia, a sparsely populated desert nation with few natural resources, nonetheless lies in a vitally strategic position at the mouth of the Red Sea. The port of Berbera overlooks sea routes between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. US presence in Berbera, together with the southern port of Kismayu, would ensure control over the flow of Mid East oil. Moreover, American officials understood that the Somali ports could provide key bases in the attempt to neutralize nearby Soviet presence and defend US interests in the Persian Gulf (indeed, Berbera was used as an intermediate deployment base during the first Gulf War). Carter pledged military and financial aid in return for control of Berbera and other bases. Foreign multinationals, including four major oil companies, were quick to win concessions. The US, fearing a direct confrontation with Soviet troops, also insisted that Barre withdraw Soviet troops from Ogaden in Ethiopia, which became a sticking point in Somali-US negotiations.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran and the concomitant loss of a base in the Indian Ocean convinced officials to finalize the deal; thus one of the Reagan Administration's first acts was to move US troops and weapons into Berbera and send over $40 million in military aid to the Barre government. Somalia quickly became a US client state. In subsequent years the US delivered an average of $80 million in economic and military aid per year (through 1987), topping $115 million in 1984 and 1985. Somalia became one of the leading recipients of US military assistance in all of Africa in the eighties, and received almost $700 million in overall aid during the decade. In addition to US support, Barre enjoyed assistancefrom Italy, West Germany, China, and South Africa. Barre employed much of this aid to fight Ethiopia over the Ogaden region and to suppress resistance movements within the country. He used massive aerial bombardment of the north to crush Somali resistance fighters, killing and displacing thousands in the process. However, Barre was unable to contain the growing insurgency, fueled by widespread hatred of his regime. Moreover, by the late eighties, Somalia's strategic importance began to wane as Moscow's influence in the region decreased and Saudi and Egyptian compliance with the US increased. By 1990, Barre had almost no support inside or outside the country, except for continued American logistical support, small-scale economic support, and military training. The extent of the rebellion and civil war was so widespread that Barre had little authority outside of the capital Mogadishu, an ignominious fact that earned him the derisory moniker "the Mayor of Mogadishu." Barre's power slipped rapidly, and he was finally overthrown by a coalition of guerilla groups in early 1991. Somalia has not seen a central government since.
Black Hawk Down
The Somalia of US and Barre's creation was one of shambles. It was a nation of refugees, with over 40% of the population classified as such at any given time. The country's political structure was nonexistent, with bandits and guerillas roaming and controlling the lawless countryside. Inflation soared, the formal economy collapsed, and there was no national banking system to speak of. Most of the population owned weapons and were ready to pledge allegiance to whichever forces could provide stability and protection. Clan divisions, which Barre so ruthlessly exploited, gave birth to independent and armed factions fighting for regional and local control. By 1992, widespread famine and drought devastated the country. Years of economic mismanagement, cronyism, graft, war, and repression, under Barre's direction and with the sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit support of the US, had taken their toll. Yet, with the Western media dutifully supplying decontextualized images of emaciated Somali children, the US began the steady drumbeat of intervention. The worst of the famine and drought passed in the summer, and the situation steadily improved towards the close of the year. Nonetheless, in December 1992, Washington launched "Operation Restore Hope," with the mandate of "creating a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian relief." And thus began the US's greatest military defeat in twenty years.
The intervention in Somalia, together with the first Gulf War, was actually the opening salvo of a battle of a different kind. This was a battle against the prevalent public perception, since Vietnam, that US force should be used sparingly, if at all. The Somali intervention marked the first in a series of "humanitarian interventions," designed to render open, substantial intervention and even war once again fit for public consumption. Indeed, as then Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Africa Affairs revealed, a plan for a smaller, more aid-oriented intervention was scrapped because "it failed to meet the US military's new insistence on the application of massive, overwhelming force." Intervention would also provide a sorely needed stability for US business interests in the region, especially the four major oil companies with concessions in the country. Sure enough, during the US stay in Somalia the new US embassy operated from the compounds of oil multinational Conoco.
The Americans, connected in many Somalis' minds with the detested Barre dictatorship, did little to win friends. In June of 1993, US and UN forces attacked a civilian hospital with over 500 occupants. In July, US helicopters fired into a meeting of political, religious, and clan leaders, killing 54. In September, American forces opened fire into a crowd, killing over 50 civilians. Other UN troops' hands were unclean as well. Belgian soldiers engaged in hundreds of incidents of rape, torture, and murder. Canadian troops frequently used unnecessary force, killing scores of civilians. Malaysian, Pakistani, French, Nigerian, and Tunisian forces were all accused of vandalism, property destruction, and civilian attacks. It is only in this context that the famous events of 3 October, where eighteen US rangers were killed and one captured, are sensible. The violent Somali reaction, flashed across television screens worldwide and later fictionalized in Black Hawk Down, was built upon a searing hatred for repeated US and international intervention in local affairs. What the news clips failed to show, however, was the Americans' disproportionably violent reaction in which hundreds of Somalis were murdered.
The War on Terror
US intervention in Somalia ended in disaster for all sides concerned; as American forces sped away from Somalia, tail firmly between legs, Somalia continued its precipitous descent into anarchy and chaos. Various warlords and clans parceled Somalia between themselves, and civilians often bore the brunt of internecine fighting. In 1999, the most influential warlords made the first attempts at forming a national transitional government (TNG); Ethiopia (and by extension, the US) withdrew support, however, and soon the effort lost its feet. Ethiopians preferred to support a transitional government in which it could play a more influential role, and after 2000 Addis Ababa and Washington both supported the rival Somalia Restoration and Reconciliation Council (SRRC).
Under Siad Barre's tightly controlled regime, mosques and religious figures were often the only source of uncensored information. Under such conditions the population turned increasingly to political Islam, and, by the mid-eighties, al Ittihad al Islami established themselves as the foremost Islamist organization. By the mid-nineties, a warlord alliance headed by Abdilliahi Yusef and Ethiopia (anxious to quell its own restive Muslim population) succeeded in partially crushing al Ittihad. In the process, parts of al Itthad dissolved into a series of independent Islamic courts, courts that would -- under the banner of law and order -- eventually unify as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and take power in June of 2006. Yusef, on the other hand, began a long and fruitful collaboration with Ethiopia and the US. Yusef was at the head of an Ethiopian-backed effort to unite the TNG, SRRC, and other factions, culminating in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of 2004.
The US, for its part, views Somalia as a major theatre of the War on Terror. When a group of regional warlords with a sense of marketability formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), the US was quick to provide funding. The Bush administration has frequently levied the charge that the UIC has ties to al Qaeda, an accusation that the warlords are only too happy to trumpet. The US-backed ARPCT fought in bloody clashes with the UIC in May of 2006, leaving hundreds dead. The UIC managed to capture Mogadishu in June, and almost immediately UIC leaders accused Ethiopian troops of crossing the border. The US began to meet regularly with Ethiopian officials and by late 2006 gave the go-ahead for the Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia, with Yusef's TFG as the sponsored government. The TFG has an extremely weak base in Somalia, most notably in the capital city, and most likely cannot survive without direct Ethiopian intervention and indirect US support (a fact which Yusef clearly recognizes -- he is demanding that Ethiopian troops remain in Somalia for months).
As US AC-130s target suspected al Qaeda fighters in southern Somalia and scores lie dead in the bombers' wake, Somalis' oppression under imperialism and misgovernment seems destined to play on repeat. Moreover, Washington's repeated overtures to the least popular in Somalia -- dictators like Barre and warlords like Yusef -- ensure that anti-Americanism will continue to do well in Somali hearts and minds. As the US strives to make Somalia safe for multinationals, the Somali horizon looks bleak indeed. But perhaps some will find a silver lining; deep in the heart of Mogadishu, the Black Hawk Down lady will continue to have steady profits, and possibly even more souvenirs, for years to come.
Image From:Washington Post
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